Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

“Good God,” he said. “Who hasn’t heard of that son of a bitch?” Nicks said Chambliss always told folks that he was a mechanic, but all Nicks had ever known him for was being arrested on little charges like petty theft and possession of marijuana and controlled substances. “I’d had my eye on him for a long time,” he said, “but he had to go and blow himself up for us to have something that would stick.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He cooked meth,” Nicks said. “And he moved like a squatter back and forth between shacks and abandoned trailers and we couldn’t ever catch him. And then one morning we had an old house explode about ten minutes outside Toccoa. It was Chambliss, what was left of him anyway.”

“Was he hurt bad?” I asked.

“You ain’t never looked at him up close, have you?” he asked me.

“No, Sheriff,” I said. “I haven’t.” The truth was that at that time I hadn’t laid my eyes on him yet. I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd of two men.

“Well, that explosion took off something like forty percent of his skin. It almost killed him. They had to graft big old pieces from his legs and his back. He must’ve worn a gas mask or something over his face while he cooked it, because you can’t quite tell it just by looking at him. But his chest and the right side of his body are just awful-looking. If you saw him without clothes on, you’d swear he was a danged mutant.” He sighed like he was about to tell me something he either shouldn’t or didn’t want to. “You want to hear the messed-up part?” he asked.

“I sure do,” I said.

“He had him a sixteen-year-old girl in that house when it exploded, a runaway from Mississippi. She died a week later from her burns. Her folks drove up here from Jackson and took her home. It was just a sad story all the way around.”

“What happened to Chambliss?” I asked.

“We tried to get him on second-degree murder, but you know how it is, Sheriff. His court-appointed suit got it argued down to involuntary manslaughter, and the newspaper made that poor girl sound like a conspirator. They only gave him three years. I think he might’ve served two.”

“That don’t seem right,” I said.

“It wasn’t right,” he said. “But like I told you, you know how it is.” It was quiet for a second, and I thought he’d finished telling me all he knew about Chambliss. Then he cleared his throat. “You want to know something else? After he got sent to the Allendale Pen down in Alto, he was explaining away those burns by telling folks that God had done it to him. He told them that the hand of God Almighty had come down and set his body afire to purify him from the sins of the world.”

“But what about the meth explosion?” I asked. “What did he have to say about that?”

“He said that was how God chose to do it.”

“And what about that girl?”

“He didn’t ever mention her, not after he got to the pen anyway. It was just like she’d never existed,” he said. “But let me tell you this, and you ain’t going to believe it when I tell you, but the warden told me he couldn’t hardly keep that man from setting himself on fire once he got inside the pen. Warden said Chambliss started up some kind of cult called the Signs Following. He said they’d hold services right there on the spot, wherever they felt moved: the chapel, in their cells, out in the yard. He said they’d speak in tongues, heal each other, talk about the Devil like he lived next door. But the thing was, once they got going, they’d pull out anything flammable they could get ahold of and light it on fire and run their hands over it, hold it right up to their faces: shaving cream, cologne, cleaning spray. He said if you confiscated lighters and matchbooks to try and keep them from setting that stuff on fire, then they’d up and drink it. But not a single one of them psychos was burned or ever got sick. He said Chambliss got him a little following together and there was nothing outside of solitary confinement that could keep those folks away from him.

“He couldn’t get nothing out of Chambliss that would explain why they were carrying on like that, but one of his followers told him that it was in the Bible, that Jesus told the disciples that after he was gone they’d be able to do all kinds of dangerous things without getting hurt, he said it would be a sign of their righteousness. I didn’t believe him until I got home and opened up my own Bible and did a little searching, and there it was, right there in Mark. Just like they said it would be.” I heard his desk chair squeak, and I imagined Sheriff Nicks leaning all the way back, his boots up on the desk, crossed at the ankle, his hat resting in his lap.

When he mentioned the book of Mark, my mind suddenly recalled the new sign out by the front of Chambliss’s church. I recalled the exact verses on it: Mark 16:17-18. I hung up with Nicks, and when I got home that night I took Sheila’s Bible out of her nightstand and flipped through the pages until I found the verses and whispered as I read them out loud: “And these signs will follow those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will place their hands on the sick, and they will get well.”

Things became clearer to me once I read that. A bad burn from a meth house explosion in north Georgia becomes a sign of holiness and power in western North Carolina. It was all in who told the story, even if that story involved a dead young girl from Mississippi. I suddenly understood the kind of mind that could convince Gillum to set his barn on fire, and I suddenly understood why a group of folks would hide behind newspaper-covered windows while they worshipped, and I finally realized what was in those little crates they carried in and out of that church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. But other than suspicion, what did I have? What could I do? Arrest a man for exercising his religious freedom? None of it was a reason to knock on church doors, interrupt meetings and services. But now, this time, it wasn’t a sixteen-year-old runaway but a thirteen-year-old mute boy who was dead, a boy who couldn’t have told Chambliss “yes” or “no” or “stop” even if he’d wanted to. This time, I knew it was different.

NOTHING I SAW AT ADELAIDE LYLE’S SURPRISED ME WHEN I STOPPED at the top of her yard and turned off my engine and then my lights. I reached into the dash and found my badge and pinned it to my shirt, and then I opened the door and stepped out and looked into the yard where the front porch light lit up the whole scene. It was just what I thought I’d find.

A couple of beat-up and bloodied men still wearing their church clothes, Adelaide Lyle and two other old women out there seeing to their wounds. Out by the road Ben Hall had his head down on the hood of what must’ve been his daddy’s old truck, and there was Jimmy Hall himself, who’d somehow become an old man since the last time I’d seen him, sitting on the porch steps and smoking a cigarette like nothing had happened. Above him, at the window by the front door that looked out into the yard, stood Ben Hall’s youngest son, his mother, Julie, right beside him. When she saw me, she turned and walked away.

Like I said, none of what I saw that night surprised me, but what did concern me was what I didn’t see. I didn’t see Carson Chambliss, and I knew there had to be a reason why.

MISS LYLE HAD MET ME AND MR. STUCKEY AT HER DOOR, and then she took my hand and led me through the living room, where Mama was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. Miss Lyle told me to sit as quiet as I could right there at the dining room table and wait for my daddy. It felt like an oven inside her house with no breeze coming in, even though she went around opening all the windows after I’d gotten in there and sat down. After she’d done that she went back into the living room and sat down in a chair beside the sofa. It was dark in her house, and there wasn’t hardly any lights on except for a lamp in the front room and the bulb hanging over the table where I was sitting and waiting. Mr. Stuckey stayed out on the porch after I came inside, and a few minutes later I heard a car come driving down the road and stop, and then I heard a door open and shut and the car drove off. I knew that whoever was driving that car had come by to pick him up.