Night-Blooming Flowers

She still grew her flowers, as she always had, even through the bad years—and, because of the man she’d married, there had been plenty of those. When she needed them, she bought seed packets from the same hardware store, which was still holding on despite the competition from the big chain store out on the highway. The hardware business had a different owner now, and Nathan had not worked there for many years, more than she wanted to think about and not since he’d pled guilty to murder—Puckett’s murder, her husband’s.

She’d kept Puckett’s name, which some—those who knew the kind of man he was—might have found strange, but it was her own private way of acknowledging her ultimate connection to him. Once you’d prayed for a husband’s death, that was a kind of solemn bond that could not be broken, and she accepted that. She’d always called him Puckett, never by his given name, and had always thought of him as Puckett. It was an old-fashioned habit, one she’d acquired from an earlier generation of country women she remembered from childhood, their way maybe of showing consent to a man’s authority—or making him think they did.

She’d remained in the same house after Puckett’s death, a kind of stubborn act on her part, and Julia had slowly made the house hers by painting the rooms in softer colors and getting rid of every item that uttered his name: turkey calls, shotguns, boots, papers, his truck, the old safe she’d finally found the key to and discovered more cash than she’d even expected. Outside she’d expanded her flowerbeds, filling them with marigolds, mums, geraniums, violets, hydrangeas. Certain darker varieties of daylilies and camellias reminded her of the flowers that had bloomed on her body, never constrained by any season, her skin fertile ground. The bruises were not constant. She might have likened them to occasionals. He usually hit her where they would not show, but sometimes he was careless, and when they bloomed on her temple or cheek, she did not try to cover them. Nathan had certainly seen them, as she’d meant for him to, when he waited on her in the hardware store. He never commented but knew their origin as well as he himself knew the man and all Puckett was capable of. His own history with Puckett was already enough to give Nathan cause for taking her husband’s life. No, he had not killed Puckett for her sake, but on a dark night on the street in front of her house, while rain fell, she’d stood at the window of Nathan’s truck and intimated what she wanted from him, granting him tacit permission. She hadn’t expected him to turn himself in afterward, nor had she wanted him to.

In the last week or so she thought she might have seen Nathan’s old truck slowly pass her house. She couldn’t be sure, of course. Its green paint was more faded, its tailgate dented, and ten years or so of wear were added on, but any number of old, worn-out trucks littered the streets of Demarville. This one didn’t have to be his. Then two days ago it had stopped for a moment in the same spot where Nathan had once parked and through her bedroom window she thought she recognized inside the cab not Nathan, who was still in prison at Holman, but the boy who was no longer a boy and who she suspected knew as much as Nathan did about what had transpired at the cross garden—that spot above the wooded bank of the Black Fork River where Nathan had planted white crosses and a pre-dug grave had awaited her husband’s body.

Julia had hoped it was not the boy. She hadn’t seen Nathan since that night in front of her house, and she had no desire to see the boy now. But on a bright Saturday at midday as she weeded her beds and dirt covered both her hands and edged under her fingernails, his shadow appeared beside her, and it did not startle her but only confirmed the inevitability of his arrival.

He didn’t speak but cleared his throat, and she stood up beside the raised flowerbed and turned toward him. His blond hair was darker but still blond enough to call it so. She didn’t address him but merely nodded a greeting.

“You probably don’t know who I am,” he said. He looked down at the ground and then back at her. It was not a movement that suggested shyness from him but more a hesitation on his part to say what he needed to, and she was curious about what that might be.

“I’ve seen you around town over the years. I know who you are. You’re James.” Then, for a moment, she hesitated herself. “I think it was you who snuck back here one night. You took all the screens off the back windows. Wanted my husband to think somebody had tried to break in.”

He looked out across the backyard and seemed to slowly survey all her beds, the ones that were raised and the ones that bordered the backyard fence. “You’ve got more flowers now than you did then.”

She nodded at first, letting him know she understood what he’d told her. “More weeds, too,” she said and looked at the pile by her feet.

“So what kinds of flowers are these?” he said, looking down at where she’d been working.

She couldn’t resist answering. “Those are tuberose,” she said, pointing. “Same as the old brand of snuff. And those beside them are moonflowers, which are poisonous. And these”—she pointed to the ones nearest her—“are Casablanca lilies. That’s flowering tobacco over there. Not that you can smoke it. And over by the fence, I’ve got Devil’s trumpet that blooms purple.” She grew self-conscious now, aware that she was talking more than she normally did and knew he couldn’t really be interested in what she was saying, despite his question.

“Something wrong with them?” he said. She looked at him over her wire-rimmed glasses, puzzled by what he’d asked. “Ain’t none of them bloomed out like your others.”

“They only open up and show their full selves at night.”

He seemed to consider this, as if it held some meaning for him, and considering what she knew of his past, maybe it did.

“So they like the darkness,” he said and met her gaze. “They your favorites?”

Julia didn’t look away from him, but she did not answer. So far, their conversation felt peculiar, like two strangers talking in a familiar way that couldn’t be explained. “You didn’t come here to talk to me about flowers,” she said finally.

He wiped a drop of sweat from his chin and dried his hand on his jeans. “No, I didn’t.”

“There’s chairs and shade on the back porch. You want to sit?” she asked and immediately regretted the invitation. What good could talking to him do her? But she guessed her curiosity and suspicions had gotten the better of her, and it wasn’t like he was one of those reporters who’d come around years earlier and asked questions about her husband she’d refused to answer. And he wasn’t one of the church members, along with Reverend Prestwood, who’d come around back then asking why she’d quit attending when this was the time she must need God the most. She’d decided finally that it was more their curiosity that had brought them to her door than any real concern, though maybe she’d thought the worst of them and wondered later what that said about her. As for Prestwood, she should have judged him better to begin with.

James now followed her toward the house and chose one of the green, canvas-backed chairs beside a small glass table. She went inside, felt the bracing relief of cool air blowing, and poured two glasses of tea. Then she walked back onto the porch and sat down beside him.

“We saw each other that night I pulled these screens off.” He gestured directly behind them toward the windows that looked inward on the den. “After I done it, you were standing out in front of the house with the porch light on, and you watched me drive by under a streetlight.” She nodded, remembering. “Did you figure I was one of his boys, come to break in his house instead of somebody else’s?”

She was thirsty but let her tea sit and spoke through a dry mouth. “I didn’t know if he still had a ring of boys. He never told me about anything illegal that he did. Not ever. Nathan’s mother, years earlier, she’s the one who told me about him once having a theft ring. I knew her from church, even went to her house a time or two.”

He took a drink. “He still had us boys,” he said and held the cool glass against his cheek. She noticed then just how blue his eyes were.

“I know. All that came out after his death. And even though they never used your name in the paper, I knew about you turning yourself in for breaking into that store where the boy with you was shot.”

“How’d you find out it was me?”

She drank from her tea and felt relief in her throat. “Granville, who used to own the hardware store, his wife, Elizabeth, she’s my cousin. She told me about it. They knew about you from Nathan. Lucky that other boy lived.”

James nodded and his eyes partly closed, as if he were seeing not what was in front of him but what was behind him in his past. “Very lucky,” he said.

She was afraid he would say more when she knew it was best to leave the past where it was, somewhere behind those blue eyes. But when he didn’t say more, she found she couldn’t quite let it be. “I always thought it was strange how a week after Nathan turned himself in you did the same.”

For a moment he looked her way but then stared out at the yard and at the various beds. “I’d like to see them,” he said, and it was as if he were talking to himself more than to her.

“See what?”

“Those blooms.”

It took her a moment, and then she understood. “Maybe you’d like to show up one night with a flashlight so you can get a good look.”

“Or maybe you’ll know I’m out here, and you can turn on a light for me.”

They were both quiet for a few moments after that. He kept looking toward her, and then Julia watched as his face slowly began to grow tense, as if the quiet between them presented some opportunity he’d hoped he might find and be ready for, but she saw he was now struggling with it and deciding he wasn’t ready after all. What did he want to tell her? she wondered. And then he took a drink of his tea and just that quickly—with the abruptness of youth, because he was still that young—whatever moment had arrived for him was gone, and she felt grateful that it was. Later, of courses, she knew she’d wonder again about the things he might have told her.

What he finally said after a little more time had passed, with his gaze steady on her once more, was still a surprise even if it wasn’t all he’d wanted to say. “Nathan’s coming up for parole.”

The words were more than sound in the air. They had a weight to them not unlike a handful of dirt in her palm. She’d known Nathan hadn’t gotten the death penalty or life without parole. She’d figured—because her husband was known by many as a man who needed killing—that a deal had been struck for Nathan, who had, after all, turned himself in when he might very well have gotten away with it.

But the idea of his being released was not something she’d thought about. Maybe if it had been twenty years, but not eleven. She’d never wanted him to go to prison, but the notion of his being released threw her. Did she feel she owed him something for the time he’d done, or would seeing him out be too constant a reminder of how she’d asked God for what must be unforgiveable? She did not need a reminder of what she’d prayed for. It was why she had not returned to church and had given up prayer. Yet she’d kept Puckett’s name, which was a reminder of what she’d done but was also a punishment she’d placed upon herself because no matter what had been done to her, her words to God had been sinful. She hadn’t simply asked for the abuse to stop but had prayed for a malevolent act. It could not have been God who granted her prayer. It had to have been an interloper. She’d understood then that there was a darkness inside her already. Could that have been what drew her to a man like Puckett and gave her the ability to sense in him the kind of man he was without his telling or warning her?

“He’s not likely to get out yet,” James said, “but maybe he could if…” He didn’t finish but just that quickly she knew what he intended to say. He looked out at the flowers again, as if they showed some level of goodness she might possess, and then he turned back to her. “If you’d be willing to go speak up for him, it could make a difference.”

Only one answer came to mind, but maybe it was one that would satisfy the boy. “The parole people, if they hear me speak for Nathan, they might think I paid him to kill my husband. That wouldn’t do Nathan any good, or me.”

“That ain’t what happened.” He made the statement so firmly, as if he had no doubt of its truth and couldn’t see the parole board thinking otherwise.

“You seem pretty sure about that,” she said and wanted to ask him why, but she took a different tact. “Why don’t you go speak for him? Maybe there’s something you could offer. A story about him that could help.”

His face grew tense again, his mouth tight, and his blue eyes narrowed, not with anger but with concern. “No, that’s not something I could do. There’s nothing I’d be able to say.” She noticed how slowly and carefully he spoke.

He looked away from her, and his avoidance of her gaze seemed a measure of some greater and more necessary aloofness that she felt she could guess at with some degree of accuracy, but she was not going to say to him that he must have been present when Puckett breathed his last.

Now he drank a larger swallow of tea and sat the glass down. She knew he was about to stand, and he did. “Will you think about doing it—speaking up for him?”

“I don’t know that I will.”

He nodded, as if it were an answer he could accept but that he hoped for more from her. He took a final look across the backyard and walked out of the shade of the covered porch and into the sunlight. In a moment his blond head disappeared around the corner of her house.

Julia carried the two glasses inside and put them in the kitchen sink. Her intention was to finish her weeding and then maybe fix some lunch, but after all the talk Puckett was too much on her mind, to the very point of distraction. There wasn’t much of him left, but that was as it should be after all the passing years. She went to the hall closet and reached down for the white cardboard box, opened its top, and pulled out the clear plastic bag. She had told the funeral home people that she did not want an urn. So this was what they’d given her, and it suited, the box a kind of coop for him that she could open and close at her will. She noticed as she gripped the bag that there was still some dirt under her nails, despite her having washed her hands before she poured the tea. She carried the bag into the hall bathroom and lifted the lid to the commode. Then she angled the bag and watched as a portion of his ashes and tiny bits of bone slid out and into the water and made ripples in the bowl. She flushed then and watched as a little more of her husband headed to his final and deserved resting place.

~

For the next few days, she didn’t venture out. She needed no groceries, and she did not really have friends that she visited. There were a few ponds outside of town where she had permission to fish, and so sometimes she took a cane pole and crickets and caught bream. She loved the meat and didn’t mind how boney it was, but at the moment she felt no desire to fish, and she’d finished the weeding she needed to do late in the day after James had left. Sometimes her cousin, Elizabeth, came to see her, but not often. Now, though, Julia found herself thinking about Elizabeth and Granville. She knew why.

She could have called but didn’t. She’d grown up in a time when dropping in was considered neighborly and not rude, and so had Elizabeth. She pulled up to their red-brick and oak-shaded home in the very late afternoon, and before she could knock, Elizabeth opened the door with a look on her face that already concealed any hint of mild shock at who stood at her door.

“Why, how nice,” Elizabeth said. “Come on in the kitchen with me.” Elizabeth’s gray hair was pinned up in back, and she wore a plain, brown housedress that hung loosely, and its folds accentuated the way her once slender figure had now become too thin with age. When they entered the kitchen, Julia was surprised when she saw Granville sitting at the table with an oxygen tube in his nose and a tank of air standing on the floor next to a walker. She hadn’t known his health had taken this far a turn, and, like Elizabeth, she withheld her shock, but he must have seen some trace of a response in her face.

“Never even smoked,” Granville said as if they’d already been talking about the mystery of how his illness had been visited upon him. And now, maybe bored already with the subject of himself, he asked how she was in a tone she recognized as genuine. She allowed she was well and sat down at the table across from him, and then Elizabeth sat also. The air was filled with the warm smell of a roast cooking.

Julia had never been much for small talk, and after a few more pleasantries from Elizabeth and then Granville, they were quiet and waited on her to speak. She touched her hand to the side of her face and then removed it as if remembering she no longer had to test the soreness of a bruise. “That boy, James—y’all know the one. He came to see me the other day.”

Granville looked surprised and didn’t try to hide the fact. “Nathan used to talk about him,” he said. “Tried to keep him out of trouble.” He paused, then added in a somewhat grave voice, “He knew how much he owed the boy.”

Julia looked Elizabeth’s way and saw her suddenly downcast eyes and heard a quiet sigh from her. Elizabeth shook her head. “Who would ever have thought?”

They all knew the story about why Nathan had made the cross garden in the woods above the river, how he had planted each cross in a place where he thought the body of Walter, James’s father, might lie. Nathan and Walter had been teenagers, both working for Puckett, and Walter had let it be known that he wanted out, that with a child coming, he’d had a change of heart about breaking into houses. Puckett was afraid Walter might do or say something stupid, especially if the police questioned him about a certain warehouse fire. And so he’d told Nathan what had to be done, and Nathan had thought they were only going to hold Walter under the river’s surface and make him think they planned to drown him, but once Nathan let go for good, he watched Puckett push him down again and saw too late that Walter’s life was taken—and Nathan’s was forever changed. He’d confessed to this the same night he’d confessed Puckett’s murder. After several days of digging by the authorities, Walter’s remains had indeed been found beneath one of the thin, wooden, white-painted crosses scattered among the trunks of hundred-year-old oaks.

Much of this story had been in the papers, and both Granville and Elizabeth had visited him in Kilby and later at Holman, where he’d told them some of the details, a further unburdening. That was the word Elizabeth had used. Because the police had been able to close the years-old case with the information Nathan had provided, and because he’d been a juvenile at the time, they’d not prosecuted him for the crime.

“The boy told me Nathan’s coming up for parole,” she said now.

Elizabeth looked away from her for a moment. “We hadn’t heard about that yet,” she said. Julia noticed a quiet note of hurt in her voice. “He writes us some. I always answer.” She paused and seemed to contemplate something. “We haven’t visited in some time because…”

“Because of my health,” Granville said. “He understands that, Elizabeth. I’ve told you. You don’t have to feel bad about not making that trip anymore.”

“Why didn’t he let us know he might be paroled?”

“Maybe he doesn’t think he will be.” Granville adjusted his oxygen tube and looked at Julia. “I still don’t understand why the boy came to you. He’s never really known you.”

Julia nodded her agreement and then offered up the boy’s request. “He asked me to go to the hearing and speak for Nathan.”

Granville remained still and Elizabeth looked at her placidly. They both understood what Nathan’s murder of Puckett had done for her, and maybe they were thinking that if the boy knew it too, perhaps from Nathan, he might think she’d want to help Nathan. But there was another question and Granville voiced it now. “Why would James want someone to speak for Nathan when Nathan helped kill the boy’s father?”

Elizabeth leaned forward and placed her crossed arms on the table. “Just because Nathan was there doesn’t mean Nathan killed him.”

“That’s a pretty fine line you’re drawing,” Granville said.

The heat from the oven seemed to crowd the room by degrees. “Nathan’s told both of us how it happened. I believed him, and I imagine James did too. It’s not like the boy didn’t know what Puckett was capable of.” Elizabeth paused a moment. “And maybe there’s things between Nathan and James we don’t know about. Like you said, Nathan tried to help him stay out of trouble.”

They each looked Julia’s way, as if she might have something she could offer here, but they must have known she didn’t. Suspicions and inklings were never hard coins to be proffered; they were far too ephemeral. “I’ve never talked to the boy until the other day,” she said. “So I wouldn’t know.” She realized she could give them one small coin, the fact that James had come by and removed those screens, which was a threat aimed at Puckett and could easily have meant James intended to do what Nathan took upon himself. Or maybe there’d been collusion between James and Nathan from the start. But here she was speculating again and so offered nothing to Granville and Elizabeth.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Granville asked. “You ever been in touch with Nathan? At any point?” The way he spoke the second question, something in the tenor of it, made the word ever sound accusing.

“No, I haven’t seen him since before he turned himself in.” Her memory again took her back to that night Nathan had been parked in front of her house in the rain. She wondered then, and now, if he’d been looking for the boy. He had not expected her at his truck window, just as he hadn’t expected her not-quite-spoken request, or he’d acted as if he hadn’t. And if he had not killed Puckett for her, did she owe him anything at all? When circumstances went your way, out of some predetermined fate or the machinations of others, no one could blame you or hold you accountable or expect gratitude. Maybe it was the boy who owed him something, a debt too large to pay, but he was trying, nonetheless. Still, it was her prayers she could not forget. They were answered. Who was accountable for that other than herself? Yet Nathan was paying, and she was not.

“You going to speak for him?” Granville asked, irritated, it seemed, that she wasn’t forthcoming.

She turned toward Elizabeth who appeared to be waiting hopefully. “I came here so y’all could help me figure that out,” she said and then found she could not say more. All she could do was listen as Granville drew in hard for air in a way he hadn’t earlier, and Elizabeth’s hopefulness turned to either an expression of worry or a suppressed judgment against her.

~

When she arrived home, she checked her mail for the first time in a few days and discovered the letter bearing the state seal that she realized she should have been expecting but hadn’t thought about. She opened it inside her den, and it announced the upcoming parole hearing in Montgomery the following week and, as the wife of the victim, offered her the opportunity to speak to the board if she so chose. There was a number she could call. They would, of course, expect her to speak against Nathan and made clear that he would not be present when she spoke, a protocol she wouldn’t have expected. She refolded the carefully creased letter, slipped it back into the torn end of the envelope, and then placed it atop a stack of mail sitting on a somewhat dusty end table. Despite what the letter said, she could not help but picture Nathan there, and she wondered how much he might have aged and what toll the confinement and the years might have taken. While never particularly muscular, he’d always been built well enough, with short, dark brown hair, and he was handsome in a way he’d probably never been aware of. Was he gray-headed now, his hair thinning, his cheeks sunken? This was, indeed, how she pictured him, and she could not imagine him any other way, as much as she would have preferred otherwise.

~

Like the letter, Julia did not anticipate the arrival of sound at the side door of her house in the dark of an hour she couldn’t have named until she looked at the clock beside her bed and saw the numerals 11:15 in glowing red. She slipped on a white housecoat, and just as she was about to reach into the drawer of her bedside table and retrieve the one pistol of her husband’s that she’d kept, she realized who was most likely at her door and left the long-barreled revolver where it was.

She walked through the kitchen in the dark and flipped the light switch beside the door that turned on the outside light. The boy blinked his eyes against the sudden illumination that flooded back through the windowed door. She unlocked the bolt and then stepped into the doorway.

“You know what I’m here for?” he said without offering any apology for the hour. She could tell he was not bad drunk but knew he’d had more than a few. The empty beer cans were probably littered along an old farm-to-market road.

“My guess is you got a couple of reasons that you’re likely to keep to yourself, but I’m betting you’re going to tell me it’s to see my flowers.”

“I am, or was, but you’ve just said it for me.”

“Go on around back. I think you know the way.”

She returned to her bedroom and put on a pair of worn slippers, and by the time she turned on the floodlight that shone over the backyard, he was out near the far fence line with his back to the house. She waited until he finished urinating before she walked outside. She saw then he had brought a flashlight, but they wouldn’t need it. Maybe he hadn’t planned on knocking at first but then something, some need, had driven him to it.

She met him at the bed of night-blooming flowers. “You could have come earlier. Some of these open up at dusk.”

“You didn’t tell me. Guess they want a head start, an advantage.” He looked down and pointed to those nearest him. “These are the moonflowers.”

“With the white blooms. That’s right.”

He leaned over them and breathed in. “Got a lemon smell.”

“They do. Remember, they’re poisonous.”

He raised quickly, as if they might do him harm. “Wasn’t planning on eating them.”

She laughed, which surprised her. “Figured you had more sense than that.”

“How about those, with the skinny flowers?”

“Tuberose. Remember, like the snuff.”

He nodded and then pointed again. 

“Flowering tobacco,” she said.

“You gon’ start selling cigars and snuff?”

She didn’t laugh this time.

“These that are white and pink. They the Casablanca lilies?”

“That’s right. You want me to cut a few and put them in water, let you take them to a girlfriend?”

He shook his head. “Got no girlfriend. Not right now.”

“Maybe take some to your mother?”

“Maybe not,” he said and didn’t look her way.

She then remembered Elizabeth telling her Nathan had been involved with the boy’s mother at one point, but it had ended sometime before Puckett’s murder. Julia wondered when exactly the woman had learned of Nathan’s part in the death of James’s father and what her reaction had been.

They stood in silence now, and she realized he was not going to ask her about Nathan’s hearing, which showed patience on his part and a level of maturity she hadn’t expected. It was also a relief. 

Julia again grew curious about the boy. “Where you work?” she asked. Maybe she’d needed to break the quiet or, for some reason she couldn’t explain, she didn’t want him to leave. 

“Out at the papermill. Pays pretty decent.”

“You live in town?”

He turned on his flashlight and pointed it toward the far reaches of the yard where the edges of darkness absorbed the strength of its beam. Then he clicked it off. “No, I live on the other side of the Black Fork.” He shifted the flashlight into his other hand. “I’m in my mother’s old house. She married and moved to Tuscaloosa. I live just past where Nathan used to.”

“Really,” she said, surprised he wanted to live so close to the river.

He stood very still now and looked toward the darkness again without the aid of the flashlight, which he held at his side. At length he said, “You ever been out there?”

She’d told him before that she’d been to Nathan’s house, so the question sounded strange, disconnected from their conversation, as if he’d found himself beyond the illumination of the floodlights and at some greater distance that seemed to have somehow altered the very sound of his voice.

“Like I said, I knew his mother from church, and she invited me to her house a few times. This was after Nathan was grown and gone. Before he came back when his mother died.”

He reached out and touched one of the moonflower blooms, cupped it in his hand, and seemed to caress it. “No. That’s not what I was asking.”

“What then?” she said.

“You ever been to the cross garden?”

She studied the side of his face in the glare of the floodlights, and his features were made hard in a way that was not natural. He appeared other than he was. Or perhaps that was wrong. Maybe he appeared just as he was. “No, I’d never have had a reason to go there.” He remained quiet and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. She saw that he was waiting, and then she realized for what, and so she asked the question he wanted. “Have you ever been there?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said and looked at her.

“More than once?”

Again, he nodded.

“When was the first time?”

“When Nathan showed it to me. He told me he cut the crosses out of an old trellis at his house where wild roses used to grow.”

She wondered if that was when Nathan had confessed to James his part in the death of the boy’s father, but that wasn’t the question she most wanted to ask and from which she’d refrain. James would have to answer whether he had killed Puckett without her asking him. For now, she asked what she felt she could. “Was it Nathan took you to the cross garden the second time?”

He was quiet for a long moment. She heard a car pass on the street in front of her house, and somewhere in the distance well beyond them a dog barked. Then, because they’d been still for too long, the motion-sensitive floodlights clicked off, leaving them in darkness. She remained still, and James’s only movement was to turn on the flashlight whose beam pooled at their feet. He then raised it just enough to throw light onto the blooms. The moonflowers seemed to both absorb and reflect it in much the same manner as the actual moon took on the sun’s radiance.

“Can’t say he took me there again,” he said finally. “Not exactly.”

Julia waited, afraid for some reason that the floodlights would turn on again. She knew he wanted, needed, to say more. She’d never been a mother to anyone but felt what must be some motherly instinct arise within her and knew it had to do with a level of kinship between them not easily defined.

He moved then, with deliberate intension she was sure, raising the flashlight and clicking it off just as the brighter lights resumed, as they were bound to. “I go out there now sometimes,” he said. “I kept just the one cross, at the place where my father was buried. I know he’s not there now, but he was for a lot of years. One of Nathan’s crosses was right. I keep it there to honor him.”

It sounded almost as if by “him” he meant Nathan, and if he did, there could only be one reason. “Do you ever see him?” she said. “Nathan, I mean.”

He faced her again. “I do.”

“How does he look?”

He seemed to think for a minute. Maybe he was picturing Nathan, carefully considering each feature. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Like himself.”

Like all of us, she thought. We all look like ourselves, whether in the light or the dark.

~

She spent the better part of the next morning, a Sunday, cleaning her house, which she sometimes did out of restlessness and not routine, and that was the case now. When she dusted the table in the den, she did not touch the letter from the state but left it where it lay. In the kitchen, just as she finished mopping, she looked at the hands on the red wall clock, but it hadn’t been necessary. Maybe it was the slant of light coming through the windows or an old internal clock that still kept proper time. Either way, she knew that now was when she’d usually left for church and remembered the way her time there had been calming, how certain hymns that she’d known from childhood had moved her, and how the preacher’s words about both good and evil had spoken to her in a way she doubted others heard. With Puckett she’d lived with the one and wondered how little of the other lived within her. When she prayed for his death—yes, even in church—it had never been for an end brought on by natural causes. Because of his nature, she’d known only a darker request would serve.

After she ate lunch, the idea came to her, or maybe it had come even earlier, when she’d put her mop away. Sometimes a notion crept up on her and didn’t make itself fully known until she was ready for it. By the middle of the afternoon, Julia was properly dressed and had decided that while she would probably never return to church, she would go and see Prestwood, her former preacher, who was now retired—pushed out, she’d heard—and widowed, and who had once told her that she should come to him if she was ever ready. She’d called, and his voice had held only a trace of surprise within it.

Upon entering his house, she saw it was still decorated with a feminine touch, and he was either unaware of the fact or simply didn’t care. She suspected the latter and found his not caring a most masculine trait. He motioned toward a flower-print sofa, and she took a seat. He sat in a gold-colored upholstered chair with the sun coming through the window directly behind him. The harsh light accentuated the thinness of his white hair, and his slightly sunburned scalp showed through.

“I still feel as if it’s my church,” he was saying, “and I go most Sundays, unless I’m not feeling well or I’m just plain too tired. I sometimes find myself looking to see if you’re there.”

“I must disappoint you,” she said, and a feeling of shame came on her that wasn’t really unexpected.

“No, you don’t disappoint. What I feel is more a sense of concern. I think I know what the church provided for you, and I hate to think you no longer have that. I know your husband’s murder changed things for you—in ways I can only guess at.”

She nodded and felt now, as she always had, that there were many things he could guess at about Puckett’s death and her place within the violence of it, and that was why she’d never tried to explain to him her absence from church, even when he had gently but persistently pressured her. At times she’d responded with rudeness, slowly shutting her front door on him.

He wore his concern for her now in his steady gaze of her and in his pressed mouth and his open posture with the palms of his hands turned outward toward her. “There had to have been relief in his death. That was nothing you had to feel guilty about. Relief is not joy.”

“No, I don’t reckon it is,” she said, and though she wanted to say more, even needed to, like the boy, she didn’t know how to begin, nor did she know what exactly she might say.

He seemed to wait on her and then maybe decided she needed prompting. “Do you still believe in Christ?”

He let the question settle between them, but she found it unsettling and attempted to smooth her dress across her knees, as if that would soothe something within her. Then an answer found its way out of her. “I must, because I feel so far away from him.”

“Then he’s still a presence for you, even if at a remove.”

“Yes,” she said, surprised that Prestwood had so quickly gotten to the center of her emptiness.

“Why the distance?” he said. “What made it? What came between you and Christ after your husband was killed?”

These were the questions that she hadn’t allowed him to ask years earlier, the ones she’d shut the door on before he could utter them. She had to answer now and knew this was why she’d come. “It was prayer, my prayer.”

“I don’t understand. Some prayer of yours that wasn’t answered? Or you found you could no longer pray?”

“No. You could even say I prayed without ceasing—for my husband’s death.”

He did not turn from her but seemed to know there was more, for which he’d wait patiently if need be.

And she made him wait, but finally some pressure within her compelled her to continue. “Not just for his death, but for him to be killed.”

Prestwood only nodded in response, as if she’d just commented on a bad turn of weather. Then he spoke, measuredly. “He was violent with you, and violence permeates everything it touches, our physical bodies, our thoughts, the way we see ourselves, and even our prayers if we allow it.”

“I did. I allowed it.”

He pressed his hands together in his lap now. “You were desperate. Desperation can be forgiven.”

“Can it?”

He looked at her sharply. “Do you want to go to hell? Is that the punishment you seek? I’m trying to offer a way out of suffering, but it’s been my experience that not all congregants want that, no matter how close to doctrine you adhere. Hell has its appeal, I suppose.”

“But I did more than pray.”

“And what was it that you did?”

Julia looked past him and out the window, and the light hurt her eyes. “I saw Nathan Rutledge the night of the murder. He had history with my husband.”

“I’m aware of that. I remember what was written in the papers.”

She looked back at him now. “I as much as asked him to kill”—she started to say Puckett— “my husband, and Nathan was the one punished, not me.” 

“But did you ask him? Did you say the words?”

“No.”

“So what makes you think he killed your husband for you?”

The sunlight pouring through the window softened, and she knew a cloud was passing its ill-defined shadow over them, something perhaps in the shape of a dark, ragged bloom. “I think he likely did it for a boy named James. My husband had killed the boy’s father years earlier, with Nathan’s help.”

Prestwood again nodded, seemingly in acknowledgment of what was already known to him. “I know the boy’s mother, Hannah. She attended church sometimes around the time of your husband’s murder, and we would talk. She still comes every once in a while. So, you think Nathan felt he owed the boy?”

“Something like that. I’m not sure. The boy, James, he’s visited me lately. It’s like he needs to tell me something.”

“Then you’ll need to be ready to listen, and remember that, because of your suffering, you’re worthy of his need. Suffering does have its place, but so does forgiveness, if it can be accepted.”

She didn’t respond at first but watched as the hard sunlight returned and bathed Prestwood’s hands. “I don’t feel worthy of anything, not even of the flowers I grow.”

“Let me ask you, do you think God granted your prayer?”

“I wonder sometimes, but I think it was some darker force.”

“But I know that you didn’t pray to that force, and you have to understand that God did not ignore your prayer. What he heard was your despair, and he let the choices of men run their course.”

“Or was it the choice of a boy?”

“You’re afraid maybe it was James that killed him.” He paused and touched his chin in thought. “We don’t know, do we?” he said, though she felt she heard some authority in his voice that said he did know, and she wanted to ask, to press him, but how much would a boy, or a young man, tell his mother, and what mother would speak in any way, even to a pastor, that would place her child in jeopardy?

“James has asked me to go speak for Nathan at a parole hearing.”

“He must feel he owes the man. Is this something you want to do?”

“I can’t decide,” she said and again smoothed the front of her dress, this time noticing a loose, dark thread.

“Maybe you need to think about who you’ll be helping the most if you go, Nathan or the boy. You’re connected to both, and one might say that connection is through blood.”

“You’re saying I’m guilty?”

“No, only that some connections are infinitely deep and can’t be denied, and if we try to deny them, it’s at our own peril.”

His words were jarring and seemed to empty her further in some way but also left room within her for something to enter, and without asking herself what that might be, she found herself making a simple request. “Would you pray for me?”

He bowed his head beneath the afternoon sun, and she closed her eyes to the hard light and followed suit.

~

The roads were changed now. After the old, narrow bridge over the Black Fork had been blown up by the highway department, the new bridge had opened a half-mile upriver, and that had altered where the county road angled off the state highway. Julia knew, though, that once she crossed the bridge, if she kept turning back toward the river and kept looking up for the old railroad trestle, she’d find the dirt road that would lead her beneath the creosote skeleton that freight trains still crossed. Then the road would take her past where Nathan had lived, and she trusted she’d spot James’s truck parked in front of his house—if he was home.

She found her way, passing camp houses and kudzu vines that threatened various dwellings with green obscurity until she did indeed spot James’s truck. The house sat high above ground—the pilings appearing just substantial enough to hold it aloft. She parked beside James’s truck, got out, and began walking up the steps to the deck across the back. The river was wide here. Its brown expanse, darkened from rains farther north, muted the force of the late afternoon sun’s reflection. She would surprise him this time, though it would not be in the dark of night.

She was wrong, though. Before she saw him, he called to her by her last name, startling her with the ugliness of it. He stood on the deck with a bottle of beer in his hand and another, probably empty, on the rail before him.

She stepped onto the deck, and somehow the ease of his manners didn’t surprise her. “You’re welcome to this chair,” he said, pointing. Then he seemed to notice her dress. “You been to church?”

“Not exactly. Maybe I’ll stand for a few minutes and admire your view.”

He moved toward her, and they both then placed their hands on the weathered rail. A barge loaded with mounds of coal appeared and pushed past them, its wake rolling and sounding finally against the bank and the small dock just beyond them. As she watched the disturbed water, she wondered how often James considered the fact that his father was drowned beneath its muddy surface, and she thought about how her husband’s hands had been upon the boy who, unlike James, would always be a boy, despite having been just old enough to father this young man beside her.

They stood in silence for some time, and it was not awkward for her. Julia had the sense that he didn’t feel any awkwardness either and she wondered what accounted for that, if maybe he felt with her the kind of blood kinship Prestwood had talked about. She knew what she needed to tell him, and maybe the knowing came from the sharpening of a maternal instinct that had begun to develop within her when she first looked up at him standing beside her flowers. She could help him now by making her own admission.

She felt emboldened and placed her hand atop his on the rail. His skin was dry beneath her fingers. Finally, she found the wherewithal to speak. “When I told you my husband never talked to me about anything illegal he did, that was a lie.” She paused a moment, as if the difficulty of the words slowed her tongue. “I knew things. He’d complain about you boys who stole for him, and I knew he set up that friend of yours who broke into the store with you. He meant to have him killed, just like he killed your father. Not that I knew about it ahead of time. It was later, when he was drunk and came after me. I could have gone to the police, but I wanted him dead, not arrested.”

James simply looked at the river and seemed to contemplate its depths. She knew, though, that he had to be weighing what she’d said and wondered if he would offer some counterbalance to the weight of her words. He then took up his bottle of beer, left the rail, and sat in a chair. She followed, and there they sat, just as they had under the shade of her porch. “So what do you want me to say?” he asked.

She looked out at the Black Fork again, its current visible in a way it usually wasn’t because of those distant rains. “Guess I want you to say whatever it is you don’t want repeated.”

He was quiet for some time and then spoke slowly. “That’s a lot to ask.”

“Not really. Not when you’ve sought out the right person, which you have.”

He drank from his beer and kept holding it in his right hand. The way his fingers gripped the neck made it look as if he were holding a tool. Then he opened his fingers and closed them again, tightening his hold. “I dug the grave,” he said and let the words settle like shoveled dirt. Finally, he spoke again, and she could see the effort it took. “I’m the one who planned the killing and got Puckett out to the cross garden.”

“So is it you I have to thank?”

He looked at her with his blue eyes, and his momentary silence made it clear he would not offer her a direct answer. “Nathan showed up. I hadn’t planned on that.”

She knew to wait and not ask any more questions. He finished his beer and placed the bottle on a small wooden table. Then he kept looking at the bottle, not so much to avoid her gaze, it seemed, but more to fix his attention on something meaningless so he could better see into his memory.

“He was there to stop me, but I couldn’t let him. So instead of stopping me, he beat me to it.”

She wanted to ask for details but didn’t. He would either tell her or he wouldn’t.

“I was about to shoot your husband at the edge of the grave, but he broke for the thicker woods, and before I could fire, Nathan shot him to keep me from doing it.”

He closed his eyes now, and she felt it wasn’t to help him picture the scene again but was an effort to erase everything in his view, both before him and within him.

“So Nathan committed your sin for you—took it upon himself.”

James nodded and opened his eyes but kept them narrowed. “Yes, and he talked me into keeping quiet, which I did. And I let him go to prison.”

“That was his choice,” she said and understood those words were true but ultimately hollow. She had to say aloud what James already knew but needed to hear. “We’re all guilty.”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“And that’s why you want to do what you can for him now,” she said. “It’s why you’ve asked of me what you have.”

“Yes,” he said.

“My speaking for him won’t be atonement enough, and it won’t get him paroled. Not this soon.”

“I know,” he said and started to rise from his chair but didn’t.

She looked out at the river, at its currents carrying away layers of silt and debris that were all but inexhaustible. “I don’t drive long distances. Does your truck run well enough?”

“Most likely,” he said.

They both sat quietly, and she became aware of the lateness of the day and of how far shadows were stretching toward them; she knew that some of her bruise-colored flowers were beginning to open, including at least a few that were poisonous but had their own appeal.