Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

As I say, it’s all ridiculous, because I live all alone out here at the end of this narrow dirt road, it’s so wild that I’ve got a nest of garter snakes just under my doorstep. There’s a beaver dam thirty yards away. There aren’t any hotels.

  Yesterday I waited too. I waited all day long.

  Jesus! Shit! Fuck the postman!

  Think I’ll go to town.

  By the side of the road he saw a child long dead, small birds feeding on its entrails. It was impossible to tell if the child was male or female. It stank terribly. There was a horse with a bullet in its brain further on. Just at the town line he stopped to watch some boys nailing a woman to a barn. He watched for a long time. They had put two nails in each hand, one through the palm and another just below the wrist. The woman was naked. Her blood ran down her arms and over her breasts, which were small and tanned. The boys beat her with thin birch switches about the face and head. One of them pushed his thighs against her but he was still too small.

  Mr. Crocker was busy with a customer so he sat down at the soda fountain to wait. In the paper’s op ed page there was a debate over whether whoever finally was to be at the end of the chain letter was determined by chance or personality. A lot of bullshit. Mr. Crocker poured him a cream soda and they watched the building burning across the street. Leary’s drugstore.

  “Don’t like that,” said Mr. Crocker. “Could just as well be me.”

  “Nobody’d burn you out.”

  “Hard to say what some people will do these days, Alfred.”

  “You don’t have to worry.” He opened a package of potato sticks.

  “Postman arrive up your way yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Been here already this morning. Henley got his letter, y’know.”

  “Did he? No, I didn’t know.”

  “Got it yesterday.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Passed it on, of course.”

  “That was sensible of him.”

  “Wouldn’t expect otherwise of Henley.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  He finished his soda and paid Crocker his dollar eighty and walked outside. So Henley had got his letter. He wondered how he felt. It was the first time anyone he knew personally had ever got one. He thought about Henley’s shy stutter and wondered. Of course now he was a free man. There was no need for him to worry anymore. Though it must have been a shock nevertheless. Alfred himself had taken to worrying far too much these days. It might be better to have it over with. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he envied Henley.

  Though now you couldn’t trust him.

  He walked across the street to the cafe. Jamie was sitting there in front of a cup of coffee, squinting at the smoke from the drugstore.

  “Damned nuisance,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “I saw you come out of Crocker’s. He tell you about Henley?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure.” He took a sip of his coffee. The mug was all but buried inside his hand. His broad bearded face dipped down to the hand and rose again. You barely saw the transaction. “Henley was a decent enough guy,” he said. “Mean drunk sometimes but otherwise he was fine. Now what have you got. Another bloody butcher. Either that or he’ll be having second thoughts or regrets or whatever and he’ll sit himself in a corner somewhere and wait for the brains to crawl on out of him. Either way we won’t be seeing much of Henley anymore. Too bad. I’ll miss him.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You’re a cold one.”

  “I didn’t know him all that well.”

  “Sure you did. Anyway I knew him.”

  He ordered coffee just to sit with Jamie awhile. It was too soon to go back. He really didn’t want to go back.

  “You ever hear of anybody the same after the letter?” Jamie said. “Damned right you haven’t. They all change. Always for the worse, seems to me. And they call this a religion. Bullshit.”

  “There’s something of a . . . religious nature about it.”

  “Sure. In the old days they used to rub shit in their hair.”

  “At least there’s the problem of conscience.”

  “There is that.”

  The two friends sat silent for a moment. The wind had shifted so it was pleasant sitting there. Alfred wondered if Henley had put his name down. Or Jamie’s. The letter might be waiting for either of them.

  “See the paper today?” said Jamie.

  “Yes. They’re wondering what kind of man it will be who stops the letter. Again.”

  “A saint of course.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No.”

  “What kind then?”

  He shrugged. “Some fucking lunatic. Somebody tired, disgusted. No promethian, you can bet on that. Somebody without the stomach for it, without the imagination—I figure suicide is about lack of imagination. Somebody missing the urge to make use of all that permission.”

  “You?”

  “Hell, no. I’ve got a few scores to settle. Enough to keep me busy for a while. I’ll take my turn. I expect to enjoy it. The freedom I mean. I don’t swallow a word of it but I’ll play the game according to the rules and then I’ll probably blow my damned fool brains out. Far too late for heroics or sanctity or whatever the fuck they’re calling it, but probably it’s inevitable. My imagination will just give out on me. What to do next? Followed by instant remorse. Conscience will hit me far too late to do anybody any damn good but it’ll hit me eventually. And then of course I’ve had it. I think of conscience as a kind of pulling of the blinds, you know?”

  “I have no desire to hurt anybody. Nobody.”

  “Sure you do. Just wait.”

  It was the age they lived in, he thought—but that was hardly an explanation. Somewhere along the line he’d lost the track. It was the age they lived in but how? And why? It was impossible to see an evolution going on from the inside. All you could do was point to its most outlandish deformities, its most hideous incarnations. But the substance of the change lay hidden. Some mystery of the blood.

  He walked the same route home.

  The woman was still there, bleeding against the barn. He wondered if she was still alive. The boys were gone. The dead horse and the child were gone too. He wondered for what amusement they’d been dragged away. Someone had been using plastic explosive on the second-growth timber along the roadside. Trees cracked and scarred everywhere. No life exempt.

  He approached the house as he always did, carefully, soundlessly. By now it was his habit. An old woman had got Wayne Lovett with a shotgun as he walked through his own front door one night.

  His letter had fallen through the mail slot.

  He opened it.

  Just above his own name was Henley’s. It amused him to think that such a dangerous world should also be so damn predictable. He read the letter through and then read it again.

  The aforesigned pass on to you all responsibility for their actions, past, present and future. We deem this the highest honor, the highest challenge . . .

  The colorless language disappointed him. There was nothing here either to inspire or elate. Was that exactly unexpected?

  You may of course choose to accept or reject this responsibility . . .

  He knew the contents. The contents were a matter of public record. It was the wording, the exact form and syntax which had fascinated him, which remained secret to any who had not already got the letter and now he found that they had no power to stir him.

  To reject, merely add a new name to the space provided beneath your own. Be sure to check the list thoroughly to see that you do not repeat any name already entered above . . .

  If this was the most important moment of his life he felt no resonance to it. Everything, everything was missing! He felt nothing. Only a great void in which a stranger who looked like himself held an odd but commonplace form letter. Who exactly dreamt this up? he wondered. And wh
ere? In what grey office building? At what grim bar?

  Its conclusion was worst of all.

  Declared by the will of God and the First Congress of Faith, Abraham White, founder. All bless.

  His Gethsemane bored him.

  I keep standing staring at the thing wondering who to send it on to. Someone in the family, maybe, some uncle or cousin. Maybe one of the kids. No point making them wait as long as I have, getting old waiting, getting more and more nervous. Besides, a lot of kids seem to enjoy themselves at this.

  Maybe I should send it to Jamie. Not strange at all that we should talk about it today, as though it were understood between us—first Henley, then me, then Jamie. Or Jamie and then me. Whichever.

  I wonder if I can do this. It’s as hard for me to choose freedom as it is to choose the other. I should not have got this letter. I’m not cut out for such decisions. Jamie would have been much more suitable. He’s smarter, tougher, more thoughtful.

  Strange it doesn’t say what to do in order to end the chain. Everything else is so neatly and clinically spelled out for you. But I guess that’s understood. It’s the old, old concept of sin-eater again, only more extreme.

  To end the chain you’d have to die. To accept responsibility for all these crimes nothing short of death makes sense. And a hideous death at that. The worst death imaginable. What’s needed is a martyr, a brand-new Christ. If it were me I’d start by putting out my eyes.

  Do I send the letter to somebody I hate or somebody I love? Do I spare those I love the pain of waiting or take a chance that the letter might miss them entirely, as unlikely as that seems? Henley neither loved me nor hated me. He just knew me. Was it fair of him or even decent to involve me? I wonder what went through his mind, writing down my name.

  But I shouldn’t try to decide through Henley.

  A martyrdom I think is fascinating. I like the idea of putting out the eyes. Without the eyes there would be no going back, you couldn’t even see where to sign anymore even if you wanted to, you couldn’t see the list of names. The names, the writing, the ordinary symbols behind which all these people hide would be obliterated instantly. All that would remain is crime. Their crimes would enter you free and clear like breath through the nostrils to pollute you through and through.

  Next you should break the eardrums. See no evil, hear no evil. That’s the ticket. A pencil should do it. Break it off in the ear itself. Two pencils, one for each ear. It would take great resolve but that’s the idea. A martyr’s gestures have got to be big gestures. All these actions would have great importance. Mythic importance. In years to come men would pour over the corpse to discover the hidden meaning to each nuance of the slaughter. A kind of divine autopsy. Every move had to leave a clue and point the way. The key to Paradise from the black mouth of the Savior.

  Meat scissors at the root of the tongue. Speak no evil. A mouth filled with gore, with the hot brine of life. One’s own cup drunk dry. Be careful, Alfred. It would take a poet to see that one. And most of the poets are dead.

  Maybe Jamie.

  I really should pass it on to him. See if he follows through as he said he would. Probably he lied, though, or at least exaggerated. A liar under the gun.

  I have no faith in anyone.

  Let’s see. What’s next?

  If only it were possible to extract the brain without destroying the body. It would be good to add think no evil to our new easy-step commandments. If you could tap the skull and drain it dry and then go on from there. But no, you have to stick to what’s possible so the brain and heart are out of the question until the very end because clearly it’s got to be slow, a death to last forever, a death commensurate with the crime, the one really emphatic death amid all these careless neutral ones.

  One should break the legs and smash the bones of the feet with hammers, crush the fingertips and sever the thumbs. Especially important, the thumbs. But first the genitals should be torn away and the teeth smashed and swallowed, one should have to throw oneself against a wall or table until the backbone cracks and the skull is fractured, long sharp knives one should shove up one’s ass, the nose must be severed, the nipples burned black.

  All this before my brains tumble free down my face and chest and puddle on the floorboards of this old dusty room.

  It would be delightful to know before it is impossible to know what the mistake was, the error in composition, the failure of the glands or of the nervous system. I really don’t want to hurt anybody, least of all myself. But I think that’s asking too much.

  I have to get busy.

  I have a message to send. A personal message. From the end of the chain.

  You’re full of shit, every one of you. I’m about to prove it.

  Forever

  It was many years ago over what was probably a little too much Almaden white wine and marijuana that my wife Rita, my old lady in those days, remember? said to me that to her way of thinking the real goal of life was simple—it was life, more and more of it, moments to days to years down a long winding path through eternity. That the ultimate goal, obviously, was to live forever. She believed that someday we’d master that trick too and was mildly pissed off that ours did not look like the generation who were going to manage it.

  I remember she cited our ever-increasing lifespan, our extended years of health and vigor. We were moving, she said, in baby steps in that direction. In the Middle Ages you were lucky to hit thirty. Our parents could probably count on seventy. And then the urge toward procreation. A pretty poor substitute for any single organism’s struggle toward eternity but as yet the best we had. Because at least it begged the gene-pool foward, it gave us time, as a species, to get the hang of it.

  I said I didn’t want to live forever. It would get boring.

  No it wouldn’t, she said. Think of all there is to learn, all the books you could read, the people you’d get to meet, the places you could travel. Moons and planets maybe. The only limit would be your own imagination.

  She had me there. Hell, I prided myself in my imagination. What young would-be writer didn’t?

  So let me get this right, I said. Nobody would ever die?

  Sure they would. An accident could get you. A natural disaster.

  But aside from that we’d all live forever? Even all those right-wing assholes out there? Kissinger and Nixon?

  It seemed to me there were flaws here.

  The way I remember it now she sort of sighed and smiled at me like you just don’t get it, dummy, do you and said something about time, about time being on our side in this. Because if you had all eternity ahead of you, why would you grasp at things and fight for money and fame and land and position, for protection, it was all about protection, wasn’t it? Why would you feel all this hate and rage toward the other guy? Time would sort that out because it would take away the fear. And it was fear that drove you. Fear of a poverty you could never get out of because you didn’t have the time to figure out how, of never having accomplished anything worthwhile because life was too damn short and your daily needs too pressing for you to try to find out exactly what it was you could do. Fear of failing health and an ugly painful death surrounded by strangers and tubes and wires in some antiseptic hospital.

  Limitless time would stop wars. Global and personal. Time would gut all the purses and distribute the wealth. Time would empty hospitals.

  She got pretty passionate, I recall.

  We did in those days.

  I miss them.

  And I miss her passion too.

  Until recently I took a lot of walks. Rita and I lived in small two-bedroom hundred-and-fifty-year-old house in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in our souls die-hard hippies to the end though we’d long since given up on soy and sprouts and brown rice. Our acre plot of land lay between the State Park on one side and ten more acres of forest owned by a pair of New Yorkers, brothers by the name of Kaltsas, who bought it in the ’60s for tax purposes. They’d never intended to build. So there
was plenty of space to meander.

  There’s a place on the Kaltsas property I always found myself going back to. Especially in summer. It’s a ledge, a high outcropping of bare rock up a trail thirty feet or so from a fast-running stream. But it’s a gradual, easy climb up the eastern slope. Once you’re up there you’re standing beside a waterfall on the western side which pours down over the rocks into a pool you can wade in up to your waist if we’ve had a little rain. You can drink the water. It’s cold and clean. Beyond the stream is thick forestland, cool even in summer. Turn to the east and you’re looking beyond some tall oak and birch trees to the mountains far away across a wide sloping field of grass. No thicket, no scrub, just tall waving grass. Until the treeline at the foot of the mountains halts its gentle march.