Aaron had parked the truck at the foot of the hill and killed the engine then joined his father and Luke in walking the long straight path up the rise to where the Lowell farm sat brooding in the dark. The twins stayed in the truck, along with the body parts they had wrapped in plastic, surveying the night for signs that the old farmer and his boy were fleeing, or that there were flickering lights burning the bellies of the clouds on the horizon, foretelling of trouble’s advance on them if it turned out they were too late.
Luke said a silent prayer that they weren’t.
He carefully scanned the wide open areas to their right, where nothing sprouted from the dead earth, and listened to the hissing of the corn in the field to their left. Those sibilant whispers seemed like voices, but he had heard such things enough to tell the difference should a human voice be among them.
Making no attempt to be quiet, Papa-in-Gray, now dressed in a frock-like gray coat—which the kids acknowledged as his preacher garb, for he had told them once he believed himself a messenger, despite his failure to be inducted into a legitimate order—led Luke and Aaron to the door, the fluttering light within assuring them that someone was home, even though the truck Luke had seen earlier was nowhere in sight. Its absence worried him. Where were they if not home? With the Sheriff? The doctor? Luke let his eyes fall to the blade gripped in his father’s right hand, the tip of the ivory handle a pale smudge in the dim light. As a child, he had watched his father sharpening that curved six-inch blade, had marveled at the craftsmanship, but had feared it also, and with good cause. Some years later it would be the instrument they would use on his genitals.
Papa-in-Gray stopped by the door, then turned his head and slowly stepped toward the window.
“He there?” Aaron asked.
Their father leaned his face close to the dusty glass, his shadow sprawling over his sons. His nose brushed the window.
“Papa?” Aaron asked, the nervous excitement in his voice infectious. The air grew taut between them; the temporary reprieve the rain had brought banished now. It was balmy, humid, their clothes stuck to their skin, and with the heat came short tempers.
The old man seemed to stiffen, his shadow flinching as if eager to be free of the tension that held its host in thrall. Luke felt something twist inside him. Something was wrong. Even if instinct had failed him, it was compensated for by the sudden rage radiating from his father’s body. Whatever he had seen in there had not agreed with him.
Luke swallowed. Was the house empty? Were they too late?
His father turned to look at him. At the same time, Aaron moved to take Papa’s place at the window. He drew in a breath. Luke did not hear him release it.
“What is it?” Luke asked. Now that Papa’s back was to the window, the warm light spilling out around him, his face was in shadow. Yet Luke could still feel his eyes on him, cold black things that reminded him of Momma’s glare from her foul bed in the dark. If there had ever been any question of Papa’s feelings toward him, there wasn’t one now. Pure unbridled hate contaminated the air between them and Luke would not have been at all surprised had tendrils erupted from the old man’s body and enveloped him, drawing Luke into his father’s body where he would burn in the fires of contempt. He squirmed in the glare, until Aaron stepped between them, quietly walked to the door, tested the handle, and opened it. New light carved the dark.
“C’mon,” Aaron said, and disappeared inside.
For a moment longer, Luke’s father pinned him with that raging and yet unseen look. Then he stepped close, his breath foul in his son’s face, and brought the knife up between them, the point pressed to Luke’s belly. When Luke tried to back up, Papa’s free hand clamped down on his shoulder.
“You best start prayin’ for salvation,” his father said, his eyes black holes. He dug the knife tip a little deeper, until it broke through Luke’s shirt and pricked the skin. “If’n you don’t get it, you gonna feel this blade in your asshole ’fore I cut you wide open and let your brothers feed on your still steamin’ insides. You hear me?”
The blade pierced the skin and the sting of it forced Luke to take an involuntary step back. This time his father didn’t stop him. Instead he straightened, sheathed the blade beneath the folds of his coat in a leather scabbard at his hip, and headed inside the house.
Luke stood there for a moment, staring at the open doorway, trembling. A circle of heat drew his attention down to his shirt, where a spot of blood was growing at his belly.
He put the knife away, Luke thought, his mind a confusion of emotions. There’s no one inside. Darkness that was not of the night edged into the corners of his vision. It was tinged with red. At length, when it became clear he was not going to be summoned inside, he followed, entering the warmth of the house and shutting the door behind him. Instantly, he saw he was wrong. There was someone here.
“Take a good look,” Papa sneered, and stepped aside. Beside him, Aaron watched Luke for a reaction, his face impassive.
Luke, head pounding, studied the man sitting in the chair by the fireplace. It was the farmer, Jack Lowell, the black man he had seen, with his son, loading the girl into their truck. Lowell was of no use to them now. A rifle lay on the floor, muzzle pointing toward the fire. The air smelled of gunpowder and singed hair. The old man’s head was lowered, as if he’d fallen asleep, but the angle allowed all gathered to see the gaping hole in the back of his skull through which the bullet and brains had exited and painted the wall and window behind them in gray and red. Blood had pooled around the chair, the old man’s checkered shirt soaked with it.
As Luke watched, heartsick, Papa dropped to his haunches by the chair and dipped his fingertips into the blood on the floor, brought it up to his nose, then rubbed it, as if testing the consistency of paint. Then he rose and looked at Aaron. “Still warm,” he said. “Ain’t been dead long.”
Luke felt himself being wrenched in two different directions at once. Part of him wanted to take his knife and cut the dead man to ribbons, punishment the farmer would never feel, but might sate Luke’s frustration. Another part of him wanted to turn tail and run, to get away from his father and the deepening sense of danger, to see how far he could get before they took him down. He did not want to be here, did not want to think about what they were going to do to him, and yet fear held him in place as surely as Papa’s blade had done.
He wasn’t going anywhere. They wouldn’t let him. God wouldn’t let him.
Aaron sheathed his own blade, shoulders slumping in disappointment. He looked up at Papa. “What now?”
Papa continued to study the blood on the tips of his fingers. “Luke said there was a boy, didn’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Find him.”
In the last days of Abby Wellman’s tortured life, her husband decided to kill her. He reasoned that the cancer was going to do it anyway, and in a decidedly less merciful fashion than he could with a needle and some morphine. As the only doctor within a thirty-mile radius, and being more or less a recluse since his wife had fallen ill, he doubted anyone would find her passing suspicious, or feel compelled to study too closely the means by which she’d found her eternal rest. If medical questions in Elkwood were raised, Wellman was the only one called upon to answer them, so unless someone went to the trouble of bringing an outsider in to confirm his story, there was nothing to stop him from going through with it.
And yet he hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched his beloved suffer, knowing it wasn’t right and desperate to save her. The morphine he administered was always the correct dosage, never too much despite how easy it would have been to increase it. He could even have told himself later that he hadn’t been paying attention, or was an innocent victim of subconscious mutiny, but nothing stuck. Every day he let his wife writhe in pain because he couldn’t take her life.