Just enough light to create grotesque shadows.
While her eyes focused on the flame, her ears told her that there were no chickens, no sound of sheep, no cow's tail thumping against a stall. She remained perfectly alone, except for erratic slithering noises that came and went- curious vermin, brought by the odor of decaying flesh; that and the sound of her own breath remained all there was. She gagged repeatedly as she took in the awful odors through her flared nostrils.
How long? How long will the process take if this sick fuck allows it to continue to its natural-or is it unnatural- resolution? Two days, six, twelve, a month? At what point will I begin to feel the inevitable pain? The horror of my own rotting flesh? The stench of flesh as it loses its bond, the unrelenting odorous horror of inhaling my own dying flesh? Will it be distinguishable from the flesh that takes my flesh into its maw? At what point will I feel no more? At what point do I go sinking and melding into Jimmy Lee's decaying body? At what point do I go insanely insane?
The old man had left the candle burning on a holder on the stool. It only required a moment's thought to prefer burning to death to what Purdy had in mind for her. She slowly began to rock Jimmy Lee's body beneath her. It was easier getting momentum going than she had imagined. The old man was right. Jimmy Lee was no longer a large man, no longer much mass left to him. Still, she would have to roll with great momentum to make Jimmy and herself a missile for the stool. She didn't care at this point if she would or would not come out atop the dead man. It would only take a half roll to send the candle onto the hay-strewn floor and possibly, just possibly, set the two of them, Jimmy Lee and herself, ablaze. She believed it a far, far better way to die than by the slow and painful degrees the old man wanted to see and relish.
She got the body rolling back and forth with great force now, and suddenly the bodies lashed together hit the stool, but at the same moment, the old man lifted the candle into the air. He'd been standing in shadow, watching, inwardly laughing at her struggle. The candle had been left to test her and to offer false hope, so that he could take it away.
Bastard…
She was under the corpse now. The old man kicked out at his son's dead body and sent it back over to its original position, she on top.
“ Wouldn't do to have Jimmy on top,” he said. “He'd decay you too quick that away. I want this to last.”
She cried as darkness completely enfolded the bam, while the old man waltzed out this time to the tune of her complaints. The old man made a noisy show of rattling the door, locking her inside.
Isaiah Purdy, determined to make his destination, had continued on toward Huntsville, Texas, at dawn, even after the near-fatal crash into the ditch that had acted like a hammer blow to wake him up at the wheel. That night he'd been nearly killed, having been run completely off the highway by a road hog truck driver, who didn't so much as slow down. Like a goddamn ocean liner running down a man in a rowboat. This all happened just outside of Sioux City, Iowa, where one turn would take him to South Dakota, another to Nebraska. He'd needed the exit for Nebraska, and having almost missed it, he'd veered into the path of the truck, which was passing him on the right. When he'd come to his senses, it was too late, and the trucker had no sym-pathy for his indecision. “Indecision kills,” he'd muttered to himself once the van had come to a complete halt.
Purdy then continued on for the border exit out of Iowa altogether and, using the interstate, was soon having breakfast in neighboring Nebraska.
The long journey had given Isaiah time to think clearly about his plans, and to again and again condemn that bitch judge who had sent his child to his death.
At the time of his going to Huntsville, Jimmy Lee's execution was imminent, looming in Isaiah's mind like a predatory bird picking at his brain whenever he gave the least thought to the adult boy he had raised on the farm. He recalled how he had taught the boy all he knew about raising pigs for slaughter, and how Jimmy Lee learned to slit a pig's throat and drain the blood from the carcass in the most efficient manner. How the pig must be boiled in water to scrape off every whisker and hair, and how to dismember the animal limb by limb, and how to use every strip of flesh and organ. At first, the boy proved reluctant and a slow learner. Isaiah had had to shame the boy into his first slaughter of a pig the boy had become fond of.
The boy's mother joked on more than one occasion as to how Isaiah loved his pigs more than he did her, and more than he did his own son, that he spent more time with his pigs than he did his family. But how else to make a go of a pig farm? It took time-lots of time-to make money off of a slew of piglets raised to become pork on the hoof.
The Nebraska state line had come and gone, and still Isaiah had miles to go before he slept that night if he were to make his son's execution by the appointed time. “What a cursed life it's become,” he moaned, and his stomach and sore heart lurched in unison, bringing a sour pain to his chest. Acid indigestion, a lifelong problem, rearing its ugly head, he thought. “Miles to go before I sleep… miles to go before I sleep…”
That had been only a week ago. Now he had completed the journey to Huntsville, and he had sat stone cold and rock-hearted as they strapped Jimmy Lee into that chair and they played out their little ritual like they were the military, and the order was given and all those many volts of electricity were sent coursing through Jimmy Lee's horrified body, turning the boy into a stiff board. He'd then claimed his boy's body, and had gotten the needed extra coffin loaded into the van alongside Jimmy's. All the paperwork was filled out, and then he'd gone looking for the judge. Miss High and Mighty. Jimmy Lee's choice to spend eternity with. It was the boy's final wish. And Isaiah believed it was the least he could do for the boy at this terrible time.
He reasoned that his fulfilling the boy's last wish would make up for all the time he'd not spent with Jimmy Lee as a child. Maybe…
That was only a week before.
Now Isaiah had set Jimmy Lee's final request in motion. Now Judge DeCampe lay helplessly strapped to Jimmy Lee's decaying corpse.
Now… now it was set in motion, he kept telling him-self, because sometimes he didn't believe it himself. Sometimes, the idea of time itself meant nothing to him. Sometimes nowadays time had no linear meaning to the old man; one day did not follow another, and there were no increments of time, no minutes, no hours, no days, no weeks, months, or years-not any longer.
Sometimes inside his head, Isaiah still had the journey to Houston to complete, still had to kidnap the woman there in Houston, even knowing now that she hadn't been in Houston but in Washington, D.C., where he had found the woman who had for so many years occupied Jimmy Lee's dreams. In his mind, he had not yet kidnapped the woman, but he would. And he'd do it without a hitch whatsoever, so sure was he of his plan. And why not? After all, it was foreseen and foretold by Jimmy Lee before his execution in one of the boy's visions-visions that had come to him after his incarceration. The visions came along with Jimmy Lee's sudden realization of how his life-even his life in prison- could be softened and helped by a steady reading of his Bible, the one his mother had sent him.
So while he drove to Huntsville to fetch Jimmy Lee's corpse and then to Houston for the judge's soon-to-be- corpse, he was also simultaneously turning the woman's flesh to a gangrenous Jell-O. All in due time… all in time, but all time was relative, after all.
His pocket watch read three A.M. Everybody was a little crazy at three in the morning. He had returned to the barn and now regained his seat on the stool facing DeCampe. She lay helpless in Isaiah's power, but in truth, it was due to Jimmy Lee's power, the power he had found in the scriptures. If truly in the faith-as old white-haired Samuel Putnam said every Sunday at prayer meetings-Jimmy Lee could move mountains even in death. Hell, he had moved his old man clear across the continent and back. Proof positive the boy had come to know that he could not go through this life without help from those who loved him, had loved him his entire life, had forgiven him his horrid deeds, had forgiven him his murdering ways, had forgiven him his unthinkable, unspeakable acts, because in the end he had accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. This above all had moved his mama and papa to stand by their only begotten son. The Lord moved in mysterious ways… the Lord moved people in mysterious ways.