I reached the camper first, opened the door while Freemont carried the body inside and placed it on the bed.
“I’m going for a phone,” he said. “We’ll get someone to help with your father.”
He left me alone with her, so I stood near the bed and contemplated the body. It shared nothing with the way men talked after returning from a wake at Felt’s Funeral Home. At the funeral parlor, they comforted one another with anecdotes about the deceased or complimented how lifelike the departed seemed inside the coffin. There was nothing left of Lady Crawford to compliment. In death, all humanity was absent. She might as well have been a woodchuck rotting in the sun.
Freemont eventually returned with the police. I watched out the window while Sheriff Thompson stood in the yard hollering at two deputies carrying a ladder into the woods. The sheriff looked nervous as he took Freemont’s statement. He spoke softly, trepidation filling his face anytime he looked over at the camper. I suppose he was worried about having to comfort a monstrous child. Still, he maintained enough professional composure to remove his hat before entering.
“Hello, son,” Sheriff Thompson said. “I’m sorry about your father. Freemont tells me she’s in here. I need to come in and have a look.”
I led him to the back room, where the sheriff stood over the bed clicking his tongue. A long pause permeated the air before he pulled some latex gloves from his belt and turned Lady Crawford’s neck. I watched him dip a finger inside the sinkhole of her fractured skull. The sheriff was about to speak when a deputy knocked on the camper window. Sheriff Thompson slid it open with some effort and stuck his face out.
“What?” he snapped.
“We need help with the . . . some help,” the deputy said.
* * *
• • •
I spent the next evening outside playing. The poor splint Lady Crawford fashioned wouldn’t allow my fingers to bend, but I managed to form most chords anyway. The problem was the tremble I’d developed. I didn’t know if it was only the wounds or the shock of what happened, but it was suddenly hard to press the strings. Static filled each muted note and an unharmonious twang invaded each bar. It sounded like I felt.
I’d just discovered a way to create a barre chord when Angela drove up unannounced. She gave a wave as she climbed out of the truck. Neither of us were sure what to say as she crossed the field to sit beside me on the stoop.
“What are you playing?” she asked. “Sounds funny.”
She’d yet to notice my damaged hand, so I tried to conceal it behind the guitar. I thought that once she saw it, she’d decide I was useless without my one valuable resource. The fear of that rejection loomed worse than the rest of my losses.
“John Lee Hooker,” I said, but it wasn’t true. Just before her truck pulled up, I caught myself strumming the chords to “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” as if it were some cruel joke.
“You got the bends down cold,” Angela said about a previous awkward run down the neck. “Playing it sort of sleazy and sloppy, huh?”
“Sure,” I said. The wound wasn’t going away. I couldn’t hide it forever, so I took my hand from behind the guitar and held it up for her to see. She didn’t speak. Just took it gently in her own hands and let her fingers trace down each knotted knuckle. For the first time, her tough exterior melted away, and I could see her biting back an amalgamation of anger and sorrow.
“Who did this?” she asked.
“My father. The night before last.” I felt the strange urge to defend him, to let her know it was his way of saving me from wayward girls like herself. In his mind, taking the last extraordinary thing from my body would preserve my soul. It made sense if you understood him.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she said.
She would’ve remedied things for me if possible, but there’s no balm for that sort of pain. I never expected my father’s death to harm me. I’d wished The Reverend dead a thousand times, prayed for it in both sincere belief and farce until cultivating what I thought was true apathy toward the man. In the end, the childhood seed of affection I carried never left. I don’t think about him often anymore, but in those early days my grief was a living thing that stalked through all silent moments.
“So, what happens now?” Angela asked.
“They’ve talked about foster care.”
We both knew I was too hideous for safety among strangers. People taking in children want babies they can mold for adoption or quiet kids they can ignore while cashing a check. I would require banishment in some locked basement.
Angela shook her head. “No fucking way. You’ll come live with me and Dad first.”
“I appreciate that, but you know better. Besides, maybe they’ll let me be an emancipated minor.”
“Could be cool,” Angela said. She took some loose cigarettes from the pocket of her jeans and lit one for us to share. “You could live in the church. I’ll come help decorate. Something audacious. Maybe red walls.”
I smiled. “The Hunchback of Coopersville County living in a church?”
“Didn’t even cross my mind.”
“Fuck these mountains,” I told her. “I’m leaving.”
Angela flicked ash and placed the cigarette between my swollen lips. She pressed a palm to my hot cheek while I inhaled.
“What’s the escape plan?”
I felt a tingling knowing Angela’s mouth had been wrapped around the cigarette moments ago. My smile was accompanied by a sore jaw.
“You think I’m a bullshitter, don’t you?” I asked.
“Everyone is to some degree. I think you’re stalling.”
I turned the guitar’s tuning pegs until the strings rattled loose. I brushed them aside, reached into the sound hole and very slowly, as if revealing something dangerous I’d captured, let Angela see the sweaty wad of cash.
“Christ,” she said. “Where’d you get that?”
“Tithes from the church. I hid it as soon as the police left.”
Angela plucked a bill from the guitar’s hollow.
“How much do you have?”
“Enough to go wherever I like. What I need is a driver.”
She was too transfixed by the cash to catch the invitation. I remember wishing I’d prepared some sort of speech. Whether it was foster care or living alone on the inherited land, I refused to remain in the mountains. I hoped Angela had the same urge to escape her father’s crumbling music business. If she stayed, it would be an early marriage to whatever successful man came courting, eventually abandoning music for children and a career giving guitar lessons. Only my tongue wasn’t proficient enough to express this.