Light to the Hills: A Novel (83)
“You shouldn’t never have laid a hand on my daughter,” added Rai. “And you almost cost the life of my boy. Reckon that score’s done settled.”
Beady lifted the lid back onto the box and latched it there. While she stooped down, Rai’s eye caught sight of Gripp’s satchel, lying where he’d dropped it when he’d come in. She picked that up, too, and showed Beady its contents.
“You prob’ly won’t be needing that no more,” Beady said. “And the law would just take it if they found it. It’s the least you can do for the woman you left a widow.”
They backed out the way they’d come in. When Gripp saw they intended to leave him there, the slit opened again. The snake nestled by his neck might strike again if he moved. Not that he could move. Likely, he could hardly draw breath. The women closed the shack door and sealed him in shadow once more. When Gripp’s heart gave out, as it surely would soon enough, his body temperature would drop, and the viper next to him would go in search of a meal and a place to bask in the sun.
Chapter 25
The knot between Sass’s shoulders, the one that had climbed up her neck and made her head ache on and off for the past months, finally unwound. She was so relieved to see Finn’s face at Amanda’s door that she almost cried, and might have, too, but for how surprised and happy she was when Amanda had leaped up and hugged on him right in front of God and everybody.
When Daddy and Finn had arrived at Amanda and Mooney’s, worn-out and dusty from their long trek to the sheriff, the situation couldn’t have turned out better if they’d scripted it themselves. Finn would not have jail time. Daddy had heard it from some men in town that the sheriff had raided the still site, tipped off, he knew, by Finn, who’d drawn a map of the location. The sheriff and his deputies approached with caution, of course, since renegade moonshiners fiercely protected their investment and craft. As it turned out, all the fight had gone out of the feller who went by Spider. One eager deputy burst into the shed and found him lying in a pitiful state, snake-bit all to pieces and long dead. One rattler crawled right out of one of the man’s boots on the floor, which goes to show why you should always knock your boots out before sinking a foot in.
Although Finn had implied he might have had firsthand knowledge of the operation, the sheriff had allowed him to walk with a warning on account of his father vouching for him and being willing to give up the locations of the operation. The law was able to bust up the equipment handily and put an end to this particular bootlegging. The other information the two of them had presented—about Gripp being responsible for a cave-in at the mine and several past killings—had less evidence behind it, but things had a way of working themselves out, the sheriff said, and in this case, that had been true for certain by the looks of the way the feller had met his end.
“I never woulda believed it,” Finn told Sass. “I can’t recall ever seeing so many rattlers in one spot in all my days in the mountains. I spent many a night myself out in that very shed and never thought of it as especially snaky. Must’a been the knockers,” he said, “roaming the woods like the Cherokee say. Maybe they wanted to settle up for what he done in the mines and lured ’em in there.”
Amanda confirmed she’d come upon a right plenty this year. “They must be thicker’n we knew. Best to keep a sharp eye out near the woodpiles.”
As for the orphaned roosters, one of the women from the WPA office in town suggested they distribute the carcasses to deserving families on the routes ridden by the packhorse librarians, many of whom had been hard-pressed to feed their children since the stock-market crash. That way, they wouldn’t go to waste, and folks in the region might benefit to boot. The sheriff allowed that was a fine idea, mostly since it saved him from figuring how to haul a whole flock of fighting birds back to the county seat.
They all piled on the wagon back up to the MacInteer place, where Mama and Beady Wick had prepared a full meal. There, Amanda introduced Finn to her folks, forgetting he’d already met them, and the look in Amanda’s eyes and the way Finn stood near her in such a close and familiar way set Sass grinning from ear to ear. Amanda promised to visit soon, on her next library circuit. Daddy and Jack Wick shook hands, for it turned out Jack had already spoken to Daddy about wanting an apprentice or two for blacksmithing. It took a toll on a body, all that bending and lifting, he’d said, and he couldn’t keep at it like he once had. They agreed Finn and Cricket would be quick hands at forging and were keen to learn a trade that would keep them aboveground.
Knowing Finn wouldn’t have to spend time in jail, locked away from the trees and fresh air, was a miracle. More miracle still was what had happened to the hateful rooster man. Jail would’ve been too good for him, had the law been able to tie him down for all he’d done. The way Sass saw it, justice had come with a swift and clever hand. It wasn’t for her to question, so she let it be.
Up on the other side of the mountain some days later, in the little white church in Pickins, preacher Jack Wick told his wife he was flummoxed that he’d neglected to latch his serpent box and had lost all five of the newly caught vipers. Beady hummed to herself as she hoed the garden rows and watched as Jack turned the box over to empty it of the dry grass and few leaves inside. She paused her work on the melon patch when she saw Jack pick something from the bottom of the box. It was a clump of hair snagged under a splinter in the wood. She held her breath as he examined it, turning it this way and that in the sunlight before he stashed it in his pocket.