"No," he whispered. "No, Cammy, that can't be. You're wrong." He listened, his face slowly going pale. "Cammy . . . I don't . . . know what to do. . . . Are you sure?" He glanced quickly up at the others, his beefy hand about to crunch the receiver in two. "Is Wayne there with you? All right, now listen to me carefully. I don't care, just listen! Get that dog to the vet and have it checked over real good. Don't talk to anybody but Dr. Considine, and tell him I asked that he keep this to himself until I speak to him. Got that? Calm down, now! I'll be home in a couple of hours, I'm leavin' as fast as I can. Are you sure about this?" He paused, exhaled a long sigh, and then said, "All right. Love you, hon. 'Bye." And hung up the receiver.
"Anything wrong, J.J.?" Hodges asked.
"Toby," Falconer said softly, staring out the window at the surrounding city, golden afternoon light splashed across his face. "My bird dog. Hit by a truck on the highway. ..."
"Sorry to hear about that," Forrest offered. "Good dogs are hard to . ."
Falconer turned to face them. He was grinning triumphantly, his face a bright beet-red. He clenched his fists and thrust them toward the ceiling. "Gentlemen," he said in a voice choked with emotion. "God works in mighty mysterious ways!"
THREE
Tent Show
11
Heat lay pressed close to the earth as John Creekmore drove away from the house on a Saturday morning in late July. Already the sun was a red ball of misery perched atop the eastern hills. As he drove toward the highway, heading for his job at Lee Sayre's hardware and feed store, a maelstrom of dust boiled up in the Olds's wake, hanging in brown sheets and slowly drifting toward the field of dry brown cornstalks.
There had been no rain since the second week of June. It was a time, John knew, of making do or doing without. His credit was getting pretty thin at the grocery store, and last week Sayre had told him that if business didn't pick up—which it wasn't likely to, being so late in the summer and so stifling hot—he'd have to let John go until the autumn. He was digging into the emergency money to get his family by, as were most of the valley's farmers. Perhaps the most contented creatures in the Hawthorne valley were the local hogs, who got to eat a great deal of the corn crop; happy also was the man from Birmingham who bought dry corncobs at dirt-cheap prices, turning them into pipes to be sold at drug stores.
There was the Crafts Fair, held in Fayette in August, to look forward to now. Ramona's needlepoint pictures sold well. John remembered a woman buying one of Ramona's pieces and saying it looked like something "Grandma Moses" might've done; he didn't know who "Grandma Moses" was, but he figured that was a compliment because the woman had cheerfully parted with five dollars.
Morning heat waves shimmered across the highway, making Hawthorne float like a mirage about to vanish. He shifted uneasily in his seat as he passed the still-vacant, rapidly deteriorating Booker house; it had a reputation, John knew, and nobody in his right mind would want to live there. Only when he had passed the vine-and-weed-grown structure did he permit himself to think about that awful day in April when he'd seen Billy's schoolbooks lying on the front steps. The boy still had occasional nightmares, but he never explained them and John didn't want to know, anyway. Something in Billy's face had changed since that day; his eyes were troubled, and locked behind them was a secret that John found himself afraid of. More than anything, John wished there was a real minister in town, someone who could fathom this change Billy was going through; the whole town was in dire need of a preacher: Saturday nights were getting wilder, bad words brewed into fights, and there'd even been a shooting over in Dusktown. Sheriff Bromley was a good, hard-working man, but Hawthorne was about to slip from his control; what the town needed now, John knew, was a strong man of God.
He had wanted to be a minister himself, a long time ago, but the farming heritage of his family had rooted him to the earth instead.
At a tent revival one hot August night, he'd watched his father spasm and roll in the sawdust as people screamed in strange tongues and others shouted hallelujahs; the unnerving sight of the lanky red-haired man with his face contorted, veins jutting out from the bullneck, had stayed with John all his life. John feared the blue evening twilight, when—his father had said—God's Eye roamed the world like a burning sun, in search of the sinners who would die that night. It was understood that Life was a gift from the Lord, but Death was Satan's touch in this perfect world; when a man died spiritually and turned away from God, physical death was sure to follow, and the pit of Hell yawned for his soul.
His father had been a good family man, but privately John was told that all women, like Eve, were cunning and deceitful—except for his mother, who was the finest woman God had ever created— and he was to beware of them at all times. They had strange beliefs, could be swayed by money and pretty clothes, and they bled once a month to atone for the Original Sin.
But, at a barn dance when he was twenty, John Creekmore had looked across at the line of local girls waiting to be asked to dance, and his heart had grown wings. The tawny-skinned girl was wearing a white dress with white honeysuckle blossoms braided into her long, shining russet hair; their eyes had met and held for a few seconds before she'd looked away and trembled like a skittish colt. He'd watched her dance with a boy whose clodhoppers kept coming down on her feet like mules' hooves, but she only smiled through the pain and lifted her white hem so it wouldn't get dirty. Rosin leapt from the fiddlers' bows, dusting the tobacco-stained air, as the dancers stomped and spun and bits of hay drifted down from the loft like confetti. When the girl and her partner had circled close enough, John Creekmore had stepped between them and taken her hands, spinning away with her so smoothly Old Mule Hoof grabbed for empty air, then scowled and kicked at a clump of hay since John was twice his size. She had smiled, shyly, but with true good humor in her sparkling hazel eyes, and after the dance was over John asked if he might come see her some evening.
At first, he'd never heard of Rebekah Fairmountain, Ramona's mother. Later, he dismissed the tales he heard as idle gossip. He refused to listen to any more wild stories and married Ramona; then it was too late, and he turned alternately to moonshine and the Bible. He could never say, though, that he hadn't been warned about how things were; he remembered several times even Ramona trying to tell him things he couldn't stand to hear. He clung to the Bible, to the memory of his father once telling him no good man would ever turn tail and run from a woman, and to God. And life, like the seasons, went on. There'd been two blessings: the birth of Billy, and the fact that Rebekah Fairmountain, as tough as kudzu vine and alone since the death of Ramona's father, had moved to a house fifty miles away, on land with a better consistency of clay for her pottery.