The Devil Walks in Mattingly (41 page)

“All I had was my old Buck knife. Justus still had Bessie then, and whether he’d pass her on to me was still a subject of question.” I touched the steel at the small of my back, reminding myself that that issue, at least, had been settled. “My hand was shaking like you wouldn’t believe when I took that knife out. Every boy’s heard stories of the Holler. You hear them growing up. The good ones’ll put a fright in you, but none of them match being here. You can feel it. It’s like a blade dangling over your head, getting ready to drop.

“I don’t know what made me look up. Maybe it was my fear looking out or maybe I heard something back in the trees. I saw Indian Hill up there. It was day still, but it was closing in on . . .” I paused. “Eventide. I could see the pines atop it, the only green things for miles. And I got this idea then, crazy as it was—
nobody’s probably set foot on that hill in all of history.
I still think maybe that was true. Who’d go all that way up there through this wood? Who’d have that kind of guts? No one. Not even my daddy had gone past the gate.

“I lit out before I could talk myself out of it. Turned my back probably a hundred times in the first hundred steps, just to make sure the gate was still here and I hadn’t been swallowed up. My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my throat. But I kept walking. All the way to the hill. All the way, Kate.”

I turned. It was just for a moment and just to see where Kate was. She’d taken two steps closer and was holding herself tighter. I looked back to the gate. To the hill.

“Made it up there just as the sun was going down. I saw no devils and heard no ghosts. There was just an empty quiet. And you know what? It’s beautiful up on that hill, at least as
beautiful as anything in the Holler can be. It’s dead land out there, but it’s untouched. There’s a magic to it. The river’s on the other side. It comes down through some cliffs and winds on down. To town eventually, I guess.

“And I thought,
Coming this way wasn’t so bad. If I hoof it down to the river, I’ll be back before night.

“If I’d do anything over in my life, Kate, it’d be that. It doesn’t seem right that a life can turn on one choice, but it can. I walked down the other side and came to the river. Followed it around the bend to where the cliffs lay. I thought I’d pushed my luck far enough and started to turn back when I saw something lying on the bank just a-ways ahead. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it wasn’t driftwood and I knew it didn’t belong. There were butterflies all around it. White ones. They’d light on whatever it was and flit away, circle around and land again. I got closer and saw it was a boy—it was Phillip. His glasses were lying near, all broken. His body was broken worse. His blood was all over the rocks. The butterflies were feeding on it.” I shook my head. “It was like bees to honey.”

Kate began to cry. I wanted to go to her but didn’t. I’d started this tale, and I meant to have its end.

“I didn’t know what to do, seeing him that way. I looked up and guessed he must’ve tumbled from the cliffs, but I couldn’t understand how he’d gotten up there and so deep in the Holler. That drop, it had to be thirty feet at least. Phillip’s lying there and his arms and legs are at these angles that aren’t possible, and I’m shaking as I stare at him and I feel eyes on me, like something’s watching. And then all of a sudden he reaches out for me. He’s trying to talk but he can’t because he’s so banged up. He’s just wiggling his fingers like, and he’s making these noises like a hurt animal and I just screamed. I screamed, Kate,
and then I ran. I turned and took three steps and stumbled on the rocks. Landed on my arm”—I pointed to my scar—“right here. Then I got up and ran harder than I’ve ever run in my life. Back over the hill and on through the Holler and I don’t care what devils I see or what ghosts reach up for me from the dirt, all I want to do is run. All the way back to the gate and my truck. I’m shaking so bad and crying so hard when I get there, I can’t even turn the engine over. Once I do, I’m gone. I flew, Kate. Wonder I didn’t run off the road.”

Far away, Kate spoke. “You didn’t tell anyone?”

I shook my head. “Meant to a thousand times. Justus asked about the gash on my arm. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I knew he’d ask why I didn’t bring Phillip out or why I didn’t go straight to Sheriff Houser, anything other than run away and leave that boy to die. And then I got to thinking maybe Phillip hadn’t been in that bad of shape, maybe it was the Holler playing tricks or maybe Phillip was playing a trick himself. Maybe he’d just picked himself up after I ran off and walked back home with a big laugh. That’s what I told myself—that if I told Justus and he’d got the sheriff out there and Phillip was nowhere to be seen, it would be worse. I figured I’d keep quiet and wait. Just one day, just to make sure. But that was my shame talking.

“Saturday morning came and went. There was no word. Then Justus came home from town that evening and gathered Bessie and a light, asking me if I knew a boy named Phillip McBride. I told Justus I didn’t really, Phillip was just a kid at school and everybody called him Phil the Fairy. Justus told me the boy was gone. They’d found his daddy’s truck along a switchback in the hill country, and Sheriff Houser believed he’d either gotten himself lost in the woods or been taken by a sex pervert. It was too late for me then. If I ’fessed to what I
saw, Justus and the sheriff both would’ve condemned me as a murderer. And that was true, what I deserved.

“I was in hell for another day, trying to find a way to go. I called Sheriff Houser Monday before school and hid my voice. He found Phillip that afternoon. Went into the Holler alone. No one dared go with him, not even Justus. Sheriff Houser said it was his duty. I thought about that often when they said I was the new sheriff. I think about it still.

“By then, what’d happened at school got out. So did the stuff about how Phillip’s daddy always beat on him and his momma. They figured Phillip was upset and didn’t feel like he could go home, so he got out of that truck and started walking. I knew you’d take all that blame, Kate. Even when they called it suicide, I knew you’d put Phillip’s death on yourself.”

Kate’s words were a knife that sank deep—“
You never told me otherwise!
” she screamed. “Even when we started dating, Jake? Even when we were
married
? All these years,
and you never told
me
?”

“I loved you,” I said. I turned so she could see my face, and though I spoke with a desperation that neared anger, I kept my voice even. “I love you still. All I ever wanted was for you to think of me as a good man, Kate. What Justus thinks and Trevor and Bobby Barnes and the mayor, what the whole town thinks, doesn’t matter. What matters is you and Zach.”

I gripped my head, aiming to jerk the words out that my tongue couldn’t carry.

“The burden I’ve carried, Kate. All that weight on me. I know the load you carry. I won’t say mine is heavier, only that it’s different. All a man has is his honor. It’s the one thing that’s his and the world can’t take, and the only way you lose it is if you give it away. But once you do it’s like you’re walking around naked and cold, and you can have the love of God and
the help of Jesus, but you live in hell just the same. I wish you could understand that, Kate. With all my heart, I do. But you can’t. You can’t know why I never told you, I can only hope you’ll try and understand.”

Kate took a step to me. The smooth skin where her jaws met bulged, and her eyes were two hard coals. All I had just confessed had been met with everything I’d always feared—Kate’s love crumbled beneath her tears, spilled away, and I would never have it again.

“Don’t you dare think only a man is saddled with honor, Jake Barnett,” she said, “and don’t you dare tell me only a man can suffer at its passing.”

“I just wanted you to love me. I just wanted to protect what we have.”

She shook her head. “What we have, Jake? What do we have? Everything we’ve built together is a lie.”

“Don’t say that, Kate,” I said. “Please don’t. Please just try to understand.”

Kate offered no such consolation, nor did I deserve one. She only stood there, looking not into my eyes—I didn’t think Kate could, and I didn’t blame her—but at a spot over my right shoulder. Her eyes widened.

She reached for my arm and asked, “What’s that?”

I turned back to the gate. Far beyond, a single white light burst from among the pines atop Indian Hill. It held steady and did not move, pressing back against the night like a beacon.

Phillip McBride had vowed to me that he would return for an end once we all had remembered true. Standing there staring at that speck of brightness, I knew I’d done just that. No less than I knew Kate had on our long ride to the Hollow. No less, perhaps, than Taylor Hathcock, who lay waiting
for me somewhere in the endless miles of wilderness on the other side of the gate. And at the very moment Big Jim Wallis declared his emergency meeting to order (and put it on record that I was too cowardly to appear), I understood an end had come.

I stepped alongside Kate and took her hand. She allowed it.

7

“That’s Lucy,” Kate said. “That has to be Lucy, Jake.”

She stared at the faraway light (a pinprick from the distance between the hill and the gate, and yet that pinprick shone brighter than the moon) and gripped Jake with both hands. Kate moved only when she felt his hand feeling for Bessie. His face had drained of all color. He looked like one of the Hollow’s ghosts.

“We should go back,” Jake said. “Let me call Alan. Call everybody. Get some men up here.”

Kate stepped away toward the gate and said, “No, Jake. Lucy’s up there
now
. Go or stay or do whatever you want, but I’m going up there.”

“There’s worse things in the Holler than Taylor Hathcock, Kate. It isn’t safe.”

“I don’t care about me and I don’t care about you, I care about what I did to him, Jake. I care about what I drove that man to do. I care about
Lucy
. She’s in trouble, and you’d know that if you’d spent your life doing anything other than hiding behind your lies.”

Kate regretted those words as soon as she said them, though not enough to apologize. Jake’s confession still stung. Yet the pain on his face hiding behind a pair of sunken eyes
and graying stubble, the way his uniform hung from a pair of wiry shoulders, the thickening of his words as though spoken through a curtain of weariness, those things stung her even more. She could almost excuse Jake for running from Phillip that day. He was only a scared boy, after all. That Jake had made the phone call to Sheriff Houser didn’t excuse his silence, but wasn’t it something? Kate wanted to believe yes. She wanted to believe it if only because she had sought to prove one thing since that day behind the bleachers—people didn’t have to remain what they were. They could change. They could become better. And wasn’t she? Wasn’t Jake?

And there was one last point, one Kate refused to let surface while Jake had told his story but one that shoved its way forward now: it wouldn’t have mattered if Jake Barnett had brought the world upon the Hollow to save Phillip that day. To Kate, the one unchangeable fact was that Phillip McBride would have never pulled his daddy’s truck over and taken a walk that ended in his death if she’d not driven him to do so. The truth would have changed nothing. Kate would still have carried the weight of what she’d done in a notebook full of good deeds the same way her husband carried the weight of what he would never become in Bessie. They would hold those things so close that even the smallest movement would be a reminder that neither of them could ever have the peace that comes from a conscience free of regret. Jake may have let Phillip die, but Kate would always believe she killed him.

“Come on,” Jake said. “Stay close to me. Holler’s not a place to be in daylight. I expect it’ll be worse now.”

Kate took Jake’s hand. And though she understood they were no longer one, they stepped beyond the gate together.

Eyes upon her, so many eyes. Crawling over Kate’s skin like ants. The dark closed in and those eyes watched and she knew it was death, it was all death.

She whispered, “The moon’s gone,” and in the silence of that great wood, her words sounded like a shout.

Jake looked up. The canopy of trees blocked the sky. He pointed to the top of the hill and said, “We’ve light enough. Quiet now. Mind your steps, and don’t let go of me. The way’s tangled.”

They crept as quiet as they could through the brambles. Kate winced as thorns bit into her skin and kept Indian Hill in her sights. There was only that light shining out of the Hollow’s dark throat, and when they finally crested the hill, that light came from everywhere and nowhere. It shined upon the pine needles like tiny suns and made the rocks at her feet glow in yellows and oranges. Even the gray dirt that covered the Hollow looked golden.

“Lucy?” Kate called. She shielded her eyes and waited for an answer. None came. “Where’s it coming from, Jake? I can’t see where to go.”

Her eyes skated ahead to the right, where something tickled a low-hanging branch. Jake reached for Bessie and put Kate behind him.

“Lucy?” she called.

Kate’s hand tightened upon Jake’s even before her mind could accept what she saw. The world melted away and left only that small, childlike voice that lives in the heart of every person and tells us to turn back, to go no farther, because what lies behind may be grief but ahead lie all the monsters that have haunted all our dreams.

What came walking toward them from the trees was not Lucy Seekins. It was a dead boy.

8

“What’s that?”

Lucy flinched as Taylor’s face,
vacant and still through his remembering, now came alive in an expression of shock. He shoved the book back into his pocket and spun, reaching for the shotgun he’d leaned against a fallen log behind the fire. Lucy backed away, her eyes searching for trouble that for now only her railing heart could feel. Taylor swung the barrel wide across the river and steadied it upon a dark, far-off spot beyond the bend.

She put herself behind him and asked, “What is it? What are you pointing at?”