No more Vontae Carters. Those were the words that went round and round Gus’ head as he made the drive up to Renee Hamilton’s old house on the hill overlooking the train tracks that marked the end of Pickett and the start of Norman. Less than a fortnight ago he had promised himself he’d do everything in his power to bring an end to the senseless murders that had blighted his community and now Jayson Aaron was dead. Gus tried to keep his cool, tell himself there was nothing more he could have done, but every inch closer he drew to the old Hamilton house he damned himself for ever thinking he had the hubris to stop what was happening in his town. He could no sooner have stopped the tide than prevented what had happened to Jayson and he’d be equally helpless the next time it happened.

It was a test of faith, it had to be a test of faith, Gus reassured himself as he climbed out of his car and approached the grand old house. Even to his untrained eye it was clear the house had been here years before Norman had been established. The architecture alone was to mark it out as different from the rest. It had grown into disrepair in recent years and the green paint job on the outside had begun to turn white and flake loose, but it was still impressive to look at. Rumour had it that the old Hamilton place used to belong to a slave owner that had gotten a whole host of children on Renee Hamilton’s great, great grandmother and left them house before he died. Gus wasn’t sure whether he believed that.

He climbed the stairs of the porch, noting that many of the houses windows were broken on the second level, and knocked on Renee’s front door gently. After next to a minute or two a dark wrinkled face peered through one of the curtains down at Gus and the door opened shortly afterwards.

Renee Hamilton was well into her eighties though she looked close to a hundred. There wasn’t an ounce of fat left on her and her skin looked like it hung lifelessly across her skeleton. She gestured Gus inside her house and he followed after her, lending Renee his arm as they walked, before sitting down in the spacious lounge. It was dusty, its corners strewn with cobwebs, and its walls adorned with pictures, some older than Gus. After he had declined some tea close to six times, Renee finally took a seat in a frayed mustard armchair in the corner of the room.

Her voice was soft and ageless. So quiet that Gus had to lean closer to hear it. “Thank you for coming, Deacon.”

“There’s no need to thank me,” Gus said with a dutiful smile. “I know it’s a difficult time for you and your family, Mrs. Hamilton.”

Her great grandson DeSean had shot Jayson dead last night. A week prior Antwan had scored fifty-nine points on him, talking trash in his face all night, and capped it off with a dunk that had been seen all across America. From what Gus understood, DeSean felt obliged to take matters into his own hands and get some payback off the court. It was senseless. Barbaric. What was even more senseless was that it was a scene that would be likely played out again and again in Norman over some imagined slight. Pride mattered more to these boys than anything else. Even life or death. 

Renee’s beady eyes were fixed on Gus. “Don’t have much left in all honesty.”

“Pardon?”

She gestured towards the countless pictures that lined the wall of the lounge. “Family.”

Each one was caked in more dust than the next. One in particular caught the deacon’s eye. It yellowed with age but he could clearly make out the faces of a smiling young woman in a wedding dress beside her doting husband. It was Renee.

“My husband passed some eight years back of cancer and ain’t a soul seen my daughter in nearly a decade. We had a big family once, even by Norman’s standards, more brother and sisters than you could count. There were twelve of us back then and I’m all that’s left.”

Gus placed a hand atop Renee’s skeletal fingers. “DeSean was all you had?”

“Mmhm.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

His imagination ran wild at the thought of the old Hamilton house in its prime, flush with colour and life, children everywhere you looked and music playing. There were more memories in this building than Gus could accrue in a thousand lifetimes and yet Renee was all that remained of them. Soon even she would be gone and the house would squat here as the solitary reminder of a time when their ancestors had endured hardships far greater than John Norman could ever inflict upon them. How long before the anachronistic charm of the Hamilton home was dragged down and new homes were built in its place? Or worse, meth heads set up shop in its walls? Gus couldn’t help but feel like that day was coming.

He turned to Renee to find her beady eyes sodden with tears.

“He was such a hardworking boy,” Renee muttered. “Always did his chores with a smile on his face, wasn’t afraid to roll his sleeves up when the time came for it, and what a singing voice he had. He used to sit by my bed when he was a boy and sing for me until there were tears in my eyes. But I guess that doesn’t matter much anymore.”

Gus clasped Renee’s fingers gently. “It matters still.”

She nodded appreciatively as Gus reached into his pocket and handed a handkerchief to dry her tears with. With a great deal of care she dabbed at her cheeks and eyes with it, folding it over each time, and then held it between her fingers as her gentle voice crept forth from her lips once more.

“The police say he shot that boy dead but as hard as I try to picture it, to picture my DeSean doing so hateful, so mean, I can’t do it. He’ll always be that sweet boy beside my bed singing for me, regardless of what the police or anyone says.”

Gus felt himself choke up a little at the thought of her up in this big house on her own now that DeSean was on the inside. There was no way Renee would be able to make the trips out to visit him given how frail she was and by the time DeSean was out she would have long passed. All that would remain of the once sprawling Hamilton family would be the house. Gus couldn’t bring himself to speak it, nor could he bring himself to give the woman false promises, instead he would offer her what little solace he could. There was not much to go around at the moment.

“There is good in all of us, Mrs. Hamilton, even those that do terrible things. It’s important not to lose sight of that. Whatever DeSean has done, he’s still your grandson and nothing can change that. He’s going to need your love more than ever.”

Renee nodded once more in appreciation at the deacon’s words and clutched onto his hand a little tighter.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what happened to DeSean’s mother?”

Renee shook her head in disapproval as she attempted to recall what had happened to her great granddaughter. “Drugs, Deacon, she got hooked on them while she was pregnant with DeSean and never lost the habit. Thank the Lord that was one weakness she didn’t pass on to DeSean.”

Drugs. It was [i]always[/i] drugs. They had torn Norman apart over the past two or three decades. They had torn Gus’ life apart too before he’d found the word of God. He thought for a moment of Michelle Lewis wishing harm on DeSean for what he’d done and exhaled in frustration. DeSean wasn’t a monster that had climbed freely from the depths of Hell. He was a person, molded by the environment he’d been born into, an environment not too dissimilar from that one that had formed Antwan. Yet he would spend the rest of his adult life in prison. There was an unfairness there, an arbitrariness that made it difficult to see the plan in it all, but now Gus understood that it had never been within his power to rectify that. It was Norman. It chewed people up and spat them out as mangled, twisted beings before they’d even had the chance to lead real lives.

All he could do was be there to pick up the pieces.

He stayed for an hour or so and spoke to Renee about all manner of things. She regaled him tales of a Pickett that Gus never knew existed, a time before the drugs had torn their county apart, and he fed on her stories hungrily to renew his faith that the county might be like that once more. For his part, he did his best to assure Renee that he would visit her grandson in prison in her stead and stop by to transcribe the letters she wished to send to him. It was the least that he could do.

As they parted, Renee clung onto Gus tightly and he placed a hand atop her thinning white hair gently. He heard her soft voice, tinged with sadness, emanate from his chest. “Will you stop by again sometime soon? It would be nice to have some company.”

“Of course,” Gus said with a soft, heartfelt nod.

As he descended the steps of the old, crumbling house he reminded himself to speak to someone in town about getting the windows fixed. He’d see about getting the house repainted once everything had died down. Even on Gus’ say-so, he couldn’t imagine there’d be many volunteers to help repaint the house of the boy that murdered Jayson Aaron. If need be he’d rolled up his sleeves and paint the thing on his own. That house was living history and Renee was too, but they were more than that. They were the future. Like an old, stubborn tree in the middle of the city that stood as a reminder of what once was and what could be again.

Vontae Carter was dead, Jayson Aaron was too, somewhere DeSean Hamilton was sitting in a cell with little chance of ever seeing the outside world again, but for as long as that old rotting house was still on its feet Gus would keep fighting the good fight. Even if it meant losing every damn time.