The Devil Walks in Mattingly (26 page)

Bobby’s truck pulled to the curb where we stood. He rolled down the window and leaned back as Justus leaned forward.

“We’re bound for Riverwood,” he said. “Gonna split up there and cover the ground west to Three Peaks. Lots of places to hole up around there.”

I said nothing. Nor did Big Jim. He’d challenged Justus enough at the meeting. He had no stomach for more.

Kate said, “You shouldn’t be doing this, Justus. You’ll only stir the town.”

“Stirrin’s what this town needs, Katelyn.” Justus turned to me. “You comin’?”

“Got work,” I said.

Justus turned up his nose. Bobby offered a sad shake of his head. Do you know what that feels like, having the town drunk look on you with pity? It was one brief moment, but it was a look I knew I’d remember for the rest of my life. And yet that didn’t stop me from going north as Bobby and my father drove south.

3

Taylor had tried once to use the binoculars to peer in the direction of the rusty gate—this was some weeks after what happened along the riverbank, back when he considered every snapping twig and whispered breeze to be either a ghost or townspeople bent on justice—but what he saw was distorted and far away. Once, as an experiment, he’d taken them atop Indian Hill to look past the river bend to the cliffs beyond—as close as Taylor ever wanted to get again. The binoculars hadn’t worked there either. It was only when he panned the lenses down toward town that the images shone clear and close, so
that was where Taylor had trained them since. That was where he trained them now.

Kate was down there. Lucy hadn’t seen her yet, but others had. And Kate had married Jake. That last bit of information was old to Taylor now, but it still carried a charge. He’d seen the group of men leave the center of town, but no truck or car matched what he thought Mattingly’s sheriff would drive. There had been women on the street. Taylor believed Kate was surely among them, but he couldn’t remember her face well enough to pick her out. The years had dulled his memory at the edges. Taylor had forgotten much, and what he recalled was little more than scraps of litter that blew across his mind in sporadic waves.

He had gone without a fire and breakfast that morning, leaving Lucy at peace. She’d done well the past days; sleep was what she needed now. Taylor knew the lady had much on her mind. As did he.

Because the Hole called to Lucy Seekins, and in a way it never had to him. Taylor had known that the moment her eyes beheld the grove. He’d known it more when she’d dared to go there without him the day before. And as he sat upon his log that morning (seeing the town, yes, but looking into his own heart more), Taylor thought of how anxious he’d been watching her go and how much that feeling had frightened him. He’d gone for Lucy later—just to see to her safety, he told himself, though he also told himself that was a lie—but the elation that had come upon finding her safely in the grove gave way to the shock at what she’d found.

The hands. Lucy had found the hands.

And not only that, the lady had also faced the bear. The evidence of that had been all over the field and plain enough for even a blind man to see. That she had and that she’d lived could only mean one thing.

Taylor heard her shuffles before her shadow fell upon him. Lucy sat at her place on the log. She’d exchanged the shorts and shirt she’d worn for jeans and a white camisole. They remained in silence for some time and watched the sun make its slow arc over the valley below. The mountains in the distance were a deep blue, like waves gathering to crash.

Lucy said, “I grew up in Washington, DC. That’s about as far away from here as a place can be and still lie in the world. My friends and me used to stay up all night. Carrying on, partying, you know. Usually it was at my apartment, because Dad was always gone. When morning came we’d all go up to the roof and watch the sun come up over the office buildings and warehouses. It would start out orange, then turn red in all the smog.”

Taylor considered this and said, “That sounds plain awful.”

“I didn’t used to think so. Just a couple days ago, there was nothing I wouldn’t do to get back there. But now . . . yeah. It does seem awful, doesn’t it?”

Taylor laid the binoculars on the log and turned to her. “We should have us a word, lady. About what you seen at the Hole. All else’ll wait.”

Lucy glanced down at her feet. The sun colored her cheeks like roses. Taylor looked away. “What were they?” she asked. “Those hands.”

“The Hole was here before there was a Here,” Taylor said. “We all got a middle, Lucy Seekins. World’s no different. What lies in that grove is the world’s middle. It’s a holy place in need of a Keeper. Those handprints, they’re a chronicle. That’s the best I can say. Those walls are a record of the ones this Holler’s called to itself. We answered, me and all those come before me, stretching on back generations, maybe thousands of years, and we wandered this wood and found that special
place. It becomes ours to tend. The berries on that bush in the grove? That’s why they’re there. You mash them up and dip your hand in, and you put your mark upon the wall. My own hand’s upon that wall along with all the rest. It means we’re bound. We belong to this Holler and we cast all else aside. Never thought you’d find them. I never wanted to take you there, lady, but you needed proof of the things I speak. Now the Holler’s spoke. It means to make you Keeper next.”

Lucy looked at Taylor in a way he could not comprehend. He saw in her countenance joy and sadness, pain and elation.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Are you leaving?”

“I don’t know, lady. The dream’s a mystery. I told you of the burden I keep. I believe to Wake would be a fair going, and I’d oblige someone to lay me down when the time comes. But I’m not going soon. There’s too much work to do and too much for me to show you. After?” Taylor shrugged. “All I have will be yours then. But mind what I say—you’d leave all else behind, for this life and after. Those eyes you feel on this side of the rusty gate are those who’ve come to the grove before. Such is what I believe is true. Absent with the body and present with the Lord may be the rule down in the world, but not here. This Holler’s a selfish lover, Lucy Seekins, and will not abide a divided heart. Once you give yourself over to it, here’s where you stay. This will be your kingdom, but it will also be your cell.”

Lucy’s eyes went to the wild spaces around them. She looked to town. Taylor looked at her again and saw how comely she was. Her hair had gone without a brush for two days and was jagged by sleep and wind, but she was wondrous just the same.

“My mother died when I was born,” she said. “My dad told me that I came out wrong. I think about that a lot, how I came into the world crooked. My dad used to call her Smiles. He calls
me that too, because he says I smile like her. He says she always smiled. I guess that’s true. That’s what she’s doing in all the pictures I’ve ever seen of her. But sometimes I think she’s not smiling at all. Sometimes I think she’s trying to tell me something, like when those pictures were taken she knew I’d see them and she wouldn’t be here, and she wanted to tell me all the things she wanted me to know. Sometimes at night when the weather’s turned bad, I think I hear her in the rain. But I can’t make out what she’s trying to say. It’s like the pictures that way.

“My dad blames me for her dying. I can see it in him when he looks at me. I think that’s why he’s gone so much. I think he hates it that it wasn’t up to him which one of us to keep, me or her. He’d have chosen her. I can’t blame him. I never thought there was much hope for me.”

“I won’t hear that. There’s hope, lady. Always.” Taylor inched himself down the log. He took Lucy’s hand and placed it to her chest, holding it there. “What do you feel?”

“My heartbeat.”

“No, lady. I say that’s hope. As long as you feel that life in you, there’s hope still.”

Tears welled in Lucy’s eyes. She tried to pull them in and could not. Taylor put his hand to the place on her cheek the sunlight had warmed. She gripped his fingers and said, “All my life I wanted a family. What I got instead was a father who’s about to send me away and a mother who couldn’t bear to be in the same world as me.”

“I’ll be your fam’ly,” Taylor said. “It’ll be us. Us and this Holler, if it deems you worthy.”

Lucy went to his arms. Taylor held her in the same way he imagined her father should have—tight, so she’d never leave. He let her cry and watched the Hollow’s hard earth drink her tears like a desert drinks the rain.

“I want to be like you,” she said. “I want to be here with you. I’ll do anything.”

Taylor smiled. There was no hiding it. “You want to be like me?”

Lucy nodded.

“To be what I am means doing as I’ve done, lady. Nothing more or less. But you have to choose to be here. All we are is what’s left of the choices we made. This Holler’s no different. You want to call it home and me your family, all it asks of you is what it asked of me—a sacrifice.”

“I don’t understand,” Lucy said.

Taylor moved close. He put a hand to Lucy’s knee. “What I’m saying, Lucy Seekins, is you gotta Wake somebody.”

4

It was Tuesday, and Tuesdays meant a patrol through the hill country past the Devereaux farm. That’s what I called my drives when in the presence of Kate or Zach or any of the townspeople. Headin’ out to patrol, I’d say, as though that were some monumental task fraught with peril. All I really did was stop by Hollis’s and say hello, maybe have a glass of Edith’s sweet tea, then drive seven miles or so on to Boone’s Pond and see if the fish were biting. No better fishing in Mattingly than Boone’s Pond.

So when I told Kate I was going to patrol, I was only doing the normal thing. That’s what Big Jim wanted from all of us. And me heading north while Justus and his men headed south? No significance there at all. Such was what I told myself in the kindest, most convincing way possible. I’d do my job and my father would do his, which offered me little comfort. The
rest? Well, I supposed the rest was up to God. That offered me little comfort as well.

I’d been raised to believe in the God of the New Testament, the God who became man and preached grace and forgiveness and died for my sins. It was a faith I never doubted until the day I met Phillip along the riverbank. Oh, I still went to church after. I still prayed and amened during Preacher Goggins’s sermons. Still ate the wafer and drank the grape juice each month. Still believed. But it was never Jesus I saw when I closed my eyes and folded my hands. From then on, it was Jehovah. The Holy Judge.

The road wound past the BP and Hollis’s farm, but I didn’t stop for a glass of tea that day. Four miles on and three miles from Boone’s Pond, I turned down a one-lane stretch of hardpan seldom traveled but for party-seeking teenagers. The road weaved through miles of hill country before ending in a sudden T.

It was only when I turned left for the mountains that I realized where I was heading, and it was only when the hardpan turned to a dark, packed clay and I made a left turn through a broken place in the oaks that I realized I could not turn back. And I remember thinking,
Why not? Why not this place?
Because the rusty gate had always called to me in much the same way that Phillip’s grave called to Kate. The only difference was that my fear had made me run from my past, while Kate’s had kept her there.

I sat for a long while, watching sunlight fall upon one side of the gate and gray fall upon the other. I reached for Bessie and stepped out to the iron piling on the left. It was taller than me and as thick as my own waist, fastened deep into the earth. I ran a tired hand along its flaking edge to the top and then over, where a series of ten horizontal bars ran a dozen feet or so to the piling on the right.

I don’t know who built that gate or when. The general consensus among the old-timers was that the gate was there before the town, and to ponder more was to waste your time. It was as good an answer as any.

The gate couldn’t keep anyone out, of course. All one had to do was step around either side and keep walking, right on to Indian Hill if they had a mind. But I don’t think the gate’s there to keep anyone out. I think it’s a warning.

I bent and studied the hundreds of names that had been scratched into the iron over the years. The oldest had been carved into the middle crossbar, and those etchings lay so faded they appeared as ancient runes. Outward toward the edges were names I knew—Hollis’s and Justus’s close together, Trevor’s and Bobby’s lower, near the bottom of the left piling. I found Andy Sommerville’s name and Timmy’s as well, along with a frantic scrawl that spelled out
JIM
. I guess the mayor had not been so big the day he’d carved those three letters. He’d been too afraid to linger even long enough to add Wallis on the end.

There was no carving that spelled out Taylor Hathcock. I thought that meant little. My own name was missing, after all. And not only had I faced the gate, I’d walked on. Then I’d been a boy intent to prove himself a man. Now I stood there a man who understood he’d always be a boy.

I brought Bessie forward and ran her curved head along the gate’s upper bar, watched as sunlight glinted off the blade. In a way it had been my daddy’s tomahawk that had brought me there at seventeen, or at least the promise of her. Back then Bessie held a place of distinction on the mantle, flanked by a picture of her in my grandfather’s hand against the backdrop of some Pacific island and a picture of her in Justus’s hand in the middle of some Vietnamese jungle. There’d been a spot reserved there for me as well—holding her in the Iraqi sand,
perhaps. But that had been Joey and Frankie’s war, not mine. By then I’d seen enough blood.

Justus had already thought me weak. Staying behind while a war was on only cemented that idea. My momma got the cancer when I was ten, died when I was eleven. I always felt there was more of her and less of Justus in me, and a part of my heart went soft when she passed. Still, I couldn’t bear knowing my father thought of me that way. Justus thought that way still when he handed Bessie to me the day he left for Crawford’s Gap. I took her anyway. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying he loved me.