Page 113 of The Reformatory

“Grave dust,” Blue said. “You can’t understand. It’s just dirt to you.”

“I could try.”

Blue sighed. “It smells like… rest. But it’s a false rest, a fishing lure, and it’s a hex instead. Most people hex the living—but Boone and Haddock hex the dirtied and the dead.”

Robert heard footsteps approaching quickly outside of the doorway. As soon as Robert rushed to his feet, he saw Redbone facing him. Robert’s own reflection was clear in the mirror behind Redbone, but Blue was no longer visible beside him.

“He here?” Redbone said. He looked older since he’d visited the Box. Tired.

Robert couldn’t help looking over his own shoulder to see if Blue was still there behind him despite his missing reflection, but Blue wasn’t in sight. Blue had been Redbone’s friend first, but now Blue was shunning him. If Redbone knew Blue had just been with him, he might yell for Boone as loud as he could to avoid going to the Box.

“Who?” Robert said, his voice thinned by his pretending.

“Who you think?”

Robert shook his head, hoping he didn’t look like the liar he was. “It’s just Mama,” he said. “Like you told me… I was asking her to stay away.”

Redbone’s face softened a bit. He would never betray his best friend’s mama, at least not yet. Would he? For a moment, Robert’s heart caught when Redbone didn’t say anything. Then Redbone took a step back to give Robert privacy. “Oh… okay. Be sure to call for Blue and tell him we need a haint. Call him all night if you have to. You heard what Boone said.”

Robert nodded and promised he wouldn’t stop calling for Blue until he came. He wished he could calm Redbone’s anxiousness and tell him he and Blue already had a plan to collect another haint. But not here. Not in the shower stall where Mama had come to comfort him in the pipe. Not where Blue’s presence was still so fresh that the tiles beneath Robert’s soles were as cold as the water at the bottom of the well.

31

No one was bringing food plates or even calling Miz Lottie’s house to check on Gloria since the deputies had begun patrolling Lower Spruce. Neighbors stayed in their houses, peeking out of their windows at every strange car that rolled down the street at random hours of the day and night—some with police stripes, some without. Miz Lottie had predicted that the patrols would let up after the memory of the courthouse visit died down, but Gloria was still living like a fugitive. And wasn’t she one, with the sheriff looking for her?

Gloria had spent two uneasy nights in Miss Anne’s basement, but she hadn’t felt safe there. She hated being on alert for creaking stairs signaling that Fred might be coming downstairs to cuss her, threaten her, or worse. She’d spent last night with the Hatchetts, who lived two houses down from Miz Lottie, but deputies had knocked that morning asking about her while Gloria slipped out of the back door, careful not to rile the laying hens in their coop. Mrs. Hatchett was afraid to let her spend the night again because she didn’t like lying to the police, so Gloria was back at Miz Lottie’s, the one place deputies might not think to look for her because it was too obvious. While Miz Lottie prayed, Waymon and Uncle June kept their guns close.

Someone had thrown rotten eggs against Miz Lottie’s door before screeching away at dinnertime, so the sour smell had sunk into the porch’s floorboards and seeped through the door into the house despite Uncle June’s scrubbing. Rotten eggs smelled like death. The smell made Gloria angry, mounted upon her anger over Robbie’s imprisonment and her father’s banishment. Papa used to say he was so mad that he sometimes got headaches, and now Gloria felt an ever-present tightness at her temples that made it easy to snap at Uncle June or Miz Lottie or throw dishes in the sink too hard, chipping them. It was all so unfair!

Only three more nights, Gloria promised herself. Three more nights and they would pack up Miz Lottie’s truck and drive out to meet Robbie at the railroad tracks in the moonlight. Three more nights and she would leave Gracetown behind forever.

“What about this one?” Miz Lottie said, holding up another dress for Gloria to examine. This had been their ritual for the past hour as they tried to forget about the patrols and the sour smell invading every corner of the house despite the rosewater perfume Miz Lottie had sprayed. Gloria’s decisions about what to preserve from her old life had been wrested away from her by the men who had burned down her cabin, but Gloria caught Miz Lottie’s eyes chronicling everything in her room she would lose. After the sheriff learned they had helped Robbie escape, a mob might come burn down Miz Lottie’s house too.

This dress was faded pink, a bit more fashionable than the others Gloria had seen, but it still looked like it belonged to a flapper during Prohibition, with puffed sleeves and a large collar, and it was much longer than a modern dress. Mostly to humor her, Gloria held the dress up to her chest and examined herself in Miz Lottie’s bureau mirror, another once-ornate gift from the Powells. Where would she wear this? Gloria realized that many of Miz Lottie’s dresses must have belonged to the Powells too. How else would Miz Lottie have afforded the clothes?

“I think… I like this one,” Gloria said, barely avoiding a lie.

“Put it on your pile, then. You can make your final choices ’fore we go.”

“Don’t you want to keep your favorite dresses for yourself?” Gloria had never been interested in looking at clothes, no matter how often Mama had asked her to go window-shopping with her on Main Street to stare at dresses they could neither try on nor afford. Gloria had always felt foolish standing on the sidewalk staring at the clothes on white dress dummies while she saw the frowning reflections of white people passing behind them. If Mama had seen the frowns, she’d never let it bother her, taking her time to stare as long as she wanted.

“Can’t take it with you, child,” Miz Lottie said quietly. “If I make it to Chicago, I won’t need much.” Gloria tried to unhear the word if. She wanted to say You’ll make it, Miz Lottie, but she couldn’t be sure. In her only vision about their escape, Miz Lottie had not been driving the truck. Neither had Uncle June nor Waymon. She had been driving the truck. And she had learned from Mama that she should listen when someone talked about dying because death was as real as breathing. Death might be more real than living, since life was over so soon.

“And a coat!” Uncle June called from the hallway. “That’s all we need in Chicago, come winter. They say it’s cold enough to freeze a—”

Keys jingled from the kitchen and the back door hinge creaked. Gloria clutched at the dress’s fabric until she heard Waymon call, “Just me!” Relief fluttered from Miz Lottie’s lungs.

Waymon had been out to the cornfield. He’d said he wouldn’t cut the hole in the fence yet, but he’d borrowed a car to drive back and forth past the cornfield to do what he’d called “recon,” short for reconnaissance, another word from the war. Waymon was excited as he filled a water glass from Miz Lottie’s chilled mason jar and gulped it down before refilling it. Miz Lottie and Gloria sat at the kitchen table to listen while June stayed by the rear window, watching.

“Anybody see you?” June said.

Waymon shook his head. “Nah. It was real quiet. Hardly nobody else on the road. Maybe we oughta just have him meet us at—”

“No,” June said. “Just ’cuz you don’t see nobody don’t mean they ain’t watching.”

“And we can’t change the plan,” Gloria said. “We already told Robbie to go to the creek.”

Waymon nodded toward June. “So Thursday before dark, you and me’ll go out there just the same as I did today. We’ll take Clive’s car again—”