Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

He hiked for over an hour into the backwoods of Jonah Ridge. A creek wound away in front of him, straggling through the forest on a downslope and careening over rocks worn to a sleek polish. Shad kneeled, washed his face, and wet down his hair in the icy stream. About twenty yards ahead he saw the water break wide over something too white to be a rock. He walked to it, reached into the current, and came up with a dimpled plastic container of moon.

The only people he knew who liked to keep their shine cold were Red and Lottie Sublett. Shad had to be close to their place.

He took a tap of the whiskey and spit it out. It wasn’t Luppy Joe’s or any of the usual makers. Someone was using an old car radiator as a still, and the lingering fluid tainted the liquor. Red must be making his own.

Shad kept moving along the trail, watching for his sister. Over the next incline, as he parted the drifting branches still wet with dew, he spotted a shack that leaned so far to the left you could reach out the window on that side and touch the ground. Beyond it, a few twisted apple trees and a pumpkin patch took up about a half acre of partially cleared field.

There was a small garden behind the shanty with a couple rows of lettuce and thin, high-growing corn that was mostly dying. To one side sat a rabbit hutch with a skinning knife jabbed into the top of the wooden box.

Lottie Sublett sat on a carpet of pine needles, in the process of diapering four infants. These were the premature quadruplets that had shown up while Shad was in the can. The babies kicked out with stunted legs and held up their deformed fists, fingers missing from nearly every hand. The infants tried to suck their thumbs but only two of them had any.

Five other children clambered and cowered around her, most of them barefoot and dressed only in ragged overalls. The oldest was a boy no more than thirteen.

The November breeze had grown colder but none of Red Sublett’s brood looked to be uncomfortable. What did it do to your nervous system, that kind of life? When your parents were brother and sister? Did nature bury your nerve endings so deep in your flesh that you couldn’t feel somebody else’s sins?

Lottie glanced up and gaped toothlessly at him. She flinched so harshly that the ill child she’d been diapering flipped over like a griddle cake.

The years had forced their raw corruption on her, the trials of such extreme motherhood written in her face. What did you call it when a woman had so many children in so few years? Her body wracked by such burden, day in and out, month after month. She had stretch marks on her neck, along her jawline, and on just about every bald inch of her he could see. What man makes his own sister live this way?

Lottie got to her feet, peered at him, finally tilted her head in recognition. “You,” she said. “I know you a bit, don’t I? From a few years back.”

“That’s right. My name is Shad Jenkins.”

The infant who’d been flopped like a flapjack sprang over again on his belly. It started creeping and mewling like an animal that had never been given a name. It looked at Shad and started toward him, like it wanted to take a bite out of him.

“Your pa’s the carpenter,” Lottie said.

“Yes.”

“Jenkins. Ah yuh, so you are. What you doing this way? You come to visit on Red? He ain’t here right now, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. Had a red deer out behind the house and Red took a shot but missed the heart. He’s out there someplace tracking it so we can have somethin’ ’sides hare stew. Or are you meanin’ to join them church folk over yonder, eh?”

“I thought I might stop in and talk with them some,” Shad admitted.

“You shouldn’t.”

“No?”

“They got strange ways.” She said it with a hint of concern, as if it mattered but not a hell of a lot.

It took Shad back a step. How odd could these people be that a woman with nine inbred kids would call them strange?

“I don’t know much about them,” Shad said.

“They’re snake handlers. They thrill on the venom. Moon ain’t strong enough, I suppose. Got a small settlement a few miles off. We don’t cotton with them much, but we trade supplies if’n we need to. They ain’t bad folks but they got a worshipful way with the snakes. It ain’t right, cavorting like that. It ain’t a blessed church.”

“Did you ever see my sister out on this side of the gorge?”

“Who she?”

“Her name was Megan. She was seventeen, long blond hair.”

“Was?”

“She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Comfort and condolences to you.”

“Thank you.”

“I never run into her.”

“She might’ve come up with a boy. Possibly a man.”

“Only girls that age I seen up this way are them Gabriel girls. Daughters of the man who runs the church. Lucas Gabriel.”

The eldest of her children hobbled over and murmured in her ear, staring at Shad in alarm. She hugged the kid and hummed in his ear for a second, telling him, “No no no. No, Osgood, no.”

But the boy had his mind set on something and kept arguing, his gaze shifting back and forth along the tree line.

Shad said, “I’m alone.”

“You ain’t lyin’ now, are you, mister?” Osgood asked.

“No,” Shad told him.

So he’d been right. Red had a little still somewhere, the guts of a radiator and copper piping making contaminated liquor. The kid’s mind had probably been filled with stories of how the Feds would come around and steal their civil liberties.

You couldn’t expect the best social graces from a teenager who probably didn’t run into more than ten people a year. Osgood couldn’t meet Shad’s eyes. His face puckered and went skittering with emotion.

Lottie finally grabbed the boy by the shoulders and shoved him toward the shack, and said, “Go on and start supper.”

“He stayin’?”

“Git in there.”

“I wanna know if he’s stayin’ ’round here!”

“Your daddy be back soon and you know he’ll be hungry.”

“I seen he got a gun tucked in his belt!”

“No, he don’t. Yer eyes is bad.”

“I see clear ’nough!”

“Hush all this foolishness and git in there and cook supper!”

As the kid trudged off Lottie grinned in embarrassment, showing nothing but gums. “He don’t know no better. It ain’t his fault. Me and Red really ought to make more of an effort to bring the children into town when we get our supplies. But Red’s a’scairt that the city ways might confuse and beguile the family.”

Shad had never heard the hollow called a city before. Under different circumstances he might’ve laughed at that, but the way she said it made him nod in agreement. Her concerns were serious ones.

He wondered how that lesson on the birds and the bees would go in this house.

“Can you give me directions to that village?” Shad asked.

“Ain’t rightly a village, I reckon. Just a whole mess of families gathered together within pissin’ distance. Their houses is real close together, so they’s like one big family. If you visit on them, make sure you’re careful on where you step. Those boots go beyond your heel?”

“A little.”

“Walk light. They might be doin’ a rattler roundup. They beat the fields and collect the vipers.” She pointed south, her arm firm and straight and without an ounce of flab. He could almost see the history of her life scrawled in her bones. “Like I says, you be cautious when you get farther on in the forest. You ain’t proper dressed for this area. There’s lots of thorny woods that way. You get lost in the dark and those thistles will surely trim your hair back for you.”

“How far?”

“About five miles or so, but the countryside gets pretty rugged. Don’t you have a knapsack or a heavier coat? It gets cold these nights. You didn’t bring no water along?”