They all looked past me, bending, and stared into the darkness there.
“That pile of rocks is around it.”
They straightened.
Donny grinned. “We don't usually go crawling up under the house, Dr. Devilin.”
The other two snorted.
“But your sister does.”
That shut them up.
“She did seal the house,” I agreed, “after a fashion.”
They glared, unblinking.
“Didn't your sister find wells once, water on your property?”
“Uh-huh,” Donny said slowly. “Good while back; she was little bitty.”
“And several of them were dry, or you didn't find water in them, I mean.”
“That's right.” Donny folded his arms. “How'd you know that?”
“One of the dry holes you dug was close to the house,” I went on, “and recently Truevine asked you to make a tunnel. Is that true?”
They looked at one another. Dixon took a barely perceptible step back.
“No,” Donny said slowly. “But a good time ago Momma asked us to do something like that. How you come to know a thing like that?”
“I'm guessing.”
“She didn't say what it was for,” Dover whispered. “Was it the house-sealing spell?”
“It was,” I confirmed. “One of the wells you dug hit on a geothermal pocket. It's unusual but not unheard of. Truevine remembered that and used it, arranged the rocks.”
Not twenty miles to our west there was a hot springs in the side of a mountain roughly the size of ours, a moneymaking tourist attraction.
“What is it?” Dover asked, still nearly inaudible.
“Very hot air or steam trapped in the earth, under the mountain.” I glanced at the door. “Your sister figured out how to direct it to your house. She's a genius, you know. Do you realize how impressive this is? I had no idea she was capable ⦔ I trailed off, shaking my head.
“Our sister,” Donny told me in no uncertain terms, “is the best person there is.”
“So you understand that she's arranged those rocks down there to send a blast of hot air up to your door.”
“If that's the spell,” Donny said calmly, “then I understand.”
I had in my head about a half hour's worth of explanation, and then I heard the voice of my old teacher, now discredited, also dead, Dr. Bishop. He turned out to be a less than perfect human being, but that didn't mean all his ideas were wrong. Ideas can be perfect even when their inventors are not.
“Folk explanation of any phenomenon,” he had told me a hundred times, “creates its own phenomenological dasein, a gestalt that supports itself. Who are you to say a scientific explanation is better, especially in the folk context? A woman says rubbing sage on her pillow keeps a ghost from waking her at midnight. You say it makes her believe she's safe, so she sleeps better. The result is the same. Let the
explanation be a part of phenomenon. Let the observer be a part of the observation. Don't obscure the phenomenon with what you perceive to be the facts.”
I nodded to Donny. “That's the spell. If you want to keep it up, leave the stones alone. If you want it to stop, move the stones.”
All three heads turned as one once again in the direction of the dark underside of the porch.
“If Truvy's done all that work,” Dixon announced firmly, “I still say we leave it be.”
“I thought you wanted me to fix it,” I said, exasperated.
“Dixon been saying Tru put it there for a reason,” Dover said. “If she went to all the trouble to crawl up under the house, I reckon we ought to respect that.”
Everyone had calmed. I surmised that the boys had really only needed outside confirmation of their sister's work. Fixing the situation had not been, after all, what they'd wanted. There are occasions upon which faith must be confirmed by the facts.
“All right, then,” I said, sitting on the first step of the porch, “let's move on. I want to find your sister almost as much as you do. Also, I promised Girlinda Needle I'd find Able, and I think he's with Truevine. I'd like to find him alive. If you all keep catching him and stringing him up, that makes my job a whole lot harder.”
They pondered.
“Ms. Needle's a good woman,” Donny allowed. “But her brother.” He shook his head.
Time for psychology.
“Would you like
any
man who was interested in your sister?” I asked. “Honestly.”
I gave it a moment to sink in. Puzzled faces contorted.
“What if I liked her?” I went on.
They tensed.
“You
got
a good woman, Doc,” Donny said, clench-jawed. “You ought to get married to that'un.”
“My point is: you don't think any man would be good enough for your sister.” I leaned back. “And from what I know about her, you
might be right. But she's got to find her own way. She falls in love, you have to let her. She wants a husband and children, that's her business. If you chase off every man who comes around, by and by she'll stop trying. What then?”
Donny started to speak three times, stopping each time before words would come out. Finally he managed, “Where is she, Dr. Devilin? Where's our sister?”
“My theory,” I answered, “is that she and Carter are hiding out in the old cemetery. But you probably scared them off last night.”
“You think she's up there,” Dover rasped, “in that boneyard?”
“That don't make sense,” Donny agreed. “Why don't she just come on home?”
“I think she had something to do with your cousin's death. She's afraid.”
“Harding?” Dover could barely say it.
“That moron.” Donny shook his head. “I know he's family, but he's as worthless as a teat on a tree.”
“Not to speak ill of the dead,” Dover said quickly.
Doing so could merit a visit from them. Deceased spirits are quite irritable, especially immediately after their death, prone to visit anyone who doesn't speak glowingly of them.
“She didn't have nothing to do with that,” Donny said after a moment, “and even if she did she'd still come home.”
“Unless she was worried about bringing the police to you,” I returned. “I'm not interested in your nefarious activities, but I know you've run afoul of Deputy Needle, and now that he's running for sheriff, he's apt to be even more stern about the appearance of illegality. Especially since you nearly hung his brother-in-law.”
“He can be a stickler,” Donny admitted. “So Tru is staying away to keep the police off us.”
“Just an idea,” I admitted.
“All right,” Donny said strongly, “I get it. You came up here to make a point, Doctor. You want us to help you find Able and Truvy. You think you're a whole lot smarter than us, and you are in a lots of ways, but we know things you never heard of.”
“I agree,” I answered, brushing the dirt from my pants. “That's why we'd make the perfect team. Between us, we know everything.”
I grinned, hoping it would put my proposition over.
They exchanged silent communications.
“Okay then,” Donny said finally, “you'd best come on in the house, if you think you can get past the spell, have you a sit-down. We got some information about Harding you need to know.”
“About what?” I said.
“I believe we might know why he was killed.” He took the steps.
Â
The kitchen was a sty, smelled worse than a slaughterhouse. Despite the jolt of extreme discomfort crossing the threshold, I made it in, along with hundreds of flies who seemed perfectly at home. Blessed shadows obscured the details of what lay on the dining table, but the word
entrails
was on my mind.
There was one large room in the cabin, and a ladder that rose to a sleeping loft. The downstairs room boasted the huge table, a kitchen, a sitting area, and a stone fireplace. The ceiling was hung with dozens of dried spices, long twigs of rosemary tied together, thick braids of garlic, bundles of thyme, cress, hyssop, sage, lavender. They battled valiantly but lost the war of smells.
“You boys made a mess in pretty quick order,” I observed, trying not to inhale. “This looks like a week's work. Did you kill a hog in here?”
They looked at one another accusingly.
“Dixon said not to open any windows,” Donny tried to explain, “might break the seal.”
“I won't be able to take this for long,” I confessed, hand over nose and mouth.
Dixon sighed, began gathering hog limbs and jowls, scooping them off the table into his arms, clutching them to his chest. Flies gathered about him. He shook his head once in my direction and exited through the front door. Dover followed behind with what seemed to be a collection of fish spines. Donny opened the window in the kitchen area.
“Not so bad over here,” he invited.
All things being relative, he was right, but I still found it difficult to breathe. As the sweet air from the side of the house poured in, I leaned and closed my eyes.
Behind me Donny said, “Dr. Devilin, I want you to understand a few things. You went to college; I didn't. You read books; I don't. You think one way; I do another. In the realm of God's world it's all equal, I believe.” He leaned against the counter next to the sink, inches from me. “My point is: I want you to understand that I read some parts of this world the way you read a book. I know the alphabets of the air and the leaves. My sister is better at it than I am; otherwise I'm the best there is. Now, I realize you don't have no idea what I'm saying, but you need to know I'm a whole lots more observant than you might give me credit for. That's my say. I'm going to make some coffee. You need some?”
“Coffee's good,” I managed.
He wasn't menacing in the way he'd been before, but I still felt threatened, maybe by his proximity, maybe the strangeness of what he was trying to say. I knew he wasn't a stupid man, that what he was saying about our different kinds of knowledge was true. There are kinds of education that don't take place in a university. He put a kettle on the stove.
“I wonder if we could stick to finding your sister,” I said.
“That's what I'm trying to do!” He pounded the edge of the sink with such force it rattled the dishes sitting in it and sent me scrambling backward. “You don't see the circle in the wheel. You don't see the way things are. You're making a mistake and it's a mistake that's been made before, with dire consequences.”
Dire consequences
seemed a bizarre phrase coming from his mouth. I felt dizzy from the stench and disoriented by the darkness of the house and the sound of Donny's voice.
The kettle's whistle startled me. He reached up to the cabinets beside him and got an old press coffeemaker. He dug into a ceramic pot next to the sink and pulled out a handful of black whole coffee beans. He put them in a pestle, ground them by hand, then dumped them into the bottom of the coffeepot, poured the hot water on top,
put the lid in place. The sounds of the day picked up, and a rush of autumn air flushed the kitchen area.
“I love my sister and I need for her to be happy. I don't want that to happen to her, what you said about her giving up on marriage. We need to leave her be. She was right about you: you're a good man. Reckon that's why she told us to look after you.”
Truevine told them to watch over me,
I thought.
That's why they let me go last night. Remember to thank her when I see her
.
“Okay, Donny,” I said calmly. “What's this about knowing why Harding was murdered?”
He cast his eye about the cabin. “Quite a smell in here, ain't it?”
“I can barely stand it.”
“Smells like a slaughterhouse,” he agreed. He took out blue coffee mugs, poured the contents of the pot through a sieve, and handed me one. “Or a mortuary.”
“No,” I corrected him, sipping, “mortuaries don't smell like this; they smell of formaldehyde and rubbing alcoholâ”
“That's right,” he interrupted, avoiding my eyes, “if the bodies have been taken care of proper. Of course, if they ain't been treated right, like if a mortician don't do his job ⦔ He wanted me to finish his thought.
“A mortician.” I set the mug down. “Harding was killed because of something he did wrong at his funeral home.”
The Deveroe boys were reluctant to let me leave. They wanted me to stay, find their sister. A few minutes of arguing and a well-chosen phrase about law enforcement convinced them I had to go. I needed to clear my head, rid my memory of the stench of their place, collect my thoughts.
I was pretty sure Andrews hadn't left the house. If I hurried, I'd be able to catch him before he ran off with Skidmore on their secret mission.
I pulled away from the witch's cabin, sped home as quickly as I could.
When I got there, Andrews's car was gone. I switched off the truck, sat in silence a moment, trying to imagine where he'd gone, what he and Skidmore were doing. Without me.
I reached for pad and pencil in the glove compartment, made random notes:
Able Carter discovered something about Harding's mortuary. That's what they were arguing about the night Harding was murdered. Why was the body naked? Visit the mortuary today. Truevine and Able won't come home because Able killed Harding, Truevine's hiding him. Where are they now? Why were they in the graveyard? Find out more about Truevine; is she the key element?
I felt I was writing from pure instinct, one of the tools I had used for years investigating folk material. These collection talents were the exact techniques required for solving Harding's murder. Folklorists
are
detectives. Dr. Bishop once told me, when I was frustrated by university politics, that I should never try to acquire new skills for new tasks if I could apply old talents I already possessed. “Fix academic problems in the department the way you would collect a folktale or song. Use those abilities you already have; make them metaphorical; translate.” Genius. I knew I could only solve the murder the way I would ordinarily investigate a folk phenomenon.
I stared at the empty house. Our day had ripened nicely, though the air was slightly chilled. Sun the color of snow glazed the roof, made me squint. What were Andrews and Skidmore up to? I climbed out of the car, deciding not to let their little play distract me from larger questions. What attributes did Andrews have to contribute to my work after all? A Shakespeare scholar's perspective: decidedly useless. Best to operate alone. I always had.
The problem, and I knew it, was that my mind could run from ignorance to paranoia with lightning speed. Skid and Andrews were working together. They were plotting. They were doing something behind my back. They were working against me. They were deliberately trying to subvert me. Not just me, my entire way of life. That's the path my thinking could take without the slightest provocation, that fast.
I felt an itch on my leg. Surely it was a hive. A hive would grow to cover my leg. My leg would swell and become useless. I wouldn't be able to walk. The hives would get into my throat. My throat would close up. I wouldn't be able to breathe. Because of my swollen leg I'd never make it to the truck, couldn't drive to the emergency room. I would die on the front steps, as far as I could crawl before my esophagus closed entirely.
That's the way fear grows: from nothing to death in ten sentences. I'd taken that course of thinking a thousand times. The only way to avoid it was to concentrate on something else with such ferocity that everything was blocked out. For decades I'd used a fear of my own
thinking process to focus my mind, the secret of my success in the field. Sometimes I had to use my mind to trick my mind, a dangerous Möbius path.
Onward, then. Go to the mortuary, see if I could discover what Donny was trying to tell me. On the way, stop by June's house. Find out more about Truevine Deveroe, if she was to be my focus. I pulled the truck back onto the road.
The slant of sun was blinding down the mountain, and the black shade on the other side of it seemed night. The sky was endless above me; curling leaves in the wind sighed upward, last gasping of the old year. October's story is always regret: the things May might have done. It's a time for ghosts, my mother's voice leaving, my father's shallow breathâall the things I should already have told Lucinda.
As I pulled up to June and Hek's home I promised myself, a prayer, to speak more honestly with Lucinda when she came home. Tell her secrets my father never told my mother, talk things out. If the sins of the father are visited upon the son, how much more is that son haunted by the father's regrets?
I honked the horn getting out of the truck, then sang out.
“June!” Hello the house.
A gust of wind, the leaning of wheat in the field behind the barn, and, at last, her voice answered.
“Come on in, then.”
The creak of the screen door was a final announcement. I knew to head for the kitchen; I could smell the cornbread.
“This is a treat, seeing you two days so close,” she said before I was through the doorway.
“I'm here on business.”
“Of course.” She nodded. “Truevine.”
Even though I knew that news traveled fast in our town and had also long suspected June's unacknowledged psychic abilities, I still managed to stumble over the threshold, surprised by her perception.
“Careful, boy,” she said, still stirring something on the stove.
She stood in her apron and dark dress, ancient shoes, in what little light the northern kitchen window allowed. Her hair was pulled
back so tightly the skin at her temples pinched, but she had not put it in a bun, as was her usual style. A gray ponytail dangled at the back of her head, an oddly young afterthought to the gently aged face.
“New hairstyle?” I took a seat at the kitchen table.
“I got up quick today.” Her words were uncharacteristically clipped.
“Well, the truth is,” I confessed, “I am looking for something more about Truevine. I don't know what, though.”
Leave it open. Suggest, then be silent. The open-ended query is a bigger net than any specific question.
She stopped stirring. “You know I don't like to gossip.”
“That's right.” My eyes shot downward.
She took a seat at the table. “You don't want no coffee.”
I shook my head.
“Truevine's real power took a hold when her parents passed. She needed something, and that's what she got. Some of these so-called churchgoers call it devil's work, but there's nothing wrong with the way that girl does, and I don't care who knows it.”
“You don't care who knows you feel that way,” I clarified.
“Right. Some call her bad names. I don't. We used to have several of these women back when I was young, and we depended on them many a time for having babies, curing livestock, helping out one way or another.” She folded her hands in front of her and wouldn't look me in the eye.
“Truevine's a good witch,” I goaded.
“Don't call her that,” she shot back. Then she slumped. “You don't know.”
“I'd like to.”
“No.” She licked her lips. “You wouldn't.”
Typical of June, of most of my friends in Blue Mountain. Suggest something mammoth, then demur in the telling. Maddening.
“Well, she put a sealing spell on her cabin before she disappeared,” I began.
“Hogwash,” June spat. “No such of a thing. Her charm is for animals.”
There it was, the first hint.
“Animals?” I tried to make it sound as innocent as possible.
June sighed a familiar sound, the one she made after she had successfully convinced herself that I had dragged the story out of her. She wasn't gossiping, the sigh said. I'd forced her to tell.
“You don't know about the wild dog?”
“No.” Careful. Too many words would scare away the story.
“I guess it was when you were at the university.” She sat back and closed her eyes, the way she began the real tale. “They say she was in the wood up there by the graveyard, gathering evening primrose to set on her mother's grave, when it come up on her. Black dog size of a calf. Growling. Hungry. You could see his ribs show. Truevine just smiled, fixed her eye on the dog. She says, âAre you hungry? I've got some spice cake and some dried fish I was to have for supper, and you're more than welcome to it, if that's to your liking.' Dog nods once. She invited him to eat.”
Invited:
a key point in the tradition.
“She took out all that was left of her food, laid it on her kerchief, spread like a table for a guest, put her flowers to the corner, stepped back. Dog nods his head again. Tru says, âThere. God's table, here in the woods.' Which if that don't prove she ain't a witch I don't know what. Dog nods his head the third time.”
“I see,” I said, smiling.
It had to be three times, too.
“They say,” she went on, “he ate very delicately for a wild animal. Then he turns around like a house dog and lays down right next to Tru.”
“She was lucky,” I said.
Wild dogs in the woods all over these mountains had attacked livestock, small children, sometimes grown hunters, often killed. They were not pets.
“No luck to it. Girl's got a way. She says, âYou like my company. Come on.' They went all over the graveyard that day. After that the wild dog took up with her every time she went out in the woods by herself. Dog was never seen when she was with her brothers, but alone the dog always found her, kept her company.”
“They say.”
“They do. So one day she had to go over to Clinch Taylor's dry goods store in Pine City. It's a long walk, and she'd no longer set out than the dog took up with her.”
“That
is
a long walk,” I agreed. Fourteen miles over rough terrain, a two- or three-hour trek each way, even for a healthy young person.
“She likes that Owen Mill stone-ground flour they sell; she goes over there every now and again. Now you know how they are over in Pine City. Slothful, that's my opinion. They always blame floods or bugs or bad luck, but they're just plain lazy and no good, Pine City is. They'd had a poor harvest that year, I reckon, but the way some of these boys do, they said it wasn't their own fault. They saw Truevine and dog come up over the hill, they commence to teasing her: âWitch girl. She got her a devil dog!'”
“Her reputation preceded her.” I sat back. “Now which boys were these?”
“Some that had to go to work in Clinch's store because their crop failed. I believe they'd been drinking. They kept up teasing, said she was the cause of the bad harvest. They blamed her. Trouble was, others thereabout joined in, and teasing turned mean.”
“That can't be good.”
“It was terrible,” June answered. “They started saying they were going to make her change her spell. She paid for her goods, left right quick, but they started after her.”
“How many?”
“Five or six. Drunk boys. She was scared; she ran, which made the boys mad. They chased her all the way to the Little Sancrow Riverâ”
“Between here and there,” I interrupted. “It's white water.”
“And it started to rain,” she agreed, “but those boys were right behind, so Tru and the dog jumped in. She might have drowned except the dog fetched her in his teeth to the other side.”
“Amazing.” I nodded, prompting.
“Wet to the bone,” she went on, her voice full of the power of the story, “no strength left, they cast themselves on the far bank. Those
mean boys stood on the other side cursing and shouting how they'd get her still. Tru and the dog were too tuckered to move, and they might have been got, except that God didn't want that. Lightning hit a tree right next to the dog, scared the boys silly. They left off, ran away. Ignorant.”
“But Tru was all right?” I asked.
June nodded. “She managed to drag several of those burning branches into the shelter of a covering rock near the riverbank. In very short order she and the dog was both warm as a summer day, dry as parson's throat.”
“Nice phrase.” Evidence she'd told the story a dozen times or more to others.
“Now the last part is hard to swallow, I don't know if it's true or not, but it's good. They say that dog went back in the water and caught a fish. Tru cooked it there on the lightning fire, and even though it was most likely a trout, that fish was entirely free of bones.”
“The dog caught a fish that had no bones.”
She stood. “God delights in little miracles as well large.”
“The point is ⦔ I coaxed.
“The point is that Truevine has a power over animals and sometimes she gets blamed for things which have got nothing to do with her.”
I watched her return to her pots on the stove. One was brimming with fresh field peas.