The Hum and the Shiver (33 page)

Bliss said nothing. Chloe seemed not to have noticed.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Bronwyn said softly. Then she added, “Now, where are my goddamned pants?”

*   *   *

Bronwyn strode into the waiting room, arm curled protectively around her side, and stopped as nearly two dozen people stood to greet her. They were frighteningly, ridiculously similar: black hair, dark skin, perfect white teeth, all gazing at her with the kind of sympathy that normally would’ve made her roll her eyes. Yet there was no pity to them, just genuine shared grief. Kell had been a pureblood, too, one of their elite. They felt his loss as well.

She found she could not move. There was no way to get to the exit without pushing through the crowd, yet how could she do that? They needed her now, her guidance and her strength. They needed, in a different way, the Bronwynator.

Mrs. Chandler stepped toward Bronwyn, autoharp clutched to her chest. A nurse passed between them, frowned at the gathering, and continued on. Bronwyn smiled at Mrs. Chandler, who began to play and sing:

I dreamed that over my soul there came,

A grief that moved my stricken heart;

And as I mourned, the earthbound world

Did taunt me with its wicked art.…

The others didn’t hesitate, but began to sing along, taking harmony parts by instinct and experience. Mrs. Chandler strummed her autoharp, and someone joined in with a banjo. A guitar’s strum came from the back. Her own fingers ached for Magda, but the song now had its own life, and bore them along like the night wind did its riders.

She sang as she moved through the crowd, touching shoulders and feeling hands on her own arms. This was the Tufa community forming around whoever most needed them, and she felt the connection through the music and song. She also knew that at this moment, it wasn’t for her.

Then she saw Terry-Joe standing beside the door, her mandolin case in his hand. He wasn’t smiling, because that would be inappropriate, but she saw the pleasure in his eyes that said he’d read the signs correctly and knew she’d want her instrument. He put down the case, opened it, and offered Magda to her.

She reached for it, then stopped. Although the song continued around her, she felt herself separate from it, withdrawing into isolation. She closed her hand into a fist and pulled it back. Then before her resolve faltered, she ran out through the sliding glass doors. She would explain later. If there was a later.

She stopped beneath the weather overhang, feeling the night’s heat and rawness. A storm was brewing in the sky, the kind that brought violence and change. She waited to see if anyone would pursue and try to bring her back, but no one did. She stepped out into the open and looked up at the stars, already blurring as the clouds coalesced. The wind would be vicious up there, slapping back and forth as it built toward release. Only the strongest of Tufa could ride it.

“You really have to tell me how you manage to heal so quickly,” a voice said.

She turned. Craig Chess leaned against one of the brick pillars supporting the overhang. In the dim light he looked mysterious, like a detective in an old movie.

“What are you doing lurking out here?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to intrude. It looked like a Tufa-only thing.”

Through the glass doors, she saw the others still singing. “It is,” she agreed. “Where’s Aiden?”

He nodded toward his car, parked at the curb. “He cried himself to sleep on the way. I’ll bring him in when he wakes up. He was pretty upset, and there was a little bit of a scene. He wanted to take his squirrel gun and go shoot Dwayne Gitterman.”

She felt a jolt through her heart. “Yeah, well, he may have to take a number. Dad’s spitting nails, too.”

“I imagine. And how are
you
?”

“Set.”

“Set?”

“In what I need to do.” She looked at him closely. “Like you. You always know what to do, in every situation. You know what people need you to be. I just figured that out for myself tonight.”

Their eyes met. Then their hands touched, fingers threading together. She had no sense of moving closer, but then they were face-to-face, him looking down at her.

“You take this minister thing seriously, don’t you?” she said quietly.

“I do.”

“So you’d never sleep with me just to see what it was like? Just to see if we got along that way, before we made any more serious plans?”

He shook his head. “I knew the rules when I took the job.”

“What about kissing?”

Suddenly his mouth was on hers, his other hand tangled in her black hair and holding her close to him. She rose on her tiptoes to reach him. She could not recall a kiss that sent shivers through her like this since her very first one, at age ten.

When the kiss broke she stayed on her toes, her lips brushing his. “That’s been coming for a while,” she whispered.

“I think so,” he agreed.

“You think your God brought us together?”

“He’s everyone’s God. And yes.”

She patted his broad chest. “I have to go. I have to do something, but…”

He recalled the haint’s words:
Be strong. Be honest. Be fearless.
He looked deep into her dark eyes and said, “Do what you have to, Bronwyn. I’ll take care of things here. I’ll be here when you finish.”

She held his gaze for a long time. He heard a faint, tuneless humming in his ears. At last she said, “I believe you will.”

“I will,” he said. “But I need to ask you something first.”

“What?”

“What
are
you? What are the Tufa?”

She kissed him again. The trees planted along the edge of the parking lot began to sigh in the wind. “Go to the Library.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Go to the library over in Cricket. Ask to see the painting.”

“What painting?”

“They’ll know.” She stepped away. “And don’t look for me. When I’m done, I’ll find you.”

“Done?” he repeated. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s okay. Look behind you.”

He did, and saw nothing. When he turned back, she had vanished.

31

Don Swayback stared up at the stars. He could never recall doing that before, although he must’ve stargazed as a child. Yet now the vista above him seemed the most beautiful, amazing thing ever, and he wondered how he’d lived this long without noticing it.

The sky had been clear when he started, but now clouds began to edge in from the southwest. Wind made the tops of the trees wave in growing animation. And it was that wind that held his attention, that seemed to be whispering, humming,
singing
something he just couldn’t quite catch.

He glanced back at his house. Susie was home but asleep, after more vigorous lovemaking that caused her to wonder aloud, “You’re not stockpiling a certain little blue pill, are you?” He was exhausted, too, but ever since meeting the little girl earlier that day, he knew he’d end up outside looking up at the stars. He’d intended to tell Susie about it at dinner, but the altercation at the Waffle House made it slip his mind, and she was peacefully snoring by the time he remembered.

He’d met the girl when he drove through Needsville again. He’d taken to doing it at least once a day, spending his entire lunch hour in the car listening to CDs of the Carter Family and other bluegrass pioneers. The first few times he told himself it was to build up familiarity with the area for his eventual interview with Bronwyn Hyatt, but it had become its own reward, a kind of rolling meditation on the nature of his
own
nature.

This time, as he drove slowly down the main street, he recalled suddenly Susie asking him to pick up postage stamps. He parked outside the new brick post office building, and as he climbed the steps to the porch a voice said, “Hello.”

He turned. An old man sat in the far rocking chair, but he hadn’t spoken. Instead it had been the young girl in the chair beside him. She wore green cotton shorts, a sleeveless jersey, and flip-flops. Her black hair was in two braids. She held an old-fashioned bottled Coke with a bendy straw poking from the top.

“Hi,” Don said.

“You were at the barn dance the other night, weren’t you?”

Don smiled. “Yeah, I was. Were you there?”

She shook her head. “I just heard about it.”

“You heard about
me
?”

She patted the arm of the third rocking chair. “Sit down.”

The girl had an odd demeanor, nothing like a normal child, and he was a little disconcerted. The old man in the chair on her other side just looked at him, saying nothing. His eyes were narrow, squinting slits.

Don settled into the rocker and said, “Did you want to ask me something, Miss—?”

She shook her head. “My name is Mandalay. And I want to
tell
you something.” The seriousness in her words was belied by the way she slurped the last of the Coke through the straw.

“Okay,” he said. “What?”

She burped lightly, then said, “You’ve come awake inside, and it’s probably messing with you a little bit. You’ve been knowing things you didn’t think you were supposed to know, singing songs you’d never heard before. Am I right?”

Don stared and nodded.

She spoke as if discussing Barbies with another child. “You’ll have a choice pretty soon. Your Grandma Benji wasn’t one of my people, but we all loved her anyway. You can go either way. With me, or with Rockhouse here, who’s head of her people.” She nodded at the old man, who said nothing. “You don’t have to choose right now. But you will have to choose pretty soon.”

He couldn’t stop gazing into her eyes. They weren’t those of a child.

“He done chose,” Rockhouse finally said. “He went to your barn dance, not our hootenanny.”

“A man can’t choose if he don’t know both sides,” Mandalay snapped, and the old man fell silent. To Don she said, “You have to pick which one of us you want to join.”

“Like the Seelie or the Unseelie?”

She shrugged. “Call it what you want.”

“What do you call it?” Don asked.

“The Tufa. The Tufa blood in you is singing now. You can either sing along, or wait for it to go quiet again. Or…”

She motioned him closer and spoke softly. “Go outside tonight. Look up at the sky. Listen to the wind. See what it says to you.”

“Hey!” Rockhouse said. “He ain’t got no right—”

“He’s got every right,” the girl fired back, and the old man again fell silent. Then she returned her attention to Don. “Listen for the wind. Listen for the riders. Listen for what calls in your own blood. Then go to Cricket and look at the painting in their library. Then decide.”

He could think of nothing to say. Mandalay smiled, wizened and old now like a Tibetan lama. He nodded, turned, and went back to his car. He was almost to the county line before realizing he’d forgotten the stamps. He wasn’t about to go back for them.

That night he and Susie picked up ice cream on their way home from the Waffle House, and as they sat on the couch eating and flirting, Don said, “Can I ask you something about your work?”

“Is this for
your
work?”

“No, I’m just curious.”

She nodded as she provocatively licked chocolate syrup from her spoon. “As long as it’s not about a specific patient.”

“You guys get a lot of Tufas in there, right? So they get the usual tests done, I assume. Tell me, is there anything different about them? I mean, different from…” He waved at the air with his own spoon.

“Different from what?” she asked.

“You know … human beings.”

She laughed. “The Tufa
are
human beings. Just like black people, or Eskimos, or Asians.”

“So, like, blood tests and stuff never come back … weird?”

“No, they come back with all the same things you’d find in anybody’s blood.” She touched the tip of his nose with her spoon, depositing a bit of vanilla ice cream on it. “I think you’re spending too much time dwelling on this.”

He wiped his nose and was hit anew by her attractiveness. “Well,” he said throatily, “I can think of one thing that might take my mind off it.”

“We haven’t finished our ice cream,” she pointed out.

He reached for her hand. “Bring it along.”

Now he looked up at the sky, the wind, the night, and felt something impending within him, a change he both dreaded and desperately longed for. He spread his arms like wings and whispered, “Okay, if anybody’s up there riding the night wind, I’m ready for a ride, too.”

If Susie had looked outside a moment later, she would’ve found the backyard empty.

*   *   *

Mandalay Harris sat beside the stream, her feet in the water. Even at night the air was humid and warm, and she felt mosquitoes approach, alight on her skin and then buzz away, repelled by something in her nature. A strange but welcome perk of being a trueblood Tufa. She plucked idly at her autoharp, sending random notes out on the wind.

The porch light came on, and her stepmother, Leshell, stuck her head out the trailer door. “Mandy? Y’all out here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mandalay called. She kicked the water and watched it twinkle in the moonlight. The stream was barely a foot deep, and the rock on which she sat bisected its yard-wide channel.

“It’s past midnight,” Leshell said.

“I know.”

Leshell, in a long yellow T-shirt with a deer’s head drawn on it, walked across the wet grass to the edge of the stream. “I think you’re going to have company.”

Mandalay looked at her stepmother and nodded. “I heard. I’ll be in when I’m done.”

When she turned back to the stream, Bronwyn Hyatt stood beside it.

“Hey,” Mandalay said, as if the woman’s sudden appearance was the most normal thing in the world.

“Hey, Mandalay,” Bronwyn said, a little breathless. “Leshell.”