# The Cache

I was topping the salt jar from the twenty-five-pounder in the pantry when Eli looked up from his dinosaur book.

"Grma, what's that for?"

"Habit, bud."

"What kinda habit?"

"The kind grown-ups don't explain till you're bigger." I set the pantry bag back behind the flour. The jar went on the windowsill where it always lives, half a hand-span left of the spider plant Carl gave me in '99. Sun came yellow through the glass. The garden was weeded, the locust tree at its slow lean, the locust grove past it dark already even though the sun wasn't. I had eggs on for supper and Eli had a half-eaten ham-and-cheese pushed off to the side because he'd decided ham was suspect this week. The kitchen smelled of coffee and the dried peppers on the rafter.

Then the cardinal hit the window.

He was dead before he was on the porch. Male, full red, neck broken on the boards. I went out without a coat. The boards were warm from the day and he was still warm too, one eye open and wet and looking at nothing in particular.

"Goddamn." Soft, so Eli wouldn't hear me say goddamn over a bird.

Inside, Eli had his face pressed to the glass. I held up one finger and mouthed *one more minute*, and he went back to his book. Seven still listens, mostly.

I picked the cardinal up by the wing-bone. He was light as a dollar. A red bird at sundown was Annie's old sign. I laid him on the porch boards because I couldn't put him in the dirt yet — not until I knew what the dirt was for tonight.

The sun went down inside an hour. A late-September chill came up off the floor; we hadn't cut the heat on yet. I gave Eli the sandwich back, told him to eat half, gave up on the eggs. He was talking about a dinosaur whose name had four x's in it when Mr. Pell knocked twice, slow, on the back screen door. Cold pine came through the screen before he did.

I knew him before I got across the floor. Twenty-one years and you don't forget the smell. I told Eli to take his book to the front room and turn the radio up, and he did, because Eli's an obedient kid when he reads the room.

Pell had his hat in his hand. Black wool suit, no tie, the same suit he'd had on in 1997 and 2003. His hair was still the wrong kind of black for a man who looked forty-five. His eyes were set wider than they should be. Behind him the porch boards held the cardinal where I'd laid him, and Pell made a small motion with his head — almost a nod.

"Mrs. Coombs."

"Pell."

"If I may. The deadline is dawn."

"I know what the deadline is. Off my porch."

"Three options, ma'am, and I'd be doing you a discourtesy not to lay them out." His voice was the voice — soft, mid-Atlantic, no accent. "The boy. Yourself. Or the original debt with interest, the interest defined on our side."

"No. No. And go to hell."

"You may take time."

"I don't need any time. Out of my air, Pell."

"I'm in no hurry, Mrs. Coombs." He tilted his head a half-inch, listening for something he hadn't quite placed. "The form does not require your consent. It has its own schedule. I'll wait at the edge of the light."

He stepped back off the porch without looking, the way I've never seen a living man do, and stood in the gravel just outside the porch lamp's reach.

I locked the back door. I locked the front. I went into the front room and turned the radio down and told Eli I needed him upstairs with his book, lights on, doors closed, and would he do that for Grma. He looked at my face and did not ask. He went up.

The horseshoe had been over the mantel since 1992. Granny Annie hung it. *Open-end up so the luck don't run out, Della-girl, but don't you take it down till you've got something to put back in its place.* And the third-night rule under it: *when you say the name, you get a window. Don't waste it.* I'd never had something to put back in its place. Tonight either way the horseshoe had to come down.

I lifted it off the nail. The wall behind it was paler than the rest of the plaster — a horseshoe-shaped patch where the plaster hadn't been touched. The iron was room-warm. It was heavier than it ought to have been.

Granny Annie's voice came up from somewhere I'd been keeping it. The catechism, clean: *You go to the cache. You break the seal. You pick up the gun. You pay in the words.* Under it, Father Whelan's Latin from the third night in 2005 — the work Annie called the third-night work. Familiar by sound. I had never known the Latin by meaning. I hadn't let myself hear either voice straight in a long time. They came straight now. The rasp in my left ear — the tinnitus the binding had given me — climbed half a notch.

I'd told myself I wasn't a practitioner anymore. I'd told it to myself in the kitchen, at the doctor's, in the pew at St. Mary's. I'd been calling the salt at the door habit, the horseshoe decoration, the cache insurance I'd never need.

Horseshit, all of it.

The choice had collapsed early. Stay in and pray for one more night and Eli wakes to me dead at the door, thing in the kitchen. Go out now, break the seal, arm myself — and Eli wakes to me dead in the garden, thing on the porch. Same boy on the wrong side of either.

I set the horseshoe back on the mantel proper, open-end up, where I could see it from the kitchen.

Eli was on his bed with the dinosaur book on his stomach when I came up the stairs. I sat on the edge of the mattress and took the inhaler and the epi-pen out of my jacket and put them in his hand. *You keep these on you. You don't open the back door. You don't look out the window if you hear anything. You hear me.*

He nodded. He wasn't crying. He was the still kind when something was wrong — the way Wren had been at his age. Wren — my daughter, the boy's mother before the overdose. I'd only just noticed.

I kissed the top of his head. *I love you, baby.* I said it in the voice he knows means it.

Then I went down to the shed for the shovel.

I crossed the yard with the shovel in my hand. Pell stood where he'd said he'd stand, just outside the porch lamp's reach, hat back on his head. He didn't move when I went past.

"Mrs. Coombs."

"Don't talk to me."

"I'm afraid that's the office, ma'am."

"Then talk while I work."

The chain-link gate was unlatched. I shoved it open with my hip and went into the back garden and across to the southwest corner, between the old well-cap and the locust tree. The dirt was hard from a dry September. I'd kept the corner mowed and weeded but I hadn't broken its surface. Four iron stakes were two feet down at the cardinal points; I'd driven them in myself. The shovel went in maybe two inches the first stab.

Pell stood fifteen feet off, on the far side of the chain-link. The chain-link was nothing to him; the consecration was. He kept to the gate as he'd kept to the back porch. He talked while I dug.

"The boy will not be a long account, Mrs. Coombs. The Old One does not stretch out a child's. The body is left where it falls."

"I said don't talk."

"It will be quick, by your standard of quick. He will be unafraid. The form quiets a child."

"Christ on a bicycle, Pell, shut up."

I put my back into the shovel. I knew where each stake was. Sweat ran down the small of my back. The tinnitus in my left ear climbed another notch and then another, keeping pace with the work. My hands started to bleed where the shovel handle had taken the skin off; I switched grip and kept digging. The braid was in my way. I looped it under my collar.

"You'll be the next account, in this scenario," Pell said. "I'd be doing you a discourtesy not to mention that. There would be no one to come for the boy. He would be alone at the kitchen table in the morning."

"Goddamn it."

The shovel hit iron.

I went down on my knees and dug it out with my hands. The first stake came up out of the dirt slow and then quick — like a pulled tooth. The second the dirt let it loose, the seal broke — a thunderclap of pressure inside my skull, and a sudden wind that came from nowhere. The locust tree shivered. The chain-link rang faintly.

Pell smiled. Nothing kind in it.

He stepped through the gate onto the lawn. The gate yielded for him the same as for me, latched or not. He stopped on the grass three steps in and waited. The hat was already starting to go wrong. Something underneath it pushed at the brim from inside.

I kept digging.

The hole went shoulder-deep faster than I'd have thought, a dry-dirt-and-roots kind of fast. How long I'd been at it I couldn't tell you. My hands were past bleeding. My left knee, the bad one from the barn-fall, had locked up at some point I hadn't noticed. The cache was where I'd put it: oilcloth, twine, paraffin, a steel ammunition box that had been Carl's father's. The lid had a name punched into it that wasn't mine.

I cut the twine with the kitchen knife I'd taken from the block on my way out. I peeled the oilcloth back. I dug a thumbnail under the paraffin and broke the seal in one pull.

Inside, all of it.

The Colt 1911, stainless, cool. The Mossberg sawed-off Carl had cut down in '01, oiled like he'd done it yesterday. Fifty .45 ACP rounds, each with the small cross I'd scratched myself. Twenty-five shotgun shells — ten silver buckshot, ten salt-iron slug, five blessed-cross. The oilcloth of Saint John's wort and rowan and mugwort, a little dry but holding. The folded note in my own handwriting.

And the crucifix.

Brass, pocket-sized, the loop on the back bent. Buddy's. My father's. I'd taken it out of his shirt pocket in the barn when I was fourteen, after he killed himself with the shotgun. The brass was still warm from him then. I kept it in my dresser drawer for twenty years. Then in 2005 I put it in the cache. Couldn't bear it in the house any longer. I picked it up now. The brass was buried-cold. I slid it into my shirt-front pocket. It sat where it had sat when Buddy carried it.

I read the note. *I am sorry. I would do it again.* I'd written it for Granny Annie. She'd told me intent had to be paid in the words. I read it now for me.

I loaded the 1911 with eight cross-marked rounds and chambered one. I loaded the Mossberg in Annie's order: silver to bleed, iron to slow, cross to break. Three silver buckshot, then the salt-iron slug, then the blessed-cross slug last into the chamber so it would be the point-blank round. The actions racked clean. Carl had oiled the shotgun in '04 and I'd oiled it in '05 and nobody had touched it since.

I stood up out of the hole with the guns and the crucifix and a fistful of salt from the cache circle in my jacket pocket. I pulled the north iron stake — the one closest to the porch — and carried it with me. The other three I left in. I went up the porch steps and propped the stake against the railing where I could reach it left-handed.

Behind me, on the lawn, the suit had come apart.

The hat was on the grass. The antlers had come up through where the hat had been — a full rack, wider than my arms outstretched. Ten points, maybe twelve. No time to count. The body had gone wrong-proportioned. Deer hips, longer arms. The wide-set eyes had finally settled. The smell of cold pine had become a wall.

It looked at me.

I had one breath.

I had the 1911 in my right hand and the shotgun across my arms when it came at me.

I unloaded the .45 first because that was the close-out drill — eight rounds, fast. Chest. Throat. Antler base. Every casing had a cross I'd scratched in by hand, and every one rang my bloodied palm as it left the barrel. The Old One staggered. It didn't fall and it didn't stop. The chest ran black where the rounds had gone in.

I dropped the empty 1911 on the porch boards and brought up the Mossberg.

I went down the steps onto the lawn. Eli was on the porch. I'd fight on the lawn. Three silver buckshot at fifteen feet, one-two-three, the recoil ringing my collarbone like a hammer. The Old One came on. I racked the salt-iron slug and fired at point-blank when its arm came up.

It hit me.

It wasn't a hand exactly. More arm. The impact came through my left forearm and shoulder. I went sideways into the porch post. The bone broke with a sound I heard from inside me. I landed on the boards beside the cardinal. The crucifix tumbled out of my pocket and rolled and stopped against my broken hand. The iron stake I'd propped against the railing came down and hit the boards beside it.

I lay there.

For a second there was nothing but the rasp in my left ear and the wrongness of the bone.

Then Granny Annie's voice came up out of my diaphragm and was in my mouth.

The third-night formula. Twenty-one years buried. It came up in the rhythm my body had kept when I wouldn't, in a register I can't reach in calm conditions. It came clean. I went into the centre of the formula. The name surfaced where I'd buried it. I reached for it.

The cover came up. Annie's voice — the cadence of Annie saying the name, which had been my cover for it — went out of me as the name came in. It went out of me like a dream at waking. It was gone before I could grieve it.

I spoke the name.

It was a sound I am not going to write down. I spoke it once and the Old One stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

The pause was a window. Annie had told me. I did not waste it.

I got my feet under me — broken arm, bad knee, the rest still working. I dragged the iron stake with my good hand across the bottom porch step. Just laid it there, salt-iron mass against the wood. I poured the salt from my jacket pocket along the threshold of the back door behind me — a line that kept small things out and would let a small body through if I called him. I did it backhand and one-handed and I did it fast.

I turned with the shotgun in my good hand.

The Old One started up the steps.

The iron at the bottom slowed it the way molasses slows a man. The silver in its body bled the strength out of it. The pause was holding. The naming had taken its rush away. It came at me on its feet, slow.

One shell in the chamber. The blessed-cross slug. One shell, one good arm, and a kid in a kitchen behind me. *Goddamn.*

I couldn't reach the crucifix left-handed — my left hand was broken and wouldn't close. I couldn't drop the shotgun. And dying on the porch with Eli in the kitchen wasn't an option.

"Eli." I said it in the voice that means it. "Baby. I need you to bring Grma the brass cross from beside my hand. Just two steps, baby. Right now."

The screen door opened.

He came across the salt line at my call. He stepped onto the porch barefoot, very still. He picked up the brass crucifix from beside my hand and pressed it into my broken palm. My fingers closed on it because I made them. The bones flexed. He did not cry. He went still — Wren's habit again, in this boy.

"Back inside, baby. Now."

He went.

The Old One was on the third step.

I fired the shotgun into its chest at point-blank and pressed the crucifix against its flank with my broken left. The slug took it in the centre, the brass on the side. Both at once. It went down. It came off the porch backward, smoking where the cross had been.

I said the third-night words clean, all the way through. The whole formula. I had it now.

The Old One walked back the way it came. The antlers went through the locust grove, visible above the trees for a stretch, then gone. The smell of pine went with it. I heard it for a quarter-mile after, going.

The back garden went quiet.

Dawn came yellow through the kitchen window. My left arm was in a dishtowel sling that would last me until I could drive to Cookeville for the cast. The iron stake on the bottom porch step was salt-rusted now. The dead cardinal was in the empty cache hole; the hole would stay open until I had two arms again.

I'd topped the salt jar from the pantry bag at first light. On purpose this time. The brass crucifix from the cache hung on a nail above the sink, beside the salt jar, where the morning sun reached first. Buddy's, brass, pocket-sized, the loop bent.

I tried, once, to remember the cadence of Annie's voice saying my name. The shape was there but no sound came with it. There was no filling it in. Annie was whole otherwise — cardigan, creek-mud boots, hands on her knees in the kitchen. But the sound of her saying *Della-girl* was gone.

Eli was at the table eating actual breakfast.

"Grma." He pointed at the salt jar with his spoon. "What's the salt for?"

"It keeps small things out, bud. We'll talk about big things when you're bigger." Same as any other morning.

He thought about it for two seconds, the way he thinks before he tells you which dinosaur was the biggest. He nodded. He ate his eggs.

"Goddamn," I said, soft, the same word the cardinal had got. I lifted my coffee cup with my good hand.