Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

“Thinking they’d be treated like regular folks when things went wrong, just because they’d been treated that way when things were right.

Instead, the TR clubbed together against them. No one who had an idea of what Jared and his prot6gs had done condoned it, exactly, but when the chips were down…”

“You protect your own, you wash your dirty laundry with the door closed,” Frank murmured, and finished his drink. “Yeah. By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their little community down by the lake had begun to break up—this is all according to Jo’s notes, you understand; there’s not a whisper of it in any of the town histories. “By Labor Day the active harassment had started—so Royce told Jo. It got a little uglier every day—a little scarier—but Son Tidwell flat didn’t want to go, not until he found out what had happened to his sister and nephew. He apparently kept the blood family there in the meadow even after the others had taken off for friendlier locations. “Then someone laid the trap. There was a clearing in the woods about a mile east of what’s now called Tidwell’s Meadow; it had a big birch cross in the middle of it. Jo had a picture of it in her studio. That was where the black community had their services after the doors of the local churches were closed to them. The boy—Junior—used to go up there a lot to pray or just to sit and meditate. There were plenty of folks in the township who knew his routine. Someone put a leghold trap on the little path through the woods that the boy used.

Covered it with leaves and needles.”

“Jesus,” Frank said. He sounded ill. “Probably it wasn’t Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either—they didn’t want any more to do with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, they kept right clear of them. It might not even have been a friend of those boys. By then they didn’t have that many friends. But that didn’t change the fact that those folks down by the lake were getting out of their place, scratching at things better left alone, refusing to take no for an answer. So someone set the trap. I don’t think there was any intent to actually kill the boy, but to maim him?

Maybe see him with his foot off, condemned to a lifetime crutch? I think they may have gotten that far in their imagining.

“In any case it worked. The boy stepped in the trap… and for quite awhile they didn’t find him. The pain must have been excruciating. Then the blood-poisoning. He died. Son gave up. He had other kids to think about, not to mention the people who’d stuck with him. They packed up their clothes and their guitars and left.