-1-
His name was Nebuchadnezzar, but everyone called him Neb.
When they were being nice, which was only when his pa was around. People were always polite if they thought Big Tom Howard was in earshot. Or any kind of shot, for that matter. That was the thing. That’s what everyone was afraid of.
But Big Tom wasn’t always around.
Then the kids had other names for Neb. Most of them weren’t really names, they were words that Neb knew they hadn’t learned in church or school. What Mrs. Carter from the next farm over called ‘barnyard words.’ The kind of words that would have earned every one of those kids a solid beating if they’d used them around the house or in front of grown folks. The kind of word Neb never used at all, even when he was alone and had to clean up the whole house by himself.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He used one of those words—a really bad one—the day the sheriff and his men came out to arrest Neb’s pa. All eleven of those men had come busting into the house with their ropes and chains and guns and fell on his pa while he was still sleeping off a drunk. They’d have never come out if Big Tom was even half sober. No sir.
Neb ran after the men when they rode off with his pa slung like a sack of beans over the bare back of a packhorse. He’d chased them all the way to the row of trees that separated the Howard spread from the Carter place, but by then Neb knew he wasn’t going to catch them. And he knew there wasn’t a blessed thing he could have done if he did. They were grown men and he was twelve. There were a dozen of them and he was all alone. They had guns and badges and all he had was his fear and his anger.
So, he yelled at their retreating backs.
“God damn you all to burning Hell.”
It wasn’t obscene but it was blasphemous.
That was not the really bad word Neb used. That was still percolating in his chest.
Mrs. Carter came running out and threatened to cuff those words right out of him. She said it was the Devil himself speaking out of him like that and she raised that little Bible she always carried as if it was the hand of God ready to strike him down.
“But they took my pa,” he protested, trying not to sound like a little boy. Trying to sound like he was Big Tom’s only son.
His plea hadn’t softened Mrs. Carter much. She lowered her Bible, though, and gave him a pitying look.
“And the Devil’s been in his soul since he was your age, young Neb,” she said in a voice of iron. “Now I hear the word of Satan falling from your lips.” She shook her head and pressed the leather-bound book to her skinny breast.
“They took him, ma’am,” said Neb, and the tears were in his voice if not yet in his eyes. “They had no right to take him.”
Saying that did something to Mrs. Carter. She lowered the Bible and walked up to him, standing face to face with him. Although she was a full-grown woman and Neb was young, he was two inches taller. Somehow, though, he felt much smaller, and she seemed to tower over him. A thin scarecrow of a woman with sticks for arms and eyes the color of dust. Straw-dry hair pulled back into a bun that looked so tight it had to hurt, and a black dress with a white apron that flapped and snapped in the east wind.
“Listen to me, Nebuchadnezzar Howard,” she said in a voice that was only slightly louder than the whisper of the breeze over the tall grass, “it’s not your fault that you were born to such a family. A whore for a mother and a lawless devil of a father.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, but his voice was nothing, too small to be heard.
“We are all sinners,” she said. “We are born with the sins of Adam and Eve painted on our hearts. They betrayed the trust of God and therefore we are all born in the shadow of that crime. All we can ever hope for is to find acceptance in the Lord and to beg for him to rescue us from the Pit.”
“N-no …”
Mrs. Carter raised the hand holding the Bible and pointed with one bony finger at the group of riders that had dwindled down to specks.
“Evil is born unto evil as sin is born out of sin. Your father is a monster. A killer of men who has known the inside of every whorehouse west of Laramie. He has blood on his hands, oh yes, he does. And as Adam’s sins were passed down to his children so are the sins of Thomas Howard passed unto you. Your soul must bear that weight and it is up to you to find a way to expunge this guilt.” She bent close and he could smell apples and bread yeast on her breath. “You stand at the very brink of Hell, Neb. Take one step and you will burn, like your mother burns now and like your father will surely burn when they slip that noose around his neck. Mark me, child. Mark what I say.”
“You’re crazy,” said Neb. “Ma used to say you were and Pa said it all the time. You’re crazy as a barn owl and twice as ugly.”
Mrs. Carter’s eyes flared as wide as an owl’s right about then.
And before Neb could say another word of sass, she slapped him across the face. Not with her hand, but with the black leather-bound holy book she always carried. She was as skinny as a hickory pitchfork handle, but she was as tough as one, too. The blow caught Neb square on the side of the face, and it sent him crashing against the post rail. He rebounded and dropped to his knees in front of her like a sinner in church.
That’s when Neb said the bad word. The barnyard word.
“Fuck you!” he screamed.
The words seemed to roll away from his mouth, blow past Mrs. Carter like a hot wind, tumble all the way to the distant line of mountains, and come echoing back. And as they did his shouted words sounded like they were in his father’s voice and not Neb’s own.
Mrs. Carter stared at him with eyes as wide as saucers, and as he watched Neb saw a strange expression come over her. Or a series of them that pulled onto her face and then moved on, like cars in a locomotive. First there was blank shock, and then horror, then righteous indignation, and finally a smile crept onto her mouth. It was one of the ugliest smiles Neb had ever seen. Cruel and triumphant and delighted, as if she had waited all her life for just this moment, and now that it was here, with the proof of his sinful corruption still burning in her ears, her life’s mission was complete. She seemed so incredibly pleased to have her certainties confirmed. Mrs. Carter pointed the Bible at him the same way his pa would point at someone with his gun.
“You are going straight to Hell,” she said in a tight whisper. “You will burn in eternal hellfire where you belong.”
Neb Howard got slowly to his feet. His cheek hurt and his face burned and tears stung his eyes. He wanted to break down and sob, and he knew there would be time for that, but he would die first rather than give her that kind of satisfaction.
“You’re always telling people that they’re going to Hell,” he said. “I heard you say that to half the people in town. You think everybody’s going to Hell. Or maybe you think they all deserve to go there ’cept you.” He took a step toward her and there must have been something in his voice or in his face, Neb couldn’t be sure, but Mrs. Carter flinched backward half a step. “If everybody you ever told to go to Hell ever did, then it would be full to busting. All the people down there and you up here. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She straightened and tried to reclaim her power. “It would be the fitting justice of the Lord. I pray for all you sinners every day.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” said Neb, “maybe you’d better pray real good because it’d be my guess that Hell’s going to get mighty full. And all them sinners down there will be remembering who sent ’em down to burn.”
He took another step.
“And I wonder what’ll happen when there’s no more room in Hell, Mrs. Carter.” He smiled and Neb knew it was a bad smile. It hurt his face to smile like that. “What do you think will happen then?”
She held the Bible out between them as if it could protect her from him and his sinful words.
Neb looked from the book to her and back down at the book. Then he hocked phlegm from deep in his throat and spat at the Bible she held. It was a big green glop that struck the black leather and splashed on her bony fingers.
The woman screeched like a crow and immediately wiped the spittle off on her apron, then pawed at the leather to ensure that it was clean. She made small mewling sounds as she did so. Neb stood there and slowly dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. He studied the glistening wetness for a moment, then he looked up at her again.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “You better run home now.”
It was still early in the day. The darkness, he knew, was in her soul and in his heart.
Mrs. Carter backed up all the way to the road, then she turned and ran home. Only when she was halfway up the footpath to her own front door did she turn and shake the Bible at him and shout something. But Neb turned away, shutting out the sight of her and anything she had to say.
-2-
It was a long, bad day.
For a long time, Neb sat on a hard wooden chair in the kitchen, surrounded by the silence of an empty house, and waited for something to happen. A thought, an idea, a plan. A hope.
Nothing.
His heart hurt and his head felt like it was full of hornets. His thoughts buzzed and stung him.
Ten different times he got up to head outside to saddle his horse, Dunders, and once even had the saddle on and the straps buckled. But then he unsaddled the old horse and trudged back to the house, knowing that his presence in town wouldn’t do his father any good. There were a lot of stories about Big Tom and though many of them were wild, Neb suspected that most of them were true. Even if half of them were lies and the other half exaggerated it still meant that his pa was a bad man.
A sinner.
Neb thought of this as he sat in the house, wrapped in shadows that rose up, towered over him, and fell crashing down as the sun moved through the sky and threw light in through the windows. The truth was a hard thing to know. Knowing it made it hard for Neb to breathe sometimes. Not just then, but at nights in his bed when he heard Big Tom downstairs weeping or yelling, raving drunk. Telling bad truths to the night and whispering into his whiskey bottle.
Neb knew that it was what happened to Ma that turned his father bad. Ruined him. That was probably the better way to think about it. Mrs. Carter and the ladies at church had a lot to do with that. With what happened to Ma and what Pa turned into.
It was on account of the baby.
Neb’s little sister, Hannah, had only lived long enough to cry once and then she stopped crying, stopped wriggling around, stopped breathing. Neb had been eight when it happened. He’d seen stillbirths before, it happened a lot on a farm. And there were birthing deaths in town, too. The Pederson twins both died, and Mrs. Sykes died along with her sixth kid. It happens, and even as young as he was Neb Howard was old enough to know that life was hard and life was fragile. Dying came easy out here. Maybe it was different in the big cities back East, but not out here. There was sickness and there were all sorts of dangers. Fires and ranch accidents, flash floods and all sorts of things. Death walked everywhere and there was no one who didn’t know the sound of the Reaper’s voice.
But with Ma it had been bad.
She’d been sickly for a long time, having never really recovered from a sickness that cut through this whole region. The influenza Neb thought it was called. That was the word people used, though Mr. Flambeau who owned the livery called it the grippe. It gripped all right, Neb knew. It grappled hold of people from Sadler’s Fork to Indian Pass, and by the time that winter passed there were probably a thousand new graves dug in the soil in the shade of these mountains. Ma had almost been one of them, but even though she lingered there on the edge she came back. It was Pa who brought her back. Sitting by her side every night, holding her hand, praying to God and to her for her to come back, come back, come back to him. That’s what he said, and Neb was sure he heard his father say those words ten thousand times.
Come back. Come back. Come back to me.
And even though she’d looked like death lying there with sweat-soaked hair and gray skin and hardly no breath at all, Ma came back. Slowly. Maybe reluctantly. But when Pa called her, she came back.
She was never the same after that, though.
Neb once heard Mr. Flambeau say to his wife that “Meg Howard looked like death warmed up.” And Mrs. Schusterman over at the general store said that she looked like a ghost.
Neb thought she looked like an angel, and sometimes at night he wondered if maybe Ma had died and it was her angel that had come back. Ma was so gentle, so soft, so quiet after the sickness. And she was always fragile as butterfly wings. She rarely went out in the bright sun and could not abide loud noises. She left the heavy farm work to Neb and his pa.
Neb missed the old Ma. He missed her laughter and her energy. He missed the Ma who could bake a dozen pies at Christmas and decorate the house and the big tree in the yard and do it all with a smile. After the sickness he never saw that Ma again. Instead, it was the angel.
Then she got pregnant. Even as a kid Neb understood about that. This was a farm after all. She got pregnant and every day, the bigger she got the sicker she looked. It was as if the baby growing in her belly was draining all the life force from her. Like a tick sucking on blood.
Neb grew to hate the baby.
At first, anyway.
Later he realized that he was just afraid of what the baby was going to do to Ma by the time she came to term.
Then that night came, and it was as if the doors of Hell had been cracked open. The midwife came and so did some of the ladies from town. Even Mrs. Carter came over, drawn by the sound of Ma’s terrible screams.
Neb tried to hide from those screams. First in his room, then in the barn. The horses were spooked by the sound, and they screamed, too.
It lasted all through the night and only around dawn did the screaming stop.
Neb, exhausted from a night of hiding and crying and praying for it all to end, heard the silence. That’s how he remembered it. He heard the silence.
He crawled out from beneath the pile of hay he’d pulled over him and crept out of the barn and stood looking at the house. He knew something was wrong. He knew that just looking at the house. It stood wrong against the dawn light. It seemed tighter, threatening. The gables and windows and everything seemed to be clutched into a fist. Ready to punch him. Ready to hurt him.
The silence was awful.
So awful.
Neb came up onto the porch and saw that the door stood open. It was never left open.
The living room was empty and messy. That was wrong, too. Ma always kept the house neat as a pin. Everything dusted, everything in its place. Neat and tidy and snug and comfortable.
Now chairs were in the wrong place and the hall rug was rumpled and there was a whiskey bottle standing nearly empty on the table. No glass. As if Pa had been drinking from the bottle itself. Was that the haystack Pa hid under? he thought. It was a thought too old for a kid, but he thought it anyway and knew it to be the truth.
Climbing the stairs was the hardest thing Neb ever did. So hard and it took forever. The effort of lifting his leg to place the flat of his shoe on each riser was harder than lifting fence rails.
Then he was upstairs, down the hall, standing at the open door to his parents’ room. It was as far as he would go. It was as far as he could make himself go. He stood with his hands on the doorframe and stared into a scene from Hell itself.
The town ladies standing around, each of them looking sad or shocked or horrified. All of them looking worn down. Ma was on the bed, but the bed was wrong. So wrong. It was painted in red. Splashed in red. Drenched in red.
Pa stood holding something. A tiny form whose legs and arms drooped down from the edges of his palms. It, too, was red.
Ma lifted a pale, blood-spattered hand toward the thing that Pa held.
“My baby …” she said in a ghost of a voice. “Give me my baby.”
Pa did not move.
Ma pulled at the neck of her sodden dressing gown, tearing it open, exposing one breast. “I have to feed my baby. Give her to me. Can’t you hear how hungry she is?”
Mrs. Carter said, “You should have called Brother Taylor when I told you to, Tom Howard.”
Pa lifted his head and Neb saw that there was no trace of comprehension in his red-rimmed eyes. “W-what …?”
“I told you that this would happen,” said Mrs. Carter. “I told you that you needed the parson to come out here and baptize the child before …”
She let her words trail off, the meaning clear.
“Where’s my baby?” cried Ma.
“Only those baptized in the blood of the lamb can ever hope to go to Heaven,” said Mrs. Carter. “Only those blessed by the Lord can hope to escape the fires of Hell.”
Pa clutched the still form to his chest and sank slowly down to his knees, broken as much by what had happened as by those dreadful words.
“Give me my baby,” said Ma. “Little Hannah is so hungry.”
He bent forward and laid the infant on the bed, let Ma take her, watched as Ma pressed the slack mouth to her nipple. Saw the smile on Ma’s face.
“There she is,” said Ma. “See how hungry she is?”
Those words beat Pa further down. He buried his face in the bloody sheets and wrapped his arms over his head. That’s when Neb heard those words again.
“Come back,” whispered Pa. “Come back. Come back to me.”
But Hannah hadn’t come back.
And as Neb stood there, he saw Ma’s eyes close and her smile slowly fade. It did not go away completely. Not even when she stopped breathing. Not even when Pa began to scream.
That was how Pa went wrong. Neb knew it for sure.
The preacher came out at noon, but Mrs. Carter met him on the porch, and she had the same triumph in her eyes that day as she had this morning.
“I told Tom Howard to send for you while there was still time,” she said. “Now look what he’s done. That poor baby is lost for good and all.”
Neb stood holding his Pa’s hand, and he felt his father’s grip tighten and tighten as they waited for the parson to refute those words, to say different, to say that Hannah was going to Heaven. To say that it didn’t matter that she hadn’t been baptized.
But the preacher only took Mrs. Carter’s hand and patted it. “I’ll say a prayer.”
That was all he said, and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t near enough by a country mile.
Pa nearly broke Neb’s hand by squeezing it so hard. If it had been a day later, Neb was sure Pa would have gone charging off the porch and punched them both. If it had been a month later, he’d have taken a horsewhip to them.
If it had been this year, Pa would have shot them both sure as God made green apples.
Now Pa was gone. Dragged out of bed, beaten and slung across the back of a horse. Now he was in jail. And maybe he was going to wherever Ma and little Hannah had gone. Into the ground. Up to Heaven? Or, if Mrs. Carter and the parson were right, then down to Hell.
Neb huddled inside the rough blanket of his own hurt and wondered what to do.
-3-
He summoned the courage to ride into town that afternoon. The sun was tumbling behind the hills, throwing long purple shadows in his path. Dunders, who was an old and trailwise horse, seemed uneasy by the coming twilight and Neb had to yank on the reins and kick him a few times to keep the horse headed to town. Though in his head Neb understood and even sympathized.
“I don’t want to go, either,” he told the horse when they were halfway there. “But we gotta find out what’s happening to Pa.”
Dunders blew out a breath that was almost a sigh of resignation and plodded on. It was nearly full dark by the time they reached the outskirts of town, and Neb knew at once that something was wrong. Bad wrong. There were lights everywhere. Torches and lanterns. He could hear voices shouting and even some gunshots popping. Mrs. Carter’s rickety old dogcart with her rickety old horse, Ahab, was tied to a post. He saw the parson’s half-breed Appaloosa tethered next to it.
Neb almost turned around.
Almost.
Dunders stopped at the edge of town and Neb sat heavily in the saddle, knowing that nothing good was ever going to come of riding on. Nothing, no-how.
He rode on.
At a hesitant walk at first, then an unsteady canter, and finally a full gallop.
Knowing what he would see.
The crowd clustered around the jail, swelling as more people ran in. He saw the fists shaking in the air, heard the guns fire into the night sky, saw the big tree in the center of town lit by torches. Saw the rope.
He knew all about lynch mobs. Who didn’t?
Dunders caught his desperate terror and ran harder than ever all the way up the length of Main Street.
Just in time to see.
There were so many things to see.
The sheriff sitting on the wooden plank walkway outside of the jail, his left eye swollen shut, three townsmen holding his arms. Torchlight struck sparks off of the sheriff’s badge, and off the badges of the men restraining him.
The faces of the people in town. People he knew. Mr. Flambeau, Mr. and Mrs. Schusterman, the milliner, the man from the hat shop, the two sons of the farrier, the parents of his friends. He knew those faces and didn’t know them. He knew them as people in town, people he knew or kind of knew, ordinary people whose faces he saw at church or at the town fair or clustered together in front of the general store on every other Tuesday when the mail coach came rumbling in. The faces of the people in his life.
Except now they were different. Now they were screaming and yelling. Now their features were twisted into strange masks by the flickering torches. Now they were like the faces of monsters. Not human at all.
Monster faces.
So many monsters.
Neb saw those faces and didn’t know any of them anymore.
The only face he knew—the only face that he recognized now—was that of his own Pa.
Sitting on a horse. No hat. Face bruised and bloody.
Shirt torn and filthy, hair mussed and hanging loose over his brow. Hands tied behind his back.
A thick loop of rope around his neck.
The air was torn apart by the yells of the gathered monsters. They shouted his pa’s name. They screamed aloud for the three burly men standing by the horse’s head to do something bad. Something impossible.
“No,” breathed Neb, though his voice was too small, too weak to be heard over the shouts.
He saw Mrs. Carter. She stood on a stump, shrieking as she shook her Bible at Pa. The parson was there, too, standing beside the stump, hands clasped together. For a moment—just one clear, sweet moment—Neb thought the preacher was calling for the crowd to stop, to step back, to not do this.
But then Neb saw the smile. A curl of his mouth that was too much like the triumphant smile on the twisted face of Mrs. Carter. That’s when Neb knew it was all going to fall apart, that the hinges of his life had split from the frame and were falling off. He knew that as sure as he knew anything else in his life.
“No …” he said, smaller than before. Faint even to his own ears.
And then it bubbled up from the bottom of his soul, boiling up past his breaking heart and tearing its way from his throat.
“Noooooooooooooo!”
It was so loud that it stilled the crowd. It froze the moment. Everyone turned toward him, every face, every eye. Even the horse on which his father sat. They all turned to Neb Howard, but all Neb could do was look into the eyes of his father.
“No,” he said again. Once more, small and faint.
His pa said, “Neb, for God’s sake go home.”
He was crying as he said it. Neb hadn’t seen his pa cry since that red day in his parents’ bedroom. He’d heard him weeping in the night, but he’d never seen those drunken tears. Now, though, they ran down his cheeks like lines of molten silver. It burned Neb to see them. It stabbed him through and through.
As the moment stretched Neb saw how his presence began to change the faces of those monsters that used to be the people in town. Some of them looked angry that he was there. Others looked down or away, anywhere but at him. Some cut looks at Mrs. Carter, the sheriff, the rope, as if calculating how far this was taking them away from the people they were supposed to be.
And in that moment, Neb thought—wondered, hoped, prayed—that they were going to step back, cut him down, release the sheriff, not do this. They should. He knew it and they knew it, because this was a line that no one should cross. Not like this. Not when hate has turned them into monsters.
It was Mrs. Carter—of course it was her—who broke the fragile tension of that moment.
She yelled, “Damn you to Hell, Tom Howard. Your family is waiting for you in the pit.”
Neb heard the gasps from the people. Even the preacher recoiled slightly from her, his smile dimming.
Mrs. Carter stared down at them, looking around, disappointment and disapproval etched by firelight and shadows onto her face. And her face had never stopped being the mask of a monster.
“No, please,” begged Neb. “For the love of God …”
Mrs. Carter spat toward him and then she threw her Bible at the horse. The leather struck the animal’s hip with a sound like a gunshot. The horse screamed as if scalded. It reared back, breaking loose from the men who held it, then it lurched forward, crashed into the people who were too slow and too shocked to move out of the way in time. The horse raced past Neb and ran down Main Street, the sound of its thudding hooves chopping into the air.
There was no rider on that horse.
Of course, there wasn’t.
No one watched the horse go.
They stood like silent statues and stared at the thing that swung slowly back and forth on the end of the rope. No one made a move to cut Big Tom down. There was no reason to hurry. Not with a neck bent and stretched like that.
The parson was the only living person who moved. He walked five paces and squatted down to pick up the Bible. He brushed it off on his black frock coat and then held it out to Mrs. Carter. She stared at him, at the book, and up at the man she’d killed for a long time, then she stepped down and took the book from him, smiling all the while, and giving a small hmph as she pressed it to her chest. When she walked away, no one said a word, no one tried to stop her.
Mrs. Carter paused for a moment in front of Dunders. She used her free hand to caress the horse’s long nose.
“All sinners go to Hell, Nebuchadnezzar,” she said. “And you will burn alongside the rest of your kin.”
Then she walked away. She never stopped smiling.
No one could look at Neb. Not even the parson.
He sat there and felt his heart turn to cold stone in his chest. He could feel the weight of it as it tore loose from its moorings. It fell and fell, landing in a much lower place. Far too low.
He knew that even then.
-4-
They buried his pa the next day. Four men brought his body out on the back of a cart and they set to digging in the front yard. They buried him next to Ma and little Hannah. The parson came out and tried to read some words over the grave, but Neb grabbed a pitchfork and brandished it at the parson.
“You take your lying words and that damn book and you git!” he snarled.
The parson was appalled. So were the gravediggers. “I am here to say a prayer over your father.”
Neb took a step forward, the tines of the pitchfork held at heart level. “Will your prayers keep my pa out of Hell?”
“You have to understand, son,” said the preacher, “your father was a murderer. He gunned a man down in—”
“I know what he did. I hear people talking. But he was supposed to have a trial so the judge could hear both sides of the story. What happened to that? Did you speak up to protect my pa from those crazy people and their damned rope?”
“I—”
Neb sneered. “Where were your prayers last night? What did you do to stop Mrs. Carter? What did you do to stop all those people?”
“You must understand … that was a mob. They were all whipped up and—”
“And what? Ain’t you preachers supposed to stand up for what’s right? No, don’t answer ’cause I know you’d just lie.”
“You ought to watch your tongue, boy,” said one of the gravediggers.
Neb pointed the pitchfork at him. “And maybe you ought to hold yours,” he warned. “This ain’t about you. This is between my folks and his asshole of a God.”
“By the Almighty,” cried the parson. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you not fear God’s wrath?”
Neb nearly ran at him with the pitchfork. “Fear God’s wrath? That’s all I know of God. He took my ma and he took my little sister and you told me that she’s burning in Hell because she died ’fore she was baptized. That’s what your God does. And my pa may not have been the best man, but he deserved to have a trial and he deserved justice, but last night I saw you standing right there when Mrs. Carter threw her Bible at that horse. Wasn’t that the wrath of God? She stood there and said it was God’s justice and I didn’t hear you speak out against that.”
Neb moved forward, the pitchfork’s tines gleaming like a claw. All of the men, the parson and the gravediggers, moved away. Neb stopped at the foot of the half-filled in grave.
“You people ain’t never done nothing but hate on my family. If you had even a shred of decency, you’d have told us that Hannah would go to Heaven with all the angels. My ma, too.”
“God’s truth is God’s truth. I’m a man of God,” said the preacher.
Neb didn’t want to cry, but the tears came anyway. Hot as boiled water. “You could have had mercy,” said the boy. “You could have lied to us. What you said, what Mrs. Carter said, that’s what broke something in my pa’s head. It’s what turned him mean as a snake. He wasn’t evil … he was heartbroke. You’re always preaching about saving souls—it wouldn’t have taken much to save his.”
The preacher said nothing.
“Go on and get off my farm,” said Neb, his voice cold even to his own ears. “You’re not welcome here. Not you and not your God. Now git.”
He jabbed the pitchfork toward the preacher and again toward the gravediggers. One of the men started to take a threatening step toward Neb, but the crew foreman caught his arm.
“Leave ’im be,” said the foreman. “This here’s his land now. He wants us gone, then we best be gone.”
The other gravedigger pointed at the grave. The corpse of Big Tom Howard was only partly covered and there was a considerable pile of dirt standing in a humped mound. “You want us gone, kid, then you best finish this your ownself. But bury him deep ’cause he’s already starting to stink.”
He turned away, laughing, and followed his companions back to where they’d left their cart. The preacher lingered a moment, looking like he wanted to say something else. It was the kind of expression people had when they wanted to have the last word in an argument. But the pitchfork had the last word and both he and Neb knew it.
The preacher backed away, then turned and hurried to catch the gravediggers.
That left Neb all alone with the half-buried body of his father. They’d wrapped him in white linen, and someone had tied some rope crisscrossed from neck to ankles. Neb figured it was the rope they’d hung him with. People did that because they wouldn’t have to use a bad luck rope.
Neb jabbed the pitchfork down into the ground at the foot of the grave and pulled the small hunting knife he wore in a leather sheath on his belt. With tears flowing down his cheeks, he stepped down into the shallow grave.
“I’m sorry, Pa,” he said, sniffing to keep from choking on the words. He bent down and sawed through the ropes. It was a horrible thing to have to do. His father’s body was rigid with death stiffness. Neb knew that this would wear off after a couple of days; he’d seen that with animals he’d hunted and livestock here on the farm. Knowing that his father would go through that process—that he was stiff as a board now—reinforced the fact that Neb was alone. That Pa was dead. That everyone he cared about was dead. He sawed and sawed. It was a task assigned in Hell and he labored at it with the diligence of the insane. He knew it. He could feel parts of his mind cracking loose and sliding away into darkness.
He stopped abruptly, his face and body bathed in cold sweat, most of the ropes cut, his chest heaving. He felt as if someone was watching him. There was an itch between his shoulder blades. Neb straightened and looked around.
The house was still and silent. The horses in the corral stood with barely a flick of the ear or swish of the tail.
But he saw two things.
One chilled him and the other set fire to something in his soul.
Above the yard, kettling high in dry air, were buzzards. A baker’s dozen of them, swirling around and around. Here to feast on the dead. Neb wished that there was something like them that feasted on the living. Something he could sic on the parson and everyone who was there at the tree last night.
The sight of those birds chilled him.
But the thing that held a burning match to the cracked timbers of his soul was the person who stood watching him. She stood like a specter at the end of the road, her feet on her side but the weight of stare reaching all the way to the grave.
Mrs. Carter.
And she was smiling.
-5-
It rained that night.
He saw the storm clouds coming over the mountain. Big, ugly things, dark as bruises, veined with red lightning. The storm growled low in its throat. It sounded like laughter of the wrong kind. The bad kind.
Neb stood by his father’s grave and watched the storm gather.
And he was smiling.
-6-
Neb filled in the grave with his hands. He didn’t bother to go get a shovel.
The raindrops began falling as he patted it down over his father.
“I love you, Pa,” he told the dirt.
Lightning forked the sky and he looked up, gasping, as thunder boomed above him. The shock of it drove Neb down to his knees at the foot of the grave. He reached up to catch himself on the upright handle of the pitchfork, but his knees buckled, and he slid down. He held onto the hickory handle, though, and laid his head against it, eyes closed as the rain fell.
“Come back,” he whispered.
Come back.
He heard his pa’s voice echo in his memory. There, kneeling much like this at the side of Ma’s bed, holding out the little dead thing and Ma taking it, too far gone to accept that Hannah was dead. Too mad with her own dying to know that the babe she put to her breast was not hungry. Would never be hungry.
“Come back,” said Neb. He was hungry. Not for food. Not for comfort. Not for peace.
He wanted to hurt them all. Mrs. Carter. The parson. All of them. Everyone who’d held a torch or raised a fist. All of them.
“Come back, Pa,” begged Neb. “You don’t belong down there.”
He did not know if he meant that his father did not belong in the ground or in the Hell that everyone said he was bound for.
The rain began to fall in earnest. Big, cold drops that hammered down on him and pinged on the leaves of the oak tree and peppered the shingles on the slanted roof. Thunder rumbled and rumbled under a sky torn by lightning.
“Come back to me,” cried Neb Howard. “You don’t belong down there, and I need you here.”
The hurt in his heart was so big, so deep, so unbearable that he could not even kneel there without caving over. He fell onto his chest, onto his face. He beat the ground as the rain turned the dirt to mud.
The storm kept getting bigger. Louder. Darker.
The clouds swirled and changed from purple to gray to a black so pervasive that it swallowed everything. Only the lightning carved edges and curves onto the things around him, trimming everything with cold fire.
The world seemed to be so huge and so dark and so empty of everything important. No love, no heat.
“Come back, come back, come back,” he wailed. “Please, Pa, don’t leave me alone. Come back.”
A light flared in the darkness and Neb stared at it. It was the Carter place, and Mrs. Carter was lighting her lamps against the darkness. He watched with hateful eyes as the house seemed to open its eyes, but then the woman began closing the shutters. The effect was like wide eyes narrowing to suspicious, accusing slits.
Neb did not even realize that he had clutched two handfuls of mud until the muck ran from between his fingers. He looked down at the mess. It was so soaked with rain that it ran like black blood down his wrists.
“Come back,” he said. Then he pointed to the distant house with one muddy finger. “If you can’t come back for me, Pa, then come back for her.”
As he said it the lightning struck directly above him, bathing him in so brilliant a light that it stabbed through his eyes and into his brain. Neb cried out and fell backward, flinging an arm across his face, screaming at the storm, hurling his rage, his curses, his damnation at the sky and all who lived under it. Hating Mrs. Carter and everyone in this damned town with a purity and intensity that was every bit as hot and bright as that lightning.
“Please,” he whispered as he lay there. The rain fell like hammers, like nails. “Please come back to me.”
Neb Howard lay in the cold mud and prayed his dark prayers as the heavens wept and the thunder laughed.
-7-
He did not remember falling asleep.
He did not know how long he slept.
Neb became aware of being cold. Of hurting from the cold.
It took him a long time to wake up.
When he did, the world was wrong.
He wasn’t in the front yard anymore.
He was covered in mud, cold and sore, still dressed in filthy clothes, shoes and all. But he wasn’t outside. He was in the house. Upstairs.
On the bed where his mother died. Where his sister never even got to live.
Laid out on the bed, but he knew he hadn’t walked up here. He never came into this room. Never. He knew that he would never have gone to bed wearing muddy clothes. Never would have laid down with his shoes on.
Never.
Neb sat up very slowly. It took a lot to do it, his muscles hurt that bad. So did his head. As soon as he sat up a cough took him and wouldn’t let him go for five long minutes. It was a bad cough. Deep and grating and when he was done coughing there were drops of blood on the hand he’d used to cover his mouth.
Sunlight slanted through the window and outside he could hear the morning birds. A couple of cows mooed out in the field, needing to be milked. Dunders whinnied in the corral.
Neb got out of bed, moving carefully, afraid of that cough coming back. His feet were unsteady and his body kept wanting to fall. He stayed up, though. And he got all the way to the top of the stairs before something occurred to him. He turned and looked the way he’d come. He saw the faint dried-mud smudges of his shoes on the floorboards, but they were coming out of the room. There were none of his footprints going in. There should have been, and his feet were covered in mud.
Not that there weren’t footprints, though. It’s just that they were too big. A man’s shoes.
Like all the boys his age he knew how to hunt and how to track. He knew how to tell one set of footprints from another, animal or not. The shoes that made those prints were shoes he recognized.
“No,” he told the morning.
No.
The prints remained, however.
Frightened, Neb hurried downstairs, clutching the bannister for support. The front door was open, and there was a pool of water in the living room. There was a line of muddy prints leading in through the open door, through that puddle, and on up the steps.
“No,” he said again.
Neb walked wide of the footprints and had to step over them to get out of the door.
He walked across the front yard to the little family cemetery. The muddy mound over his father’s grave was torn up and sunken in.
Neb backed away from it.
He stood halfway between the house and the corral, looking everywhere for answers, needing to find some that did not match the pictures in his head. The cough came again. Worse this time. So deep. So bad.
When it finally passed the whole yard seemed to tilt and slide sideways. It took forever for Neb to saddle his horse. Dunders kept shying away from him and he kept dropping things. The blanket, the saddle, the reins.
Finally, he managed to climb up onto the horse’s back.
They rode away from the house.
The way to town took him past the Carter place. Neb stopped by the gate and studied the house. Their door was open, too. He could see faint light inside, as if no one had bothered to turn down the night lanterns.
“No,” he said one more time.
He turned the horse and walked Dunders up the lane to the Carters’ porch steps. He could see how it was. The doorframe was splintered, the lock torn clean out of the wood. The porch rocker lay on its side. There was a muddy handprint on the door.
But Neb knew it wasn’t mud. Blood turns chocolate brown when it dries.
He slid from the saddle and staggered up the steps. There was mud on the porch. Footprints in that familiar shape. Going in. Coming out. They were the only footprints on the porch.
Neb stepped over them and went in without knocking.
He stood for a long time looking at the living room. Seeing it yanked him out of that moment and took him back to his Ma’s room and how it seemed to have been painted red. This room was painted red, too.
Mrs. Carter sat on the sofa.
Some of her did, anyway.
The rest of her …
Well, it was gone. Even from ten feet away Neb could tell it wasn’t a knife that did this. Nor a wood axe either. He’d seen animals in the wood that had been set upon and half eaten. He knew how that looked.
He knew what he was seeing.
Once more the world tried to tilt under his feet.
Neb hurried outside and vomited over the porch rail. Half of the vomit was red with his own blood. He gagged, coughed, gagged.
Dunders nickered and tossed his head, his big dark eyes rolling, alarmed at the smell of sickness and of death.
Neb shambled down from the porch and climbed into the saddle. He went back out to the road. Along the way, there in the center of the road, he saw those same footprints. One set of tracks coming here to the Carter place. Another set coming out and then turning, turning, not heading home. Heading to town. There were dark splotches of dried blood mixed in with the mud.
Neb sat on the horse as more of that awful coughing tore at him. He knew he was sick. Laying out there in the cold and the storm … that had been bad. There was something burning inside his chest. In his lungs.
He sat astride Dunders, feeling lost, feeling sick, feeling like he was already falling into darkness. The footsteps went on ahead and vanished into the distance.
Neb did not follow them into town.
He knew what he would find there.
“No,” he said one last time. But this time he knew that he meant ‘yes.’
He turned Dunders around and let the horse take him home.
Once he was there, he removed the saddle and bridle and let the horse go. Not into the corral. Just go.
Then Neb walked up the few steps to his porch and sat down on the chair.
And waited for his Pa to come home from town.