Chaneysville Incident Read Online Free Page B

generations of Hawleys had tended store, one of the few places in the world where you could still buy a bottle of Moxie. A little way up the slope would have been the meticulously tended home of Aunt Lydia Pettigrew. Behind its shining clean windows Aunt Lydia would have been tenderly feeding the most bloodthirsty pack of mongrels north of Meridian, Mississippi. Aunt Lydia had kept the dogs since the state had taken her last two foster children, Daniel and Francis, away from her, and she was the only person who could come near those dogs without being torn to bits, for good reason—she had spoiled them by feeding them nothing but ground round steak, with Almond Joy candy bars for dessert. At the very bottom of the Hill, and way off to the left, two little girls would have been playing in front of a ramshackle house. The girls, Cara and Mara, and the house belonged to Miss Linda Jamison. It sat where it sat to spare visitors the necessity of climbing the Hill, of venturing any farther onto it than necessary. Inside it, Miss Linda would have been sleeping, exhausted from her night of entertaining a few “good friends” from the town. At the top of the Hill was the house Moses Washington had built. Behind its windows no one would have been stirring; Moses Washington had left his wife and children “comfortable,” which meant that his wife could support the family on the money she made as a lawyer’s secretary, and did not have to get up before seven. And on the far side of the Hill, where, quite literally, the sun didn’t shine, and where the houses—only one now—had no windows, Old Jack Crawley would have been “doing his mornings” in the old battered outhouse down the slope from the spring where he drew his water.
    I knew nothing about the Hill any longer, I had made it my business not to know. But now suddenly, inexplicably, I was curious, and so I thought for a moment, pulling half-remembered facts from the back of my mind—scraps of information—and made extrapolations. Uncle Bunk, his arms permanently bowed from sixty years of suitcases, trunks, train cases, hatboxes, golf bags, et cetera, now spent his hours playing checkers by the stove. There was usually no one there for him to play with, so he moved for both sides. Aunt Emma Hawley still made biscuits. She had seen no need to stop making them when Mr. Hawley died, and so she kept on making them and fed them to the chickens—she couldn’t stand sour milk biscuits. The gleaming white paint and meticulously applied green trim on Aunt Lydia’s house was flaking and spotted, for Aunt Lydia was no longer around to hire the workmen for shrewdly low wages and watch them like a hawk; she had been found lying on her spotless kitchen floor surrounded by her sleek murderous mongrels, who steadfastly protected her even after she had been dead for two days—from malnutrition. Miss Linda Jamison’s house looked little different, but now it was just a hulk. She and her girls had moved to better quarters a few blocks from the center of town; Miss Linda’s “good friends” had grown too old to walk so far, and their sons, who were “good friends” of Miss Linda’s girls, did not like to walk at all, and the cars were…conspicuous. There would be fewer sleepers in Moses Washington’s fieldstone house; the sons had gone away. And Old Jack Crawley was sick.
    I reached the top and stood looking at Moses Washington’s house. The walls were rock-and-mortar. The style of masonry was uneven, the lower, earliest-laid courses being of dressed stone, the upper two thirds or three fourths being of fieldstone. Despite the fact that all the stones were more or less triangular—the rocks in the lower courses having been trimmed to that shape, the ones in the upper courses having been, apparently, selected for it—the change in style from ashlar to rubble was apparent and abrupt and, in fact, quite ugly. The question of why the mason had changed styles had never been