I’m rounding the third hallway at the back of the building, when I catch it. A delicate sound. I glide the back of my hand along the cool wall, following the growing sound, leading me to the person who doesn’t have long to live.
I stop in front of Miss Evelyn’s room, and my heart sinks. She’s one of my favorite residents. A tender-hearted petite woman with a sunshine personality that makes you feel special just by being in her presence.
But there’s no denying it. It’s here, the song of her soul. A light shushing, like the rustling of fabric from a breeze drifting through an open curtained window.
Faint still. A little ways off but soon enough death will arrive and take Miss Evelyn.
“Here.” Grandmama startles me and shoves something in my hands. I’m about to tell her no, there’s no death here. But she already knows I’ve locked on to something, probably followed me down the hall to see what I’d find.
I look down at the Saran-wrapped package I’m holding. A black picot ribbon tied around it with a black fern frond tucked underneath. Zebra bread. Dark veins marble through the spongy slice, made of sweet molasses and spicy cinnamon. Two ingredients that can hide the rancid taste of Sin Eater Oil.
“Well, hello, sweet girl.” Miss Evelyn looks up from her book. Romeo and Juliet, of course, her favorite. “You bring me some of that delicious cake I love?” She eyes the gift in my hand.
Quickly, I glance toward Grandmama, who’s already moved on down the hall. Then back to Miss Evelyn who waits patiently with a bright smile.
She looks so tiny as she approaches death. For a minute, I panic—what if Grandmama miscalculated and put in too much Sin Eater Oil? It could kill her straightaway. Then again, her husband passed a few months back, and she’s been so lonely without him.
We’ve done this harvesting ritual for years, but today something doesn’t feel right.
A chill prickles the hairs on my arms. It’s only Miss Evelyn and me in the room, but I could swear we’re not alone. Maybe it’s something my heart wants to believe, but I feel like Adaire is here with us. Reminding me how precious life is.
Miss Evelyn only has the one daughter. Maybe she doesn’t have much time left in this world, but it’s not for me to decide. Not when loved ones are still here to spend that time with.
I look at the bread in my hand and do something I’ve never done before.
“Oh, this?” I say, holding it up. “No, ma’am. This is a soggy batch of banana bread that got mixed in with the good stuff.” I toss the poisoned zebra bread into the wastebasket.
THREE
Language of the Dying
I am the Death Talker. I don’t heal. I don’t cure folks of whatever ails them. I talk to death. Whisper what it wants to hear. Tell it why it should love me more than the person it wants to take. Death longs to be desired, just like the rest of us. I convince death I love it most, then I invite it in.
It’s funny how I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing last week, much less seven years ago, but somehow I remember what Adaire and I wore the day I tried to save a dog.
Adaire Sorrell was a nasty scar of a girl with brows as stern as lectures. Her brown hair was chicken-scratched, short and always confused about what direction it should go. The abundant freckles on her face made her look perpetually dirty—the curse of our Scottish genes. If clothes were saving graces, well, let’s just say Adaire would have none. She had more flair in her wardrobe than Elton John. That day, she wore Kelly green shorts with a purple tie-dye halter top she made from two doilies. Thank Jesus she lined it with fabric, or you would’ve seen her breast buds straight through it.
I kept it simple: striped T-shirt, white trimmed blue shorts, and plain white sneakers. It suited me just fine. I blended in. Looked like any other kid in America. That was the way I liked it. It was bad enough folks knew my mama had abandoned me, then to have a Granny Witch grandmother didn’t help none. I didn’t need my clothing to speak up any louder.
It was one of those usual hot summer days, the kind Georgia likes to smother you in until you’re damn near certain you’ll melt into the asphalt. We were on the cusp of discovering boys, that in-between stage where you’re barely a teenager, but you start acting the part because you know something new and exciting is coming.
Adaire and I walked two miles down Law Road (not counting the two cotton fields we crossed) to get to Quickies, a hole in the wall convenience store for country folk to stop in on their way someplace else. Papaw had brought us down there more times that we could count, when we were little. It always coincided when Grandmama was chewing him an earful for one thing or another, and then he would suddenly declare he had a hankering for bologna, saving Adaire and I from her ire by taking us with him.
Quickies hasn’t changed much over the years. A square wood building with a dirt parking lot that’s been there for forty years, at least. Once a small church, it now sold a handful of groceries—a row of candy and chips, a wall of sodas, fresh produce in the summer, and a deli in the back. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays, Slim Jim (who wasn’t slim) would set up his smoker and make ribs and pulled pork that he sold by the paper plate.
Rowdy and Pops, two old men who seemed like permanent fixtures to the building, always sat out front in wood chairs watching the cars go by—the handful that passed through. The front door creaked when you opened it, old and tired from doing its job so long. But inside was an arctic oasis.
Bubba Dunn, who owned Quickies, was three-hundred pounds and wore a long-sleeve shirt and Dickie overalls 365 days a year. A stout air conditioner mounted in the wall worked harder than a ditch digger to keep that place icebox-cold. You weren’t allowed to loiter, but Adaire and I took our time, wandering through the rickety shelves, as if struggling over what to pick, knowing good and well we would order the same thing we always did: a hunk of bologna, sliced cheese, saltine crackers, and one of those ice-cold Coca-Colas. Summer thirst demanded the refreshing sweet burn only a frosty bottle of soda can give.
We weren’t crazy about having to eat our lunch outside on the picnic table, but it was shaded under a hundred-year-old oak, and there was a pretty good breeze. After we were through, we counted up our collective change to see if we had enough to buy a pack of soft and chewy Hubba Bubba.
We rarely did.
We were halfway down the road after lunch, Adaire was telling me about the latest rerun of Dukes of Hazard I had missed because we didn’t own a TV, when I shushed her quiet.
“Listen,” I said, pointing to the ditch.
I had heard a whimper, but that wasn’t what called to me. It was the sound just underneath it that only my ears could here.
A soul-song.
It warbled and stretched out to me like a yawn.
Then a painful cry crooned from among the foot-tall grasses.
A sound that could only come from a wounded animal.
The ditch was clogged with weeds. I was bound to get eaten up by chiggers or covered in poison oak. Or both. But I didn’t care and neither did Adaire.
He was just a puppy, with fur the color of a dull nickel. His back leg was definitely broken. The asphalt had chewed up one of his shoulders. His jaw didn’t look right.
“Fix him, Weatherly.” The fear in Adaire’s voice wasn’t something I’d heard before.
I knelt down beside him and hovered my hands over his body. The twinkling of his soul was dwindling.
Tears were slipping down my cheeks so bad it blurred my vision.
“It’ll be alright,” Adaire said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or the dog, Blue—that’s what his name tag read.
