The Covenant Read Online Free PDF Page B

paths split off from it at irregular intervals—deer trails, the preacher called them, but all I saw was a few old beer cans hiding under the leaves.
    Eventually, a green mound loomed up through the woods ahead of us, like a lost pyramid in a Mayan jungle. We were almost standing on its steps before I realized it was a house, an entire antebellum ruin blanketed by decades of kudzu. Dusty vines with large, three-lobed leaves wrapped around the trunks of the columns and spread along the walls like ivy, even growing over the roof. A bit of crumbling brick chimney poked up from one end of the viny mound.
    â€œKudzu can grow up to a foot a day,” Deacon said. “All the windows were bricked up years ago to keep it out of the house.” Even the fanlight above the door had been bricked over. A path of somewhat newer boards had been laid across the rotting porch, otherwise we’d have had to swing like Tarzan to get inside.
    â€œYou want to restore this?” I asked while he unlocked the padlock that secured the door. “How long has it been since anybody lived here?”
    â€œA little over a year.” He opened the door and clicked on a flashlight he had brought with him. “Mrs. Ruth’s son finally convinced her to move into a nursing home.”
    â€œKidnapped, you mean,” Holly said.
    â€œMrs. Ruth?”
    â€œRuth Vardry is Holly’s Meemaw. She owns this house, the woods, and all the land hereabouts.”
    While the exterior was a ruin, the inside of the house was merely a wreck. The main entrance staircase had fallen against the interior wall, and chunks of plaster, some bigger than me, littered the floor. A length of chain and a bit of frayed, cloth-covered wire dangled from a brass fixture overhead, the last remnant of what had probably been a crystal chandelier.
    Deacon kicked a bucket that stood in the middle of the hall, shloshing a little murky water onto the floor. In some places, the floorboards had been ripped up to reveal the bare gray earth below. “One good thing about the kudzu, it mostly keeps the rain out. Mostly.” He pushed open a door that had swollen shut in its frame. “Once the vines are cleared away, our first priority is rebuilding the roof.”
    There was a strangely familiar smell about the place, and not just of rotting wood and crumbling masonry. It was a barnlike odor, only wilder, like the cave of a bear. I’d smelled it before, somewhere, maybe way back in the lizard part of my brain. “Before she moved to the nursing home, Mrs. Ruth used to share this house with a pack of feral cats. There must have been twenty living in here with her.”
    We found a partially dismantled fireplace in a rear room of the house, its ancient bricks scattered across the floor. “It looks like you’ve already started your work,” I said to the preacher.
    â€œThis was done long ago.” He picked up a brick and turned it over. His hands were hard as horn, the hands of a bricklayer or a carpenter, not a preacher. “Old Gus Stirling believed his father had hidden gold or silver in the chimney to keep it from the Yankees. The usual family story, you know. Mrs. Ruth refused to let anyone clean this up.”
    â€œMeemaw is crazy,” Holly elaborated unnecessarily.
    I photographed the fireplace. Holly hobbled barefoot across the broken bricks to pose beside it. “I used to be a model,” she said. I wondered if everybody around here was in that line of work.
    â€œIt will cost a fortune to rebuild this place,” I said.
    â€œMoney is no concern. The Lord has provided,” he answered, not without a touch of pride. “And I will direct the restoration myself.”
    He carried his brick into the next room, which he said had been a dining room. He pointed out a door which led to an exterior kitchen. The door stood open, but the path outside was so overgrown as to be nearly impassable.
    â€œEven after we