The Harrows of Spring (27 page)

S
IXTY-SEVEN

As he made his way home on horseback across the village from Daniel's quarters, Robert heard the commotion at the doctor's place and then saw the people on the street and stopped to ask what it was about. Charles Pettie of the church music circle was one of the several dozen neighbors on the east end of the village who had gathered there. They carried candle lanterns as in a vigil.

“What happened?” Robert asked him.

“Weren't you in on this?” Charles said. “They got up a militia, you know.”

“No, I had to go out in the county and see about the mischief there.”

“I would have gone with them but for my bad knees,” Charles said. “The Berkies fired on our people. Some children got hurt. More than a few. Dear God . . .”

Robert asked him to hold on to Mookie while he went inside. The doctor's waiting room had been turned into a triage unit where the New Faith nurses were trying to comfort and console those awaiting surgery. Among the men acting as orderlies, moving the patients in and out, was Tom Allison, the former college dean who ran the livery now. Robert went over to him.

“It's going to get around that we killed a bunch of kids,” Tom said. “I hope you're prepared.”

“I don't even know what happened,” Robert said.

Tom laid out what had gone down in the hayfield.

“They fired on us,” Tom said. “After that, well . . .”

Robert attempted to comprehend the scene.

“We're good people,” Tom insisted. “We are.”

“I know,” Robert said.

“I've got to go,” Tom said. “They need me now.”

Robert realized that in the close quarters of the chaotic scene he would only be in the way, so he went back down the driveway and spoke briefly as mayor to the gathered townspeople to convey what he'd learned of the situation. He saw no point to remaining out there among them and he rode the horse back to the New Faith stables. None of the brothers was on duty there when he came in. Enough moonlight entered through the cupola so he could see what he was doing. He took off Mookie's tack, put him in a stall, found some oats in the grain room for him and a fat flake of hay, and brought him a bucket of water. Then he walked the rest of the way home to the house on Linden Street. It was upwind of the doctor's place and the cries of the wounded and dying were so faint as to be barely audible. When he stepped inside he discovered Britney sitting on the sofa in the front parlor.

“You're sitting in the dark,” he said, realizing it was a self-evident and stupid observation.

“The moon's full tonight,” she said.

“Well, that's true.”

“I was alone all day.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't be here. We've had a sort of emergency.”

“What sort?”

Robert realized she had virtually no idea what else had been going on for days. He didn't want to spell out the terrible result: children dead and dying.

“Trouble outside of town. I had to ride around the county all day.”

“Are we being invaded?”

Robert hesitated. “Just some bandits,” he said.

“I thought I heard screaming far away. Is someone having a baby across town?”

“No. The doctor's working on some people who are hurt.”

“Anyone we know?”

“No. Just the bandits.”

Britney nodded.

“Can I sit with you?” Robert asked.

“Yes.”

He slid in beside her. He could feel her warmth through the flannel bathrobe and the sweater on top of it.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“I'll never get over this,” she said.

“I know.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, I lost a wife and a daughter,” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “Forgive me. I'm ashamed of myself.”

“It's okay,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

“Did you ever get over it?” she asked.

“No,” Robert said. “But I found you.”

She turned to him.

“Let's make a child,” she said. “You and me.”

“We've been together a year, you know, and you haven't gotten pregnant.”

“I know when I'm ovulating. I can feel it. I've been extremely careful all these months. I didn't want to tell you.”

He reached over and touched her cheek, pulled some of her long hair away from her face, and tucked it behind her ear.

“Do you know what a vasectomy is?” Robert said.

Britney nodded. Then, suddenly, her tears ran as if a faucet had just been turned.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” she said and twisted herself way from him pressing against the back of the sofa.

Robert let her cry herself out. He tried to rub her neck and shoulders but she batted him away. Finally, she turned back around, looking forward. Not saying anything, just struggling with her sadness.

“I have an idea,” Robert said.

She was sniffling and it took her a while to heave a big sigh and say, “What's your idea?”

“You could get pregnant by . . . other means.”

Her eyes widened as if he'd said something crazy.

“Haven't you heard?” she said. “There are no more fertility clinics.”

“I mean somebody else could do it.”

“You want another man to get me pregnant?”

“I know you want another child.”

“But it wouldn't be your child.”

“What if the other man was Daniel?”

This time her face expressed a collapse of all hope.

“That would never work,” she said.

“It would be partially mine,” he said.

“It would never work,” she repeated. “Never. Never ever.”

He saw no benefit in arguing about it. His face also sagged in futility.

“It was just a thought,” he eventually said, sunk in embarrassment and resignation.

She reached for his hand and squeezed it damply, though as she did she turned her head to front again and did not look at him.

S
IXTY-EIGHT

Brother Enos sat in the hallway outside the little chapel room where Flame Aurora Greengrass was confined. That wing of the old high school, which otherwise contained classrooms turned to workshops, was quiet as a mausoleum at this hour. Brother Jobe trudged down the hall carrying the sack that he'd brought from the hotel. A candle burned on a stand next to Enos's chair and he just stared ahead into space.

“Whyn't you read a ding-dang book or something while you sittin' here,” Brother Jobe said. “Improve your mind a little.”

“Yessir, I'll do that next time.”

“You can read, can't you?”

“Yessir.”

“There's a whole doggone library down yonder hallway.”

“You want me to go get a book right now, sir?”

“No. Next time will do. Open the ding-dang door. And lock it back up whilst I'm inside.”

Enos took the key that hung on a cord around his neck and unlocked the door. It opened with a creak. Brother Jobe carried his own tin candle lantern into the room. The twelve chairs set up for Christian meditation were shoved to one side of the room and a cot had been set up in one corner. Flame Aurora Greengrass had been lying on it. He could see where she had attempted to stack up two chairs in hope of getting to the clerestory windows near the top of the wall. But the window openings were only nine inches and someone her size could never have wiggled out, even if she'd been able to get up to them, which she hadn't. Flame propped herself up on an elbow squinting in the meager light as Brother Jobe pulled up two chairs close to the bed and sat down on one of them.

“Sit up, young lady.”

“Think you can label me whatever way you like?”

Brother Jobe ignored the remark.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

“You're some little fat man in funny clothes.”

“I'm your fate, sittin' here right next to you, taking a special interest in what you done and what you going to do.”

“What does that mean?”

“For starters it means you'd best be polite. Go on sit up now, right here acrost from me.”

Flame stared back impudently a moment, then hauled herself upright on the cot facing Brother Jobe.

“Are you some officer of the law?” she asked.

“I'm the chief executive and pastor of the New Faith Covenant Brotherhood Church of Jesus, and that's as much authority as you got for the time being.”

“I have a right to an attorney?”

“As it happens, I'm an attorney myself.”

“You're kidding.”

“You want me to go git the Duke University sheepskin? Don't bother answering. Maybe some other time.”

“I have a right to remain silent.”

“I wish you would because then I could get on with the bidness at hand.”

Brother Jobe picked up the sack he'd brought in with him, reached in, carefully removed the mummified head of Glen Ethan Greengrass, and set it upright against the backrest on the other chair beside him. Flame recoiled at the sight of it and placed a hand over her mouth.

“Yeah, I know it ain't a pretty sight,” he said. “Maybe this here'll help.”

He took the wig out of the sack and put it on the mummified head without quite being able to determine how it was supposed to fit.

Tears began to squirt out of Flame's eyes and she drew her knees up into her chest.

“That your daddy?”

Flame nodded her head.

“Looks like he ain't been among the living for a while.”

“He . . . lives . . . in our hearts,” she said.

“As the departed should. But you been traveling all about the countryside with him for some time trying to scare folks, and rob them, and now you gone too far. You brung a lot of misery down on your own fellow travelers. There's thirteen of yours dead and three more shot up but alive, one of them a seven-year-old girl that had to have her leg cut off. Plus one town man you shot in the head and one of my rangers killed today,” Brother Jobe said, his voice both rising in pitch and breaking, “one of the finest human beings I ever known, bushwhacked by that sharpshootin' runt of yours, who's dead now too, by the way.” He struggled to regain his composure. “There's at least half a dozen common laws of conduct that I could hang you under.”

“We don't believe in capital punishment.”

Brother Jobe smacked the seat of the adjoining chair so hard that the head of Glen Ethan Greengrass fell on the floor and rolled under the cot. He did not bother to retrieve it. Flame shrieked and began to hyperventilate.

“It don't matter what you believe,” Brother Jobe hollered back at her. “Not anymore. What matters from now on is what I require of you. Where's that sumbitch Buddy?”

Flame shook her head wildly.

“You don't know or you ain't sayin'? I'm fixin' to hang his ass too.”

Brother Jobe watched Flame blubber awhile.

“Let me ask you something,” he said eventually. “Do you know why Achilles chased Hector around the city of Troy three times?”

She continued to shake her head while her eyes blazed and her nose ran.

“Because he was just that pissed off,” Brother Jobe yelled at her again and rose halfway out of his seat doing so. The tendons in his neck stood out like they were piano wires. “And you got me feeling much the same way. Where's that Buddy at?”

She would not reply but only glared back in opposition.

Brother Jobe brought his right index finger out vertically in front of Flame's face. He captured her attention and it was all he needed.

“Lookit here now and follow,” he said.

He swerved his index finger up to the outside corner of his right eye. At the same moment, the glare went out of Flame's eyes. She let go of her knees and came to sit primly on the edge of the cot, psychologically his captive.

“I'm amongst your mind now,” he told her. “Can you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“Where's Buddy at?”

“Bullock's,” she said.

“Was he aimin' to rob Mr. Bullock?”

“Yes,” Flame said.

“From what all I know of Mr. Bullock, Buddy done picked the wrong fellow to try and snooker. I'd calculate that Mr. Bullock done disposed of him by now. You think I'm quick to anger? Why, Mr. Bullock, he's a human magnum load with a hair trigger. Those men playin' Indian go with Buddy?”

“Yes.”

“He's probably got them strung up like Christmas lights down along the River Road. Mr. Bullock don't have no patience for bandits. Nor mercy. He's a harsh man. I don't like to think that I'm like that. But you and your bunch have really tried my Christian patience. Can you give me a reason why I shouldn't hang you?”

“I'm pregnant,” she said, without a particle of emotion.

It was Brother Jobe's turn to be startled. He left his position at the threshold of her mind and ventured deeper into the dark realm of her memory and experience. What he discovered there stunned him.

“You're carrying Elam's child,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

Brother Jobe sat quietly for quite a while, his own emotions in turmoil, weighing the situation and all its ramifications as he explored more deeply the mind of the young woman before him. The damage of her upbringing and her passage into the difficult new times was as plain to him as the injuries suffered by Mary Beth Ivanhoe after she was crushed by an SUV automobile.

“You prepared to bear this child?” he asked at length.

“Yes,” she said.

“You understand you will have to dwell with us?”

“Yes.”

“I'm gonna make a special provision for you. You'll live in a special place. You will be cared for and looked after and watched over. It ain't gonna be like the life you led before. Understand?”

“Yes.

“Henceforth, you'll be known among us as . . . Sister Venus. Flame is gone. She done sputtered out. A new you has took her place. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“I'm gonna count backwards from ten and you gonna fall asleep. When you wake up, you won't remember none of this, but you got a new place and a new role in this world. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Ten . . . nine . . .”

When he arrived at one, Brother Jobe reached out and helped ease her down onto the cot, where she reposed in stillness with her head on a pillow and her hands clasped beside her face as if in prayer. He left his chair, retrieved the mummified head of Glen Ethan Greengrass from under the cot and the wig that had come off again, and stuffed them back in the pillowcase he brought them in with. Then he went to the door and told Enos to unlock it. Enos peered inside.

“She asleep?”

“She gonna be for a good while,” Brother Jobe said.

“Mercy,” Enos said.

“She's out of the woods now, I judge. I'm gonna send some of the sisters down to set with her. By-and-by they gonna bring her upstairs. She won't cause nobody no trouble no more.”

When he got back to his own personal quarters at half past four in the morning, Brother Jobe found his all-around man Friday and confidential assistant Brother Boaz waiting in the office.

“What'd you do with the better half of Mr. Glen Ethan Greengrass's mortal remains?” Brother Jobe asked.

“I got him in the janitor's closet yonder, in a box.”

“Well, take this here,” Brother Jobe said proffering the sack with the head and the wig in it, “and go bury him out in the corn somewheres. It'll be light in little while.”

“Yessir.”

Boaz made to leave.

“Wait!”

Boaz halted in midstep.

“On second thought, make a nice fire out there and cremate the sumbitch. Then scatter what's left to the four winds.”