Each time, Annie shakes her head, and Abraham’s shoulders slump and his wide-open eyes narrow to their normal size.
Annie watches out the window every night, looking for some sign of Aunt Juna—an orange-tipped cigarette floating out there in the dark, a shadow slipping into the tobacco barn or over the rock fence. Many mornings, Mama has said Annie didn’t look well and pressed a hand to her forehead. Annie didn’t look well because while everyone else was asleep, she was watching and waiting for Aunt Juna.
“You sure?” Abraham said just yesterday, and he took Annie by the shoulders, his large hands covering her over and drawing her close, going so far as to hurt her.
Even though Abraham wasn’t drinking whiskey with Daddy, he was drinking it somewhere. The sharp smell made Annie tuck her chin and turn her head.
“But you did see her?” he had said. “You seen her up there, and you know she’s coming back. You said the empty rocker rocked, and that means she’s coming back.”
The way Abraham leaned into Annie and studied her eyes and breathed his whiskey breath in her face made her wish she didn’t have the know-how. She wished she didn’t know things were coming before they had come, or that the histories, all of their histories, didn’t sizzle underfoot and in the air. Abraham believed stronger than anyone else ever had, stronger even than Grandma, and that made Annie more afraid she was right.
? ? ?
IT RAINED WHILE Annie slept, and it must have been a good one. As she has every night, she sat at her window until well past midnight, watching and waiting for some sign of Aunt Juna, but eventually she fell asleep. She’d been so tired, not even a rain hard enough and long enough to pool in the ditches and leave the road so soft Mama’s tires were cutting ruts in it as they drove to town had been enough to wake her. Surely a rain so hard had brought with it a good bit of thunder, and that’ll mean Mrs. Baine has crossed on over, finally crossed on over. Annie had been hoping for some peace when that happened, but mostly things have gotten worse.
Daddy pulled down the slabs of wood strung with milk snakes, and he scolded Grandma for ruining perfectly good lumber. Since that happened, Annie has helped Grandma catch more milk snakes, and together they’ve taken to dropping the dead, shriveled snakes at each corner of the house, in the back of Annie’s closet, behind the toilet in the bathroom, and just inside the tobacco barn. Every so often, Mama will let out a scream and everyone will know Mama stumbled across one of Grandma’s dead snakes.
“Oh, good Lord,” Mama says, slowing where the road flattens and leads into town. She rolls one hand over the other to avoid the large hole up ahead.
Every time a good rain falls, particularly when it falls past midnight, a few local boys take on the cause of digging up Joseph Carl Baine’s grave. The story goes that the folks back then buried Joseph Carl here at the crossroad so he’d forever be trampled by the comings and goings of the town, and all that coming and going would keep him six feet under where he belonged. They buried him upside down too. If he did find enough peace to take a try at digging himself out, he’d be confused and dig himself farther underground.
Grandma says Sheriff Fulkerson—not our Sheriff Fulkerson but his mama, who was sheriff before him—used to surround the holes with sawhorses until she could get someone over there to fill them in again. Sheriff Fulkerson, our Sheriff Fulkerson, doesn’t bother doing that because everyone knows to keep a sharp eye on the crossroad into town when a good rain falls.
As Mama presses on the brake to stop the car outside the café, she glances in the backseat where Annie sits. Caroline looks too. Annie pretends to be staring out the window, but she can feel Mama looking even if she can’t see her. That’s Annie’s daddy down there under that hole, and even though Mama never talks about Aunt Juna and Joseph Carl Baine being Annie’s real parents and how that means she isn’t a real Holleran, not really, Mama can’t help the pity she’s feeling just now. It’s about the worst thing that can happen to a person—being the object of someone else’s pity.