Carnal Innocence

would hush him, mortally embarrassed. Vernon would cuff him hard enough to make his ears ring.Others might just stare at him. They were mostly ladies who had come, wrapped in their black dresses.
    Mrs. Fuller and Mrs. Shays, grouped together with Mrs. Larsson and Mrs. Koons. Darleen was there, too, bawling up a storm so that her mama finally stepped forward and took the baby she was clutching.
    There were other women, some who had been friends with Edda Lou, most who’d come out of Christian duty. But men were scarce. Sheriff Truesdale was there, holding his wife’s hand. The FBI man stood off to the side, his face solemn and his head bent. But Cy knew that his eyes were watching, watching, watching.
    “I am the way, the truth, and the light,” Slater intoned, and Mavis swayed so violently into her eldest son that Vernon tipped into his wife and sent a domino reaction around the circle of mourners. Everyone jigged and jogged for a moment while the reverend went on, heedless.
    “Whosoever believest in Me will enter the Kingdom.”
    Cy wanted to shout, to shout at all of them that Edda Lou hadn’t believed in anything but Edda Lou. That all this praying and carrying on was only making a bad thing worse. But he kept his silence, and he kept his head down because there was one man attending the graveyard service whom he feared more than he feared the reverend’s God.
    That was his father.
    Austin Hatinger stood straight in his shiny Sunday suit, his ankles and wrists shackled, and a glum-faced deputy flanking him at each side.
    He listened to the holy word. He watched as the coffin was lowered into its dark, moist home. And he planned.
    He heard his wife’s long, ululant cry of grief. His eyes flicked up to her face, saw the ravage done by ceaseless tears. And he plotted.
    As the last fingers of fog began to burn off the damp grass, he lowered his head. God had provided, hethought. Concentrating, he stared unblinking into the hole dug for his daughter. In reaction his eyes began to tear. Let them think he was weak with grief, he thought. Let them see a weak, helpless man.
    He waited, waited through the end of the service, waited, waited while the women moved to his wife to murmur useless words of condolence.
    As they began to walk off toward their cars, one of the deputies nudged him. “Hatinger.”
    “Please.” He focused on that hole in the ground and made his voice tremble. “I need to—pray. To pray with my wife.”
    He could see by the way the deputies shuffled their feet that they had been moved by the service and the women’s tears. Masking everything that was in his heart, he lifted his head. All they could see was the shiny-eyed hopelessness of a father with a dead child.
    “Please,” he repeated. “She was my daughter. My only daughter. It isn’t natural for a man to bury his child, is it? You know what he did to her, don’t you?” He looked down so they wouldn’t see the hate. “I need to comfort my wife. She ain’t strong and this is like to kill her. Just let me hold my wife.” He held out his hands. “A man’s got a right to hold his wife over his daughter’s grave, ain’t he?”
    “Look, I’m sorry—”
    “Come on, Lou.” The second deputy had a daughter of his own. “Where the hell can he go with his legs shackled? It’s only decent to give him a minute with his wife.”
    Austin stood, his head bowed and glee in his heart as the key turned on the cuffs. “But we’re going to have to stand with you,” the deputy who was called Lou said grudgingly. “And you only got five minutes.”
    “God bless you.” Out of the corner of his eye Austin saw that Burke was already in his car and pulling away. A few of the other women had scattered off to older graves to pay respects to family that was gone. Austin took a step forward, opening his arms. Blindly, limply, his wife fell into them.
    He held her a moment, waiting, watching as thedeputies averted their eyes out of embarrassed respect for the grieving. It was human nature to offer privacy to the mourning. The smattering of people still in the cemetery turned away.
    Then he moved fast, so fast that Cy, who had never once seen his parents embrace, stumbled back into the wet grass.
    Austin shoved his wife hard against the first deputy, tumbling both him and the screaming Mavis into the open grave. As the other deputy reached for his weapon, Austin rammed him hard in the chest, going in headfirst like a battering ram. The