A Widow's Curse Read online

  Andrews exploded.

  “Artificial pig testicles?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it right after lunch, if you don’t mind,” Shultz said, his voice lowered. “He was having trouble with one of his hogs, he got an idea, and we got rich; here we all are.”

  “No, no, no,” Andrews insisted. “I need details, many details of this phenomenon. You’re heir to a pig-testicle fortune.”

  “No details now.” Shultz was stone. “Maybe later.”

  “At least you have to tell me how you got from Iowa to Atlanta,” Andrews insisted.

  “Dad invented the thing, we moved to Georgia because that’s where he got the best manufacturing deal, and I ended up in Westminster by the time I was fourteen. Now I live more or less at my leisure. Except that I’m on, like, a hundred boards of directors and stuff.”

  “Westminster? Is that the chichi private school on the north side?” Andrews quizzed me.

  “That’s right,” Shultz replied. “When I was there, we had to wear uniforms and everything. I don’t know if they still do that.”

  “I have to hear more about the hogs,” Andrews pressed.

  “Maybe we’d better think about getting back to the cabin,” Shultz said, tilting his head toward the street.

  It was beginning to rain outside, and it was so dark, I couldn’t see the far end of the block.

  “Good call, I think.” I stood. “Lunch is on me.”

  Before anyone could object, I strode to the cash register, opened it myself, and put in a twenty-dollar bill. Tipping wasn’t customary, but I always left a little extra. I could never tell if Miss Etta even noticed.

  She did come to life enough to smack her lips when I closed the register.

  “Thanks, Dev,” she said, eyes still closed. “Got company?”

  “You might remember my friend Andrews,” I said softly. “The other guy—”

  “I don’t need to know your business,” she said, interrupting. “Just noticed, that’s all. It’ll turn cold tonight. Got you some wood for a fire?”

  She pulled her cardigan around her neck, still not opening her eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I assured her, smiling.

  “All right, then.” She shifted in her rocker and, I thought, went back to sleep.

  Andrews and Shultz were standing at the door; the place was nearly empty. Outside, the sky was a swirl of charcoal and soot. Heavy rain began to blast the cars, the street, the window of the diner.

  Shultz turned to Andrews.

  “’When shall we three meet again,’” he whispered. “‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ Macbeth, right?”

  “Well, yeah.” Andrews glared at Shultz as if he’d been insulted.

  “I’m not stupid,” he countered, “I’m just from Iowa.”

  “Okay,” Andrews said quickly, “but you know it’s bad luck to say the actual name of that play out loud.”

  “It is?” Shultz was genuinely baffled.

  “I thought that was just if you were in a theatre,” I objected, joining them at the door.

  “Look,” Andrews said, grinning, “this eating establishment is every bit as much a theatre as any auditorium or black box or grand stage. It is to me anyway.”

  “‘All the world’s a stage,’” Shultz chimed in happily.

  “Stop it,” Andrews demanded, laughing.

  “You’re not the only guy who ever read Shakespeare,” Shultz assured us. “You’re not dealing with a jerk, you know.”

  “All right.” Andrews shook his head. “But you’ll have to go outside now, turn around three times, and spit.”

  “Not for a thousand dollars,” Shultz replied, opening the door.

  “Fine,” Andrews warned, mock-serious. “But don’t blame me when the worst happens.”

  We piled through the door and made a dash for my big old green truck. Low thunder rumbled from every corner of the sky, and the rain was falling so hard, it actually hurt when it hit my arms.

  We crowded into the truck, soaked.

  “You’ve been quieter than usual this luncheon, Dr. Devilin,” Andrews teased me. “Something on your mind?”

  “Something.” I turned on the headlights. The wipers were going a mile a minute, and I still couldn’t make out anything six feet in front of me.

  The road ahead was impossible to see.

  Four

  Black asphalt seemed to color my mood. Rain’s good for melancholy introspection, and the more I thought about Shultz’s coin, the more I sank into dark thoughts. Andrews sensed it, and he didn’t pursue his question further.

  I tried to occupy my thoughts by considering, then discarding, more than a dozen people in Blue Mountain who might have owned our so-called Saint Elian’s coin. It seemed unlikely, in all that rain, that anyone here could ever have acquired such an arcane artifact. Then I spent the rest of the drive home trying to put my finger on the psychology behind thinking that rain made the possibility more remote. I was actually startled when my headlights illuminated the front porch of the cabin.

  “I’m dropping you two off,” I said absently, pulling close to the front door. “I’d like to ask around about the coin, and I might as well get started. It’s something I really have to do alone, Shultz. Andrews can tell you that everybody in Blue Mountain knows more than they will ever tell you, but they’ll never talk around strangers.”

  “And even the simplest fact is guarded,” Andrews affirmed. “I’m for a nap.”

  Shultz nodded. “Well, I’m counting this weekend as a vacation. So this is good to me. I’ll sit in the cabin, watch a little television, take a nap myself; look at the rain.”

  “All right, then.” I stopped the truck a foot from the front steps.

  Shultz bounded out and onto the front porch.

  “Hey,” he called, “how do we get in?”

  “The door’s not locked,” Andrews told him. “Can you imagine that?”

  “Not locked?” Shultz glared at the front door as if Andrews had lied about it.

  Andrews, his hand on the truck door, about to get out, lowered his voice.

  “Seriously, are you all right, Fever? You seem—I don’t know—moody. I mean, more so than normal, which, we’ll admit, is going some.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. But you’re right: I am having a moment.”

  “Is it about the coin?”

  “Maybe. Something I can’t put my finger on about this whole thing.”

  “Well.” Andrews slid out of the truck. “You’ll uncover it. If the unexamined life if not worth living, your life is worth a billion dollars. I don’t know anybody who broods about himself as much as you do.”

  “I’m not good-looking enough to be described as brooding,” I informed him. “I am introspective.”

  “Potato/potato,” he replied, pronouncing both exactly the same.

  He slammed the passenger door and was almost into my house before I got the truck in gear.

  I headed for the home of June and Hezikiah Cotage. Surrogate parents, elder teachers, folk resources—there really wasn’t a facet of my life in which they weren’t involved. Half of the traditional songs I had collected in the old days had been from June. All of the historical accounting of sacred harp music in Appalachian Georgia had come from Hek, a minister in his own church. June had always helped me when, as a child, I had been in turmoil about my mother’s public infidelities or my father’s private strangeness. Hek continued to provoke in me a sense of wonder about the spiritual content of everything in the universe—a red leaf, a shed snakeskin, the placement of three smooth rocks in a riverbed.

  Between them, they also represented the greatest single source of gossip in the state.

  Whenever the phrase “I don’t like to say this” occurred in a conversation with either of them, I knew that something juicy was soon to follow. If they knew anything about a desperate widow selling a strange coin to an Atlanta slicker, it would take only a bit of prying and subterfuge
to get it out of them.

  Although it was not a long drive to their place from mine, the rain made it take longer than usual. Andrews had prodded something in my psyche that wanted attention, so I was driving slower than usual, as well.

  I had barely turned my mind’s eye to the troubled spot when a monstrous self-doubt leapt out of it, black and scaly, eyes red, and landed like a hulking demon on the seat beside me. It stared at my profile while I tried to keep my eyes on the road.

  It whispered all the things I didn’t want to hear. It started by telling me I couldn’t be very bright if I didn’t know anything about the biggest folk artifact in my own hometown’s history. If all I could think to do was to run to my substitute parents, I couldn’t be very much of an adult, either. And anyway, they weren’t my real parents. My real parents were dead, and even if they’d been alive, I couldn’t have gone to them for help, because they had never exhibited the slightest desire to help me with anything. All I could do was guess and rely on other people’s research. And I was interested only because I was bored. I wasn’t really a folklorist at all: dismissed from a university, a crackpot in his own hometown, and unable to care much about anything or anyone.

  It was, alas, a familiar downward spiral, and one that happened all too often, but I was dealing with a particularly vile species of the well-known poisonous creature that caused it.

  The demon on the seat beside me took my hand and encouraged me to veer the truck off the road.

  The road was a black scar on the rain-blurred landscape. On either side, a smudged verdance ran in the gray rain. The sky was coal smoke; the air had little teeth that bit away any light that pried its way through the clouds. And when the road curved left, I had a sudden impulse to veer right, onto the charcoal air, down into the vague green valley.

  But just as the thought was filling my mind, a white streak of smoke cut the sky, a thin pillar from the Cotages’ chimney. Even in the early-autumn heat, rain meant a fire to Hek and June. Their house was just around the bend.

  The merest sight of that smoke made the demon vanish—not forever, but for the moment at least. I imagined that cleaning my parents’ rooms had called it forth, the Parasite of Doubt. It was a monster I fed daily, of course, but family memories most often drew it from its cave.

  I was, in short, tremendously glad to see Hek and June’s front door. Their white house was set in black soil between three mountains. Anyone driving by could see it was better kept than the other homes along the same road. Everything about the place showed God’s attention to detail, as Hek always said: the evergreen clematis vine that twined the front railing, the laurel whose tiny flowers filled the air with swooning perfume, the bloodred daylilies. The porch was always crowded with bees, but they never stung. They were too intoxicated. A few minutes on that porch were enough to have the same effect on a full-grown man.

  June appeared in the doorway before I was up the steps to her porch. I was always surprised to find her hair gray: it was so auburn in my memory. I knew her, it seemed, in several times at once. I knew a woman without wrinkles, despite all the evidence to the contrary on the smiling face in the doorway. I saw, simultaneously, her gingham skirt, a navy blue suit, and the long gray dress she was wearing as she waved to me. I could see her move quickly, like a dancer, even though I knew her joints were less agile than that. It was a comforting sensation, seeing June in a temporal blur, a hazing of linear moments exactly matching the way rain obscured the sky. Our relationship did not exist so much in a progression of moments as in a collection of experiences that could happen in a single expanded now.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  She held the door open for me. We did not embrace; there was no meaningful eye contact; her voice was not flooded with the compassion that I knew lay beneath the words.

  In my family, my town, emotion is a deep well that is most often covered over with great rocks and dead leaves—and years of silence.

  But we know it’s there.

  “I have a few questions for you,” I told her, “things you might know about.”

  “I don’t mean that.” She closed the door. “Go on in the kitchen. I’m talking about the reason your face looks gray.”

  “Oh, that.” I headed for the kitchen.

  Junie’s kitchen was one of the models that certain religions use to describe the afterlife. It was always bright and warm, the air filled with smells that provoked immediate joyous emotion. I had seen people burst into tears walking into her kitchen; I’d done it myself. Something about the absolute peace, the perfect comfort, the sense of care, the satisfaction of home—something about an all-encompassing love made her kitchen heaven. It was small, and the counters were Formica. The wooden floor had been covered over by a “modern” linoleum sometime in the late 1960s. Everything was obsessively clean. The chrome percolator was almost blinding and had to be over fifty years old. The things in her kitchen didn’t matter. The room was made supernatural by the daily presence of June’s spirit, the years of creating food that surpassed physical sustenance, the long hours of conversation and consolation that had transpired there.

  And the little moments of perfection.

  “You been thinking about your mama again.” She brushed past me. “You need apple cake.”

  There it was: June’s eerie grasp of my emotional interior. The fact that she could tell I’d been roiling my head in family recollection was surpassed only by the precisely accurate solution in the form of apple cake.

  June’s apple cake was made primarily, as far as I could determine, from some sort of edible gold and solar extract. Apples were also included. Beyond that, the precise formula was never revealed.

  I sat at the kitchen table, in the exact middle of the room. She somehow produced a piece of cake, a cup of coffee, a fork, a linen napkin, and a glass of milk in one continuous movement. Then she sat with me.

  “I have company,” I managed around a mouthful of cake. “You remember Andrews.”

  “English boy,” she acknowledged.

  “He brought a Mr. Carl Shultz with him. From Atlanta.”

  I waited.

  “I see.” She blinked. “You had to get the rooms ready for company, and that put you in mind of your parents, and that made your face gray.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “When are you going to let them go?” She folded her hands on the table in front of her. They were veined and the knuckles were prominent, the fingers a bit bent, but they were steady.

  “Well, I think they’re gone,” I said, continuing to shovel bites of cake into my mouth, “but then something happens, and there they are again.”

  “The living surely do haunt the dead,” she concluded. “Lots more than the other way around.”

  She was right, of course. My parents were gone. Their ghosts came around the house less and less as the months rolled on. They didn’t visit me of their own volition. I called them.

  I finished the last bite of cake and pushed the plate away from me.

  “So the name Carl Shultz,” I said, deliberately changing the subject, “doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  “No.”

  “Well, his father, same name, bought a silver coin from someone here in Blue Mountain about twenty years ago. She’s described as a ‘desperate widow,’ which only makes this whole scenario more improbable. But I’ve seen the coin; it has a picture, I think, of Saint Elian, a Welsh saint, on it. It’s quite valuable.”

  I had intended to continue telling her all the details, but her face had changed so much that I stopped talking.

  She withdrew her hands, put them in her lap, hidden under the table. She looked out the kitchen window at the rain and began to rock back and forth ever so slightly.

  “Hek.” The volume of her voice startled me.

  “Hek’s home?”

  “He was taking a nap. Good weather for it. But I believe he’ll want to hear this mess.”

  “What is it?” The old man was not entirely a
wake.

  “Fever’s here. Come on in the kitchen.”

  “Fever?” The cocoon of sleep had not yet given way.

  “Come in this kitchen!” June’s voice was uncharacteristically impatient.

  Hek knew, better than I, what it meant. He appeared in the door frame seconds later. White hair exploded in every direction from his head and his white shirt was a crumpled piece of paper. His work pants were clean; so were his socks.

  “Sorry.” He gave me a curt nod. “I was napping.”

  “Fever’s got a question for us.” June wouldn’t look at anything but the glistening top of her kitchen table.

  “You don’t ever come by just to visit?” Hek creaked his way to the percolator.

  “I wouldn’t want to interrupt your nap time unless it was important.” I did my best to keep the corners of my mouth from turning upward.

  “I get up at four in the morning,” Hek announced, grabbing a coffee mug, his back to me, “work the fields, tend the garden, do the chores, and preach on the constancy of sin, all before breakfast! I only came inside when it started raining.”

  I nodded. In the first place, I knew what he said was true, and in the second place, Hek took a nap every day at about one o’clock in the afternoon, though he always denied it with great vehemence, because he thought it gave an impression of sloth.

  “Fever’s asking about a piece of silver, a coin that some widow woman sold up around these parts,” June interjected.

  “Huh?” Hek was still fighting off the notion that he took naps.

  “About twenty years ago, some woman had a valuable silver coin that she sold.” June pronounced each word with supernatural clarity. The sound was sharp enough to cut hard wood.

  Hek froze—only for a moment, but it was enough to tell me he understood what was beneath the actual words that June had said.

  “Oh.” He sighed, poured coffee, and did not turn my way.

  I knew better than to press them at that moment. They were reluctant to reveal something; trying to decide how much to tell me, how much to hide. Any attempt to coax them would only make the process more difficult, could render it impossible. When I was younger, I had tried everything I could think of. But like trying to entice a turtle to show its head or a shy child to answer any question, nothing could budge the immovable—not anger, or pleading, not even a gentle bribing that passed for reasoning.