November Mourns Read online

  “Good point.”

  So Dave didn’t consider her death to be from natural causes. Shad checked for something he could use to help him hold his course. “Letters? A diary?” He unmade the bed and, despite himself, tore away the blankets, and pulled up the mattress, the box spring Pa had made himself. He stared blankly at the clean slats of the floor beneath.

  “Nothing like that. You knew your sister.”

  Of course he had—but no, of course he hadn’t. Not anymore. He’d strayed off for two of the most important years in her life. When he’d gone into the can she’d just begun the transition from girl to young woman. It made him ache to think of what he’d missed.

  “Don’t go up there,” his father said again, the man talking the way he did when Shad was a kid. “Stay away from them woods.”

  “Pa, did you ever think that maybe someone just left her there? A boyfriend?”

  “She didn’t have none.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t know.”

  “I knew everything about my baby girl.”

  Except why she was dead. “They probably went up there to make out. Had a fight. She—”

  “There wasn’t no boy, son.”

  He’d been priming himself for weeks to avenge a killing. There had been cruelty in his father’s voice, whether the old man admitted to it now or not. He’d been calling down the rage, hoping to set it in motion.

  Shad walked out but couldn’t help staring over at the chessboard. Both sides had mate in three moves. Pa always played a losing game.

  Most of them did. Shad knew he had to fight, all the time, without hope of finishing, to keep from doing the same. The blood dreams had violent, beautiful needs that were entirely human.

  Chapter Three

  WHEN HE GOT BACK TO MRS. RHYERSON’S boardinghouse he called Dave Fox from the phone in the hallway, and said, “It’s Shad Jenkins. I want you to show me where Megan’s body was found.”

  Even a call at midnight didn’t surprise Dave. When you stood six-foot-four, went 250 of brawn and assurance, and could shoot the asshole out of a junkyard rat with an S&W.32 at two hundred yards, there wasn’t much that could shake you. He’d never been rattled in his life, over anything, but there was a trace of concern in his firm voice. “Maybe that’s not such a smart decision. The hell are you doing? You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “It’s about time people stopped informing me of their opinions on where I should be.”

  “You nearly gained yourself a college degree in the can. That puts you on the highway out of this county. You got a start on something new.”

  It surprised Shad. He hadn’t known Dave Fox or the sheriff’s office would be so plugged in on him. He leaned against the wall, trying to ignore the pink wallpaper and a framed paint-by-numbers portrait of Conway Twitty shaking hands with Jesus.

  “Is that how you’d play it?” Shad asked.

  He was almost grinning and wasn’t sure why, until he reached up and felt his lips and realized it wasn’t a grin at all, he was baring his teeth. You could lose control for an instant and not even know it.

  Never show what’s inside. If you didn’t hide it, they’d use it against you. He touched his mouth again and his expression was tranquil.

  Dave still hadn’t responded and wouldn’t put it into words, but they both understood that hollow folks always paid their debts, and went after whatever was owed. “Will you take me up there?”

  “Yes. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “Thanks.”

  It made sense. Dave had been keeping tabs on him and already knew Shad was staying at the boardinghouse.

  He could hear it in the deputy’s voice, and sense his fortitude even over the phone. Dave Fox remained imperturbable, solid as mahogany, a tower of finely carved muscle, unwavering but purposeful. They’d never been particularly close but Shad guessed that was about to change now.

  He hung up and thought of Mags’s beautiful face, dead at seventeen, laid out in the middle of a road no one ever traveled.

  When he got back to the room his mother and the white bishop were waiting for him, standing there together smiling, breathing heavily as if they’d just been dancing. Shad looked down and saw himself sleeping on the bed with his eyes open.

  It hadn’t happened like this for a while.

  With her hand against the white bishop’s chin, drawing him to her, the robes flowed around them both as they whispered to one another and giggled. Shad noticed the inside of the window was steamed, and a word was written on the glass.

  Pharisee

  Someone had spelled it out using an index finger.

  Shad stepped toward his mother but she wasn’t aware of him yet. It would take time, he knew, and he tried not to let the dread build within him. The bishop moved away from her and leaned over Shad’s body on the bed, put a hand on his shoulder as if trying to wake him. Failing that, the bishop slid away and came to rest beside Shad where he stood in the center of the room, and spoke to him from the corner of his mouth. As if they were conspirators in a grand royal treachery.

  The white bishop’s voice was the voice of his father. “So there you are.”

  “Yes,” Shad said.

  The three roles of the bishop were illustrated in his vestments. His role as ruler was denoted by the crown. As a guardian, by the shepherd’s staff. As a guide, by the bells on the saccos, the short tunic with box sleeves. The sides were buttoned up with bells, beginning at the wrists and flowing to the bottom of the hem. The bells called worshipers to follow.

  The Omophorion—the long band of cloth marked with crosses that passed around the neck—wafted as if a steady breeze was loose in the room. The vestments were styled after the official’s robes at the court of the Byzantine Emperor.

  Shad had no idea how he knew such things. His cellmate, Jeffie O’Rourke, was probably the only Catholic he had ever met.

  The staff stood midchest high and had a small crossbar as a handle. The white bishop tapped it on the floor to get Shad’s attention. “She forgets more every year.”

  “I know,” Shad said. “It’s better that way.”

  “She wants to give you advice, though.”

  He tried to imagine what it might be, the form it would take, and if there was any chance that it might prove useful. Usually his mother’s guidance—if this was his mother—came in tangled meanings and bewildering prophecies that never came to pass. He kept waiting, hoping she’d help him out along the way, but so far she wasn’t proving to be much of an oracle.

  Mama’s ghost slowly became cognizant of him standing there and glanced over, searching, but without seeing him yet. She stared off into the distance, and said, “Son?”

  “I’m here, Mama.”

  “Son?”

  “I’m right next to you.”

  “Shad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, there. Hello.”

  “Hello, Mama.”

  She smiled and held her hand out to him. If he took it, she would vanish and he’d awaken on the bed and immediately begin spitting up blood.

  Now, he had an awful anxiety working through him that Megan had somehow willed this visit and was watching from nearby. He wanted to ask the white bishop about Mags but decided against it. You could only handle one ghost at a time. It unsettled him to think his sister might begin appearing to him like this, lost and perpetually confused, the way his mother had been coming to him since he was eleven or twelve years old.

  When he was a child, his mother’s spirit had been full of anger and bitterness, and spent most of her stays doing little more than railing against his father. Since then, she’d lost more and more of her interest in this world, but he couldn’t figure out if he was somehow calling her to him, and if so, what he could do to stop it.

  “Shad? You listen, son. You listen to me.”

  “He is,” the white bishop said, by way of helping.

  “Shh. Leave her be.” Shad moved to his mother until her gaze fell on him o
nce more. “I’m listening, Mama.”

  “Stay off that road.”

  He had to be sure he knew what she meant. “Which road?”

  “The Gospel road. They get taken away up there.”

  “How did Megan die?”

  “She’s not my girl. That isn’t my daughter.”

  “No, but she’s my sister.”

  The blunt angles of her face sharpened with anger. “The harlot. He lay with the harlot. I still had skin, the earth wasn’t cold, and he sanded his stone and cleaved to another.”

  Shad was surprised. It was the most emotion she’d shown him in years. “What happens on that road, Mama?”

  “There’s bad will.”

  That was true everywhere you went. “Who did it to her? Did somebody hurt her? What was she doing there?”

  “They don’t prove love with their teeth,” she said, and the bishop nodded. He appeared weaker, grieving, and she glanced over and gave him a look of anguish. “They leave their marks and they can even kill, yes, but it’s all in vain. Listen to me, they don’t demonstrate, you see. They don’t represent. They don’t represent the savior. Instead, it’s the land. One with the river. It’s him. He represents.”

  A word that had a whole different meaning in the can—the gangbangers and car boosters used it all the time. She kept at it, swaying now. “But he can demonstrate his belief on his belly. Our Lord, our Lord. My God. But they all manifest nothing more than poison. Do you understand that?”

  “No,” he told her.

  Manifest wasn’t a word his mother would know, even in the afterlife. It was a word he wouldn’t have known himself before all the books in prison. “You stay away from there. They will take you.”

  The white bishop, acting the guardian, raised his shepherd’s staff over Shad’s body on the bed. The band of cloth around his neck continued to flap and waver as if buffeted by winds. As guide, he shook his arms and allowed the bells to ring quietly.

  Shad’s hands tightened into fists, the sheets twisted and bunched around him. Mags had been a part of the spot inside him that no one could touch. She had kept him alive in prison and now he’d never be able to thank her. He began to sob in his sleep but the despondent sound choked off quickly.

  Groaning once, he dreamed of revenging himself on whoever had taken his sister from him, and soon began to whimper. His mother clawed the air, advanced like an animal, and sprang at him. The moment they touched he opened his eyes, flailed aside, and coughed blood onto the floor.

  Chapter Four

  THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED DURING the night. Over the wide curve of the ridge the countryside sloped into an area lined with virgin stands of more slash pine. The scent of matted cedar rose and wafted along the rutted road. Around them grew thin white oak and the heavy grasses only occasionally trimmed back by the chain gang road crews. Off to the east were thickets of briar and heavy thistle that could flay a hiker who’d taken a wrong turn.

  Shad stood staring at the hard-packed earth where Megan’s body had been discovered, trying to confess to her how sorry he felt, through the endless veil.

  “My pa tells me this is a bad road,” Shad said.

  Dave glanced over. “Mine says the same.”

  “He ever explain why?”

  “You know the history of the area. The plague victims. It gets him edgy. Something left over from their fathers and grandfathers, I suppose.”

  Shad thought of his old man twisted out of shape, his mother’s elusive warnings that would probably never be unraveled. “There’s more than that.”

  “There always is.”

  Deputy Dave Fox, dressed in his sharply creased gray uniform, crossed his massive arms over his chest. He shifted his stance until the leather of his gun belt creaked. With his jacket partway open, you could see that the neatness . . . the straightness of his pinned tie was so perfect it appeared to be nailed to him.

  You couldn’t get away from the feeling that Dave was about a hundred years displaced. Someone who should’ve been out there driving cattle across the plains, fighting Indians hand to hand, or walking down the middle of a boomtown street heading for a shoot-out. Shad had always held a tremendous admiration for Dave, even in school when they were kids. Back then, it had bordered on something like reverence. Now Shad didn’t know what it was. Maybe the same thing.

  After joining the local police force at eighteen, Dave had broken up the Boxcars ring in Okra County, all on his own. Over on Route 12, with the whores’ rusty trailers out back, the hole in the wall barroom had become a hot spot of loaded gambling and contaminated moon in the space of six months. The white slavery ring had brought in underage girls from as far off as Poverhoe City. The Southern mob guys would come around for some fun and go off their nuts, and they still held lynching raids when they got drunk enough.

  Dave had kicked it all down in about two hours. Killed three men and the madam, who’d just finished beating a teenage girl unconscious with a car antenna for not being perky enough with a businessman from Memphis. He arrested seven other thugs before Sheriff Increase Wintel even showed up. Dave had been shot twice in the thigh by a .22 and it hadn’t slowed him up a step. He received a commendation and had his photo taken with the governor.

  “I’ve never been out this way,” Shad admitted.

  “Not even when you were blocking moonrunners for Luppy Joe Anson?”

  “I only did it for one summer, and he had no buyers anywhere near here.”

  “None of them do, but sometimes when they’re trying to slip the highway patrol, they come out because of the turnoffs, hide in the brush or around the creeks. Powder the cops’ faces tearing along the dirt roads and kicking up dust.”

  “It doesn’t work. I stuck closer to town.”

  “That’s why you never got caught.”

  Some of the runners, they were only in it for the game. If the police weren’t involved, coming at them from all sides and putting up roadblocks, it just wasn’t any fun.

  “What’s over that way?” Shad asked, looking up the trail. It annoyed him that he didn’t know the lay of the land here, as if it had been hidden from him. “Is it just the trestle leading to the other side of the gorge?”

  “Pretty much. The road heads into the mountains, threads north to the trestle bridge. There’s a trail on the other side of Jonah Ridge that peters out in some bramble forests. Used to be sort of a lovers’ lane, a hundred forty or so years ago, before the war and the outbreak of yellow fever. They’d go courting and bring their whole families. There’s nice grasslands around in summer, wildflowers all over. Horse and buggies would head up toward the gorge and couples would picnic after church, quote scripture and sing gospels.”

  His mother telling him, They die up there.

  Shad got that feeling again, that someone was focusing on him, calling up their forces and aiming their intent. He wavered on his feet and began to sweat. He saw nothing, but still sensed movement around him—flitting, dancing even. The back of his neck warmed and his ears were suddenly burning. He concentrated but couldn’t center himself. It took a minute for the November breeze to cool him.

  Dave asked, “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Leaning back against his patrol car, Dave said, “Probably started getting its reputation right around the time of the Battle of Chickamauga. Some captured Union troops were corralled up there by the Rebs and tossed into the gorge.”

  Shad hadn’t thought of that in a long time, but now that he heard it, he abruptly remembered the story. “I almost forgot about that.”

  “It’s not the kind of Civil War moment people put plaques up about to commemorate. After that, the hollow had its share of epidemics. Yellow fever in 1885. Cholera in 1915. When the disease reached its worst they’d bring whole wagons of the sick into the hills and leave them there.”

  “Jesus.”

  Dave spoke with great clarity, completely without emotion. “Suicides would come up this way too.”

  �
��That’s right.”

  “The lonely, the elderly. They’d throw themselves off the precipice.”

  Shad caught vague, fleeting impressions of Mags around him, and spotted her pale hand again. Reaching, trying to touch. It was time to get down to hearing whatever facts there were.

  “What killed her?” he asked.

  “The autopsy didn’t reveal any cause of death,” Dave told him.

  That stopped Shad, made him turn and cock his head. “The hell’s that mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “My father suspects she was murdered.”

  “I know. He spreads his suspicions high and low around town. But officially her death is listed as ‘by misadventure.’”

  Shad waited, counting the snap of his pulse to ten while Dave patiently influenced himself upon the world. “What?”

  “Death by misadventure.”

  It could get like this at the oddest times. He wished he had a cigarette—this was the kind of circumstance where a guy would take a drag, allow the seconds to roll by while he kept his lungs busy, then let the smoke out in a thin stream, everything cool and hip and effective.

  He fought to make his voice casual. Never any show of consternation, especially with someone that much bigger than you. “Dave, are you going to keep making me say ‘what the goddamn’ all day long? Or will you just lay it out?”

  “We don’t have any answers.”

  “I got that much.”

  “Misadventure means it’s an accident we can’t explain.”

  “And that’s an official report?”

  “Yes.”

  “You guys really cover your asses.” No matter how hard you tried, you’d never figure out the carefully constructed mystification of the justice system. “If you can’t explain it, then you don’t know she was actually killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Her heart simply stopped.”

  “That’s right.”

  “For no reason.”

  “That we can ascertain.”