The Bastard Hand (36 page)

I carried her out of the cabin.

A cool, sunny afternoon, leaves of the trees whispering soothing sounds in the slight breeze. Moker’s Hill, in Cuba Landing, Mississippi. Jesus, what was I doing in goddamn Mississippi?

I lay Tassie down as gently as possible on the ground, sat down next to her corpse, and stared at her for a while. My pocket bulged with money, twelve thousand dollars. Not a fortune, no, but enough to get away from this place, enough to make us comfortable, for a while. Me and Tassie.

I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth. I got to my knees, leaned over her, and put my hands over the hole in her chest. I concentrated.

The light flickered in my fingers.

I concentrated harder, visualizing the bullet inside her disintegrating, picturing the wound closing up.

My hands glowed, and I could feel it, could feel her flesh moving under my touch. It wasn’t just death I brought, it wasn’t. It was life too, if I willed it so. It had to be. I wasn’t God’s bastard hand. I wasn’t his angel of death and destruction. It was my choice, and I chose to will life.

The hole in her chest began closing up, and the rush of new skin coming into place tickled my palm.

The light glowed over Tassie’s body, and I thought breath and she breathed. A great hitch of breath that lifted her torso up like a sudden explosion. Her eyes shot open, panicked life coming into her face, and then she was moving, hands going to her chest, knowing only that she’d been shot and nothing else.

“No!” she screamed, and I lifted her head to my chest and held her there and said, “It’s okay, Tassie, you’re okay,” and it took another minute of her screaming before she realized she was alive and it was all over.

We sat there on the ground for a long time, maybe an hour, with her leaning against me and me stroking her hair with bloodstained hands. We didn’t talk.

But eventually I had to move. There was still unfinished business in the cabin.

Tassie grabbed at my shirt when I started to ease her away from me. “No,” she said. “Please don’t. Stay.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t leave me, Charlie.”

“I’m not. I’m going in the cabin for a minute. I’ll be right back, I promise. And then we’re leaving.”

She started to protest again, then clenched her jaw and nodded jerkily. “Leaving,” she said. “Okay. Okay.”

She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees and watched me as I walked to the cabin.

At the foot of the cross, the Reverend stirred. I don’t know how long he’d been conscious, but he was sitting half-up, slumped against the moonshine still, blood streaming from his wrists and his face white.

He was mumbling under his breath. “Sonofabitch,” he said. “Sonofabitch.”

I touched each of his wrists, allowed a trickle of golden light out, stingily, just enough to close his wounds. He didn’t seem to be aware of me. I went to the sink, grabbed a dirty glass, and filled it with water. I took it to him, put it to his lips and helped him drink.

Most of the water ran down his chin. He mumbled some more, words I couldn’t understand, and a short cackle of laughter erupted out of him. His mind was gone.

He said, “Damn me. . . . Goddamn me. . . .”

Kyle said, Go ahead, man, do it. You know you want to.

And he was right, as usual. I couldn’t resist it. I said, “Reverend, don’t blaspheme. It’s wrong.”