All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris Read Free Book Online Page A

refused supper. It was now 4 A.M. Almost dawn. Birds are singing. I have half-finched finished a second bottle of whiskey which Hackaliah brought to the room two hours ago. But my hand is steady I am cold staring
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    Monday, May 25 6:30 AM.
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    W e would all do the perfect thing with an angel's indifference, but the primitive animal within each and every one of us demands appeasement for the shocks it is forced to bear, a total sacrifice of dignity, common sense and honor. And so it happened that I took my father's wife to bed little more than a day after his passing.
    Sunday noon I awoke standing in the bathtub pissing myself sick from a minus blood potassium. A meal of dried apples is a slow but certain cure for the worst hangover, so by five o'clock I was in a condition that permitted me to attend special services with Nhora at the Episcopal church. Nhora was still experiencing occasional abdominal pain, but the doctor now thought it was a characteristic case of Mittelschmerz , or pain of ovulation, which she had suffered as a young girl. Nancy had come around in the hospital but was still too debilitated to leave her bed. Nhora and I managed a visit for a few minutes despite the ever-increasing annoyance of the reporters and photographers who had flocked to Gaston to cover a story that was claiming equal attention with the war news on the front pages of America's newspapers. I didn't know what was being written, and I didn't want to know. I couldn't bear to think about Clipper at all.
    We also saw newsreel cameras grinding away as we were driven through a gentle rain from church to hospital and back to General Bucknam's house. Because the train and most of our wedding party had departed for Arkansas while I slept off the effects of my incredible consumption of sour mash whiskey, the press had concentrated its attention on Nhora and me. Everett John Wilkes thought it advisable to speak for us, and so he drafted brief statements which I approved.
    But I knew the press would not be satisfied so easily. It was a story of sensational proportions, of lunacy and bloodshed even as sacred vows were recited, and no one yet had explained the mysterious tolling of the chapel bell. The clapper, we knew, was worn but intact. The bell rope had been removed some years ago to prevent mischief. Thus the bell would have had to have been manipulated by hand, by someone in the tower. Someone with the grotesque strength of a Quasimodo, which of course was nonsense. That left the supernatural hand of God—or the Devil, considering the results. More nonsense.
    It was Evvy Wilkes who proposed a sensible answer as we sat picking at a modest candlelit supper while the rain continued and the reporters huddled doggedly beneath black umbrellas outside the house. Something strange, perhaps unique, had occurred in the atmosphere, a freak of nature caused by colliding air masses—thermal air from the burning Blue Ridge, colder air sliding past us from the North. The collision produced an extremely localized tempest, like a stationary tornado, that whipped the giant bell back and forth while scarcely disturbing the leaves on the trees around the church. And, because this tempest was occurring some fifty feet above the ground, it did not attract the attention of the many chauffeurs and servants loafing along the Parade.
    "But there was no sound," I said.
    "Because the clapper was muffled, years ago. General Bucknam can't recall, but they probably wrapped the clapper in burlap or something to retard rust. Once the bell tolled a few times the rotten burlap just fell away. That's why you finally heard it toll when the tower started to go and the bell tipped. Look hard enough and you'll find some rusted old sack wrappings up there on the floor of the bell tower. You might. I wouldn't go poking around with that tower ready to collapse."
    "I just don't believe it," Nhora said quietly.
    Evvy had a grin that came and went, often at inappropriate