Terry said, “I don’t know what’s in my bag. The money or May Lynn.”
“The money,” I said. “I have May Lynn, and she’s high and dry.”
“Wonder how the money is,” Terry said.
“What I’m worried about is Mama and Jinx,” I said, but that didn’t keep me from pulling the bow loose on his bag. We got the can out and pried it open and looked inside the padded jar. Just like the jar in my can, it wasn’t broken. It was in fine shape, and so was the money. Everything else in the bag was ruined. I tried the flashlight, but the water had messed it up. I took the lard cans out of each of the bags while Terry leaned against the tree. I figured those lard cans was all that was worth carrying.
Then we heard Jinx yell. We looked up and our hearts soared, cause there she and Mama came, dripping wet, walking along the bank toward where we was standing. We hurried to meet them, went about hugging each other, and then we found a place on the shore where the sun was bright and all of us just sat there, numb, with the sun beating down on us, drying us out.
I told them about the reverend, and when I did Mama burst out crying. I had to hold her. In time she stopped, and we all lay down on the ground in the hot sunlight and fell asleep from exhaustion.
19
When I woke up, it was fresh dark, but not so much I couldn’t see good. Terry and Jinx was still asleep. Mama was down by the edge of the river, squatting on her haunches, looking out at the river. I went and sat down by her.
“I walked down to find Jack,” she said. “He was hung up good. I could see that from the shore. I wanted to swim out there and free him, but I didn’t. I’m not that good a swimmer and I’m bone-tired. It was luck and nothing else that allowed me and Jinx to survive. We clung to a piece of the raft and it washed up against the shore and got hung up in some roots, and we were able to get onto land. We were lucky, and Jack, a man of the Word, one of God’s chosen, was killed. I don’t understand it.”
“I don’t think there’s any understanding to it,” I said.
“What are we gonna do now, Sue Ellen?”
All of a sudden, I felt like the mother and like Mama was the child.
“I don’t know just yet,” I said.
“While I was sleeping, I had the dream about the black horse again, and the white one, but this time the white horse not only had wings but he was flying up and away, fast. I was running and jumping like a kid, hopping up trying to grab onto his hind legs, or his tail. I kept jumping even though he was long gone from me. And that black horse, he came closer, and I forgot about the white horse, and I started to run. The black horse came on behind me, snorting fire out of its nostrils and mouth. He came closer and closer, and I couldn’t run any faster. He was right on me, and then…I woke up.”
“It’s just a dream, Mama. Ain’t no horses after you. Why would a horse be after you?”
She shook her head. “I think it may be some kind of sign. Some kind of warning. I feel it means something.”
“It means you need some rest, Mama. That’s what it means.”
We went back to where Jinx and Terry was. Jinx was up now and she was on her knees beside Terry. She said, “He ain’t looking so good.”
He wasn’t. Even by starlight I could see his hand was swole up a lot bigger than before.
“I reckon we’ll have to walk out, find some people,” I said.
“We’re wanted,” Jinx said.
“Just by Don and Cletus,” I said. “They ain’t going to tell no law about that money. They’re as big a crook as we are, worse.”
“There’s Skunk,” Jinx said. “He could have been out there watching us sleep, for all we know. They say he’s like that. That he does things on his own time, that it’s all just a game to him.”
“Let’s hope they’re wrong,” I said.
“We could end up dead on a big nest of hope,” Jinx said.
And then something hit me. “You know, there is another problem.”
“And what’s that?” Mama asked.
“Gene and Constable Sy,” I said. “We was the last ones anyone knew to be in that house. I got to reckon we’re going to be the ones most likely figured for the killing.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jinx said. “So maybe we’re wanted after all, and in a big way.” After a moment, she said, “Course, Reverend Joy, he did the killing of Gene with that board. He’s dead, so we could lay both of them killings on him.”
“That isn’t right,” Mama said.
“It ain’t right,” Jinx said. “But it sure is workable.”
“No,” I said. “We won’t do that. He tried to help us.”
“I know that,” Jinx said, her voice deep. “I was trying it on for size. But it didn’t fit. I guess you got to walk out and take the chance. Maybe we all got to walk out. Jail is bound to be better than Skunk.”
“I’m not sure Terry can walk out,” Mama said. “And what about the reverend?”
“He damn sure ain’t walking nowhere,” Jinx said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Mama said.
“If we pull him loose,” I said, “we got no way to bury him proper. So I don’t think there’s a good way to go when it comes to him.”
“We can’t just leave him hanging there,” Mama said.
“I ain’t as bothered by it as you two,” Jinx said.
I looked down at Terry. “We can talk about it till the blood poison kills Terry, or while he might have a bit of strength, we can try to get going. Way I see it, night is Skunk’s time, and we keep standing here chatting, he’s gonna solve all our problems for us, and not in a way we’re gonna like.”
“All right, then,” Mama said. “But how do we go?”
I thought on that a moment. “We could walk toward the tree line, see if there’s a road somewhere, but probably the best thing is to stay along the river. The river always leads to a town or somebody.”
We talked about it some more, and finally come to the conclusion it was best to stick together. Might have a chance that way, but if we split up, we was sure as hell going to be killed if Skunk was out there. Three of us could fight him better than one or two. Of course, there was Terry, but in his condition our best bet was to grab him by the ankles and sling him about, use him as a weapon.
Terry made it to his feet with some coaxing, and was able to walk with one arm over my shoulder, the other over Jinx’s. But he was out of it, jabbering about this and that: “It was an accident,” he said over and over.
“What’s that?” I said. “What was an accident?”
“The water,” he said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “A storm does what it does.”
We kept walking, his arm over our shoulders, carrying our lard cans, me with May Lynn in mine, and Mama carrying the one with the money in it.
We stayed close to the river as we could, but sometimes the growth around it got wild, and we had to go wider, come back closer to it when the stuff thinned. I don’t know how long we walked, but we finally came to a place where there was a big burned patch with a chimney sticking up. It had happened a long time off, because the rain from the night before hadn’t stirred the char up, and there wasn’t any burned smell about it. Up against the shore I could see a boat chained to a big oak that had died and fallen into the water.
We stopped and laid Terry out on the dirt and set our lard cans down. Mama sat beside him, and me and Jinx went down to the boat. The chain ran through a hole in the front of the boat and was wrapped around the log and fastened back to the boat with a padlock. The way it was looped under the log, I figured someone had to have gone to a lot of trouble to get in the water and under the log to wrap the chain. It couldn’t be pulled off either end. One end of the log went out in the water. The other end had a bunch of dead limbs on it, and you couldn’t pull the chain over them. If we had an ax, then we could have chopped the limbs off and pulled the chain free. But no ax appeared.
We looked around for a rock, something, anything, to bang that padlock off, but all there was in that way was the bricks in the chimney, and they was caulked tight. We couldn’t find any means to work one loose.