Free November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli

sister up on that bad road, Shad Jenkins? What if sweet Megan did go to sleep in the Lord’s arms like they say? What if you never got nobody to blame?”
    “When I’m satisfied I’ll let it go.”
    “And if it’s not to be?”
    “Do you always ask this many questions of the people who come to ask you questions?”
    She pursed her gray lips. “Yuh.”
    Okay, she was finally getting under his skin a little. “Do you accept it, M’am? That a seventeen-year-old girl’s heart just stops out in the low hills? In a spot she’s got no reason to be?”
    The question took her back with a hint of sour amusement. “Asking my opinion, are you?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Heh. Been a while since anyone asked me my consideration on a subject. They want answers and blessings and ways to fend off spells. And fatter calves.”
    So maybe it threw her, having somebody in front of her who didn’t bootlick. “Tell me about that place.”
    M’am fidgeted in her chair like she might want to hop off. Shad didn’t know whether to help or not. He heard her ancient knees pop and winced at the sound, but she soon settled.
    “I used to go up there with my ma and pa on Sunday afternoons after church. Dressed in pink with pretty bows in my blond hair. Hard to picture now, but so it was. Mama’d sing ‘Gather at the River’ while Daddy praised the Lord the whole ride up the mountain. In an ox wagon.” She smiled, and he saw that, brown and crooked as some of her teeth were, she still had all of them. “But those hills were cross. Peevish. The land’s got a taste for us.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Quiet now, you asked and I’m saying. So listen.”
    M’am Luvell pulled a wooden match from beneath her afghan and snapped her jagged thumbnail against it. She relit her pipe and allowed the seconds to roll by while she drew in a long, wheezing lungful of weed.
    “We fed the gorge our ill and our hated, and now the ground’s sick and full of scorn. It’s hungry, but fickle. Storms come out of nowhere. Winds that’ll take a man off his feet and hurl him into the chasm. There’s outrage up that way, in those woods. It took my ma when I was but a girl a’four.”
    “Wraiths?” Shad asked. “That played with you first before they chased and bit your legs?” He said it without judgment or presumption.
    “It’s the reason why I never grew none. The young’un spoke out of turn. But she did no more than declare the truth. As do I.”
    Shad stared at her.
    “You understand what I’m telling you?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
    “But don’t that threaten you none, boy? What you might find if you go digging in bitter soil?”
    He shrugged. “There’s evil everywhere.”
    The bullfrogs kept roaring, finding a nice contrapuntal harmony. Shad studied the old woman, trying to figure out if he was missing something here or if maybe she was. It didn’t much matter one way or the other. She tilted her head again, this time in the opposite direction, waiting for him to ask something else, but he didn’t see a point anymore. He walked out.

 
    Chapter Six
     
    YOU LEARNED TO PAY HEED TO THE DEAD breath on your neck.
    Shad had gotten away without much trouble in the slam, but he’d still tapped into the sensibility of always having danger at hand. Knowing it was always out there, an inch to your left. You always had to be careful, never think you were one of the blessed, like you couldn’t be touched. You could only be so stupid before you deserved to get taken out. Some cons thought their silver-tongued charm might be a defense, as if the charisma that made women giggle and bat their eyelashes on the outside could actually make the gen pop
like
them behind bars.
    Usually the violence wasn’t aimed at Shad, but it sometimes got close enough that another man’s blood wound up on the front of his shirt. His first week inside it happened twice on the cafeteria line when the guy standing directly in front of him had been