The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(33)
“Around then the Beckham boy went missing,” Miss Mary said. Her throat rasped now. “He was a pale little redheaded thing, six years old, who’d follow anyone anywhere. When he didn’t come home for supper we all went looking. We expected to find him curled up under a pecan tree, but no. Some people said the government inoculation men took him away, others said there was a colored gal in the woods who churned white children into a stew she sold as a love spell for a nickel a taste. Some folks said he fell in the river and got carried away, but it didn’t matter what they said—he was gone.
“The next little boy to vanish was Avery Dubose. He was a tin bucket toter and Hoyt told everyone he must have fell in one of the machines at the mill and the boss lied about it. That stirred up bad feelings between the mill and the farmers, and with so much rabbit spit around tempers ran hot. Men started showing up at church with their arms in slings and bruises on their faces. Mr. Beckham shot himself.
“But we had presents under the tree that Christmas and Daddy convinced Mama sweet times were here. In January her belly got tight and round. I was their only baby who’d lived out of three, but now another baby had taken root.
“They’d never have found Charlie Beckham if that combine salesman hadn’t stopped his horses at the Moores’ old place and seen the water from their pump flow thick with maggots. They had to let that little boy’s body sit in the icehouse for three days to let all the water drain before he’d fit in his coffin. Even then, they had to build it extra wide.”
White spit formed gummy balls in the corners of Miss Mary’s mouth, but Patricia didn’t move. She worried that if she did anything to break the spell this thread might snap, and Miss Mary might never speak like this again.
“That spring, nobody could afford to plant nothing,” Miss Mary went on. “Nobody had nothing in the ground so Daddy and Hoyt had to spend big to bring corn all the way from Rock Hill, and they had all their money tied up in the rabbit spit barrels. The banks didn’t care about no scrip and they started taking everyone’s tools, and their horses, and mules, and no one could do nothing. Everyone waited for those barrels.
“The third little boy to go missing was Reverend Buck’s baby and the men got together on our back porch and I heard them speculate through my window about one person or another, and the jar kept getting passed, and then Hoyt Pickens said he’d seen Leon Simms around the Moore farm one night, and I wanted to laugh because only a stranger would say that. Leon was a colored fellow and something had happened to his head in the war. He sat in the sun outside Mr. Early’s store, and if you gave him candy he’d play something for you on the spoons and sing. His mother took care of him and he got a government check. Sometimes he helped people carry packages and they always paid him in candy.
“But Hoyt Pickens said Leon liked to wander at night and had been creeping in places he shouldn’t. He said this is what happens when people come down from up north and spread ideas in places that weren’t ready for them. He said that Leon Simms sat outside Mr. Early’s store and licked his lips over children and took them to secret places where he slaked his unnatural appetite.
“The more Hoyt Pickens talked, the more the men thought he sounded right. I must have nodded off because when I opened my eyes it was full dark and the backyard was empty. I heard the train pass, and a hoot owl carrying on out in the woods, and I was slipping back to sleep when the land lit up.
“A crowd of men came in following a wagon and they had lanterns and flashlights. They were quiet but I heard one hard voice talking loud, giving orders, and it was my daddy. Next to him stood Hoyt Pickens and his ice cream suit glowed in the dark. They pulled something off the back of the cart, a big burlap bag we used for picking cotton, and they lifted one end and something flowed out wet and black onto the dirt. It was Leon, all tied with rope.
“The men got shovels, and they dug a deep hole underneath the peach tree and dragged Leon to it and he must not have been dead because I heard him call my daddy ‘boss’ and say, ‘Please, boss, I’ll play you something, boss,’ and they threw him down in that hole and piled dirt on top of him until his begging got muffled, and after a while you couldn’t hear it anymore, but I still could.
“When I woke up early there was mist on the ground and I went out back to see if maybe I’d had a bad dream. But I could see the fresh-dug dirt and then I heard a noise and saw my daddy sitting real quiet in the corner of the porch and he had a jar of rabbit spit between his legs. His eyes were swollen red and when he saw me he gave me a grin that came straight out of Hell.”
Patricia realized that was why Miss Mary let the peaches rot. The memory of the fruit’s sweet juice running down her chin, its meat filling her stomach, now tasted sour with Leon Simms’s blood.
“Hoyt Pickens left before the rabbit spit turned brown,” Miss Mary croaked. “Daddy took the wagon to Columbia but he couldn’t find who’d been buying from Hoyt. All our money was in those barrels but no one in Kershaw could buy the rabbit spit at the price Daddy needed and he drank up most of it himself over the next few years. Mama lost my brother child and Daddy sold his stills for eating money. He never worked another day, just sat out back, drinking that brown rabbit spit alone because no one would come by our place knowing what we had buried there. When he finally hanged himself in the barn it was a mercy. When hard times came a few years later some people say it was Leon Simms that poisoned the land, but I’ll always know it was Hoyt.”