Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  “Oh!” The man laughs. “Even longer. Long enough to lose track of the days and seasons entirely. Suns, moons, droughts, famines—who’s counting?” He laughs again. The sun is stronger now. It shifts above us but never seems to settle anywhere on him.

  “Where is your quarter section?”

  “You’re standing on it.”

  “Oh.” But where are we? “Is anyone else here? Don’t you have a family?”

  “I may have.” He frowns and licks his black lips, as if he truly cannot remember. “Yes! I did have a family. Parents, certainly. They are buried back east. And a wife … yes!” He beams at me. “I did have one. A wife, but she wasn’t worth much. Women can be so impatient, Miles. And children—I believe we had several of them.”

  He begins to shake his thin shoulders in the silvery h-yuk, h-yuk, h-yuk of a coyote. His tongue surprises me—I guess part of me thought he was a ghost, a creature like my sisters. But his tongue is as red as sunrise in his dark face. He is alive, no question. I feel relieved, then scared for fresh reasons.

  “Ah, children—that was a wash.” This time when he opens his mouth, his voice is all throat.

  “You shouldn’t laugh at that.”

  “What’s the matter?” He grins, trying to rib me with his elbow. “Out here we need a sense of humor, isn’t that so?”

  The violence of his laughter sprays dirt into the air; I cough again and think with horror that I’m breathing a powder from his body.

  “Your kids all died?”

  He shrugs.

  “Sons or daughters?”

  “Sons and daughters, yes. Sicklings. Weak ones. None lasted.”

  “What happened to your wife?”

  “She lost faith.” He lets out a theatrical sigh. “Lost her will to prosper. Became a madwoman, if you want to know. I had to make a break with her. Had to make a fresh start”—I wince; he’s talking just like Pa now—“drove her off. Or rather, plowed her under. The West is a land of infinite beginnings, isn’t that right, Miles Zegner? Pick up, embark again, file a preempt, stake a new claim”—Did I tell him my name?—“and after many lonely seasons, I have fulfilled each of the Act’s stipulations. See this?”

  He’s holding something out to me—half a piece of paper. I take it with a trembling hand and recognize the text of the Homestead Act. I marvel at the document’s creamy white color, its ink-bleeding signature—if I didn’t know better I’d swear it was the original writ. How did this dirt-streaked stranger acquire such a thing—a law that looks like it was snatched from the president’s own desk?

  SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, that the Register of the Land Office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded …

  The man trails a slushy finger down to the word glass. Every claim shanty or dugout must have a real glass window, a whimsical clause that has cost lives out here. I stare at the sod and the black ribbon of blood under his nail.

  “So you see that I’m in real need here, Miles. All the other proof I have ready for this Register, the Inspector. The last thing I need is a window.” He contorts his mouth into a terrible smile.

  My father’s instructions move my jaw, push out my breath: “Listen, sir. I have a Window. If the Inspector is coming, I can loan it to you. We can fix it so it looks like it belongs to your dugout. So you can prove up.”

  “You would do that? For me?”

  His eyes brighten fervidly in his grimy face, but not with happiness—it’s more like watching sickness take root and germinate, blazing into a wildfire fever.

  I nod, thinking about Pa. For all his charity with the Hox glass, I’m the one who bears the risk of it.

  Without my awareness, we have begun moving; and our march feels almost like a pleasant walk, just a normal trip to deliver the Window to a neighbor. I picture the Florissants’ claim swimming toward me out of the plains. The sun casts itself like a spell across the land—as if the blizzard never happened, as if Nore was not lost. The sky out west has so many tricks to make a person forget what he’s just lived through.

  We enter a clearing. Shortgrass and green ash are planted in tiers as a windbreak, and I can see what must be his dugout.

  There are no bones in his fingers. He is made of dust. If it ever rains again he will seep back into the earth.

  Before us a wall of sod bulges and heaves—every inch of it covered with flies. Doorless and stolidly black, studded through with reddish roots; there is not one thing this heap of earth has in common with a home. The snow stops abruptly fifty yards in every direction from the structure’s foundation. No grass grows on it or near it; no birds sing; the smell of death makes my nostrils burn and my eyes stream.

  Dear Bailey, I write in my mind, if you thought our sod house was difficult to understand, you’ll find it impossible to imagine this one. Bailey, I might not make it out of here alive.

  “Gosh, sir” is all that squeaks out of me.

  “Now, would you like to see my crops, Miles? The acres I have cultivated? They’re behind the house.”

  “And what crops might those be, sir?”

  I want his words to give me the familiar pictures. Say: corn. Say: wheat, milo, hay, lucerne. But he only smiles and replies, “Come take a look.”

  I let the man lead me by my elbow, and when we turn a corner I shut my eyes. I wonder if he’ll pry them open—like I did Nore’s.

  “Quite a harvest, eh?” he’s saying. “And I grew them without a drop of water.”

  Sometimes I dream that dark rains fall and my sisters rise out of the sod, as tall as the ten-foot wheat, shaking the midges and the dust from their tangled hair. Like rain, they thunder and moan. Their pale mouths open and they hiss. Their faces aren’t like any faces I know. Stay in the ground, I plead. Oh, God, please let only wheat rise up.

  Even when my eyes open, I can’t stop rubbing at them—I feel like I’m still held in that dream. The scene before me is familiar and terrifying: white crosses, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, rolling outward on the prairie sea. A shovel head glints in a freshly plowed furrow, where a yellowish knob the size of an onion sticks out of the sod. And I see now why Pa was so troubled by their milky hue, because these trees aren’t made of wood at all, but bone. My sisters go on hissing in my mind.

  “So you see,” the man says, as brightly as any western noon, “as soon as the Inspector comes, I’ll own the land—a hundred and sixty acres, and not one yard less.”

  No, you are mistaken, sir. The land owns you.

  He takes my arm and guides me back toward the sod mound. “Now, if you’ll just kindly help me put the window in—”

  “And when do you think the Inspector is coming?” I ask in a mild voice.

  The man smiles and rakes at his black eyes.

  As we unpeel the snowy burlap from the Window, I find myself thinking about my home: Once, when I was nearly sleeping, a fleecy tarantula with a torso as thick as a deck of cards crawled across my mouth, and Peter laughed so hard that I started laughing, too. My father took three months to finish a table and paint it lake blue, just because he thought the color would be a relief to Ma. My mother pieced a quilt for each of her daughters in the dark. Often, at night, I wake into the perfect blankness of the dugout and watch our dreams braid together along the low ceiling. It would take lifetimes to explain to this wretched creature why our Zegner soddy is a home, even without any Inspector’s stamp, while this place is a … tomb.

  I step back and let him do the last work to widen the aperture meant to frame the Window. He grunts and scrapes at the pegs holding the shape of the breach and snows sod down all around us. He spits sootily on the glass and rubs in broad strokes with his sleeve.

  “When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he begins prattling, and a quagmire opens up in my chest, deep in its center—a terror like the suck of sof
t earth. And like a quagmire the terror won’t release me, because the man is speaking in the voice of my own father, and of every sodbuster in the Hox River Settlement—a voice that can live for eons on dust and thimblefuls of water, that can be plowed under, hailed out, and go on whispering madly forever about spring, about tomorrow, a voice of a hope beyond the reach of reason or exhaustion (oh, Ma, that’s going to be my voice soon)—a voice that will never let us quit the land.

  “Give it back.”

  “It’s too late for that, Miles.”

  “I have money,” I say, remembering Pa’s envelope. “Give me the glass, take the money, and I’ll be on my way.”

  The man looks down at me, amused; he fingers a dollar bill as if it were the feather of a foreign bird, and I think that he must be even older than our country, as old as the sod itself. “What use would I have for that? That isn’t the paper I require. And anyway, this window isn’t yours. You stole it.”

  I reply in a daze: “You’re acquainted with the Yotherses?”

  “I was, in a way, but only at the end.”

  “I didn’t steal the Window.”

  “No, but your father did.”

  “You know my father?”

  “Where do you think I was coming from when I happened upon you?”

  My eyes swim and land on the clover glow of his hay knife.

  “When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he’s saying again, in the tone that sparkles. His back is to me, and I watch the knife bob on his hip. My legs tremble as I spread them to a wide base and get ready to lunge. In a moment, I’ll have to grab his knife and stab him in the back, then reclaim the Window from the wall of his tomb and run for the Florissants’ place. I can feel the nearness of these events—feel the tearing of his skin, the tug of his muscle tissue as the knife rips between his twitching shoulder blades—and I powerfully wish that I could crawl through the window of my Blue Sink bedroom, where such apprehensions would be unimaginable, and drift into a dreamless sleep in my childhood bed.

  As I crouch stiffly into my soles, the stranger says gently, “I thought you said you weren’t a thief.”

  “Excuse me?” I look up—and find my image reflected in the glass.

  “That’s the thing with windows, isn’t it, Miles?” he says. “Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see.”

  He turns to me then, and his eyes are bottomless.

  MRS. STICKSEL PEERS through the hole in her wall at a tall shape coming on a long trot through the wheat—the complex moving silhouette of a horse and rider. She breaks into a smile, relieved, and moves to stand in the doorway, the children fluttering around her. It’s only then that she notices the soreness of her jaw, tense from all the anxious waiting. She waves a pale arm beneath the black night sky, beneath the still-falling snow, and thinks, That Zegner child sure did shoot up this year, as the rider’s profile grows. The face is still a blank mask.

  “Well, look who made it!” she calls. “Oh praise God, lost lamb, we’ve been so worried about you. We had just about given you up—”

  A slice of moonlight falls across the horse’s flank.

  “Say, isn’t that the Florissants’ mare? What happened to Nore?”

  When the Zegner boy doesn’t answer, she loosens the grip on her smile and tries a hot little laugh.

  “That’s you, ain’t it, Miles? In this weather I can scarcely see out—”

  And just as the children go rushing out to greet the rider, she has the dark feeling she should call them back.

  The Barn at the End of Our Term

  The girl

  The girl is back. She stands silhouetted against the sunshine, the great Barn doors thrown open. Wisps of newly mown hay lift and scatter. Light floods into the stalls.

  “Hi horsies!” The girl is holding a cloth napkin full of peaches. She walks up to the first stall and holds out a pale yellow fruit.

  Rutherford arches his neck toward her outstretched hand. Freckles of light float across his patchy hindquarters. He licks the girl’s palm according to a code that he’s worked out: - - - -, which means that he is Rutherford Birchard Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States of America, and that she should alert the local officials.

  “Ha-ha!” the girl laughs. “That tickles.”

  Rebirth

  When Rutherford woke up inside the horse’s body, he was tied to a stout flag post. He couldn’t focus his new eyes. He was wearing blinders. A flag was whipping above him, but Rutherford was tethered so tightly to the post that he couldn’t twist his neck to count the stars. He could hear a clock gonging somewhere nearby, a sound that rattled through his chest in waves. That clock must be broken, Rutherford thought. It struck upwards of twelve times, of twenty, more gongs than there were hours in a day. After a certain number of repetitions, it ceased to mean anything.

  Rutherford stared down into a drainage ditch and saw a horse’s broody face staring back at him. His hooves were rough, unfeeling endings. He stamped, and he couldn’t feel the ground beneath him. The gonging wasn’t a clock at all, he realized with a warm, spreading horror, but the thudding of his giant equine heart.

  A man with a prim mustache and a mean slouch blundered toward him, streaked fire up Rutherford’s sides with a forked quirt, shoved Rutherford into a dark trailer. The quirt lashed out again and again, until he felt certain that he had been damned to a rural Hell.

  The Devil! Rutherford thought as the man drew closer. He shied away, horrified. But then the man reached up and gave him a gentle ear-scratch and an amber cube of sugar, confounding things further.

  “God?”

  The man seemed a little on the short side to be God. His fly was down, his polka-dotted underclothes exposed. Surely God would not have faded crimson dots on his underclothes? Surely God would wear a belt? The man kept stroking his blond mustache. His voice sounded thick and wrong to Rutherford’s ears: “He’s in, hyuh-hyuh. Give her the gas, Phyllis!”

  The trailer rolled forward, and in three days’ time Rutherford reached the Barn. He has been stabled there ever since.

  The Barn

  The Barn is part of a modest horse farm, its pastures rolling forward into a blank, mist-cloaked horizon. The landscape is flat and corn-yellow and empty of people. In fact, the prairies look a lot like the grasslands of Kentucky. There are anthills everywhere, impossibly huge, heaped like dirt monsters.

  There are twenty-two stalls in the Barn. Eleven of the stabled horses are, as far as Rutherford can ascertain, former presidents of the United States of America. The other stalls are occupied by regular horses, who give the presidents suspicious, sidelong looks. Rutherford B. Hayes is a skewbald pinto with a golden cowlick and a cross-eyed stare. Rutherford hasn’t made many inroads with these regular horses. The Clydesdales are cliquish and pink-gummed, and the palominos are inbred buffoons.

  The ratio of presidents to normal horses in the Barn appears to be constant, eleven:eleven. Rutherford keeps trying and failing to make these numbers add up to some explanation (Let’s see, if I am the nineteenth president but the fourth to arrive in the Barn, and if eleven divided by eleven is one, then … hrm, let me start again …). He’s still no closer to figuring out the algorithm that determined their rebirth here. “Just because a ratio’s stable doesn’t make it meaningful,” says James Garfield, a tranquil gray Percheron, and Rutherford agrees. Then he goes back to his frantic cosmic arithmetic.

  The presidents feel certain that they are still in America, although there’s no way for them to confirm this. The year—time still advances the way it did when they were president—is indeterminate. A day gets measured in different increments out here. Grass brightens, and grass dims. Glass cobwebs spread across the tractor’s window at dawn. Eisenhower claims that they are stabled in the past: “The skies are empty,” he nickers. “Not a B-52 in sight.”

  To Rutherford, this new life hums with the strangeness of the future. The man has a cavalry of electric beasts that he rides over his acrea
ge: ruby tractors and combines that would have caused Rutherford’s constituents to fall off their buggies with shock. The man climbs into the high tractor seat and turns a tiny key, and then the engine roars and groans with an unintelligible hymn. Cherubs strumming harps couldn’t have impressed Rutherford more than these baritone plows of the hereafter.

  “Come back! That’s not holy music, you dummy!” Eisenhower yells. “It’s just diesel!”

  The man goes by the name of Fitzgibbons. The girl appears to be Fitzgibbons’s niece. (Rutherford used to think the girl was an Angel of Mercy, but that was before the incident with the wasps.) She refers to the man as “Uncle Fitzy,” a moniker that many of the presidents find frankly alarming. Rutherford, for his part, feels only relief. “Fitzy” certainly doesn’t seem so bad when you consider the many infernal alternatives: Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, old Serpent, the Prince of Darkness, the Author of Evil, Mister Scratch. Even if Fitzgibbons does turn out to be the Devil, Rutherford thinks, there is something strangely comforting about his Irish surname.

  At first many of the presidents assumed that Fitzgibbons was God, but there’s been plenty of evidence to suggest that their reverence was misplaced. Fitzgibbons is not a good shepherd. He sleeps in and lets his spring lambs toddle into ditches. The presidents have watched a drunken Fitzgibbons fall off the roof of the shed. They have listened to Fitzgibbons cursing his dead mother. If Fitzgibbons is God, then every citizen of the Union is in dire jeopardy.

  “Well, I for one have great faith in Fitzgibbons. I think he is a just and merciful Lord.” James Buchanan can only deduce, given his administration’s many accomplishments, that this Barn must be Heaven. Buchanan has been reborn as a fastidious bay, a gelding sired by that racing great Caspian Rickleberry. “Do you know that I have an entry in the Royal Ledger of Equine Bloodlines, Rutherford? It’s true.” His nostrils flare with self-regard. “I am being rewarded,” Buchanan insists, “for annexing Oregon.”