Chris scarcely spoke until ws had finished one glass and poured a second.
“Well, Kirk, I’m feeling half human again, but I’m too dragged out to talk much. I’ve been thinking that I ought to do a little research. Meanwhile, I’d be grateful if you kept our little adventure to yourself—at least for a time. I’m hoping the town folks think it was just a random tornado centered around the swamp. If they saw the sky image, it will complicate matters. But maybe even that could be explained away as a freak of lightning combined with funny cloud formations.”
I gave him my word. Over a week passed before I saw him again.
He sat down in his favorite kitchen chair and propped his feet on the wood-box.
“As I hoped,” he told me, “the natives shrugged it off as an early tornado spinning around near the swamp. Not a soul noticed the sky image." He chuckled. “I guess nobody stayed outdoors to watch cloud formations!” “You’ve done that research?” I asked.
He nodded. “I found some information about Iththaqua in an old volume at the Hartford library. A collection of local Indian legends. Iththaqua was supposed to be a sort of swamp demon who granted favors to Indians who made sacrifices to him—both animal and human. In return for blood sacrifices, he would protect hunters in the swamp. And—listen to this—in some cases he would grant unheard-of longevity to faithful worshipers!”
I thought back to that repulsive, bullet-riddled body on the floor of the cellar, quickly decaying before our eyes.
“That was Old Jendick, then?”
“I’m convinced of it. So far as I can figure, he would be nearly a hundred and fifty years old!”
“How do you explain that fiery face looming in the sky above us?”
“In his last extremity, old Jendick called on Iththaqua for help—and Iththaqua responded. Jendick must have been the very last of his worshipers, however, and with Jendick s death, Iththaqua’s power immediately started to wane. Iththaqua, you might say, was kept alive by the faith of his followers—and by the blood of their sacrifices, perhaps. When none of his followers remained alive, he himself could no longer exist. The best he could do was to summon up enough final strength for a kind of thunderbolt exit while he glared down at us—boiling with fury but basically impotent.” “What about—what we found in those brine barrels?”
Chris shifted uneasily. “I feel guilty about that. You know, about eight months ago, a tramp was staying in the remains of a shack in woods near the edge of the swamp. Never bothered anybody, so I let him alone. After he suddenly disappeared, I looked in the shack and found quite a cache of new canned goods, crackers, coffee, and so on. Seemed strange to me that he’d leave all that stuff, but I shrugged it off. Now I’m wondering if he wandered into the swamp and ended up as a sacrifice to Iththaqua—and subsequently an occupant of the brine vats!”
He stood up. “I’m also wondering about those hunters of years ago who were supposed to have been caught in quicksand. You’ll remember that we didn’t see any sign of quicksand, bad as the swamp was in other respects. Maybe those lost hunters were caught by the Jendicks!”
After he left, I regretted that I hadn’t asked him what he proposed to do about the pickled human flesh we had found in that charnel-house cellar. I had an answer a month or so later when he stopped by.
“I have an aviator friend at the Hartford airport,” he told me. “We took a helicopter ride over the swamp one afternoon. The Jendick house—in fact, the knoll itself—was washed away. The row of black-gum trees has disappeared. Not a stick of wood visible. The chances of recovering any brine-preserved human remains is gone forever. And I can’t honestly say I’m sorry!” I’ve tramped through the woods and meadows around Greystone Bay many times since my adventure with Chris, but I never again ventured into Jendick’s Swamp. In fact, I've been very active in all movements to preserve the marshland as a wildlife preserve. I’m not protecting it against people so much. It’s the swamp. It keeps moving south.
POEMS
The Humming Stair
(1953)
And will tomorrow come ? And if it comes,
Will mackerel nets return their Silver catch?
Will postmen drop their letters in the box?
—Or will a sly, uncertain stranger lift the latch?
Someone with knives has slaughtered in the street;
Someone has simpered on the stair, sniggered in the hall;
Someone has shouted, has danced upon the roof—
(Someone you know, someone you feared would fall.)
Crows have come over at night, cawing, cawing;
Owls have been seen in the noonday sun.
If eager apparitions enter flesh,
Where will you hide, which way will you run?
Where will you go when shadow seizes light?
When in your empty room dark mirror shines?
How will you hear your own wild laughter,
When up the humming stair the horror winds?
The Wind of Time
(1959)
This night of frosty wind and stars
The mind in its own cold house
Returns down corridors of dark Seeking its lost sad images
In some haunted winter room
Her still white face awaits me yet;
Her gothic gift and her impassive grace
Stain the towering darkness like a star.
The wind that sweeps this labyrinth
Racks the empty earth with grief.
It is the antique wind of time
Which rushes with its phantoms through my heart.
Grandfather's Ghost
(1959)
Under the elms, on our city street,
I met my grandfather, eighty years dead.
His high silk hat was sleek and new;
His gold-topped cane was glittering.
He smiled and bowed and stopped to talk:
"Time turns back or time spins forward;
Either you’re a ghost or I am dead!”
And he twirled his ebony cane.
Out of the corner of my eye
I saw a sulky whirling by....
I turned and ran in panic flight
And then the street dissolved from sight!
One Day of Rain
(1961)
One day of rain and railing winds
I walked the street my family knew.
What I sought was lost in time;
Yet I searched, while strange winds blew.
Alien eyes that met my own
Were blank or fearful, hard, remote.
I felt as if their owners’ hands
Were talons twisted toward my throat.
For fifty years the street was home,
A sun-filled street where great elms spread.
I watched the slow eternal rain
And knew at last that I was dead.
Ghost-Town Saloon: Winter
(1961)
The bar was black with blistered age,
Rat-gnawed, beetle-drilled.
Floor boards creaked and squealed.
While I stood, deciphering the dust,
Suddenly, through the tarnished skeleton
Of a dim and twisted chandelier,
Flakes of snow began to fall.
The room was ice; they didn’t melt.
Down they came, another dust.
The one split poker table
Played with spinning whorls of snow;
The wrinkled bar turned virgin white.
Standing there, alone and still,
Charmed to a reminiscent mood,
I felt an eerie certainty that all
The roaring knights of gold and guns
—Harlots, aces, spilled whisky—
Ached for resurrection out of time.
There was none. Only this fall
Of winter snow, reaffirming death.
I crossed the clattering icy floor,
Looked back at the threshold’s edge,
An
d eighty years of silence closed again.
The Scythe of Dreams
(1961)
Sleepers are mangled by the scythe of dreams;
Every spastic turning takes a knife.
Out of childhood's thicket creeps the ghost
We thought was banished with the hopscotch squares.
Out of the drunken tunnel of our loves
The old sad terrors slowly real.
Fears have flaming faces; gains are lost.
Naked in our nightmare need, we know at last
The fissures never filled, the crevices we kept.
We glimpse again with eyes that lose their lids
The grey ineffable ghoul of all our days.
Recognition of Death
(1961)
I see now, not far away, the savage pit,
The strangling sea, the web of night, enormous.
I fear them. Murmur words, blur them with myths—
Terror remains. You cannot touch it with talk.
Fear has entered my aging fibers, coiled like an asp.
Henceforth I shall bear it toward the darkness,
And if it casts a shadow in the sun,
Then will the sun be sweeter, while it stays.
The Chestnut Roasters
(1961)
"The wind has a tongue tonight,” he said,
And knocked his pipe against the chair.
Just then a chestnut jumped and split;
When they looked again he wasn’t there.
"Guess I’ll hitch my chair up,” someone said,
And moved in closer toward the fire.
Sitting warm, they watched the chestnuts,
Whose jumped first and whose the higher.
The next day when they found him dead
Each one recalled what he had said.
They knew that night no wind had blown
And wondered what he might have known.
They lay and pondered in the dark
His enigmatic last remark,
And cursed the chestnut’s sudden height
That kept them all from just: "Goodnight!”
The Man I Met
(1961)
I saw his searching eyes at all the bars;
I heard his hurried feet along the street.
There was no place to go where he had never been,
But every door he opened swiftly closed again.
He bought me drinks and burned me with his eyes,
And when I finally went, he was not content.
What he sought was always just as far,
Yet he always hustled to another crowded bar.
He came and went until the lights flicked off,
While autumn followed autumn down the sky.
A hundred polished mirrors held his face;
The unexpected clock deleted every trace.
The Serpent Waits
(1961)
Beneath a withered bush the serpent waits.
The bee is treading gold in secret hexagons,
The goshawk turns on tides of glittering air
—But the little leaves are whispering of death,
Death of the Race of Man, the arrogant ape
Whose lethal atoms shine like living suns,
The swarming breed that hungers for the night.
Beneath a withered bush the serpent waits.
The Last Pagan Mourns for Dark Rosaleen
(1961)
Gold-headed Finn has ridden away;
The Hound of Culainn sleeps—
Who has chided my Dark Rosaleen
That she weeps?
Remembers and weeps?
The might of Cormac is no more;
Knocknaria shelters Maeve—
Who has doubted my Dark Rosaleen
Dreams of the grave?
Of the cairn-littered grave?
He of the Wine-Red Hand is gone;
Kellach, the last bard—
Who had denied my Dark Rosaleen
Finds the way hard?
Forsaken and hard?
The day of Dunsuanna’s chief is done,
By Cathbar sleeping, brothers lost—
Pity you not my Dark Rosaleen
So wakeful and tossed,
So grieving and tossed?
Ossian
(1961)
I am an old man now
And still a pagan.
My words are motes
Aloft in shadow.
The friends I knew
Are legend-dwellers
Or underneath a cairn.
And yet I think
—By my white beard!—
That olden host still waits,
Holding their horse In some high windy place.
Avery Anameer
(1961)
Instead of swinging from a beam
In the barn’s sweet summer dust,
Avery Anameer walked down the road
And like a muskrat took the pond.
The smoky hills held sapphire heat;
Tiger lilies lifted orange flanks
Along the edge of aromatic knolls
—But Anameer sank down like sin,
Past spotted turtles, catfish, frogs,
Down to silt, down to tangled snags—
And there he stayed until the grappling hook,
With lack of ceremony, fished him out.
He was middle-aged, robust,
A bachelor, neither rich nor poor.
The catfish must have marveled at the sight
As Avery dropped in their domain.
The turtles may have nibbled at his ears.
All we could do was transfer him from water
Into earth—and ever go on wondering
What made him leave a load of hay
Half forked—horses hitched
And standing in the open barn.
We never solved the riddle, never will,
And maybe never want to.
But that team of horses waiting in the barn
Haunts us as no answer ever could!
Nightmare
(1961)
Beyond the thickets of my self,
Beyond the barrier of dream,
I walked a lurid wilderness.
Under a sky of slate,
Over a landscape of stone,
I stumbled with my fear.
Down dim remembered aisles
I met the flaming dead
With eyes like fiery jewels.
Each one stared and beckoned,
Each one groped in haste
And fled down paths of stone.
In swift pursuit a chittering ghoul,
Quickened with questing glee,
Leaped like a dog unleashed.
Beyond this phantom chase,
Moored on a lake of mist,
Squatted the ultimate cave.
Fringed with bearded slime,
It waited with gaping mouth,
A door of final doom.
On the shores of that lake,
By the waters that never stirred,
I stood like a statue of fear,
Till out of the nightmare wood
With flaming eyes and fleshless feet
The phantom chase returned.
Terror split the sky!
My sudden hopeless scream
Shattered the shell of dream.
Winter Hours
(1979)
Beyond the road, far in the wood,
summer's brooks lie black with ice.
Gusts of freezing wind cavort;
hours are gripped in winter's vise.
In this stark and barren place
illusions dissipate; truth turns to stone.
The weight of bleak reality
burdens the flesh, strikes to the bone.
Contagion
(1979)
Corn turned rotten on the stalks;
crows were catching crickets in the field;
spiders crouched among the
furrows;
watercress curled up and dried.
The sun went flaming down the west
and we dragged to our pallets and died.
Encounter
(1981)
"What is it in the winter night that swings in an icy breeze?"
(It's only a broken branch, my child, caught up in some willow trees.)
"What is it staring at the moon with eyes like whitened glass?"
(It's only a vagrant owl, my love, watching the clouds that pass.)
"What is it high above the ground walking on the wind it seems."
(It's only a drunken reveler caught up in his whisky dreams.)
"What is it that swings with open mouth while not a sound comes out?"
(It's only a mute from the village, dear, a climbing but clumsy lout.)
"What is it in the winter night that glitters as the frost comes down?"
(It's just reflected light, my child, and we must hurry into town!)
Imminence of Snow
(1985)
The imminence of snow
excites me,
calms me,
soothes me like love;
it presses in
with promises
the falling flakes
will not fulfill.
No matter.
Collected Stories and Poems Page 18
