Wildwood

by Farris, John

  He had considered the possibility that some would call it murder. This deliberation ultimately made Arn smile.

  Prove she was human first, he thought, taking a sip of water from a quart mason jar. Otherwise, if he had to do it rather than lose her again, then it wasn't murder any more than if he brought home a four-pronger or a brace of wild turkeys. What the Walkouts thought, that was a different matter. But they'd already judged him guilty of murder a long time ago.

  For this season the temperature was high, at least seventy-five degrees, the air around him humid enough to wet up a sweat due to the proximity of the heated pool, which was turbulent from the impact of the fifteen-foot waterfall. The pool, in a glade that would soon be deeply shadowed for most of the day when the surrounding sycamores and beeches were fully leafed, was one of the anomalies of Wildwood. In his peregrinations, going back to boyhood, he had discovered two like it, and undoubtedly there were others, cozy hideaways sheltered by trees like the magnolia that didn't lose their leaves even in the bleakest winters. One more steambath undetectable in a landscape of cloud and mist and icy fogs.

  It was close to noon, with the overhead sun flashing from the crest of the falls to the surface of the pool and up again to greening branches as if caught within a clash of mirrors that she appeared, coming down softly through the wavering planes of light and finely dashed spray to perch on a boulder near the waterfall.

  For an instant he couldn't believe she was actually there. It was like being rudely nudged awake by Faren in a movie theater, having been bored to a cataleptic blankness by the triviality of story or the flat projected images that defied his willingness to engage them. And in that first staggered moment of wakefulness something powerful, uncanny, seemed to curve back at him from the screen with a focus that drilled him between the eyes, blazing through to the darkest reaches of the brain where all the perplexities of the universe were neatly linked and solved, liberating a tense, precious microsecond of joy.

  He had not expected she would be totally naked, small yet enticingly formed. But how could she wear clothes, unless there was someone to dress her every day? She appeared to be five feet one or two inches tall, weighing perhaps ninety pounds. She was a strawberry blonde, sunlight bringing out a lot of red: her little pubic bush seemed to be on fire. Her straight hair looked well-brushed, and it was squarely trimmed where it fell below the undercurve of her young breasts. Who brushed her hair, and cared for her?

  Now that he'd had the chance to view her objectively, he realized she would be unable to feed herself. Yet there was nothing starved, savage, or anxious in her appearance. Her fair face, on that sunstruck boulder, was blissfully turned toward the sky; her eyes savored the light behind closed lids.

  Her wings, huge for such a delicately boned body, enhanced rather than detracted from her beauty. The fact of wings where arms should be seemed pleasingly natural. She spread them now, slowly, lively fans that quivered high above her smooth, rounded head and reached almost to the level of her knees. They were bordered in sable black, with dapples of orange and rust-red on a brownish background. Her wings, while not translucent, appeared too insubstantial to lift her in flight; but she had flown, or at least glided into his view with no show of effort.

  Arn let out the breath he'd unconsciously been holding and wondered then if it might be possible to take her alive, without damage to the fragile-seeming wings. The net, a quick tap at the base of the skull to stun her—but he would have to be both silent and quick, she undoubtedly had the instincts and alertness of any other creature living in the woods.

  Folding her wings behind her, the butterfly girl stepped carefully down to another level of the rocks beside the pool, fading into shadow. He guessed she was going to make her toilet, in the place where she would be unaware and literally trapped for the time it took him to creep up on her. And he was as good a man as any who had ever moved in perfect silence through woodland. His one potential pitfall was the stream he must cross. A slip, a tiny splash, and she could be gone instantly.

  And there was always a chance the black goatman might be somewhere nearby. Her bodyguard, or servant; or so it seemed to Arn when he first glimpsed them months ago.

  Arn feared no one. But he was practical about his chances of surviving a fight to the finish with the towering goatman, no matter how well he employed his knife. The goatman, he had observed, carried an archaic but reliable-looking handax.

  She was still in sight, having hesitated, as if unsure of her footing. She bent over at the waist, peering into the dim recess between boulders. Sun illuminated the velvety crease down her back and glowingly described her upstart maidenly ass (disturbing to the equilibrium of the hunt he was trying to maintain, refuting his arbitrary assignmentof her to the realm of the beast), the light shimmered as something alive and captive in the finely drawn web of a dusky wing. (Though she might fuck as familiarly as a woman, her element, inevitably, was air. Equilibrium restored.)

  He knew he was not willing to go for months, another year perhaps, without his trophy. Without the vindication he craved, the awed silence of the skeptical and scoffing. Get right on to the business, Arn thought.

  He sat up slowly, raising his rifle.

  And heard, far back in the woods from the place where he had tied his hounds, an embattled uproar, a terrible howl of agony. He recognized instantly, from the timbre of the belling, which hound had been singled out for destruction.

  Arn rose from concealment strangling on fury, and took his quick sighting on spread wings as she flickered aloft between the papery silver scrollwork of yellow birches.

  The shot he fired was a fraction of a second late to bring her down; he couldn't tell before she vanished if he'd hit anything but the clipped branch that was now falling from the heights of a tree.

  Gone.

  He jammed on his campaign-style felt hat and gathered the few things he had with him, including his water jar and grimy canvas backpack, then retreated at a near lope down a twisting deer run only a few inches wide in places; he wore the Indian moccasins that he preferred while in the woods. In his passage Arn made few sounds, was unerring in his avoidance of obstacles or damp places where he might leave a footprint. Only an occasional flowering bough shuddered as he went by.

  He slowed to a deliberate walk as he approached the alum-laden bluff where he had left his dogs sleeping yesterday.

  Here there was a leaf-packed clearing with a diameter roughly the height of the bluff, a trickle of water from the rock, rich black salt-filled humus in which no shrubs could take root. His remaining dogs, on their feet and straining at the leashes attached to their collars and snubbed around a windfall, had the blood of the dying dog in their nostrils and were unaware of Arn.

  He took his time, motionless in concealment but with a good view of the clearing. He listened carefully, eyes on the fourth hound, a Blue Tick, still squirming weakly in a mess of guts; he had been cut from his balls to his sternum. Jim Dandy, the last of his trained coon dogs, a good semi-silent tracker. For Arn it was as bad as if he were a father seeing his child under the wheels of a bus. But he controlled his outrage, aware of potential danger if he rushed into that clearing.

  There was a chance it had been a solitary old boar, in exile from the pack; but a "Rooshian" would have eaten the steaming guts, rooted in the carcass, then turned on the other dogs, ripping and tearing with his tusks in a fit of meanness until all were dead. Of his dogs only 'Chucky the Plott cur was an experienced boar hunter, but he would have been helpless on a leash.

  A half hour passed before Arn was satisfied that whoever had killed Jim Dandy had not done it as a setup to trap him. It had been meant purely as a warning. Nonetheless, when he stepped into the clearing he carried his rifle cocked and against his side, his long thin-bladed knife in his other hand.

  Jim Dandy was still now, the milky glaze of death in his eyes. The other hounds began to leap and howl; a curt word from Arn and they subsided to meek, uneasy whimpers. He walked arou
nd the dark ground where Jim Dandy lay, ignoring the too obvious message left for him. He could not tell without a closer examination of the flyblown remains if Jim Dandy had been disembowled with a knife, or a stroke of the goatman's ax.

  The many bootprints he discerned tended to rule out the goatman, who, he suspected, wore nothing at all on his nigger's feet. The prints were all alike. A ripple-soled pattern. Big boots, at least a size fourteen.

  He stuck his knife into the ground and picked up the croquet ball then, hard lacquered maple with a red stripe around it. He had found others in the woods during the past few years, along with oddities that defied the senses. Those that were portable he had taken home with him, shown them only to Faren.

  Now he was satisfied it wasn't a Walkout who had killed his dog. He had a good idea of who had done the meanness, in a foolish attempt to scare him out of Wildwood. And one sorry son of a bitch the Jew would be, as soon as Arn got his hands on him.

  He pitched the croquet ball into the sunlit trees atop the bluff, went down on his hands and knees and began digging in rank black humus with his knife and then his hands, until he had scooped out a grave two and a half feet deep. He rolled Jim Dandy into the hole, piled the trailing pulpy intestines on top of the body and replaced the dirt, tromping it down as hard as he could. From his pack he took a pint of corn squeezings, had a swallow for himself, sprinkled the rest of the lightning around the gravesite to nullify the telltale blood tang that a buzzard could put nose to from half a mile in the air. He didn't want scavengers digging up his departed hound.

  Then he untied the remaining dogs and headed for home, hours away.

  It was past four in the afternoon when he took a break in a deep draw, beside a spring where the dogs could lap up water while sprawled on their bellies. Arn let slip his pack and leaned his rifle within easy reach, sat on the ground chewing a handful of fresh sourwood leaves for his own thirst, not liking to burden his belly with water while there was still a ways to walk. Felt like it was going to be a good night to get likkered up anyway. He gazed up the draw at the quaint remains of the Rosebay trestle, its brick piers almost shapeless beneath masses of emerald kudzu. The gravel roadbed he had crossed and recrossed in youthful wanderings, the rusted rails and wood cross ties had slowly disappeared beneath layered tons of rotted leaves, tough rattan or luxuriant fern; trees stood tall in the former right of way, a broad avenue to the west slope of Tormentil.

  Arn's father, when he came of working age, had felled trees for the railroad, assigned to the back-breaking "misery whip," or crosscut saw. Sixty-five cents a day and found, not a bad living in nineteen ought three.

  Trains had crossed this trestle every day and frequently late at night, carrying building materials and craftsmen, most of them fresh off the boats from countries Arn knew only as shelled scorched ruins, men selected for their genius in transforming stone and wood into works of art. The chateau had been under construction for more than twelve years. Long gone now, into a hell that had been described to him but still was far beyond his ken. It had vanished when Arn was just a toddler, and the distant nighttime whistle that had excited him in his bed shrieked no more.

  He could hear it again, though, if he wanted to, in this shaded draw not many miles from the cabin on the Whippoorwill that was his birthplace. All he had to do was close his eyes and listen with a proper seriousness, the train would come; and he'd feel his father's hard arms tighten in tenderness and anticipation as they waited near the crossing, as the train that became first his breath, then his eyes, then his voice and thundering heart, jarred the earth and consumed him with its black velocity. Ah, yielding to the power of his minute self and the doomed flyer, wetting his pants a little in his father's whiskery embrace. Then the solitude that described the train's passing, the night closing around him like a heavy flower. Concealed again in childhood, yet touched, alight, miraculously aware his fate rode a black train traveling, somewhere, beneath a wild wood moon.

  Chapter Seven

  [The diary of Laurette "Sibby' Langford: entry for July 4, 1904]

  Up quite late last night, my poor husband feverish from his mounting excitement and the pain that has been unrelenting since our wedding day just one week ago. I spared no effort to be a calming influence, but to lit-tie avail. Edgar's rash, specimens of which I have seen on the backs of his hands and the root of his throat, has made his skin everywhere sensitive to touch. I am not able to hold his hand, only to kiss him on his cheek, his forehead, while longing to take him in my arms. Even the light pressure of the silk sheikh's robe he adopted as a dressing gown when we boarded the train three days ago in Boston has been excruciating for him. The laudanum which the doctor has prescribed allows only for a fitful hour or two of relief. He has scarcely slept for the three nights of our journey, which now, thank the Lord, is nearing its end. To make matters worse, the weather along the eastern seaboard has been very hot and muggy. He does find a measure of relief in his icy bath. Because of the frequent and prolonged immersions, we have been obliged to proceed south at a snail's pace through the mountains so as not to agitate or spill his bathwater. But my husband's gallant spirits, his sense of humor, never falter. I have not heard a word of complaint pass his lips. Rather, he does his best to assure me, as if it is I who suffers so terribly, that the torment will subside. "It is the sting of the lash of Assur," he says: Assur, king of all the gods of Mesopotamia, the very sun of heaven; a master whose yoke he claims he willingly bears as a reminder that one must pay a price for the treasures which the ancient earth has yielded, the glory of discovering wonders the eyes of men have not beheld for thousands of years. I do suffer for my Edgar; but I know it would only worsen his trial if I revealed the true depths of my emotion, wept in his presence. I have been compelled to ponder anew Maman's only words to me on the eve of our nuptials, as she sat clasping my hands within hers, a weary hint of tears in her eyes. "My darling Sibby, to be content in marriage you must always hold a part of yourself aloof, even in the act of submission to your husband." I am still unsure of why she said that, or precisely what she meant, for if so drastic a measure as opening my veins would somehow alleviate his pain, I would gladly do it. Is this not what it means to love a man with all of your heart and soul? I have taken my vows, after prayerful consideration of their meaning. I know that I will never hold back from my husband anything that may be of benefit to him. 1 am dedicated to his happiness. While he soaked in his bath of ice water, with a sheet draped across the silver tub to spare me the sight of his inflamed limbs and preserve decorum, I read to him for hours. He has no fondness for Henry James, and although Mark Twain makes me blush at times, he also provokes Edgar to manic laughter. I would prefer above all reading aloud the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; perhaps in time I may encourage in him an appreciation of poetry. When my voice became hoarse and it was all I could do to keep from nodding, lulled by the swaying of the train, Edgar talked to me. His voice, as always, was a tonic. Some say (although not to my face!) that he is far from a handsome man; I have heard he is cruelly ridiculed for his walk, never mind that it is only through a triumph of the will that he lives at all, having accomplished more in his lifetime of adventure and discovery than a score of able-bodied men with fainter hearts and dull minds. Pitiless gossip! I resented his nagging detractors when first we met, I scorn them all now that we are man and wife. If they could but look into his eyes when he speaks of desert kingdoms, of Carchemish and Ugarit and fabulous Nineveh—"dead civilizations" revived, for me alone, by his knowledge, through the genius of his descriptions. I am more at home in the court of King Assurbanipal than I fear I shall ever be in Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Edgar's scholarship is equal to that of any man's, yet he is still young—young in his heart, in his enthusiasm for the adventures we will share together.

  I am near exhaustion from the rigors of the wedding, the travel, my worry about his condition; yet happier than I have ever been. And still I anticipate the perfect bliss of sleeping by his side.
r />   We arrived past sunset of this day, and what a welcome!

  As the train slowed, the dark brow of the mountain came to life from the booming of mortars casting aloft a pyrotechnical display that, while it did last, doomed to oblivion even the most familiar of our starry constellations. All around us, illuminated by the blossoming shellbursts, dwellings were in evidence beneath trees the likes of which I had not seen outside of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Yet the setting was parklike, and I assumed the ranks of the mighty sentinel evergreens had been thinned to make room for construction of Edgar's woodland retreat. There were rows of homely cabins with screen doors and tarpaper roofs, even house-sized tents; a commissary, stores, a barber shop with a striped pole in front! I was reminded of the stereoptican slides I had recently viewed of Dawson City in the Yukon Territory during the great Klondike gold rush. From the platform of our car at the end of the train I saw (those moments when I could take my eyes off the shimmering, exploding sky), corrals for mules and horses, huge steam tractors, wagons, two sawmills, piles of squared white building stones, acres of dirt with nothing on them but little pools from a recent rain, and a gash in the side of the mountain where solid rock had been blasted away to widen this high plateau, where we were surrounded by wilderness seemingly without end. It was thrilling, but I shuddered in the crisp night air despite my shawl. I must admit I found it forbidding as well. A small city had been erected for the sole purpose of building the cottage, which when completed will put even "the Breakers" to shame. At that moment, however, I would have been far more content on the familiar strand of Newport, because not a soul was visible as we rolled to a stop. Where were all the workmen, their wives, the many hundreds Edgar had employed? Ignoring great pain, he had come out onto the platform of the observation car in his robe and burnoose (looking uncannily to the desert born, a true Arab prince!) to stand at my side as the last of the mortars was stilled and, heavenward, the Bear and the Hunter, ignobly dimmed by the rockets' red glare, shone forth in their customary splendor.