The Devil Walks in Mattingly (45 page)

I heard Taylor’s pained moan in my ears. The weight upon my shoulders doubled as he pressed in on the back of my neck. His blood and my sweat made it impossible to keep him centered. Kate fell to her knees and sat motionless at the mouth of the Hole. It was as though Lucy had taken the air around us as a souvenir of the world she left behind.

Taylor said, “Take me there, Jake.”

“I can’t. If I do, I’ll never get you back up.”

“Take me there.”

I struggled down the remainder of the path and laid Taylor at the Hole, then knelt to Kate. I eased her head onto my shoulder.

“Where did she go, Jake?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer. The two of us stared ahead, me trying to make sense of the insensible, Kate praying that what could go in there could somehow find its way back. Whispers descended from the trees like leaves rustled by a strong wind. Phillip stood in our midst, shielding us with a light that waned to no more than an arm’s length. He pointed to the woods and then to Taylor, whose eyes were vacant and shone as glass. Blood soaked through the shirt over his wound. Phillip did not speak, yet I understood. We could not tarry.

“Leave me lay, Jake,” Taylor said. “This wood has bound me. Let me rest, and let the eyes upon us be my judgment.”

I squatted down. Pain seared my side. And though every part of my careworn body longed to let Taylor lie there, I said, “I’m not letting another person die in this Holler.”

I pulled him partway up before the muscles in my arms seized. I cursed as Taylor fell back to the ground. Kate moved behind him and lifted his shoulders.

“No,” I said.

“Let me help, Jake,” she said. “You can’t do this on your own.”

Phillip reached out his fist.

“I have to,” I told her, told him. “Taylor is my burden. I have to do this. Me.”

It was with an anger that I couldn’t do it that I lifted Taylor to my shoulders. I made the bloody shirt over his chest a pillow against my neck, then rose on two quivering legs. The whispers grew. Tendrils of dim fog wove among the trees on the hillock above.

“How far?” I asked Phillip.

He spread his arms wide.

Kate looked down and reached for Bessie. She said, “Let me help you, Jake. Please. We won’t make it.”

“Stay in front of me,” I said. “If you’re in front, I’ll be okay. Just keep in Phillip’s light.”

We moved back up the path and away from the grove. The eyes crowded in. Whispers became chattering. As we crossed into the trees, Kate turned to look at the Hole a final time.

We came to the field and crossed back into the deep woods. My body cried for the rest it had been denied for weeks as my boots struggled to find footing beneath Taylor’s mass. Twice I stumbled, nearly pitching my load. Phillip kept his eyes ahead and around, marking what we could not see. His light waned.

Kate placed her hand over her ears. “Laughing, Jake,” she said. “I hear laughing.”

She shook her head, trying to force that noise away.

Phillip’s light pulsed as he fought against what lived in that darkness. He looked at me often, plying me forward with his fist. The fog gathered into sexless bodies that stared out at me. I saw faces of those who’d taunted and hated me—Bobby Barnes and Trevor Morgan. Justus. Andy Sommerville asking
why I never waved the day I’d passed the BP. Eric Thayer standing with Taylor’s knife still in his chest.

My eyes went to the small patches of dead earth in front of me. One step at a time, one foot in front of another. Phillip moved on as we huddled in the fringes of his light. My struggle was with my own body and the body draped over me. Phillip’s was with the powers and principalities that encircled us all.

We came to the waterfall when Taylor said, “I feel this Holler, Jake. It comes for us.”

My foot caught the root of a dead maple, sending me sprawling. Taylor landed and called out in an agony that the Hollow tasted like sugar. Phillip and Kate turned back. In my exhaustion I saw the trees bend to swallow us. Hands that were neither beast nor illusion reached out and drew back, taunting.

I lay on my back in the midst of hell and found I could do no more. Kate fell to her knees at my side, crying. She took Taylor’s hand and my own, linking us together. Phillip McBride stood over the three people who had killed him. He had drawn us for an end. That end was now.

Lying there on that hard earth, Phillip finally broke me. I had been stripped bare by all those years of worry and dread and all those sleepless nights of running away from what I only ran to again. I’d lived in fear since the day Phillip died. Lived, even, as a coward. And yet as the Hollow’s eyes closed in around us, I saw that it may have been fear that had made me run from the riverbank that day, but pride was what had kept me running since. Pride, not fear, was what had plunged my life into darkness. Pride, not fear, had kept me from unburdening Kate of her guilt. Pride, not fear, was what convinced me to do as Taylor had said and call Alan Martin’s men away.

Pride, pride all. One that said I had sinned alone and so must bear the suffering for it alone. No less than Kate, who
had given joy to hundreds of children but who had never given joy to herself. No less than even Taylor, who had hidden both himself and his guilt since that day upon the cliffs in a place of no hope. We were all trying to survive our weariness alone.

Phillip looked down to me and raised a fist as the truth of why he had returned shone as brightly to me as he had appeared atop Indian Hill. And in that moment, I understood. I understood everything.

We were not dead because Phillip had come back. Phillip had come back because we were dead.

“Help me,” I told him. “We can’t save ourselves.”

The light in Phillip returned with a smile that shuddered the Hollow. He raised his arm high into that black sky as the shadows closed in. And when he opened his hand, there came a sea of white and the sound of ten thousand wings.

17

The butterflies shot as lights into the Hollow’s night, angling out into all directions, filling every black space. A cry rose from the heart of that cursed wood louder and more pained than any Taylor had offered, and from a wound far deeper. The lights buzzed and hummed in a song that hurt my ears with their beauty. They swirled into a sphere that gathered around us. The air inside that bright dome turned from poison to sweetness, filling our lungs with life beyond any living Kate and I had ever known. Of all the things from that night, all those wonders and terrors, that is what I remember most. Ask Kate and she will say the same—from there to the gate, we breathed heaven.

And yet Taylor’s wound still bled and his breaths still faded. I rose to lift him. He shook me away.

“Too late for me, Jake,” he said.

“No,” Kate said “We’re almost there. You just hang on.”

She eased her arm behind Taylor’s head and bent, kissing him on the forehead. And whether he was too tired from our journey or too enraptured at finally feeling the touch of Kate’s lips, Taylor did not protest when we lifted him from the ground. We carried him, Kate and I, she at one side and me at the other, sharing our burden. Phillip led us as that dome of lights swirled, making noonday in the midst of the howling darkness just beyond. Even now I cannot explain how that felt, knowing perfect protection surrounded me even as we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Often I long to feel that same assurance again. Often I believe that assurance is ours to have if we only believe.

The tips of Taylor’s worn boots skidded across the ground. Kate and I labored on, but with new strength.

“She loved me,” Taylor said. I felt a trickle of blood down my arm. “Spoke those very words. I spoke them back but did not know what they meant. Now she’s gone. She’s gone and there is a hole in me not of your making, Jake. It pains more than your blade. Is that love I feel?”

Kate was the one who answered. “It is,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”

Ahead the light danced upon the faint outline of angles and curves too precise to have sprouted from the Hollow’s dead ground.

“The gate’s near,” I told him.

Taylor coughed, spraying red mist into the air. “Am I a good man, Jake? Speak true, I beg.”

“There’s none good, there’s only grace and hard trying. Such is the truth, Taylor, and for us all.”

I felt Kate’s fingers lace into mine across Taylor’s back.

“Is there no forgiveness, then?” he asked. “Is there no mercy for me?”

Phillip turned to me. Each hard, shuffling step I took for the gate brought a new image—the red angels on the BP’s floor, the wounds on Timmy’s head. Phillip tumbling from the cliffs as Taylor pushed him, his throat too mangled to even scream. Phillip reaching out a bloody hand to beg for help as I ran. Kate walking across the football field with her ponytail swaying, fetching one boy and then another.

“There is mercy,” I said. “And there is forgiveness even for you. And after comes a long walk, but the going is fair.”

Taylor whispered, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” and I wanted to believe that wasn’t an apology to me or Kate or even Phillip, but an offering up of sins long harbored and finally let go. But I suppose such secrets are known only between a man and his Maker, and are hidden from all others on this side of heaven.

“We’re almost there, Taylor,” Kate said. “You hear me? You just hang on.”

We reached the gate as one. Phillip remained behind the bars as Taylor’s lungs filled a final time. His body shuddered against our shoulders as a long, mournful cry fell over the Hollow. Taylor Hathcock breathed out his spirit as we crossed beyond the dark mountains he’d called home for all those years, and though Kate and I could carry him no more, we did not want to let him go. When we laid his body down in soft grass, it was like laying a sick child down to rest.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “I never want to see this place again.”

Kate stepped to me and took my hand. Phillip remained on the other side of the gate. She looked at him and knew his mind.

“He’s not coming,” she said. “We’ll go home and so will he, but for now those are different places.”

Phillip smiled. Kate left my side and crossed back into the Hollow. She stood facing him, her eyes red and tired. There were no words. I knew words felt as empty to Kate then as the names written in her book. She held out her arms against the swirling lights around them, and Phillip met her with an embrace she felt not with her body but with her heart. Phillip healed my wife with that hug. He’d come for Kate and freed her from the bonds she’d long placed on herself. It was forgiveness he offered, and a plea for Kate to go on with her life. To live. To love. Standing there watching her, I felt a newness and a joy that had long departed.

Kate released him and returned to my side. Phillip turned and walked into the Hollow. To the grove, I guessed. On to home. He paused among the trees and looked back to me. Phillip said nothing, but there were words enough in his gaze. It was that same forgiveness and that same plea to move on, but it was also a knowing of what lay in my heart. I did not feel Kate’s joy, nor had my own chains been loosed. I was still dead and Phillip knew it. He knew it, and he said it would be yet awhile longer.

He raised a hand and smiled, then turned away. Phillip McBride had looked upon us with mourning atop Indian Hill. Now he looked upon us as friends well met and not long parted. We would gather again on some far-off day—Phillip, Kate, Taylor, and I. We would meet along the banks of a greater river and stand in a brighter light, and we would rejoice. I did not doubt it would be so. Life is a wheel, after all.

The Beginning

T
he
service was brief and without song beneath a clear sky, exactly a week after Reverend Goggins preached of life’s burdens and the faith to overcome them. The words had come easy to him in the pulpit that day, as soft words often did in hard times. Yet the preacher struggled as he stood over the pine box that held Taylor’s body. He spoke of how Mattingly’s devil had been only a man, and how that man had suffered as all who believed themselves flesh and bone and water and nothing more. He prayed for the wisdom to set aside yesterday and embrace tomorrow.

Zach, Justus, and I put our hats on at the preacher’s amen. He asked if any of us needed a word and took his leave when we all answered no. It was peace rather than counsel that had brought us there that day. Peace and a new beginning.

Kate’s eyes met mine. I offered a nod and smiled as much as a funeral would allow. She placed her notebook under her arm and took Zach’s hand in her own. They set out for the knoll just ahead, leaving me with Justus. His eyes were to the casket.

“Good of the town to do this,” he said. “Must’ve been a hard coming to.”

I nodded. “Was the preacher who did the convincing. Taylor’s aunt refused the body. So did Camden. Her I could almost see, but I’ve no idea how a town can deny a man rest in their ground. Reggie said it was the Christian thing to do.”

“Ain’t always easy,” Justus said, “abidin’ by the Lord.”

“No, sir, it sure ain’t.”

We stood there silent. Justus stared at the pine box as I tilted my head toward my family. Zach swung Kate’s hand forward and back in giant arcs as they weeded through the gravestones. Few things matter more in the world than keeping family close. I vowed that from then on the Barnetts would never roam far from one another.

“What happened out there, Jake?” Justus asked. “In the Holler. What was there?”

I’d vowed I would tell him everything, and I did. I spoke of Phillip and Taylor and Lucy, of the Hollow and the Hole. I spoke of my dreams. Justus took it all in with an impassiveness that looked near boredom and altered his expression only once (it was an upward twitch of his left eyebrow upon learning that Bessie had fallen, however briefly, into Lucy Seekins’s hands).

Otherwise his face remained blank and pointed to the blue mountains rising in front of us. It was a sight I imagine Justus Barnett never expected to see again after being hauled away in the back of Alan Martin’s car. Nor had he expected Alan himself to plead with the judge to grant him bail. Yet what had shocked Justus most of all—and what brought a warmth to his cheeks even after such a sorrowful tale as mine—was that bail being raised by the town folk. Pocket change and crumpled dollar bills for the most part, all delivered by Big Jim Wallis’s own hand. My father told me it was grace, no less than that. Grace perhaps meant to bring him inside the gates of Oak Lawn with his son that bright Sabbath morning, to hear my words and see my face and know that both were true.