And then something hit me. “You know, there is another problem.”
“And what’s that?” Mama asked.
“Gene and Constable Sy,” I said. “We was the last ones anyone knew to be in that house. I got to reckon we’re going to be the ones most likely figured for the killing.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jinx said. “So maybe we’re wanted after all, and in a big way.” After a moment, she said, “Course, Reverend Joy, he did the killing of Gene with that board. He’s dead, so we could lay both of them killings on him.”
“That isn’t right,” Mama said.
“It ain’t right,” Jinx said. “But it sure is workable.”
“No,” I said. “We won’t do that. He tried to help us.”
“I know that,” Jinx said, her voice deep. “I was trying it on for size. But it didn’t fit. I guess you got to walk out and take the chance. Maybe we all got to walk out. Jail is bound to be better than Skunk.”
“I’m not sure Terry can walk out,” Mama said. “And what about the reverend?”
“He damn sure ain’t walking nowhere,” Jinx said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Mama said.
“If we pull him loose,” I said, “we got no way to bury him proper. So I don’t think there’s a good way to go when it comes to him.”
“We can’t just leave him hanging there,” Mama said.
“I ain’t as bothered by it as you two,” Jinx said.
I looked down at Terry. “We can talk about it till the blood poison kills Terry, or while he might have a bit of strength, we can try to get going. Way I see it, night is Skunk’s time, and we keep standing here chatting, he’s gonna solve all our problems for us, and not in a way we’re gonna like.”
“All right, then,” Mama said. “But how do we go?”
I thought on that a moment. “We could walk toward the tree line, see if there’s a road somewhere, but probably the best thing is to stay along the river. The river always leads to a town or somebody.”
We talked about it some more, and finally come to the conclusion it was best to stick together. Might have a chance that way, but if we split up, we was sure as hell going to be killed if Skunk was out there. Three of us could fight him better than one or two. Of course, there was Terry, but in his condition our best bet was to grab him by the ankles and sling him about, use him as a weapon.
Terry made it to his feet with some coaxing, and was able to walk with one arm over my shoulder, the other over Jinx’s. But he was out of it, jabbering about this and that: “It was an accident,” he said over and over.
“What’s that?” I said. “What was an accident?”
“The water,” he said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “A storm does what it does.”
We kept walking, his arm over our shoulders, carrying our lard cans, me with May Lynn in mine, and Mama carrying the one with the money in it.
We stayed close to the river as we could, but sometimes the growth around it got wild, and we had to go wider, come back closer to it when the stuff thinned. I don’t know how long we walked, but we finally came to a place where there was a big burned patch with a chimney sticking up. It had happened a long time off, because the rain from the night before hadn’t stirred the char up, and there wasn’t any burned smell about it. Up against the shore I could see a boat chained to a big oak that had died and fallen into the water.
We stopped and laid Terry out on the dirt and set our lard cans down. Mama sat beside him, and me and Jinx went down to the boat. The chain ran through a hole in the front of the boat and was wrapped around the log and fastened back to the boat with a padlock. The way it was looped under the log, I figured someone had to have gone to a lot of trouble to get in the water and under the log to wrap the chain. It couldn’t be pulled off either end. One end of the log went out in the water. The other end had a bunch of dead limbs on it, and you couldn’t pull the chain over them. If we had an ax, then we could have chopped the limbs off and pulled the chain free. But no ax appeared.
We looked around for a rock, something, anything, to bang that padlock off, but all there was in that way was the bricks in the chimney, and they was caulked tight. We couldn’t find any means to work one loose.
I kept looking around for Skunk, but I figured by the time I saw him come up, it would be too late. Besides, we was all so tired we could hardly move. I went over and sat down by Mama while Jinx went off in the woods to take care of nature’s business.
“Sorry you came now?” I said.
“I don’t think I am,” Mama said. “It would have been nice had things worked out a bit smoother, but I’m not sorry. I’m sorry for the reverend, and even Gene and Constable Sy, I guess.”
“Constable Sy got it pretty bad,” I said. “Skunk did some things to him for fun.”
Mama nodded. “I’m still glad I came.”
“Even if you dream scary dreams of horses?”
“Even if I do.”
About that time Jinx came out of the woods, hurrying along so fast I was afraid she might have come up on Skunk.
“There’s lights on the other side of them trees,” she said.
“Skunk?”
“I don’t know it ain’t Skunk,” she said. “But I figure he’s a whole lot sneakier than to go out there and light a fire, and him trying to creep up on us.”
“You stay here with Terry,” I said to Mama, and me and Jinx hustled into the woods. This wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, to leave them by themselves, but it seemed at this point less smart to have them approach a fire with us. It could be Skunk, and he might not even care to put a sneak on. For that matter, whoever it was might not be friendly. It was better two young girls who could run like deer went to see what was what, instead of a tired woman and a boy we’d have to drag around by the arm.
We hadn’t gone far when I could see the same light Jinx had seen. It was definitely firelight, and we could faintly hear someone talking. Easing closer, we could make out the fire was in a big clearing, and beyond the clearing was some trees. We squatted down and looked out at the fire and listened as best we could to the voices, but there wasn’t much that could be made out. There was some laughing, and I could tell one of the voices was a man, and the others was a woman and child, and there was some other voices, too, that might have been older children. It was hard to tell.
Jinx and I didn’t even discuss it; we just got up and walked out of the woods where we was hiding and started toward the fire. I called out, “Hallo, the fire.”
The voices stopped, and I seen then that there was two men, because they both stood up and looked in our direction. We kept walking.
One of the men said, “Who’s out there?”
“Some near-drowned people,” I said.
There was some hesitation, but one of the men called out, “Come on up,” and that’s what we did.
When we got closer we could feel the heat of the fire. Though it was a warm night, we were still a bit damp, and it felt good. I sniffed something cooking, and the smell made my stomach hurt like it was going through a washer wringer. Where the smell came from was a big lard can setting on some logs in the fire. It was full of something and that something was bubbling.
I looked around at the others. The fire flickered over their faces. There was three young people, one maybe six, and the other two was a boy and a girl in their early teens. The woman was about Mama’s age, and she looked like she would have been pretty in daylight with a good dress on and her hair done right. Both men had on worn-out clothes and hats. I figured the one that was about the woman’s age was her husband, and the other man, though older, looked enough like the younger man I reckoned it was his father. They both had on old suit coats, which wasn’t the best thing for the weather, but I reasoned out they thought they might need them when the weather changed, and wearing them was the best way to keep up with their goods. They wore ragged hats and had some bundles bound up and lying near the fire. It d
idn’t take much thinking to know they was on the scout, trying to survive with what they had, same as us.
“We had an accident on the river,” I said. “Our raft got torn apart in the rainstorm, and we near drowned. We got an injured boy back there with part of his finger chopped off and his hand all swole up.”
“Chopped off?” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am, he got it caught up in something when the raft broke up, and it come off. We been walking, trying to find our way out.”
It was a lie, but I figured I might not want to point out we had been chased by a crazy man with a hatchet, since he was most likely still out there.
“We come here by train,” said the older man. “Not to this spot, but back there”—he pointed—“where there’s a higher grade. The train slowed down and we could jump. We was tired of riding in the boxcar. You ride long enough, and you jump off, you feel like you’re still riding. I just now got over it. Thing is, though, I ain’t so sure jumping off was the smart idea. We’re just out here in the woods now. I was fed up plenty with that train then, but now I’m wishing we was back on it.”
“We’ve walked awhile,” said the woman.
“We’re thinking we ought to catch the next train coming through,” said the older man, “though this ain’t a good spot for it.”
I looked out beyond them, knew then that the rail line run right past us, not more than a hundred feet away.
“When’s that next train come through?” I said.
“We ain’t got no schedule,” said the younger man. “We’re new to this hoboing. We wasn’t born to it. We never had so much to begin with, but then it got so there wasn’t any work, and what work there was had fifty men after the job.”
“Jud,” the wife said. “She’s just asking a question, not our life stories.”
“No problem, ma’am,” I said.
“We was in the Dust Bowl up in Oklahoma,” the older man said. “Day that first dust storm come in. We hadn’t never seen nothing like it.”
“I don’t know there’s ever been anything like it,” Jud said.
“Naw,” said the old man. “Nothing like it.”
“These girls don’t want to hear all that,” said the woman, but that didn’t slow the old man down.
“At first,” he said, “out there on the horizon, it looked like a rain cloud, but the color was wrong, and it was too low to the ground. It got closer, and I thought, twister. But it wasn’t that. It was like big balls of dirty cotton being pushed along by the wind, balls higher than a house and wider than a town. It was sand. The birds was flying in front of it fast as they could go. And then it come. It hit the house and knocked out the windows, throwed glass and dirt every which way. It ripped the curtains to shreds. Everything turned dark, so goddamn dark we couldn’t see each other in it. It come and it come. We lay on the floor coughing. Then, when it was gone, we went out and looked at the fields. There wasn’t even a sprig of grass out there. It was like the storm had pulled everything up from the ground, including the ground. All the good planting soil was gone, taken off to God knows where. But them storms wasn’t done. They just kept coming. One after another. We fixed windows and we put wet rags around the cracks. We even sealed some with flour paste. But them storms, they didn’t make no never mind. I thought it was like in the Bible for a time. I thought it was the end times. And later, I sort of wished it had been, cause there wasn’t nothing left for nobody to eat that was worth eating. Oh, there was the rabbits at first. They was starving just like we was, and they was everywhere. Them rabbits was so poor, you had to eat three to get a meal for one person. And even cleaned and cooked they tasted like grit. Then if that wasn’t enough of a rock to tote up the mountain, along come a tornado and blowed our house all over Oklahoma. We got what was left and piled it in our truck, which by the grace of God didn’t get blowed away with the house. It got turned over two or three times and righted, but we was lucky there. It ran, even if it did have an engine full of sand.
“We went out to California to pick oranges, and that wasn’t no good. Everyone in the whole damn world seemed to be there. You could work all day and not make enough to buy a sack of flour. We come back this direction for no good reason at all. It’s greener than Oklahoma, but there ain’t nothing here for nobody to do. We’re on our way somewhere else.”
“Where?” I said.
“Just somewhere else,” he said.
“You went on and told our life story anyhow,” the woman said to the old man.
“I reckon I did,” he said, slumping his shoulders. “Reckon I did. It was just all balled up inside me.”
“It got out,” she said, then looked at Jinx. “The boy. Can he walk?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“If we could get him here by the fire, I might could look at his hand. I’ve done some patching up in my time.”
“We can try and cart him over here,” I said.
“Jud and Boone here can help you, you need it,” she said. “We can give you a bite to eat.”
“We ain’t got that much to share,” Jud said. “Some beans is all, and not enough for any more mouths.”
“Hush, Jud,” the woman said. “We’ll make do, if we all just get a spoonful.”
Jud looked at the woman, then looked back at the fire. From experience, he knew he wasn’t going to win any kind of a battle over sharing beans, or much of anything else.
“There’s also another person,” I said. “My mother.”
“Bring them both here,” she said.
Jud nodded toward the can on the fire. “You ain’t got nothing to add to the fixings, do you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “Sorry. Everything we had is at the bottom of the river, except for a couple of nonfood items.”
“All right,” Jud said, and then sighed. “Let’s go see we can get this friend of yours. But I ought to tell you, I got a gun.”
To prove that, he pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket. It was a very small pistol. It had an over-and-under barrel that rattled a little in its groove. Most likely, he shot it at you, you’d have to lean into the gun to get hit—provided it didn’t explode in his face.
“We ain’t aiming to get shot,” Jinx said. They all looked at her kind of startled. She had been so quiet up until now they may have figured her for a deaf-mute.
“Ain’t no shooting going on,” Jud said.
He put the gun back in his coat, and we started out with them toward the river.
20
It was a real job, but we finally got Terry to the fire.
We sat there while the woman—who, we learned, was named Clementine—looked at Terry’s hand. By firelight it looked bad as bad could be. It was swollen big and had gone purple and there was some dark lines moving up the wrist toward the elbow. You could smell the wound, like meat going to rot.
The men both stared at Mama. I don’t think they meant to be rude, but it isn’t every day you see someone looked like her out in the woods wandering around. Even damp as a pissed-on hen, she was still something special, and I couldn’t help but envy her. I guess I looked all right, but there wasn’t any way I was ever going to look like her.
“What’s in them buckets?” said Jud.
We had carried our lard cans with us, and I was sitting on mine, and Jinx on hers.
“It’s a friend of ours got burned up in a fire in a house,” I said. I didn’t feel too bad telling that lie, as part of it was true.
“What?” said Boone.
“She was a big friend, and she’s packed in both buckets,” I said.
“You scooped her out of a fire?” Jud said.
“What was left of her.”
I got off the lard can and used my pocketknife to open it up. I put the knife away and took out the jar and showed it to them by holding it close to the fire. It was dark with ashes.
“What in hell are you doing with her burned up like that?” said Jud.
“We’re taking what’s left to h
er relatives, to let them decide where she ought to be buried. We figured we ought not just let her ashes lie around and dry out and get blown away by the wind.”
“That’s something,” Boone said, trying to wrap his head around that.
“I guess that’s the Christian thing to do,” Clementine said.
“You ought to have just kicked some dirt over that ash,” Boone said. “I don’t know it’s so Christian to carry her around in a bucket. That don’t seem right, keeping a woman in a bucket, even if she is dead and burned to ash.”
“How do you know what ash is hers and what ash is the house?” Jud said.
“I reckon God can sort that out,” I said.
This seemed to end any interest in the buckets, and Jinx didn’t have to open the other, cause if they had seen that money, desperate circumstances might have changed their character.
“It’s bad infected,” said Clementine after she had checked over Terry’s hand. “There ain’t nothing for it but to let some of the poison out. I can do it, but I can’t make no promises.”
“Then you better do it,” Jinx said. She was near Terry and she was looking at his hand lying across his chest.
“It’s going to wake him up, when I do what I got to do,” said Clementine, “and it’s going to hurt like the fires of hell for a moment, but if we can let the poison out, he’ll do better, at least until you can find a doctor.”
“My Clementine was a nurse,” said Jud.
“Not official,” she said. “I just helped the doctor out until this Depression come down. He called me a nurse, but all the training I got I picked up from doing. Jud, I’m going to need your knife.”
Jud gave her a large pocketknife, and Clementine opened it up and poked the blade in the fire and held it there. She held it there a long time. We sat and watched. When the blade started to glow red, she said, “He’s going to need holding down.”
Jinx got his arm, the one that didn’t have a hand on it the color of an eggplant, and held it down. Jud came and straddled Terry and sat on his legs. I got hold of his other arm, the one with the injured hand, and held it out on a rag Clementine had spread on the ground.