Shelter (1994) Read Free Page A

pictures of the blond children and the spotted dog. Run, Spot, run! Betty throws the ball! Beyond the brick facade of the school the winter sky was low slung and yellow. Scrub pine edged the hills, gnarled and overgrown, crushed by the weight of the cold, the damp that smelled of decaying straw. Parson read Bible stories from a children's book and went to the prayer meetings run by Preacher Summers, the volunteer revivalist from Calvary. Everyone called him Preacher. In chapel he turned the lights up bright, then snapped them off and prayed in the sudden dark; once in a downpour he opened the windows wide.
Hear the cleansing thunder of the Lord! Among you are souls bound for God, chosen to recognize His enemies and cast them out—the wind may tear the clothes from your backs, the multitude may call you infidel, but the Lord's child never stumbles.
    Here at the camp Parson wore khakis like the others, work clothes given the pipe crew by the foreman. He was in disguise, just like in prison. In the shack at night Parson saw the dead, the legion of the vapor world, and the shades of the living who were marked for death. Carmody floated near the ceiling, leered his snide joke of a grin, or lounged along the low board wall in prison blues.
Where you from? You from up in my country? What you in for?
He'd laugh, and his laughter was too long and too slow.
Not saying, or don't know, maybe. They say you ought to be locked up with the loons.
Carmody's mocking words were drawn out like the sounds on Preacher's old Victrola. Preacher used to lay his finger on a record to slow the sound of the hymn, distort it to a garbled rumble:
The Devil speaks in many guises, but this is the sound of his dark, sick soul. Never pity those who are sick with evil.
The darkness in the shack swelled a little around Preacher's words, rippled, shivered like the skin of a horse. Carmody rippled too. Along the angled rafters Harkness floated in his ill-kempt blue uniform, whimpered like a dog half froze, kicked with his feet as though he were trying to swim. But the river was a ways through the trees and Turtle Hole was too perfect to admit such desolation. Harkness began a low buzzing like a fly trapped in a screen, and Parson slept.

BUDDY CARMODY: BLACK LEAVES
    No one was safe at church in the dark, but Buddy knew better than to beg not to go. While Dad was away in Carolina they'd walked down the road to the clapboard building maybe three nights a week, winter and summer, and every Sunday. Now they only went if Dad was asleep, but lately he drank himself into a stupor most nights. Then home was like it used to be. Buddy and Mam could play Crazy 8's and Slapjack at the table, and pop corn on the stove in the covered skillet. Buddy hated going to church when it was already dark, pulling on his long pants and a button-collar shirt in the heat. The clothes stuck to his sweat. At least now he didn't have to take a bath first, or Dad might wake up and get to swearing. Mam only wiped Buddy across the face with a cold cloth and made him scrub his hands. Now she shoved him gently toward the sink, whispering at him to hurry up. He squeezed the yellow soap, a slippery rectangular hunk of Fels Naptha she'd brought home from the camp kitchen. The strong-smelling lather stung his scratches.
    Buddy didn't think he remembered Dad from before the prison visits, not really. He remembered someone, but Dad had gone away. Five years he was gone, and now Buddy wondered why he'd come back. It was like he didn't know he'd left jail, the way he woke up in the dark and didn't know where he was, and then went after Mam like a dog that was near starved and loony. When he was like that, she did what he wanted, and he was so loud he woke Buddy up. Fighting sleep to listen, Buddy got nervous and drowsy like he used to sometimes at school; he'd hear things, and then hear the shivery echo of each word or sound, the echoes coming faster and closer until he couldn't keep his eyes open.