Chapter Twenty-Six

 

Bitsy

 

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

The next day the farm was definitely getting business like I had never seen, but it wasn’t the stream of money that I was hoping for. Instead, it was the Ladies League. The religious equivalent of a lynch mob. Of course, since it was the Hollow Ladies League it was only five women, but it is important to never underestimate the power of an offended woman bearing a Bible and a casserole.

“Oh, shit. I mean shoot. I mean…”

I let out a sigh and let the curtain drop back into place from where I had been holding it so I could peek out the parlor window to see whose footsteps were crunching gravel up the walk.

“What is it?” Roman asked.

He had come over with the small handful of new responses that he had picked up from Coy. I was hoping for something better than what we had already gotten, but the oncoming storm of self-righteousness dressed up in pastel didn’t seem to bode particularly well for me.

“The Ladies League of the First and a Half Church of the Hollow.”

“First and a Half?” Roman asked.

I nodded as I tried to smooth out my hair and make myself as presentable as cotton shorts and a tank top could make me in the twelve seconds I had before the group made it to the door.

“The actual first one had a fire a bunch of years back and they built the rest of a building around what was left of the first one.”

“First and a Half,” he said.

I nodded just as the doorbell rang.

“Yeah.”

I opened the door and smiled wildly.

“Bessie! Sage, Sarah, Julia, Norma! It’s so good to see you. To what do I owe this surprise?”

“I think you know exactly why we’re here, Beatrice.”

Oh, damn. It was more serious than I thought.

It seemed funny that for years I had struggled to shed the nickname that had come to define me in the Hollow, to redesign myself under the title of my actual name, and had bucked against anyone who insisted on continuing to call me Bitsy. Now, though, I was so accustomed to it that hearing these women call me Beatrice felt like I should be standing in the corner of a classroom wearing a pointy cap. It reminded me of being a little girl and getting caught with my fingers in the caramel when my mother was making caramel apples for Halloween in Granddaddy’s kitchen. The thought brought a sudden and unexpected wash of emotion over me. I hadn’t thought about that in so long. It would only be a few weeks until the weather cooled, the leaves changed, and my mind started searching for the smell of caramel in the hallways of the house. It was a smell that I hadn’t experienced since before I was even a teenager, and now I was worried that this would be the last year that I would even get to walk the hallways.

Bessie was talking, but I had missed everything that she had said. I blinked away the tears and shook my head hard before looking at her again.

“I’m sorry—” I started, but Julie cut me off before I could say anything else.

“I’m sure you are,” she snapped.

I looked at her, my jaw set and my heart aching.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear what you were saying,” I said.

“I was saying that we came to offer our counsel to you in your time of need.”

“My time of need?” I asked, looking at Bessie again.

“Well, it’s no secret that it was a scandal that brought you back here after you left, and since you’ve come back we’ve all done our best to welcome you, but now we are really concerned about your mind.”

“And your soul,” Sage said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, you are?” I asked, my dread at being judged now replaced with growing anger at being judged.

“Yes,” Sarah said softly. “We are very concerned about this man who has come to stay with you. Especially with all this gory, shameful Halloween nonsense.”

“Not to mention how you are raising your little one.”

“Excuse me?” I said, unable to hold back. “What’s wrong with how I’m raising my daughter?”

The women exchanged glances. They were all shifting uncomfortably, obviously thrown off their game by being left to stand on the front porch rather than being invited inside and plied with tea and cookies like the official social representatives of the lord should be. I wasn’t about to bring them into my home and go out of my way to make them comfortable. If they came here to cast stones at me, I was going to show them just how trashy I could be.

“We haven’t seen you at church,” Bessie said. “You haven’t even had her dedicated.”

She spoke the words as though she were describing me murdering someone and running through the Hollow naked except for a bikini made from the person’s entrails.

Another option for the haunt.

“I’m sorry,” I said, the sarcasm coming out in my voice now. “Did I neglect to have my daughter dedicated? How could I be so neglectful as to forget to bring my newborn to get dunked in the baptismal that has seen the likes of Jeb Montaigne and his standing bi-weekly dunk to keep himself ahead, Mitzi Delacroix and her parade of children, each with their own personal daddy to spread out their weekend activities, and Vint Addleton and three out of his four wives. I’m sure that we could include his fourth, but nobody’s heard from her in a while, have they?”

The women all looked at me as if I had run down the row of them and slapped each across the face end-of-the-baseball-game style. Not that that would have been such a bad approach.

“That’s not what…” Julie started, but I shook my head.

“You know what? I don’t really care what you think you are here to do. I’m not listening to it. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go inside with my illegitimate baby daddy and think of all of the gruesome ways that we can terrify anyone who will come out here. Maybe we’ll even throw in some gratuitous nudity just because we can. You know what? I don’t even care if you mind.” I took a step back into the house and closed the door. I opened it again and looked out at them. “In fact, I hope you do mind.”

I slammed the door and closed my eyes, counting to ten to try to calm myself down. I let out a growl of anger and stomped my feet like I had seen Rue doing at the post office.

I always knew that counting bullshit didn’t work.

“What’s wrong?” Roman asked, coming into the hallway.

“Who do they think they fucking are?” I shouted, halfway hoping that they would hear me from where they were slinking away – or still standing on my front porch trying to figure out what they were going to do now that their usual routine had been completely thwarted.

“What happened?”

I looked at him, shaking with anger, and tried to formulate a way to explain what had just happened without having to delve deeply into the history and legend of Whiskey Hollow and the complex often tumbleweed-like networks of family and associations that defined it. I realized then that there was really no way for me to do it, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t vent.

“How dare they judge me? What makes their panties so damn white that they can fly them on the clothesline?”

“I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“They actually accused me of being a bad mother. That little baby in there is my whole world and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t.”

“So where do they get off implying that I’m not raising her properly? Just because I came back here pregnant and wouldn’t tell anybody who her father was and now you’re here living in the old house and we’re scaring the living bejeezus out of everybody.” I sighed. “Shit.”

“No,” Roman said, coming toward me. “No. None of that justifies them judging you. From some of the stories you’ve told me about this place, you’re almost boring.”

That was so close to both a multilayered insult and a compliment that I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I stared at him, my mouth opening and closing a few times without any words coming out. Finally, I stomped past him.

“Where are you going?” he called after me.

“To read through these responses so we can get started on this haunt. If they are already thinking the worst of me, I might as well just fling myself into it full-ass.”

He had been following me, but I heard his footsteps stop and I turned around to look at him.

“What is full-ass?” he asked.

“Full-ass,” I repeated, thinking that he just hadn’t heard me. “As opposed to half-ass.”

“Assed,” he said.

“What?”

“Assed. There’s an ‘-ed’ at the end. Assed.”

“Really?”

“I’m fairly certain.”

“When did ‘ass’ become a verb?”

“I don’t think it’s a verb.”

“But you just said that it has ‘-ed’ on the end. That makes it a verb. Like yelled. Or judged. Or flailed.”

“No, it’s an adjective. Like angered. Or confused.”

“You know what? It doesn’t really matter. I just want to do this the way that it should be done. Do you still think that it could work?”

“Yes,” Roman said confidently. “I do. If we do it right, it could really be something amazing.”

I nodded.

“Then that’s what we’re going to do. I want to create the scariest, most detailed, most successful haunt this area has ever seen.”

“I thought that you said that there hadn’t ever been a haunt around here.”

“Not the point.”

I started toward the office again, filled with even more vigor than I had had the day before. The disdain from the women had only given me more fire in my belly to prove them wrong and achieve the success that I knew would convince my grandfather that it wasn’t time yet to let go of the farm.

 

Unfortunately, no amount of vigor or belly-burning could make up for the responses that we got that day. The little stack that Roman had brought over seemed like just a continuation of the day before, if even a bit more vehemently against both stories. This general idea repeated twice more and by the time the middle of the next week arrived, I was beyond thankful that the response deadline had come because it meant that I wasn’t going to have to read through any more.

I carried the last of the responses into the house and immediately realized that Roman was already there. It was almost as though I could feel him there, like his presence changed the environment of the house. I didn’t like to admit that even to myself, and was certainly not going to say it to him, but as I walked into the living room, I felt my heart flutter.

Roman was standing in the center of the room with Lorelei cradled in his arms. She rested her head against his chest, one little hand up on his shoulder, as he murmured something into her ear. His head was turned away from me and I couldn’t understand the words that he was saying, but the serene look on the baby’s face was enough to tell me that whatever it was, was soothing something deep within her. I stood watching them, feeling a cold piece within me melting slightly at the sight of them bonding. As if he could sense that I was standing there, Roman turned around and looked at me. I tried to pretend as though I had just come into the room, not wanting him to know that I had been watching them. He smiled at me and lifted the baby slightly as if presenting her to me, showing off that she was happy and comfortable in his arms.

“She was crying when I came in,” he said. “So, I picked her up.”

“Where’s Granddaddy?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

Roman’s smile lessened.

“He stepped outside for a minute when she calmed down. I can handle holding her.”

I felt guilty for making him think that, but I couldn’t help but be worried. He had barely held Lorelei since getting to Whiskey Hollow and to find him in the living room walking around with her like it was second nature and Granddaddy missing had startled me.

“I know you can,” I said, trying not to let the frustration that Roman so easily created in me build up.

I resisted the urge to take the baby from his arms, reminding myself that he deserved to spend time with her, and that she deserved a father, and rushed through the house toward the back porch. Granddaddy had always loved standing out here in the early mornings, looking out over the farm in the first misty moments of the day, taking in the fresh air and thinking about all of the possibilities and potential that the day ahead of him held. I could only hope that that was what he was feeling now, starting to experience the excitement of the upcoming fall season like he always used to and thinking of ways that he could draw in the crowds again. It might even be the time for me to tell him about the idea for the haunt.

When I stepped out onto the porch, however, it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t the positive, optimistic grandfather I had known. Instead, he looked even more tired and worn than he had and I felt the concern rise up in me again.

“Granddaddy?”

I stepped up beside him and he glanced over at me, then looked out over the fields again. I followed his gaze. Even they looked tired and old. There was a time when at this point in the year the fields would be overflowing with pumpkins, their rinds starting to change to the bright globes of orange that would delight families that came in from miles away to find the perfect one to add to their porch. Many of the women from around the Hollow knew to go to the back fields where they would find little sugar pumpkins perfect for baking into pies and the sometimes oddly colored and shaped heirloom styles that looked gorgeous in the middle of a Thanksgiving table. Now the fields had pumpkins, but the rows were uneven in some and the crop not nearly as dense as it had once been. Many of the vines had simply grown from where the pumpkins the year before had sat in the field and disintegrated away.

“I couldn’t pick her up,” he said.

“What do you mean? Lorelei?”

He nodded.

“She was crying and I went to pick her up, but I couldn’t get her up past my knees. It’s like my whole body just stopped working.”

“That’s alright, Granddaddy,” I said, patting him on his back comfortingly. “You just need to get up and moving around more. Maybe this just means that the cool weather’s going to come earlier this year.”

He shook his head.

“No, Ladybug. I’m just old.” He let out a long sigh. “I know now that it’s really time.”

“Time for what?” I asked, my heart starting to pound nervously in my chest.

“To let go of the farm. If I can’t even pick up a little baby, how can I expect to get back out in the fields and work?”

“I can do that,” I insisted.

He shook his head.

“You worked so hard this year. I know you have. But you just can’t handle it on your own.”

I looked out over the pumpkins again. I had put everything into the pumpkin and corn crops since coming home. I had tried to follow everything that Granddaddy had taught me growing up, but without farmhands and with Lorelei to look after, I had only been able to do some of the fields. A sense of defeat was starting to settle in, but I fought it. I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to just give in and let my childhood disappear.

“I’m just out of practice. I’ll get better.”

I wanted to tell him about the haunt, but I worried that he was in such a sad place in that moment that he wouldn’t be ready to hear it, much less agree to it. He shook his head.

“Running this farm is hard. It takes all of your time, your energy, your soul. You have Lorelei to think about. Your baby deserves all of those things. I can get a good price for the land and the houses. It’ll be enough to set the two of you up and take care of you for a good long time.”

“And you?”

“I’ll get by. I don’t need much.”

“Granddaddy, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do, Ladybug. This is the last season for Galloway Farm. We’ll start preparing it for a spring sale.”

He turned away and walked back into the house, and by the time that I followed him in, I heard the door to his bedroom close. I looked at Roman, who was lowering the baby into the playpen where she promptly began her devoted pilgrimage around the edge. He turned to look at me, his expression falling as he noticed the look on my face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This has to work,” I said, fighting the emotion in my voice. “It has to.”

“It will, Bitsy,” he said, coming toward me. “It will.”

“Let’s read these responses. They’re the last ones that we’re going to get, so we have to make a decision today. If we’re going to be open by October, we have to get started. I can only imagine it’s going to take time to get this thing built and going.”

Roman shrugged.

“We’ll work it out. I promise.”

I nodded and walked over to the couch, dropping down on it and leaning forward to drag the disturbingly light mailbag toward me. Without Granddaddy in the room we could stay in the living room with the baby to read the responses. It kept me that much closer to the coffee pot bubbling and sputtering in the kitchen. Apparently Roman had been courageous enough to face the coffeemaker on his own.

Roman reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of envelopes. I reached in for the next batch and found the bag empty.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Looks like it.”

“How abundant.”

“Well, to be honest we already got responses from what seems like most of the Hollow. We’re lucky to have even gotten this many.”

“Let’s reserve qualifications of luck for after we’ve read them.”

“Here we go.”

Roman picked up the first envelope and opened it. He took out a notecard and started reading.

“Why don’t y’all do a haunted house with clowns and dolls and they’re creepy clowns and dolls, you know with all the makeup and the blood and the ripped-up clothes. Why are their clothes always ripped up? If they’re going to be having company, even company that they want to scare the living hell out of, they should really try to look presentable and do a little bit of mending on those clothes. It just doesn’t make sense. Who tore up their clothes? Did they fall over or something? Did they---”

He stopped and flipped the card around.

“Did they what?” I asked.

“That’s it. They ran out of room.”

“Well, that was helpful.”

Roman handed another envelope out to me.

“This one looks like it has the same handwriting.”

I took it and looked down at it before opening it and taking out the notecard inside. The handwriting looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“—get into some sort of fight with somebody and they got their clothes knifed? If that happened, why isn’t their skin cut? And why are their faces always bloody? Does that mean they’re eating people? If you’re going to do this idea, you really need to tell us all this stuff. You can’t just think that we’re going to believe it. We aren’t dummies, you know. We’re not just going to go along with something because you say that it’s scary but don’t give us a good backstory that explains it all up. You really should have –”

Roman picked up another envelope and took out the notecard.

“—thought this through better before you started throwing this whole clown and doll haunted house thing together. You really should have come up with a backstory and shared it with all of us so that we could let you know what we thought about it and getting excited about the haunt before the season starts. We might have even been able to give you some suggestions that you could have put into the house, but no. You just built the whole thing all willy-nilly without any thought about if we—”

One last envelope.

“—understood it.”

I put the notecard down and looked at Roman. He was staring back at me with an expression on his face that said he was just as stunned by what just unfolded as I was.

“That was an interesting progression of thoughts,” he said.

“And now you’ve seen the effects of Cletus’s Clementine Moonshine at its best. In fact,” I picked up one of the cards and looked at it again. “This might have been Cletus.”

“There are a couple more.”

I picked up a postcard.

“Still thinks there’s a serial killer.” I tossed it down and picked up another. “Wants to know why it was only girls that you cut up. I’ll not say I told you so right at this moment, but know that it’s reserved.” I picked up the second-to-the-last envelope. “Aaaand…. Jesus.”

I tossed the letter down and rubbed my temples, squeezing my eyes closed and leaning forward to rest my elbows on my bent legs.

“There’s one more,” Roman said. “Do you want to read it?”

“Sure,” I said, letting my hands drop as I turned my head to look at the last envelope lying on the couch between us. “Let’s wrap this up with a bang.”

I picked up the last envelope and took out the letter. As I unfolded it, I immediately noticed that this one was different. I adjusted my position on the couch so I faced Roman, my eyes scanning the letter quickly before I glanced up at him, then back at the paper and read it to him.