Page 80 of Stay Buried

“Let’s go.” Uncle Thomas squeezed my hand, trying to rally us both. He was still wearing his coat and clutching his medical bag.

WE ARRIVED ATthe church to find a group of men gathered there: Michael Knapp, Pete Talbott, Robbie Prichard, and Jim Collins—Luther’s young farmhand. Jim didn’t meet my eye when I looked at him. Reverend Davies had been praying, saying something about Jesus having mercy, about the trickster Satan being driven out, when we walked in and he looked up. The church was dark inside, lit only by the dim sunlight coming in through the windows and a few oil lamps. It had been years since I last attended church, but I immediately recognized the close, almost claustrophobic feeling, the smell of the oil lamps, candles, and incense Reverend Davies sometimes burned combined with old wood and furniture polish.

Finally we reached Mrs. Stoddard. She was up at the front of the church, in the sanctuary before the altar, the men in a loose circle around her. She lay on her back in a floral dress that was several sizes too large. Her hands and feet were purple, her hair a nest of tangles.

Just behind her, Jesus watched from the cross, his hands and feet nailed and bleeding, his head ringed with a crown of thorns, his eyes half open. Above the crucifix, a round window let in rays of diffuse light.

“Was she dressed when you found her?” Uncle Thomas asked, getting down on his knees. I joined him there on the ground, ready to assist in any way I could. He felt her neck for a pulse, put his ear to her chest and shook his head. She was gone.

The dead have a certain look: a waxy pallor, a film over the eyes. They no longer look human to me, but like a shell of what once was, an empty cup. It always makes my heart ache—to see how little is left when a person passes from this world on to the next.

Mrs. Stoddard had always been so kind to me. Treated me like her own daughter when I was young. Made molasses cookies when I visited because she knew they were my favorite. Now she lay there, lifeless, an empty husk. The sweet and rotten smell still came off her. I was so grateful that Pearl had left town, that she was not here to see her mother like this.

“Was she dressed when you found her?” Uncle Thomas asked again, more firmly this time.

“No,” Reverend Davies said. “She was unclothed when they brought her in. I thought it was only right to preserve her decency, to cover her up in the house of God. So I asked Gayle for one of her dresses.”

Gayle was Reverend Davies’s wife, leader of the church choir, and a good friend of Aunt Margaret’s.

“Help me with this, Frankie,” Uncle Thomas said as he began undoing the buttons on the dress.

“What are you doing, Doctor?” Reverend Davies asked. “Isn’t itclear that the poor woman is beyond saving? She’s with Jesus now.”

“Her soul is free of the wicked one at last,” added Robbie Prichard.

“Hasn’t she been through enough, Doc? Out there for days, consorting with the devil. Doesn’t she deserve to be left at peace?” asked Michael Knapp as my uncle and I continued to undress her.

“I shall examine the body,” Thomas said determinedly.

“I don’t think—” the reverend started to argue.

“If we have any chance of surviving this sickness, I need to understand all I can about it.”

I knew he was right. Clarice Stoddard had been the picture of health when she was bitten, making her the first such person to succumb to the sickness. Her body might hold some sort of clue, something to help Uncle Thomas understand how to prevent more deaths.

“My God,” Uncle Thomas said as soon as her upper body was bared. “Who did this?” he demanded, glancing up and looking from one man’s face to another.

“We found her like this,” Pete said. “I swear.”

“She was out at the base of Saw Meadow Hill,” Michael added.

The bandage on her arm was gone, the bite wound red and festering, a yellowish, foul-smelling pus leaking from it.

Her skin had a yellow tinge but was mottled with purple and black in places—signs of frostbite, of dying tissue.

Yet it was clear that neither the cold nor the mysterious illness had killed her.

Clarice had been shot with a bullet straight through the heart.

THIRTY-THREEMINI

October 18, 2016

Her mother closed the curtains in the living room and forbade her to look through them.

“We’re not to go out. Not to be seen. We’ve been shunned, Mini, so like it or not, this is the way we live until he comes for us.”

The way her mother said it made Mini wonder if maybe Mama knew she’d snuck out twice yesterday: to the Holland pasture, and then later to the cemetery. But there was no way she’d know. Still, Mama had a suspicious look in her eye, like she no longer trusted Mini. And why should she?