Lay Your Armor Down

by Michael Farris Smith

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A dark Southern tale of desperate souls who've wound up on the road of poor choices, a messianic child with untold powers, and those out hunting her for their own reward, all drawn together by Michael Farris Smith's trademark mournful, spirit-gnawing prose.

An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night.
 
A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose.

The two men have a job to do. They've been told to find the abandoned church in this burned-out countryside and go into the cellar. For what? You’ll know it when you see it, they were told. When you have it call back and I will tell you what to do.
 
When the two men approach the place, they find bodies littering the churchyard. Inside, at the end of a long hallway, they find a door with light leaking underneath. There, they find the old woman, cut and scratched from traipsing through the woods. Standing next to her is the answer they never could have predicted.
 
So the journey begins and from here nothing can be undone, no step can be taken back.

Release date: May 27, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

She moved in the solemn lamplight of the cluttered house like the vague figure of a troubled dream. She shuffled from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors and picking up things and putting them into the grocery sack. No sense or order in the gathering. A random ring and a broken bracelet from a spilled jewelry box. One shoe. A ragged notebook from the bottom of a stack of other ragged notebooks. Two postcards from a longdead sister. A handful of hairclips. A small wooden picture frame that held the rudimentary drawing of an angel that had been created by her child decades before.

She wore a thin housecoat that hung on her aged and slender figure. Her gray hair in a matted mess. She talked to herself as she moved throughout the house. Reminding herself of errands that had been years ago completed and gossiping about people she no longer knew and singing fragments of songs that had once played on the radio during the summer days of her smalltown youth. In doorways she would stop and look into the shadows and touch the tip of her index finger to her chin and hold it there in troubled thought and then she would begin again to fill the sack with the random fragments of time gone by.

At the end of the hallway the closet door was open and the contents overflowed and spilled out onto the floor as if the house was regurgitating its own clutter. The pace of her rambling quickened as she dropped to her knees and began to dig into the closet as if just remembering something essential. Her arms thin and weak but working in a sudden fever as she pushed away dirty towels and newspapers and shoeboxes and she burrowed into the closet. At the bottom of the pile she found a red tin coffee can and she opened the top and felt inside and touched the roll of cash. She kept digging and she pulled out three more coffee cans from beneath the rubble and each one held a roll of cash of various size. A savings hidden away and then forgotten and then remembered again in the swirling winds of her mind. She dropped the rolls of money into the grocery sack with the random gathering. Ran her fingers across her pallid face. Her eyes like deepset windows into a sprawling world. She seemed to gather herself and she let out a great exhale as if arriving at a moment of resignation.

She stood and straightened her housecoat. Stepped out of her slippers and brushed off her ashy feet and then she stepped back into them and she tucked the grocery sack under her arm and she made for the front door. She opened it and the nightwind greeted her and she gazed out into the darkness. A traveler readied for some journey.

A starblown sky above the winding road that led from the house. The road badly patched and bumpy and she stumbled twice but caught herself both times. Cursing the uneven ground in quick insults before returning again to the harried conversations of her lost world. She wandered from the road and into a field where she pushed through the kneehigh grass. Where searching eyes busied with the hunt stopped and stared in the direction of her shuffling and the wind pushed at her wild hair and slushed through the wild grass and on the other side of the field she entered into the woods where the moonglow gave shadows through the trees and where she held out her hands and touched the trunks as she moved through the forest. The dark guardians willing to give her pass. The wind shook leaves from the limbs and they fell around her in swirls of decay as she stepped across the leafstrewn earth. The small crunches of aged and careful steps.

She was not afraid until she was deep into the woods. She stopped and looked around and whatever confused purpose had been there to guide her slipped off into the dark and left her alone. There was wind and there were the calls of the night and between the black treelimbs there were stars and moon. The heavens infinite. She leaned her back against a tree and hugged herself as if suddenly cold and she began to cry.

She cried and began walking again in no direction. Moving through the woods in a confused and careful gait and beginning to call out the names of people who passed through her mind. Names that both meant something and meant nothing. Her father and a woman she once sat next to on an airplane and a pigtailed friend from childhood and the old man who taught her to ride a horse and the boy who sacked her groceries once upon a time. The wind gained strength and the limbs swayed and bent and her hair whipped on her head and she clutched the sack with both hands and called out to anyone who might be listening and she lost a slipper and moved with one bare foot and panicked eyes and a deepening fear that something in the dark was going to devour her. She was lost in head and heart and soul and she stopped and stared up at the moon and she began to question it as if it had the answers to the universe. Who are you and where am I and what are we and the questions continued and carried her as she meandered through the dark. Walking into branches that scratched her face and bits of leaf and limb getting stuck in her hair and she lost her other slipper and she was no longer crying and no longer questioning the moon but now transformed into something ancient and mindless and driven by some preordained task as if she was no longer of grayed flesh and bone but instead a shapeless spirit of the wood that drifted timelessly. She moved through the night in the random pattern of wind and then through the trees she saw the firelight. She fixed her eyes on the flames as she pushed away lowhanging limbs and crunched across the leaves and her mouth moved as if speaking but she was soundless as she came into the clearing.

Two crouching silhouettes next to the fire. Two figures rising when they looked up at the old woman who emerged from the wood. Twigs in her hair and a torn housecoat and bare feet and sticklike legs and the distant gaze. She regarded the dark figures and then she looked again into the starstruck night. At the marblewhite moon. She let her arms fall to her sides in a great release and she spoke in some language they did not understand. She then fell silent and the sack dropped from her hand and spilled onto the ground. A spindle of cash rolled forward and settled in the firelight and there was no judgment among them but for the emptiness in which they all stood.

They left the dying fire and walked out of the clearing, the tawny light on their backs and darkness before them. Their car parked on the roadside. A big four-door thing, long as a boat. Two hubcaps missing. The antenna snapped off. Each man lit a cigarette before climbing in and closing doors and then they sat there smoking and staring through the bugsmeared windshield. Something small and brighteyed crossed the road. It stopped and looked at the car and then continued on its journey and disappeared into the brush. Falling leaves swirled in the wind and fell in the moonshine like flakes of rust.

One man sniffed and the other coughed as the car filled with smoke. The driver rolled down the window. He smoked and scratched at his beard before flicking out the cigarette, a little red spray as the butt bounced on the road. The man in the passenger seat smoked more methodically and was still at it when the car cranked and the headlights split the dark. The big car moved in a great lurch and began its descent from the hillside, filling the night with a low rumble.

They drove through the darkness. Past rolling pastures lined by leaning fenceposts held erect by strands of barbed wire. Past gatherings of hardwoods and over skinny bridges with rotted rails where the moon reflected in the wobbled creekwater. The big car cruised around the bends in the road where deer stood backed away and still and waiting and it rolled through desolate four-way stops where there was nothing and no one and they drove on with their redtipped cigarettes across the fallen landscape of the autumn where the fields had turned the color of sand and the stars stabbed the sky in darts of silver.

Neither man spoke.

They emerged from the unmarked country roads and turned onto a two-lane highway. Mailboxes stood on the roadside at the end of gravel driveways and sleeping houses sat quiet and peaceful back in the gloom. Dogs slept on porches and raised their heads to regard the loud thing moving through the night and then returned to slumber as the growl of the engine disappeared. The lights of the world appeared in the fluorescents of gas stations and in flashing red signals and in yellowed street lamps and then disappeared in the rearview mirror as the car followed the highway right through the meager town and entered a new dark.

Thirteen more miles of silence between them and pine trees and the rise and dip of the hills and then as if leaving one country and crossing into another the landscape bottomed out. The car now traveled a flat terrain in a rhythmic glide as if trolling across the serenity of lakewater. Spanish moss hung from treelimbs in gray and gathered clumps and the long and drooping limbs of the willows swayed in the wind and the swamp slurped up against the roadside as if only waiting for the command from some weather god to swallow what was left of the raised earth.

The frame that held the child’s drawing of the angel sat between them on the benchseat. The man in the passenger seat picked it up. Flicked his cigarette lighter and looked at it in the solitary light of the flame. He ran his thumb across an angel wing and then he set the frame back on the seat and gazed out into the night. The driver looked over at him and wanted to ask why he had bothered to bring it along but he only gave a silent look of disgust and his eyes returned to the road.

And then there it was. The allnight truckstop sat in isolation as if it had long ago been misplaced and forgotten. The car bumped across the potholed parking lot and stopped in front of the glass doors of the diner. A handful of cats hunted around a dumpster. Two eighteen-wheelers parked off behind the gas pumps. Darkness closed all around as if this place had been created as a sojourn before some final plummet. The neon sign read OPEN in the front window and bugs danced around in the cottoncandy glow. From behind bent and twisted blinds the lights of the diner cut into the night in awkward slants. The two men sat there and stared until the man in the passenger seat coughed and shifted in his seat.

“Well. Ain’t you gonna say something?”

The driver grabbed his cigarette pack from the dashboard.

“About what?”

The driver then looked at himself in the rearview mirror and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes before climbing out of the car. The passenger watched as the bearded man pulled open the door to the diner and disappeared inside.

“About what,” he muttered.

He then got out and followed.

They sat in a booth against the window. An ashtray between them. Above them a ceiling fan turned slowly and the knocking of kitchen work came from behind a swinging door. A tiredlooking woman with her sleeves rolled above her elbows brought them cups of coffee and then she asked if she could bum a cigarette. The man with the beard held his pack to her and she took one and then she pulled a lighter from her apron pocket and lit the cigarette and said I hope you like breakfast because that’s all we got.

The men nodded. She shuffled away and sat down on a stool at the end of the counter. At the other end of the counter a man in a flannel shirt read a ragged paperback and sipped a beer. The men watched and waited for her to pass the breakfast order on to someone somewhere but she only sat and smoked.

Burdean was the older of the two by nearly twenty years. His beard had begun the transformation from coffeebrown to gray and his eyes wore the lines of an outlier. The skin of his hands and face was fatigued by decades of cigarette smoke and the strike of the sun in the days when he worked on a roofing crew or a construction crew or whatever crew he could find to take him for a few weeks until he had what he thought was enough cash in his pocket to quit and survive for a while. Until he decided that it was too goddamn hot or too goddamn cold or just too goddamn pretty outside to be wasting his time working on any of those crews and the list of things he would do for money grew longer. And those were the things that should be done in the dark. He lifted his cup and sipped and looked at the man who was sharing this strange night with him. His washedblue eyes and the flips in his hair and the fading expression of boyhood still clinging to the edges of the hard world.

“You might as well stop thinking about it,” Burdean said.

“I don’t see how you could say such a thing,” Keal said.

“There ain’t no room for conscience in what we’re doing.”

“We didn’t do what we’re doing. We did something else.”

“Just the same.”

The waitress got up from the counter and slipped behind the swinging door. Keal stabbed out his cigarette and then bent down the blinds and looked outside.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

He removed his fingers and the blinds slapped back in place. In the kitchen the waitress argued with someone and then there was the clatter of pots and pans and then silence. She returned to the end of the counter and sat picking the polish from her fingernails.

Keal could not be still. He adjusted in his seat. Bumped his knuckles on the table. Rubbed at the stubble on his face. Scratched his ear. Flicked the cigarette lighter. Counted the sugar packets. Bumped his knuckles on the table again.

“You got to quit it,” Burdean said.

“Quit what?”

“Squirming around like you’re waiting on the verdict.”

“That’s a funny way to put it.”

“I ain’t trying to be funny. I’m trying to get you to settle down or you need to go sit somewhere else.”

“Where you want me to go sit?”

“Anyfuckingwhere.”

A bell dinged. The waitress got up from the counter and pushed through the swinging door and then returned carrying two plates covered in bacon and eggs and grits. She set the plates down in front of them and then she refilled their coffee. The diner door opened and a man in a cowboy hat whistled at her. The waitress grinned and then she returned the coffeepot to the warmer and she followed the cowboy out into the parking lot.

“What are we doing here?” Keal asked.

“This is where we’re supposed to deliver and I thought maybe there would be somebody sitting around who looks like they could give us a clue as to why there is a light inside that church.”

“Are we going back out there?” Keal said.

“Not tonight.”

“How come?”

“They wanted it done before daybreak.”

“There’s time.”

“Maybe.”

“I wish you’d tell me what we’re supposed to be looking for.”

“I told you already. You got the same information I got. The way it was explained to me is to go around the back of the church house and some doors open and go down into a cellar. Whatever it is. . .