“Don’t tell me that Brother Whatsisname hung himself.”
“No. It’s Wayne Karp.”
“How in hell did he get in there?”
I gave Terry a bare bones account of how Wayne ended up in our jail. I couldn’t explain how he happened to turn up dead that morning, though, or account for how Brother Jobe got out, and I didn’t want to spend any more time puzzling on it there in the store. Terry and his boy Teddy helped me, of course. We wrapped Wayne’s body in theater drapes and took it to Jerry’s in the handcart that Buddy Haseltine used to make deliveries. When we got there, Jeanette was coming down the outside staircase to the second-floor infirmary above Jerry’s office carrying a bundle of cloth dressings stained with blood. Though the sight of all that blood was shocking, the fact that she was coming from up there suggested that Loren had made it through the surgery.
“How’s is he?” I said.
“He had a significant tear inside,” she said, “but it was at the rectum, which means less chance that anything got into the peritoneal cavity. You know, we don’t have a sigmoidoscope with fiber optics anymore, so it’s hard to see up in there. Anyway, we stitched him up. Now it’s a matter of hoping his bloodstream didn’t pick up anything.”
“Is he awake?” I asked.
“No, Jerry’s keeping him heavily sedated for now.”
“Where’s Jerry?”
“Asleep. He’s exhausted.”
“I have a body here.”
Jeanette flinched.
“Over in that cart,” I said. She glanced at Terry, who waved nervously.
“What the hell is going on around here?” she said.
I told her it was Wayne Karp and someone had killed him in his jail cell, and more than that I couldn’t say, except we had to get him into the springhouse because it was getting hot out.
She said, go ahead, put him in there, if we could find room for him. She left us and went inside the house with the bloody dressings. Terry and his boy helped me carry Wayne inside the springhouse. Another body was in there, on a table, among the milk cans and other stuff of daily life. I assumed it was Minor’s body, since Joseph had said they brought him to the doctor’s. It was covered with a blue tarp. We made more room on the big table and put Wayne up there next to Minor, the two of them side by side, mutely, in death. It seemed unfair to Minor. Terry and his boy went back to their store on Main Street. I went upstairs to the infirmary to look in on Loren. I had to see for myself that he had made it through the surgery.
Loren was there, all right, in the clean, bright, austere room. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully, snoring even. Jane Ann sat in an armchair in the corner. Her eyes were red, from crying or sleeplessness. She shot a hostile glance at me when I stepped into the room. They’d rigged Loren up to an IV, with some kind of clear solution in a bottle on a drip valve through a rubber tube to a needle in the inside of his elbow. It was the only hint of modern medicine in the room.
“I ran into Jeanette,” I said, trying to whisper. “She sounded optimistic.”
Jane Ann nodded noncommittally.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Her shoulders bowed a moment, her body shuddered and she started to weep. I went to her and knelt down beside the chair, taking her hands in mine.
“He’s going to recover,” I said. “We’ll get through this.”
She cried some more. Eventually, she pulled her hands away, patted my shoulders, and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Can I get you anything?” I said.
She said no, she’d be all right, and I left her there. I dreaded what I had to do next.
Sixty-three
When I got to the old high school sometime later and asked to talk to Brother Jobe, one of the sisters, without hesitation, led me around the back of the building, around the north end of their big garden where the football field used to be, and pointed at the edge of the woods along an up-slope pasture. A distant figure dressed in black sat up there.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I think he’s been waiting for you.”
I climbed over a stile into the pasture and made my way up the hill. Cadmus was among the horses there. A dozen of them were huddled in the shade of a large oak tree along the fence running up to the woods. At the top of the hill, Brother Jobe sat in an unpainted rough-sawn slat chair with a jug on the ground in the clover beside his chair. He was drinking whiskey from a jelly glass with cartoon characters embossed on it. Sweat beaded on his low forehead.
“Afternoon, old son. Have a drink?”
In fact, I was still intensely hungry, and I was not accustomed to drinking liquor in the middle of the day, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea.
“All right,” I said.
“I only have but one glass,” he said. “You’re welcome to share or drink straight out of that there jug. I don’t have no cooties.”
I went for the jug. A stiff pull. It was good whiskey.
“Have a ding-dang seat, you’re making me nervous.”
I sat on the ground next to him.
“I love to watch the horses,” he said. “You know, all those years back down home, my people were just crazy for the NASCAR. They’d go out to some honking huge oval track at Darlington or Daytona and watch those dadblamed machines go round and round and round, making all that noise. A horrible din. For hours and hours. If I knew how somebody could endure that, I’d die happy. Not to mention calling it recreation! Heck, it’d be more interesting to go out to the freeway overpass and watch traffic. At least the goldurn cars’d go in different directions. Anyway, I’m glad that foolishness is over. The car wrecked the southland. It wrecked Atlanta worse than Sherman ever did. It paved over my Virginia. They made themselves slaves to the car and everything connected with it, and it destroyed them in the end. Well, here’s to the New South. May it rest in peace.”
He raised his glass and took a good gulp. We had a nice view from the top of the pasture. You could see clear over the school into town, down Van Buren, the street trees all in a line, the jumble of rooftops amid the billowing foliage, and a glimpse of Main Street at the end of the vista.
“I can see how you could grow to love this little burg, though,” Brother Jobe said. “It’s a sweet corner of the country. Good fertile land too. I wish the town wasn’t so beat, but maybe we can bring her back. You see down there where the school auditorium is?”
“Yeah…”
“We’re going to build a pitched roof on her with a real steeplenot one of those dumb-ass cartoon steeples like they did in the old times on them churches that looked like goldurn muffler shops. In a few years you won’t recognize this place. It’ll be like unto a shining city set upon a hill.”
“How’d you get out of your cell, Brother Jobe?” I said, the whiskey finally driving some of the tension out of my skull.
“How do you suppose?”
“I can imagine you worked the combination lock open somehow.”
“Yeah, well, that would be an obvious one.”
“Is that what you did?”
Brother Jobe shrugged.
“What I can’t figure, though, is how you got into Karp’s cell. That’s a regular padlock, and I have the only key and the lock isn’t broken. I don’t see how you did it.”
“What’d I tell you the other day about this being a world of strangeness? Science don’t rule the roost no more.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Was I supposed to know that he’s dead?”
“I’d say so.”
“Then I’d say he was struck down by the Lord’s righteous wrath.”
“Were you the instrument of it?”
“Look at that fine mare yonder, the big bay with the star blaze. I’m aiming to breed my jack to her and go into the mule business big time. You folks don’t appreciate a mule. They ain’t stubborn. They’re sensible is all. You can’t make them do some durn fool thing that’ll endanger their lives or well-being. They’re smart. But they’ll gladly follow any reasonable command, and they’re smoother riders than your horse. People feel it’s demeaning to ride a mule, but I’ll take a mule to a saddle horse any day. Plus, they can endure the heat where a horse can’t.”