Page 4 of Blood Hymn

He's done this before. That's what the whistling means. This is a man setting a table.

The barn smells like it always did; old hog, wet hay, and river coming up through the floor. And under that, tonight, diesel from the generator he's got running out back for the one bulb over the stall. The bulb throws his shadow up the far wall, twice his size. Mine doesn't throw at all. I'm above the light.

Wait for the second one.

That's not me thinking it. That's an old man with a voice like gravel in a bucket. He's been dead six years, and he's the one who taught me to sit still. I don't argue with him anymore. He was right about how to wait. He was wrong about everything else.

There's a second one coming. Marcus said so, on the phone, in the Dollar General parking lot Tuesday last, while I sat two rows over in a truck that isn't registered to anybody. Thursday, he said. Ten o'clock. Bring the paper. I don't know who the paper is for or what it says, and that's the reason I'm here instead of in the river with him already.

My shoulder's pulling. Left side, the old one. It does that when I hold a position too long, and I've been holding this one since sundown. There's a screw in there from a night I don't think about. The cold makes it talk, and October in this barn is cold enough. I roll it once, slowly, and the beam doesn't creak because I know which beams creak in here. I learned that at eleven. I learned it because a boy who makes noise in the rafters gets found, and a boy who gets found gets brought down, and a boy who gets brought down in this barn learns what the rope is for from the other end.

Marcus stops whistling.

He's looking at his phone. The light's on his face and he's frowning at it, thumb moving. Then he puts it away, looks at the door, looks at his watch, and says out loud, to nobody, "Well, shit."

The second man is late.

I could wait. The old voice says wait. But the old voice never had to account for a girl asking questions in Baton Rouge, driving into the parish with a box on her seat, and every deputy in Harlowe knowing her name before she crossed the line. Things are moving. Marcus Sawyer is laying out rope on a Thursday with nine days to go, and last year he didn't start until the twenty-eighth.

Something's changed the schedule. And the second man knows what. The second man isn't coming, and Marcus is standing directly beneath me with his back to the ladder.

I drop.

Not the ladder. The ladder's fourteen feet and it's on the wrong side. I go off the beam and take the fall the way I was taught to take it, knees soft, one hand down, and I'm behind him before the sound of my boots on the dirt has finished happening. He turns because anyone would turn. He gets halfway. Then my forearm's across his throat, my other hand has his right wrist. I put him down on his own tarp, face-first, and I put my knee in his back and let him understand where he is.

"Hey, Marcus."

He knows my voice. I feel it go through him like a current; the whole body going rigid and then, a second later, going loose, because there's a part of the brain that decides when a thing is already over.

"You're dead," he says into the tarp.

"That's what they tell me."

I take the knife off his belt first. Then the phone from his back pocket, and I look at the last message before I put it in mine. From a number with no name. Three words. Can't tonight. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow's fine. I don't need the second man now. I've got the first one.

I let him up enough to breathe but not enough to think, and I turn him over so I can see his face. A man tells the truth with his face before he tells it with his mouth. That's another one of the old man's. He used to say it standing right about where the tarp is, with somebody kneeling on the spot where Marcus is lying, and I'd be up in the rafters listening, learning, taking notes I never wrote down.

"I've got two kinds of questions," I tell him. "The kind you answer and the kind you make me ask twice. You know which kind hurts."

Marcus Sawyer is forty-one years old. He's got a gut, a receding hairline, and a Saints tattoo on his forearm that's gone green. He's got a wife who left, a mother in a home in Alexandria, and a daughter he hasn't seen since she was nine. And he's got a barn where he brings other men's daughters and ties them to a post so they're quiet when the truck comes.

He looks up at me and starts to cry.

That's fine. Crying's just water.

"Who's the paper for?"

"I don't⁠—"

I press on the wrist I'm holding. Not hard. He's fat and out of shape, and I could break it without trying. He knows that, and it's the knowing that does the work.

"Who's the paper for, Marcus?"

"The girl." It comes out fast. "For the girl. Douglas has the paper. He does it every year, he picks the hymn and he writes it down and I get the paper and I know who to⁠—"

"Who?"