The Devil Walks in Mattingly (2 page)

“Go, Jake,” she will tell me. She will say, “Mind the woods” and “See if someone’s come” and “Be home with Zach and me soon.” And even though the fear in her eyes begs me stay, Kate never asks me to keep away from the Hollow. She knows I must come to this place. It is my duty both as sheriff and as a Barnett.

And yet even as I hold my name and station in the highest regard, that is not why I dare enter this wood and strike east and north for the grove. I come to this place of darkness because it is where the light of heaven once touched. I come here for the ones who were saved on a night long ago and for the ones lost.

I come because heaven is not without the past.

I walk here now just as I walked here on the night of my salvation—uniformed and holding Bessie at my side. The blood on my old tomahawk was wet then, and a color like deep crimson. Now it is no more than a thin line of dulled brown that glimmers in this struggling sun.

Aside from that—from me—I find all is as it has always been in this wild and mountainous place. Change may come beyond this wide span of gnarled trees and gray soil, but the Hollow clings to its past and will not yield to the passing of
time. It endures. That is why I both loathe this land beyond the rusty gate and give thanks for it as well. It is an anchor to hold the world in place.

There is no sound here. Neither birds nor crickets sing, and what few animals remain in these thousands of acres are scattered and hidden. The forest is silent—tired. I make for the river and turn back to the forest when I reach the bend. I do not look to the cliffs. I must walk this wood and endure the eyes upon me, but I will never gaze at those cliffs again. It is a place of blood.

Beyond river and wood lies the field, and here among the stones and brittle grass I find the only track I’ve seen—an imprint of a front paw sunk in the dirt. I bend and place my arm to the ground. The paw measures nearly the length of my elbow to the tips of my fingers. More than the Hollow has survived unharmed. The bear, too, lives on. The print is fresh, no more than a day old. I look up and scan the trees. I feel eyes and hear whispers but see no movement. Though the bear and I have no quarrel, my grip on Bessie tightens.

The trail waits beyond the mass of thick oaks at the field’s edge to my left. I step there, careful to keep between the two lines of stones that guard its sides, and follow it to the hidden grove beyond. Here, too, little has changed. Swollen vines still grow upon the limestone walls, covering what lies behind. The brittle bush in the back still withers in the dead soil and still offers its fruit.

And the Hole is still here.

I do not know that I expected otherwise. If the Hollow has lived on untouched and the bear still roams this cursed land, then the Hole would surely remain. I suppose it always will, and in that notion lie both Kate’s hope and my purpose.

I stand at its mouth and move no closer, will not. To face
this blackness is to find yourself at once drawn and repulsed, and here more than anywhere else I understand that I am not alone. I ease toward the Hole and bend to my knee, mindful of the stiffening hairs on my arms and neck, mindful of what Kate said before I left.

See if someone’s come
.

There are no marks in the barren earth at the Hole’s mouth. No one and nothing has come.

What remains now is the long walk back through a forest empty of what life a man’s eyes can see but filled with what a man’s eyes cannot. But I pause here nonetheless, as I always do, and stand facing the Hole. I do this so I may remember. So I remember true. The townsfolk do not know the truth of Happy Hollow and call it a place of evil. I know its truth and call it a place of memory.

I can still picture all of us here—me kneeling in this gray dirt beside Kate, Taylor Hathcock looking on in despair.

We were drawn to this place by a dead boy named Phillip McBride, who had haunted my dreams for a month. Even now the people of Mattingly will say Phillip died in the Hollow after throwing himself from the cliffs along the riverbank. Only Taylor, Kate, and I know the truth. There was no suicide. Phillip was murdered. Who killed him was and is an open question, I suppose. Kate would say she ended Phillip’s life. Taylor would say it was me. I would say Taylor had it right.

Such is my burden still. The wounds I carry are not unlike the Hollow or the bear or even this Hole in front of me—they may lie hidden, but they are always there. My hurt remains with me. I came into this world pure and unblemished, but I will leave it bearing all of my scars. My comfort rests in a grace that will mold those scars into the jewels of my crown.

In many ways the story of what happened is mine. And yet
I can say it is Kate’s and Taylor’s as well. But at its heart lies Phillip. He made no distinction between those who blamed themselves for his death and the one who killed him. He came back for us all.

Part I

Wake, O Sleeper

1

I
sat on the edge of Zach’s bed and stared at the small town of LEGOs and Matchbox cars that covered the floor. Took us a week of evenings to piece everything together—all the streets and buildings and shops that made up downtown Mattingly and the stretch beyond. Everything had to be just right (Zach would have it no other way), and as such we both still considered it a work in progress. But that night I wasn’t thinking of how the courthouse could use an extra layer of bricks or that there needed to be another window on the Dairy Queen. I only pondered what a good father would say next. All I could manage was a weak, “You know you’re in trouble, right?”

Zach lay there and tried to appear indifferent by holding his red blanket as close to his body as possible. The lower lid of his right eye had curdled to a dark and swollen purple. It looked as though an invisible hand was forcing him into an ugly wink. The cut scabbing the slit that bridged the tiny space between his nose and mouth looked no better. It was painful to be sure, though it wasn’t a busted lip and a black eye that held
my son’s tongue. It was whatever punishment I would levy for his getting them.

Zach said, “He had it comin’, Daddy.”

“Danny Blackwell.”

“Yessir. He was on the playground pullin’ on Allie Granderson’s pigtails. I tole him to stop, Daddy.
Twiced
. But he dint.”

“So you figured you’d just wallop him?”

“Nosir, Allie figured
she’d
wallop’m. But Danny’s got a hard head, and Allie started bawlin’ after, ’cause her hand hurt so bad. An’ then Danny understood he’d just gotten wailed on by a girl, so he started tuggin’ on Allie’s pigtails
harder
. An’ that’s when we tussled.”

I put a hand on the covers above Zach’s knee and felt my shoulders slump. For reasons I couldn’t understand, lately the shoulders were the first to go. Zach saw that slouch. He said nothing and I pretended nothing was wrong, even if there was no hiding my sagging cheeks and the way the skin beneath my eyes looked like tiny potato sacks.

“Think what you did was right?” I asked.

I believe Zach thought yes. He was smart enough to say no.

“I don’t ever want you to go looking for trouble, son. You go looking for trouble, trouble always finds you. Now I appreciate you standing up to a bully, but next time you go tell Miss Cole before you take your fists out. Okay?”

“Yessir.” Then, “Is Momma mad?”

I said, “Your momma was once a girl like Allie,” and left it at that. Sharing how I’d once caught a boy peeking up Kate’s skirt while she was on the monkey bars would serve no purpose, especially since I’d walloped him a good one that day. “Now it being Friday and you being more in the right, the
principal said you can come on to school Monday. But I expect you to make peace.”

Zach pursed his lips. “It was real peaceful when Danny was holdin’ his jaw.”

I offered a smile filtered through a yawn I couldn’t swallow. “That’s not the peace I mean. Now say your prayers.”

Zach closed his left eye to match his right and began with his customary, “Dear God, this’s Zach . . .” His words were soft like a lullaby, and sitting there I felt my body grow heavier. I took a deep breath and pinched my arm.

“An’ I’m sorry I whupped Danny Blackwell, God,” Zach finished. “But I reckon I ain’t a whole lot sorry, because he’s plain ornery and IlikeAllieGrandersonjustfineamen.”

I smiled again and said, “Amen.”

Zach opened his eye and winced. He traced a finger parallel to the cut on his lip.

“Reckon I’ll scar, Daddy?”

“I think by morning you’ll give your momma a fright, but I doubt you’ll scar.”

He reached for the arm I was using to prop myself up and turned it to the lamplight. A thick ridge of pale skin no wider than Zach’s fingernail stretched from just inside my elbow to near my wrist.

“I wish I could have a scar like yours,” he said. “It’s cool. Allie says scars make the man.”

“I mean to make sure you never have a scar like this,” I whispered. “That’s why we had to have this little talk. Now you get on to sleep.” I bent and kissed Zach’s head, careful of the bad places. What came next were the words I said to my son every night, what every child should hear from his father and what I never heard from my own. “I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

“Love you and proud too, Daddy.”

I stepped over the quiet town lying in shadow on the floor and left Zach to sleep. Kate waited under the covers in the next room. The thick ringed binder that was her constant companion leaned open against her raised knees. Her almond eyes were bunched, and her finger twirled at the ends of hair as black and smooth as a raven’s wing. She might as well have been back in high school, cramming for a test.

“Something preying on your mind, miss?” I asked.

She looked up from a worn page. “More than one thing. How’d it go?”

“As good as it could. He’ll make peace Monday.”

She closed the notebook and clicked off her bedside lamp as I eased into bed. “You tell him about coming to my rescue in the second grade when Bobby Barnes tried to get a look at my underwear?”

“Seeing as how that would defeat the purpose, I left that part out.” I settled in and added, “Last thing I want is the sins of the father being visited on the son.”

I sighed as smells of green grass and Easter breezes rose from the pillow. Frogs sang along a prattling creek beyond the open window. Far away a train whistled as it lumbered through the center of town. I was nearly gone, and I both welcomed and feared the going. Kate took my hand beneath the covers.

“Jake Barnett, you are the best man I’ve ever known.” She paused before voicing what else had been preying on her mind: “Will you sleep?”

Part of me—the same wishful thinking that would reach for a ringing phone in the middle of the night believing it was just a wrong number—said, “Yes.”

“Maybe they’d go away if you just talked to me.”

Maybe, I thought. But there had been little talk of
they
in the past weeks, at least on my part, just as there had been little talk of Kate’s notebook over the years on hers. I guess that’s how it is in most marriages. You learn what to talk about and what to leave alone, what to share and what to hold close. We were no different. Our lives both together and apart had taught us the same undeniable fact—secrets make people who they are.

I brought our joined hands up, turning mine to kiss hers. “Know what I love most about you?”

“Mmm?”

“Your hand fits perfect in mine.”

With Zach asleep in the next room and Kate nearly there (“Wake me if you need me,” she mumbled, to which I replied I wouldn’t because there would be no need), I struggled for words to send heavenward that would keep Phillip away. Simple prayer hadn’t worked from the beginning, nor the desperate pleas in the weeks that followed. Now it had been a month, and my tired mind was twisted such that I no longer believed grace would end my nightmares, but some magical arrangement of vowels and consonants.

I reached beneath the covers and touched Kate’s thigh, hoping her nearness would keep my sleep quiet. Or, if not, that her nearness would shame me into keeping quiet. In many ways, that was the worst part of what I suffered—not the dreams themselves, but those frantic bellows upon waking that betrayed a fear I’d long kept locked inside. I kissed the top of Kate’s head and closed my eyes. The last whisper on my lips was a petition for rest now, rest finally, that I would sleep, and then I
wake standing atop the pile of rocks along the riverbank and I know it’s happening, it’s happening again, and no prayer and no wishing can take me from this place—this grave. My home and bed and family are gone, left in some faraway place, and I
know the distance between where I am and where I was is best measured in time rather than distance.

The Hollow lies in late day around me. An orange-red sun licks the tips of an endless sea of gnarled trees rising from the spoiled earth like punished souls. And there are butterflies, butterflies everywhere. White ones, covering the mound of rocks beneath me like fallen snow. They flap their wings opencloseopen in a hot, vapid wind that engulfs me. But even that sight does not frighten me as much as the sight of who lies at my feet.

Phillip. Always Phillip.

My eyes dip to his sprawled body. The hood of his sweatshirt is pulled tight, hiding his face. His arms and legs splay out at grotesque slants, his right hand reaching for the glasses that have fallen near the swirling river. I fight my thoughts, trying to push away the knowing that Phillip reached for his glasses because he wanted to see, and yet I think it nonetheless because that’s what I thought that day.

Beside me, a sharp rock the size of a deflated basketball lies atop the pile. I pick the stone up and lay it on one of Phillip’s broken arms. I turn, knowing another stone has taken the place of the one I just moved, another always does, because this is a nightmare and it’s always this nightmare and please, God, wake me before Phillip speaks.

I heft the sharp rock I find at my feet, feeling the strain in my back. It goes over Phillip’s head and face. The next conceals most of his bloody shorts, the stones after cover his legs and feet, on and on, stone after stone, just as I’ve done every night for the last thirty. And just as all those other nights, when I heft the final stone that will cover Phillip forever, I turn to see his body lying fresh upon the others I’ve just laid. And from beneath the sweat-shirt’s hood comes a pained voice that is soft and far away: