The Sacrifice by Janice Daugharty

Author:Janice Daugharty
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: alapaha river, angels, evil vs innocence, friendship, murder, nature, religion, suspense, terror, the trinity, torture
Publisher: Janice Daugharty

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While Bobby slept the next morning, Ruth lay still, trying to reconcile herself to the girl she had been and the girl in the bed with a stranger. Not only a stranger but one of her kidnappers. Throughout the night she had made him drink and his fever was now on the wane, as far as she could tell. She thought about him tenderly teaching her about the pistol, calming her, and never once had she felt threatened, not really. She thought about the story of Ruth and Naomi and why he had told her that—to make her know that when this nightmare was over, she’d wake up and be okay; that she was strong enough to keep hoeing corn till she could be rescued. She laughed to herself, thinking about the corn. Then the corn figured into a story Bossie had told about hogs and one thought led to another and she was back to thinking about food and the mulberries and the wild hog smell beneath the tree and how more than anything she’d like some barbequed pork.

When Bossie was eight or ten, she said, her mother would take her some afternoons to visit her Aunt Sudie and Uncle Leftie at the crossing in Statenville. The two homebodies would pass the afternoon rocking on the front porch of the clean little shack-of-a-house, talking family, sewing and cooking, while dipping snuff, keeping watch over the crossing and the townspeople on foot passing in and out of the turpentine commissary and the white two-story courthouse across the way. Behind the house was Troublesome Creek which crooked through the acorn and mulberry trees where wild hogs fed and cooled in the mud wallows.

West up the road, the two women could see the wooden river bridge and the graveyard where they would be buried if the good Lord didn’t rapture them before they died. It was a fact, said Bossie, and the graveyard would be about the farthest they ever got away from home, neither of them ever wanting to go anywhere anyway. Another fact, Uncle Leftie was a thorn in Aunt Sudie’s side. Not only was he the town drunk but he was the town thief and was known far and wide for his skills at arson.

Well, Bossie said, this one afternoon while they were visiting, Uncle Leftie was off to one side of the porch letting the women talk when up comes a good-sized shoat from the wallow behind the house. Bossie could hear the pig snuffling and rooting underneath the porch but so far had not been able to lay eyes on it.

Tired of doing nothing, of waiting for the visit to end, she lay down on her belly on the pale lye-scoured boards of the porch to peep through the cracks, hoping for a look at the shoat.

Uncle Leftie, a slick lean fellow with no teeth, and generally not all that friendly with children, or old women, as he called his wife and sister-in-law, came walking over with a dry cob of corn and handed it to Bossie, who lay belly-flat on the porch.

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