Bound by Blood and Brimstone (21 page)

Lorrie Beth. I wasn’t about to leave her alone any more than I had to. Naturally, it made more

chores for me, but I knew my sister took a certain amount of pride in Miss Hacker’s attention.

Besides, what could be safer than being inside the schoolhouse with the teacher?

One blustery October evening I set out at the usual time to fetch Lorrie Beth home. We’d

had an early frost, and the ground was a carpet of crunchy leaves. Being distracted by the noise

and colors of the scenery, I was unprepared for the surprise of the darkened schoolhouse.

How can they see how to get any work done? The power
must’ve gone out
. I walked up

the dirt path to open the door. Inside, it was as dim and hushed as a tomb with no sign of

anybody.

“Lorrie Beth? It’s time to go! Miss Hacker?” Dead silence was my only answer. I

checked the cloakroom, behind every table, every nook and cranny, calling her name, and still,

no response. I even went outside and checked the outhouse. By now, my hands were shaking, my

heart fluttering and flopping within me.

I raced out behind the school where it was thickly wooded, screaming her name. There

was no plan in mind, just instinct and blind panic. I headed back up the road toward home with

no clue what I was doing.

I just ran and called for her. It would be getting dark before long, and the woods on either

side of the road could hold any number of terrors. My breath burned in and out of my lungs, and

I kept stumbling on unseen rocks.

By the time I reached the incline at the bottom of the cemetery, I was nearing a breaking

point, the edges of my vision starting to go dim. I imagined I heard a cry of some sort.

I stopped. There it was again. It was coming from the top, among the tombstones! I

started to climb, grabbing fistfuls of dirt and jutting limbs to pull myself up, slipping, sliding

every other step. I saw her before I reached the first marker.

I could tell it was Lorrie Beth from the blue scarf she’d worn that morning. Momma had

loaned it to her to wear with her old coat, claiming it would protect her complexion from the

wind. Knotting it beneath her chin and over her pinned-up locks, she’d looked like some foreign

princess draped in fine silk.

She was sitting on the ground beside Daddy’s grave with her head in her hands, sobbing.

As I approached her at a dead run, she started, then raised her head, meeting my eyes. I’d never

seen such pure, untarnished horror as I saw in those green depths.

She scrabbled up from the ground and threw herself at me, clutching my jacket, gibbering

incoherently. Grasping her tightly against me, I had no clear thought except gratitude that she

was alive. It was several minutes before any of the gibberish began to make sense, and I caught

the words “Caleb did it.”

As though watching myself from somewhere else, I was shaking her by the shoulders, her

head bobbing front and back as I yelled for her to slow down. “Did what? What did Caleb do?

Lorrie Beth, for the love of God, what did Caleb do?”

She stopped cold, as if ordered by a waved wand. “This,” she whispered. Her chin

quivered slightly. Then she untied the scarf and let it drop. There was simply no stopping the

gasp that escaped me.

My sister’s glory, her marvelous mane of cascading curls was gone. She’d been cruelly

shorn, roughly, as though someone had taken a hatchet to her. Her scalp showed through in a

couple of spots, and in others, the remaining hair wasn’t even an inch long. Gapped, ragged, and

in different lengths, it stuck out wildly in all directions, like tufts of black feathers.

I swallowed hard and willed myself not to cry. “Tell me,” I said shakily. “And don’t

leave out anything.”

After she had graded a few papers, Miss Hacker had suddenly taken ill and told Lorrie

Beth she was going to leave early. She had left Lorrie Beth alone inside to wait for me. Thinking

to occupy her time preparing lessons, Lorrie Beth had her back turned to the windows and hadn’t

seen who lurked outside.

The door had banged open, and the Nazi twins had been on her before she knew what hit

her. “They must’ve been outside all the time, just waiting,” she said.

She’d had no chance against both of them. Sue Lee had screamed insults, saying Lorrie

Beth was deformed, that she shouldn’t have been born. In the middle of this tirade, Sue Lee had

said, “I’ll make sure your eyes stay in your head now!”

“Wonder what she meant by that?” I mused. Was she making fun of your eyes, too?”

Lorrie Beth shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. She wasn’t even looking at me

when she said it. She was just staring into space.”

She appeared to be somewhat calmer, so I urged her to continue. She told me how they

had forced her to the cloak room, where Sue Lee had brandished a pair of wicked-looking

scissors. Lorrie Beth had been sure beyond doubt they’d meant to kill her.

“You hold her down!” Sue Lee had ordered Caleb. He had grasped her slender arms in

his paws and yanked them behind her back, wrenching her against his front.

“He smelled so bad, Ember, and was so big, and then Sue Lee took the scissors and

pulled my hair hard. She started sawing at it--sawing and laughing this awful laugh. She kept

yelling at Caleb to hold me harder. She kept saying, ‘Let’s see how pretty you think you are now,

you freak!’”

When it was over, Caleb had held the point of the scissors under her chin and promised

her the next cut wouldn’t be just hair.

“He said if I ever told anybody it was them, they’d hunt me down and use the scissors to

cut my heart out! Oh, Ember, what am I going to do?”

I took a deep breath and attempted to collect my runaway thoughts. This has got to be

assault or, at the very least, some sort of illegal threat. Maybe we should just go to the sheriff.

Caleb has had us running scared since first grade, and nobody’s even tried to stop him.

But how could we prove all this? Nobody has actually seen Caleb do anything but run his

mouth. Miss Hacker’s so chicken she practically clucks. We couldn’t count on her to back us up.

And what if we did tell and nothing could be done? We’d both be dead meat for sure, no

questions asked.

Looking back now, going to the sheriff probably would’ve saved us a lot more grief.

Caleb’s sheer size and age compared to ours should’ve made our story convincing. Maybe he

could’ve actually been locked up. I’ll never know.

Where I come from, there was a thing called Mountain Justice, and I was born and bred

into it. For some, it boils down to nothing more than an “eye for an eye.” For a peace-loving man

like my Daddy, it translated into “We take care of our own.” Whatever we decided to do about

Caleb and Sue Lee Jacobs would remain between us, and only us.

I took her by the shoulders and forced her to look at me. “Here’s what we’re going to do;

now listen to me, and listen good, Lorrie Beth. We’re going back to the school for Miss Hacker’s

scissors. I’m going to trim this up the best I can, and we’re going to tell people you asked me to

give you a haircut; that you were tired of long hair and wanted a change. No crying anymore.

You’re going to hold your head up and act like you’re proud of the way you look.”

She opened her mouth to protest but was halted by my upraised hand. “You’re not going

to say a word to
anybody
about any of this or about being afraid. And from now on, you go

nowhere without me
and Max
. He’s the best protection you have now. I think this happened

because we saw Caleb cry, and to him, nothing could be worse. Now, he wants to make us cry,

and we’re not going to give him the satisfaction. Wonnie told me once that some people feed on

fear, and we’re going to starve Caleb and Sue Lee!” For a moment she was silent, taking all of

this in.

“But what about Momma and Reese?” she ventured.

“What about them? They’ll get over it if you don’t let on that you’re bothered by it.

Besides, what can they say? ‘Grow your hair back?’”

I’m still not sure how we managed to pull it off as well as we did. Lorrie Beth was cool

and nonchalant when she delivered her lines about wanting a change and how she insisted I help

her with her new look. I, too, mastered the butterflies in my stomach and lied through my teeth,

swearing that we were so late because I’d made Lorrie Beth stop and rest on account of my being

sick. “Cramps,” I added, hoping to make Reese ill at ease.

Instead of the explosion I fully expected, Reese’s face simply fell, and he shook his head

sorrowfully. “Lord have mercy, girl, you done went and had your glory shorn. Don’t you know

the Lord gave you that beautiful hair of yours for a covering?”

Lorrie Beth apologized meekly and promised to grow it back. Momma only gave a

sideways glance and smiled absently. “It’s kind of pretty, Honey. Now, you all go wash up.

Dinner’s cold, but it’s in the oven. And, oh, Ember Mae, soon as you’re finished eating, I need

you to give the baby his bath. And I have some Mason jars I need to move to the cellar.”

I must admit it, my plan ended with astonishing results. With Lorrie Beth’s thick hair, it

wasn’t difficult to cut so the bare spots were covered. I was able to pull a few strands forward

and snip them in a way that framed her face in airy wisps.

With the heavy mass of hair gone, her eyes took over completely, her exquisitely molded

features thrown in sharp relief. The total picture came off as waif-like, fragile, and exotic.

Overnight, Lorrie Beth became the school celebrity. The girls loved her new look, and

the boys relished any reason to gawk at her. I could’ve laughed at the irony of the whole mess,

had it not been for the misery it cost my sister.

As expected, our ever-present shadows did not cease to follow us, but we now had Max’s

company to soften the edges of our jitters. Lorrie Beth adjusted to life with a bodyguard, and I

continued my stolen trips to Wonnie’s.

Christmas break came and went, and we survived it without Daddy. It actually seemed,

for a time at least, that things were looking up. Then disaster came calling.

One Friday afternoon shortly before Valentine’s Day, we left school, anticipating the

familiar barks that always announced Max’s arrival. None came. “Maybe he went up to Wonnie

Dean’s and got sidetracked with Wovoka,” I suggested. “You know those two are like long-lost

buddies when they get together.”

“Maybe,” she mused. “Or maybe he’s not feeling well and didn’t leave the yard.” I

agreed that was a possibility.

By the time we made it home, Max was nowhere to be found. I offered to walk out to

Wonnie Dean’s to look for him, and Lorrie Beth set out for our nearest neighbor’s place. By

nightfall, even Momma and Reese had joined in the search, but with no luck.

To keep Lorrie Beth from driving me nuts with her pacing and hand wringing, I invited

her to sleep with me in my room so we could talk. My hope was to reassure her, but in my heart,

desolation reigned.

“You know how dogs can be,” I told her, forcing a light tone. “Sometimes they like to

wander off for days at a time. Maybe he’s found a girlfriend.” Even that didn’t drag a smile out

of her.

“Ember Mae, what will I do if something happens to him?” she cried. “I just don’t think I

could stand losing someone else I love!”
Now why did she have to go and say that and make me

think of Daddy?

Angrily, I choked back my own tears and rolling over to turn my back to her, I said, “Just

because he’s gone a day or two doesn’t mean anything’s happened to him. Now let’s get some

sleep.”

A day passed without Max, then another and another. Lorrie Beth put up a brave front,

but I knew she was falling apart, piece-by-piece. On the fifth day we trudged home, irritated and

exhausted by another day of heckling at the hands of “Hitler and Stalin.”

When we neared the porch step, Momma met us at the door, jiggling Sam on one hip. “A

package came for you today, Lorrie Beth,” she said, grinning. “Is there a boyfriend you haven’t

told me about?”

“Course not, Momma,” she said with a snort. “Did somebody mail me something?”

“No, Lonnie Watts didn’t bring it. It doesn’t have any postmark or anything like that on

it. Somebody must’ve brought it to the house while I was in the cellar this morning.” Her

eyebrow shot up the way it sometimes did if she was worried. “Maybe you better come in and

have a look at it.”

It was on the kitchen table, a square parcel about the size of a hatbox, wrapped in plain

brown paper and tied with a piece of twine. Lorrie Beth’s name was scrawled in ink on one side,

but there was no address or any other visible marks.

“I bet it’s a Valentine present,” I said, snickering and jabbing Lorrie Beth in the ribs.

“Probably from that Andy Wharton. You know how he’s always offering to carry your books.

Go ahead, you big chicken. What’re you waiting for?”

She gave me a sheepish grin. “Nothing, I guess.” She reached for a knife to cut the twine