For a long time Wayne lay still, staring at the ceiling. The plastic airplanes stirred in the faint breeze, their wings swaying as if they were soaring amid the clouds. He heard Toby barking way off in the woods, and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly.
16
THE SUN WAS RISING too on the Creekmore farm. Ramona awakened just after six, when she heard a car pulling up in front of the house. She heard the car door open, but did not hear it close. Then someone was fumbling with keys, trying to get in.
Ramona quickly put on her robe, lit an oil lamp, and walked into the front room just as her husband staggered in. John grinned widely; a shock wave of body odor and the heady smell of moonshine rolled out before him. A red stubble of beard covered his jaw. His clothes were rumpled and a couple of buttons were missing from his shirt. “Hi, hon,” he said, and took an unsteady step toward her.
“No.”
The word stopped him as if he’d been struck, but his clownish grin stayed hooked in place. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked as if they were about to burst. “Awwww, don’t be like that,” he said. “Jus’ been out howwwwwlin’, that’s all. Saw Mack van Horn and old Wint, too; you’d never believe that damn still they got workin’ way back in the woods!” He blinked and ran a grimy hand across his forehead. “Where’d that mule go after he kicked me in the head?” He laughed, his eyes wanting to close on him. “Why don’t you go on back there and comb your hair real nice and pretty, huh? Put on some of that sweet-smellin’ stuff I like. Then you can welcome me home like a real wife…”
“You’re filthy,” Ramona said quietly, “and you smell like an outhouse!”
“DAMN RIGHT!” he thundered, his face contorting with anger. “What’d you expect, that I’d come home with roses in my hair? You made me wallow in shit at that tent revival, woman, and I thought I’d jus’ bring a little of it home!” He was trembling with rage. “You made a fool out of me,” he said. “You disgraced my name, woman! Oh, you planned it all, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted to go all of a sudden, ’cause you figured you could raise some kind of sin at the revival! And I had to stand there while you…!” He stumbled over his words and stopped, because Billy had come out of the gray shadows at Ramona’s back and stood there watching.
“Billy,” John said. “Son. You daddy’s back home now. I know I look a mess, but…but I had an accident, I guess.”
“Go get your clothes on,” Ramona told the boy. “Hurry.”
Billy stared at his father, his face crumpling, and then went to get ready.
“What’s goin’ on?”
Ramona said, “I’m taking Billy to his grandmother.”
“Oh.” It was a soft, stunned exhalation of moonshined breath; John wavered on his feet, the room beginning to spin slowly around him. He felt strangled for a second and couldn’t find his voice. Then: “Now I see it. Nowwwwww I see it. Gonna take my son away from me when my back’s turned, ain’t you?” He advanced a step, and Ramona saw the glint of red in his eyes behind the soft flabby drunkenness.
“No, that’s not it.” She stood her ground. “You know why I’m doing this…”
“So you can make him like you are!” he shrieked. “So you can put all that…that shit in his head! I won’t let you do it, by God! I won’t let you have him!”
“Billy saw some part of Will Booker that was left after death, John. Call it a haunt, or a spirit, or maybe even the soul. But he did see something in that basement, and he has to understand what’s ahead for him…”
“NO!” John staggered backward, almost falling, and splayed himself across the door as if nailed there. “I won’t let him be taken over by that blasphemy! Maybe I had to stand by and watch you do it, but I won’t—WON’T—let you take my blood into it!”
“Your blood?” she asked him softly. “He’s my blood too. He’s got both of us in him, but the old Choctaw blood in him is strong, John. He’s the next link in the chain, don’t you see? He has to carry it f—”
He clapped his hands to his ears. “Evil evil evil evil evil…”
Tears burned around Ramona’s eyes at the sight of the pitiful drunken man, pressed frantically against the door of his own house to keep Billy in. “It’s not evil, John. It never was.”
“You tell me death’s not evil? That’s been your life, ’Mona! Not me or the boy, not really! It’s always been death, and ghosts, and demons!” He shook his head, his senses reeling. “Oh God have mercy on your soul! God have mercy on my soul for puttin’ up with your lies!”
But then Billy, in his jeans and a striped cotton shirt, stepped into the orange wash of the lamp; he was clutching the paper sack containing his clothes, and his face looked sick and scared.
“Come on, Billy.” John stretched out his arms. “Come on, let’s show her how men stick together.”
“Momma…says I should go, Daddy. She says there are things I need to learn.”
“No. She’s wrong. Know what kind of things she wants you to learn? Stuff about ghosts, and death. You’re a righteous, God-fearin’ boy, and you shouldn’t listen to things like that.”
“I didn’t want to see Will Booker, Daddy. But he was there, and he needed my help.” He lifted his hand and showed his father the black lump of coal, resting on his palm.
“What’s that? Where’d that come from?”
“I don’t know, but I… I think that Will’s trying to help me now. I think he’s given me this to let me know that… I was right to go down in that basement, and just because it was dark and scary didn’t mean it was evil…”
A deep groan came from John’s throat. “Poisoned,” he whispered, staring at the coal. “The poison’s in the blood, it’s in the blood! Dear God strike me dead if I haven’t tried to be the best father—”
“Stop it!” Ramona said sharply.
And suddenly Billy had run across the room, dropping his clothes-filled bag, and was clinging to his father’s leg. Through his strangled sobbing the boy moaned, “I’ll be good, Daddy, I’ll be good, I’ll be…”
John shivered—whether with emotion or in disgust Ramona couldn’t tell—and gripped Billy by the collar, flinging him toward his wife. “TAKE HIM, THEN!” he shouted, and threw the car keys to the floor. “Go on, both of you! Get out of my…” His voice cracked, and a terrible sob came up from the depths of his soul. Billy was staring at him, tears streaming down the boy’s cheeks, and John raised a hand to ward off Billy’s gaze. “…house,” he whispered. He staggered across the room and fell down into his chair before the cold hearth, his face streaked reddish by the rising sun. “I can’t do it, Lord,” he said softly, one hand clamped at his temples and his eyes tightly closed. “I can’t get the darkness out of them…” Then he was silent but for his rumbled breathing.
“Get your things,” Ramona told Billy, and then she went back to slip on socks and shoes and get her traveling bag. She would drive in her robe and change later, but right now she wanted to get herself and Billy out of the house. In the kitchen, Ramona took a few dollars and fifty cents in change from their emergency money, kept in a clay apple-shaped cookie jar that Rebekah had made for them. Then she came back to the front room and picked up the keys. Billy was standing near his father; the boy’s eyes were swollen, and now he reached out and gently touched John’s arm. John mumbled and groaned in his tortured, drunken sleep. “Go on to the car,” Ramona said. “I’ll be there directly.” When Billy had left, Ramona smoothed the tangled, dirty curls of reddish-brown hair away from her husband’s forehead. The lines of his face, she thought, were getting deeper. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, steadied herself when she began trembling, and got a coverlet for him from the bedroom. She spread it over him, and watched as he gripped at it and curled up into a ball. He moaned softly in his sleep—a sound of sadness and confusion, a lost sound like a night train way off in the distance—and Ramona left the house.
FOUR
Potter’s Clay
17
THE OLD WOMAN’
S HANDS, wet with clay, moved like brown hummingbirds to give shape to the formless lump that sat on the spinning potter’s wheel before her. Vase or jar? she asked herself, her foot rhythmically tapping the horizontal wooden bar that controlled the wheel’s speed. Oiled gears meshed with a quiet hissing of friction. She was partial to vases, but jars sold more quickly; Mrs. Blears, owner of the Country Crafts Shoppe twenty miles away in Selma, had told her there was a real market for her small, wide-mouthed jars glazed in dark, earthen colors. They could be used for anything from sugar jars to holding lipsticks, Mrs. Blears said, and people paid a bit more for them if there was the Rebekah Fairmountain signature on the bottom. After all, Rebekah had been written up both in the Selma Journal and in Alabama Craftsman magazine, and she’d won first prize for most original pottery sculpture four years in a row at the Alabama State Fair. She did the sculpture only once in a while now, to challenge herself, but stuck mainly to the jars, vases, and mugs the crafts shop ordered, because blue ribbons didn’t make a very filling meal.
Midmorning sunlight streamed in through two windows before her, slanting across the wood-floored workroom and glinting off the finished pieces arranged on pineboard shelves: there were cups and saucers the color of red autumn leaves, dishes as dark blue as a midnight sky, a series of jars ranging in hue from pink to deep purple, black mugs with a finish as rough as pine bark, unglazed pieces painted with brightly colored Choctaw figures. The workroom was a hodgepodge of colors and shapes, a riot of creativity; at the center of it sat the old woman, smoking a plain clay pipe and regarding the material that lay before her. She had smoothed the sides, wetting her fingers from a can of water to keep the clay soft, and had already worked over several small imperfections that might crack in the kiln’s drying heat. Now it was time to decide.
She saw a vase in this one. A tall vase with a fluted rim, glazed deep red like the blood that flows through a woman’s heart when she’s with the man she loves. Yes, she thought; a beautiful dark red vase to hold white wild flowers. She added more clay from a box at her side, wet her ringers again, and went to work.
Rebekah Fairmountain’s strong-boned, deeply furrowed face was spattered with clay; her flesh was the color of oiled mahogany, her eyes pure ebony. Straight silver hair fell to her shoulders from beneath a wide-brimmed straw sunhat, and she wore clay-smeared Sears overalls over a plaid shirt. As she worked, her eyes narrowed with concentration, and blue whorls of smoke wisped from the right side of her mouth; she was puffing rabbit tobacco that she’d gathered in the forest, and its distinctive burned-leaves aroma filled the workroom. Her house was set far off the main road and surrounded by dense forest; even so, the electric company was running lines out to provide lights to some of her neighbors, but she didn’t want that false, cheerless lighting.
A covey of quail burst out of the brush off in the distance, scattering for the sky. Their movement through the window caught Rebekah’s attention; she watched them for a moment, wondering what was stalking through the woods after them. Then she saw a faint haze of dust rising in the air, and she knew a car was drawing near. Mailman? she wondered. Too early in the day. Bill collector? Hope not! She reluctantly left the potter’s wheel and rose from her chair, stepping to the window.
When she saw it was John Creekmore’s car, her heart leapt with joy. It had been Christmas since she’d last seen her daughter and grandson. She opened the screen door and went out to where the Olds was pulling up in front of the white house, built separately from the pottery workshed. Ramona and little Billy were already getting out, but where was John? Something bad had happened, Rebekah told herself as she saw their faces. Then she broke into a hobbled run, and embraced her daughter, feeling the tension that hung around her like a shroud.
Rebekah pretended not to notice Billy’s swollen eyes. She tousled his hair and said, “Boy, you’re going to be tall enough to snag the clouds pretty soon, aren’t you?” Her voice was raspy, and trembled with the excitement of seeing them.
He managed a weak smile. “No, Gram, I won’t ever get that tall!”
“You’re about five feet there already! Let me just look at the both of you!” She took the pipe out of her mouth and shook her head in awe. “Ramona, you’re as lovely as April! You please my eyes, girl!” Then she put her arm around her daughter, sensing that the tears were about to break down Ramona’s cheeks. “Could you use a cup of sassafras tea?”
“Yes. I surely could.”
They walked to the house—the old woman steadying her daughter, the younger woman clutching to her son. On the porch was a large pile of firewood used for cooking; around behind the house, where the woods had been cleared, was a well, and at the edge of the forest stood a small smokehouse. In the comfortable but sparsely furnished house, Rebekah boiled fragrant sassafras root in a kettle on the kitchen’s woodburning stove. She said, “Billy, I’ve got a piece almost done on the wheel right now. Why don’t you run over there and take a look at it, and tell me what color you think it ought to be?”
He scampered out of the kitchen, eager to get to the pottery workroom and its explosion of shapes and colors. Ramona sat down at the kitchen table with her cup of tea, and Rebekah said quietly, “I want to hear it—everything—before the boy comes back.”
Ramona couldn’t hold back her tears any longer; she’d had to be strong for Billy, but now she felt as weak as water. She trembled, sobbing, and her mother rubbed her neck and shoulders to ease the tension in them. Ramona began with the Booker tragedy, and told her everything. “We came straight here,” she said after she was through. “You should’ve…heard what John said today, right in front of Billy…”
The old woman lit her pipe with a long kitchen match and puffed out blue smoke. “What did you expect?” she asked. “For John to send you off with his best wishes? It’s not that he sees badness in you or Billy, it’s that he’s lost all idea of what’s bad and what isn’t. Anything that makes him afraid—or makes him think—is to him as black as a demon’s armpit in Hell. Damn it, child! I knew all this was comin’—here I go, rattlin’ on like any other old granny, eh?”
“I don’t care about myself. It’s Billy I worry about.”
“Oh, no.” Rebekah shook her head. “Don’t go sayin’ that. There’ve been too many martyrs in this family already. So: you went to this Falconer revival, and you think it was him, do you?”
“Yes,” Ramona said. “I know it was.”
“How do you know?”
“If I have to explain that to you, you don’t know me very well. I wish I’d never gone there! I was a fool to go!”
“But it’s done.” Rebekah’s dark eyes glittered. “Have you told Billy?”
“No, not yet.”
“Are you?”
“I…don’t think the time is right for that. I think it would be too much for him. Last night…what he thought was his father came for him, and took him out on the road. He was almost killed by a truck.”
Rebekah frowned, then nodded grimly. “It’s after him already, then. He may be able to see, child, but he may not be able to know what he sees, or be able to help. Our family’s been full of both good and bad fruit. There were the no-’counts, like your great-uncle Nicholas T. Hancock, who was the king of the flimflammin’ spirit merchants until he got shot in the head in a crooked poker game. But then there was your great-great-grandmother Ruby Steele, who started that organization in Washington, D.C., to study the afterlife. What I’m tryin’ to say to you is: if Billy can’t help, there’s no use in him bein’ able to see. If he can’t go forward, he’ll go backward. And he’s got a lot of tainted white blood in him, Ramona.”
“I think he can help. He’s helped already.”
“And you want him to start the Mystery Walk?”
“I want him to continue it. I think he started when he went down into that basement.”
“Maybe so. But you know as well as I do about the Walk—if he’s not strong enough, if he doesn’t have the inborn sense to understand
it, then the ritual could hurt him. I was fifteen when my daddy started mine; you were sixteen. This child is only ten. Only one other I ever heard of who started the Walk that early: Thomas X. Cody, back in the 1800s. Interesting man. It was said our old enemy hated Thomas so much, he raised a corpse out of its grave and walked in its skin with a knife in one hand and a hatchet in the other. Thomas and that thing fought on the edge of a cliff for two days straight, until they both went over the side.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I believe Thomas was strong. I believe our enemy hasn’t begun to show us all his tricks. Changing shapes to deceive is only part of it.”
“Then it’s important for Billy to start the Walk now,” Ramona said. “I want him to know what kind of thing tried to kill him the other night.”
“If he’s not ready, the ritual could do him damage. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
The front door opened and closed. Billy came into the kitchen with wet clay on his hands. He was carrying a particularly large pinecone he thought his gram would like to see.
“That’s a mighty hefty pinecone.” Rebekah laid it on the table before her. Then she looked into Billy’s eyes. “How’d you like to stay here for a few days?”
“I guess so. But we’re goin’ back to Daddy, aren’t we?”
Ramona nodded. “Yes. We are.”
“Did you see my new piece?” Rebekah asked. “It’s going to be a tall vase.”
“I saw it. I think it ought to be…” He thought hard. “Red, maybe. Real dark red, like Choctaw blood.”
Rebekah paused and nodded. “Why,” she said, an expression of pleasure stealing across her face, “I hadn’t thought of that!”
18
BILLY WAS AWAKENED BY his grandmother who stood over the bed holding a bull’s-eye lantern that cast a pale golden glow upon the walls. Through the open window a single cicada sang in an oak tree like a buzz saw’s whine, the note rising and falling in the midnight heat. Billy thought he could smell woodsmoke.