Annabelle Murdock

I sat forward as Crucifixion River came into view ahead. It was an awful, bleak place in the best of weather, and on a dark gray day like this one the look of it made me shiver and hunch up even more inside my black dog coat. Except for marsh birds, the quiet was eerie. You could almost hear the people singing “We Shall Gather at the River,” the way they had been the day they arrived and Dad and Mother ferried them across the slough. I was just a little girl then, but I still remembered the singing and it still gave me chills.

There was a big weedy meadow where the road ended, stretching out along the banks of the mud brown river. At one end were the remnants of the potato and corn and vegetable patches the sect people had started, and at the other was a church or meeting house and about a dozen cabins built back among willows and swamp oaks. There wasn’t much left of the buildings now. After the people moved away, shanty boaters had come in and carted off everything that was left behind. Even doors, window coverings, floorboards. They were all just hollow shells now, some of them with collapsed walls and roofs. Dead things waiting for the swampland and the river to swallow them up.

“Now isn’t this a pretty spot,” James Shock said.

Pretty? It was like visiting a cemetery.

But I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t looked at him since we left the levee road and I didn’t look at him now. I sat away over on the wagon seat, as far away from him as I could get, and hunched and hugged myself and tried not to think what was going to happen.

He wasn’t James Never Jim Shock to me any more. He wasn’t a handsome, romantic, banjo-playing traveling man; he was just a peddler and a cold-souled, foul-mouthed killer, and I didn’t know how I ever could have believed he was a man to run away with and give my favors to. Shame made my face and neck flush hot. I wasn’t ready to leave the delta yet, on my own or with anybody. I knew that now. What an addle-pated fool I’d been!

I kept remembering the way he’d talked and the look on his face when he found me in the wagon, as if I were a bratty child instead of a woman—as if he’d like nothing better than to paddle my backside, or do something even worse to me. His eyes—Lord, that cold, ugly stare! It wasn’t anything at all like the way his eyes had been in the common room last night. That James Shock had been a sham, a sweet-talking wolf in sheep’s clothing. This was the real James Shock, sitting next to me right now. And I was as purely scared of him as I’d been of anything in my whole life.

“This road just ended,” he said. “And I don’t see any other.”

I gestured without looking at him. “It runs through that motte of swamp oak down along the river, on the far side of the meeting house.”

“It better had. And it better lead where you say, back to the levee road.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

“Well, that’s right, now, isn’t it? You wouldn’t have any reason to lie.”

“None at all. What…what are you going to do with me?”

He didn’t answer, just snapped the reins and clattered us across the meadow toward the meeting house. We were almost there, angling past the big empty shell, when he shifted around in a way that made me cast a quick glance in his direction. He was holding the reins in his left hand and he’d moved his right down and was pulling the tail of his coat back, reaching inside to his belt.

I don’t know how I knew he was about to draw his revolver, and what he intended to do with it, but I did know, all at once, and never mind that I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason for him to want to harm me. I just knew, with a certainty that made the hair on my scalp stand straight up, that he was planning to kill me as soon as he was sure of where that other road was.

I’d been scared before. Now I was terrified.

“Annabelle? You sure, now, the road starts in that motte of trees?”

I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried. And I didn’t dare sit there next to him a second longer. My only hope was to jump off the wagon and try to get away from him, and that was what I did, quick as a cat.

I landed all right on both feet, but then I lost my balance and sprawled headlong in the wet grass. Shock yelled something, but I didn’t listen to it. I rolled over and pulled my legs under me and lifted my skirts and ran as fast as I’d ever run, away from the wagon toward the meeting house.

The open doorway yawned ahead. I was almost there, almost safe…

And then—oh, God!—he started shooting at me.