Far below, in the valley, a silver thread of stream wound its way from someplace out of sight to someplace out of sight.
“Is that where you used to fish?” Jake asked, pointing.
His grandfather took a moment to answer; he was gasping for breath.
“That’s where I used to fish,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Can we fish there together sometime?” Jake asked for the second time that day, taking his grandfather’s hand again.
“Why…why sure we can. Sometime we can fish there together. Come Spring. When the fish come out of hiding.”
“Promise?”
His grandfather looked down at him and smiled. “What did I say about having truck with liars?”
Jake smiled back, squeezing his grandfather’s hand tighter. Then he blinked. For a brief moment his mind had wandered.
He looked down at the child holding his hand.
“Grandpa Jake?” the child asked.
“What’s up, Doc?”
“You feeling better now, Grandpa?” his grandson asked in a small voice.
Jake nodded, trying not to cough. When he started it was hard to stop.
His grandson tugged his hand. “Is that where you used to fish?”
Jake looked down at the stream far below, a ribbon of silver winding its way from someplace out of sight to someplace out of sight. “No,” he said. “But I always wanted to.”
“You wanna go fishing there sometime with me?” his grandson asked.
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.
“When?”
Jake smiled. “There’s a good day ahead of us. We’ll come back this afternoon. Pack a picnic lunch. I’ll drive down to Stockton’s and buy us some gear first.”
“Really?” the boy exclaimed. “Promise?”
“I don’t hold much truck with liars,” Jake said, then closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of spring.
Wolf Stone
Brewster was melancholy—a vague adjective which can mean anything from mildly glum to virtually suicidal. His case fell somewhere in between.
“Melancholy” usually conjures up mental images of an ennui-stricken consumptive from the nineteenth century. Brewster was luckier—a twenty-first century college graduate, physically fit, education paid for and completed, and more than a little spoiled by doting, upper-class parents. But his degree in eighteenth-century European theater was worse than useless; it was pointless. Everyone had told him so from the start, but after five years spent working as an assistant manager at Blockbuster Video with no brighter job prospects in sight, no lasting relationship, and no greater understanding of the world around him, he’d finally come around to admitting it to himself.
So in a listless, self-pitying state of mind Brewster sold his apartment in Killington, moved back in with his parents, and wondered what to do next. Not finding any ready answers, he started losing weight, stopped shaving, didn’t bother washing his clothes, and seldom left the house. He made a nest for himself in the basement, complete with television, couch, computer, and mini-fridge… and there he hid.
Three weeks after the return, his father came downstairs.
“You should go back to the doctor. He helped you before.”
“No.”
“Then you’re going to Aunt Margaret’s.”
“Aunt Margaret’s dead,” said Brewster.
“Very observant. But the house is still there, and you’re going to spearhead a restoration operation. That’s lakefront property, prime real estate. You’re going to have the place inspected, hire contractors, live there while the work is underway, make sure nothing gets stolen—”
“I don’t want—”
“And get your shit together while you’re at it.” He patted Brewster on the shoulder and clumped back upstairs.
* * * * *
There wasn’t much to do in Bethany. All the wonder from Brewster’s childhood visits to his aunt’s had died with her. Lake Erie still held some appeal, but autumn pushed him away from dark water and the darker thoughts that came with it. While the contractors worked, he walked. Too much noise to watch TV. Too much sawdust and commotion to sleep.
One of his only mildly satisfying discoveries was the Bethany Historical Society, an old three-story clapboard built in the 1880s. Except for Stockton’s Grocery and Drug, the post office, Paige’s Pizzeria, and a VFW hall, it was about the only building in town open to the public.
He signed in at the front desk, much to the delight of the blue-haired woman behind the counter, and declined a guided tour for two dollars—much to the woman’s obvious dismay. After falling back into sullen silence, she returned to her faded paperback and ignored him completely. This left him free to explore in a bored, haphazard way.
It was on the third floor, under the slanted attic eaves, that he found the portrait. Stacked among photos of the Bethany Flood, he almost overlooked it, but a hint of color—of skin—caught his attention among all the black and white.
The frame, too, was different from the rest—ornate gilt and arabesque patterns instead of unpolished oak. He turned it over. A date on the back, in flowing quill pen: 1792.
A sharp breath of air cleared away the heavy cover of dust. Brewster stared at the young woman and she stared back. Her eyes, a faded green similar to his own, gazed at him with playful vitality. A pile of red hair, held in place with jeweled combs, accentuated the pristine, almost translucent ivory of her skin. She can’t be more than twenty, he thought, and she knows what that means…all those years stretching ahead. So much time. So many possibilities. Look at that poise, that confidence…
Embarrassed, surprised, he found tears verging in the corners of his eyes. Worse, he heard footsteps on the stairs. Clearing his throat, he looked at the portrait with close interest, trying to regain his composure. Doing so, he was surprised to notice that the girl didn’t have any teeth. She was smiling—grinning, actually—but the artist had chosen to leave a swath of pink acrylic gum lines where her teeth should have been.
The woman with the blue hair waddled up behind him. “Closing in ten minutes!”
“Oh yes…I’ll be going.”
She peered over Brewster’s shoulder.
“That’s not supposed to be out for public viewing,” she said in an accusatory tone.
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Not your fault. Bernice, the other guide…she’s always moving stuff around. Should be back in the basement. No one wants to see that.”
“It’s a good painting. Was she one of Bethany’s first citizens?”
“Who, Roberta Kirkpatrick?” She snorted.
“Is that her name?”
“Sure is. Was. No, the town’s far older than her. If you’d taken the guided tour, you’d know that.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“No, she was just a girl who died young. Lots of those back then. Nothing special.”
“What happened to her teeth?”
The woman leaned in close. “Don’t know,” she said, recoiling quickly.
“How’d she die?”
The woman looked at her watch. “Closing time!”
* * * * *
Brewster couldn’t get the portrait out of his mind. Or the name. “Roberta Kirkpatrick,” he whispered that night in the dark, as the wind clattered tree branches above the house and pushed waves against the shore of the lake. She fascinated him—close to his age, but separated by over two hundred years.
In the morning he walked up Bethany Hill to the end of the paved road. A half-mile up the steep dirt path beyond, he came to the old cemetery. Forty-five minutes later he was kneeling in the dead grass by Roberta Kirkpatrick’s grave. The chiseled letters on the headstone were almost worn away, but the massive slab of granite that lay across the length of the grave bore a deeper inscription, along with two dates: 1773-1794.
“She was twenty-one,” Brewster murmured.
“Twenty,” said a voice behind him.
He whirled,
heart slamming.
An old man stood behind him, smiling apologetically.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” said the stranger. “I keep a home over the crest of the hill. Watch over the graves. Stupid kids come up once in a while, especially round this month when it’s close to Halloween. Do all kinds of mischief if you let ‘em.”
“I just came to look for her,” said Brewster, nodding at the grave.
The old man clucked his tongue. “Name’s Dwight Farnum. You from around here?”
“My Aunt was Margaret Peron.”
“Oh hell, I knew her! Fine lady. Nobody never said a bad word about her. You selling the property?”
“Yes.”
“Damn shame. You know, I used to—”
“Do you know anything about her?” Brewster interrupted, pointing to the stone.
Farnum paused, rubbing the back of his sunburned neck. “Well…not much,” he said slowly.
“I saw a portrait. How come she didn’t have any teeth?”
Farnum’s face drained of color so fast Brewster thought he’d have to save him from a fall.
“There was a good reason,” Farnum said thinly, steadying himself, “but I can’t rightly remember what it was.”
“You don’t look so good. Here, sit down on the slab a minute.”
“I won’t sit on no wolf stone,” said Farnum quickly. “And I’m fine, thank you very much. I’d best get on. You keep away from here, now.”
And Brewster, too surprised to speak, could only shake his head while the old man walked away.
* * * * *
That afternoon, Brewster looked up “wolf stone” on Google.
“A slab of concrete or stone placed on a grave to keep wild animals from disturbing the remains of the recently interred,” he murmured. “Popular through the mid-nineteenth century.”
The rest of the evening Brewster felt increasingly anxious. He hadn’t had a monomaniacal impulse since high school, but he recognized the signs that he was now in the grip of a developing obsession. He struggled against it for hours, but couldn’t shake the thought of Roberta Kirkpatrick’s body beneath that massive slab; of her decay; of her skeleton surrounded by stained, disintegrating burial cloth. Alone, far from anyone he knew, she felt like a friend, and he grieved for her passing.
He missed her.
He thought of her wolf stone. What a terrible necessity—a monstrous reminder of a long-gone culture’s fear. Images of corrupt, defiled graves coursed through his mind. And wolves, of course. They skirted his thoughts like dark figures on the edge of firelight.
Later, in tormented sleep, Brewster tossed and turned, haunted by dreams of Roberta’s face. The eyes, the hair, the smooth marble skin… even the toothless mouth didn’t detract from her striking beauty. That face promised great things—friendship, love… other things; fulfillment in all its great and many forms…
He woke up bathed in sweat, loins throbbing, eyes wet, and knew his father had been right to send him here. And he continued to know this as he threw on his clothes, went out to the shed in the back yard, grabbed a crowbar and shovel, and trotted silently up Bethany Hill.
“There are no wolves now,” he said, digging around the base of the slab as quietly as he could. “No wild animals.” He giggled. “All dead. All dead.”
He pressed down on the crowbar with all his weight, heaved at it until a blood vessel burst in his left eye, and laughed wildly as the wolf stone moved an inch, then two.
“You called to me the only way you knew how,” he whispered two hours later, three feet down in the grave, “and here I come.”
Soon the coffin, surprisingly intact, began to take form beneath the dirt. His shovel struck old sheet metal.
“Roberta,” he said, and dug at the box with his nails. Earth fell away in wormy clods. The rotting casket lay fully revealed. He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket, turned it on, and clamped it between his teeth. He reached up for the crowbar, eyes wide, smiling with expectant glee.
“My purpose,” he whispered, and forced open the coffin.
* * * * *
The heart attack that killed Dwight Farnum came two weeks after he found the young man’s body, but nobody doubted that the shock of the discovery contributed heavily to his demise.
Just days before his death, Farnum drove down to Tap’s Bar outside of town, a rare enough event, and when some of his cronies started asking questions he waved them down.
“I didn’t come to talk, I came to drink,” he said. “But all I’ll say is that I never seen a body like that before.” He downed a big gulp of lager. “Throat ripped out an’ all.”
“Police say it was like claws did it,” someone said.
“My last words on the subject,” Farnum muttered, setting down his empty mug and reaching for his hat, “are that Mr. Brewster learned three things. First, he learned why they took out that Kirkpatrick girl’s teeth all them years ago. Second, he learned they probably should’ve taken out a few other things, too. And last of all, I guess he learned what a wolf stone’s really for.”
He tipped his hat and left the bar, which had gone very quiet.
And shortly thereafter, he died.
All, Always
Paul Burton sprouted up in a small town called Plumville, and in Plumville the Christmas season officially began on “Light-Up Night” down at the courthouse, where a few dozen strands of colored lights sparked off a speech by Mayor Davidson, two competing choirs, the train display down in the station shooting range, and an earnest bake sale by the formidable ladies of the Plumville Historical Society.
But for Paul, Christmas truly began when his father and mother piled him and his sister into the old Ford truck and headed out to the McCullough farm to choose the family Christmas tree.
Choosing was a laborious process. His mother always wanted a thin tree, his father always wanted a fat tree, Janey always wanted a little tree, and he always wanted the biggest one they could fit in the house. Beyond that, the pros and cons of ten-dozen Frasier Furs, Douglas Furs, Blue Spruces, and White Pines had to be weighed, debated, and argued over.
Ultimately, the final decision was based on compromise—and a “thinnish chubby tree, not too tall,” was invariably purchased, tied to the back of the truck, and driven home. Once the roots were tied up in plastic and the tree balanced up, they decorated it with homemade stars, cranberry garlands, silver tinsel, bubble lights and winking lights, white lights and colored lights. Then Mom heated up cinnamon cider and cooked sweet and sour beef-log, and Christmas was officially under way.
So it had gone when Paul was two, six, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-two, and all the in-between years that, once past, weave together into a glowing sheen of memory. But his mother’s passing, shortly before his thirty-third Christmas, had marked the beginning of the end—a time of downward-spiraling change that destroyed ritual and froze warmth. Crisis followed crisis, and now, six days before his forty-fifth Christmas, there was no tree—only a hospital room.
“Dad,” he said, gently shaking his father’s shoulder. The skin felt warm and dry through the thin paper gown.
“Mmmm.” The old man opened jaundiced eyes and peered out at the small world of pastel walls and mildly alarming plastic machines that counted down his life.
“Dad, I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning.”
For a long moment Paul’s father didn’t seem to comprehend what he was saying, or even realize he had spoken. It was hard for Paul to tell. Paul cleared his throat, opened his mouth to repeat himself, then stopped as his father raised a hand.
“Janey,” a broken-reed voice said.
Paul sighed. “Sorry, Pop. I tried every number I had. I called Information, old friends… I even contacted Bob.”
“Bob’s a son-of-a-bitch.” The disused voice gained confidence. “If I’d known what he was really like, I never would have let Janey marry him. And if she hadn’t divorced him, I would’ve kil
led him myself.”
“I know. And he hung up on me, so that didn’t help.”
Paul’s father grinned. “Almost Christmas and our holiday sucks. Ho ho ho!”
He smiled back. He couldn’t help it.
The old man chuckled. “Not much fun, is it? Your mother gone, me on the way out, your sister MIA, you divorced. Shit. What are you going to do? Who are you going to spend Christmas with?” He held out his hand. Paul took it. The skin was like tissue paper. The grip was palsied but oddly, desperately strong.
“It doesn’t matter, Pop.” The words were listless and hollow, dark emptiness behind false nonchalance.
Paul’s father snorted. “Sure it does. I’m stuck in this bed, but you’re not. I don’t want you moping around, even if there is plenty to mope about. I got you a present. I think you’ll like it. If you do, then I know you just as well now as I did when you was a little kiddo. You always loved Christmas.”
“That’s right. It used to be my favorite holiday.”
“Mine, too. And it still is. So listen up. In my bathrobe—”
A nurse bustled in, humming, and administered a shot. The old man gave her a dirty look, began to extend his middle finger, then sank abruptly into a deep sleep. The hand that held Paul’s relaxed its grip slowly, a worn bundle of bones and sinew.
Paul placed it gently on the coverlet over his father’s chest, then quietly left the room.
* * * * *
He threw his keys down on the coffee table and collapsed into an easy chair. The apartment didn’t feel like home. Outside, Pittsburgh hummed with late-evening life. Inside, sterile walls, much like those of the hospital he had just left, stared blankly back at him and did not comfort.
Paul liked to talk, but since his divorce and his father’s illness had forced the move from his town and house, there hadn’t been many people to talk to. So he talked to himself.
“This isn’t Christmas,” he told the dark television screen.
Scaring the Crows Page 8
