Then in silence they waited for the misery to fade, but acceptance and the lifting of the dreadful sense of loss would be a long time coming.
The weather changed, too, immediately after the burial, becoming unseasonably warm with ice and snow dripping off the dead, overhanging boughs of the trees in Howell’s Coppice. Somehow their pain, tamped down by the demands of survival, would have been easier to bear in the cold grip of acute winter.
A moist southerly blew across New England, bringing the noon temperature up to fifteen degrees above freezing.
It made everyone moody and mean. Brother snapped at brother and wife at wife. Mac took Paul and John out hunting with him, going into the scrubland to the north of Mystic.
They came back with a deer, killed by the older boy with a single clean shot to the head.
It had been a successful expedition, apart from one unsettling factor.
John had been leading the way, rifle cradled under his arm, pushing through the muddy slush. Mac and Paul were following close behind him, carrying the deer between them.
They had been less than a half mile from home when someone had called out to them. A hoarse man’s voice, strained and high, as though the speaker was trying to conceal his identity from them.
“You jes’ best look out for us. We know all ’bout you and we’ll get you! You won’t fucking know where or when.”
John had brought the gun to his shoulder, but Mac warned him not to shoot.
“Waste of a good bullet. Just some crazy out there, feels like letting go.”
“Yeah, but there was that broken window last week,” Paul had said.
“And someone crapped in the front path a couple days ago.” John had spat angrily in the dirt at his feet.
The shout wasn’t repeated, though they’d heard crashing in the undergrowth as if someone was running hurriedly and clumsily away.
There were no more such incidents after that, and when they finally got back to Melville Street, coming in the back way, over Beulah Creek, it was closing in toward full dark. The narrow stream was still frozen over, but the ice had become a leaden gray.
“More of this warm weather, and it’ll be thawed through,” said Mac.
“Reckon it’ll change, Dad?”
“Could be, John. See if the wind starts veering back northerly. It carries snow from Canada in its teeth when it does.”
“Look.”
Paul stopped dead, pointing at the side wall of their small, shingled barn. It was normally painted dark brown, but the snow was still piled three or four feet high against it.
Someone had come in while they were away on the hunt and daubed a message on the wall in what looked like yellow highway paint.
Think you got the guns so you think you got power well you got a leson to lern abouot real fucking power your all dead.
Chapter Thirteen
Somebody was calling his name, but his attention was on the road that wound out ahead of him, lined with abandoned churches.
“Jeff, come on now, Jeff.”
Each of them had a magnificent stained-glass window overlooking the highway, but in every case the color had leached out, leaving behind weird images of crucified saints that looked like a series of photographic negatives.
“Jefferson!”
It was odd that all of the tortured figures looked like Jed Herne. Jed was dead.
“Dead,” whispered Jeff Thomas.
Of course he was dead. He wasn’t going to rise on the third day and come to judge…judge anyone. Not on the third day. Nor the fourth. Not on any fucking day. Nobody knew that better than Jeff did. Warm blood on his hand as the knife slid into the flesh. Red blood. The blood in the church windows was like the finest rubies.
“Jeff! For God’s sake, Jeff!”
He could smell incense and hear the distant tinkling of a tiny silver bell. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou and blessed… Forgive me, for I’ve sinned. I’ve taken life and lied and fornicated… the fruit of thy womb.”
Something hit him on the side of his leg, stinging like a thrown pebble.