The Sabine is an old river. Old woods around her. It ain’t never been a place for soft folks. You don’t see families picnicking on the banks. Not that kind of river. Too wild. And when I was a kid, it was more boonies than it is now. By a long shot.

There’s been awful things happen here. People come up missing. Sometimes lost. Sometimes just gone. Bad folks like this place. It’s a good place for murder. A real good place for it. I promise you. Maybe not like it used to be, but you still see it sometimes in the paper. And this water. It can come up quick. She’s a mean ole bitch after a heavy rain. You can get yourself drowned real easy. Yessir. There’s plenty of bones out here. Enough to fill a graveyard. Believe that.

My great-granny was Caddo Indian. Two Sticks we called her. She knew all the stories about this place. She told me one time about the Caddaja. She said it was a great old she-snake that lived in the river. Said it hated the Caddo people. That it would eat any child it found wandering too far off from its mother. One day the devil himself come passing through and saw the Caddaja sunning herself on a big rock in the middle of the river. The Caddaja’s evil nature was so great, the devil was overcome with lust and turned himself into a snake and swam out to her and seduced her and left her pregnant. Two Sticks said this was the end of the Caddaja because her belly grew so big, she split wide open, and when she did, a million cottonmouth snakes poured out of her into the river. There’s enough of them bastards out here for it to have happened too.

Two Sticks told a lot of stories. Especially before she passed. The night before she died, she told me a story I’d never heard her tell before. About a secret tribe that lived back in the older bayous and the deeper woods. A tribe that was feared by even the bravest Caddoans. She said they’d been here since before the Caddo people came. That they lived between our world and one much older. She said they were giants. She told me they were still here.

East Texas, 1958

A Stained Burlap Sack

In the dark, the child hid like a prey animal among the high limbs of an old live oak tree, the calloused soles of his feet set firm against a limb, toes gripping the rough bark. He was young and very thin, with skin the color of wet sand and a dark cascade of curly, wild hair no comb could be drawn through. The wind whipped his tattered shirt and slashed his eyes. Tears cut slanted, shiny tracks down his grimy cheeks. He listened for Rebecca’s screams; a terror draped about him like the arm of a nightmare.

Before him sat the Halseys’ clapboard house, built long ago by men now dead, their bones reclined in moldy coffins beneath forgotten gravestones. The house, once handsome, had decayed through the generations, its roof of tin sheeting gone psoriatic and swaybacked, the walls sloughed of paint and the planks rough and gray and slivery. At one end, the thick back of a redbrick fireplace and narrow spine of chimney. The porch boards lay warped like diseased bones. An old hound dog lay next to an empty rocking chair, white-haired muzzle resting on its outstretched forepaws.

The boy craned forward, straining for any sound that might tell him of Rebecca. He cocked his head at what might have been a faint whimper coming from an open window, but a wind rattled the leaves about his head, so he couldn’t be sure.

The screen door screeched open, and Papa Len clomped onto the porch. The weak light from inside the house exposed him as an ominous shadow, tall and slender and imposing. His hunched shoulders betrayed years of physical labor. He wore a sweat-stained fedora with a wide brim that drooped low over his eyes. The cuffs of his patched denim overalls frayed. His clenched hands, the skin stretched white and bloodless across broad knuckle bones. A burlap sack hung from one fist, a small lump at the bottom and the material stained dark, wet. He clutched a hunter’s lantern in the other hand. The screen door banged closed, and he stalked off the porch and into the wind and the darkness. He did not turn the lantern on. The hound struggled up and padded after him.

The boy moved down through the limbs. Papa Len’s pickup truck was parked near the sprawling oak, and the boy darted into the shadows beneath it. He searched the darkness; afraid Papa Len might come back. He crawled from under the truck, ran across the dirt yard, and crept up on the porch, careful not to step on the single scarlet drop that stained the dusty boards. He looked in through the screen door. A coal-oil lamp lit the front room. An inside doorway opened to a kitchen and beyond, an unlit hallway. He stood trembling, unsure of what to do. A gaunt woman emerged from the shadows of the hallway, wiping blood from her hands with a kitchen towel. He called through the screen door, “Momma Nell! Can I come in? Momma Nell!”

She rushed into the front room. “Don’t you come in here. Go on home.”

“Is Rebecca dead?”

“No, she ain’t dead. But she needs to rest. Go on.”

“Is she going to die?”

“She ain’t dead, and she ain’t dyin’. Git now. Come see her tomorrow.”

“Is the baby dead?”

Momma Nell’s shoulders fell, as if sloughing off a heavy yoke. In the half-light, she looked ancient. “Yes, it’s dead. Go on now. Len’s liable to be back anytime.”

The thought of Papa Len coming up behind him jolted the boy, and he turned and sprinted across the yard. He entered a familiar stand of pines and wended through them by moonlight, coming out on a rutted dirt lane. A quarter mile down, the shell of an old car slumped in a shallow ditch, covered over by a mantle of poison oak and honeysuckle. The boy squatted in the grass beside it.

At the end of the lane was a clearing and an unkempt three-room house. The place of his birth, so said Byrd. An enormous, ugly wrecker was parked out front, and with its boom and chains and hook saluting the moon, it seemed an instrument of malicious purpose. The wind had settled, as if to skulk past this parcel. He felt his arms tingle with gooseflesh, and he thought maybe he should just fade back into the woods and return to the safety of the bus, but a need he could not explain prodded him forward. He scurried to the wrecker, his fingertips brushing the dented and rusted steel as he slunk past it. He ducked into the shadow of the house and froze, listening. Light from a lantern quivered through an open window above his head. He climbed up on a couple of old tires stacked beneath the window and peeked inside. A table overflowed with empty beer cans and bottles, a brown jug and food-encrusted plates and mechanical parts, tools. A wood-burning stove with a glowing red slit along the door seam. More beer cans and empty bottles scattered on the floor around a deflated armchair.

The boy jumped at the creak of a metal chair being unburdened, the crunch of a beer can stomped flat, and heavy boots clomping across the back porch, followed by the patter of urine hitting the ground. The boy slunk down from the tires, and when the boots began to thump back across the porch, he eased cautiously up to the vine-covered back corner of the house. In the deep shadows, Lewis Halsey collapsed into a chair. He lit a cigarette and used the opener on his keyring to puncture a fresh can of beer. The can hissed, and he took a long drink and set the can on his knee.

“Why are you sneaking around my place?” A voice like a rattlesnake’s warning.

“I just come from up at Papa Len’s house,” the boy’s words nearly whispered.

“Did Rebecca have the baby?”

“It died.”

“Well. That’s good. Brother and sister, Lord have mercy. That sort of thing ain’t meant to be anyhow.”

“Rebecca’s okay, but Momma Nell said she’s gotta rest.”

Lewis took a drink from his beer and pulled on his cigarette. His cruel features showed in the red glow like a demon peering out from a fire.

“I seen a tractor up at the shop. Are y’all working on a tractor?”

Lewis stubbed his spent cigarette in a hubcap on an upended cable spool he used for a table, got up from the chair, and walked to the edge of the porch. He was a pale, sinewy man with stout forearms and thick hair like black fire. His hands were big and capable. He looked down at the boy with eyes that might look upon stunning beauty or incredible horror and be moved by neither. Eyes that made the boy stand very still.

Lewis finished off his beer, set the can down on a board at his heel, stomped it flat, and swept it off the porch with the toe of his boot. He fished out a cigarette from a crumpled pack, lit it with a brass lighter, took a slow drag, and blew out a rolling smoke.

“Don’t come around my place. I don’t like strays around my place. I done told you that. You remember me telling you that?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, did I ever tell you about the time an ole momma cat come up here and had her kittens?”

“No sir.”

“She had’em under this very porch I’m standing on. That’s right. I had me a mess of kittens running around. They was just as cute as they could be.” Lewis seemed for a moment to recollect something fondly. He pulled on his cigarette. “But like I’ve said, on more than one occasion, I don’t like strays around my place. So, you know what I did?”

“No sir.”

“Well, let me tell you what I did. I took my rifle that’s sitting just inside the door over there, and I shot that momma cat through the belly. And then I had me a beer, and I watched her flop around. Right out yonder. And then I gathered up all them little kittens and I put’em, one by one by one, in a feed sack. And then I tied a knot in that sack. And then I took me a stroll down to the pond.”

Lewis leaned his shoulder against a corner post, studying the boy. “You know what I did then?”

The boy did not answer. Lewis grinned down at him.

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

“No sir.” A small, trembling voice.

“Well, I throwed that sack of kitty cats as far as I could throw it. Right out into the middle of the pond. And that pond. It’s deep. Deeper than you might think.”

Lewis’s cigarette coal flared hot, and his eyes lit with pinpricks of red fire.

“Something just occurred to me. You ain’t much bigger than that mess of kittens I threw out in the pond. Hmmm. I guess that’s something to think on. Anyhoo, back to our original discussion. About how I don’t like strays coming around my place. You reckon I’ll ever have to tell you to stay away from here again?”

“No sir.”

“I’d say that’s a good thing for you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, what are you waiting on? Carry your black ass.”

And the boy ran for the dark woods, and the wind lurched up and fled with him.

Those Halsey folks were an odd bunch, and that’s the righteous truth. I heard ’em referred to as a clan more than once. They certainly had clan ways. Didn’t socialize much outside their own family tree. They only came to town for necessities and such. ‘Cept for that Lewis Halsey. My friend Colette said he hung around them honkytonks down at Whiskey Bend, and she only knew that because her sister was, well, a bit of a tramp—Lord forgive me, but she was. Now they’ve cracked down on some of that mess out there, but back then you had to be careful driving 149 on a Friday or Saturday night. Them fools would come out of them joints drunk as Cooter Brown, and they didn’t much care which side of the road they were driving on. Plenty of wrecks on account of it. Lewis, he always drove that big tow truck so, he being sideways hisself, would tow ’em down to Wister’s Garage.

He ended up marrying a girl from over Harleton way. It hurts me to say it, but she’d been making the rounds out at Whiskey Bend. Whoring herself, you know. That was according to Colette, and she’s a God-fearing woman, so I know it to be a fact. Now, I can’t follow what a man would see in a whore, but Lewis, he was crazy about that girl. But now, she wasn’t as smitten with him as he was with her, cause she kept to her Jezebel ways. The rumor was she was having relations with a colored man, if you can believe it. Black as a Halloween cat and green eyes like one too. Green now! It’s true! You haven’t never seen nothing like it! Well, it wasn’t long before that girl come up pregnant. Of course, we all couldn’t help but wonder who the daddy was. And right after she had it, we heard her and the colored feller took the baby and run off.

Now, at the time, that was a good enough answer for me. I just thought like everybody else did, you know, that they’d run off to keep away from Lewis. Even before everything that happened, it was a common understanding you didn’t mess with Lewis Halsey. So, we all thought it was for the best anyways. Black folk and whites mixing? That wasn’t really an acceptable situation around here. So them two going missing just made sense, you know. At the time. But Lord Jesus, I guess there’s a lot of bad in this world, and that old serpent, there’s just no telling where he’s gonna turn up. Now, I don’t want to give the impression I condone the kind of relationship those two had. I don’t. But I wish they had run off. I truly do. I wish they’d gotten away.