Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

“Did you try again?” Shad asked.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

The longer they went without tussling, the more time Zeke had to fan his anger and keep himself worked up. The fear was draining out of him too. “That ain’t it at all, you son of a bitch!”

“Then why were you bothering my father?”

“Me? You blame me? That bastard’s been putting the devil in folks’ ears for weeks, telling ’em I had a hand in Megan’s murder.”

Shad tensed and stood straighter. “You think she was murdered?”

Zeke screwed his face into about as much of a pout as he could pull off. His fingers fluttered about like he was in front of a chalkboard trying to map out Sherman’s March. “You’re a damn fool. She was only seventeen. No young girl like that dies for no good reason, up in them foul woods.”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t you glare at me like that no more neither. You want to scrap, we’ll have it out right now. But don’t you give me that eye no more. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with what happened to yours. No matter what you and your miscreant daddy’s got to say about it. And you better not be spoutin’ gossip like that ’round town no more!”

Zeke Hester didn’t have the temperament for any real slyness. Shad felt a small surge of shame even though he’d been attacked. He had known better. Zeke didn’t have anything to do with Mags’s death. He would’ve left marks.

“Get out of here,” Shad told him.

“You don’t tell me to move on, boy.”

“It’s time for you to be quiet now.”

“You go on and stay the hell away from me, if you have any consideration for what’s good for you. Or I’ll beat you down and leave your ass out on the highway like week-old roadkill.”

Shad sighed. Pa was right. Zeke didn’t have a good memory. Already he was starting to flex again, weighing his odds, getting ready to push a little harder. You could see how he tongued his rotted tooth and the raw nerve gave him a painful kick that lifted him up onto his toes.

Whatever Zeke was going to say would be immensely unwise. It would be mean and it would be about Mags. Shad took a step backwards, as if urging the insult toward him.

Here it comes.

Zeke Hester smiled through that wild thatch of hair, and muttered, “The way she threw it around, driving guys crazy, I’m surprised it didn’t happen no sooner. Now, you dwell on that some.”

“Sure,” Shad said, and he went for Zeke’s bad arm, grabbing it at the elbow and wrist and giving it a vicious twist.

The snap was clean and loud as a gunshot. Zeke instantly went into shock and didn’t even scream. He sat down heavily, twitched a few times, and started to cry.

HIS FATHER’S PICKUP WASN’T IN THE YARD when Shad finally decided to visit Megan’s grave.

A trace of storm grew heavier in the air as the wind rose and gusted through the pastures. Crimson-tinted clouds swarmed across the sky, darkening it to the hue of trailer-trash bruises.

The rain let go for a while, stopped briefly, and began again, fitful and hesitant and cold. Stands of pine jerked and swayed, bowing as if determined to groan in your ear and confirm every apprehension. As he drove up the wet dirt road the Mustang hit every rut.

He parked at the base of the foothill and got out. The hound pup crawled free from beneath the house and trotted up the road to greet Shad. Lament’s collar was old and oversized, but he’d grow into it. The tags were scratched and they jangled together as he began to lope.

“Come on,” he said.

The dog followed as Shad worked his way up the knoll toward the graves of his mother and sister.

The sun had begun to hemorrhage in the west as the late afternoon cooled even faster. The nearest church, four miles away along the bottoms, crooned a despondent tune he’d heard before but could only remember while it played. The breeze in the boles of the oak trees hummed and occasionally drowned it out.

Standing in the weeds, he noticed again how stricken the land had become. The groves had thinned until they were little more than brushwood and briar patches.

His cool and calm seemed to come and go lately, and he knew he had to work on that before it got him killed. You played games as a kid that became the discipline of your adult life. He’d never realized it years ago-lying there in the darkness at the back of his closet, covered in sweat with his cheek pressed to the smooth hardwood floor, as the silence heaved around him, and he kept going further inside himself, hoping to talk to his mama, demanding it to be-that he was developing a skill that would come in handy in prison.

He tried to center himself before the tombstone of his mother, drifting for a second while he sought out the dark, quiet place behind his eyes. Your strength had a name that wasn’t your own, and there were times you were going to need it. It would also need you.

With one foot set on his mother’s grave, the other toed into his sister’s, he kept his eyes open waiting for Mags’s hand to flit into his vision once more and give him another sign. He shoveled the blackness aside like dirt covering her. The sound of his own heartbeat faded.

His depths parted. He went further, intent on her whisper. He didn’t know what might happen if he ever hit bottom. It didn’t matter. You went where you were called.

He kneeled, held out a fist to the ground, thinking how killers liked to stick close to their prey, even after it was dead. Would the malevolence in the hills climb down this far?

He aimed himself. The world shifted to red as Shad hooked on to somebody, or perhaps something, moving in and out of view, brooding about him again. He held his hand out farther and slowly wriggled his fingers, the way you do to get fish to rise to the surface. His chest grew warmer. Mags was helping. Maybe Mama too. He started panting, eventually hyperventilating, as the indistinct and somehow imperfect shape, the glowing broken threads of an anguished aura still wheeling from it, turned its unfinished face toward him. And beneath it, another face, slowly becoming recognizable.

There.

Easy.

He was almost there.

Another moment, Mags. This is for you.

He was almost… yes…

… when he felt a weak influence fuss beside him, like a kid tugging at his elbow. Intruding on his purpose. Tushie Kline used to do it all the time, jabbering on about books, his homeboys, and anything else that flitted into his head. Tush couldn’t turn off his talk.

It was over. Shad’s breathing returned to normal. The irritating force continued to pluck at his concentration until he looked over.

Preacher Dudlow stood beside him, staring down at the ground, with his hands clasped over his mammoth belly, sucking at the edges of his mustache.

Well now, Shad thought.

Most preachers Shad had run into were still brimstone types, thin as cottonwood and harsh as sun-scorched bone. They visited the hollow in their vans and set up tents out in the fields. They raved and slammed the meaty part of their palms into sinners’ foreheads and commanded them to heal. They took crutches and canes and busted them over their knees. You watched the cripples struggling to stand upright on their diseased, gnarled legs. Folks threw silver. Gospel singers caterwauled like beasts. Deaf men leaned over mumbling, “ I cahn heh thuh voice’a Jehsus .” Maybe they could. They were as punchy as if they’d knocked back a jug of moon.

But Dudlow had always been a happy, robust man, perfectly round but still sort of muscular, with his face tanned by his outdoor sermons in the pastures and his baptisms at the river.

This afternoon he was bundled tightly in a sheepskin coat and wearing a bright red hunter’s cap with the flaps down over his ears. A mauve knitted scarf had been wrapped twice around his throat and still trailed over both shoulders, down to his ankles. Mrs. Swoozie, Dudlow’s mother, lived next door to him, around the side of the church. The only thing she’d ever found to ease the pain of her arthritis, so she said, was to keep busy crocheting and cooking around the clock.