The Hum and the Shiver (32 page)

And mama’s song will sound the best.…

“What song is that?” Craig asked, his voice catching in his throat.

Terry-Joe was too weary to be circumspect. “Kell’s dyin’ dirge. Every Tufa has one. It comes to the people around him when it’s time for it.”

Now there was harmony, from the husband and daughter beside her.

So sing, sigh, little boy sleep.

So sing, sigh, the wind her watch will keep.

Oh baby mine, how fondly I love you.

Oh son of mine, a family’s love is true.

Craig wiped at his eyes. The sound was so plaintive, so touching, that its sorrow was irresistible. A nurse emerged from the treatment area sobbing into a tissue.

“We should go,” Craig said.

*   *   *

Aiden came to the door rubbing his eyes, clad in sweatpants and a Transformers T-shirt. “What?” he said, drawing the word out into several syllables.

“It’s me, Terry-Joe. Can you open the door?”

“Ain’t supposed to.”

“This is important, Aiden. I’ve got Reverend Chess with me. We need to talk to you.”

“To me?”

Terry-Joe was tired, and his balls ached.
“Aiden, open the goddamned door!”

“All right, all right,” the boy said. Craig put a calming hand on Terry-Joe’s shoulder, but the younger man shrugged it off. He pulled the screen door open as soon as Aiden unhooked it and went inside.

Aiden looked askance at Terry-Joe’s wet spot. “Did you pee your pants?”

“Never mind. Listen, something bad’s happened,” Terry-Joe said. He couldn’t look directly at the boy, so he gazed at the floor.

“Is Bronwyn hurt?”

“No. I mean, yes, but that’s not the bad thing. The bad thing is…” And Terry-Joe froze. He simply couldn’t say the words.

Craig stepped up. “Son, I’m afraid your brother, Kell, has passed on.”

Aiden blinked, and the last of the sleep cleared from his eyes. “Wha … Kell’s
dead
?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well, then
say
dead!” Aiden yelled, making them both jump. He turned to Terry-Joe. “What happened?”

“Ah … he got in a fight with my brother.”

Aiden stared at Terry-Joe with the kind of betrayal only a child can feel when his idol topples from the pedestal. Dwayne Gitterman had been the epitome of cool when Aiden was a small boy, always showing off and bringing treats. “
Dwayne
killed him?”

Terry-Joe nodded, still looking at the floor.

“Your mom, dad, and sister asked us to come bring you to the hospital,” Craig said. “You should probably get dressed first.”

Aiden swallowed hard. He was too overwhelmed to cry. He turned and went into his room, and they heard dresser drawers opening and closing.

Craig looked around at the family pictures. He saw photos of Deacon and Chloe as young newlyweds, then with their gradually increasing brood. He was impressed with how little they had visibly aged; Chloe, especially, was as vibrant now as she’d been as a young woman in the eighties and nineties.

There were three pictures of only Kell; in one he was a toddler, in another an adolescent proudly holding a stringer of fish, and finally his high school graduation picture. Craig had never met Kell, and he realized now he’d never see him alive. The boy holding those fish was gone forever.

Another picture drew his eye. Bronwyn, fourteen or fifteen in a halter top and shorts, making a muscle for her father, who felt it and feigned terror. Even though the picture was only a few years old—when it had been taken, Craig was probably finishing his undergraduate degree—there seemed ages of difference between the girl in the photo and the one he’d met. It wasn’t just the trauma of her experience, although that was part of it. There was a power within Bronwyn now that was entirely missing from this earlier girl.

Then he was yanked back to the present when Aiden strode from his room, dressed and carrying his hunting rifle. “Y’all lock up behind yourselves,” he said without looking at them.

With cries of alarm, Terry-Joe jumped at Aiden, while Craig rushed to block the door. Terry-Joe grabbed the rifle by the barrel, but Aiden wasn’t letting it go. Craig held up his hands in a
calm down
gesture. “Aiden, I think you need to take a deep breath.”

“I think y’all need to step back,” Aiden said.

“You’re not leaving with that gun,” Craig said seriously.

“The hell I’m not,” he said, and began tugging to get it away from Terry-Joe. Craig jumped forward to intercede just as a loud crack filled the room. Terry-Joe jumped back, and Aiden dropped the gun.

Craig put his foot on the barrel to keep anyone else from grabbing it. For a moment no one moved. Then he asked, “Are you two hurt?”

Terry-Joe shook his head. Aiden stared wide eyed at the wall. The bullet had passed through a framed picture, shattering the brittle glass. Craig glanced at it, then looked more closely; it appeared to be a piece of sandpaper. He tentatively touched it and confirmed this, then saw an
X
drawn with a Sharpie. The words,
I’m going here
were written beside it, and the signature,
Love, Pvt. Bronwyn Hyatt.

Craig picked up the gun, unscrewed the tube, and poured the little gold cartridges out into his hand. He worked the bolt action several times to make sure nothing was left in the chamber. Then he tossed the weapon onto the couch. “That wasn’t real bright,” he said through his teeth, forcing his anger down. The boy had just gotten terrible news, after all.

Aiden turned to Terry-Joe. “Sorry, Terry-Joe, I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” he said flatly, as if discussing a ball game. “But I reckon I have to kill your brother, either tonight or eventually.”

Craig turned Aiden’s face to him. “Aiden, listen to me. Right now the living need you more than the dead. Your mom, dad, and sister are at the hospital, and they want us to take you there. Unarmed. Okay?”

Aiden nodded. Then his lower lip began to tremble.

Craig managed a wry, sad smile. “I don’t blame you, I’d cry, too.”

Aiden burst out with a sob, splattering saliva and mucus in Craig’s face. He ignored it, dropped to his knees, and wrapped the boy in a big hug.

Terry-Joe, still shaken by the gunshot, suddenly had a thought. He ran into Bronwyn’s bedroom and grabbed her mandolin from under the bed.

Craig picked Aiden up and carried him outside. The boy cried all the way to the hospital.

30

At the hospital, Bronwyn was back in her bed, her parents seated in chairs beside her. Kell’s body was now in the morgue, evidence of a capital crime. The police had been notified, and the search for Dwayne Gitterman went from casual to much more serious.

None of the Hyatts spoke. They knew that, in the lobby, members of the Tufa community had begun to gather, but none of them felt like making an appearance.

The wrapping around Bronwyn’s chest had begun to pinch and itch, and the artificial weariness of the pain medication kept her mind fuzzy. She fought the drowsiness, though; she couldn’t imagine sleeping through a time like this.

Kell. Was. Dead. The certainty of that encircled her and cinched far worse than the bandages. The older brother who’d taught her to shoot and drive, who’d helped her hide from her parents the first time she came in drunk, who’d advised her repeatedly not to hang out with that no-account Dwayne Gitterman, was now gone.

Dwayne. The bad boy with the good heart. Except he didn’t have a good heart, or it had gone bad while she was away in Iraq. Whatever the cause, he couldn’t be allowed to roam free anymore.

Suddenly her mind cleared. The dream returned, its meaning suddenly obvious.

Dwayne hadn’t turned to petty crime out of a desire for wealth or power, but from simple laziness; it was easier to steal something than work for the money to buy it. Now that he’d killed someone, he’d apply the same logic. From this point on, it would be easier to just eliminate someone than try to deal with them. That meant others would, sooner or later, die. Like an animal that had tasted human blood, Dwayne now knew what he’d been missing.

The police would arrest him. He would stand trial, probably be convicted, probably sent away for life. He had enough Tufa in him to understand how torturous that would be, separated from the night wind. So he would fight.

He would run.

He was running now.

And only she could catch him. Only she
should
catch him.

She started to throw back the sheet when a hand gently touched her wrist, startling her. She winced at the jolts of pain through her side, and glared at Bliss Overbay. “A little warning next time.”

“Sorry. But you’re in no shape to be leaving.”

Chloe, who had spent an hour simply staring into space, blinked back to the moment. “You’re leaving?”

“She’s not leaving,” Deacon said simply. It was the voice he used when he wanted no discussion from his children.

Bronwyn glared at all of them now. “First off, none of y’all can tell me what I’m going to do anymore. Second, you’re all assuming I don’t have sense enough to make a good decision. Granted that’s been true in the past, and might even be true now, but it’s nobody’s business or trouble but mine.”

Deacon stood, his face dark with rage. She knew its source; the urge to hunt down Dwayne must be eating him up, too, yet he had the control to sit quietly with the surviving members of his family, those who needed him most right now. “I
said,
you’re not leaving. For once in your whiny little spit of a life, think of something besides yourself.”

No one spoke for a long moment. Deacon’s eyes burned with suppressed fury; then he looked away and sat again, staring at the space between his feet.

Bronwyn swallowed hard. Her face simmered in the cold hospital air, bright red with emotions she couldn’t sort. She was about to speak when Bliss began to sing, so softly, her voice was a whisper that broke on the higher notes:

Near yonder stream that flows so free,

Where storms can never rave,

Beneath a drooping willow tree,

Is gentle Annie’s grave.

My heart is sad for Annie dear,

She’s left me here alone,

And over her grave I weep a tear,

For Annie’s lost and gone.

Bronwyn began to tremble. Without conscious intent, she came in on the chorus, singing harmony, her voice shaky and thin:

She’s gone, she’s gone, we’ll shed a tear,

Over gentle Annie’s grave,

We’ll never forget in memory dear,

Who sleeps where flowers wave.

Chloe stood and came to the bed. She put one hand on Bliss’s shoulder, and the other stroked her daughter’s hair. She sang the next verse alone:

Alas, my gentle Annie’s gone,

She’ll ride the wind no more,

We never can wander here alone,

As we have done before,

Where I have plucked the flowers of spring

And placed them in her hair,

The little birds still sweetly sing

But Annie is not there.

Deacon continued to stare at the floor between his shoes, his arms tightly folded. This was a woman’s song; his own, the song of a man seeking justice, would come later.

The three women harmonized on the final chorus. It was something Bronwyn hadn’t fully experienced since childhood: the Tufa bonding over song. All three of them were purebloods, their connection strongest to the night wind that brought them here and still guided their lives. And in music, they connected even more, their emotions surging into the other and finding balance as they were smoothed out and redistributed.

When they finished, Chloe wiped her eyes and said calmly, “Thank you, Bliss.”

“Yeah, thank you,” Bronwyn agreed. Then she pushed the sheet aside and swung her legs over the edge. “But I’m still going.”

She turned to her father, and her rage matched his own. “And right now I don’t give a fuck what you think, old man. Something has to be done, and I’m the one who has to do it. And if you try to stop me, you’ll learn what other songs I know.”

That was the greatest single threat one Tufa could make to another, the promise to sing their personal dirge and hasten—or even cause—their death. As a pureblood, Bronwyn could certainly carry it out. And the steady gaze in her eyes told Deacon she was close to doing so.

Yet he was a pureblood, too, and her father. After a long moment he said with chilling calm, “You left home as my daughter. You came back as a stranger.
Now
I know you, though. You’re nothing but the killer the army made you. You’re worse than Dwayne, because you
enjoy
it.” He paused. “Now get out of my sight, Bronwyn,” he added, then resumed staring at the floor.