Behold the Bones Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Joane,

  who blazed her own trail

  so girls like Candy could, too

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Three Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Natalie C. Parker

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  Hear this the tale of Mad Mary Sweet,

  Who crawled through the swamp on her hands and her feet,

  In the wild lost her way,

  Her voice it did fray,

  And now she’s got none but her teeth.

  1

  GRANDPA CRAVEN KICKED IT THE day I was born.

  It’s a family tradition: Once in every Craven’s memory, a child will be born on the day some other Craven dies. In the infinite loop of cosmic justice, that child will grow up to be killed by the birth of another. We call it the Craven Curse and every year on the anniversary of Grandpa’s death, we visit the family graveyard and listen to Uncle Jack recite the list of all those who have carried this fine tradition of death by birth forward.

  That’s why every year, before they wish me happy birthday, my family hauls me to a backwoods graveyard to remind me that I, Candace Craven Pickens, killed my own grandpa.

  The family plot is on the forested piece of Nanny Craven’s land. August is a brutal time to be tromping anywhere in Sticks, Louisiana, but a braided cover of pines makes it bearable. Nanny Craven is set up in a deluxe camping chair right next to Grandpa’s headstone; one of her bejeweled hands caresses the cold stone, the other grips a jar of Clary hooch. As Uncle Jack continues through the line of our cursed ancestors, Nanny alternately sips and pours a bit on Grandpa’s grave.

  Nearly all of my living relations are here, crammed inside the low, wrought-iron fence that separates holy ground from regular old ground: twenty-three cousins—second cousins, double cousins, and cousins some-number-removed—two sets of aunts and uncles, my parents, and the bones of who knows how many ancestors. Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best but for footwear—only a fool would cut through the summer wood in anything less than a full boot. We’re an odd collection of Sunday hats and cowboy boots, button-up shirts and sweat stains.

  We’ve been standing in this sticky heat for exactly thirty minutes and though we were a jubilant parade on our way here I can see tolerance draining from the faces of my near and distant kin. I can’t hardly blame them. The older ones keep their eyes glued to Jack, willing him to lose the spirit of telling this familiar tale, the younger ones slouch against gravestones and fiddle with the cell phones in their pockets, and the very youngest get away with playing a quiet game of hide-and-seek. The pervasive feeling is that we’ll be here until we’re ready for the very graves on which we stand. This is the sort of thing we do because we always have.

  Jack lords over Grandpa’s grave like a pulpit. He abandoned his jacket first thing and now his sleeves are rolled to the elbow, his forearms are tanned and muscled, his hands broad and calloused. He speaks with the authority of someone who was there to witness the passing of each Craven.

  “Louis Paul inherited the curse from his father and passed it on to his daughter. He was injured in a fishing accident and took ill from his wounds. On the day little Annemarie Craven was born, in the winter of 1788, our great-great-great-great grandfather passed away in his bed, God rest his soul,” he says with immense sympathy. “And as most of us well know, Annemarie did not have an easy life. Married at the young age of eleven, she was ill-treated by her husband. The poor girl ran away into the swamp one night and was never heard from again. Only when the death of her cousin Lettie-Rae coincided with the birth of Johnny Jacob Tatum did we understand that Annemarie had passed away when Lettie-Rae was born. She is the only soul not resting here in this very yard.”

  In between each story, Aunt Daisy rattles a tambourine, and Nanny Craven solemnly tips a little hooch for Grandpa. It’s a waste of good hooch if you ask me, but nobody ever has or ever will.

  The stories and sweat stains continue to grow. Finally, Jack reaches the tale of Solomon Craven, who fought in World War II as a young Army man, prized working with his hands, hunted gators and ducks and deer, and was tough as nails. His death took everyone by surprise, as did my birth, for which I was one month early.

  “Dad was not a quiet man,” Jack says, frowning at the sudden quiver in his voice. He clears his throat. “And even in the face of death, he was a mean old coot. What did he say as that heart attack squeezed his innards?”

  Then comes the roar of my collective family, “Come at me, you bastard!”

  Daisy’s tambourine is ecstatic. My aunts and uncles hoot and holler, once again caught up in the spirit of the day. We’re nearly done with this oppressive tradition. The anticipation is palpable.

  Jack’s voice cuts above the cheer. “And on that very day our Candace Pickens was born! What day was that?”

  “This day!” Cousin Red calls from across the yard with a wink for me. He’s no taller than me and never will be, but he makes up for it with biceps and soul.

  “That’s right. Happy birthday, Candace!” Uncle Jack cries. “May you carry this curse for a great many years!”

  That, too, gets a rousing chorus of cheers as though there’s nothing at all wrong with wishing a girl happy birthday by reminding her she’s expected to die. The cheering quickly morphs into a discordant round of “Happy Birthday,” and at the end, Nanny Craven lifts her jar of moonshine.

  “Candace,” she calls, bidding me to approach.

  This is also a tradition. A strange communion somehow meant to demonstrate my willing participation in this family superstition. All my life, I’ve joined Nanny Craven at Grandpa’s headstone and sipped from a small jam jar of white grape juice to bring this ceremony to a close. This year, she makes no move to swap the jar. I weave through the crowd of living and dead to reach Nanny’s side. She presses her mason jar to my open palm with a dare in her eye. The nerves ruffling my stomach are senseless; this will not be my first sip of liquor, it will not even be the first sip I’ve taken around my family, but Clary hooch is the holy grail of moonshine and I’ve waited all my life for a taste.

  Don’t cough, I warn myself. Don’t you dare cough, Candace Pickens.

  I take the jar. Nanny Craven’s face spreads into a dangerous grin. Her lipstick stains one side of the rim. I choose the other and confidently bring the jar to my lips.

  I am too confident. Warm liquor splashes against my mouth and nose. The sip I meant to take is more like a gulp. It’s all I can do not to sputter at the sharp taste. My eyes water and I hear all my kin holler and laugh.

  “Y’ain’t a fish, girl,” Nanny Craven chides. “Save some for Sol.”

  Even she is amused by my novice performance. Tears, made from pure alcohol, I’m sure, crowd my eyes. I barely see Gr
andpa’s grave when I tip the jar and make my offering.

  Jack has one more point to make. He begins it by clapping a hand to my shoulder. “We call it a curse, but this cycle is how we know Craven blood is thick. Whether we’re Cravens or Pickenses or Tatums or even Lirettes, we are bound together, to this place and each other.”

  Smiles travel through the crowd like a virus. For a moment, all past hurts and slights, no matter how extreme, are forgotten. Second cousin Bart even reaches over to give second cousin once removed Joshua’s hand a shake. Never mind the fact that Josh sold Bart’s truck so he could buy an engagement ring for the fiancée he’d stolen two weeks prior. Even I feel a tiny swell of pride at having such a committed family. Everyone has been seduced by Uncle Jack’s tale. This is manipulation at its finest.

  Then it’s time to eat.

  The aunts file out of the graveyard first and down the small hill to where our feast awaits in foil trays and foam coolers. The menfolk brought folding tables and chairs out earlier in the day. They even saw fit to plant a generator where it could power a few Crock-Pots and strings of lights, haphazardly draped along the low branches of magnolia trees. My cake’ll be a two-tiered tray of Twinkies and Snowballs, and we’ll sit here in the shadow of our graveyard until the sun’s down and the food’s gone because this is how we party in the Craven family.

  Nanny grips my arm in her bony hand, claiming me as her aid, and we begin our shuffling descent down the slope.

  “Your mother says you’re waiting on some bad news,” Nanny says, prying. One of her favorite pastimes is mashing my buttons. It’s my opinion that Nanny guards a secret hatred of me for killing her husband.

  “Just news. We have no idea if it’ll be bad.” One of my favorite pastimes is denying Nanny anything.

  Nanny laughs like a crow. “Not as she tells it.”

  I spy my mother at the tables. She stands in the crowd of women arranging store-bought rolls on a plastic tray. Her smile is the tightest thing about her and I’ve got no sympathy for her misery. She’s not the one waiting to find out what’s wrong with her.

  “She shouldn’t be telling it at all.” Too late, I realize I’ve given Nanny an inch.

  She pats my arm. “Don’t you fret. Lots of girls have these sorts of problems. I’m sure she doesn’t blame you.”

  Her needles are so practiced. She’s stitched me into a corner with barbs masquerading as kindness. My options are to take it with a smile or be bullheaded.

  I smile. She wins. I’ve made her day with this sticky silence. It’s a small comfort, but if it means she’ll leave the topic alone for the rest of the night, then in some way, I’ve won, too.

  Nanny settles into her chair and sends me off with a command to bring her something to chew on. There’s a line at the buffet, but Uncle Jack makes a hole for me at the head. I pile Nanny’s plate with barbecue, fried okra, and creamed corn. I skip Aunt Sarah’s loathsome green bean casserole because I’d like to keep what little of Nanny’s good graces I still have.

  Mom stands at the end of the table, fussing with aluminum foil and condiments we’re all capable of opening ourselves. She hands me the hot sauce without a word. A small sigh escapes when I thank her.

  Today is my seventeenth birthday and my mother won’t meet my eyes. I am more dead to her than the generations of kin rotting beneath our feet.

  I started to die earlier this summer when Doc Payola updated his concern over my lack of a womanly cycle. When I was thirteen, it wasn’t an issue at all. When I was fourteen, I was simply a “late bloomer.” But when I was fifteen and sixteen it went from “peculiar” to “problematic.” This summer, it finally became something that warranted a visit to New Orleans Children’s Hospital, where the doctors ran a few tests and listed possible causes as carelessly as they might a grocery list: late onset menstruation, amenorrhea, cancer. Now we wait for the results. And my mom seems to think I’m already dead.

  I am alive. I am a ghost.

  Just after delivering Nanny her plate, Cousin Red catches me around the neck and pulls me into a sweaty armpit hug. It’s worth it for the cold beer he sneaks into my hand. I swivel and let his broad shoulders block me from view while I take a long pull. Half the bottle in one go. He’s only two years older than me, but the Cravens believe in the eighteen-year-old adult—if you’re old enough to vote and die for your country, you’re more than old enough to drink. I, on the other hand, still have to employ stealth.

  “Thought that was your ‘save me’ face,” Red says with a satisfied laugh. He’s compact as a tank. Every bit of him means business, from his tanned skin to his blunt nose.

  I scoff. “I’ve never had a ‘save me’ face in all my life. You must be thinking of my ‘I’ll raze this village to the ground’ face.”

  “Things that bad?” He steals the bottle and swigs. “I heard something about doctors . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

  Red opens his mouth to protest, but Leo appears at his shoulder. He stands a head taller than his little brother, which allows the Craven family girth to sit more comfortably on his sturdy frame. He’s less a tank and more a semi. His brown eyes shine beneath the worn and curved bill of a baseball cap, and he gives his brother a meaningful shove.

  “Respect,” he says, and Red begrudgingly shuts his hole.

  The food is exactly as it always is: salty and spicy and damn good. As expected, my “cake” is a mountain of cream Twinkies and pink Snowballs sporting seventeen wilting candles. And the darker it gets, the easier it is for me to slip my own bottle of beer so I can stop siphoning off Red and Leo.

  When the sun’s quit the sky, the party begins to wind down. Nanny Craven leaves first, propped in the Gator with Jack at the wheel and the majority of the folding chairs and leftover food in the flatbed. He’ll be back for a second run, but their departure is the beginning of a slow bleed as folk decide it’s time to pack it in for the night. Soon, there’s only a small crowd left to shut down the generator and collect the trash.

  The lights go out and the generator whinnies as it shivers to a stop. The night air is dense with the heat of the day; it gathers on my skin like a comfort. At the top of the hill, the graveyard is formless and dark but for the small figures of the Tatum girls racing between headstones. Behind it, skinny pines stripe the dim blue glow of the fading summer sky.

  Every year this tradition grows in absurdity. This is not how birthdays are celebrated; this is a charade designed to give everyone an inflated and unfounded sense of importance. I’m forced to be party to it but only for one more year. After my eighteenth birthday, I’ll never spend another standing on the bones of my kin. Because I won’t be in Sticks to do it. The Cravens, Pickenses, Tatums, and Lirettes will just have to find someone else to carry their curse.

  A shrill scream knifes the air. Every one of us squares up to the noise as my little cousins Irene and Carol come racing down the hill. They run straight to their mama’s legs. The men become a row of hunched shoulders and smoldering aggression, all searching for the offense.

  Aunt Dee is coaxing sense from her eldest, Irene. She holds the seven-year-old’s face in her hands, catching tears with her thumbs.

  In a trembling voice, Irene says, “A haint, Mama. There’s a girl ghost in the graves.”

  In the dark, it’s hard to decipher all the faces, but there’s a brief hesitation, a telling hush that surrounds us before Aunt Dee says, “Shush that nonsense. There ain’t no such thing as haints.” A few months ago, Aunt Dee would have done that with conviction. Now, after a summer of spirit sightings throughout Sticks, her words bear the hollow ring of falsehood.

  Mom lifts little Carol into her arms. “Why don’t we all head back to Nanny’s? Brice, you have that flashlight?”

  But before we can move toward the trail, Red drawls a long, “Ho. Lee. Shit.”

  “Redford Craven,” Aunt Dee bites.

  Red points. Following his index finger, I see dark brush, dark earth,
and dark pines. Nothing at all of note. Except for Leo, who stands next to me with an expression of fierce perplexity on his long face.

  Mom and Dee quickly move the girls toward the trail. Dad, taller than everyone here, raises the flashlight, training it on a spot between the graveyard and us. Red curses again. Leo joins him. The girls whimper.

  “What do you see?” I ask Leo.

  His eyes refuse to leave their prey. “A girl,” he says, voice thick. “A ghost.”

  It isn’t true, of course. There’s nothing in the unsteady beam of Dad’s flashlight but trampled pine needles. This is an extension of the strange new madness that’s swept across Sticks since the night a small group of people walked out of the swamp after being lost for days or weeks or months. All the folk who used to swear from one Sunday to the next there wasn’t anything more peculiar in Sticks than Featherhead Fred became superstitious overnight. Ghost sighting has slowly become the thing to do on a Saturday night. Yet another reason to leave this town behind.

  The scene around me has come to a complete halt. My family’s eyes are wide and fixed to the same point of air. How is it possible they all see something I don’t? My family may be nuttier than a pecan orchard, but they’re not gullible. Not this kind of gullible. What if they’re actually seeing something I can’t? What if there’s really a ghost standing a few feet in front of me? In spite of myself, a bracing wave of fear washes over me. Then it’s gone and I take a step away from my family into the light.

  “Brice!” Mom pleads with my dad at the same moment I hear Leo hiss, “Candace!” But too late.

  I walk straight into the beam of Dad’s light. My shadow is long and dark, my outline traced in hazy light. Behind me, my family holds their breath.

  “There’s nothing here,” I say.

  “What’s she saying?” Mom asks.

  “I said—”

  But Uncle Trent cuts me off. “Not you, Candace. Her!”

  Again, a cold feeling rushes down my spine as I realize they’re all listening to something I can’t hear. The only sounds that reach my ears are the quiet chirp of a few crickets and my family trying not to breathe.