Sweet darling Curtis, the gate is going to open again soon, and they are coming to take me away, Idri and some men. The Sisterhood still exists. It’s been butchered and forced to flee, but it still exists. Idri must have tracked me, and then gone back to Evansville for help.
I sensed them coming yesterday, and this morning I felt them again while I was cooking breakfast. They’ll be here very soon. It wouldn’t do any good for us to run away. They would only follow. That’s why I sent you to town. I’m sure she’s supposed to take us both, but she’d find an excuse to kill you. I know her too well.
Don’t forget to take the money out of the honey jar. It’s yours.
Darling, it hurts so much to leave you like this. But you’ll get over it. It was beautiful to be your wife this short time. I’ll remember you and love you forever.
Reading it, it was like I’d been there watching her write it, tears running down her face like mine were, and for a minute, when I was done, I felt helpless, like a wooden man. But only for a minute.
4: Conjure Woman
I stopped at Morath’s long enough to tell Miz Morath I wouldn’t be able to milk for them awhile. That my wife’s relatives had come and stolen her away, and I was going after them. I left my team there; Morath could use them or rent them out, to pay for their keep. Then I headed south on Route 51, and before I got forty miles, the truck quit on me. I figured it was the carburetor—I’d had trouble with it before—but fooling with it didn’t help, so I gave up and hiked on into Assumption, where I hired myself a tow. The fella at the garage there fussed with it awhile, and I ended up getting a new one put on. All in all, it cost me more than three hours. I didn’t know whether to swear or cry.
I’d never before felt the way I did then: dangerous. Never knew I could. I didn’t feel at all like the Curtis Macurdy folks knew back in Washington County.
Then I drove on. North of Vandalia it threw a rod, and there wasn’t a thing in hell I could do about that. Not in the time I had. I wondered if Idri’d cast a spell to keep me from following them, and told myself if she had, it wasn’t going to work. Leaving the truck by the road, I started walking. Each time a car came along, I stuck a thumb out, and after a while a moving van went on by me a little way and pulled over. I took off running and climbed in.
“Where yew a-headin’?” the driver asked me. A southerner by the way he talked.
“Kentucky,” I told him. “Muhlenberg County.”
He laughed and slapped his leg. “Talk ’bout bein’ in luck! I’m deliverin’ this load to Central City; that’s in Muhlenberg County.” He reached under the truck seat, took out a clear glass bottle three-quarters full, and handed it to me. “Have a swig,” he told me.
I handed it back. “Thanks,” I said, “but my family’s all teetotalers. Been that way as far back as anyone remembers.”
He didn’t take offense like some might. Just pulled the wooden stopper with his teeth, raised the bottle, took a big swig, and about strangled. “Good stuff,” he said with his eyes watering. “Not like most of the rotgut folks sell these days. My uncle makes it hisself.”
He started the truck then and drove on, talking about how he wished he was headed for home instead of Kentucky. After a while I started dozing, off and on. Woke up when he stopped the truck for gas. It was beginning to get dark out.
“Yew gonna git a crick in yore neck, yew sleep like that,” he told me. “I’m figurin’ to drive all night, if I can, but I’m apt to git sleepy. Can yew drive a truck?”
I told him I could.
“I put a sofa crosst the back of the load, so’s I can go back there and sleep if I need to. Why don’t yew go back there? Then if I git too sleepy to drive, yew’ll be all rested, and we can change places. Git there quicker.”