A-Sides

by Victor Allen

From We Are the Dead...

  BEDTIME STORIES

  Over her second piece of Margie Saunders' fabulously fattening Pecan pie, 'Scilla had become right at home. Margie's kitchen reminded her so much of her grandmother's home. The ratty old stuffed armchair she sat in fit in perfectly with the homey, dimly lit feel. A prehistoric cast iron cook stove brooded over the humped and buckled floor. A cheap kitchen table balanced on rickety legs like a baby taking its first steps. The stovepipe wove its crooked path through the ceiling after too many twists and turns to be reasonable. Innumerable kitchen utensils and pot holders hung from the hooks and runners like dozing bats. Ricky polished off the last bite of his Persimmon pudding and belched. Margie glared at him.

  “Honest to God, Ricky. I don't know why you have to do that in front of company. Bad enough you do it in front of me.” She looked sympathetically at 'Scilla, a handsome woman, a little on the plump side.

  “Don't mind him,” she said. “That moonshine he drinks has left him senseless after all these years. If you encourage him, next thing he'll be stickin' his finger so far up his nose he can stir the little brains he has left.”

  Ricky smiled benignly. He was unknowably ancient, a stooped, grinning, green slacks-clad gnome. A cloth hat was plopped on his head. He held a cane in his right hand. Hyperpigmentation marks lay like shadowy sunspots against the pale, puffed and shiny skin. His teeth were stained brown from a lifetime of chewing tobacco, but his smiles were frequent and sincere.

  “Margie's just kvetching. She's always said I wouldn't have sense enough to poor piss out of a boot with the directions printed on the heel.” His anxious gaze fell on 'Scilla. “That pie okay?”

  “It's wunnerful,” she answered around a mouthful of pecans and Karo syrup. “I've never had better.”

  Ricky swelled in his chair. “Margie's the finest cook for miles around. She purt near always wins the blue ribbon at the 'coon dog races, though we ain't been in several years. Ain't that right, Margie?”

  Margie acknowledged the compliment with a modest nod.

  “You get on her good side,” Ricky advised. “She'll show you a hunnerd ways to fix cabbage so it don't blow a hole in your longjohns.”

  Margie rolled her eyes. “Hell's bells,” she muttered. “Would you like more tea? Lisa? 'Scilla?”

  “Yes, please,” 'Scilla answered. “If it's no trouble.”

  “Not at all,” Margie said, picking up a gallon jar of tea. The jar had once held pickles. She filled 'Scilla's and Lisa's glasses. “Slop it up until your back teeth float.”

  Ricky produced a tin of snuff and wedged a bit into his mouth. He gauged the distance to his tarnished brass cuspidor with a practiced eye. It hunkered on the floor, its faded brass surrounded by juice stained floor panels.

  “I'm glad it was somebody like you that took the old Morgan place,” he commented. “I'da hated to see it go to rack and ruin like so many of the fine old homes around here. A lot of history in that old place. You can turn it into a real showplace if you're of a mind to. If you need some help with the carpenterin', Phillip Anderson is a plus man. If you can get him to let you in his house to do some hirin', that is.”

  “I wouldn't think someone who depends on service work for a living to be standoffish,” 'Scilla said.

  “Oh, he's far from standoffish. Most likely he doesn't want you to see those chintz curtains, lavender sheets, and good shoes in his house. I'll give you directions when you leave.”

  Ricky spat a thin stream of brown juice at his cuspidor where it plopped home with a ding. 'Scilla looked helplessly at Lisa, who simply shrugged.

  “Me and Willie Morgan went back more than seventy years before he passed over last year. House has been empty for all that time, until you bought it. He was a fair plumber, no doubt, and a better than par 'coon hunter, but-not to speak ill of the dead-his brain always seemed to be in a perpetual state of brown out.”

  “An oddball,” 'Scilla asked.

  “Not always,” Ricky answered. “Everybody's best reckoning was it was the fire that pushed him off the deep end.”

  “The fire?”

  “Back in '28, it was,” Ricky said. “The fire started in the old furniture factory. We had no FD to speak of and the only water pumps around were hand pumps on the wells. The whole town turned out in a fucked up Chinese fire drill, hauling slop buckets and milk buckets full of water, but I think we might have done just as much good by pissing on it. The whole town burned flat, except for three buildings. The furniture factory where the damn thing started, Willie Morgan's house, and the place you're sittin' right now. And if it hadn't been for Willie almost killing himself, I might not be alive today.”

  “How is that?”

  “At that time there was nothing but woodland all around except for these two houses and that little dirt road that was closer to a horse trail back then. My dad had gone off to town, helping with the main fire. He had left me at home to get the animals out of the barn just in case the fire did spread up this way.

  “The smoke came up the valley, thick with burning green wood and sickening with that turpentine smell of burning pine. I could hear the cows bawling and the horses banging in their stalls, trying to kick them down. I went out to let 'em have their head and their eyes were all white, rolling around in fright, their mouths foaming and their flanks soaked in fear sweat. I remember that, but not much more. The animals stampeded out of the barn, running at me, legs flying and hooves pounding dust up all around. I covered my head and tried to get out of the way, making my way toward the door with the horses shrieking and cows bawling. I made it out into the sunshine that even then was starting to darken. 'Twasn't thirty seconds later that the smoke had put me out. It was God's own mercy that I passed out face first and got down beneath the worst of the smoke.”

  “How old were you,” 'Scilla asked. Her thoughts of rootlessness and dissociation were still very much on her mind and to hear Ricky speak about vintage Americana spanning seven decades gave her a sense of time and place that was comfortable and easy to slip into.

  “I was eleven, Willie thirteen. Kids grew up into work faster then. I would put in ten hours a day after school. But we were luckier. We didn't grow up into the ways of the world so fast.

  “I don't know how long I was out, slipping back and forth between daylight and darkness. It seemed like a dream most of the time while I lay there hearing the crackle of burning pine straw, seeing the red and orange of the flames moving closer, winking through the smoke. And I saw Willie Morgan, stripped down to the waist, sweat pouring off of him, his eyes flashing with the bright white light of a madman. Big as a grown man even when he was thirteen and had a full beard when he was eleven.

  “He had a big old double sided ax and a pruning saw. I had seen that ax many times, hanging in the barn behind his house. It was old and pitted with a splintered handle, but Willie kept that edge sharp. Willie almost always done whatever cutting had to be done. His dad was a mean drunk and most likely would have ended up burying that ax in his leg when he swung it. He never got completely out of the bottle after his wife died, and that was where he was on the day of the fire. He likely never knew a thing about it until after it was all over.

  “For three solid hours Willie chopped and sawed. I remember hearing the crash and thud of trees falling while I laid there; remembered seeing him shining with sweat, and though I was too far away to have heard it, I imagined hearing his breath coming harder and harder while he raced to make a firebreak. To this day I remember how I was almost hypnotized by how he worked; how I didn't much care about the fire coming ever closer. That didn't seem very important compared to what Willie was doing. He must have felled fifty trees in those three hours, working like a maniac without a single break, creating a small firebreak, but it was enough to stop it from taking these two houses.

  “And it must have been right after one of those times I slipped away, but I opened my eyes and he was kneeling down next to me, reachin
g down to pick me up and tote me into the house. And even then, I could see in his eyes how much of a toll had been taken on him. There was a wild light in them, like a fever, and it never went away in all the years I knew him after that. It was a wonder it didn't kill him, but the fact is he plugged along for another seventy years.”

  “Sounds like you miss him,” 'Scilla said.

  Ricky tilted his hat up.

  “Can't help but miss someone you've known for seventy years, been neighbors with, got up to the dickens with back before the time there was even electricity in these parts.

  “He was a hoot, no doubt. There wasn't nothing Willie was afraid of. Strange things happen all the time-things that nobody can explain-but Willie couldn't leave 'em alone like regular folks. He would go looking for trouble, most often with my dumb ass right there beside him.”

  “What kind of strange things?” 'Scilla had had her fill of strange things over the past year.

  “Here it comes,” Margie said. “The big lie.”

  “Absolutely not,” Ricky said. “Margie knows I speak the truth. That's why she's stayed with me all these years. But as part of the town, you need to know this, 'cause you're gonna hear of it anyway.

  “As a lad of fourteen, Willie and me were out burning the roads in his dad's old truck. Frank Morgan was the only one with an automobile around these parts and Willie, whenever his dad was laid up drunk -which was most of the time- would take that car and go joyriding.

  “Me and Willie both had made a raid on Tom Danle's likker still and were both pretty well lushed up, neither of us caring if the sky stayed up or fell down. We had already been given hell by a bunch of field hands who had their horses and wagon run off the road by this crazy Willie bearin' down on 'em, jammin' the gears and sprayin' dirt and gravel all over hell and half of Tennessee, the motor snortin' and hollerin' like a stuck pig. Bales of cotton and bushels of corn come tumblin' down like manna from heaven when them carts went rolling into the ditch. Them field hands didn't leave us much doubt as to where me and Willie would spend the afterlife. And the way Willie was drivin', I didn't think it would be much longer before I found out for certain.

  “This was in October, not much later than this, and it was gettin' on toward dark. I had slipped off during the day and I had no jacket. It had begun to get chilly, like it does, and I begged Willie to get us home. The booze had been my blanket for a while, but it was wearing off. And aside from that, I had something else weighing heavy on my heart.”

  “And what was that?” 'Scilla had finished her pie and Margie had magically whisked her plate away. She felt cool and uneasy now, with night falling on the Saunders household. The daylight had matured to spun gold, slipping in through the living room and laying its brassy sheen on the TV screen where it rattled on and on, unheeded. 'Scilla's palm was wet with condensation from the glass she held. She set the glass down on a folded paper towel.

  “It was October 29th,” Ricky said. “The eve of Let To Day.”

  “Some kind of local holiday?”

  Ricky scratched one raspy cheek and stared at the ceiling with his pale, albino-like eyes.

  “I don't think I would call it that. More like a local superstition. Folks here in Brighton, even the newbies from East North Carolina and upstate New York don't question it. They just let it be, like everybody else.” 'Scilla thought this had the sound of a gentle warning.

  “We were headed toward Ira Parnell's pasture,” Ricky went on. “Nothing there now but weeds and thorn bushes. But the fence is still there. I used to sit on that fence during the trailing end of the summer and watch the sun go down over the pond. It would shine off the water and back into my eyes and it looked like there were two suns; one in the sky and one sinking into the water. I could almost see myself, a little towheaded kid with a wisp of straw in his mouth, decked out in crappy dungarees, a pretty stiff breeze kickin' up a cowlick in his hair, the sun shinin' the color of apple cider.” He smiled whimsically, bringing up the elfin charm that was a part of him.

  “I asked Willie where we were goin'.

  ‘“You'll see,’ he says. Folks thought it best to steer clear of Willie after the fire. Everyone thought Willie would come to a bad end and they all figured I would go down the tubes with him. And that night he was plain crazy, as crazy as the day he had built the firebreak. Driven by something or to something, I still don't know.

  ‘“We're here,’ he says.

  “I knew right off it was Parnell's pasture. I saw the fence stretchin' off to my right, looking like black, iron bars with splinters of wood sticking out at the ends like hair. The wind blew a little, sort of sad like it does when darkness is heavy on the land with no electric lighting. Above the wind I could hear the fence creak from time to time. But for mine and Willie's breathing, that was the only sound.

  “Willie didn't say anything, just took me by the arm and pointed me toward the side of the mountain that popped up on the far side of the pasture. It was then that I seen the shimmery white mist rising up out of the ground, drifting up from the face of the mountain and rolling on down the hill. It didn't come up in one big cloud, or drift down like a lacy fall of dew. It came up out of the ground, like the earth had cracked open and was breathing in the cold. It shone in the moonlight, a watery silvery blue. It spun around like a wind chime in the breeze, slow as a country afternoon, and started to steal across the field, moving steady, spreading apart like fingers.”

  He stopped for a few seconds and pried the top off of a Coca Cola. He grimaced slightly as he did so, glancing at Margie sitting across the room in her rocker, arms crossed, nodding gravely at times as if corroborating the tale. Ricky took a long swallow of the Coke and set it on the floor.

  “The fog spread out into shapes, like columns about six feet high and two feet through the middle. It came on apace, moving toward us like an advancing patrol, five or six of those curtains of fog. And I started praying. I felt out of place, unwanted and...” he cocked his head, the exact phrasing he wanted eluding him.

  “I knew I was seeing something I shouldn't see, something maybe I shouldn't have even known about. There was something. Something watching and waiting. And I felt like if we didn't leave it might get tired of waiting.

  “I grabbed Willie by the arm, just gibbering. He shook me off.

  ‘“It's never been this close before. I have to see.’

  “That's when I knew he had seen it before, who knew how many times? And I wondered if it wasn't this as much as the fire that had made him crazy.

  ‘“They're gonna be here in a minute,’ I told him. And when he looked at me, he was smiling like a moron, hair all out in kinky curls, his beard twisted and tangled on top of that boy's face.

  “‘I know,’ he says.

  Ricky looked sagely at 'Scilla, but with an impish gleam of humor in his eyes. But it was a front. 'Scilla could tell he was deadly serious.

  “Then the fog was at the car, swirling around like blowing spirits, cold and wet, shining all silvery blue. I thought there was somebody in the fog, somebody or something that I couldn't see, watching me, wondering if it could extend its unearthly arm and drag me into it and take me away back to that hole in the earth it came from.

  “And then the fog seemed to trifle away a little and I saw something in the mist. A shape seemed to take form, flesh turned to vapor; a ghostly face in the fog.”

  'Scilla frowned. Ricky took no notice at all.

  “And then it swept down over us, seeming almost to fall on us like some swooping bird, wet and cold and sticky.” Ricky took a whistling breath. “My Sainted Aunt, it felt as close to death as I want to be until my time comes.”

  He sat back and drained the rest of his Coke. He set the empty on the floor. A lawn mower engine, the last of the season, wound down distantly beneath the twilit sky. Moths skirted against the screen.

  “And then,” 'Scilla prompted.

  “Willie fired up the car and blasted outta ther
e so fast he almost cracked us up by driving dead bang into a bigassed old pine tree. There was something in Willie like a streak of rock that can be chipped away but not broken. I could see in his eyes as he drove that something had gotten hold of his poor, scrambled brains, and had dug in and made a home there.

  “After a short time, he stood on the brakes, damn near tossing me straight over the hood.

  ‘“I'm going back,’ he says.

  “‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You do that. But you go alone. My daddy's gonna bust my ass black and blue as it is. If you had any sense, you'd go home, too.’ I started to hoof it, afraid to be out in the dark after what I'd seen, but knowing it was preferable to going back.

  ‘“Where are you goin'’, Willie hollers, like he can't believe I ain't going back with him. Well, I felt for him some, you know. But nothing could have got me back there. I was just about cryin', begging him not to go back.

  ‘“I have to go,’ he says. ‘I have to see.’ And just lookin' at him you knew that nothing would stop him. And off he roared, leaving me there scared and cold, but glad all the same. Glad to be away from the fog, and glad to know I could make it home before midnight, when Let To Day started. Glad to take the beating I knew I would get.”

  “Did Willie go back?”

  Ricky was silent for a few seconds.

  “I don't know,” he finally said. “I didn't see him again for a couple of days. I had tried to forget about it, though my dad forcibly reminded me of what had happened by whoopin' my ass pretty soundly. When I did see Willie again, he said nothing about it. And for seventy years I never asked him about it, and he never told me about it.”

  “Why didn't you see him the next day?”

  “It was October 30th, Let to Day. Nobody knows how old it is, or how it came to be. On Let to Day, none dare to venture out of their homes, especially not to work. Most of the town's folk head out of town for a one day vacation. Take in Luray Caverns or Tweetsie Railroad. We're all back the next day in time to give the young 'uns their trick or treat candy. Only those that wish to fall to the Stranger's Discomfort will lift a finger to till the land they've worked all summer.”

  'Scilla didn't like the sound of that and said so. “Sounds very ominous. What's the Stranger's Discomfort? Diarrhea?”

  Lisa giggled and Ricky smiled.

  “Nothing of the sort,” Ricky soothed. “Just a phrase I picked up from my dad and his dad before him. Just a bit of local color we can call our own. But it's tradition and tradition is mostly a good thing. No need in upsettin' it just on the off chance it's something besides a scary bedtime tale.”

  He looked wisely at 'Scilla. “Don't worry yourself over some local mumbo jumbo. It's our one excuse to get out of this one horse town and play hooky from work.”

  “I'm not really in the mood for anything so dark.”

  “Not much of a dark side to Brighton. Just a rinky dink burg with no claim to fame but a funny holiday and some nice scenery. Folks from all over the country live here, most of 'em like you, only looking for a place to start over.”

  “I didn't come here for pity.”

  “And pity you won't get. I meant no slight, 'Scilla. I didn't realize you would take it that way.” Ricky put on his most penitent expression. “Forgive?”

  “Of course.” Staying mad at Ricky would be like staying mad at a kitten in a ball of your best crewel work.

  “Might I ask you how you came to pick Brighton as your homeplace?”

  “It sounded like a nice place,” 'Scilla said in half truth. She didn't want to tell him that she had simply opened a map and picked the first place her finger had landed on. But it was turning out right, more so than she would ever have believed in the days of tunnel vision after George's and Jenny's deaths.

  Ricky didn't seem to want to press her on the matter. He clasped his hands across his belly and leaned back like a duke in his home, lord of all he surveyed. 'Scilla was struck by the simple ruralness of the gesture.

  “I think I'd better be on my way,” 'Scilla said. “I want to thank you for your hospitality.”

  “You don't have to go,” Margie said. “We're happy to have you.”

  “I don't want to wear out my welcome on the first day.”

  “No danger of that,” Ricky said, standing up with effort. “We don't want you to be a stranger.” 'Scilla thought Ricky said this last with a slight emphasis. “We're just down the street.”

  “Everyone is just down the street in Brighton,” Lisa said.

  “I won't be a stranger,” 'Scilla said. “Count on it.”

  She said her goodbyes and walked down the street to her house. Lisa chatted with her for a few moments before going on to her own house. It wasn't cold enough for frost yet, but the dew that fell on her arms as she talked to Lisa was like pinpoints of ice.

  She had gotten used to lying awake at night until the loneliness abated, but by the time she lay down that night on a makeshift pallet in place of a bed that had yet to arrive, she had almost forgotten about Let To Day. Ricky had made a half-assed effort to shrug it off, but she knew there was more to the story than Ricky had told her. She had often thought that, in her shattered life before this bucolic time, she and her family had been haunted by some stalking terror. But now her family was gone and, she hoped, the stalking terror with it. Even so, as she lay down to sleep, she wondered what it was that Willie Morgan had seen in the water lace shroud of silently spinning fog.