Page 83 of The Reformatory

Boone was squatting in the corner, and ordinarily Robert might have laughed because his pants were tugging down low past his butt crack. He looked back at Redbone to see if he might be smiling, but the crushed look on Redbone’s face lashed Robert, so he turned away as fast as he could. Redbone would never be his friend now. Tears nearly snuck from Robert’s eyes, but he wiped them away while Boone wasn’t looking.

Boone was shaking powder from the saltshaker, oh, so carefully. He could have been drawing a picture with the grave dust, the way he took his time. “This here’s my trap,” Boone said, and backed up a step, still shaking dust out in a careful way so he wouldn’t spill a fleck, “and I’ll lay out a trail from where he was standing. Right here?”

Robert nodded. “Right next to the big pot, like he was stirring it.”

Robert had to admit he felt a twinge of excitement now, the way he’d gotten past feeling bad for the rabbits Papa had hunted with him and concentrated instead on the thrill of finding their hiding places and timing the buckshot just right. Once he’d shot a rabbit’s head clean off, leaving the rest perfect for stewing, and Papa had put his hand on top of his head and said, “Great shot, Robert”—not Robbie, not Junior, which he hated (and reminded him too much of Uncle June), but his full name spoken aloud as if to remind him they were both the same.

Boone surveyed his work when he was done: a thin, barely visible line of dust about twelve inches long led from the spot in front of the vat to the corner of the wall, where, indeed, Boone had drawn what looked like a loose circle. The trap was obvious if you knew what you were looking for. The haint might catch the scent and follow it to the circle like a lit match.

“What happens now—” Robert started to ask, but his words were snatched away by a keening scream between his ears like nothing he had ever heard before. Heard wasn’t the right word, because it wasn’t his ears; it was in the place where he’d heard Mama’s voice in the Funhouse, a secret place beyond hearing. But it wasn’t Mama, not this time. The sound was barely human, but Robert knew in his bones that it was the boy with the knife in his back.

“Well, I’ll be… god… damned…,” Boone was saying. Robert thought he was hearing the sound too, but instead Boone was pointing at the wall. “Look! Look here!” Boone raised such a fuss that other boys gathered behind them, curious.

At first, Robert didn’t see anything except the circle in the floor, but then Boone raised Robert’s chin to look up, and he saw what looked like pale dust motes gathered in the air above the circle with lazy swaying as they floated toward the floor, the way Papa had described snowfall. These fell with a loose order inside the circle, never outside, clinging more tightly as they fell, until they grew to a small pile: an inch-high gathering of gray, dead dust. With a peak at the top like a mountain. And small as it was, it seemed like a mountain because the air had conjured it.

“He was right here!” Boone said, slapping Robert’s back so hard that it hurt. But Boone hadn’t meant any harm, because his face was full of that too-big grin. “Musta been standing close by the whole time! I ain’t never seen one caught so fast! Ain’t never seen one, not like that.”

Boone looked at Robert with wide-eyed wonder the way a small child might. “I knew it,” Boone said, nearly whispering. “Soon as I drove you through the flames. Most boys, they don’t feel a thing, maybe just get an itch. But you? You felt it all right. You felt every lick.”

Boone watched and waited to see if more dust would come or the pile would grow, but it had all happened within a few breaths. If either of them had turned their heads, they would have missed the falling dust and only seen the pile left behind.

Boone’s hands were shaking as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a laboratory tube and a brush like the one Mama used to paint her cheeks and a miniature dustpan. Working carefully again like an artist, he swept up the dust and shook it into the jar, hissing behind his teeth if he dropped a single speck. The dust wasn’t as impressive in the jar, a thin layer across the bottom, but it was perfectly visible. Boone admired the jar in the light, and all of the boys behind them tried to see it too. At the bottom of the tube, the prick of a miniature firefly’s flare came and went so quickly that Robert was sure he was the only one who’d seen it. He couldn’t have named the color: not golden, not bronze. Something in between.

Robert turned to look for Redbone among the watching boys, but Redbone was gone. “Lookit, he’s a haint catcher!” Boone said. “All of y’all hearin’ bumps and jumpin’ at shadows can rest easy now. We won’t have no more haints in the flour bags and under your beds.” The boys—now ten or twelve of them at least—let out a cheer. The sound of their celebration helped unlock Robert’s stomach and make it seem less like he might throw up. Instead of thinking about the white boy with the knife in his back, who had actually died long ago, Robert took in the happy eyes and smiles all around him. Would it matter if Redbone wasn’t his friend? He would have many friends now.

When Boone looked down at him, Robert wondered if it was sweat or happy tears falling from the big man’s eyes. “Warden Haddock’s gonna be so pleased,” Boone said. “When the warden’s happy, we all git a piece. You go an’ eat—have all the sweets you want. No more cornfield. No more kitchen. The only job you got now is catching haints.” His face glowed.

Before Robert could finish fixing his plate of stew and runny mashed potatoes, the younger boy who’d fooled him because his height was so close to Blue’s was tugging on Robert’s shirt to ask if he could sit at his table. “Haints keep me up all night,” the boy said. Up close, he was gap-toothed, nothing like Blue.

“Me too,” said another. “Bad enough we stuck in here, but we got haints too?”

Robert had filled a table before he took his seat. A crowd of boys raced for the seats nearest to him, then at the edges, until all eight seats were taken and a few boys were left standing with their trays, jostling for space behind him.

“You got some nice boots,” a cross-eyed boy told Robert. “Where’d you get ’em?”

“From my papa,” Robert said. He was glad to speak of Papa with pride instead of shame. Every boy agreed they were the finest boots they had ever seen.

“You gotta have good boots to be a haint catcher, you know,” one said wisely.

Robert told the boys how he’d caught the kitchen haint, although it was a flimsy story because he’d only pointed the way. He remembered how Redbone exaggerated his stories and added, “I could smell where he was. Like a coal burning in the stove.”

Two or three boys gasped like it was the most amazing thing they had ever heard. In return, the boys told Robert how the captured haint had surprised them around corners and hidden in the cabinets and whispered curses in their ears. How once it had spilled a whole bag of rice on the floor and gotten three boys sent to the Funhouse. How it had left a burner lit and caused a grease fire. Every wrong they could imagine, it seemed, was laid at the feet of the haint Robert had caught.

Robert almost believed every word.

Sleep was impossible. Robert didn’t feel natural sleeping on his stomach, but his back was still sore. And the awful heat in the dormitory still hung everywhere, made worse because every breath he took felt used up by someone else. And Robert’s mind was racing in circles. All he saw when he closed his eyes were those odd flecks of dust falling from the air into a pile. And he heard the awful scream. He remembered the freckled face of the boy with the knife in his back. A stranger had stabbed that boy to kill him, but Robert might have stolen his soul. Thinking of it, Robert trembled despite the heat. “I’m sorry,” he whispered through tears.

Redbone had not looked Robert’s way once before bed, avoiding him in the shower room, the radio room, and the dorm before the lights went out. Robert had hoped to explain himself to Redbone, but what could he say? He was a haint catcher. Everyone knew it now. And what if Mama was drawn to that spot like the stabbed boy? Would he return to the kitchen tomorrow and find another small pile of dust? Robert was so anxious to know that he wanted to fling off his thin blanket and sneak out to the kitchen to see. Only his memory of the Funhouse kept him in bed, his mind wide-awake and worried.

Although Robert was on his stomach, his scarred back sweating in the dark, he felt someone above him, just out of his sight. The tiny hairs across the back of his neck quivered, and the sweat on his back changed to ice water. He hoped it was Redbone ready to talk to him at last—a daring move after lights-out—but even before he turned his neck slightly to try to see, straining his muscles, he knew it wasn’t Redbone visiting his bed. Robert’s eyes looked up, only his eyes moved, and he was relieved no haints were floating above him in retaliation.

But then he saw a kneecap. Someone was sitting cross-legged on his headboard, someone small with impossible balance, and he didn’t have to look further to know it was Blue. Blue still smelled like the cornfield. Now that Robert noticed it, he smelled faintly of soot.

“Don’t you touch me,” Robert whispered, “or I’ll call for Boone.” He sounded braver than he felt; his heartbeat was banging hard against the mattress.

“That was wrong,” Blue said, not a whisper but not loud. “What you did to Clint.”

Well, if that didn’t beat all. A haint telling him he was in the wrong when a haint had no business trying to talk to living folk! Robert was ready to tell Blue to go back where he’d come from, but hot shame clamped his mouth. Another tear came to the corner of his eye.