Abandon (12 page)

“Zeke, no—”

“Glori.” By the way he said her name, with a gravity she’d not heard in years, Gloria knew better than to push the issue. “Ya’ll don’t move from this spot. Savvy?”

As Ezekiel ascended toward the servants’ quarters, he filled with an exhilaration he’d not experienced in some time. It wasn’t fear—he couldn’t recall ever having been plagued by that emotion, even as a younker in Virginia—but an airiness in his stomach, birthed by the anticipation of something he’d always had a taste for, and still did. It reminded him of the rough old days, helling around with the boys. In all honesty, he had to own up to missing aspects of his former self. Much as he loved Gloria and his life with her, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt this alive.

Ezekiel reached the penultimate floor, but the blood continued up, sticky little pools of it on the steps and banister. He climbed on, following the drops and spatters to a small cupola that Bart had transformed into a library, the first seven feet of each wall lined with books, the last five sloping up to a hipped roof.

It made no sense. Blood on the floor, on the spines of books, entrails draped across the back of a leather chair, but the library was empty, its two hearths fireless and this top floor cold enough to cloud his breath.

Then he noticed the ladder tucked under a long bookshelf, glanced up, saw a trapdoor beside the skylight in the ceiling, almost smiled at the needles in his stomach. Using a shiny eight-foot brass pole with a hooked end, he reached up and unlatched the lock and pushed open the hatch. Then he stood the ladder up, bracing it against the opening, snow already falling into the library.

He climbed fifteen steps before emerging onto a small open veranda, the highest point of Emerald House. The panoramic eyeful of the four wings and chimneys and the surrounding basin distracted Ezekiel for a split second before he saw them—five figures near the wrought-iron railing on the east side of the platform.

Bart Packer and his servants.

Three had slumped over, face-first and half-buried in the newly fallen snow. Two still sat upright, Bart one of them, his face black, purple, and distended beyond recognition from what looked to have been a merciless beating. Their throats had been opened, the snow in the vicinity stained with great quantities of blood. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch.” It snowed again, but the wind whipping across the roof kept the platform mostly bare. He heard approaching footfalls, spun around.

Stephen climbed through the trapdoor onto the roof.

“Goddamn, son,” Ezekiel said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Lucky I didn’t have my gun. You’d a been belly-up, coming up on me like that. What’d you leave my wife—” He saw Gloria coming up the steps behind the
preacher. Ezekiel rushed past Stephen, stood blocking her view of Bart and the servants.

“You seen it?” he asked her.

“Seen what?”

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Stephen said.

“Glori. Glori, look at me. My eyes. They’re up here.”

“Dead?”

“Had their lamps blown out, I’m afraid, and trust me, ’less you alkalied to it, sight like this, you’ll spend the rest a your life tryin to forget.”

“But you seen it.”

“Awful to say, but I seen worse.”
I done worse.
“Now I’m madder’n hell you came up here when I said stay put, but I can probably let that slide if you listen to me.” He held her face in his hands. “Look here, Glori. Go on back down now. Go on.”

He watched her descend back through the trapdoor, then walked up to Stephen, said, “Man, where the fuck is your head? My wife almost saw this. Got half a mind to throw your ass off this roof.”

But the preacher stood stone-faced and glaze-eyed, staring at the stiffs and all of that red snow surrounding them. “Who do you reckon would do a thing like this?”

“Bad men,” Ezekiel said. “Looks to have been done with a couple a Arkansas toothpicks. Nasty work. They were probably worried about gunshots settin off a slide, blockin their way out a the basin.”

Stephen started toward the dead. Ezekiel grabbed him by the shoulders, drew him back. “Best to let ’em lie for now, Preach. What can you do?”

Stephen nodded. His hands shook. He tried to steady them.

“Is it any wonder, Zeke, that He hates us?”

“Who?”

“God.”

“Wait. You sayin God hates His own creations?”

The preacher gestured at the carnage. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Now I understand why we been eatin pooch and splatter dabs for supper, ‘stead a meat,” Billy grumbled, still stretched out and hungover on the lumpy straw-filled mattress.

Bessie said, “I’s fine to make the sacrifice. Look at your daughter, Billy. You ever seen her so happy? Don’t it warm your heart even a little?”

Harriet sat on the dirt floor by the sink—just a washbasin on an upended packing crate—whispering secrets to Samantha.

“Fire’s gettin low,” Billy said. “Go on, bring in some wood from the porch. This shithole’s drafty as hell.”

“Billy! That mouth! It’s Christmas mornin, and your daughter—”

“Get goin, I said!” So Bessie wrapped every available blanket around her underpinnings and stepped into Billy’s arctics. When she’d gone outside, Billy sat up in bed and raised his arms over his head. At twenty years, he was small and looked young for his age, with jittery eyes that caused most men to treat him like a boy. He was handsome until he opened his mouth. His front teeth had resembled jagged canines ever since his father had broken them when Billy was nine. He got up, the dirt floor freezing, his head pounding. He could feel the morning cold slipping through his stained and threadbare long drawers.

He staggered to the table, covered in oilcloth and a few airtights of rarities
they’d saved for Christmas. Billy pried open a tin of mustard sardines, crammed a handful into his mouth. He went over to the cabin’s only window and swept back the curtains Bessie had sewn out of an old lace-edged petticoat—nothing to see of the outside world, condensation having frosted the inside of the glass.

A whiskey bottle filled with tiny seashells sat in the windowsill. He ran a finger across the glass and thought of his big brother, Arnold, missed him so much in that moment, he felt his throat close up, went short of breath, like someone had punched him in the gut.

Billy turned around, looked at his daughter.

“Merry Christmas, girl,” he said.

The six-year-old glanced up at her father, and he saw the wariness in her eyes, and it shot him full of sadness and vexation.

“Got a present for your mama,” he said, and he reached under the bed and lifted something the size of a small loaf of bread, packaged in newspaper. He walked over to the spruce sapling they’d uprooted from the hillside above their cabin. Bessie had potted it in a lard bucket, kept it watered, but the needles had begun to brown at the tips. Billy placed the package on the flour sack wrapped around the base of the Christmas tree.

“Y-y-y-you like that doll?” Billy asked, blushing as he always did when he stuttered, no matter that he was conversing with his six-year-old. He’d never had a speech problem before coming to Abandon.

“Yessir.”

“That’s good. It cost a damn sight more than we can afford.”

He lifted the lid and peered into the graniteware pot on top of the stove. The snow had finally melted, tiny bubbles rushing up from the bottom. He took his tin cup down from one of the newspaper-lined shelves above the washbasin and poured the hot water over the old Arbuckle’s grounds. “Christmas mornin, ain’t even got a decent cup a coffee to sip. This is belly wash.” The front door swung open and Bessie stumbled in with two armloads of firewood and a draft of bitter cold. She dropped them on the floor, opened the iron stove, shoved in three logs. “Guess it’s still snowin,” Billy said, noticing the streaks of white in Bessie’s yellow hair.

“Comin down like it got no mind to stop. Dust me off, will ye?”

Billy walked over, brushed the snow off her blankets.

“W-w-w-well, looky what’s under the tree,” he said.

Bessie saw the small package on the flour sack and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d got me nothin.” Bessie draped the blankets over the rocking chair beside the stove and approached the dying spruce.

She lifted the present. “Heavy.”

“C-c-c-c-come over to the bed.” Bessie sat down on the mattress. Harriet crawled over, crouched at her parents’ feet.

Bessie ripped off the old newspaper.

“Holy God, Billy.” What lay in Bessie’s lap amid the torn newspaper was inconceivable, a dream.

“I weighed it,” Billy said. “Twenty-two pounds.”

“Mama, let me see.”

Bessie hoisted the bar of solid gold, the metal freezing cold to the touch, marred with scrapes and tiny chinks, a dully gleaming bronze.

“How much?” she asked.

“Gold’s at twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents a ounce, so you’re holdin more’n seven thousand dollars right there.”

It was more money than Bessie had ever heard of. She began to cry. Billy put his arm around her.

“Where’d you get this?” Bessie asked.

Billy sipped his coffee. The grounds had been used and reused so many times, they barely even colored the water.

“Look at this place.” He waved a hand at their shanty. “We live in squalor,” he said. “Ain’t ye tired of it yet? This floor turnin to mud ever time it rains? Chinks fallin out. They’s goddamn drifts in the kitchen from snow blowin through the walls.”

“Where’d you get it?” Bessie asked again.

“I-I-I-I don’t think ye need to know. We’re rich, Bessie. Concern yourself with that. Oh, and this ain’t the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

He grinned. “That bar’s got a whole mess a brothers and sisters.”

Bessie dropped the bar on the bed and stood up. With her hands, she framed Billy’s acne-speckled face. He’d been trying for a mustache the last six months, but it looked patchy and ridiculous.

“I need to know right now what you done,” she said.

He swatted her hands away.

“What you mean, what I done? I’m providin for my fuckin family.”

“Billy, when you brought the high-grade home from the mine, I didn’t like it, but I let it go. Next thing I know, we got a half ton a ore in the root cellar. I said nothin. But that.” She pointed at the bar of gold. “You take it from the Godsend?”

“What if I told you I found it and—”

“I’d call you a black liar.” He jumped to his feet and grabbed Bessie’s arms and shoved her toward the kitchen.

She crashed into the washbasin and the shelves. A can of condensed milk fell on her head, jars of sugar, long sweetening, flour, and salt shattering on the dirt floor. When Bessie looked up, Billy stood over her, eyes twitching, face bloodred.

Harriet had disappeared under the table, but her crying filled the cabin.
Billy ripped the oilcloth off the table, glared at his daughter. “Now you shut that fuckin yap, Harriet! I’m speakin to your mother, and I don’t wanna hear peep one out a you!”

The little girl buried her face in her dress to muffle her sobs.

“Your daughter, Billy!” Bessie screamed. “That’s your—”

Billy grabbed his wife by the ankles and dragged her toward the bed. He picked her up and slammed her onto the mattress, climbed on top of her, pinning her underneath his weight.

“L-l-l-l-listen, you ungrateful cunt,” he whispered, straining to hold her down. “By God, I’ll make you be still.” He slapped her twice. Bessie quit struggling. They lay pressed together, panting, Bessie trying not to gag at the fishy reek of Billy’s breath.

“It’s Oatha, ain’t it?” Bessie said. “He got you into somethin. You changed since you taken up his company.” Billy pressed his forearm into his wife’s neck and leaned into her windpipe.

“M-m-m-m-make no mistake,” he whispered. “One word, I’ll fuckin kill ye. Simple as that.”

“And your daughter, Billy?” she wheezed. “Gonna kill Harriet, too?” Bessie saw it happen. The madness spilled over in Billy’s eyes and she knew he would suffocate her. “All right, baby. All right.” She’d been digging her fingernails into his biceps, but now she let go and ran her fingers through his greasy sandy-blond hair. “Billy.” She couldn’t produce anything louder than a whisper. “Billy, I can’t breathe.”

It passed. He let up on his wife’s neck, but he still lay sprawled on top of her as she coughed and gasped for air.

“You gonna make me kill you one a these days,” Billy said.

All Bessie could do was stare into his twitching eyes. It wasn’t anger she felt toward him. Not anymore. Only fear and profound sadness, because so little about him resembled the person she’d married in West Tennessee at fourteen. That sweet and tender boy felt as distant as her father, long dead from stone on the chest.