Summer Sons(82)

“Oh, hell, I remember that face now,” Lisa said. She propped her chin on her hand. “You and the Fulton boy were the ones that got in trouble out in the woods back there, weren’t you? He said he was curious about his family, and we’ve been here for years, my mama and her mama before that.”

Andrew nodded, glancing out the doors again. A steep hill rose up at the edge of the yard, shale sticking out of the crumbling dirt and grass, straggling trees tumbling and growing on the slope. A curious tremble ran up his fingers into his sore arms.

“So I guess you’re here about the curse too, then,” she said.





22


“Curse?” Sam asked first.

“The Fulton curse,” Lisa McCormick repeated. She sipped her tea and glanced between the boys at her table. “It’s a grim subject though, considering your friend’s accident.”

“No, I want to hear,” Andrew said.

“He asked us to meet a little while back, but then he rescheduled. I think he had some detail or another on the family history he wanted to chase down before he interviewed us,” Rob interjected.

“There’s a couple different versions of the story,” she said. “I heard it from my mama, who must’ve heard it from someone else, and so on. But I guess it’s too backwoods for people to be putting in books.”

Andrew crossed and recrossed his arms on the table, finding the safest angle to support his wounds. He settled with a thumb tucked into the crease of his elbow on one side and the other hand resting on his bicep. Sweat prickled the divot of his pectorals. Sam and Mrs. McCormick sipped their tea.

Andrew said, “What’s the curse about, then?”

“Well, it’s more or less what you’d expect, but it’s a good story. Legend has it,” she started, hill-rolled accent deepening, “that the second son of James Fulton fell head over heels for a delicate girl from up north he met when he was at schooling. So against the family’s judgment, given he had prospects down here, he marries the girl and brings her home to the estate his daddy built.”

Mrs. McCormick gestured out past the slope of their yard. The sympathetic tingle in Andrew’s skin rippled. He was closer to the Fulton land than he’d been in eight years. When he’d checked a GPS map before the drive, he realized that the McCormick forest joined the Fulton forest some distance from the trailer with its flower boxes. He owned the land across that invisible line. He wondered if he’d recognize the moment he stepped across the divide.

“What happens to the wife?” Sam asked, his posture unsticking as he listened.

“Good question,” Mrs. McCormick said. “She was delicate, like I said, and she got sick from the trip. And they’re only your age, might as well be babies. The second son puts her up in that big plantation and gets her all the best care money can buy, but she doesn’t get better. She catches fevers and won’t eat, and she wastes down to skin and bones.”

“The Fultons had a plantation?” Andrew cut in.

“Of course! I bet the old house is still standing out there, but you wouldn’t know it. The ones that came back after the war moved to the opposite end of their land and built fresh,” she said.

On some level Andrew had forgotten, spending his years as a teen and then a young man in northern Ohio, that histories had a longer and uglier reach where he was from. His mind turned straight to the fat zeroes in his accounts, the estate he’d inherited and the implications of where it came from, with a creeping dread. Of course the Fultons had owned a fucking plantation—how else had he imagined them getting rich?

“Sounds like something out of a book already,” Sam said, oblivious to his ongoing internal reckoning.

Mrs. McCormick laughed, a brief pealing sound. Her husband chuckled as well. His fond approval radiated from the attention he paid her as she spoke. Andrew noted their openness, then asked, troubled, “What happened next? After she got sick?”

“This is where it gets interesting. The second son loves this girl so much he decides to step onto an unholy path. Now the story varies, but in the one my mama told me, he makes a deal. He takes his youngest sister, goes out to a crossroad on the property past the witching hour, and he waits until some evil comes to him. He looks that evil square in the face and offers it his sister in return for his wife.”

Despite her warning of grimness, her face was alight with the pleasure of spinning out the tale, leading them from one beat to the next. He supposed she hadn’t had much occasion to tell it. He hadn’t noticed pictures on the mantles or the walls, not of children or grandchildren.

“He kills his sister,” Sam guessed.

“Of course he does,” Mr. McCormick said.

“Naturally,” his wife confirmed. “He slashes her throat and she bleeds out onto the crossroads. Right where they put the marker of the estate, if you’re feeling symbolic. It’s old land anyway, land that’s had people doing their deeds on it for a long time before the Fultons decided to own it. So he sheds her blood, then he opens his wrist and gives it some of his, and he makes a deal that if he can have power over his wife’s death, he’ll keep giving the land more.”

Andrew stopped breathing, hands gone tense around his arms. Blood for blood, offered to the earth—wasn’t that a familiar story, one that lived curled up at the core of him.