Lost (37 page)

Then the medicine took hold, so hard he swayed with it. The surrounding night distorted and slipped into place, then grew so sharp it was almost painful. And Sherman felt it come over him like ice water, his muscles pulled tight, his breath drawn in short, deep gasps. There was nothing but the house now and the people in it, Mamie in it. Nothing else reached him, there was no other world. If that woman tried to stop him, that woman he had hated so long … If anybody tried to stop him, he would do whatever had to be done. He would kill them all. The knife blade glistened at the end of his fist. Nothing would keep him from Mamie this time. He looked again at the firelit windows where nothing moved, then back at the gate in the picket fence and slowly turned and beckoned the dog.

Untying her sash, Vee slipped the bright collar over her head and dropped the apron on the back of a kitchen chair. With the neighbors gone, the house seemed hollow and lonely. She hadn't missed Leona until she stood up from the piano an hour ago to offer her neighbors dessert and a late-night cup of coffee. Hardesty was gone, too; she knew immediately what had happened. She smiled. Well, I hope they have a good time, she thought. It'd do her good. Now, except for the unwashed coffee cups and dessert dishes left on the table, everything was in its place, the kids' playthings still upstairs where she had stashed them, the room pretty much in order. It was almost too tidy for her taste; she had grown used to having the kids and their things underfoot. Through the doorway to the living room, the light from the stove throbbed.

After the festivities, she felt her solitude acutely. She opened one of the tall windows a crack to air out the room. The pall of tobacco smoke began to seep away. The night sky looked so close now. With a barn ladder, she could crawl right up into that moon and go to sleep with no regrets. She stood looking through the window at all that was hers and thought, Shame on you, Vee Turner, what've you got to feel so low about? There's corn aplenty in that crib, chickens brooding on eggs this very minute, and three little babes fast asleep in your attic. Then she knew what she wanted to do. I'll go upstairs and keep 'em company till Leona gets back. I don't need to stand here feelin' so blue. She shut the window, turned back the covers on Leona's bed, and went toward the stairs.

Hearing footsteps, Mamie sat up in bed. “You're not her,” she said.

“No, I'm not,” Aunt Vee told her quietly. “But I'm the next best thing. Slide on over there a little bit. I'm goin' to keep you company.”

“Stay,” Sherman whispered, bending down, his voice a dry husk. “Stay. Wait here.” Obediently the Chinaman sat down, his matted tail sweeping the snow. Sherman straightened up to study the night.

The gate opened, silent as ball bearings, and stuck in an icy drift. He stepped into the yard. Clouds drifted across the moon. The mist was changing to rain.

Leaning toward the window, Funny Grandma watched him come through the misty haze. Then she heard him entering the house—a muffled sound that struck at some deep chord in her heart.

A plate was set aclatter. All at once, it was stilled. Sitting upright in bed, her heart pounding, Funny Grandma strained to hear him through the drafty walls of the house. “I'll show ye,” she muttered. “I'll show ye, damn ye! Won't let an old woman catch 'er breath.” She shifted to the side of her bed and squinted through sleep-tilted glasses at the door. “Vivy!” she called, and choked; her heart twisted painfully. No voice answered her, no one came to the door.
Somethin's afoot in the house
.

Out of the dark, Sherman emerged in the doorway. The wood stove left burning in the living room gave off little light. Across the room a bed was turned down and even that was hard to see. He wondered what it meant—that bed. He wished he hadn't lost his pencil flashlight. He lit a match. Yellow light leapt from his fingers and he held it higher. He saw nothing to indicate that children had been here. The match burned out; he dropped it and struck another, then another, wandering past the stove. Is this the wrong place? His eyes roamed back to the turned-down covers. He struck a match and stepped toward the bed. Suddenly he bit his lips and flung the smoking black stick from his scorched fingers. “Ah, shit,” he mumbled, sucking at his fingers. The bed had been turned down, but why? Who for? He had seen all the others leave.
Where is everybody?
At the foot of the bed, wedged among suitcases, was a purse.

He looked back toward the dark doorway and heard nothing. He grabbed the purse, opened it. Feeling inside, he pulled out some papers and set them out on the bed. Then he dug down inside the purse until he found a billfold. Quickly he flipped through the plastic sleeves, past meaningless snapshots, looking for something with a name—and saw the driver's license. He struck a match, his next to last, and read the signature. Leona Hillenbrandt. Seeing her name sent sparks through his blood. He shook out the match. I knew it! he thought, thrusting the billfold back into the purse. I knew it.

Then he saw the map.

In her house slippers, Funny Grandma crossed the painted floor to her wardrobe.
They come in here, Vivy, at night, in here. To steal our corn … in my own house
. She could feel her heartbeat in her runaway hands, but she caught the wooden knob, opened the mirrored door, and pulled out, through hanging clothes, her dead husband's 10-gauge shotgun, the big gun, the one he'd once used to kill a bear. From the hat shelf on the other side, Funny Grandma took down a box of shells. The exertion only increased the wildness in her hands. The box shook like a live hornets' nest.
Don't respeck nothin', nobody!
She tore the box open and dumped the cartridges on her bed, where they fell together in a loose clutter of thuds.

Her arms ached and her joints were beginning to stiffen. Her heart would not slow down. She managed to break open the breech of the shotgun. Humped over the bed in a bank of hazy moonlight, she caught up one of the red waxed shells and jammed it into the first of the two empty chambers. “Ha!” she exclaimed, under her breath. She reached for another shell, but her hands were shaking too much. She dropped it. The weighted casing struck the floor with a loud clack, then rolled in noisy rim runs. “Damn ye,” she mumbled, startled, and held her breath. Then she snatched up another cartridge. The shell stuttered against the chamber opening and slipped in. She cranked the double barrels upright. The breech plunked to. She let loose a sigh and drew the hammers back to cock the gun. Holding it cradled against her chest, she went to the door and crossed the porch, her right-hand forefinger on the trigger.

The kitchen door was standing open. She squeezed her eyes and stared at it. The door was ajar, nothing else. Dim moonlight fell through it in a long broken crack, exposing part of a chair and the edge of the kitchen table. The wind's ablowin', she thought; fixin' to rain. She opened the door wider and peered over her shoulder. Setting her feet, she swung around and the shape of darkness on the wall changed into harness. “Shadder,” she said, and let go all her breath, “you ain't nothin' but night standin' still.” But afterward, to keep her courage up against the terrible thing that was afoot, she began to talk to herself. “I ain't afeared,” she murmured. “I ain't afeared.” Drifting forward, tottering from side to side, she crossed the worn threshold. Not a plank announced her passage.

Brandenburg Station
.

He held the map down in the stovelight to see it clearer. With his finger, he followed the pencil line across the map of Kentucky till it ended. A town on the river, circled. In the flickering dimness, his eyes smarted. Even down close to the stove, he had trouble reading the tiny map words. Again and again, he shaped the name with his mouth to remember it. He had started to take the papers—had unbuttoned his shirt to stuff them in—when he thought, No. Put them back. Just in case. Then she won't never know the difference. Quickly he returned the papers to the purse and slid it back in its place. From some other room, he heard a noise, and somebody talking very low. Then silence. Bent in concentration, he listened and heard it again, a soft garbled voice like somebody talking in their sleep. He drew rigid, turned and glimpsed a shadow drifting toward the doorway: a woman, it looked like. Wavering ahead of her, the long double barrels of a gun protruded into the firelit room.

Twisting, darting for a place to hide, he bumped a rocker and shadows leapt around him, like crazy laughter.

“I have seed all kindsa things good and bad come my way. I have seed women built up wi' child and tore down and put asunder. I have seed men strung up and shot down.…” Outside, the black night shook with loud thunder. Her arms began to cramp. The big gun was too heavy. She had to stop and rearrange it in her hands.

Next to the turned-down bed, Sherman stood inside the filmy curtains watching her come.

“I know of things ye'll never know.…” In the glimmering light, the doorway rose up around her. She stood straight as a stake. In that terrible instant, Sherman saw her as he had never seen anything in his life. She was small, smaller than him, and old, her skin as patterned as a snake's hide. Blurred behind glasses, her deep-socketed eyes watched the room with hawklike scrutiny. Her lips were puckered together, absolutely expressionless and unchanging. She was making a little noise, humming or moaning. His fist grew slippery on the knife. In her hands, she carried a shotgun that looked longer than she was.

Everything was swaying and uncertain: the stovelight ebbed and receded, her flannel nightdress shifted, her face quivered uncontrollably. She heard a sound, but even in that suspended silence it was so low she couldn't make out what it was. “Whar are ye?” she demanded.

Only his eyes moved.

“Who the hell are ye?” she snapped even louder. “Botherin' me and mine.” Suddenly there was a noise—a grating noise tearing across her nerves—and she turned swiftly toward it. Standing boldly at the window was a monstrous shadow thing. She staggered forward and stared at it. Hit's some man, she thought, peerin' at me. In my bedclothes. A big man, black, mulled by the rain on the windowpane. Her spine stiffened with fright. The glass fogged and cleared under its breath, but it made no sound just then. Trembling all over, she drew her mouth even tighter. “Who are ye?” she demanded sharply. “Show yerself!”

It just stood there, breathing on the window glass.

Never taking her eyes from it, Funny Grandma edged back into the room. The dark sank around her. “Git outa here, Goddamn ye!” It tore at the screen, that sharp grating sound.

Poised like a cat, Sherman watched her. It's the Chinaman, he thought. But as long as she commanded the doorway, he was trapped. She's liable to shoot. He wiped his hand on his pants and gripped the knife harder. Thunder rumbled in the high beyond and the Chinaman was whining outside, crying to get in.

Lightning. The flash struck the windows and she saw—not a man. The thing had fur and glowing eyes. “Ye ain't nobody!” Funny Grandma exclaimed, bringing the gun around and up toward it. “Hit's some dog!”

She's gonna shoot him! Sherman felt a sickening jolt.
She's really gonna shoot him!
He tore through the curtains. “Hey! Hey, that's my dog!”

The dark figure hurtled at her, flying fast, crosswise, at an angle to her. Weighted by the gun, she reeled on her feet, trying to track him, raw instinct tearing through her tired muscles. She saw, in his fist, a blade slung back in an arc, closing with blinking speed. His bandaged hand reached, swung at the long barrels to knock them aside, and her spidery finger closed down.

The room exploded with blazing incandescence.

The recoil knocked Funny Grandma backward, completely off her feet, and the deafening blast took out the first of the four tall windows. The shot pattern honeycombed the wall, reducing to slivers the entire window glass and splintering the woodwork and wallpaper in a wide, dense configuration. Stray pellets pinged and whined on the stovepipe; curtains shredded; a light dust of plaster, gunpowder, and soot floated through the air. Someone was screaming upstairs. Footsteps scurried. Dazed, his head still ringing from the concussion, Sherman rose to his knees and saw no one. She had missed him, though the gun seemed to go off right in his face. He pushed up on legs gone to rubber, staggered to the destroyed window, and vanished through it.

The noise broke through the layers of Leona's unconsciousness like a stone falling through deep water. Her eyelids wrinkled and fluttered. That wasn't thunder, she thought. Still woozy and half asleep, she rose on an elbow, listening intently, then drew herself up away from Hardesty. “Did you hear that? Mark?”

He shifted toward her and rubbed his face. “It's just the weather,” he said sleepily. “It's not anything.” His fingers stroked her waist and stopped. He sat up slowly and squinted toward the dark window. “You know, it did sound odd … like a shot.”

“It sounded close,” she said. “I think it came from Vee's.” Covering herself with the sheet, she slipped to the edge of the bed and quickly began to dress. “I want to go back. Will you take me?” He struck a match and lamplight spread around them. A sensual stupor clung to Leona; all her flesh, every tiny vein was exhausted. Her movements seemed exaggerated and clumsy. Her fingers were awkward. Her shoes wouldn't go on. She tried to rearrange her hair and decided to leave it down. But though her thoughts were muddled, the fear went on mounting.

A shot
.

The cabin door opened and Hardesty sent her ahead. “I have to get something,” he told her. “I'll catch up. I'll be right behind you.” Unable to hold herself back any longer, Leona started to run. The path through the snow unreeled before her. Rocks loomed up in the night and slipped away, twigs snapped against her, icy branches cracked and sprang back, a rusty fence appeared beside her momentarily, yet she seemed to make no progress. An excruciating twist tightened in her stomach. I shouldn't have left them. My God, my God. Rain trickled on her face, ran into her eyes. She failed to see the ropy tree roots lying in the path—her feet caught in them and she pitched headlong into the icy brush.