speakin’ it.” The Lady reached over to her bedside table, opened a drawer, and
took out a piece of lined notebook paper. She gave it to my mother. “You
recognize this?”
Mom stared at it. On the paper was the pencil sketch of a head: a skull,
it looked to be, with wings swept back from its temples.
“In my dream I see a man with that tattoo on his shoulder. I see a pair
of hands, and in one hand there’s a billy club wrapped up with black tape—we
call it a crackerknocker—and in the other there’s a wire. I can hear voices,
but I can’t tell what’s bein’ said. Somebody’s yellin’, and there’s music
bein’ played real loud.”
“Music?” Mom was cold inside; she had recognized the winged skull from
what Dad had told her about the corpse in the car.
“Either a record,” the Lady said, “or somebody’s beatin’ hell out of a
piano. I told Charles. He recalled me a story I read in the Journal back in
March. Your husband was the one who saw a dead man go down in Saxon’s Lake,
ain’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Might this have anythin’ to do with it?”
Mom took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out. “Yes,” she said.
“I thought so. Your husband sleepin’ all right?”
“No. He… has bad dreams. About the lake, and… the man in it.”
“Tryin’ to reach your husband,” the Lady said. “Tryin’ to get his
attention. I’m just pickin’ up the message, like a party line on a telephone.”
“Message?” Mom asked. “What message?”
“I don’t know,” the Lady admitted, “but that kind of pain can sure ’nuff
drive a man out of his mind.”
Tears began to blur my mother’s vision. “I… can’t… I don’t…” She
faltered, and a tear streaked down her left cheek like quicksilver.
“You show him that picture. Tell him to come see me if he wants to talk
about it. Tell him he knows where I live.”
“He won’t come. He’s afraid of you.”
“You tell him,” the Lady said, “this thing could tear him to pieces if he
don’t set it right. You tell him I could be the best friend he ever had.”
Mom nodded. She folded the notebook paper into a square and clenched it
in her hand.
“Wipe your eyes,” the Lady told her. “Don’t want the young man gettin’
upset.” When my mother had gotten herself fairly composed, the Lady gave a
grunt of satisfaction. “There you go. Lookin’ pretty again. Now, you go tell
the young man he’ll have his new bicycle soon as I can manage it. You make
sure he studies his lessons, too. Potion Number Ten don’t work without a momma
or daddy layin’ down the law.”
My mother thanked the Lady for her kindness. She said she’d talk to my
father about coming to see her, but she couldn’t promise anything. “I’ll
expect him when I see him,” the Lady said. “You take care of yourself and your
family.”
Mom and I left the house and walked to the truck. The corners of my mouth
still had a little Potion Number Ten in them. I felt ready to tear that math
book up.
We left Bruton. The river flowed gently between its banks. The night’s
breeze blew softly through the trees, and the lights glowed from windows as
people finished their dinners. I had two things on my mind: the hauntingly
beautiful face of a young woman with green eyes, and a new bike with a horn
and headlight.
My mother was thinking about a dead man whose corpse lay down at the
bottom of the lake but whose spirit haunted my father’s dreams and now the
Lady’s dreams as well.
Summer was close upon us, its scent of honeysuckle and violets perfuming
the land.
Somewhere in Zephyr, a piano was being played.
TWO
Summer of Devils
and Angels
Last Day of School—Barbershop Talk—A Boy and a Ball—I Get Around—Welcome,
Lucifer—Nemo’s Mother & a Week with the Jaybird—My Camping Trip—Chile
Willow—Summer Winds Up
1
Last Day of School
TICK… TICK… TICK.
In spite of what the calendar says, I have always counted the last day of
school as the first day of summer. The sun had grown steadily hotter and hung
longer in the sky, the earth had greened and the sky had cleared of all but
the fleeciest of clouds, the heat panted for attention like a dog who knows
his day is coming, the baseball field had been mowed and white-lined and the
swimming pool newly painted and filled, and as our homeroom teacher, Mrs.
Selma Neville, intoned about what a good year this had been and how much we’d
learned, we students who had passed through the ordeal of final exams sat with
one eye fixed to the clock.
Tick… tick… tick.
In my desk, alphabetically positioned between Ricky Lembeck and Dinah
Macurdy, half of me listened to the teacher’s speech while the other half
longed for an end to it. My head was full up with words. I needed to shake
some of them out in the bright summer air. But we were Mrs. Neville’s property
until the last bell rang, and we had to sit and suffer until time rescued us
like Roy Rogers riding over the hill.
Tick… tick… tick.
Have mercy.
The world was out there, waiting beyond the square metal-rimmed windows.
What adventures my friends and I would find this summer of 1964, I had no way
of knowing, but I did know that summer’s days were long and lazy, and when the
sun finally gave up its hold on the sky the cicadas sang and the lightning
bugs whirled their dance and there was no homework to be done and oh, it was a
wonderful time. I had passed my math exam, and escaped—with a C-minus average,
if truth must be known—the snarling trap of summer school. As my friends and I
went about our pleasures, running amuck in the land of freedom, we would pause
every so often to think of the inmates of summer school—a prison Ben Sears had
been sentenced to last year—and wish them well, because time was moving on
without them and they weren’t getting any younger.
Tick… tick… tick.
Time, the king of cruelty.
From the hallway we heard a stirring and rustling, followed by laughter
and shouts of pure, bubbling joy. Some other teacher had decided to let her
class go early. My insides quaked at the injustice of it. Still, Mrs. Neville,
who wore a hearing aid and had orange hair though she was at least sixty years
old, talked on, as if there were no noise of escape beyond the door at all. It
hit me, then; she didn’t want to let us go. She wanted to hold us as long as
she possibly could, not out of sheer teacher spite but maybe because she
didn’t have anybody to go home to, and summer alone is no summer at all.
“I hope you boys and girls remember to use the library during recess.”
Mrs. Neville was speaking in her kindly voice right now, but when she was
upset she could spit sparks that made that falling meteor look like a dud.
“You mustn’t stop reading just because school is out. Your minds are made to
be used. So don’t forget how to think by the time September comes around a—”
RINGGGGGGG!
We all jumped up, like parts of the same squirming insect.
“One moment,” Mrs. Neville said. “One moment. You’re not excused yet.”
Oh, this was torture! Mrs. Neville, I thought at that instant, must have
had a secret life in which she tore the wings off flies.
“You will leave my room,” she announced, “like young ladies and
gentlemen. In single file, by rows. Mr. Alcott, you may lead the way.”
Well, at least we were moving. But then, as the classroom emptied and I
could hear the wild hollering echoing along the hallway, Mrs. Neville said,
“Cory Mackenson? Step to my desk, please.”
I did, under silent protest. Mrs. Neville offered me a smile from a mouth
that looked like a red-rimmed string bag. “Now, aren’t you glad you decided to
apply yourself to your math?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am.”
“If you’d studied as hard all year, you might’ve made the honor roll.”
“Yes ma’am.” Too bad I hadn’t gotten a drink of Potion Number Ten back in
the autumn, I was thinking.
The classroom was empty. I could hear the echoes fading. I smelled chalk
dust, lunchroom chili, and pencil-sharpener shavings; the ghosts were already
beginning to gather.
“You enjoy writing, don’t you?” Mrs. Neville asked me, peering over her
bifocals.
“I guess.”
“You wrote the best essays in class and you made the highest grade in
spelling. I was wondering if you were going to enter the contest this year.”
“The contest?”
“The writing contest,” she said. “You know. The Arts Council sponsors it
every August.”
I hadn’t thought about it. The Arts Council, headed by Mr. Grover Dean
and Mrs. Evelyn Prathmore, sponsored an essay and story-writing contest. The
winners got a plaque and were expected to read their entries during a luncheon
at the library. I shrugged. Stories about ghosts, cowboys, detectives, and
monsters from outer space didn’t seem much like contest-winning material; it
was just something I did for me.
“You should consider it,” Mrs. Neville continued. “You have a way with
words.”
I shrugged again. Having your teacher talk to you like a regular person
is a disconcerting feeling.
“Have a good summer,” Mrs. Neville said, and I realized suddenly that I
was free.
My heart was a frog leaping out of murky water into clear sunlight. I
said, “Thanks!” and I ran for the door. Before I got out, though, I looked
back at Mrs. Neville. She sat at a desk with no papers on it that needed
grading, no books holding lessons that needed to be taught. The only thing on
her desk, besides her blotter and her pencil sharpener that would do no more
chewing for a while, was a red apple Paula Erskine had brought her. I saw Mrs.
Neville, framed in a spill of sunlight, reach for the apple and pick it up as
if in slow motion. Then Mrs. Neville stared out at the room of empty desks,
carved with the initials of generations who had passed through this place like
a tide rolling into the future. Mrs. Neville suddenly looked awfully old.
“Have a good summer, Mrs. Neville!” I told her from the doorway.
“Good-bye,” she said, and she smiled.
I ran out along the corridor, my arms unencumbered by books, my mind
unencumbered by facts and figures, quotations and dates. I ran out into the
golden sunlight, and my summer had begun.
I was still without a bike. It had been almost three weeks since Mom and
I had gone to visit the Lady. I kept bugging Mom to call her, but Mom said for
me to be patient, that I’d get the new bike when it arrived and not a minute
before. Mom and Dad had a long talk about the Lady, as they sat on the porch
in the blue twilight, and I guess I wasn’t supposed to be listening but I
heard Dad say, “I don’t care what she dreams. I’m not goin’.” Sometimes at
night I awakened to hear my father crying out in his sleep, and then I’d hear
Mom trying to calm him down. I’d hear him say something like “…in the lake…”
or “…down in the dark…” and I knew what had gotten into his mind like a black
leech. Dad had started pushing his plate away at dinner when it was still half
full, which was in direct violation of his “clean your plate, Cory, because
there are youngsters starvin’ in India” speech. He’d started losing weight,
and he’d had to pull the belt in tight on his milkman trousers. His face had
begun changing, too; his cheekbones were getting sharper, his eyes sinking
back in their sockets. He listened to a lot of baseball on the radio and
watched the games on television, and as often as not he went to sleep in his
easy chair with his mouth open. In his sleep, his face flinched.
I was getting scared for him.
I believe I understand what was gnawing at my father. It was not simply
the fact that he’d seen a dead man. It was not the fact that the dead man had
been murdered, because there had been murders—though, thank goodness,
relatively few—in Zephyr before. I think the meanness of the act, the brutal
cold-bloodedness of it, was what had eaten into my father’s soul. Dad was
smart about a lot of things; he was commonsense smart, and he knew right from
wrong and he was a man of his word, but he was naive about the world in many
ways. I don’t think he’d ever believed that evil could exist in Zephyr. The
idea that a fellow human being could be beaten and strangled, handcuffed to a
wheel and denied a Christian burial in God’s earth—and that this terrible
thing had happened right in his own hometown where he’d been born and
raised—had hurt something deep inside him. Broken something, maybe, that he
couldn’t fix by himself. Maybe it was also because the murdered man seemed to
have no past, and that no one had responded to Sheriff Amory’s inquiries.
“He had to be somebody,” I’d heard Dad telling Mom one night, through the
wall. “Didn’t he have a wife, or children, or brothers or sisters? Didn’t he
have folks of his own? My God, Rebecca, he had to have a name! Who was he? And
where did he come from?”
“That’s for the sheriff to find out.”
“J.T. can’t find out anythin’! He’s given it up!”
“I think you ought to go see the Lady, Tom.”
“No.”
“Why not? You saw the drawin’. You know it’s the same tattoo. Why won’t
you at least go talk to her?”
“Because—” He paused, and I could tell he was searching inside himself
for an answer. “Because I don’t believe in her kind of magic, that’s why. It’s
false trickery. She must’ve read about that tattoo in the Journal.”
“It wasn’t described in such detail in the paper. You know that. And she
said she heard voices and piano music, and she saw a pair of hands. Go talk to
her, Tom. Please go.”
“She doesn’t have anythin’ to tell me,” Dad said firmly. “At least not
anythin’ I want to hear.”
And that was where it stood, as my father’s sleep was haunted by a
drowned phantom with no name.
On this first day of summer, though, I wasn’t thinking about any of that.
I wasn’t thinking about Old Moses, or Midnight Mona, or the man with the
green-feathered hat. I was thinking of joining my friends in what had become
our ritual of celebration.
I ran home from school. Rebel was waiting for me on the front porch. I
told Mom I’d be back after a while, and then I ran into the woods behind our
