by Urban Waite
“And you killed it?”
“No,” Will said. “How do you kill something you cannot see?”
Lonny finished the cigarette and flicked it away toward the firepit. “You think this bear is supernatural? You think this bear is some heavenly retribution? The Father would love that. That would be scripture to the man.”
“No,” Will said. “I’m saying I don’t know a goddamn thing. I’m saying I can’t help you.”
“Now, Will. You know that’s not something you can say.” Lonny took a small flask from his pocket, worked the top off and then drank. He never took his eyes from Will. “You need a little liquid encouragement?”
“No,” Will said.
Lonny took another swig of the flask and then he sat on one of the cut logs by the firepit and looked up at Will. “Things could be a lot worse for you,” Lonny said. “Being out here as much as you are you haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen. You don’t know what they have us doing these days.”
“The Father chose to put me here,” Will said.
“The Father says the time is approaching.”
“Is that right?”
“He tells us to read the signs. Plain as day, he says. All hell is breaking loose out East. And it’s coming, all the goddamn way across the country. I see you, Will. I see how you are. You’re not a believer like the new blood we have now, but you will be. You will be one of these days and you’re going to need to be saved like all the rest of us.”
“I see you over there keeping the faith,” Will said, looking at the flask and the man that held it.
“Old habits die hard.”
“Yes, they do.”
Lonny took another drink. He ran his eyes out to the clearing and the view of the mountains farther on. Insects were dancing in the last lowering rays of sun. “What happened to the tiger?”
“The powers that be went and talked to the local villagers. A pit was suggested. The enemy used to use them on us. Just slaughter us all to hell. Maybe you’ve heard about it? Lines of sharpened sticks, covered over by a latticework of twigs and then concealed. Gravity did the rest.” Will worked the knife across the skin again, yanking the hide down until he reached the front legs, then he worked the blade down along the backs of each, cutting and pulling.
“That’s how you got the tiger?”
“No, the tiger waited. He took one man out at a time. He waited in that jungle and he watched and he knew without a doubt that we were there to kill him and we never did.”
“What the fuck.” Lonny took another drink. “Why the fuck did you tell me that story in the first place?”
“Sometimes it’s important to understand you don’t always get what you want.”
“That goes both ways,” Lonny said. He looked Will’s work over and then he got up to leave. “You better throw that fucker in the back of the truck for me. I’ve got a lot to do before I start digging us a hole out by the Kershaw place.”
“You’re not going to catch him,” Will said.
“Yeah, well, I’m going to do everything I goddamn can. And you’re going to help me.”
* * *
WILL STOPPED AND STOOD IN THE SAME SPOT HE’D SEEN THE bear stand to meet the coming thunderstorm. He turned and looked up on his place. The slant of the roof, the tin cap of the stovepipe, the whole cabin almost part of the forest itself, so small and nondescript atop the little hill.
A day had passed since Lonny had come and Will now carried three beavers on a string. He had shot them from the shore that morning and then watched them bob to the surface. Stripping down naked, he’d gone wading into the pond until his feet lost the bottom. For a little while, after he’d gathered them up and come back to the shore, he glanced back at the lodge there and the hole in it that the bear had torn a few days before. Blood and water now dripped down his naked forearm and fell in a splatter to the mud below. He gutted each animal to preserve the meat longer and then tied the castor glands shut.
The Kershaw place was twenty miles away, but it was half that if he cut through the forest and made his way through the fields. It was getting on in the afternoon, and as he stood in the place the bear had stood he tried to think the bear’s thoughts, see the bear’s path, and know the bear’s world.
* * *
HE DREAMT AND HIS MIND WANDERED IN TIME AND HIS UNCONscious thoughts were of old stories he’d heard as a kid, passed down through his family all the way back to the pioneer days. Bears twice the height of a man, miners and loggers hunting them near to extinction. Ranch owners shooting any they saw. These bears simply hungry, simply doing what they could to survive, and doing it the only way they knew how.
He woke in the night and sat up, looked about the clearing he had chosen to make his camp. The Kershaw place was another five miles or so. The camp made when he had come up the ridge and moved into the high country gave him a vantage over the land. And while the setting sunlight spread like an orange dye through the darkening blue water of the sky, he ate mountain blueberries he’d gathered and chewed bits of smoked jerky he’d made from past kills. Fifty yards away the beavers hung from a branch on a tree and while he took his meal he watched the way the coming night breeze turned the carcasses. The flat, broad tails like some sort of sail catching the wind.
It was to this string that he looked now, fresh from his dreams, watching the dark shapes of the beavers turn in the blue starlight. He coughed and spit away mucus and in the silence that followed, his eyes roamed the clearing considering each tree and blade of grass as if each harbored some unknown threat to his person.
In the east a pale red light shone like that of the sun in primordial dawn, but he knew it was not. He stood now, folding his wool blanket away, then pulling one boot on after the other. He reached for the rifle and then set out across the clearing, moving through grass that came to his kneecaps.
When he reached the far wood, he could smell the smoke. And by the time he’d gone a hundred yards farther in, passing through dappled shadows and pools of moonlight beneath the overhead evergreen thatch, he had begun to hear the chanting and the calls of the worshippers below. After another hundred yards, he came to a broad rock face that ran for a quarter mile to either side of him and outlined the river valley below. A river ran at the bottom of the rock face, the water black and ink-like but the light of the fire shining in places where it caught on the surface. Farther on he could see the great bonfire. The pile of wood was ten feet high and the fire burning another twenty or thirty feet in the air. He could feel the thermals working out over the river and then rise, a vortex of warmth and cool river air swirling like a whirlpool before him.
The bonfire cast its light all around in the circle that formed at its base and in this Will saw the shapes of those who had come to worship its destruction. The sound of their chanting heard as they prayed and worshipped, their heads bent in a chaotic dance of their own making. The words, at this distance, not clear to him as they bounced off the rock face and were lost in the thermal wind. But Will had heard them before and knew much of what was being said, though he liked not to think of it. They were part of the Eden’s Gate Church, and like Lonny had said, they did what they pleased and worshipped in ways of their own choosing. For this was their land and whether Will liked it or not he had come to them twelve years before looking for salvation, and they in turn had given it to him, making him what he was now, game warden, poacher, killer of beasts large and small.
Keeping back from the ledge a little he found a shadowed bit of rock and, putting the rifle on the forty or so people that danced and circled below, he flipped up the scope cover and began to roam his eye across those below. Many wore the white robes of the church. He ran the scope from the bearded faces of men to the unkempt, flowing hair of the women. He watched not just them but the elongated shadows of their movements, the shadows of legs and arms cast across the fiery ground like some sort of transmogrified creature, half beast and half man.
By the time he had run the scope
all the way around the circle they were forming into a line that stretched from the burning pile of wood down toward the river. Taking his eye from the scope, he moved forward on his elbows until he was at the edge of the cliff. He reached back, brought up the rifle and, careful not to let the light catch on the glass lens, he looked down on the figure of The Father there in the river. Fifty-some years old, he wore the same unmoving face that could be terror or salvation to any who looked upon it. The man stood knee-deep in the water in his own robe. The water clung to the material and climbed its way to his chest where it hung from him and showed the strong musculature of his body. He chanted and looked to the heavens and one at a time he invited each worshipper to come to him as he dipped them into the river and held them there, watching as their arms flailed for some sort of purchase.
After all had been baptized a new group was gathered. Some in robes but many in their own clothes, brought huddled together from out of the shadows, some shivering, some visibly frightened. All of them led by men carrying guns and several with machetes. As they walked, the rest of the willing in their baptismal robes closed in behind them, encircling them there on the shore. Out of this group, holding a large revolver, was John Seed, the younger brother of The Father, slighter in build, but cut from the same cloth. Both bearded and tattooed, and both with those all-seeing eyes that seemed to search through the dark with a kind of nocturnal prowess.
With the revolver John went into the water and stopped no more than a few feet from The Father. They waited, the two of them, as men bearing rifles and machetes brought these new worshippers out to them. Each, as had been done with the willing, were baptized in turn and then led back to shore by their guards. And though Will had seen baptisms before, he had not seen anything like this, where men and women were forcibly dipped. Lonny had told him of the shift, and had Will not skipped so many sermons in the past—his own faith waning little by little—Will might not have been as surprised at what he saw down below.
Many on shore were crying and he could see the visible shaking of their shoulders and the terror of the night in their faces. He watched them as if seeing them from out of some bubble that no sound could escape. Their distance and the rush of the water sucking away at the cries they made and the protests they had for this forced ceremony.
For a time he kept the scope on them, watching as they came to the water, tried to fight, to break free from their captors, but none made it far and each met the same fate that had awaited those baptized before them.
Years had gone by since Will had been a part of this. And none of it had been as it was now, watching those down there who were unwilling. In those times, years before, he had seen the giving of a soul and the baptizing of many. He had stood in a robe on the side of a river like this one and he had done his part to be one of them, giving his soul to the church. But that even seemed like another life, another time, a past that had grown distant from the man he was now and the role he’d been given.
Having seen enough, he pulled back from the edge. He stood and moved away toward the forest and then from out of the depths he heard the crack of a shotgun. He rushed to the edge and looked down. He could see many among them had cowered, the guards standing above them. Still farther back stood many of the first of the willing and in the water waited The Father, and John. Will could not tell who had fired the shot and he ran his eyes down the river, wondering if he might see a body pulled toward the rapids and then out of sight where the river curved away farther on.
But he saw no body and when he brought his eyes back to The Father, the man was already calling for the next to be baptized. And Will, as witness in all of this, looked again to the empty place in the river where the rapids turned the water to white, and he was unsure of what he had seen. He let his eyes linger there and he watched how the water ran below him. He thought about the meaning of the baptism and the washing of the sins.
When all had dipped their heads beneath the water, Will moved away from the edge. He did not need to know what The Father would say to them now. He did not need to watch anymore. For he knew this part well, he had heard it twelve years before when he had come willing to the church and he repeated it to himself as he walked back to his camp. “We stand on the edge of a great chasm. Below us is the fate of mankind. Humanity has grown numb to the machine of strife that it has created, but we cannot. We and we alone have been chosen to survive this calamity and rebuild. We are all angels, and we few are set on a path back to the garden. We are a Family. I am your Father. You are my Children. And together we will march to Eden’s Gate.”
* * *
THE MORNING MIST WAS IN THE FIELDS BEYOND WHEN WILL came to the top of the small rise and looked down upon the Kershaw house. The grassy fecal odor of the cattle lingered in the air. He ran his eyes out along the cattle wire until it dropped away over the edge of the rounded field. A slim line of wood smoke escaped the chimney top and this too he watched.
Moving now, following the gravel road that ran the top of the hill, he came down through stands of pine and could see the barn below. One of the broad doors stood open, its lowermost corner resting in the dirt. Dark shadows seen within. And though he could smell the cows in the air he had not seen one and he stepped closer, wondering now what had happened and whether the bear had come again and would now emerge from within that greater shadow, covered in the fresh blood of some new slaughter.
He found nothing of the sort, simply hay and the chipped paint of the stalls. The heady aroma of forgotten animals, long vacated from this place. When he came out again he saw the white church truck parked off the road, closer to the pine forest than to the house. A shovel and pick had been leaned against the side of the bed with two yellow cowhide gloves resting atop each pole, like the coxcomb beginnings of some makeshift pair of scarecrows.
Fifty yards away the opening of the screen door startled Will. He turned and looked toward the porch where Lonny now waited, dragging his fingers through his beard and looking across the grass and gravel to Will.
When Will walked up, Lonny had already taken his pouch from one of his pockets and had begun to roll a cigarette. He stood atop the porch. He wore a thin cotton tank that clung tight around his ribcage all the way to the waist of his pants. His hair was mussed and on the skin of his face were the visible imprints of sleep. He spat and then wet his lips and he watched Will where he stood with the beavers on a string over one shoulder and the rifle on the other.
“You sleeping here?” Will asked.
“Sometimes.”
Will watched him rummage through his pocket and then bring up the lighter. Lonny cupped the lighter and brought the flame to his lips, the cigarette flared and the first draught of smoke was taken down within his lungs. All of it seen in a kind of deliberate and slow catharsis, smoke and air, the shift of a breeze, the washing of the smoke across his skin. The smell of the smoke commingled with the smell of the cows now made their absence from this place more apparent. “What happened to the cattle?”
“Eaten,” Lonny said.
Will looked past him to where the door stood open, as if the cows might somehow be within. “And the Kershaws?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
Lonny was smiling a little, watching Will, and then he leaned and spat again, not even bothering to get the spittle off the porch.
* * *
WILL LEFT THE BEAVERS ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER AND WENT to use the bathroom. When he was done he came back into the small hallway that ran out from the living room. His hands were wet from washing them in the sink and he ran his palms down his shirtfront then flipped them over and ran the backs against the material, drying them one side at a time like the stropping of a razor across the leather of a belt.
Across the hallway was a partially closed bedroom door and he pushed it open and looked within. A queen-sized bed, the sheets pulled back on each side. Two pillows and the indents of two heads, as if whoever had been here had simply risen minutes before and now was o
ut walking the field or waiting on the coffee to finish percolating.
He turned and went farther down the hallway, moving away from the kitchen and living room. He came to two more bedrooms, pushed each door open in turn and glanced inside. In one, blue walls and the hanging models of airplanes built from some kit. In the other, pink walls and a dresser lined along its top with stuffed animals and small plastic toy horses, many toppled over, but some still standing in various poses of action like a frozen moment captured by a child’s diorama.
“I heard you had a daughter.” Lonny stood at the head of the hallway, thirty paces away.
“You heard?”
“That’s what they told me. That’s what they said when they gave me the job of watching over you.”
Will took in the pink color of the walls, the diffuse curtains across the single window. He’d had a daughter. He’d had a wife. A family. Will had had a whole life before this one and it was his fault his wife and daughter were not with him anymore, that they were not part of this world anymore. And though he had come to The Father and to Eden’s Gate for some kind of forgiveness, he knew now that forgiveness was not what he’d found.
He closed his eyes a moment. He smelled dust and something beneath it all that was sweet and almost recognizable. When he opened his eyes again, he turned and looked toward Lonny. “What happened here?” Will asked.
* * *
“YOU’RE PART OF US, WILL. BUT WHEN YOU, OR JOHN, OR THE Father, or even I look at the same thing it does not mean we see the same thing.” They walked the field. The blood could still be seen in the grass where the cow had died, where the bear had come and eaten its fill and then moved on again. “Every one of us has our purpose. You have lived out there and you have served the purposes of the church and they are grateful for it.”
“And the Kershaws?” Will asked, still thinking of the empty rooms and what had been said to him. The answer Lonny had given that was not an answer.
