The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(115)

Those would be the only words she spoke to James Harris for the next hour. Without giving herself a chance to hesitate, Mrs. Greene stuck the knife into the inside of James Harris’s elbow. It hit bone right beneath the surface but she worked it around, and the more she imagined she was trimming the fat from a Christmas ham, the easier it became to dissociate herself from what she was doing as he screamed.

She hacked away at his elbow, giving up on clean, neat cuts and just chopping at the ligaments and tendons. She sawed, she sliced, she scraped at his skin with her hunting knife.

“Listen to me,” James Harris gibbered. “You’re confronted with the secret to eternal life and you’re just flushing it away. This is insane.”

Mrs. Greene ignored him and finally got his elbow carved down to the bone.

“Maryellen?” she called. “Let Kitty take care of Patricia. I need a hand.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maryellen said, coming in from the bedroom.

Maryellen held James Harris’s forearm in both hands and twisted it back and forth while Mrs. Greene held his shoulder and cut anything that looked like it was still connected. With a cartilage-tearing crunch and a series of small, fast pops, his forearm came free. A few strings of meat and gristle connected it to his body but Mrs. Greene cut the ones Maryellen couldn’t pull apart. Maryellen dropped the forearm into a black plastic garbage bag and carefully tied a knot in the top. Immediately, the bag began to writhe as the arm tried to get out.

“I can feel my spine healing.” James Harris grinned at Mrs. Greene. “You’d better hope you can cut faster than I can heal.”

Mrs. Greene worked fast, with Maryellen assisting. They took off the rest of his left arm at the shoulder, then his right foot, his right leg at the knee, then at the hip. The black plastic bags piled up in the corner of the bathroom in a squirming heap. As his muscle and bone dulled each hunting knife, Mrs. Greene dropped it into a plastic bag and picked up a new one. Maryellen cleaned the chain-mail gloves when they became too clotted with gore to keep a firm grip on his flesh anymore.

“Where are your boys living?” James Harris said to Mrs. Greene. “Irmo, isn’t it? Jesse and Aaron. When I get out of here I’m going to pay them a visit.”

Even when she turned him onto his stomach to work on his left arm and leg, James Harris kept up a running monologue that became less and less coherent as they cut more and more of him away.

“I never went where I wasn’t invited,” he rambled. “The farm, the widow’s house, Russia, I only went where they wanted me. Lup asked me to use him, he asked me with his eyes, he knew I could keep him alive, but he had to keep me alive first. I’ll always remember that beautiful boy. That soldier wanted it, his face was so burned, and I did him a favor. I only did what people asked for. Even Ann wanted what I had to offer.”

They took a break. Mrs. Greene’s arms throbbed and ached. The threat of James Harris’s spinal column knitting itself back together loomed over her. They didn’t have much time, but all she wanted to do was take a hot bath and go to sleep. The night felt endless.

“How’s Patricia?” she asked Kitty.

“Asleep,” Kitty said, still pressing the towel to Patricia’s thigh.

Maryellen looked at the stiff way Kitty held her neck. A purple shiner circled her left eye.

“What’ll you tell Horse?” Maryellen asked.

Kitty’s face fell.

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” she said.

“We’ll figure it out when we’re through here,” Mrs. Greene said. Her confidence calmed Kitty. “Put some ice on your eye for now.”

Back in the bathroom, James Harris’s torso greeted her again. It was time for his head. She dreaded this moment although she also hoped it would finally shut him up. One thing she’d learned about men: they liked to talk.

As she worked her knife through the tough tendons and what remained of his spinal column, James Harris kept talking.

“The Wide Smiles Club will come looking for me,” he said, eyes trying to find hers. “That’s what we do. They’ll come looking for me and when they find out what you’ve done, there will be hell to pay for you and your children and your families. This is your last chance. You can stop now and I’ll tell them to leave you alone.”

“No one is going to come looking for you,” Mrs. Greene said, unable to resist. “You are all alone. You have no one in the world, and when you die no one will notice. No one will care. You leave nothing behind.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, and gave a bloody grin. “I’m leaving you all a present. Just wait until your friend Slick gets ripe.”

He started to giggle and Mrs. Greene crunched her knife through his windpipe and she and Maryellen gripped him by the hair and pulled off his head with a loud pop.

Then they did what Miss Mary had told Patricia to do all those years ago at the supper table the night she spat at James Harris. Maryellen held his head and Mrs. Greene took a hammer and drove two thick twenty-penny nails into each of his eyes. His mouth finally stopped moving. Then they dropped his head into a bag and tied it shut.

They gutted him and packed his organs and entrails into different bags. She was too tired to saw through his rib cage, so they simply removed as much meat from it as they could and wrapped pound after pound of flesh and muscle in different plastic bags. They double-and triple-bagged them, reducing James Harris to a pile of tightly sealed trash bags that could fit into an ordinary sized garbage can.