The sky reflected the sepia tint of Troy’s eyes as he unscrewed the cap of his flat pint whiskey bottle and ran it under his nose to smell the burn of fumes before knocking back a swallow. His granddaddy drank, he called it sweet nectar, and he reckoned bourbon or beer was how a man was meant to smell.
The water crashed down the muddy falls dashing against the yellowed creek rocks, subsiding downstream into the bracken. Theron Beecher listened to the water gurgling most of his life back there down in the trough running behind the house his grandfather built.
Over the years apathy sat down on Walker Scofield’s ears like a favorite cap. Some said he quit living the same day his wife died in childbirth with their fourth and last, and also dead. His grandsons made life worth living when he gave it some thought. They pissed him off a lot too.
Ruby Phelps stood at her stove making fried chicken at six in the morning. Russell and Lizzy Bowman ran a grocery store and gas station out on Route HH. The couple tried for years to have a baby, but without much luck. Ruby convinced Lizzy to start going to the Baptist Church with her where they prayed that God would give her a baby.
Saturday morning they drove down Court Street toward the square, passed all the rich and well-to-do people’s houses, and dreamed of moving in there beside them along the live oaks and rose bushes. The groaning sound of a lawn mower started up. An elderly man and woman were talking over the hedge line dividing their lawns while a little terrier did his business a few feet away.
Walker drove the back roads with a six pack of PBR on the seat next to him. He drove with one hand on the wheel, moribund and lonesome, as he recalled the way Claire made him breakfast; their wedding night and her round-eyed surprise at just the right moment; and the birth of his son Merle.
Troy stood leaning against the sink shaving in the house he and Alisha first lived in right after they were married by Reverend Scully. Alisha’s family were holy rollers and they insisted on Scully even though he seemed about two drinks from Fairmont State Hospital to most folks.
Jaelyn let the horses out of their stalls and followed them to the little muddy paddock and then watched as they jockeyed for position at the gate leading to the pasture and the pond. She held her hand palm out to feel their hides as each of the six: white, sorrel, sorrel with socks, chocolate, appaloosa, and her own saddle-bred horse with a star on his forehead.
She left Ray with Theron Beecher who had all but adopted the both of them. She had to get a job so she could take care of herself. For some reason Theron refused her his truck, said he thought she’d steal it or sell it for a song but that did not deter her. Alisha Scofield turned her blouse into a kind of halter top, tying the loose shirttails to show her belly and started walking down the gravel road in her best pair of cutoff shorts.
Thunderheads were forming on the horizon. Rain was coming like God’s judgment on pharaoh. Merle listened to the transistor radio hanging from a leather strap on a nail on the front porch. It might do more harm than good. The ground was cracked open in jags, yawning lightning strikes of desiccation across the land.
Alisha knew Troy couldn’t have stopped himself, not from coming over even at a funeral. The judge never said he could not talk to her under any circumstances, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea — at Walker’s funeral no less. The suit he wore was too big for him and she felt tender toward him despite tape over his nose, it made him more pathetic and less menacing somehow.
Jaelyn left her daddy’s truck parked at her Grandma’s. She cut across country to the Interstate, cockleburrs sticking to her pant’s leg. It hadn’t rained for awhile, but she still managed to get mud on her boots. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her Grandma about how much her mama and daddy drank.
Beecher awoke with a start from a dream about his wife. He knocked the alarm clock into the floor only to realize it wasn’t the clock ringing, but some part of his mind clanging as if to remind him. Awaken.
Royal tapped a stick on the ground as he walked into the scrub pine out past the back lot. His Mama and Daddy were getting along again. He had walked into his Daddy’s room to find them putting their hands all over one another. It made him happy that they were together again, even if it didn’t last.
The phone rang. Alisha let it ring ten times and picked up. Hello, she said. Nothing. Dead space. I can hear you breathing, she said into the receiver. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything. It was Troy. He was coming after her. She was afraid.
Blood all over the seat. He coughed up blood just before he died. Was it normal to do that? He took another drink of his Schlitz. Try that, he told himself. Lurlene called him the other day talking about getting back together. Shit.
It was awfully warm for the time of year, but Alisha just went over and edged down the thermometer on the temperature gauge on the wall to cool things off. It was one of the nice things to being with a man who had the means to afford a nice new A-frame and central air.
The night was cooling on the manicured lawns. Heat from the day was burning off in hazy, visible, waves of fog from the evening dew. The boy made his way on his white mule, Napoleon, passed the Church that had been hauled there all the way from Great Britain, almost destroyed in World War II.
Troy grilled some burgers and poured a little beer over them as they cooked. Jaelyn was in the kitchen doctoring up some baked beans and store bought potato salad. It was a good thing he had finally had the water and power turned back on so she didn’t think he was a complete barbarian.
She was gone. It hurt him more deeply than he could say. Most days he didn’t allow himself to think of it at the brickyard, but when he drove him at the end of the day it hit him hard.
He found a job on a construction crew of sorts. All the real businesses he applied at refused to give him an ex-con a job so he found a rough outfit that did odd building jobs run by a hardheaded old cuss called Dallas. A large man, almost as wide as tall, with a shaved head and wrinkled forehead like sandpaper.
Theron walked closer across the shorn corn stumps of the fallow field to better see the boy under the starlight. His countenance downturned in an attitude almost like prayer. Dirt smudges across his forehead. He turned off the flashlight now and the light disappeared gradually like the burst of a camera electrocuting the air with immortality.
Now it was plain Troy no longer cared for her. She felt rootless, purposeless. She heard how happy he was with the girl and it gnawed at her. Once the object of worship, she felt reduced to the life of a simple woman. All the air sucked out of the atmosphere.
A hunched figure came out from the penumbral of the carriage house. The face was abnormally long, a prickly chin resting on the chest, with an ugly gash over one eye. The clothes were raggedy as the man crept through the alleys shaking terriers off his torn pant’s leg.
Ruby was bound and determined to get the boys off to school herself. She developed into a thyroidic woman over the years and bemoaned the fact that she was allergic to dairy products, loudly and often much to the annoyance of the rest of her family.
On All Soul’s Day a vicious hailstorm ended fall for all practical purposes, fiercely walloping the autumnal leaves from the trees and stripping them naked—black charcoal drawings against the pale sky. Where was the boy? Ever since he caught him burying the baby, he felt obliged to keep watch over him.
She hid out by the trees along the fence line of Scofield property. One arm embracing the skinny trunk of an ash with her cheek resting forlornly against the bark. When her mother’s Pontiac appeared she could think of nothing reasonable to do, she simply ran out the back door. Having a conversation was not an option.
The child stood uncertainly looking at the dark-haired man standing at the register, shirtless and sunburnt. He turned his head bashfully to the row of paints and varnishes in front of him.
A new place called the Walnut Cafe’ opened up to give the other more established places a run for their money. Troy stopped in. He knew from experience places had their best food for at least the first six months, and then they settle into what you could reasonably expect anywhere for a greasy spoon.
He changed into a heavy flannel shirt, two pairs of clean socks, a clean pair of jeans, boots, and a leather flight jacket. It was snowing harder when he walked back out to the Ford.
Jaelyn awoke in the darkness of the truck bunk. It had been snowing earlier, hard. The Trucker was trying to drive right through the storm, but the white was blinding. The sun was setting behind the clouds. She felt like being sick.
Merle’s drawn and serious face was on the other end of the rifle. Lurlene stood behind him in a dark wool sweater with her arms crossed in front of her standing with her weight on one leg. Merle put an arm around him and pulled him into the house, slammed the door and locked it.
The sky was gunmetal gray as the early morning light began to give a soft blue light as the voices of the singing birds echoed in the crisp air. There was a roadside joint where cars and trucks were parked for breakfast, it looked jammed packed and she made for it holding her tummy. She felt like she might vomit, but not for the same reason as before.
Troy tried to get a job at the brick plant but they were in one of their cycles of laying people off the office secretary said. Maybe he should try back in the spring. He went down to talk to Cal, head of the maintenance crew for the city, thought maybe he could work for the parks doing odd jobs.
Ruby Phelps had not heard from Jaelyn since she disappeared back in November and once again she grew dissatisfied that no one saw fit to do anything about it. Why the Sheriff’s office hadn’t begun a manhunt for her daughter or drug the river or nearby clay pits was beyond her. Clearly, her daughter was dead or lying in the proverbial ditch.
A primer-colored truck with a rust front quarter-panel pulled up outside of the house as Royal was standing out on the front porch. A big stocky boy named Lesley jumped out of the truck bed and eased a couple of things out with him, under each arm.
Alisha lay on her bed with the heat cranked up in her nightgown drinking a homemade Bloody Mary with a piece of celery in it. An old Doc Watson number was on the radio. She was thinking about Troy. If she wanted him back, this was the time to get him.
He woke himself up coughing like a barking dog. He knew he should have stayed off the river a few more weeks but he was addicted to her. Theron drank some green tea after sunup for a spell. He never allowed himself the leisure of being sick a day in his life and he wasn’t about to start now.
Ruby lay awake in the darkness with the walls of the bedroom leaning spasmodically at times as she waited for her sleeping pills to take effect. Jessie was asleep and snoring slightly. She looked at his sleeping form under the moonlight streaming in through a space in the blinds, the cat had slipped between the window and blinds again.
Merle had taken to wearing a gun belt and holster on his property. He wanted to protect himself from the Phelps and anyone else. In his recollection, there was a time a man could go into town and leave his front door unlocked and come home a day later and no one would have touched anything but no more.
Jaelyn looked at herself in the full-length mirror and wanted to cry, but she didn’t. Sometimes she felt disgusted with herself, but she refused to go back home crawling for a handout. She didn’t want her folks giving her their I told you so looks. The evening gown she wore was silver with shiny beads on it.
When Troy awoke out at the house the sun was peaking over the lip of the world through his window at him. His hand went up by itself to pull at the window sheers, trying to close them but to no avail. He turned away from the light, on his side and he could feel his belly rumbling from all the shots and beer chasers of the night before. King Henry’s face appeared every time he closed his eyes.
Ruby could see her own breath in the crisp air and the breaths of Jessie, Cyrus, Billy and Johnny. The strangest idea occurred to her, the idea that they were all angels walking the earth waiting to carry out a mission. Few knew exactly what their commission in life was all about, but each had his own and could not leave until it was carried out.
Mo stared into his mother’s bedroom at a man holding himself over his mother on his arms. His eyes were closed but the lower half of his body bucked up and down. Her red nails kneaded his forearms as he groaned and sweated over her in the early morning sunlight shining in through the curtains.
There were many a grand destination Troy Scofield meditated on while in prison, but he had not divined he would find himself at the big white house on Court Street. It was a grand two story affair, a front lawn with carefully trimmed and dapper grass like a putting green. Over to the side of the house was an awning more for appearance than utility where honeysuckle vines grew up the white trellis.
Air bubbles like rosary beads jogged in the whiskey bottle as Cyrus drank from it. Ruby refused to allow Jessie to drink a thing stronger than beer since he was the one driving. He drove better when he was drinking beer anyway. A lot of alcoholics she knew said they drove better drunk, but Jessie was one who actually did.
Thunder and lightning put on an act outside the picture window in the living room. The television blew during the news. He went outside and watched the sky light up, photoelectric. Troy always felt energized during the spring thunderstorms.
In the beginning, Royal had started out just handing folks leaflets about the not so subtle juxtaposition of hellfire and judgment, and the true need for repentance in the literature, and a body couldn’t do no better than to stand next to a blind old man if he figured on passing out his share of booklets.
Troy thought about Merle as he was driving down through the Lake of the Ozarks. Traffic was not bad since it wasn’t exactly tourist season yet. The two lane blacktop needed to be widened especially when summer hit.
When they arrived just outside Baton Rouge, Ruby told Jesse and Cyrus to stop at a low-roofed joint with a long row of bikes parked out front. Before Cyrus could get in the front door a man came out in a leather jacket and motorcycle boots to tell them to leave.
They began to call him The Boy of God throughout Kingdom County. Theron Beecher told him his own daddy had been a preacher too and he took to driving Royal to nursing homes, hospitals, prayer meetings, and Church services of various denominations from Baptists, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, Holiness, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Catholics, and Methodists, and a host of unaffiliated Churches that believed in the power of the Holy Ghost.
He sat on the edge of the bed in the motel room drinking a beer from a little Styrofoam cooler full of ice he had picked up at a little grocery store just off the highway. The trees here were different. The plants looked like they were made out of rubber to Troy.
At twilight Merle held the warm boy in his lap on the swing until the child could contain himself no longer and threw himself off the porch and into the yard to chase fireflies.
