Red Harvest Read online

  Dennis cocked his chin at Stuart. “Dude, we say grace every night.”

  Pedro swatted the back of Stuart’s head. “Yeah, buzzkill.” Pedro caught Ma’s nod and began the grace. “Bless this food and this family and our band, heavenly God, and if it’s cool, let us get signed this weekend.”

  Dennis opened one eye to see Stuart sitting with his cheek on his fist, glancing around in boredom.

  “And how about don’t let that crummy sucker-in-a-three piece, Kerwin, screw this up for us,” Pedro continued.

  Dennis discreetly gave Stuart the finger, drawing an elbow to the ribs from Jill.

  The second Pedro finished, Jill looked at Stuart. “Hey,” she said and kicked him under the table, a smile curling at the corners of her black lips. “Heard you got a lady friend.”

  Pedro turned to him like a curious cartoon bulldog, while Stuart shot a reproachful stare at Dennis.

  “Stuart!” squealed Ma. “That’s wonderful news!”

  “Yeah.” Stuart realized it was pointless to resist. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Dennis asked. “I thought the parade invite sealed the deal.”

  “First, looks like I gotta deal with somebody else,” Stuart explained.

  “What?” Pedro washed down his mouthful with a slosh of milk. “An interloper?”

  Jill leaned toward him, enthralled. “A rival for her affections?”

  A half-smile formed on Dennis’s face. “There’s a song here.”

  Stuart stabbed at his potatoes with his fork. “Just some square. I can deal with it. No biggie.”

  Pedro nudged him with an elbow. “You need me to bop this lame-o for ya, little bro?”

  “No bopping!” Ma commanded.

  Dennis’s expression grew serious, almost morose. He narrowed his eyes at Stuart but spoke to his mother. “Don’t you worry, Ma. No bopping. He’ll take care of it like a smart guy. Like a guy with a future.”

  Stuart tucked into his food, embarrassed by his big brother’s tough love. Jill smiled at him while Pedro stole his dinner roll right from under his face.

  * * * *

  Farther from town, Candace and family—minus Everett, of course—ate from paper plates on a cramped folding table surrounded by half-filled boxes, a roll of paper towels in place of napkins, the pie a bakery special from the grocer.

  As Aloysius took his seat at the table, Mamalee beamed her permasmile to Candace. “And what do we say, young lady?”

  Candace turned to address her father—but in rote manner. “Thank you for our food and home, Father.” She allowed a pointed pause before finishing. “Homes.”

  Both parents gave her a reproachful scowl.

  Taking a bite, Candace kept a wary eye on her parents as they engaged in the most forced of small talk.

  “Is the attic coming along, dear?” Mamalee asked Aloysius.

  “Don’t go up there,” Aloysius said. “The floor is flimsy.” He wiped his mouth and asked, “How was Everett?”

  “A little scary, Father.”

  Mamalee tittered. “What does the TV always say? ‘Duh!’”

  “He’s not afraid of Bravo anymore,” Candace stated.

  Her parents stopped chewing and cutting.

  “I think Bravo is afraid of him now.” The mastiff whimpered at her side.

  Aloysius’s frown was deeper than usual. “Perhaps this will be the last time. This time, it will be done. He’ll have it out of his system.”

  “No, Father.” Candace’s tone was only matter-of-fact.

  Her father bristled as if at a challenge. “What?”

  “No,” Candace repeated. “It will never be out of him.”

  “Candace!” Mamalee interjected. “You don’t know!”

  Aloysius pounded the table, startling them. “You will not disrespect me!”

  Candace had the courage of conviction though, having witnessed Everett’s behavior just an hour previous. “It’s true though, Father! He will always be this way! And he’s getting worse!”

  Aloysius stood, the rage of denial painting his weathered features. “No!”

  Mamalee rose to calm her husband with jittery pats on his arm. “Aloy, it’s all right! It’s all right. We’ll get through this one and then we’ll figure it out! Like we always do.”

  Aloysius sat and returned to eating.

  Candace summoned her courage. “I guess it’s pointless to ask about the parade.”

  More silence. Mamalee placed her still-shaking hand on Aloysius’s. He cast a brief glance toward Candace, mumbling, “You may go.”

  Candace was stunned.

  “You won’t see your friends here again,” Aloysius said. “You might as well have a chance to say goodbye this time.”

  Mamalee’s happy mask somehow seemed genuine.

  Candace stood and hugged her father, and he even patted her arm. “I will go pack right now, Father!”

  She dashed away, her young heart singing.

  Chapter 6

  It was never clear what the catalyst was. Perhaps a doctor’s recommendation, or a marriage counselor’s. Perhaps Aunt Miriam herself.

  The drive was less than two hours, yet to little Stella, it was a cross-country journey ending in permanent fundamental change. For all she knew, her parents had conspired with the strange relative to rid themselves of Stella by selling her into slavery.

  They arrived at a cottage centered on an acre of rolling hills, much like Saint Saturn Unitarian, where neighbors were within view, if not earshot.

  Aunt Miriam emerged. Even though it was June, she wore a flowing shawl. It smelled of delicious cooking and fragrant herbs. After an introductory hug, Stella held it to her cheek and announced, “I like this.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make one for you!” Miriam declared, wrapping the shawl around herself and Stella in an affectionate gesture.

  Miriam’s smiles and scents put Stella at ease. When her parents left, she no longer felt it was the end of all she knew. In fact, it didn’t feel like any kind of end at all, but a very important beginning.

  Entering the kitchen, Stella saw that Miriam had things cooking, sweet things as it happened. “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby! Now I will just have to spoil you!”

  Stella giggled, and Aunt Miriam held up a playful hand. “No, ma’am! I’ll have no argument about it!”

  That was when Miriam handed Stella a handmade floral apron and said, “I’ve needed a helper for a long time!”

  During kitchen duties, Stella stood beside her aunt at the counter, handing her things and answering questions about her life that Miriam asked like it was the most crucial information this side of the Pentagon. A warm thing encircled her ankles, and Stella met Miriam’s cat friend, Sneezy, who slept with Stella that very night, after Aunt Miriam hugged and sang to her and then whispered something Stella couldn’t understand but that Miriam said would protect her. In the corner of her bedroom a candle burned, smelling of honeysuckle.

  That night her sleep mostly felt like rest. Oh, she had bad dreams, but not nerve-shredding visions of bloody mayhem. And she also had dreams that were just normal. Not as bucolic and serene as Miriam’s house during waking hours, not the first night. But they weren’t scary or tense either.

  Stella learned how to cook amazing dishes and they did make her that shawl, just like Aunt Miriam’s. Aunt Miriam had a piano that she played every few days, and she gave Stella a few lessons, telling her she had a knack for it and could probably play professionally!

  And there was something else very cool.

  Aunt Miriam’s neighbor Tom Dover came over in his old Scout truck, leading a worried-looking man named Reb. They had on identical-brand overalls, which was kind of funny. Stella was sure they hadn’t planned to match. An imagined conversation between the oldsters planning their outfits t
ogether amused Stella as she rode in the back of the truck while Miriam squeezed between the two men and they took a rambling drive to Reb’s place—something about the well going dry—that gave Stella an unforgettable IMAX view of a beautiful countryside even more rural than Ember Hollow.

  Reb’s was a true farm, with a smelly old pigpen. The pigs were scary at first, but then Stella saw Miriam, unconcerned with the stench, go up and talk to them, and she saw how they only responded with dumb gazes and lazy ear flicks.

  They all crowded into Reb’s pump house, where Reb flicked his fingers on a little gauge and shook his head like a doctor giving up on a patient, to show something or other about the pump.

  Aunt Miriam walked to an apple tree out front of Reb’s house and selected a thin limb, borrowing Tom Dover’s pocket knife to cut and trim it to a neat Y shape. “Let’s have Stella try it first,” suggested Miriam. “That okay?”

  Reb was doubtful. “What if it don’t work?”

  “Then I’ll just do it,” answered Miriam with a smile. “But I think she has it too.”

  “Has what?” Stella asked.

  The farmers waited for an answer that came out sounding mundane. “The ability to find water.”

  Aunt Miriam got behind Stella and showed her how to hold the divining rod. “When you get close, the front part will pull. You’ll feel it.”

  Stella spun to her, a little alarmed. “What makes it do that? Spirits?”

  “It’s not just the spirits, sweetie,” Aunt Miriam said. “You have to help them.”

  Right then, Stella realized that spirits weren’t just evil entities waiting to haunt or bedevil the lucky living, but rather people that sometimes moved among the living, helping or hindering depending on their own circumstances, just like flesh-and-blood folk.

  Aunt Miriam gave Stella a gentle shove to start her walking. She stared at the pale stick, hoping this wouldn’t somehow trigger her night terrors again.

  In just a few seconds, she felt a light tingling in her hands as the tip of the branch rose. She felt it pull to the left. As she obeyed the pull, she became exhilarated, giving Aunt Miriam an excited smile, feeling like she was working with something greater than herself to do a good deed.

  Thirty feet beyond the well house, the stick pointed straight down and refused to be moved. Stella was breathless as Miriam took the rod and hugged her. “There’s your new spring, Reb.”

  Reb gave Aunt Miriam a roll of bills, most of which Miriam gave to Stella, and Tom Dover drove them home.

  No terrors came to her that night, and life became normal for Stella—except that she knew something most people don’t.

  The next day, Aunt Miriam called her parents, and they came to get her, relieved, perplexed, more at ease than Stella had seen them in a long time. Stella told them about all the cool things she had learned over the three months she had spent there, including the dowsing.

  Stella no longer experienced night terrors—but she also never saw Aunt Miriam again, not even at her funeral. When Stella was sixteen, her mother told her that the spirit world was nonsense, and Aunt Miriam was probably crazy. It was just best not to see her again.

  After that, Stella didn’t pursue spiritual experiences, except in church—yet another trigger for eye rolling from her parents. At least their marriage had healed, and she still harbored a healthy interest in the supernatural, often reading books about the topic, alongside paranormal romances, and oh, God, don’t tell Ruth!—ghost erotica.

  These days, Stella slept through the night. Her alarm barely woke her, and when her husband, Bernard, went to rouse her, it required some effort on his part, something about which he often joked. It was as if she were making up for all those years of restless sleep.

  * * * *

  Stuart absently outlined the lightning-spouting guitar drawn on the back of his composition book as Mrs. Steinborn paced her usual route, two steps down each aisle between desks, then two in front of the blackboard, of which she made liberal use.

  A sense of excitement buzzed around school, fueled by early release and holiday fever.

  Every year, Mrs. Steinborn ended the unit on Ember Hollow history with its most interesting facts and myths on the day when they were most meaningful. “They arrived midsummer and formed our little town. One day, scouts brought back a variety of robust foods—pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, corn—they had acquired from a band of Cherokee they encountered.”

  She drew a plump pumpkin with a curly stem. “These bloomed in the fall, and it is said that Bennington, remembering his native country’s tradition of making lanterns from carved-out turnips with an ember placed inside, took to doing the same with these strange new fruits, giving us both our town name and the modern tradition of jack-o’-lanterns.”

  Stuart knew a good bit of Ember Hollow history. His father had sometimes related town legends to him at bedtime, when the story well ran dry. Discussing these in class brought back memories, bittersweet, strangely energizing.

  Amid distracted, fidgeting bodies, a prim hand rose.

  “Yes, Kelly?”

  “Is it true that Wilcott Bennington worshiped demons?” Kelly asked.

  Mrs. Steinborn held up her own hand to quiet a smattering of condescending titters, then went to her desk to refer to a memo from that very morning. “Before we delve too far into that, I’m obliged to preface with a disclaimer.”

  The day after the unit began, an anonymous parent had called to complain about, as the parent called it, the “glorification of heathen rituals.”

  Kelly’s parents were of the southern fundamentalist variety, almost as fanatical as Ruth. They traveled to the next county for Sunday services, rather than expose themselves to McGlazer’s liberal philosophy at Saint Saturn Universalist. Teachers often found themselves stumbling around her questions, which invariably led back to the Bible. Regarding the complaining parent, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots.

  “Who knows what ‘disclaimer’ means?”

  “Neither you nor the school system approve, agree with, or encourage the actions described,” Albert Betzler pronounced. “Strictly educational purposes, blah blah.”

  “Albert, we still raise our hands and wait to be called on,” said Mrs. Steinborn.

  “Should go without saying,” Albert continued, casting a sarcastic face at Kelly that was not unlike Mrs. Steinborn’s.

  “He talked to the dead, I hear,” mumbled Fergus Rhew.

  The teacher cleared her throat, faced the chalkboard. “Much of the following has been dismissed as urban legend and exaggeration.”

  She wrote the words “Circa 1660” on the board in a flowing script that would have been quite at home on any preprinting press document. “Around 1660, Wilcott Bennington, an Irishman who had amassed a reasonable fortune with his import-export firms in Virginia, met a tracker who expressed high regard for the flatlands of a colony then called Carolina. Bennington was under a cloud of suspicion at the time, for a conversation he’d had in a pub, about his religious beliefs.”

  Kelly’s hand shot up.

  “Yes, Kelly?”

  “He was a heathen?”

  “The man we know as our town father built the town’s first church, which still stands,” Mrs. Steinborn said. “But before that, who can tell us how he wound up here?”

  “By boat?” Fergus Rhew said, getting a round of laughter he didn’t expect, playing it off like he did.

  “The man to whom Bennington spoke in that Virginia pub went to his priest and claimed Bennington stated that he not only believed in the gods of the Roman pantheon but further asserted that Christianity was largely false.”

  “So, he was a Satanist.”

  “We raise our hands, Kelly. Bennington denied it and accused his accuser of slander. It was Bennington’s word against the other man’s.”

  Mrs. Steinborn drew a tankard on t
he chalkboard, spilling over with froth, held by a beefy cartoon drunk with crossed eyes and bubbles rising from his head. Despite the detail, it took only a couple of seconds, and drew buoyant chuckles. “In spite of this and Bennington’s stature, he was sure he was under suspicion and scrutiny. His tracker acquaintance had already planted a seed in his mind about the pristine Carolina wilderness.”

  She speed-drew a pine tree and a chubby squirrel. “Bennington recruited families from the employees of his businesses, swearing them to silence, giving the reason of not wanting hordes of unsavory settlers saturating what he hailed as God’s own country.”

  Kelly’s hand again. Mrs. Steinborn ignored it.

  “Then came the harsh winter no one could have expected. As food supplies dwindled, panic rose and prayers went unanswered, Bennington called the townspeople together at the church-schoolhouse and made a momentous announcement.

  “He dumped out a bag of dried pumpkin seeds and bade the villagers eat their fill—which they did. He proclaimed that he had plenty of food to last the rest of the winter and then some, and he was happy to share, as long as everyone agreed to follow him without question.”

  She sketched a document, furled at top and bottom, a feather quill beside it. “They all signed a pledge, and then followed Bennington to a field in the woods behind his home. There, they beheld hundreds of ripe, hearty pumpkins.”

  Kelly nearly leaped out of her desk, waving her hand like a stranded castaway.

  “Please, Kelly. Let me finish, and then I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “Actually, I have comments.”

  “In a moment.”

  Kelly settled, issuing a frustrated sigh.

  With a muffled giggle, the kid beside Stuart raised his own sketch, a stick figure of Mrs. Steinborn with twin pumpkins in place of breasts, flashing it around for his immediate neighbors before jamming it under his notebook and hunkering over to giggle silently.

  “Bennington came clean about his beliefs, crediting the bounty to the Roman god…” She awaited participation.

  “Saturn,” Stuart mumbled.