Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2)

by Miller, Jason Jack

  Wood smoke from the campfire cast sepia shadows over the shallow floodplain. A chill crept down from the heights in a fog that mingled with the smoke to block out the freshly peeking stars. I shivered a little as we finished unloading the old pickup.

  “Frost tonight,” Fenton said, as he poked at white hot coals with a long stick. Over a dozen small venison steaks sat in a heavy old cast-iron skillet waiting to be cooked up with onions and peppers and a green tomato piccalilli. “Did you bring something warmer?”

  “Nope. This is pretty much all I got left.” My teeth clattered a little when I spoke.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit. Here,” Fenton stood up and took off his coat. “I have another in the tent.”

  “No, man. I can’t,” I said, but he was already handing it over the fire to me. I gave in, put it on and buttoned it all the way up to my neck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him still looking.

  “Thank you.” I said, “I mean it.”

  “C’mon, buddy. Everything’s going to be all right. Rachael and Katy are taking good care of your sweetie. We got these bastards, okay? The law’s with us. They just need to figure that part of it out.” He kept poking the coals, although his gaze was somewhere else.

  “I don’t know, Fenton. Things almost always go the other way. Kind of makes me think the universe has it in for me.” His jacket was warm, but a little tight. I moved a bit closer to the fire.

  “What kind of talk is that? You and your girl are safe, right? Property comes and goes. Life goes on and that’s a beautiful thing. Hear me? And as far as the Jane stuff…you have a chance to avenge her and end this. You got a clean slate coming your way, buddy. Right here, right now, life begins for you. Trust me. Most people never get that chance.” He nodded his head slightly, waiting for me to do the same.

  He added, “Trust us. Look at all this.” He jerked his head back at the tents. “This is for you. Don’t think for a second I’d do more for Chloe or Katy.”

  “Thanks, man. I mean it.”

  “No problem. I believe you’d do the same for me.” He slapped my back twice. He put the skillet into the coals and covered it with a beat-up lid. “Here we go. I’ll give you dibs.”

  “Hey,” I asked, not sure what came next. My mouth got real dry and I waved the question off. “Never mind.”

  “Go ahead, it’s okay.” He set the stick down and clasped his hands between his knees, giving me his full attention.

  “I was wondering…” I rubbed my temples and said, “You heard from my dad through all this?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Henry.” “It’s okay. I figured as much.” “Sorry.”

  One by one the party shifted from the tents to the fire. Ben came first, followed by Jamie and Preston, who trailed Jamie like a puppy. Ray came from the trees carrying more firewood. Greg arrived with my pap. They were all content to stare into the fire without saying much of anything while dinner cooked.

  Ben picked at bread and apples and other things that could be eaten as is. My pap and Ray wouldn’t sit down, which made me a little skittish. Conversation stayed light for a very long time. Then, as dinner finally started to smell like dinner, Jamie tuned his fiddle, conversation picked up. I was so hungry my belly thought my throat had been cut.

  My pap stood behind Fenton with a hand on his shoulder and said, “How’s the ackempucky coming along?”

  “She’s coming along just fine. I know how much you like ramps, so—”

  “Stop acting ugly. The thought of eating those weeds makes me sicker than a dog on a gut wagon.” He used Fenton’s shoulder as a handrail to help him take his seat on the log. “Straighten up and act like you have some sense or you’ll be sleeping on the ground.”

  Fenton grabbed the skillet’s handle with an old chamois and lifted the lid for my pap’s approval. He reached his fork in and lifted a small steak onto his plate. Fenton invited everybody to help themselves.

  Only Greg, who didn’t really know my grandpap, didn’t know he was playing with Fenton. He quietly chomped on some of the bread and cheese he had left over from yesterday. Greg fixated on Jamie’s fiddle, and started a side conversation by rattling off a list of requests.

  “’Forked Deer’?”

  “Too easy,” Jamie said, lifting the fiddle to his chin. He played a cheap, store- bought fiddle tonight, not one that was irreplaceable or had sentimental value.

  “’John Henry’?” Greg said while chewing. He seemed to be looking for something, like a jug of wine or a snifter of brandy.

  Jamie glanced at my pap, who sat up a little straighter at the mention of his namesake tune. “Of course.”

  Greg, now faced with the challenge of stumping Jamie, said “My father used to love ‘Walkin’ in the Parlor’ and ‘Jo Bones’. Do you know those?”

  My pap interrupted, “Jamie’s traveled far and wide collecting songs. God put the good stuff where the lazy people can’t have any, you know. Been in hollows I ain’t ever heard of. Met people that should’ve been dead a hundred years ago.”

  Greg paused in a pool of deep thought, then cocked an eyebrow. “’Two Sisters’?”

  Jamie kept his jaw clamped shut and stared into the fire. After a moment of reflection, he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Don’t know it.”

  Greg gave it another go. He rolled up a bit of ham, shoved it into his mouth and wiped his hands on his pants. “It’s also known as ‘Dreadful Wind and Rain’?”

  “I said I didn’t know it.” I knew Jamie was lying.

  “Surely you must have…here,” Greg said, then began to sing, “A young fiddler he went a courtin’ there, oh, the wind and rain—”

  My pap intervened, “Not to be rude, but that’s not a song we sing. Hits too close to home. I lost a sister and a daughter and a granddaughter to the river. Part of that song’s in a drowning spell those Johnny Bull Lewises use.”

  “I meant no harm,” Greg said, obviously embarrassed. “If I would’ve known… you must think I’m very rude.”

  “Fucking Lewises,” I said, motivated by the reference to Jane. I could never tell my pap about Alex being a distant Lewis relative. Ever. In my mind, the best thing for everybody involved would be if I ran off to finish this myself. They could keep their hands clean and I could be the scapegoat. I knew how I’d do it, too, going down to Elkins to the Lewis Lumber offices with a shotgun. A bunch of witnesses, no accomplices.

  “It’s okay, son,” my pap told Greg. “You didn’t know.” Then he added awkward to awkward with an even more somber anecdote. “My ma said if any of us kids ever went into the woods at night, witches would find us and put us into a barrel with ten- penny nails pounded all through it. Then they’d roll us down the mountain to their caves or to old mine shafts or coke ovens.”

  I believed he was trying to lighten the mood.

  “Brutal,” Ben said. He leaned back, feet up on a rock next to the fire, hands in his pockets. “That’s some hard living. Talk about some mean bastards.”

  Greg raised a finger, signaling a question. He said, “So we’re talking about Black Bibles and all that?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely interested or just trying to keep the witch talk going to hide his earlier faux pas.

  Personally, I’d had my fill of witch talk, and interrupted, “Sorry guys. I’m going to bed. This has been a shit day, and the superstition…I’m getting sick of it.” Sparks from the fire flew past my face.

  My pap held his hand up to cut me off. “Henry, sometimes you’re dumber than a mud fence. How do you know you don’t need to hear this? Like it or not, some of this pertains to you. You’re young, and I can understand your skepticism. But the Lewis clan—out of all of us here, you probably need to hear this the most,” my pap said, quite adamantly. He patted the log beside him, a signal to sit.

  I sat out of respect to him, not because I believed any of this crap. Champ rested his head on my leg and watched me with sad, old eyes. “What is it, huh?” I gave his neck
a good scratching.

  I looked at Jamie for some kind of sign that this was all bullshit. He said, “You need to listen. Ben, you too. Preston found out the hard way this winter that the difference between believing and not believing can be very dangerous.”

  Preston didn’t say a word. He stared right into the fire as if Jamie were talking about somebody else.

  After a moment to compose his argument, Jamie went on, “Why do you think every old house between Oakland, Maryland and Boone, North Carolina has a SATOR square pinned above their windows? It’s to keep the devil away. To knock witches. The reason the old magic is still around is because it works.”

  “What kind of square?” Ray said, acting only half-interested. He passed Jamie a bag of peanuts and poked the fire with a stick. “I’m a bit bumfuzzled.”

  Jamie picked open a pair peanuts then threw the shells into the fire. “SATOR squares? I don’t know. They’re like puzzles I suppose. They’ve been found on the walls of buildings destroyed by Vesuvius at Pompeii. Early Christians say it was a message from God saying their savior was on his way.”

  He gestured for Ray’s stick and began drawing rows of letters in the dirt. “Five lines of five letters arranged in a square that form multiple anagrams.

  I tried to read the letters, but it was difficult in the low light. I leaned over to see. It read:

  SATOR

  AREPO

  TENET

  OPERA

  ROTAS

  “Some people say the words are nonsense, but when rearranged in a cross they spell out ‘paternoster’ flanked by an ‘A’ and an ‘O’.” Jamie handed Ray back his stick. “Our father and the Alpha and Omega.” Jamie stomped the letters away with his foot.

  Silence fell over the camp. By now the crickets were in full swing. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. “In my life I’d never seen anything to prove magic was real. Magic would’ve kept my mom around. Would’ve kept Jane alive.”

  My pap spoke up again. I wasn’t trying to disrespect him, but his tone told me he felt I was. He said, “Well son, you ain’t going to like what I’m fixing to tell you. I know what I saw. And I’m an educated man, too. Not a doctor, but I put my time in and earned my degree. All so my boys didn’t have to work in a coal mine.” It came out before he could catch himself. He opened his mouth, but couldn’t force an apology out. And he didn’t have to. I knew why my dad ended up in the mine.

  So he went on. “Belsnicklers came to our farm every Christmas, dressed in sackcloth with coal dust all over their faces. Scary sons of bitches. Us kids had to just stand there while they threw candy on the floor. If we fidgeted they whipped us with switches. I’ve even seen elder spring from the frozen ground on Old Christmas Eve—”

  “He wasn’t trying to refute you, Dad.” Jamie wiped his hands on his pants then held his palms up. The firelight reflecting in his lenses made it difficult to see his eyes. “He just hasn’t seen the things you saw.”

  Ben sat up, ready to come to my defense, too, if need be. Wood sparked and popped as it burned. The rush of water from Red Run was louder than it had been all night. I didn’t like the noise, because it hid other noises, like whispers and footfalls. I didn’t want Ben telling them what we saw the night we buried Jane.

  Pap looked at Jamie. “The first time I saw Old Christmas,” he paused to put in some chew. “Up in the barn they started to bray. All of them, awake and on their knees. The sounds were words. Chants. Prayers. It sounded like church when the nuns pray the rosary. The sky was clear, there was no wind. Starlight and a full moon lit up the night. All the fields glowed with fresh, white snow. We got scared and took off back to the house.”

  He spit into the fire and took off his hat. “And out in the snow there were hundreds of sets of footprints. Human footprints and other footprints. Into the fields over the fences and stone walls. They went right up to the barn. Like a thousand people converged on the barn while we were in there and were watching us. So we ran. When we got further away we could see the footprints up on the steep barn roof. We reckoned the devil was up there having a laugh at us.”

  Fenton threw a log onto the fire, sending a spray of sparks into the sky. Ben nodded in agreement.

  “There’s still plenty of women in these hills who can get a full pail of milk from an ax handle or an old rag. And Mary Lewis was one of them. I seen it done with my own eyes a hundred times.”

  Fenton passed around a jug of wine. My pap spit into the fire. Then he pulled the plug of tobacco out and threw it onto the coals. He motioned for the jug of wine, but didn’t drink. He just held onto it while he talked.

  “When the magic starts you can smell them. I’ll never forget that smell. Like…cucumbers maybe?”

  He passed the jug along without drinking. As the silence wore on, he slipped his hand into his jacket and pulled out his whiskey.

  I had no problem drinking up as much wine as I could. I gulped it, rather than sipped it, in fact. Anything that’d help me be someplace else right now. A long time passed before I handed it off. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Long enough to change my mood. I passed it to Ben, who didn’t drink. He acted like he was listening for something nobody else heard. After a minute or two I motioned for him to pass it back.

  “Wine magic,” I said, finally breaking the lull in discussion, not that anybody was paying attention to me anyway.

  “This.” I swung the jug on my thumb, “This is magic. Tell me the fuck it isn’t. You know—”

  Fenton cut me off. “Henry. Quiet.” He cupped a hand to his ear then put his finger to his lips.

  At some unseen signal, Ray went to his truck and grabbed a shotgun from the seat. He slipped into the trees on the other side of the tents. Ben drew his pistol from his waist band as he retreated into the darkness near the stream.

  “What is it?” I whispered, still not getting the hint.

  Jamie stashed his fiddle behind the log he was sitting on. Fenton set his hunting rifle on his knee and flipped the safety off. Preston’s head was cocked to the side, listening. I stood up, not sure what I was supposed to do, and my pap grabbed my jacket and pulled me back down to the log.

  We waited for a long time without hearing anything from the forest. I strained to hear, but my ears couldn’t discern anything unordinary. Just crickets and the stream. Occasionally the wind washing through the leaves of the highest trees. Fenton stopped putting logs on the fire. The fog seemed to clear, and stars appeared through breaks in the canopy.

  “Hey there,” a dusky voice called from the dark.

  I jerked myself awake. Everybody else stood up. A moment later, I was on my feet, too. I said, “Was that Ray?”

  My pap shook his head and pointed. Champ sat up and stretched, and trotted into the trees.

  A man in a camo jacket stepped into the dim glow of fire. He had a pair of hunting rifles slung over his shoulders. He carried an old duffle bag.

  It was my dad.

  My pap said, “Come to join us, have you Levon?”

  He’d trimmed his beard and cut his hair. His dark eyes gleamed from beneath the visor of his old trucker hat. Except for the deep lines that flared from his nostrils to the corner of his mouth and the creases on his brow, he looked like he could’ve been thirty years old.

  He said, “I come to finish this.” His words cut through the chill. No ornamentation. No misunderstanding. I hadn’t heard him speak so clearly in years.

  Ray drifted over from the tents. He lit a cigarette and said, “Gave us a hell of a good scare.”

  Jamie called Ben over.

  “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to rouse you all. Just figured this is something I needed to be a part of.” His voice still sounded like sandpaper. He could barely be heard over the stream.

  He didn’t look like my dad, or sound like him. His eyes found you when he talked to you. He didn’t shuffle his feet or stutter.

  He was sober.

  Jamie said, “Glad you’re here, Levon.” He gave my ol
d man a hug. “Hopefully this blows over and we’ll get back and teach these boys how to build a house. We got all kinds of food here. Enough to last a week or so. Let me fix you something.”

  My dad set his duffle on the ground and carefully laid out his rifles next to it. He pulled a revolver out of his waist band, and another pistol out of a shoulder holster, and laid them on his bag. He took a seat next to the fire and Fenton handed him a plate. My pap sat next to him and cautiously offered him a sip of radiator whiskey from his flask. My dad waved it off. He took a bite and chewed it real slow.

  We all relaxed. You could almost feel the warmth return to our circle. Fenton even threw another log onto the fire.

  Just when I started feeling comfortable, my dad swallowed and said, “There won’t be a lot of waiting around after tonight. Like I said, I came to finish this.”

  I thought he was being symbolic or metaphorical until he went on.

  “Won’t be an intervention from the law either. And as much as I appreciate you all taking care of me and mine for the last few years, I plan on doing this myself. No need to spill any more blood.” He looked at me, and spoke to me for the first time in years. “You too, son. You did a good job carrying the torch after Janie, but you need to go on home tomorrow.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Lewºis is looking for me. Running home won’t bring nothing but trouble.”

  “You won’t find any trouble back at the farm.”

  “How do you know?” I said. Years of doing my growing up without fatherly concern made me cold to him and his gestures.

  “I know, because I brought it with me. I made damn sure of it.” He pointed his thumb at the trees behind him. “We got a few hours until they show up here.”

  NINE

  I’d gone to bed knowing it would be over soon, just like a March blizzard. Even when snowdrifts covered the front porch you know the sun is still moving closer to equinox each day.

  I’d fallen asleep with a shadow over my dreams. I could only toss and turn, a losing fight against the old quilts. My mind kept inventorying everything I’d lost: family, property. At this rate, my future would be the only thing left for them to take.