I expect the door to fly open and Daddy to stomp inside. He’ll be relieved it’s not his curse that’s taken Dale from us. Now he’ll have someone to grab onto. He’ll have Abraham Pace with him and maybe John Holleran, though John doesn’t take much to violence. Daddy will drag Joseph Carl out of the kitchen, right in front of his own mama, throw him from the porch, and put a gun to his head until he tells what he’s done with Dale. It won’t matter to him that Joseph Carl didn’t do it, and that he won’t be able to do a thing to help us. It won’t matter that maybe there’s someone else out there who did something terrible to Dale, or that maybe Juna herself did it. Joseph Carl will be someone to blame. But the door doesn’t fly open. Instead, there is a knock.
With a rag wrapped around her hand, Mrs. Baine taps the door on her stove until it’s closed. Joseph Carl crosses his arms and lets his shoulders roll forward. I look at the door but don’t stand. There is another knock.
“Cora.” It’s a woman’s voice. “It’s Irlene. Irlene Fulkerson. Open on up, will you?”
I stand, but Mrs. Baine grabs me by the arm. “Don’t you dare,” she says. “Don’t you open that door.”
“Be thankful it’s Irlene Fulkerson out there,” I say, reaching for the latch, “and not my daddy.”
The lights of one of the trucks are still lit up, and they catch me full in the face when I open the door. I hold a hand over my eyes, tip my head, and then I see them. It’s Irlene Fulkerson and John Holleran too.
“The Brashears told me,” John says. “Told me about the fellow and Cora Baine. Figured this was best.”
John has a way of looking at me. He holds my eyes a little too long, a little longer than anyone else. It’s his way, I suppose, of trying to fashion something between us. It’s how he’s looking at me now, out on the porch, the truck lights making me squint and dip my head. Even when I turn away to see Joseph Carl still sitting at the table—him looking like a passing glance of who he once was—and turn back, John’s eyes are there, waiting to latch onto mine.
“I don’t think it’s necessary,” I say. “Juna, she’s confused, is all.” And then, to Sheriff Irlene, I say, “Evening, ma’am.”
Sheriff Irlene was probably just finishing up supper when John came knocking on her door and likely left her children, the three young ones, to do the cleaning up and putting away. She wears a blue blouse tucked into a full beige skirt that skims the toes of her boots. Her hair is done up in a tight knot at the base of her head. Even now, at long past dusk, it looks as fine as it would at Sunday morning services.
“Sarah,” Sheriff Irlene says, taking hold of my hand and patting it, “let’s get you home. How about that? How about that, Sarah?”
Sheriff Irlene tries to draw me from the doorway with a hand to my shoulder. When I don’t move, she gives a squeeze, and in a quieter voice, she says, “I’m worried for you, dear. You really should get home. This is no place for you.”
“Boy won’t be long for this world unless we get him to town,” John says, nodding so I’ll know he agrees with Sheriff Irlene.
“He didn’t do nothing,” Mrs. Baine calls out from inside the kitchen. She still stands near her stove, a rag wrapped around one hand.
“Be for your own safety, Joseph Carl,” John says. “Folks going to want to talk to you. Better they do it in town.”
John grabs onto my forearm, and much like Sheriff Irlene, he tries to draw me outside, but I want to stay and wait for Ellis. He’ll take care of Joseph Carl, and he’ll see me here, finally see me like he doesn’t at church or in town or on the road when he’s got himself wrapped around me. But John holds on, not with a tight grip but a grip that’s not letting go.
“We ain’t got much time,” he says when I don’t move. Then he looks to Sheriff Irlene, who gives a nod.
“You’ll come along with me now,” she says, “won’t you, Joseph Carl? We’ll have a hot meal for you. Take real good care of him, Cora.”
Joseph Carl is still sitting at the table, his hands resting in his lap, when I step onto the porch. In the last letter he sent me, he told about the dust. He said it was all the time in the air and that every green thing had died. The grasshoppers came next, and if something did manage to grow, they seized it and ate it, and when the living things were gone, those grasshoppers took to chewing the wooden handle right off a rake. Right off a rake, he wrote. He and the other fellows hung snakes, white bellies toward the sky, over their fences in hopes of inciting a decent rain. Didn’t work. And there were rabbits. Rabbits like you never seen. They rounded them up on Sundays, a circle of folks beating sticks on the ground, and when the circle was good and tight, they took the sticks to the rabbits. They cry, you know. Those rabbits cry when someone gets after them with a stick. The dust was all the time in his eyes and between his teeth, and God damn it all, he was hungry. Wasn’t everyone so Goddamn hungry?
10
1952—ANNIE
ANNIE WATCHES UNTIL Ryce disappears over the rise and she can no longer hear the squeal of his bike. Sheriff Fulkerson is watching too, and when he turns to greet Daddy, the sheriff is shaking his head like he doesn’t know what gets into that boy. Mama sometimes shakes her head the same way at Annie.
“Why don’t you come on with us,” the sheriff says to Annie when she starts up the stairs to go inside and help Grandma in the kitchen.