The Best American Mystery Stories 2006
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри, Хантер Эван
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51746-6
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
I won’t say there was no other. In the doughboy times I slipped off some and had no regrets, but I had already shut my heart and shot the bolt. It was just a letting go here and there, then back to my pets, my own cow barn by then with peafowl strutting. I would lie under the rhododendrons and stare a lady slipper in the eye. I was comrade to orchids and a friend to owls.
It was the year that rain was raining all the time, and I recall Granny wet and cold when she found me, me cold and wet too by then, because the roof was not tight. It was the year the ferro beetles showed up for their seven-year courtship, and what I heard them saying, even in town, was spoiled, spoiled, spoiled. It was a question why my uncle and another with skin so blue he was a dark flower at first would pitch into killing rage over me, as not one seemed to want much to do with me most days. That is the limitation of a man.
It was a hard tramp down South Mountain to a road, but she propped me and kept shushing when I tried to say what all I reckoned had transpired. She named birds in the trees and flower bells by the pathway, keeping my mind from drifting back to that blood scene. It wasn’t till I’d had a night sleep and bowls of broth and some dittany tea with hard brandy that she said, let’s tell it now, and the whole swirling tussle came back before me, the blades in failing light, some rutting and laughter, the red tide and apples, my scream through green light, and the hint of honey. Before long the pieces in my heart had commenced to come together like a puzzle, while the rain was drumming again, shaking me back to that day with its whirlwind and bloodshed, and then I knew what I knew.
The Account of a Baffling Spirit Appearance as Reported by Sister Sura Sawyer in the Roanoke Alternative Magazine, April 7, 1965
As I was about to release my familiar, Prince Akira, at the conclusion of a successful séance, a voice unknown to me interceded and delivered a mysterious report which bore on none of the present circle but which seemed not of negligible import. As follows is my best recollection of the monologue spoken by a beard-faced essence hovering above the table but never fully in focus, as tormented spirits are wont to appear:
When my sister Sheila passed in childbirth, I swore to help her lawful husband hold the child precious, as the Irish Creek was rife with copperheads of both the crawling and walking kinds. Poor sister, who was smitten hard with Anders Grove and never recovered from lovewit before she met her end. She was fool for a fiddle, and he bowed string music all along the Pedlar at play parties and stump speeches, moving widows, wives, and maids alike to sashay and smile. I took a shine to himself and pleasured at playing reel music to his devil’s box. It’s true enough he doted on her, but he had more eyes than the one, and they traveled, so even before Sheila was spent, I had concerns for her and the baby that he mightn’t stay and provide. When Anders was done in by a broke shaft timber, I knowed the child would get her best raising from me alone. I might be prone to poach and loath to till, but I had my own ways of bringing the specie in.
Why I come back to speak with the white tongue is to say I done her wrong, swapping care for neglect whilst I milked the worm and horsed barrels of apple pomace about when it was too wet for the wheeling barrow. Good shine kept a roof over us and vittles on the table, but she much growed up her own creature till something ugly in me started taking low notice.
In close quarters like ours, you can’t miss seeing, and she bloomed like the May apple all creamy and soft. Seems one day she was a doll child herself scolding the rag baby. Next day I was chewing sweetgum sap to cure my breath for her and sprucing my hair, as she was a little woman with fair flesh to taunt the hungry. I was hungry. I partook.
To even talk moonlight with such close kin is a misdeed, I know, and I would wish for a hard brush to curry myself after we cuddled. I would speak to God to stop me before hard harm grew to habit. I said, Lord, I would not wish to tread her, but I do, and nothing ever smote me.
There’s another verse to that song. Ina was rambunctious and would always hide where I could find her. We kept up the tease game for a year, never fording the stream, but then Painter commenced skulking and watching. At first, I took him for a still spy and found relief on him ogling the house from out in the rain. I figured him for a half-breed the John Laws kept in corn to scout us, knowing that’d peg him as lazy. He’d be all vine and no taters, and nobody’s idle spy will find where I shift my mash nor cut my faggots on Whetstone. By dark, in case he was peering from some windbreak, I’d have Ina strike the wick of a grease lamp and venture out to the crib or muck house. Anybody taking notice would follow her, and I’d slip over the casement and to my works.
But then I seen he had other notions. She come back from the slope orchard with an ill smile and said, when I asked after the lurker, that she’d seen nothing but two yanks nesting in a white oak and a checkervest hammering his mattock, after tree beetles. It was yet too airish for the birds to be stirring so, just Easter or thereabouts, and she had that grin like a doll’s face stitched on. Jealousy is as bad to shake you as the preachers say, and if that Injun was to have zip on his stackcakes, it would not come from my ambry.
One morning I claimed to her I’d be off a whole day decanting my usquebaugh but circled back to catch them in the beast act, and sure enough they was raw and blushed when I come in, Eve and Adam, but him dark as the devil. It was rage, all I saw, and after I slapped her a strong one, I pulled the razor, so we went round, thrashing and panting like we was red-tails mating, but he got lucky and cut my breadbasket, which leached much of the fight out of me. Still I had the advantage, as I’d slung Ina about in my temper, and he went to tend her, then started heating up a pot of water, like lie was to care for her, and I had forfeit all his attention on account of my weakness.
That was when I reached for my boot gun, as I should of done at the outset. I knowed it was closing in, the deep moment, and what I was fighting for might fall to me forever mine or never, so I stuck my hand down toward the pistol butt. Then it closed over me, something floating dark and silky as night wind, and I felt my throat tearing like a lamb’s, the fountain flowing scarlet.
The spray of my own life toward a sway of darkness was the last thing I could ever see and I am signed to tell it whenever a listener heeds.
The News-Gazette, March 4, 1968 IRISII CREEK PROPERTY SOLD TO O’MALLEY LUMBER
The property previously known as the Pogue Homestead on Irish Creek has been sold by the County of Rockbridge to the O’Malley Lumber Company of Fairfield. The twenty-four acres of prime hardwoods had been held in trust by the county for three years against unpaid property taxes, and the commission voted last Tuesday night to approve the sale to Michael O’Malley.
The transaction would have proceeded with little notice but for Felton Newday’s insistence that a brief history of the property be read into the record, as the Pogue place was the site of a vicious murder and rape of a young girl sixty-four years ago. It was also the known haunt of brigands and poachers, and the murdered Leaf Pogue himself was long a recognized trafficker in illegal whiskies. The taxes were for a time paid sub rosa by a Ms. Fell every spring from 1954 until 1966 on the supposed anniversary of the crime, for which one Brodie Painter was convicted and hanged. The felon had put the old Pogue home to the torch after the crimes, but the outbuildings persisted as ramshackle reminders until the late fifties, and excursionists and hunters often used them as shelter. Many local residents will also recollect childhood legends of a spectral hen girl haunting the region.