The Preacher: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom Book 3) Read online

  He tossed the rock toward the creek. The truck door opened and James Greene, one of the church elders, climbed down from the seat. He wore denim overalls and a plaid shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thin forearms with silver, wiry hairs. Greene pushed his Atlanta Braves baseball cap off his balding head, wiped at the sweat, then returned the cap to its usual skewed resting place.

  “Hi, Elder David,” James said, using the title giving to lay preachers among Primitive Baptists, since lay preachers weren’t held in elevated esteem.

  “Elder James,” David said in welcome.

  “You tending to the grounds?”

  “Even Eden needed a little clip job now and then.”

  “Hmm.” James looked at Harmon Smith’s grave, which had a depression in the earth at the foot of the stone. “The grass grows best over him that sleeps with a clear heart.”

  “The joyous day is coming soon,” David said. “The elected shall rise up and walk with the Lord.”

  James noticed the dark hole. “Hey, look at that,” he said.

  “Figured it was a mouse. It’s about time of year for them to start laying winter plans.”

  “No mouse. That’s a copperhead tunnel.”

  “I never saw a copperhead in a hole before.”

  “Of course you ain’t. Smart, ain’t they? A lot of people think snakes are pure, dumb evil, but they know how to sneak. Do you know if you cut off a snake’s head, the snake won’t die till sundown?”

  “I’ve killed one or two in my time.”

  “Some of them churches in Kentucky handle snakes during worship service,” James said. “Pretty dadgummed stupid if you ask me.”

  “There’s a verse in the Gospel According to John that says if your faith is true, you can take up serpents and they will not harm you.”

  “Still sounds pretty dadgummed dumb to me. Pardon my language, Elder David.”

  David kept his eye on the opening to the hole. He was trying not to think of the snake twisting through the moldy rib cage of the itinerant preacher. But plenty of folks believed the preacher had left that grave long ago. That seemed like a blasphemy that God would never allow. Maybe David could set some kind of trap for the snake, restore things to their proper order. If it be God’s will, of course.

  “I hear the Carters left the congregation,” James said. “Took up with the Free Willers.”

  David wiped the sweat and stray bits of grass from his face. “Yeah. I talked to Benjamin Carter about it. He said with all the trouble going on in the world, he needed extra reassurance. Said it wasn’t enough to just sit back and hope you were one of the saved. Said he felt better if he took matters into his own hands a little. Of course, Rosie went along with him, like a good wife will.”

  “We’re down to two dozen members, Elder David.”

  David nodded. “At least we got Mark Draper coming in, and I’m baptizing his daughter Sunday morning.”

  “Be nice to have some new blood. All us oldtimers have been scaring them off.”

  Since the Primitives didn’t believe in missionary work, there was no call to go out among the people and recruit new members. The younger generation had drifted away from all the churches, not just the Primitive sub-denomination. Sometimes David watched those showy evangelists on television with their silk neckties and stiff hair and felt a little jealous. He wondered how he would fare out there on stage, where you felt the spirit work in you as you exhorted others to take Jesus Christ into their hearts and be born again.

  The Primitives had already been born into grace, according to their statement of beliefs, so believers had little to do besides wait around for Rapture. Of course, the rituals at church helped soothe worldly troubles. And services offered socializing, too, something still a little rare in the mountains, with the closest Wal-Mart over forty miles away. The Solom General Store had a potbellied stove and a little dining area, but loud tourists with their cell phones and cologne had altered the store’s atmosphere, and in some ways, their money had taken the store out of the hands of the community. He didn’t blame Sarah Jeffers, the store’s owner, because she was an old spinster who wouldn’t take any help from the government. But it was the same kind of change that was shrinking their church membership. People were choosing slicker, faster, louder.

  “The Lord will take care of it,” David said. The collection plate had yielded more metal than paper over the last few months. David didn’t preach for money, though he did accept reimbursement for the gas and equipment he used to maintain the church grounds. But none of them would pray for more. The Lord would take care of it, one way or another.

  “Folks around here could use a good miracle or two,” James said. “Lords only knows, Solom has had its share of trials over the years.”

  “Amen to that.” David fixed his gaze at the hole in Harmon Smith’s grave, which glared right back like a cold, ebony eye.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Odus Hampton didn’t like those hoof prints at the Smith farm.

  He’d seen them right after picking a bushel of Hubbard squash, but didn’t mention them to Miss Katy. In fact, if he could’ve found a way to erase them or disguise them without her catching on, he would have. As it was, he just finished up his chores, took her twenty dollars in cash, and headed to his next job, which was helping Mose Eldreth lay down some baseboard and trim at the Free Will Baptist Church. But he couldn’t help stopping at his favorite bootlegger’s along the way, hoping to drown out the memory of those prints and what they meant.

  Oh, Odus knew exactly what they meant, he just didn’t want to admit it. He’d first heard about the circuit-riding preacher Harmon Smith when he was eight years old.

  His grandmother, a thick, dough-faced woman who survived the Great Depression and hoarded canned foods because of that deprivation, would often gather the grandkids around the front porch on Saturday nights. The older kids complained because they would rather watch television, but Odus saw it as a way to stay up after bedtime without getting in trouble. He knew even then that stories were a way of passing along the truth, even when they walked in the shoes of tall tales.

  Granny Hampton was the matriarch of half a dozen kids, and three of those had seen fit to breed. Odus was an only child, but he had five cousins, and that was before they all moved away from Solom to get jobs. So Granny’s front porch was a lively and crowded place during the summer. Granny would settle in her rocker, the smaller kids gathered on the cool boards at her feet, the bigger ones slouched against the railing. A Mason jar at Granny’s feet served as her spittoon, and she wouldn’t talk before she’d placed a large pinch of Scotch-colored snuff behind her lower lip.

  As if on cue, the dusk grew a shade darker, the crickets launched their brittle screams, and fireflies blanketed the black silhouettes of the trees. The stars twinkled over the bowl of the valley, and the rest of the world may as well have broken off and drifted past the moon for all it mattered. It was like Granny was a witch who conjured up a magical stage for her tales and Solom was the only solid ground in the universe.

  “The Circuit Rider was one of the first horseback preachers to come through these parts,” Granny said on that July night of 1979. “There had been a couple of Methodists and an Episcopalian, but Harmon Smith was a converted Primitive Baptist. The Baptists weren’t all over the place like they are now, and most of the white settlers kept their religion to themselves. The thing about Primitives is they don’t believe in salvation—”

  Lonnie, who was a year older than Odus, cut in and said, “Does that mean they don’t believe in Jesus?”

  “They believe in Jesus, but He ain’t the only way to heaven. Primitives believe you’re born saved.”

  “I don’t want to hear no sermon,” said Walter Buchanan, Odus’s oldest cousin and the one probably most in need of a sermon. “Get on to the ghost.”

  Granny paused to let a tawny strand of saliva leak into the Mason jar, her eyes like onyx marbles in the weak light of the porch’s bare bulb. “I�
�ll get to the ghost soon enough, but if I was you, I’d make sure the ghost don’t get on to you.”

  Walter Buck snickered, but there was a little catch in his breath when he finished.

  “Harmon Smith decided he liked the look of the land, because it reminded him of his homeland in the Pennsylvania high country. He aimed to settle down and build a little church here. Problem was, a couple of other preachers had been riding through the region, and they were all hell-bent for saving souls in those days. The Methodists were the worst, or the best, depending on how you looked at it. They would ride themselves ragged, cross mountains in the dead of winter, sleep on hard ground, and generally run themselves to the bone in order to bring a single person into the fold. They tended to wear down and get ill, and it was common for them to die before the age of thirty. This all happened a century ago, so people didn’t live all that long back then anyway.”

  “Was Daniel Boone here then?” Lonnie asked.

  “Boone never was here, much. He’d come up and hunt, maybe spend a few weeks in the winter. He kept a little cabin over on Kettle Knob, but he never had much claim on this place. Besides, this story ain’t about Daniel Boone, it’s about Harmon Smith.”

  All the cousins had watched Fess Parker wearing his coonskin cap on television, starring as Daniel Boone, the fightin’-est man the frontier ever knew. But Odus was more interested in the Circuit Rider and looked at the Three Top mountain range, imagining Harmon Smith guiding his horse along the rocky trails.

  “Harmon Smith was based in Roanoke, Virginia, at the time, and his territory went into Tennessee and Kentucky. He had used up three horses by the time he first set eyes on Solom. In them days, there was probably two dozen families in the valley, and most of them are still here.”

  “Was there any Hamptons?” Lonnie asked.

  “Quit interrupting or we’ll never get through,” Walter said. “I got to catch me some nightcrawlers for fishing.”

  Granny lowered one eyelid and gave Walter a stare that shut him up for the rest of the story. The bugs had found the porch light by that time, and a mosquito bite on Odus’s ear swelled up and began to itch, but he could put up with a hundred bites to learn about the Circuit Rider.

  “The Hamptons were here, Robert and Dolly—they’d be your great, let me see, great-great-grandparents, if I’m figuring right. They were one of the first to invite Harmon Smith in for a bite of supper, which is why I know so much about him. The story’s been passed down all these years, but I’m sure there’s some parts that have been beefed up a bit along the way. Wouldn’t be a good folk tale otherwise.

  “Harmon Smith told Robert and Dolly that he wanted to buy some land up here. Preachers in those day never had any money, figuring they’d get their reward in heaven, not like them slick-haired weasels you’ll find behind a pulpit these days. But Harmon had a young coon dog with him, and one of the Hicks boys took a cotton to the hound and ended up trading three hundred acres for it. Back then, land was so common and cheap people divvied it up like pennies. By that time, Harmon had persuaded Dolly and Robert to join the Primitives, mostly because joining didn’t seem to require any kind of obligation. You didn’t have to give up dancing or corn liquor, not that any Hamptons ever liked to take a drink.”

  Odus knew that was one family trait that hadn’t made it into his branch, because his dad rarely went through a day without a drink. But Odus didn’t think liquor was bad, because it made his dad sleepy and talkative. When he wasn’t drinking, he was prone to cussing and stomping around, so Odus’s gut always unclenched a little when his dad twisted the cap on a pint bottle.

  “Harmon ended up building his church, but it took him five long years. In the meantime, he was still making his circuit on his horse, Old Saint, taking collections where he could, preaching the Primitive line as he went. Harmon took a wife but she must have wandered off and left him, because she was never heard from again. The preacher turned peculiar after that. He took up farming, but his soil was too thin and rocky. One autumn, Harmon stacked up some stones and covered them with dead locust branches. He knelt before them and prayed, then took one of his chickens and chopped”—here spit flew from Granny’s mouth as she made a chopping motion with her hand, and Lonnie jumped a foot in the air even though he was sitting on his rump—“and its head flew off and dribbled blood all over wood. He set the branches on fire and tossed the chicken on it, like the way they used to offer up lambs in the Old Testament. People whispered about that, but figured Harmon knew how such things were done. The next year, Harmon’s crops were busting open they were so thick, corn and cabbage and squash and even things that don’t take hold too well here like melons and strawberries. In his church he said God had smiled down on a humble servant, but that October he sacrificed a goat on his stack of killing stones. Garden got even better, so the autumn after that it was a cow, and the wood had to be stacked as high as man’s head in order to do the job proper.”

  “Didn’t anybody think he was crazy?” asked Debbie, who was the weird cousin who had once tried to show Odus her panties. The night had settled down more heavily than ever, a thick, black blanket held in place by the glittering nail-heads of the stars.

  “Sure, some did, but they figured if burnt offerings was good enough for Abraham, it was good enough for Harmon Smith. Other horseback preachers came through, though, and talk went around that they weren’t happy with the way old Harmon had set up shop. These were ‘enlightened minds,’ and they didn’t hold with old-fashioned ways. The Methodist man in particular felt the strong hand of God pushing him into this territory as if there was only one right way to put us mountain people on the path to Glory.”

  Granny Hampton paused on that word “Glory,” and let them chew it over as she relieved her mouth of brown saliva. The way she said it, getting to heaven sounded almost like a scary thing, because you’d find a cavalry of nasty horseback preachers guarding the Pearly Gates, scowling down at you for old sins.

  “One October Sunday morning, when Harmon was due back for a service, Old Saint came clopping down Snakeberry Trail with an empty saddle.” Here Granny Hampton gave a vague wave to Lost Ridge, and Odus could almost hear those iron horseshoes knocking off of granite and maple roots. “Some of the menfolk went up to hunt for him, and they saw what looked like signs of a struggle near the creek. Never found his body. Your ancestor Robert figured he got took by a mountain lion. Some said Harmon went in the water and got tugged down into a sinkhole and turned to soap. Others say they did find his body, torn to bits, which is why he now has graves at three different churches, because nobody wanted the whole mess.”

  “Yuck,” Lonnie said.

  “A few said he never did die. They say he still comes back every decade or so to toss a body on his killing stones to feed the final harvest. And it ain’t animals no more.”

  “What is it, then?” Walter Buck said, and his voice was low and reverent and maybe just a little bit spooked.

  Granny leaned forward and squinted at each silent kid. “Now nothing will do for Harmon Smith’s Garden of Solom but a bad little young’un.”

  A good twenty seconds passed in which no one dared breathe. Granny Hampton lifted herself up with a groan and a creak of chair wood, took up her cane, and headed for the screen door. She paused and looked out at the mountains once more and said, “Praise the Lord, I’m mighty glad I’m old. Not much left to be scared of anymore.”

  She went inside, her chair still rocking, the runners whispering against the night like a language a hundred years lost.

  Odus never forgot that story, and more than once he’d found himself alone at night on a dark trail or stretch of pasture and recall that image of Old Saint prancing down off Three Top. Except, in the image, a soapy, pale figure was perched on the horse’s back, the head beneath the black hat swaying back and forth with the horse’s motion.

  And when Harmon Smith returned last year, Odus got a chance to meet him face-to-face.

  He still wasn’t sure
how he’d survived, and he wasn’t eager for a reunion.

  But it wasn’t just himself he was worried about. If Harmon Smith was coming home like the signs foretold, then Miss Katy and Jett were occupying his old stomping grounds.

  Right smack dab in the middle of the Garden of Solom.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What’s with your mom?” Hayley Aldridge asked, keeping two hands on the steering wheel at the ten-and-two position just like they taught in Driver’s Ed.

  Jett got her license six months ago but Mom rarely let her drive, and she was jealous that Hayley’s parents could afford an extra car. But at least she had a ride. She had a way out of the house. For all Mom’s talk of independence, Mom sure didn’t make it easy. “Oh, the usual. You know how moms are.”

  “Good thing you turned out to be normal,” Kelvin Burnett said from the passenger seat, half-turned so he could look at her in the back seat. “After Gordon went crazy, you were right on the verge of ‘freakazoid’ territory.”

  “Yeah, nothing damages your social standing like getting terrorized by your psycho stepdad.”

  “It was hilarious when half the kids dressed up like the Scarecrow Man at Halloween,” Hayley said, tossing her fabulous blond hair and making sure Kelvin got a good whiff of her Chance by Chanel. The perfume was a little too sophisticated for Hayley’s sweaters-and-blue-jeans style, but Jett doubted Kelvin noticed the difference. Or cared.

  “Yeah,” Jett responded with a half-hearted chuckle. “That was so trendy it was lame enough to kill the trend. Last year only Buster Wilcox did it, which was the final nail in the coffin.”

  They were on Highway 67 heading toward Titusville, and Jett was cheered to see the houses grow in density. No matter how much she tried to convince Mom she liked the farm, she was a city girl at heart, and she was pretty sure once she went to college, she’d never look back. A whole year and a half until then, so may as well grin and say “y’all” in the meantime.