Late the next morning, Zeke stood on the scattering of hay and dusty horse shit that carpeted the floor of his stable, wondering if he had run out of tears. His eyes burned and he knew it was partly from the lack of sleep—he’d surprised himself by dropping off for a couple of hours just as the sun came up—but he thought the sandpaper feeling came from the unfulfilled need to cry. He felt empty in so many ways; the inability to summon tears was just one more.
“Come on, bud,” he rasped. “Say hello to Jester. He missed you.”
His voice cracked on that last bit, but Savannah didn’t notice. She stood in front of the stall where her horse, Jester, snorted and chuffed and turned his back to her. From the moment Zeke had led Savannah into the stable, playing the ugly tune on his pipe—which still had the coppery scent of his blood on it—Jester had done his best to stay as close to the back wall of the stall as possible.
Zeke clutched the pipe in his hand, forcing himself to loosen his grip, afraid he might break it or rub off some vital part of its magic.
Ain’t magic, he thought. It’s a curse.
What could it be but a curse that let him see his daughter like this? Savannah still wore the rose-hued dress she’d been buried in, a lovely thing she had persuaded him to buy her for the fall dance at her school and that had garnered far more attention from the boys than he would have liked. The funeral director had gently implied that the color might be too red, that it might trouble him to see such a red on her, there in her casket at the wake, but Zeke had insisted, remembering the smile on her face when she’d worn it.
Now it seemed obscene. A party dress on a corpse.
He stared at her pale skin and noticed the way the warm breeze through the barn stirred her limp, dead hair, and bile burned up the back of his throat. He turned away, dropping to his knees as his stomach revolted and he vomited in the sawdust and hay. On his knees, trying to breathe, waiting for his stomach to calm, he thought for sure he would weep then, but still his eyes were dry.
After a few seconds, he rose shakily to his feet and looked at her.
There were bruise-dark circles under her eyes and she had the tallow complexion of old candle wax. Her blue eyes had paled, faded like their color had been nothing but paint, left in the sun too long. In the warm, late-morning light coming through the open doors at the far end of the stable, the shadows around her had acquired a gold hue. In that golden darkness it would almost have been possible to believe she was merely ill, were it not for those eyes, staring into a null middle distance, as if she could still see back into the land of the dead.
“Come on, honey,” he breathed. “Do it for Daddy. Say hello to Jester. You love your Jessie-boy, don’t you? He’s right here.”
It felt to Zeke as if something at the core of him was collapsing inward, a little black hole growing in his gut. An invisible fist clenched at his heart.
“Hey. I’m here, bud.”
Something darted along the left side of his peripheral vision and he turned to see a furry orange tail vanishing into an empty stall. Tony was a marmalade cat who had been born in the stable. His mother had been a stray who had taken up residence there, and Zeke had never tried to drive her away because he believed that every stable and barn needed at least one cat to catch the mice who would invariably find their way in. The rest of the litter had been given away, but Savannah had kept the orange marmalade and named him after Tony the Tiger, the mascot of her favorite cereal.
The memory struck him hard—seven-year-old Savannah sitting on the floor of the stable, holding Tony and stroking him and giving him his name. She’d put a little bow in her hair that morning that nearly matched the color of Tony’s fur, her way of making the moment into a sort of ceremony. The image led to a rush of others. Zeke closed his eyes and let them come, a sad smile on his face as he recalled nine-year-old Savannah’s first ride on horseback, and the squeals of delight a year later when he brought Jester home and told her the new horse was hers and hers alone.
Mine forever? she’d asked.
He could still hear the little-girl voice in his head.
“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, though not in prayer.
Or maybe it is a prayer, he thought. Maybe it always is.
“Come on, Savannah,” he said, slapping his hands together and moving to stand only a foot away from her, face-to-face. “Come on, bud!”
His hands were empty. Frowning, he turned to search for the pipe. When he’d thrown up, he must have tossed it aside. No, no. Where the fuck are you? he thought as he scanned the floor until he located it. He’d worried that he might have broken it, but the pipe seemed intact. He stared at it, turning it over in his hands.
The night before, he had begun to experiment with the tune that Enoch had taught them. Lester had suggested that they work together, that he bring his son, Josh, over to Zeke’s ranch and they practice how to influence their children with Enoch’s pipes. Zeke had refused. What they were doing was both a miracle and an obscenity, and either way it was too intimate to share.
His hands and arms and back still hurt from digging up Savannah’s grave. His muscles had burned as he’d thrown himself into the work, numbing his mind and heart so he would not let horror stop him, knowing she must have awakened down there in the cold ground along with the others. But he hadn’t really believed it until he had used the shovel to smash the casket’s lock and then pried open the lid and seen her moving, milky eyes staring blindly through the webbing of thread that had been used to sew her eyes shut. The thread had torn loose, her ripped eyelids almost instantly healing. A corpse, to be sure—she already looked so much better than she had last night—but a corpse resurrected.
Zeke had screamed, then, but not in fear or horror. He’d screamed out the pain and grief of her death and dragged her up into his arms and sat there cradling her inside her grave, whispering to her, promising her that he would do anything to bring her back to him, all the way back to him. She had been the light in his life, the sun around which his heart and soul revolved.
He would do anything.
Once he had more or less mastered the notes Enoch had taught them to play, he had put her into his truck and brought her home, cleaning her hands and face and feet but not willing to change her clothes. Eventually he would take off her dress and put her in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and boots, but not yet, because he didn’t want to see the wounds on her chest and back where the bullets had entered and left her body. They’d have been sewn up, but he didn’t want to see. Enoch said the wounds would heal, and so he wanted to give her a little more time.
“Time,” he whispered now, standing in the stable. Zeke took a breath. Time was really the only thing of value in the world—time to live, time to be with the ones you loved.
Stuffing the pipe into his pocket, he turned away from Savannah’s catatonia and went to the vacant horse stall into which he’d seen the cat disappear. Zeke unlatched the door and dragged it open. Tony had curled into a pad of hay in one corner and jumped up as he entered. As Zeke approached, the mouser tried to bolt past him, but Zeke had been wrangling cats in the ranch’s old buildings since he could walk and snatched Tony up before he could escape.
The cat struggled, but Zeke carried him out of the stall and over to Savannah. He knew that he was supposed to use the pipe. Enoch had made it clear to all of them that it would be days before any of the dead could think clearly enough to direct their own actions. Their brains were not working properly. The ritual Enoch had taught them made it possible for others to give them direction, as if the notes the pipers played turned on some kind of motor inside them and the words of the pipers were their navigation.
Zeke wanted to believe it. He needed to believe that there was a happy ending, because having Savannah back like this was worse than having her dead. Anarosa would have cursed him for it. He could endure it if he could accept Enoch’s promises, but in order for him to have that kind of faith, he needed just one glimpse of the future, one hint of awareness in Savannah’s eyes to prove that she was still in there.
“Look, bud,” he said. “It’s Tony the Tiger. Remember him? Remember when Ginger had her kittens? She hid under the stable but you heard the mewling and you were the one who found them. You were such a big girl and when I told you that you could have one you knew right away it had to be Tony the Tiger. Remember the bows you wore when you—”
Zeke took a step closer to Savannah. The cat hissed and clawed his arms and he swore and dropped the beast. It raced the length of the stable and out the door, a rare excursion. It knows, Zeke thought, his stomach dropping. Even the damn cat can see this is unnatural. It’s wrong.
“God, what have I done?” he whispered, hanging his head in the shadows.
The noise might have been the creak of a beam or the shifting of one of the other horses, but it sounded to him like a soft moan, deep in his daughter’s throat. He whipped his head around and stared at her, catching his breath as an impossible hope emerged like sunrise within him.
Savannah had not moved. Her gaze remained vacant and distant.
But there were tears on her face, streaking the dry, waxy skin of her cheeks.
“Bud?” he ventured.
Nothing. No reaction. But the tears were hope enough.
“All right,” he said, nodding firmly. “All right.”
He dug out the pipe and began to play.