by Paula Guran
“Ain’t not a speck left on you,” I promise. “You washed it all clean.”
“Maybe one day, that be the truth of it,” she mutters, hustling the both of us outta the house.
There still be patches of blood on the snow where we dragged his body, where it lay before the wolves come slinking outta the woods to carry it off. I ain’t ever gonna forget the deep, mournful sound of me Mam’s howl as she called to her kin, or the way me aunt yelped and bounded about her, excited as cub in its first spring to find her sister wearing the fur at last. But me Mam, she just turned tail back into Granmama’s house and by the time I followed her, she already be woman again.
I kick at the biggest stain, hoping to bury it ’neath cleaner snow, but it just spreads itself bigger and me Mam yells at me to keep up. “Little bit of blood don’t matter none,” she says. “Ain’t no one gonna find any piece o’ that man, once they be done with him.” Her face be tight and hard, her lips pressed to a trembling white line, like she be furious but trying not to show it. I seen her make that face before, when me stepfather come home stinking of ale, or when some fine lady dream up a fault in her stitching and wanna pay less than be promised.
“Sorry, Mam,” I says, me voice wheedling with worry. “I ain’t meant for him to find out I be wolf.”
And then me Mam, she stops dead in her tracks and turns round, grabs me shoulders with both hands like she means to shake the teeth from me head. “You don’t got to apologize for this,” she says. “You don’t got to apologize for what you be, not ever. That man were gonna take your life, girl, just as he took me own Mam’s and would’ve taken mine, he ever found out, no matter that I be the mother of his child, no matter that I loved him.” Her words break, and her breath billows in frosty plumes. “Maybe I still love him, and maybe I be loving him till the end of me sorry days, for in many ways he were a fine man, and better women than me been known to blind themself to what lie black and rotten ’neath a man’s finery. But that be my burden to carry, not yours. Not ever yours.”
She hugs me close and the crimson thread thickens and tugs, the pull of it gentle as me Mam’s hands, and I know it be knotted as tight round her breastbone as it be knotted round mine, that it binds me to her now and always, as it always has done, and there be nothing in the world what could ever see it severed.
Far off in the hills, there come a howl, long and yodeling. Me aunt’s maybe, or maybe one of her pack, and I yearn to throw back me head, open me mouth and call back an answer full-throated.
“Would you still love me if I be wolf,” I ask me Mam. “If I never be nothing else?”
She smiles, all wistful and strange. “Wolf be simple, don’t it? Wolf be an arrow, shooting from where you be to where you want to be, without the muddle of a woman’s heart to skew the path. Sometimes, wolf be what we need most.” She pulls up me hood, presses a kiss to me brow. “Skin or fur, daughter, you be me kin, and I love you for it. By the Moon’s good grace, that be nothing you ever need doubt.”
Then she takes me hand and we run together, me with me red cloak and her wrapped in me Granmama’s forest green, and I feel them all threaded through me, me Mam and me Granmama both, and me aunt as well, those clever yellow eyes watching the wane and wax of Moon, watching and waiting for the night I come to run for a time with her.
Kirstyn McDermott has been working in the darker alleyways of speculative fiction for much of her career and her two novels, Madigan Mine and Perfections, have each won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel. Her most recent book is Caution: Contains Small Parts, a collection of short fiction published by Twelfth Planet Press. When not wearing her writing hat, she produces and co-hosts a literary discussion podcast, The Writer and the Critic, which generally keeps her out of trouble. After many years based in Melbourne, Kirstyn now lives in Ballarat and is pursuing a creative PhD at Federation University.
One of the bloodier German folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, “The Juniper Tree” tells of a boy who is abused then murdered by his stepmother, chopped into pieces, and cooked into a stew that is devoured by his oblivious father. With some help from his loving stepsister and the magic of his deceased mother, he is turned into a bird and finds his revenge.
Peter Straub’s version of the story is both powerful and disturbing, subtle yet graphic. Although not identified, the narrator is Timothy Underhill, a character who appears (most notably) in Straub’s novels Koko, The Throat, Lost Boy Lost Girl, and In the Nightroom. Here, we learn how Tim uses the “magic” of the movies to survive devastating trauma as a boy and heal.
The Juniper Tree
Peter Straub
It is a schoolyard in my Midwest of empty lots, waving green and brilliant with tiger lilies, of ugly new “ranch” houses set down in rows in glistening clay, of treeless avenues cooking in the sun. Our schoolyard is black asphalt—on June days, patches of the asphalt loosen and stick like gum to the soles of our high-top basketball shoes.
Most of the playground is black empty space from which heat radiates up like the wavery images on the screen of a faulty television set. Tail wire mesh surrounds it. A new boy named Paul is standing beside me.
Though it is now nearly the final month of the semester, Paul came to us, carroty-haired, pale-eyed, too shy to ask even the whereabouts of the lavatory, only six weeks ago. The lessons baffle him, and his Southern accent is a fatal error of style. The popular students broadcast in hushed, giggling whispers the terrible news that Paul “‘talks like a nigger.” Their voices are almost awed—they are conscious of the enormity of what they are saying, of the enormity of its consequences.
Paul is wearing a brilliant red shirt too heavy, too enveloping, for the weather. He and I stand in the shade at the rear of the school, before the cream-colored brick wall in which is placed at eye level a newly broken window of pebbly green glass reinforced with strands of copper wire. At our feet is a little scatter of green, edible-looking pebbles. The pebbles dig into the soles of our shoes, too hard to shatter against the softer asphalt. Paul is singing to me in his slow, lilting voice that he will never have friends in this school. I put my foot down on one of the green candy pebbles and feel it push up, hard as a bullet, against my foot. “Children are so cruel,” Paul casually sings. I think of sliding the pebble of broken glass across my throat, slicing myself wide open to let death in.
Paul did not return to school in the fall. His father, who had beaten a man to death down in Mississippi, had been arrested while leaving a movie theater near my house named the Orpheum-Oriental. Paul’s father had taken his family to see an Esther Williams movie costarring Fernando Lamas, and when they came out, their mouths raw from salty popcorn, the baby’s hands sticky with spilled Coca-Cola, the police were waiting for them. They were Mississippi people, and I think of Paul now, seated at a desk on a floor of an office building in Jackson filled with men like him at desks: his tie perfectly knotted, a good shine on his cordovan shoes, a necessary but unconscious restraint in the set of his mouth.
In those days I used to spend whole days in the Orpheum-Oriental.
I was seven. I held within me the idea of a disappearance like Paul’s, of never having to be seen again. Of being an absence, a shadow, a place where something no longer visible used to be.
Before I met that young-old man whose name was “Frank” or “Stan” or “Jimmy,” when I sat in the rapture of education before the movies at the Orpheum-Oriental, I watched Alan Ladd and Richard Widmark and Glenn Ford and Dane Clark. Chicago Deadline. Martin and Lewis, tangled up in the same parachute in At War with the Army. William Boyd and Roy Rogers. Openmouthed, I drank down movies about spies and criminals, wanting the passionate and shadowy ones to fulfill themselves, to gorge themselves on what they needed.
The feverish gaze of Richard Widmark, the anger of Alan Ladd, Berry Kroeger’s sneaky eyes, girlish and watchful—vivid, total elegance.
When I was seven, my father walked into the bathroom and saw me looking at my face in the
mirror. He slapped me, not with his whole strength, but hard, raging instantly. “What do you think you’re looking at?” His hand cocked and ready. “What do you think you see?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing is right.”
A carpenter, he worked furiously, already defeated, and never had enough money—as if, permanently beyond reach, some quantity of money existed that would have satisfied him. In the morning he went to the job site hardened like cement into anger he barely knew he had. Sometimes he brought men from the taverns home with him at night. They carried transparent bottles of Miller High Life in paper bags and set them down on the table with a bang that said: Men are here! My mother, who had returned from her secretary’s job a few hours earlier, fed my brothers and me, washed the dishes, and put the three of us to bed while the men shouted and laughed in the kitchen.
He was considered an excellent carpenter. He worked slowly, patiently; and I see now that he spent whatever love he had in the rented garage that was his workshop. In his spare time he listened to baseball games on the radio. He had professional, but not personal, vanity, and he thought that a face like mine should not be examined.
Because I saw “Jimmy” in the mirror, I thought my father, too, had seen him.
One Saturday my mother took the twins and me on the ferry across Lake Michigan to Saginaw—the point of the journey was the journey, and at Saginaw the boat docked for twenty minutes before wallowing back out into the lake and returning. With us were women like my mother, her friends, freed by the weekend from their jobs, some of them accompanied by men like my father, with their felt hats and baggy weekend trousers flaring over their weekend shoes. The women wore blood-bright lipstick that printed itself onto their cigarettes and smeared across their front teeth. They laughed a great deal and repeated the words that had made them laugh. “Hot dog,” “slippin’ ’n’ slidin’,” “opera singer.” Thirty minutes after departure, the men disappeared into the enclosed deck bar; the women, my mother among them, arranged deck chairs into a long oval tied together by laughter, attention, gossip. They waved their cigarettes in the air. My brothers raced around the deck, their shirts flapping, their hair glued to their skulls with sweat—when they squabbled, my mother ordered them into empty deck chairs. I sat on the deck, leaning against the railings, quiet. If someone had asked me: What do you want to do this afternoon, what do you want to do for the rest of your life? I would have said, I want to stay right here, I want to stay here forever.
After a while I stood up and left the women. I went across the deck and stepped through a hatch into the bar. Dark, deeply grained imitation wood covered the walls. The odors of beer and cigarettes and the sound of men’s voices filled the enclosed space. About twenty men stood at the bar, talking and gesturing with half-filled glasses. Then one man broke away from the others with a flash of dirty blond hair. I saw his shoulders move, and my scalp tingled and my stomach froze and I thought: Jimmy. “Jimmy.” But he turned all the way around, dipping his shoulders in some ecstasy of beer and male company, and I saw that he was a stranger, not “Jimmy,” after all.
I was thinking: someday when I am free, when I am out of this body and in some city whose name I do not even know now, I will remember this from beginning to end and then I will be free of it.
The women floated over the empty lake, laughing out clouds of cigarette smoke, the men, too, as boisterous as the children on the sticky asphalt playground with its small green spray of glass like candy.
In those days I knew I was set apart from the rest of my family, an island between my parents and the twins. Those pairs that bracketed me slept in double beds in adjacent rooms at the back of the ground floor of the duplex owned by the blind man who lived above us. My bed, a cot coveted by the twins, stood in their room. An invisible line of great authority divided my territory and possessions from theirs.
This is what happened in the morning in our half of the duplex. My mother got up first—we heard her showering, heard drawers closing, the sounds of bowls and milk being set out on the table. The smell of bacon frying for my father, who banged on the door and called out my brothers’ names. “Don’t you make me come in there, now!” The noisy, puppyish turmoil of my brothers getting out of bed. All three of us scramble into the bathroom as soon as my father leaves it. The bathroom was steamy, heavy with the odor of shit and the more piercing, almost palpable smell of shaving-lather and amputated whiskers. We all pee into the toilet at the same time. My mother frets and frets, pulling the twins into their clothes so that she can take them down the street to Mrs. Candee, who is given a five-dollar bill every week for taking care of them. I am supposed to be running back and forth on the playground in Summer Play School, supervised by two teenage girls who live a block away from us. (I went to Play School only twice.) After I dress myself in clean underwear and socks and put on my everyday shirt and pants, I come into the kitchen while my father finishes his breakfast. He is eating strips of bacon and golden-brown pieces of toast shiny with butter. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray before him. Everybody else has already left the house. My father and I can hear the blind man banging on the piano in his living room. I sit down before a bowl of cereal. My father looks at me, looks away. Angry at the blind man for banging at the piano this early in the morning, he is sweating already. His cheeks and forehead shine like the golden toast. My father glances at me, knowing he can postpone this no longer, and reaches wearily into his pocket and drops two quarters on the table. The high-school girls charge twenty-five cents a day, and the other quarter is for my lunch. “Don’t lose that money,” he says as I take the coins. My father dumps coffee into his mouth, puts the cup and his plate into the crowded sink, looks at me again, pats his pockets for his keys, and says, “Close the door behind you.” I tell him that I will close the door. He picks up his gray toolbox and his black lunch pail, claps his hat on his head, and goes out, banging his toolbox against the door frame. It leaves a broad gray mark like a smear left by the passing of some angry creature’s hide.
Then I am alone in the house. I go back to the bedroom, close the door and push a chair beneath the knob, and read Blackhawk and Henry and Captain Marvel comic books until at last it is time to go to the theater.
While I read, everything in the house seems alive and dangerous. I can hear the telephone in the hall rattling on its hook, the radio clicking as it tries to turn itself on and talk to me. The dishes stir and rattle in the sink.
At these times all objects, even the heavy chairs and sofa, become their true selves, violent as the fire that fills the sky I cannot see, and races through the secret ways and passages beneath the streets. At these times other people vanish like smoke.
When I pull the chair away from the door, the house immediately goes quiet, like a wild animal feigning sleep. Everything inside and out slips cunningly back into place, the fires bank, men and women reappear on the sidewalks. I must open the door and I do. I walk swiftly through the kitchen and the living room to the front door knowing that if I look too carefully at any one thing, I will wake it up again. My mouth is so dry, my tongue feels fat. “I’m leaving,” I say to no one. Everything in the house hears me.
The quarter goes through the slot at the bottom of the window, the ticket leaps from its slot. For a long time, before “Jimmy,” I thought that unless you kept your stub unfolded and safe in a shirt pocket, the usher could rush down the aisle in the middle of the movie, seize you, and throw you out. So into the pocket it goes, and I slip through the big doors into the cool, cross the lobby, and pass through a swinging door with a porthole window.
Most of the regular daytime patrons of the Orpheum-Oriental sit in the same seats every day—I am one of those who comes here every day. A small, talkative gathering of bums sits far to the right of the theater, in the rows beneath the sconces fastened like bronze torches to the walls. The bums choose these seats so that they can examine their bits of paper, their “documents,” and show them to each other dur
ing the movie. Always on their minds is the possibility that they might have lost one of these documents, and they frequently consult the tattered envelopes in which they are kept.
I take the end seat, left side of the central block of seats, just before the broad horizontal middle aisle. There I can stretch out. At other times I sit in the middle of the last row, or the first; sometimes when the balcony is open I go up and sit in its first row. From the first row of the balcony, seeing a movie is like being a bird and flying down into the movie from above. To be alone in the theater is delicious. The curtains hang heavy, red, anticipatory; the mock torches glow on the walls. Swirls of gilt wind through the red paint. On days when I sit near a wall, I reach out toward the red, which seems warm and soft, and find my fingers resting on a chill dampness. The carpet of the Orpheum-Oriental must once have been bottomlessly rich brown; now it is a dark non-color, mottled with the pink and gray smears, like melted Band-Aids, of chewing gum. From about a third of the seats dirty gray wool foams from slashes in the worn plush.
On an ideal day I sit through a cartoon, a travelogue, a sequence of previews, a movie, another cartoon, and another movie before anyone else enters the theater. This whole cycle is as satisfying as a meal. On other mornings, old women in odd hats and young women wearing scarves over their rollers, a few teenage couples, are scattered throughout the theater when I come in. None of these people ever pays attention to anything but the screen and, in the case of the teenagers, each other.
Once, a man in his early twenties, hair like a haystack, sat up in the wide middle aisle when I took my seat. He groaned. Rusty-looking dried blood was spattered over his chin and his dirty white shirt. He groaned again and then got to his hands and knees. The carpet beneath him was spotted with what looked like a thousand red dots. The young man stumbled to his feet and began reeling up the aisle. A bright, depthless pane of sunlight surrounded him before he vanished into it.
