Phantom Nights (2 page)

Leland couldn't resist. "Bare-handed. But James is a gentle soul. Just on occasion takes a deep disliking to one fella or another."

Leland looked up at the second-story windows, drapes partly drawn, of the large northwest-corner bedroom. Pyracantha hugged the wall up to the windowsills. Partly drawn? Old Doc Hogarth sitting outside right now with his raspberry lemonade the color of weak blood and a paper fan in his other hand, courtesy of Malfitano's Quality Furniture on the Square. Nothing left for Doc to do but pronounce Priest Howard dead; a job of comfortable waiting, no doubt.

"Guess I'm not too late, the look of things."

Sax glanced where Leland's attention was focused. "I thought it was all over for sure about two-thirty; then he opened his eyes and even said a couple of words. It's like he's hangin' on for your sake, Leland."

Leland's lip curled. "Same old song and dance. Hour from now he's sitting up eating a good supper."

"Catch sight of him and you won't be sayin' that. Any breath might be his last. I stayed with him for an hour and a half, just walked outside when you showed up. Had to give myself a short break, use the—" Sax allowed himself to choke up.

"Dying can be a hard business. Who's up there with him now?"

"Mally Shaw."

"For a fact? Thought Mally went off to Nashville to live with her Daddy after William blew his brains out."

"She did, and studied nursing. Came home again; it's been eight months, she said. And from what Burnell tells us, Mally has been a pillar of strength for Daddy."

Saxby's youngest boy was surreptitiously torturing his sister; the little girl wailed. Sax said sharply, "Rose Heidi, do somethin' about those chirrun."

"Well, they are just awfully
hot
, Sax. They want to watch television inside. It's almost time for
Howdy Doody
."

"Not with my Daddy bein' called home this very instant. Have some sense." To Leland Sax said, "I'll just go on back up there with you. Maybe if he hasn't drifted off too far you could tell Daddy the good news about Boss Crump. Much as he's always had a deep regard for that old sumbitch."

Leland nodded. From a coat pocket he fished out the little sack of hard candies he always had with him on the campaign trail and handed some out to the kids who clamored around him. He took off his hat again to Doc Hogarth and Rose Heidi. A ceiling fan on the porch ruffled his wavy blond hair.

"So pleased to see you again," Rose Heidi said with the minimal amount of enthusiasm she thought she could get away with. Whisking a wad of scented handkerchief through the blue-moon hollows of her dark belligerent eyes. "Hasn't it been such a long time, though?" She had been born accusing the world of a vague something, Leland thought; and all of the world's deeply flawed—by her lights—inhabitants.

The little girl, whose name Leland couldn't remember, sprawled half in her mother's lap, inviting another pinch in her behind from the troublemaking brother, who danced away from the glider with a smirk.

"Joe Dean, you keep it up and there will be a switchin' in your immediate future," Rose Heidi said.

Leland turned his attention elsewhere.

"Doc."

"Leland?" Nod. "You're looking fit."

Leland nodded back proudly; a man whose ego was always on the lookout for a stray stroking, like a cat passing through a crowded room. He glanced at Saxby, who obviously despised what he considered to be a subtle reference to his own girth.

"Believe me," Sax said to Leland when they were walking up the curved stairway inside, "I have tried every diet known to man, and I can't lose an ounce." Wheeze. "What's your secret?" This with a sidelong glance. In spite of a forced smile his eyes, like bees in a violated hive, were busily angry.

Light passing through a stained-glass window above the front door made a rainbow splash on the gloomy brown wallpaper, illuminating the depressions in the wall on either side of Sax's boyhood room where Leland had on occasion pounded Sax's head.

"My mother," Leland said, "was trim as a willow sapling. Could have something to do with it. How much exercise do you get, Sax? I don't count fucking Rose Heidi. My guess is she does most of the work anyhow."

Silence as they walked toward their father's room.

"Trust you to come up with a trashy remark," Sax said dourly as they paused at the door.

"Sax?"

"What?"

"Just wait out here in the hall while I say my fond farewell." Sax hunched his shoulders grudgingly. Leland said with a slight smile, "Our Daddy's not going to have a deathbed change of heart and turn loose a single dime has my name on it."

Snuffle.
For God's sake
, Leland thought, the old days flashing through his brain. Sax still snuffled like a little kid.

"None of us can be sure what is in Daddy's heart at this fateful hour. You may be underestimatin' his capacity for forgiveness."

"I seriously doubt it," Leland said, his smile wise and cold. They heard a car with poor brakes outside, then voices of newcomers. "More company to grieve with us?" Leland said. "How many did you invite, Sax?"

"That would be Pastor McClure and his wife." He turned and went back along the squeaky hall to the stairs, saying "Hope you choke on that toothpick." Leland allowed Sax's mood and attitude a few moments' study, then gave an exaggerated snuffle and nose-wipe that Sax had to hear. Just to remind him who had taken charge early in their relationship and was still on top. Childish of him, but how satisfying.

M
ally Shaw looked up when Leland entered his father's bedroom. She was sitting in a rocker near the old man, a Bible open in her lap. The Howard family Bible, no less. Ponderous to hold, the pages fragile as moths' wings from age. He caught a little of what she was reading aloud as he opened the door. Psalms.

"Go on, Mally," Leland said.

Instead she placed a bookmark in the Bible, closed it, glanced at Priest Howard's face elevated on pillows, and stood.

"Appears that I'm in time," Leland said.

"Praise be, Mr. Leland," Mally said, and she put the Bible on a stand near the bed, where diffused sunlight brought out what was left of the gold stamping on the leather cover, darkened by the oils from countless fingers over a century and a half.

Leland admired the profile Mally presented against that same light. She would be, he guessed, four or five years younger than he was. Even a man who had no liking for dark meat—never one of Leland's prejudices since he'd been old enough to take up the chase—couldn't fail to be attracted to such a comely woman. It was obvious that more than one white man had temporarily roosted in the family tree, going back at least a hundred years.

Leland approached his father's massive and ugly old mahogany bedstead. Initial shock at how desiccated the old man looked, this bone-sack, toothless, eyes agley, caved face the color of a harvest moon. The old enchantment ebbing, its nucleus deveined. He was taking fluids and holding at his low level on morphine. Nothing left of him to dread or despise, this relic who in his prime could change the weather with his scowl. Leland wasn't at all sure in the eclipselike pallor of the sickroom that Priest Howard was still drawing breath. Still, Leland felt uneasy. Then he saw the dying man's chest rise convulsively and fall again beneath tangled fingers, the flickering of lashless eyelids.

"Who's there?" Priest Howard said, voice phlegmy but surprisingly strong.

"It's Leland, Daddy. How you feeling today?"

"I've seen . . . the Light."

"How's that, Daddy?"

"There's . . . shadows in the Light. They're . . . waitin' on me."

Leland, perplexed, looked across the bed at Mally, who was smiling sympathetically down at the old man.

"Hasn't said that much in two days."

There were bad odors in the room, among them human flesh on its way to the grave; and something good, refreshing: the mild appealing scent Mally wore.

"What light does he mean?" Leland said with a slight, unexpected shudder.

"I don't know. First time he's spoken of it, Mr. Leland." Her face calm, but her lower lip folding between white teeth.

Priest Howard's veiny eyelids trembled again. His head moved fractionally on the pillows.

"Come closer . . . Lee. See you."

Leland took the toothpick from his mouth and popped in a piece of candy to suck on before he approached the bed. There were a few chick-feather remnants of hair clinging to his father's long, runneled skull. No further movement. Leland bent over the old man, growing tense, thinking he'd heard that telltale death rattle in the throat. Eyes flicking to Mally, who was frowning as if she'd heard it too. Then his father breathed again.

"Mally. Oxygen."

There was a tank beside the bed. Mally placed the mask over Priest Howard's mouth and nose, opened a valve on the tank. Leland liked the compassion he saw in her eyes. Totally absorbed, the ministering angel. She had fingertips on the pulse in one of the old man's thin wrists.

Half a minute passed; she removed the mask.

"Can't give him all he wants," Mally explained. "Enough so his lungs stop reaching, hard on his heart." She picked up a moist sponge and gently wiped it across the dying man's forehead.

Leland motioned her back and leaned over his father, who apparently had been restored to the point of being able to keep his eyes open. Pale, pale blue beneath an overgrowth of wilderness eyebrows.

"Do you want to say something to me, Daddy?"

". . . Can't win."

"What's that? Can't win what, Daddy, the Democratic primary?"

"See to it . . . myself."

Leland drew back, a burning sensation behind his breastbone. He bit down hard on the piece of cherry-flavored candy.

"Hard news for you, Daddy. I'm stronger than Wellford everywhere. Come November when the flowers have all withered in your crypt, I'll be the incoming junior senator from Tennessee."

"Mr. Leland—" Mally said, small-voiced.

"Don't be shocked, Mally. We've always carried on like this, haven't we, old man? Hammer and tongs all my life." He put his face closer to his father's, forgetting in his anger to hold his breath, not caring to hold his tongue. "Still rankles, doesn't it? Couldn't forge me to your likeness. Now understand this before you go off to Jesus or the Devil. Leland Howard is the winner in this family, and you have lost again—you miserable sumbitch."

He wasn't prepared for the hand that shot up, the strength of the long fingers at his throat. The almost merry look in eyes that had been so dim and distant moments ago.

"No. You . . . lose.
Thief
."

Priest Howard's brown lips curved just a little, tendons standing out in his neck. He rolled his eyes toward the evening's light and the figure of Mally Shaw between himself and the light as Leland brushed away his clutching hand, outraged and demeaned. And, it occurred to Leland as the burn worked deeper into his heart, possibly outmaneuvered in a last gesture of contempt and hatred by a longtime spiteful and hating man.

Leland felt Mally's eyes on him as he straightened and backed off from the bed. His father's eyes were closed again. That rattle of oncoming death in his frail throat. Unmistakable. Someone knocking at the door. Sax. Leland looked at Mally, his mood baleful. Instantly her gaze went down. She used the sponge again on Priest Howard's forehead, as if her protective tenderness were the proper response to Leland's outburst. Goddamn if it didn't look to him like the old man was still smiling. The door opened, Sax sucking his sweaty balding head inside.

"Leland? I've got Pastor McClure with me."

"Yeah, bring him on; I'm finished here." Not caring, soon as he spoke, for the taste of the words in his mouth.

Mally Shaw was listening close for another breath, fingers on the old man's pulse again. But she looked up momentarily. Something about Leland's tone. Their eyes meeting. Something in his eyes too, that she'd spent her life resenting, the white man's calculated appraisal of her. But other concerns claimed her attention.

"Would someone ask Dr. Hogarth to come up, please? I'm needing him now."

W
hen it was all over and Mally could take her leave from the old man's house, which was oppressively filling up with relations and everyone of importance in Evening Shade come to pay their respects, she drove in her '41 Dodge sedan to her favorite getaway place at Cole's Crossing, on the main line of the Southern Railway outside of town. The railroad spanned the south fork of the Yella Dog River there on a low trestle. The Yella Dog was hardly worthy of the name "river," only a few feet deep most of the time, but it swelled to cover a floodplain in the wooded bottomland when the heavy rains fell. Other times it was a fine place for picnics on the gravel bars shaded by high hickory and osage orange trees.