Chapter 1
Jonah
The bell rang on a Tuesday and nobody was in the tower.
I know nobody was in the tower because I was the one who went up.
Forty-one steps, a trapdoor with a padlock on it that hadn't been opened since Easter, and the padlock was locked from the outside, which is a sentence I've had to say out loud eleven times now to eleven different people who all wanted me to say it differently.
"Locked from the outside," Roach said.
"Yes."
"With the lock."
"That's generally how locks work, Roach."
"I'm establishing a timeline."
"You're establishing that you can talk."
We were in the church lot on a Wednesday morning with coffee that Duckie had made, which is a specific kind of punishment. Duckie makes coffee like a man settling a grudge with water.
"So the bell rang itself," Roach said.
"The bell rang."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the true part of the answer. You want me to guess at the rest?"
"I would love that, actually. I love when you guess. It's like watching a bridge try to dance."
Here's what I've learned in thirty-eight years of living in this parish. You can carry almost anything if you keep your voice level. My daddy taught me that, and then he died out past the Vachon culvert with his boots off, so take the lesson with the salt it deserves.
Preacher came out of the church doors with Odalys behind him.
He looks older now. He's earned it — he paid for it in a way I watched happen and still don't have a good word for. His hair went the rest of the way white in October and he moves like a man who trusts his knees again, which is the strangest part. Aged twenty years and walks better.
Odalys had her charts under her arm, which is never good.
"Count," she said to me. No hello. She's never once said hello to me. I've decided I like it.
"Twelve in the pews Sunday."
"And?"
"And twelve people who were in those pews say there were thirteen."
Roach set his coffee down on the hood. "Say that again."
"Twelve bodies. Thirteen chairs full."
"Who counted?"
"Everybody counted," I said. "That's the problem. Miss Ida counted, and Miss Ida has counted the Sunday congregation every week for fifty-one years, and she's never been wrong about anything in her life, including things that weren't true."
"So who's the extra?"
"That's the second problem."
"There's a second problem."
"Roach, there's always a second problem. You've been in this club nine years."
"I keep hoping."
The second problem was this: nobody could tell me who the thirteenth was. Twelve people, all of them certain, and every single one of them, when pressed, said the same thing.
I don't remember his face, but I remember he knew the words.
To the hymn. All four verses. Including the fourth, which nobody in Marrow Bend sings, because Miss Ida has cut it since 1979 on the grounds that it's morbid.
Odalys spread a chart on the hood of the truck and put a rock on the corner of it, and I watched Roach quietly move his coffee before she could.
"East boundary," she said. "The Sunday line."
"It's scattered," Preacher said. "We found it scattered in the spring."
"It's not scattered anymore." She looked up at me. "You went out there. Tell them."
"Mile four's gone."
"Gone how?"
"Gone like the ground's dead in a strip you could park a truck in." I put my hands in my pockets because I didn't want anybody watching what they were doing. "And mile four is where the last break was."
Preacher's chin came up. "Seven years ago."
"Yes."
"Same spot."
"Same spot."
Nobody said her name. This is a talent the Iron Hex MC has developed over seven years and I want to say for the record that they are not good at it. They're loud about not saying it. It's the least subtle silence in Louisiana.
Odalys, who has been in this town two years and does not care, said, "Wrenlee Thibodeaux."
Roach made a noise like a man being sat on.
"What," she said.
"Nothing."
"Say the nothing."
"There's a history," Roach said.
"I'm aware of the history. I live in a house where the history is the load-bearing wall.
" She tapped the chart. "The east line is a Thibodeaux line.
It has been laid four times in a hundred years and every time it was laid by a woman with that name and that blood, and it does not take from anyone else.
Delphine tried. Show them your hands, Delphine. "
"She's not here," I said.
"Then take my word."
"I do."
"Good." Odalys straightened up. "There is exactly one Thibodeaux left."
The lot got quiet. Somewhere down the road a screen door banged and a dog started up about it.
Preacher looked at me for a long second.
"Jonah."
"No."
"I didn't ask yet."
"You were going to."
"I was."
"So — no."
"All right," he said, mild as milk, and he rolled the chart up and handed it back to his wife, and I stood there with my whole chest tight because I know exactly what it means when Preacher says all right that fast.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"That thing where you agree with me so I have to argue with myself for you."
"I don't know what you're referring to."
"You've been doing it since I was nineteen."
"And it works every time," he said, "which is the part I'd think about, if I were you."
I went out to mile four that afternoon by myself, which I hadn't told anybody I was going to do and which Preacher knew about before I got back, because that man has a network of eighty-year-olds that would embarrass a federal agency.
The boundary road out past the Vachon culvert is shell and it hasn't been graded since the storm. You take it slow or you don't take it.
I parked and walked the last two hundred yards.
Here's the thing about the dead strip. It doesn't look frightening. If you drove past it you'd think somebody had a diesel spill and never called anybody. Black ground, maybe fourteen feet across, running from the shoulder off into the field.
It's when you stand in it that it gets you.
I stood in the middle of it for about a minute with my hands in my pockets. No bugs. That's the whole horror of it and it took me a full minute to work out why my skin was doing what it was doing. It was August in Louisiana, six feet from standing water, and there was not one mosquito on me.
I have never in my life been outdoors in this parish and not been bitten.
I walked the edge of it, from the road out to where it tapered off, and then back. Forty feet, maybe. And at the far end, in the soft ground past the strip, I found a print.
Bare foot. Small. Pointed in.
I crouched over it for a while and did not touch it, because whatever else I am, I've been in this parish thirty-eight years and I know what you don't touch.
Then I got up and looked out across the field toward the treeline, and I said, out loud, feeling like an idiot:
"I know you're out there."
Nothing happened. That's what I want written down. Nothing happened at all, no shape at the treeline, no wind, no voice, nothing you could put in a report.
The birds started back up about ninety seconds after I got in the truck, and I sat there with my hand on the key and listened to them, and I want to say plainly that I have never been so glad to hear a grackle.
My daddy died four hundred yards from where I was parked.
They found him in September of '04 with his boots set side by side on the shoulder of that road, laces tucked in, the way he did when he came in the house. That's the detail that runs this family. My mother could survive him being dead. She could not survive the boots being neat.
He wasn't the first. Uncle Ray went out there in '89 and it was the same, and there's a Pike in 1957 and a Pike in 1931 and my grandmother wouldn't say either of their names in the house.
Nobody ever gave me a reason. I asked once, at fifteen, and my mother said, "Some families farm, Jonah," and went back to the dishes, and I never asked again, which is a decision I've been living inside for twenty-three years.
Church was that night and church was ugly.
I'll say what I said, because I said it badly and I'd rather it be on the record than get improved by somebody else's telling.
"Send Cane."
"Cane's not the one she'll get in a truck with," Preacher said.
"Send Delphine."
"Delphine's four hours out at her cousin's and won't be back till Sunday, and we've got a week and a day."
"Send Bear."
Bear, from the end of the table, without looking up: "I ain't driving three parishes to get yelled at by a woman about a wedding I paid forty dollars toward."
"You didn't pay forty dollars."
"I put forty dollars in an envelope, Jonah. What happened to the envelope after ain't my business."
"You took it back out of the envelope."
"I'd like the record to show he can't prove that."
"You told me you did. In this room. You said, and I'm quoting, 'I took it back out of the envelope.'"
"Hearsay," Bear said.
Roach had his hand up.
"Put your hand down."
"I've got a solution."
"Put your hand down."
"My solution is that Jonah goes."
"That's not a solution, that's the thing everyone already said."
"Yeah, but I said it with my hand up," Roach said, "which makes it parliamentary."
There is a version of that room where I hold the line. I've thought about it a lot since. In that version I stand up and say find another way, and Preacher says there isn't one, and I say then it's on me, and I walk out and they let me, because I've earned enough in this club that they'd let me.
That version ends with two hundred people in a building on Sunday and something in the thirteenth seat.
"How many in the pews this week," I said.
Preacher checked the paper in front of him. "It's the fifth Sunday. Combined service with Beulah Grove."
"How many."
"Two hundred and ten. Maybe twenty."
I sat there for a while. Nobody rushed me. That's the thing about this club that I couldn't explain to an outsider — twelve men who cannot get through a hardware store without an incident, and they will sit in absolute silence for four minutes while a man decides something.
"I'm not asking her," I said finally.
"Jonah—"