“Mom sold some of her pieces to a dealer in Fayette. I don’t think this is enough to take care of what we owe you, but…”
Granger took the money and shrugged. “It’s all right. I’ll still be here.” He made change and handed back the few coins. “Too bad John didn’t get that job at the sawmill, huh? They pay pretty good up there, I understand.”
“Yes sir, but they only hired five new men, and Dad says over fifty showed up to get work.” Billy started sacking the groceries. “I guess a lot of folks need the money pretty bad, what with the droughts we’ve been having.”
“Yes,” Coy agreed. He couldn’t think of any family offhand who needed money any worse than the Creekmores. Perhaps the only business that was really thriving in Hawthorne was the Chatham brothers’ sawmill; they had owned the family mill for over forty years, still housed in the same run-down wooden structure with most of the same engines and belts running the saws. “Well, maybe they’ll be hirin’ more in the fall. Have you given any thought to your own future?”
Billy shrugged. Mr. Dawson, who taught auto mechanics at Fayette County, had told him he was pretty quick at catching on to how machines worked and would probably make a good wrench-jockey after high school; the boy’s adviser, Mr. Marbury, had said his grades were very high in English and reading comprehension, but not quite high enough to get him a junior-college scholarship. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll help out my dad for a while.”
Coy grunted. The Creekmore land hadn’t produced a good crop in three years. “You ought to get into the construction business, Billy. I hear some of the contractors up around Fayette are going to be hirin’ laborers. That’s good pay, too. You know, I think Hawthorne’s a losin’ proposition for a bright young man like you. I wouldn’t say that to just anybody, but there’s a real spark in you. You think, you reason things out. Nope. Hawthorne’s not for you, Billy.”
“My folks need me.” He grinned. “I’m the only one who can keep the Olds running.”
“Well, that’s no kind of a future.” The bell over the front door clanged, and Billy looked up as Mrs. Pettus and Melissa—her radiant blue-eyed face framed by a bell of hair the color of pale summer straw—came into the grocery store. Billy forgot to breathe for an instant; he saw her every day at Fayette County High, but still there was a quiver of electric tension down in his stomach. The school dance—May Night—was less than two weeks away, and Billy had been trying to muster the courage to ask her before anyone else did, but whenever he thought he was about to approach her he’d remember that he had no money or driver’s license, and that his clothes had been worn by someone else before him. Melissa always wore bright dresses, her face scrubbed and shining. Billy picked up his sacked groceries, wanting to get out before Melissa saw his grease-stained hands and shirt.
“My, my!” Coy said. “Don’t you two look lovely this afternoon!”
“That’s what ladies do best!” Mrs. Pettus said merrily. She put a protective arm around her daughter as the Creekmore boy stepped past.
“Hi,” Billy blurted out.
Melissa smiled and nodded her head, and then her mother pulled her on into the store.
He watched her over his shoulder as he neared the door, and saw her look quickly back at him. His heart pounded. And then the cowbell clanged over his head and he ran into someone who was coming through the door.
“Whoa there, Billy!” Link Patterson said, trying to sidestep. “You gatherin’ wool, boy?” He grinned good-naturedly; in another instant the grin had frozen on his face, because Billy Creekmore was staring at him as if he’d sprouted horns from the top of his head.
Billy’s blood had gone cold. Link Patterson looked healthy and well fed, possibly because he was one of the few men who’d gotten a job at the sawmill and his life had taken a turn for the better; his wife was expecting their second child in October, and he’d just made the first payment on a trailer parked outside the town limits. But Billy saw him enveloped in a purplish black haze of light, a hideous cocoon that slowly writhed around him.
Link laughed nervously. “What’s wrong? Looks like you’d seen a…” The word ghost lay in his mouth like cold lead, and he swallowed it.
Billy slowly reached out; his fingers touched the haze, but felt nothing. Link shrank back a step. “Boy? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Coy Granger, Mrs. Pettus, and Melissa were watching. Billy blinked and shook his head. “Nothing, Mr. Patterson. Sorry. I…sorry.” And then he was out the door and gone, hurrying along the road with the sack of groceries clamped in the crook of an arm. With a few more steps he began running, feeling scared and sick. What did I see? he asked himself, and didn’t stop running even when he passed the green, grown-over ruin of the Booker house.
“Pack of Kents, Coy,” Link Patterson said. As Granger got his cigarettes, Link stepped to the window and peered out, watching Billy running away. He could hear the high singsong of the saws; in fifteen minutes he’d be on the line, called in to fill the shift for a man who’d gotten sick and had to go home. “That Creekmore boy is…really strange, ain’t he?” Link said, to no one in particular.
Mrs. Pettus answered. “He’s got that wicked seed in him, that’s what. My Melissa sees him at school every day and he’s always picking fights, isn’t he?”
“No, Momma,” she replied, and pulled away from her mother’s arm. “That’s not how it is.”
“Always picking fights. And he’s such a nice-lookin’ boy, too, to have such bad blood in him.”
“Billy’s all right,” Coy said. “He’s a smart boy. He’ll go far if he can cut himself loose from that farm. Link, here’re your cigarettes. How’s work at the mill?”
“In bits and pieces,” Link joked, trying to summon up a grin. The way Billy had stared at him had made him jittery. He paid for the cigarettes, went out to his pickup truck, and drove on toward the mill.
Link parked his truck in the gravel lot, took a few pulls from a cigarette to calm his jittery nerves, then crushed it out and put on his heavy canvas safety gloves. Then he walked the few dozen yards to the main building, past bunks of yellow pine logs sitting alongside the railroad tracks; they were newly arrived, oozing sap, and ready to be hauled into the small pond behind the mill before the hot weather made them harden and swell. He went up a flight of rickety stairs to the main hall.
Before he opened the door, the noise of the saws was simply irritating; when he stepped inside, into a golden haze of sawdust and friction heat thrown off by the whirring circular saws, band saws, and ponies, the shrill scream of machinery pounded into his forehead like a sledgehammer. He fished earplugs from his pocket and screwed them in place, but they helped hardly at all. The smell of raw lumber and sawdust in the air scratched the back of Link’s throat. He clocked in next to the glassed-in office where Lamar Chatham sat at his desk, the telephone to one ear and an index finger plugging the other.
The mill was working at full speed. Link saw where he was needed—the master sawyer, Durkee, was operating the headrig and aligning the logs, a two-man job that was slowing down the flow of timber—and hurried toward the far end of the line. He took his place next to the whining headrig and began operating the long lever that sped up or braked the circular saw, while grizzled old Durkee judged the raw logs and maneuvered them so they’d go into the headrig at the proper angle and speed. Link worked the lever, adjusting the saw’s speed to Durkee’s shouted orders.
The logs kept coming, faster and faster. Link settled down to the routine, watching the oil-smeared gauge set into the machinery next to him, reading the saw’s speed.
Bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, illuminating the mill with a harsh and sometimes unreliable light: many men who’d worked the mill were missing fingers because they couldn’t judge exactly where a fast-spinning sawrim was, due to poor lighting. Link let himself relax, became part of the trembling headrig. His mind drifted to his new trailer. It had been a good buy, and now that his second child was on the wa
y it was good that he, Susie, and his son Jeff were out of that shack they’d lived in for years. It seemed that finally things were working out his way.
Durkee shouted, “This one’s as punky as a rotten tooth!” and jabbed at the wood with a logger’s hook. “Damn, what sorta shit they tryin’ to pass through here!” He reached out, pushed the log’s far end a few inches to line it up correctly, and made a motion with his forefinger to give the saw more speed. Link pushed the lever forward. The log started coming through, sawdust whirling out of the deepening groove as the teeth sank in. The headrig vibrated suddenly, and Link thought: This sonofabitch is gonna come a—
And then there was a loud crack! that vibrated through the mill. Link saw the log split raggedly as the saw slipped out of line. Durkee roared, “SHUT HER DOWN!” and Link wrenched the lever back, thinking I’ve screwed up, I’ve screwed up, I’ve…
Something flew up like a yellow dagger. The three-inch-long shard of wood pierced Link’s left eye with a force that snapped his head back. He screamed in agony, clutched at his face, and stumbled forward, off-balance; instinctively he reached out to keep himself from going down…and the saw’s scream turned into a hungry gobbling.
“Help!” Durkee shouted. “Somebody cut the master switch!”
Link staggered, blood streaming down his face. He lifted his right hand to clear his eyes, and saw in his hazed half-vision the wet nub of white bone that jutted from the mangled meat of his forearm. His hand, the fingers still twitching, was already moving down the conveyor belt wrapped in its bloody canvas glove.
And then the stump of his ruined arm shot blood like a firehose.
Someone hit the master switch. The machinery stopped, the saws whining down like angered wasps. Link’s knees buckled. He was trying to scream, but he couldn’t find his voice; instead, he could still hear the noise of the circular saw in his head—screaming, screaming in a hideous metallic voice. He couldn’t get a breath, he was lying in sawdust, he was going to get dirty and he didn’t want Susie to see him like this. “…Not like this,” he moaned, clutching his arm close to his body, like an infant. “Oh God…oh God, not like this…”
Voices cut through the haze above him. “…call the doc, hurry…”
“…bandage it…tourniquet in the…!”
“…somebody call his wife!”
“My hand,” Link whispered. “Find…my hand…” He couldn’t remember now which hand was hurt, but he knew it had to be found so the doctor could stitch it back on. The sawdust around him was wet, his clothes were wet, everything was wet. A black wave roared through his head. “No!” he whispered. “…Not fair, not this way!” Tears streamed down his cheeks, mingling with the blood. He was aware of someone knotting a shirt around his forearm; everything was moving in slow motion, everything was crazy and wrong…
“…too much blood, the damned thing’s not gonna…” a disembodied voice said, off in the distance. A shout, full of sharp echoes: “…ambulance!” and then fading away.
The black wave came back again, seemingly lifting him up from where he sat. It scared him, and he fought against it with his teeth gritted. “NO!” he cried out. “I WON’T LET IT…be…like this…” The voices above him had merged into an indistinct mumbling. His eye hurt, that was the worst of it, and he couldn’t see. “Clean my eye off,” he said, but no one seemed to hear. A surge of anger swelled in him, searing and indignant. There was still so much to do, he realized. His wife to take care of! The new baby! The trailer he was so proud of and had put so much work into! I won’t let it be like this! he screamed inwardly.
The light was fading. Link said, “I don’t want it to get dark.”
Above him, an ashen-faced and blood-spattered Durkee looked at the ring of stunned men and said, “What’d he say? Anybody hear him? Jesus, what a mess!” Durkee went down on his knees, cradling the younger man’s head. Now that all the saws were quiet, they could hear an ambulance coming, but it was still on the other side of Hawthorne.
There were droplets of blood across the front of Lamar Chatham’s white shirt. He was trembling, his hands curled into helpless fists at his sides. His brain was working furiously on two tracks: how to make up the work that was being lost and how to smooth this thing over with the safety inspectors. He saw Link Patterson’s gloved hand lying on a conveyor belt like a large squashed spider, the air was rank with blood and icy with shock.
Durkee rose to his feet. He let out a long sigh and shook his head. “Somebody else’ll have to close his eyes. I’ve had enough.” He walked past Chatham without looking back.
21
JOHN CREEKMORE STOOD STIFFLY in an ill-fitting black suit, the sun hot on his neck through a break in the pines. As Reverend Laken spoke, John looked back over his shoulder at the figure sitting up the hill perhaps fifty yards away, watching the funeral through the rows of small granite tombstones. Billy had been up there since John had arrived, before the funeral had started. The boy hadn’t moved a muscle, and John knew the others had seen him up there too. John looked away, trying to concentrate on what Hawthorne’s new minister was saying, but he could feel Billy sitting back amid the pines; he shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, not knowing what to do with his hands.
“Amen,” Reverend Laken finally said. The coffin was cranked down into the ground, and Susie sobbed so terribly John had to walk away from her. He stood and stared up at his son for a moment. Billy was motionless. John thrust his hands into his pockets and walked carefully toward him between the mounds of earth, his shoes slipping on the carpet of fresh pine needles. The boy’s face was a tight mask of secrets; John knew that Ramona and Billy kept a world of secrets from him—dark things that had to do with the time Billy had spent at his grandmother’s house. John didn’t want to know what they were, fearing contamination, but for one thing he could be happy: Rebekah Fairmountain had gone to her hellish reward two years ago. Ramona and Billy had found her on the day after Christmas, sitting with her eyes closed in her easy chair, a yellowed picture of her late husband and a red vase full of wild flowers on a table at her side.
John reached his son. “What’re you doin’ here?”
“I wanted to come.”
“People saw you sittin’ up here. Why didn’t you come down?”
He shook his head, amber lights glinting in his eyes; he was unable to explain his feelings, but when he’d seen that strange black haze clinging to Link Patterson he’d known something terrible was about to happen. He hadn’t told his mother about it until later, after Mr. Patterson was lying dead up at the sawmill and the whole town knew there’d been an awful accident. As he’d watched the coffin being lowered, he’d wondered if he had had the power to change the man’s destiny, perhaps with a single word of warning, or if the accident was already waiting for Link Patterson to step into it and nothing Billy could’ve said or done would’ve mattered.
“What did you come for?” John asked. “I thought you were supposed to be workin’ at the gas station this afternoon.”
“I asked for the afternoon off. It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“The hell it don’t!” John felt a flush of unreasoned anger heat his face. “People see you sittin’ up here among the graves, what are they gonna think? Damn it, boy! Don’t you have a lick of sense anymore?” He almost reached down and hauled Billy to his feet, but restrained himself; lately his nerves had been on edge all the time, and he lost his temper like a shatterpated fool. A pang of shame stabbed him. This is my son! he thought. Not a stranger I don’t even know! He abruptly cleared his throat. “You ready to go home now?”
They walked down the hill together, past the new grave with its bright bouquets of flowers, and to the Olds. The car was held together with more wire and odd junkyard pieces than Frankenstein’s monster. The engine, when it finally caught, sounded as if it were gargling nuts and bolts. They drove out of the cemetery and toward home.
John saw it first: a white pickup truck with CHATHAM BROTHERS st
enciled on its side in red was parked in front of the house. “Now what?” he said, and then thought: could be it’s a job! His hands tightened around the steering wheel. Sure! They needed a new man on the line, since Link was… He was sickened at what he was thinking, but—sickened or not—his heart was beating harder in anticipation.
Lamar Chatham himself was sitting on the front porch with Ramona. He rose to his feet, a short heavy man in a seersucker suit, as the Olds approached.
John stopped the car, then stepped out. He was sweating profusely in the dark suit. “Howdy, Mr. Chatham,” he called.
The man nodded, chewing on a toothpick. “Hello, Creekmore.”
“My son and I went to pay our respects to Link Patterson. That was a terrible thing, but I guess a man can’t be too careful around those saws. I mean, when you’re workin’ fast you’ve got to know what you’re doin’.” He caught Ramona’s dark gaze on him, and again he felt a hot surge of anger. “I hear the mill’s gonna be shut down for a while.”
“That’s right. I’ve been waitin’ to speak to you.”
“Oh? Well…what can I do for you, then?”
Chatham’s fleshy face looked loose and slack, and there were gray patches beneath his blue eyes. He said, “Not you, Creekmore. I’ve been waitin’ to speak to your boy.”
“My boy? What for?”
Chatham took the toothpick from his mouth. “I meant to go to the funeral,” he said, “but I had business. I sent some flowers, you probably saw ’em there. Orchids. One thing about funerals: they’re supposed to be final, ain’t they?”
“I guess so,” John agreed.
“Yeah.” He gazed off at the field for a moment, where a new crop of corn and pole beans were struggling out of the dusty earth. “I came to see your wife, and we had a good long talk about…filings. But she says I should speak to Billy.” He looked at John again. “Your wife says that Billy can do what has to be done.”