The Firefly and the Knife

Seven days after the dog mauled the girl to death, the only son of the man who owned it vanished without a sound. She had been bitten to pieces all over. Half her face was ruined.

She held on a few days in that pain. Then she died anyway. And what was left of her family came apart behind her. The dog's owner had money.

He paid the family off quietly, nobody was ever charged, and life went on looking about the same as before. But it wasn't over.

A week later, the dog owner's sixyearold boy, his only child, went missing too. Chapter 1 The girl's name was Junie, and we played together all the time.

We were all just past ten back then, and in a coal hollow like ours nobody much bothered about who was a boy and who was a girl. She was quick and restless and strong for her age.

Going up the ridge after wild blackberries, going after birds' nests, she could keep up with any of us.

And that was the girl a vicious dog tore up until she didn't look human anymore. She didn't die right away. They put her in the hospital over in town.

The three of us who were closest to her went to see her together. The hospital was old and badly run, and the air inside pressed down on you.

Junie was hurt bad enough that she had a room to herself. When we snuck in, there was nobody in that room at all.

We found out later that her mother had fallen apart, because her father had taken Junie's settlement money and gone, and nobody knew where. Junie was asleep too.

We only stood in the doorway and stole one look at her. That one look left a scar on all of us.

Her whole face was almost completely wrapped in bandages, and in the few places the gauze left bare you could still see where the skin had been peeled back.

There were terrible wounds on her neck and on her arms. She must have been hurting so bad. So bad.

For me the sight of it made my skin crawl, because the girl I still had in my head was the lively one, the one who could go up a tree, get the fruit, and drop back down light on her feet.

Now she could only lie there like a body, not moving. Even her breathing was too faint to see. None of us dared say a word. We just hung back at the door and looked.

And we didn't know it then. That look was the last one. A few days later, Junie died.

That was the first time I understood that people die, and that wanting them not to has nothing to do with it. All those days Junie was hurt, we prayed for her every day.

We even ran up to several old church houses that had caved in on one side years back and prayed in there. It didn't do any good. She died anyway.

The irony of it was that the people who buried her weren't her own family. She had no grandparents.

Her father was gone, and her mother came apart completely the day she died and couldn't do a thing. So it was the county that put her in the ground.

Which really just meant a few men laid her in the cheapest pine box there was, piled up a mound of dirt, and covered her. There wasn't any kind of service.

I was young then, and I didn't really know how to be sad yet. It was Little Red who cried the hardest. Sneaking into the hospital had been his idea in the first place.

He was one of my best friends, and so was his brother, Big Red. Junie and the three of us had been a happy little bunch with nothing to worry about.

Now there were only three of us left. That day at Junie's grave, Little Red cried and said he was going to kill that dog. He was going to get her back for it.

But Big Red didn't think killing the dog was revenge at all. Killing a person was. Chapter 2 A life for a life. That was revenge.

So the next day, after Dale Rennick's little boy went missing, the first thing that came into my head was this. Did Big Red take him?

Rennick was the richest man in the hollow, and every year he wrote checks to the sheriff's campaign and to the volunteer fire department.

His coal business was over in the next county. It made money, but it wasn't a place to raise a child, so the child stayed back here in the hollow.

Because he had money, he'd put up a house here too.

A tall board fence closed in a front yard the size of a field, and the house itself was three stories, the tallest one in the hollow.

His parents lived there and kept Rennick's only son with them, and three big dogs on chains guarded the place. One of those dogs, the shepherd, was the one that killed Junie.

So when the family's sixyearold, Cody, went missing, it set off something the hollow had never seen.

The volunteer fire department was out searching, deputies came to ask questions, and people came and went all day long. The whole hollow pulled tight.

Tighter than the day the shepherd tore into Junie. Even the neighbors were out, drifting around in front of the Rennick place in twos and threes. I was running everywhere myself.

I wasn't looking for Cody. I was looking for Big Red. Neither of the brothers was home, and that scared me worse.

But in the end I found them, of all places, right in front of the Rennick house. They were standing there watching, same as the neighbors.

I wanted to ask Big Red a few things, but there were too many people around, so I let it go for the time being.

A little while later, two brandnew sedans came fast up to the Rennick gate. Out came Rennick and his wife, of course, and their kin with them.

Rennick's wife started crying and carrying on the second her feet hit the ground, pointing at his old parents in the yard and cussing them out.

The two of them were already crying over losing the boy, and now they couldn't lift their heads at all.

Rennick went straight to the deputies and the fire department men waiting in the yard and started talking. He carried himself like a man used to being listened to.

After a bit, he came back out through the gate.

He looked around at all the neighbors who had come to watch, and then he took off his hat, held it balled up in his hands, and bowed his head low. "Folks, I'm begging you, help me out.

Help me find my son. I'll make it worth your while! I'll make it worth your while!" He sounded like he meant every word of it.

But an old voice came back at him, hard. "Your boy's a treasure. Other folks' kids ain't people?" It knocked the wind out of me, and I spun around to find who had said it.

Everybody else was startled too, everybody turning to look, and by following the way they turned I saw right off who it was. Uncle Amos.

He was an old man with no family anywhere, living off his veteran's pension and his Social Security, up in a cabin halfway up the mountain.

He was past sixty and whiteheaded and walked with a cane, but he'd been in a war when he was young, and he was still hard. What he said was hard too. "You remember Junie?

You remember the day her mama came up here wanting an answer out of you? She cried and she hollered, over and over, and you never once came out to face her.

Ended up you called a deputy and had her hauled off." "You said it cost you more to feed your dogs than other folks spend raising a kid.

You reckon nobody heard that?" Rennick finally caught up to what he was hearing, and he asked fast, "Is it her? Did she take my boy?

Do you know where she is?" He was worked up enough that he took a step forward, and then he knew better. Because Uncle Amos wasn't only a man who had nobody.

He was also a man who feared nobody. So Rennick took hold of his hat again, bowed his head low, and said, Chapter 3 "You're right, sir, it's all my fault.

But none of that has anything to do with the boy…" "I'm only asking you to help me first.

After it's over, I swear I'll…" Uncle Amos shook his head and kept right on cussing him. "Back when your people were saying that girl's life wasn't worth nothing, how come you never once thought about a day like this?

Reckon your boy's life ain't worth nothing either?" You could tell Uncle Amos really did just want to cuss him out. Past that, it didn't look like he knew a thing.

Rennick could tell too. And that was when his eyes turned mean. Right then, Big Red moved beside me.

He shot out of the crowd so fast I couldn't get a hand on him. "I know who it was… I know who took Cody…" What Big Red said stunned everybody standing there.

The deputies came running out of the yard. They crowded around him in a rush and pulled him inside. Even Uncle Amos was thrown.

He had the look of a man cut off before he was done cussing, all the fight gone out of him. Me, I was starting to panic a little.

Because I remembered what Big Red had said at Junie's grave. Killing a person was revenge. Was it really him? Had he hidden Cody somewhere?

He wouldn't be fool enough to try to make a deal with those grown men face to face, would he? At least Little Red was still beside me.

I latched onto him like a lifeline and asked, "Do you know what's going on with your brother?" But Little Red looked just as shocked and lost as I was. "I—I don't know either." We hunkered down outside the Rennick place the rest of that day.

Before long more deputies showed up. They took hold of Uncle Amos, arguing and dragging, and hauled him off.

Jumping out in front of everybody to cuss Rennick like that, of course they were going to suspect him.

We waited a long while more, and then Big Red's grandmother, Granny Posey, came looking for him.

But the yard dogs kept her from going in, so all she could do was wait out there with us. Other than the dogs, there were people hurrying out of the place now and then.

Finally it was nearly dark and the neighbors had all gone home for supper before the deputies walked Big Red back out.

Little Red and Granny Posey and I all went up to him and asked if he was in any trouble. He said no, he'd only gone in to help. We got away from the Rennick place fast.

Granny Posey cooked that night, and it smelled so good. Then Big Red told us the reason. He really had seen the man they were after. Cody had gone missing that morning.

Right about then, Big Red had gotten up to use the bathroom. Through the window he'd seen somebody on the mountain path out behind their house.

It looked like a man carrying a child, running uphill. The man was moving so fast that Big Red had looked twice on purpose. And then he'd recognized him. The man was Junie's father.

Wendell Tackett. The one everybody said had taken the settlement money and run. So that explained the men I'd seen coming out of the Rennick yard during the day.

They had gone up the mountain to search. By the time he was done, we were done eating too. We went and sat out on the porch to cool off.

Little Red and I were chattering away, but Big Red stayed quiet the whole time. Something was clearly weighing on him.

After a bit I spoke up first. "You got something you want to say?" He waited a moment before he asked me, "You think if it was Junie, she'd hurt Cody?" I thought about it and shook my head. "She wouldn't.

You know she wouldn't." Big Red went quiet again. Chapter 4 After that we just looked at the sky, at the moon, at the stars.

Little Red pulled out a backpack and dug the snacks out for all of us to share. About then some fireflies went past in front of us, pretending to be stars.

And I had a thought of my own. Maybe not everything Big Red told the Rennicks that day was true. Early the next morning it was Big Red and Little Red who woke me up again.

I was still half asleep and couldn't make out a word of what they were jabbering at me. Until I heard this. "Rennick's killing the dogs!" That woke me all the way up.

Then I took off after the two of them, running for the Rennick place. From way off I could already hear the dogs howling.

There were plenty of neighbors gathered in front of the house, heads together, the air heavy. The three of us got up to the gate, and then I saw it.

They really were killing dogs in there. The first one to go was the shepherd that killed Junie.

The chain was choking its neck, and it fought and fought and never quit wagging its tail. It didn't do any good.

One of Rennick's men, a big fellow with a thick wooden club, walked over and brought the club down on the top of its skull.

The howling cut off all at once, and the dog started making a whimpering sound, begging. It was still fighting, but the chain around its neck held it right where it was.

The big man never stopped. He brought the club down on its head again, harder this time, and in a better spot. A thin puff of dust came up between the club and the hair on its head.

That heavy shepherd finally went dizzy and just about dropped flat. Its eyes were wide open, like it was pitiful.

But its eyes were wide open like that when it was biting somebody too. So I couldn't see anything pitiful in it. All I could think was that it deserved to die.

The other two, the mixedbreed yard dogs, saw all this and threw themselves in every direction in a panic, the chains rattling and swinging.

They shook with fear and pissed all over the ground. At first I thought the only one they were going to kill was the shepherd that bit her. But that wasn't it.

Before long the big man went at the other two with the club. They had never hurt anybody, and they had to die just the same. Not only that. They died hard.

Because once all three dogs had been beaten senseless, the men brought out knives. It turned out killing them wasn't the whole of it. They meant to take the hides off them too.

While the men worked, a thick blood smell filled the Rennick yard. Three dogs that had guarded that big yard were lying quiet in the blood now.

I heard somebody in the crowd say it. "The kidnapper's the one wanting these three hides.

That's the trade for Cody." "I heard they searched the mountain all night and never found a soul, just a strip of burlap the kidnapper left with a message on it." "Said he wants the hides off all three of those dogs, and then he'll turn Cody loose…" I turned my head fast to look at Little Red.

But Little Red wasn't paying me any mind at all. He couldn't take his eyes off the killing in the yard.

I didn't believe that if Junie's daddy really had taken Cody, the only thing he'd ask for was these three dogs dead. Little Red doing a thing like that, that I could believe. No.

That wasn't right either. They hadn't found the kidnapper at all. All they'd found was a few words he left behind.

And if nobody had gone up the mountain, nobody would have seen that piece of burlap. So I turned and looked at Big Red.

He looked away right off, like he was afraid of catching my eye. If it hadn't been for Big Red, they would never have gone up that mountain. Would they?

Once the three dogs had gone completely still, the Rennick men gathered up the hides. The blood smell hung around that place a long time and wouldn't clear off.

Chapter 5 Rennick went up the back mountain himself, taking his men along, carrying the three whole hides. Word was that the burlap had called for that too.

A lot of us tailed after them, because the whole thing was too strange not to see.

The volunteer fire department and the deputies were pushing people back, trying to keep anybody from following, but there was no stopping it, because there were side paths a person could climb up that mountain.

Big Red, Little Red, and I all went around and up. In the end I saw them hang the three dog hides on the dead old oak on the ridge. That tree was old already, the bark on it rough.

The hides swayed a little on the branches when the wind came through, and it looked as wrong as anything I had ever seen.

Once that was done they came back down, and they wouldn't let anybody else stay up there either. They ran everyone off the mountain. We got run off too.

The people in the hollow who had work went to work. The ones with nothing to do drifted back around outside the Rennick place, waiting to see what happened next.

Big Red and Little Red and I played close by. The deputies and the fire department men were all waiting inside the yard. Everybody knew what they were waiting for.

They were waiting on the kidnapper to keep his end of it. Waiting for Cody to be brought back. But everybody had figured the other thing too.

Since when does a kidnapper keep his end that easy? Folks who come to watch don't mind the trouble getting bigger.

Some of them were even hoping the kidnapper wouldn't make it so easy. Sure enough, along toward noon, one of Rennick's own men came running back.

He was white in the face, and he went straight into the yard without a word to anybody. So Rennick had left men up on that mountain on the quiet.

It was plain enough, because he had only just come down off it. He hadn't shaken all the burrs off his clothes yet. He had a strip of coarse burlap in his hand.

One look at it and you could tell it had been out in the weather for days. We didn't know what was written on it. But we could guess.

Because right after that, the Rennick place all at once started getting ready for something. They were going to hold a funeral.

Word that the Rennicks would be feeding the whole hollow got around in no time