The Devil Take the Blues--Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Beatrice

The Spanish moss swayed, ghosts in the air. The clouds were boiling in the dark, bruise-purple sky above me. Wind whipped the trees into a frenzy, and ahead of me, I saw lightning flash orange and jazzed. The resounding thunder rolled through my chest.

I had my suitcase clutched in my hand. I sped up, not because of the rain, but because the sense that my luck was about to run out. I could see Agnes’ house just up the lane. So close.

I’m coming.

That’s when my sister’s scream tore through the air.

“You’ll be the death of me,” screamed Tim. “You’ll be guilty.”

The front door flew open. She rushed out of the house, her dress torn and dirty. I was about one hundred yards away.

“Agnes?” I called.

Then Tim came out behind her. Even in that white, awful hood, I knew it was him. Did he think to hide himself? Did he want to make himself braver? Did he want to hide his cowardice behind fabric?

God knows. Or Frank.

He reached for her, and he grabbed the collar of her dress and yanked her back. Slammed her against the side of the house and gripped her neck with his huge hands. She clawed at him but could not move. She kicked him in the fork of his legs, and he released her.

I was running before I could process it. I had no time to feel as though I had been punched in the stomach, no time to process the sheer terror I felt. No time to wonder how he had escaped the jail.

Agnes was running toward the woods and toward her fate. I followed her, praying that I would not be too late.

But I already was.

Twigs and branches scratched my face and hands as I tore through the woods. I had followed them—I tried to outrace Tim and Agnes, but they sped ahead of me.

I glanced through the trees and saw them—on the other side of the river, cresting the hill of the graveyard. They were still too far away for them to hear me.

“Agnes!” I screamed, but thunder swallowed it up.

I could see them, through the trees, Agnes’s face twisted in terror and Tim running to catch her.

Speeding through the forest, I sobbed.

Time warped and slowed, like dripping honey down a Mason jar. Tim’s face contorted in rage. As he shouted, his lips drew back, and he bared his teeth like a wild animal. My blood froze at seeing how completely unhinged he was. He was no longer on this side of sanity.

I knew then that he would kill her.

The curse rang in my head.

Not now, not now, please dear god, just save her, just save her.

God did not show up.

But the Devil would.

As I approached the river’s edge, my feet froze. It was as though it were an open, gaping mouth in front of me, an endless, black chasm.

I was completely and utterly paralyzed.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stand there, looking into the river, instead of at my sister, who was even now being grabbed by Tim. He held onto her arm and shook her so hard that I felt my own teeth rattle in response. The two inches between me and the river was a void that I could not cross. I knew that if I crossed that line, I would be swallowed up, never to be seen again. I remembered. I remembered the water rushing into my mouth, my lungs, remembered the painful inability to breathe, the certainty of death. I remembered the caress of water against my skin, the stickiness of the mud, the sharpness of rocks scraping my knees.

Again, lightning crackled through the sky, and thunder rolled through my heart.

I looked up. Tim had drawn back his hand and now punched Agnes in the stomach.

Perhaps I was closer to the edge of my own insanity than I had previously thought, for when I saw Tim lay the first blow on my sister, something in my mind cracked.

I could hear the sound echoing in the now empty, still places of my awareness. 

Still, the river flowed on.

But that snap, that sweet, succulent breaking of whatever kept me tied down to reality broke something in my legs as well. It broke through the stillness, the frozen, frigid lock.

My feet entered the water. I was shaking, and it had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with how cold the water was. When it got to my knees, my breathing accelerated. My feet were squelching in the mud, but any slippery rock would send me to my death. The water was as black as the sky. The trees were heavy with sticky pine tar. Such a lovely smell on the way to death.

Agnes had saved me from the water. I would save her.

My life for yours.

Agnes’s face was swelling. Tim had now thrown her on the ground. As he lifted a fist to the sky, lightning illuminated the sky behind it, leaving his hand in a black shadow. I willed my traitorous legs to move faster.

When the water rose to my chest, I realized the power it had. I lifted my legs and started stroking my arms, slicing the water into velvet ribbons. With every single breath that I had, I moved toward her.

With every heartbeat, my mind never strayed from one, resounding thought: Agnes.

I would save my sister; I would defy fate, God in His Heaven, and the Devil in the South. A harsh laugh escaped my lips. Once it left, more followed it, and I screamed my laughter so loud that it startled the owls from their trees.

My foot slipped, and I went under.

Blackness, all-consuming, greedy, soft blackness; it tried to impregnate me, as it pounded and pulsed into me. My unholy baptism.

Pushing with all my might upward, my head burst through the water.

Not this time.

I was nearly at the other side, and Agnes was on the ground.

She was not moving.

Howling, I clutched at a tree root hanging over the edge of the river. I pulled myself up and out. My clothes hung heavy on me, but I did not even notice their weight as I ran toward Agnes.

I saw Tim, and I knew that I would kill him. Prison be damned. Laws of man and nature too. If my sister died, and that piece of no-good, lying, piece of trash lived, I would not rest. My fingers would not rest until they plunged a knife in his heart.

Just then, I saw a sliver of movement at the corner of my eye.

Frank leapt onto Tim, their bodies colliding. Frank rolled with the impact, and he braced himself against Tim. He pinned him down with his arms as though they were lovers. They kept struggling.

My legs burned as I ran up the hill. I threw myself at Agnes.

My god, what did he do to you?

Helplessness washed through me, threatening to drown me, even as the river once tried to. I could do nothing but take my sister into my arms and count the seconds until she died.

I could not make my mouth work. I could not speak. Agnes was purple and red; her beautiful hair was matted, and she could barely breathe.

“Rib,” she gasped.

Tim had snapped one of her ribs. It had punctured something deep inside her, and now she was bleeding out—on the inside.

“Shhhh,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Agnes closed her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she said.

“You won’t,” I said.

She would.

“I’m here,” I said, tears streaming down my face. I could not let her go. I could not, could not, this could not possibly be the end, where would she go, what would I do, there was nothing left for me if she died, who would I tell my secrets to, who could I talk to without fear of judgement, who would always rescue me from rivers and demons and shadows, who was the most important person in my life…

I rocked her; rocked us both.

“Do you remember that time we said we would leave this town?” I asked. “We were in the back of the wagon, and we said that we would go everywhere.”

Agnes smiled, the barest upturn of her lips. “Yes,” she whispered. “We swore it.”

“That we would go to France and Spain and even the Carolinas,” I said. “We would take apples and beef jerky and set out with that rickety wagon and the horse that looked liable to fall over.”

I could not stop the tears pouring down my face, my cheeks. I had to make her remember. I had to make her hold on.

Just then, I heard a rustling in the trees. I turned my face for just a moment.

Angelo and Shirley emerged from the brambles. My mouth fell open.

“Now’s the time.” she said walking closer. She looked at Frank and spoke to him, but he was still fighting with Tim. When she spoke, she wasn’t talking to Frank, not really. She looked down at my broken sister, with her tiny, faint gasps and her ruined body. “You took the one thing that I loved most in the world. You’ve been stalking this girl from the moment you’ve arrived. It may not be much, and I may pay for it in the end, but now it’s time to give me my due. Hell hath no fury like a mother.” She held out her hand to Angelo. “You told me you have the harmonica, oui? Give it here.”

Wordless, Angelo pulled out the harmonica and gave it to his grandmother. She put it to her lips and played. Never mind that it was tuneless; never mind that Angelo, as the musician, could have played better. Shirley played like wind chimes; no rhythm, reason, or rhyme, but music all the same. Lightning cracked the sky behind us.

Tim jerked to his feet. Tim walked as though attached to minstrel strings over to Agnes, then lay down beside her. I could feel each beat of Agnes’ heart getting weaker and weaker through her hand. Finally, Shirley stopped playing to speak.

“She’ll be gone for a moment,” Shirley murmured. “But she’ll be back.”

Her playing became louder, ever louder. Thunder rolled in my chest, and my breath was icy. It streamed out in a fog. Shirley now breathed out music with every ounce of strength she had. At the next lightning strike, Shirley finished and played no more.

In that instant, I felt Agnes change. That was exactly what I did not want. I never wanted her to change. I had wanted her to go on existing exactly as she had before, when we were young and carefree. I had spent so many years seeing her slowly transform into the woman she was now, and it had always seemed like there was another person inside, someone who was not Agnes making her move and talk. Even her laughter was different. That was someone else’s laugh. I had ignored it, and maybe if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be clutching her blood-stained hand, praying to a God that I was not sure existed.

She had already lost consciousness, but her hand somehow relaxed in a way that made my heart stop. It made everything stop. I heard time creaking by. Someone was laughing in the background. Nothing moved.

Then it came. I could not stop my sister from changing. I could not stop her from loving who she wanted. She had to make her own choices, choices that would let her be happy. I had tried to let her be happy, but god, it had stuck a twelve-inch, steel-bladed bowie knife in my own heart.

Now I watched her make the ultimate transformation.

After a moment, an hour, a day, eternity, her hand twitched.

But it was Tim’s voice that drew me.

Tim opened his eyes and said in a voice that was his, the same tenor, the same cadence, but it belonged wholly to Agnes.

“Beatrice?”