Chapter Fifteen

 

“You awake in there?”

Mary Ann shook the tent, awakening me. The moment I moved, I remembered the meeting with the loggers and biker.

“What time is it?” I said, crawling out of the sleeping bag and slipping on my pants.

“Seven. You all right?”

“Sore all over,” I said, sticking my head through the tent flap and squinting into bright sunlight.

“Oh!” She touched my swollen forehead with her finger. “You don't look in any shape for a hike in the mountains.”

“I'm fine but I'm not sure we should go back up today.”

“Why not?”

“Because I still don't understand why Bill was mapping quartz veins. What significance do they have? Maybe I'll pay a visit to the BST office in Dill City instead.”

“You think those loggers had something to do with Bill's disappearance, don't you?”

“Maybe. Besides, where else is there to look on the mountain?”

Mary Ann didn't answer. She bit her nails and prodded a rock with her toe, not seeming to hear my question. She glanced at her grandfather, already at work at the bottle stand, and nodded as if she had suddenly determined the solution to the problem.

“Remember me telling you Grandpa used to be a prospector? Let's ask him about the veins.”

She started toward the bottle stand without waiting for me. With painful stiffness in my joints, I crawled from the tent and wriggled my shoulders and neck. When I reached the stand I found John Stewart busily dusting a bottle the sun had varnished an opaque green. He blinked in surprise when he noticed my swollen face and black eyes.

“Been tangling with a mountain lion, boy?”

“More like a bear,” I said.

The old man let the subject drop and returned to dusting the bottle. Mary Ann braced herself against the trunk of a giant pine, listening to our conversation. Behind us a semi droned by on the highway. The sky was pale blue and a nip of autumn had finally chilled the air.

“Mary Ann tells me you were once a prospector.”

“Yup,” he said, not elaborating.

“Well I have a question.”

He glanced up from the bottle, briefly rubbing his large hooked nose and said, “Shoot, Luke.”

“What's the significance of quartz veins?”

Stewart didn't immediately answer. For a moment, I thought it was because he did not know. I was wrong. In his slow hillbilly drawl, he explained while making slow-motion gestures with his long skinny arms.

“Panned for gold once in Colorado. Set up camp at a crook in a river. Know why?”

I shook my head.

“Cause when the river takes a bend the current slows down and heavy minerals drop out and settle in the bank of sand. That's where you find the gold.”

“Because it's too heavy to go any further?”

“Son, you hit the nail on the head. Gold don't come from the river. Comes from somewhere upstream.”

Slower than a napping tortoise, he reached across the table crammed with bottles and mineral specimens. He picked up a beautiful crystalline mass of raw metal and handed it to me.

“This is sphalerite and galena which is zinc and lead ore. But you see what it's mingled with?”

I did, and could plainly see the metallic crystals embedded in a milky matrix of quartz.

“Gold, like zinc and lead, comes up in veins of quartz. When the placer deposits played out we prospectors moved upstream until someone found the quartz veins. They's the source.”

I tapped my toe against the leg of the table, letting my mushy brain absorb the old man's words. Mary Ann had deserted her post beneath the pine tree. She took the ore specimen from me, staring at it reflectively as she turned it in her hand. When I reached in my pocket for the diamond and dumped it into John Stewart's hand his pale eyes bugged.

“Ever seen this before?”

“You find this over in Murfressboro?” he asked.

“Bill sent it to me. I thought you might know where he got it.”

“Nope,” he said, his gaze unwavering from the crystal.

Light reflected through the diamond like a broken prism and Stewart turned it in his hand, touching every edge and studying every reflection. His next statement caught me quite by surprise.

“But I do know where that pouch come from,” he said.

I glanced at the brown leather pouch that I still held in my hand and asked, “Where?”

“The Conjure Man. Up on Lacy Mountain,” he said, pointing toward the east.

Another semi sped down the hill, honking its horn as it passed. John Stewart waved as the mournful whistle echoed through the hollow. When he handed the diamond to Mary Ann, she grinned and placed it over her ring finger.

“Tell me about the Conjure Man,” I said.

“Name's Zekiel. He's old. Been old long as I can remember,” Stewart said, removing his wide-brimmed hat and scratching his snow white hair. “Performs spells, mixes potions, things like that.”

“Voodoo?”

Stewart grinned and said, “Don't know about that, but the story goes he once tranced a man into a mule cause he stole a bottle of his shine.”

“And you think he made this pouch,” I said, ignoring his tall tale as I fingered cracked leather.

“Sure as I'm sitting here,” Stewart said.

“Thanks, Mr. Stewart. By the way, did Bill ever ask you about quartz veins?”

“He was as curious about prospecting as you are. I told him to chase the quartz and he'd find the ore.”

“Thanks,” I said over my shoulder as I hurried back to my campsite.

Mary Ann followed me into the tent and handed me the diamond. The large crystal had a greasy feel and left a lingering sensation on my fingertips long after I had dropped it into the pouch.

I said, “You know where the Conjure Man lives?”

“Sure, but I've never been to see him myself. Girls at school say he can turn you into a frog.”

As I slid the red ice chest into the Jeep, I said, “If he does be sure to kiss me when I return.”

Mary Ann made a face at my bad joke and jumped into the passenger seat of the Jeep. “You'll never find it without me,” she said.

“You're not frightened?”

“Maybe just a little, but not enough to wet my pants.”

We ate breakfast at the cafe in town, listening to two old men in an adjacent booth bantering about the qualities of their respective coon hounds. An unattended infant in a bassinet by the cash register cried for its mother. After bacon, eggs, and half a pot of coffee we started up the mountain to find the Conjure Man.

“There's a liquor store just outside of town,” Mary Ann said. “Might ought to stop and buy him a bottle of whiskey.”

“An offering,” I said. “Good idea.”

A sea of broken rock, the parking lot for customers yet to arrive, surrounded the tiny liquor store by the highway. Mary Ann waited in the Jeep. When the bell on the door signaled my entrance, it left me in a peculiar state of uneasiness.

“Help you find something?” asked the skinny man behind the cash register.

His expression bordered on constipation. His toothbrush mustache twitched when I declined his offer. He rang up the fifth of Jack Daniel’s, then watched me exit without saying thanks. Armed with a suitable gift, we started up the mountain to find the Conjure Man.

The road to the Conjure Man's house was unpaved. It was also steep, narrow and rough and even the Jeep rebelled against the grade until I switched it into four-wheel drive. By now, the sky was clear and azure blue and we could see for miles down the slope. Far below, the highway wound a circuitous route through steep hills and the rumbling of big trucks and the distant drone of occasional passing cars wafted up the hill. We found the Conjure Man's house around an abrupt bend in the dirt path.

It was more shack than house. The tarpaper shack centered on a tiny clearing on a hill overlooking the highway. An old black man occupied an antique rocking chair on its rickety front porch and he did not attempt to rise when he saw us round the bend. Like John Stewart, he had a large, lop-eared hound at his feet. He also had cats. The most spectacular cat was a large, solid black tom with a long tail that looped like a question mark over its back. As I parked the Jeep, the black tom wove a sinuous path between the old man's legs and slow moving rockers of his chair. The friendly hound walked out to meet us, wagging its bony tail in easy, slow-motioned swipes. When I patted its large head, it gave my hand a warm lick with its tongue.

“Morning,” I said. “I'm Tom Logan and this is Mary Ann Stewart.”

He caught me by surprise when he said, “Been expecting you. Sit a spell and we'll talk.”

He motioned to two crates on the ramshackle porch. Mary Ann sat on one and I turned the other around to face him. I could see he was very old.

“You knew we were coming?” I said.

He slowly pulled himself up from the rocker and crossed the porch with the help of a cane. Stooped with age, he had no meat on his little body, just ropy sinew and tendons and furrowed skin stretched tightly over ancient bone.

“Been waiting on you for weeks.”

The old man's accent was straight from the bayous of south Louisiana but imprinted softly with a hillbilly twang. Despite his obvious years, his voice was deep and clear, as were his eyes.

“You know about the diamond?” I said, unable to mask my surprise.

Completely white was the color of what little hair remained on his head and it was feathery fine as the underside of a snowy egret. He nodded an affirmative to my question.

“Then you know my brother, Bill?”

He nodded again, touching my shoulder to signal me to make room for him on the crate. He took my hand and said, “I'm Zekiel. I knew your brother well.”

“Is he . . .”

Zekiel raised his palm and shook his head ever so slightly.

“Bill recorded my voice with his machine. Asked me questions about these mountains and people that lives here. He came back many times after that. He told me all about himself and about you.”

“Did you give him the diamond?”

“He found the diamond on the mountain and brought it to me, wondering where it came from. I don't know where it came from but I do know it was a gift to him—a powerful gift.”

“I don't understand.”

“It was stuck to the flesh of a rabbit carcass. A hawk dropped it in front of him on the mountain.”

“Why did he send it to me?”

As an answer, he quoted a poem:

“The Evil Eye shall have no power to harm

Him that shall wear the diamond as a charm,

No monarch shall attempt to thwart his will,

And e'en the gods his wishes shall fulfil.”

“Zekiel, I still don't understand,” I said.

“A diamond has powerful magic. It attracts planetary influences so strong it renders its owner invincible, brings him spiritual peace, and chases away his demons. That's why Bill sent it to you.”

“But Bill wouldn't have believed that malarkey.”

Zekiel glanced at the dirt floor of the porch, as if my words were blasphemous. To him they probably were. He began to chuckle and the hoarse sound rose out of his sunken chest like a scratched record.

“It did work,” he said. “You're here.”

“I got better because it was what I had to do to find my brother.”

“The stone gave you the strength.”

I could see there was no use arguing with the old man. He evidently knew many things about Bill and I intended to find out what they were.

“Where is Bill?”

The old man shook his head and turned away from my stare. “Bill is dead,” he said. “But I think you already know that.”