Poisoned Soil: A Supernatural Thriller (34 page)

Tammy wasn’t sure why Ozzie had taken to isolating himself, but felt it wasn’t her place to question it. He was just doing what he was made to do, just as she was. There was no reason to fight it, to go against the way nature made them. Tammy knew what her role was and what she wanted more than anything. She liked not having to think about it, but just going with the rules of nature. Of course, she didn’t know what it felt like to be Ozzie, to be a strong male, but she realized a curse of his assignment was the loneliness of isolation. She knew her role was to care, to nurture. Without question, Ozzie felt his was to protect and defend. That meant he had to stay on guard, to isolate himself and to be prepared. He did that not out of selfishness or a need for time alone. He did that for her, and she understood that.

She walked along the stream and studied the trail of trees and stumps that had large chunks gouged from their sides. Ozzie wouldn’t be hard to find, Tammy realized, as she examined one tree injury closely. It was fresh and bright and smelled of fallen pine needles. She followed the trail through the woods and down the stream hoping to find Ozzie. Hoping that he would be happy to see her.

A couple of hundred yards before the fig tree in the garden, Tammy stopped to listen. In the distance, she could hear him, sharpening his tusks as if he were grinding an ax blade. Every day he had been sharpening his tusks on anything the forest offered. Mostly stumps, she observed, as he was now doing downstream forty yards from her, unaware of her presence. For a moment, Ozzie stopped and scraped his hooves on the rocks. They, too, were honed and well sharpened. Tammy stared at Ozzie, marveling at how much he had grown in such a short period of time. His arched razorback and physical size was impressive. Indeed, his long sharp tusks and bulging shoulder muscles intimidated even her. But he had grown so much more mature. When she had seen him escape from his paddock, she recalled, she had seen something akin to a scared teenager. A child that had just suffered the horror of seeing his father murdered before his eyes. That day now seemed so long ago, as if it was the final remnant of a vague and distant dream.

Staying well back from Ozzie, Tammy stepped off the trail and hid behind a mountain laurel. She watched and marveled at him. And she worried about him. This was no child. He had become his father, the protector, the defender. And yet, there was something else. He wasn’t just preparing himself to protect. There was a restlessness in him as if he was searching for something, and Tammy was afraid of what it was. Ozzie turned and focused on a pine stump. He stared at it with the concentration a martial arts master applies to a cinder block he intends to slice with his bare hand. Pawing the ground, he began oscillating his head back and forth, opening his mouth and moving his upper and lower jaws in opposite directions to reveal his menacing tusks to the stump. Abruptly, he charged and rammed his head into the stump as if he in fact were a ram. Shredding the stump with his rippers and tearing it apart, freeing his rage over his mother’s imprisonment as the shards of pine flew from the stump, leaving a soft bed of shavings on the ground where the stump had been.

Panting breathlessly, Ozzie stood with bleeding gums. He tasted the blood and got a crazed look in his eye as he looked around, searching the woods for anything, anyone that was a challenge, a threat. A man. His breathing slowed and he thought for a moment. He turned and continued walking downstream breathing in the faint smell of man.

Chapter 28

A harsh morning sun magnified its light through the living room window and landed squarely on Blake’s right eye. He twitched his head and woke, instantly feeling the crick in his neck from sleeping with his head on the armrest of the sofa. He grimaced and threw his feet to the floor to right himself. The CNN newsroom still haunted Blake from the television and displayed the time as 9:34 a.m. EST in the lower corner. A team of weather forecasters stood in front of satellite images, discussing the devastation and path of Hurricane Isabel. The motion graphic read “Hurricane Isabel Upgraded to Category 4. Sustained Winds 123 MPH. Expected landfall Savannah Thursday late afternoon.”

Blake rubbed his eyes as he tried to wake up. He couldn’t believe he had slept so long, but the scrolling text at the bottom of the CNN screen brought the memories of the prior night into focus for him.

“Meat samples tainted with anthrax removed from restaurants.”

Blake jumped up, fully awake as he looked for Angelica. Both bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen were empty so Blake ran up the spiral staircase and looked first in the nursery and then in the rec room. No sign. Evidently Angelica had quietly taken the girls out without awakening him. He felt the back of his neck and rubbed his hand over the dressing she had placed on his wound, realizing what it meant.

She knows! Did she leave me?

Adrenaline shot through Blake’s veins as he considered the thought that terrified him. He moved quickly and walked out the door to see if she was outside. His truck was there so she hadn’t driven herself anywhere. He walked around the house and circled back to the small lawn in the front. The only sound was the trickling of the brook in front of the lawn that flowed from the mountain above. There was no sign of Angelica or the girls as he looked and listened.

His eyes focused on the opening between two Cryptomeria trees that Angelica had planted a couple of years prior. They stood as pillars framing the path she had cleared, the path that Blake had chosen to avoid until today. He walked to the entrance, and as he looked down the winding path, a flood of painful memories washed over him. Blake remembered how inadequate he felt, how much of a failure he felt he was when Angelica called and told him about the miscarriage. She had sobbed on the phone and told him what the doctor had said while he was in Savannah picking up pigs that would later demonize him. While she sobbed out the details of their loss, of
her
loss, all Blake could think of was how he felt. As if somehow it was
his
fault. That somehow his semen was weak or had penetrated poorly because of his sorry Cherokee genetics. As a boy, Blake’s father always blamed the Cherokee blood in their veins for their wretched life in the housing projects. “Me and you, son, have more Cherokee in our blood than anyone in this county,” his father would cry in drunken despair. “And look at what it’s brung us? This here’s our own reservation of poverty, all because our English ancestors mixed with Indians!”

As long as he could remember, Blake had been bitterly ashamed of having Cherokee blood. The thing that Blake hated more than anything about himself was the thing that Angelica loved the most about him.

When Angelica told Blake about the miscarriage, he couldn’t cry himself because Angelica was so distraught. She was the woman so
she
got to be emotional, he recalled.
She
was the one who got to feel inadequate, so Blake just shoved his feelings down as far as he could. And when she told him what she planned to do with Nancy’s remains he lost his lid, unleashed his feelings of inadequacy on her, which he suspected she might have misinterpreted as something else. Like perhaps he didn’t care. Now, Blake shook his head visibly as he tried to knock the memories from the forefront of his mind and bury them again. He had more pressing problems now to focus on.

For the first time he began down the path that meandered by the stream to the secret garden. The growth on each side of the path was dense and lush, but Angelica had kept the path itself neat and tidy. The winding path was peaceful and inviting as roots from trees on each side crisscrossed the path at the surface and formed something of a staircase for Blake to ascend in the sweet and humid air. After five minutes, Blake came to an opening so lush and full of life that the only word that came to mind was Eden. It was a sanctuary of life, a celebration of life, full of fruits, flowers and health. In the far left corner, near a bend in the stream, stood a lone and beautiful fig tree. “Nancy’s Tree,” Blake whispered to himself, his head nodding. Angelica hadn’t spoken about it in a long time and Blake knew that was his fault. Close to the tree was a raised bed that Angelica had obviously built herself. He saw a flash of movement from the right and turned his head to see what he could have sworn was an angel and her two cherubs walking among her flowers, fingering their leaves and petals. Angelica looked and caught his humble gaze, and kissed a smile to him.

Blake stepped into the secret garden for the first time. He walked to Nancy’s Tree, knelt and began to weep softly. At first, only a solitary gentle tear, as he was man enough to suppress the others. But then, the angel appeared and placed her loving touch on his left shoulder, opening the dam of tears to drench the soil. The angel knelt beside him as the girls played in the corner with a pair of frogs that Angelica had introduced them to. She draped her arm around Blake’s shoulders, taking great pains to not press down on his neck. He collapsed his head in her bosom and reached around to hold her as dearly and closely as if she was the most treasured being in the universe. He tried to look up to her, to meet her eyes, but the lead weight of shame pushed his eyes down and kept them subservient. Still, he began to speak through the tears. “I’m so, so sorry, Angelica.” The first words brought more tears from Blake, more stroking from Angelica, as she listened and tried to understand.

“I’ve just–” the tears took over, momentarily getting the best of Blake. This was no football game, no opposing crowd. He couldn’t block this out, couldn’t block out this pain. Most importantly, he couldn’t shift the blame to someone else. He had to accept the tears and the remorse. “I’ve just—been wrong about everything,” he said. “And you were right about everything, about how we should live our life. I’ve just done so much that’s wrong.” The stream of tears flowed as Blake was in the midst of a powerful confession, both confessing his sins and giving himself at the same time. Giving himself to God, he felt, but more important to him, giving himself to Angelica.

She held and stroked his head.

“There, there,” she said, just as all mothers and caregivers say in times of comfort, “it’s okay. It’ll all be all right.”

Blake fought through the tears, realizing that he hadn’t told Angelica everything. Hadn’t told her nearly everything. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve done some awful things. I’ve been—on the mountain, just back up that ways a bit, I’ve been–” Blake broke down, saying no more and keeping his finger pointed high on the mountain where he had built the sheds, built the fences that held the pigs. Pigs that had now unleashed this deadly plague, this trail of death that led straight back to him.

“There, there,” she said. Blake straightened up. He looked into Angelica’s soft eyes. The hard part was over, he felt. He had confessed, he had told her. The secrets were mostly out, but not entirely out.

“Angelica, I feel like I am the one who unleashed this storm. Everything you saw on TV last night, all that stuff with Nick.” He paused; not wanting to say what he knew was true. “That was me,” he said. “I just want to fix it, to get out of this mess so we can live our life just the way you want.” He took her hand. “Can we? Can you forgive me?” Blake forced back the storm of tears that swelled beyond the dam of his eyes.

Angelica stood as Blake knelt at her feet. She stroked one of Nancy’s branches with her left hand before turning her gaze back to Blake and taking his chin in her right hand. “Blake,” she said, “sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes He lets the storm rage to calm the child.”

She glanced at the girls to make sure they were content and looked back to Blake. “You do what you have to do, Blake, and God will sort you out. You need His forgiveness, not mine. I will be where I belong.”

Blake rose before her and cupped his hand behind her head and stroked her hair. He pushed his tears back and looked at the tree. “So, this is Nancy’s Tree?” he asked.

“Yes!” she said. “Isn’t she a beautiful young woman?”

Blake smiled. He had troubles that lay before him, he knew that. But he now had a peace within him thanks to Angelica’s amazing gift. “Yes, she certainly is,” he said. “What’s this contraption over here in the center?” Blake pointed to a large circle of stones at the center of the garden. Within the circle, thirty-six stones outlined four segments, creating pathways to the center.

“That’s my medicine wheel,” Angelica said. “I gathered the large rocks for the circle from the stream and planted various medicinal herbs in each of the four quadrants.”

Blake pretended to be interested, but was already confused. “What’s it for?” he asked.

Angelica smiled. “Oh you’d be surprised what I can use it for,” she said. “Our Cherokee ancestors relied on these for a great many things, but this morning I used it to harness healing energies.”

“Why?” Blake asked. “Heal what, who?” Angelica looked at Blake sternly and placed the palm of her hand against his chest. As she touched his heart she closed her eyes and spoke. “I feel,” she said, “trouble brewing around me, Blake. And I will summon the help I need to repel it and protect the innocent and those I love.” She opened her eyes slowly and pulled her hand from Blake’s chest. Blake stood motionless, as if he had survived a spell.

“Uh...listen,” he said, shaking his head in awe of Angelica, “I have one more thing I have to do to clean up this mess I’ve made. I have to take the farm truck and go now, but I’ll be back for dinner with you and the girls.” He leaned and kissed her on the forehead and began walking down the path. As he did, he turned to see Angelica standing in the middle of the circle, facing south with her arms held wide and her head tilted back. It reminded Blake of a human crucifix.