1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  “What happened?” Swan called frantically. “What is it?”

  Killer made an effort to rise to all fours when he heard Swan’s voice, but his body was beyond control. His head was hanging limply, and as Killer toppled back on his side Josh could see that the dog’s eyes were already glazing over.

  “Josh?” Swan called. Her hands were up in front of her, because she could hardly see where she was going. “Talk to me, damn it!”

  Killer gave one quick gasp, and then he was gone.

  Josh stepped between Swan and the dog. “Rusty’s been hurt,” he said. “It was a bobcat. We’ve got to get him to town in a hurry!” He grasped her arm and pulled her with him before she could see the dead terrier.

  Josh gently laid Rusty in the back of the wagon and covered him with the red blanket. Rusty was shivering and only half conscious. Josh told Swan to stay with him, and then he went forward and took Mule’s reins. “Giddap!” he shouted. The old horse, whether surprised by the command or by the unaccustomed urgency of the reins, snorted steam through his nostrils and bounded forward, pulling with new-found strength.

  Swan drew the tent’s flap open. “What about Killer? We can’t just leave him!”

  He couldn’t yet bring himself to tell her that the terrier was dead. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “He’ll find his way.” He snapped the reins against Mule’s haunches. “Giddap now, Mule! Go, boy!”

  The wagon rounded the bend, its wheels passing on either side of Killer, and Mule’s hooves threw up a spray of snow as the horse raced toward Mary’s Rest.

  Fifty-eight

  The seamstress

  The road spooled out another mile before the woods gave way to bleak, rolling land that might have once been plowed hillsides. Now it was a snow-covered waste, interrupted by black trees twisted into shapes both agonized and surrealistic. But there was a town, of sorts: Clustered along both sides of the road were maybe three hundred weather-beaten clapboard shacks. Josh thought that seven years ago a sight like this would’ve meant he was entering a ghetto, but now he was overjoyed to the point of tears. Muddy alleys cut between the shacks, and smoke curled into the bitter air from stovepipe chimneys. Lanterns glowed behind windows insulated with yellowed newspapers and magazine pages. Skinny dogs howled and barked around Mule’s legs as Josh drew the wagon up amid the shacks. Across the road and up a ways was a charred pile of timbers where one of the buildings of Mary’s Rest had burned to the ground; the fire had been some time ago, because new snow had collected in the ruins. “Hey!” Josh shouted. “Somebody help us!” A few thin children in ragged coats came out from the alleys to see what was going on. “Is there a doctor around here?” Josh asked them, but they scattered back into the alleys. The door of a nearby shack opened, and a black-bearded face peered cautiously out. “We need a doctor!” Josh demanded. The bearded man shook his head and shut the door.

  Josh urged Mule deeper into the shantytown. He kept shouting for a doctor, and a few people opened their doors and watched him pass, but none offered assistance. Further on, a pack of dogs that had been tearing at the remains of an animal in the mud snarled and snapped at Mule, but the old horse kept his nerve and held steady. From a doorway lurched an emaciated old man in rags, his face blotched with red keloids. “No room here! No food! We don’t want no strangers here!” he raved, striking the wagon’s side with a gnarled stick. He was still babbling as they drew away.

  Josh had seen a lot of wretched places before, but this was the worst. It occurred to him that this was a town of strangers where nobody gave a shit about who lived or died in the next hovel. There was a brooding sense of defeat and fatal depression here, and even the air smelled of rank decay. If Rusty hadn’t been so badly hurt, Josh would have kept the wagon going right through the ulcer of Mary’s Rest and out where the air smelled halfway decent again.

  A figure with a malformed head stumbled along the roadside, and Josh recognized the same disease that both he and Swan had. He called to the person, but whoever it was—male or female—turned and ran down an alley out of sight. Lying on the ground a few yards away was a dead man, stripped naked, his ribs showing and his teeth bared in what might have been a grin of escape. A few dogs were sniffing around him, but they had not yet begun feasting.

  And then Mule stopped as if he’d run into a brick wall, neighed shrilly and almost reared. “Whoa! Settle down, now!” Josh shouted, having to fight the horse for control.

  He saw that someone was in the road in front of them. The figure was wearing a faded denim jacket and a green cap and was sitting in a child’s red wagon. The figure had no legs, the trousers rolled up and empty below the thighs. “Hey!” Josh called. “Is there a doctor in this town?”

  The face turned slowly toward him. It was a man with a scraggly light brown beard and vague, tormented eyes. “We need a doctor!” Josh said. “Can you help us?”

  Josh thought the man might’ve smiled, but he wasn’t sure. The man said, “Welcome!”

  “A doctor! Can’t you understand me?”

  “Welcome!” the man repeated, and he laughed, and Josh realized he was out of his mind.

  The man reached out, plunged his hands into the mud and began to pull himself and the wagon across the road. “Welcome!” he shouted as he rolled away into an alley.

  Josh shivered, and not just from the cold. That man’s eyes… they were the most awful eyes Josh had ever looked into. He got Mule settled down and moving forward again.

  He continued to shout for help. An occasional face looked out from a doorway and then drew quickly back. Rusty’s going to die, Josh feared. He’s going to bleed to death, and not a single bastard in this hellhole will raise a finger to save him!

  Yellow smoke drifted across the road, the wagon’s tires moving through puddles of human waste. “Somebody help us!” Josh’s voice was giving out. “Please… for God’s sake… somebody help us!”

  “Lawd! What’s all the yellin’ about?”

  Startled, Josh looked toward the voice. Standing in the doorway of a decrepit shack was a black woman with long, iron-gray hair. She wore a coat that had been stitched from a hundred different scraps of cloth.

  “I need to find a doctor! Can you help me?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Her eyes, the color of copper pennies, narrowed. “Typhoid? The dysentery?”

  “No. My friend’s been hurt. He’s in the back.”

  “Ain’t no doctor in Mary’s Rest. Doctor died of typhoid. Ain’t nobody can help you.”

  “He’s bleeding bad! Isn’t there someplace I can take him?”

  “You can take him to the Pit,” she suggested. She had a sharp-featured, regal face. “’Bout a mile or so down the road. It’s where all the bodies go.” The dark face of a boy about seven or eight years old peeked through the doorway at her side, and she rested a hand on his shoulder. “Ain’t noplace to take him but there.”

  “Rusty’s not dead, lady!” Josh snapped. “But he’s sure going to be if I don’t find some help for him!” He flicked Mule’s reins.

  The black woman let him get a few yards further down the road, and then she said, “Hold on!”

  Josh reined Mule in.

  The woman walked down the cinder block steps in front of her shack and approached the rear of the wagon while the little boy nervously watched. “Open this thing up!” she said—and suddenly the rear flap was unzipped, and she was face to face with Swan. The woman stepped back a pace, then took a deep breath, summoned her courage again and looked into the wagon at the bloody white man lying under a red blanket. The white man wasn’t moving. “He still alive?” she asked the faceless figure.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Swan replied. “But he’s not breathing very good.”

  She could make out the “yes,” but nothing more. “What happened?”

  “Bobcat got him,” Josh said, coming around to the back of the wagon. He was shaking so much he could hardly stand. The woman took a long, hard look at him with her piercing co
pper-colored eyes. “Damned thing had two heads.”

  “Yeah. Lots of ’em out in the woods like that. Kill you for sure.” She glanced toward the house, then back at Rusty. He made a soft moaning noise, and she could see the terrible wound on the side of his face. She let the breath leak out between her clenched teeth. “Well, bring him on inside, then.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “We’ll find out.” She started walking toward the shack and turned back to say, “I’m a seamstress. Pretty good with a needle and catgut. Bring him on.”

  The shack was as grim inside as it was out, but the woman had two lanterns lit, and on the walls were hung bright pieces of cloth. At the center of the front room stood a makeshift stove constructed from parts of a washing machine, a refrigerator and various pieces of what might have been a truck or car. A few scraps of wood burned behind a grate that was once a car’s radiator grille, and the stove only provided heat within a two or three foot radius. Smoke leaked through the funnel that went up into the roof, giving the shack’s interior a yellow haze. The woman’s furniture—a table and two chairs—were crudely sawn from worm-eaten pinewood. Old newspapers covered the windows, and the wind piped through cracks in the walls. On the pinewood table were snippets of cloth, scissors, needles and the like, and a basket held more pieces of cloth in a variety of colors and patterns.

  “It ain’t much,” she said with a shrug, “but it’s better than some has. Bring him in here.” She motioned Josh into a second, smaller room, where there was an iron-framed cot and a mattress stuffed with newspapers and rags. On the floor next to the cot was a little arrangement of rags, a small patchwork pillow and a thin blanket in which, Josh presumed, the little boy slept. In the room there were no windows, but a lantern burned with a shiny piece of tin behind it to reflect the light. An oil painting of a black Jesus on a hillside surrounded by sheep hung on a wall.

  “Lay him down,” the woman said. “Not on my bed, fool. On the floor.”

  Josh put Rusty down with his head cradled by the patchwork pillow.

  “Get that jacket and sweater off him so I can see if he’s still got any meat left on that arm.”

  Josh did as she said while Swan stood in the doorway with her head tilted way to one side so she could see. The little boy stood on the other side of the room, staring at Swan.

  The woman picked up the lantern and put it on the floor next to Rusty. She whistled softly. “’Bout scraped him to the bone. Aaron, you go bring the other lamps in here. Then you fetch me the long bone needle, the ball of catgut and a sharp pair of scissors. Hurry on, now!”

  “Yes, Mama,” Aaron said, and he darted past Swan.

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Rusty.”

  “He’s in a bad way. Don’t know if I can stitch him up, but I’ll do my best. Ain’t got nothin’ but snow water to clean those wounds with, and you sure as hell don’t want that filthy shit in an open—” She stopped, looking at Josh’s mottled hands as he took off his gloves. “You black or white?” she asked.

  “Does it matter anymore?”

  “Naw. Don’t reckon it does.” Aaron brought the two lanterns, and she arranged them near Rusty’s head while he went out again to get the other things she needed. “You got a name?”

  “Josh Hutchins. The girl’s name is Swan.”

  She nodded. Her long, delicate fingers probed the ragged edges of the wound at Rusty’s shoulder. “I’m Glory Bowen. Make my livin’ by stitchin’ clothes for people, but I ain’t no doctor. The closest I ever come to doctorin’ was helpin’ a few women have their babies—but I know about sewin’ cloth, dogskin and cowhide, and maybe a person’s skin ain’t too much different.”

  Rusty’s body suddenly went rigid; he opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but Josh and Glory Bowen held him down. He struggled for a minute, then seemed to realize where he was and relaxed again. “Josh?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “Bastard got me, didn’t he? Old two-headed bastard of a bobcat. Knocked me right on my ass.” He blinked, looked up at Glory. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m the woman you’re gonna de-spise in about three minutes,” she answered calmly. Aaron came in with a thin, sharpened splinter of bone that must have been three inches long, and he laid it in his mother’s palm along with a small, waxy-looking ball of catgut thread and a pair of scissors. Then he retreated to the other side of the room, his eyes moving back and forth between Swan and the others.

  “What’re you gonna do to me?” Rusty made out the bone needle as Glory put the end of the thread through the needle’s eye and tied a tiny knot. “What’s that for?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” She picked up a rag and wiped the sweat and blood from Rusty’s face. “Gonna have to do a little sewin’ on you. Gonna put you together just like a fine new shirt. That suit you?”

  “Oh… Lord” was all Rusty could manage to say.

  “We gonna have to tie you down, or are you gonna be a man about this? Don’t have nothin’ to kill the pain.”

  “Just… talk to me,” Rusty told her. “Okay?”

  “Sure. Whatcha wanna talk about?” She positioned the needle near the ripped flesh at Rusty’s shoulder. “How ’bout food? Fried chicken. A big bucketful of Colonel Sanders with them hot spices. That sound good to you?” She angled the needle in the precise direction she wanted, and then she went to work. “Can’t you just smell that Kentucky Fried heaven?”

  Rusty closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he whispered thickly. “Oh, yeah… I sure can.”

  Swan couldn’t bear to watch Rusty in pain. She went to the front room, where she warmed herself by the makeshift stove. Aaron peeked around the corner at her, then jerked his head out of sight. She heard Rusty catch his breath, and she went to the door, opened it and stepped outside.

  She climbed into the back of the wagon to get Crybaby, and then she stood rubbing Mule’s neck. She was worried about Killer. How was he going to find them? And if a bobcat had hurt Rusty that badly, what might one do to Killer? “Don’t you worry,” Josh had said. “He’ll find his way.”

  “You got a haid inside there?” a small, curious voice asked beside her.

  Swan made out Aaron standing a few feet away.

  “You can talk, cain’t you? I heard you say somethin’ to my mama.”

  “I can speak,” she answered. “I have to talk slowly, though, or you won’t be able to understand me.”

  “Oh. Your haid looks kinda like a big ol’ gourd.”

  Swan smiled, her facial flesh pulling so tight it felt about to tear. She knew the youngster was being honest, not cruel. “I guess it does. And yes, I have a head inside here. It’s just covered up.”

  “I seen some people looked like you. Mama says it’s a real bad sickness. Says you get that thing and you got it your whole life. Is that so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She says it ain’t catchin’, though. Says if it was, everybody in town would have it by now. What kinda stick is that?”

  “It’s a dowsing rod.”

  “What’s that?”

  She explained how a dowsing rod was supposed to find water if you held the forked ends of it just right, but she’d never found any water with it. She recalled Leona Skelton’s gentle voice, as if drifting through time to whisper: “Crybaby’s work isn’t done yet—not by a far sight!”

  “Maybe you ain’t holding it right, then,” Aaron said.

  “I just use it like a walking stick. I don’t see too well.”

  “I reckon not. You ain’t got no eyeballs!”

  Swan laughed and felt muscles in her face unfreeze. The wind brought a new whiff of a sickening odor of decay that Swan had noticed as soon as they’d entered Mary’s Rest. “Aaron?” she asked. “What’s that smell?”

  “What smell?”

  He was used to it, she realized. Human waste and garbage lay everywhere, but this was a fouler odor. “It comes and goes,” she said. �
�The wind’s carrying it.”

  “Oh, I reckon that’s the pond. What’s left of it, I mean. It ain’t too far. Want to see?”

  No, Swan thought. She didn’t want to get near anything so awful. But Aaron sounded eager to please, and she was curious. “All right, but we’ll have to walk real slow. And don’t run off and leave me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he answered, and he promptly ran about thirty feet up a muddy alley before he turned and waited for her to catch up.

  Swan followed him through the narrow, filthy alleys. Many of the shacks had been burned down, people still digging shelters in the ruins. She probed ahead with Crybaby and was frightened by a skinny yellow dog that lunged out of an intersecting alley; Aaron kicked at it and ran it off. Behind a closed door, an infant wailed with hunger. Further on, Swan almost stumbled over a man lying curled up in the mud. She started to reach down and touch his shoulder, but Aaron said, “He’s a dead’un! Come on, it ain’t too far!”

  They passed between the miserable clapboard shacks and came upon a wide field covered with gray snow. Here and there the frozen body of a human being or an animal lay contorted on the ground. “Come on!” Aaron called, jumping up and down impatiently. He’d been born amid death, had seen so much of it that it was a commonplace sight. He stepped over a woman’s corpse and continued down a gently sloping hill to the large pond that over the years had drawn hundreds of wanderers to the settlement of Mary’s Rest.

  “There ’tis,” Aaron said when Swan reached him. He pointed.

  About a hundred feet away was what had indeed been a very large pond, nestled in the midst of dead trees. Swan saw that maybe an inch of yellow-green water remained right at its center, and all around was cracked, nasty-looking yellow mud.

  And in that mud were dozens of half-buried human and animal skeletons, as if they’d been sucked down as they tried to get the last of that contaminated water. Crows perched on the bones, waiting. Heaps of frozen human excrement and garbage lay in the mud as well, and the smell that wafted from that mess where a pond used to be turned Swan’s stomach. It was as rank as an open sore or an unwashed bathroom bucket.