Mr. Shivers

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He shook his head.

  The cards shuffled again. Her rose-pink fingers sped through the deck and lifted one out. On it was a capped man wearing a colorful, festive gown and carrying a rucksack over his shoulder. In his other hand he had a walking stick and dogs nipped at his heels.

  “The fool,” she said. “All of them, fools. Their way is easier than yours. But perhaps you were made for hard ways and hard worlds. For this one and the one that lies far to the west. Where things still remember younger years of joyful savagery.”

  Sibyl looked at the cards in her hands and then angrily threw them over her shoulder. They fluttered to the ground behind her like moths upset from old clothing. She shook her head and in her tantrum Connelly was again reminded of her age. She was no more than a girl.

  Feeling his gaze, she lifted her eyes and said, “There’s nothing you can do for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can no more stop what I am doing here than you can stop yourself now.” She toyed with her hair and sullenly watched him. “Did you get your money’s worth?”

  Connelly said nothing.

  “I’m tired. Let me rest, Connelly. Go if you want, but let me rest.”

  He turned and walked out.

  Outside the carnie was sitting on the stoop.

  “Have fun?” he asked.

  Connelly walked down to him. He gestured to the flask. “Give me a sip of that.”

  “What, this? Sure.”

  Connelly took it and drank. It was either vodka or half-decent moonshine, he couldn’t tell. He breathed in. The air was still sickly sweet and the ghostly image of the match flame was burned into the bluegreen night.

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “A lot of things,” he said, then handed it back and walked away over the fields. The music had died and the people had stopped singing. Somewhere a horn honked and a child began crying and would not quiet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He found the others seated outside of a tent watching the carnival workers break the show down. Tents deflated gracefully around them to lie on the ground like the skins of some unworldly animal.

  “What’d she say?” asked Pike.

  “Nothing much,” said Connelly.

  “It was a foolish thing. We shouldn’t have let her delay us. Still, we have something useful now.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be money or brains at the moment. What is it?”

  “That boy over there,” said Roosevelt, nodding at a young man helping the workers. “He seen him.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “Asked a few folks. They knew of him, said one person had talked to him. That boy right over there.”

  “I guess they were right,” said Hammond. “The man did come here.”

  Connelly could feel the anxiety washing off of them like smoke.

  “You may not understand,” said Pike, his voice quiet. “This is the closest we’ve come in months and years.”

  “I understand plenty,” said Connelly.

  They sat in the road and watched the tents topple and flounder and waited on the boy. He was a skinny thing, no older than thirteen, overalled and sandy blond and barefoot. When the carnival workers had given him his pay he came over and said, “You boys the ones looking for the ugly fella?”

  “That would be right,” said Pike.

  “Why you looking for him?”

  “He stole something from me,” said Hammond smoothly.

  “Huh. I’d believe it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  The boy didn’t answer. Instead he said, “My brother owes me fifteen cents, still hasn’t repaid it.”

  “Bastards the world over,” said Hammond.

  “Watch your language in front of the boy,” said Pike, but the boy seemed pleased to have men casually swear in front of him.

  “Come and sit with us, if you will,” Roosevelt said.

  “I will, thanks.”

  “What’s someone your age doing out so late?”

  “Working. Getting what I can. My folks is going to head west. We’re going to pick fruit out there. They need what they can get. Maybe I can get me something, too.”

  “They going to California?” said Pike.

  “Or New Mexico for cotton, they haven’t made up their minds yet. They argue a lot about it.”

  “Times are tough,” said Hammond.

  “They are. Everything in the whole state just dried up. Like the dirt just decided it didn’t care for plants no more and just cut them loose.”

  “Where did you see the scarred man?” asked Pike, impatient.

  “Why?”

  Hammond said, “I already told you, he’s stolen something from me and—”

  “Ain’t what I was talking about. I meant why would I tell you?”

  “Tell us?” said Pike, frowning.

  “I ain’t telling you what I know for free. Why would I do that?”

  “Why you little scum!” snarled Pike. “How dare you talk to your elders this way? If I was your pa I’d whale you raw.”

  “But you ain’t. You’re just some hobos off the road, like the ugly fella was.”

  Pike started to stand to his feet. The boy sprang up and began dancing away, wild-eyed and frightened.

  “Here,” said Roosevelt. “Here. I got a nickel. Let’s all sit down now, I got a nickel.”

  Pike glowered but sat. The boy looked at Roosevelt and the nickel in his hand. He came over and tried to take it but Roosevelt’s hand snapped shut.

  “You get it after you talk to me,” said Roosevelt.

  “You’ll just keep it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “I may be a hobo, but I ain’t a bastard,” said Roosevelt.

  Hammond smiled. “Bastards the world over, like I said.”

  The boy sat down, keeping his distance from Pike.

  “Now,” said Roosevelt. “Where’d you meet him? Where’d you meet this scarred man?”

  “Over at my pa’s.”

  “First of all, what did he look like?” asked Connelly.

  “Fair question,” said Pike.

  “He was a tall man,” said the boy. “Tall with tired eyes and he didn’t blink much. And he had big scars all over his face and around his mouth that made it look like his mouth was three times as big as a normal man’s. Here and here,” he said, and drew the lines on his cheeks that they all knew so well.

  “How’d you meet him?”

  The boy hesitated, like he was about to impart a terrible secret about himself. “You won’t tell no one, will you?”

  “Why? What’s he done?”

  “I just don’t want anyone to know. I just don’t want anyone else to know what I saw him do.”

  “What did he do?”

  “You promise you won’t tell no one? I don’t like them even knowing I talked to him.”

  “Tell us,” said Hammond. “We’re only interested in the man.”

  The boy shuddered in the wind and said, “We was slaughtering a pig.”

  And he told them.

  The boy has been to slaughters before but he has never gotten used to the screams.

  It is impossible to say exactly why the sow screams. They have done nothing to harm it or scare it, not yet, and yet somehow when the animal turns and sees the men in the doorway bearing a rope in hand it understands. There is something wrong. It looks at the men and even with its primitive mind it recognizes murder in their movements.

  The men subdue it and the boy helps, trying to keep it in the corner, and they tie its neck and lead it out and bind its legs. It is a dangerous task. Its hooves are sharp and hard as stone and its teeth can crush and tear through fingers. But the men have done this before. They know the animal better than it knows itself. When it bites at their hand they snap back and when it lashes out or thrashes they are already there to restrain it. The men complete their lethal dance with a lover’s care and the boy’s father turn
s to him and says, “Watch.”

  The boy watches.

  The creature trumpets and screams, its chest heaving and strings of snot and spittle running from its snout. The men loop a cord around its front two legs and pull the legs away to expose the throat and the boy’s father steps forward, knife shining in his hand and his eyes shining in that strange dull way, and he looks at the animal for a moment and the arm stabs down, quick and sure, and punctures the animal’s throat. The movement has no doubt, no question. It knows where it is going.

  The spray of blood is terrific, as is its hue. Never would a man think that so much blood could come from an animal, and so red. It is a geyser bursting forth, a stronger and more violent flow than urination, more sporadic than any assault or sex. It pumps with the beast’s heart, whipping out, and still the creature screams. The blood mixes with the clay dust, red on red, and it is hard to tell where the earth starts and gore begins.

  Still it screams, bellowing in its death throes, an ancient sound. The men keep the animal subdued but now they all watch, letting the seconds tick by. Its cries weaken. Soon it is wheezing, breath whistling through its slackening chest. The pool of blood spreads, and still the tiny aperture in its throat dribbles blood, gentle spurts becoming arrhythmic.

  The flow ceases to a seep. When the animal dies is difficult to say. The men do not consider it. They gather hay and pile it over the creature and set fire to it to remove the hair.

  The boy watches the fire and wonders if the animal is dead. After all that screaming it may still be screaming on the inside.

  “It won’t take much,” says a voice at his side.

  The boy leaps and turns and looks. A man is standing beside him. He is tall and lank and the skin hangs loosely from his neck and chin. Wild tufts of white-gold hair form messy peaks on his scalp. A dusty black coat hangs from his shoulders, gray in some places and leathery in others, and his mouth has the curious feature of seeming almost distended, like melting rivers pouring out its corners and across his face. He watches the fire with distant eyes.

  “What?” says the boy.

  “It’s not a particularly hairy animal,” said the man. “I doubt if it will take many burnings.”

  The boy wonders where he came from. The man seems to have come from nowhere. Then he looks at the man’s feet and sees his tracks leading away to the road. He came, thinks the boy, but came silently.

  “Can I help you, sir?” says the boy’s father, suddenly aware of the man on his property.

  “I heard the screams,” says the man. “I came to see. I’m sorry, I thought there may have been trouble.”

  The man speaks like he has only recently learned that words exist. Not English, but all words. The nature of speaking is foreign to him.

  “Oh,” says his father, disturbed. “Well, there’s no trouble here, sir.”

  “No. I can see that.”

  The men and the boy look at him awkwardly, waiting for him to leave. He does not. He stares at the form of the animal slumped in the bloodclay, flames licking its sides.

  The man becomes aware of them again. “I can help,” he says.

  “Eh?”

  “I can help. I’ve been in slaughterhouses before. Many times. I can help.”

  “We don’t need no help.”

  “No, I suppose not. But many of you have more work to do, I would think.”

  This is true. Today is the beginning of a busy day. They must salt the meat and then prepare the rest of the farm for their departure. The man has arrived at a difficult time.

  “We don’t have much to pay you,” says his father.

  “I didn’t expect much. Nor do I want it.”

  “Fair enough,” says his father, and hands the man the scraper. “Help him,” he says to the boy, and most depart to other work.

  Once the fire dies the boy helps the man hold the carcass down and the stranger straddles it, flipping the scraper over and over again in his hand with an easy grace. He looks at the body with a doctor’s care, then takes the scraper with both hands and begins to scour the body, making piles of burnt hair and scooping them off with the curved blade and flinging them away. The other men watch him, impressed by the surety of his movements. When he calls to them to flip the body over they and the boy react quickly. But again the boy notices his unfamiliarity with words. At first the call was not even a word, just a bleating noise that called for aid. Then the stranger seemed to remember and changed it as it tapered, adding in some vague command. Yet still they obeyed.

  They flip the body over and the man takes handfuls of hay and sprinkles it on the other side. The boy looks down and sees rust and crimson streaks on the man’s coat.

  “You’re getting blood on your coattails, mister,” he says.

  “It’s of no matter,” says the man, and lights a match and begins the next fire. They stand back and watch it burn once more.

  “You have seen a slaughter before,” says the man to the boy.

  The boy nods.

  “That is good.”

  “Why?”

  “Some places don’t know of such things. They don’t want to, either. They pretend they do not exist. But it is good to remember what we come from and what we go to,” says the man, watching the body burn.

  “I killed a pig once,” says the boy.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. It was a wild boar. I shot it.”

  “Hunting?”

  “No. It come into our barn. Started eating the piglets.”

  The man nods, still watching the fire. He may not be listening.

  “It was night and my pa was away,” says the boy. “I heard screaming. I thought it was people, just as you did. I came out and it was eating them and I shot it in the head with the shotgun.”

  “You did well,” says the man. “Most would have run, or missed.”

  “I know,” says the boy quietly, but he does not feel like he has done well. He does not feel proud of that night in the barn with the screams and the musk and the breathing of the thing in the darkness, or the lightning flash and thunder of the shotgun. And the way the floor was soaked, soaked in blood.

  They both look at the dead thing on fire and watch the hay blacken and curl. It burns out. The boy steadies the carcass once again and the man cleans it of all hair, and they flip it and burn again and flip it and burn again until it is smoked and smooth. Its ears are crunchy and they break them off and toss them away and peel the hooves off like old fruit. They brush it down to remove the rest of the hair and soon it is hairless and raw and pink, just as it would hang in the butcher’s shop.

  The man stoops now and removes the eyes and they begin to flush out the blood, again and again. They set up the butchering plank, an old, thick door that once hung in the front of the house. The stranger and the boy and some of the other men strain to lift the animal and set it up on the door, and still they flush out more of the blood. They step back to catch their breath.

  “How’d you get those scars, mister?” asks the boy.

  “I have always had them,” he says.

  “Since you were born?”

  A queer look comes into his eyes. “Since I was born, yes.” He looks back at the animal hanging on the door. “I cannot even remember the first slaughter I attended.”

  “Been doing this for a while?”

  “Oh, yes. But then, everyone has, in a way.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Everything needs to feed. And, in doing so, it must kill. Perhaps not with a knife or with a gun, but all things strive to learn of more ways to eat, and consume, and live another day, and so they learn of killing. Even those with no mind such as corn in the field and trees in the forest rejoice and grow stronger with more to consume. And always in sating hunger, in some form or another, one can find death.”

  “Huh? Like, killing something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trees don’t kill nobody. Unless they fall on someone.”

  “No. But if
a man buys a steak, did he kill the cow? He did not kill it himself, certainly, but it died for him and so he eats it and is satisfied for a day or more. Just as a tree’s roots eat the decaying bodies of animals and other trees, even if it did not choke out their life. And we eat the fruit of these trees, or the corn or the wheat or the animals we have raised from these fruits.” He begins to approach the animal’s body, hatchet now in hand. “All that lives kills. All that breathes murders. Prays for it, even. It is simplistic, yes, but so is life and death. All living things are friends of death, whether they know it or not.”

  And the man steps forward and stops as though struck by a sudden thought, and he turns and looks at the boy. His cheeks twitch strangely, pinching around the eyes, and the boy realizes he is trying to smile.

  “My friends,” says the man to the boy. He walks to the dead beast without another word, flipping the hatchet in his hand as though it were no more than a toy.

  The stranger takes the hatchet and prunes the legs off of the animal, cracking and tearing, and sets them aside like kindling. Then he splits the head of the animal with terrible ease and he wriggles the blade of the hatchet in the gash and then pulls it apart, one half in each hand, and the men say they have never seen someone do that so effortlessly. The stranger chokes his grip up on the hatchet and then removes the jaw until the animal is headless and legless. He swaps the hatchet for a knife and makes a cut in the animal from its groin to its neck and his eyes narrow in concentration as he makes sure not to puncture the intestines. The men all nod, seeing how familiar he is with this task. Then he takes a metal pail and removes the intestines, the stomach, the heart and the bladder, making sure not to rupture any and release their foulness.

  It is practically done. Almost ready to roast or salt. The man steps back and nods at his work. He is not even sweating.

  “That was the quickest I ever seen a man do that, mister,” says the boy’s father. “What’s your name?”

  His mouth twitches again as though to smile, but he cannot. “I have been in a slaughterhouse. It is an easy thing.”

  “We don’t have much to pay you with.”

  “I wouldn’t ask it of you. A bit of food would do me well, though.”