November Mourns Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time I got back to the door.”
    Pa was like a cop standing watch over a crime scene. The body removed, but the blood still on the floor.
    “He’s a fool, Pa. He isn’t even worth getting mad about.”
    “That your advice to me after spending two years downstate for trouncing hell out of him?”
    “But I didn’t get mad,” Shad said.
    “You split your own hairs, son, I’ll split mine. That’s the way of it.”
    “Sure enough.”
    The rage started working through Shad again, but he kept it down where it could be handled. It wasn’t anger though, not the usual kind. He swallowed a groan, felt the living confusion inside him swell for an instant, then settle. The hound let out a whine, keeping an eye on Shad. Zeke Hester had wanted Megan, there was no other way to say it, but she’d always managed to elude him as she flourished into womanhood. Shad did what he could, which amounted to giving Zeke a few even-handed threats that the guy was too ignorant to heed. He simply may not have understood what Shad was getting at.
    It went on like that for a couple of years, until the night Zeke caught her behind Crisco Miller’s still on Sweetwater Creek. While Shad was just starting to put the butter knives back out for Elfie, Zeke was throwing his all at Mags. He battered her pretty good, fractured her wrist and dislocated her left knee, but he never got what he was after. Mags had hellfire in her when she got going. She had Pa’s hands, small but hard with meat to them.
    She succeeded in slugging Zeke in the mouth hard enough to crack a rotted front tooth he had hanging among the rest of the brown train wreck. The pain catapulted him sideways, and she kicked free and crawled into the tree line to hide.
    She refused to go to the doctor and only lay in bed for a weekend before she got back to doing her chores. Mags had a resolve that Shad had never acquired. They talked a lot during those couple of days, but he couldn’t remember a word of it. He was having a difficult time even hearing her voice nowadays. It was the kind of thing that made you knot your fists and drive them into your temples, trying to loosen memories. The only voice she had was the impact left on him.
    When Shad caught up with Zeke Hester outside of Griff’s Suds’n’Pump, he broke the bastard’s jaw, cheek, nose, and left arm in three places.
    True enough, he hadn’t gotten mad. A cool lucidity had somehow draped over him, a calm he hadn’t experienced before. By the time Zeke was weeping on his belly and baying in pain, Shad felt only an ample amount of pity and sadness.
    When Sheriff Increase Wintel asked him why it had happened, Shad refused to explain. Some circumstances you kept quiet about if you could. When you managed it, you found your assurance in the silence.
    Perhaps it was a talent he’d picked up from his father. He willingly took the deuce in prison and managed to finish three semesters’ worth of college courses. All in all, he’d read about a book a day for the two years he was inside, and he’d only had to watch one man die.
    His father studied the chessboard for a minute before he moved the white bishop.
    Shad looked off at the brush-shrouded terrain and tried to discern movement. Already the old caged-in feeling was beginning to overtake him. You could prepare for it but you couldn’t get away from your smallest apprehensions. The dark land led back into the surrounding weed-choked pastures, and the air seemed thick with a sickeningly sweet honeysuckle even at the end of autumn.
    “What happened, Pa?”
    His father’s perfect control wavered, and the angles of his face fell in on themselves. The old man opened his mouth and shut it again. Cleared his throat and moved the white bishop back where it’d been.
    “She never came home.”
    Shad waited but his father said nothing more. “The hell does that mean?”
    “She went to school like always and just never come back.”
    Okay, so he was going to have to pry it