Mule Maddox

By Ronald L. Bern

MULE MADDOX by Ronald L. Bern. On a stormy November night in 1932, young Rafe Maddox is exploring the flooding Saluda River in rural South Carolina when he hears a womans scream. Beaching his boat behind a counry church, he finds three men attempting to rape a beautiful local girl. In a fierce struggle, Maddox fights and kills two of the men and stabs a third. He is desperately wounded but manages to get back to his boat, which is swept more than 60 miles downstream on the crest of the swollen river. He is rescued by Buck Daniels, a landowner and World War I combat veteran who tends to his wounds in a rough woods shack at the edge of his land. Assumed a rapist and murderer, Maddox becomes the object of an intense manhunt headed by longtime Sheriff Bud Clarke. Meanwhile rumors begin to circulate among fearful sharecropper families on the Daniels place about a dead man living in the shack down on the river. Dark legends grow and more people die as Sheriff Clarke edges closer to finding Rafe Maddox. Powerful currents of justice and religion, guilt and superstition, fear and moral resolution all swirl together in a surprising and satisfying conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 24, 2005
• ISBN: 9781465315618

Ronald L. Bern

Ronald Lawrence Bern is a 68-year-old story teller who was born and raised in the cotton country of South Carolina. His first published novel was The Legacy, which was hailed as “…one of the best novels to come out of the South in the ‘70s” by the Detroit Free Press. Bern’s other published books range from books on business management and psychology to two recently published explorations of the best fishing spots in New York and New Jersey. He received bachelors and masters degrees in Journalism from the University of South Carolina and for many years was CEO of a management consulting firm headquartered in New York and New Jersey. He resides in North Brunswick, NJ and Naples, FL. with his wife Elaine.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Just one smile, maybe not even at him. But still it was something he had taken as his own and kept in his heart. All blond curls and bright eyes and white teeth. Pretty as a soft Spring morning. So pretty it made his heart hurt just to remember her. He needed the memory now. It was something to cling to through the waves of pain and weakness as the blood ran out of him and puddled on the floor of the bateau.

Sweeping along on the crest of the rampaging river, no star brightened his way and Maddox, who had never thought much on God one way or another, now believed that the hand of God had been raised, not just against him but against all the people. For two years running, the drought had shriveled and burned the crops in the fields and destroyed farmers’ thin hopes and frail ownership of land. Thousands of sharecroppers had been sent down the road. Banks and businesses failing. Children gaunt and hungry, their peoples’ hopes near gone. And now he was cut and dying and a hundred year rain was washing the world away.

He shivered in the raw November night as the raging Saluda River whipped the unguided bateau down current, sometimes straight and true, sometimes spinning end around where the flooding river made a bend. All Maddox could do was lie on the narrow boards, mile after painful mile, try to hang onto living, and remember a little.

The river was taking him away and that seemed right. After all, the river was the only thing in his life that had never run out on him; never failed him in its provenance and its constancy. That thought got him remembering the gentle, luring solitudes of its upper branches, the isolated and mysterious reaches he discovered when he traced the old survey maps up each of her three tributaries to their mountain sources.

He remembered his first lonely explorations up the river’s southern fork, starting amid pine, oaks and hickories and gradually ascending through shadowed, dreamy regions of basswood, magnolia, sourwood and poplar. He remembered tracking the branch north, then west and then north again all the way to the foothills of Sassafras Mountain to the place the old maps called Rocky Head Spring, where the sweet headwater bubbled up out of limestone and granite and the water ran cold and clear as air. He remembered thrusting his face into the stream and feeling the fine shock of cold on his sun-warmed skin.

The Middle Fork was gentler, itself begotten by the confluence of six pebble-strewn streams the old mapmakers had never bothered to name. When he tracked up the middle fork, it was with a sense of wonder at its timelessness and its splendor as it skirted Pinnacle Mountain to flow through gullies and flood plains and little valleys south toward its appointment with the other branches.

As the bateau swept on, he remembered through the haze of pain that exploring the North Fork had been a harder business; days afoot fighting through thickets of rhododendron and blazing azaleas beyond the foothills of Panther Mountain, shaded by original growth beeches and black spruce, maple and cherry. Whereas the South Fork had trickled out of ancient rocks and the Middle Fork had pulsed gently through shadowed valleys, the North Fork rushed wildly down a steeper gradient, splashing, tumbling and roaring its way through the shadows of steep-walled granite canyons.

Wild trout flashed in the rapids of the North Fork and once, when he rested motionless in the shade of a massive chestnut tree, he saw a shy spotted fawn emerge from the shadows to drink the cold water, followed closely by a young doe. How old had he been then? Fifteen? Maybe sixteen? At least old enough to sense some mystical kinship with the river, although he had no words to express it.

He felt it again now as the river bore him away, rocking him gently despite its rampaging wildness at flood stage, rocking him gently, gently as no mother’s hand ever had, rocking him gently even as it tore up 100 year old water oaks and thrust them into the cascading current. Houses and farms and every kind of animal and equipment had been flooded, lost, swallowed up in a rush as the tinder dry land absorbed all it could and the rain kept falling. He had never heard of such a flood except the great flood in the Bible, when nearly everything on earth was drowned. He saw every kind of strange thing floating in the river’s wild current: houses and outbuildings, dead horses and cows and mules, bedsteads and boat docks torn loose from their moorings; coffins washed out of graveyards, a church steeple floating on its side, even the dead body of a little girl.

He would never get back to the river’s headwaters; never again taste the sweetness of that water where it formed its first cold pools shadowed by ancient stone and towering tulip poplars. He wondered whether he would make it to another nightfall, wondered whether the boat might just float up into a flooded stand of trees somewhere and stop so he could die, wondered how much blood was left in him to leak out.

The girl came into his mind again. Where had he first seen her? Was it in town? That was it. Right in town, right on the square, standing in the sun and reflecting a glint of gold.

He started gagging again. The blood was thick in his throat and he could hardly turn his head to vomit into the water. The brassy scent of his own blood was all he could smell and the solid cloud cover over the moon made it impossible to see.

He wanted badly to sleep but he knew that wouldn’t do, not with him bleeding so much and it getting colder. He was sure to drift off and not wake up again.

His handmade ten-foot bateau tore on downriver on the dark crest of the river hour after hour, his head propped in the bow just above the gunwale. He had no idea how long he had been drifting or even that he was on another river now, not knowing that he had passed out when the boat made a junction of rivers in the dark and the current had swept him into the smaller of the two rivers, at the source point of the Generostee.

He felt colder now where he was wet with river water or blood; particularly his face and the top of his head felt cold where the blood seeped across his skin. Something was wrong in his chest, too. The skin was burning above his ribs and he felt pain when he breathed.

The boat hurtled faster as the river narrowed and cascaded between granite bluffs. Then the current flattened out again.

He slept, woke, slept again. A sorry way to end up, he thought. 21 years old, the life leaking out of me, shivering in the cold, alone; carried on the big shoulders of a flooding river like other men are carried to the grave on the shoulders of their friends.

The wind came up a little, rattling the branches above his head. He was thirsty and with some effort, he managed to cup his hand and scoop a few drops of muddy river water to his lips. Then he slept or maybe passed out and when he roused himself, he felt thirsty again. The top of his head, his forehead and left cheek were burning as if raked with fire and his chest still pained him. He touched the cut side of his face with his trailing hand, the one that he had dragged in the water and everything felt misshapen and strange. He touched higher up his face and into his hair, feeling where the slash started high on his head. Son of a bitch got me good, he thought, and wondered how much of a face he had left.

Well, it won’t matter long, he thought.

If he had the chance again, would he do things differently; maybe just go on about his business, even after he heard the scream? No, there wasn’t anything different to do, what with those boys forcing themselves on that sweet, innocent girl.

He saw a buzzard circling high up in the November sky and then a second and a third and he wondered for a moment if they were circling him; then realized that made no sense. He wasn’t dead yet, certainly wasn’t ripe, and buzzards never took much interest in moving things. He might not be moving much but the boat was still drifting on the current. More buzzards circled, higher up. Must be something big, judging by the number of buzzards. Maybe a mule or cow drowned and drifted up on dry land. He made it 12 or 13 now, some of them high, some low enough so the white stripes under their wings were easy to see.

He once heard somebody call buzzards nature’s undertakers. Of course, others did the same job without getting the credit, he thought. Possums eat the dead sure as buzzards do.

He recalled the distant summer day when, as a small boy, he decided he would never eat possum again. His daddy had dragged a dead mule off to his back pasture to rot. A few days later, he was out wandering and came upon the mule, grotesquely bloated in the heat. He wondered what sound its swollen belly would make if he kicked it; if maybe it would sound like a drum. With his first tentative kick, nothing happened. Then he kicked it a little harder and suddenly live things—possums—came flying out of that dead mule’s hind end, all of them covered with rotting entrails and flesh and running for their lives. At first he was scared and then when he thought about it, he felt sick at the thought of ever eating possum flesh again. But a few days later, the harsh old woman who had taken up with his daddy put possum on the table, cooked crisp with bright orange sweet potatoes. There wasn’t much more than a few scraps on the bones when his daddy and older brothers and sisters got through but he was glad to get what he did and he never thought much more about not eating possum.

He thought about the girl again and about what those boys were doing, those two Millers and that damned Cliff Stamples. When he remembered, a greater pain than he felt in his face and chest swept through him.

It wasn’t anything but luck, his to the bad but theirs, too, that he came along when he did. There wasn’t rhyme nor reason why he should have been on the river at night near the Centerville Church cemetery; no reason except curiosity about the river at flood stage. But reason or not, there he had been, paddling back up the edge of the flooded river toward the spot where he had parked his daddy’s old truck.

He had watched five and a half inches of rain fall in one day, had seen fourteen inches fall in eleven days and nights in late October and early November, had seen the Saluda swell over its banks ten, twenty, thirty and finally more than forty one feet above flood stage; watched it rise and keep right on rising as the rains came steadily on for eleven days and nights, until everything that was low lying for miles around was drowned deep under muddy water and the usually sluggish channel was a torrent of rushing water and debris. When the rains finally slacked late on Tuesday, he wanted to see what things looked like down river. So he loaded his new bateau in the bed of the beat-up old truck, drove the five miles or so past the narrowest stretch of the river where the current would be too strong to paddle back, parked at the end of a little logging road and eased the bateau into the water. Paddling close to shore, he avoided the strongest part of the current and the rush of uprooted trees and runaway boats that hurtled past him in the late afternoon gloom. In the quieter water near shore, the carcasses of drowned animals—possums and rabbits and squirrels and a half-grown Guernsey calf—eddied against the trunks of partially submerged trees. Once the bow of the bateau smacked hard into a partially drowned oak tree and he watched in surprise as writhing water moccasins rained down around him into the water.

Thinking about the river eased him a little. He had always thought of it as his own, always felt its rhythms and its transformations in the rising and falling of his own spirit, although he had no words to explain it. He loved the quiet of the river of a summer’s evening and its dark, leaf-studded translucence in the fall. He appreciated the bounty of it, the catfish and bass and big yellow carp it yielded, the turtles and hornetheads, the ducks he jump shot in late fall, the muskrats he trapped in winter. He loved the river’s purling song when it was quiet and the power of its roar when its dander was up. There was no mood of the river, no aspect, no phase he didn’t appreciate. When he finally quit school at thirteen, he fashioned his first clumsy boat out of scrap lumber and began spending days and nights on the river, fishing, drifting and learning most of what he knew about life that was gentle and fine.

So it was natural that he would be on the flooded river at night in the moon shadowed darkness; natural that he alone would be there to hear the girl’s scream and then the rough men’s voices yelling over hers.

of course, he had no way of knowing whose voices they were or that he might get involved, especially since he had never been one to meddle in other folks’ business. But he was curious about the sounds, just as he had been curious about the flood. So he beached the bateau where the flood took the water almost right up to the churchyard cemetery and started toward the sound. That was when he heard the girl’s voice again, low and pleading; then heard the beginning of another scream, this time choked off with a gasp. Something about the voice got him moving faster through the second growth hickories and gnarled loblolly pines.

When he heard the first of the men clearly, he thought he recognized Cliff Stample’s voice.

Hold her, Goddamn it. Hold her still, Charlie, the rough voice commanded.

The girl pleaded again.

Please . . . please don’t . . .

Another male voice said, Shut her up, Charlie. Hold her mouth or somethin’!

Running now, Maddox burst through the last of the trees and what he saw almost froze him in his tracks. It was Cliff Stamples and the two Miller boys, fighting to hold down the beautiful blond girl he had seen in town. Cliff Stamples had pulled her skirt up and was struggling to get astride of her and she was fighting and screaming and crying all at once. Mase Miller had one of her legs and was struggling to get hold of the other one and Charlie Miller was holding one of her arms and her mouth, or trying to. Just then she managed to sink her teeth into the side of Charlie’s hand. He howled in pain, hollered for her to let go.

Ow . . . Ow . . . Mase, Goddamn it, do something, he screamed as he felt her teeth cracking bone. Hit her!

With Charlie hollering in pain and the girl trying to scream now without opening her teeth and all of the thrashing around, nobody heard Maddox coming across the little clearing until he yelled for them to let the girl be. He was almost in time to keep Mason Miller from slamming down at the girl’s face with a big rock that had come to hand, to make her let go of his brother’s hand. He smashed her the first time right on the side of her jaw, just as he heard Maddox’s voice, and by the time it registered that someone else was there, the rock was already descending a second time, this time smashing her in the teeth and knocking her unconscious.

The bateau turned in the current now. He was in somewhat quieter water. He trailed his hand in the water and put his fingers to his mouth, licking off a few drops of water. He didn’t know how badly he was cut; didn’t even know if he was cut anywhere else except his head and face and maybe his chest, but he thought it best not to drink too much, just in case.

Just a few seconds late. If he had hollered just seconds sooner, that damned Mason Miller might not have hit the girl with that rock. But he hadn’t hollered until the rock was coming down and by then he was right in amongst them.

He got to Charlie Miller first, kicked him hard in the face and knocked him over backward. It wasn’t a second later Charlie’s brother Mason was on his feet, running his hand in his pocket for a blade. Cliff Stamples, who was known to be a little slow, still hovered over the girl, blinking in surprise.

This ain’ none of your bi’ness, Mase hollered, but he saw it wasn’t any use talking and so he commenced fighting without another word. Wiry and quick, he slashed at Maddox with his blade, yelling for the others to come on and help him. As Maddox jumped away from the blade, he saw Mase’s eyes dart up over his shoulder and knew one of them was coming up behind him. By then he had his heavy cane knife out of its sheath.

Mase’s thrust had thrown Maddox off balance so all he could do was stumble back, half turn and blindly slash. By the purest of accidents, the sharp blade bit into flesh right at the back of Charlie Miller’s jaw. Maddox pulled the knife down hard, then jerked away and whirled as Mase rushed him again, bellowing like a bull, crazy like, forgetting the blade in his hand and hitting him with his head and shoulder in the chest. Maddox went over backward and as he fell, he heard a weird choking, grunting sound to his left. He might have got stomped to death by Mason Miller right then or had his own throat cut, but Mase heard the sound too and whirled to see his brother stagger to his feet, blood gushing down his neck and shoulder, a dazed look in his eyes. Then he sat down hard, still making the choking sound.

Maddox had dropped his knife as he hit the ground. Now he rolled over, frantically feeling for it until his hand fastened on its handle in the wet grass.

Look what you done! Mase was screaming, Look at Charlie!

But Maddox didn’t give a damned about Charlie except that he was one less he’d have to deal with. Cliff Stamples was up now, running his hand in his overall pocket for his hook-bladed Barlow knife. But it was Mason Miller that Maddox had to worry about first and he was coming hard.

Look what you done, he kept screaming, shrill as a girl.

He was holding his blade out in front of him, moving it side to side so that Maddox wouldn’t know just where it was coming from. Maddox side stepped hard, then stepped up and forward, bringing the cane knife up sharply into thin air. He half turned, dodged a bit too slowly and Mase was all over him. Maddox expected to feel blinding pain but instead, he felt a light slap across his face, then another across the top of his head. It was puzzling why Mase wouldn’t do anything more than slap him. Then blood started seeping into one eye, partially blinding him, and suddenly he understood what had happened. Mase had cut him with a damned straight razor, maybe cut him real bad, but because the blade was so sharp, he hadn’t felt it bite through his skin and flash. He stepped back, then back again, and as the other man rushed in to finish him, Maddox brought the cane knife up from the ground into the middle of Mase Miller’s body. He heard the grunt and knew he had hit home, even as Mase doubled over in pain and stumbled away.

Blood filled his left eye now and was starting to blur vision in his right, causing him to lose his sense of balance. Cliff Stamples was clumsily hacking at him now with his Barlow knife, grunting each time he swung, and all Maddox could do was back away from the blade. He knew Mase was behind him somewhere, cut in the belly, but he had no idea whether he was disabled or not.

When Maddox stumbled backward, it was over Mase’s leg. Mase was sitting up against a pine tree holding his belly, trying to keep his guts in where the cane knife had opened him up. Things were a little blurred but he saw Maddox stumbling back toward him. With what energy he had left, he raised his foot to trip him. A spasm of pain took him then, spread down from his stomach into his right thigh and he passed out.

Cliff Stamples was on Maddox quickly, grunting and slashing at his face and throat. But he was off balance just like Maddox was and his knife missed Maddox’s throat, raked down the front of his shirt and finally penetrated the muscle between two ribs on the left side of Maddox’s chest. Then Cliff tripped and fell right on Maddox, just as Maddox was rolling away to his right. Cliff had always been clumsy but it never had cost him more than just a scratch here and a bruise there. This time it cost him dearly. Staggering to his feet, Maddox kicked Cliff hard in the face and then kicked him again, stunning him enough to put him down. Then he cut Cliff’s throat like a shoat’s. Cliff dropped the Barlow knife, grabbed at his throat and stumbled off into the brush. Weaving like a drunk, the life bubbling out of him between his hands, he finally sat down hard at the base of a big hickory tree. His head slumped forward, his legs kicked and he was still.

Maddox got unsteadily to his feet and looked around him, making sure nobody was moving. He knew Cliff was dead or dying and he figured that Charlie had to be dead too, even without looking. Mase was still, too; cut badly in the belly or the chest, so whether he was dead or not didn’t matter. Maddox had no more stomach for cutting anyhow. So he wiped the blood off his cane knife on the grass and put it back in its sheath. Then he remembered the girl. He hoped she wasn’t hurt too bad, hoped that she had got up in the confusion and run away.

But hoping never had gotten him much. What he knew for sure was that he had done his best for her, that he was hurt bad himself, that he needed to get away from this place, as fast and as far as he could. If he could get to his bateau and get out into the current, maybe the river would keep faith with him one more time.

Cut as badly as he was, it took all of his strength of will to put one foot in front of another. His breathing came in labored gasps and with each breath he sucked fresh blood into his mouth. Several times he fell. He made the last few yards on his hands and knees, vomiting blood, and by strength of will, managed to slump forward into the boat. For a long moment he lay still, so exhausted that he was sure the moment of his death had come. He wondered if he would be found right there, almost in sight of the churchyard where the dead boys lay. Then the current undercut the bank where the boat was lodged and set it adrift.

The clouds covered up the face of the moon and in the profound darkness, the boy tried to remember how to pray. But all that came to him of God was the majesty of the river.

CHAPTER 2

The Reverend E. J. Salem finished his supper and went into the living room to listen to the news on the radio console. The sound of rain pelting on his tin roof had finally slacked off after days and nights of what some were calling a 100-year rain. At least after months of gloomy reports of hunger and suicides and Hoovervilles throughout the country, there was finally some good news on the radio.

Marietta, come in and listen to this, he called to his wife, turning up the volume on the big radio set.

In the top news of the day, the network announcer was saying, early returns point to a landslide victory for Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President of the United States. Mr. Roosevelt promised throughout his campaign to restore this country to prosperity. His stunning defeat of President Herbert Hoover comes at a time when the nation is in deep depression, a time of growing bread lines and soup kitchens, of bank failures and farm foreclosures and soaring unemployment.

Lord is praised, Mrs. Salem said. That President Hoover . . .

During his campaign, the announcer’s crisp voice went on, "President elect Roosevelt vowed to revive prosperity on the farms, to rehabilitate the railroads, to regulate the banks and security exchanges. He called for public development of electric power, for public works, for unemployment insurance. And he promised that, if elected, he would see to it that no American would starve.

He likened his campaign to a state of war on things as they are, the announcer said. In his own words . . .

The oddly patrician voice of Roosevelt came on then.

"I am waging a war in this campaign, a frontal attack, an onset against the Four Horsemen of the present Republican leadership: the Horsemen of Destruction, Delay, Deceit and Despair.

This country needs, this country demands bold, persistent experimentation, Roosevelt’s voice continued. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Now the announcer’s voice was back.

In other news today, Britain and France applied to the united States for debt relief. officials in Washington acknowledged that Greece already has defaulted on its obligations and Hungary . . .

Salem turned off the radio and followed his wife back into the kitchen.

Fine news about Mr. Roosevelt, he said. That was a fine chicken, too.

He had seldom failed to compliment her on her cooking since the early spring night in 1909 when they were married in Hartwell, Georgia. The Lord hadn’t blessed their union with children but He had made Marietta Osborne Salem a fine cook and the Reverend Salem counted that as no small gift. He watched the quick, efficient way she washed and dried the dishes, wondering as he often did where such a little bit of a woman found so much energy. People often looked at them together and smiled because his massively powerful 240 lb. body contrasted so starkly to her petite little figure. But he knew, as they did not, that while his day job hauling ice in the summer and shoveling tons of coal in the winter demanded great physical strength, it was Marietta who, of the two, had the greatest strength of character and will.

While she put the dishes away, he returned to the radio newscast.

The repudiation by the nation’s voters of the Hoover Administration, the announcer said, appears to be a natural reaction to failures and disasters such as this nation has never witnessed. Since the stock market crash just over three years ago, more than 1,600 banks and nearly 20,000 businesses have failed. The average U. S. weekly income has fallen to seventeen dollars. Breadlines are forming in more towns and cities every day. U. S. industrial production has fallen to one-third its 1929 total. Most alarming of all, more than 21,000 Americans have committed suicide.

Salem turned off the radio again. Marietta was just finishing in the kitchen when he asked her if she wanted to take a ride out to the church. He had left his notes for Sunday’s sermon and he needed to go over them.

He drove the black ‘27 Ford slowly through the outskirts of town and out into the country, chatting with his wife about the work she was doing with the county’s poorest children.

It’s always darkest before the dawn, he said softly. I’m afraid you’ll have more to do before things get better.

A good woman, he thought, kind and generous and so quick to help. She thought nothing of cooking and cleaning and minding the children in a house stricken with smallpox or influenza; never gave a thought to her own health and safety. When he came home at night from the icehouse, he never had any idea whose hungry children would be bedded down on their worn living room couch or which abandoned wife would be crying over coffee at their kitchen table.

He turned into the long gravel driveway to the little country church and drove between rows of oaks and pecan trees to the white clapboard building. He was braking to a stop when he spotted a mud-splattered automobile in the churchyard back near the cemetery.

odd time for somebody to be out here, he muttered.

Thinking that vandals might have broken into the church, he advised Marietta to stay in the car and started getting out.

What is it? she asked. E. J., what is it?

I’m not sure, he answered. There’s a car back there behind the church, he said. I’d better have a look.

He heard the door handle click on her side.

I’m coming too, she said. I might be needed.

Knowing it was useless to protest, he walked directly to the front door of the church and tried the handle. To his relief, the door was securely locked. Probably teenagers in that car, he thought, up to no good. He walked up to the side of the car, prepared to give whoever he found inside a stiff lecture. But the car was empty. The moon had been almost completely obscured by clouds but now it found a rift. In the dim light, Marietta thought she saw something white in the grass.

Over there, she said. I think I see something.

They both stopped, looking in the direction she indicated and listening. All they heard was the soft soughing of the wind in the trees.

There’s a lantern in the church, the preacher whispered. Let’s get it.

He fumbled with the keys, found the right one and opened the door. It was the only entrance to the church and it had been securely locked; still the hair went up on the back of his neck as he entered the dark sanctuary. Things were as quiet and orderly as always inside the little church; yet he felt a terrible sense of foreboding.

He located the lantern, trimmed up the wick and lit it. Suddenly he dreaded confronting whatever it was his wife had seen in the moonlight.

Come on, E.J., Marietta urged. Somebody may need help . . .

Now they were in motion, back down the aisle between the rough pews, back out the front door and across the churchyard. The lantern cast a dim light against the darkness as the moon disappeared behind the clouds. He advanced cautiously toward the edge of the cemetery, alert for sudden motion or sound. At first they saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Maybe it was a headstone you saw, he said hopefully. Maybe it was just a headstone.

Then they heard a faint sound ahead in a little grove of trees just beyond the edge of the cemetery.

Help me . . .

Did you hear something? he whispered.

I’m not sure, his wife replied. I thought . . .

Is someone there? he called.

There was no response and so they continued on toward the little grove of pecan trees that he had helped plant the year they joined the church. The wind had died down and the moon was entirely lost again behind the clouds. They heard another sound, a nearly inaudible groan.

Salem swung the lantern around toward the sound and for the first time spotted what his wife had seen in the moonlight: something light against the dark thatch of weeds and Bermuda grass.

Dear God, he thought. Please give me the strength . . .

The disturbing story about possession came into his mind, the one that troubled him whenever he questioned the steadiness of his own faith. While overseas in the war, he heard the story of a young Italian man who was possessed by the spirits of darkness and an old Catholic priest who thrust out the demon; who never wavered, never lost faith as the black spirit roared at him and tormented the young man and even spoke to the priest with the voices of the dead; an old priest who took it all and stood rock solid firm out of faith so pure that eventually it forced the evil spirit out of the man and out of the world. He wished again, as he had wished so many times before, that he never heard that story, because it had given him a yardstick to measure his own true constancy in Christ and he always came up short. That priest didn’t have to carry 50-pound blocks of ice all day, he had tried to tell himself, but it wasn’t much consolation.

Marietta was right at his elbow, urging him on. They heard a man’s voice now, not much more than a whisper in the dark.

Help me . . .

They reached the girl first. It was her light blue dress Marietta had seen in the pale beams of moonlight. She was on her back; the smashed side of her face turned away from them in the grass, looking so untouched she might have been asleep were it not for the dark stain they saw on the shoulder of her dress and the metallic smell of blood.

Why, it’s the Marshbanks girl . . . Bill Marshbanks’ daughter, Marietta whispered. Is she . . . ?

The rest of the question died in her throat as her husband reached for the girl’s throat to feel for a pulse. Under the pressure of his hand, her head lolled over and even in the dim light of the lantern, the full horror of her injury registered in their minds.

The left side of her face was deeply matted with blood but still they could see that the girl’s nose had been ripped away from the side of her face and her jaw shattered so violently that they could see the inside of her mouth and her tongue though the side of her face. Jagged pieces of bone pierced her skin and teeth broken away from the jaw stuck in the blood that had pooled and dried on her neck.

The preacher felt his stomach roil, even as Marietta began to vomit in the grass behind him, down on her hands and knees.

The girl was entirely still, almost certainly dead.

Help me . . . please, a faint voice called again.

There was someone else.

Marietta, somebody else’s hurt, he said. I’ll go . . .

He turned away from the two women, held the lantern higher and turned in a slow arc. At first he saw nothing. Then he caught sight of a pale face on the ground to his left. He was past all fear now and he hurried forward. A few strides away, the footing suddenly went slippery and he skidded. His hand went out to break the fall and came down fully upon the dead Cliff Stamples’ chest. It took him a moment to realize it was blood-drenched leaves he had skidded in.

Recoiling, he held the lantern up to the young, blanched face of the corpse. The eyes were open, staring, and dark against the whiteness of the face drained of blood. Even in the gloom, E. J. Salem could see the dark, jagged line that ran from under the boy’s chin around to the side of his neck. He looked closely at the boy’s hawk nose and oversized lips and realized this was a boy he knew, a sharecropper’s son named Cliff Stamples.

It wasn’t the first he had seen of death, not by a long shot. He had seen every grotesque form of death in the trenches in France; had seen men blown into pieces, men kicked to death by frantic caisson horses, men decapitated by shrapnel, men run through with sabers, men buried alive under tons of dirt, men without faces, men disemboweled by grenades, men without heads or arms or legs. But that