Chance Damnation Read online

  Chance Damnation

  By DeAnna Knippling

  Copyright © 2011 by DeAnna Knippling

  Published by Wonderland Press

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  To my family

  ***

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter Selections

  Author Information

  Cover Credits

  Publisher Information

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  Chapter 1

  Buffalo County, South Dakota, 1960

  Jerome stared up at Celeste Marie on the top of the pile of dirt outside the church in Gray Hill. She was standing with her hand shading her eyes from the sun, and the wind was blowing her shining black hair. They were both just kids—fifth graders—but someday, he was going to marry her, and there would be problems.

  “Look,” she said.

  “At what?”

  “Over there.” She pointed at something on the other side of the hill.

  Jerome climbed to the top of the hill beside her. His feet sank into the loose dirt, dried to a crust on top with wet clay just underneath. They were running water from the new well to the church, and there were trenches and pits in the ground all over the place.

  Jerome shaded his eyes and squinted, but it was no good. He’d left his hat inside the church, and he couldn’t go after it or his father or somebody would remember it was time to go home and sit at the long table for dinner and say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” and “may I go now?” Yet his blue eyes were no good in the sun.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A demon.” She stood on tiptoe, grabbed his arm.

  “There’s no such thing as demons. It’s a bull.”

  “It’s not a bull. Too many horns. Oh!” The dirt shifted from underneath her, and she slid down the hill. She tried to grab his arm but lost hold.

  The dirt shifted under Jerome, too, and he tried to both stop himself from falling and grab Celeste Marie at the same time. All of a sudden, he knew they were in danger. It wasn’t a question of looking back later and wondering if he had known; he knew.

  “Run!” he shouted.

  The dirt shifted again and he went down on hands and knees, sliding to the bottom. He pushed backward from the dirt hill and got to his feet. The ditch where the pipes were going to be buried was between him and Celeste Marie.

  Celeste was standing up again and staring into space. “Look at them run!”

  That damned girl. He carefully checked the ground, then jumped over the ditch and pulled her by the back of her shirt. “Come on, Celeste Marie.”

  The dirt hill was starting to fall down like a milkshake being sucked up from underneath. Jerome pulled Celeste Marie away from the hill, toward the cemetery. Not that the cemetery was important; that’s just where the one safe direction was, for the moment.

  He didn’t run, and he didn’t do any more shouting. He led Celeste Marie among the graves to the big statue of Jesus kneeling. They’d be safer back there, out of sight.

  “We have to go back,” Celeste Marie said.

  “What for?”

  “We have to get in the back of Peggy’s pickup truck and have her drive us out of here before the demons check the graveyard.”

  Jerome sighed—she couldn’t have said something two minutes ago?—and led her back toward the church’s gravel parking lot, stopping behind his sister Peggy’s pickup truck so they couldn’t be seen. He peeked through the dirty window toward the church. The hill was a hole in the ground now. Jerome shaded his eyes and saw something moving underneath.

  From the front of the church, Mr. Blackthorn hollered, “Celeste Marie!”

  Celeste Marie jerked like she’d just got woken up and started to take a breath. Jerome slapped a hand over her mouth.

  From the dirt hole, something grunted.

  Jerome murmured in her ear, “I ain’t ready to get killed yet, are you?”

  Celeste Marie shook her head.

  “Let’s pretend we didn’t hear your dad.”

  Celeste Marie grinned around his hand. Her sweat smelled like bread, and he could feel her big front teeth under his fingers. He let her go.

  “Okay,” she said. “But only for a little while. Until the demons are gone. They’re right over there.” She stepped out from behind the truck to point into the wheat field with her brown stick arm.

  Jerome jerked her back behind the pickup truck. “You got to be better at hiding than that.”

  Celeste Marie giggled as Jerome peeked from behind the back of the truck. Sure enough, the field was scattered with black dots running toward them, whatever they were.

  Jerome coughed as an evil smell got up his nose and stung his eyes. Something grunted behind him. When he turned around to see what it was, he saw that he was face-to-face with something big, black, and ugly. Celeste Marie stared up at it as it reached for her.

  Jerome dragged Celeste Marie out of the way and around the truck. Big Ugly was naked and hairy, with four curling horns and a big snout, and he walked on two legs. He followed them for a second, then doubled back around with his hands outspread, waiting to see which way they would go.

  Jerome pushed Celeste Marie into the side of the pickup truck, grabbed her legs, and lifted her up. She bent at the waist and toppled into the truck, protesting: “This is a terrible place to hide.”

  Jerome put his boot on the tire and boosted himself up behind her while the black thing circled toward them. There was a tarp in the back of the truck, held down with the cans of green paint and linseed oil they were using to paint the roof. Jerome pulled the tarp over Celeste Marie, in case it happened to do any good, picked up a gallon can of linseed oil, and swung it, hard.

  If it hadn’t hit the demon, it would have smashed the back window of Peggy’s pickup truck, and then he would have been in trouble. But the full can hit the demon with a thump and bounced back. Jerome let the weight of the can carry it over his shoulder; then he swung the can over his head. The thing bellowed as the can cracked one of his horns.

  “Celeste Marie!” Mr. Blackthorn shouted again. He sounded cross and impatient. He probably wanted her to go inside to help dust the pews or clean fingerprints off the windows or something.

  “Coming!” Celeste Marie shouted. She struggled under the tarp and pushed it back.

  Big Ugly was touching his horn and shaking his giant, shaggy head. He started to grab for Jerome, but Jerome swung the can again, and it knocked the demon’s muscled, hairy arm aside. Big Ugly growled and reached for him again.

  More time.

  Celeste Marie screamed. Her tiny body threw the heavy tarp out of the pickup truck and into Big Ugly’s face; then she pummeled the thing with the meat of her fists. “Leave him alone!”

  Jerome would have laughed at how angry she sounded and how futile it was for her weak arms to pound at the demon if the demon hadn’t been big enough to pull her out of the truck bed and throw her to the moon.

  “Celeste? Celeste Marie!” Mr. Blackthorn’s shouting sounded far, far away. Jerome shoved Celeste Marie out of the way.

  The demon roared and the smell got worse; it was as bad as rotten Christmas oranges in July or Easter eggs in August.

  Celeste said, “So that’s how
you do it.” Jerome looked down; she had one of the cans of paint open and waiting. As far as he could tell, she’d used her bare hands to open it with. She picked up the can and held it carefully by the handle.

  The moment Big Ugly stripped off the tarp, she hurled green paint into his eyes. The paint splattered the demon and splashed back over their church clothes.

  “Hah!” Celeste Marie said. Then she shrieked as another one of the demons caught her from behind, right around her waist.

  Big Ugly bellowed as Jerome leapt from the truck bed toward the second demon. He missed, as he knew he would, and landed on his knees. He got up and ran after the thing, which was running with Celeste Marie toward the dirt hole.

  Jerome had a metal fence post in his hands; he didn’t know where he’d got it from, probably from the back of the truck. His arms didn’t want to move right, it was so heavy. He swung and missed. He swung again and hit the demon, right in the back, but the demon didn’t stop. The post was too heavy to swing again, so he charged with it, slamming it hard into the demon’s back, right at the spine.

  The demon stumbled, dropping Celeste Marie and leaping over her, then skidding into the ground. Jerome followed and hit him again with the post, at the bottom of his neck this time. The post slid along its neck and got stuck in the crack between the top of his neck and the bottom of his head.

  The demon went down on its knees. Celeste Marie kicked the demon with her sandals, and Jerome jerked the post out and swung hard, hitting the demon in the back of the head.

  The metal post anchor got stuck in the thing’s head, and Jerome wasn’t strong enough to jerk it out this time. He screamed with the need to hurry.

  Then someone was pulling him backward. He kicked and twisted but couldn’t escape. The next thing he knew, he was inside his sister Peggy’s truck with Peggy on one side and Celeste Marie on the other. He almost slid off the seat into the dashboard as the truck whirled out of the parking lot.

  Celeste Marie stared at him up and down, hanging onto his arms with her tiny hands. “You’re green.”

  Jerome looked around. Peggy was driving them down the gravel road away from church, which was surrounded by demons.

  There was smoke.

  Chapter 2

  Aloysius said, “The way I figure it, Sebastian, what you just said makes you an idiot. Why don’t I just ignore what you said, so you can go back to being a man of God instead?”

  They were standing in the vestibule, long after mass had ended. Even the old ladies had gone home, mostly. He’d been trying to get his little brother Sebastian alone, so he could congratulate him on his ordination, but their ability not to get into each other’s sore spots hadn’t lasted five minutes.

  “Stop calling me Sebastian. It’s Father Vincent Paul now. And stop pretending you’ve forgotten.” Sebastian brushed a wrinkle from the front of his green vestments, which were shinier with gold thread—and quite a bit cleaner, to be honest—than Aloysius’s shirt and slacks. The black shoes sticking out from underneath his vestments were polished to a bright shine, while Aloysius knew his shitkickers had a few spots of mud on them at the best of times.

  Aloysius said, “I don’t keep track of ladies’ married names until they last two years or start having babies, and I ain’t keeping track of your priest name, either, until I know you have what it takes to make it stick. Frankly, if our father heard what’s coming out of your mouth, he’d bend you over his knee and wallop you. I’m tempted to do it myself.”

  Theodore, learning against the wall and waiting for Aloysius, walked to the doors of the church itself and shut them so Jim Blackthorn, the deacon, couldn’t overhear Aloysius being disrespectful to a priest.

  Unblinking behind his coke-bottle glasses, Sebastian said, “Our father agrees with me. As does the Federal Government.”

  “Bull,” Aloysius said, reluctant to swear in church, even if only in the vestibule. “Taking away somebody’s land ain’t right. Next thing you know, the government’s going to take our land, too. If what you say is true, which I doubt, Father shouldn’t of put up with it. And I don’t care what the Feds say anyhow.”

  “He sent a letter to the Governor in support of it.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Aloysius said.

  “He did,” Theodore croaked. Between the cigarettes and the lack of speaking, he sounded like a damned frog when he did open his mouth. “I heard him talking about it the other day.”

  Aloysius shook his head. “It ain’t right.”

  “You’re the only one who thinks so,” Sebastian said. “It’ll bring a lot of business to the area.”

  “What do we need with business?” Aloysius asked. “We’re a bunch of ranchers, not a city-bedamned-council.”

  “Hydroelectric power will—”

  “They’re just going to send it out of state.”

  “And the irrigation.”

  “I don’t want no corn farmers out here anyway. This is cow country. Hay. Wheat. Alfalfa.”

  “And the flooding.”

  “That’s rich,” Aloysius said. “You’re going to tell me the best way to stop flooding is by flooding the whole area?”

  “Aloysius, they’re going to put in the dam whether you or the Indians like it or not, and that’s the end of it,” Sebastian snapped. “So stop arguing with me. Go argue with someone who gives a...” He snapped his lips shut. His hands were shaking inside his big sleeves.

  One of the doors into the church popped open, and Jim Blackthorn stormed out. At first, his chest stuck out and his brow roiled like a thunderstorm. But when he saw the brothers in the vestibule, he shrank into a hunched-over excuse for a scrawny weakling.

  “Oh, excuse me, excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. You haven’t seen Celeste Marie, have you?”

  Aloysius hated the bald-headed, slick-faced Indian, vicious and mean to his daughter and his white wife (at least he had been, before she’d left him) and to the other Indians who came to service, but groveling to other whites and the priest. Sebastian used to hate the man, too; at least he used to say so, before he came back from seminary. Now they were thick as thieves.

  Aloysius shook his head. “Nope, ain’t seen her.”

  Theodore grimaced, which meant the girl was probably outside playing with their youngest brother, Jerome. Their father, Liam, didn’t approve of Jerome mixing with the half-blood girl. Neither did Jim Blackthorn. Aloysius couldn’t understand it; she was a good kid for all her father’s flaws. A little odd was all.

  Come to think of it, Aloysius was almost willing to believe the old man was willing to overlook the injustice of flooding out Indian land to build a dam. Liam didn’t give a good God damn—so to speak—about the Indians, but Aloysius had thought that he’d have been up in arms at the thought of someone losing their land to the government.

  Sebastian said, “She ran outside with all the other kids after service, James.”

  Mr. Blackthorn scowled. “She’s supposed to be cleaning the church. She’s old enough to help.”

  Sebastian said, “Why don’t you give her a holler, James? I’m sure she’ll be right in.”

  Jim stepped outside and shrieked, “Celeste Marie!”

  After a second, when she hadn’t answered, Jim said, “That girl. When I see her, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, Jim?” Aloysius asked. “Whip her with a switch?”

  Theodore rolled his eyes, as if to say, There he goes again.

  But Aloysius had been in enough trouble already to know that he didn’t mind making a few enemies now and then.

  Jim Blackthorn almost steamed with rage. “Celeste! Celeste Marie!”

  Sebastian said, “Now, Aloysius, that was uncalled for.”

  Aloysius snorted. “Why didn’t you say it? You’re our man of the cloth now. Aren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on us sinners and making sure we follow the straight and narrow? And not beating our daughters?”

  “When I have something to say to Jim, I’ll
say it in the confessional, Aloysius.”

  —He had a point there.

  Aloysius said, “How did you get assigned here anyway? You ain’t supposed to be priest for someplace you grew up in, I know that much.”

  Sebastian’s eyebrows were a solid stripe across his forehead. “I’m starting to agree with you,” Sebastian growled. “I’m going to change.” He whirled around, his vestments flaring as he stormed into the changing room. The door slammed, trapping the hem of his vestments.

  Aloysius grinned while the green cloth jerked in the doorway like a live thing. Then the door opened and the cloth disappeared. The door slammed again.

  “You got to lay off him, Aloysius,” Theodore said.

  “What for? Is he going to stop acting like a—excuse me—like an arrogant—” Aloysius had trouble thinking of an appropriate term, here in church. He continued, lamely, “If I don’t remind him from time to time?”

  “He didn’t want to come back here either,” Theodore said. “It was Father who set it up. Made him do it. Wanted to be proud of him. You ain’t helping.”

  Aloysius hissed through his teeth. “He should have married that nun instead.”

  Theodore said, “What’s done is done.”

  Aloysius had forgotten about Jim Blackthorn standing near the doors until the man yelled, “Celeste Marie!” again.

  Aloysius sighed. “I’ll go help you look for her, Jim.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “You already did, Jim.”

  For a second, he could have sworn that Jim Blackthorn’s eyes lit up with a wicked glee. Well, if that was all the pleasure the man could get out of life, so be it.

  There was a crash from the basement, and Aloysius tried to remember if his sweetheart Honey Lindley was still down there with Theodore’s wife Maeve.

  “What was that, the pipes?” Aloysius said.

  There was another crash and a terrible groaning sound from inside the church, like the ground itself was in pain, and Theodore took off running down the stairs.