Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  Overwhelming silence; finally:

  “My god,” said Vanessa. “I had no idea you could be so morbid.”

  “Still want to marry me?”

  “Yeah, more than ever.” Fingers stroking Heather’s inner arm. “Only now I want to marry you so I can cure you.”

  “Does a plan like that ever work?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t there be a lot fewer divorces if women would just forget about trying to change who it is they’re hitching and accept that it can’t be done?”

  “Well, we sure changed you, didn’t we?” said Vanessa.

  “Did we ever.” Heather, backing her up all the way. “You used to be this hypertensive workaholic I was perennially on the verge of leaving. And look at you now … unemployed and a permanent member of the leisure class.”

  “We made you what you are today. Just admit it and adore us.”

  “Don’t you have a story to tell us or something?” I asked Vanessa. “Because I’d sure like to hear it now.”

  “Stubborn bastard,” she said to me, but stretched across to kiss me anyway.

  And as Vanessa envisioned the history of this place, it wasn’t surprising that she would focus on the carved heads. Heather, I couldn’t help but notice, had ignored them entirely, but it was only natural that her idea of forces greater than herself should involve things plummeting from above.

  In Vanessa’s firmament, the house belonged to a renowned sculptor whom the world has long since forgotten. This was during the 1920s, in that more optimistic period after the Great War, the War to End All Wars, before the shadow of the next and even greater war began to fall across Europe. Suddenly the sculptor withdrew from his adoring public and the world at large, for reasons he would share with no one, not even his wife, because, well, men are like that. All she knew was that it seemed to follow some mysterious encounter he’d had while walking in the woods, about which he steadfastly refused to say a word. Over the years to come, he spent his days chiseling ancient faces into the garden wall, recreating carvings whose origins were shrouded in the mists of time. And even though he’d turned his back on greater fame and greater fortune, he was much happier now, and then one day he simply walked into the woods and was never seen again, although his wife said that during their final breakfast together he seemed to be holding onto a secret that brought him both joy and sorrow. And so for years and years afterward, she simply couldn’t abide noise, in case she might hear him calling for her to reunite with him at last, at the edge of the trees, and together they would walk into the forest and slip into that much older England, where only a privileged few were now allowed to tread, and where they would join with the elder spirits of the land.

  Overwhelming silence; finally:

  “But eventually she remarried, right?” said Heather. “And then some Nazi asshole dropped a bomb on the place?”

  “No!” cried Vanessa. “Just see if I tell you any more bedtime stories.”

  Me, I was just glad I hadn’t been the one to say that.

  “Beautiful story, Vanessa,” I said instead, and meant it, wondering if she really could hear voices. If ravens whispered in her ear after all. If, even though she’d made up the details, every word might nonetheless be true.

  “And you’re absolutely, positively sure you want to marry me?” Heather asked her.

  “You know, I’m really not liking the way you keep steering the conversation around to that,” Vanessa said. “Now what’s wrong?”

  Heather, rolling onto her back: “Hasn’t the irony of the situation hit you yet? I mean, with the example I had set for me, way back when, I’ve always thought of matrimony as a kind of prison sentence.” Hands laced behind her head now as she stared at the ceiling. “And what am I doing? I’m doubling the usual number of jailers.”

  Until Vanessa, my idea of other worlds, other realms, had always tended to begin and end with cyberspace — nebulous enough to imbue with reverential awe, yet ultimately the creation of a binary number system, and therefore not impossible to grasp.

  Such arrogance. Such blinkered vision, no better than a horse allowed to see only what stands directly before its eyes.

  And my idea of a power greater than myself tended to acknowledge death and only death. Veterans of wars talk of the bullet with their name on it, but since I had no wars to fight, I thought instead of that graveworm underfoot, the worm with my name on him, keeping pace with me through the soil, wherever I might go, patiently waiting for the twilight of my life so that it could begin its work at last.

  In moments of insight, of honesty, I would wonder if Heather and I hadn’t sucked Vanessa into our lives because she made it easier, somehow, to believe in things we otherwise never would have. Like purpose. Like reassurance that we hadn’t squandered our lives chasing articulated goals only to end up well-fed slaves. Like the existence of doorways to someplace, anyplace, better than those places that had shaped us as children and younger adults … a new and welcoming place that had withstood the test of time because time could not permeate it.

  And while I was starting to believe in these, that didn’t mean I understood the keys that might unlock their doors. Was it faith? Longing? Or need? Was it the energies released before a blazing fire by the Saturnalian couplings of three people whose mouths and loins were so eager to violate the taboos of the only god others had tried to ram down their throats?

  Or were the keys never ours to turn at all, those doors opening only for the ones who were most desired by those on the other side?

  Fickle and capricious, maybe. Yet since when has life been anything but?

  When Vanessa and I awoke, we woke up alone, Heather’s spot between us on the sleeping bags empty. At first we thought nothing of it. I’d last roused to tend the fire during the wee hours, while it was yet pitch black outside, and she’d still been there, curled onto her side. Vanessa recalled being awakened briefly sometime after dawn, Heather stepping over her and whispering that she had to go outside to pee.

  Smoldering embers now, and chilly mists and morning dew.

  We checked the house, calling down its hallways and into its forsaken rooms. Checked the garden, both sides of the wall. Perhaps she had strayed beyond, toward fields or treeline; gone for a walk with a craving for solitude or an impulse to watch border collies run sheep.

  “Or maybe it’s wedding day jitters,” Vanessa said.

  An hour, then two, and after packing and re-packing our gear we had done as much as we could to kill time, unless we were to grab the broom and start sprucing up the house as a whole.

  Such a peculiar thing, when something feels amiss and you’re trying not to allow your imagination to play the worst tricks it knows, the way the obsessions and compulsions take over. A plan of helpless desperation begins to hatch: If you can just dial the same phone number enough times, or look out a window, or down a street, you can eventually materialize someone out of thin air.

  With me, it was the garden, patrolling its blossoms and fronds and leaves every twenty or thirty minutes. Had Heather walked here, stood there? What had I missed a half-hour ago that was in plain view? All along envying the ravens their unclipped wings and their sharp eyes.

  While walking past a section of the wall, for a moment it was tough to say who had startled whom more — me, or one of the ravens. With a harsh squawk and a flurry of shiny black wings, it came bursting out from behind a veil of ivy, at the same level as my knees, and it was only after it had rejoined its clan along the top of the wall, some tattered morsel glistening in its beak, that the unlikeliness of this struck me: from behind the ivy?

  Where was there room enough?

  I stood before the spot that had disgorged the raven, and even though I didn’t want to reach a hand into that dense greenery and pull it aside, this had to be done. And in the cavity newly revealed, there she was, or at least as near as I could tell it was her.

  Seconds. Or hours. How long? Goddamned if I know. No matter how many times I bunched the ivy shut, like a
curtain, then pushed it aside again, I could not change what I was seeing. Our Heather, my Heather, between stone teeth.

  It occurred to me to start ripping the ivy away, so I began tugging it free a few tendrils at a time where it had anchored its roots into rock, and while I did this, yesterday’s grim little rhyme crawled through my head like the tiniest of worms.

  Fe fi fo fum,

  I smell the blood of an American

  Features revealed — an enormous eye, glaring directly at me as I stripped it bare; a nostril the size of a basketball.

  Be she alive or be she dead

  The hollow in which she lay crushed was but the mouth.

  I’ll grind her bones to make my bread.

  Hours. Or seconds. How long? I couldn’t know, since time did not permeate here, aware only that Vanessa was running across the gardens from the house and I was meeting her halfway, trying to hold her back while shaking my head and telling her, “No, no, you don’t want to go back there and see this,” and of course she did because you can’t tell a person a thing like that and expect her to listen.

  Hours. Or days. Living by the clock and the sun again, when it seemed that Vanessa and I could only look at each other as if the other were to blame somehow, and finally her voice broke and she said, “We can’t just stay here, and we can’t leave her out there, out in that thing’s mouth, we have to tell someone.”

  “You go,” I murmured. “I’ll stay and make sure … nothing else happens.”

  Alone, then, I returned to the garden, half of me wanting so badly to follow Vanessa into the world of badges and inquests, because I would at least know my way around there, while the other half longed to follow Heather, if only I understood how, and leave Vanessa behind to find her own way, wherever and whenever she was able.

  Because I wondered if, in the dawn, heeding nature’s call, Heather hadn’t finally heard the voice she’d always yearned to hear.

  As I waited, I realized that last night we had gotten sidetracked and I’d never told a story of my own about this place. But for the time being I simply didn’t have the heart to contrive one, and decided that Vanessa’s tale would do, because in a way I was living it now, listening for Heather in case she called out for me to come, follow … you won’t believe what I’ve found on the other side of the inside of the wall.

  But the only sound I heard was made by some of the ravens, who plainly had more purpose to their lives than I ever did, as their smooth claws found purchase halfway down one blank section of weathered wall, and slowly, with infinite patience and an intelligence I would never have dreamt of, they began using their beaks like chisels to render yet another likeness of their masters.

  I was no threat.

  Pages Stuck By a Bowie Knife to a Cheyenne Gallows

  I expect the first thing I should set down is my name. A man’s name is all that connects him to his past and the people he has shared it with and squares up his life in the scheme of those others. But it has been a good long time that I have been severed from all the past that truly matters, back when it might have been considered a true thing that I had yet some measure of goodness in me. The man who wore that name is no more.

  So I will content myself with a name that was hung on me by another during the War, and has dogged me during these years since. Methuselah was that name, and it was hung on me by a boy who did not live two minutes after it left his lips. We were but two of many around a campfire in the autumn of 1864, to a man each of us riders with Bloody Bill Anderson in the war he waged against the Federals. When the boy called me Methuselah, I did not know who or what this was, but because of the way he laughed I suspected this should be otherwise.

  He was the oldest man there ever was, the boy told me. Lived over nine hundred years. Or maybe it was closer to a whole thousand.

  Nine hundred or a thousand, sounds like horseshit to me either way, I said. Where’d you hear such a thing?

  It’s in the Bible.

  That explains it, then, I said.

  I looked around to say without speaking that just about anywhere you could rest your eyes was something set in flat contradiction to a gospel of love. I had not seen any more of the world than Missouri then, but if that was any indication of the rest, it was hate that was winning.

  Yeah, well, the boy said. Out here I guess I’m doing my best to forget my Sunday learning, but that one there just stuck. Oldest man who ever lived, says so right in there, so I figure that’s a good enough name for you.

  There’s plenty older than me.

  Not around this fire there ain’t, nor anybody else saddling up with Captain Anderson. Nor most likely with Quantrill or nobody else neither, from what I seen.

  And because I no longer wished to abide the tone of his voice, I drew one of my pistols and aimed across the fire and blew off one of his kneecaps.

  How about the meanest man in the Bible, I said. Does it tell who that was?

  But because he could do no more than roll upon the ground and scream and hold his twisted leg, I rose and took aim on his moving head and finished it. I figure now it was the whiskey that had put me in such a mood, but my aim was still true enough. Then I sat down again to work at the rest of the bottle.

  I’ve read me some of the Bible, said another of us in time. And I reckon if you was to settle on the meanest cuss in there, that would have to be the Lord God Almighty.

  Well, I guess Methuselah suits me just fine then, I said. Because you know Bill would want the other name for himself, and there’s no good to ever come of making him sore.

  I was not always this way. It was a state that had come upon me while in the company I kept, although I alone am guilty of letting it happen.

  Folks had plenty names for us then. Bushwhackers, you heard that one a lot. Prairie wolves, too, and anymore it is that one I like best, because we fought where the Confederate Army did not, for a state that was contested about equally betwixt North and South, and was thus torn as would be a piece of meat caught in the teeth of two quarreling wolves both determined not to let go. We fought for two states at once, for to the winner would likely go the whole of Kansas. There was no end to the places east where you could find bigger killing fields, but numbers of dead do not tell a story to completeness, for look as you might, you could never find a place where blood was shed any more bitter or savage than it was shed in Missouri. I know this to be true because I waded through a lot of it with my own boots.

  You who may have found this tale of mine, and the cleaved and wretched body I shall leave with it once the telling is done, if you have more than the least bit of knowledge of the War, you will surely recollect that compared to the soldiers who wore the gray, the armies of Missouri were small and homegrown and prone to operating upon their own initiative. Early on there was William Clarke Quantrill and his raiders, and you would not have thought a more bloodthirsty man could have ridden in opposition to the Union, but out from under him came that very man. When after a falling out Bill Anderson took his leave from Quantrill’s command to ride off on his own, I was one of those who rode along with him. I could not tell you why, then or now, except maybe for my recognition that Bill Anderson would never look upon a new risen moon with the feeling in his heart that he had done enough killing for one day.

  He was as dark and angry a man as I had ever set eyes on, and that suited me just fine. He was young enough to be my son, if I had started sowing my seed some years earlier than what I did, and mayhap this was all the reason I would ever need to throw in my lot with his, for I had no more dark-haired sons of my own.

  There are men who lose all they have ever had in a single day, but I was not one of them. Mine was lost a bit at a time, and I suspect this must be worse than all at once, because it makes a man fearful and jumpy. A man who becomes too experienced with tragedy will begin to recognize it from a long ways off, and the cruelest part of this is knowing how unlikely it is that he will duck it when it gets up close, no matter how hard he tries. I have lost chi
ldren to illness and to accident. I have seen them claimed by winter’s cold and by river water in summer. I have seen an infant emerge blue and still from betwixt my wife’s bloodied thighs, and even before its poor tiny form could be borne up from the bed I have heard my wife’s final breath sighed up to the rafters of our home.

  These things had beset us long before there was a war. All the war did was set a capper on it.

  Up til then I had enjoyed some modest prosperity in the sale of dry goods in the county of Lafayette, but it did not take too many passages of Union soldiers or Kansas Red Legs to clean a man out. They would carry off whatever they wanted and would not overly concern themselves with who it was they were taking from, and if you dared to utter a word in protest then they would sooner cut you down as listen to you, and it did not matter if you and they were on the same side. They were more ill-behaved each time, and the worst of them, if a mood was upon him, would cut a man down for no better reason than wondering which way he might fall.

  The truth of the war was I found it a confusing thing to ponder, at least when it came to my place in it. As I looked at matters then, if a man had himself a nigger bought and paid for, this was nobody’s business but his own. But as a merchant I harbored the suspicion that the money minted by the Union would always be worth the space it took up in my till, and this was not a thing I could say about Confederate dollars.