Crow said, “Hell. Ain’t this a hoot? Neighbors now.”
The stuffy little shack with its nightly scurrying, slithering visitors had suddenly grown more appealing, but if he changed his mind now, Crow wouldn’t never let him forget it.
Del said, “Appears so.”
Crow kept scraping at his nails.
Del said, “Word gets round in this camp, so I’ve learned, and I ’spect you’ve heard about Cobb.”
Del watched him carefully. Crow paused in his nail cleaning and stared off into the distance.
“What about him?”
“You ain’t heard?”
Crow returned his gaze to his knife, applied it to his nails again.
“I been a little busy.”
“He’s not around. Ain’t no one seen him all day.”
“That right?”
His lack of reaction was peculiar. Matter of fact, his attitude was downright dull, and what Del had expected him to do, he didn’t. No talk of Woodall and his pack a hounds. No cussing, or comments about whippings, or the box. Nothing. Crow’s front door opened and the woman Del had seen earlier glanced at him, barely. She didn’t speak to either of them, and Crow remained as still as she was, as if one waited on the other to do something.
Del said, “Well. Good night.”
He shoved the front door open, went inside, and shut it. You couldn’t never tell with some. He’d met a lot of different kinds of people in his life, but he’d never met anyone like Crow. Maybe he’d come by his ways honestly, because his mama sure was a strange one. He moved about in the murky interior, feeling his way until his fingertips encountered the edge of a table and a lantern in the middle of it. He brushed his hands over the surface and found a small box of matches. He struck the match, lit the wick, and adjusted it. He then walked around the main room, pleased to see he had a small bedroom with a bed off to the right. How about that, a real bed, nothing like what he’d been sleeping on. It almost brought a smile to his face.
Back in the main room against one wall was a crudely built frame holding a wash pan like what he carried his things in. There was a wooden cabinet beside it for keeping flour, sugar, and such. He had two window openings at the front, and one on each side too. He went to the one at the front, pushed it from the bottom, and propped the stick left on the sill against the edge to hold it open. There was no breeze, but letting the night air in gave him the notion of it being cooler. He untied his belongings, such as they were.
As he was settling in, a barely discernible thumping came to him, and at first he paid it no mind, but then he did. It came from Crow’s house. He went over and stood by the side window, listening, and began to question what he was hearing. If it was what it sounded like, it didn’t make no sense. Del eased the shutter open. He should mind his own business, but he couldn’t hardly believe his ears. He glanced over to Crow’s, where the side window was open as well. The lantern’s glow cast a torrid scene before him, and Del backed away from the window, accidentally stumbling over one of the chairs set at the little table.
“Damn,” he said.
Suddenly, the window next door slammed shut and was so loud it echoed through the woods. Del stood in the middle of the room, replaying the snippet of what he’d witnessed over and over in his head. Crow and his mama? It was then he began to understand, perhaps a bit, what made the man the way he was.
Chapter 18
Rae Lynn
She wanted to call out for help, only she didn’t have it in her, and if she had, who would hear? She’d overheard the work hands say the box held nothing but sorrow, and all the tears and sweat of the suffering, as well as a bit of each soul who’d fled from it to the Great Beyond. If they did have to go by it, and they certainly had when the crop they were working happened to be beyond it, they’d turned their eyes away, some believing by looking at it, the sorrow it held would jump on to them.
Time no longer made sense. Whether it was light or dark, it all melted into one and the same. She’d gone deep inside herself, where she could escape the sticky, hot, suffocating interior. Once, she’d woke to what she thought was rain. She instinctively moved her head, opened her mouth, and caught a tiny stream of water, cool and sweet, falling through the thin crack, her only eye to the world. She wasn’t sure it was rain, though, because it stopped as quickly as it started. And there was the sun, high in the sky, creating a streaked pattern across the top of her. A miracle had happened, she determined. The water had been a miracle.