by Scott Thomas
“You needn’t pay me now, Doc. I figured you’d wait ‘til we got home.”
Gabe shrugged ambiguously and set off through the crowds.
There were tents and the smell of cooking, close laughter and great-eyed children. Gabe craned his neck, searching. His pulse was fast and dizziness rose swiftly to his head along the road from his heart. He reached into the pocket of his grey coat and clung to the cold metal there.
There was a large wooden structure erected for the occasion; a long steep roof supported only by beams. Much of the activity was centred there. Gabe worked his way over, excusing himself politely, numbly, as he stepped closer, moving through the throng. It was shaded and cool beneath the roof and there were tables and more milling bodies. Prize-winning pumpkins, prize-winning apples, prizewinning grain were all on display. He could smell the corn, gold, pale, and sweet.
There were household goods made by women and a section where men, with thumbs crooked in their suspenders, gazed eagerly upon newfangled labour-saving farm devices. Gabe moved along, floated tall in the crowd, the hum of his blood moving faster.
Exiting one of the mall’s far ends, Gabe studied the field where the fair had been set up. He could see the rail pens with their show-beasts enclosed. Closer still and he could smell the warm earthy animal smells. Bored and nervous creatures paced, chewed, or impossibly tried to become invisible, tucking themselves into hay or corners in their tight pens. There were ribbons tacked to the enclosures—best ewe, best heifer, best bull. Cows lowed. But where was the talking cow?
More tents stood ahead, beyond the livestock area. There was a touch of carnival atmosphere. A garish painting of a two-headed lamb loomed up. People had gathered around for a contest to award $2.00 to the woman with the smallest feet. A larger group stood outside a pale rippling tent from which came the scent of fresh hay and manure. Gabe saw the sign with big red letters, heard a boy out front, like a barker, calling, “Come see the magnificent talking cow! Come one and all and view this miraculous wonder. Hear it speak and answer your questions!”
Gabe stared at the crude painting of a black and white cow as people bumped against him, pushing past to join the human herd. He found himself in line, moving slowly toward the freckled boy, felt the money leave his hand.
It was dark inside and a man with a bushy white beard was addressing the group, which faced the dully staring cow. The animal stood in a tiny pen up on a pedestal at the centre of the enclosure. The beast looked innocuous enough.
The farmer, dressed handsomely in an expensive suit, thanks to his freak cow, chose from a small sea of raised hands; everyone wanted to ask the talking cow a question. “You there,” the man said, pointing to a pretty young woman.
“What’s your name?” the girl giggled, feeling rather foolish.
“Betsy,” the cow replied in a voice that sounded rather masculine for a Betsy.
A low murmur went through the crowd.
The farmer gave a big toothless smile. “Someone else?”
Again the hands went up and the farmer, gloating like a ringmaster, pointed to Gabe, tall, solemn looking, with dark, deep-set eyes. Gabe edged closer. He strained to see the side of the cow, which bore strange markings, as if the hide had been opened and then melted shut.
Gabe was about to speak when a familiar voice assaulted him. “Hey, Gabe!”
It was Sam Maynard. He and his son stood nearby, and the farmer thrust out a blue ribbon that his pig had won.
“Look, Gabe, we got first prize!”
The sideshow’s host sounded impatient now. “You had a question, mister?”
Gabe’s concentration had been broken by the appearance of his neighbour. He turned back to the cow’s head, large and close through the bars of its pen, and his hand slid back into the gun pocket. He felt the weight, the trigger, the sweat and heat in his palm.
“Yes, I have a question. Tell me, Betsy, how is it you can talk?”
The cow raised its skull to the man and the mouth moved and, looking into its eyes, Gabe could tell that the animal was not truly alive—not in the conventional sense.
The beast answered evenly, “My speech is a gift from God,” it said.
Gabe edged closer still, in the cramped, choking shadows of the tent. “What god might that be?”
“The very same god that gave you speech,” the cow said.
His hand came up, and the gun banged and flashed, again and again. The tent filled with smoke and noise. People screamed and stampeded to get out as Gabe fired into the head and body until the gun was empty and clicking. The cow shrieked as a man would shriek and toppled heavily onto its side.
“Son of a bitch!” the beast’s owner cursed, rushing at Gabe.
Gabe spun to face the man, said, “It’s a monster! A monster!” The farmer struck Gabe in the face and he went down, dropping a crescent-bladed pruning knife he had pulled from his coat. Others, seeing that he was out of bullets, converged, kicking him. He looked up, saw Sam Maynard staring in horror and confusion.
Gabe called to him, “Sam, cut it open! The right side—cut it!” Gabe curled on the ground as a flurry of feet thudded against him. He gasped and coughed. Sam hesitated for a moment, then grabbed the pruning knife with its cruel, curved blade and pulled himself up into the cow’s pen. He knelt beside it. Trembling, he sliced into the side of the animal, along the oddly mottled length of hide. It gave easily, opened wide and a burnt smell filled the tent.
The men who had been beating Gabe stopped and watched as Sam pulled open the sides of the bloodless maw. There were no ribs on that side, and curled inside, like an unborn thing, was a naked brownish man with wild black hair and wild dying eyes. The bullets that had punched through the cow had found him, and now blood came snaking from a hole in his throat. Unable to speak, he let out a final breath, a hiss of black mist that went up into Sam’s face. Sam gasped, shuddered and toppled from the platform. He lay beside Gabe on the hard dirt floor, dead.
Having been arrested for murder, Gabe sat in a cell for two days, bruised and cold, hugging his cracked ribs. He heard a pair of footsteps approach and looked up to see the chief of police and young Dan Muir. Muir’s father had been hired to defend the veterinarian.
“You’re all done, here,” the officer said, unlocking the cell.
Gabe stared quizzically. “I don’t... understand...”
“The charges against you have been dropped, Doctor Burkett. Go home and try to forget this whole thing. That’s what folks around here want to do, forget the whole ungodly mess.”
Muir helped Gabe from his bunk, then out to the Model T that, under the circumstances, was a welcome sight.
They drove down the quiet lanes of an autumn afternoon. The air was pleasantly cool and the sun shone bright. Hawks hung free and smaller birds pecked in the harvest fields, unaccosted for the time being.
It did not take Gabriel long to ask the question. “Why did they let me go?”
Dan Muir gave him a strange look. “They said I’m not supposed to say a word to anyone.”
Gabe studied him. “But...?”
“But I think you ought to know. They performed an autopsy on that man that was in the cow. He wasn’t like a man in ways, from what I heard.”
“What do you mean?” Gabe asked.
“Well, when they opened his head and looked in his skull, there was this thing in there where his brain should have been. Some kind of an animal, I guess, sort of like a cross between a human foetus and an insect in a larval stage. Its body was all shiny black and segmented, and it had these skinny tendrils running down into his spinal column, and into his major blood vessels.”
Gabe stared at the road. “Dear God,” he whispered.
“The fellow that did the autopsy wanted to take it to show a professor friend over at Harvard, but the police chief had it burned.”
“Good man,” Gabe said softly. “Good man.”
The smell of baking chicken was emanating from the house. Gabe sat on the porc
h, watching as the sun mocked the colours of the ridge of trees it was setting behind. His chair creaked as he rocked and he could hear Audrey humming inside.
The days were short now, and October was only hours away. Dreaming off into the deepening heavens, he caught movement from the corner of his eye. A moth had become entangled in a spider web up where one of the porch support beams met the overhanging roof. The moth struggled futilely and the spider poked out from a dark split in the wood and edged out.
Gabe stood, tall man that he was, and reached up. With gentle fingers, he worked delicately to pry the moth from the thin and sticky bands. The brown moth fluttered and went spinning free into the cool air. Gabe stood on the porch and watched as it made its way into the uncertain dusk.
He smiled and his smile, as always, was both hopeful and sad.
The Copper Mask
Massachusetts, 1830
After the cider making, after the killing frost, November was close, crouched in the New England hills like a giant old man made of black twigs. The geese knew and the moths, and even the crickets had taken away their summer noise. While bright with sun and seemingly innocuous, it was, in fact, the last day of the tenth month.
Abigail gave it little thought—her mind was on bayberries. “Good-bye, Mother,” the younger Safford said—it being just the two of them since fever had taken her father.
The widow Safford waved from the kitchen door and Abigail was off past the herb beds in her lead-coloured dress with a hungry basket swinging; away from the clean white house by the chestnut tree, on the road leading out of town, it was the season of bleak fields and they showed flat amongst the roll of hills; superfluous scarecrows nodding in air cool with secret currents.
Here, under trees and quick shadow, there, squinting in light, Abigail walked, humming, past the edges of the fields, her hair loose and windy, more August than October. The trees that had so recently boasted their plumes of colour, were dissolving and the sky, in turn, grew wider by the hour.
The fields reposed—dirt wombs for winter wheat, or scrubby with cut maize, nervous with small birds. Abigail went up hills and down them, stepping between the wagon ruts in the dry October road, humming beneath geese and the crows that called to the straw men with a language only wind would share.
Then came the sweet reek of the dying orchards, the soft browning fruit concealed in triumphant weeds. The buildings of the town were small and toy-like in the distance, the smell of the shops, the clatter of carriages, the voices, hidden by the grey-treed hills. Not to say that there was no colour, there were the stubborn gold, defiant red, and frail and bitter yellow awaiting the plucking winds and quiet fingers of frost.
The young woman knew just where to find the sweet bay; off the path, by a meadow near a wood that turned to swamp, hollow with the sound of crows. Abigail waded into the meadow, the dry weeds snatching at her skirt. Birds were in the wood, dark flurrying shapes that tumbled up as pale leaves tumbled down. The bay bushes were hunched together by the bordering trees; their dark leaves had the dull shine of leather. Close to them, Abigail knelt and brushed the hair from her face with the back of her wrist.
The berries that had eluded the birds hung like small black eggs. They were ripe and Abigail gathered them to use in candle making. Humming, she reached into the scented shadows of the bush and stole the fragrant fruit.
West of the October wood, beyond the swamp and the hills heaped like smoke, the light was receding. Shadows in the wood made the trees seem to multiply and a deer, or something large enough to snap twigs, stirred there.
Abigail moved to the next bush, moved to a new tune to hum. Her basket grew heavy, its bounty glinting softly. The smell of the leaves was on her hands and the wind flicked her hair at her eyes.
Sticks snapped in the wood where trees shaped a jail for the light. Abigail leaned to one side to look. A shadow in the shadows—upright—limbs. She stood and stared but the thing had slipped away.
“Hello?”
Again, in the maze of trees, a figure ducked in and out of sight. It was small, dressed darkly. Abigail heard the leaves crisp and rustle beneath its quick steps. The breeze toyed with her hair and she reached to restrain the betraying strands.
“Hello?”
The woman took up her basket and pushed past the bay bushes into the woods, after the boy. It was a boy after all—she had seen his legs, swift in the brittle bracken, the pale hands, his best little Sunday suit. The glimpse had not revealed his head.
“Wait,” Abigail called, “Don’t be frightened.”
The boy thumped away like a rabbit, threading through the bare and near-bare trees, rattling the reluctant colours. Abigail, awkward in her skirt and trying not to dump her berries, fell behind.
“Wait, won’t you?”
Every step rasped where the maples had bled and squat pines like green shadows obstructed the peripheral child. Sometimes Abigail could see his arms waving, his hands plucking leaves as he went. Other times it was his back and once, where bone-coloured birches stood thin in the gloom, she spied his whole body and, in that compromised afternoon light, there was no head.
The sky was widening beyond the trees, a wistful blue. The small dark shape of the boy burst out of the wood, into the air, and Abigail lost sight of him. Breathing hard, she slowed, stepped over roots and crippled boughs. Good Massachusetts hills rose beyond a field and the wood fell behind.
Pumpkins hugged the ground in the dimming light, like orange turtles half-tucked under wide leaves. Abigail did not see the boy— perhaps he was lying among the crops, close to the cool earth. She stepped carefully through the fragile vines, peering down.
“Hello?”
Her voice went out across the field, to the hulking ghost hills, grey like ash, red where maples still burned.
There was no sign of the boy. Abigail moved on, deeper into the pumpkin patch, her two feet crunching as she stepped around the many-sized globes. Near the middle of the field, she found a number of dead crows, neatly folded about themselves, there in the withering leaves. They were dark against the yellowed grass, shimmering softly, as if damp in faltering light. Abigail was about to stoop for a closer look, but a sharp glint of light caught her eye. Like a crow herself, Abigail was drawn to the spark and, upon inspection, saw something metal tucked close to the pumpkins and crows.
She bent and lifted the copper mask. How it gleamed! A simple, elegant face comprised of metal leaves, cool and light in the hand. It stared back impassively, the eyes cut out. How could she not put it on?
Forgetting all about the boy, Abigail placed the mask over her face and it held there as if pushed by wind. She shot up and her hair flung out like a scream. She saw the world through the October mask—the falling light, the decaying fields, the crows, the round hills where November perched in its cold black bones.
Acorns, rose hips, gourds, and winter squash. Ash, sycamore, oak, and silver maple. The road led through the last day of the tenth month. The light was weary and, like the mask, coppery as it knelt upon the fields. Abigail walked as if sleeping, her basket of berries swaying gently.
She passed two men harvesting turnips, their cart heaped and smelling of earth. Gazing through the mask, Abigail saw the first, pale as a swan, his eyes dead in deep smudges. The other, oblivious, about his task, appeared charred where his flesh showed. A small clay pipe was clenched in his teeth, his lips burnt away.
It was the same in town, where Abigail walked in her copper guise. Death, beneath the mask of flesh, was hers in all its future faces. Unconcealed, the townsfolk showed her these faces—this one shrivelled in age, that one gashed in mishap, others bloated, blue, pocked, wasted with disease.
It was the same with the houses, lonely and dim in the dusk-draped town. The sun was lost, down through the trees, like a big brass kettle, glinting its last. The twilight breeze mocked the ocean in the leaves. The moon was on the sky like breath on glass.
One house after the other showed Abigail its sorry f
ace. Up from the weeds, a peaked behemoth of mouldering gingerbread stood, its paint in the moonlight like the scales of crumbling fish. Wind sounded in the vacant stairwells, behind the hollow windows with nothing in their darkness but strange eyes like dislocated stars.
Down the street, house after house. Dolls with crabapple eyes, in a house filled with dark water, hovered like slow pale fish in the windows. The sinuous foliage of a willow waved from the chimney like tentacles of smoke.
Her own house crumbling grey beneath the chestnut, Abigail kicked her way up the leafy path to the door. Inside and quiet as could be, she peered into the kitchen. She was thankful that her mother’s back was to her, afraid to see what was on the other side of the crone-coloured hair. Her mother was singing quietly, the words strained and muffled as if fumbling through a broken mouth.
Up the drafty stairs, past walls dripping spiders, Abigail sought her bedchamber. The frosty light of the moon was on the window. A mirror hung above her chest of clothes and she stood in front of it, her full skirt rustling as if there were only leaves beneath. The copper mask was dim in the glass and it was likely the improbable light that made Abigail imagine the mouth of the mask opening, a beak and maybe the dark of a bird’s head poking briefly from between her teeth.
The mask that had seemed so light, now ached against her features and Abigail lay on her dusty bed beneath the great copper weight.
November seemed grey and brown, its light weak as if shone through milk. Widow Safford stirred over breakfast, the scents warm in the clean, tidy kitchen. Ferns of frost were on the window glass, a kettle on the stove.
“Abigail,” her mother called.
Her daughter must not have felt well—hadn’t she gone up to her sleep early the night before?
“Abigail, breakfast...”
Her calls went up the stairs without reply. Widow Safford sighed and went up herself. She rapped softly at the door and called through the wood.
“Abigail?”
