Except I did know about it. And I was going to find it.
About an hour into my hunt, trekking over uncharted territory where neither trail nor road broke the monotony of trees and brush, I realized I was lost. Ancient oaks and maples and spruce towered over me, scorning me for my foolishness, hiding the sky and light from me. I stumbled through the thick woods, thickets pulling at my clothes like claws, branches slapping at my chest and face, rocks punishing the soles of my feet, lost, frightened, and held captive to my over-active imagination conjuring up ghouls and gremlins, goblins and ghosts. I didn’t know how long I had wandered, pushing deeper into the woods, watching the golden light of late afternoon slip through varying hues of pinks and reds and oranges, awaiting my impending death by demon, before I heard the familiar sound of my older brother’s laugh.
As it turned out, I wasn’t gone long, three hours at most, and hadn’t wandered far, maybe a mile from the north field, but the feeling of being lost, abandoned, forsaken to fend off the fearsome forest by myself has left me scared of the woods ever since. Not scared like scared of the dark, the absence of light, the kind of fear that dissipates and flees as soon as a single beam of light pierces the gloom, but scared like scared of evil, darkness, the kind of fear that only God can banish.
There was something wicked about the woods, something unknown that I didn’t like. And now I found myself with only a lantern flashlight and a shotgun manned by my too-scared-to-admit-it brother. We didn’t stand good chances against whatever was lurking in the darkness. I knew that and it frightened me. Whatever had caused Pop to moan like he had was still out there, and I was in no mood to meet it and join its ghostly choir.
Henry led with the stock of the shotgun pressed against his right shoulder, and I followed close behind, holding the flashlight out in front like a weapon in its own right, running the beam over the ground in front of us. Our feet fell on a carpet of dry leaves and fallen pine needles that crunched with each step. It hadn’t rained in several weeks here and the leaves were crisp and brittle. The sound seemed to echo off the trees and grow louder with each step. There was no hiding our presence in this strange land. Every occupant of the forest within earshot, from chipmunk to bobcat to black bear to eight-armed, eight-foot, hairy octopus-men would have been well aware of our intrusion. And they had better hearing than we.
After pressing cautiously into the woods no more than twenty yards, I thought I heard a third set of footsteps crunching leaves. We took two more steps, and I was positive of the other sound, the other presence, to our right. I put one hand on Henry’s shoulder and stopped him. He looked at me, eyes glowing in the residual light of the lantern’s beam, and I put a finger to my mouth then pointed to my ear then to the woods to the right. But the moment I stopped, the other footsteps stopped a fraction of a second later, but delayed enough that Henry heard it as well. I turned the flashlight toward the sound and traced a wide arc over trees and underbrush. Nothing. No glowing eyes, no dark movement, no misplaced shadows. We both stood motionless, holding our breath, listening.
After a full minute, Henry leaned toward me and whispered in the lowest voice he could manage, “Let’s keep moving, probably just a squirrel or chipmunk, maybe a raccoon.”
I nodded, and we started off again. The plan was to stay on course another seventy yards or so then turn left toward Dad. But when we fell into a steady rhythm I again picked up the sound of the third stride. And again I stopped Henry and, a millisecond later, the other footsteps fell silent. He nodded that he’d heard it too.
By now my imagination was on the loose. A beast of unknown origin, from another dimension, lurked in the pitch blackness to our right, following us, no, stalking us, step for step, waiting for the most opportune time to rush us and tear us limb from limb. Several months earlier I’d read in the newspaper how a couple of coon hunters in Texas were frightened spitless when something large and fast rushed their dogs. Days later, one of the hunters caught a glimpse of an eight-foot tall, hairy ape-man ambling through a thick patch of brush, leaving behind the distinct scent of a wet dog.
Henry and I listened. A cool breeze blew down my back, chilling even my internal organs. I drew in a long breath through my nose, trying to pick up even the faintest hint of wet canine. But the only aroma that dusted the still air was woodsy and wild.
“Maybe it’s Dad.” I kept my voice just above inaudible and tried to convince myself more than Henry that whatever matched us step for step was human and harmless and wore flannel.
Henry shook his head. “Dad’s over there.” He motioned the gun in the direction of where Dad was allegedly searching for Pop, to our left.
“Maybe it’s Pop then. We should—”
Then came something that turned that cool breeze on my back into a chilly blast—the moan, ahead and to the left.
Forgetting the third pair of footsteps and any idea I had of them belonging to Pop or Dad, both Henry and I took off toward the sound. We were running now, not full throttle, but at a controlled trot, a little faster than a jog. The light bounced ahead of us, leading the way through a maze of undergrowth and massive tree trunks. I kept my focus on where I thought the sound came from and, as we closed in on it, the pulse in my neck grew stronger. Pop was there, somewhere in the dark ahead of us, in need of help. I had no doubt Dad had heard it too and was also en route. I tried to listen for his footfalls, smashing leaves and snapping fallen branches, but the sound of our own feet chewing leaves was so loud in my ears I could hear nothing else, and I wasn’t about to stop and listen. Pop needed us and needed us now.
We ran what must have been at least a hundred yards before stopping. I bent over, hands on my knees, and heaved the cold air. Henry stopped beside me, shotgun still at his shoulder, eyes round and alert, scanning the area. Being a discus thrower in high school and Dad’s right-hand man on the farm, he was in much better physical condition than I. I helped around the farm, gathering eggs, feeding the chickens, mucking out the horse stalls, but the labor, the work of the farm, had mostly been handled by Henry and Dad since Aaron left for Europe to defend the stars and stripes.
Now Dad’s noisy gait approached from the left like a herd of steer stampeding over a potato chip prairie, but still a good distance off. I guessed maybe fifty yards or so.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash, like a falling tree, and Dad cried out in pain.
5
Henry was the first to react. “Dad!” He bolted toward the sound of the crash, leaving me nailed to the ground, holding the light.
“Wait.” I took off after him, aiming the light at the ground in front of his feet. “Henry, wait, I got the light.”
But he paid no mind to me and kept on running ahead. I did my best to keep up with him.
Dad hollered again, something I couldn’t quite make out but sounded like “Toys for Bert!”
Henry pushed onward and finally stopped near a large scaly-barked tree. I caught up with him a few seconds later, and my light found what he was looking at. There, lying on the ground near the base of the trunk, was Dad, holding his left ankle with both hands, face twisted into a painful grimace, grinding his teeth like he was chewing on leather.
I stopped next to Henry and aimed the light at Dad’s ankle. At first nothing appeared awry. Dad must have seen the question on my face. “I twisted it good,” he said through clenched teeth, his voice thin and shaky. “I heard something pop.”
That something was most likely his anterior talofibular ligament. I lifted the hem of his pants and the swelling had already stretched the leather of his boots.
Henry looked at me, and his face asked what we should do.
“We need to get you back to the cabin,” I said.
Dad shook his head and grimaced again. “No way. It’ll take too long. Leave me here, go find Pop, then come back for me. Did you hear him again?”
“Yeah,” Henry said. “We heard it, but couldn’t find him.”
“He’s out here somewhere,” Dad snap
ped. He was losing his patience. We needed to get him inside near the woodstove, splint his ankle, find Pop, and get everyone off this mountain. It was a possibility, of course, that Dad had done much more than sprain his ankle. The pop he’d heard could have been the tibia or smaller fibula. An ankle fracture was the last thing we needed. It would definitely complicate things.
I moved the light off Dad’s leg. “Dad, we need to get you in—”
“Don’t sass me boy,” he said in clipped words. “Go get Pop. Do as I say.”
We couldn’t just leave him there like that. By the time we found Pop and got back to Dad, there was no telling what might happen. The temperature was well above the freezing mark, mid-forties by my best guess, but cold enough that someone with Dad’s kind of injury, especially if it was a fracture, slipping into shock, wouldn’t last very long. “But we can’t—”
Dad shot me a look that shut me up. It was a look I’d seen a hundred times and each time regretted it. It said Obey me, or else. If we were going to move Dad we were going to have to manhandle him to do it, and no one manhandled Ned Harding. Certainly not his sons.
I shook my head and looked at Henry, hoping he would be of some help, but one year older and eons wiser when it came to dealing with Dad and his stubborn streak, Henry gave me a look that said to let it go and obey if I knew what was good for me.
“C’mon,” he said. “We’ll find Pop right quick and get back here to Dad.”
I wanted to fight it, stand my ground and insist that we take Dad back to the cabin first, but in my heart I knew it would do no good. I’d watched Mom insist for seventeen years and never succeed in moving Dad when he didn’t want to be moved. He was like our bull, Otto. If Otto, at nearly a thousand pounds, didn’t want to move, he didn’t move.
Simple as that. “Okay,” I said, then turned to Dad, “We’ll be back soon. Don’t try to move, okay?”
He nodded and waved us on. “Go on. Git. I’m fine.”
Henry and I departed in the direction we had come, back to where we last heard the moans. About twenty feet out I turned and pointed the light at Dad, half expecting to see him struggling to stand. To my surprise he was still seated with his back against the tree, holding his ankle. He shielded his face and waved us on again with his hand, shooing us away like a couple of pesky flies.
“We shouldn’t leave him there,” I said to Henry. “Anything could happen.”
“Anything could happen to Pop too. Dad will be fine, you know how he is. Finding Pop is more important right now.”
I turned my head back and looked in the direction of where Dad was. The darkness had moved in and surrounded him, a curtain of black between him and us. “I hope you’re right.”
We trudged through the woods, pushing aside clingy thickets and tangled serviceberry, searching for any sign of Pop, listening for footsteps or the moans. I don’t know how long we looked, it couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty minutes before I stuck my wrist under the beam of light. My watch read almost four o’clock. We’d been out there for over an hour with no success at locating our lost and bewildered grandfather. We’d combed the area of the last moan at least ten times over and found nothing, stopped every few minutes to listen and heard nothing, called his name, both Elmer and Pop, countless times with no reply. It seemed he was just gone. Lost somewhere out there in the wild, defenseless, confused, and possibly injured. I thought about Dad and hoped he was doing okay. I didn’t like the idea of having to return to him Pop-less. He wouldn’t be happy with us.
“Pop,” I called. “Elmer Harding!” Both Henry and I stopped to listen but heard nothing. The only sound was the rush of blood in my ears. With each minute that passed we were one minute closer to having to tell Dad we’d failed him. A part of me wanted to just stay in the woods, get lost myself, so I wouldn’t have to face him again. I was already a disappointment to him; it killed me to have to prove it all over again. My only hope was that soon the sun would peek over the horizon and our chances of finding Pop would be better.
“Maybe we should go back and check on Dad,” I said.
Henry turned and looked at me like I had just confessed to being a Martian in humanoid disguise. “You crazy? He’ll kill us if we go back without Pop.”
“How’s he going to kill us? He can’t even walk. I just want to check on him, make sure he’s okay. He might be in shock.”
“No way. We don’t go back to Dad until we find Pop. He may not be able to walk but he’ll find a way to kill us regardless.”
I wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Listen, if we go back now we can tell him we haven’t found Pop yet. We’ll keep looking and when the sun comes up we’ll have a much better time at finding—”
I’d been walking around in concentric circles, sweeping my light along the leaf-covered ground when something glimmered, something metal. I bent down and pushed some leaves out of the way. It was a brass box, round, about two inches in diameter. A pill box of some kind. I picked it up.
“What’d you find there?” Henry said, coming along side me.
“I don’t know.” I turned the box over in my hand and almost dropped it. On the top was engraved a swastika and the words Gott Mit Uns circled the perimeter.
“What’s it say?” Henry asked.
“'God With Us' in German. It’s Nazi.” I’d taken three years of German in high school but was still anything but fluent. I recognized a lot of words written, some spoken, but could speak only the basics. In a pinch, in Germany, I could introduce myself, keep myself fed, and always find a lavatory—Wo ist die Toilette? That was about it.
I opened the box and found three folded pieces of paper, each one inch by two inches with tiny writing on them. I recognized letters of course, but the words were foreign. Not just foreign because they were German, but foreign because they weren’t German. Just jumbles of letters arranged into words but no words I’d ever seen or recognized. It was some kind of code.
Henry looked around into the darkness as if the owner of the box would step forward and claim his lost treasure. We all held a certain contempt for anything Nazi, even if it was just somebody’s souvenir. News of the Malmady Massacre was still so fresh in the minds of Americans that anything or anyone sporting the swastika or anything that referenced Nazism or Hitler or the Third Reich was demonized to the fullest extent. “Let’s go show Dad,” he said.
I couldn’t have agreed more. Though I doubted very seriously the box was anything more than a souvenir lost by some hunter, it would serve well to take the heat off of us. It would serve well as a distraction. We wouldn’t be returning to Dad empty-handed, just without Pop.
Making our way back to where we’d left Dad, I turned the box over in my free hand, rattled it, ran my thumb over the carved swastika and words foreign in dialect but not meaning. God With Us. Emmanuel. What kind of hypocrite read those words, carried them on his body, maybe even held them dear, repeated them often, all the while dealing out the atrocities the Nazi war machine had perpetrated on mankind. God’s creation.
“He’s gone.”
I heard Henry say the words but missed the meaning behind them. “What?”
Henry suddenly looked panicked. He grabbed the flashlight from my hand. Waving it back and forth over the ground, he scurried around, kicking at the leaves. “Dad’s gone. This is where we left him.”
I looked at the tree, the leaves. Honestly, it looked like any other tree in the woods, any other trunk, any other leaves. “Are you sure this is the spot? It doesn’t feel like we walked far enough.”
“It’s the spot,” Henry said. His voice cracked with anxiety. He was rushing toward a state of all-out panic. “We left him right here,” he jabbed the light at the base of the tree. “Right here. And he’s gone.”
6
The only thing Henry and I could conclude was that Dad had somehow made his way back to the cabin on his own. He couldn’t have moved very quickly, not with his ankle the way it was. I suggested he may have c
rawled, though the image of Dad crawling was one I had to work hard to convince myself of. Dad didn’t crawl, crawling was a sign of weakness and weakness wasn’t something he did very well. What I could envision was Dad hobbling on his bad leg, swallowing the pain as it bit into him like a viper, sweating buckets but never letting it show that it was killing him. That was the Dad I knew. Proud. Stubborn. Tough.
As we made our way through a labyrinth of stoic trees and gnarled underbrush back to the cabin, I couldn’t help but once again feel nervous about standing before Dad without Pop. It sat like a brick in the pit of my stomach. My only hope was that Dad was so exhausted from his painful journey back to the cabin that he’d collapsed onto his cot and drifted into a deep sleep. Henry and I could check on him, make sure he was okay, still alive and breathing, then return to the woods and wait for the sun to rise. With the light of day helping us, locating Pop wouldn’t be so difficult. But a darker outcome also loomed in my mind. If Dad was still coherent after his painful trek, he’d be in no mood for bad news. Like a bear with a thorn in his paw, Dad could be downright ornery. And a lame leg made worse by an agonizing hike would only fuel the fire lighted by the disappointing news of an unfruitful search. Again, I didn’t want to face Dad with no Pop in tow. I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d be a hibernating bear rather than a hostile bear.
Fear Mountain Page 3
