The unexpected man wore tattered clothes, sported a long beard, ragged hair, and confused eyes. With mouth wide open, he gazed at Purdy and past him to the coffin into which Isaiah had deposited Maureen DeCampe's benumbed form. Purdy thought of Moses and John the Baptist when he stared at the homeless man, who now asked, “Do ya' think you're doing the right thing here?”
“ I'm about doing the Lord's work. And you? You have come from God as a messenger, like John out of the wilderness, and you, sir, are a sign!”
“ A sign? Me?”
“ Yes, a sign that I am doing exactly as God intends me to do.”
“ Really?” Purdy's arms went up as he spoke, making him look like a preacher. “I am following the dictates of the One True Lord God. And you? Are you one of his prophets?” Purdy opened his palms to the homeless man. “Be at peace, brother.”
“ Then you're taking care of her, you mean?” The homeless man indicated the two coffins with a single finger. “Or them…”
“ Precisely, yes.”
“ Can I have her purse money?” The homeless man indicated where DeCampe's purse lay alongside her gun, several feet from her car.
'Take it; render unto Caesar that which is his.”
Purdy closed the van's rear doors on one coffin from which a slight groan erupted, and on one silent coffin. At the same time, the homeless man shuffled off for the purse DeCampe had dropped, but he first stared at the long- barreled gun, lifting it in his greasy, food-stained hands. His heart said use it, but his logical side won when he lifted the purse and carefully placed the gun back where he had found it.
“ I ain't been nobody's hero for a long time,” the man muttered to himself.
Purdy walked around to the front of the van and stared back at the homeless man. Purdy simply waved at the old prophet, climbed into the van, put his keys into the ignition, turned the motor on, and then slowly pulled away. The homeless man had already disappeared into the gray walls.
“ Well, Jimmy Lee… our undertaking's been blessed… blessed by Ol' John the Baptist himself,” the old Iowa farmer muttered as he arrived at the ticket booth, where he calmly paid his bill and continued on, the attendant so strung out on drugs that he had seen nothing and had heard less. Purdy, at Jimmy's urging, had brought plenty of drugs- mostly animal tranquilizers-to bargain with.
As for- Judge DeCampe, she was past caring, at least not for now. Purdy would taunt her with the story of her would- be knight in shining armor, who turned out to be Purdy's prophet. He'd share it all with her in detail when she next regained consciousness and when he next awoke. He knew the story well, but she had yet to hear it.
Maureen DeCampe now lay amid hay and dirt in an open room filled with dust, mites, and pollen. She could only imagine being in the coffin which was standing in a comer alongside Jimmy Lee's. The old man had told her all about how he had transported her here in it. He'd also begun to hint that it had all been a plan concocted in Jimmy Purdy's fevered brain. DeCampe at this point would prefer the safe confines of the coffin and a death by asphyxiation to that which the Purdy men had in mind. Had in mind was the right phrase, for the old man had his son's dead voice filling his mind, or so it seemed to her.
She would readily have chosen being buried alive to what torture she now endured. She felt her skin crawling with the decay from Jimmy Lee's body. For now she was in some sort of large area where animals had once been kept, some sort of a barn like structure, she realized.
“ Am I'n I-o-wa?” she asked under the gag, realizing the tape around her mouth protected the only area of her body touching the dead man's flesh-and grateful for this two- inch-wide swath of freedom from the desiccation. Unclean tissue… contamination, these words swam in her mind like feeding piranhas, but these toothy microbe fish ate away at her sanity and soul as well as her flesh.
The only response from the nearby darkness was a hearty laugh at her attempt to speak; she wondered if the old man could understand anything she said, that she had guessed at her whereabouts. If it were Iowa, how did he transport her without anyone knowing or seeing something? As if to answer her thoughts, the dark little man, Purdy, stood and lifted a kerosene lantern and turned the light up. She welcomed the pungent kerosene odor into her; for half a nanosecond, it masked the overwhelming odor of decay that had caused her to pass out more than once. Worse thought yet, she had gotten somehow used to the odor.
Her father had been a cattleman rancher in Texas, and his father before him, and she had often wondered how the DeCampe men could get used to the smells that came with slaughtering cows, but they did. In fact, it seemed to have lodged in their genes. Her grandfather had once sat her down and told her that men could, given the circumstances, get used to anything-anything at all. Any odor, any deed, any sinful behavior, if exposed to it long enough. He pointed to the slave trade, the Holocaust. She began to feel that she'd reached that point here, the point of no return, in which her senses, so assailed by the decay, simply had shut down. She could tolerate it, at least long enough to hate this man Purdy strongly enough to want to live to wreak vengeance on him.
Why was the old man turning up the wick on that damned kerosene light of his? At first, she thought he simply wanted a better look at the progress of his gruesome art. However, in the next instant, the light shone on the two white pine boxes with cheap chrome handles: coffins. One had held his son's electrocuted body, and now she recalled the horror of having awakened inside her coffin. He'd lifted the lid, smiled down at her in grotesque, toothless fashion, and then he'd shoved a cloth filled with chloroform over her face, and when she next awoke, she was lashed to his son's decaying corpse.
And my brain is beginning to accept this shit? she inwardly screamed.
How long? How long had they journeyed from D.C. to this godforsaken place? Had she been lying unconscious for the duration of a trip that had taken her near lifeless body from Washington to Iowa, where the old man resided? Had she been out that long? Had he managed to bring her back to his private property-to the safety of his homestead amid the nothing void of rural Iowa, where the only other soul to set foot in his bam might be the occasional postman, or Jimmy Lee's mother, the old man's wife? Did he have a wife? Did she condone what was going on out in her bam? Had she masterminded the entire abduction from her front porch rocker? Was it a ma and pa operation? Or was ma out of the loop? It felt unseasonably warm for an Iowa fall; even the nights had felt somewhat warm. The warmer the weather, the faster the decay, she knew. What was the cause for the warmth? Was it part of that large thing they called global warming, Indian summer come early? Or was it simply the heat of her own decay?
She wondered these things and why the old man was hovering with the light over her, studying her again. She wondered all these things before passing out again.
SEVEN
I will ransom them from the power of the grave: I will redeem them from death…
Isaiah Purdy had gone to his son's execution with no expectations save to see the thing through and to follow through on Jimmy Lee's requests-appeals made in his psychic visits.
After the execution, which had been handled with an eerie and perfunctory precision, Isaiah made his way down an institutional green and yellow corridor that felt like a tunnel out of The Wizard of Oz, at the end of which, he could view the body. It was a cold and stony Jimmy, his boy, whose head had been shaved, and whose temples were bubbled- marks of the boiling brain that had been scrambled by the electrocution. He didn't want to know the number of volts they'd fired into the boy's head. Poor Jimmy. Poor boy… Last of his lineage… end of the line…