Chapter 15 #3
Elias paused to glare at him. “Your turn to stop it. Or are you gonna tell me you don’t remember Nat Gaines?”
Nails shrieked from the wood as Elias worked the hammer upward, beginning to pry up the lid.
Malcolm shuddered. “I remember.”
Nat Gaines had been Jennie’s first crush, the first boy to capture her heart.
She’d been in the ninth grade and Nat in the tenth.
Malcolm and Elias had never learned the details of what Nat Gaines had done to their sister under the bleachers during a nighttime football game, but there’d been bloodstains on a towel their mother had left on the bathroom floor that night, and bruises on Jennie’s arms.
Maggie had instructed her boys never to utter a whisper about that night—it was Jennie’s business, she’d said, and private.
During the next nighttime football game, a group of troublemaking middle school boys found Nat Gaines dead under the bleachers, with mushrooms growing out of his ruined eye sockets.
Elias dropped the hammer. It clanked to the floor as he worked both hands into the opening and forced the lid off the crate. The sound of nails pulling free of the wood made Malcolm want to clap his hands over his ears.
One hand on the crate, he forced himself to his feet. “My head’s bleeding.”
Elias set the lid aside, leaned against a steamer trunk. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
The exchange was childhood reflex. Brothers again, they stood and stared into the crate. In the dimly lit baggage car, the chickens grew further agitated. Malcolm put one hand on Elias’s shoulder.
“I told you. She’s gone.”
The body inside the crate looked the same as it had when it had been placed there.
The canvas shroud remained sewn shut around the rubber blanket, and the body inside it.
Maggie’s corpse had shifted and settled from being transported.
Her legs had been folded slightly, and now she seemed crunched nearly into fetal position.
The train juddered over the tracks. The lights flickered in the baggage car. Elias swayed to one side, and as his shadow swayed with him, Malcolm saw a single eye staring up at him from a gap between stitches in the canvas.
The tracks curved slightly southward, the shroud shifted, and that eye was lost in shadow again. Malcolm turned away, in case there was any chance he might see it again.
“No rats in there,” he told Elias. “No portable radio. Just Maggie.”
The lights flickered again. Elias had turned away from him and now stood in silence, swaying with the train.
His body shook, and Malcolm thought the reality of their mother’s death had finally struck home, that he must be weeping and ashamed of his tears.
Ashamed to finally show that he cared about someone other than himself.
“It’s all right,” Malcolm said, reaching out for his brother. “Everything’s just upside down right now.”
Elias coughed. He brought a hand to cover his mouth as it hit him again. A coughing fit bent him over. Wheezing between bursts of coughing, he allowed Malcolm to turn him around. He’d seemed sickly, and now Malcolm felt a rush of real worry. Was there something really wrong with him?
He lowered his hand, trying to catch his breath. His lips were smeared with blood. The fist he’d held in front of his mouth had been spattered with it. He’d coughed so hard that blood vessels had burst in his eyes, turning them pink, streaked with crimson.
“My God,” Malcolm said. “What’s wrong with you?”
Elias gave a throaty chuckle. “So many things.”
He looked as if he might fall down.
Over by the door, the goat bleated again.
Then it spoke. “Nail the lid back down on that crate, you damn fools.”
The voice came out a soft, whispery rasp, but it was familiar nevertheless. It seemed to come from the shadows behind each of the crates and trunks and traveling cases as much as it came from the goat.
Malcolm couldn’t breathe. He stared at the goat, then at Elias, who still had blood on his lips, though he’d finally begun to catch his breath. Neither of them spoke, but Malcolm thought he and his brother were both thinking about Nat Gaines under the bleachers.
The train creaked and rolled onward.
Elias picked up the hammer. Malcolm grabbed the lid and set it back in place, and they got to work.
Some of the nails had to be removed and replaced with fresh ones from the box of tenpennies.
When they finished the job, a few sorrowful piano notes sounded from within the crate, and that was it.
No music, no scratching, no words from the goat.
Elias settled down beside the crate and drew his legs beneath him, trying to stay warm inside his coat. He looked awful, and that cough worried Malcolm.
By the door, the goat bleated.
Malcolm jerked, startled by the sound. “They’d better take that thing off in Albany.”
The goat said nothing, though the chickens fluttered their wings and banged against the insides of their cages. Whether this signified agreement or protest, Malcolm didn’t know.
He didn’t want to know.
Maine seemed very far away.