November Mourns Page 3

  Somehow the cold never bothered his father, regardless of how far the temperature dropped. Even after the ice crystals formed in his beard stubble, he’d still sit there rocking, waiting.

  Pa was playing chess against himself, as usual, moonlight flickering in the polished, hand-carved quartz pieces. The old man made only three or four moves a night. He took the game more seriously than others might think—it gave his life an even greater simplicity than anyone would suppose. He just didn’t know what to do with himself since his third wife had left him.

  The shotgun, always loaded, remained propped across his father’s knee.

  Collar up, with the heat of his grief keeping him warm as he edged the ’Stang forward. The car helped to keep him in the past, where he needed to be.

  A shiver worked between his shoulders as he thought of Mags’s empty room inside the house. He gripped the steering wheel tight and drove through the shadow of Mama’s headstone, teeth clenched. Symbols like these had the power to torment. You always had to be on your toes.

  He felt it again, that somebody in the hills was thinking about him, worried, bitter.

  Shad parked and walked up the porch. His father looked over and a rare smile crossed his lips. “Hello, son.”

  “Hi, Pa.”

  “You should’ve let me meet you.”

  Shad shook his head. “I preferred it this way. Gave me a chance to reacquaint myself. See some of the folks gathering out in the fields, down by the river.”

  “Any of them right enough in their minds to say hello?”

  “A few.”

  “Can’t expect more than that.”

  You could, but there wasn’t much point to it. His father furrowed his brow but said nothing else. He stared at Shad’s hands as if inspecting them for prison tats, wondering exactly what tales the new scars might betray. Brawling, knifing, the puckered flesh around his wrists from the tight handcuffs.

  His father handled grief and remorse even worse than Shad. You didn’t want to think of him as a hypersensitive beat-down disappointment, too often lost in self-pity, but there it was. The old man had discarded everything that ever belonged to each of his wives, damn near every dish, sheet, or couch cushion they’d ever touched. He walked around his own home like it was tearing off his skin.

  His memories were already too powerful and he didn’t need anything more to remind him of the experiences. Pa couldn’t bear to own anything with a history that he hadn’t made with his own hands.

  Karl Jenkins had turned sixty-three years old last month, and he’d finally aged into his flat broad face as hard-featured as bedrock. Firm-muscled and compact, he contained a coiled energy that made him always seem a second away from leaping forward into your chest. Pa moved with a bearish and terrible grace, a relentless sense of force.

  He usually kept his thick silver hair short, but since Mags had died no one had cut it for him. Shad liked how it had grown out, giving him an easygoing appearance that offset his impenetrable dark eyes. Shad had started to go gray when he was seventeen, and now at twenty-two he had white at his temples and a patch in front that at first glance made him appear older than his own father.

  Pa had passed a determined sort of melancholia down to his children, but not much of his despair. The man’s first wife had run off with a farm equipment salesman trying to sell them a used corn thresher. It didn’t take much to seduce and persuade folks to leave Moon Run Hollow.

  His second wife—Shad’s mother—had died less than a year into their marriage, three weeks after Shad’s birth and long before the final log had been shaved and laid into the roof of the house.

  You could wind up with a wretched history without having to do a damn thing on your own. Just sit around long enough and it would just happen around you.

  His third wife, Tandy Mae Lusk—Megan’s mother—had given birth to Mags, stuck around for about three years, then skipped town with her own first cousin whom she’d always been in love with. She hadn’t gotten far. They lived less than twenty miles away in Waynescross now, burdened with a brood of crippled ill children. Two with flippers instead of arms, one hydrocephalic with a wet brain and enormous head, another with no bone in his jaw and hardly any spine.

  Mags never saw her mother again. But on occasion Shad would drive out to the neglected Lusk farm near a diseased cherry orchard, watch the kids rolling and crawling around the yard, and try to figure out exactly what it all meant.

  Pa wouldn’t ask any questions, and he’d never bring Mags up on his own. He propped the shotgun in the corner, pulled a beer off the porch rail, and passed it to Shad, gesturing for him to sit. Shad slid into the love seat swing and pretended to sip from the can.

  His father had never asked him to play chess. Pa did on his own, at his own pace, in order to keep his own footing in the world. He sat in the night for his own reasons, some of which Shad could guess at, most he never wanted to learn. You had to let some things slide.

  They’d have to get around to Megan’s death slowly. The weight of Mags’s presence was a solid pressure on Shad’s shoulders. He could feel it there caressing his back the way she used to do when he’d wrenched himself chopping wood. The women in his life were always rubbing him, patting him like, Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now. He knew it was his own fault.

  It was going to take a while to think of her in the past tense. He still occasionally spoke of his mother as if he’d just seen her a couple of days before, instead of never having met the woman at all. When you needed your family, you built one from whatever you had on hand.

  He peered through the window, but the inside of the house was too dim for him to see anything. The dog sat up, furiously scratched his ear, then lay down again with a lengthy sigh.

  “Zeke Hester come around looking for you three or four days ago,” Pa said. “He was keeping tabs on when you got out.”

  “Did he hassle you?”

  “No, but he’s got a short memory, that boy. Doesn’t quite recall what happened to him last time.”

  “He remembers.”

  “Not well enough, I reckon.”

  Maybe that was true, maybe not. Shad supposed he’d find out soon enough. The pride in his father’s voice was more jarring than he’d expected. If only Pa had ever sounded that way about something that hadn’t sent Shad to jail. “Did he say anything about Mags?”

  “You don’t want to know what he said about her. I went for the shotgun but he was already gone by the time I got back to the door.”

  Pa was like a cop standing watch over a crime scene. The body removed, but the blood still on the floor.

  “He’s a fool, Pa. He isn’t even worth getting mad about.”

  “That your advice to me after spending two years downstate for trouncing hell out of him?”

  “But I didn’t get mad,” Shad said.

  “You split your own hairs, son, I’ll split mine. That’s the way of it.”

  “Sure enough.”

  The rage started working through Shad again, but he kept it down where it could be handled. It wasn’t anger though, not the usual kind. He swallowed a groan, felt the living confusion inside him swell for an instant, then settle. The hound let out a whine, keeping an eye on Shad. Zeke Hester had wanted Megan, there was no other way to say it, but she’d always managed to elude him as she flourished into womanhood. Shad did what he could, which amounted to giving Zeke a few even-handed threats that the guy was too ignorant to heed. He simply may not have understood what Shad was getting at.

  It went on like that for a couple of years, until the night Zeke caught her behind Crisco Miller’s still on Sweetwater Creek. While Shad was just starting to put the butter knives back out for Elfie, Zeke was throwing his all at Mags. He battered her pretty good, fractured her wrist and dislocated her left knee, but he never got what he was after. Mags had hellfire in her when she got going. She had Pa’s hands, small but hard with meat to them.

  She succeeded in slugging Zeke in the mouth hard
enough to crack a rotted front tooth he had hanging among the rest of the brown train wreck. The pain catapulted him sideways, and she kicked free and crawled into the tree line to hide.

  She refused to go to the doctor and only lay in bed for a weekend before she got back to doing her chores. Mags had a resolve that Shad had never acquired. They talked a lot during those couple of days, but he couldn’t remember a word of it. He was having a difficult time even hearing her voice nowadays. It was the kind of thing that made you knot your fists and drive them into your temples, trying to loosen memories. The only voice she had was the impact left on him.

  When Shad caught up with Zeke Hester outside of Griff’s Suds’n’Pump, he broke the bastard’s jaw, cheek, nose, and left arm in three places.

  True enough, he hadn’t gotten mad. A cool lucidity had somehow draped over him, a calm he hadn’t experienced before. By the time Zeke was weeping on his belly and baying in pain, Shad felt only an ample amount of pity and sadness.

  When Sheriff Increase Wintel asked him why it had happened, Shad refused to explain. Some circumstances you kept quiet about if you could. When you managed it, you found your assurance in the silence.

  Perhaps it was a talent he’d picked up from his father. He willingly took the deuce in prison and managed to finish three semesters’ worth of college courses. All in all, he’d read about a book a day for the two years he was inside, and he’d only had to watch one man die.

  His father studied the chessboard for a minute before he moved the white bishop.

  Shad looked off at the brush-shrouded terrain and tried to discern movement. Already the old caged-in feeling was beginning to overtake him. You could prepare for it but you couldn’t get away from your smallest apprehensions. The dark land led back into the surrounding weed-choked pastures, and the air seemed thick with a sickeningly sweet honeysuckle even at the end of autumn.

  “What happened, Pa?”

  His father’s perfect control wavered, and the angles of his face fell in on themselves. The old man opened his mouth and shut it again. Cleared his throat and moved the white bishop back where it’d been.

  “She never came home.”

  Shad waited but his father said nothing more. “The hell does that mean?”

  “She went to school like always and just never come back.”

  Okay, so he was going to have to pry it loose. Shad flipped the beer can across the porch and stood, moved in on his father. “Tell me about it. That afternoon.”

  “You can’t change nothin’, son.”

  “I realize that.” His fingers flexed, like he was ushering the words out. “But I need to know. Do it for me. As much as it pains you.”

  Pa pulled himself together, sluggishly. He shut his eyes and his chin began to lower to his chest. It stayed there for a while. Shad rapped the chessboard with his knuckles, careful not to jostle the pieces. His father opened his eyes.

  “I tried not to get nervous that afternoon,” Pa said. “I thought maybe she went off with that Luvell girl. Malt shop, the junior rodeo over there in Springfield. However they keep busy. You know your sister was a good girl, she doesn’t do what them others all do. When it came evening I made some phone calls but nobody’s seen her. Come ten o’clock I called the sheriff’s office. She’d never been out past that without telling me before. That damn Increase Wintel didn’t pay me no heed, but Dave Fox went off looking right then. He found her the next morning.”

  Leaning closer, Shad remained poised, but his father had hit the wall again.

  “And what happened to her?”

  “Nobody’s sure. She just . . . went to sleep there on Gospel Trail Road.”

  “That’s not what you told me.”

  “Yes it is, boy.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said. I told you the truth is what I did.”

  His father’s voice had cracked painfully when he’d phoned the prison over a month ago. It was the only call Shad ever received on the inside. He knew it was going to be awful the instant he touched the receiver. Pa had said exactly thirteen words and hung up before Shad could respond.

  Your sister’s been killed. Come home ’fore you get on with your life.

  Pa couldn’t see the disparity of what he’d said on the phone and what he was saying now. Shad had to let it go.

  He chewed his tongue, kept staring into darkness. “There’s nothing up that way at all. Gospel Trail leads to the trestle, doesn’t it? Why was she near the gorge?”

  “I ain’t got no answers.”

  “But what did she die from?”

  “I don’t know that either. They never found out. Doc Bollar ain’t a big-city medical examiner. All he told me was her heart stopped. How’s that for putting a father’s mind at rest? That bastard!”

  Mags had just turned seventeen. He searched Pa’s face to see if the old man was hiding anything, but there was only the usual frustration in his features, the endless disappointment.

  “It’s a bad road, son.”

  The words, spoken as if they held a terrible meaning. “What’s that?”

  “I told you kids to keep off it, didn’t I?”

  “The road? When did you ever tell me to stay clear of it?”

  “Since you were both children!” The veins on his father’s wiry forearms stood out, the thick muscles in his neck corded and going red. “Not to go up there on Gospel Trail! It’s a bad road! Didn’t I say that?”

  “Did you?”

  “Stay away from Jonah Ridge! There’s nothing there but murder in wait. Don’t neither of you ever listen to me?”

  Now that Shad thought about it some, he realized that he’d never been up there to the top of the gorge in his life. His father had told him, many times, but Shad didn’t stay away because of that. He simply never had a reason to go into those hills. And neither had Megan, so far as he knew.

  “Tell me what you mean by that.”

  “Don’t you know yet, boy?”

  “No. Why would there be murder waiting?”

  “I can’t explain it no better.”

  His father stood, with that coiled explosive force inside him about to propel him forward. Shad reached out and took his father by the shoulders, held the old man where he was. They both began to tremble, fighting one another like that, will against will. Shad understood that his father was no longer going to be of any help. Whatever had to be done, he had to do himself.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “Don’t talk such damn nonsense!”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  The pressure inside Pa suddenly eased. He deflated and slumped back into his chair, weakly started to rock again. The dog began to crawl around in circles. Shad patted his father’s back, rubbing him, like, Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.

  “Have you told Tandy Mae?” he asked. Shad didn’t feel comfortable bringing it up, but had to do so.

  “I got no truck with her anymore, son.”

  “She’s Megan’s mother.”

  “That isn’t much of a truth to tell. Tandy gave birth to her, that’s all. ’Sides, she got enough worries with them other lame and afflicted children. Every one of us got enough burden already, don’t you think?”

  When you got down to it, when somebody put it like that, you couldn’t do anything but agree. Shad nodded. “Yes.”

  “You gonna stay the night?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think you would, but you’re welcome to stay, a’course. Your old bedroom’s still fixed up. Megan always cleaned it, put clean sheets on while you were away.”

  His father’s steady motion began to waver. As if he consciously forced himself to keep going but kept forgetting, from second to second, what he was supposed to be doing.

  Shad started to turn. His father was instantly on him, an inch away and hovering. “Son—”

  “I want to see her room.”

  “There isn’t anything left that might help you.”


  “Show me.”

  “It’s gonna do nothing but kill you, if’n you stay.”

  Everyone thinking he didn’t have a chance, that he was already dead.

  “What is?”

  “The hollow.”

  Shad spoke gently now, softly, the way you had to talk to Tandy Mae’s hydrocephalic pumpkin-headed son. “Pa, you wanted me to come home. Now I’m here. I want to check her room.”

  The hound rose slowly and stood at Shad’s knee as he pulled open the screen door and pressed inside.

  Immediately he could feel the oppression of common failure and everyday defeat. You could smell it like the stink of terror. Anybody who had it on him in prison was finished by the end of the first week.

  You didn’t have to be murdered to haunt a house. And the place didn’t have to do anything more than exist to harass you. He wondered why he’d never felt it in his cell, with a century of caged men’s energy imprisoned along with him. No, only here, surrounded by family.

  He entered Mags’s room and stopped short. All her belongings were still in their appropriate spots—the schoolbooks and teen magazines stacked neatly on her desk, closet door open and her clothes draped on hangers and hooks. Shad gritted his teeth and almost glanced away.

  “You didn’t touch anything.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “That’s not like you. She’s been dead six weeks.” About twenty minutes after Tandy Mae had taken up with her cousin, Pa had cleared every remnant of the woman from the house. Whatever she didn’t take, he burned in a bin out back.

  His father shrugged, appeared almost sheepish. Was it because he’d lost yet another woman in his life? Or had he finally learned that removing the effects didn’t push out any of the memories?

  “Five and a half,” Pa said.

  “Did the police show up here?”

  “Sheriff Wintel never came around at all, not even to offer his commiseration and condolences. Dave Fox searched through her things. Wore a pair of latex gloves the whole time. He inspected different parts a’the house, looked around the yard some. I’m not sure what he might’ve been hunting for. Drugs, I suppose. But she never touched none of that. There was nothing suspicious. So he told me, anyways. But if there was nothing peculiar, why was he lookin’?”