“No wonder he’s spoilt,” Old Man Harlan said.
“He could use a little spoiling around the likes of you.”
“Say what you want to, old girl. Your days is numbered.”
“All our days are numbered Nealy.”
“Humph!” Old Man Harlan stepped to one side of Granny and walked off with the dripping chickens. Dotted lines of blood followed him across the yard.
Everybody was eating supper except Victor, who was still passed out in the trailer. I wasn’t hungry. I got me a coffee can and went out by the chicken yard. A breeze was coming in from back of Granpaw’s tobacco patch, blowing up bits of straw and making the tin roof on the chicken house tick. Granny’s knife was still where I left it by the fence. I stuck it in my belt and went looking for Elvis and Johnny’s heads. I found them in one of the tracks of the wagon road covered with flies. Elvis’s floppy comb had shrunk to about a third of its size. Johnny’s beak was frozen in mid squawk. I picked them each up by their bloody neck feathers and put them in the can, crying so hard now I could barely see.
I slipped past the house with the can and out across the road to the cemetery. I’d never been out there by myself, and never so late. The ‘Harlan’s Crossroads Cemetery’ sign faced outward from its curve over the gate. The cottonwood limbs were rocking in the breeze. I pushed open the gate and crossed the weedy, picker-filled graveyard to the busted out place. The sun was going down and the umbrella of the weeping willow tree stood black in the haze.
I came across Granny and Granpaw Ray’s graves, crumbling white slabs, darkened now, though I could still make out the worn letters of their names. And there was Daddy’s grave too — the shiny gray stone — the words ‘Loved By All’ cut across the front.
I dumped Elvis and Johnny’s heads out of the can and onto the grass. Taking up the butcher knife, I made a hole at the foot of Daddy’s grave. I put the heads in there and covered them with the dirt. I sat listening to the breeze. It was true, what the words on Daddy’s grave said. Loved By All. Everybody loved Daddy. Missy and me loved him. Momma loved him. Granny and Granpaw did. The church people did. People he worked with too. Why would anybody want to kill Daddy? Why would Victor?
A voice cracked behind me. “What you burying chicken heads in my graveyard for?” I whirled around with the knife. Hunched over like a gray bug, standing just inside the busted out place, was Bird Pruitt. “Chickens ain’t peoples.” She had that same purple dress she always had on, the purple hat with the purple net. “Answer me, Ruby’s boy! I said what you burying chicken heads in my graveyard for?”
I couldn’t believe it — first Victor, then Old Man Harlan, now this. I scrambled to my feet. “This graveyard doesn’t belong to you Bird!”
Bird ran a tongue over her lips, grinning. “You just like your Momma was. Course now her spirit’s robbed away. Ain’t it? In ‘at box! And here you are all by your lonesome agin that man. Eee! Eee! Eee! Poor thang.” Half her teeth were gone, her face watery with watery gray eyes and a mouth like a brown hole of black gumline and yellowed bits of bone. The perfect cousin for Old Man Harlan, I thought. She shuffled up under her hump and started toward the weeping willow.
“What box?” I said.
I could see just one side of her face as she paused, one watery eye looking up in the sky. “You know they’s a storm coming don’t you? A big un too. Look up there.” She pointed to the sky. The sun had gone down but it was still light out. Up where Bird pointed was a round moon, floating in the dark sky, around it a hazy white ring, one diamond star inside. “Storms a coming, shore ‘nuff.” Bird wagged her head and shambled off into the black shape of the weeping willow tree.
“What storm?” I called.
28
Body Snatchers
Friday morning Granpaw woke up from his spell. Granny told him what all Reverend Pennycall had said and about Victor too. “I got to go talk to that judge.”
“Judge Beechum?” Granpaw said.
“Yeah, Judge Beechum! I got to go talk to him.”
“You mean we, don’t you?” Granpaw said. “I’ll tell you what’s the truth; Nealy and the Reverend can both kiss my ass! Victor too. Ought to’ve run him off long ago.”
“You don’t have to get all worked up about it,” Granny said.
“I ain’t worked up!” Granpaw growled. “I’m mad!” He waited for that to sink in; then said, “Reckon what Reverend Pennycall said is true? Reckon they hung ole Moses?”
“I don’t know,” Granny said. “I didn’t believe it at first, but now they all talking about it.”
“I’d trust the Devil for I would the Reverend.”
“Strode,” Granny said.
“Well I would, by grabs.”
After breakfast they both got in the station wagon and drove off.
All the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon it was so sweaty hot outside you could hardly get your breath. Victor wouldn’t eat breakfast. He wouldn’t eat lunch. Both times Momma took food out to the trailer, and both times she had to bring it back.
I went around the side of the house and looked out across Nub Road. A huge cloud was swelling up over Granpaw’s tobacco patch; the top so bright it was hard to look at, the underside all charcoal gray and bulging with dark green bubble shapes.
Willis sat Chester in the middle of the road — the first I’d seen of him since Reverend Pennycall’s visit. “What ya’ll doing?” he said.
“Watching that cloud. What you?”
“Nothing. Too hot.” Willis slid off Chester. He looked at the cloud. “Rain ca-comin’.”
I remembered what Bird said. I remembered the circle around the moon and the diamond star. “It’ll blow over.”
“Might,” Willis said.
“Where you been?”
He didn’t answer, but I could see he had been crying.
“He ain’t dead,” I said. “Can’t be.”
“Can be too.”
“Granny don’t think so.”
“Miss Alma do.”
We watched the cloud a while, and then we went around to the front porch. I had my comic books and drawing papers and all my colors out there. Momma was sitting at the end of the porch in the rocking chair with Missy. Willis drew a picture of them. Then he started coloring it in. The colors looked good. Momma with black slacks and a blue blouse, little white flowers stitched across the front. Missy in a pair of black pedal pushers and a pink tee shirt. I sat back against the wall and read about body snatchers, about this man who was trying to warn people about the invasion of the body snatchers but nobody would listen.
Momma took up a little brown make-up case and looked at herself in the mirror. She took out the powder-puff and rubbed powder around the bruises on her neck. Willis worked on his picture. A blue dragonfly zoomed down next to his arm, flickered in the sunlight and zoomed away. Momma put the powder-puff back in the case. She dropped the case in a makeup bag by her chair. She took up a fan with a picture of Jesus on the back and began fanning herself and Missy.
I put away the Body Snatcher book and looked up in the sky. The cloud had moved up closer to the house and had mushroomed big as an A-bomb, twice the size it was before. The sky underneath was almost green with black-green curlycues and cave holes going through it. I had on my red shorts and Davy Crockett tee shirt. Flies kept tickling me, landing in places I couldn’t reach. I was smothering in the heat.
Something, a suitcase, Victor’s tan colored suitcase, kathumped down on the end of the porch right next to Momma, causing her suddenly to sit straight as a board. Victor kathumped his green file box on the porch too. He stood there a minute, looking around at the yard, all fidgety-like and nervous. “Momma,” he said. “I’ve decided. I’ve got to get out of here honey, and I want you and the kids to go with me.”