IGMS - Issue 12 Page 15

  "If it didn't happen to you then you just shut up about what's nothing or not," said Teague.

  Brother Deaver held out a little blue swatch of cloth. "Here's your underwear, Rona --"

  Rona turned away. Sister Monk snatched the panties out of Brother Deaver's hand. "For heaven's sake, Brother Deaver, use some sense. He touched these! She isn't going to put them back on."

  "Rona, I'm sorry, but we've got to get moving," said Teague. "Right now, right this second. Those gunshots are bound to call more of them -- these two might have twenty more a mile behind them."

  Rona turned away from him, staggered to Sister Monk. Marie didn't mind much, having Sister Monk switch from nursing her to comforting Rona. It was plain Rona was in worse shape.

  Teague got the other two men to help him hoist the corpses onto the horses.

  "Leave them here," said Annalee.

  "Got to bury them," said Teague.

  "They don't deserve it."

  Pete explained, real gentle. "So nobody finds the bodies and chases after us to get even."

  A minute later they were off the road and cutting along the edge of some farmer's field, half-screened by trees. Teague pushed them to go faster, and quieter, too, his voice just a whisper. Finally they were down a hill in the hollow. Teague had Brother Deaver and Brother Cinn dig a single large grave, while Annalee kept the children away from the horses.

  "Bury these, too," said Teague.

  That was the first time Marie noticed that both saddles had heads tied to them. They looked even worse close up than the heads Marie had seen from a distance.

  "I'll take them down," said Rona. She set right to untying the thongs from the saddle.

  "Me too," said Marie. She didn't even let herself wonder whether it had been a girl or a boy, a man or a woman.

  Teague took his rifle and went back up the hill to keep a watch on the road.

  Marie didn't puke and neither did Rona. Mostly Marie was just thinking about how grateful she was that her head wasn't on the horse. Then Marie helped Sister Monk strip the corpses and empty the pockets of everything. Three dozen shotgun shells. All kinds of matches and supplies. They stuffed it all in the saddlebags, which were already near full of stuff the mobbers no doubt stole from other folks just today. In twenty minutes both corpses were in the hole, dressed in their ragged underwear, the heads tucked around them, their limp, filthy clothes tossed in on top of them. Only Marie had noticed how Sister Monk wrapped Rona's blue panties inside one of the dead men's shirts. Rona insisted on helping them, tossing dirt onto the bodies until they were covered up.

  Marie couldn't keep from speaking. "They were poor."

  "Everybody's poor," said Pete. "But they kept alive by stealing the little that others had and likely killing them, too."

  "Feels wrong, having their victims' heads buried with them," said Sister Monk.

  "The victims don't mind," said Brother Deaver, "and we didn't have time to dig more holes. Marie, can you get up the hill real quiet and tell Brother Teague that we're done here?"

  But Teague had already seen from up the hill, and he slid down the slope. "Nobody coming. These two might've been alone," he said. "It's getting late enough, maybe we ought to camp farther on down the hollow here. If I remember right there's water. The horses'll need that. We can work the rest of the afternoon rigging up some kind of harness for the horses to pull the bikes." Teague looked at the grave. "Get some dead leaves on here. Something to make the soil not look so fresh-turned. And if this happens again, save out their clothes. Dead people don't need them."

  "We'd never wear them," said Brother Deaver.

  "You would, if it got cold enough, and you got naked enough."

  "I've never been that naked," said Brother Deaver.

  Teague shrugged.

  "Brother Teague," said Marie.

  "Yeah?"

  "I was wrong about not wanting you to kill for me."

  "I know," said Teague. And that was all he said to her. "Mr. Deaver, Mr. Cinn, you got any objection to hanging on to those shotguns?"

  "If they do, I don't," said Sister Cinn.

  Brother Deaver and Brother Cinn kept to themselves any objections they might have had. They slung the shotguns over their shoulders. Brother Cinn dropped a few shells in his pocket; then he dropped some in Brother Deaver's pocket. Brother Deaver looked at him in surprise, then embarrassment. Marie was a little disgusted. Didn't college professors know anything?

  Mostly, though, Marie watched Teague. That's why she was the only one who saw how Teague kept clenching and unclenching his jaw. How his hand shook a little. And late that night, she was the only one who woke up when he took a walk in the moonlight.

  She got up and followed him. He stood beside the grave, looking nowhere in particular, his hands jammed in his pockets. He showed no sign of noticing she was there, but she knew he had heard her coming from the minute she got up from the ground.

  "You're such a liar," said Marie. "You didn't kill your parents."

  He didn't say a thing.

  "You never killed a living soul before today."

  "Believe what you like," he said.

  "You never."

  He just stood there with his hands in his pockets until she went back to the camp. She lay there wondering why a man might want other folks to think he was a murderer when he wasn't. Then she wondered why she wanted so bad to believe a man wasn't a murderer when he said right out that he was. She lay awake a long time, but he didn't come back until after she was asleep.

  As for Rona, Marie was sure that girl really did have a crush on Jamie Teague, before. Seeing how Teague saved her from rape and probably from having her head bounce along on some mobber's saddle, you'd think she's be totally in love with him now. But no, not Rona. From then on it was like Teague didn't even exist, except as just another grown-up. Like he was nothing special.

  There's just no understanding some people, Marie decided. Maybe Rona just couldn't be grateful and in love at the same time. Maybe she couldn't forgive Teague for waiting to kill the mobbers till they had her panties off. Or maybe Rona just couldn't ever be married to a man that watched her stamp a dead man's head to mush. Rona never told her, and Marie never asked.

  Marie carried a scar on her forehead to the end of her life. She'd touch it now and then, and from the start she was glad to have it. She always remembered that it could have been much worse for her than a gun barrel leaning on her head. She could've been in Rona's place.

  Day after next they came to the mountains, where the road sloped upward so steep that they had to stop and rest every twenty minutes or so. Pete was grateful they had the horses now, to pull the carts, though he didn't say so out loud; it didn't do to start saying it was a good thing to have the horses, not with Rona still so upset about how they got them.

  Pete concentrated on the children, his own and the orphans. They were the ones who suffered most, he knew that. The youngest of them, Scotty Porter and Valerie Letterman, they weren't even born when the first plague struck. The famous Six Missiles had already fallen before Scotty and Valerie said their first words. He murmured to Annalee one time, "Think there's any chance of getting them into a college-prep kindergarten?" But she'd either forgotten all that craziness from the old days, or else she didn't think it was funny. She didn't think much was funny these days. Neither did Pete, for that matter. But at least he tried now and then. Sometimes, for hours, maybe even days at a time, he didn't think about his father killed in the missile that got D.C., or his stepfather shot by looters, or his mom and Annalee's folks and all their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews crammed into the cultural hall at the stake center, not being sure what was going to happen to them, but knowing deep down all the time, knowing and being terrified. I was in plays on the stage where the guys with the guns stood. I played basketball on the floor where the bullets gouged up the wood finish and blood soaked in under the polish. I was baptized in the font behind the stage, where the men from the
city hooked up the hoses to wash out the blood. The Baptists were already talking about making it a Christian library when Pete went there to lay flowers in the parking lot where he had first kissed Annalee after the dance, where now his kin and his friends lay in a jumbled heap of broken bodies under the dirt.

  That was the whole world to these children. It had always been in turmoil -- did they even realize that things weren't supposed to be this way? Would they ever trust anything again, now that their parents had been taken away from them?

  Teague asked him once, when they were alone together, leading the horses. "Whose kids are those?"

  "Donna, the big one, she's mine, and so's Nat, he's my boy."

  "Any fool can see that, they're so blond," said Teague.

  "Mick and Scotty Porter, Valerie Letterman, Cheri Ann Bee, they're orphans."

  "Why'd you bring them along? Wasn't there anybody in Greensboro who could've took care of them?"

  "That's what took us so long leaving. Fighting everybody to get the right to take them with us."

  "But why? Don't you know how much faster we'd go, how much safer we'd be without them?"

  Pete held himself back, kept himself from being angry, like he always tried to do and almost always succeeded. "It's like this, Teague. If we left them, they would've been raised up Baptists."

  "That ain't so bad," said Teague.

  Pete held himself back again, a long time, before he could answer quiet and calm. "You see, Teague, it was mostly Baptist preachers who spent fifteen years telling people how Mormons were the anti-Christ, how we had secret rituals in the temple where we worshiped Satan. How we and Jesus and the devil were brothers, and how we weren't Christians but pretended to be so we could steal away their children, how we Mormons owned everything and made sure we got rich while good Christians stayed poor. And then when bad times came, all those Baptist preachers washed their hands and said, 'We never told anybody to kill Mormons.' Well, that's true. They never taught murder. But they taught hate and fear, they told lies and they knew they were doing it. Now, Teague, do you see why we wouldn't let these Mormon kids get raised by people who'd tell such lies about the religion their parents died for?"

  Teague thought about that for a while. "How come these kids got out alive? I heard the Christian Soldiers went through killing the wounded."

  So Teague had heard the story. "These four went to Guilford Primary. When the Christian Soldiers were going around arresting people, they got to Guilford Primary school, and Dr. Sonja Day, the principal, she met them at the door. Didn't have a gun or anything. She just shows them the ashes of the school records, still smoldering. She says to them, 'All the children in this school are Mormon today, and me and all the faculty. If you take anybody, you take us all.' Faced them down and they finally went away."

  "Guts."

  "Think about it, Teague. Mormon kids were ripped out of class in fifty schools in the county. If more principals had guts --"

  "One out of fifty's above average, Cinn."

  "That's why America deserves all that's happened to her. That's why the Lord hasn't saved us. America turned to loving evil."

  "Maybe they were just afraid," said Teague.

  "Afraid or weak or evil, all three roads lead to hell."

  "I know," whispered Teague.

  His whisper was so deep and sore that Pete knew he'd touched some wounded place in Teague. Pete wasn't one to push deeper at a time like that. He backed off, let a man be. You don't go poking into a wound, that just gets it all infected. You keep hands off, you let it heal up, you give it time and air and gentleness.

  "Teague, I wish you'd take me with you when you scout around or go hunting or whatever."

  "I need you to stay with the rest. I don't figure Deaver to be much good with a shotgun."

  "Maybe not," said Pete. "But if you don't go with us beyond these mountains, somebody's got to be able to do some of what you do."

  "I been walking the woods for ten years now, long before the plagues started."

  "I got to start sometime."

  "When we get to the Blue Ridge Parkway, I'll start to take you hunting with me. But you carry no gun."

  "Why not?"

  "Take it or leave it. Can you throw?"

  "I pitched hardball."

  "A rock?"

  "I suppose."

  "If you can't hunt with a rock, you can't hunt. Bullets are for killing things big enough to kill you. Because when the bullets run out, there won't be no more."

  The higher they got into the mountains, the more relaxed Teague got. After a while, he stopped having them look for sheltered, hidden places to camp in; they camped right out in the open. "Mobbers don't come up this high," said Teague.

  "Why not?"

  "Because when they do, they don't come back."

  At the Blue Ridge Parkway, Teague laid out a whole new set of rules. "Walk spaced apart, not bunched up. Stay on the pavement or close to it. Nobody goes off alone. Don't hold anything in your hand, not even a rock. Keep your hands in plain sight all the time. If somebody comes, don't move your hands above your waist, not even to scratch your nose. Just keep walking. Above all, make plenty of noise."

  "I take it we're not afraid of bushwhackers anymore," said Brother Deaver.

  "These are mountain people around here, and Cherokees beyond Asheville. They don't rob people, but they also don't ask a lot of questions before they kill strangers. If they think you might, just might cause them any trouble, you're dead where you stand. So make it plain that you aren't trying to sneak up on anybody and you stay visible all the time."

  "We can sing again?" asked Sister Monk.

  "Anything but that 'walked and walked and walked and walked' song."

  It was a glorious time then. The Blue Ridge Parkway crested the hills, so they had sky all around them, and the mountains were as pretty as Pete had ever seen them. His real dad took them along the parkway most autumns when he was growing up. One year they drove it clear from Harpers Ferry down to the Cherokee Reservation. Pete and his brother griped the whole way till their dad was promising to amputate limbs if they didn't shut up, but now the trip was glorious in memory. Sometimes Pete forgot he was a grown-up, walking along here, especially when he walked on ahead so he couldn't see any of them. It wasn't autumn yet, though autumn wasn't far off; still, it felt good, felt like coming home. He'd heard other folks say that, too, about the Blue Ridge. About the Appalachians in general. Felt like coming home even if they grew up in some desolate place like California or North Dakota.

  Teague made good his promise. It near drove Pete crazy the first few times, when his rock always missed and Teague's almost never did. But after a while he got the knack of it. It was like pitching with a smaller strike zone. By the time they skirted around Asheville, he could clean a squirrel in two minutes and a rabbit in three. He also learned how to choose a hunting ground. You always look for a cabin and walk up singing, so they know you're coming. Then you ask the owner where it's OK to hunt, and if he'd like you to split your catch with him. To hear these mountain folks talk, you could hunt wherever you liked; but Teague would never so much as pick up a rock unless the folks had said "That holler down there" or "Along that slope there," and even though they always said, "No need to bring me none," Teague always took the whole catch to them and offered them half. He wouldn't leave until they'd accepted at least one animal. "They can't claim you stole it then," said Teague. "If they took part of it, it wasn't poaching."

  "What's to stop them from lying and saying you stole it?" asked Pete.

  Teague looked at him like he was stupid. "These are mountain people."

  Whenever he returned from hunting, Pete loved to hear the sound of the children singing, and the grown-ups too now, more and more. Most of all he loved hearing his Annalee's voice, singing and laughing. When they climbed up out of the piedmont and into the mountains, it was like rising out of hell. This is what redemption feels like, he thought. This is what it's like when Christ for
gives you of your sins. Like putting you on the top of a green mountain, with as many clouds below you as above; and all your bad memories just washed away with the rain, got lost in morning fogs. All those bad memories were lowland troubles, left behind, gone. Pete had been born again.

  "I never want to come down out of here," he told Annalee.

  "I know," she said. "I feel like that too."

  "Then let's don't go down."

  She looked at him sharply. "What's got into you, Peter? You talk like Teague, you walk like Teague. If I'd wanted to marry a hillbilly I'd've gone to Appalachian State or Western Carolina."

  "A man belongs up here."

  "A Latter-day Saint belongs in the kingdom of God."

  "Look around you, Annalee, and tell me God doesn't love this place."

  "There's no safety here. You feel good cause we don't have to hide every night. But we aren't staying in the open cause we're safe and free, we're staying in the open so somebody won't shoot our heads off. We'd never belong here. But we're already citizens of Utah. Every Mormon is."

  After that Pete didn't mention his desire to stay in the mountains, not to Annalee, not to anybody. He knew that after a while they'd all come around to his point of view. When you get to heaven, why go farther? That's what Pete thought.

  "Sister Monk, your dress is getting longer," said Valerie Letterman one day.

  "I must be getting shorter," Tina answered.

  "You're getting prettier."

  "Child, you're going to make a lot of friends in this world."

  But Valerie was right. Walking more than two hundred miles was every bit as effective as stomach stapling in the old days. She'd already hemmed up the skirts of all her dresses twice, as her bulk evaporated. She could feel the muscles working under the flesh of her arms and legs. She could spring to her feet all at once, instead of step by step -- all fours, kneel up, one foot planted, two feet squatting, and the last terrible unbending of the knees. That was ancient history now. She rolled out of her blanket -- it was cold at night up here -- and got right to her feet and felt like every step she was jumping several feet in the air. All the pills she'd tried, all the doctors, all the diets, all the exercises -- but the only thing that worked was to walk from Greensboro to Topton.