Chapter Three

Language of the Dying

I am the Death Talker. I don't heal. I don't cure folks of whatever ails them. I talk to death. Whisper what it wants to hear. Tell it why it should love me more than the person it wants to take. Death longs to be desired, just like the rest of us. I convince death I love it most, then I invite it in.

It's funny how I couldn't tell you what I was wearing last week, much less seven years ago, but somehow I remember what Adaire and I wore the day I tried to save a dog.

Adaire Sorrell was a nasty scar of a girl with brows as stern as lectures. Her brown hair was chicken-scratched, short and always confused about what direction it should go. The abundant freckles on her face made her look perpetually dirty—the curse of our Scottish genes. If clothes were saving graces, well, let's just say Adaire would have none. She had more flair in her wardrobe than Elton John. That day, she wore Kelly green shorts with a purple tie-dye halter top she made from two doilies. Thank Jesus she lined it with fabric, or you would've seen her breast buds straight through it.

I kept it simple: striped T-shirt, white trimmed blue shorts, and plain white sneakers. It suited me just fine. I blended in. Looked like any other kid in America. That was the way I liked it. It was bad enough folks knew my mama had abandoned me, then to have a Granny Witch grandmother didn't help none. I didn't need my clothing to speak up any louder.

It was one of those usual hot summer days, the kind Georgia likes to smother you in until you're damn near certain you'll melt into the asphalt. We were on the cusp of discovering boys, that in-between stage where you're barely a teenager, but you start acting the part because you know something new and exciting is coming.

Adaire and I walked two miles down Law Road (not counting the two cotton fields we crossed) to get to Quickies, a hole in the wall convenience store for country folk to stop in on their way someplace else. Papaw had brought us down there more times that we could count, when we were little. It always coincided when Grandmama was chewing him an earful for one thing or another, and then he would suddenly declare he had a hankering for bologna, saving Adaire and I from her ire by taking us with him.

Quickies hasn't changed much over the years. A square wood building with a dirt parking lot that's been there for forty years, at least. Once a small church, it now sold a handful of groceries—a row of candy and chips, a wall of sodas, fresh produce in the summer, and a deli in the back. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays, Slim Jim (who wasn't slim) would set up his smoker and make ribs and pulled pork that he sold by the paper plate.

Rowdy and Pops, two old men who seemed like permanent fixtures to the building, always sat out front in wood chairs watching the cars go by—the handful that passed through. The front door creaked when you opened it, old and tired from doing its job so long. But inside was an arctic oasis.

Bubba Dunn, who owned Quickies, was three-hundred pounds and wore a long-sleeve shirt and Dickie overalls 365 days a year. A stout air conditioner mounted in the wall worked harder than a ditch digger to keep that place icebox-cold. You weren't allowed to loiter, but Adaire and I took our time, wandering through the rickety shelves, as if struggling over what to pick, knowing good and well we would order the same thing we always did: a hunk of bologna, sliced cheese, saltine crackers, and one of those ice-cold Coca-Colas. Summer thirst demanded the refreshing sweet burn only a frosty bottle of soda can give.

We weren't crazy about having to eat our lunch outside on the picnic table, but it was shaded under a hundred-year-old oak, and there was a pretty good breeze. After we were through, we counted up our collective change to see if we had enough to buy a pack of soft and chewy Hubba Bubba.

We rarely did.

We were halfway down the road after lunch, Adaire was telling me about the latest rerun of Dukes of Hazard I had missed because we didn't own a TV, when I shushed her quiet.

"Listen," I said, pointing to the ditch.

I had heard a whimper, but that wasn't what called to me. It was the sound just underneath it that only my ears could here.

A soul-song.

It warbled and stretched out to me like a yawn.

Then a painful cry crooned from among the foot-tall grasses.

A sound that could only come from a wounded animal.

The ditch was clogged with weeds. I was bound to get eaten up by chiggers or covered in poison oak. Or both. But I didn't care and neither did Adaire.

He was just a puppy, with fur the color of a dull nickel. His back leg was definitely broken. The asphalt had chewed up one of his shoulders. His jaw didn't look right.

"Fix him, Weatherly." The fear in Adaire's voice wasn't something I'd heard before.

I knelt down beside him and hovered my hands over his body. The twinkling of his soul was dwindling.

Tears were slipping down my cheeks so bad it blurred my vision.

"It'll be alright," Adaire said. I wasn't sure if she was talking to me or the dog, Blue—that's what his name tag read.

I took a deep breath to steady myself, then I bent closer to him and carefully cradled his paw in my hands.

I caressed the back of my finger over the rough pad of his front paw. My soft touch to let death know I was there. Then I pushed my mouth closer and whispered the secret scriptures, low enough so only death could hear. Words my papaw taught me to say that death cannot ignore.

The air around me grew colder, a sign that death was pulling on the energy to manifest itself. That slight shift as Blue's soul-song grew stronger, slipping from death's hold, told me so. I hummed my own soul-song—a nameless hymnal sung by the grave, but it has played in my head now for years. It invited the dog's soul to join mine out here, to dance in my palm.

I readied my hands open, so I could clap our two souls together, so we could push death out—

A brash truck horn honked. It caused me to jump and Blue to flinch. Bubba Dunn, in his old Chevy, came to a screeching halt on the roadside next to us.

"Come on, Weatherly. They told me to fetch you and hurry," he hollered out the passenger window. His oldest son hopped out of the truck and nodded for me to get in.

But I didn't want to go. I wanted to save Blue.

"You hear me, girl!" Bubba yelled. "Leave that damn animal alone and get in!"

His son wrenched me up by my elbow and shoved me in the truck like I was a petulant child that needed handling.

From behind, I heard Adaire cursing as she hurriedly jumped in the truck bed before we took off.

"Did it work?" I screamed through the back glass to Adaire who was kneeling at the tailgate, stretching her neck, watching to see if the dog moved.

After we made it down the road a piece—too far for her to see anymore—she turned around and shrugged, then sank down in the truck bed, her heart just as heavy as mine, tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

My chest tightened as an awful burn lit up my lungs. I coughed once, then a second time. Quickly, I grabbed the dirty grease rag from the floorboard and hawked up a small wad of black ooze. Sin Eater Oil. Wasn't much but I hoped it meant I had saved Blue.

When we made it to the house, Grandmama stood there in the driveway. Scowl-faced and angry, she turned away at the sight of us pulling up to the house, tossing a dismissive hand toward Bone Layer.

I didn't have to ask what we were doing. I knew. Somebody was dying and needed me. From the looks of it, whoever it was, Grandmama didn't approve.

Silently, I got in the truck as Bone Layer held the door open for me, and watched in the side mirror as Adaire stood there, arms smarted across her chest and anger scrunching up her face.

Bone Layer, in his yellow-plaid farm shirt and plowing khakis, drove with a furrowed brow, like his only mission was the road. He didn't say word. An expressionless and emotionless rock like always.

"If it's Mrs. Coburn, I won't do it," I told him after a long silence. "That old hag spat on me and called me devil child." Of course, it was because Adaire and I had toilet-papered and egged her house, but we only did it because she tattled to the preacher after she caught us smoking behind the church shed.

As we approached the center of town, instead of heading out to the country to visit one of the church folk, Bone Layer turned north, up the mountain.

"Why we going up here?" A lick of fear rose in my chest. We lived on Appalachia's edge, not in the thick of the trees. We're not hill-folk, but we're not flatlanders, either.

And we weren't allowed north.

Well, Agnes Wilder wasn't allowed.

Papaw never told me what Grandmama had done to get kicked out of the hills, cast down to the bottom with a good riddance. But there was no going back for her, it seemed. I'd only been up here once before myself.

We drove high, where the roads wound and narrowed. Pines stretched tall and thickened. Homes, sparse and toothpick-frail, looked as if they'd slide right off the mountain if given the chance.

The narrow dirt road led to a small square house. An older home with faded gray lap-jointed wood siding with the prettiest pale pink painted on the shutters. In the yard stood a bottle tree taller than Bone Layer. It crooked to the side, its branches weighed down by the colorful glass bottles, all shades of blue, to trap the spirits that tried to get inside.

A big-boned elderly woman in a floral cooking dress stepped out onto the front porch to greet us. Just from the looks of her, I imagined she smelled like home cooking and Jesus.

Worry lines etched deep on her face, but then relief relaxed her shoulders at the sight of us. I didn't know this woman from Adam, but I could tell in the assured steps Bone Layer took to get to her and the careful way he cupped her hands in his own, she was someone important to him. I'd never met Bone Layer's friends, wasn't aware he had any. But the heavy murmur of his words comforted her in a way that only people who went way back could.

I smelled death before I even stepped on the porch. A stagnate smell. Like the rotted stump water mosquito larvae thrived in.

"Are you sure?" she asked Bone Layer after sizing me up. "She looks awfully young."

He nodded. "She got it from Augustus," he told her. My papaw's name, though tainted by his marriage to my grandmother, was all she needed to let me inside.

"She looks like her mama," she said, admiring my face. "Cleodora," she introduced herself as she opened the rickety screen door for me to enter. "But you can call me Miss Dora."

Inside was pristine; it smelled like Pine-Sol and fresh biscuits. Curio cabinets were tucked in all the corners of the room with every kind of religious figurine you could imagine. Angels and crosses. Little mini churches. Baby Jesus and crucified Jesus. They lined the walls and down the halls.

I swallowed hard, my unholiness stuck out like a cowlick in such a religious home.

"This here's my grandson, Lucky." She stepped to the side so I could see the pitiful man lying on the couch underneath a crocheted blanket. Maybe late twenties. His eyes were sunken, rimmed with dark circles. His lips were bone-dry and shriveled. There was a familiar frailness to him, one I'd seen a time or two before. Cancer.

Not sure what kind. It didn't matter.

Death was creeping in on him, like a shadow, slowly inching over his body a little bit every day. His death probably wouldn't be for weeks yet, but it was coming.

I thought at first, what I had heard when I walked in, was the muffled sound of a church choir on the AM radio. But that murmured harmonic music was coming from the man. His soul-song was a sweet, mournful sound. Whoever this man was, he was worth saving.

"Doctors said there's nothing more to do with him. Just take him home until the Good Lord calls," she said to us, but looked down on her grandson like he was a most precious gift. "But I told them, the Good Lord set people on the earth that can do things better than them. That's why I called you, Jonesy," she said. He'd been called Bone Layer so long I'd forgotten he had a Christian name.

A weak smile pushed up the corners of Lucky's mouth as he looked at me. "If I'm seeing a sweet angel, Big Mama, I must be dying," he said and gave me his best effort at a wink.

"Hush now." Miss Dora fanned that nonsense away with her hand as if shooing flies. "I don't want to hear none of that talk. You let this girl do what she does. You'll be up and about in no time." Her worried eyes weren't so sure, though. Then she turned to me. "Jonesy and me will be out on the front porch if you need us." She patted her grandson's leg one more time with an everything's-gonna-be-alright kind of pat, but the tears welled at the edge of her eyes.

I waited until they both stepped outside before I slipped off my sneakers and knelt on the braided rag rug beside the couch.

He opened his mouth to speak, but it took him a second. "I knows your kind of people before," he managed. Then he took a ragged breath like those few words had already worn him out.

His right hand gripped mine, the back side scarred over from a bad burn. I felt the echo of someone else. Someone like me. A Fire Talker, I guessed. I'd heard of them in the stories Grandmama told. Stories of magic and witchery that still went on up in the hills, hidden from the modern day, clinging still to the traditions and ways of old. But I never knew they existed for certain.

I rid my head of the thought, and focused again on the task in front of me.

And then I began.

I rubbed my hands together to awaken my soul's energy, letting that sweet hum of my soul-song rise. Cupping my hands, I ran them over my face, then pushed that energy onto him. Then I scooped up the energy from his soul-song, that powerful gospel choir that lived inside him, and dumped it back onto myself. Back and forth, I did this, until the outlines of our souls blurred and death could not tell us apart.

Hot as it was in the house, a chill set upon us.

Into the palm of his hand, I whispered to death the secret Bible verses. I rocked on my knees as the words drifted over his skin.

Our soul-songs hummed in harmony. Tempting death.

Two for the price of one.

Eyes closed, I rose up on my knees. Fingers rubbing his palms where our souls danced.

Lucky's in my left hand.

Mine in my right.

I opened my mouth for death—then I clapped. A loud smashing that made no sound but popped your ears from the stark silence of it.

Lucky gasped, a grand and powerful wheeze that lifted him upright as death unsheathed itself from his body. The black smoke of death, now with no home, barreled itself inside me, looking for its prize. The force of it knocked me to the floor.

It pushed inside every corner of my body, searching for my soul. Under my skin. Over marrow and bone.

But I waited, curled against the floor while my insides were pillaged. The death flu began to rack my body, eating me up with sickness. I kept my clasped hands gripped tight together. Not allowing our souls to return just yet. Holding them outside our bodies a moment longer. My arms quivered from the effort.

Then there it was—death began to slow, finding nothing inside me to feast upon. Nowhere to gain purchase within my body. Without a soul, it thickened into a useless sludge, that slipped helplessly back into my lungs.

My eyes scanned the room for something, anything to spit in.

"Here." Miss Dora had come back into the room and thrust a blue Mason jar into my hands and pulled my long hair out of the way for me to puke. Black bile gurgled up in my throat and dribbled out of my mouth in tarry clumps of phlegm. Sin Eater Oil.

The coppery tinge of Lucky's cancer coated my tongue. I purged once more, then spat to clear the last out of my mouth.

"You poor girl." Miss Dora used a wet rag to clean my mouth. The cold compress felt like heaven to my forehead. "Is it always this bad?" she asked Bone Layer as I wilted onto the floor into a limp pile.

"Only once before." Bone Layer's eyes narrowed on me a moment. His deep voice might have sounded concerned if it didn't come off so brusque.

"Agnes will want it as payment." Miss Dora tried to hand Bone Layer the blue jar filled with my Sin Eater Oil.

He eyed the jar, then her again. "Burn it."

Bone Layer scooped me up like I weighed nothing and carried my limp body to the truck.

Later that night, I found the strength to leave my bed—or maybe delirium fueled my willpower. But I walked across the scant field of trees, from my house to Adaire's. Weak as a kitten, I climbed that familiar old oak tree, the one that led to her bedroom upstairs. Through her window, I crawled, the one she left open for me, like always. Fever burned up my brow. My bones ached from the flu my body would go through until it purged out the last of the death I'd talked out of that young man...and hopefully Blue.

Adaire pulled back the covers, and I curled up in the bed next to her, shivering so hard I thought I'd crack my teeth.

Three days I lay in her bed, fighting for my life. She never left my side.