The murmur from the old timers always at the table in the corner died. Roy Sadley was leaning on his counter, watching us, over a roll of cured deer hides.
“Morning, Phineas,” said Roy finally, and his voice broke the silence like a rock through pond ice. “Your grandfather was just here trading…” He trailed off.
My grandfather. Ephraim Joel Ostler. The old bastard himself. He was staring at me still, but for some reason I could only focus on his hands, spotted and papery on the backs and held together with scars. Maybe I was seeing if my grandmother’s blood was still there for all to see.
The old bastard looked me up and down, examining me like a horse for sale or a spring crop. He pursed his lips. Then he shook his head with… was it sadness? Disappointment?
“Coulda been,” he muttered, and his breath stank of rotten teeth. “Had hopes.”
I stood stock still like an animal waiting for the situation to change so he’ll know whether to fight or run. I was almost curious to know what I would do if he had tried to introduce himself, to put his hand out to shake mine or to hug me. I think I would have watched myself like a spectator as thirty years of learning to hate the old bastard had let loose like a thunderstorm.
But instead he slipped past me in the doorway like a outhouse breeze and went out. I couldn’t help myself; I turned to watch him go. He was trudging slowly back up the direction of the Wallow, his shoulders slumped as if he was sorrowing for something.
So high you cant get overit
So low you cant get under it
So wide you cant get raond it
O rock omy sole
I don’t dream much, and when I do they’re boring dreams not worth remembering, just repeated bits from my daytime life—tending sheep, shoveling snow, felling trees, feeding horses. I wasn’t surprised when I woke up in the morning having had dreams with the old bastard in them; the trip out to Ostler Wallow was not an everyday thing that blended into the background. All the same, as I sat on my stool milking the cows before sunup, I couldn’t help going back over and over those dream images, even though they made less sense than they had when I was dreaming them.
In one, the waxy mushrooms were the size of trees, and I watched the old bastard stalking a deer through the white trunks. He didn’t have any gun or anything in his hands, but I knew that he was dangerous anyway, deadly to whatever he caught. When a deer wandered out into his line of sight, the old bastard just pointed his finger at it, like a little boy playing cowboy. He didn’t say “bang,” though. When he opened his mouth, my dream-ears popped like they do sometimes when I go down-mountain when I have a cold. The deer flopped over dead. And then the old bastard looked at me, and I realized that suddenly he could see me, whereas before I’d just been outside the dream, watching it. That woke me up.
In another dream, I was inside the little cabin on the black rock, but the walls were all smooth like plaster. I had a lantern in my hand—it was night outside the cabin—and I was trying to read black letters that had been written all over the walls, up and down and sideways and crisscross. They weren’t like any letters I knew, but in the dream I was convinced that if only I could find where the whole string of letters started—and it was just one string, wound around and around the inside of the cabin like a ball of yarn—then suddenly it would make sense to me. But the old bastard’s corpse was just outside the door, right where Walter and I had first dragged it to turn it over, and it was slipping toward the edge of the black rock, and if I didn’t stop trying to find the start of the letters, the body would slip over the edge and… the frogs would get it, or something. The dream faded out then, or faded into something else.
There were other things too, little bits and images that got foggier the more I tried to thing about them. Voices out of empty areas, a feeling of time passing like a grandfather clock that went for hours and years between the second-hand ticks that sounded like metal on stone, a longish number that seemed to mean “hate”… All of these were dream-scraps that didn’t want to sit still for my woke-up brain to figure them out, and by the time I was done milking I had almost given myself a headache trying.
Walter woke up groggy after the rest of us were up and the oatmeal was on the table, and he rolled off the couch like he was a generation older than me. He said he was fine, but I could tell that he wasn’t used to anything near the work we had done yesterday. His spoon hand shook as he ate his oatmeal, and I could see the red spots all over the palm of his hand. But he was in a good mood, complimented our couch, and said that he wanted to make an early start of cleaning out the cabin so we wouldn’t be rushed by the shadows that fell early in the Wallow. He even helped a bit as I went out to take care of the sheep, and tried to make it look like he wasn’t being careful of his shoes.
Low clouds had moved in overnight, the kind that sit right down on these hills and layer everything like wet cheesecloth. Walter didn’t complain about leaving his car to sit for another day while we took the horse and cart back toward the Wallow. I had loaded up the cart with a few old feed sacks to haul away whatever the old bastard had crammed into his living space.
“Well, Kezzie sure seems to love you,” I said as the horse plodded up over the hill.
Walter shrugged, but he looked pleased. “Around here, seeing anyone new is exciting, at least once Mama and Papa show that they’re friendly. She’d probably love to come down and visit Velma and Walter Junior.”
“Or you could bring them up here, I guess—once we’ve got that cabin cleaned out. That’s what you’re thinking, right?”
“Yeah, sometime,” he said. “Although I don’t know how many that cabin can fit.” He stretched he shoulders back, trying to relax a kink in his back that had been bothering him since he climbed up into the cart. “So, do you get your family out to church often?”
I grunted at the change of subject. “Sounds like ‘Cousin Walter’ just turned into ‘Pastor McKinnon.’”
“One and the same, Phineas.” He smiled. “I just thought that Kezzie might have other friends there, children her age and such.”
“Well, someone needs to tell the clodhead reverend at the Lutheran church not to start services so early,” I said. “He starts at eight sharp, and most mornings ain’t no way I could get chores done that gotta be done each morning, plus get everyone all clean and dressed and all the way down there to Timoree before he starts sermonizing.”
Walter smiled. “He’s old enough now—that’s the Reverend Staheli, isn’t it?—he’s old enough that he probably wants to get his sermon out of the way before he feels his midday nap coming on.” He laughed. “Maybe another benefit of me being a pastor is now I’m the clodhead, and can start services whenever I want to walk the dozen yards to the chapel!”
I laughed with him, and we rode along in comfortable silence for a bit.
“To tell the truth, though,” he started up, “I’m jealous that you could go to Pastor Staheli’s church. This up here—” and with his raised eyebrows, he took in all the misty hills around us “—is truly God’s country. If I could live up here and serve at that church down there… That would be ideal.”
“You’d have to switch from Methodist to Lutheran,” I said.
Walter shrugged. “Changing teams, but playing the same game,” he said. “As long as I didn’t have to be a Baptist.” We laughed again. “But I don’t know how well Clara would do up here. Her health, you know. Anyway, it’s a good dream, even if that’s all it is.”
Mentioning dreams brought back some of the images from the night before that had lodged in my head. The old bastard’s corpse sliding toward the edge of the black rock. Long numbers as hateful as a mad dog. Big empty spaces that had a bunch of angles in them you couldn’t see, but you could feel. I wiped the drizzle off my face and watched the clouds that had come down to fill the spaces in the mountains.
Its in the Bible that the honnors of the World are nothing unless thats all you want. Fokes that go to Church think they unerstand what
that means, and they think the Paster’s so smart when he repetes it for them. But they unerstand so Little they cant even unerstand that they dont unerstand. Theyr there in the little world of the Church, with its honnors, and they dont unerstand that those are all the honnors theyll git.
Ostler Wallow looked just the same as we’d left it, except for the puffs of fog. The white frogs kept their eyes on us as we made it across to the black rock with our empty bags. The mushrooms were little congregations of waxy white.
We’d left the door of the cabin open to air it out, but it still stank of everything that had ever gone into or come out of the old bastard. It would take more than one night of good air to clean it out. I didn’t think that even Walter’s grandchildren would be able to come up here and not get nightmares from the old bastard’s stink, but I didn’t say anything.
Walter tried to open the small window to get the air moving, but it was just a piece of salvaged glass anchored over its hole with nailed scrap wood. It was already broken, and the hole in it was covered with oiled brown paper.
The fireplace, at least, was clean—as clean as fire can make it. I searched around the lean-to for wood that hadn’t been drizzled on, and used the old bastard’s flint and steel to start a fire to clean the air and try to hold back the damp from seeping into our bones.
We started by hauling the bed out, the two of us struggling to turn it far enough to get it out the door. It didn’t look it had been moved since the old bastard had originally come to live in the Wallow; the corners at the back behind the split-log bedframe were filled with dust, threads, small bones, and mouse droppings, which had all solidified in each corner, like mortar. I hadn’t thought to throw a shovel in the back of the cart today, but the old bastard had used a rusting spade-head, as his one fireplace tool, its edge split and its wooden handle broken at the end of the iron, and I used it to carry three loads of corner crud out of the cabin at arm’s length to drop over the side of the black rock into the water.
Walter was still just looking at the bed, put together with logs and sagging ropes. I don’t think the bedclothes had ever been changed; it just looked like whatever secondhand castoffs the old bastard had scrounged just went on the top of the stack, turning into a layered, matted mattress over the decades.
“That sure doesn’t look like it’s even worth hauling back,” Walter said. “And I’m not excited about trying to carry it across the Wallow back to the cart.”
I said, “We should probably just set fire to it right here. That’s all we’d do with it anyway, once we got it home.”
“What, right here?”
“You’re right,” I said. “A little farther away from the cabin—I don’t want to smell the smoke when it goes up.”
Walter was reluctant, but together we dragged it to the edge of the rock as far as we could get from the cabin, and I used the old bastard’s flint and steel again. It took four tries before a flame would stay lit, everything was so greasy and damp, but eventually the fire started growing on its own, and I moved back to the cabin so I wouldn’t get a face-full of the oily, yellowed smoke.
“I guess if there’s anything else we want to get rid of,” I said, “we ought to haul it out here while the fire’s still going.”
There wasn’t much. On a shelf that probably doubled as his table beside the fireplace was his “larder”—dried smoked strips of meat wrapped in oily deer-hide, an old Mason jar with dried mushrooms, a tin bowl of what had probably been fresh-picked mushrooms when he died and was now nothing but a tarry slime puddle in the bottom. All of them went into the fire.
Hung on the wall above the bed was a faded, smoke-stained blanket hung against drafts. Into the fire it went.
His clothing was hung on pegs on the wall and piled in a heap beneath it: ash-colored undershirts, a pair of trousers that had torn through around its leather patches, a couple of wrapped pelts that likely worked as his boots in the winter, several lengths and patches of cloth that had started as specific garments but which were now nothing but wraps and shawls. Under it all was a bear pelt that had been tied so it could function as a wraparound cape. We piled all the clothing on the pelt and carried it out to the fire.
The only other shelf, above the head of the bed, held his few personal items: a penknife, a tin drinking cup, a Bakelite comb that probably hadn’t been used for years, and a stack of composition notebooks, the kind children use for their assignments in school. There had to be a dozen of them; the bottom one was obviously the oldest, and the top one was only half-used. I flipped through a couple. The writing was blockish and cramped. Some of it was written in lead pencil, and had faded to clouds on the old paper. Other parts were in ink using a bird-feather quill, but a lot of the ink had been watered down and mixed with ash to make it last longer, and was nearly as faded as the pencil.
Walter looked over my shoulder as I was puzzling over the composition books. “Granpap left a diary?” he asked. “Those definitely shouldn’t go in the fire.”
I turned and handed him the stack. “Then they’re yours, because I don’t want ’em.”
He took them outside and looked at the dark sky. “Gonna open up soon,” he said. He brought the composition books back in and set them just inside the door. “Don’t let me forget.”
The only things left inside were the old stump he used for a seat, and the rag rug in the center of the floor.
“The stump looks pretty new,” Walter said. “It might still be useful as a seat.”
Outside, the first solid raindrops hit, splashing so loud they sounded like the frogs jumping. The fire, now on the downhill side of its burn, steamed and spit as the rain hit it.
I stuck my head out the door. The dark clouds above us were being followed by black ones, rolling slowly over the lip of the Wallow.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “Is this clean enough for you? There’s still whatever’s out in the lean-to, but…”
Walter nodded, then took one of the burlap bags and wrapped it around the composition books. “Let’s close it up,” he said. “I’ll try to get back another day this year to finish.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. I grabbed the unused bags while Walter pushed the door shut and made sure that the rope latch caught.
By the time were were halfway back across the Wallow toward the cart, the sky had opened up and was dumping bucketfuls of rain on us. The soggy puddles at the bottom of the Wallow frothed in the rainstorm. But the frogs kept their white heads above water level, watching us with their black eyes.
Sometimes I can see myself from far away, and Im so small that I can almost ferget Im even ther. But other times when the Glory is apon me and eyes and ears and tung become usseless becase they dont tell me what can be told, then those times I see maself in the midle of the endless distanse of time from all Eternetty to all Eternetty and I realize that Im being held by all of Creashion, that everything that is and was and will be is embrasing me.
It kept raining all the way home, and Walter and I agreed that the whole road down the mountain would be nothing but a mudslick straight down to Timoree, and that he should stay until morning
That night, I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the rain keep coming down, and I tossed and turned until I was worried I was going to wake Beth up, so I finally went downstairs to the kitchen to find something to eat.
I poured myself some water and got a piece of cheese to nibble on. Over the sound of the rain I could hear Walter snort occasionally in his sleep on the couch in the next room. This wasn’t a thunderstorm, but something still felt electric, about the air or about me. Even after my snack, I could tell that I still wasn’t going to get to sleep anytime soon.
The door in from the barn was at the back of the kitchen, and that’s where Walter and I had come in after we’d put away the cart and taken care of the horse. On top of the boot rack with our muddy shoes drying on it was the burlap bag that Walter had brought in, full of the notebooks.
I lit the la
mp in the kitchen and bought the bag over to the table. The books all still smelled like the smoke-rot-sweat of the cabin. I riffled through their pages, then chose one at random near the center of the stack—careful to keep the rest of them in order—and flipped it open.
The entries were undated, and sometimes ran into each other where the only way you could tell them apart was the different darkness of the ink or the change to pencil. The old bastard had had even less education than I had, and trying to figure out what letters his scrawls were supposed to be, and then what words they were lumped together to make, was somewhere between finding a maker’s mark on a rusty plow and imagining animal shapes in the clouds. But I got myself another drink of water and set to it, determined that my grandfather couldn’t do anything that was beyond me.
It wasn’t a diary, at least not like those I’ve heard of. The events of his life weren’t much mentioned; I suppose his life routines would have been boring even compared to mine. But he rambled on about dreams and visions, about what “truths” he thought he’d discovered sitting out there alone in the Wallow, eating mushrooms and listening to the frogs.
After reading as much of the first three pages as I could make out, a word popped into my head to describe it: “religious.” What I was looking at was the journal of a religious man, although not much I read sounded like anything I’d heard from the Holy Book or a holy man. I couldn’t even hardly make out what it was the old bastard was religious about—his notebooks had been for him, I guess, and he didn’t need to explain for anyone else the things that he would understand when he re-read them.
Reading there by the lamplight, even though I was wide awake, I still entered a kind of dreaming. As the old bastard’s handwriting got easier to my eyes, I skimmed along the rows of text, not so much studying it out like before as just absorbing it. The old bastard hadn’t simply taken up in Ostler Wallow because he had nowhere else to go; this was where he’d wanted to be. In that greyed cabin perched on the black rock, ringed by a moat of sog and frogs, he’d put his mind back into the past so far he couldn’t see the speck of himself when he turned to see where he’d come from. He’d thought himself up into the sky past everything that was tolerably warm, to where nothing but great burnings and freezings existed, and the only things that thought and moved were too hot or too cold, or too much of both at the same time, to ever be anyplace a man could live. He thought down so deep beyond the dark of coalmines that the weight of all the blackness pressing down turned into sparks of blinding light, like the spots you see when you press on your eyes, but instead if his eyes it was his soul being pressed upon, and he laughed and named the spots and bowed to them and worshiped them and worked for them, chipping his tools and his life away in a great work that would take ten thousand times ten thousand years to accomplish...
Redneck Eldritch Page 13
