Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

Even so, he was a little surprised to realize she was smoking marijuana. The sweet stink of it filled the shack and made him clear his throat.

He waited. Five minutes passed. It was a test of his patience, he knew. You learned more about people when they jumped than when they didn’t.

The room was empty except for a small table in the corner, a plate and some utensils on it, and a kitchen area filled with wooden boxes and glass bowls filled with powders, roots, and herbs. Opposite that, a tiny bed with a cotton-stuffed mattress. At its foot rested the homemade wicker-backed wheelchair they would use to push her around downtown. Shad drifted over, inspected it, and recognized the work. His father had built everything in the house.

M’am Luvell had crossed to the point where age no longer mattered. There was a timeless quality to her, like a stone outcropping barely forming the shape of an old woman. The fierce decades had passed her in these mountains and done what damage they could, but she’d survived the forces thrown against her.

Shad tried to imagine how she might stretch her hand out and call him over to her. So that he’d crouch at her side while she patted his head with a diminutive hand, whispering words of understanding to him. You were always looking for somebody to trust.

“Commiseration,” she said, opening her eyes. “Comfort and condolences.”

“Thank you.”

“First time you been by since you were a child.”

He nodded, remembering back to when he was about five and Pa had brought him here. “You helped my father when he needed it.”

“That wasn’t so much.” She noticed her pipe was out and laid it aside on the table. “I just gave him a game to take his mind off his troubles.”

“It still does,” Shad said. “Considering the burden of his worries, that counts for a great deal.”

“For some neighbors, maybe,” she told him. “But not all.”

“Sure.”

That was the end of it, these preliminaries. He felt it come to a close as if a cell door had slammed shut. M’am Luvell had pondered him long enough and was now ready. “So, what do you ask of me?”

“I’m not certain,” he said.

“Well, you think on it some.”

She cocked her head, watching him impassively. He glanced around and wondered what the hollow folk did with their chickens when they brought them to her. Did they just toss them on the floor so that you had squawking hens flapping all over? What other payments did they make? Since there was no place else to sit, did they kneel? He couldn’t recall if his father had stood straight before M’am. Shad remembered lying on the floor, staring at spiders in the corner.

“They say my sister just fell asleep out there in the woods on Gospel Trail.”

“But you don’t believe it none?”

“I want to have an answer.”

She broke into a quiet titter that sounded like bones clicking together. “I always did like the Jenkins men. You got an easy honesty about you. Sometimes leaves you stupid and exposed, but it’s still a peculiar quality around these parts.”

Shad was getting a little tired of people calling him stupid all the time, even if it might be true, but he said nothing.

“You afraid of me, boy?”

“No.”

“Why’s that? Hex women scare most hollow folk.”

Telling her the candid fact that geriatric dwarves didn’t hold much sway in the world most of the time just didn’t much appeal to him, so Shad went at it a different way.

“I knew a guy in prison just like you. An older man who did a lot of smirking and chuckling. He knew people from the inside out and used it to his advantage. He talked up a streak and could slap you back into your place without half-trying. You looked at him and no matter who you were, you still saw somebody twelve feet high, with plenty of power in his face. It made a lot of cons cringe and hold their heads down.”

“Who be that fella?” she asked.

“The warden.”

M’am Luvell burst into a brittle laughter and shuddered in her seat. Drool slid down her billy-goat chin and clung to the curling white hairs. “You got wit. Your pa ain’t got any of that wag.”

Shad didn’t exactly find it so witty, telling the truth. “He’s got some.”

“And what happened to this warden? I can see by the way you’re leaning that there’s more you got to say on him.”

He looked down and saw she was right, he actually was leaning. No matter how hard you worked at it, you always had a tell. A way for them to see inside you.

“A bank robber named Jeffie O’Rourke used to work for him in the office. As a secretary, an assistant sort of, but really they were lovers. Jeffie used to write him long, affectionate letters. They both liked to paint. The warden did seascapes, masted ships on the ocean. Jeffie did watercolors of children. Puppies. Flowers. The warden would tell him about the garden in his backyard, the hot tub, and the satellite dish. How he’d introduce Jeffie to the family when Jeffie got out.”

“How you know all this?” M’am asked.

“I was his cellmate.”

She let out a disapproving grunt. “Oh, you must’ve seen a lot.”

“No, nothing like what you mean. But the warden fell for a new inmate, a straight guy called Mule. Mule was doing time for statutory rape, but he used to brag about how he would beat women, how much he hated them. The warden wasn’t only gay but a misogynist too, and Mule appealed to him. He liked hearing the stories. He thought he could sway Mule’s preference, bring him around. One night he came by the cell to break it easy to Jeffie and tell him it was all over. He probably did love the kid, in his own way. Didn’t want to hurt him, said he’d help with his parole and hoped they could still be close friends.”

“Uh-yuh.”

Thinking back, Shad’s voice dipped. “Jeffie O’Rourke had an easel with a self-portrait of himself looking serious. Fist under his chin, thoughtful, with his eyes very dark and deep. Maybe it was supposed to be sexy. He was painting it for the warden’s birthday, which was coming up in a couple of days. He took the news about Mule poorly. Snapped his paintbrush and jammed it through the warden’s eye and into his brain. Took half a second. Killed him on the spot.”

Her disproportionately large head bowed to the right and the furry white chin bobbed, as if she’d heard the story many times before and was being tolerant by listening one more time. “What happened then?”

“They carried Jeffie away to solitary and he vanished.”

Shad let it hang in the air like that, unsure of which way M’am Luvell might take it. Sounded like he was saying the guards killed Jeffie and buried him in secret. But the reality was, Jeffie truly had disappeared. He’d broken three prisons before and probably could’ve gotten out of this one anytime he wanted. He’d only stayed locked up because he was in love.

“And what lesson do you get from that?” M’am asked.

“I’m still working on it,” Shad said.

A weighty silence passed between them, but neither looked away. It was a comfortable moment upset only when she beckoned him closer.

“And what if you find out it was Zeke Hester that done harm to that sweet child? Or some other mad dog fool on the loose?”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Without no regret?”

“Not too much.”

He’d already decided that if events repeated themselves, he’d lie this time and do whatever he had to do to stay out of the joint. He considered any further dealings with Zeke to be an extension of what had already gone on before. He’d paid his price and wouldn’t give up anything more.

“Without feeling?” she asked, prodding him a touch.

“There’s always feeling.”