A Land More Kind Than Home Read online

  “I wouldn’t say afraid. Wary. But not afraid.”

  He walked over to the wall and ran his fingers through the snake skins. Some of them had rattles on the end, and they sounded like tiny maracas when he jostled them.

  “Where did you find all those?” I asked.

  “Oh, they’re easy to find if you know where to look,” he said. “I guess you could say I collect them. I like to think they remind us that we can change into something new. That’s what the good Lord can do for us when he grants us salvation, Sheriff. He makes us new. All the old, dead life falls away from us.” He looked over at me like he expected that to leave some kind of impression.

  “I’ve heard something about that,” I said. “And I can see how that would mean something to you as a pastor, especially after what happened to you down in Georgia—that fire and all.” He looked up at me like he was shocked that I even knew about that, much less had the guts to bring it up.

  “I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at,” he said. “I don’t think you understand either.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. “A couple phone calls, and I traced you back to Toccoa real quick. I’ve just never had a reason to let on that I know about it until now. But like I said, I can see how you’d like those snakes. They shed skin, men shed skin. Skin grows back, sometimes it gets grafted on.”

  “I served my time for that,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re even talking about it. It’s got no bearing on my life here.”

  “It might and it might not,” I said. “But it’s funny what you find out about people after a little boy dies. It’s funny how it gets folks to talking about things they hadn’t talked about in years.”

  “What are you getting at?” he asked.

  “Does the name Molly Jameson mean anything to you?”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” he said.

  “Nothing that I could charge you with,” I said. “At least not right now. But this other, this little boy, that’s something else altogether. This thing can’t be left out in a garden and forgotten. It’s got to have some kind of conclusion.” He must’ve been telling the truth about that bulb having a short in it, because the light began to flicker off and on, and before I knew I couldn’t hardly see anything inside that barn. “You mind if we talk outside?” I said.

  “Not at all,” he said. “But I need to tell you that I’m attending a prayer meeting this evening.”

  “I won’t keep you long,” I said. “I promise.”

  I WALKED OUT INTO THE LIGHT OF THE BACKYARD, AND HE FOLLOWED me. That thunderhead was getting closer, and the sky had started to darken even though we had a couple hours of daylight left.

  “The days are getting shorter,” I said. “Seems like every year I forget it’ll happen, and every year it surprises me.”

  “I know you didn’t come out here to talk about the weather, Sheriff,” Chambliss said. He was holding a rag and wiping at his hands. I watched him use it to get in between his fingers.

  “I know you know that,” I said. “And you know I’ve never given a damn about what y’all do up in that church. I’ve never passed judgment about how y’all chose to worship, no matter what I heard people say about it. But this is different. Something happened up there on Sunday night, and I need to find out what it was.”

  “What happens on Sundays in your church, Sheriff?”

  “Mr. Chambliss, I haven’t stepped foot in a church in about twenty-five years, and stories like this one here make me think that’s been a pretty good decision.”

  Chambliss laughed to himself and looked down at his hands and kept wiping at them like he just couldn’t get them clean enough.

  “A few of the folks I’ve talked to seem to think y’all were attempting some kind of healing,” I said.

  “If I knew who you’d been talking to, I might be able to give you some kind of bearing on the truth.”

  “Well, I ain’t going to tell you who I talked to, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said.

  “You know Adelaide Lyle’s about out of her mind,” he said. “You can’t trust a word an old woman like that says.”

  “You trust her with the church’s children, don’t you? As far as I know, one of them never died while she was watching them. That boy had a bruise the size of a football on his backside. I don’t guess you’d know anything about that, would you?”

  “I can’t say that I do,” he said. “Young boys are likely to get all kinds of bruises.”

  “That’s true,” I said. I turned toward my car like I was thinking about leaving. I even took a step toward the yard, but then I turned around and looked at Chambliss.

  “I almost forgot,” I said. “You ever hear of something called petechiae?”

  “No,” he said. “I ain’t never heard that word.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and looked down at the gravel. “That’s okay,” I said. “Most folks haven’t.” I looked up at him again. “And I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard it either until it showed up in a coroner’s report about fifteen years ago.” I took a step toward Chambliss. “Down in Hot Springs, a man named Chestnut had strangled his girlfriend with a telephone cord and then shot himself in the head. It was just an awful scene in their trailer: blood everywhere. But as bad as that scene was, as bad as it was to see that man’s brains blown all over the wall and all over his sofa, nothing bothered me until I saw that woman’s face. Her eyes were open, and they looked like somebody had come along and just poured blood into them. I learned from the coroner that they looked that way because her vessels had exploded because her air had been cut off while he was strangling her. It wasn’t just her eyes, though. You could see that her vessels had burst under the skin around her cheeks, her neck. I can still see her face, just as blue as a robin’s egg, those eyes swimming in blood.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “I didn’t even live here then. I never knew those people.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “You didn’t live here then, but you’re here now, and I’m telling you this because Christopher had petechiae, just like that poor girl did. But we know Christopher wasn’t strangled with a telephone cord. He died from broken ribs—three of them. That’s a strange thing to die of, isn’t it?”

  “I reckon it is,” Chambliss said.

  “Well, he didn’t die just because his ribs broke. The coroner’s report says he died because one of those broken ribs punctured a lung. He died of asphyxia. That means he suffocated, Pastor.

  “Now, I don’t know what y’all do up in that church that could cause something like this to happen, but I want you to know that it’s all going to come out eventually. And I can tell you, the sooner it does the better it’s going to be for everybody. If it takes the court and subpoenas and the jail to get you to talk, then that’s what it’ll take. But this family’s got themselves a dead boy and no answers.”

  “Are you threatening me, Sheriff?”

  “No, I ain’t threatening you,” I said. “But folks get to talking after something like this happens. People get ideas, and they’re likely to place blame whether it’s deserving or not.”

  “Are you one of them people?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not one of them people. I ain’t ready to blame anyone just yet. All I’m doing is looking for facts and trying to make sense of them. But it probably ain’t me and my blame that you need to be worried about.”

  “Who, then?”

  “You must not have seen what that boy’s daddy did to those men you sent out there to Miss Lyle’s on Sunday night.”

  “I have, and it wasn’t called for either. I’d like to think a sheriff offers his people a little more protection and is a little more interested in keeping the peace.”

  “I am interested in peace,” I said, “and that’s why I’m here. But I can promise you that you ain’t going to have none of it until this is settled. One thing I can’t promise you is that that boy’s daddy ain’t going to come around lo
oking for answers just like me. Only difference between me and him is that I’m bound to uphold the law. He’s not going to have any interest in doing such a thing. He hasn’t seen the law work for him yet.”

  “You think he’s coming to kill me or something?”

  “No,” I said, “I ain’t saying that, Pastor. We already had us one funeral. I’d like to hold off a while on having another one if we could.”

  I heard a crack of thunder way off behind me over the hills. The breeze picked up again and stirred the branches on the trees behind the barn.

  “Now, I believe you’re a spiritual man, Mr. Chambliss. And I know you like to keep your secrets about what’s going on up there in that church, and that’s fine with me as long as nobody gets hurt and nobody ends up dead. But there’s a family’s spirit that needs healing, and I would think a God-fearing man would want to see that it’s done.”

  “God don’t just care for the spirit, Sheriff,” Chambliss said. “I’m sure even a man like you knows that Christ healed the sick.”

  “Yeah, I know He did,” I said. “But you ain’t Christ.” He smiled and looked up at me and narrowed his eyes. “You call me when you get to feeling like you want to do the right thing. If not, I can guarantee that you’ll be hearing from me soon.”

  I turned and walked away from the barn and out across the yard toward the cruiser.

  “We’re all in need of some kind of healing, Sheriff,” he hollered after me.

  I opened the door to my car and slid onto the seat and watched him as he walked back toward the barn. The first drops of rain splattered on my windshield. I thought about what he said and realized that I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

  EIGHTEEN

  I COULD SMELL THE PORK CHOPS FRYING IN THE PAN WHEN I opened the door and walked into the house. Sheila was in the kitchen with the radio on, and I walked down the hallway to the bedroom. I hung my belt and my holster on the closet door, and then I unbuttoned my pants and untucked my shirt. I kicked off my boots and left them on the far side of the bed and sat down. I could hear Sheila’s footsteps coming down the hall. She stopped at the bedroom door.

  “You ready to eat?” she asked.

  I turned and looked at her over my shoulder. “You sure know how to greet a man,” I said.

  She smiled. “Well, come on while it’s hot,” she said. My shirt was almost soaked through with the rain, and I took it off and dropped it by the bed. I walked into the dining room in my undershirt and sat down at the table.

  “I forgot to wash my hands,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” Sheila said. “It won’t kill you to eat with dirty hands, not tonight, anyway.”

  I forked two pork chops and dropped them onto my plate, and then I spooned some salad out beside them.

  “You want a beer?” Sheila asked.

  “You want a beer?” I asked her back.

  She smiled at me and stood up and went into the kitchen and I heard her open the refrigerator, and then I heard the sound of the bottles clinking together. She walked back into the dining room and sat my beer in front of my plate. She sat down and picked up her fork. “So, what you got so far?” she asked.

  I took a sip from my beer and sat it on the table and looked at it for a minute. I watched the sweat run off the bottle onto the tablecloth, and then I picked it up and wiped it down with my napkin. I sat it back on the table. “Well, I got a dead boy who never said a word in his life, a mama who don’t want to say one now, a preacher who’s more interested in saving my soul than telling me the truth, and an old woman who’s too scared of him to say hardly anything at all. I know it sounds like I got a lot, but when you take a hard look at it it don’t amount to much more than jack shit, if it even amounts to that.” I picked up the beer and took another drink.

  Sheila smiled at me across the table. “Something’ll break,” she said. “It always does.”

  And by God if she wasn’t dead on with that.

  Jess Hall

  NINETEEN

  AFTER THE SCHOOL BUS DROPPED ME OFF ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, I left my book bag on the porch by the front door and walked over to Joe Bill’s. There wasn’t nobody at home at my house, and I didn’t feel like being there alone.

  I rung Joe Bill’s doorbell, and he flung the door open before the chimes even stopped. He stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door behind him like he didn’t want me to see what he was doing inside his house.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Can you play?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But you can’t come inside. My mom’s not home. She doesn’t want nobody coming in when she ain’t here.”

  “All right,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

  “It don’t matter,” he said. He turned his head to his left and looked down the road like he was expecting to see someone. “I was just out in the backyard shooting Scooter’s BB gun a few minutes ago.”

  “What were you shooting at?”

  “Just different things,” he said.

  “Can I shoot it?”

  “No,” he said. “I already put it back, and I ain’t getting it out again. He’ll be getting home from work pretty soon, and I don’t want him catching me with it. He’d kill me if he did.”

  “Whatever,” I said, but I didn’t blame him. Joe Bill was scared to death of Scooter, and I was too. He was fifteen years old, but he seemed a whole lot older to me. He had a fat friend named Clay, and I was especially afraid of him because he was as dumb as a rock and that made him even more terrifying because he’d do just about anything Scooter told him to do. The two of them worked for Joe Bill’s daddy down at his garage in Marshall. Joe Bill had sworn that one time he saw his brother talk Clay into eating some broken glass that somebody had busted out of the windows in an old school bus that was parked in the junk lot behind the garage. Joe Bill said Clay thought about it for a minute, and then he picked out a couple of pieces of glass from the gravel and put them in his mouth and chewed them for a while and swallowed them. Joe Bill said Clay’s mouth didn’t bleed or nothing. I didn’t know if I believed that or not, but sometimes I thought I might.

  The meanest thing I’d ever seen them do was a few years before when Joe Bill got a remote-control car for Christmas. We’d built a little ramp out in his driveway, and we were taking turns launching the car off into the grass. Scooter and Clay rode up on their bikes and watched us from out in the road. After a minute they came up the driveway and Scooter picked up that car and wouldn’t give it back, and then he told Clay to jump up and down on our ramp until it broke, and it wasn’t but two or three jumps before it snapped right in two because he was so fat. Joe Bill said he was going to holler for his mom, and when he did Clay picked up a baseball bat out of the carport and Scooter tossed that car up into the air and Clay swung at it like he was hitting a baseball. He busted all the wheels off the car and knocked out the batteries. It landed right in the middle of the yard, and Joe Bill went running over to it and picked it up and looked at it, and then he threw it down and ran into the house.

  He left the carport door open and I could hear him crying inside, but Scooter and Clay just rode off on their bikes before Joe Bill’s mom came out. I knew Joe Bill wouldn’t fess up to crying about that now, but I think I probably would’ve cried too. That was an awfully nice car just to watch it get broken for no reason.

  “Well, what do you want to do?” I asked.

  “We could shoot some baskets out back,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  THERE WAS A LITTLE PATCH OF DIRT IN JOE BILL’S BACKYARD WHERE his daddy had put up a basketball goal, but it really wasn’t nothing but a wooden backboard with a rusty old rim nailed to it. The rim didn’t even have a net on it. The court was just made of dirt, and when you bounced the ball it looked like brown smoke was rising up off the ground.

  “You want to play PIG or HORSE?” Joe Bill asked. He tried to dribble the ball between his legs, but he bounced it on his foot and it rolled to
the edge of the dirt before it stopped at the grass. He walked over and picked it up.

  “Let’s play PIG,” I said. “HORSE takes too long. It’ll be dark before we’re done.”

  “Okay,” Joe Bill said. He took a few steps toward the basket, and then he leaned backward and tried to aim the ball like he was going to throw it over his head behind him. “Are you watching?” he asked me. “I make this one all the time.” He looked at the goal upside down and tossed the ball toward the basket with both hands. It rattled on the rim, but it didn’t go in. I heard thunder rumble over the mountain behind me, and I turned to look in the direction of the sound, and I saw the clouds had started growing darker. I knew that if Mama was at home instead of at Miss Lyle’s, then she would’ve come looking for me by now, but she wasn’t there and there wasn’t nobody who knew where I was right then except for Joe Bill.

  “It’s your shot,” he said.

  “You hear that thunder?” I asked.

  “The storm’s still a long way off,” he said. “It’s your shot.”

  I carried the ball and walked away from him toward the woods, and then I turned around to see how far away I was from the basket.

  “You can’t make it from there!” Joe Bill hollered.

  “Want to bet?” I hollered back. I held the ball up to my chin and stared at the rim like I was concentrating on it, and I thought about how far away the basket was. I walked a little closer before I took my shot. The ball rolled around the rim like it wasn’t going to go in, and then it dropped into the basket.

  Joe Bill caught the ball when it dropped through, and then he walked out to where I was still standing.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said. He took his shot, but it bounced off the side of the rim. The ball rolled out to him and he picked it up.

  “That’s a P,” I said. Joe Bill bounced the ball once, and then he held it against his chest and brushed the dust off it. I clapped my hands for him to toss the ball to me.