The Covenant Read online

  He took a check out of his shirt pocket and showed it to me. It was made out for nine grand and assigned to his church building fund. The paper was damp with his sweat and the date was almost a month old. He was so flush he hadn’t bothered depositing it.

  “The man who gave me this has been in that nursing home for three years now. He can count on one hand the number of times his children have visited him. His mind is as bright as yours or mine, but his body has failed him and he is a widower. His children have all but abandoned him, but after he wrote me a check for twenty grand, they came.”

  There was a break in the bell of his voice, just the slightest quaver of an emotional fracture. His body was still relaxed, reclined upon the hot metal bleachers, but his jaw was clenched so he could hardly get the words past his teeth. “Oh yes, they came. And they brought their lawyer.”

  25

  HOLLY’S NORTH LAKERS WON by three runs. They might have scored more if Nathan hadn’t hit into a double play with the bases loaded in the last inning. After the game, the cotillion moved back to Luther’s Roman garden.

  The sun was still high and hot, but there was enough shade to survive as long as the beer didn’t run out. I wandered through the dinner crowd, casually overhearing as many conversations as I could, but no one was discussing murder, just the usual racketeering, embezzlement, insider trading and corporate espionage that everyone does without thinking or even trying very hard to hide.

  Through some error I had been assigned to Senator Mickelson’s table, between Holly and Nathan. I tried to wrangle a seat next to Mrs. Ruth so I could mine her for gossip, but Luther and his wife had already bookended her before anyone else could get close. Senator Mickelson was seated directly across from Ruth. There was an empty spot for Jenny Loftin, but she hadn’t arrived yet. The other empty seat was reserved for Eugene Kitchen, but they had taken him by helicopter to the hospital in Collierville. Eugene’s seat was between Deacon and the senator, so I grabbed it, even though it upset the seating arrangement. At the far end sat Holly’s fiancé Justin, and Nathan’s date Annette LaGrance (the Elle model’s mother, I later found out).

  Senator Mickelson had changed into a sailor-blue jacket with chicken guts on his sleeves. He doffed his white captain’s cap and handed it to Stegall as he sat down, then squeezed my knee under the table. Perhaps he thought I had been brought in for the evening’s entertainment. Ruth was a picture of misery between her son and his wife. Every time Virginia Vardry tried to whisper in her ear, she swatted at her like a horse fly.

  When we were all seated, Luther asked, “Has anyone heard how Eugene is doing?”

  “His nose is broken, but he’ll be OK,” Nathan answered.

  Holly sipped her wine, leaving behind a small rose petal of lipstick folded over the rim of the glass. She hadn’t changed out of her uniform. She leaned across and whispered to Deacon, “I meant to hit him, just not in the face. That was his fault.” She scraped a breadstick through the table butter, meticulously inserted it like a catheter into her mouth, then swiftly munched down its length until her ruby lips met her scarlet fingertips. Patting her lips with a napkin, she added, “He’s always hanging around, hitting on me and drinking Daddy’s liquor.”

  “I thought your father was Baptist,” I said.

  “He is.”

  “What were you aiming at?” Deacon asked.

  “His nuts,” she laughed. “First pitch. My arm was a little stiff.” She performed the same perfunctory operation with a second butter-lubed breadstick, so swiftly that were it not for the minute and rapid oscillations of her munching jowls she might have been performing a carnival trick, like a sword swallower.

  Ruth said, “Luther tells me you don’t want to marry that boy, what’s his name?”

  “Justin. His name’s Justin, Meemaw. He’s always accusing me of cheating on him. I can’t cheat on him. I don’t even love him.”

  He sat next to her at the end of the table, quietly stabbing postholes in the butter with the broken half of a breadstick.

  “You’re wearing his ring,” Ruth said.

  Holly moved her hand to allow a shaft of sunlight to sparkle the crush of diamonds caked atop her finger. “It is a pretty ring.” She squeezed Justin’s arm and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Only the best for my Holly,” he sighed to the tablecloth.

  “Oh my God, that is not a Coach handbag!” Holly cried.

  “This old thing?” Jenny said as she sauntered up, flaunting a patchwork denim purse before us. Her shoulder-length blond hair was pushed back and held in place by an orange bandana. Her face was fresh-scrubbed and freckled, and she wore a pair of tiny, rectangular, wire-framed sunglasses perched on the ridge of her sunburned nose. Her lacy white blouse hung loose out of her jeans, and floppy beaded sandals dangled from her long toes. She flopped into her chair as though at the very end of her resources.

  * * *

  When the house servants announced the buffet was ready, we queued up. While the good senator stood behind me surreptitiously pressing his boner into my back, folks let us skip ahead until we were at the head of the line. He piled his plate with barbecued pork, pork ribs, barbecued chicken, fried catfish, hush puppies, baked beans, slaw, spaghetti, potato chips and fried pickles.

  “Aren’t you eating?” he asked. Apparently my portions were too small for him to see without his reading glasses. His breath smelled like dentures and minty-fresh death.

  Arriving back at our table I found that Stegall had misappropriated my seat. I was forced to dine beside Nathan. The dinner proceeded without unnecessary effusion of sophomoric sexual innuendo for the first ten minutes or so. When Senator Mickelson leaned back and unbuttoned his trousers with a groan, it was as though the lion had staggered away from its kill and gone to lay down in the shade. Hyena laughter broke out at one of the tables. Luther’s dogs were fighting underneath it, knocking people over like bowling pins.

  Holly consumed barely enough to keep a goldfish alive before pushing away her plate and departing into the house to change out of her uniform. Jenny, I noticed, supped exclusively from a bottle of Chardonnay. Deacon received a phone call and was spirited away to some theological emergency. I watched to make sure he didn’t follow Holly inside, hating myself for caring, but he left by the side gate.

  Nearly everyone had eaten their fill, but Nathan seemed to get his second wind along with his second helping. He grunted and shoved a forkful of barbecued raccoon topped with mashed potatoes into his mouth. He pointed at the barely polite bit of meat still on my plate. The coon was merely symbolic, like the bread and wine of olden times, when people knew their places and kept to them. Everyone was expected to partake, if only in sacramental portions. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” he asked.

  “I’m full, thanks,” I said.

  “I love this shit.”

  Elbow on the table, I rested my chin thoughtfully on one hand. “Did you kill it yourself?”

  “Hell no. We buy the coons from some niggers I know.”

  “Nathan!” Luther barked.

  “It’s OK, Daddy. Ain’t no niggers around to hear.” The caterers were white. No doubt they’d been selected off a picture menu just like the chicken and ribs.

  “It’s ironic, don’t you think?” Nathan said to me.

  “What is?”

  “We buy our coons … from the coons.” His face broke apart. He’d been saving that one all day, just waiting for someone to pull his finger. Luther straightened his tie and gazed mournfully across the lake, perhaps noting that some shirtless, drunken woman was riding the prow of a speeding boat, like a figurehead of winged Victory.

  I stood, collected my paper plate to throw it away.

  “You didn’t eat much. Aren’t you hungry?” Nathan asked.

  “Us girls have to watch our figures.”

  “Let me watch it for you. Do you work out? Your body is amazing.”

  He was a broken record. He had the same five lines memorized an
d repeated them endlessly. I started to walk away. “Jackie,” Ruth quavered. “Take me away from here.”

  I dropped my plate in a garbage can and pulled Ruth’s chair back from the table. “Take me down to the lake,” she said.

  “Can I call you?” Nathan asked as I pushed his grandmother away.

  “You can, but I probably won’t answer.”

  “I’ll see you around then.”

  “Sure. We’ll probably run into each other at the cross burning.”

  26

  I PUSHED RUTH DOWN the long path to the boathouse and out to the end of the dock. Jet skis and speedboats roared up and down the lake, dense as rush-hour traffic, towing sunburned skiers saluting each other with beers lifted in their hands. The sun was still high and bright. Ruth sat blinking in her chair and I wondered if she could see anything that passed before her.

  The day had seemed to age her. She leaned wearily on the arm of her chair, her veined and knobby fingers clinging to a sweaty glass as she sucked watery bourbon through a tiny cocktail straw.

  “So much has changed, Jackie,” she sighed. “I can’t remember how the land looked before they flooded everything, before Luther built all these damn houses. I want to see the hills and the hollows again, the old farms and pastures. It’s all gone.”

  When I was a cop, they taught us tricks for stimulating the memory of witnesses. I needed Mrs. Ruth to tell me about the people who lived in all the damn houses her son built over her memories. The only thing I had learned today was that everybody worshiped Sam Loftin. He wasn’t just the HOA treasurer. His company mowed their lawns and raked their leaves. He coached their daughters’ softball teams and taught their Sunday schools. Mrs. Ruth knew Sam and she knew all the people Sam knew. Hopefully she knew who hated him, who would want to see him dead.

  Even a trained observer can’t recall details cold, like looking at a picture held up to the eye. That’s not the way the mind works. Humans evolved remembering stories and songs; sequences of events, not moments in time. If you ask a man to describe a photograph of his wife of twenty years to a police sketch artist, the picture would come out looking like a stranger. But ask him to describe her at the supper table last night, when they fought about the woman she thought he was sleeping with, and what you get is nearly as good as a photograph.

  “Close your eyes,” I said.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Pick a time, the best time you remember, before everything changed. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.” She smiled.

  “It’s your fifteenth birthday. What do you see?”

  “I see our herd of Jersey cows. My God, I forgot we had them. They were the prettiest dairy cows you ever saw. They all had names. I can still smell their breath in the morning and the warm milk steaming in a cold pail.”

  “What else?”

  “I see Lonnie behind his plow.” She smiled and opened her eyes and there were tears on her thin cheeks.

  “Who is Lonnie?”

  “The first man I ever loved. He was one of our sharecroppers. He was thirty-three years old, with a wife and four kids. If ever he got a spare nickel he lost it playing dice.” She looked up at me, squinting against the sun. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re thinking he took advantage of me. But times were different then, and I was no child. How could I be? I was already overseeing the farm and running our store. Daddy made the finest whiskey this side of Lynchburg, distributed it across five counties and three states, managed a fleet of illegal runners, all while operating five whorehouses. But he couldn’t run this farm. He wasn’t a farmer. I ran it for him. That’s how I met Lonnie. He was the most beautiful man I ever saw. I was a grown woman of fifteen and I knew what I wanted and how I wanted it. I knew exactly what I was doing when I lured him down to Spring Lake.”

  “Evening, Meemaw,” Holly said as she sashayed by in her pink and purple Bendito Romanni bikini, big lemon-yellow Hollywood diva sunglasses, and pink stacked heels by Vince Camuto. She dropped a white towel at the end of the boat dock, kicked off her heels, and dove into the lake with barely any splash at all. Twenty yards out she surfaced, backstroking hard, sleek as an otter, out into the boat traffic and apparently oblivious to the danger. I waited to see her run over and chopped to pieces by the props, but she lived a charmed life. By some miracle, she reached a small rocky island and climbed out, water streaming from her black hair.

  Ruth said, “They call that island Holly’s Spot. Thirty years old and she still believes one good fuck will fix her life. I tried to teach her to be a heartbreaker, but she prefers to wreck herself on the shores of love.”

  “Mrs. Ruth, I believe you are a poet.”

  She handed me her bourbon glass. “I can’t take credit for those words. Bobby Darin sang them to me on my forty-fifth birthday.”

  Holly spread herself out to sun on the rocks. The boats weren’t passing so quickly now, but there were more of them, mostly full of shirtless boys and tattooed young men waving cans of beer in the air and shouting obscenities.

  “Well, times are different now,” Ruth said. “And at our age we have the luxury of being choosy, don’t we?” In her mind, Ruth was still a young woman, as young as me, at least. Not that I was very young.

  “When you’re fifteen years old and in love, every moment is so desperate. You just can’t see how tomorrow will ever come. I remember the first time I saw Lonnie. He was splitting wood. Lightning had hit a sweetgum tree out behind his cabin and the storm blew it down on top of his hog pen, killing two of his sows. He broke his arm trying to get the others back in their pen. To compensate him, Daddy gave Lonnie permission to cut up the tree and sell whatever firewood he didn’t need. He cut that whole tree up himself, sawed it one-handed into sticks with an old lumber saw Daddy had in his barn, then split every stick of it into firewood, lifting that eight pound maul in one hand over his head as easy as you pick up a back scratcher.”

  She straightened up in her chair, pushing herself up on the arms. I leaned over the dock rail and looked down into the water at the minnows schooling around the wooden posts, and the green, moss-grown concrete piles beneath them.

  “I was coming home, riding my Bayard, a big black horse with a white blaze on his nose. Daddy said he was too much horse for me but I loved him. I heard the fall of that ax, like the report of a rifle echoing across the meadow, regular and spaced out every minute or so. It wasn’t hunting season so I turned Bayard into the lane beside Lonnie’s cabin and rode around back. That’s where I saw him first, with his broke arm hanging in the bib of his overalls like a sling. He lifted the ax with the other hand and swung it like a baseball pitcher with the whole of his body, and when it hit, the two pieces of wood flew apart like they had been split by a stick of dynamite, bouncing end over end across the yard. His boy would gather up the halves and set them up to be split again into quarters and then stack the quarters and stand up a new stick for his daddy to split. His wife was sitting on the porch watching him work, a baby latched on to her tit like a tick. I could see she loved him and knew she had the best man in the county but I didn’t care. I wanted him. And I got him, eventually.”

  Obviously, she hadn’t married Lonnie. “Whatever happened to him?”

  “Daddy finally caught us. It was bound to happen, but we just couldn’t quit each other. He beat Lonnie half to death. Lonnie had crossed the line, you see. Oh, not the difference in our ages. I told you, those were different times. Daddy was trying to shake off his reputation as an outlaw and a hoodlum and set himself up as a respectable citizen. Lonnie was a sharecropper and I was the daughter of his landlord. Daddy had every right to beat him. He had to do it. He’d have been shamed if he hadn’t. But he beat him so bad, Lonnie couldn’t make his crop that year and pay the share he owed. So Daddy threw them out. I never saw Lonnie again.”

  The sun crept toward the tops of the trees. I lit a cigarette and blew
smoke at the gathering clouds. “Thank you, Jackie,” Ruth said as she patted her eyes with a bit of Kleenex.

  “For what?”

  “For helping me remember. Lonnie’s hog pen was where the softball field is now. His little shack was right down there.” She nodded off to her right, at the bottom of the lake. “Me and Lonnie used to meet at night at the top of that hill.” She pointed to the island where Holly lay stretched out on the rocks.

  Ruth slipped a hand under her leg and pulled out a silver hip flask. “Pour me another,” she said, “and one for yourself.”

  “All your ice is melted,” I said.

  “Who wants to drink watered-down whiskey anyway?” I poured half the flask into her empty tumbler, then took a sip for myself. It was strong but not unpleasant, cool in the mouth, exploding like a cherry bomb in the chest. It would have gone down better on a cold winter evening by the fire.

  “I am eighty-seven years old, Jackie Lyons. We Stirlings are a long-lived people. Maybe it’s something in the water around here that keeps us young. My father Gus remained virile well into his nineties. He died at the age of a hundred and two with a full head of hair as black as the day I was born. He was one-quarter Chickasaw, you know.”

  I’d seen his sarcophagus in the tomb in the woods. I took another sip of her whiskey and felt it erupt around my heart. My father would love this stuff. He would love this woman, the old philanderer. He’d wreck himself upon her shores, as blindly as the drunken boys buzzing around Holly’s Spot. Strangely enough, my mother would have loved Ruth, too, for very different reasons.

  “Deacon mentioned to me that your mother had recently passed. I’m sorry,” Ruth said, seemingly reading my mind. It felt like years since we buried her in Pastor Corner.