Harvestman Lodge (3 page)

“Why so secret?”

Millard shrugged. “That was just their way, Roger and Sadie. Didn’t ask about nobody else’s business and wouldn’t share none of their own. Besides, Sadie had some kin who would have been mighty hard on her for having give birth to a baby without being married. Easier just to keep the old lip zipped.”

“Where are Roger and Sadie now?”

“Dead and gone, sad to say. Both of them kilt ’bout a year after Junie was born when they was out honky-tonking and driving the back roads one night. Hit a big oak tree off the north side of Mountcastle Road and went right through the windshield. Me and Maude, my wife, was babysitting baby Junie the night it happened. Junie’s not left this property since. Maude and me took over raising her, in secret. Maudie and me kept quiet just like Roger and Sadie had done, figuring they’d have wanted it that way, and we kept Junie out of sight as she growed. We made a special room for her down in the cellar … good, snug, clean place, and she was comfortable. I even put in a bathroom down there just for her. We taught her to not speak unless we spoke to her first, and to only say what we told her to. Never to holler out or make noise unless the house was afire or something.

“For a time when she was still a little girl I had a high wood fence around the back yard so she could go back there and get fresh air without nobody seeing her. That fence is gone now: tree fell on it in a storm and busted most of it all to splinters. The point of all this is that we tried to do right by Junie in how we raised her, me and Maudie. Why, when she was small, I would sit with Junie on my lap and read her stories out of a book, like she was my own child, and I’ve never been one for reading. We taught her to read some when she was old enough … well, that was mostly Maudie who done that. I ain’t much of a teacher. But I did read to her … sang to her, too … I got a better voice for singing than you’d think from hearing me talk. I put a TV down in her room to keep her occupied. We always have tried to be good to Junie, long as she behaves herself. We just settled natural-like into the habit of keeping her secret, and then years went by and she commenced to, well, blossoming toward her womanhood, like they say. You know what I mean. You can look at her – hell, you
been
looking at her – and see that she blossomed early, and just right. She’s …
ripe
. Ripe as a young gal can be. Wouldn’t you say?”

Donnie nodded, grinning. “Like a summer peach. I won’t lie to you, Millard: I drove by earlier with my family in the car, looked over and seen Junie up here like this, that light from the door there behind her … Lord have mercy! It was a sight to race a man’s heart.”

“Son, I’ve seen men near drive off into the ditch just from catching sight of her up here. A right lot of them end up pulling in the driveway and coming up to ask about her just like you’ve done just now. She’s her own advertisement, y’see, and brings in a lot of cash money to this here old man. Y’know, for my ‘business manager’ duties.”

“I come close to driving into the ditch myself.”

Millard drew in a long, wheezing breath. “Know what I like about you, Mr. Donnie? You seem a man who don’t stand in judgment, and that’s the kind of man who can be trusted. So I’m going to tell you something I don’t share with just everybody. The truth is, it ain’t just men passing by who stop by and have … well,
special
times with Junie. I ain’t immune to such kind of temptation no more than any other man.” He winked and chuckled. The girl, Donnie noticed, looked away from the old man as he said this, and seemed to tense very slightly.

Donnie was a man of few scruples, but Millard’s words prompted an atypical burst of moral shock. “Are you telling me you done that, and her being your own granddaughter?”

Millard firmly shook his round head and looked annoyed. “You ain’t listening as good as I thought, friend. Remember what I told you: my boy Roger wasn’t her father. Her mama was already carrying her even before she and Roger met each other. Not a drop of my blood runs in Junie’s veins, not one drop. Just because I raised her like my own blood kin don’t mean she is.”

“All I can say is, Maudie must be a mighty open-minded wife.”

“Maudie’s dead, rest her soul. Two-and-a-half year now. And while she was living I never laid a hand on Junie. Wouldn’t have seemed fitting, with her being young as she was, and Maudie still being around besides.”

“Sorry to hear Maudie’s passed on.”

“I miss her, but I ain’t left alone. My youngest boy, Roy, he’s here with me. He’s the one you met …”

“…. In the garage. Yeah.”

“And Junie’s here, of course. I ain’t lonely.”

Donnie got over his sudden scruples and grinned. “I got a question … if Junie here’s a secret, if she don’t exist, as you put it, how is it you can have her right out on your porch where folks can see her? Don’t sheriff deputies and such drive up this road sometimes?”

“Oh, most of the lawmen around here know about Junie. And every one of them ….” Millard pursed his lips and made a side-to-side zipping motion across them with thumb and forefinger.

“What keeps them quiet?”

“My boy Roy, he’s always liked pitcher-taking and has him a camera and a darkroom in the basement. When certain men paid call on Junie when we first got started with all this, we had made us a little closet Roger could hide in and snap some right detailed pitchers of the, uh, festivities. Insurance policy, sort of. We got pitchers of Junie being mighty friendly with half the law officers in Kincheloe County, and quite a few of the Tylerville town cops. She was only fourteen year old in some of them. The pitchers Roy took ain’t the kind a good Sunday-go-to-meeting deputy sheriff wants his sweet Christian wife to find in the mailbox come Monday morning. And it ain’t just deputies and such; we’ve even got pictures of some mighty prominent citizens, uh … fraternizing with Junie here. Police, firemen, lawyers, even some social worker fellow. Some fine elders and deacons and a preacher or two. In a county like this it’s easier than you’d think to keep secrets … if you got the right folks gripped where it counts.” He put his hand out, palm up, clenched his fist, and made a twisting, pulling motion. Donnie winced and grinned at the same time, then suddenly grew serious.

“Hey, Millard, Roy wouldn’t take no pictures of me with Junie this evening, would he?”

“You carry a badge? Work with the law? Do private detective work?”

“Not me. I don’t even live around here. I work in a mechanic shop in Grainger County. I’m only in Kincheloe County to visit with my wife’s relatives.” He made a face of distaste and Millard chuckled.

“No pitchers, then. You got old Millard’s word on it. No pitchers. And Roy’s still over there in the garage, anyway.”

Donnie looked closer at Junie’s blank face. “How old is she?”

“Old enough for what you’re wanting.”

“But maybe not according to the law?”

“Let’s just say that the law’s got nothing to do with what happens in this house, or with you and Junie.”

“Nobody’s going to know. Right? You swear?”

“You worry way too much, son. Not a soul beyond us here right now will ever know. That’s the Millard guarantee.”

Donnie was smart enough to see that Millard’s notion of Junie as a secure local secret was blatantly unfounded. Given how she was displayed on this porch in view of a public road, plenty of people had to have seen her, including many whom Millard was in no position to blackmail into silence. This was as precarious a house of cards as Donnie had ever run across, one bound to collapse at any moment. Donnie, though, found himself willing to play the odds that the collapse would not happen tonight. “Good enough for me,” he said, and shook Millard’s hand.

“Let’s go inside, son. You can unhitch Junie from that post, but you hold on tight. She tried once to pull loose and run once when there was a man she didn’t like the smell of. Couldn’t much blame her … that old boy did stink like an SOB. But she got through it. She’s a tough one and a trouper, this girl. Right, Junie?”

Junie gave no reaction, verbally or bodily. She was a blank and empty vessel, her eyes devoid of light.

Donnie gently patted the side of Junie’s face and smiled into her expressionless visage. “Junie ain’t going to run from old Donnie. Nothing wrong with the way I smell. I take showers and use shaving lotion, good stuff. Buy it at the drug store. Me and Junie are going to be real fine friends. Ain’t that right, sweet thing?” He made a small kissing noise at Junie.

She stared back at Donnie with an expression fit for a corpse. Her dirty-blonde hair was long unwashed and hung like limp, straw-colored mop-strings to her shoulders. Her frock was worn and filthy, and she smelled of dried perspiration. Junie was either very unintelligent or very drugged, or both. She had not spoken a word.

Millard grunted and freed himself from the confines of his chair’s pinching arm rests. He stood, so wobbly Donnie reached out to steady him.

“You ready, son? We got a back bedroom where Junie does her receiving of guests, as we call it around here.”

Donnie grinned. “I’m ready as I can be. Yes sir.”

DONNIE WAS STILL FINISHING his work on the thermostat replacement when Emmie reached the Millard property. Staying outside the reach of the garage light, she knelt in the shadows near the mailbox at the end of the driveway and watched her father work, hoping that maybe a legitimate car repair was all he was up to after all. She could see the girl on the porch, just as she’d been when they’d passed earlier. A greasy-looking fat man was seated nearby the girl.

Donnie’s work hadn’t taken long. When he was done, he had lighted a cigarette and paced about a little in the garage while he smoked, talking briefly to the two younger men working under the hood of an old pickup truck. Emmie was watching when her father made his way toward the house and started talking to the big man in the chair, while casting blatant stares at the restrained girl. Emmie was too far away to catch the actual conversation, but was sure it was the girl they were talking about.

Maybe he’ll just leave, Emmie thought. Maybe he’ll just get in the car and go back to Mama. The thought was very nearly a prayer. Her heart sank when her father, after an extended conversation, followed the fat man into the house, leading the girl dog-like on her leash. The inner door closed behind the shabby screen porch door and Emmie could see no more.

Steeling her courage, the little girl sneaked up along the driveway toward the garage, keeping out of the light, and circled the back of the garage to the darkest part of the yard. She darted to the side of the house, in the shadowed twenty-foot gap between the house and the garage.

She crept to a side window. It was just low enough for her to stand on her tiptoes and look in, but the shade was fully closed and no light was on in the room beyond. No hope of seeing inside, and the dark window suggested the room was not in use anyway.

There was a second window, though, farther back, yellow with muted light. Probably a rear bedroom. She went to it and found the shade was drawn down but ragged. Three holes penetrated the shade, too high up for her eye to reach, even when she stood on tiptoe.

She spotted a metal bucket beside a backyard shed. This she fetched back to the window, and placed upside-down on the ground for a footstool. Edging up on her tiptoes atop the overturned bucket, she could get her eye up to the level of the lowest hole in the shade. She pressed her eye against the window and looked in.

She stayed there nearly a minute, not daring even to blink and barely letting herself breathe, and watched what was happening in the room. Her heart sank and she felt ill. She stepped off the bucket and sank to the ground, where she sat a few moments, heartsick, tears streaming and shoulders heaving.

“No, Daddy … no,” Emmie said in the quietest of whispers. “Please … no.”

She got up, considering but rejecting a second look. She’d seen more than she wanted already. Emmie darted back around the rear of the garage and headed back toward the Winona Court on the run, so distressed that she had to pause to vomit onto the ground along the way. After that she forced herself to calm down, dried her tear-moistened face, and drew in long breaths until her respiration settled and her heart was beating at something close to a normal pace. She walked rather than ran for the rest of the distance. That was all that saved her from running, cartoon-syle, into the open space above a brush-filled sinkhole at least twelve feet wide and invisible in the darkness. It opened like some ragged wound in the land in the midst of an empty, overgrown lot. She stopped just in time, skirted around its edge carefully, then fell in anyway when the ground at the edge of the sinkhole gave way under her weight.

She caught herself on roots coming out of the steeply sloped wall of the hole, and climbed out wondering how deep the depression was. She knew little about sinkholes, and wondered if some of them were like vertical cave entrances. What if she’d fallen into a crevice at the bottom of the sinkhole and vanished forever into some vast cavern?

She climbed out with the greatest of care and continued on toward the Winona.

Dale was smoking his fourth sneaked cigarette of the night outside the motel, and she caught him. They struck a bargain for her to keep quiet about the smoking if he’d do the same regarding her having left the motel. Back inside the room, where their mother remained unconscious on her bed, they fumbled with the TV some more, finally got a flickering, snowy picture, and in boredom watched an ancient western in black-and-white while listening for the crunch of the Mercury’s tires on the gravel parking lot.