Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

Mags had gone down to the river and tossed her letters out on the current and sent them to her new love. To someone who would be able to quote from them when he met her later on, in the night, on the bad road.

IT TOOK THREE WEEKS BEFORE HE FELT STRONG enough to take a step outside. Shad hadn’t spoken to his father in all that time and wondered if the man was worried. Or if Pa had made do cutting and polishing Megan’s headstone.

The December air had a heaviness to it, crisp and hard. It hadn’t snowed in the hollow for almost twelve years, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the sky cracked wide and heaved down a blizzard. As above, so below. He was getting colder but still fighting for his cool.

When he thought he could handle it, he walked across the property, headed down to the river, and sat at the shore. He wondered if the snake handlers might still be after him. Lucas Gabriel hadn’t wanted to involve the police, but had he eventually done it? Were Increase Wintel and Dave Fox after him?

He bent, put his hands in the icy river, and splashed his face. No, his thinking was still a little foggy. Dave wouldn’t have gone three weeks before checking on Tandy Mae’s farm. Either nobody gave a damn or he was considered lost up on Jonah Ridge or Dave had been around and knew exactly where Shad was but was giving him time to recuperate.

The pumpkin-headed kid stood a few yards off, sort of hiding behind a small copse of cottonwood. Shad waved and the kid fluttered his four fingers, beckoning.

“Daddy,” the boy said, with a heavy thrum of sorrow. His strange voice carried in the woods and echoed above the sound of the water surging over rocks. For a moment Shad thought the kid was calling him his daddy. But no, that wasn’t it.

Oh Mama, what now.

Shad stood, walked over to the boy, and saw that a pile of wildflowers had been laid out on a patch of washed-out ground.

The grave had been shallow to begin with. It looked like a runoff of rain edged down the grade toward the river and had eroded a wide track of soil.

The forehead and eyes of the man were still covered with dirt, but his nose and chin were now exposed. A few plumes of hair stuck up like brown weeds. Most of the flesh was gone and his jaws had been pried open by animals going after the tongue.

So, there’s Jimmy Ray Lusk.

Shad turned to say something but the kid had vanished into the brush. From the corner of his eye he spotted Tandy Mae, carrying one of her brood, coming straight for him. Was he supposed to run? Was she going to shoot him in the head for discovering the body?

He stood his ground for no other reason than inertia. Where was he going to go?

The baby was wrapped tightly in a blanket and from what Shad could see, it only had two small holes where its ears should be.

Glancing down, Tandy Mae said, “I killed him.”

“I figured that part.”

“With his own gun. Then I tossed him in the truck and drove him down here.”

“I see. Any particular reason why you did it?” Not that anybody needed one.

That closed-up face opened just a little. “He wanted to stop.”

His thoughts were ahead of him. He knew what she meant but couldn’t help but repeat the word. “Stop?”

“Stop giving me children,” she explained.

You didn’t have a dialogue with someone like this, he knew, about things like this, but he couldn’t quit so far in. He sounded a touch more weary than he actually felt. “Why did you want even more?”

“You didn’t notice, did you?”

“I guess not.”

“They’re boys,” she said. “All my babies. They’re boys. I wanted another girl. I wouldn’t let him stop until he gave me a girl.”

“But why did you want a girl so badly?”

She frowned and touched her forehead with her free hand, like somebody was knocking from the other side of her skull. “I needed to make up for leaving Megan behind.”

It made no sense. “But you were talking to her again, after all those years.”

“I’d already done it by then.”

The infant threw the bottle on the ground. Shad stooped with a grunt, picked it up, and the cutting, familiar smell hit him. He squirted a few drops of the bottle’s contents into his palm and saw that the liquid was clear. He dipped the tip of his tongue into it.

She was giving the babies moon.

He stared at her with a mix of regret, hopelessness, and indifference.

“It’s the only thing that will get them quiet,” she told him. “This child I’m holding is deaf and mute and got no knees. You think you could live like that without some make-liquor to hold you over?”

“No,” he whispered.

“You gonna tell the police about this?”

“No,” he said. If Sheriff Increase Wintel put her in jail, who in the hell would take care of all the ill children?

“I didn’t think so. You don’t even sound upset. Do me a favor then and cover up Jimmy Ray’s nose. He always had such a big goddamn nose, I should’ve cut it off first.”

Tandy Mae trudged off with the kid in her arms. The pumpkin-headed boy slipped out of the brush and started kicking flowers and leaves over his dead father’s nose. Shad stood there in silence for a while, then wandered off, trembling. The little tap of moon he’d taken had given him a bad thirst for it.

There were sticker bushes on the shore. Where a young girl might scratch her cheek before lying back to sleep or to daydream, to cry or fret or hum to herself. Where she could be with a man, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the last.

His toe scuffed over a hump in the dirt.

The things you went and tripped over. You never knew what you were going to find.

It was a beer bottle, half-buried in the mud.

He pulled it out and saw a piece of paper stuffed inside.

Shad smashed the glass against a rock, plucked through the shards and found that the paper had been perfectly folded into quarters.

He opened it and read:

Glad to see you’re okay

TANDY MAE PACKED UP THE WHOLE BROOD OF ill children in her truck and drove Shad back to Mrs. Rhyerson’s boardinghouse. He lay on his back, in his room, waiting for the end to find him.

It wouldn’t be long. He’d pulled at all the threads he could find, and gone into the hills, and now whatever was up there had to come down to town. He knew it would happen but he was getting sick of waiting.

With moonlight tracked across his brow, Shad awoke naked on his feet, standing at the side of the bed with a woman seated next to him, her open hand on his back. For an instant he thought it was Jerilyn. And then her sister. Even as he stared and shook off the feeling, he nearly spoke Rebi’s name. He was still panting, and his sweat plied down across the vivid partially healed wounds on his belly.

She leaned up on her knees and embraced him from behind, shimmering in the silver radiance of the room. The glass pane was coated with a trace of ice, and the shadows of frosted patterns wheeled against the far wall.

There was a remote sense of dissatisfaction within him. As if he had not yet completed the chore set before him. It was the kind of feeling you got used to after a while.

Elfie Danforth nodded down at him, gave him a flicker of that devastating smile, and Shad felt himself curl up and roll over inside. That rough tickle started working through his chest.

“What are you doing here, Elf?”

“The hell kind of question is that to ask me?”

A foolish one. You had to work with what was given to you.

Her shoulder-length blond hair caught in the breeze and came after him in a tangle. He wanted to run his palms along the angle of her nose, around the sharp jut of her chin. She grinned and it crinkled her eyes.