We sink into the tallgrass, happy to get swallowed and escape the midday sun. But when we emerge the sky is seamless and black, and the last yellow stitching goes dark. Something is shifting, I think. We reach a timber belt of cottonwood and Siberian elms—species not uncommon to Nebraska, yet I’ve never seen examples of such overpowering heights. Atmospheric salts spill through the air as birds scatter in fantastic numbers before us. The charge pucks the horse’s huge nostrils, causes her devil’s ears to cup around. A chill races down her bony shoulders and prickles up my neck. Between noon and one o’clock, the temperature must plummet some twenty degrees. A sound I barely recognize claps in the distance. “Oh, Nore,” I mumble into her ear, sick with hope. The black sky grows blacker still.
Rain?
I dig into her soft belly too meanly, as if the moons of my spurs could burst the clouds, and maybe they can: The miracle sounds again as if the sky’s been shot, and rain gushes all over us. Unstoppably, like blood from a body. I stick out my tongue to catch it. Over my scalp and Nore’s coarse hair it runs and glimmers, crystal clear and clean. Sheets of water hammer the tallgrass flat, and we go whooping on, Nore and I whinnying in a duet:
Rain! Rain! Rain!
Deeper into the storm I begin to get a picture in my mind of water flooding down the Hox glass. Rain shining the Window. “Oh, God, I want to see that, Nore,” I whisper to her. It’s a scene I’ve imagined a thousand times through all the dry years.
I slow her to a stop and dismount. The red stump I use as Nore’s hitching post is boiling with water; she stares at me, her great eyes running. I undo the knot, loosen the burlap. Rain soaks over my trembling hands; I move the scatter rugs and expose a triangle of the Hox glass. The first drop hits with a beautiful plink, and I feel like an artist. Soon this corner of the Window is jeweled with water, and I uncover the rest of the glass, floating the whole blurred world through it.
I close my eyes and see my mother and father drenched outside the soddy, still dancing but joyously now; Louma in the barn rolling her twinkling eyes at real lightning; the sod crumbling from our ceiling; the house turning into a mudslide. We’ll sleep outdoors and watch the wheat growing and leafing, heading out and reseeding. I angle the Window and funnel the cold rain onto my boot toes. Feelings billow and surge in me to a phenomenal height, a green joy that I wish I could share with my mother.
By now a whole river must have fallen out of heaven and into the sod, and I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Then I look up and see it’s not only rainfall sweeping over the prairie: a shape slips through the bluestem just ahead of us, disappears.
“Mr. Florissant?”
But the Florissant claim is still an hour from us at a gallop. And if that shape belonged to Daniel Florissant, well, he has changed considerably since the Easter picnic.
Quickly I rebundle and rope up the Window and get astride Nore, wishing for Peter’s .22 rifle or even a pocketknife as I scan the ground for flat rocks, sticks.
“Hello?”
The black figure is moving through the switchgrass. I turn Nore around and try to give chase until I realize it’s not escaping through the rain at all but rather circling us, like a hawk or the hand of a clock.
“Mr. Florissant? Is that you?” I swallow. “Inspector …?”
I wheel inside the shadow’s wheeling, each of us moving against the rotation of the other like cogs, the stranger occasionally walking into sight and then vanishing again; and if he is the Inspector, he does not seem in any hurry to meet me. Perhaps this is part of some extra test—as if our patience requires further proof. Five years, three daughters, half an inch of rain, and no wheat crop last winter—even Cousin Bailey can sum those numbers. “Inspector!” I holler again over the thunder. Nore trembles, and I imagine that she, too, can feel the pull of this fellow’s gaze, the noose he’s drawing around us.
I realize that I’m shivering out of my clothes, my hands raw. Then a cold flake hits my nose. The rain is turning to snow.
Can a blizzard strike this early, in late October? Does that happen on the prairie? Immediately I regret putting the question to the sky, which seems eager to answer, suddenly very attentive to the questions of humans. “Run, Nore,” I tell her. We still have to pass the Yotherses’ place.
ONLY I KNOW where the Hox River Window really came from. Pa told me by accident after a pint of beer and made me pledge my silence. It’s a scary story: One December night, almost two years ago now, we believed the Inspector was coming to visit our farm. We were eighteen months short of the residency requirement, and we had no window. Frantic, Pa rode out to the Yotherses’ to beg for a square of glass and found their claim abandoned.
Tack was scattered all over the barn floor. Outside, three half-starved Sauceman hogs were masticating the pale red fibers of Mrs. Yothers’s dress; piles of clothing lay trampled into the sod—bouquets of children’s bow ties. The dugout was dark. A family of spotted black jackrabbits were licking their long feet under the table. A tarantula had closed around the bedpost like a small, gloved hand. The Window was still shining in the wall.
So Pa took it. He rode home and told Ma that he’d bartered for the Window from a man moving back to ranch West Texas.
What a whopper! I thought, and almost laughed out loud, guessing that Pa must be teasing us. Straightaway I’d recognized our neighbors’ glass.
I waited for Ma to dispute the story, yet she surprised me by breathing, “Oh, thank you—” in a little girl’s voice and reaching out to the Window with dreamy eyes. Peter, too, chuckled softly and touched the glass like it was a piece of new luck, and no one ever mentioned our friends the Yotherses again. As we carried the Window down to our dugout in a Zegner parade—Ma singing and Peter’s smile lighting even his eyes—those thousand kids were everywhere in my imagination, asking me why I kept quiet, asking why I was trying with all my might to forget them.
To me only, Pa confessed to coveting their title, still posted on the dirt wall—but he took the Window instead, not wanting to risk our own claim by squatting on another man’s haunted land. This scared me worse than anything else: Who would leave 160 acres to which they held title? What happened to them? “What’s the difference, Miles?” My father had drunk himself into a moon-squint, his eyes glowing crescents. “Dead is gone.”
Now whenever he mentions “West Texas,” he winks at me, and I think of my sisters under the sod, silently winking back.
“What puzzles me, Miles,” he slurred at the end of the night, “is that before he left, Mr. Yothers had drilled in a new crop. At first I saw the rows behind the wheat and thought, Ah, Henry knows how starved we are for timber, he’s planted trees—dozens of queer little trees, shaped like crosses. Just a single branch right through their middles. Saplings, sure. Only one grew about a foot and a half, and the rest were much smaller. The thin trunks were the funniest shade of milky white, my son, like no tree’s wood I’ve ever seen; and there wasn’t a leaf in that bleached grove. And who plants anything in the dead of winter, in frozen ground? On my knees I discovered that each horizontal branch was roped to its base by a hitching knot, and these white branches were knobby at the ends, almost like animal—or even human …”
But Pa saw my face and trailed off, and soon he began to snore, and I was left alone to fret over his riddle. Now I think we must be very near to this milky white grove, and I am grateful for the dark sky and the snowflakes on Nore’s reins—because there is no time for me to dismount and wander into the rows, to prove my guess right or wrong.
Forgive us, forgive us, I think as I race Nore past the Yotherses’ bleak dugout, where the empty window frame leers on, and snow swirls in lovely patterns.
We detour five miles around a carmine streambed filled with ice, where dozens of black snakes draw S shapes like a slow, strange current, spooking Nore; and afterward I’m no longer sure of our direction. Like us, the sun is lost. The temperature continues to fall. We come upon a dam I’ve never seen, the Window ra
ttling like a saber against Nore’s belly.
“Oh, God, where are we, Nore?” I coax her up a low hill, and it’s around then that the blizzard hits.
The wind attacks our naked skin like knives; I can nearly hear Ma’s voice in it, calling me home. But I’m too brave to turn the horse around, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which way to go. White octaves of snow shriek from the tallgrass to the great descending blank of the heavens. “Go, go, go,” I moan into Nore’s ear, wanting her to decide. A part of me is already at the Florissants’, warming up by the fire, sharing a meal of drumsticks and cider and biscuits with the Inspector. Their title drying on the kitchen table. “Well, sir,” I tell him, “we did have a little trouble getting here, but it was certainly worth the risk …” A choke-cherry branch cuts my left eyelid, and the eye fills with blood. The more I rub at it the denser the red gel gets. Outside of my mind I can barely see. We go flickering through the snow, until it becomes difficult to say which colors and temperatures are inner or outer weather, where one leaves off and the other picks up. I tighten my knee’s grip on the Window frame. When Nore breaks into a gallop I drop the reins and grab her neck. Snow is eating our tracks: when I look back, it’s as if we no longer exist.
She shoots through the tempest like an arrow for its target, and I think, Thank God, she must smell a barn—but when her jaw jerks around, I see that ice coats her eyes. She’s been galloping completely blind.
I am sure we’re being punished—I should never have unwrapped the Window, not even for one second. Snow pummels us with its million knuckles. “Oh, my darling, oh, poor darling,” I tell Nore—I don’t recognize my own voice anymore; Peter would caw with laughter if he could hear my tone, my father would be sickened—“Nore, my sweet one, my love …” Tender words pour out of me, my grandmother Aura’s words, the kind I haven’t heard since she spoke them on the cousins’ rose sofa in Blue Sink, and I wish I could use them like a compass needle to lead me back.
I grab ahold of the bridle and tug Nore forward with the wind at our backs, blowing more snow in on gales. I think of trying to guide her by the reins, but the snow’s banked too deep to walk. Nore’s sides heave, covered in freezing lather. Her eyelashes are stiff. I can’t feel my toes inside my boots.
The horse keeps going blind, and I can’t stop it—the ice coating the dark circles of her purply-black eyes. She moans whenever I attempt to pry and crack them clear. The reins wriggle snakily down her back and she jumps sideways. Hatred shivers along her spine; I’ve got one eyelid in a pinch when she peels back her lips and tries to bite me but misses and rears. As if in slow motion I watch the Window coming loose, thumping against her side in the snow-furred burlap; I feel myself rolling, falling out of the saddle and somehow beneath her churning hooves, reaching up as the Window slides slantwise, one point angled at my chest—and then I’m lying in the snow with the Window in my arms, stunned, watching as Nore disappears.
Now I understand: this is a nightmare. She flies into the white heart of the storm while I pant all raggedy in the drifts with the Window hard against my chest, sucking my frozen thumb. Screaming turns out to be an agility I’ve taken for granted; “Nore,” I try to shout, but hear nothing. For one moment more I can see her running: a black match head tearing against a wall of snow. It’s a wonder the gales don’t catch alight and burn.
Mr. Inspector, sir, I hope you’re stuck in the weather, too. And, Mrs. Florissant, do not let us hold you up for dinner, please eat, and should you spy a man through the open socket in your wall, won’t you tell him that I’m lost …
Suddenly I realize what I’m holding on to—did I shatter it? I’m terrified to look. (What I see instead is Louma’s skeleton in dust, my fingers threading through the open sockets in her skull.) As I pry at the burlap I learn something surprising about my future, something I hadn’t guessed: If the Hox glass is in pieces, I won’t ever go back home. I’d rather die here than return to our dugout without it.
Oh, Father, thank you—it’s intact. I push my palms down the smooth length of it twice before sealing the burlap, then roll onto my back. High above me the black sky withdraws forever into an upside-down horizon—not a blue prairie line but a cone of snows. Wind wolves go on howling. Each of my eyelids feels heavier than iron, but sleep isn’t what’s beckoning me; the snow is teaching me a deeper way to breathe: long spaces open up behind each inhalation, followed by a very colorful spell of coughing. There’s blood on the back of my hand—I knocked loose several teeth when I fell. One is lying near my left eye in its own smeary puddle. Snow falls and falls. Tomorrow, I think, the thirsty sod will drink this storm up, guzzle the red runoff from my chin. Acres of gold wheat wave at me from the future: March, April.
Hold on to your claim, Pa hisses, and I wipe my eyes.
What am I supposed to be doing out here again? Where am I taking the glass? And wasn’t there a horse? For the life of me I cannot remember the horse’s name.
More than anything I want to get the Window through the storm. I crouch over the burlap like something feeding—my skin becoming one more layer of protection for the glass. Soon my clothes are soaked through. The elements seal my eyes, so that I have to keep watch over the Window blindly with my arms. I clutch at it like a raft as the prairie pitches in icy waves. Images swirl through my mind of animals freezing in their stalls, black fingers lost to doctors’ saws. Think of a Bible verse, a hymn! What enters my head instead is my mother’s humming, a weedy drone that has no tune. Hours pass, or maybe minutes or whole days; the clock of my body breaks down. The world is pitch-black.
WHEN I WAKE, water is running in spring rivers down my face; my eyelids unravel and crack open. The temperature has risen, and a sunbeam fixes an X on my hand, which burns when I flex it. The hard pillow of the Window comes into focus under my cheek. I turn my head and find I’m surrounded by leafless skeletons of trees and the sapphire ice—and a man, watching me.
I sit up. Fifty yards ahead, a willowy man takes one sideways step through the golden haze and is somehow suddenly upon me. I’m saved! I think—but just as quickly my cry for help dissolves. This man looks even worse off than me. His gaunt face is entirely black except for the wet cracks of his eyes and mouth and pink lesions on his cheeks, as if he has just survived some kind of explosion. At first I think the skin is charred, but then the light gives it a riverbed glow and I realize he’s covered in mud—soil, sod. His shirt and trousers are stiff with the same black filth, and the dirt on his collar isn’t dried at all, but oozing. A dim saucer at each knee shows he’s been genuflecting in the fields. Only, what sort of man is out farming in a blizzard? Not even my father is that crazy. What would drive a person into this weather?
He shuffles toward me, removing his hat.
“Inspector?”
We shout this at the exact same moment. Then we’re left to gape at each other. White frogs of breath leap from my mouth. He doesn’t seem to breathe at all.
“Hello, sir,” I manage, and hold out a numb hand. The feeling returns to my stiff arm, and I bite down as pain rips along the bone—the polite smile, by some miracle, still on my face. “I guess we are both mistaken, sir.” (“Etiquette will take possession of you at the oddest times, won’t it, Miles?” Ma murmured once, when I caught her apologizing to a cupful of grasshoppers before drowning them in kerosene.)
Well, the stranger doesn’t return any of my friendliness. I’m Miles Zegner, I was about to offer, but I swallow it back. And I don’t ask for his name, either; a queasiness stirring in my gut warns me that I might not want to know it.
I’m certain that I’ve never seen this man on any homestead around here—but he’s dressed for the work, with his cuffs pushed to the elbows like any man in Hox; and like Pa he has the settler’s scar from the moldboard plow. He’s a southpaw. A sodbuster. One of us. A newcomer to the Hox River Settlement? (No, no, a little voice in me whispers, not new.) His eyes have the half-moon markings of a pronghorn antelope. He looks like he’s been awake for gen
erations.
“You did not see a horse come through here, sir?”
“No horses. No Inspectors on horseback. No bats hanging from Inspectors’ noses.” He giggles.
“Are you all right, sir? Are you lost, too?”
Then the man says something in a jangly tone that I can barely understand, it’s so reedy and high. His voice is almost female, or animal, and the words make no sense whatsoever.
“Green me that wheel!”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Grease me that doe!”
I swallow hard.
“Sir, I am not understanding you.”
He draws a rectangle in the snow-dotted air and laughs; I swear I see a nugget of earth tumble out of his mouth. His lips are plush and smeared.
“But we need to wake up now, don’t we, boy? This is quite a day! It sounds like you and I are on the hunt for the same fellow. The Inspector is coming shortly, you see. Yes. I believe that he will be coming very soon.”
A fine gray ash is blowing from his curly hair, which looks like it is or once might have been yellow. The wind shifts and my nose wrinkles—there’s a smell, a putrescence, a mix of silage and marrow and a hideous sweetness, like the time a family of rats suffocated in our sod walls. One hand keeps fussing with his trousers, which he’s belted with a double loop of rope—his rib cage is almost impossibly narrow. If he were any thinner I swear he’d disappear. My mother’s voice drifts into my ear: “He’s a rumor, he’s smoke …” But his eyes are solid marbles, and his fingernails are real enough to be broken. His left hand closes on the handle of a hay knife.
“That’s a beautiful knife.”
He smiles at me.
“And you say you are also”—I cough—“waiting on the Inspector? You’ve been here for the five years, then?”
The handle of the knife is some kind of clover-toned wood. The blade looks like a long tooth.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove Page 10
