She was unlikely to go out after dark ever, until they killed that bear.
Daddy said she’d never get married. And despite herself, despite her strong wish to be independent, and strong, she was beginning to think that was quite a sentence that had been laid on her.
She hated Daddy for it.
“Ben? Coming to bed?”
Ben heard her, but found it difficult to speak.
“Ben…” Martha Taylor appeared in the doorway. “You need your rest.”
Ben looked up at her and smiled. “You sure look pretty tonight…”
Martha blushed, then sat on the chair beside him, tousling his gray hair as if he were a naughty boy. Her hair was almost exactly the same shade of gray; she liked that. “Old fool,” she said, and laughed.
“Martha…” He was silent then, for what seemed a very long time. Martha had long been used to her husband’s ruminations and knew he couldn’t be rushed. He would get to the point in his own good time. “I could have sworn I saw Reed up on that mountain tonight.”
“But that couldn’t have been. You said yourself his train hadn’t even gotten in yet when all that happened. He would have been halfway between here and Four Corners.”
“I know… I know. Guess it was somebody else, but that worries me… who?” Then, after another long pause, “My brother was a hateful man, Martha.”
“Shouldn’t talk ill of the dead, Ben.”
“Can’t help it… it’s true. Man like that would hold a grudge past all reasoning. I knew times when he was still thinking up vengeance for things twenty years gone.”
“But why worry about that now, Ben? Why upset yourself so?”
“I don’t know… but I just can’t seem to help thinking ‘bout him right now.” He suddenly sounded exhausted, and Martha helped him up from his chair, guiding him toward the bedroom, past the kids’ room, their snores so loud it made them both smile a little. “I don’t know… we need to take care of Reed, Martha. Make it up to him.”
“We’ll do our best,” she said, looking up into his eyes, suddenly frightened. “I’m sure we both will.”
Once again Mr. Emmanuel wakened from the dream drenched in sweat. He’d been drowning. The room had filled with water, he’d opened the window to climb out when small hands had grabbed his ankles, pulling him down. He twisted and turned, struggling, and in fighting off the grip dragging him under had turned around to see his attacker: a dead little girl with jelly eyes, her hands clenching his flesh like two sets of long white teeth.
He’d screamed and she’d opened her mouth as if to join him in the scream, but no sound came out of her mouth. Just mud. Rivulets of yellow, mine-acid mud.
He stared around the dimly lit bedroom, his heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs. He could hear Mrs. Parkey’s rats in the slab next door, scrabbling at the wall as if hungry for his meat.
Damn the woman anyway. He knew he could never have heard them if she hadn’t ranted so much about their nightly visits.
Inez Pierce checked in on her brother Hector one final time before going downstairs to bed. She was furious. He could have been killed. Naked as a jaybird. It was so bad this time she’d gone past embarrassment. There seemed no point to being embarrassed; everybody knew, no one was going to be surprised. But it still bothered her. She thanked God their parents weren’t still alive.
When she passed the window at the second-floor landing, she thought she saw something out in the yard. A woman in white, wrapped in fog, out walking on the lawn. Redheaded. Beautiful. Inez gaped, the sweat popping out on her forehead. Her bowels suddenly loosened, and she was afraid she was going to mess all over herself right there on the stairs. At her age.
“She hates us… she hates us all…” Inez whispered.
Now why had she said that? There was no sense in it. But somehow she knew. Then the image was gone, and it quickly became evident to Inez that the whole thing had been a trick of the light.
Brother Hector wasn’t the only squirrel-head in the family. Maybe it was catching.
Joe Manors sat huddled up on the pillows at the head of his bed, three empty liquor bottles on the nightstand. Inez wouldn’t be too happy if she knew about those; he’d have to get rid of them before she cleaned in the morning.
He couldn’t sleep; there’d be hell to pay in the morning at work. Tomorrow was Thursday though; maybe he could catch up on sleep during the weekend.
He just couldn’t get his mind off the little girl he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—up on the Big Andy. A little girl just like his baby sister. She’d died of the chicken pox a good thirty years ago. Only his sister had had black hair, black as the highest-grade coal. This one had been blonde. Freckled.
But of course he’d just thought he’d seen her. It had just been the dog, and the way the light and shadows had played across its heaving sides.
There seemed to be some sort of light outside his window, but somehow he knew he shouldn’t look out. He turned his face toward the wall and closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t even see its reflection.
In his dream Reed lay buried at the bottom of layer upon layer of earth. His body covered with filth and cobwebs. His body mummified. The earth around him alive, crawling with life, life thick to the point of revulsion.
Above him he could feel the giant excavator on Big Andy Mountain, its steel maw a dozen feet across, its power consumption far greater than that of the entire Simpson Creeks area. It began gnawing at the dirt, devouring tons of it at a time. First the covering vegetation, then layer after layer of subsoil and rock strata, overburden, looking for the sea of pure coal, looking for Reed’s body so it could strip it down too, layer after layer.
Reed could feel the excavator chewing at his head, gnawing away his hair, stripping off his scalp, cutting through the bone of his skull, seeking the soft, gray layers of brain, hungry for the thoughts sleeping there, peeling them, stripping them away until the skull was emptied like an oyster.
He awoke in a sweat, and at first he thought he had left his light on, the bare bulb over his bed blinding him with its halo.
But then the glow became a face, a woman’s face, her hair in flames. Reed screamed and leaped from the bed, but she still seemed to be there, following him, and even though he would not look around to check, he was sure she was reaching for him, trying to embrace him with her pale, cool arms, the flames licking at her face, at the ceiling, and reaching out for him as he ran for the corner.
Then the first light of morning broke through the window, and the apparition dissolved slowly into the illuminated dust motes floating before his window.
Chapter 15
Joe Manors climbed aboard the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer using leg and arm muscles that seemed to creak with every movement. Not a moment too soon: the day foreman was staring down at him from his yellow pickup on the edge of the embankment. Fool was going to slide over the lip someday; here he was ridin’ everybody’s ass about safety all the time and the man himself was a walking accident. Wouldn’t break Joe’s heart none if the truck took a high dive.
He’d barely made it; he was pretty sure the foreman would use just about any excuse to get rid of him. The foreman didn’t like hiring the local men for his crew—that was well known—but it was hard getting people to work this far back in the woods. Joe felt satisfied that he’d be hard to replace.
Foreman was talking to Mr. Emmanuel now. Then the two were laughing, looking like idiots when you couldn’t hear the sound of the laugh. Joe set his jaw and warmed up the engine a few minutes, then started up the cut.