by Hank Early
Backslide Gap, I thought. What a place to die. It was the place where young boys who’d turned their backs on God had gone to die. It had haunted so much of my childhood, because like all the things that haunt a person, I knew it was something I wanted. To backslide, that is, to push all the stuff that scared me way down inside and not think about it again. Now I wondered if backsliding might be the only way to truly be saved. The world demanded so much. It was only when you stopped listening and let yourself fall into who you were really meant to be that salvation was possible.
Savanna was screaming now for him to stop. He didn’t hear her or didn’t care to listen, because the bullets kept coming.
Miraculously, none had hit me, though I gritted my teeth in anticipation that one would.
Finally, the gun fell silent, but the gap didn’t. It was filled with the echoes of the past, reverberating from wall to wall, seemingly stuck there like a lump inside the throat of a great and eternal beast. I wanted to expel all of the past that had built up inside me, that had led me to this moment where I was truly, truly alone. If I could have made a different decision at some point, learned to live with myself better, not been so damned desperate for a few fleeting seconds of pleasure, maybe this moment would have been a dream or a scene in some book instead of my life, my reality, the crushing present that would not ever go away because the past trailed it around like mud on the underside of death’s old shit-kicking boots.
The remaining Hill Brother—as nameless as he’d ever been—was shaking the bridge now as he came out onto it, his face hidden by the night, his body luminescent in the moonlight until he was nothing more than a ghost of a man, a boy disregarded by his mother and unknown to his father, a wolf, a hill, a forlorn wind twisting through hollows that would never be fully mapped.
But not a man. A grotesque specter from the feral past. He came on, resolute and unblinking, and I thought of Old Nathaniel again, the masked phantom. If I died right now, I’d never know his real face. Maybe it had been this brother all along, or maybe it was the other one, or maybe Old Nathaniel was their father and they were the product of some unholy union between their flesh-and-bone mother and a spiritual manifestation of evil that was the thing that stalked the corn.
But I didn’t think so. There was something deeply human in the Hill Brothers, something sad and broken and something stuck, hanging just like Savanna and I were hanging, sinners all of us over an endless abyss.
I started pulling myself up, and my muscles ached with the effort, but I didn’t stop. Muscles were tissues that felt the past keenly, but they only worked in the present. I worked them like there had never been a past, like the now was everything and always, and by the time I was almost up on the shaky suspension bridge, I realized I’d found a truth right there.
Savanna still clung to me, holding on to my boots with everything she had left. I could see she’d been shot. Well, I couldn’t see it, but I could sense it. Her breathing had turned ragged, there was the smell of blood in the air, and the unmistakable sense of gravity pulling her down.
With a great effort, she pulled herself up my legs and to my hips. I was partially lying on the suspension bridge now, and I thought about how our lives were too often spent in a gap, trying to balance on a suspension bridge, trying to avoid the fall, but sometimes it was better to get to the other side and never look back.
She reached out a hand for me to take, and I did. I pulled her up until I could see her face. The bridge wobbled and shook as her son approached. He shouted something. It sounded like Mother, and the sound of it touched me greatly. I felt a great respect for the primal things of this world, the bonds between mothers and sons, but then I remembered his brother, and I met Savanna’s eyes, now filled with moonlight. She could have been beautiful, I thought, if she’d had any light in her at all.
“I’ve got to let go,” I told her.
Her eyes grew wider. “No, you don’t. I’ll tell you everything about Jeb. You can take him down.”
I was running out of time. The brother was getting closer now. I needed to make a decision.
“I already know about him,” I said. “And I know about you.”
Her eyes understood before I think I did. They went dark, flushing the moonlight out, repelling it. There was emptiness inside her, and when I let go, I felt like I was dropping a shell of a person. She fell, screaming, and I watched her as long as I could before the darkness ate her and a new silence settled over the mountains.
67
I pulled myself up to safety just in time to get knocked back down. The Hill Brother swung the stock of the rifle hard, and it landed against my jaw. I dropped to wooden planks, scrambling to hold on to something to keep from sliding off and joining Savanna in the fall.
“You killed my brother,” he said, and drove the stock of the rifle into the center of my back. My body lit up with pain that flashed outward to my extremities. Fingers, toes, even my teeth hurt.
“Why did you kill my brother?” he asked, and I swear it wasn’t rhetorical. He expected me to answer, but I had no answer. Why was the toughest of all the mysteries. Even how couldn’t come close.
“I don’t know,” I moaned.
He sucked in a breath, and I understood he was raising the gun again. I waited a beat before kicking his shins with both of my boots. He gasped in pain and dropped the rifle onto my back. I screamed as the pain came back, like a flame that ran along my nerve endings. The bridge rocked as he fell.
“Help,” he said. Gradually, I worked myself up to my knees and turned to see that he’d been pitched headfirst off the bridge, and somehow his leg had become twisted in the rope. The rest of him dangled headfirst over the dark gap. It was the same way I’d hung as a boy, so many lifetimes ago.
I slid over on my knees and examined the situation. I could easily let him fall by simply pulling up on the rope, releasing the snag that had saved him.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He said nothing, his arms spread out like he was ready to embrace the darkness.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going to help you.” I just didn’t have it in me to watch somebody else disappear into that darkness. I just didn’t. Besides, maybe he still had a chance now that his mother was gone. Was being put in a shed in the woods when he was a small child his fault?
“You wearing a belt?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“If you’re wearing a belt and can take it off, then you could toss it up to me. I can hook it to my belt, and then you can get a hold of it. Then I can let your foot loose and pull you up.”
He reached for his midsection and unbuckled his belt. Once he’d pulled it through the loops, he let it dangle in his hand, holding it by the buckle.
“Are you ready?” he said. I realized I’d never heard him speak in a normal voice before. His voice was low and gravelly, almost poetically powerful. Calmer than I’d expected.
“I’m ready,” I said. “Make it a good throw.”
He swung the belt up and let go of it. The buckle gleamed in the moonlight. It was a bad throw, and I had to lunge to get a hand on it, disrupting the balance of the bridge again. I caught the belt and landed flat on my belly, my arms and head out in space. The rope his boot was tangled in shuddered, and he slipped down into the gap two or three inches before it snagged him again.
I unhooked my own belt and then spliced the two of them together. I held onto one buckle, sliding it over the middle finger of my right hand. “Here it comes,” I said, dropping the rest of it into the open gap. “Can you reach it?”
He didn’t have to answer. I felt the tug on the belt. “Make sure you’ve got a good two-handed grip. When I undo this boot, everything is going to change.”
“I got it,” he said.
“Okay, here goes.”
He said nothing.
I lifted the rope with my free hand. It was harder to lift than I’d expected, but eventually I created enough space and his boot slipped free. I
felt the sudden weight of the man just an instant before I doubled up my grip. I was dragged forward with him as he started his fall, but when I got two hands on the belt, I was able to curl my arms up, to fight against gravity again, to make my muscles forget the past and live in the now.
Together we worked to get him up to the bridge. I lay there on my back, panting, and a memory I’d lodged inside the blacked-out places of my mind came back to me suddenly and vividly.
This was where I’d lain drunk, looking up at the stars, and decided there was no point in continuing to try. Hell, I was so done with life, I didn’t even have the energy to off myself. I just wanted to go to sleep and let the chips fall where they fell, which I was quite sure would be in the gap my father had once promised me would by my destiny.
But my destiny was still writing itself. The past isn’t set in stone even if we want it to be, because it’s a living, fluid thing, open to a thousand interpretations and evaluations, influenced by the present as much as the other way around. Destiny and the past are intertwined because they can both be manipulated by the present.
And right now, I felt like a man who’d done a hard day’s work, and a man who still had a few jobs to do, but I’d have to do them after I rested a bit. But just before I faded off, I heard the Hill Brother speak.
“What?” I asked the dark.
“It’s Jeb,” he said. “My name. It’s Jeb Junior.”
* * *
I dreamed of my father and Mary and Rufus. Ronnie was by my side and we were in the woods, on some island in the middle of some river. My father was a ghost we saw on the path, and Mary lived in a small hut beside a small stream where she made moonshine and happiness, just not the kind that could do me any good. We encountered Rufus last of all, lying faceup in a stream that looked a lot like Ghost Creek. He was naked except for the tattoos on his chest. They shimmered in the clear water and came alive in the radiant light of a moon brighter than any I’d ever seen.
On his chest was a road map tracing the path of his life from the Holy Flame to the Harden School to Two Indian Falls and then back to the church. It was a circle, and I was struck by the strength of the circle, the way the present ate the past and subsumed the future. I reached a hand out to him, and he opened his eyes and saw me. I helped him out of the stream, and that was when I realized my dream had played a trick on me in the way dreams sometimes do: Ronnie had vanished and in his place was Joe. I patted his shoulder and pushed him toward the creek. And now Rufus had been replaced by Harriet and her wheelchair in the creek. She extended a creek-dirtied hand, and Joe took it.
Harriet closed her eyes again and nodded. Above us, the moon went dim, and then all of us were as blind as we’d been in the womb, the last safe place before death.
68
Rufus hurt, but he was alive. He could move, but what was the point? His blindness had finally beaten him. He had no idea where he was. To walk was to fall. To rise again was to tumble into a void. Why shouldn’t he just stay put? Stay put and die.
But dying wasn’t as easy as it seemed, and after what seemed like hours of lying in the same spot, Rufus dragged himself up and began to move forward, away from the slope of the hill, away from the mountain. There were trees in every direction, pine mostly, but some that felt like maple and oak as well.
There was deep shade here, but periodically he stepped out of the cover of the trees and felt the sun on his face. The day was hot and he began to sweat. Wiping it away with one hand, he wondered where he’d find water, and if he didn’t find it soon, when he’d begin to feel the effects of dehydration.
If he just had some idea where he was. He needed a landmark, but there was nothing, just random trees, a pitched forest floor, occasional sun.
He sat to rest, listening closely to the woods. Birds sang in the trees. Wind blew branches like silent bells, ringing whispers all around him. Was there a sound beyond that, something faint, like silk pulling away from silk?
Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he rose again and began to walk toward the sound. It was barely there, beneath the wind, and occasionally when the wind stopped shaking the tree branches, he heard it more clearly. Smooth and soft. Eternal. It was a stream or maybe a river, water caressing rocks, grooving its way through the land. He kept going.
The sound got louder, more clear, more like a river, and he knew he was going the right way. Fifteen minutes later, his hands raw from stumbling into trees and over deadfall, he knelt and scooped the water into his mouth and drank. It tasted like life itself.
An image came to him then, the last one he’d ever seen before the world went dark. It was of the milky-white substance floating away in the stream not too far from the Duncans’ farm.
Mr. Duncan had given him a month to get out of the barn when he’d told him he was quitting. “Take your time. Randy says he hates to lose you. Maybe you’ll change your mind. I also want to thank you for trying to help Harriet. You didn’t have to do that, and I appreciate it.”
Rufus didn’t even attempt to tell him how he hadn’t helped Harriet at all, how he’d actually betrayed her.
It was funny how quickly things had changed after Rufus said what Harden wanted him to say in the newspaper. Not only was Mr. Duncan offering to basically let him stay for free, but Harden and Deloach acted as if there had never been any conflict with him, as if he was one of them again. He wasn’t fooled. He was done being fooled. And he was done caring about men like Deloach and Harden. Once, when he walked out of RJ Marcus’s church, he’d believed he had the world figured out. Now he knew he had nothing figured out, which was why he’d never trust a man selling something again, be it religion, a way of life, or just plain hatred.
He’d made a clean break from all that. Well, almost clean. He still had to live with the regret.
Savanna had moved away, and for that he was thankful. There were rumors she was pregnant, but Rufus didn’t imagine it could be his. He later learned she’d been having sex with multiple men, including Deloach. Maybe he would make it after all.
The shadow girl showed up again on the second night after he quit. He was terrified, but it was just a strange dream, he told himself, not the same thing that had happened to his mother. Just a dream.
Three nights later, he realized how wrong he was. It was no dream. It was Harriet, and she wasn’t going to stop coming for him. Each night, she drew a little closer, and each night he tried not to sleep, but eventually he succumbed anyway. He soon understood there was a pattern. Eventually she would get close enough to reveal her face. And once he saw her … he couldn’t properly explain what dread the thought of seeing her did to him. It broke him. It made him not want to live.
The idea came to him easily, the way a person might see a bowl of sugar on the table and decide it would be good in a cup of coffee. It was just a thought at first, but it grew inside him in a way that felt like a solution, a final answer to all his problems, a way to live in the face of his regret.
The drain cleaner was under the sink in the Duncans’ kitchen. The heavy-duty, industrial kind.
He left it alone for a week, while he looked for a new job and packed his things. He didn’t sleep much. Whenever he did drift off, the shadow girl was there to greet him, and then he was stuck, facing down the regret he’d created during his waking hours. He hadn’t killed her, but he hadn’t saved her. Worst of all, he’d smeared her legacy to save himself. It was an act, he came to understand, that had condemned him. The only way to save yourself was to live your life for others. Short of that, there was damnation. The hell of the mind was so much more brutal than that of the body.
The next time he saw the drain cleaner was during dinner with the Duncans. Lyda, the older sister, was home, and she’d invited him to eat with them. He liked Lyda, wished he’d met her before he’d become so broken, before the regret had infected him. He tried to be polite, to answer their questions about his future, but he didn’t feel polite. He didn’t feel like he had a future.
When Mr. Duncan stood and went to the sink, Rufus watched him. He opened the cabinet under the sink, and there was the drain cleaner just waiting for him.
After dinner, everyone moved into the den for coffee. He sat next to Lyda but couldn’t relax. She asked him about Harriet and seemed to be under the impression he had somehow been kind to her sister instead of betraying her. When it became too much, he excused himself to go to the bathroom.
The bathroom was off the foyer. He walked right past it, turned into the dining room, and slipped past the laundry room back into the empty kitchen. He was moving as in a dream. In fact, he wondered if it all hadn’t been a dream as he opened the cabinet and picked up the drain cleaner. He walked back the way he’d come and out the front door. He didn’t pause at the barn, not to get his things or for a moment to say goodbye. He knew he would never be coming back to the barn again. At least he didn’t plan on it.
He made it to the road, crossed it, walked into the trees that soon turned to woods. He walked in the darkness for most of the night, looking for the right place. When he finally found it, morning had come, and the sun was bright on the water. He didn’t know the name of the river, but the best he could tell, it flowed down from the Fingers, gathering all the streams and rivers into this body of slow-moving yet resolute water. It seemed appropriate that this be the spot.
He never hesitated. It was as much about penitence as it was about putting a stop to seeing the shadow girl. He lay down with his head hanging off the bank, looking up at the sky. He unscrewed the top of the drain cleaner and held it up like an offering. In a way, he knew that’s exactly what he was making. His sight for his life, his sight for the regret that ate at him, his sight for a second chance to be himself without the rest of the world trying to hold him back.
He tipped the container over, and the nearly clear white liquid spilled out, hitting his rapidly blinking left eye. The burning was instantaneous and exquisite, but he didn’t scream. Instead, he felt pure exultation as the cleaner filled his eye cavity, as he switched to the right one, careful to keep his hand steady as he poured it drop by drop into his pupils.
