CHAPTER 37
JAMIE
Thirteen-year-old Jamie Petree could work the dogs just as good as his older brothers, and they knew it. They let him go hunting on his own whenever he wanted, so long as he shot something they could eat. Jamie didn’t give a lick about playing with other kids, he just wanted to be out in the woods treeing coons, shooting birds, and splashing in the creek. His mama homeschooled him, mostly math and religion, so he had plenty of time outdoors. He had four hunting dogs in his pack: Josh and Calvin’s two blue ticks, his little brother Gage’s black-and-tan coonhound, and his own yellow cur, Custard, raised from a pup.
He was wandering the hills around Old Scratch Cavern, even though his mama had told him not to. She said the witch lady haunted that cave. She’d been saying that a good long year—ever since Lila went missing—and that was exactly what drew him here. He wanted to see the witch lady again. He remembered vividly the first time he’d seen her over a year ago, in Ralls’ grocery, when she’d rescued him from Junior and bought him a candy bar. No one ever looked at him the way Lila had. Her gaze took in everything about him, inside and out, good and bad; she had seen all that and smiled.
To his mama’s dismay, Lila had also sparked in him an uncontrollable urge to touch himself. He was hexed, Mama said, bedeviled, and she did her best to whip the evil out of him. But the witch lady had powerful spells. She wouldn’t let him be. In his waking dreams, Lila was a seductress. She crept into his sleep as well, though in those dreams, she did nothing more than hold his hand and smile.
It was his favorite time in the woods, near dusk, when everything was still and shadowed and cool, not yet dark enough for the bugs to start singing. It seemed to him the best time for spirits to show themselves. He watched for Lila. Loose rocks and dead leaves covered the ground, and the soles of his boots, worn slick, threatened to slide out from under him if he didn’t mind his footing. Some of the ravines here were so steep, they never saw sunlight.
The dogs had moved on ahead, sure-footed and eager. Jamie ran his hand along the bark of a fallen tree and knelt to see if there might be any early morels on the lee side. Then he heard a yelp and its answering chorus of bays and shot up in time to see the ruckus at the top of the rise. He didn’t get a look at the quarry, but the blue ticks were on to something, and the other two lit out after them. Was it her? Had she finally come back to him?
By the time he got to the ridge, Custard was hauling ass for Old Scratch, and the others had already disappeared inside its black maw, their howls echoing out into the holler. Jamie wasn’t sure what to do, so he waited and watched for Lila. He knew he couldn’t catch up. The dogs were smart, too smart, probably, to get themselves lost in the cave, so they might turn around and come back. But they were also determined, single-minded. They might well chase their quarry down the Devil’s Throat and never come out again. What were they after, if not a ghost? Something that didn’t naturally tree, he guessed. A mountain lion? A bear? He’d never seen one in these parts, though plenty of other folks had. He no longer heard barking.
Tears stung Jamie’s eyes, and he rubbed them away with grimy hands. The dogs would be all right. But if they weren’t? He’d only turned his attention away for a minute, to look for the mushrooms. He hadn’t expected them to go for the cave, and by the time it occurred to him to whistle and call them back, it was too late. He was trying to figure out how to tell his brothers—who’d skin him for sure, and who could blame them?—when the dogs’ muted yawps rolled through the holler. The sound wasn’t coming from the mouth of the cave, where Jamie stood. It was coming from the other side of the hill.
Jamie hightailed it through the trees, slipping and skidding and catching himself and pushing on, the barks becoming clearer but less frenzied as he approached the far side of the hill. He still couldn’t see the dogs, but he followed their sound down into a gap he hadn’t explored, its entrance narrow and cloaked with underbrush. The path was steep, and he clutched roots and vines to slow his descent. When he reached the bottom, he found himself standing in a shallow creek bed. The dogs ran toward him, muzzles frothing, coats filthy, ropes of slobber draped over their snouts. Custard came up to lick his hand as the other dogs lapped the thin stream of water at their feet.
Jamie sank down and clung to Custard, bawling with relief. He wiped his face on the dog’s fur and sat back to take in his surroundings. He couldn’t see the opening where the dogs had left the cave, though he knew it had to be there, that perhaps this very stream trickled out of it. There was no sign of their quarry, either. “Lila,” he said. She’d protected them, but she wouldn’t show herself.
Flowers filled the little glen despite the lack of sunlight, purple and blue and yellow, frilly things Jamie had no names for. He pressed his hands into the stream to rinse them off, rubbing them over the stony bottom to scrape away the dirt. He noticed one rock with a strange shape, like some sort of fossil, and held it up to the fading light. It wasn’t a fossil, he decided. A bone. A small one. He lined it up with his own finger and came close to a match. Something panged within him. He didn’t know what animal it came from, but it looked different, special. He ran one gentle fingertip over the length of it, examined its delicate contours, considered taking it home to sit on the bedroom windowsill with his other treasures: a four-leaf clover pressed in waxed paper, a shell lined with mother-of-pearl, a Matchbox car he’d stolen from a kid at church.
The dogs whined, anxious to get home and eat. Instead of putting the bone in his pocket, Jamie set it back down in the stream. On his walk home through the darkening woods, he imagined a big rain coming, a good old gully washer. He pictured the underground river in the cave flooding, gushing out into the ravine, and lifting the bone along with it. Who knew how far the bone could go, from the stream to the North Fork, from there to the Mississippi, way down through the port of New Orleans, the Gulf, out to sea. Not that it mattered where the bone went, because he could tell when he held it that the spirit had been washed free.