The Covenant Read online

  “I’m not retarded!” He glared at Holly.

  “Are, too.”

  “Holly’s the slow one in the family,” he said to me. “I dropped her on her head when she was a baby. On purpose.”

  I believed him.

  “Y’all were so scared! I thought you were going to pee yourself. You were scared, too, Deacon.”

  “You got me, Nathan,” the preacher chuckled.

  Nathan’s eyes dropped to the camera around my neck, then traveled down the length of my body, taking me in with a hungry glance. “You about blinded me with that flash.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What kind of Canon is that?” He reached for it, as though he expected me to give it over. I shook his hand instead. Too surprised to pull away, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m a photographer. Not a professional, of course. I have a real job and a business to run.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Nathan is a popsicle man,” Holly snickered.

  “My company, Happy Time Frozen Treets, has a fleet of twelve vans,” the brave young entrepreneur boasted. “I don’t drive one, of course. I have an office.”

  “Daddy bought it for him.”

  “At least when I was your age, I wasn’t still living at home.” He turned back to me. “My camera’s a Nikon D3X digital SLR with 24.5 megapixels. I bet your Canon isn’t as good.”

  “It’s several years old,” I said.

  “What are y’all doing in Meemaw’s house?”

  “This house will soon belong to the church, Nathan.” Deacon introduced us, but this time we didn’t shake hands. “Jackie is doing the photography for the restoration.” Although he still hadn’t officially offered me the job, I was starting to consider upping my fee, especially if the Lord had been so generous.

  “I’m free all this week. I could start shooting tomorrow.”

  He shook his head. “There’s a lot to do before you can begin,” he said. “We should run power to the house. It hasn’t had electricity since the ice storm knocked the lines down in 1993. And it’ll be three weeks before we can clear the brush around the house and bring in a cherrypicker.”

  “What do you need with a cherrypicker?”

  “Do you want to hang off the roof to photograph the cornices and architraves?”

  I saw his point. “I could start inside the house while you do all that.” I really needed that money right away.

  “But I won’t be here. I have to leave for New Orleans after Sam’s funeral. I’m already supposed to be down there. We’re closing on a house that will be dismantled and used for the restoration of this place. I’ll be home in Louisiana for two weeks maybe.”

  “I could let her in, show her around, keep an eye on things,” Nathan offered. Although I desperately needed the money, I didn’t care to spend any time alone in the house with him. I figured I’d be too busy batting him away to take any pictures. Handsome as he was, something about him put me off. It wasn’t just his adolescent behavior or the way he stared at my tits.

  “I need to be with Mrs. Lyons to show her what I want photographed,” Deacon said as he led us back to the front door. I don’t know who was more disappointed—me or Nathan. He sulked along behind us, kicking bits of plaster at his sister.

  “Where in Louisiana?” I asked the preacher.

  “My church used to be in New Orleans, but my mother’s family lives in Opelousas—the Trapagniers of Opelousas.” They sounded like a trapeze act.

  Once we were outside on the porch, Deacon padlocked the door. “Well, Jackie Lyons. What do you think?”

  “You haven’t made me an offer yet.”

  “I’m willing to pay professional rates, in exchange for which you will supply me with copies of the photographs. The originals remain yours, of course. You can use them or sell them to other people, if you can find somebody to buy them.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. I’d have to pick up a tripod and some lighting, but I was pretty sure Deiter would loan me the equipment I needed. That wasn’t the problem. “I just wish there were some way we could start right away.”

  “There’s plenty of time to make the pictures after I return,” he said. Then he looked at me in an odd way. His eyes had a strange light to them that I’d never noticed before, an intensity that was almost disconcerting. “If you’re in need of money…” he started to say.

  “I just want the work.” I’d lived most of my life off the charity of men, and it had got me into more trouble than it was worth. I was through being a leech.

  Well, mostly through.

  “I can respect that,” he said, but his eyes lingered on me, as though he were seeing for the first time the holes in my jeans and in my arms. I thought he might change his mind, but he only nodded and returned the key to his pants pocket. “It’s getting late. We should head back.”

  We walked down through the twilight woods in single file, Deacon leading, Nathan dangling from my hip pocket. “I don’t usually go for older women but your body is amazing,” he grunted in my ear, his breath smelling like cinnamon Certs.

  “Not so amazing with the lights on.”

  “Bullshit, lady. You’re hot.”

  “Thanks.” I tried not to make it sound like I meant it. “The years have not been kind.”

  “You should let me be the judge.”

  “If I ever need a jury, I’ll let you know.”

  Clouds had moved in while we explored the house, and it was getting dark quicker than we expected. We hadn’t gone far before we heard kids playing in the woods ahead of us. They were running and shouting all along the paths that crisscrossed the forest. A couple of times, I saw a whirl of color or a flash of long blond or red hair. Somewhere ahead of us, two girls were singing the jump-rope song I’d heard the day before. I wondered if they were jumping rope in the woods.

  Suddenly, I heard the song repeated behind me, in a soft, dreamy voice. It was Holly, and she chanted it all the way through:

  Wire, briar, limber lock.

  Three old geese in a flock.

  One flew east, one flew west,

  One flew over the cuckoo’s nest,

  Up on yonder gallows hill,

  Where my father’s bones do dwell.

  He had jewels, he had rings.

  He had many pretty things.

  He had a hammer with two balls.

  He had a cat with nine claws.

  Whip Jack! Lick Tom!

  Blow the bellows, old mon!

  Saddle the horse and beat the drums,

  Tell me when the Yankee comes.

  Sit and sing, by the spring.

  Clap, clang, clattery, cling.

  Hintlery, mintlery, cutlery, corn,

  Apple seed and whipple thorn.

  Screw a dishcloth up his snout.

  Turn him over and shove him out.

  She finished with an embarrassed smile. “That’s the way we used to sing it.”

  I was finally able to remember where I’d heard the chant before. “Where I grew up, that was a counting song. Like eeny-meeny-miney-moe.” The words were a little different—our version didn’t have a Yankee or a father with bones on gallows hill, but it was essentially the same.

  The kids had stopped singing by the time we crossed the log bridge over the dry creek. We were almost to the edge of the woods before they started up again, but they sounded miles away now. We hadn’t passed them on the footpath. We stopped to listen, but their voices drifted into silence, swallowed by the vastness of the woods.

  “I saw a Bigfoot in there once,” Nathan said in a soft voice.

  “God, you are such a liar!” Holly snarled.

  7

  THE DAY BRIGHTENED considerably once we were out from under the trees, and the westering sun, coming out from behind the clouds, was almost hot on our faces as we crossed the field. Our feet kicked up a cloud of dust that seemed unusual for that time of year. It hadn’t rained in a couple of weeks.

  Jenny greeted us at the road, posed
by her mailbox in her black dress dotted with small white flowers and a little round black cap with a half veil covering her face. She had just taken a bundle of letters from the box. Cassie and Eli were sitting on the grass beneath the trees, the boy pushing a toy truck around and the girl pretending to play with a doll. Nathan crossed the lawn, knelt beside Eli and helped him make truck noises. He grabbed Cassie and rubbed her head with his knuckles.

  Jenny invited us in to dinner. “There’s just so much food, we can’t possibly eat it all,” she said. “Everybody has been so good.” Part of me wanted to say I had to get back, but I had nothing to get back to—an empty motel room without even a fridge to keep a cold beer. I had spent too many hungry nights to turn down a free meal, no matter what it cost.

  Also, I wanted to get another look at the place where Sam Loftin drowned. I don’t know what I hoped to find—maybe whatever the coroner was trying to hide. As we crossed the lawn, Cassie followed just behind me, and once we were inside she sat next to me on the couch. Nathan pushed in beside her and tried to make her giggle by squeezing her knees. She looked like she wanted to crawl into my lap and cry. I got up to explore the house.

  Jenny cut me off in the hall by the grandfather clock, her eyes swimming with questions I couldn’t answer. I edged into the half bath and closed the door, turned on the faucet and let it run while I sat on the toilet and tried to talk myself out of bailing on these people with their soul-sucking grief. Their money kept calling me back.

  As I turned off the faucet and dried my hands, I heard Jenny and Deacon in the kitchen. “She can help you. You will need her strength.”

  “But I can’t afford it now, Deacon.”

  “And I told you before, I can help you with that, too.”

  “I don’t want charity. I can’t. I just have to trust in God. He’ll find a way.”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” Deacon said.

  Holly met me in the hall with a plastic cup of pale wine. I took it and left through the back door.

  Jenny had a swimming pool between the house and the lake. It was shaped like the print of a shoe, with a diving board at the heel and a waterfall at the toe end, fan palms in pots and a hollow concrete tiki statue that they used as a chiminea. Beyond the pool, a path led down to the lake, where a dock and boathouse stood over their reflections in the water. One side of the yard sloped steeply uphill, and an iron gate let out to a small orchard of plum trees with dark purple leaves and pale pink flowers that glowed in the gathering dusk. A path climbed up between the trees until it reached the levee.

  I found Officer Lorio standing on a limestone boulder at the water’s edge and turning something over in his hands. At first I didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and a hat. The wind had come up and was blowing toward us, bringing the smell of frying fish.

  He seemed surprised to see me, so I explained my visit. “That preacher again,” he mused. “Did you finally meet him?”

  “Just got back from the house. Mrs. Loftin has invited me to dinner.”

  “Jenny’s a good woman,” he said, almost to himself. “She doesn’t deserve any of this. God knows she’s been through enough already.”

  He was standing above the spot where I’d found Sam Loftin facedown in the water. I glanced back toward the street, but didn’t see a car parked there. “Do you live around here?”

  He snorted and shook his head. “Not on my salary. I couldn’t even afford one of the golf lots.” He explained that a golf lot was a piece of undeveloped land that the community sold to people who didn’t live at Stirling. The lots were scattered around the borders and too small to build a house on; people bought them because ownership gave them access to the clubhouse, the golf courses and other amenities. It was like the membership fee of a country club, except it could be taxed as property by the county.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked.

  “I parked on the other side of the lake and walked across the levee.” He turned and climbed up the rocks. “I remembered you said Sam was coming from that direction when you saw him. I was hoping maybe he dropped something.”

  I took a sip of wine and swirled it around in my mouth, remembering that I didn’t like wine. Lorio was taking me at my word about what I had seen, even though I couldn’t have actually seen Sam Loftin walking anywhere. “Did you find anything?”

  “Just this. I think it belongs to you.” It was my cell phone. “It was down there by the water’s edge between two rocks.”

  I thanked him. “How did you find it?”

  “It was ringing.”

  I checked the last call received. It was from my mother. She had phoned a dozen times since this morning. Her normal routine was to phone me every other Sunday, never on a weekday, except when she found some nice gentleman from her church who was about my age and had just gotten a divorce and was available if I wanted to meet him and settle down, preferably back home in Pocahontas—the small town in Arkansas where I grew up and where she and my father still lived together in nominal matrimony.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to you yesterday.” Lorio pulled up a tuft of dry grass and shook the loose, dry dirt from its roots. “It’s hard to believe it’s only been one day.”

  “Y’all were friends?”

  He took a deep breath and nodded without looking at me. “Sam called me from the office. He was working yesterday morning.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “Sam worked all the time. He wanted to meet after my shift ended. We were gonna watch the Cardinals game at his house. That’s why I was the first one at the scene—I was already in the neighborhood. Then, when I saw you standing here, I just knew…” He took his hat off and and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

  “What did you know?” I asked him.

  “That Sam had killed himself.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Yesterday…” he began, then sighed and pressed his hat on his head. “Sam’s oldest daughter, Reece, drowned herself at this same spot, five years ago yesterday.”

  8

  WE ALL SAT DOWN TO A dining table practically groaning with food: Jenny and her kids, Deacon, Holly, Nathan, Officer Lorio and me. My seat was at the end of the table, opposite Deacon. A large picture window to my left provided a view of the pool and boathouse. The preacher thanked the Lord for the bounty provided by Jenny’s neighbors at this, her time of need, amen. Jenny passed around a box of cold fried chicken bought at a local convenience store.

  “Doris Dye brought the Jell-O salad,” Holly said.

  “I wouldn’t eat it,” Nathan muttered with his mouth full. “It’s probably poisoned.”

  “There is good in all of us. Even Mrs. Dye,” Deacon said as he took the plastic container and passed it to Jenny.

  “Doris is our neighbor next door,” Jenny explained. “She calls the police on us almost every weekend, accusing us of hosting loud parties at all hours of the night.” She still spoke about us and our as though her husband were still alive.

  Holly passed me a bowl of peas. “Doris is crazy. Daddy’s got her number blocked on his cell phone.”

  Jenny explained, “Holly’s father is Luther Vardry. He’s the president of the homeowners’ association.”

  “Pastor Luther Vardry?” I asked.

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  Luther Vardry was pastor of one of the largest Baptist churches in the state of Tennessee. They used to broadcast his Sunday-morning church services on local television, back when I was married and still went to church every other month or so.

  “Of course, Daddy’s unofficially retired now,” Holly said. “He doesn’t preach anymore, but he still does his Benedictions commercials on the radio.” Benedictions were these trite little one-minute sermonettes, basically infomercials that Stirling Baptist Church bought on all the top radio stations in Memphis. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man who reminded us that we
may all be God’s children but only the Baptists were getting into heaven.

  I ate as much as I could stomach and remain ambulatory. Holly had already finished her bird’s portion and gone off to sniff some diet powder up her nose, but Deacon and Nathan were just getting their second wind. I pushed my plate away and set my wadded napkin beside it. “Are you sure you got enough to eat?” Jenny asked. I noticed she mostly just shifted the peas and mashed potatoes around on her plate without tasting any of it. “There’s enough to feed an army. If somebody doesn’t eat it all, I’m going to have to throw it away.”

  “I’m stuffed.” It wasn’t a lie. A half a sandwich would last me all day.

  “Jackie has agreed to shoot my photographs for me,” Deacon announced.

  “I’m so glad!”

  “I’m just happy you were able to recommend her.”

  Jenny smiled and touched my hand across the table. “I believe these things happen for a reason. There’s a connection between us. God keeps bringing us together for a reason.” I smiled back as sincerely as I could manage, which wasn’t much, but she didn’t seem to notice. Whatever God had in mind for the two of us, He hadn’t bothered to pencil it into my calendar.

  I stood and pushed the chair back from the table. “I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk before you left,” Jenny said.

  “Just callin’ my mom.” I held up my cell phone as proof of my intentions.

  “OK. But you need to eat some dessert when you’re done. I hope you’ll take some of this home.”

  French doors in the dining room opened onto a deck big enough to hold a square dance. The deck had two levels that hugged the rear angles of the house, with the higher level overlooking the lake. I found a hot tub in one corner, glowing and bubbling like a witch’s cauldron. The last light of sunset was still bright on the lake. The levee was dark and empty, not even a ghost of a ghost. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the sky.

  I hadn’t really intended to call my mother. I only wanted a chance to get away from everyone trying desperately to be brave in the face of death. I almost would have preferred some obnoxious display of grief to all this onward Christian soldiering and bold stiffening of the upper lip. But while I was sitting on the edge of the hot tub, Mom called me. I stubbed out my cigarette in a potted plant so I wouldn’t have to lie to her when she asked me if I was smoking.