CHAPTER 4

      Patsy

      June, 1952

      At the end of Ebenezer Road, under a thinning day that rubbed itself against the bark of a spreading elm, a murky light laundered saw-toothed leaves, splashed down onto the gnarled feet of the old tree, the 1950 Mercury resting in its puddled path.

      Patsy inspected her new prom shoes, worrying about them getting dusty. At least it’s still daylight, she comforted, standing under the elm, wringing her hands, stroking her arms. The early evening light slashed coppery-gray streaks across her pale skin.

      The leaving hour. She feared this time of day, hated that the last hour always felt like it was snatching a vital part of you with its leaving—could pull you into its sneaky shadows and disappear from the world without a trace. Frightened by the way the bats swooned for skeeters, cartwheeling, dipping a little too close to your head, and hated the way chittering birds hurried to tuck themselves in. Hated this place, too, lately fearing it more than ever. Though she didn’t understand why the old spot had set its tentacles onto her like that. That was the reason she’d stopped riding her bike and started catching rides with Danny and his brother down the road in the mornings, begged for the totings in the afternoon.

      Sometimes Flannery stayed after school to practice her silly baton twirls. If Patsy couldn’t hitch a ride, she would get stuck walking weedy Paintlick Field. Bad enough, but there was Ebenezer Road too, the only cut-through to home and all by herself—something that gave her the willies.

      Old Ebenezer snugged alongside a cemetery and was an occasional private nest for lovers and rumored to be haunted. Walking the dirt-packed road, under a canopy of sleeping elms, she’d have to keep a sneaking eye behind and ahead, loudly humming to get out of that pocket of fear she carried.

      Patsy snapped her head away from the cemetery gate. A shudder climbed up her backbone and slid around her scalp.

      Others felt the same way, and, over the years, more than one stranger’s automobile had broken down on that dead-end road. Some in Glass Ferry said the town should build a filling station out there.

      Just last month, one carload of out-of-towners swore they’d seen what others had over the years. A small family cemetery crooked across from a white clapboard house. Children yelled out of its two-story panes, and in the yard below, a long-skirted woman wearing a bonnet called back to the youngsters.

      The woman turned to the lost travelers, beckoning them up to the white picket fence. The stranded folks walked the fifty-odd feet and looked over at the graveyard and back to the house. But no one was ever there, just a church-quietness that licked at the home’s laced curtains, and a gift resting outside the somber cemetery’s wrought-iron gate—a full gasoline container for the frustrated strangers’ empty automobiles that had mysteriously gone dry at the end of Ebenezer Road.

      Late into the blue hour, the weary travelers hurried and tended to their automobiles before full dark took hold. Some ended up renting one of the vacant rooms above Lenora’s Dry Goods & Notions, the only resting spot and motel of sorts to be had in a circle fifty miles across.

      Most felt the urge to drive back to Ebenezer Road the next day to thank the charitable family. Pulling up alongside the cemetery, they found only a half-broken picket fence that had rooted itself into the black earth, and the crumbly remains of rubble and chimney rock where a house once stood.

      Folks said Ebenezer Deer and his three children had perished in the farmhouse fire decades ago when the midwife, Joetta, left her husband and small boys to tend to an ill neighbor. Others called her a witch and said she’d done the deed herself.

      Driven to madness, the widow hanged herself under the elm, folks rumored. She’d been walking Ebenezer Road ever since.

      Flannery didn’t mind being on Ebenezer, she’d told Patsy. Said the old place reminded her of a lullaby that was always tucked sweetly in your chest. And that the parting hour made Flannery think of Honey Bee and their old whiskey boat on the river heading home in the sunset.

      Patsy couldn’t understand why Flannery would like this horrid place, especially in the hour that calls to the darkness. Why couldn’t her twin feel what she felt? What Honey Bee knew, same as her: The place was bad. Though her daddy’d never said why, Patsy had known his look enough not to push, the tilt of the head; what with that and the cut in his eyes, he’d warn his girls he was through talking about Ebenezer and was ready to let go of any further discussion.

      “Flannery, you got to feel something too,” Patsy said one day as they walked home from town. “This old place is ugly, and you know it.” Patsy urged her sister to change her mind, prove Patsy had sound reason to hate the place.

      “It’s not too bad,” Flannery’d said.

      “Even Honey Bee told us it was. Said we couldn’t play here when we were little. That we shouldn’t tarry in this spot. Not on the way to school, or on the way home either. That there was evil soaked here. Mama said so, too,” Patsy’d reminded her sister.

      “Mama just doesn’t like to talk about Joetta. Any bad things.” Flannery had shrugged. “They probably just said that ’cause of the cemetery. And those hoodlums who cut loose once in a while out here and trash it up. That’s all.”

      “Flannery!”