Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

“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.

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 once 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.”