Let It Be – final section.

It’s been a while since I last posted this story but I decided to finish it. It does end quite abruptly, but I want to enter the whole thing into a competition with a 5000 word upper limit so I needed to be concise. I hope I haven’t lost anything by doing so. Let me know your thoughts

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I must have stumbled back to the garage rather than going home and woke up the next morning to Mary pushing a coffee cup into my hand. Back then, I used to take it black – and she knew that – but she’d clouded it with cream and when I sipped it, I tasted nothing but sugar.

“Christ, Mary. This is rank,” I said, spitting across the ’shop floor.

“It’ll sober you up, though. And I need you to come with me.” I’d never seen those black eyes so dark as I did then. I sat up from where I’d made my bed on the worktop and stared at her before noticing the terrified figure in the corner of the room.

“John, this is Nancy,” Mary paused while I took in her big belly, “And what Junior did to her wasn’t something she had a say in.”

Nancy looked down, shame faced and teary, and Mary looked to the truck. I nodded, gulped down my coffee and stood, handing over the keys. I was in no state to be driving, but damned if I’d let my girl go and fight this one alone.

As we rattled out of the ’shop I noticed that the sun wasn’t up yet, and I saw tear tracks glowing down the faces of both women in that early light. My head was throbbing something rotten, but I liked the pain it gave me as we shot over the bumps in the road, reminded me what we were going to somehow. All the while, that creamy coffee threatened to reappear.

Junior, it turned out, lived way out of town, past the Davies’ ranch and about another ten miles north. We all sat in silence, Mary with her foot to the floor and my old truck’s suspension squeaking as we went. We parked up in front of his neat little house and Mary turned to Nancy, offering a soft smile,

“It’s alright, sweetness. We’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
Mary and I left the truck and made our way to the porch. Ruby light was spilling over the horizon now and glinted off the buckle of Mary’s belt. She stopped when she noticed me staring and met my gaze evenly.

“John, I don’t know what’s going to happen and what exactly I’m going to do in there. Just promise me if it all turns bad that you’ll take care of Nancy. She can have my job and bring the kid to work with her. Mamma Doyle’s already said she can have my room.”

“It ain’t going to go bad, Mary. But sure. I’ll keep her safe.”

Mary knocked on the door. There were some noises inside and then bleary eyed and dressed in a gown, Junior appeared.

“Miss Ward?”

“Shut the hell up, Junior. Is Ruth in?” Mary’s voice was cold.

“No, but I don’t see-”

She shoved him aside and entered, checking every room of the property while I kept my eyes on the boy. He glared at me, looked like he was ready to say something, but Mary’s return made him hold his tongue.

“She isn’t here, John. We can make this loud.”

I pushed the boy into the den to shouts of protest and Mary kicked his knees into a bend. He fell onto the couch and glowered at her.

“Nancy told me what you did, you bastard.”

“I didn’t do anything she didn’t ask for. She loved every second of it.”

“The knife marks? Did she love the knife, you sick freak?”

“She threatened to tell her Papa, to tell Ruth. What was I supposed to do? I let her see the consequences.”

“I’ll show you consequences,” Mary hissed and spat at him, “I told your old man. I told Nancy’s and I told the sheriff. We’re just going to wait here until-”

Junior had a gun in his hand from God-knows-where and pointed the thing at Mary. I don’t know what made me do what I did, but I picked up the nearest heavy looking thing – a big blue vase – and I tossed it at the boy’s head. It shattered on his skull and fell into thousands of pieces around him.

Mary pulled at what I’d thought was a shiny belt buckle and pointed an old Schofield at the boy.

“I love you, John,” she said to me with a wry little smile and then turned to the dazed kid before her.

“Blood of my blood, flesh of mine, you are nothing. It ends here.”

* * * *

Mary fell after shooting Junior, blood spilling from her stomach where she’d put a hole in him. And then she just vanished and I was left standing in a room with a dead man.

Like she’d said, the sheriff showed up, wanting to talk to the boy for what he did to Nancy. I thought fast – I knew they’d try and pin the thing on me since I was the only one there, but I’d promised Mary I’d take care of the girl and her child so I did what I had to.

I told them the story up until the point Mary pulled the trigger, and then acted like she’d run off into the dawn. They searched for her for months, even posted a reward, but needless to say they got nowhere.

I went to speak to Bertie after it happened and told him and Mama Doyle what really took place. They finally shared Mary’s secret with me, and that just made me love her more.

Way back before Columbus even set out for this great land, someone had done to Mary what Junior did to Nancy. She’d lived as an outcast outside in her village – an unmarried woman with a boy-child. She’d sworn to protect him, to protect every drop of his blood and the fates took her at her word. When that boy’s blood passed to his son, she was bound to protect him and so on, until Albert Hart Junior. By pulling that trigger and ending his life, she’d broken her vow and been taken from the world.

Blood of my blood, flesh of mine, you are nothing. It ends here.

Let It Be – Part Four

To my surprise, Mary showed up the next day like normal. Neither of us said a word about the night before and she just got to sorting out our jobs for the coming week like she did every Saturday. It got to an hour before I was due to meet Hart’s Papa, so I handed her the keys and told her to lock up when Big Steve finished fixing one of the cylinders on the Pontiac.

She didn’t say a word when I went to go, just nodded and followed me to stand outside. We waited together for a minute while she fished round in her pocket and pulled out some cigarettes, lighting one for herself and offering one to me. I took it, lit it up, and watched her as she blew smoke up towards the sun, like she could block out some of its heat.

“John,” she said, slow like, “Bobby took me out last night and I’m not going to sugar-coat it. Betty was out too, dancing with Walter Davies. They looked real close.”

Normally when Mary and I talked she’d be watchful and just nod when she agreed with me, or shake her head when she didn’t, but it was my turn to stay quiet today. Suddenly everything got clear. I was chasing something impossible – that picture of Hart’s granddaddy was probably him with some relative of Mary’s who just happened to look like her. And while I’d been running round trying to make that photograph into something else, my first love was being stolen from me by that idiot, Davies.

“Thanks, Mary,” I said, eventually, when I saw she was looking at me strange. She just nodded again, finished her cigarette and walked back inside. I looked down at mine and it had burned right back to the butt. I let the whole thing fall to the ground and watched as the ash collapsed in on itself and went sailing into the dry summer air. Then, I got into my car.

Folk still don’t understand what the road really is, but I saw it that day as I sped out towards the Davies’ place. I had an L35 Oldsmobile back then – a sports coupe – and I really let the engine run. The way I understood it, that searing lunch time, made me ease off the gas a little. The road out of town was suddenly my life – if I came off it at all, I was as good as dead, but if I stuck in, followed the bends as they came, then it’d take me any place I wanted to go.

And to my great surprise, that wasn’t the Davies’ ranch. I’d sped out there with a mind to Talk to young Walter, but I pulled over real quick when I discovered it wasn’t Betty and him that bothered me. That damned picture of Mary had set me onto thinking she was something Other, something from beyond, and I knew she sure as hell wasn’t a demon. If I’d learned anything from a life time of Sundays in baking hot churches it was that demon’s didn’t work real hard – sloth, I think they called that sin – but Mary worked harder than anything I’d seen before. So it was the idea of my angel secretary with Bobby Wilson that set my blood to boiling – Bobby, who I’d known from being a kid to pull the wings off bees so he could watch them fail to fly.

I looked at my watch then and figured that if I ran my engine flat out, I could still make it back to town in time to meet Hart’s papa. I turned the Oldsmobile around and pushed my foot to the floor, careful to stay on the road.

* * * *

Let It Be – Part two

People actually liked the start of my story, which is always nice, and incredibly, my hits actually doubled when I posted it! So here, once again for your reading pleasure, is the second part of ‘Let It Be’.

* * * * *

We were closing up the second time I saw that boy.

Mary was out back when he arrived, cleaning up the Ford before we took it back out to the Moore farm. They’d been having problems with the underside rusting but it was nothing an occasional clean wouldn’t fix. The car was going on twenty years old and they ran it all over the fields, never bothering to take a look and see what was under the mud.

This time, the boy seemed calm enough, even shot me a dumb smile when he saw me, but I just couldn’t shake what he’d said the last time he came. Even back then I was seeing Betty – had no business interfering in Mary’s affairs – but she was a good friend, and I didn’t much like the thought of anyone putting her in her grave, let alone this city boy.

“Is Miss Ward here?” He asked, peering into the ’shop shadows. I sniffed, loud like and smirked when he wrinkled his nose.

“She’s gone home,” I lied, praying the girl would stay out back and not make me look like a fool, “It’s past five, boy, we don’t normally work late.” He waited a second, looked like he was thinking hard, and reached into his Sunday-suit pocket, dragging out a neat little envelope.

“Would you please give her this, then?” he offered it out to me and after a moment I took it. I’d no intention of handing it over – whatever it was, coming from this kid it couldn’t possibly be good. Still, I was curious as to who’d been showing up in my garage uninvited.

“Who should I say it’s from?”

He stared at me a long time, his sluggish blue eyes trying to read whether or not I was asking an honest question. I suppose I’d’ve been curious too had we been in opposite places. If I’d yelled bloody murder at a girl in his place, he looked like the kind who’d make that girl tell him why. After a long moment he cracked a little smile and said slowly, like he thought I was dumb,

“Albert Hart.”

He glanced at his letter, all puppy-dog eyes, one last time before stalking out into the yard and climbing into his car. It was a stunning thing – a brand new, 1936, Buick 8 Business Coupe and he didn’t even deserve to look at the thing. I shook my head while I watched him go and looked at my oily prints on his nice white paper.

I headed over to my room, shutting the door like I did when we got a phone call. The line was so bad way out here that to hear it proper, you had to lock yourself in. If Mary came back in she’d not disturb me, but just to be sure I picked up the receiver anyways and held it to my face with my chin. Thinking hard, I started to push down round the envelope, trying to feel what was inside – sure didn’t feel much like a letter, and it wasn’t the shape of some bills, either. The thing wasn’t sealed, so slowly, careful like, I opened it up.

Inside were a couple of photographs. The first two were of Hart, and he had his arm round a different girl in each picture. One of his ladies was wearing a wedding gown and on the back of that he’d written ‘Me and Ruth, June 10, 1934’, while on the other, he’d just scrawled ‘Nancy’.

“Cheating bastard,” I said to the walls and looked at the third picture.

The other two, though they got me pretty mad, weren’t a surprise. This one though… this one was all kinds of crazy.

It was old – had been printed in browns and yellows instead of silver and white – and there was a man in it who looked like Hart a little. His eyes were different though, wilder somehow – like he wasn’t so spineless. It could have been the boy’s rich papa – or from the clothes, maybe his granddaddy.

And there, plain as day beside him, was Mary.