The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (16 page)

A fly landed on her arm, tickle of its air-light feet over her skin. Waite said other things but she never again looked up at him and didn't answer him further or take notice when he sighed one last time and turned and gathered the reins of his mount and climbed on the animal's back and sat a spell longer and then finally prodded the horse with his spurs and walked it away.

She sat watching her hands. There was dried blood on her knuckles, beneath her nails, that she wouldn't ever wash off. Blood on her dress front. She'd have to bury her boy now, and this time there'd be no undertaker to summon the preacher so it could be a Christian funeral. She'd have to find the preacher herself. This time there was only her.

She walked two miles along unfenced cotton fields wearing Clay's hat, which had been E. J.'s before Clay took it up. She didn't see a person the whole time. She saw a tree full of crows, spiteful loud things that didn't fly as she passed, and a long black snake that whispered across the road in front of her. She carried her family Bible. For no reason she could name she remembered a school spelling bee she'd almost won, except the word
Bible
had caused her to lose. She'd not said, “Capital
B
” to begin the word, had just recited its letters, so her teacher had disqualified her. Someone else got the ribbon.

Her Bible was sweaty from her hand so she switched it to the other hand, then carried it under her arm for a while. Later she read in it as she walked, to pass the time, from her favorite book, Judges.

Her pastor, Brother Hill, lived with his wife and eight daughters in a four-room house at a bend in the road. Like everyone else, they grew cotton. With eight sets of extra hands, they did well at it, and the blond stepping-stone girls, less than a year apart and all blue-eyed like their father, were marvels of efficiency in the field, tough and uncomplaining children. For Bess it was a constant struggle not to covet the preacher and his family. She liked his wife too, a tiny woman named Elda, and more than once had had to ask God's forgiveness for picturing herself in Elda's frilly blue town dress and bonnet with a pair of blond girls, the youngest two, holding each of her hands as the group of them crossed the street in Coffeeville on a Saturday. And once—more than once—she'd imagined herself to be Elda in the sanctity of the marriage bed. Then rolling into her own stale pillow, which took her tears and her repentance. How understanding God was said to be, and yet how little understanding she had witnessed. Even he, even God, had only sacrificed once.

Girls. Everyone thought them the lesser result. The lesser sex. But to Bess a girl was something that didn't have to pick up his daddy's pistol out of the sideboard and ignore his mother's crying and push her away and leave her on the floor as he opened the door, checking the pistol's loads. Looking back, looking just like his daddy in his daddy's hat. A girl was something that didn't run down the road and leap sideways into the tall cotton and disappear like a deer in order to get away and leave you alone in the yard, trying to pull your fingers out of their sockets.

She stopped in the heat atop a hill in the road. She looked behind her and saw no one. Just cotton. In front of her the same. Grasshoppers springing through the air and for noise only bird whistles and the distant razz of cicadas. She looked at her Bible and raised it to throw it into the field. For a long time she stood in this pose, but it was only a pose, which God saw or didn't, and after a time she lowered her arm and walked on.

At Brother Hill's some of his girls were shelling peas on the porch. Others were shucking corn, saving the husks in a basket. Things a family did in the weeks the cotton was laid by. When they saw her coming along the fence, one hopped up and went inside and returned with her mother. Bess stopped, tried in a half panic to remember each girl's name but could only recall four or five. Elda stood on the steps with her hand leveled over her eyes like the brim of a hat, squinting to see. When Bess didn't move, Elda came down the steps toward her, stopping at the well for a tin cup of water, leaving the shadow of her house to meet Bess so the girls wouldn't hear what they were going to say.

“Dear, I'm so sorry,” Elda whispered when Bess had finished. She reached to trace a finger down her face. She offered the tin.

“I thank you,” Bess said, and drank.

Elda touched her shoulder. “Will you stay supper with us? Let us go over and help you prepare him? I can sit up with you. Me and Darla.”

Bess shook her head. “I can get him ready myself. I only come to see if Brother Hill would read the service.”

The watchful girls resumed work, like a picture suddenly alive, when their mother looked back toward them.

“Oh, dear,” Elda said. “He's away. His first cousin died in Grove Hill and he's there doing that service. He won't be back until day after tomorrow, in time for picking. Can you wait, dear?”

She said she couldn't, the heat was too much. She'd find someone else, another preacher. Even if he wasn't a Baptist.

It was after dark when she arrived at the next place, a dogtrot house with a mule standing in the trot. There was a barn off in the shadows down the sloping land and the chatter of chickens everywhere. This man was a Methodist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but he was prone to fits and was in the midst of one then, his wife said, offering Bess a cup of water and a biscuit, which she took but didn't eat. Though Bess couldn't recall her name, she knew that here was a good woman who'd married the minister after her sister, his first wife, had died of malaria. Been a mother to the children.

In a whisper, casting a glance at the house, the woman told Bess that her husband hadn't been himself for nearly a week and showed no sign of returning to his natural, caring state. She'd sent the young ones to a neighbor's.

As Bess walked away, she heard him moaning from inside and calling out profane words. A hand seemed to clamp her neck and she felt suddenly cold, though her dress was soaked with sweat. God above was nothing if not a giver of tests. When she thought to look for it, the biscuit was gone; she'd dropped it somewhere.

The last place to go was to the nigger preacher, but she didn't do that. She walked toward home instead. She thought she smelled Clay on the wind on her face before she came in sight of their house. For a long time she sat on the porch holding his cold hand in hers, held it for so long it grew warm from her warmth, and for a spell she imagined he was alive. The flies had gone wherever flies go after dark and she fell asleep, praying.

She woke against the wall with a pain in her neck like an iron through it. The flies were back. She gasped at their number and fell off the porch batting them away. In the yard was a pair of wild dogs, which she chased down the road with a hoe. There were buzzards smudged against the white sky, mocking things that may have been from God or the devil, she had no idea which. One seemed the same as the other to her now as she got to her knees.

Got to her knees and pushed him and pulled him inside and lay over him crying. With more strength than she knew she possessed, she lifted him onto the sideboard and stood bent and panting. He was so tall his ankles and feet stuck out in the air. She waved both hands at the flies, but most were outside; only a few had got in. She closed the door, the shutters, and moved back the sheet to look at his face. For a moment it was E. J. she saw. Then it wasn't. She touched Clay's chin, rasp of whisker. It was only a year he'd been shaving. She built a little fire in the stove, heated some water, found the straight razor, and soaped his cheeks. She scraped the razor over his skin, rubbing the stiff hairs onto the sheet that still covered his body, her hand on his neck, thumb caressing his Adam's apple. She talked to him as she shaved him and talked to him as she peeled back the stiff sheet and unlaced his brogans and set them side by side on the floor. She had never prepared anyone for burial and wished Elda were here and told him this in a quiet voice, but then added that she'd not want anybody to see him in such a state, especially since she'd imagined that he and Elda's oldest daughter would someday be wed. Or the second oldest. You could've had your pick of them, she said. We would've all spent Christmases together in their house and the sound of a baby laughing would be the sound of music to my ears. His clothes stank, so she unfastened his work pants and told him she'd launder them as she inched them over his hips, his knees, ankles. She removed his underpants, which were soiled, and covered his privates with the sheet from her bed. She unbuttoned his shirt and spread it and closed her eyes, then opened them to look at the wounds. Each near his heart. Two eye-socket holes—she could cover them with one hand and knew enough about shooting to note the skill of the marksman—the skin black around them. She flecked the hardened blood away with her fingernails and washed him with soap and water that turned pink on his skin. Then, with his middle covered, she washed him and combed his hair. She had been talking the entire time. Now she stopped.

She snatched off the sheet and beheld her boy, naked as the day he'd wriggled into the world of air and men. It was time for him to go home and she began to cry again. “Look what they did,” she said.

The Reverend Isaiah Hovington Walker's place seemed deserted. The house was painted white, which had upset many of the white people in the area, that a nigger man would have the gall to doctor up his house so that it no longer had that hornet's nest gray wood the rest of the places in these parts had. He'd even painted his outhouse, which had nearly got him lynched. So many of the white folks, Bess and Clay included, not having privies themselves. If Sheriff Waite hadn't come out and made him scrape off the outhouse paint (at gunpoint, she'd heard), there'd have been one less preacher for her to consult today.

“Isaiah Walker,” she called. “Get on out here.”

Three short-haired yellow dogs kept her at the edge of the yard while she waited, her neck still throbbing from the crick in it. She watched the windows, curtains pulled, for a sign of movement. She looked over at the well, its bucket and rope, longing for a sup of water, but it wouldn't do for her to drink here. “Isaiah Walker,” she called again, remembering how, on their first night in the area, E. J. had horse-whipped Walker for not getting his mule off the road fast enough. Though the preacher kicked and pulled the mule's halter until his hands were bloody, E. J. muttered that a nigger's mule ought to have as much respect for its betters as the nigger himself. He'd snatched the wagon's brake and drawn from its slot the stiff whip. She'd hoped it was the mule he meant to hit, but it hadn't been.

The dogs were inching toward her, hackles flashing over their backs, taking their courage from each other, smelling the blood on her hands, her dress. She wished she'd brought a stick with her. She'd even forgotten her Bible this time, saw it in her mind's eye as it lay splayed open on the porch with the wind paging it. She hadn't eaten since they'd brought Clay back, and for a moment she thought she might faint.

She stamped at the dogs and they stopped their approach but kept barking.

In all, it must have been half an hour before Walker's door finally opened, the dogs never having quit. She lowered her hand from her neck. The reverend came out fastening his suspenders and put a toothpick in his mouth. He looked up at the sky as if seeking rain. A man entirely bald of hair but with a long white beard and white eyebrows and small rifle-barrel eyes. He whistled at the dogs, but they ignored him and ignored him when he called them by name.

She thought it proper for him to come down and meet her, but he never left the porch.

“This how you treat white folks?” she croaked at him.

“I know you,” he said. “Heard why you here too. And you might try tell me the Lord God, he expect me to forgive. But I been in there praying since you first step in my yard, Missus Freemont, since them dogs first start they racket, and I been intent on listen what God say. But he ain't say nothing 'bout me saying no words over your boy soul. If he wanted me to, he'd a said so. Might be them dogs stop barking. That would tell me. The Lord, he ain't never been shy 'bout telling me what to do and I ain't never been shy for listening.”

But she had turned away before he finished, and by the time the dogs stopped their noise she had rounded a curve and another curve and gone up a hill and then sat in the road and then lay in it.

Lay in it thinking of her past life, of her farmer father, widowed and quick to punish, overburdened with his failing tobacco farm and seven children, she the second oldest and a dreamer of daydreams, possessed he said by the demon Sloth. Thinking of the narrow-shouldered, handsome man coming on horseback seemingly from between the round mountains she'd seen and not seen all her life, galloping she thought right down out of the broad purple sky onto her father's property. The young man taking one look at her and campaigning and working and coercing and at last trading her father that fine black mare for a battered wagon, a pair of mules, and a thin eighteen-year-old wife glad to see someplace new. Of crossing steaming green Tennessee in the wagon, of clear cool rainless nights with the canvas top drawn aside, lying shoulder to shoulder with her husband, the sky huge and intense overhead, stars winking past on their distant, pretold trajectories, the mules braying down by the creek where they were staked and she falling asleep smelling their dying fire, his arms around her.

E. J. Ezekiel Jeremiah. No living person knows what them letters stands for but you, he'd said.

Ezekiel,
she'd repeated.
Jeremiah.

Out of the wagon to jump across the state line (which he'd drawn in the dirt with his shoe), laughing, holding hands, and going south through so much Alabama she thought it must spread all the way from Heaven to Hell. Slate mountains gave way to flatland and swamp to red clay hills, and they ferried a wide river dead as glass, then bumped over dry stony roads atop the buckboard pulled by the two thinning mules. Then the oldest mule died: within two months of their wedding.