Page 23 of Blood Hymn

For a long time she says nothing. I wait for her to pull away. I'd understand it if she did. Instead she lets out a breath against my throat, long and slow.

"The number was in my pew," she whispers. "She sat down right next to me and held my hand. She picked me out in front of the whole church and she held my hand while she did it."

"Yes."

"You should have told me."

"Yes."

She lifts her head at last. Her face is swollen, blotched, and streaked gray where the ash stuck to her tears, and her eyes are the clearest I've seen them.

"No more of that. Whatever you know, I know."

"All right."

"Then tell me the rest." She sits back on her heels between my knees, in the ash and the wreckage she made of my wall. "You told me the shape of it in here the first night. I told you mine in that basement, all of it, the long one. I want yours."

Nobody has ever asked me that.

The old man knew all of it because he made it. The women the family sent to the guest house never asked about anything. The women in the bars in Lafayette asked where I was from and I lied. For six years I've told it to nobody but the water. I open my mouth, and for a second nothing comes, and she waits with her hands on my knees.

"My mother's name was Rose," I tell her. "Rose Harlowe. She was the old man's youngest girl. She ran off at seventeen with a man who picked strawberries in Hammond every spring and moved on in summer. She came home at eighteen, pregnant, with nothing but a paper sack of clothes. The old man took her in on one condition. The baby was the family's. Not hers. Theirs."

Evie doesn't move.

"We lived in the guest house on the Harlowe place, down past the pecan orchard. I remember she used to sing to me in Spanish, songs she must have learned from him, and she'd stop the second anybody came up the walk. I was four when she died. They told me it was complications. Some female thing, they said, and they didn't talk about it after that. The woman who cooked for the big house raised me until I was eleven."

"What happened at eleven?"

"The old man came down to the guest house on my birthday and took me out to the barn. The Sawyer barn. It was the family's then, before they gave it to Marcus's daddy for services. He sat me up in the rafters and made me watch what they did to a man who'd stolen out of the church building fund." I keep my voice level. I learned that from him too. "He told me I had a gift. He told me God made some boys to be shepherds and some to be sheepdogs, and I was the other kind. He said I wasn't an heir and never would be, a bastard can't inherit, but the family would always have a place for a boy who was useful."

"Eleven years old."

"He taught me everything after that. How to track. How to wait. How to go through a window. How to hold a knife so it doesn't turn in your hand. I learned the barn at eleven because he'd leave me up in those rafters for a day and a night and if I made a sound coming down he'd send me back up." I look past her at the torn map on the floor. "I was fourteen the first time. A man named Earl Cheramie owed the family eleven thousand dollars and tried to run for Texas. I tracked him into the swamp off the Bayou Boeuf road. He was a grown man, but he was drunk and he was tired, and I got him face down in water not three feet deep. He fought a long time. I held him. The old man stood up on the bank the whole while with his hands in his pockets and watched. When it was done, he nodded at me and said, Good boy."

Her fingers tighten on my knees.

"That's all he ever said about it. Good boy. I'd have done it a hundred more times to hear it again, and I did."

I pull my shirt over my head. She's seen the scars on my chest in the dark, felt them with her hands against the church wall, but she hasn't seen them in the light. I watch her look. Three words across my chest in raised white tissue, one above the other, cut with a straight razor and rubbed with salt so they'd heal thick.

SACRED across the top, over my collarbones. WEAPON across my breastbone. CLEANSED down low over my ribs on the left side.

"He did one each time I learned something," I tell her. "Sacred at fifteen, the night he explained what the gathering was for. He said I was part of something holy now. Weapon at seventeen, after I took care of a sheriff's deputy from Rapides who'd been asking questions in Alexandria. Cleansed at twenty, after my first gathering at the gates. He said I'd been washed in the work and there was nothing left in me now but purpose." I touch the bottom word with two fingers. "He was proud of that one."

"How long?” she asks. Her voice has gone very quiet.

"Fifteen years. I did whatever they pointed me at. Men who owed. Men who talked. A preacher's wife in Natchitoches who'd seen something. Nine years at the gates on Halloween, waiting for the girl to come running." I don't look away from her while I say it. She'd know if I did. "I told myself it was a job. I told myself the girls were somebody else's business, that I only ever stood by the gate. That was a lie too. Standing by the gate is part of it."

She doesn't flinch. She reaches out and puts her hand on the word WEAPON, flat, and leaves it there.

"There was one," I go on. "I was twenty-three. They gave me a girl named Jolene Tate who worked at the Sonic out on 71. She'd gone to the state police in Alexandria about her little sister, who'd been at the gathering the year before and never came home. I was supposed to take her out Parish 12 and put her in the Thibodeaux ditch and make it look like she'd run her car off the road." I breathe out. "She was sitting in my passenger seat with her hands tied, and she wasn't crying. She was praying. Not loud. She was asking God to look after her mama. And I drove past the Thibodeaux curve and kept going."

"Where?"

"The county line. I cut her loose at a truck stop outside Bunkie with two hundred dollars and told her if she ever came back I'd finish it. Then I drove her car into the Red River myself so they'd find it." I shake my head. "I never heard of her again. I don't know if she made it out of the state. I don't know if she's alive. I told the old man it was done, and he believed me, and that was the only time in fifteen years I lied to him."

"Why her?"