The White Road

He had noticed him for the first time in the showers. Hubert doesn’t look at the other men in the showers as a rule. That is a way of attracting attention and maybe trouble to himself, and Hubert doesn’t want that. Hubert isn’t very tall or very strong and he has lost possessions in the past to men more violent than he. He has learned to stay out of their way and not to meet their eyes, which is why he always looks down in the shower, and why the other man first came to his notice.

It was his ankles, and the scarring around them. Hubert had never seen anything like it before. It was as if the man’s feet had been severed from his legs and then crudely reattached, leaving the marks of the stitches as a reminder of what had occurred. It was then that Hubert broke his own rule and glanced up at the man beside him, at his stringy muscles, his frizzy hair, and his strange haunted eyes, semibleached of color and obscured by clouds. He was humming something to himself, and Hubert thought that it might have been a hymn or one of those old Negro spirituals. The words were unclear, but Hubert picked up on some of them.

Walk with me, brother,

Come walk with me, sister,

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road to-

The man caught Hubert looking at him and fixed him with a stare.

“You ready to walk, brother?” he asked.

And Hubert found himself answering, his voice sounding strange to him as it echoed hollowly from the tiles: “Walk where?”

“On the White Road. Are you ready to walk on the White Road? She’s waiting for you there, brother. She’s watching you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hubert.

“Sure you do, Hubert. Sure you do.”

Hubert turned off the shower and stood back, grabbing his towel from the rail. He didn’t say anything more, even when the man began to laugh and called to him: “Hey, brother, you mind your step, now, y’hear? You don’t go stumbling, you don’t go falling. You don’t want to fall down on the White Road, because they folks waiting for you, waiting for you to fall. And when you fall, they going to take you. They going to take you and they going to tear you apart!”

And as Hubert hurried from the showers, the song began again:

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road together.

That night, Hubert was assigned a cot by the rest rooms. Hubert didn’t mind. His bladder played up sometimes, and he often had to get up two or three times a night to take a leak. But it wasn’t his bladder that caused him to awake that night.

It was the sound of a female voice, crying.

Hubert knew that couldn’t be right. The Family Shelter was down at 49 Walnut, and that was where the women and children slept. There was no cause for a woman to be in the men’s shelter, but there were men among the homeless whose ways nobody could know and Hubert didn’t want to think of a woman or, worse, a child being hurt by anybody.

He rose from his bed and followed the noise. It came from the showers, he thought. He recognized the way the voice echoed, recalling the sound of his own voice and the man’s song earlier in the evening. Hubert padded to the entrance and stood there, transfixed. The olive-ski

There was a pillar of light before the man, maybe five feet in height. It shifted, flickering like a candle flame, and it seemed to Hubert that there was a figure behind or within it, cocooned in its glow.

It was a little blond girl. Her face was contorted in pain, her head shaking from side to side in a blur of movement, faster than was humanly possible, and he could hear the sound of her cries, a steady nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh filled with fear and agony and rage. Her clothes were shredded and she was naked from the waist down, her body torn and marked where she had been dragged along the road beneath the wheels of the car.

Hubert knew who she was. Oh yes, Hubert knew. Ruby Blanton, that was her name. Pretty little Ruby Blanton, killed when a guy distracted by his pager hit her as she was crossing the street to her house and dragged her sixty feet beneath the wheels of his car. Hubert recalled her head turning at the last moment, the impact of the hood against her body, the final sight of her eyes before she disappeared under his wheels.

Oh, Hubert knew who she was. He knew for sure.

The man standing before her made no attempt to reach for her, or to console her. Instead, he hummed the song that Hubert had heard for the first time that day.

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk-

He turned, and something shone behind those blighted eyes as they regarded Hubert.

“You on the White Road now, brother,” he whispered. “You come see what’s been waiting for you on the White Road.”

He moved aside, and the light advanced toward Hubert, the girl’s head shaking, her eyes closed and the sound pouring from her lips like the steady drip of water.

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

Her eyes opened and Hubert stared into them, his guilt reflected deep within, and he felt himself falling, falling to the clean tiles, falling toward his own reflection.

Falling, falling, to the White Road.

They found him there later, blood pooling from the wound he had opened in his head on impact. A doctor was called, and he asked Hubert about dizzy spells and alcohol consumption and suggested that Hubert should maybe take up the offer of a proper home. Hubert thanked him, then collected his things and left the shelter. The olive-ski

But now he has returned to the cemetery. It is his place, and the memory of the vision in the showers is almost forgotten, the stain of its recalling papered over with the excuse of alcohol and tiredness and the temperature he had been ru

Hubert sometimes sleeps close to the Stolle grave, marked by the figure of a woman weeping at the foot of a cross. It is sheltered by trees, and from here he can see the road and the lake. Nearby is a flat granite stone covering the resting place of a man named Be

There is a shape lying on Be

There is a ragged wound at the man’s throat, a strange hole, as if something has been inserted into his mouth through the soft flesh beneath his chin. The torso and legs are almost black with blood.

But there are two other things that Hubert notices before he turns and runs.

The first is that the man has been castrated.

The second is the implement that has been thrust into his chest. It is rusted and T-shaped and a note is impaled upon it, the blood from the man’s chest staining it slightly. There is something written on the note in neatly drawn letters.