December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  “You’re not going to shoot the bear,” she said firmly.

  “Not if it leaves me alone I’m not,” I assured her.

  We were now in total darkness.

  “Wait.” She switched on her flashlight.

  The passage was illuminated—unfortunately. All around us, on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor, there were thousands of brownish-red cave crickets, camel crickets—humpbacked, jack-legged nightmares. I hated them. They were skittering and jumping all around us. Obviously we’d felt their grotesque bodies pelting us when we’d been feeling our way along the cave earlier. They were not poisonous. I knew that. But they were revolting, extremely unnerving in such numbers. They appeared to be blind, or had no eyes, but they could feel our movements, and they jumped toward us. Ceri was apparently as disconcerted as I was.

  “What I would like to do now,” Ceri said slowly, “is to run as fast as I can until I’m in your living room. Can we do that?”

  “At least,” I whispered.

  Without further consideration, we both exploded forward, down the crawling stone hallway, past other disturbing insectum and fauna too fleeting to consider, until we found ourselves near the other opening to the caves.

  Slowing only slightly, I saw the bear near the entrance. Ceri saw it, too. It was waiting for us, crouched and motionless.

  “Don’t shoot it,” she commanded.

  “If it comes at us,” I disagreed, “I’m going to shoot it.”

  “No!” she insisted firmly.

  We slowed to a cautious, tentative walk. I had the pistol pointed at the animal, but Ceri was in front of me, apparently intent on blocking my shot.

  “Get out of the way!” I whispered.

  “Stop pointing that gun!” she countered. “You’re not going to shoot at that bear.”

  “I’ll aim to wound it,” I said, “just to stop it.”

  “No!” she barked.

  A second later it was obvious that the point was heartbreakingly moot: the bear was dead. David had, indeed, shot and killed it. Or maybe Issie had, there was no telling at that point.

  “Goddamn it,” Ceri said softly.

  “Let’s get to the house before I bleed to death, could we?” I insisted, stepping over the carcass and into the snowy bank in front of the cave’s entrance.

  “You’re not going to bleed to death, you’re barely grazed, but okay.”

  I trudged up the hill, my arm aching and beginning to twitch. I was shivering, an aftermath of the shock more than a product of the frigid night.

  The snow had stopped falling, and the stars were burning above our heads, more than I could ever remember seeing, as if the sky were mostly starlight, only occasionally interrupted by a benevolent black peace.

  I slowed down to stare up at all that stunning illumination. It seemed to be drawing my attention upward, lifting my weight and my every intention. I thought how wonderful it would be to take a few moments to lie on my back and stare up at the astonishing brilliance, a sensation I hadn’t felt since I’d been a child, alone at Christmas, out on the snowy lawn in front of our house, making snow angels and staring up at the burning Nativity, the holy night, the bleak midwinter sky.

  Just as I was about to fall backward, Ceri took my arm.

  “Fever?” she said firmly. “What are you doing?”

  I realized then that I’d been about to lie down in the snow. “Shock,” I managed to say. “Adrenaline. Not good.”

  “Right.” She put my good arm over her shoulders and wrapped her arm around my waist.

  Up the hill we staggered.

  In what seemed several hours to me, the house came into view.

  But what I saw was not exactly my house. It was a rare glimpse of the expanded Now. I didn’t see my home simply as it was at that moment, I saw the house in all times at once: as it was being built, long before I’d been born, and I saw it as it was when I’d been a child, then the abandoned house of the first days after I’d returned to Blue Mountain—even the renovations that would happen to it after I died. I could see the entire history of the house, shifting in the nighttime air. It was an eternal moment, and it was beautiful.

  25

  I have no recollection of what happened next, but moments later I found that my feet were on my front porch.

  “I’ll get it,” I said giddily, fishing in my pocket for the keys.

  I unlocked the door and turned my face toward Dr. Nelson.

  “Won’t you come in?” I asked her politely.

  “Okay,” she said, helping me past the threshold and into the kitchen. “Let’s get your coat off, wash out the wound in your arm, and patch you up.”

  “Good,” I agreed, making my way toward the kitchen table. “I could use some patching up.”

  In a dream of a dance I moved across the kitchen floor and sat in a kitchen chair. I watched as my mother and Lucinda and Melissa Mathews and Dr. Ceri Nelson all went to the kitchen sink, as though they were all one woman. I dizzily recalled the Wallace Stevens metaphor: “Twenty men crossing a bridge, into a village, are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, into twenty villages.”

  “I’m Billy Pilgrim,” I mumbled, half-distressed.

  “What?” she asked absently. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “I’ve come unstuck in time,” I explained.

  “Okay.” She was humoring me.

  In relatively short order, however, I felt a cold cloth on my arm, then a bandage, a piece of cloth that looked remarkably like one of my kitchen towels.

  Dr. Nelson handed me a glass of water.

  “Drink,” she commanded gently.

  I did.

  “Take about ten slow, deep breaths, right?” she encouraged.

  I did.

  Somewhere around breath number seven, she sat down beside me.

  My head began to clear. The white mist that had filled my house, and my mind, was evaporating. My arm hurt like hell.

  “All right.” I nodded. “Thanks. That was close.”

  “You were going to pass out.”

  “Yes.” I looked toward the phone. “We have to call the state patrol now. And we should call Melissa Mathews, too.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she asked, obviously testing my cognition.

  “Yes. She’d be offended if we didn’t.”

  She thought for a moment, and then nodded her head. “Right.”

  “In fact,” I said, getting to my feet, “I’m calling her first.”

  I strode to the phone and dialed the Blue Mountain police number, which I knew, of course, by heart.

  No answer.

  I had to look through a small paperbound book beside the phone to find Melissa’s private number.

  That phone rang only once.

  “Mathews,” she said sharply.

  “Melissa,” I shot back, “it’s Fever. There’s been another incident in the caves down from my house, and David Newcomb is dead.”

  “How?” was her first question.

  “Shot by the woman, Issie Raynerd,” I answered.

  “Right,” she said, “but that’s not her real name. You know that, right?”

  “I— it does seem like a fabrication. What’s her real name?”

  “Have you called anyone else about this?”

  “No,” I assured her. “This is my first call. But I thought the state patrol—”

  “I’ll call them,” she said.

  “Good. Look. How’s Skidmore?” I held my breath.

  “He’ll be fine.” I could hear the weariness in her voice then. “He’s hurt bad, though. And mad as the devil. I never heard him cuss before today.”

  “It’s a rare occurrence,” I agreed. “Melissa?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s Issie Raynerd’s real name?”

  “Where is she now?” she asked.

  “Down in the caves, or, really, probably on her way up to the house. I’m calling from my house. She also shot me. Did I mention that? In the arm
.”

  “You’uns had to keep running back and forth between your house and them caves. You was bound to get hurt.”

  I glanced at Ceri. “Melissa says we were bound to get hurt running back and forth between my house and the caves. Why were we doing that?”

  “That’s therapy,” Ceri answered, “in a nutshell.”

  “Get a gun,” Melissa said instantly. “You got a gun, right?”

  “Skid gave me one for Christmas some years ago, a hunting rifle.” I looked aimlessly around the house. “I have no idea where I put it.”

  “You have Issie’s pistol,” Ceri reminded me.

  “Oh, right,” I said to Melissa. “I’ve got a little pistol I took off of Issie.”

  “What kind is it?”

  I pulled the pistol out of my coat pocket and stared. “No idea.”

  “Well point it, but try not to use it, okay?” She sighed.

  “Right,” I agreed. “But look, Melissa? Why won’t you tell me this woman’s real name?”

  “I’m not sure we know her real name,” she said, but I could tell she was hedging.

  “But you think you know who she is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then?” I demanded

  “There’s a lots to it, Dr. Devilin,” she answered uncomfortably. “Best right now for me to get to your house with the state patrol. You’uns lock the doors and get some kind of plan, hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I told her.

  She hung up without further comment.

  “Well,” I announced, “the cavalry is on its way. But there’s a wrinkle.”

  “Issie Raynerd is not the girl’s real name,” Ceri said. “I heard. Should we look for your hunting rifle? That way we could both be armed.”

  “I’d rather not,” I answered, heading toward the front door.

  “Why not?” she asked, following me into the living room.

  “I’m not that comfortable around guns,” I answered honestly. “I don’t know where this particular rifle is, and I would rather, at this point, clobber Issie—or whatever her name is—in the head with a big stick. More direct. More satisfying.”

  “More caveman.”

  “Ah. Metaphor. Nice. I was just thinking of this great poem by Wallace Stevens,” I began.

  “Christ,” she interrupted. “For a guy who didn’t really take to academia, you certainly are an academic. Poetry, really? Now?”

  I had it in my head to argue that dire situations were the only real excuse for poetry in the human experience. But then I realized that such a line of conversation would only prove her point concerning my conflicting feelings about the academy.

  Instead, I went to the front door and bolted it, glanced at the living room window locks, and went to the fireplace, there to take up a very solid iron poker, and place the pistol on the mantel.

  “Here’s my weapon,” I told her, hefting the poker. “What’s yours? You want this pistol?”

  “No, my weapon is my mind,” she said, only half-jokingly.

  I started to say, “Now who’s the academic?”—but a pane of glass in my living-room window exploded.

  Ceri dropped low, behind one of the chairs. I stood, stupidly, right where I was by the fireplace.

  “Fever?” Issie’s voice came from my lawn. It was gentle, even flirty.

  Then I heard the bolt action eject a shell and put another in the barrel.

  “Yes?” I answered, and then instantly moved away and to my left.

  The gun fired, broke another pane of glass, and a bullet struck the mantel. That told me what I had intended to discover by answering her call: she was a very accurate shot.

  The bolt clicked again.

  I stayed low and made my way to the door.

  After a moment I could hear my porch steps creak. Then the boards in front of my door groaned. Then I could actually hear her breathing heavily and sniffing several times.

  My plan was to hit her as hard as I could in the shins, a move I was certain would dislodge the gun from her hands and render her helpless for a while. I crouched low, right by the doorframe, and waited.

  After another few seconds I was quite startled when she knocked on the door. I jumped a little and hit my elbow on the table near the window.

  “It’s me, Fever,” she said, her voice soft and simple. “It’s your Issie. Your wife.”

  I glanced toward Ceri. She took in a breath, but obviously had no idea what to do or say.

  “I have the wedding ring to prove it,” she said, almost at a whisper. “Remember?”

  I actually did remember, with odd clarity, that she had showed me a wedding ring the first night she’d appeared at my door. And the words she had just spoken were, I thought, identical to some of the first words she’d said to me. That gave me a very uncertain idea.

  I stood up to greet her, though the poker was still in my hand. I unlocked the door. I turned the handle. I pulled the door open.

  There she stood, her eyes vacant, the gun pointing downward, toward the porch floor.

  “You must be cold,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said, stone still.

  “Please come in.”

  “Do you know me?” she said.

  “Should I?”

  She held out her hand, and there it was: a golden wedding ring. Why did it look so familiar? Then Issie crossed over the threshold into my home. She didn’t look right or left. She took three strides and stopped, eyes closed.

  “It smells like home,” she said.

  “Issie?” Ceri began softly, “would you like to sit down.”

  Issie seemed surprised by the sound of another voice. She looked at Ceri and then back at me. It seemed clear to me that she had begun to repeat her first visit to me, nearly word for word. Something seemed to be looping in her brain. I realized that I ought to be extremely careful—she’d made some kind of odd shift. Again.

  “Please,” I said calmly, indicating the sofa with an oddly formal gesture.

  “Here,” she said absently, handing me the rifle, “I brought your gun back.”

  I took it from her hand quickly, and looked down at it. I shook my head. No wonder I had known some of the specifics about the gun. It was, in fact, the very one Skidmore had given me years before.

  “David took it when we broke into your house while ago,” Issie continued, drifting. “I see by your face I don’t need it now.”

  “You broke into my house?” I asked, before I thought better of it.

  “Uh huh.” She sat down. “It was David’s idea. He thought we should grab you in your sleep and take you down yonder, you know, to the caves. But you looked so sweet lying in your bed asleep that I told him no. He took your gun and some liquor—a few other valuables. We didn’t really think it out. We just—catch as catch can, so they say.”

  Ceri nodded. “And now you’re here to tell us the rest of the story. The real story.”

  “I am.” She sighed. “None of this worked out the way I thought it would. Not a bit of it.”

  Ceri moved around the sofa and took a seat in one of the chairs across from Issie. I stood by the door, apparently frozen, with a gun in one hand and a poker in the other, just watching.

  Ceri sat back. “Where would you like to start?”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, “you just said that you took some other valuables.”

  “That’s right,” Issie answered serenely.

  “What, exactly?” I wanted to know.

  “Found what I wanted,” she said, not looking at me. “Precious keepsakes, I might say.”

  “For instance?”

  “They’re mine,” Issie answered, a hint of anger touching her words.

  “Yes,” Ceri interceded quickly, “they’re yours and they’re safe.”

  She shot me a warning glance.

  “Right. Good.” I looked around the room for a second as if I’d never seen the place, and then laid the gun and poker against the wall by the door.

  “Why d
on’t you have a seat, too,” Ceri said to me, very pointedly.

  “Yes.” I moved instantly and sat.

  “Well,” Issie began, “it all started when I was just a little girl way back in the woods, over there in Fit’s Mill.”

  I couldn’t hide the obvious fact that I was startled by the mention of that place. It was a terrible, dead patch of kudzu and Klansmen, only occasionally enlivened by misery and despair. And it was the last resting place of my mother: her grave was in Fit’s Mill.

  “You never knew that’s where I was from,” Issie declared with some satisfaction. “I never let on. Changed my way of talking. Just like you. You did that when you left here and went to that university.”

  That was true enough. I learned very quickly that I’d been admitted to the university only partly because of my IQ and aptitude. I’d fulfilled a very specific niche in the institution’s enrollment records: token poor white mountain boy.

  So I sanded down my accent and my vocabulary every day until the rough-hewn edges were all gone, and the colorful colloquialisms had vanished. I spent lots of time making a five-word sentence into a twenty-five-word declaration, the way I heard most of my professors speaking. And when all the work was done, though I was still the odd Appalachian boy with the interesting family and the fascinating stories, people took to me, and I settled in.

  “Maybe,” Issie went on, “for people like me and you, Fever, there’s no real home, no real place to call our comfort. Not in this world, at least.”

  It was, at that point, impossible to tell if the wavering accent and the wistful demeanor were contrived or genuine. Was she the actor, again, or had she been shocked backward into her real self?

  “You were a little girl,” Ceri said, attempting to return Issie to her story.

  “I was just a little girl,” she said, and appeared to be on the verge of tears. “Away back in the woods.”

  Then, slowly at first, with growing intensity, we all heard the sirens coming. Apparently Melissa’s plea to the state patrol had been sufficiently insistent, and several cars were on their way up the mountain.

  “Police?” Issie asked, stunned. “You’uns called the police on me?”

  Ceri stood so suddenly it startled me, and Issie jumped.