“Franklin?”
He looked down into her eyes, glowing a putrid yellow. The yellow of corruption and decay. Then the color was gone, and her bright green eyes stared back at him.
“We can bring them back,” she said.
“Who?”
“All of them. Alan, Jeremiah, Stephen, Henry and Daniel. We can bring them back. Hastur showed me how. Franklin, we can bring our children back. Forever.”
“How? Tell me how. Anything you want. As long as you’re with me.”
“It will take more sacrifice.”
“How much more?”
Rebecca smiled.
“Everyone.”
OSTLER WALLOW
Nathan Shumate
I aint had the dream abowt the corners for long years. I didnt no I misst it. Wen I first had it over and over, way back in the bigining, the corners fritened me so bad I almost left the wallow and wats here. But now I no that the corner cuttin into you is the only way corners can embrase you.
The first I heard that the old bastard was dead, I was down at Roy Sadley’s store on a Tuesday morning; on top of the normal things Beth had sent me for, I needed a new mattock blade, as I’d sharpened the old one down to a nubbin I could shave with. Roy Sadley saw me come in, and the first thing he said was, “Phineas, your grandpap’s passed on.”
At first I thought he meant my grandfather Grandin, my mother’s father—he’s the only one I ever thought of as “my grandpap”—but that good man had already been been seven years in the Lutheran churchyard in Timoree. But Roy just went on.
“It was my Jude that found him,” he said. “We hadn’t seen Ephraim for a few weeks past when he said he’d be in, and I had stuff for him, so I sent Jude to truck it up to him in the Wallow, and that’s how he found him in the cabin.”
Ephraim. So that would be Ephraim Joel Ostler, my pap’s pap. I didn’t really know how Roy expected me to react, so I just shrugged.
“All gotta go sometime,” I said, just to be saying something.
“True ’bout most people,” Roy agreed, “though I ain’t sure I figured it applied to Ephraim. He’s still up there—Jude just barely got back, and he didn’t know what to do—so I guess you’ll want to go up there for him?”
I said, “Why?”
That took Roy back a step, and his bad eye rolled in surprise. “Well, he is your own blood kin—”
“I only set eyes on the old bastard three times in my life, and never spoke a word to him ever. I’m guessing if there’s someone who wants to take the effort to gather him and put him ’neath the dirt, they’re welcome to. I’ve got other things to do.”
Roy was so shocked that both his eyes looked straight at me, up and down. “You listen here, Phineas,” he said in a rough voice, “I don’t say you gotta make up and like him now that he’s passed, but there’s some family responsibilities you gotta take as the eldest, the man of the family. Obligations, even, no matter love nor hate.”
“So let my cousin Walter deal with it,” I said. “He’s older than me.”
Roy looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues. “The oldest Ostler,” he said in a voice like you’d speak to an idiot child. “Walter can help with the funeral and the like, heck yes, but he’s a McKinnon. You’re the last Ostler, and that means something.”
I didn’t like the look in either of Roy’s eyes, so I glanced around the store to give myself a break from them. Sadley’s is a comfortably shadowy old store, with windows hazed over with dust and smoke so that sunlight coming through softens and blurs all around. There were a couple of old-timers by the small stove with the coffeepot, playing cards with a deck that I knew for a fact was missing the three of hearts. They kept their eyes on their cards and played right ahead, but I could tell all the same that they were both listening to Roy and me. Sadley’s hadn’t had a working radio since a tube blew in October, so there was nothing else to listen to.
“Fine,” I said. “I need sugar and coffee and a new mattock blade, and ring up an extra dime so I can use your phone to call Walter anyway.”
Roy’s face softened, and his bad eye went back to looking at whatever it wanted to. “Ain’t no need of that, Phineas,” he said. “You go right ahead and make the call.”
Sometims I feel like I got a therd eye in the back of my hed that dosnt see all the normal stuff that the Ssun shows becus it dont need lite to see by. It can see by the glow of the Edjes that are all around us, fillin the distans bitween all the things. The eye aint alwaz in back of my hed, somtimes its too the side or rite up top, but becus it dosnt see with lite it dosnt go blind with the Sun. And somtimes I dont no were it is, but it sees down, strate down, to all the things I love, and it sees so much it openss my Mouth and lets out all it sees in words and notwords til I got no breth left.
Most families around these parts have their own mountain or hill. When I say “have,” I don’t mean that they’ve got title to it, with fancy pieces of paper and something written in a book down at the county courthouse away in St. Stephen. Those families have been up here since before there was any county courthouse, or any St. Stephen, and we own what we own because we own it, not because a paper says.
Like I said, most families got a mountain or something. The Ostlers, we’ve got the Wallow.
It’s away west off the land we live on, right in the crotch made between Blair Mountain and the Godfrey Ridge, a low spot where the rain runs down and makes a huge soggy puddle with inlet and no outlet, always in damp shadow because the sun don’t shine there except right at midday. It’s like our own little swamp in the hills, with plenty of frogs but no fish because there’s no way for them to have gotten there. In the middle of the Wallow is a hump of black rock with moss growing up all sides, and on top of the rock is the hunting cabin put there by my great-great-great-grandfather Ostler.
That’s where old Ephraim Ostler, my grandpap, had lived since the night that he killed my grandmother and got driven out of the house—the same house I live in now—by my pap, Eliazar Joel Ostler, when he was all of thirteen years old.
I think I heared its Name in my dream last night, but it wasnt ear-hearin, I only heared it with somethin deep in the senter of my head, a part that almost doesnt no how to hear because it hasnt heared for so long, for ages and ages back throu Fathers and Sons. But I heared it with that somethin in my head, I heared its Name or mabe only part of it becose it felt like its hole Name wouda bin too big for my head to hold it in at onct. And becose it warnt ear-hearin, its nothin I can say with my maoth, but thats okay becose I dont think its somethin I have a right to say. Names is presious, and even the little bit I got is presious, and I am to keep it safe and presious.
Walter had a telephone in his house, and his wife Clara picked it up after two rings. Walter had grown up here in the hills but Aunt Rose had let him go away for school when he was fourteen, and he never really came back. He’d gone off to the war—he was in the Pacific, though he never saw any fighting—then went to university and came out a Doctor of Divinity. Now he lived down in St. Stephen and was the pastor of a Methodist church. Clara said he was out and she’d have him ring me back as soon as he got in, but I knew Beth would be wondering where I’d got off to if I stayed down at Sadley’s too long, so I told Clara the main points about old Ephraim’s being dead—main points being all that I knew myself—and told him to call back and talk to Roy if he wanted to help me clean him out the cabin in the next couple of days.
Roy was listening, and as I hung up, he said, “Don’t you think you oughtta go up there right away and collect him?”
While I’d been putting the call through, Roy had pulled everything on my shopping list to the front counter. I hoisted the bags up and balanced them on my hip.
“He’d dead already,” I said. “A day or two ain’t gonna make him any more or less dead, is it?” I pushed out the door without waiting for an answer. From what I’d been taught by my pap, anything short of leaving the old bastard to turn to bones by
himself in the Wallow was more than he deserved.
The mushroms are bitter this spring. I dont know if that means thers somethin els in the Water, or mabe there was too littl snow and more flaver comes from Underneth. I dont mind the bitter. Its a good bitter. Somtimes bitter can be sweet if your tung is reddy to change. And the Frogs are getting meaty alrady.
My pap never actually told me about that night, when the old bastard had killed my grandmother Hannah right in front of him and Aunt Rose, or about why no punishment ever caught up with old Ephraim—even out here in the hills, where you can grow to an adult without ever once seeing a police uniform, there’s still law, whether it’s government law or our own law. I once asked Aunt Rose about it—that was back before Walter left for school, when we still played and hunted together and help each other with big chores—but she said that she had only been nine, and things were a little hazy in her memory.
“This is really your pap’s place to tell you, not mine,” she said, “but what I really remember from that night was his voice. It was so loud—not just shouting like they were having an argument—it’s like he was a preacher, praying or preaching clear for the back rows. I don’t know what he said, I didn’t know what it was even back then, but he bellowed like it was something he’d practiced, and then he grabbed my mama’s head. And then…”
Aunt Rose cocked her head in memory. I’d heard my pap describe her as “a slip of a girl” when he’d become the man of the house, but since then she’d plumped up, especially on her hips, so she looked like a sagging pear sitting there in her favorite chair.
“…And then,” she said, her eyes looking past me into the past, “he grabbed her head on both sides, and just… he squeezed, maybe. I don’t know what he did. But her eyes, they just…” Her voice trailed off. “And then he smiled. Like he was so proud. He smiled at me, but mostly at Eli. Your pap.”
She shook herself then and put her eyes back on me, like she just realized who she was telling these details to. And that was all we ever talked about it.
Off to Sadleys today with deer skins to trade. Need more salt and a new pikax.
It was the middle of the next morning, while I was trying to replace a fencepost at the corner of the sheep’s pen uphill from our house, that I heard a car horn and found Walter pulling up to the front porch.
Walter was dressed like he’d never even been to the hills before, much less came from here. His shoes were in two colors of leather, he wore a jacket and tie, and his hat looked like it had never seen a raindrop. He wore the same round eyeglasses he’d been wearing ever since he came home from school the first time. I don’t think he needed them to see, I think he just wanted everyone to know he could read.
“Good morning, Phineas!” he hollered with a wave. I waved back with the hammer in my hand and went back to pounding the nail down to hold the barbed wire looped around the post. The country in the hills was too hilly for much farming—most people had a little family garden plot and nothing else—and the downhill ends of pastures were always bearing the brunt of snow and rain, and pulling the fences over to let sheep out.
At least Walter wasn’t over-protective of his shoes as he left the pebbled area in front of the porch and waded uphill through the long grass to where I was. He crouched to check the line of the fenceposts I was repairing, and nodded in approval.
“So,” he said. “The old so-and-so finally passed.”
“That’s what they tell me,” I said. “You go say hi to Beth and tell her to hitch up the cart for us. I’ll be down as soon as I’m done here, and we can go out to the Wallow.”
“Or we could just take my car,” he offered.
I squinted at his sedan, its white-walled tired gleaming with the morning dew they’d picked up from the road. “Do you even remember what the track back to the Wallow is like? Your rig’ll barely get through, if at all—and it surely won’t be pretty when we get back.”
Walter shrugged. “Whatever you think it best. You’re in charge.”
I snorted and swung the hammer, and Walter retraced his steps to where Beth had come out on the front porch, Kezzie on her hip. I caught the murmur of their pleasant voices as I finished up. The sheep in that enclosure had retreated to the far side when I started hammering, and they still looked at me with stupid suspicion while I gathered up my box of nails and coil of spare wire.
Last night was a new dream I think, I dont remember it before enyway. There were big things like Lizzerd-pigs runnin around snortin, and trees that looked like big fethery mold. And there was the Rock, same as it oways ben. The lizzerd pigs lay down in front of it and sounded like Cats. They did this all day and when the nite came, the Moon was so big like it was close enof to touch, and still they made their cat sounds to the rock. I wonder how thos lizzard-pigs taste.
I had only met the old bastard once, and seen him two other times besides. The first time I saw him was once when Walter and I, both teenagers—him just about to move away for school, me just twelve or so—had trekked over to Ostler Wallow to try some hunting. Everyone from my pap on down had told me that the hunting in the Wallow was thin and dire; the deer just didn’t go there, and the rabbits and other small animals were stringy and sour-tasting. But we wanted to shoot something where we didn’t have to ask some other family’s permission first, and I’d never been to what was supposed to be our land, so off we two went.
Even though the Wallow was ours, it wasn’t connected to the land on which we lived. A lot of places were like that; a family would have a homestead and animals on the land easier to get to, and then a place that was theirs further on back in the hills that was like their own game preserve. The track to Ostler Wallow—even us hill people didn’t call it a “road”—wound between a few other families’ mountains and ended up with us looking down on the soggy cesspool in the hills, where the lump of black rock supported the old grey cabin. We didn’t want to go down there anyway—nothing we wanted to hunt lived in swamp water—so our plan was to circle the slopes around the pit of the Wallow, seeing what we could flush out.
From just about everywhere we moved, all around the Wallow, we could see the cabin except when the trees blocked it out. I wasn’t there to finally see my own grandfather, and I don’t think Walter was either, but our eyes kept returning to the grey box of wood, slumping with its age, perched on the wide black rock. Out back were upright racks made of unmilled wood with pelts nailed to them, some from deer that definitely hadn’t been caught in the Wallow. There was nothing that looked like an outhouse, not that one could dig a hole for it on that solid mass of rock.
About third of the way around the edge of the Wallow—we had heard things rustling in the bushes, but hadn’t seen anything worth shooting at—we saw movement at the cabin, and both Walter and I stopped without saying anything and watched. We could just make out a pale human figure—skinny and naked—walk out of the cabin and stretch in the sunless daylight. He went over to a spot where the flat top of the black rock fell away steeply, and squatted, backside sticking out over the air.
When business was finished, the figure stood up again without wiping, stretched some more, got onto its knees like he was kissing the rock, and went back inside the cabin.
Walter and I finished our circuit around the Wallow, but I don’t remember that we shot anything.
There are dayz I cant work atal because I feel it so much and I cant work for lovin it. I just haf to lay meself down on the Rock like I want to hold it all, the hole Rock and bineeth it, I just want to hold it and get holded by it til it crushes me into it like a Fly draonin in hony.
I would have just ridden or walked with Walter up to the Wallow that day, but we’d have to bring back the old bastard’s body, so Beth hitched the horse up to the small cart I use for hauling sheep shit, and I threw in a couple of worn-out canvas tarpaulins and my two shovels. Beth made us each a sandwich and gave us each an apple—she didn’t listen when I said for God’s sake, we weren’t off on a picnic—and away we we
nt. The air was wet, and the sky threatened rain weakly.
We rode in silence for a while until we passed the old Shurdy place—the last Shurdy had died a decade ago, and now the place was nothing but a mound of falling-in greenery—then Walter cleared his throat.
“Kezzie’s sure getting big,” he said. “She got to be two, now?”
“Coming up in a month,” I said.
“Funny how you always feel like people shouldn’t get older when you’re not watching.”
“Like the old bastard himself.”
“Well, Clara’s doing well,” Walter said, “though she gets awful tired these days. Doctor said she might be anemic. That means her blood doesn’t have enough iron in it, so it can’t carry enough oxygen.”
“I know what anemic means.”
“And Velma and Walter Junior are healthy and doing well in school,” he continued. “And the church is growing, of course.”
“Of course.”
The track wound through a tight spot on the slope of a steep hill, and I slowed the horse down and watched for loose stones. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to Walter, but there wasn’t a lot that we both knew about and wanted to hear about, these days.
After the next few miles, Ostler Wallow opened up in front of us. If it had changed any since I’d seen it last, I couldn’t tell: it dipped into wet shadow, like a mossy sheet suspended from the mountains around it, weighed down in the middle by the black rock. The cabin was still there, grey and lichened, surrounded by drying racks now empty of skins.
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