All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (34 page)

She leaned closer, imposing her weight; he felt her breath on his cheek, her own heartbeat. He was still dazzled and filled with a sense of doom, but he could look at her. Nhora smiled.

"I know what you're going through; I can help. Come on."

"You know—"

"I'll tell you all about it;
come
."

Steady in her grip, focused on her calm strength, he walked—like an aged man with a double hernia—to the porch. As soon as he was safely up the steps the phobia lost its power. He paused to get his breath. Nhora squeezed his hand reassuringly as she let him go.

"Dynamite," he muttered. "I don't think so."

"What, Jackson?"

"There's no lingering odor of explosives. And half the house would be in ruins."

"I see what you mean."

He peered at the stars through the joists, the scrap remains of a metal porch, then approached the smashed-down screen door. Hinges had been ripped from the frame, but otherwise the frame was intact. They stepped over a jumble of rusty mesh and went inside.

There was a sharp odor of medicine in the house. Furniture was upended, smashed. A tall, stooped Negro man with slick hair like Cab Calloway's led Jackson into a small bedroom. They heard another gunshot. A kerosene lamp burned at the foot of the bed; shadows dragged across the ceiling. The granny woman, stretched out with her swollen hands loose on her breast, was obviously dead. She had hematomas the color of eggplant and had bled from the nose and ears. So many of her bones had been broken, including both wrists, she might have been struck by a speeding car. Jackson made a cursory examination, then drew a sheet over her.

He turned to a younger woman in a chair, held down by two friends. Their fingers were biting into her plump arms to keep her from thrashing. Her eyes were blindfolded by a makeshift wet cloth bandage.

"Kill it," she raged, grinding her teeth.

When Jackson tried to unknot the bandage the woman twisted away.

"What's her name?"

"Arabella."

"I'm a doctor, Arabella. Let me look at your eyes." Arabella could open them only for an instant. She screamed in pain.

 
"Hold her tightly," Jackson instructed the other women. They were all sweating profusely in the hot room. He carefully pried open a suppurating eye to examine it.

"Kill it, kill it!" the distraught Arabella pleaded.

"She be blind?" the tall man asked.

"Only if there's extensive retinal damage. The corneas should heal without scarring. I'll apply a salve to ease her pain, but you must drive her immediately to a hospital where an ophthalmologist can treat her.. Do you know what happened?

He shook his head. "I live over thataway. Something blew up. Big flash, like a propane tank."

Arabella strained forward in the chair. Cords stood out in her neck. "For God's sake, git de hoe and kill it! Don't let it in de house, it bite us all."

Nhora, looking over Jackson's shoulder, put a hand on him, which prompted him to ask, "What is it, Arabella? What did you see?"

The woman stiffened, letting out her breath in a hiss of anger, or fear. Then intense pain carried her off a little distance, momentarily separating her from danger as if she were in a frail boat on a rocky coastal sea. It was no one man or group of men in white sheets who had frightened her—
Git de hoe and kill it . . . it bite us all!
Was she phobic too? The explanation wouldn't serve. A raw and powerful force had burned her eyes, wrecked half the porch, hurled one body the width of the house through two screen doors, and mangled the old woman lying under the sheet. Jackson felt hard pressed and heavy with dread, as if the violence could flare up again, supernaturally—from the well of the smoking lamp, from a tame shadow on the wall. He fumbled in his medical bag for morphine and gave Arabella an injection before working on her eyes.

Sheriff Gaines came in as Jackson was reapplying bandages with pads of gauze soaked in a solution of boric acid. Arabella, released from the worst of her pain, was peaceful now, half-asleep. She muttered unintelligibly when spoken to. The other women were anxious to get her dressed and on her way to the nearest large hospital, John Gaston in Memphis. Jackson and Nhora left the room with the sheriff.

"Where is the other body?" Jackson asked.

"Out back."

"Have you killed the—are there many—"

Gaines looked at him with a hint of amusement. "No snakes. Scared 'em all away."

Jackson, his pulse racing, forced himself to go outside. The back screen door, on a line with and twenty feet from the front door, was also wrecked. They walked down railed wooden steps and across the yard, past a grape arbor and a vegetable garden. Someone had hung a lantern at the corner of a tool shed. Two Negro men in bathrobes were talking to deputies near the hen house. A dead hound, apparently killed by a thrust of the sharp-pointed pole that protruded from its throat, lay in the dirt.

A deputy with wire cutters was hacking Old Lamb loose from the fence. Nhora took one look at the blood and chicken feathers and returned to the car to wait.

"What happened to the dog?" Jackson asked.

"Caleb—he's the nigger inside the house—saw a man runnin' through here after the dynamite, or whatever it was, went off. Caleb let his dog off the chain. Man killed the dog."

'What did the man look like?"

"Too dark. He ran with a kind of a limp, Caleb says. Skipped along kind of stiff-legged. But he was fast anyhow. Caleb had a couple cracks at him with his rifle. Didn't hit him. He disappeared into the bayou."

Sweating deputies lowered the body of Old Lamb to the ground. They spread a tarp and shone a light on the body. Insects were swarming. Glossy red chickens strutted around aimlessly.

"Well, what the
hell
?"

"Looks like his pecker was blowed off, Lydell."

"Looks like it," Gaines said glumly. He applied a match to a fat cigar.

"Must have shoved that stick of dynamite hard up his ass," another deputy said.

"Dynamite, hell," Gaines said. "Cover it up till they come with a box for him." He stared at Jackson through a blue billow of cigar smoke. "Unless there's something else you need to see."

"Sheriff, I'm puzzled."

"Know exactly what you mean."

Jackson turned and looked at the house, which stood thirty feet ft way. He reckoned the distance from the front porch to the chicken-wire enclosure as more than fifty feet.

Gaines said, "My daddy was an old powder man. Now I know dynamite just don't act like that. Old Lamb been standin' that close to a good-size blast, you could pack what's left in a fruit jar. It would've blowed the front of that house to smithereens. Bust windows up and down the street. Fumes hang in the air, specially on a still night like this one. What was it then? You know where he stood and you see where he is now, stuck like a wad of chewing gum to the chicken wire. He must have shot through that house like a goddam human cannonball in a circus. Hit his own wife hard enough to break near every bone in her body. Jesus Christ. Maybe it was a lightning bolt. A tornado. I don't know what else has that much power."

"I don't either," Jackson said.

"Some kids was fooling around the federal transmission line last spring. Storm blew up. One of them was on the pylon, maybe fifteen feet off the ground. He caught a big surge; there was a flash and it flung him a ways. Broke his back, but he was probably electrocuted already. There's only one little AC line connects up with this house, and it's nowhere near the front porch."

"I noticed that."

Gaines stuck out his hand. "Thanks for comin'. How's Champ?"

"Holding his own."

"That's good. You get a notion about this, come around to see me. Lewis, swing your light over here. Doctor's goin' back to his car now, and he don't want to be steppin' on a dead cottonmouth."

More Negroes, relatives of Old Lamb, had arrived. A woman wailed as Arabella was half-carried to a waiting car. Nhora was sitting sideways in the seat of the Chevrolet
 
coupé, head heavy in her hands. She looked up at Jackson's approach.

"Sorry. I couldn't take any more."

"We can go now. I've done everything I can."

"Wait," Nhora said, getting out of the car. "Old Lamb's granddaughter was in the house, or near the house, when it happened. A neighbor is taking care of her—she's afraid something's wrong with the child, that she's hurt but won't say anything."

Jackson yawned. "Okay." They walked together down the road to a house with a picket fence, lamplit windows. A teenage boy let them.

It was a clean house, the furniture dilapidated, lace curtains turned crumbly as brown sugar at the windows. A woman wearing an orange bandanna sat holding the girl in her lap. The girl was wearing an oversize nightgown and appeared to be asleep, but she was convulsively sucking her thumb. The woman in the bandanna crooned to her.

"What's the little girl's name?" Nhora whispered to the boy.

"Loretta."

The woman cradled the back of Loretta's head with a big hand as Jackson came near.

"Is she cut or bruised?"

"No, doctor. Jus' scared out of her wits. They found her 'longside the cistern, half-drowned. But she won't say a word."

Jackson hunkered down and studied Loretta's pretty, glazed face. Her eyes were open, blank and empty as a couple of walnut shells. He smiled at Loretta, then replaced the woman's protective hand with his own. Loretta didn't resist. Her skin was cold, her heartbeat and pulse too fast. Snakebite? He gently removed the nightgown and looked everywhere for puncture wounds. No. He then felt for lumps or broken bones, watching her unresponsive eyes. He found nothing suspicious and dressed her again in the nightgown.

"I think she'll be all right. She's in shock. Stay with her, held her, talk to her. I'll leave a mild sedative to help her sleep."

"Yes, doctor."

As Jackson rose the child's eyes moved with him, and focused for the first time. She was looking at something behind him.

Suddenly she moved, scrambling from the woman's lap, nearly knocking Jackson over in her haste to get away. He reached for her, but missed. The boy also attempted to get a hand on her. Loretta changed direction effortlessly, raced for the front door. Nhora blocked her way. Loretta flung up both hands, spun from Nhora's grasp and crashed into a curtained window next to the door, breaking the glass with her elbow.

At the sound of shattered glass, Loretta's eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted, falling weightless as an autumn leaf to the carpet. Nhora picked her up.

"My God, what happened?"

"Lay her on the sofa," Jackson said.

Loretta was unconscious, but her breast heaved. Then saliva bulged at one corner of her mouth, ran down her chin. There were blood drops above one wrist, from a shallow cut or scratch. Her heartbeat was arrhythmic, respiration forced and shallow. Jackson was preparing an injection of scopolamine when she had her first convulsion. The second one tossed and doubled her and she died rigidly in his hands.

During the next fifteen minutes Jackson tried every life-saving device at his disposal: digitalis in the heart muscle, artificial respiration. He was exhausted and shaking, his suit soaked with perspiration, when he went outside. A hearse from the Negro funeral home had come for the bodies of Old Lamb and his wife. Jackson told the undertakers about the dead girl, then went in search of Sheriff Gaines.

"Heart give out?" Gaines asked. He was down to the stub of his cigar. In the yard a cock crowed. The sky had drained to silver in the east.

"Very unlikely. I've heard of cases of extreme fright where the vagus nerve becomes paralyzed. Then the victim can't breathe, the heart stops. More common in animals than it is in humans. The convulsions were symptomatic of strychnine poisoning, but she had nothing to eat or drink while I was there—I just don't know what happened."

"I reckon you did all you could."

"
That bloody doesn't bring the child back, now does it?
"

Gaines took a step out of the way, as if he didn't want to be contaminated by Jackson's anguish..

"Can't go blamin' yourself. Get some rest, doctor."

"Good advice," Jackson said, still red-faced from his outburst. He turned and walked back to the house where Loretta had died.

The living room was filled with neighbors, a great brown bulwark. Psalms were spoken, coffee was brewing. Nhora had her arms around the woman in the orange bandanna, who sobbed quietly. Nhora was staring at the blanketed corpse on the sofa. Jackson walked toward her. Hands touched him kindly. A pint bottle of whiskey was slipped into his coat pocket; he didn't know who the benefactor was. He smiled numbly and stopped in front of Nhora.

She shifted her gaze.

"We might as well—" He held out a hand. She came with him, eyes puffed and red, hair in a wild tangle.

Outside they met Tyrone as he was coming through the gate. He was wearing a dark suit and had a Bible under his arm. Two other men, perhaps deacons of his church, trailed behind him. Nhora and Tyrone stopped and looked at each other. He seemed touched by her powerlessness in grief. He nodded gravely to Jackson, and went on past them to the house.