The Witch's Grave: A Fever Devilin Mystery Read online

  Cornbread was as much an implement as a menu item. Held in the left hand, it pushed errant morsels left on the plate toward the waiting fork. The value was twofold: not even the smallest dot of collard greens could escape the combined efforts of bread and fork, and when the process was done the cornbread had collected the juice and gravy on the plate, and served as a reminder, when eaten, of what the meal had been.

  “I will.” I wiped my mouth with the folded paper towel. “I have a plan.”

  I stood, leaving a ten-dollar bill on the counter under my fork. He stood. “I’d expect no less.” He stretched, toothpick in his teeth. Nothing says fine dining like a splinter in the mouth.

  “I want to record her current version of ‘Black-haired Lass,’ if she still sings it.”

  “Don’t know that one,” he admitted, waving to Etta, who was nearly asleep by the register.

  Etta’s white bun lolled on the back of a mule-eared chair, gnarled hands rested in the folds of her rumpled drab apron. She gave no acknowledgment.

  “It’s about a girl with three brothers,” I told him as we made our way between the tables, “who killed her suitor in the twilight of the year.”

  “Which might lead to more current events,” he said, pushing the door open. “I see that.”

  The rain had stopped; there was a cardinal on my truck. I didn’t want to be the one to disturb it. The old Ford held up well. Originally my father’s, the ’47 pickup had been rebuilt by a student of mine in 1997, its dark green a perfect canvas for the bird’s dash of red. I stood on the sidewalk, arms folded, watching the clouds roll across the mountain.

  “All these years,” I said to Skidmore, “and I’m still surprised when you understand the subtlety of my plans.”

  He slung open the door to his squad car, wiping water onto his tan uniform pants. “You think a university education and visit to Europe give you an edge, but you fail to realize that I am God’s holy instrument when it comes to being subtle.” With that he spat his toothpick into the street, sniffed, hawked into the gutter, and tipped his hat. “Dr. Devilin.”

  The drive to June’s house was a matter of ten minutes; the air was delicious after the rain. Skidmore knew June had always been a better mother to me than anyone else alive. I pressed the accelerator unconsciously. Fields flew by; the highway rose upward, aiming me to the sky. The white house was set in black bottom soil between three mountains. Even from a distance, it seemed more cared for than other homes along the same road. The sun shot through a rip in the clouds, gave the edges of new-harvested corn sheaves a gold they could only borrow and would never pay back. Everything about the place had an angel’s attention.

  I couldn’t help thinking about the odd, personal ghost story she often used to tell when she sang “Black-haired Lass.” June Cotage, wife of a Pentecostal snake-handling preacher about whom I had written many articles, was among the kindest souls on earth. Her soft singing voice held centuries of unrequited loves, unfair trials, lost travelers; new mornings. But the ghost story was very real to her.

  When she was a young girl, the war in Vietnam had just started, but her beau enlisted and didn’t come home. She got a government letter that told her he was “Missing in Action.” She still thought he would come back and went to visit the veterans hospital in Atlanta once a month, hoping to find someone who knew him. After two years, she met an older man there who was recuperating from his wounds. He’d lost a leg, along with the heart to go home. They got to talking because he was from Bee’s Holler, not too far from Blue Mountain. His name was Kenly, and he claimed he’d known her beau. He told June that her boyfriend had died in the same battle that had taken his leg.

  He tried to comfort her, said she’d find somebody new by and by, but June was inconsolable.

  Kenly got out of the hospital in the autumn of 1967, and throughout the rest of that year he paid regular visits to Blue Mountain. June always asked Kenly to stay and take supper with her family, which he seemed glad to do. He had no family of his own. The talk was always good and the food was fine; they often got into the spirit of trading stories. He was a religious man, a Baptist. He told the old story of Diverus and Lazarus.

  Diverus was rich, and he gave a feast and invited all the well-to-do. There was food for a hundred; only thirty were present. Lazarus, the poorest man in town, came begging at the door. And what did Diverus do? He sent out his hungry dogs to bite Lazarus away. But the dogs had better hearts than that and took pity on Lazarus, licked his wounds. Lazarus petted them all and called them by name. So Diverus sent out his bodyguards to beat Lazarus away. They had not taken one step for him when the power to raise their arms left them; they couldn’t move. So Diverus himself went to the door and called to Lazarus, “Go away!” So Lazarus left and that night he died. Starved to death. Two angels out of heaven came to guide his soul home. “There is a place prepared in heaven on an angel’s knee.” The next night, Diverus died from gluttony. Two serpents out of hell came to guide his soul to its reward: “Come with us. Because you turned away a beggar, you have to stay in hell until you find a place to sit on a serpent’s knee.” Diverus is there to this day, because he hasn’t yet found the knee of any snake. So if a stranger comes to the door, don’t turn him away. Have him in by the fire, and fill him with food. That wandering stranger may be brother Lazarus, come to our door.

  June always told it that just as Kenly finished his story there came a knock on her kitchen door.

  A stranger stood there, his hair unkempt, his beard unshorn, clothes barely enough to save modesty. His bones were clear to see in the pale moonlight, his eyes hollow and lifeless.

  After Kenly’s story, June felt she had to let him in.

  The stranger moved over the threshold and into the warmth of the kitchen like a revenant. It was a full quarter of an hour before he stopped shivering. He ate three full plates of food and was slowing on his fourth before he could look up again.

  He said, “I have no idea where I am. I don’t know my name nor my kin nor life at all. I’m a traveling creature.”

  June told him, “Get over by the stove.”

  “What place is this?” the stranger asked.

  “Blue Mountain.”

  At this he seemed disturbed. “What year?”

  “It’s Nineteen sixty-seven,” June answered. “Where’ve you been? Who are you?”

  “I fought in the war. I was wounded and left for dead. Spent time as a prisoner. The Lord was my salvation. More wandering. The mind is cloudy.”

  He pulled back his hair to show a terrible scar on the side of his head and drew back his thin coat to show another in his side.

  “They’ve all but healed now,” he told everyone in the kitchen, “but I’m a ghost. I don’t have much memory and scarcely any reasoning. I know I’m looking for someone. I can’t find her, but I see her every night in my dreams, and I hear her voice every day. I’m tired to death, but I’m not weary of the search. I want to go home, and I’ve toiled to get there. I’ll never rest until I find her.”

  With that he took a broken locket from around his neck. “She gave me this on the day I shipped out. I’ll know her when I find her; she’ll know me no matter how much we’ve changed. She kept the other half of this locket.”

  Then, every time she told the story, June would reach up to her throat and show me a silver chain.

  “Here it is around my neck,” she’d say. “This is the match, the other half. That stranger was Hezekiah Cotage, who is now my husband.”

  The story never failed to give me a pleasant chill, however much she embellished it over the years. As I pulled my truck beside her white Buick and reached for my ancient Wollenzak tape recorder, I half-hoped she would tell it again.

  I got out of the truck, glanced at the little pillows on the porch rockers embroidered by June’s hand with medieval scenes from the Book of Revelation: four skeletal horsemen, angels drowning in blood. All with her gentle touch.

  June did not attend her husba
nd’s services. Hers was a more sedate religion, despite the images from her needlework. True, she often told me, all life was suffering and there would be a terrible judgment in the last days. God would harvest the wheat and burn the chaff, but there was no need being harsh about it.

  The instant my foot hit the first step to the porch she was at the screen door.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” she said, standing on the threshold.

  “June.”

  “You want you a little bite to eat?”

  “I’ve just come from Etta’s.”

  She stepped back into her dark living room. It was small, smelled of wood smoke and fifty years of cooking. The windows had not been opened since 1962; the curtains had been closed most of that time. Family portraits on the mantel stared at me, the door hushed as it closed.

  “I see you got your machine.” She was already headed for the kitchen.

  “I have to send the publisher something by Thanksgiving.” I followed her. “I was hoping you’d sing today.”

  The kitchen was brighter, the surfaces glittering. She moved into the light, I was struck by how much older she looked since I’d come home. I remembered her hair auburn; now it was snow. Her ginger eyes were encased in wrinkles. The long gray dress didn’t help; the hard black shoes made matters worse—she was a parody of age.

  An ancient percolator was plugged into the wall by the sink and she went to it immediately, poured without asking me, and handed over a cup of hot black water.

  “You know this coffee’s not strong enough to get itself out of bed,” I told her, setting the cup down on the counter.

  “What you come to record?” She was always nervous around the tape player, even when it wasn’t on.

  I plugged the Wollenzak into the wall by the coffeemaker and took the microphone out of my pocket, a Shure Vocalmaster, my favorite. I’d made a cushioned stand so it could sit on the tabletop without picking up stray noise. People would tap the table, bump it; sounded like thunder on the tape.

  “I have several versions of ‘The Black-haired Lass’ from you,” I said, hoping to distract her by clicking on and starting without the usual slow build. “Some of them go back ten years. I’d like to get a variant that’s more contemporary. For comparison.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I looked up.

  Her arms were folded and her face was steel. “You think I don’t know this is about the Deveroe girl and Skidmore’s brother-in-law?”

  So much for the subtlety of my plan.

  “Skid asked me not to be too obvious,” I told her, turning off the tape recorder. “He’s worried about his election.”

  “No, he ain’t.” She took a seat at the table, relaxing with a final glance at the Wollenzak. “Long as you two known each other, you don’t see. He’s afraid you’ll show him up.”

  I’d been told before about the so-called competition between us. I’d never noticed it.

  “How exactly would I show him up?” I took a seat across the table from her.

  The kitchen light came from everywhere, not just the windows. The perfection of June’s cleanliness bordered psychosis.

  “You running for sheriff? If you find Mr. Carter and that girl, everybody might want you to. Then what’d he do?”

  “Nobody in this town is going to want me to run for dogcatcher. I was a strange one when I left, more so now that I’m back.”

  “I know it’s hard to be a stranger in your own hometown.” She leaned her elbows on the table. “That’s a fact. But folks take to you more’n you think they do. Look up to you. They wouldn’t say it.”

  “Then how am I supposed to know?”

  “You a grown man, Fever. You ought to figure things out.” She laughed.

  For sixteen years in the mountains I’d heard that kind of laughter, though it was rarely as soft as June’s. My parents were traveling performers, my father a magician, his wife the beautiful assistant. They were gone as often as they were around, and I’d fended for myself since I was seven. Skidmore and I had scraped away a world of dirt and pine straw scuttling all over the woods. When I needed comfort, I was fed in June’s kitchen. But when I needed explanations, I went hungry. Derision was never in short supply for a huge shy boy from a carnival family. I wasn’t comfortable with laughter.

  “I’m grown in some ways,” I agreed. All it took was the merest suggestion, and images long dead rose up in my mind. I was a child of seven, shivering on the steps of my abandoned house, watching dark shapes move in the wood, the creatures that only came out at night.

  “Comes a point, boy,” she said sternly, “when you got to let the past go, own up to your part in it, be a person to yourself.”

  “Could we talk about Able?” I said, shifting in my seat. “Do you have anything to tell me or not?” Even the ghost of subtlety had flown.

  “I don’t.” She folded her arms and locked her body. “Not that I know for certain myself.”

  I knew there was more. She shot a quick glance at the kitchen door, the place where her husband would shortly enter, coming home from his work. She knew something about him he wouldn’t want told or something he’d rather tell me himself.

  “All right then,” I said, moving the microphone closer to her. “Let’s get on with the recording; I know it makes you nervous. We’ll get it over with, and I can get on to the next chapter.”

  “How’s it coming?”

  “Slowly,” I said, pretending to adjust the recorder, “but great work takes time. I’m creating a new definition for an entire academic discipline.”

  “Okay by me.” She sat back, glaring at the microphone. “Tell me this time before you turn that thing on.”

  “Of course. Etta slept through the lunch crowd today. Is she all right?”

  “She ain’t been to Wednesday meeting in a month.” June shook her head, lowered her voice. “I think she might be drinking again.”

  “She’s a hundred and seventy years old, June, and she has rheumatoid arthritis.”

  “I’ll look in on her.”

  June’s shoulders were slumped back to their normal position; her face was smoother, her breathing less quick, movements more fluid.

  “Turning on,” I warned her, and snapped the Wollenzak.

  “Lord.” She began to fidget, clicking her fingernails.

  “Now, June,” I said absently, making a note in my field log, “your husband is a preacher.”

  She’d done this a hundred times with me, and it always started the same way: she barely spoke, and it seemed we’d get nowhere.

  She nodded in the direction of the microphone.

  “He handles snakes in his services,” I coaxed.

  “I don’t take to it, raised a Methodist.”

  “Yes,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “You don’t go to his church. But he tells you about it when he comes home.”

  “I reckon.”

  “Any good stories lately?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” I moved the mike closer to her, still looking down in my log. “Any stories at all?”

  “Nothing but foolishness.”

  “You think your husband’s religious ideas are foolish.”

  “Hezekiah’s ways mean something to him, I don’t deny that,” she cranked up, “but the Bible is clear. Taking up serpents and drinking lye, it’s just a show to me. God don’t care for a show. He wants it plain.”

  The perennial enmity between June’s quiet faith and her husband’s flamboyance had done the trick. She was no longer paying attention to the tape recorder or her suspicions and had launched a campaign of education.

  “The Bible says,” she explained to me, tapping her index finger into the palm of her other hand, “‘That ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.’ Why’d I want to mess with that?”

  “Where does it say that?”

  “Revelations.” Her favorite book, Hieronymus Bosch meets Clive Barker.

  “You sound angry, J
une.” No angrier than usual on the subject, but goading always worked. “Has something happened recently?”

  “That old man,” she plowed on, “thinks he can scare me with his talk, and I won’t have it.” Another flirt with the kitchen door. “I shall fear no evil.”

  “I see; he’s trying to scare you?”

  “Come home last night and would not keep shut about that graveyard.”

  “Let’s clarify,” I said to the microphone, my voice steady despite my anticipation, “that your husband goes to his church up on Blue Mountain every evening, close to the public cemetery.”

  “That’s right,” she said, elbows on the table, “and every night there’s fools up in the church house with him, listening to what he says.”

  “When he came home last night …” I circled my hand.

  “Come busting in the house,” she went on, “going on about that boneyard, top of the mountain.”

  “On about what?”

  “Oh, usual mess.” She dismissed it all with the flick of a hand, sitting back in her chair. “Scary noise, moving shadows. Ain’t even a story.”

  “Maybe he’s revving up for Halloween.”

  “You know better’n that, Fever.”

  June and her husband, as did many older people in town, eschewed Halloween as a celebration of the demonic.

  “You prefer to stick to the truth about revenants,” I teased her.

  “I do,” she answered without a hint of irony.

  “Didn’t you have some story about your Uncle Hiram?”

  “Woke up one night.” she confirmed, “shortly after he moved into his new house in Blairsville. Every lamp in the parlor was lit. Come in and found a bouquet of dried flowers on his rug. Doors were bolted from the inside, all the windows locked. Found out an old widow woman died in the house. She was buried with that bouquet, they said, because she had no man to give it to. Hiram reckoned she give it to him because he took such good care of the house and garden. She didn’t have a husband in this world but found one in the next.”

  “And that’s a true story.”

  “People leave behind all sorts of things when they die, son. Some leave furniture, some letters. Once in a while, a body forgets part of the soul. They leave it behind, and it’s got to wander for a time.”