The Drowned Forest (10 page)

“Give us two double cheeseburgers with the works—”

“Uh, just a single for me.”

“Sure?” Tyler asks.

I nod.

“Okay. One double, one single. The works on both. And onion rings and Cokes.” Tyler swivels on his stool.

“Got it.” The waitress calls out our ticket to the cook. Taking three patties from an under-the-counter fridge, he drops them into the seething oil of the fryer.

“He’s deep fat frying our burgers?” I hiss to Tyler.

“Give it a try. You’ll like it.”

The “works” are mustard, tomato, and lettuce. The bun tastes buttery from the grease, and the whole thing sort of dissolves in my mouth and slithers down my throat. I take two bites, and I’m done. At least the Coke is cool and sweet.

The waitress heads for the door with a cigarette in her hand. As she passes by, I say, “Excuse me. We were wondering, do you know anybody named Mattie Peake?”

She twiddles the cigarette between her fingers. “Don’t think so. Sorry.”

“She could mix up medicines and things. People might have said she was sort of a witch, but—”

“Auntie Peake ain’t no witch.” The cook turns, glaring at us. “She’s a root-worker.”

Tyler tries to talk and sputters on his drink. I ask, “You know her? You know how we can find to her?”

“She mixed up medicines for folks the doctor couldn’t help. She never cursed anybody. Ms. Peake broke the curses witches put on people.”

“Well, it seems like people don’t really see the difference between root-workers and witches anymore.”

Scraping the grill with his spatula, he snorts. “Witches get their power from the devil. Root-workers get theirs from the Lord up in Heaven. I’d say that’s a big difference.”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

“My parents, their first three babies all died before they were a week old. Broke my mamma’s heart so it never healed again. The doctor said she was just too frail to have babies, but she went to Auntie Peake, and Auntie Peake saw there was a curse on my mamma. An ex-girlfriend of my dad’s had put it on her when they got married. But Auntie Peake broke it, and I’m living, breathing proof that Ms. Mattie Peake never did anything but good for any soul. Don’t come into this place calling Auntie Peake a witch. My people owe her too much to let that stand.”

“I’m sorry. But do you know how we can find her? Please, we have to talk to her.”

“Oh yeah? What about?” He turns all the way around for the first time, glancing from Tyler to me with suspicious eyes.

Tyler says, “It’s our friend. She drowned and became a ghost, and we need to put her to rest, but we need somebody who knows about these things to help us.”

In the clear light of day, it still sounds unbelievable to me. But the cook just nods, wiping his hands on his splotched apron. “Auntie Peake had a stroke, something like that, few years back. I heard they put her in Morningside.”

“Morningside?”

“The nursing home out on 31,” he adds.

“Thank you! You don’t know how much you’ve helped us.”

After Tyler finishes lunch, we step back out into the noontime heat. I say, “I don’t even want to know what that burger is gonna do to your guts later.”

“That’s why you get the cheese, see? The cheese is like a parachute. It creates drag and slows the meat down as it hurls through your colon.”

“Tyler! Ew!”

He chuckles and shakes his head. “So you feel better now? Now that we’re clear Auntie Peake is a root-worker, not a witch?”

“I just want to know if this will work. I don’t care what she’s called if she can help Holly.”

Morningside has cinder-block walls painted half yellow and half white. It smells like Ajax and pee. After we sign in, the nurse points us down the hall. Auntie Peake sits in bed with her slippers on. She doesn’t look like much of a witch or root-worker or anything at all. One arm is shrunken and twisted from the stroke. Her body curves toward her strong side. Her roommate watches TV, but Auntie Peake ignores it.

“Ms. Peake? I’m Tyler. This is Jane, and uh, we need your help.”

“Get my glasses. On the table there.”

Tyler fetches her tortoiseshell glasses from the cluttered bedside table. She puts them on and studies us. Her eyes blink rapidly against the thick lenses—moths fluttering inside mason jars.

“Get my water there.”

Tyler hands her a cup of water with a bendy straw in it. “It’s my girlfriend, Holly. She drowned this spring. Drowned in Wilson Lake. And she’s become some sort of a ghost. It’s like she’s trapped in the lake.”

“I heard that you knew about another ghost,” I say, butting in. “Somebody named Tommy Mud-and-Sticks. We think Holly’s turned into something like him.”

Auntie Peake closes her eyes. “Poor, poor Tommy. That was the last winter before they built the dam and flooded us out of the holler. Old Amos Buckley had a devil of a time tracking him down and putting him to rest. ’Course, people love telling a good haunt story, especially after somebody got the notion that he only haunted the prettiest girls.” She grunts disapprovingly. “Vain little things all over Lauderdale County started swearing he’d come up, chased them ’round, for years after he was gone.”

It takes effort for her to hand the cup back to Tyler. Setting it down, Tyler says, “Amos Buckley. He helped Holly’s grandfather, actually. He was really sick, and Mr. Buckley found a fever disguised as a frog in his house.”

“Uh-huh. Old Amos was hard as a nail but twice as sharp. Won’t be any more root-workers like him again.”

“Do you know how he got rid of Tommy?”

“Same as any restless spirit, I imagine. Most aren’t wicked, they just gets lost. Happens sometimes when people drown in the river.”

“How come?”

Auntie Peake’s good shoulder shrugs. “The river has its own way of things.”

“You mean, like, it’s alive? It has a soul?”

“Only man has an eternal soul, young lady, only man can leave Earth to enter Paradise. But sometimes things of this earth—old, old things like rivers—they grow some power akin to a soul, something that makes them more than what you can see with your eyes or hold in your hands.”

“How?” I ask.

She shrugs again. “Rivers are strange. They’re not human places like towns. A human’s soul gets tangled up in the river’s power, it can be dangerous pulling them out again.”

“We know. We already called her once and … it doesn’t matter. We have to do it.”

Auntie Peake doesn’t ask what I mean. She sends me to the nurses station for a pen and paper. When I come back, she starts to write while explaining. “First, you have to find your friend, the part of the river that’s shaped like her. The body won’t be
her
body anymore, but her soul is still holding it together.”

I remember the clay-skinned thing that crawled onto the boat and spoke with your voice. I shudder, realizing we’ll have to face it again.

Auntie Peake goes on. “Next, mix together white chalk and slaked lime and draw a circle around yourselves. No spirits can step into the circle, so you’ll be safe. Then pray over her. Call down Heaven’s blessing using this prayer here.” She hands me back the scratch paper. The lines cramp up along the right-hand margin. They read,
Lord, guide this troubled soul to rest. Carry her from darkness and cold evermore, for those washed clean in Your blood shall fear not. Amen.

I touch the words.
Fear not.

“Holly’s motto.”

Tyler asks, “Huh?”

“Fear not. Remember? She painted it on her guitar.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah. See?”

I nod. We’re on the right path. This will work. It has to. “Thank you so much,” I say to Auntie Peake.

“That all you came for?”

“Yeah, I … I guess.” A twinge of guilt makes me squirm; we’re taking what we need from her and just leaving her here. It’s not right. But we’re so close.

Guilt hits Tyler at the same moment. He stammers, “Anything we can do for you before we go?”

She thinks for a moment, then, “What’s the milkweed like?”

“What?”

“The milkweed. Out in the fields, out by the roads.”

“It’s all over. It’s everywhere.”

“This late in the summer? Hmm … going to be a long, wet winter.”

We spend another half-hour telling her about the wildflowers and hummingbirds and pawpaw trees. Auntie Peake reads them all as weather signs for the coming year. I feel sorry for her, a root-worker cut off from the land, with just a window looking out onto a nursing home courtyard.

Still, I’m anxious to go. I fold the prayer she wrote out into tight little squares. Then I unfold it, then fold it back. I want to get this over with, Holly.

“What about foxfire? There been a lot of foxfire this summer?”

“Um, I don’t think so. Haven’t heard anything, at least.”

She nods. “When people start seeing foxfire lights every night, especially in the graveyards, it’ll mean the Lord is coming. The time of Revelation is at hand. We’ll have days then, maybe weeks, but not more.”

We finally leave and drive to Home Depot. Slaked lime comes in big ten-gallon buckets. The only powdered chalk they have is electric blue, but we find sticks of white sidewalk chalk we can crush up. Since the lime is caustic, I get heavy-duty rubber gloves too. We carry everything out to Tyler’s truck and head out to Swallow’s Nest Bluff.

Holly, don’t you remember the ice storm when we were ten? Power lines were down all over the city, but you came and stayed with us because we at least had propane for heat. There was no TV, no computers, nothing. We spent hours just walking around the neighborhood, seeing the snow cover everything. We walked over to Swallow’s Nest Bluff. It looked so different from how we’d ever seen it before. The lake had a white crust of ice, and the blackberry bushes were leafless, brown, and curled up asleep. The storm had sheathed every branch of every pine, and every needle of every branch, in clear ice. When the wind blew, they jingled together like thousands of tiny bells.

How can I be the only person left who remembers that day, Holly?

Tyler pulls over near the bluff. Nobody is around, so we get to work. I take a chunk of limestone and use it to grind the chalk into powder on the truck’s tailgate. We haven’t been to the river since we came with your pa-paw. I think about him, and my stomach tightens into a knot. My hands shake. I drop one of the chalk sticks, and it rolls into the weeds. “Son of a biscuit!”

“Jane, relax.” Tyler touches my shoulder, making me jump. I punch him in the arm. He just laughs. “Relax. I know you’re nervous. Me too. But if we do this right, we’ll put Holly to rest and you can go home. Just focus on that. Going home, okay?”

The thought is a cicada in my chest, light and buzzing. I might be holding Faye—tickling her, smelling her sweet skin—in a couple hours. I’m gonna squeeze her so hard her head might pop off.

I take some deep breaths and steady myself. We’re here for you, Holly. We’re going to put you to rest. We’re going to make sure you don’t hurt anybody else. I find the stray chalk stick and grind it to powder. We fill one of the bags with the lime and chalk. Tyler slings Max’s guitar over his shoulder, and then we sidle between the blackberry bushes. The water winks orange between the pines. The tire swing turns slowly, looking for all the world like a noose. We walk past it, creeping down the steep slope of the bank, getting as close to the water as we dare.

Mud-crusted turtles bask on a half-submerged log. When we get close, they slide into the green water,
splish, splish-splish
, then everything falls quiet again. Suddenly, Tyler stops and stares, then picks a white piece of trash out of the wildflowers. “Jane, check it out.”

It’s a water-splotched photograph, wrinkled and peeling. But I can still make out the grinning face of your me-maw
.

“This must be one of the pictures Mr. Alton had on the houseboat,” Tyler says. “It must have floated up from the wreckage, and the wind blew it up here.”

I nod. Is this a good omen or a bad one, Holly? It doesn’t matter. Tyler can’t just drop the picture back onto the ground, so he trudges back up to put it in his truck.

Waiting for him to come back, I take two fistfuls of the lime-and-chalk mixture in my gloved hands and draw a thin line of white powder around us. “Think it matters if it’s not a perfect circle?” I ask when he reappears through the blackberry bushes.

“Probably not. Just make sure there aren’t any gaps. Actually, go around twice to make sure.”

After I draw another wide circle across the rocks and earth, Tyler starts playing “The Drowned Forest.” Shielding my eyes with my hand, I stare out across the lake. Tyler’s sad little melody still makes my chest ache, but I think about Faye, keep myself together, and keep watch.

The heat sags my shoulders like an old mattress. I smack at bugs and would love to dip my face in the water. Instead, I pace the inside of our white chalk border. I worry at the paper with Auntie Peake’s prayer until it hangs limp with sweat from my palms. I borrow Tyler’s Aviators so I can see better, but besides the bugs and boats zipping along in the distance, the world lies still.

Everything is still.

I squint up into the face of the bluff, up at the mud nests dotting the limestone. When I walk closer, Tyler stops playing. “Jane? Hey, don’t cross the circle, Jane.”

“The swallows are gone.”

“Huh?”

“All the swallows. They’re gone.”

Tyler leaves the circle to walk up beside me. “Probably asleep. They feed mostly in the mornings and evenings.”

I whip a stone at one of the nests. The wad of mud and dry grass comes spinning down, trailing a few downy feathers. No angry squawks, though. No rustle of wings from any of the nearby nests.

“Well.” Tyler shrugs again. “When do they migrate?”

“Not this early. Something’s wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but it’s weird, isn’t it?”

He pushes sweat-damp hair back. “I bet Holly scared them away. Animals maybe knew somehow she wasn’t … you know, she wasn’t right.”

“She sent that catfish. Why would the swallows fly away when that catfish is doing what she tells it? And the plants aren’t growing like last time. Remember the milfoil?”