The Bully of Order

by Brian Hart

  Come on, you’ve had enough. Let’s go home. There he is, falling down in the street, the boy beside him pulling at his muddy sleeve. The two of us stumbling homeward like three-legged racers under a harvest moon.

  You go ahead and get pinned to the cross, Jacob. Be righteous. I’m going to see what’s happening at the very bottom of the ocean, where I can’t see or hear anything about your business or be reminded of you at all. I’ll sit there like a trained bear and touch my paws together. Mother said she spoke to a bear once, didn’t she; said he had an English accent, which surprised her. I could see God doing that, resting at the bottom of the ocean. The fools probably had it all wrong; heaven was down there beneath the clouds of the sea. Jesus felt so alone and was always trying to make new friends because he’d given bad directions. Walk until you hit water, then go due south.

  “Where is the sadness in a life lived?” Macklin had said at her funeral. Some preachers should be muzzled. The nerve of that Calvinist snatch saying graveside that she had lived a full life. No one murdered lived a full life. Vanity, Macklin, you squid, is thinking that you lived well, and to go on and fantasize about your good death, placing sweet punctuation on the fiction of your good life. Three days it took her to die, and she cooked meals for her murderer on two of them. A knot on her head like black water dripped and frozen turned risen pool ice, and we ate and ate. And it was the found fish, or it could’ve been. It could’ve been we sipped bowls of warm blood. For kindness or evil disdain—liplickers, bonesuckers—what you would change if you could see the morning next. My father cried when he finally took her to Dr. Haslett. He cried carrying her up the steps, blubbered. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I swear it. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  It wasn’t easy to hate him—he was my father, after all—but I persevered, for Mother’s sake. I spent long nights calculating slow death. I’d sharpen blades and load guns, but all of it ended in a dream. I hated how deeply I could sleep when I lay down plotting patricide. Morning arrived with memories of the old man stomping around the kitchen, and it felt like my own blood pouring out of me, aching as it went. I wondered sometimes if it would hurt more or less not to kill him, to let him live, because I feared, ultimately, that I couldn’t do it.

  I studied the house for movement and, not seeing any, stepped onto the plank path that led from the southern forest. Girdled with canals and mottled with slash piles, the clearing was both expansive and impassable. Limbs stuck out of the mud and danced in the flow of the ditch currents. Stumps like great statues towered, moated. The garden fence strained hopelessly against the swelling of the mud.

  I opened the door and tromped inside without even attempting to clean off my boots. Matius was on the floor next to the cold fireplace, facing the wall. He was wrapped in blankets, and beside him there was a piss pot with a tin plate for a lid. The room smelled of excrement and bad meat.

  “Who’s there?”

  “The skookum.”

  “Skookum. Where the hell have you been?” The bundle moved. A trembling hand clawed at the floor in an attempt to roll over.

  “Workin like a dog. I built an ark. It’s waiting outside in a mud puddle.”

  “Yer shit is tiresome.” He had a red flannel scarf tied around his head, like he had a toothache. “You haven’t seen Miss Eunice around, have you?”

  “Nobody’s around but me.”

  “She picked a fine time to skedaddle.”

  I could commiserate. “Thought I’d check and see if I needed to drag you outside and bury you so you won’t taint the place any worse than you already have.”

  “Where’s Jonas? Where’s my son?”

  “Work. I told him what happened.”

  “I been out here I don’t know how long. Can’t get up. I haven’t eaten anything except that bread you brought by. When was that? Three days?” He was talking through his teeth.

  “Two. Want me to get you some more food?”

  “I didn’t say I was hungry, did I? Said I hadn’t eaten.”

  “Jonas’ll be by.”

  “Tonight, you think? I need to speak with him.”

  “I don’t know.” I went back and shut the door, skirted the sicky, and set to building a fire. He lay there and watched me. “Can you stand?”

  “No, I told you. I can’t. I’m fucking dying.”

  “You should let me take you to the doc. It’s just your foot. You can spare one.”

  “My father amputated a thousand Union legs during the war. I’ll go into the ground whole.”

  “If that’s yer reason, yer a fool.”

  “Woefully dying. I’m poisoned. I can feel it in my heart.” He awkwardly lifted his crustily bandaged foot from under the blanket, and when his pant leg slid up, I could see that the black veins had gotten worse.

  “You want some water? Or another blanket?” The fire was going, and the light showed the grayness of his face, bristly as a singed hog.

  “Don’t be sweet.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Soft boy. I don’t want anything from you.”

  “Want me to shoot you?”

  With that, Matius found the energy to roll all the way over. He couldn’t turn his head, his neck was locked. Dirt in his hair and on the scarf. “You wouldn’t do it if I begged.”

  “I might.”

  “Then do it.”

  “You’re saying that’s what you want.”

  “I’m tired of lying here.”

  Not hesitating one spark, I retrieved the shotgun from behind the door and broke it to see the brass. “You wanna say anything?” Snapped shut, ready, both barrels.

  “I wasn’t so bad to you.”

  “No, you weren’t so bad.” I stood over him and used the gun barrels to slide the greasy scarf from his head and onto the floor.

  “Tell Jonas I wished he’d have come and seen me.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Go ahead.”

  I cocked one hammer and then the other. My uncle squinted up at me.

  “Ready?”

  “I said do it.”

  I tapped the barrels against his forehead and then swung them around and blasted a fist-sized hole into the wall, just below the window, to the left of the door. Matius tried to roll upright, but he was too weak. He was near tears, just done in.

  “I won’t help you like that.” I set the gun down on the hearth, well out of his reach. “Shells are on the shelf by the door.” I couldn’t believe I could be so awful, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good.

  “I know where the goddamn shells are,” he said.

  “You shoulda been better to me.”

  “I raised you like you were my own.”

  “Course you did, Uncle. Course you did.” With the blanket pulled back, the rotten smell of his wound was unbearable. I opened the door and the flames in the fireplace sucked out and nearly lit him up.

  He wormed his way into the center of the room, leaving a wet drag mark behind him.

  I leaned against the jamb. “If you would’ve asked for anything else, I’d a done it. I’d a carried you on my back all the way to town. I’d a cooked you a steak and bathed you and cut yer hair. I’d a built you a casket.”

  “Load that gun for me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Do it, I said.” He’d kill me now if he could. I was sure of it.

  “If I see Jonas, I’ll tell him your condition. Maybe he’ll do what you ask.”

  “He’ll do it if I tell him to do it.”

  “He might not.” I checked to make sure there was water in the pitcher and filled a glass for him and set it on the floor. “So long, Uncle.”

  “Wait, Duncan. I have something to tell you. Something I’ve been holding back for a long time. A confession.” A dark and toothy grin spread over his face. His eyes were shimmering and red, and his brow was covered in milky beads of sweat.

  “I was the first one through the door tha
t night.” The grin disappeared, and I could see he didn’t want to continue. He took several deep breaths and his bravado, backed by fevered eyes, returned. “I’m speaking of the night your mother took the beating. You were old enough to know, weren’t you?”

  “What’re you sayin?” I shut the door and went and stood over him, towered over him.

  “She always had a mouth on her. I did like your father should’ve been doing for years. He’d spoiled her. Did she ever tell you what happened on her wedding day? What I did to her? Did she tell you? No, she wouldn’t. I knew she wouldn’t, and that’s why I did what I did. No recourse. She’d keep her mouth shut when it came to protecting her own shame. I knew that. But she hit her head against that metal woodbox when she fell and next thing I know yer father comes through the door and he’s blind drunk so I says to him, What’d you do, Jacob? Then Jonas is there, and I tell him that his uncle Jacob just hauled off and clobbered his wife. Just look at her face.”

  I tried to say something, and my mouth may have moved, but no words came forth.

  With his eyes locked on mine, he continued. “When I was helping her up, I told her that I’d kill her if she told anyone. She wasn’t for it at first, I could tell, so I told her I’d kill you if she told. Neither of us thought she’d die, you understand.”

  “You let him think he did it. You let me think it.”

  “Makes no difference.”

  His eyes followed me as I retrieved the shells and again loaded the shotgun. “If you’re lyin, you’d better tell me.”

  “I’m not lyin.”

  I rested one barrel against his cheek then pulled it back slightly and pressed them both into his temple and slammed his head against the floor. “Tell me the truth.” Years, I felt all the years pour down my arm like lead and weight my fingers to the twinned triggers.

  “I already did.”

  “It was you?”

  “Did you a favor,” he said, eyes open, daring me.

  His head caved and went onto my boots and up my legs. Same house as where he’d hit my mother, not six feet from where she fell. So much blood it could’ve come from a hose. Reckless hardly captured what I’d done. I hadn’t made a decision to do this. I’d done it, and it was irrevocable.

  After standing there terrified and watching the red blood blacken for I don’t know how long, an hour, two minutes, I wrapped his body in the blankets from the floor and dragged it outside to where he’d been cutting posts. There was no hiding what I was doing. At first I didn’t feel like I had the strength to bury him, but once I started digging, I wasn’t so tired anymore. I hit water a few feet down and rolled him in and covered him up. I stacked his fence posts on top of him and went inside the house and cleaned, sopped up the mess with some rags and then burned them. I wasn’t trying to get away with it, I told myself, straightening up is all. Getting rid of his stench, making him disappear.

  I made myself a cup of tea and drank it at the table. To my surprise, with Matius gone, the house seemed sorely inviting. A place to live. I’d nearly forgot. My mother. I sat there and watched the fire die and cried until I couldn’t stand the weakness of it any longer. I picked up the shotgun and the shells and I left.

  At the edge of our lot the limbless trunks stood damaged where the fell trees had scraped them clean, white as baby’s teeth. Beyond, the forest was unscarred; true, huge darkness. I turned and looked back at the small house and barn, like toys tumbled onto the rough ground.

  I knew it was awful, what I’d done, the worst thing ever. But I could live with it for now, and it would get easier. Sometimes the things I thought to be right ended up being the most wrong, and this, and what I’d done to Teresa, felt terribly wrong, so maybe when it settled it’d end up being right.

  To keep it dry I slipped the shotgun under my coat and watched as the rain returned as a mist and almost disappeared and then turned to sleet. Soon the wind picked up and large flakes of snow tumbled toward me. The edges of the seasons were being torn apart, unraveling, and with the snow a deep quiet befell the forest.

  I’d follow the river into town; it was quicker than the road, and I wouldn’t have to bother sneaking by the Parkers. Last thing I needed was to run into Zeb, but I’d like to talk to him. I had the urge to confess. To apologize. Not so long ago he’d been a good friend. I didn’t have many of those left.

  The forest dressed in white, wedded to the faller and the mill. They’re coming for you, sweetheart. Flakes fell filtering through the reaching limbs of the giant Doug firs and blanketed the ground. I was in Boyerton’s lease now, trespassing actually. Add it to the list. His rights bordered mine like my interests bordered his.

  The water in the river had swelled with the rain. Ice was beginning to dully glob on everything where the snow couldn’t stick. Downstream, the river strained through a logjam and the current made the tree limbs dance. Someone, a logger named Wilkinson, had drowned in the jam a few months before. He’d been trying to attach a cable to it to break it apart when he fell in. At the graveyard I had straightened the man’s windblown grave marker. You treat the dead well because they’re still here. Mother taught me that. Even when you can’t see the moon, the moon is there.

  Watching the swirling water, I had an echo in my head as if it were full of tiny metal springs. I was standing just outside the noisy room of all the bad I had done.

  Then I saw someone at the water’s edge and crept downstream until I could see the leather patchwork coat and red wool hat. I recognized the coat. The hat looked new.

  “Kozmin the Cossack,” I said, but the old man went about his business unaware. I shouted again, and the iron man Kozmin turned stiffly and held out his bloody hands and in the right was a knife. He swayed drunkenly. Behind him there was something dead and meaty on the rocks, halfway in the river, naked. A dirty drag mark led up the bank. The old hermit looked like he’d done something awful. I went forward and then stopped and hung on to a sapling so I wouldn’t slip down the crumbling bank. But it wasn’t a man; it was far too large. No, it wasn’t human at all, or it was; it didn’t have a head. Kozmin had carved it off. He was speaking now, but I couldn’t hear him over the water so I held up my hand and made the jawing motion like a duck quacking and Kozmin squinted back at me.

  I made my way down the riverbank. The water churned its muddy soup and was so active and boiling it hardly looked cold. As I crossed the snow-cleansed mudflat a somber feeling passed over me. I thought of Matius, felt the shotgun buck in my hands. I still had blood on my boots, trapped against the eyelets. I took off my hat, and the wind blowing off the river turned my part the wrong way.

  Kozmin hopped gingerly from foot to foot. His pants were wet to the knee. “You can help me with this, can’t you?”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Near finished.” He pointed the knife at the mess. “But if you help me, I’ll split it with you. I get the hide. You won’t talk me out of it.” The old man smiled. “The meat is what I’m offerin, and you look hungry as ever. This’d feed you for a month at least.”

  The old hermit had truly winked out. He was talking about a dead man and sharing the meat. The hide?

  “What’d you do, Kozmin?”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “What’d you do it for?”

  The old man looked at his knife because I was looking at it. “For the hide, like I said.”

  We were both murderers, by rights horrible men. I went closer and soon realized that the body on the rocks wasn’t a man at all but a bear.

  “I thought you’d killed somebody.”

  “Eh?”

  “I thought it was a man, and you’d killed him.”

  A glimmer of recognition passed over Kozmin’s face. He shook his head no.

  “It looks like a man,” I said.

  “Cold weather does that, makes everybody seem purely evil or purely good. Look at that forest.” Kozmin tipped his blade to the trees.

  I looked at the drifting pale.

&nbs
p; “Winter makes a person pick sides.”

  The bear seemed so nearly human, only one incomplete rotation away from my uncle, from my father, from me. I woke under the trees like a bear in the spring, but it’s winter now. Why was the bear awake? Why had it found Kozmin? Was it on the same map that led me to the frozen steelhead?

  Like he’d heard my thoughts: “I found it here drowned.”

  “I’m not eatin it or havin any part.”

  Kozmin’s eyes narrowed, and the wrinkles at the edges were deep enough to hide coins on edge. His features softened as he considered this, considered his outstretched arms. His arthritic fingers couldn’t be straightened with a vise. “I wanted the hide mostly. I did, and I got that done.” He gave me a once-over. “How’s your uncle faring?”

  “You heard?”

  “Course I heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Cut his foot in half. What else?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Jonas know?”

  “You’re the first I told.”

  “From the foot? The cut killed him?”

  “I killed him.”

  Kozmin pursed his old cracked lips. “I never liked the man.”

  “Me neither.”

  Kozmin smiled, and a sneaky look settled onto his face. “Hey, why do old loggers hate oatmeal?” He thought I was joking about killing Matius, that I was joking about him being dead at all, so I let him.

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “Heartbreak.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “To you, a fool that wanders around getting swell ideas like twisting Teresa Boyerton’s arm.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Don’t matter.” The old man showed me his gums, what was left of his teeth. “Boyerton is gonna whoop yer ass.”

  “Good luck findin me.”

  “You hurt his girl. He’ll find you.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Don’t matter.” Kozmin lifted his arm and wiped his nose high on his sleeve. “You can stew bear meat, and it ain’t bad.”

  “It’s turned. See the black.”