You Believers

You Believers

You Believers

JANE BRADLEY

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Unbridled Books

Copyright © 2011 by Jane Bradley

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bradley, Jane
You believers/by Jane Bradley.

p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-046-4
1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.R2274Y68 2011
813′.54—dc22
2010047173

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by SH · CV

First Printing

For Monica Caison

and Community United Effort
,

Wilmington, North Carolina

Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm, for stern as death is love, relentless as the netherworld’s devotion; its flames are a blazing force
.

Song of Songs 8:6

Bodies

When Wilmington police searched for Katy Connor, they found a woman’s leg, fish-belly white, gray at the crease at the back of the knee, black at the top where someone had hacked it off before tossing the leg into the stream. A blue Keds sneaker still clung to the foot in spite of the suck and pull of so much water. It wasn’t Katy’s leg but some other woman’s leg, another woman’s story we will never know. This is Katy’s story. At least I think it’s Katy’s story. It’s hard to say sometimes where one woman’s story ends and another begins.

It’s classic, almost. Like the story of Persephone picking flowers in a field one spring afternoon. The earth opens. Hades comes roaring up in his chariot, black horses digging up dirt with their hooves, hot breath swirling from flared nostrils. With a quick swoop of thick, muscled arm, Hades snatches the girl, drags her down to the underworld. You know the story. A mother comes to the rescue, finds her daughter has eaten six seeds of the dark fruit, pomegranate seeds that crunched between the girl’s teeth, red juice running from her lips.

And the mother’s world, the whole wide world, is changed.

You could say it could be anyone’s story. People go missing every day. That twelve-year-old blond who disappears while waiting
for her school bus one spring morning. The woman last seen turning away from an ATM camera. Sometimes we find them. Sometimes not. Most often we find remains.

My name’s Shelby Waters, and you don’t know me, and you might not ever want to know me because I’m a searcher. I’m the one you call when someone you love goes missing. Yes, of course you call the cops first, and you should. But once the cop is gone with his report and the profile of what went down rising up in his mind, and you’ve got nothing left but worry and waiting for the phone to ring, you call me.

And I listen to your sorrows and fears and speculations. And you, like everyone who’s missing someone, hope for the best and fear the worst. That’s a hard line to walk. So I step in and I look at your pictures, letters, whatever fragments you might have that belong or relate to the one you’ve lost. I try to fill in the gaps between what you think might have happened, what you fear might have happened, and what did go down and how it went. And while I’m figuring the story, I’m doing my best to make you feel you can stand and walk, and no matter what happens, you can go on and live.

It was my sister, Darly, got me started on this.

I was always the hard, shy one, but Darly, she was the popular girl. You know the kind, with blue eyes and a sweet little mouth that makes you think of cherries. All the boys liked her. The girls too. She was the kind anyone could love. Pretty and sweet, you know, not taken with her own beauty, just cheerful and helpful and good. She grew up, got married, and moved out of our little cove called Suck Creek to Chattanooga. Momma had a bad feeling, but mommas most often have bad feelings about their babies moving away. But the rest of us, well, we were proud. I mean Suck Creek isn’t exactly the kind of place where people do big things in life. In the old days it was pretty much moonshiners and poor folks making do with some kind
of labor. Some say there was a curse on the place for all the shooting and drinking and general meanness that went on back in the woods off the roads. Some say it was cursed by the Cherokee when they got pushed out on that old Trail of Tears.

There was a creek there, Suck Creek, looked clean and deep and just right for swimming in the summer. It sat back a little from the Tennessee River, where the rainwater runs off the mountain, just tucked back a little in the cove. It looked calm enough, but now and then there’d be this current, some said it was the pull of the river way down beneath, but something would shift, pull people under. And they’d drown. Mostly kids and drunk teenaged boys. My momma liked to say God looks after drunks and little children, but living in Suck Creek, I don’t know how she could hold to that way of thinking. But she was strong on religion. Lots of folks are strong on religion back there. Momma said one day they had a revival out by that creek, and there was a woman there. Lillian Young was her name. My momma knew her, said she had some power of God working in her. She’d once stopped two boys from lynching this black boy just for riding his bike back in there. The white boy that brought him in, the redneck boys knocked his teeth out. They beat the black boy pretty bad. His face was all bashed in. They were throwing a rope over a tree limb. Had the noose tied. Some of the boys tried to keep Miss Young away, but she pushed on, saying, “I want to know what you boys are doing back there.” And when she saw what they were doing, she stopped it all right, just by calling those boys down with words. She said, “God is not pleased with what you boys are doing.” And they listened. They all knew Miss Young. She’d go all around there helping the old folks, teaching the young ones to read. So those boys, they quit their beating on that black boy, and she yanked him up, shoved him toward his bike, and said, “In the name of Jesus, get on that bike, get home, and never, ever, come back here.” Whenever
she said something in the name of Jesus, something changed in the world. Everybody believed in the powers of Lillian Young.

So after that revival, when folks were all full of faith and joy in salvation, Lillian Young decided it was time to go out and pray over that creek, pray for whatever evil lay beneath that water to vanish, in the name of Jesus, of course. She prayed, “Lord, if this creek gives you no glory, in the name of Jesus, take this creek away.” They say she said that a few times, along with some others praying. And it wasn’t a week later a big storm rolled through, tore up the riverbank, changed the way the rain flowed down the mountain and into the river, and that creek, it disappeared. I do not lie about this. That creek was gone. And Miss Young, well, she came to be known from Knoxville to Tuscaloosa for the holy woman she was.

I wish we had her now. And I wish we had had her to pray over Darly before she moved away. Like I said, Momma had a bad feeling, and to tell the truth I did too. I thought maybe I was worrying about being lonely for my sister, so I told Darly I was proud she was moving off and going to college to be a nurse. It wasn’t long before she had a job and a husband and a house and all that stuff a woman’s supposed to get in this world. And it was good for a while. Then, on her way to work one morning, Darly disappeared.

You never believe it at first. You go looking for the simplest explanation, the thing you want to believe, like she just met up with a friend and forgot to call. But they found her white nurse’s cap on the shelf in a phone booth, her little white MG broken down by the side of the road. No signs of a struggle, just a car, keys hanging in the ignition. The car had had some kind of engine trouble. It was always getting her stuck on the side of the road. She’d probably be alive today if she’d done like my daddy always said to and bought a Dodge.

I had a dream the morning she disappeared. I was planting red tulips in black dirt, and Darly rode by the house in a black car. She
was in the passenger seat in the dream. I didn’t see the driver. She just looked at me, so sad. I straightened up from digging in the dirt and said, “Darly doesn’t like this.” I woke up with those words. And I wondered why I was dreaming about Darly. I mean I’d seen her around, but we’d kind of drifted apart with me still back in Suck Creek running the Quick Stop and her off being a nurse and married and all. While I was pouring my coffee that morning, my momma called, told me about the phone booth, the car, the keys still there. I knew it was bad.

After the cops investigated her husband and did a half-assed job of a search, they gave up looking. Too many other crimes to get on to, they said, or something like that. I knew we’d find her in time, not Darly, but what was left. It’s a hard thing to learn to live with what’s left when so much is always falling away. A year later two hunters out for deer found Darly in the brush in the north Georgia mountains where only hunters go.

Police never found the facts, just figured it was some guy saw an easy target. Such a little woman, her nurse’s uniform bright in the predawn darkness. Did he snatch her from the phone booth? Or did he, smiling, offer her a ride? These are the questions that got me started. With answers I’ll always want to know. I tried to talk to Darly all those months she was gone, and I sent up prayers trying to catch a sense of her spirit. But Darly never answered. I guess I’m no Lillian Young because no matter how much I cried out, God just sat silent and shadowed as those deep, dark mountains back there. Once they found her remains, I gave up on God. And I couldn’t look at mountains without thinking what meanness might be going on. I used to love mountains, had no fear of any kind of wildness out there. But I got to where I couldn’t even get off our porch, so my momma thought I should visit my cousin in Wilmington. He ran a bar out on the beach. No mountains, just sea and sky and sand. I needed that. And
it was good for a while. All those happy tourists, big beach homes and condos and parties and money and laughter flowing in and out like the tides.