Wildwood

by Farris, John

  Terry was stricken, then angry. "You don't love him, do you?"

  "Oh, yes, I do, Terry."

  "Well—it sounds like—"

  "I don't love some things about him. I don't love it when he leaves me alone, and I'm worried sick he'll never come back. But I love Arn."

  Terry still felt angry but didn't know what to say, tried silently to phrase something rewarding, was upset by her weeping and hated Arn, hated him; and, helplessly, began to cry himself, each stifled, inadequate word of sympathy seemed to boil into a tear. He wiped at his cheeks, face averted.

  When she could see where she was going Faren drove on; and when she could manage the wheel with one hand she put out the other hand to Terry, who held it tightly. Neither of them said anything for miles until they reached a settlement spread over low hills, farmland, half a dozen cabins and barns frail gray against a threatening sky with lightning inside the clouds like fireflies in dark bottles. Unshed rain scented the air, an old-fashioned tractor with iron lugs instead of tires was heading in across a sloping half-plowed field, dust devils kicking up behind it.

  "This be the place," Faren said pensively.

  Meadowlarks smote by the downdrafting wind careened across their path as Faren forced the car up the side of a hill blanketed with glossy yellow lespedeza flowers, no definite road to follow, just a welter of tracks worn through the ground cover to red earth. The house on the crest, its twin pitchfork lightning rods looking too fragile to absorb the power that gleamed in several places at once in the forbidding darkness overhead, was made of squared-off logs, with a swaybacked roof that was all hubcaps hammered into overlapping shingles. Children were flocking inside the house now, flat-featured girls in skimpy cotton dresses, toddlers wearing undershirts only, all of them barefoot. The old apple and pear trees on the hill were tortured to their roots by the wind, new leaves tearing off and flashing through the air with the velocity of thrown knives. The sky, a battlefield of dragons, crackling. Faren pulled up alongside the porch as raindrops, widely spaced but smacking down hard, starred the windshield.

  "Just made it," she said. "Make a run for the porch, Terry."

  The wind was nearly enough to knock him over; he had to force the car door shut. He picked his way up the steps to the porch almost on his hands and knees, aware of red animal eyes underneath, the stink of dogs and garbage thrown to the dogs. He waited for Faren and from the porch they watched as the rain came diagonally across the hill like a bright metallic theater curtain drawing swiftly to a close, blotting out their view of the valley down below. The house trembled in the torrent.

  Faren said into his ear, "Terry, it's maybe going to smell inside like you're not used to, there's a whole lot of Trudy's people live in two, three rooms here, and an old man's dying besides; but you just can't let on that it bothers you."

  "I won't."

  Rain blew in their faces; they backed up and the door, which had been closed to a quarter-inch crack, opened for them.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was after six o'clock and Faren hadn't shown up to cook supper for them; Arn was acting peevish, although he'd drunk so much during the long, wet, frequently tedious afternoon, Whit didn't understand how he could have much desire for food.

  They'd spent a not particularly comfortable day with each other following Arn's violent run-in with Jacob Schwarzman, so Whit had done some drinking, too, misjudging the potency of the white lightning Arn had vouched for and urged on him. His tongue was deadened, his head hurt, and his vision was fuzzy. He was a little worried about his son.

  "If it's been rainin' this way down on the Boundary," Arn told him, "then those two are just holed up somewhere. Most likely with that Smith fella she calls her half brother. Roads down there ain't passable in a gully washer. When she lets up, reckon they'll head on two-quart mason jar on the polished floor beside his lounge chair. The jar had been brimful of hundred-proof liquor earlier in the afternoon. Now it was a quart low. "Still working on this one."

  Arn unscrewed the lid carefully and gave himself another generous splash. They were in the parlor. The electricity had failed an hour before, but Arn had set out a kerosene lamp once it got too dark for them to see each other except when lightning dusted off their opposing faces, somber as death masks stored in a reliquary. Arn's eyes screwed slot-tight and narrow as a Chinaman's, the only visible effect booze seemed to have on him.

  There was a third party in the room with them, sitting off to one side on a horsehair sofa with hands folded obediently in its lap. Arn's Grudge.

  Whit had first become aware of the Grudge a couple of hours ago after his fourth—fifth?—shot of squeezings, as a ghostly outline that appeared during silences and waned when they talked about things of interest to Arn, distracting him. Firearms and hunting, dogs and women. But as the day wore on, Arn was distracted less easily from the soreness that afflicted him like a bad tooth in his head, the matter of Whit Bowers standing up to him and humbling him in front of men who would flap about it, to Arn's detriment. No matter that Whit had been right to step in, and that Arn had gone off half-cocked and might have killed or seriously injured Jacob Schwarzman. Two wrongs didn't make a right in Arn's book (Whit knowing full well how his mind worked), and Whit, in wronging Arn, had done damage to his esteem that would remain long after Whit was gone from the valley of the Cat Brier. So the Grudge had appeared, slowly shaping up as if born of the frequent lightning, Arn breathing life into it until it was full-bodied, faceless but muscular, silent, intimidating. The Grudge would follow everywhere they went until something powerful, perhaps violent, happened to satisfy it. Mere apology would not do. An offer to have it out, no holds barred, until one of them was unable to lift his head from bloodied ground? Maybe. Whit wasn't afraid of Arn, but he didn't want to fight him. The uniforms were packed away but the habit of command was ingrained; so was the assumption of superiority. He had his own pride to consider, and the liquor had made him stubborn. Fighting Arn and losing would be a disgrace. To Blackie's memory, if nothing else. But he also equated a beating with losing his son's respect. He kept looking over at Arn's Grudge, squinting to make it out there on the shadowy side of the parlor, stiffly wearing an old-fashioned garment that might have been a hair shirt. Fuck it, he thought. He wished Faren would come home. He wanted to see her more than he wanted to see Terry. She would recognize the Grudge right away, and banish it from the house. Send it out to live with the dogs.

  This house needed Faren. It was a cheerless place without her, lackluster. Even Arn seemed to realize that, while he talked about other women, his prodigious sexual despoliation.

  "Haven't you ever wanted children, Arn?"

  "Wantin' ain't gettin'. Hell, I knew a long time before I got married I wasn't goin' to have none. It's not Faren. It's me."

  "Oh. Sorry to hear it."

  "Maybe it's best. Rowdy as I've been, by now I'd have bastards slung all over this end of creation; Ireland and England, too, since we spent all that time there gettin' ready to take Europe back from the Krauts. Maybe I wouldn't have been no good with kids, Lord must know what he's doin'." He chuckled. "Might have wound up married a whole lot sooner, like to that preacher's gal I had when I was about your boy's age. Kind of a washed-out pale little blond thing with big blueberry eyes, and her own notion of how to scourge the devil out of me, so I'd be a fit vessel to receive the spirit of Jesus Christ. She'd come along and drag me off in the woods and make me take my pants down. Make me! Huh. And there'd be my pecker standin' up big and red and I reckon ugly as sin to her. The devil. Oh, she'd talk to it. Stamp around and shake her fist, workin' herself up to a e-van-gel-i-cal frenzy. 'All right, devil, we're gonna whip you today. Whip you till you can't stand up no more.' I swear to you this is no lie. Then she'd get me down on the ground and squat-fuck me, little bubbies just a-bouncin', yellin' 'Praise Jesus!' And 'Hallelujah!' ever' time one of us would come, which was plenty often. So I learned a long time ago you never can tell about the pale shy ones, sometimes t
hey bum the hottest. But she had the excuse in her head that it weren't no sin to be doin' that with me, because what she was really up to was helpin' me tame the devil. There was times we worked at it a whole afternoon and the ole pecker-devil still wouldn't bow down more than halfway. I'll say this for her, she never flagged in her devotion to the Lord's work. Wish I could think of her name now. Maybe it was Bonnie."

  Whit finished the squeezings in his glass. A few drops too many, perhaps. Bitter as belladonna on the tongue, he was through the looking glass before he had swallowed it all. His head felt very large and roly-poly, his feet little and far away. He dimmed out, hearing Arn talk on and on but unable to make sense of the words. The rain would let up for a while, then thunder would come rolling back across the roof and shake the house, every window rattling, lightning like moments of pure blindness, needles dead-center through each eyelid and paralyzing the optic nerves.

  Then Arn was leaning over him, holding the lamp in one hand, shaking him with the other.

  "What? What's that, Arn?"

  "Said I'll prove to you I'm no liar! Get up, if you can walk."

  "I can walk," Whit said in a surly tone of voice; who was Arn Rutledge to pass judgment on his competence, he had a snootful himself, his breath was foul from liquor. All Whit really wanted to do was drink a gallon of cold water to awaken his numbed tongue and refresh his burned-out throat, then go to sleep. What had Arn been talking about, a preacher's daughter who—but that might have been hours ago. He'd totally lost track of time.

  "Faren home?" he asked Arn.

  "Not yet. On your feet, there you go." Arn was smiling at him, his head deformed by the nearness of the curved lamp chimney that contained a sooty orange flame. His eyes slits. Whit saw something of himself in the lamp and, between them, what might have been the ghostly outline of the Grudge. Was Arn lusting for satisfaction now? Whit couldn't think, much less throw a punch if he had to.

  But Arn put a hand on his elbow to steady him. "This way," he said curtly.

  "Where're we going?"

  A big bolt of lightning, like a wave of the sea, came down on their heads. Rain gushed everywhere. Arn walked him slowly to the kitchen. He opened the pantry door. The pantry was long and narrow, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on two sides. Strings of dried green and red peppers, dark twists of sausage, and a couple of cured hams dangled from ceiling hooks. There was an unhinged trap door in the floor. Am pried up the door and leaned it against a shelf filled with old-style Ball jars, the kind with rubber gaskets and clamp-on lids. Dank air rose from below. Whit looked at wooden steps going down into darkness.

  "What's down there?"

  "Root cellar. Watch your step."

  Arn went first. He was able to stand erect on the dirt floor with only inches of headroom to spare. He waited with the lamp.

  Whit descended with care, wishing he didn't have to but having no will to resist. There were cobwebs between the joists. The walls of the root cellar were crudely plastered; despite the heavy rain the floor was dry. But he found it hard to breathe, air was scarce and smelled of the grave, vaguely rotten.

  In one corner were the corroded coils and green-tinted thirty-five-gallon copper kettle of a long disused still. "My daddy's works," Arn said. "He'd move most of his corn down in South Carolina, where the niggers paid him fifty cents a pint. Ain't a bad livin' nowadays nuther, in spite of the ATU, but I just never had the patience to sit around the woods tendin' mash." The root cellar was crowded with other odds and ends of mechanical junk, an old Jack Daniel's distillery barrel, wooden boxes containing what was left of last year's apple crop and some spoiling sprouted potatoes, which accounted for the prevailing odor of rottenness. And there was a big black steamer trunk that might have been fifty years old. Arn set the lamp on the barrel top and, crouching, opened the trunk. With two hands he lifted something out and stood, turning to give Whit a look. He was holding what appeared to be a crudely fashioned loop of granite, not symmetrical, mounted on a bronze pyramidal base. He set the object on the dirt floor and stepped away from it.

  "Ever seen anything like that before?"

  Whit shook his head, wishing the fog would lift.

  "No. What is it?"

  "Buddy, I don't know what you'd call it. Found it deep in the woods and lugged it home, this was two, three years ago. I set it on the kitchen table and just looked at it for a while, that's all, tryin' to figure out what it meant or where it might've come from originally—there ain't no words or markin's on it. Next thing I knew flies in the kitchen was fallin' down on the table next to it, buzzin' around on the oilcloth till they died. Faren, when she come home, she took one look and kinda drawed back like it was fixin' to bite her; she knows about things that don't meet the eye, and she said I had to pound it to pieces or throw it away where nobody could look at it, or soon enough we'd die, too, like the flies."

  "What do you mean, Faren knows about things that don't meet the eye?"

  Arn tapped the middle of his forehead with one finger. "She's got what the old granny women 'round here call 'the sight,' what some preachers mean by 'discernment.' Probably all the same thing, but she knew this piece as a bad 'un right away, if you wasn't careful how you handled it. She said it was four thousand years old, but somebody not too long ago had been usin' it for the wrong could harm us."

  "How could she know all that?"

  Arn said impatiently, "She just does. She knows. I learned early on to respect her hunches. Before we got married, when we was just gettin' acquainted, I borrowed Ralph Spivey's '53 Studebaker, which wasn't two weeks out of the showroom, and drove all the way to Hiwassee, Tennessee, where she was teachin' college at the time. Yeah, I was suckered up and struttin' my onions. Faren took one look at that red Studebaker and wouldn't set foot in it. She said the brakes was bad. I said, 'I just drove pret' near a hundred miles to take you out, and you're not gonna go with me?' She said, 'Not in that car.' I said, 'Well, good night, darlin', and don't you be lookin' for ole Arn around here anytime soon.' Last thing I heard, 'Get those brakes checked!' But I just drove off in a cuss-ed frame of mind, thinkin' that she was the most contrary piece of pussy I ever met. But I'm tellin' you, didn't travel half a dozen miles 'fore I missed a curve, brakes just went completely, and I would up rolled in a gully, the car pure-d totaled. Ralph got himself twelve thousand damages plus a new Studebaker from the car company; all I collected was a busted spleen and a cracked shinbone that laid me up in the hospital for a couple weeks. Faren come to see me ever' day, and the same day they let me out of the hospital I got married on crutches." He looked at the object on the floor of the root cellar, and quickly away. "To satisfy Faren I took my eight-pound sledge to that thing. Couldn't chip the littlest piece off it. Looks like it's sure 'nuff made of stone, but I reckon how it's not."

  "You found it in Wildwood?"

  "'Bout one third of the way up Tormentil, near the Ookoonaka branch of the Cat Brier. Here's somethin' I near forgot. There was dead birds lyin' around it, in all directions. But I didn't connect the birds then with the—whatever it is, otherwise I never would have brung it home."

  "You carried it, but you didn't suffer any ill effects?"

  "Said I brung it, must weigh upwards of twenty pounds. Wrapped it in the ground tarp I had with me, tied a rope around it, and drug it behind me on a skid. Too heavy to handle any other way."

  "Why do you keep the thing, Arn?"

  "I reckon it's just steadily losin' power, locked up here in the dark. And it's proof, part of the proof that whatever I say I seen in Wildwood, I'm not just spinnin' yarns. And here's better proof."

  This time, with the greatest of care, he removed from the big trunk a long oilcloth bundle tied at both ends with rugged twine. The bundle, in contrast to the solid, mysterious, slightly lopsided loop, seemed to weigh next to nothing. Arn hunkered down and untied the bundle with fingers that shook slightly; his face was reddening, almost a blush, as if he were a virgin bridegroom beside himself with the excitement of disr
obing his wife on their wedding night. He laid the bundle open and revealed a nearly complete skeleton about five feet in length, the skull separate and staring vacantly up from the nest of bones formed by ribs and shieldlike pelvic structure. Or was it parts of two skeletons? Whit felt a twinge of dismay, trying painfully to distinguish the assortment through bleary eyes. Youthful-looking teeth in the skull. A powerful rib cage and breastbone sturdy as the keel of a whaling ship. One foot missing at the ankle—and where was the rest of it? The long arm bones, the tapering fingers, and complex joints. He saw instead kitelike frameworks as large as the body, attached to the shoulder blades. Not two skeletons as he'd thought, it was all of a piece—

  "Oh, my God," Whit said, and Arn looked up, lips tight in a grimace of triumph.

  "You see it, then, don't you? That skeleton ain't faked up nuther, like some claimed it to be. This is just how I found it, years after I shot him out of the sky."

  "It—flew—?''

  "Goddamn right he flew! The hawkman. Ten of us and a big pack of dogs saw him take off from a ledge high up Tormentil. Now, look here, you got to hunker down real close to see it. This little chip out of the breastbone? That tiny gray mark you see is lead from my 30-'06. I nailed him with the one shot from half a mile, got him clean through the heart, too, judgin' from the way that chip was taken out of the bone. Ten of us saw it, and I'm the only one left. Some of the others just tore to pieces while they was out huntin', by wild things with the minds of men. So how about it, Whit? When I tell you I seen a fire-breathin' animal in the woods no bigger'n a housecat but walkin' on eagle's claws, do you still believe I made it up? Wildwood is just what it sounds like—a wild place, and strange. You take your Alice in Wonderland, your Grimm fairy tales, hell, it's stranger than any of that. Wasn't always, not when my daddy was growin' up, but they hadn't built the big chateau up there then."