[franklin]
Phoebe Winston sat in the cusionless chair with her hands kept neatly in her lap and her spine erected severely. Her mouth was tiny and strict. Her hips were too narrow. She had pink, anthill breasts that barely breathed against her blouse. There was a kind of wasted perfection about her. The plain, pious way she wore her hair, in a steel bun, like the shell of a beetle. The reigned meticulousness of her fingernails. Straight, woven dress, no nonsense. The precipice of her nose. Just the smallest dabbing of lady-like sweat on her upper lip.
She wore her skin like a uniform.
And age wore her like the yellowing, well-traveled pages of a bible.
The only things out of place about Phoebe were her silly, unchristian name and her teeth. Her crooked, carcassed teeth. Stained and rusty. A row of poisoned, sick trinkets. Unevenly space, rotting, atrocious in their foulness. She kept her lips closed around them. She kept them secret and out of sight. Her cheeks were smooth from the infrequency of a smile.
She smelled of chamomile and abstinence.
Phoebe sat in front of Pastor Franklin's desk. Charlotte, her daughter, sat beside her. She held her head in her hands. Franklin was playing with his pen and avoiding eye contact. He had stripped off his coat and loosened his collar and the window was propped open, letting in flies and the sound of cars choking on the road.
It was a real shame about the Gibbs boy. Real, godawful shame. Shot himself clean in the mouth. The girl's eyes were red and sick looking, like round sucker wounds left on the legs by leeches. He opened his mouth to speak, but lost the words, and closed it again. The carnival of the flies.
Phoebe said, “Pastor, let me make things clear and short. Charlotte was sinning with this boy. She was pretty much whoring with this boy. She's got no more grace. She's a stain and a dishonor. But God in his great and infinite mercy will provide forgiveness. You know this. He always does. Even for her kind.”
She paused.
The sin crawled and groveled in the the curdled shadows of the room, unseen, like a monster under the bed. Festering and licking at fingertips. Franklin kept his lips tight and his eyes down.
“First, I want you to pray for her immortal soul, Pastor. God knows that I've prayed enough. And maybe she'll find it within her to change. Second, I would like it if you could find some work for her to do. Some work around the church. Maybe if she's somewhere holy she'll realize the heaviness of what she's done.”
In a strangled voice, Charlotte said. “Mother, I do. I swear I do! I'm sorry. I've said it a million times and I'll say it a million times more until you hear me, but I'm sorry.”
“Doesn't make things any better. Don't apologize to me. Apologize to your Father in heaven.”
She looked at Franklin.
“Can you do that for me?”
Franklin sighed and shrugged. “Listen, Phoebe. I think I know what you're going through. And I can't deny what Charlotte did was a sin. It was. But people will be people. Sin's our big brother.”
“Christ is our brother.” Phoebe looked offended.
“Sure, sure. You're right. He is. He's right there with us, too, even in all of our sins. Your daughter looks sorry enough. She looks like she knows the 'heaviness'. She's a good girl, Mrs. Winston. Let her and Jesus work it out between themselves. Let's do it that way, okay?”
Phoebe's lips shriveled and tightened in on themselves, and her face grew passive and distant, color draining out of her cheeks, like a yolk being sucked out of an egg by a weasel. Charlotte was looking out of the window, her mouth hanging open slightly. Her face fallen and swollen. Her whole body still trembling a little bit. The soul, slumped and shouldered. A pale resemblance, tired, like it's seen the whole world. Just want to sit and think. Sit on the curb. Dry and old already, he could tell. The grind and squeal of unoiled chastity.
Franklin looked back down at his hands.
He didn't like this spoiling of youth.
Phoebe Winston stood. He could hear her dress slithering, molting on her body. She pulled at Charlotte's shoulder who stood up behind her. She walked to the door, opened it, and looked back at Franklin.
“Pastor, you're a spineless, godless man.”
Franklin stood up and pointed at her. “Now wait a minute!”
“And you can stop calling her my daughter. She is no daughter of mine.”
The heat chafed.
[mathis]
Mathis had his thumbs through his belt-loops. He was smoking a cigarette. Daniels was talking to him – fast, incomprehensible words. His flustered hands. Boot heels crunching on the hard dirt. Mathis wasn't listening. He felt muddled and sedated by the fatty heat. The sun shone so pale, it looked ill. There were thin, beggarly clouds humping the horizon, circling, but keeping far away, like scavengers restless around a left-over body.
The few trees were white-skinned and shy, like undressed women.
Mathis tipped up his hat brim and flicked his cigarette to the road side.
Daniels was saying, “Aw, hell, my nose was picking up that godawful scent from all the way clear up the road and I was thinking what in the Lord's good name is that? And so I drove out here and I heard nothing, man. Dead, crap silence. No hogs or chickens. Shoot, man, I got out of my car and checked the stile and the coop and all my animals were dead. Ever' single one of em. It was all I could do to keep my stomach. Lord in heaven, the stench'll knock the breath right out of you...”
Mathis nodded.
He could smell something in the air.
Barely there, waiting. A suggestion of rot and decay.
The day was completely silent. Still and blue and secret. Hiding something. The trees were abolitionists. The shadows crouching and hounded at their bases by the light, like runaway slaves. Daniels pointed out the stile and the dumpy, squatted chicken coop, titled slightly to one side as if it were a head regarding the faraway clouds. Mathis sniffed again. The smell of fetid guts and hot, unused flesh, breeding in the heat.
They walked into the stile first. Mathis could almost feel the touch of the smell, could feel it crawling up his pant leg and slicking back his hair and pulling at his throat muscles. Dilated, naked. The heat spread its legs and wallowed in the smutty odor. He pulled out his bandanna and pressed it to his nose, coughing and holding his stomach. Daniels stood a little way off, still talking.
In the shade of the stile, he saw them. The black, mud-crusted bodies of seven or eight hogs, fat and stump-legged. Flies haggled and philosophized, congregating on the soggy flesh, diseased dabbing proboscises and wings, black and glittering, like the sweat on a negro's back. A casino of sickness and old meat. Just laying there. Mouths partially open, filled with flies. Eyes shriveled and wormy with slippery grubs. Mathis took his flashlight out of his belt and shined it into the shadows. He scanned the light up and down the bloated bodies. No signs of predators. No signs of struggle. Just the corpses. Peaceful and pupating.
He walked away and took a breath of air.
“See anything, Sheriff?”
He shook his head. “Nope. They're just lying there. What's in the coop?”
Daniels took him to the coop. Mathis put the handkerchief back over his nose and stepped in. Flies. Ghostly feathers and a thin spreading of hay and dry dung. There were hens and a few chicks strewn around the coop, stiff-bodied and strict-mouthed. Lying there white and dessicated. Deaf to the buzzing, nauseating fly-songs. Spoiled eggs in the nests. A filthy rooster, green-blue tail feathers curving behind him like peelings of the nighttime.
Mathis stepped out.
He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and took a cigarette out. He offered one to Daniels who accepted. They lit up and started walking back up the road.
“Sorry, Daniels. I don't see anything that would make me say this was a dog or a kid or something. It looks like they all just plopped over and died. I mean, look at the hogs. They're lying in the shade. All together. They aint got no wounds or nothing either. No footprints. Nothing out of place, right?”
Daniels nodded, his rawhide face sinking a little in thought and worry, features almost melting, dissolving in the dusty hot, like swallowed pills.
Mathis continued. “I bet it was just the heat. I think it was heatstroke is all.”
“Gonna be helluva mess to clean up.”
Mathis nodded and bit the inside of his cheek and looked warily up at the sky.
The heat preened.
(A/N): Somewhat slow again. Needed to introduce Phoebe Winston, though. More on her later.
