The Amulet

  Every morning Sarah would leave the house distrustful of Jo and Dean. One day after another, she would find an excuse to run back inside, in hope and dread that she would catch Dean and Jo in some unexpected commerce. But no matter how quietly Sarah would reenter whatever room she had left them in—and sometimes she simply stood outside the closed doorway and listened intently—there was no sound, and Dean was in the same position, atom for atom, in which Sarah had left him.

  Jo always laughed at Sarah for these contrived en­trances, as if she knew what was behind them, as if she were gloating: Dean and I’ll never be caught at it, never be caught!

  These little traps, that invariably failed and that Sarah still couldn’t refrain from executing each morning, left her unhappy and frustrated. If she could only see some little change in Dean, something that indicated that he wasn’t as bad off as he seemed, she wouldn’t even mind that he was trying to trick her.

  The drive away from the house was welcome, even though it meant that there were eight long hours ahead of her at the assembly line. Sarah smiled and joked with Becca, and did not speak at all of her husband and mother-in-law except to reply with a brief “all right” to Becca’s unvarying interrogatory: “How you this morning? How’s Dean and his mama?”

  Becca Blair and Sarah Howell arrived at work just a few minutes earlier than usual. The two friends arranged themselves leisurely in their little cubicles, procured cups of coffee, and then talked idly to one another over their partition, nodding greetings to the other women who passed by them every minute or so. The belt was still, and the Pine Cone rifles lay in every stage of assembly, like a textbook diagram of the fashion in which such a piece of goods is constructed.

  “You know,” said Becca, “I think that this is the sweet­est five minutes of the day.”

  Sarah nodded her agreement to this proposition.

  “But then it goes on until five,” sighed Becca.

  “We get dinnertime,” said Sarah.

  “Dinnertime’s not hardly enough time to get home and back though,” said Becca. “You practically got to stay around here.” Becca paused in these reflections on the workday, and said suddenly, as if she had just remem­bered something. “You know the Weavers, Sarah?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “You know who I mean though,” said Becca. “They was the ones that run down that woman in the highway, and then brung poor little Mary Shirley back into town. Two corpses in the back of the truck, and a orphan in the front. And driving that way at night! Can’t be no fun driving corpses around the back roads at night! But that was the Weavers—so you do know who I mean . . .”

  Sarah was suddenly very interested in Becca’s story. “What about them?” she demanded. “They aren’t dead, are they?”

  “She is,” replied Becca, wonderingly. “How’d you know, Sarah?”

  Sarah did not reply; she avoided Becca’s glance. Her lips were set in anger and alarm, and involuntarily she thought of Jo and Dean, as she had left them at the house that morning: Jo spread across one of the living room chairs watching the Today Show, and describing to Dean what everyone was wearing, and her husband lying on a quilt spread lengthwise on the floor at the foot of the couch. He looked like a mummy that had been tipped out of its sarcophagus onto the floor of the tomb.

  But much worse than this involuntary vision, which she had hoped to avoid through the course of the day, was the knowledge that her nightmares had not gone away with the morning light. Becca had very often told her never to tell a dream before breakfast, because it was sure to come true; Sarah always took that precaution, just to be on the safe side, but it hadn’t done her a bit of good.

  “How’d she die?” asked Sarah after a moment.

  With a little hesitance, Becca said, “Rooted to death by her own pigs.” Sarah grimaced; that was worse than she could have guessed. Becca continued, “While her hus­band was watching, and they say he’s just not the same. She fell in the trough, and they just tore her throat out, right by the roots!” Sarah’s glance still wandered over the large room, focusing idly on this woman and that, but her mind raced. Becca waited for her friend to say something, but when she did not, Becca went on. “Terrible way to go, and I bet you wouldn’t be the same now, if you had seen it, like Jack Weaver did.”

  “Becca?” said Sarah.

  “What?” Becca still wanted to know how her friend had found out that Merle Weaver was dead.

  “Becca,” said Sarah cautiously, “what you think’s caus­ing all these people dying?”

  “What do you mean?” Becca asked.

  A whistle sounded, and the two women broke off their conversation; in a moment, they knew, it would be im­possible to continue it.

  “Get ready, Sarah,” said Becca, “here we go.”

  Sarah was thinking hard. “Becca,” she said, “did you know these people with the pigs?”

  “Daddy knew ’em,” replied Becca.

  “Let’s you and me go out there,” said Sarah.

  Becca was surprised. “What for?” she asked.

  “I want to see the place,” said Sarah softly. The as­sembly line began to vibrate, and Sarah picked up her screwdriver. Becca stared a moment longer at her friend, over the partition. She started to say something else, but the noise of the machinery grinding up to begin the day covered her speech and her thoughts on the subject.

  Chapter 42

  At five o’clock, when they left the factory building and got into the purple Pontiac, Sarah again asked Becca Blair to drive her out to the Weaver farm.

  “You crazy,” said Becca shortly. “You crazy to want to go out to that place.”

  “Maybe,” said Sarah, quietly. “But will you take me out there?”

  “No,” said Becca adamantly. “I’m not gone do it. I know what you’re thinking about, and I think it’s crazy for you to think that way, and I’m not gone be no part of it.”

  “Well,” said Sarah seriously, “would you let Margaret take me out there?”

  “I wouldn’t let Margaret have this car to do a damn-fool thing like that for you, Sarah Howell!” But Becca wasn’t refusing her friend so much as pleading with her to give up these nonsensical ideas. Becca was a superstitious woman, but the things that Sarah was hinting at were ideas too unpleasant and too dangerous to entertain.

  “Well, that means I got to get on the phone and see if I can find somebody who will take me out there.”

  “Why you want to go?” Becca demanded.

  Sarah replied slowly and quietly, “Because when she died, that poor Weaver woman must have been wearing the amulet. Somehow she got hold of it from Dorothy Sims when they ran her down in the road. Now this poor woman’s dead, and she died horrible, and I intend on getting the thing back. I intend on getting rid of it.”

  Becca threw up her hands. “You know I’m gone take you! You know I’m gone do it for you. And you know I think you’re out of your mind! You decided to go out there, and nothing’s gone stop you, and I’m not gone let anybody else find out how crazy you are. You think I’d want it all over Pine Cone that my best friend was ready to be carted off to Tuscaloosa?” Becca shook her head in despair; she had given in entirely.

  Sarah took Becca’s hand and squeezed it; Becca pulled sharply out of the parking lot. “We going by the house first so you can tell Dean and his mama where we’re go­ing?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I don’t want ’em to know. We’ll be back ’fore long. I don’t want ’em to know where we went. I’ll tell ’em something later—I don’t know what.”

  Becca grinned, for she liked the idea of deceiving Josephine Howell. “Well,” she said, much more brightly, “it’s only ’cause the clover’s in bloom, and that it’s the prettiest road in the world this time of year, that I’m ’llowing you to drag me out to look at the place where that poor woman got her throat tore out by the roots . . .”

  But Sarah was very serious, and would not allow her friend to sidestep the issue. She turned in h
er seat, and placed her legs beneath her. Becca kept her eyes on the road, and listened without comment, and very sadly, to all that Sarah had to say.

  “Now, you listen to me, Becca. You don’t think I like this, do you? You don’t think I want to go out there, and throw myself on poor Mr. Weaver, who I don’t know from Adam’s first cousin, when his wife is dead just this morning. It’s intruding. But honey, I thought about this all the afternoon long, all day since you told me what hap­pened. That necklace just gets around, it gets around, and whoever gets hold of it dies. Ever’body in Pine Cone that got hold of that necklace this past week is dead. What if Mr. Weaver has it? What if he’s got hold of it? Is he gone run out and kill somebody? Is he gone get killed himself? And when he’s dead, who finds it, who picks it up? And they gone die too? I can’t just sit back. It was Jo Howell that started all this. She won’t stop it, and I’ll just have to. It’s not my fault, but I got to do what I can.”

  “You really believe this, hon?” asked Becca desper­ately.

  “No!” cried Sarah, to her friend’s surprise. “I don’t be­lieve it! You’re the one who believes in all them things, not me. I don’t believe in ’em. But I know what I know. I never saw that thing till Jo Howell gave it to Larry Coppage for no good reason in the world, and I know all them Coppages burned to their frying ashes not two hours later. Gussie told me that Thelma Shirley had it, and Thelma Shirley went and stuck a ice pick in her hus­band’s ear. And Thelma herself is dead. I saw it on Dorothy Sims, and Dorothy Sims is dead. And so’s her husband. Now we hear that the woman who run her down in the highway is dead too, and what else can I believe? I don’t believe it’s possible for a piece of jewelry to do that, ’cause how could it? But I tell you something, if I got hold of that thing, I wouldn’t think twice about smashing it with a tire iron. I wouldn’t think twice. Don’t you see, Becca? I don’t believe it, but I just got to be sure! All I could think about today was that I was just chicken to call up Dorothy Sims after the funeral. Now she’s dead, and her husband’s dead, and this poor woman out in the middle of the country’s got trampled to death by her own pigs!”

  Sarah and Becca were silent for a few moments, while Sarah’s labored breath gradually subsided.

  “Lots of people dead, Sarah,” said Becca cautiously.

  Sarah nodded grimly.

  “And you think if they get hold of that necklace, then they die, whoever gets hold of it dies?” Becca demanded.

  Sarah nodded again.

  Becca silently pointed out the Weaver farm, coming up on the right. They turned down a side dirt road, and headed away from the farmhouse, toward the barn. Becca pulled the car up next to a pickup truck parked in a space of packed red clay, and turned off the ignition. Then Becca placed her hand atop Sarah’s on the seat, turned to her friend, and whispered huskily, “What you think it’s made out of?”

  Chapter 43

  That afternoon, there was considerable activity in that corner of the barnyard where Merle Weaver had died so wretchedly the morning before. Morris Emmons’ large yellow truck was backed up to the pigpen, and a ramp let down into the mire. Two teenaged boys, one lean and pimply, the other fat and redheaded, were nervously loading all the hogs up onto the truck. Normally, these two boys would have gone right down among the animals, pushed and urged and driven them up the ramp, but to­day they coaxed and prodded with long poles from the good side of the fence. They very much feared that one of the sows would go on the rampage, and neither of the boys wanted to end up like poor Miz Weaver. The piglets rushed up onto the truck after their mothers, but the two boys reached in, scooped them up with their hands, and tossed them squealing back into the mud.

  Morris Emmons ran the country store on the road be­tween the Weaver farm and Pine Cone, where the inven­tory was so varied it put the Sears catalogue to shame. A slaughterhouse was attached to the place in back and it was in his capacity as butcher that Morris Emmons had been called out to the Weaver farm. All these animals had been sold to him the afternoon before, and he had got them cheaply with the promise that he would slaugh­ter them—every one, and as soon as possible. Emmons stood to one side, watching his two nephews at their work. Emmons was corpulent, red-faced, and had a belly that was large from biscuits and beer. He scratched his throat thoughtfully.

  Two recalcitrant hogs were all that remained in the pen when Becca Blair and Sarah Howell pulled up into the packed red dirt area in front of the Weavers’ barn. The two women got out and looked about them. Timorously they approached Morris Emmons. Both women at first mistook him for Jack Weaver, and they were hesitant to approach him in his grief. Sarah was doubly nervous, for she was not sure just what questions she ought to ask in regard to the circumstances of Mrs. Weaver’s death. She liked being out here even less than Becca did, but it was necessary that she find out about the amulet. It was a mercy, she considered, that Jack Weaver himself wasn’t dead, and she hoped that he would be able to tell her if his wife had been wearing the necklace, or if she had not.

  Becca and Sarah came close to the man, who leaned against the fence that bordered the pigpen. He regarded the two women with a cool, disfavoring eye.

  “You’re not Mr. Weaver, are you?” asked Sarah. He had not at all appeared a man prostrate with grief over the death of his wife.

  “You a friend of his?” said Emmons, paying no atten­tion to the illogicality of the question: if Sarah were a friend of Weaver’s, then she should certainly know what the man looked like.

  “I used to know him when I was little,” said Becca.

  “You hear what happened?” said Morris.

  The two women nodded.

  “Come to pay your respects, or just curious?” he de­manded.

  “Both,” said Sarah hesitantly.

  “He’s not in much mood for talking,” said Emmons, “and they’s not much to see, either.”

  Sarah didn’t know what to do then. This man, who­ever he was, wasn’t being of any help at all. She wondered if she shouldn’t go over to the house and try to talk to Mr. Weaver. Perhaps she would even have to pretend that she had known his dead wife. But it was also possible that this man knew something that would be of use to her.

  “These the animals?” Sarah asked.

  Morris Emmons nodded, and broke a little grin. “Them boys is scared,” he said. He pointed to the teenagers, and laughed shortly. The two boys turned and stared at their uncle with no great goodwill. They were having difficulty in coaxing the last two pigs up onto the truck.

  “Scared that the pigs’ll turn on ’em.”

  “Pigs don’t usually turn, do they?” said Becca.

  “Well,” drawled Morris Emmons, and leaned back against the fence, “my granddaddy used to say he knew of five pigs what teamed up and used to kill Yankee sales­men and preachers when they come down the road on the way to Mobile. But other than that, I never heard of it. And truth to tell you, I don’t rightly know as I would take much stock in my granddaddy. He was a liar, even after he started teaching a Sunday school class. Used to make up Bible stories hisself. So, to answer your question—no. I don’t know of no other pigs what turned.”

  After a pause, Becca asked, “Mr. Weaver all right? You know?”

  “Well,” said Morris, with an unpleasant laugh, “how’d you feel?”

  Becca’s eyes widened, but she said nothing. She hoped, though, that this man wasn’t any close friend of Mr. Weaver’s, for it would be a chilly brand of comfort that he would administer.

  With as little emphasis as she could, Sarah said, after another little pause, “D’you find anything here?”

  Morris stared at Sarah incuriously. “Like what?” he said.

  “Anything,” she said vaguely. “Like a necklace. Miz Weaver was wearing a necklace when she was killed.”

  Becca made a little nervous jump. Morris Emmons saw this but lazily chose not to interpret it.

  “How’d you know that?” said Morris. “You see the body?”

  Sarah didn??
?t answer.

  “Come to think of it,” said Emmons, “she didn’t have no throat to put a necklace on, when she was pulled out of here.” He waited for Sarah to explain herself. Becca stared at her friend.

  “I just know that she had one on, that’s all,” said Sarah bravely, “and I want to know what became of it.”

  Emmons shrugged, accepting her flimsy explanation. “Nothing here but mud—mud mixed with a little blood. Jack Weaver said he didn’t never want to ever see these animals again. I’m taking ’em off his hands. They get slaughtered tonight. Jack wanted me to come take ’em away yesterday, but I had the boys working on the carbu­retor yesterday, and they didn’t get it fixed till this after­noon.”

  Sarah said to Emmons then, “My name’s Sarah Howell. Dean Howell’s my husband.” There was no real reason for her to expect that this man had ever heard of her, or Dean.

  “Heard ’bout the accident,” Emmons said—for he had listened to the talk in the county. “Real shame. And a Pine Cone rifle that done it, too, wasn’t it?”

  Sarah nodded briefly, and said, “If you find anything you call me, you hear? I work at the plant.”

  “Well,” said Morris Emmons, “if I find anything, Miz Howell, I reckon it’ll belong to Jack Weaver, won’t it?”

  “No,” she said, “that necklace, what I’m looking for, belongs to Dean’s mama. It’s hers, and I just want to know if it gets found.”

  It was a peculiar story, and one that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Morris Emmons. He looked the woman up and down, and still could not decide if she was telling the truth.