“We’re here,” he said.
As Marybeth turned into the driveway, the long run-up to the house, the wind gusted with more force than usual and threw a burst of plump, hard raindrops across the windshield. They hit in a sudden, furious rattle, and Jude waited for more, but there was no more.
The house stood at the top of a low rise. Jude had not been here in more than three decades and had not realized until this moment how closely his home in New York resembled the home of his childhood. It was as if he had leaped ten years into the future and returned to New York to find his own farm neglected and disused, fallen to ruin. The great rambling place before him was the gray color of mouse, with a roof of black shingles, many of them crooked or missing, and as they drew closer, Jude actually saw the wind snag one, strip it loose, and propel the black square away into the sky.
The abandoned chicken coop was visible to one side of the house, and its screen door swung open, then banged shut with a crack like a gunshot. The glass was missing from a window on the first floor, and the wind rattled a sheet of semitransparent plastic stapled into the frame. This had always been their destination, Jude saw now. They had been headed toward this place from the moment they took to the road.
The dirt lane that led to the house ended in a loop. Marybeth followed it around, turning the Mustang to point back the way they’d come, before putting it into park. They were both staring down the drive when the floodlights of Craddock’s truck appeared at the bottom of the hill.
“Oh, God,” Marybeth said, and then she was out of the Mustang, going around the front to Jude’s side.
The pale truck at the foot of the drive seemed to pause for a moment, then began rolling up the hill toward them.
Marybeth jerked his door open. Jude almost fell out. She pulled on his arm.
“Get on your feet. Get in the house.”
“Angus…” he said, glancing into the back at his dog.
Angus’s head rested on his front paws. He stared wearily back at Jude, his eyes red-rimmed and wet.
“He’s dead.”
“No,” Jude said, sure she was mistaken. “How you doin’, boy?”
Angus regarded him mournfully, didn’t move. The wind got into the car, and an empty paper cup scooted around on the floor, rattling softly. The breeze stirred Angus’s fur, brushing it in the wrong direction. Angus paid it no mind.
It didn’t seem possible that Angus could just have died like that, with no fanfare. He’d been alive only a few minutes ago, Jude was convinced of it. Jude stood in the dirt next to the Mustang, sure if he just waited another moment, Angus would move, stretch his front paws, and lift his head. Then Marybeth was hauling on his arm again, and he didn’t have the strength to resist her, had to stagger along after or risk being toppled.
He fell to his knees a few feet from the front steps. He didn’t know why. He had an arm over Marybeth’s shoulders, and she had one looped around his waist, and she moaned through her clenched lips, dragging him back onto his heels. Behind him he heard the dead man’s pickup rolling to a stop in the turnaround. Gravel crunched under the tires.
Hey, boy, Craddock called from the open driver’s-side window, and at the door Jude and Marybeth stopped to look back.
The truck idled beside the Mustang. Craddock sat behind the wheel, in his stiff, formal black suit with the silver buttons. His left arm hung out the window. His face was hard to make out through the blue curve of glass.
This your place, son? Craddock said. He laughed. How could you ever stand to leave? He laughed again.
The razor shaped like a crescent moon fell from the hand hanging out the window, and swung from its gleaming chain.
You’re gonna cut her throat. And she’s goin’ to be glad when you do. Just to have it over with. You should’ve stayed away from my little girls, Jude.
Jude turned the doorknob, and Marybeth shouldered it inward, and they crashed through into the dark of the front hall. Marybeth kicked the door shut behind them. Jude threw a last glance out the window beside the door—and the truck was gone. The Mustang stood alone in the drive. Marybeth turned him and shoved him into motion again.
They started down the corridor, side by side, each holding the other up. Her hip caught a side table and overturned it, and it smashed to the floor. A phone that had been sitting on it toppled to the boards, and the receiver flew off the cradle.
At the end of the hall was a doorway, leading into the kitchen, where the lights were on. It was the only source of light they’d seen so far in the entire house. From the outside the windows had been dark, and once they were in, it was shadows in the front hall and a cavernous gloom waiting at the top of the stairs.
An old woman, in a pastel flower-print blouse, appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was a white frizz, and her spectacles magnified her blue, amazed eyes to appear almost comically large. Jude knew Arlene Wade at a glance, although he could not have said how long it had been since he’d last seen her. Whenever it had been, she’d always been just as she was now—scrawny, perpetually startled-looking, old.
“What is this business?” she called out. Her right hand reached up to curl around the cross that hung at her throat. She stepped back as they reached the doorway to let them by. “My God, Justin. What in the name of Mary and Joseph happened to you?”
The kitchen was yellow. Yellow linoleum, yellow tile countertops, yellow-and-white-check curtains, daisy-patterned plates drying in the basket next to the sink, and as Jude took it all in, he heard that song in his head, the one that had been such a smash for Coldplay a few years before, the one about how everything was all yellow.
He was surprised, given the way the house looked from the outside, to find the kitchen so full of lively color, so well kept up. It had never been this cozy when he’d been a child. The kitchen was where his mother had spent most of her time, watching daytime TV in a stupor while she peeled potatoes or washed beans. Her mood of numb, emotional exhaustion had drained the color from the room and made it a place where it seemed important to speak in quiet voices, if at all, a private and unhappy space that you could no more run through than you could make a ruckus in a funeral parlor.
But his mother was thirty years dead, and the kitchen was Arlene Wade’s now. She had lived in the house for more than a year and very likely passed most of her waking hours in this room, which she’d warmed with the everyday business of being herself, an old woman with friends to talk to on the phone, pies to bake for relatives, a dying man to care for. In fact, it was a little too cozy. Jude felt dizzy at the warmth of it, at the suddenly close air. Marybeth turned him toward the kitchen table. He felt a bony claw sink into his right arm, Arlene grabbing his biceps, and was surprised at the rigid strength in her fingers.
“You got a sock on your hand,” she said.
“He got one of his fingers taken off,” Marybeth said.
“What are you doing here, then?” Arlene asked. “Shoulda drove him to the hospital.”
Jude fell into a chair. Curiously, even sitting still, he felt as if he were still moving, the walls of the room sliding slowly past him, the chair gliding forward like a car in a theme-park amusement: Mr. Jude’s Wild Ride. Marybeth sank into a chair next to him, her knees bumping his. She was shivering. Her face was oiled in sweat, and her hair had gone crazy, was snarled and twisted. Strands stuck to her temples, to the sweat on the sides of her face, to the back of her neck.
“Where are your dogs?” Marybeth asked.
Arlene began to untie the sock wound around Jude’s wrist, peering down her nose at it through the magnifying lenses of her glasses. If she found this question bizarre or startling, she showed no sign of it. She was intent on the work of her hands.
“My dog is over there,” she said, nodding at one corner of the room. “And as you can see, he’s quite protective of me. He’s a fierce old boy. Don’t want to cross him.”
Jude and Marybeth looked to the corner. A fat old rottweiler sat on a dog pillow in a wicke
r basket. He was too big for it, and his pink, hairless ass hung over the side. He weakly lifted his head, regarded them through rheumy, bloodshot eyes, then lowered his head again and sighed softly.
“Is that what happened to this hand?” Arlene asked. “Were you bit by a dog, Justin?”
“What happened to my father’s shepherds?” Jude asked.
“He hasn’t been up to takin’ care of a dog for a while now. I sent Clinton and Rather off to live with the Jeffery family.” Then she had the sock off his hand and drew a sharp breath when she saw the bandage beneath. It was soaked—saturated—with blood. “Are you in some kinda stupid race with your daddy to see who can die first?” She set his hand on the table without unwrapping the bandages to see more. Then she glanced at Jude’s bandaged left hand. “You missin’ any parts off that one?”
“No. That one I just gouged real good.”
“I’ll get you the ambulance,” Arlene said. She had lived in the South her whole life and she pronounced the word amble-lance.
She picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. It made a noisy, repetitive blatting at her, and she jerked her ear away from the receiver, then hung up.
“You crashed my phone off the hook in the hall,” she said, and disappeared into the front of the house to right it.
Marybeth stared at Jude’s hand. He lifted it—discovered he had left a wet red handprint on the table—and put it weakly back down.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” she said.
“Nowhere else to go.”
She turned her head, looked at Arlene’s fat rottie. “Tell me he’s gonna help us.”
“Okay. He’s going to help us.”
“You mean it?”
“No.”
Marybeth questioned him with a glance.
“Sorry,” Jude said. “I might’ve misled you a bit ’bout the dogs. Not just any dogs will do. They have to be mine. You know how every witch has a black cat? Bon and Angus were like that for me. They can’t be replaced.”
“When did you figure that out?”
“Four days ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was hoping to bleed to death before Angus went and croaked on us. Then you’d be okay. Then the ghost would have to leave you alone. His business with us would be done. If my head was clearer, I wouldn’t have bandaged myself up so well.”
“You think it’ll make it okay if you let yourself die? You think it’ll make it okay to give him what he wants? Goddam you. You think I came all this way to watch you kill yourself? Goddam you.”
Arlene stepped back through the kitchen doorway, frowning, eyebrows knitted together in a look of annoyance or deep thought or both.
“There’s somethin’ wrong with that phone. I can’t get a dial tone. All I do get, when I pick up, is some local AM station. Some farm program. Guy chatterin’ about how to cut open animals. Maybe the wind yanked down a line.”
“I have a cell phone—” Marybeth began.
“Me, too,” Arlene said. “But we don’t get no reception up in these parts. Let’s get Justin laid down, and I’ll see what I can do for his hand right now. Then I’ll drive down the road to the McGees and call from there.”
Without any forewarning she reached between them and snatched at Marybeth’s wrist, lifting her own bandaged hand for a moment. The wraps were stiff and brown with the dried bloodstains on them.
“What the hell have you two been doin’?” she asked.
“It’s my thumb,” Marybeth said.
“Did you try to trade it to him for his finger?”
“It’s just got an infection.”
Arlene set the bandaged hand down and looked at the unbandaged left hand, terribly white, the skin wrinkled. “I never seen any infection like this. It’s in both hands—is it anywhere else?”
“No.”
She felt Marybeth’s brow. “You’re burnin’ up. My God. The both of you. You can rest in my room, honey. I’ll put Justin in with his father. I shoved an extra bed in there two weeks ago, so I could nap in there and keep a closer eye on him. Come on, big boy. More walkin’ to do. Get yourself up.”
“If you want me to move, you better get the wheelbarrow and roll me,” Jude said.
“I got morphine in your daddy’s room.”
“Okay,” Jude said, and he put his left hand on the table and struggled to get to his feet.
Marybeth jumped up and took his elbow.
“You stay where you are,” Arlene said. She nodded in the direction of her rottweiler and the door beyond, which opened into what had once been a sewing room but was now a small bedroom. “Go on and rest in there. I can handle this one.”
“It’s all right,” Jude said to Marybeth. “Arlene’s got me.”
“What are we gonna do about Craddock?” Marybeth asked.
She was standing almost against him, and Jude leaned forward and put his face in her hair and kissed the crown of her head.
“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I wish like hell you weren’t in this with me. Why didn’t you get away from me when you still had the chance? Why you got to be such a stubborn ass about things?”
“I been hangin’ around you for nine months,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck, her mouth searching for his. “I guess it just rubbed off on me.”
And then for a while they stood rocking back and forth in each other’s arms.
42
When Jude stepped away from Marybeth, Arlene turned him around and started him walking. He expected her to march him back down the front hall, so they could go upstairs to the master bedroom, where he assumed his father lay. Instead, though, they continued along the length of the kitchen to the back hall, the one that led to Jude’s old bedroom.
Of course his father was there, on the first floor. Jude vaguely recalled that Arlene had told him, in one of their few phone conversations, that she was moving Martin downstairs and into Jude’s old bedroom, because it was easier than going up and down the stairs to tend to him.
Jude cast one last look back at Marybeth. She was watching him go, from where she stood in the doorway of Arlene’s bedroom, her eyes fever-bright and exhausted—and then Jude and Arlene were moving away, leaving her behind. He didn’t like the idea of being so far from Marybeth in the dark and decayed maze of his father’s house. It did not seem too unreasonable to think that they might never find their way back to each other.
The hall to his room was narrow and crooked, the walls visibly warped. They passed a screen door, the frame nailed shut, the screens rusty and bellied outward. It looked into a muddy hog pen, three medium-size pigs in it. The pigs peered at Jude and Arlene as they went by, their squashed-in faces benevolent and wise.
“There’s still pigs?” Jude said. “Who’s carin’ for them?”
“Who do you think?”
“Why didn’t you sell them?”
She shrugged, then said, “Your father took care of pigs all his life. He can hear them in where he’s layin’. I guess I thought it would help him know where he was. Who he was.” She looked up in Jude’s face. “You think I’m foolish?”
“No,” Jude said.
Arlene eased the door to Jude’s old bedroom inward, and they stepped into a suffocating warmth that smelled so strongly of menthol it made Jude’s eyes water.
“Hang on,” Arlene said. “Lemme move my sewin’.”
She left him leaning against the doorway and hastened to the little bed against the wall, to the left. Jude looked across the room to an identical cot. His father was in it.
Martin Cowzynski’s eyes were narrow slits, showing only glazed slivers of eyeball. His mouth yawned open. His hands were gaunt claws, curled against his chest, the nails crooked, yellow, sharp. He had always been lean and wiry. But he had lost, Jude guessed, maybe a third of his weight, and there was barely a hundred pounds of him left. He looked like he was already dead, although breath yet whined in his throat. There were streaks of white foa
m on his chin. Arlene had been shaving him. The bowl of hand-whipped foam was on the night table, a wood-handled brush sitting in it.
Jude had not seen his father in thirty-four years, and the sight of him—starved, hideous, lost in his own private dream of death—brought on a fresh wave of dizziness. Somehow it was more horrible that Martin was breathing. It would’ve been easier to look upon him, as he was now, if he were dead. Jude had hated him for so long that he was unprepared for any other emotion. For pity. For horror. Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. Jude had not imagined he could feel either sympathy or understanding for the man in the bed across the room.
“Can he see me standing here?” Jude asked.
Arlene looked over her shoulder at Jude’s father.
“Doubt it. He hasn’t responded to the sight of anything in days. Course it’s been months since he could talk, but until just a little while ago he did sometimes make faces or give a sign when he wanted something. He enjoyed when I shaved him, so I still do that ever’ day. He liked the hot water on his face. Maybe some part of him still likes it. I don’t know.” She paused, considering the gaunt, rasping figure in the far bed. “It’s sorry to see him die this way, but it’s worse to keep a man going after a certain point. I believe that. There comes a time, the dead have a right to claim their own.”
Jude nodded. “The dead claim their own. They do.”
He looked at what Arlene held in her hands, the sewing kit she was moving off the other cot. It was his mother’s old kit, a collection of thimbles, needles, and thread, jumbled in one of the big yellow heart-shaped candy boxes his father used to get for her. Arlene squeezed the lid on it, closing it up, and set it on the floor between the cots. Jude eyed it warily, but it didn’t make any threatening moves.