David Baldacci Read online

  Sam and Hit stood silently in their own corral. Old Mo would never prey on the pair. An ornery mule could kick just about anything to death in a matter of minutes.

  The front door of the farmhouse opened. Oz made not a sound when he closed the door behind him. The boy was fully dressed and had his bear clutched tight. He looked around for a few seconds and then took off past the corral, cleared the fields, and plunged into the woods.

  The night was a bucket of coal, the wind rattled tree limbs, the underbrush was thick with sounds of stealthy movement, and the tall grass seemed to clutch at Oz’s pant legs. The little boy was certain that regiments of hobgoblins were roaming nearby in full terrifying splendor, he their sole target on earth. Yet something inside Oz had clearly risen superior to these horrors, for he did not once think of turning back. Well, maybe once, he admitted to himself. Or perhaps twice.

  He ran hard for a while, making his way over knolls, navigating crisscross gullies, and stumbling through the jumble of dense woods. He cleared one last grove of trees, stopped, stooped low, waited a bit, and then eased out into the meadow. Up ahead he saw what he had come for: the well. He took one last deep breath, gripped his bear, and boldly walked right up to it. But Oz was no fool, so just in case, he whispered, “It’s a wishing well, not a haunted well. It’s a wishing well, not a haunted well.”

  He stopped and stared at the brick-and-mortar beast, then spit on one hand and rubbed it on his head for luck. He next looked at his beloved bear for a long time, and then laid it gently down against the base of the well and backed away.

  “Good-bye, bear. I love you, but I’ve got to give you up. You understand.”

  Now Oz was unsure of how to proceed. Finally, he crossed himself and put his hands together as though in prayer, figuring that would satisfy even the most demanding of spirits who granted wishes to little boys desperately in need of them. Staring at the sky he said, “I wish that my mother will wake up and love me again.” He paused and then added solemnly, “And Lou too.”

  He stood there with the wind slicing into him and with peculiar sounds emerging from a thousand hidden crevices, all potent with evil, he was sure. And yet with all that, Oz was unafraid; he had done what he came to do.

  He concluded with “Amen, Jesus.”

  Moments after Oz turned and ran off, Lou stepped from the trees and looked after her little brother. She walked up to the well, reached down, and picked up his bear.

  “Oz, you are so dumb.” But she didn’t have her heart in the insult, and her voice broke. And ironically it was iron-tough Lou and not open-souled Oz who knelt there on the damp ground and sobbed. Finally wiping her face on her sleeve, Lou rose and turned her back to the well. With Oz’s bear held tightly to her chest, she started to walk away. Something made her stop though—she wasn’t exactly sure what. But, yes, the fierce wind truly seemed to be blowing her backward, toward the thing Diamond Skinner had so foolishly called a wishing well. She turned and looked at it, and on a night when the moon seemed to have totally abandoned her and the well, the brick seemed to glow as though afire.

  Lou wasted no time. She set the bear back down, reached in the pocket of her overalls, and pulled it out: the photo of her and her mother, still in the frame. Lou placed the precious photograph next to the beloved bear, stepped back, and taking a page from her brother’s book, clasped her hands together and looked to the sky. Unlike Oz, though, she did not bother to cross herself, or to speak loud and clear to that well or to the heavens above. Her mouth moved, but no words could be heard, as though her faith in what she was doing were lacking still.

  Finished, she turned and ran after her brother, though she would be careful to keep her distance. She didn’t want Oz to know he’d been followed, even though she had come along only to watch over him. Behind her the bear and the photo lay forlornly against the brick, resembling nothing so much as a temporary shrine to the dead.

  As Louisa had predicted, Lou and Hit finally reached middle ground. Louisa had proudly watched as Lou rose each time Hit knocked her down, the girl growing not more afraid through each tussle with the wily beast, but rather more determined. And smarter. Now plow, mule, and Lou moved with a fluid motion.

  For his part Oz had become an expert at riding the big sled that Sam the mule dragged through the fields. Since Oz was lacking in girth, Eugene had piled rocks all around him. The big clods of dirt gave way and broke up under the constant dragging, and the sled eventually smoothed the field like icing on a cake. After weeks of work, sweat, and tired muscles, the four of them stood back and took stock of good ground that was ready now to accept seed.

  Dr. Travis Barnes had come up from Dickens to check on Amanda. He was a burly man—red hammy face, short legs—with gray side whiskers, dressed all in black. To Lou, he looked more like an undertaker coming to bury a body than a man trained in preserving life. However, he turned out to be kindly, with a sense of humor designed to make them all comfortable in light of his bleak mission. Cotton and the children waited in the front room while Louisa stayed with Travis during his examination. He was shaking his head and clutching his black bag when he joined them in the front room. Louisa trailed him, trying to look cheerful. The doctor sat at the kitchen table and fingered the cup of coffee Louisa had poured. He stared into his cup for a bit, as though looking for some comforting words floating among the strains of beans and chicory root.

  “Good news,” he began, “is that far as I can tell, your momma’s fine physically. Her injuries all healed up. She’s young and strong and can eat and drink, and so long as you keep exercising her arms and legs, the muscles won’t get too weak.” He paused and set his cup down. “But I’m afraid that’s also the bad news, for that means the problem lies here.” He touched his forehead. “And there’s not much we can do about that. Certainly beyond me. We can only hope and pray that she comes out of it one day.”

  Oz took this in stride, his optimism barely tarnished. Lou absorbed this information simply as further validation of what she already knew.

  School had been going more smoothly than Lou had thought it would. She and Oz found the mountain children to be far more accepting of them now than before Lou had thrown her punches. Lou didn’t feel she would ever be close to any of them, but at least the outright hostility had waned. Billy Davis did not return to school for several days. By the time he did, the bruises she had inflicted were mostly healed, though there were fresh ones which Lou suspected had originated with the awful George Davis. And that was enough to make her feel a certain guilt. For his part, Billy avoided her like she was a water moccasin looking to get the jump on him, yet Lou was still on her guard. She knew by now: It was right when you least expected it that trouble tended to smack you in the head.

  Estelle McCoy, too, was subdued around her. It was apparent that Lou and Oz were well ahead of the others in terms of book learning. They did not flaunt this advantage, though, and Estelle McCoy seemed appreciative of that. And she never again referred to Lou as Louisa Mae. Lou and Oz had given the school library a box of their own books, and the children had slipped by one after the other to thank them. It was a steady if not spectacular truce all around.

  Lou rose before dawn, did her chores, then went to school and did her work there. At lunchtime she ate her cornbread and drank her milk with Oz under the walnut tree, which was scored with the initials and names of those who had done their learning here. Lou never felt an urge to carve her name there, for it suggested a permanency she was far from willing to accept. They went back to the farm to work in the afternoon, and then went to bed, exhausted, not long after the sun set. It was a steady, uninspired life much appreciated by Lou right now.

  Head lice had made their way through Big Spruce, though, and both Lou and Oz had endured shampoos in kerosene. “Don’t get near the fire,” Louisa had warned.

  “This is disgusting,” said Lou, fingering the coated strands.

  “When I was at school and got me the lice, they put sulfur, lard, and
gunpowder on my hair,” Louisa told them. “I couldn’t bear to smell myself, and I was terrible afraid somebody’d strike a match and my head would blow.”

  “They had school when you were little?” Oz asked.

  Louisa smiled. “They had what was called subscription school, Oz. A dollar a month for three month a year, and I were a right good student. We was a hunnerd people in a one-room log cabin with a puncheon floor that was splintery on hot days and ice on cold. Teacher quick with the whip or strap, some bad child standing on tippy-toe a good half hour with his nose stuck in a circle the teacher drawed on the board. I ain’t never had to stand on tippy-toe. I weren’t always good, but I ain’t never got caught neither. Some were growed men not long from the War missing arms and legs, come to learn they’s letters and numbers. Used to say our spelling words out loud. Got so the durn noise spooked the horses.” Her hazel eyes sparkled. “Had me one teacher who used the markings on his cow to learn us geography. To this day, I can’t never look at no map without thinking of that durn animal.” She looked at them. “I guess you can fill up your head just about anywhere. So you learn what you got to. Just like your daddy done,” she added, mostly for Lou’s benefit, and the girl finally stopped complaining about her kerosene hair.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LOUISA FELT SORRY FOR THEM ONE MORNING and gave Lou and Oz a much needed Saturday off to do as they pleased. The day was fine, with a clean breeze from the west across a blue sky, trees flushed with green swaying to its touch. Diamond and Jeb came calling that morning, because Diamond said there was a special place in the woods he wanted to show them, and they started off.

  His appearance was little changed: same overalls, same shirt, no shoes. The bottoms of his feet must have had every nerve deadened like hoofs, Lou thought, because she saw him run across sharp rocks, over briars, and even through a thorny thicket, and never once did she see blood drawn or face wince. He wore an oily cap pulled low on his forehead. She asked him if it was his father’s, but received only a grunt in response.

  They came to a tall oak set in a clearing, or at least where underbrush had been cut away some. Lou noted that pieces of sawed wood had been nailed into the tree’s trunk, forming a rough ladder. Diamond put a foot up on the first rung and started to climb.

  “Where are you going?” asked Lou, as Oz kept a grip on Jeb because the hound was acting as though he too wanted to head up the tree behind his master.

  “See God,” Diamond hollered back, pointing straight up. Lou and Oz looked to the sky.

  Far up a number of stripped scrub pines were laid side by side on a couple of the oak’s massive branches, forming a floor. A canvas tarp had been flung over a sturdy limb above, and the sides had been tied down to the pines with rope to form a crude tent. While promising all sorts of pleasant times, the tree house looked a good puff of wind away from hitting the ground.

  Diamond was already three-quarters up, moving with an easy grace. “Come on now,” he said.

  Lou, who would have preferred to die a death of impossible agony rather than concede that anything was beyond her, put a hand and a foot on two of the pieces of wood. “You can stay down here if you want, Oz,” she said. “We probably won’t be long.” She started up.

  “I got me neat stuff up here, yes sir,” Diamond said enticingly. He had reached the summit, his bare feet dangling over the edge.

  Oz ceremoniously spit on his hands, gripped a wood piece, and clambered up behind his sister. They sat cross-legged on the laid pines, which formed about a six-by-six square, the canvas roof throwing a nice shade, and Diamond showed them his wares. First out was a flint arrowhead he said was at least one million years old and had been given to him in a dream. Then from a cloth bag rank with outside damp he pulled the skeleton of a small bird that he said had not been seen since shortly after God put the universe together.

  “You mean it’s extinct,” Lou said.

  “Naw, I mean it ain’t round no more.”

  Oz was intrigued by a hollow length of metal that had a thick bit of glass fitted into one end. He looked through it, and while the sights were magnified some, the glass was so dirty and scratched, it started giving him a headache.

  “See a body coming from miles away,” proclaimed Diamond, sweeping a hand across his kingdom. “Enemy or friend.” He next showed them a bullet fired from what he said was an 1861 U.S. Springfield rifle.

  “How do you know that?” said Lou.

  “ ’Cause my great-granddaddy five times removed passed it on down and my granddaddy give it to me afore he died. My great-granddaddy five times removed, he fought for the Union, you know.”

  “Wow,” Oz said. “Yep, turned his pitcher to the wall and everythin’, they did. But he weren’t taking up a gun for nobody owning nobody else. T’ain’t right.”

  “That’s admirable,” said Lou.

  “Look here now,” said Diamond. From a small wooden box, he pulled forth a lump of coal and handed it to Lou. “What d’ya think?” he asked. She looked down at it. The rock was all chipped and rough.

  “It’s a lump of coal,” she said, giving it back and wiping her hand clean on her pants leg.

  “No, it ain’t just that. You see, they’s a diamond in there. A diamond, just like me.”

  Oz inched over and held the rock. “Wow” was again all he could manage.

  “A diamond?” Lou said. “How do you know?”

  “ ’Cause the man who gimme it said it was. And he ain’t ask for not a durn thing. And man ain’t even know my name was Diamond. So there,” he added indignantly, seeing the disbelief on Lou’s features. He took the coal lump back from Oz. “I chip me off a little piece ever day. And one time I gonna tap it and there it’ll be, the biggest, purtiest diamond anybody’s ever saw.”

  Oz eyed the rock with the reverence he usually reserved for grown-ups and church. “Then what will you do with it?”

  Diamond shrugged. “Ain’t sure. Mebbe nothing. Mebbe keep it right up here. Mebbe give it to you. You like that?”

  “If there is a diamond in there, you could sell it for a lot of money,” Lou pointed out.

  Diamond rubbed at his nose. “Ain’t need no money. Got me all I need right here on this mountain.”

  “Have you ever been off this mountain?” Lou asked.

  He stared at her, obviously offended. “What, you think I’a hick or somethin’? Gone on down to McKenzie’s near the bridge lots of times. And over to Tremont.”

  Lou looked out over the woods below. “How about Dickens? You ever been there?”

  “Dickens?” Diamond almost fell out of the tree. “Take a day to walk it. ’Sides, why’d a body want’a go there?”

  “Because it’s different than here. Because I’m tired of dirt and mules and manure and hauling water,” said Lou. She patted her pocket. “And because I’ve got twenty dollars I brought with me from New York that’s burning a hole in my pocket,” she added, staring at him.

  This gigantic sum staggered Diamond, yet even he seemed to understand the possibilities. “Too fer to walk,” he said, fingering the coal lump, as though trying to hurry the diamond into hatching.

  “Then we don’t walk,” replied Lou.

  He glanced at her. “Tremont right closer.”

  “No, Dickens. I want to go to Dickens.”

  Oz said, “We could take a taxi.”

  “If we get to the bridge at McKenzie’s,” Lou ventured, “then maybe we can hitch a ride to Dickens with somebody. How far is the bridge on foot?”

  Diamond considered this. “Well, by road it a good four hour. Time git down there, got to come back. And that be a tiring way to spend a day off from farming.”