The Amulet

  Becca whistled.

  “You know what that means?” asked Sarah.

  “What does it mean?” demanded Becca. “I think I know what it means,” she added sourly.

  “It means,” said Sarah, “that we know of three people who got hold of that amulet, they’re all three of ’em dead, and their families with ’em. ’Cept for little Mary Shirley, and who knows what’s gone come of her now?”

  “That’s the worst luck I ever heard of,” Becca judged.

  “That’s worse than bad luck,” said Sarah. “Bad luck is just sort of coincidence. I don’t think that this was coinci­dence. I really do think that amulet’s got something to do with it.”

  “That’s crazy, Sarah, and you know it! What could it have to do with it, except being bad luck and all?”

  “I don’t know, but I do know I got to find it and get rid of it before anybody else gets hold of it. I mean, what if somebody else was to die? How would you feel, know­ing what I just told you, knowing that we didn’t do every­thing in our power to get hold of it and get rid of it?”

  “I just cain’t believe it . . .” Becca maintained. “It’s too crazy.” Then she thought for a moment. “But if there was something wrong with that necklace, I mean something really wrong with it, then that means that Jo Howell prob­ably gave it to Larry Coppage on purpose, knowing what it would do. That’s what it means, don’t it?”

  Sarah didn’t answer.

  “That means that Jo Howell is responsible for all them people dying, don’t it?”

  Again Sarah said nothing. This was the part of it that she disliked thinking about most of all.

  “I believe that!” cried Becca. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She found out where to get them things and she was the first in line for it. She probably ordered two of ’em! That woman peeves me, that woman hasn’t done nothing but peeve me since the day I laid eyes on her broad be­hind! I wouldn’t be surprised if she set out to get back at Larry Coppage for not giving Dean a job. You said she was mad at him for it.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “She tried to get back at him with a amulet.”

  Becca paused, breathing heavily, and looked at her friend. They had just pulled into the driveway, and Becca turned off the ignition. “Isn’t that what you think, Sarah? Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Becca, I don’t know what to think. I didn’t want to think about that. I’d hate to think that Jo Howell was capable of such a thing. Just right now I’m pretending that she didn’t know anything about it, about what it would do, and it was all just a accident.”

  “Jo Howell don’t have accidents. She’s mean on pur­pose, she’s mean ’cause she wants to be mean, and no other reason in the world. She wasn’t born that way, I bet. She practiced. Went out in the field by herself for just hours on end when she was a little girl, practicing being mean. She wanted Larry Coppage burnt up to a crisp. She didn’t like Rachel neither, and she threw in them five kids for good measure. You know she did, Sarah!”

  “No!” cried Sarah, “I don’t know it! She couldn’t want to kill all these people! There’s eleven of ’em, Becca, eleven people dead in Pine Cone. And you think I could go back in that house right now if I thought it was Jo Howell that did it? I cain’t think things like that!”

  Sarah jumped out of the car, and ran toward her back door.

  Becca leaned out of the passenger window, and exclaimed softly, “It’s crazy, Sarah, just too crazy, and I don’t believe a word of it. Not any of it . . .”

  Chapter 38

  Later that night, after Sara Howell had washed up the supper dishes and turned off the lights in the kitchen, she peered through the door into the living room. The only light there was from the television set, and it flickered ghastly illumination on the bandages around her hus­band’s neck and head. Dean lay on the couch with his head thrown back, sinking down between the tattered sofa arm and the tattered cushion, his feet lying heavily in his mother’s lap. Jo Howell, who sat at the other end of the couch, was slowly massaging her son’s ankles.

  Sarah had refrained from mentioning to her mother-in-law her visit with Mary Shirley and Gussie. She was not yet sure that it was best to let Jo know what she was up to. Jo Howell was a secretive woman and Sarah felt that until she got some straight answers about the amulet, it was probably best to say as little as possible about her own suspicions. It would not do to put Jo Howell on her guard.

  Sarah sat in a chair apart from her husband and Jo and tried to interest herself in the television program, but could not for thinking of the amulet. She cast sideways glances at her mother-in-law and began to think she had gone absolutely insane to imagine that such a great fat woman, who wouldn’t move out of her chair if the vice-president of the United States were choking on a fishbone at the other end of the room, would be able to engineer the horror that Sarah was tempted to credit her with. She was fat and she was mean and it was very unpleasant to spend an evening with her, but was she any more than that, an obese country woman who hadn’t taken to farm­ing, who hadn’t taken to marriage, who had never even really taken to mothering until her son came home from the army a scarred vegetable?

  “What you staring at?” Jo demanded, at the onset of a long commercial break.

  “Nothing,” replied Sarah quickly. She was used to Jo’s quick interrogatories and was rarely caught up by them anymore. “I was just looking at Dean, trying to see if he was reacting to anything, trying to see if he had improved, or anything.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Jo. “I think he’s a lot better today. A lot better.”

  “How can you tell?” said Sarah.

  “You can tell, that’s all. He’s taking more interest in things, you know what I mean?”

  “No,” said Sarah, “I don’t know what you mean at all.”

  “Well,” said Jo, “I mean that like this afternoon, I was telling him everything about the Simses getting killed up on Burnt Corn Creek. You know, I used to live up that way. I know right where that car went in the creek. I used to have to go pick blackberries near there every summer. I hate picking blackberries. Cut your fingers to pieces on them thorns.”

  “It was real bad, what happened up there. I don’t know why she did it,” said Sarah, but there was an edge in her voice.

  “Well, she was a mean woman, and that’s about all there was to it. I used to live up that way, and that’s where Dean’s great-aunt got drowned, right down near there.”

  “How do you know that’s where it happened?” asked Sarah.

  “That’s the only bridge on Burnt Corn up that way. Can’t be nowhere else. Real pretty spot, too. I was the one that found the body. There wasn’t much traffic on that road, way back then. People didn’t go to Montgomery like they do today, they didn’t just pick up and go off to buy a quart of milk in Montgomery like they do now. So I found Dean’s great-aunt down there in Burnt Corn Creek, right in the same place where Dorothy Sims beat her husband over the head with a pine branch, and I had to drag the body out. You know, Sarah, how hard it is for a girl—and I wasn’t much more than fifteen then—how hard it is to drag somebody out of a creek when they got their lungs full of water? But there wasn’t nobody else to do it and if I hadn’t done it right then and there, then she would’ve been washed down to the Gulf, and there wouldn’t have been nothing left to stick in the grave. And you know what?” Jo smiled maliciously.

  “What?” said Sarah.

  “I bet it was harder to pull ol’ Malcolm Sims out than it was for me to drag Dean’s great-aunt out of that water. Ol’ Malcolm Sims was a big man. And Dean’s great-aunt was a little bitty thing.”

  Sarah didn’t reply to this observation. Jo didn’t often talk at such length, and almost never spoke of her past, so Sarah was inclined to let her go on without interruption in the hope that she would give something away. But though Jo seemed to speak with narrative abandon, there was very little that Sarah could deduce from what was said.

  Jo cackled then, “Th
ey ought to put up a sign down by that bridge, telling people how dangerous it is, that peo­ple get drowned and beat over the head there, and that they ought to watch out. Somebody ought to put three little white crosses by the side of the road, just ’fore you come to the bridge, to tell about the three people that died right there. Dorothy Sims and Malcolm Sims and Dean’s great-aunt.”

  “What was her name?” asked Sarah.

  “Bama,” said Jo. “Her name was Bama. That was short for Alabama. She was named after the state.”

  “That’s real peculiar,” said Sarah. “I thought Alabama was a man’s name.”

  “It is,” said Jo argumentatively, “but her name was Alabama, and she got herself drowned in Burnt Corn Creek, and I found her ’fore she had time to get washed away. Don’t nobody know why she was down there. Didn’t like her much, but she taught me a lot of things.”

  “What sort of things?” questioned Sarah.

  “Shhhhh!” cried Jo, “the show’s back on now, and Dean don’t want to miss a word of it.”

  Sarah sighed heavily. She had the distinct feeling that Jo was toying with her, that the old woman knew that Sarah was trying to find something out. Jo was deliberately feeding her information that sounded good but was actu­ally worthless. Sarah knew that it would do no good to talk to Jo longer that evening so she rose, saying, “I’m going to speak to Becca for a few minutes.” Jo replied nothing at all, but only motioned for Sarah to move out of her line of vision.

  Sarah let the kitchen door swing noiselessly shut behind her and then stepped quietly out the back door, into the moonlit yard. She knocked on Becca’s back door and Margaret appeared presently, cradling and stroking a small white cat in her arms.

  “Mama’s just about to put her hair up. Come on in, Sarah,” said the young girl.

  “No,” said Sarah, “ask your mother if she won’t bring her pins out here, and sit with me a while in the back­yard.”

  Margaret nodded and disappeared into the house. In a few moments, Becca Blair appeared with a scarf around her wet hair and a small tin box filled with bobby pins.

  “Ohhhh,” she cried, “what a good idea you got, Sarah! Let’s go right out in that yard and you talk to me while I put up my hair by the light of the moon. I got a little mir­ror with a hook that goes right on my neck and I can see everything I’m doing. I just love to do these little things outside. You just got to promise me one thing, and that’s that you won’t mention word one about that thing, that necklace. ’Cause you got me upset this afternoon and I don’t want to hear a word about it, you hear me?”

  Sarah nodded, and smiled. “No, I promise, I won’t say a word.”

  And so the two women settled themselves into the iron chairs in Becca’s backyard. Sarah arranged hers so that she could watch her own back door and see if the light went on in her kitchen, sign that Jo was looking for her. Becca set the mirror around her neck and the box of bobby pins in her lap.

  “You gone have to talk to me, Sarah,” she said, laugh­ing, “ ’cause you know I can’t put my hair up ’less I got half a dozen of these things in my mouth! You know how it is, just a habit that don’t make no sense . . .”

  The moon was bright, and the shrubbery in the yard so thick that it blocked from view the harsh mercury lamps and the sharp illumination from kitchen and living room windows throughout the neighborhood. A cat in heat screamed in the next block and frogs in a drainage ditch croaked loudly from a nearer distance.

  “I don’t know, Becca,” Sarah began sadly, “I don’t know what to do about—”

  “ ’Bout what, Sarah?” said Becca peremptorily, and stuck four pins in her mouth. She widened her eyes, to show that she would not be able to speak again for some minutes to come.

  “To do—don’t know what to do in general. Dean’s com­ing home has upset me, coming home like he did. There’s this thing in there on the couch that I’m supposed to take care of, but it don’t seem like it’s Dean inside there. I think of Dean, and it’s not that thing in there on the couch that I’m thinking of. You know what I mean?”

  Becca nodded her head somberly, her fingers still twirl­ing spirals in her wet hair.

  “I don’t know why I’m here. Jo and Dean, they belong together, they seem to get along together. But Dean, he don’t move, he don’t say a word, if the spoon didn’t come out clean, I wouldn’t even know he was alive inside there. And I’m his wife, Becca! They get along fine, and they need me to clean up after ’em, and that’s all. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life doing that? Going to the plant every day, sitting at the ’ssembly line, getting a little money and a lot of hemorrhoids? And then coming home in the afternoon to cook supper and clean the house and run errands for ’em? Spending all the money I get on prescription drugs?”

  Becca whistled sympathetically through the bobby pins in her mouth.

  “I’m stuck in this, and I don’t like it a bit. I’m stuck in it, and I don’t know what to do to get out of it. It don’t seem like there’s anything that I can do to get out of it. I don’t know where to start. There’s not time to start. There’s not time to do anything but the things I do do, go to work, clean house, cook, go to the drugstore for Dean’s medicine. You know, I tell myself things will be better when Dean gets better, when he gets out of the band­ages, when he can get a job or disability insurance or something. But I feel it in my heart that he’s not never going to get any better, that he’s gone spend the rest of his life wrapped up in white, lying in the hammock, lying in bed, lying on the sofa, and doing nothing but listening to Jo Howell talk to him.”

  Sarah paused a moment, and then concluded, softly, with despair, “Becca, I tell you something else. I don’t like this, I don’t like this a bit in the world.”

  Chapter 39

  Jack and Merle Weaver had been considerably upset by the accident that occurred on the Montgomery road, and slept restlessly that Sunday night, both dreaming of the woman that they had knocked into the bridge piling, dreaming of the face of the man caught in the roots of the cypress. Over and again in their sleep they heard the frightened cries of the small child in the half-submerged car, screaming out for fear of the snakes.

  On Monday the couple drove back into Pine Cone and gave their deposition to the sheriff and his deputy. Again, they were assured that they would not be held culpable for the accident. Though technically Jack Weaver could be charged with manslaughter, the accident was clearly not his fault, and certainly any guilt on his part was more than balanced by the crime that was committed by his unintentioned victim. No jury in the Wiregrass region of Alabama would convict him and therefore, in the sheriff’s practical eyes, there was no point in bringing the incident to trial.

  The Weavers then visited the Baptist preacher in town, having heard that the couple were of that denomination; and again they were assured of their moral innocence in the matter; and that the only real problem was what was to become of the little girl, who now was wholly alone in the world. The Weavers shook their heads, and drove away. Late in the afternoon, they purchased a dozen bags of feed grain from the Farmers’ Exchange in Pine Cone, with the vague idea that by doing business in the town where the people had been driving from, they would be making some sort of reparation, even if it was only after the most indirect and purely financial fashion.

  Monday night as well proved sleepless for the unfortu­nate couple, and they rose, as usual, at dawn, however ill-prepared for a thoroughgoing day of strenuous farm activity.

  Directly after Merle Weaver had prepared breakfast for her husband and herself, she sat down at the table across from him, with a cup of coffee held just below her lips, and said: “You know Jack, I thought all night long.”

  “About that woman,” said her husband.

  Merle nodded. “But about the little girl too. It’s our fault really that she’s alone in the world, that poor little girl, with nobody left—all of ’em dead that would have taken care of her, and it’s our fault. It was a accident, but it??
?s our fault.”

  “My fault,” said Jack. “I ran the woman down.”

  “Not your fault,” said Merle. “Our fault. Though I don’t know if it would have done any good not to run the woman down, ’cause she would have been sent up the river anyway, for murdering her husband, and it’s prob­ably just as well then that the little girl didn’t have to tes­tify in the trial. They say testifying in trials is real hard on little girls.”

  Jack nodded. His wife had put a better light on it than any that he had been able to strike, but he still judged against himself. “I still wish I hadn’t done it though.”

  Merle nodded. “I wish we hadn’t either. And that’s what I was thinking about. I was thinking that maybe we ought to see what we can do about the little girl. I mean we don’t have any money to give her, and for all we know, there may be insurance, but I wouldn’t count on it, but I was thinking that maybe we could bring her out here to live.”

  “You mean live with us?” said Jack.

  Merle nodded. “We could adopt her or something.”

  “Would they let us do it? I mean, we run down her only surviving relative in the middle of the road, and are they gone let us adopt the little girl then?”

  “She was a sweet little girl.”

  “Oh, she sure was,” agreed Jack. “I’d sure like to do something for her, like you said. Maybe we could adopt her. I mean, it’s all right with me if we do. I’d like to have a little girl, and seeing she needs somebody real desperate to take care of her, it might as well be us.”

  Merle nodded.

  “If they let us,” said Jack, “and if she wants to. She may not want to live out on a farm, but you’re right, and I think we ought to offer, because I think it’s the least we can do, offer to adopt her.”