Luther saw something else, though. Something that ate away at his gentleness and his light, and Lila had begun to fear that their child would not reach the world in time to save its father. For on her more optimistic days, she knew that’s all it would take — for Luther to hold his child so he’d realize once and for all that it was time to be a man.
She ran a hand over her belly and told the child to grow faster, grow faster, and she heard a car door slam and knew by the sound of it that it was that fool Jessie Tell’s car and that Luther must have brung that sorry man home with him, the two of them probably high as balloons that had lost their strings, and she got up from her chair and put her mask on and tied it behind her head as Luther came through the door.
It wasn’t the blood she noticed first, even though it covered his shirt and was splashed up along his neck. What she noticed first was that his face was all wrong. He didn’t live behind it no more, not the Luther she’d first seen on the ball field, not the Luther who smiled down into her face and brushed back her hair as he moved in and out of her on a cold Ohio night, not the Luther who’d tickle her until she screamed herself hoarse, not the Luther who drew pictures of his child in the window of a speeding train. That man did not live in this body anymore.
Then she noticed the blood and came toward him, saying, “Luther, baby, you need a doctor. What happened? What happened?”
Luther held her back. He gripped her shoulders as if she were a chair he needed to find a place for and he looked around the room and said, “You need to pack.”
“What?”
“Blood ain’t mine. I ain’t hurt. You need to pack.”
“Luther, Luther, look at me, Luther.”
He looked at her.
“What happened?”
“Jessie’s dead,” he said. “Jessie’s dead and Dandy, too.”
“Who’s Dandy?”
“Worked for the Deacon. Deacon’s dead. Deacon’s brains all over a wall.”
She stepped back from him. She touched her hands to her throat because she didn’t know where else to put them. She said, “What have you done?”
Luther said, “You got to pack, Lila. We got to run.”
“I ain’t running,” she said.
“What?” He cocked his head at her, only a few inches away, but she felt as if he was a thousand miles on the other side of the world.
“I ain’t leaving here,” she said.
“Yes you are, woman.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Lila, I’m serious. Pack a fucking bag.”
She shook her head.
Luther clenched his fists and his eyes were hooded. He crossed the room and put his fist through the clock hanging above the couch. “We are leaving.”
She watched the glass fall to the top of the couch, saw that the second hand still ticked. So she’d repair it. She could do that.
“Jessie’s dead,” she said. “That’s what you come home to tell me? Man got himself killed, near got you killed, and you expect me to say you my man and I’m’a pack a bag right quick and leave my home because I love you?”
“Yes,” he said and took her shoulders in his hands again. “Yes.”
“Well, I ain’t,” she said. “You a fool. I told you what running with that boy and running with the Deacon would get you and now you come in here covered in the wages of your sin, covered in other men’s blood, and you want what?”
“Want you to leave with me.”
“You kill tonight, Luther?”
His eyes were lost and his voice a whisper. “I killed the Deacon. I shot him straight up through his head.”
“Why?” she said, her voice a whisper now, too.
“Because he the reason Jessie dead.”
“And who’d Jessie kill?”
“Jessie killed Dandy. Smoke killed Jessie and I shot Smoke. He probably die, too.”
She could feel the anger building in her, washing over the fear and the pity and the love. “So Jessie Tell kill a man and then a man shoot him and then you shoot that man and then kill the Deacon? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes. Now—”
“Is that what you’re telling me?” she yelled and beat his shoulders and his chest with her fists and then slapped him hard across the side of the head and would have kept on going if he didn’t grab her wrists in his.
“Lila, listen—”
“Get out of my house. Get out of my house! You’ve taken life. You are foul in the eyes of the Lord, Luther. And He will punish you.”
Luther stepped back from her.
She stayed where she was and felt their child kick inside her womb. It wasn’t much of a kick. It was soft, hesitant.
“I have to change these clothes and pack some things.”
“Then pack,” she said and turned her back on him.
As he tied his belongings to the back of Jessie’s car, she stayed inside, listening to him out there, and thinking how a love like theirs couldn’t possibly end no other way because it had always burned too bright. And she apologized to the Lord for what she now saw so clearly was their greatest sin: They had searched for heaven in this world. A search of that kind was steeped in pride, the worst of the seven deadly sins. Worse than greed, worse than wrath.
When Luther came back, she remained sitting on her side of the room.
“This is it?” he said softly.
“I guess it is.”
“This is how we end?”
“I believe so.”
“I …” He held out his hand.
“What?”
“I love you, woman.”
She nodded.
“I said I love you.”
She nodded again. “I know that. But you love other things more.”
He shook his head, his hand still hanging in the air, waiting for her to take it.
“Oh, yes, you do. You’re a child, Luther. And now all your playing brought this bloodshed home to roost. That was you, Luther. It wasn’t Jessie and it wasn’t the Deacon. It was you. All you. You. You, with your child in my womb.”
He lowered his hand. He stood in the doorway a long time. Several times he opened his mouth, as if to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.
“I love you,” he said again, and his voice was hoarse.
“I love you, too,” she said, though she did not feel it in her heart at that moment. “But you need to go before someone comes here looking for you.”
He walked out the door so fast she’d never be able to say she’d seen him move. One moment he was there, the next his shoes were hard against the wooden planks and then she heard the engine turn over and the car idled for a short time.
When he depressed the clutch and shifted into first the car made a loud clanking and she stood but didn’t move toward the door.
When she finally stepped out on the porch, he was gone. She looked up the road for his taillights, and she could just make them out, far off down the road in the dust the tires raised in the night.
Luther left Arthur Smalley’s car keys on his front porch on top of a note that said “Club Almighty alley.” He left another note saying the same thing to let the Irvines know where to find their hope chest, and he deposited jewelry and cash and most everything else they’d taken on the porches of the sick. When he got to Owen Tice’s house, he could see the man through his screen door, sitting dead at the table. After he’d pulled the trigger, the shotgun had bounced back in his hands. It stood straight up between his thighs, his hands still gripping it.