The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (13 page)

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On the front pew beside her, Laura Bruce had set her cassette tape recorder, capturing the sounds of the Christmas service for Will Bruce, who was present in spirit. Deacon Guthrie, in his Tex Ritter voice, was reading Scripture. The passage he had chosen was the second chapter of Luke, of course—"And there were in the same country ..." Laura winced as he began it, remembering the handmade Christmas card she had just received from Will. On the card, a sheet of typing paper folded in half, Will had drawn the rounded white village of Bethlehem as it is shown in Christmas illustrations, but above it, on two opposing cliffs, he had sketched two modern tanks, their cannons aimed at each other. One was marked with a Star of David, the other with the Arab's symbol, a star and crescent. Beneath the drawing, Will had written, "And there were in the same country ..." Laura hoped that the tape of the service might cheer him up, although he would receive it weeks too late for Christmas. She had asked the choir to sing the one carol that she knew he was fond of, "I Wonder As I Wander," and she'd included "What Child Is This?" as her own special reminder of their child to come. After the service was over, she'd add a private message of her own, telling him who was there, describing the church decorations, and assuring him that everyone in Dark Hollow missed him very much. Perhaps she ought to make an announcement to the congregation that anybody who 197

wanted to wish Will a Merry Christmas could record a brief message after the service.

She needed to make announcements at the end of the service, anyway. The church was taking up a collection of food, toys, and clothing to take to Tammy Robsart, who lived in the trailer park. Tammy had quit high school to get married, and her twenty-year-old husband was off in the Gulf as well, leaving his wife and three-year-old son to get by on whatever he sent them, which didn't seem to be much. Laura had visited her once early in the fall, but she couldn't think of any way to help the girl. Tammy had no parents to move in with in order to save money, and her father-in-law had been sent to jail for killing his wife in an argument. There didn't seem to be much point in trying to find a job for Tammy. Since she had no skills and no education, she wouldn't earn as much in salary as she would pay in day care. Tammy Robsart was nineteen and her son, Morgan, was three, but Laura Bruce could see not one ray of hope for either of them, regardless of the efforts of "the system." Still, she organized the Christmas drive, because she felt that a charity project would be good for the parish and because she wanted Morgan Robsart to have some kind of Christmas.

Will would like that. She must remember to tell him about that on the tape, too. He worried about Dark Hollow so much more than he did about himself. She knew he missed his home. His letters still spoke of the frustration of exile in the desert, and his feeling that God could bet-198

ter use him somewhere else. Laura tried to reply with cheerful, newsy letters, debating on baby names and color schemes for the nursery, but she said little about Will's depression. She felt that she was hardly the person to offer spiritual counseling to an ordained minister.

Deacon Guthrie finished the reading with a jovial "Merry Christmas—Amen!" and closed the lectern Bible with a thump. Recognizing her cue, Maggie Underhill stood up and walked to the front of the choir loft to begin her solo. The organist turned around on her bench; she would not be accompanying this solo. Instead, Tavy Annis, looking like a bag of bones rattling around in his blue suit, stepped forward and opened his battered violin case. Mostly, when Tavy played square-dance reels and bluegrass train songs like "The Orange Blossom Special," the instrument in the case was a fiddle, but tonight, for Maggie Underbill's solo, it would be a violin.

He rosined the bow, and drew from the strings the first mournful notes of the old song, one of the few Christmas carols written in a minor key. Maggie, her eyes still fixed on the stained-glass angel, took up the melody in her husky contralto. "I wonder as I wander out under the sky, how poor Baby Jesus was born for to die . . ."

Taw McBryde felt his eyes smart with tears as he watched his old friend play. Surely this was the strangest of ail the songs of Christmas. He hadn't heard it in years. Up north in Detroit they never sang it in church. Christmas was a

happy time—"Joy to the World"—and nobody wanted to be reminded of the sorrow that was present the other 364 days of the year. Easter was the time for dirges. But these strange fey people, seeking out mountains wherever they found themselves, could not forget in their joy of Christ's beginning that they knew how the story would end. The minor-key melody of the song was as sad as any funeral requiem, but it was beautiful, and probably very old. It didn't sound like the other tunes people sang. Taw knew nothing at all about music theory, but he tried to puzzle out how this song was different. The best he could come up with was that the tune didn't go where you thought it would. It went up at the ends of lines, where tunes usually go down, and the end of the verse didn't sound like an ending at all; the notes just hung there in the air, as if the singer had forgotten what came next. It was a strange carol altogether, words and music. It sounded like whoever wrote it had remembered all the things Christmas is supposed to make you forget: that it's the dead of winter and a long time till spring; that peace on earth never did come to pass; and that the Christ Child and every other little baby, so beautiful and full of promise, was born for to die. The dark-haired girl singer in the choir loft couldn't be more than sixteen. She sang the words sweetly, as if they didn't apply to her, but all you had to do was look at the parchment face of Tavy Annis to see the truth of it: It's coming to us all, sooner rather than 200

later. Taw felt the winter in his bones. He looked away from the singer, staring instead at the flickering candles beside the altar, while he waited for them to sing something else.

After the benediction, Laura Bruce thanked the congregation for all their hard work in making the service a success. She was careful to mention each participant: flower arrangers, musicians, even the ladies who cleaned the sanctuary. "I just have one or two announcements," she said to the rows of restless faces. "I wish Will were here to do this, and I guess y'all do, too, but I'll do my best. First, there's a collection box in the front of the sanctuary here; if anybody has brought anything for Tammy Robsart and her little boy, please put it there." Several people stood up, with parcels in their arms, and made as if to head for the collection box. Laura signaled for them to wait. "There's just one more thing. I have a tape recorder up here, and I've taped the service to send to Will in the Gulf. If anybody wants to come up and say Merry Christmas to him on the tape, please do. I know he'd love to hear from you."

Freed at last from an hour's confinement, people struggled into their coats and gloves and surged past her, collecting choir members or dropping their donations into the charity box. As Laura finished thanking Deacon Guthrie for the fine Scripture reading, Nora Bonesteel appeared at her side. Laura's face lit up as she saw her. "I'm so glad you came!" she cried. 201

"Mrs. Arrowood absolutely refused to let me come and get you!"

"It can be a treacherous road for those that don't know it," said Nora, "but I'm right glad I came. The singing did my heart good."

Laura saw that the old woman was carrying a wrapped present. "Is that for the Robsarts?" she asked. "Shall I go and put it in the box for you?"

"I brought this for you," said Nora. "Don't put it in the box. A while back you asked me to make you something for your child, and so I have."

"Oh, how wonderful of you!" cried Laura. "Can I open it?" Without waiting for a reply, she tore at the taped ends of the red paper. "Oh, this is so sweet of you . . . and it's such a good baby. I hardly ever feel it kick around in there . . . Oh!" Her voice died away as she opened the box and took out Nora Bonesteel's gift. The red sweater was beautifully hand-knitted, embroidered at the neck with a design of green coiled circles, but it was much too large for an infant. Laura thought that it looked large enough for a four-year-old. She faltered in her thanks, determined not to let her disappointment show. "It's just beautiful," she said at last. She wondered if Nora Bonesteel were getting perhaps a little senile, or if she didn't remember how tiny newborn babies were.

"It's all right," said Nora. "I believe I'll go over and say hello to Will on the tape."

As she turned away, Laura remembered that 202

she hadn't yet told Maggie Underhill how beautifully she had sung her solo, but when she looked about the emptying sanctuary, the girl was gone.

Spencer Arrowood spent Christmas Eve on the Johnson City highway, where the holiday lights were red flares and the flashing sign of the rescue-squad ambulance. A family in a green Toyota, hurrying to get to Grandma's house for dinner, lost traction on an icy curve and slid into the oncoming lane of traffic. They hit a pickup truck driven by an old man.

A passing trucker used his CB to summon help and then stopped to direct traffic until help arrived. Spencer got there minutes before the ambulance. The trucker and some other witnesses had got the family out of their car. "I seen a wreck catch fire once't," the trucker later said to explain why he hadn't waited for the ambulance. The old man in the truck hadn't been wearing a seat belt. They could see that they might as well leave him where he was.

Spencer took blankets out of the trunk of the patrol car and wrapped up the two kids, who looked about four and six years old. The little girl had a bloody nose, but they looked okay. He told them that everything was going to be all right, and put them in the backseat of the patrol car, out of the wind.

"Our presents is in the trunk," the little boy said.

"They'll be okay," Spencer told him. "You'll get them."

"If anybody tries to steal 'em, will you arrest him?"

"I sure will," the sheriff promised.

The driver, their father, lay on the side of the road, covered by the trucker's overcoat. His wife stood nearby in that silent daze that meant shock was coming on. "Come on," Spencer pleaded silently to the ambulance. He hated wrecks; the awful wastefulness of death and destruction to no purpose whatsoever. He also hated the fact that being on the scene made him feel helpless. His medical training was minimal; except in extreme emergencies, everyone was better off if he left things to the rescue squad that followed close on his heels. He was supposed to talk to witnesses, look at skid marks, photograph the scene, determine blame. Sometimes the pointlessness of it sickened him more than the carnage.

When the rescue squad arrived, he left them to tend to the living, while he went about his own tasks of preparing for the aftermath, when the insurance companies, if no one else, would care about what happened and why. As he walked toward the twisted car, he slid on a patch of ice and nearly fell. This time Allstate would have to sue God.

"We're leaving now," said Millie Fortnum, one of the rescue-squad members, as he was kneeling to measure a skid mark. "I wish I could have wished you a Merry Christmas somewhere other than this. Sheriff."

"Same here, Millie," he said. The fog from 204

their breath made a little cloud in the glow of the flashlight. "The other fellow didn't make it, did he?"

"The one in the pickup? No. The others will, though."

"He wasn't from this county."

"No. From Sullivan." Suddenly, Millie understood. "Oh, I see. You don't have to be the one to tell his family."

Spencer nodded. "Right. All I have to do is the phone calls, the paperwork, and then—say, by midnight—I'll be all through."

Someone on the squad yelled for Millie. Patting his arm, she loped off toward the van. "Merry Christmas, Sheriff!"

His estimate had been just about right. He finished up the last of his paperwork at 11:40, usually too late to stop by his mother's house, but tonight being Christmas Eve, she would wait up for him. She would want to tell him about the church service he'd missed, and they'd have the traditional cup of eggnog to commemorate the occasion. He thought he might sleep over in his old room, since it was so late. No point in going home, when he was going back over in the morning, anyway.

Just on midnight as he drove down Hamelin's deserted Main Street, he looked at the snow-covered park bench in front of the courthouse, half-expecting to see Vernon Woolwine in Christmas regalia. "Don we now our gay apparel," Spencer thought, smiling. As he slowed the car, he caught sight of an unmoving form on the bench, and for one stricken moment, he 205

thought Vernon had frozen to death, but when he looked again, he saw that the figure perched there under the streetlight was a plaster garden gnome, sprinkled with snow. Vernon had left a deputy.

A sad tale's best for winter: I have one Of sprites and goblins.

—The Winter's Tale

Nora Bonesteel always gathered her balm of Gilead buds on Epiphany, if the day was fine. January and February were the months for harvesting the plants, but Nora liked to harvest hers early in the new year, in case the coming winter turned out to be a harsh one. This year the signs were mixed: There had been six thunderstorms in the late fall, sending ripples of low thunder across the valley—a sign that the coming winter would be harsh. But the woolly worms' coats weren't as thick as she'd seen them in years past, and the pinecones had not opened any earlier than usual. Still, she thought it was best to get the task of harvesting done first thing and then not have to worry about it anymore. Human frailty was less predictable than winter weather.

She cinched the belt on her black wool coat and shoved the knitted tarn over her silver hair. She wore two pairs of wool socks under heavy work boots. Across her left shoulder she slung a burlap bag to collect the buds in. When she left the house, she stood on her front porch for a moment, savoring the crisp winter air, and 209

the cold sunshine that made sharp shadows on the grass, but brought no warmth to the day. The meadow was a field of brown stubble, studded with the glistening black shapes of leafless trees; spring was far away. Across the valley the Hangman shone white above his collar of pines.

As she crossed the yard, Nora thought about walking over to the pile of loose earth that marked Persey the groundhog's winter burrow, but instead she walked past it and stumped down the hill to the creek bank to inspect the balm of Gilead plants. This was not a season for reunions. It was no time for excursions, either, so she kept her mind fixed on the task before her, shutting her mind firmly to old songs, and to the lure of the mountain itself. It was too cold today for one of the Nunnehi's excursions; an hour lost on the hillside and she could catch her death of cold. Fifty paces downhill to the bank of the stream, to the balm of Gilead trees. It is January sixth, she told herself, George Bush is president.

The excursions used to happen more frequently when she was a child, but she still got a drift of one now and again. She wouldn't have minded, but for the cold. The first time it happened she couldn't have been more than six. She was walking through the cane brake on the ridge, headed for her aunt's house, trailed by a hound pup, and thinking of nothing in particular, when she looked at where she was, and found that the cane was gone. She was surrounded by tall brown grasses, swaying slowly 210

in the breeze, and the trees at the edge of the field looked somehow different. She stopped walking and listened for sounds from her aunt's yard, children calling or dogs barking, but all was silent. Finally in the distance she heard the drone of human song, like nothing she had heard before. It was a rhythmic singsong, a chant in words that she could not make out, but she knew not to go toward that sound. Beside her, the brown puppy whined and huddled against her leg. Not knowing what else to do, she had walked on down the hill, in the direction that her aunt's house should have been. She squinted up at the August sun, brushed gnats out of the pools of sweat on her face, and pushed the tall plants aside with a sturdy forearm. In the heat and aggravation her mind forgot to worry about the strangeness of the field, and when she noticed again, the leaves in her face were cane plants, and in the distance she could see a row of Esther's white sheets on the clothesline, flapping in the breeze. She told her grandmother about that excursion, for she'd heard folks in the family say that Grandma Flossie had the Sight. The old woman had listened to little Nora's halting account of being on the ridge and yet somewhere else. She nodded thoughtfully as the tale unfolded, and twice she asked Nora to make the sounds of chanting that she'd heard on the hill.

"Was I lost, Grandma?" the little girl asked.

"In a way you was, Nora," Grandma Flossie replied. "You had the place right, but the time was wrong. I judge from the sounds you heard 211

that you was back in a field of buffalo grass in the days when the Indians owned this land. You just strayed a little from the path of time, that's all."

Nora's eyes were round in the firelight. "What if it happens again and I can't find my way back?"

"Why, I don't think that's likely," said her grandmother with a sad smile. "But if it was to happen, I reckon the Nunnehi in the hollow hill would come out and fetch you home."

For a long time after that, Nora would try to get off the path of time whenever she went out rambling, but she found that you couldn't stray on purpose. It happened when you weren't thinking about it, and never for very long. Once when her Aunt Esther was in the front porch swing singing an old ballad, it happened. Ten-year-old Nora was sitting on the stone steps of the porch, with her back to Esther's singing, when suddenly, in the verse about the dead soldier who'd come no more, she saw that the mountains had changed. They weren't the familiar rounded mountains surrounding Dark Hollow, green with oak and pine trees; these dark and angular peaks were taller and treeless, brooding under storm clouds that weren't there before. Nora kept silent and looked at the strange mountains that seemed somehow to go with Esther's singing. When the last verse laid to rest the Scottish soldier, Nora turned to ask Esther what was wrong with the mountains, but when she looked again, they were Tennessee hills once again, as green and wooded as ever. 212

The excursions happened less frequently as Nora grew older, perhaps because she never gave her whole mind to anything, as one does a child; a grown-up's mind has at the back of it a steady drumbeat of obligations, no matter what the circumstances, and perhaps that kept her on the time path, marching steadily along to the place where it would end for her. Sometimes she missed the excursions, but not today. Today was January sixth, and George Bush was president. It was a day too cold to get lost in. When she found herself among the balm of Gilead trees, she glanced back up the hill to make sure that her little house was there unchanged, and it was.

Years ago, people in the mountains used to harvest balm of Gilead buds to sell at the little country stores. When home remedies were still a popular form of medicine, the buds might sell for a dollar a pound, a good return for a day's work, since one large tree might yield several pounds of buds. Now the making of the salve was almost a lost art, and since lack of demand had driven the prices down, few people bothered to brave the cold to pick the buds.

Nora Bonesteel kept up the tradition. She made the salve herself, and stored it in mason jars on the cool shelves of her concrete cellar, alongside the canned tomatoes and homemade watermelon pickles. The clear salve would keep for years.

When Nora was a girl, a few of the old women had claimed that balm of Gilead ought to be harvested at dawn or dusk, but these days she 213

dispensed with that part of the ritual. Early morning and evening were colder than midday, and she was too old to brave a chill for the sake of rough magic. She understood the logic behind the stricture, though. There was a power in the borders of things: in the twilight hours that separated day from night; in rivers that divided lands; in the caves and wells that lay suspended between the earth and the underworld. The ancient holy days had been the divisions between summer and winter, and that border in time created a threshold for other things; that was why ghosts and goblins were thought to roam on Halloween and Beltane. The mountains themselves were a border, Nora thought. They separated the placid coastal plain from the flatlands to the west, and there was magic in them.

The balm of Gilead trees on Nora's land grew at the edge of the creek, so perhaps there was enchantment enough in that border, without their needing to be picked at the threshold of day to strengthen the charm. Some people whacked the whole tree down to a stump when they harvested the buds, because the tree is fast growing and will renew itself in three years. Nora didn't need as many buds as that, though; she wasn't going to sell them. She would pick the buds from the branches the way she would pick apples in October from the trees farther up the hill. A pound or two would make enough salve to last until next year, with some extra jars to give away, if need be. She might cut a couple of small limbs from the tree, and stick 214

them into the ground by the creek. They would take root there in the damp earth and make new trees for years to come.

She turned her back to the bright afternoon sun, and began to strip the buds from the sturdiest branches. Modern medicine probably had treatments just as good as her homemade salve, but she knew that she could rely on this one for burns and sores on man or beast. When she finished harvesting the buds, she would take them back up the hill to the house and heat a dozen buds in the cast-iron skillet with a quarter cup of mutton tallow. When the mixture cooled she would mash up the buds, and then strain off the clear liquid into jars to use for home doctoring. Nora's people had used this medicine for centuries, and while she seldom needed it these days, she was loath to let go of the ritual.

Lately she had been dreaming about fire.

Spencer Arrowood was staring up at the Judds poster above his desk, but he wasn't really thinking about them. He had eaten chicken and dumplings at lunch at Dent's, and he was wishing he could take an afternoon nap without catching hell about it from somebody, probably Martha. As if in answer to this prediction, Martha appeared in the doorway looking virtuously wide awake after a brown-bag feast of raw carrots, peanut-butter celery, and black coffee. Either Martha would live forever, or it would seem like it. "Naomi is not her real name," Martha an-215

nounced, waving the magazine that had been her lunchtime diversion.

"What?" Spencer groped for continuity.

Martha tapped the poster with pink-taloned impatience. "Naomi Judd. It's not her real name. Well, the Judd part is, but they made up Naomi and Wynonna when they went into show business. Her name is Diana, like the princess of Wales."

"So it would have been okay for show business," said Spencer, taking the easy shot at one of Martha's favorite celebrities.

Martha ignored him. "It wouldn't have fit her image. She was Mama Judd, and Naomi is one of those pioneer-type names that suggests old-fashioned values and country ways. She was a nurse. She lived in Los Angeles for years." Her tone of voice left no doubt as to what she thought about people who put on country airs.

Spencer waited. This didn't seem to be about Naomi Judd. Martha's lips were pursed into a tight line as she gazed up at the smiling woman on the poster. "She's the same age we are," she murmured. "Isn't it strange to think we're old enough to have a grown daughter like Wynonna?"

"It's strange to think we're old enough to be dying of degenerative diseases," said Spencer.

"And nothing to show for it," said Martha, sitting down uninvited in the straight chair in front of his desk. "What have we got, Spencer? Jobs that aren't terribly high in pay or prestige. No kids. No mark made on the world."

"We've got our health." 216

Martha was not appeased. "What's the point of living another uneventful forty years?" She followed his gaze upward to the poster. "Don't feel sorry for her, Spencer Arrowood! She's had it all, even if she goes tomorrow. She's beautiful, rich, famous, and she's got a daughter to carry it on. I'd trade places with her in a New York minute, liver and all. Why, look at you, Spencer. I do believe you're about half in love with her, and so is pretty near every other fan of country music. And she's got a husband. I'd give a whole lot more than a vital organ for some of that love. I don't know why some women get so much of it without even trying, and others don't get so much as a flicker no matter what they do. I think—I think if I could trade places with Naomi Judd and die, the whole world's vote would be unanimous to let me do it. Unanimous."

He saw the sparkle of tears in her eyes, and he wanted to run. Why didn't the phone ring? "Where's LeDonne?"

Martha sniffed. "On patrol. It's my job to know that, because I'm the dispatcher. But when his shift is over, you'd be asking the wrong person."

He didn't want to get involved in their private lives, didn't want to hear her side of it behind his deputy's back. Joe LeDonne couldn't be easy to live with, though, with all his moodiness. But that was Martha's lookout; she'd known it all going in.

"I don't know what's the matter with him, Spencer," she said as if he'd asked. "He's so 217

withdrawn these days. I rack my brain trying to think up topics of conversation, and he answers me with this world-weary voice, like as not saying, Whatever you want to do. Like he's a prisoner of war. Like I'm a goddamned Viet-cong. And sometimes he just disappears, and I don't know where he's off to. He's in a daze, seems like."

"Have you brought it up in the veterans' support group?"

"We couldn't go last week. He forgot. I didn't see him till the next morning here at the office. He said he was just off by himself, thinking. I don't know what to believe, Spencer. Sometimes I halfway wish it was another woman, so I could be sure he wasn't having a breakdown." She hit the desk with her clenched fist. "I don't deserve this! I've loved him, dammit, when it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do!"

"Look, I'll try to talk to him. If I can do it without prying, I'll see if anything is bothering him. Okay?" He stood up, about to invent an urgent errand.

Martha nodded mistily. His promise of intercession seemed to solve all the problems of life's meaning for her, but for the life of him Spencer couldn't see why Joe LeDonne's love should make any difference at all in the point-iessness of her next forty years of living.

"Oh, and Spencer? Sam Rogers called from the high school."

He sighed. "What did he want?"

"He said to tell you that the Underhill kids didn't come back to school after the Christmas 218

holidays. Thought you would want to be told. It's not illegal. The girl turns sixteen this month, but he thought he ought to report it."