The Hum and the Shiver (10 page)

Bliss paused before speaking, allowing her words to accumulate the weight they would need. “Peggy Goins saw one of the chairs on her motel porch rocking with no wind. Mandalay Harris had a picture of her mom with Chloe that fell off the mantel. I dreamed of muddy water. And your mama saw the sin eater come out of the woods and stop at your door before moving on.”

Bronwyn knew all these things were traditional omens of death, just like the bird she saw. But the sin eater changed everything. Suddenly she knew why her father had fashioned the strange feathered chime clapper, a time-honored way to ward off or delay malefactions. “It’s not me,” she whispered. “My
mom’s
gonna die.”

“Don’t know for certain. But someone’s marked for it, and the picture falling pretty much says it’ll be in this house.”

Bronwyn knew Mandalay’s mother was already dead, having expired from the complications of giving birth to her. So she read the signs the same way Bliss did. “Well … we have to stop it, then.”

“There’s no stopping it, you know that. You’re either marked or you’re not. You weren’t. That’s why you didn’t die in Iraq. Chloe might be.” Now Bliss spoke with the quiet authority of a Tufa leader. “And maybe that’s why you were spared. You
have
to learn her song.
Now.
”

“But I can’t,” she said simply. “I can’t play. When I pick up Magda, there’s nothing.”

Bliss walked to the window and looked out into the blackness. “You have to learn to play so you can learn the song. There’s no way around that. A First Daughter who loses her mother’s song diminishes all of us. We’re diminished enough already.” She faced Bronwyn with all her Tufa authority. “If
we
don’t know the melodies hummed in the night wind, then all that’s left is the shiver of the grave.”

“But how will I learn? Will you come and give me lessons?”

Bliss shook her head. “Not me. I play guitar, anyway. But someone will turn up.”

Bronwyn nodded. The conversation had left her more numb than usual. “Okay, I’ll give it a shot. But can I ask you something?”

“Chloe knows,” Bliss said, anticipating the question.

Bronwyn nodded. It explained her mother’s outburst that morning, at least.

Bliss looked out the window again and said, “And I’ll take you into Knoxville next weekend to get those pins out. I can use the county ambulance. It’s good PR for when we have to apply for funding next year.”

“Thanks.”

Bliss kissed Bronwyn on the top of her head, then saw the figure Ed had given her. She picked it up and looked it over, paying special attention to the delicate wings. “Pretty good resemblance,” she observed.

“Maybe two years ago,” Bronwyn said.

“You’ve been through a lot. But you’re home, and we care for our own.” She put down the carving and made a slow, elaborate hand gesture. “You know that.”

Bronwyn responded with another similar gesture, but it was weak and weary, as she now was. “I know. But they tried that with Humpty Dumpty, too. Didn’t work out.”

Bliss smiled. The authority of a leader was replaced with a sisterly affection. “They just didn’t know the right song.”

9

Bliss’s headlights raked across the bedroom window as she backed from the yard, turned, and drove away. Bronwyn wondered if the visit had even awakened Deacon, Chloe, or Aiden. There was etiquette involved when one First Daughter visited another on official business, but this seemed more clandestine: not secret exactly, but certainly discreet. If Chloe was marked, if Bronwyn really did need to take her place soon, then the less fuss, the better for the community at large.

Mom …

Bronwyn had a sudden, vivid image of her mother in a coffin, her face still and pale, her dark hair arranged around her shoulders. This merged with a flash of memory, of Steve Caffaro sprawled on the sand beside her, eyes open but sightless. Then came the blow that crushed her like a swatter coming down on a fly as yet another IED went off nearby.

“Private Hyatt … Private Hyatt…”

She opened her eyes. Had she been asleep? Someone had turned off the light, and the room was black. She felt a shiver along the back of her neck as the situation’s reality set in. The voice could be only one thing. Her haint, a genuine
ghost,
was calling for her from the darkness outside. Apparently it was just waiting its turn.

This wouldn’t be the first haint she’d encountered. When she was nine, she’d spotted one walking slowly along the curve of County Highway B. It had been just after midnight, and she was returning home with a pillowcase full of bullfrogs. The haint resembled an old man, and hummed to himself as he shuffled along. His footsteps made no sound as he scuffed across the gravel toward her, and he vanished in the headlight beams of her father’s truck as he arrived to pick her up. She’d gotten six swats from Deacon’s belt that night, which took priority over the haint. So she’d never told anyone except Dwayne about it.

She’d seen another haint, a little girl this time, when she was thirteen and stumbling drunkenly along the tractor path between her father’s land and the Hamilton farm. And she thought a third encounter was a haint, but it turned out to be simply wild child Curnen Overbay, Bliss’s forest-roaming, possibly retarded sister.

But this was the first one that called her name, in a voice so soft, she wasn’t sure at first it was even more than the wind. It was the first one specifically haunting
her.
And it was creepier than she ever imagined.

She rolled onto her side as much as her shattered leg allowed and peered past the American flag curtain. A shape materialized out of the darkness, lighter than the surrounding night. She swallowed hard as it resolved into a young woman in desert combat fatigues, with strands of dark hair dangling from under her helmet. Her left side was missing a basketball-sized chunk of flesh, leaving a jagged gap from the top of her hip to her rib cage. The edge was black with blood.

Bronwyn swallowed hard. “Not now,” she whispered.

“Private Hyatt…,”
the haint repeated.

She drew courage from the blue glass on the windowsill. Still soft, but more firmly, she said, “Soon. But
not now.
”

The haint tilted its head and silently, expectantly gazed at Bronwyn. It was hard to look directly at it; when Bronwyn focused on any specific part, like the face or the gaping injury, the details went fuzzy. It was like something glimpsed in the corner of your eye that vanishes when you turn toward it. Then it seemed to both back away and fade until the shadows reabsorbed it. In moments it was completely gone.

Bronwyn rolled onto her back and sighed. She was sweating, the chill kind that comes after a narrowly avoided disaster. There was a tingle in her throat that, for a moment, seemed about to develop into a sob. But like the haint, it too faded into nothingness.

Still, there would be no sleeping anytime soon. She turned on the lamp and laboriously used her crutch to drag the mailbag to her bedside. She took a handful of cards and letters and put them on her stomach.

The first one said,
We hope and pray for your swift recovery. God bless you for your service to our country.

The second one said,
Without people like you, the ragheads would have struck us again. I think you deserve a medal for every one of those bastards you sent to hell. Stay strong, and keep the faith.

The third said,
You’re no more a “hero” than my fucking dog. You’re a pawn being used by the right wing to pander to its illiterate, TV-sucking constituents. Between you,
American Idol,
and global warming, we’ve proved without a doubt that the human race is worthless.
The letter was signed,
A global citizen.

Bronwyn stared at this one, trying to decide how she felt about it. It should piss her off; these were the cowards who didn’t
know
they were cowards, people who didn’t understand the need to meet violence with violence. She’d joined her fellow soldiers in mocking them, and truly felt they were as big a danger as those wild-eyed grunts who craved the experience of killing another human being.

Something Bliss once told her came back vividly. They’d been seated on the edge of a cliff looking down over the valley, their bare feet dangling in the breeze. Bronwyn had been maybe ten. “There is no sanctity of life,” Bliss told the younger girl. “There’s always something that has to kill something else, either to eat it or to protect itself from it. And even with people, there’s some that just need killing. I remember a fella named Ardis, who used to live down by Trebbel Creek. He was the meanest fella anyone ever knew.”

“Meaner than Rockhouse Hicks?” Bronwyn had asked. Even among the children, the old man was notorious for his vindictive cruelty.

“Honey, he made Rockhouse look like a dang pussycat. But Ardis was Tufa, he had his song, and we put up with him as long as we could. But finally…”

“What’d he do?”

“Beat a fella’s dog to death. Tied the dog’s paws and beat it to death with a baseball bat. Started with the back legs and worked his way up so the dog would suffer the most.”

“Why?”

“The owner accidentally cut him off on the highway. So Ardis followed him home, stole his dog, beat it to death, and left it back on his driveway.”

Bronwyn was silent for a long time.

“You
should
feel bad hearing that,” Bliss finally said. “Just because we’re Tufa and can ride the night wind doesn’t make us above the rules of right and wrong. Ardis thought it did, thought that we’d protect him.”

“We didn’t? I mean, you didn’t?
They
didn’t?”

“‘We’ is always right. No, we didn’t. A man who’ll kill an animal that way will eventually move on up to people if he’s not stopped. The legal system says you have to wait until
after
the crime to remove them from society, but we have our own rules, and our own ways of dealing with things. He showed up at the barn dance to play, and no one stayed to listen. The next day he was found right there.” She pointed down, where the cliff ended eighty feet below at the tops of the trees. From this height, the highway resembled a gray ribbon.

“Wow,” Bronwyn said, imaging the impact as the body crashed through the tree limbs before striking ground she knew was rock hard. “So he killed himself?”

“Our songs are important,” Bliss said. “We have to know them. We have to sing them. And someone has to listen. That’s why we meet and play, that’s why Rockhouse’s people meet and play.”

“But he
did
kill himself?” she persisted.

Bliss looked into the girl’s eyes. “He
needed killing,
Bronwyn. Whether he did it to himself or someone else did it, the result was the same.”

Now Bronwyn recalled that conversation in a whole new light. Had Bliss confessed to murder? Had she personally shoved Ardis the dog-killer off the cliff? And ultimately, was she right? Hadn’t Bronwyn been trained to kill, quickly and efficiently, anyone her superior officers said “needed killing”? Bliss had at least made the determination herself; Bronwyn simply followed orders.

She put the letter aside and picked up another. It read simply,
Get well soon. The Davis Family: Bill, Suzy, Brittany, and Joshua
.

Her laptop was still packed away. She hadn’t checked her e-mail in three days, since leaving the base for the flight home. Would it now be full of similar greetings? She’d learned in the hospital that Web sites devoted to her, or rather to the media’s image of her, had sprung up like mushrooms after a summer rain. She’d deliberately avoided them; did these people not have
lives
?

She considered trying to get to the refrigerator for a beer to help her relax. She’d been sneaking beer out of that same fridge since she was twelve, and climbing out the window through which she’d spied the haint for almost as long. Lying in a drugged stupor in the hospital, she’d wished for this room with almost feral ferocity, but now that she was here, all the feelings that drove her away from it had returned. She felt more trapped than ever before.

She wanted a drink. She wanted to kiss a boy. She wanted that boy to put his hands all over her. She wanted to drive like a maniac, and pick fights with other boys’ girlfriends, and with other boys. She wanted to spray-paint something rude on the water tower in nearby Mallard Creek.

Instead, she was on her ass in bed, her leg assimilated by the Borg and her head numb and fuzzy. The Bronwynator had left the building.

She yawned.
Now
she was tired, after all those deep thoughts. She pushed the envelopes and cards aside and turned off the lamp. The sense of foreign objects under her skin was so palpable, she could barely stand it, so she closed her eyes and began whisper-singing one of the oldest songs she knew, something that always gave her comfort. She was so weary, she did not realize that this was the first whole song she’d been able to recall since her injuries. She just knew it felt wonderful to sing it.

Oh, time makes men grow sad

And rivers change their ways

But the night wind and her riders

Will ever stay the same.…

The transition from song to dream passed without notice. Unlike her recent nightmares, in this reverie she reclined naked on soft grass, the night air warm and humid, the silver full moon overhead. Her skin was smooth and bore no injuries, no scars. In the dream she began to cry with happiness.