Patricia remembered Kershaw. They’d driven the hundred and fifty miles upstate many times to visit Carter’s cousins, and Miss Mary when she lived alone. They hadn’t been in a long while, but Patricia remembered a dry land populated by dry people, covered in dust, with filling stations at every crossroads selling evaporated milk and generic cigarettes. She remembered fallow fields and abandoned farms. She understood the appeal of something fresh, and clean, and green to people who lived in a small, hot place like that.

“Around then the Beckham boy went missing,” Miss Mary said. Her throat rasped now. “He was a pale little redheaded thing, six years old, who’d follow anyone anywhere. When he didn’t come home for supper we all went looking. We expected to find him curled up under a pecan tree, but no. Some people said the government inoculation men took him away, others said there was a colored gal in the woods who churned white children into a stew she sold as a love spell for a nickel a taste. Some folks said he fell in the river and got carried away, but it didn’t matter what they said—he was gone.

“The next little boy to vanish was Avery Dubose. He was a tin bucket toter and Hoyt told everyone he must have fell in one of the machines at the mill and the boss lied about it. That stirred up bad feelings between the mill and the farmers, and with so much rabbit spit around tempers ran hot. Men started showing up at church with their arms in slings and bruises on their faces. Mr. Beckham shot himself.

“But we had presents under the tree that Christmas and Daddy convinced Mama sweet times were here. In January her belly got tight and round. I was their only baby who’d lived out of three, but now another baby had taken root.

“They’d never have found Charlie Beckham if that combine salesman hadn’t stopped his horses at the Moores’ old place and seen the water from their pump flow thick with maggots. They had to let that little boy’s body sit in the icehouse for three days to let all the water drain before he’d fit in his coffin. Even then, they had to build it extra wide.”

White spit formed gummy balls in the corners of Miss Mary’s mouth, but Patricia didn’t move. She worried that if she did anything to break the spell this thread might snap, and Miss Mary might never speak like this again.

“That spring, nobody could afford to plant nothing,” Miss Mary went on. “Nobody had nothing in the ground so Daddy and Hoyt had to spend big to bring corn all the way from Rock Hill, and they had all their money tied up in the rabbit spit barrels. The banks didn’t care about no scrip and they started taking everyone’s tools, and their horses, and mules, and no one could do nothing. Everyone waited for those barrels.

“The third little boy to go missing was Reverend Buck’s baby and the men got together on our back porch and I heard them speculate through my window about one person or another, and the jar kept getting passed, and then Hoyt Pickens said he’d seen Leon Simms around the Moore farm one night, and I wanted to laugh because only a stranger would say that. Leon was a colored fellow and something had happened to his head in the war. He sat in the sun outside Mr. Early’s store, and if you gave him candy he’d play something for you on the spoons and sing. His mother took care of him and he got a government check. Sometimes he helped people carry packages and they always paid him in candy.

“But Hoyt Pickens said Leon liked to wander at night and had been creeping in places he shouldn’t. He said this is what happens when people come down from up north and spread ideas in places that weren’t ready for them. He said that Leon Simms sat outside Mr. Early’s store and licked his lips over children and took them to secret places where he slaked his unnatural appetite.

“The more Hoyt Pickens talked, the more the men thought he sounded right. I must have nodded off because when I opened my eyes it was full dark and the backyard was empty. I heard the train pass, and a hoot owl carrying on out in the woods, and I was slipping back to sleep when the land lit up.

“A crowd of men came in following a wagon and they had lanterns and flashlights. They were quiet but I heard one hard voice talking loud, giving orders, and it was my daddy. Next to him stood Hoyt Pickens and his ice cream suit glowed in the dark. They pulled something off the back of the cart, a big burlap bag we used for picking cotton, and they lifted one end and something flowed out wet and black onto the dirt. It was Leon, all tied with rope.

“The men got shovels, and they dug a deep hole underneath the peach tree and dragged Leon to it and he must not have been dead because I heard him call my daddy ‘boss’ and say, ‘Please, boss, I’ll play you something, boss,’ and they threw him down in that hole and piled dirt on top of him until his begging got muffled, and after a while you couldn’t hear it anymore, but I still could.

“When I woke up early there was mist on the ground and I went out back to see if maybe I’d had a bad dream. But I could see the fresh-dug dirt and then I heard a noise and saw my daddy sitting real quiet in the corner of the porch and he had a jar of rabbit spit between his legs. His eyes were swollen red and when he saw me he gave me a grin that came straight out of Hell.”

Patricia realized that was why Miss Mary let the peaches rot. The memory of the fruit’s sweet juice running down her chin, its meat filling her stomach, now tasted sour with Leon Simms’s blood.

“Hoyt Pickens left before the rabbit spit turned brown,” Miss Mary croaked. “Daddy took the wagon to Columbia but he couldn’t find who’d been buying from Hoyt. All our money was in those barrels but no one in Kershaw could buy the rabbit spit at the price Daddy needed and he drank up most of it himself over the next few years. Mama lost my brother child and Daddy sold his stills for eating money. He never worked another day, just sat out back, drinking that brown rabbit spit alone because no one would come by our place knowing what we had buried there. When he finally hanged himself in the barn it was a mercy. When hard times came a few years later some people say it was Leon Simms that poisoned the land, but I’ll always know it was Hoyt.”

In the long silence, water overflowed Miss Mary’s twitching eyelids and ran down her face. She licked her lips, and Patricia saw that a white film coated her tongue. Her skin looked thin as paper, her hands felt cold as ice. Her breathing sounded like tearing cloth. Slowly, Patricia watched her bloodshot eyes lose their focus, and she realized telling the story had set Miss Mary adrift. Patricia started to pull her hand from Miss Mary’s, but the old lady tightened her fingers and held firm.

“Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”

Patricia waited for Miss Mary to say something else, but her mother-in-law didn’t move. After a while, she pulled her hand from Miss Mary’s cold fingers and watched the old woman fall asleep with her eyes still open.

A black wind pressed down on her house.

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

July 1993

CHAPTER 12

Deep summer suffocated the Old Village. It hadn’t rained all month. The sun cooked lawns to a crunchy yellow, baked sidewalks white-hot, made roof shingles soft, and heated telephone poles until the streets smelled like warm creosote. Everyone abandoned the outdoors except for the occasional midafternoon child darting across spongy asphalt streets. No one did yard work after ten in the morning, and they saved their errands until after six at night. From sunup to sundown, the whole world felt flooded in boiling honey.

But Patricia wouldn’t run errands after the sun started to go down. When she had to go to the store or the bank, she raced to her sunbaked Volvo and blasted the air conditioner while sitting miserably on the scorching front seat until she could tolerate touching the burning hot steering wheel. She insisted that Blue take the garbage cans out to the street before dark, no matter how much he complained about dragging them to the end of the driveway under the relentless, burning sun.

After sundown Patricia stayed close to home. When Korey or Blue got picked up for sleepovers, she watched from the front porch until they got into the cars, closed the doors, and drove safely off the Cruze. Even when their central air conditioning finally broke and the air-conditioner man told them they should have called earlier and it would be two weeks before he could get parts, Patricia insisted on locking every window and door before they went to bed. No matter how many fans they had running, every night, everyone sweated through all their sheets, and every morning Patricia stripped every single bed and made them up again fresh. The dryer ran nonstop.

Finally, James Harris saved their lives.

The doorbell rang during supper one night and Patricia went to answer, not wanting Korey or Blue to open the door after dark. James Harris stood on her porch.