Edge of Dark Water (21 page)

“Skunk?” the old woman said, and I swear, even there in the near dark, the room lit only by the fire in the fireplace, I was sure I could see her turn pale.

“You know of him?” I asked.

She nodded. “If that hellhound is on your trail, then you’re already dead and just walking around.”

“I don’t plan to just roll over and let him have me,” I said.

“It don’t matter,” said the old woman.

“It matters to me,” I said.

“What you need to do is go in the bedroom there, look in the chifforobe and get the pistol shells, and load up that pistol. Then you ought to get the shotgun out of the closet. It’s loaded and there’s a box of shells in there for it. I was going to try and get to it later and blow your head off, but I don’t think I can get out of this chair again, and I doubt you’ll help me over there so I can take hold of it.”

“You got that right,” Jinx called out.

I went and got the shells for the pistol, pulled the shotgun and shells for it from the closet. I gave the pistol to Jinx and she loaded it while I went back in the main room with the shotgun. It was a double-barrel. A twelve-gauge. I had the box of shells for it with me, and I sat down on the floor and laid the shotgun across my legs and set the box of shells nearby.

“Surely,” Mama said, “he’s given up by now.”

“He don’t give up,” the old woman said. “He might take a break, get bored, or decide to go off and look at something he ain’t seen for a day or two, but he’ll come back.”

“You’re just going on old stories,” I said.

She shook her head. She licked her lips, said, “I heard tell my mama and daddy knew Skunk’s mama. That after the slaves was freed, she used to work for our family, doing laundry and stuff, cooking. She lived in a shack on the back end of her former master’s property, Eval Turpin. The master was long dead, but his grandson, Justin, lived there without no living kin. But them that had been slaves he let live on the farm, let their children and their children’s children live there, too. He didn’t hire them or pay them nothing, cause he didn’t have nothing himself. Like my family, when cotton wasn’t king no more, his family went broke, and stayed that way.

“One of the women living there was named Mary, and she got with baby by a half-Comanche nigger, and had a child. She called him Absalom. He wasn’t never right, would stir the ground with a stick, killing ants, just grinning. That’s what Daddy said. Said he talked all the time, but a lot of it was nonsense. He was even suspected of killing one of Daddy’s prize coonhounds by feeding it meat with broken glass in it. Daddy said he never knew for sure, but suspected it. Said that old dog was just as good a dog as there was, and followed Absalom around like he was the boy’s pet, and then the boy did that to him. Probably just to see him suffer.

“When Absalom was little, his daddy, the half-breed, got tired of hearing his babble, and held him down and pulled out his tongue with a pair of pliers, and run off, and wasn’t never seen again. Wasn’t but a few years later, when the boy was ten or so, his mama got scared of him. Said she’d wake up at night and he’d be standing over her, just looking down at her the way he looked at those ants. One morning she gathered him up and took him out in a boat. It was the boy’s birthday, and she later said she thought that was about the right time to do it. She told him they was going fishing, but what she did was she shoved him out of the boat, and pushed him in the water, leaned out of the boat and held him under.

“My daddy said she done it and didn’t feel bad about it, because she thought there was something in that child that was wrong, and that she was doing what she ought to do. What God would have wanted her to do. She said she could see that boy’s eyes looking up at her from beneath the water, looking up through the cracks of her fingers as she held him down. She said his eyes was cold as marbles. He didn’t drown, though. She took a boat paddle to him and hit him some licks with it, and he floated off. She thought he was dead. But he ended up on shore, and he lived. Stayed out in the woods like a wild animal. He lived in such a wild way he got a stink about him, and that’s how he come to be called Skunk.”

“I done told them this story,” Jinx said.

“Well, then,” the old woman said, “if you told it like I told it, then you told it true.”

“The pliers part was new,” Jinx said.

“That’s the little detail that matters,” said the old woman.

“You didn’t mention about how he lives in places where he hangs up bones and such, and they rattle in the wind.”

“I ain’t never heard that part,” said the old woman.

“You didn’t tell nothing but a story most everyone tells,” Jinx said. “I don’t believe your daddy knew Skunk or his mama. I think you’re just yarning.”

“I’m telling it like it was told to me,” she said. “From white men, reliable and truthful.”

“Ha,” Jinx said.

“Now, here’s some more details,” said the old woman. “After Skunk was grown, after everyone thought he was dead and rotted away in the woods, he come back. He was a young man by then, and somehow he had survived. Daddy said one morning Justin Turpin went down to Mary’s shack cause he was starting to take up with her in secret, but when he got there she was skinned and nailed to the side of the shack like a deer hide. She was just a head and a skin, and he had put a boat paddle between her teeth. He hadn’t never forgot, and that’s how everyone knew who it was. What had been inside her was outside of her, piled up on a chopping block in the yard, and it was still warm. Turpin had missed Skunk by just a few minutes. Her hands was gone. Chopped off. They say he does that now all the time, when he kills someone, on account of his mama’s hands holding him under that water, and him trying to come up, and those hands holding him down. I can’t vouch that’s the reason, but that’s how folks guess at it. He don’t like the thought of hands because a pair almost drowned him.

“Anyway, in time he got to be known about, and it got known, too, that he was a tracker and a killer if you paid him with the things he wanted. I thought by now he might really be dead, but if you’re telling your story true, I reckon he ain’t.”

“No,” I said. “He ain’t. But we haven’t seen him in days.”

“He’s like the heat, wind, rain, and the earth,” the old woman said. “Days to him ain’t nothing. He ain’t one for time. He does what he does cause he’s been asked, and he’s getting something out of it. Shoes, or food, or hats and such. Or at least that’s his reasons if you look at the surface of the thing, but you scratch them reasons a little, it’s got more to do with him doing it because he likes it. He got him a taste of killing, and for him, it was sweet. Once he sets out on the job, he’s going to finish it, come hell or high water, even if he takes his time about it. And now you done brought this stone killer to my door.”

“Thought you wanted company,” Jinx said.

The old woman shook her head. “I figure it don’t matter. The hand of fate is already laid upon me. I’m going to die soon.”

“You old fool,” Jinx said. “You’re near three hundred years old. Of course you’re going to die soon, and should have been dead already.”

“Let’s be quiet before we wake Terry up,” Mama said. “Let’s let him rest.”

I
t was early morning, the sun leaking light through the edges of the shutters like river water, but that wasn’t what brought me awake. It was the screaming.

I sprung to my feet, holding the shotgun. The screaming was coming from the bedroom. The door was still open and I could see Terry, awake and aware now. Feeling pain and knowing he had lost an arm and hadn’t had a say in the matter. He was sitting up, trying to throw a foot out of bed.

Jinx was on the bed with him, holding him back by his good arm. But he was showing some serious strength for a worn-out, one-armed fella.

Me and Mama rushed in there, tried to comfort him, but it wasn’t no use. He went on like that, screaming and yelling about his arm, struggling. It took all three of us to pin him to the mattress. Finally he was just so weak from all that had gone on, he fell back on the bed unconscious.

The three of us was shaken bad. We made sure he was all right, not bleeding from the stump, then went out and closed the door.

“He woke up screaming for me to put his arm back on,” Jinx said. “I tried to tell him we had to do it. I hope I was telling him right.”

The old woman in her rocker, her back to us, hadn’t stirred through any of this. That infuriated Jinx.

“You don’t care about him or nobody,” Jinx said to the old woman’s back. “You could hear him scream all night, and it wouldn’t be anything to you.”

The old woman didn’t respond, just sat still in her rocker.

Jinx was really mad. She went around front of the rocker, started to say something to her, and stopped. The look on Jinx’s face made us come around to look at her. We looked closer at the old woman, seen her mouth was hanging open. Her eyes looked like they was filmed over with candle wax. She was dead.

“That figures.” Jinx put her hands on her hips. “She didn’t die bad at all. She just went in her sleep after three hundred and fifty million years of meanness.”

“Poor thing,” Mama said.

Jinx looked at Mama with a look of confusion, shook her head. “You white people are something.”

“Don’t make us a pair,” I said. “I can’t feel no sympathy for her, neither.”

“She’s still a human being,” Mama said. “God makes all human beings, no matter who they are.”

“Well, he needs him a better mold,” Jinx said, “cause some of these he’s making ain’t worth the waste of material.”

Now, I ain’t proud of this next part, but we wasn’t sure what to do with the old woman. We didn’t even know her name, and really didn’t want to. We was also scared right then of going outside after all that talk about Skunk, and though we knew we’d have to in time, we decided it was more than we was ready to handle right then. So what we done was we took that bloody rug we had rolled up and laid aside, unrolled it, and wrapped her up in it. We done it so good you couldn’t see nothing left of her but the bottoms of her shoes on one end and the top of her cotton bonnet on the other. Then we put her and the rug in the closet and shut the door. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So now the day wore on, and we looked around the house for some food and found some dried-out biscuits in the stove warmer. If there had been enough of them, we could have used them to build a wall around the house—and it would have been solid, too. We soaked the biscuits in water till they wouldn’t break your teeth off, and ate what we could of them.

I took some of the wet bread into Terry, who was starting to stir. He was covered in sweat, but then again, it wasn’t just his condition. We all were sweating. It was summer hot and the house was closed up tight as an old maid’s purse. The idea of opening some windows was mentioned, but no one wanted to be the one that let Skunk in, so we just grinned and stood it.

By the time I come into Terry’s room with the biscuits, Mama and Jinx had stretched out on some pallets in the living room, cause it was my time with him, and as that was the case, and as he was awake and needed to be fed, I closed the door and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

I tried to give him some of them softened biscuits, but he wouldn’t have none of it. He pushed the tin plate to the other side of the bed. He said, “You shouldn’t have allowed my arm to be removed.”

“There wasn’t no choice. You had been out of it for some time, and was sick and feverish, and that arm of yours was black as a hole in the ground, and juicy-like with pus.”

He sat there for a while, said, “What did you do with it?”

“We put it in a box,” I said.

“Where is it now?”

“It’s in the other room on a shelf.”

“On a shelf?”

“We hadn’t been wanting to go outside no more because of Skunk. The old lady knew about him.” I told Terry all she had said. I finished with: “The old lady is dead and rolled up in a rug and stuck in the closet.”

“What happened to the money and May Lynn?”

“Down by the river pushed up under some blackberry bushes.”

“You sure there wasn’t another alternative when it came to my arm?” Terry asked.

“If that means another choice, I don’t think so.”

“May I see it?”

“Your arm?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“I want to see the shape it was in.”

“It’s been cut off all day and it’s warm,” I said.

“I understand that,” he said.

“All right,” I said, and went quietly out the door and got the box. I went back to the bedroom, closed the door again, and set the box on the bed, opened it up. Stink came out of it like a dead fish. Terry wrinkled his nose, looked in.

“Close it up, Sue Ellen.”

I did.

“You did right,” he said. “It had progressed to an irreparable stage.”

“It would have killed you,” I said. “Old woman who kept us here was as rotten as they come, rotten as that arm, but she knew how to cut it off, though Mama had to finish up the job.”

“There’s an old woman wrapped in a rug?”

“In the closet.”

“After all we have been through,” Terry said, “something like that shouldn’t astonish me.”

“Terry, I got to ask you about something I think I’ve figured out, and I wish I hadn’t.”

He looked at me while I tried to find the words. I couldn’t find them, least not right away.

“I thought you might have something on your mind,” he said. “Way you’re staring at me, I doubt it’s just because I am a cripple.”

“It ain’t that at all.”

“Then let loose with it.”

“May Lynn, when we found her body, it had a sewing machine wired to it, tied off in a bow. Later, when I was down by the river, I came upon a bag you had tied. I had seen it before, the way you tied it off, but it didn’t hit me because I couldn’t believe such a thing. But it struck me then, way that bow looked. It wasn’t wire, but it had the same look about it that wire bow had. It got me to thinking. You was sure all fired up about burning her to ash and taking her off to Hollywood. Also, your mama, she was a seamstress, and your stepdaddy made her get rid of her stuff, and then it all come together.”

Terry looked at the wall the way you would if you could see enemy soldiers marching toward you.

“I don’t know why you done it, Terry,” I said. “That’s what’s been hard for me to cipher, but I think you done it. I feel bad for thinking that way, but it sure looks like—”

“I did it,” he said. “I am responsible.”

Even though I figured as much, hearing him say it made it feel like someone had ripped the bottom out of the world.

“Why?” I said.

“It isn’t what you might conjecture,” he said.

“Then what kind of ’jecture is it?”

Terry leaned back heavily against the pillows. The air in the room was as stuffy as if we was in a tow sack with a bunch of chicken feathers.

“We have all been so close for years,” he said, “and now it’s come to this.”

“How did it happen?” I said. “And why?”

“Me and her had begun to talk privately. I had come to the conclusion that she was on her way to Hollywood. I was glad for her, really, and even then I thought I might go with her. She confided in me about a lot of things, and one of those things was she was certain that she could cure me.”

“Cure you?”

“Of being a sissy.”

“Oh.”

“I believed my life would be enhanced if I could be attracted to girls. I knew from the way men acted around her that if I could be attracted to anyone, it should be her. But it wasn’t that way. Well, not the way it should be, boy and girl, that sort of thing. We were out at the swimming hole, at night, up in the old oak over the river, out on the big limb. It was night and she was stripped off, and so was I, like we had done many times before, and she stood up on the limb, and positioned herself on it with a knee forward, her hands on her hips, said to me, ‘Terry, how do you like my body?’

“I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that question, so I said something like: ‘It’s excellent. Very nice.’ This just made her mad. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. She said, ‘You can’t look at me and want me the way a man wants a woman?’

“I said, ‘I guess not,’ and May Lynn, she says, ‘Everyone wants me, and if you don’t, then you are a queer and you’ll stay that way,’ or words to that effect. She said that very mean, and I was so upset with her I pushed her. I didn’t mean to do it, or rather I didn’t even know I was doing it until she went backward off the limb and fell in the water.”

“She’s jumped out of that tree plenty,” I said. “How’d that kill her?”

“It didn’t,” Terry said. “I looked down at her, and she looked up and laughed. Not in a fun way, like we’d had a bit of a disagreement, but like she knew why I had done it. That I was in fact a sissy, and couldn’t live up to what she thought a man ought to be. The worst part was she saw all that as something funny and pathetic. I was so irate I leaped off that limb at her, gathered my feet beneath me cannonball-style. And I hit her, too. I remember looking down just in time to see her face look up at me, and I observed her expression change. It went from humor to fear, and I have to admit that in that brief moment, it pleased me. I hit on top of her. It was a hard hit. It drove both of us down deep in the water.

“When I floated up, I wasn’t angry anymore, just frightened. I knew how hard I had dropped on her. I searched for her, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Then I saw her pop up in the moonlight like a cork. I think she shook her head a little, like there were cobwebs in her brain. She was drifting downriver, and I started swimming for her, hard as I could, but it seemed like the harder I tried, the more rapidly she was swept away. I couldn’t catch up. She tried to swim, but she couldn’t swim fast enough to defeat the current. She screamed, Sue Ellen. She screamed, and she called my name, and then she went under.

“I was at the end of my strength. I didn’t leap after her. I knew if I did, I would drown as well. I struck out for shore. It didn’t seem to me I was going to make it. Part of me didn’t want to, but the other part of me, the cowardly part that wanted to live, just kept swimming. Next thing I knew I was on the shore. I looked out over the water, to see if I could find her, but I couldn’t. She had gone under, and as far as I could tell, she hadn’t come up.”

“Jesus, Terry.”

“That isn’t the worst of it. I ran along the shore, calling her name, but nothing. And then I came to a place where the river turned, and there she was. She had washed up in a bend and was banging up against the shore. I grabbed her and tugged on her until I managed to haul her from the river. I don’t know how far I pulled her, but when I looked back at the river it was a far distance from me. I laid her out in the grass. I talked to her. I yelled at her. I sat her up, bent her over, thinking some of the water would come out of her, but she was gone.

“I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. I started wandering around aimlessly. I finally walked back and got my clothes and got dressed. I got her dress because I couldn’t stand for her to be naked like that. I pulled it on her body as best I could and left her there, decided to go home. It made sense all of a sudden. I would just go home. I was almost home and I thought: I left my friend lying back there dead in the grass and I didn’t plan to tell anyone. I can’t explain it. I thought if I tried to tell someone what had occurred, they might think I murdered her…Which I guess I did. Before I got home, I veered back to the place on the river where my stepfather had deposited all my mama’s sewing materials. He had become angry, and didn’t merely demand she quit, he made me help him load all her equipment, everything that had to do with her sewing business, in the back of his truck. We drove down to the river, backed to where it sloped off, and I had to get in the truck bed with him and help him toss everything out. He thought he’d shove the sewing machine out and it would slide into the river. It didn’t make it all the way. It ended up partially in the river, partially on land.

“I remembered that event walking back home, and at the time, I thought it best to hide May Lynn’s body. It doesn’t seem smart at the moment, but back then the idea arrived in such a fashion I convinced myself it was a stroke of genius.

“There was some wire with the sewing machine. It had come out of the pickup. It was wire for binding bricks into piles, and it had been in the back of the truck. Some of it came out when we pushed Mama’s equipment out. I got the wire and coiled it up and tried to carry the sewing machine.