“What?”
“I just don’t like the company very much,” she said. “I don’t mean you,” she added hurriedly.
“Who then?”
“All these dead folk,” she said.
“What dead folk?”
“Over the hill. There’s a bloody cemetery.”
“Really?”
“It’s not ideal viewing in your state of mind,” she said hurriedly. But she could tell by the expression on Lori’s face she shouldn’t have volunteered information.
“You don’t want to see,” she said. “Really you don’t.”
“Just a minute or two.” Lori said.
“If we stay much longer, we’ll be driving back in the dark.”
“I’ll never come here again.”
“Oh sure. You should see the sights. Great sight; Dead people’s houses.”
Lori made a small smile.
“I’ll be quick,” she said, starting down the street the direction of the cemetery. Sheryl hesitated. She’d left her sweater in the car, and was getting chilly, all the time she’d been here she hadn’t been able dislodge the suspicion that they were being watched. With dusk close she didn’t want to be alone in the street.
“Wait for me,” she said, and caught up with Lori who was already in sight of the graveyard wall.
“Why’s it so big?” Lori wondered aloud.
“Lord knows. Maybe they all died out at once.”
“So many? It’s just a little town.”
“True.”
“And look at the size of the tombs.”
“I should be impressed?”
“Did you go in?”
“No. And I don’t much want to.”
“Just a little way.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
There was no reply from Lori. She was at the cemetery gates now, reaching through the ironwork to operate the latch. She succeeded. Pushing one of the gates open far enough to slip through, she entered. Reluctantly, Sheryl followed.
“Why so many?” Lori said again. It wasn’t simply curiosity that had her voice the question; it was that this strange spectacle made her wonder again if Boone had simply been cornered here by accident or whether Midian had been his destination. Was somebody buried here he’d come hoping to find alive? or at whose grave he’d wanted to confess his crimes? Though it was all conjecture, the avenues of tombs seemed to offer some faint hope of comprehension the blood he’d shed would not have supplied had she studied it till the sky fell.
“It’s late,” Sheryl reminded her.
“Yes.”
“And I’m cold.”
“Are you?”
“I’d like to go, Lori.”
“Oh… I’m sorry. Yes. Of course. It’s getting too dark to see much anyhow.”
“You noticed.”
They started back up the hill towards the town, Sheryl making the pace.
What little light remained was almost gone by the time they reached the outskirts of the town. Letting Sheryl march on to the car Lori stopped to take one final look at the cemetery. From this vantage point it resembled a fortress. Perhaps the high walls kept animals out, though it seemed an unnecessary precaution. The dead were surely secure, beneath their memorial stones. More likely the walls were the mourners’ way to keep the dead from having power over them. Within those gates the ground was sacred to the departed, tended in their name. Outside, the world belonged to the living, who had nothing left to learn from those they’d lost.
She was not so arrogant. There was much she wanted to say to the dead tonight; and much to hear. That was the pity of it.
She returned to the car oddly exhilarated. It was only once the doors were locked and the engine running that Sheryl said:
“There’s been somebody watching us.”
“You sure?”
“I swear. I saw him just as I got to the car.”
She was rubbing her breasts vigorously. “Jesus, my nipples get numb when I’m cold.”
“What did he look like?” Lori said.
Sheryl shrugged. “Too dark to see,” she said. “Doesn’t matter now. Like you said, we won’t be coming back here again.”
True, Lori thought. They could drive away down a straight road and never look back. Maybe the deceased citizens of Midian envied them that, behind their fortress walls.
TOUCHED
It wasn’t difficult to choose their accommodation in Shere Neck; there were only two places available, and one was already full to brimming with buyers and sellers for a farm machinery sale that had just taken place, some of the spillage occupying the rooms at the other establishment: the Sweetgrass Inn. Had it not been for Sheryl’s way with a smile they might have been turned away from there too; but after some debate a twin-bedded room was found that they could share. It was plain, but comfortable.
“You know what my mother used to tell me?” said Sheryl, as she unpacked her toiletries in the bathroom.
“What?”
“She used to say: there’s a man out there for you, Sheryl; he’s walking around with your name on. Mind you, this is from a woman who’s been looking for her particular man for thirty years and never found him. But she was always stuck on this romantic notion. You know, the man of your dreams is just around the next corner. And she stuck me on it too, damn her.”
“Still?”
“Oh yeah. I’m still looking. You’d think I’d know better, after what I’ve been through. You want to shower first?”
“No. You go ahead.”
A party had started up in the next room, the walls too thin to muffle much of the noise. While Sheryl took her shower Lori lay on the bed and turned the events of the day over in her head. The exercise didn’t last long. The next thing she knew she was being stirred from sleep by Sheryl, who’d showered and was ready for a night on the town.
“You coming?” she wanted to know.
“I’m too tired,” Lori said. “You go have a good time.”
“If there’s a good time to be had,” said Sheryl ruefully.
“You’ll find it,” Lori said. “Give ‘em something to talk about.”
Sheryl promised she would, and left Lori to rest, but the edge had been taken off her fatigue. She could do no more than doze, and even that was interrupted at intervals by loud bursts of drunken hilarity from the adjacent room.
She got up to go in search of a soda machine and ice, returning with her calorie-free nightcap to a less than peaceful bed. She’d take a leisurely bathe, she decided, until drink or fatigue quieted the neighbours. Immersed to her neck in hot water she felt her muscles unknotting themselves, and by the time she emerged she felt a good deal mellower. The bathroom had no extractor, so both the mirrors had steamed up. She was grateful for their discretion. The catalogue of her frailties was quite long enough without another round of self-scrutiny to swell it. Her neck was too thick, her face too thin, her eyes too large, her nose too small. In essence she was one excess upon another, and any attempt on her part to undo the damage merely exacerbated it. Her hair, which she grew long to cover the sins of her neck, was so luxuriant and so dark her face looked sickly in its frame. Her mouth, which was her mother’s mouth to the last flute, was naturally, even indecently, red, but taming its colour with a pale lipstick merely made her eyes look vaster and more vulnerable than ever.
It wasn’t that the sum of her features was unattractive. She’d had more than her share of men at her feet. No, the trouble was she didn’t look the way she felt. It was a sweet face, and she wasn’t sweet; didn’t want to be sweet, or thought of as sweet. Perhaps the powerful feelings that had touched her in the last few hours seeing the blood, seeing the tombs would make their mark in time. She hoped so. The memory of them moved in her still, and she was richer for them, however painful they’d been.