Adaire saw him long before he went missing. I’ll never forget the blank, lost look in her eyes as she stared off into the oil pan Bone Layer used for the truck.
Gazing is what we call it. Others call it scrying. It’s when you see something that hasn’t quite happened yet in a dark reflective surface.
Gazing is in Adaire’s blood like death-talking is in mine. Aunt Violet used to gaze, before she gave herself over to drinking. Wyatt never quite got the hang of it. But Adaire could do more than either of them—she even had visions.
She showed Papaw on a map right where to find the boy. She’d seen him, said he was stuck in between coming and going but wouldn’t be there for a few days yet.
Sure enough, a couple days later a boy fell in the river up at Blackbeak Falls in Tennessee. Rapids were fierce that winter with all the ice storms and flooding that hit us. They combed the woods from Tennessee all the way to down Georgia where our borders kissed, hoping he’d got free from the waters and was wandering in the forest simply lost.
Papaw and Bone Layer found him right where Adaire said he’d be. Washed up five miles south down the Savannah River here in Black Fern’s Creek. They said he was laid on a stretch of slate rock, eyes wide-open to the sun, looking like a waterlogged raccoon with his heavy dark corduroy coat that probably weighed him down below the surface.
The boy was stuck between coming and going but not in the living and dying kind of way. He was dead, but stuck between this world and the next. That’s what happens when an innocent life is snatched too soon.
Papaw’s ancestors say it’s the crow’s job to take those ill-fated souls to the other side. Guide them safely into the afterlife. That’s why I made the wish that day.
I figured, at the time, if you could talk the death out of dying, then maybe, if a Death Talker worked the prayer just right, they could convince death to leap out of the dead just the same.
But death-talking doesn’t work that way, Papaw said. We shouldn’t try talking the death out of the dead.
Shouldn’t.
Late in the night, he and Bone Layer finally returned home with the boy’s body wrapped up in one of my great-granny’s quilts. They left him in Bone Layer’s one-room smokehouse until the sheriff could come the next day to collect the child and return him to his family.
I wanted to see the boy. So I snuck into the smokehouse and pulled back the quilt—about jumped out of my skin to see him looking back at me. His eyes were wide-open, cloudy white, but you could tell they were once blue. His dark hair was shorn tight to his head. His skin pale as moonlight. He was beautiful, even then. So beautiful I kissed him. Coldest kiss my lips ever felt. And there was a terrible ache in my chest, seeing him lie there, lifeless. So I bent my head next to him and whispered a little prayer, something from Psalms that drifted comfortably into my thoughts.
And then I talked the death out of the dead.
I twiddle a crow feather between my fingers in the moonlight that’s streaming through Adaire’s bedroom window. Rain drizzles down the glass pane, casting wormy shadows on the wall.
“You think Rook will stay this time?” I ask aloud, my voice cutting through the darkness of her room. My whiskey-filled head begins to think maybe I didn’t see Rook at all. That he was just a dream. Or an omen.
Pathetic how I let my emotions get here. Wanting him to come. Trying to hold on to something in this lonely world. Makes me wonder what’s broken in my head—or maybe my heart—that dreams about a man who can’t stay. But this time might be different, I tell myself.
A cold breeze pushes through the room. My breath a frosty cloud. I turn toward Adaire. Our noses a finger’s width apart.
You gotta let me go, she whispers. I close my eyes and choke back my feelings and let the liquor and exhaustion drag me off to sleep.
EIGHT
Violent Delights
A thundering fist pounds my head. An angry sun rages against my eyelids.
Then the pounding comes again, only this time I realize the fist is on Aunt Violet’s front door and not just in my head. There’s a murmur of voices as she curses whoever is racking on the door at the damn crack of dawn. I glance at the alarm clock that reads after nine. Oh, shit, I’ve gotta go.
Shielding my eyes from the sun, I peer out the window and spy a police car about the same time I hear Deputy Rankin announce himself. My first thought: What in the hell has Aunt Violet done now? Car in the ditch again? As the fuzz starts to clear from my head, though, I remember Ellis is dead, and I am a satanic whore. Damn it. The last thing I want is to talk with the sheriff. So I tumble out the window and into woods behind their house that lead to mine.
On the front porch, Bone Layer slathers on a layer of blue paint around the doorway; same bright aqua color as our ceiling inside the house. Extra precautions since I couldn’t save Ellis.
I head inside, straight to our herbal cabinet and take a piece of willow bark to chew on, though I doubt it will be enough to get rid of this hangover. A cup of black coffee is what I need. With the bark between my teeth, I set about making some.
From my pocket, I pull out the trinket I found on my windowsill. In the light of day, I can tell it’s not a clip-on earring but some kind of toggle button. A cuff link, I realize. Looks like brass; surely it isn’t real gold. I set my coffee cup down and start to scratch at the speck of black on its flat surface—
“Where have you been?” The cragged sound of Grandmama’s voice jabs at my back. I startle at the sound, then shove the cuff link into my pocket. Her eyes drop to my muddy feet. She walks over to her recipe box that had been left open and slaps the lid shut, locks the box, and returns it to the square niche above the kitchen window. When she turns back around, I cast my gaze to my coffee cup, attempting to tamp down any curiosity she might detect.
“Out” is all I offer, yet I know it won’t be enough. The roadside market opens at ten, and I need to shower, so I head to my room.
“Here, now!” The words, sharp claws that hook into my back and command I stop. “Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you. Answer me.”
My teeth grind together. I am not a child and have not been one for some time now, but sometimes it’s easier to lie. One slithers from my tongue like a slippery snake. “Wyatt and I were—”
“Devil’s eyes, don’t tell no lies.” Grandmama sings each word slow and clear. The hairs on my neck stand. “He sees the secrets you try to hide.”
It’s the same rhyme she sang to Adaire and me as kids before she’d switch us for hiding the truth. She always knew when we were lying or when we’d done wrong. She said the chickens told her. Whispered it on the wind.
I believed her.
Chickens are the Devil’s birds. He chains them to the ground to keep them close. That’s why they can’t fly.
Grandmama always gave us a choice. Truth or the switch. I always told the truth.
Adaire, even if the truth would set her free, always took the switch. Never made any sense to me. Not until I realized there was power in not giving in. Where I was last night and what I was doing is none of her damn business. I exhale my last ounce of patience and turn around.
Grandmama stands there, hands locked in front of her with the poise and patience of a nun. Frail, slender arms covered in a sheer black long-sleeve blouse. A mini ruffle trims the collar and down the button flap, hinting to a sweetness or softness—but there isn’t anything about my grandmother that is sweet or soft. Her long khaki skirt stiff from the durable cotton material. Saggy thick stockings cover her broomstick legs that hide inside heavy orthopedic shoes.
Those eyes—unseeing, yet all-knowing. They zero in on me like a snake that senses the heat of its prey. “Where were you last night?” she asks again.
Why do I stay in a world that’s growing harder and harder to live within? When I was little, I thought church and Grandmama were everything. I’ve come to realize for some time now I was raised up on the wrong side of right.
