The Jabberwock Read online

  The Jabberwock

  Nowhere, USA Book One

  Ninie Hammon

  Copyright © 2020 by Sterling & Stone

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  A Note from the Author

  About the Author

  Also By Ninie Hammon

  Chapter One

  “Hurted me,” was all Merrie said, swiping ineffectually at the gush of blood pouring down her forehead, over her eyebrow and into her left eye.

  Charlie McClintock turned from the books she was stacking in a packing box, expecting a skinned knee requiring a kiss to make it better. When she saw the blood, she couldn’t help burping out a tiny scream, which, of course, let three-year-old Merrie know that the cut on her forehead was, after all, something worthy of pitching a fit over. And so she did.

  Dropping dramatically to her knees, Merrie tilted her head back and began to wail, a high-pitched screech that should have etched the sound syllables into the glass in the windows. Charlie took two steps and scooped the little girl up into her arms, mumbling soothing words — “Shhh, sokay, shhhh, momma’s gotcha, shhhhh” — trying to keep the child still long enough to examine the wound.

  Ordinarily, Charlene Reneé McClintock was not a woman easily rattled, but she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after last night’s freak storm and the violent fury of it left her … unsettled. It had struck without warning, no rumble of thunder to signal its approach. It hadn’t even been sprinkling when a sudden wind savagely attacked the house, tearing the front screen door off its hinges and ripping the porch swing off its chains to use as a battering ram against the wall. A strobe of lightning burned into Charlie’s retina the image of the front-yard willow tree’s branches lashing out like a cat o’ nine tails, the juniper trees cavorting like those blow-up figures you see at car dealerships and grand openings, ripped-off limbs threatening to come crashing through the windows … and then it was over.

  It didn’t ratchet down in ferocity. It just … stopped. Blew through and was gone in — what? Three minutes? Five? When she’d stepped out on the porch to survey the damage, she could see stars twinkling in the velvet black sky.

  A twister perhaps? How could you have a tornado without an accompanying thunderstorm? There hadn’t been a drop of rain. And the fresh, after-a-storm smell in the air … it wasn’t there. She smelled only the honeysuckle around the porch. She’d been in a hurricane once in South Florida and it had been no more ferocious. That’d make the record books: The Appalachian Hurricane of June,1995.

  It wasn’t just the ferocity of the storm, though. It was the sound it’d made. The wind had … wailed. Sounded like crying children … or lost souls in hell. Now, maybe that was the normal sound of a hurricane in the mountains — hard to know a thing like that when there was no such thing as a mountain hurricane. But perhaps last night’s storm was holding up for Charlie McClintock’s inspection the outside edges of “no such thing.”

  Who knew?

  Well, what she did know was that the cut on Meredith’s forehead, far from as life-threatening as the amount of blood would seem to indicate, did need a couple of stitches. And unless Charlie wanted the little girl to carry for the rest of her life a permanent reminder on her forehead of tripping over a storm-tossed tree branch in her grandmother’s driveway, the sewing should be done by a plastic surgeon. That certainly wasn’t going to happen if she took Merrie to the emergency room at the Beaufort County Hospital in Carlisle.

  But where else could she go?

  She couldn’t haul a screaming three-year-old all the way to Lexington! And Nower County, Kentucky had no hospital.

  Nower County, Kentucky had no … anything.

  Charlie was facing a half hour’s drive through the mountains with a bleeding, shrieking toddler strapped into a car seat behind her.

  Goody.

  Chapter Two

  Viola Tackett’s teeth clacked together when the old pickup truck slammed down into a hole big as a soup pot in the logging road and she made herself a promise: I ain’t doing this no more.

  She hadn’t ought to be doing it now, but until she was lead-pipe certain that Neb, Obie, and Zach knew what they was doing, she didn’t dare leave it to them without her coming along behind to check. Shoot, them boys was forty years old. You’d think they could handle a little thing like planting marijuana seedlings with a tobacco setter. But wasn’t none of the three smart enough to pour sand out of a boot if the instructions was on the heel, so here she was bouncing around in the old truck on the way for a surprise inspection.

  She come around a bend and slammed on the brakes — had to push the pedal all the way to the floor because them brake pads was flat as week-old roadkill. Barely got stopped before she ran right into the tree lying across the road, so big it must have been a sapling when Abraham Lincoln was a pup over in LaRue County a century and a half ago. Okay, maybe that was a stretch, but she couldn’t imagine how it had stood as long as it had, big as it was. The fierce winds of last night’s storm must have took it out.

  It’d been a storm unlike any Viola’d seen in near seventy years drawing breath at the good Lord’s pleasure on this earth where he put her. The wind was the thing. She had a log cabin sat snug as a dung beetle in a cow patty, had been built by her granddaddy back before the First World War. She’d been born there, would likely die there and had birthed her children, the five that’d lived and the three that hadn’t — all except the twins she sent back to the devil — in the same bed where they’d been conceived.

  But even snug as it was, the wind last night was peculiar. Wasn’t like no ordinary wind, and she told Neb, who’d got drunk and missed the whole thing, that it sounded like it was … crying, had a sound like a baby wailing off in the trees, like to broke Viola’s heart.

  And wasn’t much in life broke Viola Tackett’s heart.

  She had to throw her shoulder against the pickup truck door twice ‘fore it’d open. Latch was broke and she supposed not being able to open the door was a sight better than not being able to close it. She walked around to the front of the truck to have a look-see at the downed tree but it was a waste of time. Wasn’t no way she’d ever be able to move it, not even if she tied a chain to
it and pulled it with the truck. She’d send the boys out here with chainsaws to clear the road soon’s they got back to the house. But that was then and this was now. She sighed.

  Wasn’t nothin’ for it but to take the branch road that went up over Bent Stick Ridge. It was ten miles out of the way if it was a foot, wound all the way into Drayton County and back into Nower County, but wasn’t nothing else she could do ‘less she wanted to turn her flat butt around and haul it back to the house and that wasn’t gonna happen.

  Viola climbed back up into her truck and eased the old thing into reverse. You had to hold your mouth just right to get it into and out of gears. Transmission was shot. But the old truck was like an old dog and she wasn’t ready yet to put it down, even if it was held together with Bondo and duct tape.

  Heading back down the mountain, retracing her steps up it, to the fork where the other logging road took out east give her time to think, and ‘course her mind went to what she’d ought to do about Malachi. Wasn’t nothing but a rooster chasing its own tail feathers to consider it because wasn’t nothing she could do about Malachi. The boy was hurting, bleeding inside where you couldn’t see it, and she was watching him sink further and further into himself every day.

  Malachi was her baby. Well, no, Esther Ruth was her baby, always would be. She wouldn’t never be more than six or seven years old and even though she was a woman full growed, she still lit up like a Fourth-of-July sparkler whenever she seen Viola and cried out “Mommy!” before racing to give her a hug. Esther would stay a child forever.

  But Malachi was the youngest, the only one of the lot of them had a lick of sense. He was the one of her boys that she’d always intended to run things for her, the one who’d take over the “thriving family business” she’d spent her whole life trying to build. Her enterprises had ebbed and flowed with the commerce of the world outside the mountains over the years, but didn’t none of them thrive.

  ‘Course there’d always been shine. She’d took that over from her daddy — what was left of him when she got done with him. She’d run a chop shop at one time out of a garage down on Rabbit Run Road. Cars stolen off the streets of Lexington was reduced to unidentifiable car parts in less than an afternoon, drove in one side and come out the other in pieces. She’d fenced other stolen goods, too, had run a couple of rings of prostitutes that worked the coal fields, collected protection money every week from mom-and-pop businesses as far away as the West Virginia line.

  There’d been money to be made growing weed back ‘fore everybody got their panties in a wad about it when they busted the Cornbread Mafia over in Marion County six years ago. Anymore, it was almost more hassle than it was worth, had to hide it between plants in a cornfield, grow a little patch here, a little there.

  In the last few years, they’d been what the big-city newspapers called an “epidemic of addiction” in the mountains — to a little white pill called OxyContin. Of course, she elbowed her way to the front of the line to make a buck on the drug, but it was hard to turn a profit on something you couldn’t manufacture yourself, when you was at the mercy of some sleazy drug dealer who charged whatever he thought he could squeeze out of you.

  For a right smart while now Viola’d been struggling to control a growing rage that life wasn’t never gonna give her what she’d spent all her years chasing. Springtime come and went and come again, and with each new turning of the seasons the anger in her belly grew. It was one thing to have a yearning inside, chewing at your guts like a lazy rat when you was young, looking at years stacked up on top of each other out in front of you. It was another thing altogether to have the pile of years behind you, watching the time grow short and your dream still hanging there out of reach.

  Far as the world knew, Viola Tackett was a workhorse who intended to die in the harness, a woman who’d still be out there scrambling while they was shoveling in the dirt.

  She scoffed at “retirement.” Said she’d read the Bible through cover to cover so many times she’d about wore the print off the pages, and she hadn’t never run across the part that said you could retire, that you could just quit whatever work it was the Lord had allowed you to put your hand to, kick back in a lawn chair with a beer and never hit a lick at a snake again.

  But the truth still in the husk was that Viola Tackett yearned to stop clawing and scratching. Longed to ride easy. Life owed her that. She’d got stomped on hard and she was determined to collect payback — with interest. Going hungry night after night when she’s a little kid, the ache in her belly so constant her jaw was always sore from gritting her teeth. She and her brother Lester had beat Joey Purdom with a stick for the candy bar the preacher’d left and Joey wasn’t never right in the head after. When Lester tried to keep more than half, she’d broke his arm to get her fair share. For nigh on to seven decades she’d watched other people get what she wanted but couldn’t have — stuff, big houses, fancy cars and the like. She never let on to nobody she gave a rat fart about such as that. She’d learned early and well you didn’t never let folks know what really mattered to you ‘cause they’d snatch it away. But she did care. Oh my, yes, indeedy she shore did. She coveted an easy life with fine things and folks doin’ for her and makin’ over her.

  But for all her scramblin’ lo these many years, she was still sitting in the weeds on the side of the road, watchin’ other folks drive by in a car they didn’t have to worry wasn’t gonna make it to wherever it was they was going. She was looking the end of life square in the eye, the last of the sand was drainin’ out of the hourglass and it was now or never. It was her turn, and wasn’t nothin’ Viola Tackett wouldn’t do to grab hold of what was due her.

  Her boys helped, best as they could. Neb, Obie and Zach, they was good boys, done whatever she told them to do, but dad-gum if wasn’t all of them dumb as fire hydrants. She’d often pondered on what it was that’d made them so, like might be it was from Jack whoring around and he got some kind of disease, but the doctor said no. Said Esther had a thing called Down syndrome and that wasn’t something you could catch from a prostitute.

  She knew the fault wasn’t with her female parts when Malachi come along. Jack didn’t know it, of course, but that boy wasn’t his git and soon’s she had the right kind of seed in her womb, she’d growed a boy there to be proud of. Tall and strong, so good lookin’ all the girls was fightin’ to drop their drawers for him. He wasn’t obedient like the other boys, though. She’d told him he’d ought to drop out of school at sixteen to help his brothers in “the family business.” He’d stayed to graduate. After that, she’d laid down the law — he was not going to go off and join the military. She flat out would not have it. And ‘course after a while he went on ahead and done it anyway. They packed him off to some place with a name you couldn’t pronounce and when he come home, he …

  Actually, her Malachi never did come home. Somebody who looked like him, talked like him, walked and liked strawberry pancakes like him come home. But her boy never did. He had got lost out there somewhere in the jungles or desert or wherever it was he went.

  No, that wasn’t the way of it.

  It wasn’t that he’d stayed there. He’d come home alright, but he’d brought that war home with him when he come.

  They had a name for it, like giving a thing a name made some kind of difference somehow. Once you knew what to call it, well, everything was gonna be just fine.

  PTDS something. Initials. She’d gone to the library in Carlisle right after Malachi got home, looked it up. What she found described what was happening to her boy like somebody’d been standing there watching him, taking notes.

  But that’s as far as it went. They named it, and after they done that, apparently everybody smiled at each other and shook hands and went home. Didn’t nobody say nothing about what to do about it, how to fix it. Viola wasn’t surprised. Every person she’d ever knowed with nothing more than book smarts was a fool.

  Brushing a stray hair out of her face, Viola glanced in the rearview
mirror and didn’t like the old woman who looked back at her. She’d been a pretty girl, not beautiful by anybody’s reckoning, missed it by her features bein’ too big and blunt, and by the space between her two front teeth on the top that she never did get fixed and was there to this day.

  But the woman who looked back at her now was somebody she had come to know over the passage of years and to understand, but would never fancy. She had a hard face. Not sharp-angles hard. She had round cheeks to go with her dumpy little body and a soft turkey neck under her chin. The hardness was in the eyes, sunk so deep in caverns she sometimes thought they looked like cigarette burns in her face. Even at almost seventy, her hair was still jet black, only had streaks of white through it now, looked like lightning bolts on a night sky. And it still hung all the way to her waist when it wasn’t done up in a bun at the back of her neck.

  Around her face, her hair had turned pure white, though, like maybe she’d got a good look into hell as she wasn’t supposed to see and it’d seared her, left its mark. In them eyes was pain. And rage. The pain of Daddy fooling with her and her sisters ever night soon’s it got good dark outside, how he’d take a lantern and set it by the bed cause he wanted to see. Her sisters always cried but Viola never did, never shed one tear, not even when she was squatting by herself in the back of the chicken house, birthing his git, twins, wrung their necks, the both of them ‘fore they ever drew a breath. And it’d been Viola who’d took revenge for all of them, though maybe her sisters’d done the same kind of things she done when they had the chance. She’d never asked and they was all dead now so she never would know.