Chapter Twenty - Lisa
I spent a lot of time at Goliad during those first few weeks after Cody left. Hard as it was to be apart from him for so long, it made me feel a little bit better to be near the people and the places that he loved. I took to stopping by after work when I could, and sometimes went to the cowboy church with them on Sundays. Marcus and Cyrus still played the music service even without Cody, and I’d usually sit with Miss Josie on our regular hay-bale on the third row. Sometimes Brandon was with us and sometimes he sat with Lana and her host-family. She was short and slight, with longish brown hair and not much of an accent, but I can’t say that we ever talked all that much.
Some folks like their hymns, so Marcus and Cyrus always played a few of those every Sunday, and it so happened that one morning they got a request for Unclouded Day. Nothing particularly unusual about that. But after a while, I noticed that Bran was crying, and that shocked me. I would have had an easier time believing the government is run by lizard people than that Brandon Stone could cry in public. Let alone over a song.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in a low voice, not wanting to embarrass him.
“Nothing,” he said, wiping his eyes and trying to hide his face. He didn’t do a very good job of it, of course, and I decided this wasn’t the right place to talk about it, whatever it was.
We were close to the back door that led out to the corral, and I grasped his hand.
“Come outside with me,” I said. He didn’t seem enthusiastic, but he didn’t argue. We both got up and slipped outdoors without too many people noticing that anything was wrong, and once we were out there I sat down with him on the tailgate of Marcus’s truck.
“Now what’s wrong? Don’t tell me nothing, either. You don’t cry over nothing. So tell me,” I said.
“Nothing,” he insisted, wiping his eyes again. I wanted to either cry myself or choke him.
“Bran, I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me,” I pleaded.
“I told you it’s nothing,” he repeated.
“So why’d it make you cry, then?” I asked. He was calmed down again now, stoic and iron-faced as always. He looked at me, weighing his words.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he finally said, looking away. And that, apparently, was all I was going to get out of him.
“Well, I love you, kid. Don’t you ever forget that,” I told him. He nodded, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
Miss Josie came outside right about then, looking uncertain.
“Is everything okay?” she asked when she got close enough.
“Yeah, it’s all right. He’s fine now,” I said. Times like that make me wonder just how true that is, and how deep Bran’s cuts really go. I worry about him sometimes, especially when he does strange things like that and won’t explain. But there’s no way to force it out of him, if he won’t talk. All I could do was love him and pray for him and keep my fingers crossed that he’d somehow come out of it one of these days.
But things like that were an oddity, and most times we had fun when I was there. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons I helped Miss Josie cut and weed all those beautiful roses, and I soon found out Cody was right about how much she loved to talk about her flowers. She knew more history and folklore about roses than I’d ever dreamed existed in the world. But it was fun to listen to her because she was so enthusiastic about it.
I found myself talking to Marcus a lot more than I used to, also. He reminded me of Cody in a lot of ways; they were the same age, and he wore the same kinds of clothes and had the same deep voice and rough hands. Other than that I don’t guess they really look much of anything alike; Marcus has longer hair and paler blue eyes, and he’s a good bit taller and stockier, too. Not a bad looking boy, but still, not nearly as handsome as Cody.
We reminisced about the good old days of running all over East Texas to sing at hokey little street fairs and supper clubs till three am, and laughed about some of the things we’d seen along the way. People are funny, sometimes even when they don’t mean to be. All that was a thing of the past, at least till Cody got back. Cyrus had talked about maybe finding another guitarist to fill in for a few months, but so far it was nothing but talk.
“So what’s the deal with you and Cody, anyway?” Marcus asked me one day. He was brushing the horses and cleaning the tack out in the barn, and I was sitting on an upended water bucket to keep him company. It was mid October by then, and it was the first time he’d ever come right out and asked me about me relationship status.
I immediately remembered all that loose talk over the summer about how he’d like to pick up the pieces if I ever broke up with Cody, and wondered if Jenny was right after all about how you can never really be just friends with a guy.
So I hesitated, choosing my words carefully.
“We’re doing pretty good. I miss him a lot, but I figure we’ll take it one day at a time,” I finally said.
“But you don’t want anybody else, right?” he guessed, looking at me keenly. That made me even more uneasy, to tell the truth. I didn’t want to get into a clash with Marcus, especially not over something like that.
“No. He’s my one and only,” I said firmly. But Marcus seemed not to notice. He just kept brushing Buck’s mane, and it was several minutes before he said anything else.
“You know Cody’s got some issues, right?” he finally asked, clearing his throat.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well. . . he thinks he’s got a one-way ticket to the boneyard, you know,” Marcus said. It sounded unkind, but I couldn’t decide if he was being snarky or if he simply had a strange way of putting things.
“Yeah, he told me about the Curse and everything, if that’s what you mean,” I agreed, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
“Did you believe him?” he asked offhandedly. That was a hard question to answer, honestly. I still hadn’t quite decided what I thought about the Curse yet, and Cody hadn’t said a word about it since that night when he first told me. It had been easy to sweep it under the rug and not think about it much, what with everything else we’d been through since then. I frowned, but Marcus seemed to be absolutely serious about the question.
“Do you believe him?” I asked instead, playing it safe.
“Yeah, I really do,” he said.
“I still don’t know what I think about that,” I admitted.
“I didn’t believe it at first, but then I got to thinking, you know. He’s been right about everything else he ever said. There might be some truth to that, too,” Marcus said.
“Maybe. He never said much about it, except that nobody in his family ever makes it past thirty. I don’t think he likes to talk about it much, so I haven’t pushed him. Life’s been too crazy lately to worry about something like that, anyway,” I said.
“Well, you know about his Grandpa Reuben, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, a little bit. He named this place and fought at Goliad and all that,” I agreed.
“Okay, so you know he was a soldier most of his life, right? He fought down there at Goliad and then later on at Mesilla and Glorieta Pass out in New Mexico during the Civil War,” he said.
“Yeah, I know all that. Fought under Baylor, captured a platoon of drunk and dehydrated Yanks who tried to cross the White Sands Desert after filling up their canteens with whiskey instead of water. Cody goes on about that stuff all the time. But what’s your point?” I asked.
“Well, they say Reuben picked up that curse from a witch in Mesilla. He killed her son in battle, so she cursed him and said none of his sons would ever live longer than hers did. And ever since then, none of them ever have,” he said, sounding very spooky and mysterious.
“Oh, come on, Marcus. Really?” I scoffed. It sounded like a lurid campfire story that kids told to scare each other before they scampered back to hide in their tents.
“Th
at’s what I heard. Honest,” he said.
“Heard from who? Cody never said anything like that,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t from Cody. My grandmother told me,” he said.
“And how did she know anything about it?” I asked.
“It’s a small town, Lisa. People notice things, even if they don’t talk much. There’s always been a rumor amongst the old folks about a curse on the McGraths. It’s nothing new. They’d never say anything to Cody or Miss Josie, of course, not in a million years. But Granny told me about it when she found out I was working here, because she was worried about me. She made me promise never to tell anybody, though,” he said.
“You’re telling me,” I pointed out.
“Anybody at Goliad is what she meant, so I never said anything to Cody about it. I didn’t see any point in passing along gossip, anyway. Especially when it’s nothing but a little snippet like that which might not even be true. It may only be a wild rumor, for all I know,” he said.
“Okay, fine. But you still haven’t said what the point is,” I reminded him.
“Well, I got to thinking. If Cody’s really got this death curse on him, then don’t you think we should try to find a way to break it? He’s my best friend and I owe him a lot. I’d save him if there was any way I could,” he said, and that softened my heart. He loved Cody too, in his own brotherly kind of way, and I could relate to that.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
“I thought I might go out there to Mesilla and see what I could dig up. It’s a little town, too. Surely if there was ever a real live witch in a place like that, somebody’d remember something, wouldn’t they? Or if not that, then maybe there’d be some records of her somewhere, at least. Seems like it’d be worth a try,” he said, shrugging.
“I’m not sure Cody would like that idea much,” I said, surprising myself. I was actually toying with the thought of running off on a wild goose chase to some dusty little Podunk town in the middle of nowhere, all so I could find out about a witch who might not exist and a Curse I still wasn’t even entirely sure I believed in.
“Nope, I can tell you right now, he wouldn’t like it at all. He’d think I was either wasting my time and money or maybe even putting myself in danger for his sake, and that wouldn’t set well. That’s why I’m talking about doing it now, while he’s not here,” he countered.
“So I’m guessing there’s something you want me to do, right?” I asked.
“Well. . . yeah. You never know what you might run into when you’re out there on your own like that. It’s best to be careful. So I thought I might text you, maybe once an hour, and if I don’t then you’ll know something’s wrong and you’ll know exactly where to find me,” he said.
“What if you get a dead battery on your phone or something?” I asked.
“I won’t let that happen. I’ll call you from a pay phone, if I have to. I won’t lose touch, no matter what,” he said.
I considered all the various things that might go wrong, and finally admitted that it might be a halfway decent plan. If he dropped out of contact then I’d immediately know it was time to call for help. It remained to be seen whether he’d find anything useful or not, of course, but I figured it was worth a shot.
So Marcus went, and we both agreed that it was a secret to be kept strictly between the two of us. No one could know; not Miss Josie, or Cyrus, or anybody else. And most especially and emphatically not Cody.
That was the hardest part, I think. I usually wrote Cody a letter every night, sometimes pouring my heart out for ten or twelve pages when I missed him especially much. Now and then I rose to such lyric heights that it was almost a kind of poetry, and I never considered the fact that all this might be too much for the poor boy. Thankfully it only seemed to leave him faintly bemused, and maybe a little amused. I could read between the lines of his (much shorter) letters well enough to tell what kind of look he must have had on his face while he wrote them. Once in a while he joked about the post office having to deliver his mail with a forklift, but I knew he was only playing with me.
In his first letter he sent me a picture of him standing on a gravelly beach in nothing but his boxer shorts, soaking wet from the ocean. Somehow it never crossed my mind that they might have beaches in Alaska; it’s just not the kind of place you normally think of when swimming comes to mind, you know.
He sent me another picture of him sitting at a metal table holding his lifetime membership certificate to the Polar Bear Club, but at least he was smiling in that one even though he looked tired. He never wrote much, but then he’d always been a man of few words.
We talked on the phone for about an hour or so before bed most every night, and I would have talked longer if I could have. But he was usually tired and his phone service wasn’t always that great, especially when the weather was bad. I’ve always heard that letter writing is a dying art, but there are still times even nowadays when it has its special appeal. When I couldn’t reach him any other way, then the most ancient method of all was sometimes the best.
But all this back-and-forth did make it awfully hard to keep secrets. Several times I had to bite my tongue to keep from letting something slip, but somehow I managed to keep a lid on it all.
Things were sweet as soda pop, for a little while.
The first hint of trouble came when Marcus stopped answering my texts.
The hourly text plan worked fine for several days. He made it to Las Cruces with no problems, and found a cheap motel right outside of Old Mesilla. He told me there didn’t seem to be anything sinister about the place, so he’d been busily digging up tons of interesting folklore ever since; most of it completely irrelevant.
But then he’d found a book of oral histories at the library and come across something really useful for a change. According to the article he read, a lady named Selena Garza had supposedly been an infamous witch in the area during the middle of the nineteenth century. The most interesting tidbit of information about her seemed to be that she’d been present at the Battle of Mesilla in 1861, which was definitely an oddity for a woman in those days. The book didn’t say anything about curses, but it did mention that the information had been provided by a certain Miss Layla Latimer, a lady who lived in White Sands, right outside Las Cruces.
Marcus had decided it was worth going to visit Miss Latimer himself, to see if she might know anything else besides what was in the book. He texted me again right before he headed over to the woman’s house, and that was the last I ever heard from him.
At first it didn’t worry me too much. In spite of what we said, I didn’t want to fly off the handle just because he was thirty minutes late texting me. But after several hours of no word, I started to worry. A lot. There was no reason I could think of why Marcus wouldn’t have been able to get in touch with me within that amount of time, unless he was in serious trouble.
I fought down a rising sense of dread and tried to grasp at straws. I hadn’t really expected much from Marcus’s expedition except that he’d find out a lot of useless trivia and then come home empty handed after a few days. Now he was missing, and he was depending on me to do something about it.
I still didn’t dare tell Cody. I knew him too well; he’d feel like he had to come running home from Alaska to look for Marcus, and I knew exactly what that would mean. He’d lose his job, and then soon enough he’d lose Goliad. Cody was the last person on earth who needed to know.
But who else could I ask for help? I didn’t feel like I knew Cyrus well enough to confide in him, and I wasn’t even sure if he knew about the Curse in the first place. The only other person I could think of was Miss Josie, and that was hardly any better.
What I needed was a schemer, and as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I knew the perfect person to help me, if she would.