24

Lubbock, Texas

1970

The words come ripping out of Marjorie, powered by a year’s worth of repression, further fueled by the remorseless anger on her mother’s face.

Words like “loyalty” and “betrayal” and a dozen other descriptions of the real crimes that destroyed their family, crimes her mother committed against her father. A part of Marjorie had hoped that if she ever did get the chance to say these things—and she never thought she would, but her mother hit her so damn hard there was just no keeping her mouth shut—they would overpower Momma, fill her with shame, break down her arrogance and false fealty to Christ and leave behind a woman desperate for Marjorie’s guidance and instruction. A moment similar to that night right after her father’s arrest, when the truth, spoken plain and simple, had shamed Uncle Clem out of the house.

But there’s no shame in her mother’s blazing eyes, only rage. For a split second it feels like each of them assumes the unholy wail suddenly filling the kitchen is coming from the other woman. Has she broken her mother like she hoped? But her momma’s staring at the living room window as if the madly rattling frame is the source of the awful sound.

She’s looking toward downtown, Marjorie realizes, which is where the storm sirens are located.

The sounds of the weather outside have changed in tone. They’re less chaotic, less like dozens of holes being torn open in the sky and more like a gargantuan locomotive roaring toward them across the open plains.

It’s the combination of all these things that seems to finally do her mother in—her boiling hatred of her daughter, the terrible sirens, and the approach of a massive house-eating predator are just too much for Danielle Payne to bear. She erupts into hysterical tears, hands going to her mouth.

In her mother’s emotional collapse, Marjorie sees an opportunity.

She races through the kitchen, throws open the back door. The fierce wind and its stinging curtain of horizontal rain slam the door against the side of the house, holding it wide open like a giant palm. As she crosses the backyard, it feels like her hair’s going to be ripped sideways off her head along with most of her scalp. The door to the storm cellar, the one her father dug when Marjorie was a little girl and their house was shiny and new, rattles in its diagonal frame. She heaves it open with both hands, steps inside. At first it seems like her mother hasn’t followed, but when she turns to pull the heavy door shut behind her, there she is, blonde hair raging around her head like a Gorgon’s snakes. She grips one side of the doorframe with a hand to steady herself so she can step through, and that’s when Marjorie pulls the door shut with both hands.

She slides the bolt in place, backs away into the cellar’s dark. For a few moments, her mother’s pounding and pleas are audible above the raging storm; then the scream that destroyed her family is consumed by the sounds of fencing tearing from the ground, tree branches snapping and being shed of their leaves, the serpentine protests of power lines ripping free of their poles, followed by the whumps of transformers exploding.

It’s all lined up so perfectly. Brenda’s betrayal, the fight with her mother, the tornado’s approach. The heavens and their earthly compatriots have conspired to deliver the judgment that has eluded her mother for too long.

25

Amarillo, Texas

There’s blood all over the blue tarps covering part of the barn’s floor, and the plain fact of the matter is she’s too damn old to drag the bodies of these kids anywhere. Shotgunning them would have been a mistake if her boys hadn’t been on their way. But they are, and so they’ll clean up this mess when they get here. Dispose of the bodies the way they dispose of broken seedlings.

It’s not like she didn’t try. Even managed to drag the boy’s body some distance from the edge of the covered pits, just because it felt like too much of an indignity to leave him lying right in the middle of where they’ll begin the planting in a few hours. But the effort drained her, reminded her she’s aged into being a woman whose real power comes from her shotgun and her willingness to use it. And her boys.

She shot the girl first because she thought maybe, just maybe, some protective instinct in the boy might keep him from running. No such luck; no such loyalty. Hysterical in the wake of the thundering blast, he’d run for the door as soon as he’d found himself splashed in his girlfriend’s blood. The blast that brought him down filled Marjorie’s already ringing ears with a veritable scream that reminded her of her mother’s dying one.

She set the shotgun down a few moments ago, but her hands are still shaking.

She tells herself it’s just the aftermath of the recoil, not nerves. No one’s going to come looking for this human trash anytime soon. She’s thirty minutes from the nearest neighbor and anyone else who might have heard the shot. But maybe that’s not her worry. She’s an old woman now, and the older she gets, the more room there is for error. These past few years she’s wanted the boys to stay longer. Wanted them to visit during other parts of the year, too, not just their annual reunion. But that would be a betrayal of them, she knows. A betrayal on par with her mother’s betrayal of her father. None of them will be served by her clinging to them like some little simp.

She’s built many things of which she can be proud. This family most of all. A family based on understanding and truth.

But right now, she needs a bit of rest.

Whenever she feels fatigue or some form of doubt, she calls to mind the sight that greeted her when she emerged from the storm cellar after one of the worst tornadoes in West Texas history tore through downtown Lubbock and reduced her neighborhood to splinters. At first, she thought her mother was floating high above the earth, suspended by an invisible force, her body eerily lit by the explosions of blue sparks from the battered power pole nearby.

Another few flashes from the transformer and Marjorie saw that her mother had been speared by a dozen leaf-stripped branches of the cedar elm tree. Like Saint Sebastian and his arrows. And one of those branches had been run straight through her mother’s throat, a sight that almost sent Marjorie to her knees. But prayer, she realized, was not the language of the god who had sent her this vision. This god taught you how to channel the darkness of men and storms for your own benefit, and he had used both of those things to set Marjorie free. This god spoke in thunder alone.

He’d silenced her mother, and in this was the key to Marjorie Payne’s liberation.

The phone is ringing. Tinny and distant, coming from the house.

The lure of talking to another one of her boys is so strong she’s halfway back to the house before she becomes aware of the pain in her hip. But even as she hurries through the dark house, it feels like the exhaustion of killing the two tweakers has been pumped from her system. Then she gets to the phone and finds herself breathless again.

“Good evening, ma’am. Is Sheryl there?”

It’s Jonah, the handsomest of her boys. If Cyrus is the smarty-pants and Wally the sweetheart, Jonah’s the soulful one, the one prone to fits of darkness and too much self-reflection and, in her opinion, too much book reading. Jonah, out of all of them, is the one who struggles mightily with the gifts of focus and direction she’s provided them for most of their adult lives. It’s because he’s the handsomest and therefore perpetually distracted and deceived by the women who desire him sexually. For him, the added benefit of a planting is that it will purge him of natural urges he might accidentally unleash on the women he insists on sleeping with. She’s explained this to him many times, and each time he seems to get it. Then, a year later, he’s mired in the same self-doubt. Given the demons that haunt his mind, she’s always most relieved by his call.