He waited a moment, took a drink, let the alcohol settle. Maybe he had taken too much of the liquor, because as he sat there and thought, his jaw began to quiver.
“I loved my boy,” he said. “But it’s not always an easy thing to show. And when you’re working too damn hard and fighting to feed and clothe a family, sometimes you figure the showing can wait. When he was young, Jesse had a friend he could go to, but then they got confused about things and the friend died, and Jesse, I think Jesse was never the same. I tried, I did. But I knew things then maybe I shouldn’t have known and wasn’t under as much control as I might have been. How do you show a boy that you love him still when every look out of his eyes is full of sorrow and every word out of your mouth comes out in anger? I didn’t know the answer, and I live with it every day of my life. It weighs me down like it weighed down my Sarah until she just let go. I thought I was showing what I felt by arguing with him. I thought he could tell from the volume how much I cared. But volume ain’t enough. Listening maybe might have been better. That’s why he died. ’Cause I didn’t know how to show him that I loved him.”
“You blame yourself,” I said.
“What you don’t find at home, you look elsewhere for. And generally you find it in the worst places possible. And that’s what he done. He found hisself a girl that had nothing in her but pain and hurt and the seeds of destruction. You could almost tell it just by looking at her, that might have been the attraction, for all I know. But that’s where he went looking for what he wasn’t finding at home.”
“You’re talking about Hailey Prouix,” I said. “You think she killed him?”
“Don’t know who it was, I told you. But I know she was at the heart of what happened to him, know it in my bones. I won’t say I’m not sorry she’s dead, but I know where she’s going. And I’ll tell you this: Even the devil he best stay clear of her. Yes, sir. Even the devil.”
33
I DROVE unsteadily down the rutted drive that fell from the Sterrett house, weaving more than I meant to and skirting the sheer edge of the ravine as we bounced around the ruts. The two dogs kept us company, running alongside, yelping their good-byes to Skink.
“You made yourself a couple of friends,” I said.
“Steeling my nerves to cozy up to a pair of bloodthirsty hounds, I was. Best advice I ever got from my daddy: Muster your courage and face your fears.”
“Looked to me what you were mustering was that corn liquor?”
“Nah, I was just being polite. But truth to tell, I could use myself a nap right about now.”
“We’ve got someone else to see. You know, I can’t get that image out of my mind, Lucifer sliding respectfully out of the way as Hailey exits the elevator at the bottom floor.”
“That was the liquor talking.”
“I don’t think so. He truly thinks she was evil.”
“He’s entitled.”
“What do you think?”
“Girl I knew,” said Skink, “was hard as dog’s teeth and twice as sharp, but she wasn’t evil. There was a softness in the middle, is all. There was too much need to her. When something’s soft and needy like that, it ain’t much of a trick to twist it around.”
“You think she was manipulated?”
“Don’t know.”
“By Grady Pritchett and his rich father?”
“Money has a way, don’t it?”
“So what do you think of our little murder case now?”
“You mean the boy in the quarry? The cop says it was an accident. The father says it was murder. Hard to tell, though what you told me of them letters makes it seem the father might be more on the right. Still, I don’t see what this one has to do with the other.”
“Neither do I. That’s why I think it’s time to go to church.”
“You reduced to looking for a sign from the Almighty Himself?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
THE BUILDING was solid and white with narrow arched windows and a steeple high enough for you to know it was a church but not so high as to look unduly prideful. Beside the door was the symbol of a cross with a red sail attached. PIERCE UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, read the sign out front. REV.THEODORE H.HENSON.SUNDAY SCHOOL 10:00 A.M.WORSHIP SERVICES 11:00A.M. 1 AND 3SUNDAY.WE BLESS HIS NAME, HALLELUJAH.
The Reverend Henson, as one would expect, was on his knees, but not in supplication. We found him outside in the rear of the church, tending to the flowers in the beds alongside the path that led from the church to its well-shaded cemetery farther up the hill. His hands were moving like creatures in the loam, weeding, smoothing, pulling out withered stalks to make room for those still thriving.
When he heard us coming, he looked up and his face registered dismay for just a moment, as if the harbingers of a doom he had long been expecting had just arrived, before his features lit up in an inviting smile. He was a short, thin man, with nervous hands and pointy features that had aged sourly. He stood up when he heard his name, brushed the dirt from his palms, reached out to shake.
“You’d be the gentlemen from Philadelphia,” he said in a sharp, high voice.
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Good. I’ve been expecting you. Why don’t you wait inside the church, give me a chance to clean myself a bit before we talk.”
“Don’t be changing for our benefit, Padre,” said Skink.
“I was pretty much done here, but if you’d like instead, we could take a walk.”
“That would be perfect,” I said. We followed him through the path defined by the beds he had just been working in, and I made the introductions.
“I hope you don’t mind if we take our walk here,” he said as he led us into the quiet of the church’s graveyard.
The headstones were a mixture of weathered limestone markers, narrow and thin, and newer, thicker memorials, the smoothed granite still shiny. The grass was long and uneven, oaks were scattered among the plots like sentinels standing ramrod straight.
“When I first joined this congregation a few decades ago, I was intimidated by this place. It wasn’t the fact of death that it so starkly represented as much as the history. I didn’t know these people, didn’t know these families. My parishioners came to me as blank slates that left me feeling inadequate to their needs, and I felt that sense of inadequacy most strongly here, in this place, where the pasts of which I knew nothing were represented by these stones.”
As he walked, he gestured to the stones and the names upon them: Carpenter, Bright, Skidmore, McKinnon, Perrine. The older had the dates of birth and death carved on them, though the printing on some was so weathered as to be unreadable. ROY CUDDY, said one I could just make out. BORN JULY 1907,DIED MARCH 1908. It was impossible not to feel the same history the reverend talked about as we walked alongside him.
“But now that I have a surer sense of the past, now that I recognize the names and the people buried beneath the earth, I find this to be a place of great comfort. As many as I’ve buried in this dirt, I’ve baptized more, boys and girls with the same surnames as on these stones. You want to learn of the circle of life, Mr. Carl, you don’t need see a Disney movie. Just come and take a walk within any church graveyard in any small town.”
It was a nice little talk from Reverend Henson, touching and real, but it was clear he had choreographed it for our benefit. Having learned from his poker buddy, Chief Edmonds, that we were in town, he decided to spend the day gardening so that we would find him out back and we could take this very walk and hear this very speech. Because the subtext of what he was saying was as clear as his words themselves. There is history in this town, Mr. Carl, centuries of history that you neither know nor could possibly understand. Be careful what you conclude, be careful how you judge, for in the scheme of all things you know nothing.