6
Sometimes Caleb Callister thought about his life and the building blocks that it was erected from. But not often. Now that Hiram was dead and buried some seven months, Caleb was the sole owner of the Callister Brothers Mortuary which would soon be renamed Callister Funeral Parlor. Occasionally, Caleb missed his brother, but not too often. They’d always had a pretty good arrangement-Caleb made the coffins and Hiram embalmed the bodies. Handling corpses was nothing Caleb cared for. After Hiram died, he’d tried his hand at it for a time, but it made him sick touching that cold clay so he’d hired an embalmer named Moss out from Stockton, California.
Moss was capable and he minded his own business, which was a plus. Caleb didn’t have that much to hide-not since Hiram’s passing that was-but last thing he needed was some young snip fresh out of mortuary school nosing into his affairs. Caleb was a gambler and a womanizer and most knew it, but he liked to keep such things quiet. For by day he was a respectable business owner. And he didn’t need Moss spreading stories about the teenage girls Caleb had brought to the mortuary or what he did with them in the rooms above.
Some things had to be kept secret.
Like the history of the Callister brothers, for instance.
Nobody in town knew much about them. Like everyone else they had just drifted in like leaves before a harsh Autumn wind. They blew in and set up a cabinetry shop and then the local undertaker had died, so Hiram decided they should get into that end of things, too, since most cabinetmakers were undertakers as well.
So they did and in a town with a very high mortality rate like Whisper Lake, it proved very lucrative. Extremely so. Eventually (and with the population boom) the Callisters gave up making cabinets and concentrated on coffins and undertaking. And this is all people really knew about the Callister brothers, aside from whispers and gossip.
They didn’t know that they were from Logansport in western Louisiana or that their father had been a cabinetmaker and his father before him. They didn’t know what it was like growing up with a man who was hardened by life and physically powerful from uncounted years of harsh manual labor. A man that liked to drink and use his fists on his family. Caleb himself had tasted the fury of those fists on numerous occasions as had Hiram. And that time the old man had caught Hiram out in the barn with that other boy doing those disgusting things, he’d nearly beaten him to death.
Only Caleb’s intervention had saved his life.
And sometimes Caleb wondered why he’d bothered because as the old man said, Hiram was “touched and not by the hand of the Lord.” Hiram was a strange boy, plump and bookish. He didn’t run and play with the other children. He collected beetles and toads and anything dead he happened upon. Liked to sun-dry dead things and sit around and look at them. Caleb thought it was sick, but Hiram was blood and what could he do but protect him? Except, the older they got, the more peculiar Hiram became. And it was Caleb himself, just shy of his twentieth birthday, that had to pay that boy off after what Hiram had done to him. And it wasn’t the first time. For Hiram was a pervert and he had fondness for children, especially boys. But Caleb protected him and kept his secret, though sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night, his skin crawling at the memory of things he’d seen.
But that was a secret.
The Callisters had been good at secrets. The old man had a few of his own. By the time he was fifteen, Caleb had been to the local brothel more than once, striking up friendships with some of the girls. Most, barely older than himself. They had confided in him that his father would come in drunk, throw money around, then want to take one of the girls upstairs. That he liked to use his belt on them. That was one of his secrets. Another was what happened to their mother. The old man didn’t think the boys knew, but they knew, all right. They didn’t believe she had up and run off. They knew the old man had come home one night in a drunken rage, stinking of whorehouse perfume and their mother had mentioned the fact. And the old man had savagely beat her. Kept beating her long after she was unconscious, pounding her skull with those massive fists until her brain had hemorrhaged and she had died. And that the old man had thrown her body in an abandoned well… where her bones still lay. Yes, the boys knew this, but they kept it secret.
Secrets, secrets.
Like how the old man had taken to regularly beating Hiram because he was so sick ashamed of “that queer little bastard.” Yet, Hiram remained at home even after Caleb had long since moved out. But trouble was going to come in spades and it finally did. Caleb had gone home to visit after three solid days of debauchery and found Hiram, naked and bloody, standing over the old man’s corpse with a hatchet in his hand. Hiram had nearly cut his head off. So another secret was born. They bagged up the old man in sack cloth weighed down with rocks and sank him in the depths of the Sabine River where he could spend eternity with his own kind-alligators and water moccasins and all the other slimy, slinking nightmares that called those dark bottoms home. Shortly afterwards, once the old man was declared dead? on account he just vanished and nobody in town liked him anyway? they sold off the properties and business and came west.
People in Whisper Lake did not know these things.
Nor did they know what Hiram did with the corpses of dead prostitutes that came into the mortuary. Or how Caleb had happened in one night and found him having sex with one of them. And by that point, Caleb was just damn sick of covering up for that goddamn deviant even if he was his older brother. And that when Caleb found him dead-suicide, coroner said, even thought they both knew it was far from the truth-it was really a blessing because sooner or later, Hiram was going to get caught doing something unpleasant and it would destroy everything Caleb had worked for. And when Hiram was buried, a lot of secrets were buried with him.
But there were secrets even Caleb did not know.
Like maybe how it was for Hiram that night when black, malevolent voices got into his head and made him see things and feel things and hear things that were just plain awful. Or how he opened James Lee Cobb’s casket and Cobb was awake in there, staring, staring with a single eye like a coal glowing in a furnace, taking the blood sacrifice offered him. Or how Hiram went mad when Cobb took him by the throat and tried to scream but had no voice and his heart finally gave out, knowing, knowing that nothing could look like Cobb and live.
Caleb did not know about that, but he sometimes guessed awful truths.
People in town could not know these things. Nor would they honestly want to. Just like they didn’t know that Caleb Callister hated Mormons and was part of a vigilante gang that had murdered no less than twelve of their members or how omnipotent he felt when he pulled on that white hood and got down to business. And they didn’t know about those two Mormon girls the vigilantes had happened upon picking berries and how they had raped them continually until they’d bled and then slit their soft white throats and buried them in shallow graves no one would ever find. Or how the vigilantes laughed when renegade Indians were blamed for the disappearance of the girls. Nobody knew about that. Nor did they know that of all the Mormon camps and villages scattered in the hills and valleys, the vigilantes did not raid in the one called Deliverance. Because even the Mormons shunned that place and whatever had happened there, it was Devil’s work.
And above all, nobody guessed that the disappearance of James Lee Cobb’s body and the hideous degeneration of Deliverance from a God-fearing Mormon hamlet to a place of dark, nameless rites was not coincidental, but very much connected.
Like the Callisters, these secrets were tended in the lonely tracts of the town’s sordid soul.