Now, Cot saw the way Constable Kamen was scrutinizing the funeral attendees. She came to the same conclusion that I did, that perhaps the Donnel boys were not the ones who killed Miss Holly. That Kamen was looking for an identifying aspect that would reveal the true killer. All I could see in his face was frustration.
His eyes met those of another man across the way near the front door. Reverend Saulk was greeting people as they arrived, shaking hands, nodding and patting. He looked sad and tired through the paternal set of his face.
Then a buggy pulled up and Miss Holly's old Mama came out. She stepped down the fragile steps of the conveyance on the arm of an even older black man. They hobbled up the church stairs through the stilled crowd like a boat among reeds. She was the very picture of her daughter, save older. Her hair, though white, retained an aura of the blond tresses of her youth.
Cot looked particularly dismayed at the sight of Miss Holly's mama. As the ancient woman passed right by us, her smell wafted in of mothballs and medicine. Cot started crying quietly and Luce, to the surprise of us all, put his arm around her.
I saw Saulk and Kamen exchange a glance, the meaning of which was obscure to me.
Then, our local power baron, William Wickley III marched up to Reverend Saulk. William Wickley’s holdings were on a magnitude of scale appropriate to our small town, but his ego and aspirations were off the chart.
His long frame, composed primarily of severe acute angles, hung in the lobby as if suspended by an invisible, silken thread. I was brought to mind of an ancient spider, lurking in shadow, only emerging to strike and devour.
My animosity toward the man may be perceptible. William Wickley owned the sawmill where my parents were at that moment slaving away, and behind which Miss Holly's ravaged body was found.
Everybody in the town called the man Winky, for reasons I assumed illiterative, but which ultimately turned out to be based in the nature of certain intimate occurrences that had come to light, events I was too young to be appraised of.
Winky's eye passed over the three of us. His disdain was in evidence. We were, after all, the dirty spawn of a couple of his degraded employees. Then he was talking animatedly to Saulk, pausing only to glare intensely at anyone who threatened to approach.
Winky went low toward the Reverend's ear and started whispering, saliva spattering the poor Reverend's face causing him to flinch over and over. As I watched Winky's face reddened and seemed to expand, the whiteness of his eyes enlarging, looming. His too-white teeth flashed like knives. Then he abruptly stopped and walked into the church, his long strides carrying him in parabolic importance.
The Reverend looked utterly dismayed. He made excuses to an approaching parishioner and then he too left the scene, in the opposite direction, toward the church offices. I looked over at Constable Kamen. Kamen’s eyes followed Saulk as he hurried away. Then he turned and looked directly at me.
I could feel my eyes visibly widen. I grabbed Luce's elbow and indicated my desire to go inside and sit down.
Luce walked us all into the church proper, and we sat near the back. My perverse desire was to sit right up in front, like in class, but the basis of that desire, that I could somehow catch Miss Holly’s eye, her living eye, was powerfully weighed down with its own somber impossibility. I submitted to Luce's quiet direction.
***
"So don’t let despair eat at you as it has so very many. It is in these very moments, when events break in unexpected and tragic ways, that our mettle is tested. That our resolve in the Lord is strained to the breaking point. That we either succeed, or are defeated."
Reverend Saulk braced himself against the pulpit, his arthritic knuckles white. He had the admirable facility of transforming himself, during sermon, from the irretrievably inoffensive, rather foolish person he usually appeared to be, into a capable steward of moral authority, sensibility, and humanity. I was getting further choked up, and if Luce's weird breathing was any indication, so was he. Cot was silent between us.
"Of course I knew Theda Holly from a baby. I baptized her and Eli right there, almost twenty nine years ago."
Eli? I looked around the church, in all the locations of import, but saw no one to merit mention who looked like an Eli.
Saulk continued to intone, "I know her mother, Helen,” here he gestured expansively to Miss Holly’s mam, “… and knew well her father Kenneth, before the great war took him from us. All compassionate, moral people who loved and love the Lord, as their fellow men.
"How can folk defend themselves from such evil as brings us all together on this fine spring day? The answer sadly is that they cannot. For that is the nature of such evil, that it is contingent, unnecessary, and unraveling of our most precious designs.
"To Helen Holly, I say this," Saulk paused seeming to build up energy for the words he was about to utter. Miss Holly's mama was a stone in the front row, her face immobile as she looked up at him. "You have proved yourself through your hardships, your good will, your love of God and your incredible strength. We are all here for you, to say goodbye to Theda. We love you and are here for you.”
Miss Holly's mama just kept looking up at him, her face streaked with tears. Saulk seemed just about start up again, but then he just stopped, looking down at Helen Holly. Everyone in the church followed his gaze.
Her head was moving. It was kind of swaying back and forth. Now it was left to right, increasingly violent.
She was shaking her head, no. No! No!
"The Lord won’t never forgive,” she whispered. The accoustics of the church conveyed her soft words to every ear in the place and there was a white noise chorus of murmur and breath intook.
Miss Holly's mama stood up sharply and her purse fell to the floor clattering objects all over the place. She stepped forward, unmindful as she crushed a small mirror under her foot.
"Not you" she whispered, pointing up at Saulk with a claw like hand.
"Not any of you!" She turned her claw round to us and her rasping, almost pleading voice continued.
"Any of you.." as her gesture rested on Winky, sitting with his family in the row behind her. He seemed to shrink from her pointing hand as if it were emitting poison. Then the accusing digit drifted over, to Winky’s son, Robert, sitting just down the row. Robert Wickley was weeping.
Then Miss Holly's mama collapsed on the floor. The ancient black man who'd brought her in tried to get to his feet but was unable to. He fell back into the pew, his legs actually rising into the air for a moment.
There was a susurrus of alarmed whispers from the church goers. Then Constable Kamen, who had inched closer to the front as Mrs. Holly was talking, and had rushed over a second too late as she fell, spoke quietly to Reverend Saulk who was leaning down from the pulpit, "She ain't breathing Rev."
The whole church silenced. All we could hear now were the strange sounds of the recussitory attempts, poundings and wheezings and other such awful noises.
Luce pushed me and Cot out of the pew and fairly shuffled us out of the church.
"Just keep walking and don’t say nothing" was all he told us. Cot looked wide eyed at me but did as she was told and remained silent. I just hung my head and followed Luce all the way to our house, where I fell into my bed. I contemplated the ceiling and its flow of shadows until sleep overtook my racing mind and I was subjected to roiling dreams in dark lands.
***
Let us wend past to days when Miss Holly breathed and smiled across at me from her dappled wooden desk.
Miss Holly was killed right at the start of the school year. So the time I describe was a more distant memory, with a summer intervening. I sometimes feel it was this summer’s break from seeing her that had so intensified my crush on Miss Holly. As if indeed in her absence my heart had grown so fond that the thought of returning to school was an exciting one, just to see her again.
She had been, before she was pulled from me, my teacher for the whole day. Out there where we lived we did not go from teacher to teacher to learn different subjects as they do in urban settings. We had the practices of combined grades and one teacher all the day long. I sat directly in front of her desk and would endlessly steal furtive glimpses, whether she was teaching or writing in her papers. Every so often she would catch me and flash a smile, as if to say "It's ok - I don't mind that you love me."
"Mr. Cleary, did you want to ask me something?"
"No Miss Holly, just thinking,” I blurted out, shuffling a book into my desk and hiding behind the raised top.
Miss Holly got up and erased the blackboard in long swipes and arcs.
"We've got an imposing amount of material to get through today. Who can tell me what 'imposing' means?"
One of the older girls ventured, "scary?" amid giggling of her less brave friends.
"Close enough," said Miss Holly. She opened a pair of books on her desk.
"Juniors to page 16 of the primer and seniors to 51 of their math text. Cot and Sam please just practice the sums below the dotted line on your work sheet."
An hour later found me doodling in my notebook instead of reading the assignment. I looked up from my drawing to see Miss Holly staring dead at me. Her face was drawn into a mask of absolute impassivity. I looked right into her eyes then, but I don’t think she even knew it. She was off somewhere in dense thought while we students were silently reading.
Finally, she turned her face away, to the sun from the window.
The initial reason I loved her so was primordial and simple. She looked just like the woman on the cover of a book I often gazed at for minutes, hours, for the entire duration of my childhood. It was The Cave Girl, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and showed a fur-bikini clad, raven haired beauty flanked by two ravenous saber-toothed tigers.
The cave girl was strong and full hipped and looked me directly in the eye from the cover of the book. The fantasies I derived from this image remain with me still.
Miss Holly’s dark hair was wild like the cave girl’s, her eyes as mischievous and powerful. She seemed as if she could readily tame tigers, yet in my fantasies, she always submitted sweetly to me.
