The Possum King: A Novel

By John Thomas Chiles

The Possum King is set in the fictional town of Clayton, South Carolina, in 1974. The story revolves around the Bishop family as they await the return of family patriarch Frank Bishop, a career soldier who has been away at war in Vietnam. The story is told from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Marcus Bishop, who has grown to hate his father’s cruelty and must now deal with the impact of his return. When a murder takes place in Clayton shortly after his father’s return, Marcus finds himself thrust in the position of having to save his family from his father’s long-buried past, which is explored through multiple flashbacks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796092516

John Thomas Chiles

John Chiles is a lifelong resident of South Carolina, where he currently resides with two insolent and overfed dogs—Birdy and Hera. He has studied creative writing at the University of Lander, also located in South Carolina. He’s currently working on the next fictional project.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

In another life, years from this present one, a life when he was something closer to a man, Marcus Bishop would look back and remember that summer of blood and violence as its beginning—the beginning of that other life. Only after that summer would he fully realize that everything before then was not life at all, not really, not the way it was for most people, and certainly not for anyone calling themselves a Bishop.

People around town, other black folk and probably some whites too, talked about his family. Those Bishops. He knew that; they all did. Any other Bishop knew that they were talked about like any other subject of passing interest like the weather, which had been very hot that summer—stewed tomatoes hot—or perhaps how the work was going at the textile plant a town away in Milford. They meant no harm in talking; it was simply a thing they needed to do to combat what would otherwise be too dreary an existence in a small town that did not offer a great deal in the way of entertainment. The talking was a crucial part of their entertainment, and so it was carried out that way, no harm intended.

Marcus could see it in their eyes, the eyes of others who lived in Clayton. It was easy enough to see, at least for him, what their eyes were not quite able to mask or hide well enough—those truer thoughts and feelings that lurked behind them like a guilty secret, something not meant for certain others. Sometimes but rarely, a breach of decorum of small-town civility would occur, and something would be spoken. It might be a thing as small as the way someone asked about his mother—how Gloria gettin’ on?—as if she was sick when she really wasn’t and then the apologetic gesture of looking quickly away to save him the embarrassment of having to come up with a suitable answer because they knew—they knew how his mother was doing.

As he had grown there in that town of just over three thousand souls and come to recognize himself through the eyes of others, he had learned through a kind of osmosis to be somehow ashamed of it, or he at least associated no pride in being a Bishop or carrying the name. It was a gradual thing, this not being proud of who he was—not proud like the Coopers or Sullivans or even the Willibys, who themselves were not regarded by others in any way that might be called favorable—a thing slowly made a part of him in ways hardly even noticed until the awareness of it was fully comprehended and accepted as permanent and unchangeable, as much a part of him as teeth and fingers.

It was the soldier Frank Bishop, his father, whom they talked mostly about—how crazy and strange he seemed. The Frank Bishop stories were there in abundance, cataloged by subject, and told over the years by those who knew him, told until they painted an incomplete picture of who he was: Did ya hear how he took dem niggas’ money on the Hill? Wiped ’em clean out, sho’ did. Nigga threw five sevens in a row. Nigga lucky as the devil.

Read a lot though, they said. Man done read more books than most folk ever seen.

Probably what wrong wit’ him, too much readin’.

Yeah, ’spect so.

Don’t fool too much wit’ other folk, though, ’less he out to get ’em some kind a way, never did. Problem started wit’ him when he was birthed. Ain’t stopped yet. Don’t ’spect it will. Yes, people talked about him, as well as the drinking and the hell raising when he was home, the trouble in the Bishop house. And her carryin’ on the way she do when he gone. Shame is what it is.

Even before the war that had taken him away just over a year ago, long before then, people had said of him that he had been raised too hard by a woman feeble of mind and that the sheer hardness of it had twisted him somehow and led to him becoming cruel as a man. Being a soldier, they said, fit him properly because it was the only life that might offer the kind of rigid inflexibility a man like that might want or be able to really appreciate.

For a year of Sundays, the year of his being away, Marcus had prayed to a Baptist God that the war would take him and that he would not return. In some deeper part of himself, he had known that it was wrong to pray for someone’s death, more so when that someone happened to be his very own father, the life his own had sprung from. But knowing that it was wrong, twice wrong in a way, had not stopped him; and so for that year, he had gone on with it, praying for the death of Frank Bishop. The prayers were silently conjured in the sanctified and overperfumed hush of Calvary Baptist Church, the house of worship attended by the Bishop children every Sunday morning.

Of course, it had not worked; no matter how increasingly desperate and overwrought the prayers had become toward the end of that year, nothing had come of them. Maybe, he had eventually come to believe, the prayers had not even been heard by such a loving God, or perhaps he had heard them but found them to be offensive and unworthy of being granted. Whatever the reason, the God of Abraham and Moses had stubbornly refused his deliverance from the torment of Frank Bishop. With no word of his father’s death having arrived, Marcus had slowly and painfully come to realize that there would be no divine intervention and that, once again, he would have to learn to live with his father being alive and not dead and coming home.

Before the call letting them know that he would soon arrive, there had been hope—a year’s worth of clinging hope—that something over there would kill him. It didn’t really matter what it was either, not to Marcus—bad water, a bomb, a bullet, even one of those special enemy soldiers called the Cong he’d heard about on the news, the ones who had no noticeable aversion toward blowing themselves up if it would gain them the death of an American soldier. The means did not matter, anything to keep him from coming home.

But he was coming home—coming home alive and not dead. There was no doubting it now, not since last night, when Marcus had heard his mother on the phone with him. He had stood only a few feet away, listened, and watched her try to seem happy while speaking with him, happy even if the beginnings of an unmistakable look of dread had begun to cloud her eyes. It was then, while watching her on the phone, that he had wondered if perhaps he and his mother had prayed for the same thing over the past year.

She had struggled to sound happy at the news of his coming home, struggled as she had held the phone to her ear in that overcareful way when someone might hold something thought to be fragile, a hand lightly grasping each end of it. Watching her in that struggle, Marcus had begun to feel sorry for her—sorry that she was in the position of having to put on in such an obvious way. She, his mother, would never be accused of being a good actress; and last night, he had watched her struggle to fulfill the requirements of a role she had to play without notice. What was the word he had come across somewhere, the word that meant not prepared or ready for something? Was it improvise? Yes, she was improvising and not really doing a very good job of it.

The dread and shocked surprise he’d seen blossom in her eyes was all real enough, he could tell that. It was the show of happiness he knew to be unreal, knew to be an attempt on her part to affect what she thought happiness might sound like if not actually felt. And it went beyond mere improvisation, well beyond that, to straight out lying—a quick and unplanned scramble to find a modicum of what might, if presented correctly and not overdone, pass for sincerity.

Anyway, it was a lie, plain and simple, her being happy at the news of him coming home. It was a lie, and Marcus had felt himself become somehow complicit in telling it while standing there in the small den as his mother had spoken to him on the phone. It was almost as if the two of them were telling the lie together, concocting it as a team because of the way her mascara-rimmed eyes, fluttering and worried looking, had kept darting back to him as she had spoken into the phone.

Standing there, watching and still clutching the piece of still wrapped Bazooka bubble gum he’d dug from behind the couch seat cushion before the television was ordered off, Marcus had been able to not only sense but also hear the grappling and tenuous urgency in her voice, the struggle to strike the right tone and make herself sound happily surprised when she was not. Silently within himself, he had begun cheering for her and had wanted her to do a good job of it, not mess it up. And it was almost as if she had somehow found strength in his standing there, watching her, and listening, in effect taking on the role himself of coconspirator, a silent and willing abettor. It was almost as if she, Gloria Bishop, knew he was rooting for her and drew strength from his participation in her deception.

He wondered too what her voice must have sounded like to his father, wondered what the lie must have sounded like traveling all that distance, crossing countries and great bodies of water before reaching its destination, Frank Bishop’s listening ear. Did it sound like the truth to him as it flowed into that ear pressed against a phone somewhere far away? Did the lie strike the right note, make the transitional leap, and come out sounding like something it wasn’t? Or did it make the journey, go all that way, only to arrive still sounding like a lie—a lie told of necessity more than anything else considering who the person was on the other end? A well-traveled lie, Mrs. Baker, who taught ninth-grade English, might have called it.

Oh, day after tomorrow, he had heard her say, and then she had gone quiet, listening. That look of pretend joyfulness stamped on her face was already wearing thin, giving way to something more real so that even when she managed to go on, keeping up the pretense in her voice, it was no longer matched by the look on her face. And then after listening for a while, she had spoken the word retirement, and her voice nearly cracked as it was uttered. Oh, for good now?

Marcus knew what the word meant and also how it was meant, and with that knowledge, something deep within him, something in his gut, tightened. It was like suddenly being hit hard in a fight, hit and having the very sense knocked from him so that, for a moment, he felt somehow disembodied and incapable of mounting a defense against further assault.

Retirement. The harshly clanging bells of doom may as well have begun tolling, ringing throughout the house so that all within would know of what he had just heard.

Frank, I … I … Again, her voice failed her, and she had gone quiet, listening, her eyes darting back to him, searching and now agitated, silently desperate. And then, Well, yeah … it’ll be … it’ll be good. You been through so much over there. And I guess wit’ it being over now … yeah, yes, okay then. I love you too, honey. It was another lie, Marcus was sure of it; this last was followed by a short pause, and then her voice again was struggling to regain a lost composure, to find that elusive note of sincerity. Yeah, I’ll tell them. I’ll tell the children. We’ll all be waitin’, Frank. Okay, bye… You too. Bye for now.

Did he know? Marcus had wondered. Was he telling himself the whole time that she was lying but playing along for now, perhaps storing it all away so that it might be retrieved later—retrieved and presented when oceans did not come between them and when what the eyes held could no longer be so easily hidden?

She’d hung up then and for a long while simply stood there, staring somewhat blankly ahead, rooted in place as if frozen there by what had not been expected, by what she could never have guessed was coming.

She was still, Marcus thought, quite beautiful, extremely light complexioned for a black woman. Light, bright, and damn near white, he’d heard others say of black women who looked like her. Yes, she was quite beautiful still. Her hair was the color of a raven’s wing and piled up now on her head like an upside-down ice cream cone; a beehive hairdo it was called, her favorite way of wearing it, though Marcus preferred it down and framing her slender face like a dark silken hood. It was all the mixed blood on her side of the family, according to Frank Bishop, all that mixed blood in her.

Also, according to his father, Our women never have been our women. Just another tale niggas been fed, that’s all, just another lie. Niggas gotta learn. Niggas need to learn the truth about themselves.

But no matter where it came from, she was still beautiful, and Marcus could see why other men stared at her the way they did. They seemed to always want to be nice to her, black and white men, always smiling and so quick to open a door or carry her bags out when she went for groceries at the Piggly Wiggly in Milford. Yes, she was beautiful, but now that beauty—very delicate in a way like a thing made of bone china or porcelain, shimmering at times as if heated and glowing from within—was overshadowed and strained looking, overcome somehow. Her dark eyes were troubled as she stood there, staring ahead. Her small thin oval of a face was wearing a look of worry and sadness too. It was all there, radiating so intensely now like an actual veil of some sort, a kind of accessory that might have been taken off, folded neatly, and put away at the end of a hard long day, of which there were many with the burden of keeping in order six children, none of whom lacked energy.

But the veil, this aspect of unease and worry, did not leave her face, did not come off, not then, not last night as Marcus—almost fifteen now, a few months shy of it and skinny as a coachwhip with a head of woolly hair that had finally, after many days of picking and tending with the dogged and unflagging persistence of a gardener, grown out long enough to be called an Afro—had stood there watching her. He’d wanted to put her at ease, say something grown up to make her believe everything would be all right. The proper wording, the adult way to go about this, did not avail itself to him; and so he had simply stood there, waiting helplessly, sharing with her the silent torment of knowing that everything would change now, that a year of living in the relatively tranquil bubble of what could fairly be termed a normal existence would all soon end.

She was afraid; Marcus could sense that. A fearfulness was lurking within her as real and solid as the eggshell-colored walls of the old house with its outdated high ceiling and draftiness during the winter, with jays nesting in the eaves along the front porch. It was the fear he most wanted to rid her of and bury so that it would never bother her again, never appear in her eyes or show up on her face the way it was there now. But again, there was the how of it, how to get something out of someone that was already there—there and growing with the rapid quickness of a spreading tumor. What words could be used? What words could he ever use to make the fear go away? And what about his own fear? He would have to conquer that first. Wouldn’t it have to be conquered, beaten first before there could be any hope of defeating hers?

It had grown so quiet as the two of them had gone on standing there in the small den amid the decorative and overdone wall hangings—a troubled silence, pervasive and somehow vaguely ominous, unnatural in a house crammed with children of various ages, all of whom went about on a given day with their own repertoire of noises. But now it was so deafeningly quiet. The others had already gone to bed or off somewhere in the house, attending to their own private matters.

The last sound Marcus remembered hearing was that of his mother clearing her throat while placing the old rotary phone back in its cradle, and then the silence had crept in to settle over everything, done so in a way that soon became nearly oppressive and inescapable, unyielding in all its wordless but felt implication. It was as if the two of them had become somehow frozen within that silence, rendered unable to move or speak, all of it coming behind what had been said over the phone.

Retirement—it was as if the word itself required a debt of silence.

It seemed to go on for a long time, the utter quiet, to stretch impossibly on and lie heavy, the secret message it carried fouling the air like an unpleasant odor, the lingering residue of a stubborn smell not to be gotten rid of so easily or without a great deal of trouble. At the end of this enveloping, oppressive silence, his mother had moved away from the end table and the phone to come toward him.

She was wearing some flowery blouse and tan capris, and he could smell a vague trace of perfume coming from her when she stirred, something from one of the small oddly shaped bottles she ordered from the Avon sales brochure that came in the mail. The fragrance, whatever it was, smelled good like flowers and citrus; there was a slight sweetness to it, something delicate and girlish, verdant like the honeysuckle shrubs that grew around the house.

After closing the short distance between them, she lifted her hand and placed it on him; the palm laid there at the union of his neck and shoulder possessing a feathery softness, with a slight dampness from where she’d held the phone. He was nearly as tall as she was by now and required no upward tilting of the head to look her squarely in the eyes, which he did. He looked there into her eyes—a light-shot brown luster of irises and darker pupils—to see clearly that she was trying now not to look worried because she did not want to worry him. But it was still there beyond her eyes—the tension and strain, attendant worry, emanations of an inevitable fearfulness—all there in the tightness along the corners of her mouth, the plump protrusion of lips colored in a bright hue of violet and smeared just the tiniest bit along the top edge. A brave face, that was what adults called it, a brave face she was putting on just for him, although behind it, behind that brave exterior, he could see the rickety, unstable foundation on which it was built.

He could feel her hand lying against his skin, the softness of it, its warmth and dampness pressing there just against his neck. Her fingers tightened just the slightest bit, clutching, and then: He comin’ home, Marcus. Your daddy comin’ home, and you should go to bed now.

So much more could have been said, but that was all, the words delivered almost in a whisper, quickly as if to hurry past saying them, the violet lips parting for that one quick moment before sealing themselves together again. He had gone on gazing into her troubled eyes, waiting for more. His only reply had been a softly spoken oh.

He comin’ home, Marcus—they were a few simple words uttered in the flat, emotionless kind of way a teacher might speak while handing out an assignment. Her eyes were so full of worry knowing that things would change now, change again like they did every time he came home, only now for good. He comin’ home, Marcus—they were a few simple words, yet they carried the dynamic, tearing force of a whirlwind. He may as well have been told that the sun was about to explode. And then she was pulling her hand, its damp softness, away from him. She lingered there for a moment longer to go on gazing quietly at him before turning away to leave the den.

* * * *

He was still awake when the car lights slashed like bright, sharp blades across the walls of the room he shared with his younger brothers, Isaiah and Kenneth. He knew the sound of the motor that came with the lights, knew that sound well, every rise and fall of the 429 V8 motor. Sometimes Marcus would lay there and pretend that the deep, reverberating rumble of the Thunderbird’s motor was something else, not man made but a thing born in the wild, one of the big hungry cats he’d seen on Wild Kingdom, the creature hungry and grunting just beyond the room, its neon eyes shining like bright torches in the purple night. It was Sammy.

The motor fell silent toward the back of the house, and immediately, Marcus heard his mother’s quickly paced footsteps moving through the house to let him in. He imagined the two of them embracing, the words flowing out of her more urgently now so that he would understand that what had gone on between them for the better part of a year now would have to end. She would have to make him understand that now—that he was coming home and that it would have to end. No more driving them all out to the lake in Milford on Sundays or showing just the boys how to grip a baseball if you wanted it to drop just before it reached home plate, no more visits in the middle of the night. Marcus imagined her telling him that all of it would have to end now; he could almost hear her saying the actual words. Yes, I know, I know … but this is it … I can’t … it’ll be for the best … No, I don’t want it to be over, but it has to be. It has to be!

And then Sammy—he preferred it over Samuel—not wanting it to be over, would tell her, But we could just be more careful about it. Don’t have to end, not just like that, not just like that. And then his mother would say again that it did have to end, telling him again why it would be for the best, that he was coming home—trouble.

Marcus felt the sting of it himself, the clawing hurtfulness of knowing he might never see Sammy again. The two of them had grown close over the past year, had in fact seemed more like a father and son than Marcus could ever remember having felt like with the man coming home from the war in two days. It was Sammy who, at times, had seemed to take a special interest in just him, sensing a special need of his for an older man’s attention. He’d taken him to the fair in Milford just this past September, just the two of them, driving there in the Thunderbird with the top down, with Sammy smoking a White Owl cigar and telling knock-knock jokes while he drank an orange Crush and laughed. It had been a treat he would always remember—Sammy so confident and strong when the carny had tried to give him a lesser prize for tossing the correct amount of balls into a basket, candied apples and a ride on the Ferris wheel, more knock-knock jokes coming home. And so the hurtfulness of knowing that it was over for him too bore in on him now like a toothache as he lay there. The pain of it registered deep down inside somewhere, past the reach of anything that might have given him comfort—and if not comfort, then at least the simple relief of knowing that things might not have been as bad as they seemed. But they were; things were that bad, as bad as they seemed and maybe even worse because the war had not ended him, had not done to him what he had prayed it would, and now he was coming back. And so—yes, yes, he told himself, lying there in the darkness—things were that bad, every bit that bad and maybe even worse.

For a moment, as a means of countering the dread, nullifying the oppressiveness of too much bad news in one day, he considered masturbating, quickly jerking off to the image of Lola Falana, the large glossy pinup of her on the wall above his bed, enough of it now brightly illuminated under the sliver of moonlight coming through the window. Angelic, sweet Lola, he considered her to be the most beautiful woman in all creation, who was currently featured on the cover of Jet magazine in town at Worthington’s drug store, more beautiful even than the pigtailed Dorothy Gale of Oz, a close second, or the girls he watched on Soul Train. And now calling out to him from the poster, whispering in the darkened bedroom, Lola—once conjured—was difficult to put off, not that he would ever think of trying; the image of her on the wall—her eyes so bright and alive, Lola wearing a tight-fitting costume of sheer material, breast pushed up and swollen—beckoned. But somehow even she, with her flawless beauty and the smile of an angel, the true queen of his adolescent heart, could not displace or quite overcome the metastasizing abundance of gloom currently abiding within him. Lola, he decided, deserved his full attention and not the diluted fragments available now; and so for once in a very great while, he allowed restraint to win out, allowed the stirrings of arousal to fade and go still.

He rolled over onto his back and gazed toward the ceiling, the block of rectangular darkness there. He could hear one of the others breathing, perhaps Kenny, a ragged wheezing sound that started up and then stopped after only a moment or two. He lay there and listened for sounds beyond the room—nothing. He imagined then once more, just a short distance away, the two of them together in the darkness, holding to each other, neither of them wanting anything to end but knowing that it would have to, that it would be for the best, that only trouble would come from not letting it end but knowing too that trouble was coming anyway. Trouble always came with him. Trouble was part of him, in him just like a stomach or liver or any other part of him. And so the trouble would come anyway. Marcus imagined his mother explaining that to Sammy, whom she had met at a garage in Milford when she had taken the station wagon there to have something repaired. The trouble would come anyway but less of it if the things that had been going on between them, if those things, were to stop. He lay there and some minutes later heard the faint, broken sound of music, a melody laced with static, barely reaching him even in the quietness of the house. It was coming from his mother’s bedroom, a record playing on her portable phonograph—At Last sung by Etta James, her and Sammy’s favorite—its melancholy strains mute and far away yet audible enough for him to make out as he lay there in the moonlit darkness. My love has come along. My lonely days are over, and life is like a song. For a moment, the sound of it seemed to grow louder and more distinct; its doomed sadness, the note of aching pain coupled with a yearning for happiness, the lullaby ushered him finally into a troubled slumber.

* * * *

He awoke the next morning and pretended that none of it had really happened, that last night had simply been a crazy, mixed-up dream that had taken place nowhere but inside his head. And for a short time, it worked, and he was able to convince himself that all was well, that the call last night was simply the residue of a bad dream, and that summer would go on just as it had begun when school had ended, go on with swimming at the river and fishing, playing ball, and generally just having a good time when not working at the Carsons’ store hauling watermelons and pumping gas when Mr. Jack was busy inside with customers. Upon opening his eyes, he tried to pretend that, but the pretense had already fallen apart before his bare feet even touched the floor; and once more, the truth of it struck like a hammer blow.

Kenneth and Isaiah were still sleeping, curled lumps beneath their covers, untroubled by what he himself already knew. Marcus sat up in the bed, hating the truth now that it had come back to him, hating what he could not hide from and what that meant, the awfulness of it. He was thinking now through the haze of wakefulness, If only it had come true. If only what I had prayed for had come true. He was thinking of a year of praying and now this. He comin’ home, Marcus. Her words were coming back to haunt. Harder, maybe I should have prayed harder. He was thinking maybe then it would have happened; the war would have taken him away, dealt with him for the things he had done, the way he was, the way he wasn’t. But it hadn’t happened that way, and so for a short while longer, Marcus just sat there hating the truth of it, hating that Kenny and Isaiah didn’t know it yet and would have longer to not know it, and hating his father most of all for not being dead and coming home that way but instead the same way he had left a year ago, whole and breathing and not dead.

He’ll be home tomorrow sometime. He didn’t say exactly when. It was their mother talking to his eldest sister, Sadie, in the kitchen. Her words were floating out to him as he passed, and then just after her voice, there came the sound of a plate smashing when it hit the floor, the sound of it having the effect of reaching him with enough unexpected suddenness to actually stop him in midstep and cause a slight shudder to run the length of his body.

Sadie! It was his mother’s voice again, upraised and perturbed, calling Sadie’s name as if that might change something and cause the plate or whatever it was to not be broken, to not fall from her hand and smash against the floor. And then Sadie, still dressed in her nightclothes, was rushing past him out of the kitchen, fleeing the news with eyes wide with alarm and outrage and lips formed up as if she was about to speak, only no sound left her as she moved past him and rushed on through the house in a commotion of stomping feet and agitation.

Marcus glanced in the kitchen, where wisps of steam were coming off the stove, and he could see that his mother had begun the work of picking up the broken glass, humming as she went about it. Once, he’d asked her why she hummed, and she’d told him it calmed her nerves and made her feel peaceful inside, and so it made sense that she would hum now when both calm and peace were needed. He didn’t recognize what she was humming now but thought it sounded like one of the hymns he’d heard in church, the notes rising and falling as she went about picking up the broken glass.

He stood there listening, watching her, and then it came back to him—the look on Sadie’s face from a few moment’s ago, the rictus of alarm and panic and outrage and what had caused it, the news that he was coming home, returning. He wasn’t even there yet, Marcus thought, and he may as well have been for all the upset it was causing, just the news alone and no more than that, just the news by itself. It’s already changed everything, he thought, already done changed everything. For what the news was doing, he may as well have been standing there, fresh from the war with whatever look on his face a war would put there; he may as well have been since everything had already changed just from the news of him coming back.

CHAPTER TWO

He could smell the pungent odor of burning wood or leaves, probably coming from somewhere up toward town, maybe the Peterson sisters paying someone to burn off trash or some of the other older white people having some yard work done. There was another odor, closer and more delicate, the smell of honeysuckle, its sweetness, coming off the thick vines of it that grew near the side of the house where he was standing and down beside the storage shed a few yards away. Marcus blinked against the brightness of the noon sun, felt the heat of it on his face, and thought then of how it would get hot again today, maybe even hotter than yesterday, and that maybe he, Isaiah, and Kenneth would go down to the river to get out of it if it came on too bad.

From that side of the house, beyond an overgrowth of field, he could see the Carsons’ store, that wedge of the green tile roof that stuck out over the tall cedars growing at the edge of the field. The store was only a short sprint away, and Marcus was thinking now not of the coming heat or even of last night’s news but of the cookies lined up in their tall glass containers along the front counter inside the store, lined up like soldiers standing at attention, waiting for orders, his orders. There were lemon, oatmeal, gingersnap, and his personal favorite, chocolate chip two-for-a-pennies, all waiting there in the tall glass containers, waiting to be set free and eaten.

There had only been grits and eggs for breakfast, no bread this morning, and Marcus was thinking the cookies would go a long way toward filling the space left vacant by food that had to be stretched to go around. Seven people, he knew by now, required a shitload of food; and most of the time, that food was there but not always, not in amounts anyone would call plentiful, not with he, Kenny, and Isaiah almost always lining up for seconds while the girls claimed only pigs needed to go back for more. They got by mostly on what he sent home, that and what their mother made working part time at the shirt plant sewing on buttons, a job she would probably not be returning to with him on the way home. They didn’t live high, but no one starved either. Holes in clothes were stitched shut by either their mother or one of the girls. Sunlight replaced electric lights during the day. Bathwater was shared. Cooking oil was sometimes used three or four times before being thrown out. Their mother saved change in a coffee can and counted it out to use in emergencies. Bits of soap were collected and allowed to liquefy before being dipped out and used again. Their mother studied thriftiness like a science of some sort, maybe alchemy since she always seemed to be making something out of nothing.

The field separating the Bishop house from the Carsons’ store was around a hundred-yard tangle of weeds and high brush, dead cornstalks from the last planting. The field should have looked like a garden by now, but because his mother had been unable to find anybody with a tractor to do the plowing in time, it was still just an overgrown field; and to Marcus right now, the field simply represented the only barrier that stood between him and the treats that lay beyond.

After a moment of further reflection, of anticipating the goodness of things soon to be had, he peeled himself away from the house, moved down a slight incline of black earth, and made his way through and around a fairly dense thicket of garden tools, woodpiles, abandoned bicycle parts, and a large black pot made of cast iron and used for various things in need of boiling. A worn footpath as smooth and slick as leather ran along the edge of the field where the weeds grew up close to the yard. Marcus started along the path, moving gradually faster so as not to be spotted by either Isaiah or Kenneth, which would have meant having to beat back attempts on their part to share in his good fortune. Safely away from the house and concealed now by the higher brush, he slowed a bit and moved along the path with his head slightly lowered so that he took in the back-and-forth movement of the Converse sneakers he wore, black and white high-tops badly worn themselves now from more than a year of abuses, even once having been run over by the family station wagon.

The path on which he trod was dry for nearly three-quarters of its length but then entered a sort of natural tunnel, a cooler grottolike enclosure of bamboo stalks, live oaks, and diminished light. And a shallow creek ran across the path here and washed most of it out, leaving only a muddy and swamplike trail, decaying vegetation, and a dank, rotting odor where the water from the creek had gone stagnant. Marcus stepped carefully over the narrow band of running water, felt the soft earth there give slightly beneath his feet, and then continued on until he emerged from the tunnel of trees to step back out into the brighter light.

Beyond the path and to his immediate left, not more than a few yards away, he could see Eunice Carson, Mr. Jack’s wife, still in her night coat, busy sweeping around the storefront, head bowed to the task of clearing any trash or debris from the rough slab of concrete fronting the two-story old wooden building. It was an edifice simple enough in its tall boxlike design, with white paint peeling off in large scabs along the near side while thin crooked curtains a shade of dull yellow covered the windows both upstairs and down. The once green tiles on the roof had worn black in large sections from years of being rained on and burned by the sun while the building itself had about it an aspect of dilapidation and ancientness yet also a refusal to yield any further to those agents of decay attacking it.

Mrs. Eunice, a woman small in physical stature, had begun moving in tight circles with her sweeping, striking out at the dirt and dust around the storefront with frustrated short quick jabs from the broom. Just as Marcus stepped onto the concrete slab, her rotating, counterclockwise movement brought her around toward him in a way that allowed her eyes to lock onto him without her having to make any adjustments at all with her head or body, which remained slightly stooped over and more so than not lost somewhere beneath the night coat’s thick, lumpy fabric.

Hey, Miss Eunice, Marcus offered in the way of greeting.

Eunice Carson never stopped sweeping, nor did she acknowledge him in any other way than to let her eyes settle briefly on him as she rotated around, all the while continuing on with the sweeping in quick, jabbing strokes, her short well-covered arms working furiously to move the broom back and forth along the rough concrete. Marcus had always thought of Mrs. Eunice as having eyes like those of a rat because of how small and dark they appeared, almost like two simple black dots made with a marker to peer out from a face that itself looked to have been formed out of fresh dough, with jowls sagging just the slightest bit and a face unified mostly by a set of shoelace-thin lips that seemed more like a two-dimensional line drawn there than the actual opening for a mouth. And then those eyes of hers, the rat eyes, were tiny and black but really giving the face its only actual symmetry since the lips were too thin to help any, leaving the eyes set close together and back in the doughy flesh of her face like raisins baked into it. There was something oddly sad about Mrs. Eunice, and the sadness kind of radiated out from her like something nearly physical, a thing that could be seen or touched or quantified in some way, measured by anyone who might have found a reason to go through the trouble of doing it. Marcus had heard things from his time working around the store—everyone had—bits and pieces concerning Mr. Jack and some other woman, a scandal of some sort. The whole thing, whatever it was, nearly broke Mrs. Eunice, leaving her with this sort of permanent air of sadness and isolation that hung about her like an invisible enclosure from which escape had become impossible.

Come for some cookies, Miss Eunice, Marcus said, watching her continue to move about with the broom, jabbing furiously at whatever bits of trash and dust had collected on the concrete slab.

She kept right on sweeping, jabbing with the broom as if she was still alone, as if he had not spoken. Her motions with the broom were short, choppy, and frustrated but enough to cause a small, thin cloud of dust to rise around her.

Come—

Ain’t got no cookies out here. She kept right on sweeping, eyes cast downward now, the few words having been uttered in a flat, matter-of-fact kind of way, not angry or quick but just plain and simple, like telling someone there was no milk to drink or that it might rain later. And then she kept right on sweeping, going on as if he or she had not said anything.

Only a screen door barred the way inside during the warmer months. The bell tied on the inside of the door jangled when Marcus pulled it open and went inside, where the air was cool and smelled of fish and boiled peanuts. The Carsons lived on the building’s upper floor and did their cooking downstairs in the rear, an arrangement that almost always left the residual odor of some food item lingering in the air. Shelves of canned items and various packaged goods lined the walls; two long coolers—one for ice cream, the other for soft drinks—occupied the center of the wooden floor a few feet inside the front entrance, and to the right, a counter ran the length of the interior. Dust motes whirled about on the still air, and there was the faint creaking sound made by the ceiling fan that rotated slowly overhead.

Mrs. Eunice came in behind him and went behind the counter. Like always when Marcus came in, she stationed herself behind the row of tall glass cookie containers and waited, peering out from there in a way that, because of a slight amount of magnification from the glass containers, made her appear as if her head was twice its normal size and inside one of the cookie containers instead of behind it.

I’m gonna have fifteen-cent worth of the chocolate chips, Mrs. Eunice, he said, watching her stare out from behind the glass containers, her expression giving no indication of anything she may have been thinking or feeling, the dark rat eyes huge now and blinking slowly while she stared out at him. Fifteen cents’ worth would give him thirty of the cookies, Marcus thought, enough since he would need the rest of what he had earned, two dollars in all, right there at the store dipping minnows for fishermen earlier that week. And he would need the rest of it for Shadrock and his cat bones since he had decided last night to find out if Shadrock, who had the reputation around town of possessing some sort of unnatural ability, could see anything—see anything at all—with the cat bones that might help him know what would happen when his father got there, when Frank Bishop came home.

Eunice Carson counted the cookies out in twos, dropping fifteen pairs into the small brown paper bag that she had popped open with a quick, practiced flick of her wrist; the trick of popping the bag open that way using only her wrist impressed Marcus because of how fast it happened and because Mrs. Eunice did everything else—everything—with slowness. And so her popping the bag open like that, moving it through the fish-smelling-air only a short distance, and then snapping her wrist at just the right moment seemed to Marcus a thing worthy of being impressed by. He watched her through the glass. The chocolate chips were getting low, and soon, he thought, Mrs. Eunice would have to fill the container again. He counted silently with her and watched as, a moment later, she dropped the final pair of cookies into the bag.

Marcus moved the few feet away and stationed himself near the cash register, waiting there for Mrs. Eunice to arrive. The register had always seemed to him too large somehow, imposing, like something that giants might have used to conduct business; the machine, which operated manually, was a huge black and bronze block of metal that towered to a height well over two feet and contained small numbered panels that could be seen through a glass slot near the top. Large black keys fronted it like stairs leading up to a porch, and every time one of the keys was mashed, its corresponding panel and number would rise above the others like a tombstone, and a chime would sound.

A box of single White Owl cigars and a large jar of pickled pig’s feet, pink in color and swimming in a bath of vinegar, occupied the space beside the register. Marcus had begun idly inspecting the pig’s feet when he noticed the newspaper, the Clayton Telegraph, lying on the counter beside the jar. He could hear Mrs. Eunice somewhere back toward the cookie jars fussing over something she’d dropped. The newspaper was folded in half and angled in such a way that allowed him to read most of what he could see on the lower half where the words LOCAL SOLDIER were printed in bold letters near the bottom; above that were the words NIXON REFUSES TO HAND OVER TAPES. TALK OF IMPEACHMENT GROWING. For some reason, he didn’t connect the words local soldier to anything concerning him, instead choosing to scan the paper for more interesting subjects while he waited for Mrs. Eunice, who was known to take her own sweet time to do anything. A rabid fox had been killed out near Old Pond Road after it attacked a man mowing his lawn. The fox, according to the Telegraph, had chased the man but had not caught him, allowing the man to get to a firearm. Authorities said the man was lucky and warned of rabid animals being a danger.

There was something in another story concerning an upcoming town council meeting, below that the mention of a fireworks display for the upcoming Fourth of July, and then Marcus became aware of Mrs. Eunice’s voice, a bit shrill sounding and annoyed, telling him that she would be there as soon as she got some mess cleaned off the floor. Marcus went back to looking over the paper. He loved to read and, standing there, wondered what it would be like to report for a newspaper and write the stories that went in it. The words LOCAL SOLDIER caught his attention again, and when he realized who the story was about, his eyes actually widened to the size of quarters before quickly narrowing to slits as he focused back in on what he had passed over to begin with: LOCAL SOLDIER TO RETURN HOME AFTER BEING AWARDED SILVER STAR FOR VALOR IN VIETNAM. And then he actually saw the name Sgt. Frank Bishop in smaller print. Almost immediately, he felt his breathing quicken; it was as if he’d been suddenly plunged into ice water or suffered some other unexpected shock to the senses like when his name had been called out in class last school term because he’d won a statewide essay contest and twenty-five dollars to go with it, a shock of that magnitude, only not in a good way, an opposite way, a darker and much more paralyzing kind of way.

For a few long moments, his vision seemed to blur; and in those same moments, he became vaguely aware of the sound of his own beating heart, the pulsing bass notes of sound thumping in his ears with an abnormal quickness, an urgency. Suddenly, the words on the paper lost all clarity and became indistinct like simple black lines of indecipherable ink and not words. Only after a conscious effort was he able to make words, meaningful symbols, out of the black lines of ink again. He continued reading through the quick thumping sound inside his head, the rush of blood, his eyes following the print that explained how his father, Sergeant Bishop, had saved the lives of other badly wounded soldiers by getting them to a place of safety, doing this the story said, under heavy enemy fire and while returning fire himself.

He became momentarily aware of Eunice Carson’s approaching footsteps just before she arrived, and then the bag of cookies was on top of the newspaper, placed down directly on the spot where Marcus had been reading. He peered up at her, knowing somehow by the detached and inscrutable look in her eyes that she was completely unaware of the story in the paper concerning his father; and that was Mrs. Eunice, seemingly oblivious to most anything outside of what it took to run the store or fuss over something Mr. Jack was doing in a way she did not care for. Christ himself could have appeared in the store right this moment, the Son of God aglow in ivory splendor; and in all likelihood, Mrs. Eunice would have gone right on waiting for payment on the cookies. The thin unpolished line making up her lips parted just the slightest bit as if she was about to speak, a prompting, and Marcus pulled from his pocket a wrinkled and badly faded dollar bill, placing it on the counter. Eunice Carson’s alabaster hand, blue veined in spots, came up from below the counter and closed on the bill immediately, the quick fingers plucking the bill away as if it were a living thing and might attempt escape if not prevented by the closing of her hand around it.

Seen Shadrock, Miss Eunice? Marcus asked, his breathing back to normal but his mind still whirling from what he had read in the paper, the story printed almost ahead of them even knowing of him coming home.

Eunice Carson seemed not to hear him. She depressed one of the large black keys on the front of the register, an act that set into motion the uncoiling of springs that in turn caused a set of small rods to push up the panel displaying 30 cents so that it was visible in the small window at the top of the enormous machine, and then other rods and mechanisms unleashed the big cash drawer, which suddenly popped open with a loud rattle of change; and then finally, there was a chime sounding as if to officially conclude the transaction. Ding! Eunice Carson went about inserting the bill and extracting the proper amount of change. Marcus held out his hand and waited.

Seen Shad?

Eunice Carson dropped two dimes and two quarters into Marcus’s hand and then said, Surprised you can’t smell him. Man fouls the air. It still stanks in here. Came by a while ago for some sardines.

She hesitated, peering from behind the counter at him for several moments before adding, Mr. Jack need y’all boys to work in the mornin’, need y’all to he’p’m with the watermelons. He brangin’ in a extra big load for the Fourth. Need you boys to he’p wit’ ’em.

Marcus closed his hand around the coins, slipped them into the right front pocket of the jeans he wore, then came back with the same hand, and lifted the bag of cookies off the newspaper. For a brief moment, he peered down at the words LOCAL SOLDIER and then looked up at Mrs. Eunice, her close-set dark eyes watching him back now, waiting expectantly. Her skin was the color of flour, pale to the point of seeming almost bloodless; the thin line of her lips turned slightly downward at the corners. He had forgotten that the Fourth wasn’t that far off and that Mr. Jack always stocked up on watermelons so that people could have them for their cookouts and celebrations and whatnot. Mr. Jack called it having your ducks in a row to think ahead like that. Don’t know ’bout tomorrow, Mrs. Eunice. Might be busy, he said, thinking, He’ll be home tomorrow. Tomorrow he’ll be home, and then everything’ll be different. Thinking I can’t say about tomorrow because he’ll be home, and things won’t be the same because he won’t let them stay that way. So I can’t say about tomorrow, even though Mr. Jack will need us for the watermelons.

Eunice Carson stared back as if still waiting for him to answer, as if he had not already answered her. Marcus could not remember ever having hesitated at the chance to work and earn money at the store, but with him coming home tomorrow, there was just no way to know how things would turn out, if working there would even be possible tomorrow or any other day.

Say Mr. Jack need y’all boys to he’p with them watermelons in the morning, she repeated as if offering Marcus a chance to answer in another way, saying this the second time not harshly or with any real emotion in her voice but simply as if he had not heard her correctly the first time. He down in the low country now to get a truckload of ’em for the Fourth, and he gon’ need y’all boys over in the morning to he’p wit’ ’em. He pay y’all boys the same as always.

He thought briefly of explaining things to Eunice Carson, telling her why tomorrow would not be the best day for them to come for work, but telling her would be the same as accepting that it was going to happen, that nothing—nothing—could stop it, and there was always a chance for something to not happen that was supposed to happen. Maybe the army would decide to send him somewhere else, or maybe an accident would happen, or maybe he would just decide to not come back. Marcus had heard of that happening before, had heard of men just up and deciding they didn’t want a family anymore and just like that moving away somewhere else and never coming around their family again or wanting to. It could happen; anything could happen, and so to speak of him coming back as if it was certain seemed to Marcus a sure way of helping it come true.

Don’t know ’bout tomorrow, Mrs. Eunice. Have to see, he said again, hoping that now she would accept this, that she would accept what he had said and just leave it alone.

You come wit’ your brothers early as you can now, Eunice Carson said, uttering the words once more as if Marcus had not spoken and had not told her what he had. You boys come on now. Mr. Jack pay you boys like always.

He saw no need to respond, no reason to answer again, since Eunice Carson had evidently given herself the answer she wanted and would not be influenced by anything that ran counter to that answer, not even the truth. She watched him from behind the counter, the faded, fraying housecoat buttoned tight at her neck, the unmade face with its doughlike complexion and dark rat eyes set in a way that gave no hint of what she may have been thinking. And now once more, she seemed to sort of shrink back into that private place of isolation, doom, and silence, to become hopelessly entangled in those things once again, enveloped by them once more as if having spoken a moment ago was only possible because of some temporary release from the place she had made for herself because of things Marcus had only heard whispers of.

He stepped back away from the counter and Mrs. Eunice, who continued to stare out at him, only now it was as if she didn’t even really see him anymore, almost as if she were having a spell of some sort, not seeing anything, the rat eyes appearing almost glazed and fixed on some point beyond him. He glanced toward the Clayton Telegraph a final time, thinking that maybe she would read it, and then she would know why he had answered the way he had, thinking that she would then know why tomorrow would not be a good day for them to work.

He continued to shuffle backward away from the counter and Mrs. Eunice with the odd fixed look on her face. And now the quiet inside the store seemed to deepen with each passing second until it became somehow burdensome and unpleasantly awkward. Suddenly, Marcus wanted to be away from all of it—the store and Mrs. Eunice, the smell of fish and boiled peanuts, the quiet that had moved in over everything, the Telegraph and its unwanted news. He spun and made for the screen door and stepped out into the bright white light of day, and for a moment, he felt as if he had just surfaced from beneath the darkness of water.

CHAPTER THREE

The store fell away in the hot distance behind him, back along the Milford Highway. Marcus was a football field away from it before he started in on the cookies, and still, he never stopped thinking about the Telegraph and the news it had contained, how it had all seemed so unreal and yet true too, about as true as anything could get since it had been right there in the Telegraph, right there in black and white, writ large. He had never thought of his father as being brave, only terrifying, and now he supposed he would have to think of him as both, even though the two things, brave and terrifying, didn’t seem to belong together,