Bull Mountain(15)

They were the last to arrive at the funeral, if you could even call it that. Outwardly it looked more like a crowd who’d turned out for a cockfight. Just a bunch of unkempt men standing around in a circle in their dingy work coats and boots, holding jars of corn whiskey, smoking, and carrying on. The few women who’d been allowed to come sat silent, bound together by expressions of profound sadness that were in no way inspired by the departed. They all looked much older than they were, tired and bleached out, the color of summer hay bales. Kate felt equal parts compassion and resentment toward them all, but also found herself trying to tug a few extra inches out of her skirt to cover more of her bare legs. No reason to rub it in.

Halford wouldn’t allow his brother’s body in a church, or a preacher to be present, so the men just stood together out on the banks of Burnt Hickory Pond, telling their stories and pouring whiskey on the ground. Soon they would just dump the body in a hole next to the one his father was buried in.

Clayton’s grandfather, Cooper, had been buried in a field near Johnson’s Gap, intending it to be the burial site for all the Burroughs to follow, but his son, Gareth, Clayton’s father, had wanted to be buried here, at Burnt Hickory Pond. No one knew why. The graves spoiled memories she had of this place when she was a girl. Swinging out on the old tire swing with silly teenage boys, beating their skinny bird-chests, being loud and young. This place used to be a symbol of her childhood, of summer, something dear. Now it was the burial ground of murderers and thieves. She was surprised that the lush grass and bright green moss around the pond wasn’t rotting and brown, considering the amount of bad blood in the dirt.

From the moment Clayton pulled the truck up next to the line of primered pickups and ATVs, every set of eyes locked on them. First on her, in her not-so-conservative black dress, then on Clayton, in a uniform that evoked the purest form of disgust and hatred these people could muster. The crowd broke in half as she and Clayton approached, revealing Halford Burroughs hunched over a plain pine box next to a freshly dug hole. The box held a man shot to death by men dressed the way her husband was dressed now. Halford’s eyes were red and swollen from crying, and it was maybe the first time since meeting Clayton’s family all those years ago that she’d ever seen the big man show any type of emotion that wasn’t fueled by spit and vinegar, but his face faded back into the slab of cold granite she was used to seeing when he laid eyes on his little brother. Right then, in that moment, Clayton said something to her under his breath, but she didn’t hear it. Maybe it was an admission of this having been a bad idea after all, but she couldn’t be sure. She did ask him when it was all over what he had said, but he told her he couldn’t remember. It was the first time, to her knowledge, that Clayton had ever lied to her. The crowd either stood silent or whispered and pointed as she and Clayton joined the group, but it was Halford who verbalized the mood with just three words.

“How. Dare. You.” He fumbled to draw the gun poking out of his pants, and Kate had thought she might pass out right then and there. She felt the tingle in her fingertips and saw the flashing black starbursts in the corners of her vision. It was the most frightened she’d ever been in her adult life. Thankfully, Halford’s men grabbed him and held him back. He roared a string of obscenities at them and fought to get at Clayton, but, thank God, his people were successful at keeping him in check. Clayton never flinched. He never reached for his own sidearm, he simply reached a hand across Kate’s abdomen and calmly pushed her back a step behind him. Kate remembered in the middle of all her panic how sexy he’d looked at that moment.

“He was my brother, too,” Clayton said, “and I deserve to be here.”

Halford spit at them, getting most of the slick brown spittle on the pine coffin. One of the men Kate recognized and knew as a good man at least on the surface, a man Clayton called Scabby Mike, yelled back while struggling to contain Halford’s gun arm. “Well, be quick about it, Clayton, or we’ll be burying two of y’all today.” Kate believed that, and nudged Clayton forward. An eternity could be fit into the time it took her husband to say his piece to that simple closed pine box and rejoin her at the truck. She couldn’t remember even taking a breath. But he did eventually come back, and they left, driving slower than she would have liked. She looked back and saw the men gathered around Halford. He’d stumbled and they were helping him up off the ground. She saw that he’d started crying again. Maybe it was proof of a soul in there somewhere, but she didn’t want to stick around to find out. She just wanted to go home. She put her hand on Clayton’s leg and went to speak, but saw that he was crying, too.





CHAPTER





5




HALFORD AND CLAYTON BURROUGHS

1985

“You ever been stung by a hornet?” Hal said out of the blue. He didn’t look at his kid brother when he spoke. It was pitch black out, so he just kept his eyes on the dirt road ahead. He had one hand dangling lazily over the steering wheel, and the other gripped around a can of Stroh’s in his lap—his third since they’d left the house.

“Sure I have,” Clayton said. “It stings like the dickens.”

Hal narrowed his eyes and studied his little brother’s face. It was a boy’s face. “Well, I don’t think you have, then, Clayton, ’cause if you did, you wouldn’t say ‘It stings like the dickens.’ That just don’t cover it. Those sum’ bitches hurt like nothing else in this world. Pain you ain’t never gonna forget. You get stung by one of those suckers and it’s enough to bring tears to your eyes. God forbid you get stung by a bunch of ’em . . .” Hal paused to find the right wording. He blew out a long trumpeter’s breath of air and shook his head. “You get hit by a bunch of ’em—buddy, you’re going down.”