“Don’t kill him,” was all Dick Lee said on the way up.
“All I have is an ax handle,” Bullock said. “You’re the one with the pistol.”
The cottages of Bullock’s village were situated along a little main street with the larger community building at the end of it, set into a formal village square. At this hour, no lights were burning inside it, and only here and there did windows of the cottages glow. Several narrow lanes ran perpendicularly off the main street, the cottages built close together on narrow lots with dooryard gardens, the fall stubble in them now glazed with ice. Dick Lee directed his boss to the home of Travis Berkey. It was dark within. Bullock rapped stoutly on the door. After waiting a minute he rapped again, this time with the ax handle. Shortly, the door opened a crack and a frightened woman in a muslin nightdress peered through the slot.
“Let us in, Molly,” Dick Lee said. She opened the door and backed away. Dick Lee raised his lantern. The interior of the cottage was tidy but smelled of fermentation. “Sorry to come by so late,” he continued gently, while Molly Berkey’s gaze was fixed on Bullock, in the immensity of his fur coat. “Would you ask Travis to come down.”
“He’s . . . not here,” she said.
“Who’s that?” said a man’s voice from up the staircase.
Molly looked away from Bullock and wrapped her arms around herself. He noticed that she looked old, though she was half his age.
“Get down here, Travis,” Bullock bellowed. The three of them waited. The first floor of the cottage was effectively one room: a kitchen with a long table, some rustic chairs, and a wooden bench with a crude back. Much of one end wall was taken up by a fieldstone fireplace with an iron crane for hanging cook pots and trivets and other iron furnishings disposed around the hearth. Bullock was a little shocked to discover how primitive the arrangement was, like life in the Thirteen Colonies. His mind was still sojourning in the formerly modern world of the movie he had been watching. Most of his people at least had proper cast-iron woodstoves, which Bullock had taken pains to collect in the initial crash years of the economy. It was cold enough in the room so that their breath came in visible huffs of steam. Finally, they heard a commotion on the stairs and Travis Berkey appeared, slender and crooked like an old hand tool, in patched wool pants, shirtless and barefoot.
“Get in here,” Bullock said. There was more noise on the staircase. A small boy’s face appeared near the top of the stairs in the meager lantern light. Berkey came closer, moving sideways, as though expecting a blow.
“What’s up,” he said.
“Perses is dead.”
Berkey did not reply but his eyes slammed shut and he hung his head.
“Get into your warmest clothes and your best boots,” Bullock said.
“What about them?” Berkey muttered, cocking his head at his wife.
“They stay.”
“What’s he mean?” Molly said.
Berkey turned his head sharply and said, “I’m being run off.”
She rushed across the room, not to her husband but to Bullock, and threw herself at his boots. “Don’t make him go,” she said and repeated it several times until her voice turned to blubbering.
The boy on the stairwell, who was six, began keening.
“You can’t come between a man and his family,” Berkey said.
“Go finish getting dressed,” Bullock said, pointing upstairs with the ax handle.
Berkey glared, then turned, climbed the stairs, tenderly scooped up his son, and disappeared.
“What’ll I do?” Molly blubbered.
“You’ll stay here. Our people will care for you. You’ll work. You’ll have food and a place to live,” Bullock said. The child could be heard weeping above.
“What about him?” she said tremulously.
“He’ll be fine.”
“Maybe we should go too,” Molly said. Bullock detected the lack of conviction in her voice.
“You can’t,” Bullock said. “He might survive out there on his own this time of year, but with the two of you weighing him down you’ll all perish. I can’t allow that.”
“But he’s my husband,” she said.
“He’s an ill-tempered rogue. He beat my horse to death and I’m aware that he beats you too. You can find a better man. When the time comes, as magistrate, I’ll annul your marriage, if that’s what you want.”
Molly grasped at Bullock’s leather boot tops and her sobs turned racking in a manner that seemed theatrical. Bullock didn’t fail to notice that she did not dispute the idea of finding a better man. He also noticed that she did not so much as attempt to prepare a parcel of food for Travis to take on what was bound to be a difficult journey. Berkey soon came downstairs followed by his son, who then clamped his arms around Berkey’s leg as he keened. Dick Lee separated them with some difficulty and the boy then threw himself, shrieking, on his sobbing mother. Berkey stuffed his feet into a pair of ancient manufactured hiking boots, grabbed a wool coat and knitted toque from pegs on the wall, and pulled on two thick, crudely assembled shearling mittens.
“Do you want to say good-bye to them?” Bullock asked, meaning the wife and child.
“I’ll send for you,” Berkey muttered.
The child lifted his head but Molly did not.
“Do you aim to thrash me with that thing when we get outside?” Berkey said, pointing his scruffy chin at the ax handle.
“Not if you leave peaceably,” Bullock said.
“Let’s do it, then,” Berkey said, twin billows of steam issuing from his nostrils as he struggled to contain his emotion. He glanced back at his wailing son and then left the house followed by Bullock and Dick Lee.
T
HIRTY-SEVEN
Brother Jobe, snug in his personal quarters, the former office suite of the high school principal back in the day, was notified late at night that the prisoner had been weeping strenuously and carrying on for several hours in her cell. Her guard for that shift, Brother Levi, was distressed and didn’t know whether something ought to be done about it, so he sent for guidance. Brother Jobe asked his companion for the evening, Sister Susannah, to excuse him, wearily pulled on his clothing, and wended his way through the large building to the prisoner’s place of confinement. He could hear her plainly enough himself through the barred door.
“Let me in,” he said to Levi.
He brought a candle with him and set it on the table. Mandy lay heaped on her bed in something like what the yoga instructors of yore used to call the
child position,
her knees drawn up to her belly, face buried in the blankets. Her body shuddered with her sobs.
Brother Jobe took a seat and sat with her patiently, leafing through a Bible he had brought in with him. At first, Mandy seemed unaware of his presence. By and by her sobs subsided, she unfolded herself from her compact position on the bed, and slowly, with a feline economy of movement that impressed him, came to sit erect on the edge of it with her feet on the floor and her head down, as if waiting for some pronouncement, which was not long in coming from Brother Jobe.
“It says here,” he read, “
And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven
. The him in here,” he said, “that could be a her, of course. Could be you.”
Mandy lifted her head and looked up at him. Her eyes were directly level with his. She had stopped weeping and she wiped the residual moisture away from her eyes.
“I’ve done terrible things,” she said. “It’s all become clear.”
“I’m afraid that’s so. You know who I am, don’t you?”
“Yes. You’re the minister up from Virginia.”
“And you know where you are?”
“Somewhere in the old high school?”
“That’s right. In confinement, of course.”
“In confinement,” she repeated. The words fell off her lips as though they had weight and seemed to crash on the floor.
“I’ve been amongst your mind a few times recently.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say I have, uh, special abilities that would puzzle your average folks. It don’t matter. The thing is, you come back to yourself now. You been a sick girl. Your mind was affected. I know it. Now, apparently, you know it.”
Mandy’s shoulders humped as a spasm of despair ran through her and she choked on a fresh sob. She wiped her eyes again and came out of it.
“I’m in a nightmare,” she said.
“Well, you’ve woke up, at least, and that’s a start. I can tell you that the sickness itself, it’s gone out of you. Now the law don’t easily separate acts done in sickness from the person that done them. It also happens that I’m an officer of the court that is going to try you for your acts. I’m concerned that justice is done. And to do that we got to get down to some serious bidness. Lookit here at my pointing finger.”
Brother Jobe held his index finger up to his right eye. It was his key to unlocking the door to someone’s interior. She slipped into his thrall easily. Her jaw fell slightly and her own eyes went glassy.
“One thing I got to know,” he said. “Do you want to live?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I killed my husband and my son. How could I deserve to live?”
“You can let God be the judge of that question. The answer to death does not have to be more death. Tell me how you were in this sickness and who was in it with you, and what they did with you.”
Mandy complied, recounting her journey through the meningitis, and the demon-like entities who held her captive, and all the particulars of the fateful night when the baby Julian died and she slew her husband upon his discovery that the baby was dead.
It was well after midnight when Brother Jobe concluded the session.
“You going to come out of this after I count backwards from ten,” he said. “When you do, you gonna suspend judgment on yourself while the law works its way with this. It is important for you to know that grace means getting mercy that you may not deserve or think you deserve. God is abundant in grace and mercy. It is what God means, what He is all about. His greatest grace is salvation, and He loves us with a love everlasting. It says here in Hebrews:
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need
.”
“What do you want me to do?” Mandy said.
“You don’t have to do nothing for now but be open to God’s grace,” Brother Jobe said, then began counting backwards from ten.
T
HIRTY-EIGHT
Daniel Earle was up on his feet early in the morning, well before dawn, restless with returning energy. He kindled a fire in the cookstove, made himself a pot of mint tea, found a ration of leftover corn bread and the butter tub, warmed up the bread on top of the cast-iron stove, sat down, and enjoyed the leisure of a breakfast indoors, unharried by trouble and hardship. He was making a second pot when Britney appeared in the doorway, wearing a flannel robe that once had belonged to Daniel’s mother. The sight of her in it startled him.
“It’s only me,” she said.
They exchanged a fraught glance that seemed to suggest many possibilities of thought, emotion, action, and judgment.
“I hope you don’t mind that I rustled up some breakfast for myself,” he said.
“Mind? It’s your house.”
“It’s my father’s house. I’m in the way here.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, and swept her hair out of her eyes.
“I ate the last piece of corn bread too.”
“It’s okay. I came down to make more.” She moved around the table where he sat, getting the cornmeal out of a large tin, a steel pan from a cabinet, a jug of milk. “I’m glad to see you up and about,” she said over her shoulder.
“I feel just about human again.”
“Would you like some eggs?”
“I couldn’t find any. Would have made them myself.”
“Allow me. Scrambled?”
“Okay, sure.”
He watched her move in the predawn candlelight, in the robe, things shifting liquidly around inside. He saw a lot that he understood his father would like. She took three eggs out of a stoneware bowl high atop a cupboard.
“Sometimes it gets so cold in here the eggs will freeze,” she said, so we keep them high up where the last bit of heat from the stove lingers.”
“You’re a good cook, I’ve noticed,” Daniel said.
“Thank you. You have to be these days,” Britney said. “Remember when you could buy lots of things already made? You know what I miss? All that crunchy stuff that came in bags: potato chips. Taco triangles. Cheez Waffies?”
“Cheez Waffies. Never heard of them.”
“They were these bright orange round waffley crackers, really salty, with even brighter orange cheesy, salty sludge in the middle, probably incredibly bad for you. God were they good. Washed down with a Diet Coke . . . Ha!”
Daniel saw the girl in her, the person who was closer to his age than his father’s and the cargo of experience that it represented.
“I don’t remember as much about that stuff,” he said.
She peeked inside the firebox of the cookstove. The top was heating up nicely and she put a finely tempered cast-iron pan on it. “Things have changed around here since you left.”