Carved in Bone

his jaw and glared furiously from me to the deputy and back again. Crouching down again, he propped the pistol on the fallen tree trunk, taking careful aim at Orbin. He held so still I wasn’t sure he was even breathing. The deputy stepped away from Vernon, but he kept his gun pointed directly at the man on the ground. “Vernon, you stay where you’re at, and not another damn word out of you. You have that thousand when I come back in two weeks, or I’ll shoot you like a dog, too.” He backed away and climbed into the chopper, the gun still pointed out the open door. Only when the engine had spooled up did he withdraw the gun and slam the door. Seconds later he was gone, leaving behind a vortex of dry leaves and fresh grief.

CHAPTER 28
    O’CONNER POURED WAYLON ANOTHER shot of whiskey—his third, by my count, and I was counting pretty closely, as I was depending on Waylon for a ride back to my truck. “I know you want to,” O’Conner said for the hundredth time, “but killing him won’t help. It’ll ruin your life, and Vern’s too.” Waylon just snuffled and shook his bearlike head.
    “What turns a man into something like that,” I asked O’Conner, “all mean and hateful inside?”
    O’Conner shrugged, as if he had no clue, but I was reasonably sure he possessed some insight, so I waited him out. Finally he spoke. “Well, Cooke County alone—the hardscrabble life that requires a man to break the law or break his back just to get by—is enough to harden anybody,” he said. “Anybody predisposed to it, at least.”
    “But this goes way beyond hardened,” I said.
    “Well, then there’s the Kitchings family itself—sort of the Cooke County of families.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the matriarch and patriarch yet,” he said, “but they’re about as warm and nurturing as those copperheads on the trail to Vern’s. A copperhead mostly wants to be left alone—he won’t generally come after you—but provoke him, and you’ll get a nasty dose of poison.”
    “But the father’s a minister, isn’t he?”
    “He is, but you’ve got remember what kind of church he’s in. Primitive Baptists—‘Hardshell Baptists,’ they’re also called—are about as flinty as Christians get, in my experience. Their faith is the washed-in-the-blood, fire-and-brimstone variety. Not as keen on the touchy-feely, love-thy-neighbor part of the gospel. Most of the time, they’re pulled in pretty tight—don’t tolerate drinking, dancing, or card-playing; take a pretty dim view of movies and television; don’t much trust a woman who cuts her hair or wears pants or makeup. Funny thing is, though, on Sunday, this tamped-down, thou-shalt-not crowd completely cuts loose, working themselves up into a frenzy of righteous enthusiasm.”
    I nodded. Cultural anthropology was full of studies of religious ecstasy; that variety of spiritual experience cuts across virtually all nations and cultures, including highly conservative groups. Even Pentacostal churches that practice snake-handling and speaking in unknown tongues—practices at the far end of the Christian spectrum—were based on ecstatic, trancelike states.
    “I heard Reverend Kitchings preach a few times in my youth,” O’Conner went on, “back when I was courting Leena, trying to make a good impression on the family. Sitting in that cold stone building, I would just marvel at the transformation this tight-lipped, tightassed puritan would undergo once he got fired up. He’d get into this preaching rhythm that was almost hypnotic, more incantation than sermon. He’d punctuate every sentence with a ‘Praise God!’ or a ‘Hallelujah!’ instead of a period. Go hell-for-leather till he’d run out of breath, then give this final, quacklike gasp, then draw in another huge breath and let fly again. I reckon he’s still at it these days. You should go hear him; I bet you’d find it fascinating.”
    “I probably would,” I agreed. “How about the mother? How would you describe the family dynamics?”
    “Well, I’d say the reverend is a big fan of St. Paul—‘Wives, submit to your husbands’; that sort of thing. I don’t think she’s had an easy or pleasant life with that man. Pretty hard for the sons, too.”
    “In what way?”
    “Well, let’s just say that if it took a liberal application of the razor strop to keep his boys on the straight and narrow path to salvation, the reverend was just doing his