The Buried Book (24 page)

CHAPTER 46

How did she die?

Braying and bleating wails echoed all around him. Jasper rolled his head away from the noise, and his ear filled with muddy water. He was lying in a puddle. The sounds of dying animals flooded the spaces between the sheets of rain dropping all around him.
Am I dead?
he thought, unable to move.
Is this hell?
Another death wail rang out only a few yards from where he lay. In the distance, the wind rattled the trees. A giant crash shook the ground.

Feeling began to register in his extremities. His legs were tangled beneath him. His arm lay at an unnatural angle. It was as though his body had been ripped apart and put back together wrong. Somewhere in the distance, a woman was crying.

Mom?

He tried to look toward the noise, but all the lights had gone out. Invisible rain drenched his face. The soft sobbing continued, but he hardly believed it was there at all. His eyes might not even be open.
I’m dead.

Somewhere in the distance, a voice called out. “Jas—per!”

His mind was playing tricks on him again. He didn’t answer.

“Jas—per!” it called again.

He tried lifting his head. “Mom? Is that you?” he called, but the dry rasp of his voice was lost in the crack of a shotgun. Then another.

His mind broke open at the sound. He was outside his grandmother’s house, lying prostrate on the grass. The fire roared hot wind.
Crack!
He could hear the floor collapse inside.
Crack!
Jasper could hear her crying. She was trapped.

“No!” Jasper flailed his arms and legs, trying to get up and run. A shock of pain in his shoulder made him scream.

“I found one!” a voice called out over the gunshots. The chorus of dying animals grew quieter with each blast.

A pair of hands lifted his head from the mud. From the rush of cold air down his back, he realized he was naked. Another gunshot rang out.

“Stop,” Jasper whimpered. He realized he was crying. “Don’t shoot her.”

“Shh!” the voice murmured.

“Is he alright?” a deeper voice asked. Whoever it was sounded winded. A warm glow floated next to him, shining down at his face. Jasper recoiled from the light.

“I think so. Get me a blanket.” It was a woman’s voice talking.

A moment later, scratchy wet wool fell all around him. A yelp caught in his throat as strong hands lifted his shoulders off the ground. His arm dangled from his side in an unnatural way, and bolts of pain shot up his arm. He couldn’t breathe.

“I’m going to need a board and a wrapping,” the woman ordered.

Cold, wet mud seeped into his bare rump as she propped him up. As if she sensed his discomfort, she gently laid his head back down onto a pile of damp cloth. The voices of men shouted a few yards away.

“Grab the head!”

“Get her onto the side. We’ll have to break her down here.”

“I need a bigger knife.”

The wind carried the pungent smell of fresh blood and entrails. He could taste it. Jasper heaved up the contents of his stomach into the puddle as muddled parts of a face appeared in his head. A hairy chin. Wet lips smiling a drunk, sweaty smile. Hot breath on his neck. A pair of hands gripped him. Struggling to escape, he sat pinned on a bouncing knee.

Jasper let out a strangled scream.

“It’s okay. It’s okay, baby. They’re just butchering the cows. That’s all. They’re beyond our help now.”

Jasper forced his eyes open to stop the terrible nightmare in his head. The blackness reeled overhead. Another gunshot fired in the distance. “Why?”

“It was the storm, hon. It picked us all up and threw us back down hard.”

Jasper remembered falling from the sky. He seized as though he were plummeting again.

“Shh! Take it easy, baby. Can you feel your legs?” the woman cooed in her hoarse voice.

He turned toward her. In the yellow light of the lantern on the ground, he could only make out the side of her face. Her hair was short and unkempt. A thin scar ran down the length of her cheek. She reached down and patted his forehead gently.
Mom?
he thought again, but he knew it wasn’t her.

“I got what you asked for.” The man with the bright lantern trotted over with a wood board and an armful of long rags.

The woman had him set the supplies down, then swiftly slid the board under Jasper’s back. Together, the two adults rolled him onto his side and began to tie his back and bad arm down to the board. They rolled him flat and straightened his legs out.

“Can you wiggle your toes?” she asked. Not waiting for his response, she ran a fingernail down the middle of each foot until they both twitched. “Good. You’re gonna have to stay here a minute until the truck can get in.”

The woman stood up to leave. He wanted to yell after her,
Don’t go!
But by the time he’d mustered his voice, she’d gone.

In the distance, he heard other panicked calls out over the fields. “Cecil!”

“Mary? Where are you?”

“Eleanor? You out there?”

Tied firmly to his board, all Jasper could do was lie there. Trapped. Turning his head to the side, he saw the field nurse had left her lantern so the truck could find him. The putrid smell of bile and stomach acid spilled onto the ground as a cow was gutted nearby.

“Uncle Leo?” he called out in a weak voice. His lungs felt flooded, but he tried again. “Uncle Leo? Wayne? Are you there?”

Refusing to close his eyes for fear of what he might see, he craned his neck and tried to tell from the shadows of nearby trees and buildings where he was. His uncle’s barn and cabin were nowhere in sight. Nothing in the landscape looked familiar. A large silo loomed off on the horizon. None of his uncle’s neighbors had a silo.

“Where am I? Hello?” he called out. No one answered. Death was all around him. The air reeked of it. Fear began to squeeze his chest, making it harder and harder to breathe.
They’re not dead,
he told himself.
They can’t be dead.
He struggled against his bonds to sit up. The pain in his shoulder forced him back down. He couldn’t move.

A man’s voice breathed in his ear,
Stay down, boy. This isn’t going to get any better for you.

Somewhere far behind him another gunshot rang out.

“Stop it,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. The instant he did, he was back in his grandmother’s house. The man was laughing.

“Leave me alone,” he whimpered and opened his eyes at the black sky. “Make him leave me alone. I’ll be good for Uncle Leo and Aunt Velma. I’ll do good in school. I promise. I’ll make you proud.”

He realized he was talking to his mother. For the first time in months, he allowed himself to picture her. The backs of her fingers brushing his cheek. Her breath, warm with whiskey. The way her black hair fell across her forehead and curled around her ear. The beaded necklace hanging down from her long neck as she hovered over his pillow. Her smile . . .

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” he wept. “I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry I did everything wrong. Please forgive me. Please.” He shouted at the sky for all he was worth. “God,
I’m sorry
!”

The rain kept falling.

CHAPTER 47

Who discovered the body?

Jasper startled awake as two men he didn’t recognize lifted him up into the back of a pickup. They laid him flat on his back next to a girl wrapped in a blanket. Her face was caked with dirt and dried blood, and her eyes were shut. He stared at her for several seconds, trying to see if she was breathing. “You okay?” he croaked.

She didn’t answer.

The truck lurched forward through the mud. The driver moved slowly over the lumpy ground, and each bump sent fire up his arm. The girl didn’t seem to notice. She had long dark hair, and for a dazed moment, Jasper wondered if she had brown eyes too. The black-and-white photograph on a folding table outside Calbry’s floated behind his eyes.
Do you know who killed me?

Jasper turned his head away from her and gazed up at the stars. All signs of the storm had cleared from the night sky. He searched for constellations to keep himself from hyperventilating.

After a quick examination, the nurse at the Burtchville clinic removed the board from Jasper’s back. She determined that his shoulder was dislocated. What happened next happened too fast for anyone to argue. An orderly just held him down as still as she could.

The nurse barked, “One . . . two . . .”

Crunch.

Jasper screamed and thrashed against the poor woman.

“Shh! It’s over, honey. It’s over,” she whispered. She held him until he’d quieted down. It was several more minutes before his shaking body could manage to sit up. The nurse wrapped his arm in a sling and told him he’d need to wear it for at least a week. Then she handed him a set of clothes.

“These were donated by the good folks of Burtchville,” the nurse said in an apologetic voice as he unfolded a torn set of overalls. “I hope they fit well enough to get you home. Do you know where your folks are, hon?”

Jasper hesitated. From the look on the nurse’s face, he could tell he was too young to be released on his own. She would make him stay and wait with nothing to do but think the worst. He had to go find them. He wouldn’t let himself consider what would happen if he didn’t. “Yeah. They’re waiting outside.”

Thankfully, things were too frantic at the clinic for her to question his lie. She held the door for him and wished him well.

The hallway was filled with battered people wrapped in bedsheets and blankets. Some were bleeding into red rags. Some were just staring. The sheriff was there in his uniform, talking with one of the survivors. Jasper caught a few words as he walked past with his head down, hoping not to be noticed.

“. . . was the worst we’ve ever seen. State’s calling it a category five. We’ll be searching a thirty-mile radius for the next several days. You missin’ anybody?”

The man nodded his head, but his eyes looked blank. His hand covered half his face. His shoulders were shaking. From the look of him, they were
all
missing.

Jasper scanned the waiting room for Aunt Velma, Uncle Leo, and Wayne. There was no sign of them. He checked again before pushing through the door.

Outside, the sun was rising. The sky glowed golden shades of orange and red as if nothing terrible had happened at all. Jasper found himself hating the sun as it peeked over the edge of the world. It would go on burning, no matter what happened to him or his family or the poor man in the clinic. It simply didn’t care. By all rights, the damned thing should have fallen from the sky the day his mother disappeared.

Jasper sighted up and down Lakeshore Road. It was less than three miles up Route 25 to Harris Road. The blinding white pain in Jasper’s shoulder had cooled to a dull ache. He could walk it, he decided. He didn’t really have a choice.

Besides a few scattered tree branches, the shops and houses lining Lakeshore were untouched by the storm. Jasper wandered past them barefoot, wondering how a storm could tear apart his home and leave these unscathed.
Were these families more loving, more devout, more deserving?

The sun rose higher in the sky, lighting the few scattered clouds in beautiful shades of silver and gold. If there was a God, he was toying with him, like Lucifer batting around an injured rat.

Jasper reached the top of the hill north of town, and the night’s carnage splayed out before him. Uprooted trees and tattered lumber littered the ground where houses had once stood. Pieces of tractors and trucks lay scattered. The foot of a giant had stepped down and crushed everything beneath it.

“My God,” Jasper breathed.

The wreckage grew more devastating as he approached his uncle’s farm. The younger trees had been ripped from the ground. The older ones stood naked, stripped of their leaves and lighter branches. A signpost that read “Harris Road” was sticking out of the trunk of an enormous tree on the other side of Route 25. He walked over to it and saw the four-by-four post had been driven into the side of the giant maple as though it were a tenpenny nail. Jasper gaped at it, not believing that wind could do that to a tree.

Down Harris Road, he found a man dragging the trunk of a huge oak out of the road with his tractor. He stopped when he saw Jasper coming. “You alright, son?”

“Yes, sir.” Jasper put his head down and tried to skirt around the man and his questions.

“I wouldn’t head that way if I was you,” the man warned. “There’s not much left. Where’s your family?”

I don’t know,
Jasper wanted to scream. “They’re—um—down there already. I should go help.” With that, he scuttled by the tractor and down the road before the man could stop him. A few seconds later, the motor started up again.

Huge tree branches lay strewn across the dirt roadbed like a child’s Lincoln Logs. Jasper climbed over and under them as best he could with his bad arm, inching his way back toward the cabin.
They’re fine,
he told himself.
Uncle Leo’s probably mad I haven’t shown up yet.

He imagined his uncle chiding him.
Just decided to leave all the work for us, that it?

As he approached Mr. Sheldon’s farm, his imaginary conversation with Leo stopped short. Not a single building was left standing. A tractor stood half buried in the mud, its six-foot tires missing, its one-inch steel bolts sheared clean off. Mr. Sheldon and his wife were nowhere to be found.

Uncle Leo’s farm was just three hundred more yards down the road.

Jasper raced past Sheldon’s wreckage all the way to his uncle’s two-track driveway, yelling, “Aunt Velma? Uncle Leo? Wayne? Are you there?”

They didn’t answer. The stand of trees that shielded the house in winter had been stripped bare. The cabin was flattened. The roof was nowhere to be seen. The logs that made up the walls lay scattered. Jasper’s feet slowed halfway down the drive. “Aunt Velma?”

By some miracle, most of the barn was still standing. Jasper trotted toward it. “Uncle Leo?”

The roof of the barn was half torn off, and the entire structure was listing to the east. As he approached it, he could hear a cow groan. Loose hay covered the ground. The hayloft at the top of the barn had exploded all around him. Jasper ran to the door and tried to pull it open, but it was so badly wracked, it wouldn’t budge.

“Uncle Leo?” he shouted through the jammed doorway.

A cow answered. She sounded hurt.

“I’ll get you out, girl!” he called back to her. Jasper ran around to the collapsed end of the barn. The end wall that had housed all his uncle’s tools had been blown apart. None of the pitchforks or shovels had survived, and Jasper shuddered, thinking of them flying through the air like missiles, landing God knows where. The barn walls leaned over far enough to make him feel dizzy. One stiff wind and the whole place would collapse. Some of the cattle stalls had been sucked open while others were wedged shut. Over half the cows were still in their pens. Jasper didn’t want to think about the rest of them.

His family was nowhere to be found.

The barn creaked as a breeze blew by. It was a warning. He had to get the livestock out of there. He ran to the far end where the goats were penned. Several planks of wood had fallen down into the stall. None of the goats could be seen.

“Timmy? Timmy, you in there?” Jasper shouted, lifting one of the boards with his good arm. He kicked it aside along with three more. Under them he found a huddled lump of gray and black hair. Lying on top, a goat’s head was smashed with its eyes fixed open. It was Timmy’s nanny. He grabbed her by the collar and pulled her off the top of the pile. The other nanny lay under her with her tongue hanging limp. Jasper collapsed to his knees. Timmy wasn’t even six months old.

A muffled noise like a child crying made him lift his head. The dead goat was moving. Jasper stumbled back. Its fur was fluttering. Another high-pitched wail came from under it.

“Timmy?” he whispered, not daring to hope it was anything more than his imagination. The sound came again. He grabbed the other dead nag by the neck and lifted her up. Out from under the carcass, a baby goat came scrambling. Jasper pulled the kid loose and wrapped his free arm around his neck. “Timmy! Is that you?”

The baby goat staggered two uneven steps before lying back down. Jasper could see his back leg was broken. He wiped a tear and laughed, showing Timmy his sling. “Aren’t we a pair, huh?” He hugged him again and helped him out of the barn.

It took the better part of an hour to get the rest of the animals out and into the yard. Jasper had to wrestle and kick at the wedged stall doors, but he managed to get them all open. He was drenched in sweat by the time he was finished.

The cows were grazing on the grass, stepping between the fallen branches as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Timmy was curled up under a tree that had been stripped of every last leaf. Jasper knelt down next to him and took a breath. In the branches overhead, a bird started singing. Jasper stared up at it for a moment in wonder, realizing he hadn’t heard a single bird since the storm had blown in.

Her voice returns to him in the songs of the birds . . .

A cow bellowed across the yard. Udders were hanging like sandbags, and the old girls were starting to complain. He could hear his aunt warning him,
These cows need milking soon or they’ll get mastitis.

Jasper went back to the barn and gathered all the rope and buckets he could find, pushing Dr. Whitebird’s riddles out of his head. The bird kept singing while he set up a stool and bucket and started in, roping each cow and milking it dry. After filling two storage containers, Jasper grabbed a spare water dish and filled it up with milk for Timmy.

The road stayed dead quiet the whole while. He gazed up the driveway every few minutes, hoping to see Aunt Velma or Uncle Leo trudging down all banged up.
Maybe they were all at some clinic somewhere getting broken bones set.
He tried not to think of the girl who had been lying so still next to him on the bed of the truck. He had no idea what had happened to her.

When the milking was done, Jasper stepped back into the empty barn to take stock. His uncle’s toolbox had spilled out onto the ground. His father would say,
Good tools don’t come cheap.
If the barn fell over, his uncle would have a hell of a time getting them out.

He plopped himself down and pulled the box back upright. The upper and center trays toppled out, sending screwdrivers and wrenches spilling to the ground in a metallic avalanche.

“Shit!” he hissed, knowing his uncle would be furious at the sound of his tools hitting the dirt. But it was for the best. He couldn’t lift the full toolbox with only one arm anyway. He’d have to carry it out a few pieces at a time. He lifted the trays and tools one by one and carried them over to where Timmy was sleeping all alone under the tree.

Poor Timmy.
He patted the kid on the head and told him, “It’ll be alright. I’ll take care of you. I’m not much of a nag, but—” He knew nothing he said would help.

Jasper gazed up the driveway again at the empty road, then headed back into the barn. As he went to close the lid of his uncle’s giant steel toolbox, something at the bottom of it caught his eye. Under his uncle’s pipe and tobacco was a small leather-bound book. Jasper reached down and picked it up, not quite believing it was really there. He opened the cover.

Inside, written in a girlish hand, was the name
Althea
.