Strange Seed

by Stephen Mark Rainey

  “You should have told him you were born here, Paul.”

  “Why? I don’t care what he thinks. He’s nobody. And he’s wrong.” He paused as if to let his anger dissipate. “Now, about a phone,” he continued. “That’s going to take a while, too. It seems they have to string wire, which takes time and money.”

  “We’re going to have one, aren’t we?”

  “Eventually, yes. In a couple of months. It won’t be so bad without one. We’ll survive.”

  “I suppose. If it can’t helped…” She sighed. “Did you check to see if the car was ready?”

  “Uh-huh. It isn’t. Shit, I’m tempted to go out and get another one. I would if I thought the economics would work out, if a used car would be worth what I’ve got to put into the Ford to keep it running. But I think it’s just a carburetor, and that’s only to be fifty dollars or so. I doubt I could get a decent used car for that much.”

  “You’re probably right,” Rachel said, clearly unconvinced. “So what are you going to do? Hire Marsh as your chauffeur until the car’s ready?”

  “No.” He grinned. “We’ve got all the food and gasoline we need”—gasoline for the generator—“for the time being. No, the mechanic said a week. I won’t need Marsh till then. I asked him to come back anyway on Friday, just in case.”

  Rachel sighed again. “And what about the windows, Paul?”

  He waved agitatedly at the bedroom window. “We’ll cover them, I guess. There’s scrap wood in the barn. It’ll look like hell, I know—“

  “It’ll be dark as a cave,” Rachel protested.

  “Well, it can’t be helped. I’m sorry.”

  A moment’s silence followed, then Paul made a small gesture designed to indicate the rest of the house. “I like what you did here today. It makes the house more presentable.”

  “Oh yes, that.” She paused meaningfully. “I forgot to tell you; we had a visitor. A man named Lumas.”

  “Lumas?”

  “Henry Lumas. He said he knew you.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Henry Lumas. Did you let him into the house?”

  “He said he knew you, Paul. I told him our name was Griffin, and he said, ‘Griffin? Your husband’s father’s name wasn’t Sam, was it?’ I said yes, and he said he’d known your father, and that he knew you.”

  Paul sat next to her on the bed and shook his head slowly, in condemnation.

  “He said he knew you,” Rachel repeated. “And besides, he’s just a harmless old man. He brought us some firewood. That’s how I was able to get a fire started. He showed me how it’s done.”

  “I really wish,” Paul began, “that you wouldn’t let strangers into the house when I’m not here. New York City should have taught you that much. How do you know this man wasn’t responsible for…” He made a long, slow sweeping motion with his arm. “For all this? How do you know?”

  “I don’t, Paul. But I think I’m a good enough judge of character to—“

  “Just promise that you’ll never again let someone into the house when I’m not here.”

  She sighed. “I promise.”

  “Good.” He paused. “Did this man stay long?” His tone was vaguely apologetic.

  “No,” Rachel answered after a moment. “He just brought firewood in, we talked a while, and he left. He’s really quite a harmless old man, Paul. He’s got this great mound of white hair—he looks like an emaciated Moses. Well, he’s not really emaciated, just very thin. He lives in a little cabin out in the woods.” She nodded to the west. “He says he’s been living there for close to twenty years. He knew your father very well, apparently,”

  “Oh?” Grudging interest.

  “Yes. He had nothing but good to say about him. He said it was a real shame your father died so young.”

  “He was just thirty-six.”

  “That young, Paul? I didn’t know.”

  Paul smiled feebly and cupped his hands in front of his knees. “Someday,” he said, “I’ll tell you about my last week or so here, after my father died, I mean. It makes…interesting after-dinner talk.”

  “Yes, I’d like that, Paul.” She looked questioningly at him. “I’m sorry,” she continued. “That sounded callous, didn’t it? You’ve always been so secretive about that part of your life. It must be…” She searched for the right word. “It must be painful to talk about it.”

  “No,” he answered. “Not painful.” Confusing, he wanted to say, but it would require and explanation, and he wasn’t up to that. “Just unpleasant, I suppose.” A smile that Rachel mistook for self-pity flashed across his mouth. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.” He stood abruptly. “Now we’ve got work to do. Maybe I can put up some of those shingles on the east wall of the house before nightfall.”

  “Do you think the vandals were responsible for that too—for ripping those shingles down?”

  “Probably.” He reached into his pocket, withdrew a measuring tape. “Here,” he began, and handed the tape to Rachel. “You can measure some of those doorways while I’m outside. Marsh has some doors that might fit.”

  Rachel took the tape from him and studied it briefly. “I just take the inside measurements, right?”

  He smiled. “That’s right. It shouldn’t be too difficult for a bright girl like you.”

  She returned his smile. “Don’t be so sure, Paul. I am female, you remember—very weak, very dependent, et cetera, et cetera.” She made a little, coy, mincing motions with her mouth and hands.

  Paul’s smile broadened.

  “I mean,” she went on, “anything other than breakfast-making, baby-making, and love-making…well, I’m just a babbling idiot.”

  Paul laughed suddenly—a genuine laugh. It was the first time he’d laughed since they’d come to the house and it told Rachel that the tension she’d sensed in him was decreasing.

  “You don’t agree, Paul?” Rachel asked. She held the measuring tape extended between her outstretched arms. “See all the numbers on this thing, Paul? It’s very confusing.”

  His laughter increased.

  That’s nice, Paul, she wanted to say, but knew it would make him self-conscious. That’s more like your old self.

  His laughter subsided. “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “Just…thank you.”

  He left the room.

  *****

  It was all much better now, Rachel told herself. She leaned against the living room doorway and folded her arms across her stomach. And it hadn’t taken much to make it better. Just a few odds and ends of furniture—a white wicker chair, hers; a red wing-backed chair, Paul’s; a small cherry-wood table, a roll top writing desk, very old, a brightly colored rug, and, most importantly, plans to erase the awful damage done to the house. That wasn’t much. In time it would be quite a beautiful little house. One day, she might even be able to call it home.

  She felt something tickling her ankle. She looked: “Hello, cat,” she said. She’d have to think of a name for the animal, of course. She couldn’t go on calling it “cat,” although Paul seemed to feel it was all that was required. “It’s not like it’s a bona fide member of the family,” he’d told her. “It’s just a cat, and it’s supposed to be quite a mouser. God knows this house needs one.”

  She stroked the cat, pleased by the upward-thrusting motion of its huge gray head. “I don’t care what Paul says,” she cooed. “You’re going to have a name, like everyone else.”

  *****

  Laughter! It had been a long time since Henry Lumas had heard laughter from within that house. The Newmans had been too gloomy and self-involved for it, which might have been part of their undoing.

  Sam Griffin had known how to feel good and how to laugh. He’d had his share of trouble, more trouble than ordinary men, but, up to the day the earth took him, he had been happy with himself. And that counted as much as enough sun, or enough rain, or easy winters, or bright, strong children. It
counted more, as a matter of fact..

  Lumas watched as Paul clumsily hammered a shingle into place, stepped back and gauged the accuracy of his work. “Damn,” Paul murmured; the shingle was slightly out of line. He ripped one of the nails out, repositioned the shingle, put another nail into it, and stepped back again.

  “That’s better,” he said aloud.

  “You want some help there, young man?” Lumas called.

  Chapter 5

  The rabbit knew nothing about death. It had lived forever. It would continue to live forever. Still, there were the predators. The fox, the great horned owl, the red-tailed hawk. And the others.

  Instinct did not tell the rabbit that its enemies required its death, only that its flesh would make a satisfying meal. So when the rabbit’s lungs refused to work because its throat had been crushed, it slid into death not as frantically as its killer might; no memories or sympathies crowded back. Its eyes opened wide, its always twitching nose stopped twitching, its muscles tensed, as if readying themselves for use, and it died.

  Then its body was carried away by the ears for use as food. And its killer was neither joyful nor saddened because of the killing. Its killer had been beset by hunger and a craving for meat. And the rabbit had not been cautious as it could have been.

  Chapter Six

  Rachel pushed her chair away from the desk and glanced at the dozen crumpled sheets in the wastebasket to her left, all abortive attempts at a letter to her mother.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  Each sheet bore at least a few paragraphs, but they were inadequate—either too subtle (her mother would think she was hiding something) or too full of small talk (which her mother disliked) or too enmeshed in weighty philosophizing about her “new life” (her mother would believe she was being pretentious or, which was worse, idealistic).

  But this last one came close, didn’t it? She picked it up from the desk.

  Dear Mom,

  I’m sorry about that depressing phone call. Expect better from this. The house has changed, so my mood has changed. Not that I’m “comfortable” here yet, but I’m getting there.

  The work we’ve done has helped. The mess we found the house in three weeks ago shocked us both—it was like a slap in the face, especially for Paul and all the plans he’d made. We actually thought about going back. Even now I don’t know why we didn’t. Laziness, maybe.

  I can’t say I’m hopeful, but at least I’m not as darkly pessimistic as I was. My mistake, I believe, was in looking for parallels between life here and life in the city. There are no parallels. New York and this place are two different worlds. I’m learning to appreciate that, and to accept it. Not that I’ve totally succeeded. Some mornings I wake up expecting to hear sounds of the city awakening around me but, instead, there’s silence (though if you only listen hard you realize it’s not silence at all). At such times, I find that I’ve momentarily lost track of where I am.

  There are other things. For instance, yesterday Paul and Mr. Lumas (did I mention him in my last letter?) found the remains of a deer, a “six-point buck,” according to Mr. Lumas. He says that maybe there’s a wolf in the area, although Paul says that the last wolf around here was killed decades and decades ago. He does admit that no other animal, except a mountain lion (and there are supposed to be none of those here, either), could have done what was done to this animal (all its internal organs were ripped out—lungs, liver, and heart, etc. Pretty disgusting, the way Paul describes it). Let me correct that: A man could have done it, Lumas says. A man could have shot the animal and left it to rot. Both he and Paul examined the animal and came to the conclusion that it had to have been attacked by a wolf, or maybe by a very large dog, which to me seems much more likely, though I haven’t seen any dogs around.

  At any rate, Paul bought a rifle. I’ve told him how much I hate those things, but he’s got his mind made up and there’s no way I’m going to change it. He’s in the forest with the gun now. He took a hatchet, too—to cut firewood, he says, but since the idea of a wolf has got him very excited, I think he’s gone into the woods after it rather than to cut firewood, which we have enough of anyway.

  Yes, it came close. It was good enough. Damn, if only the phone were in…

  She looked up, toward the kitchen; certain there had been a knock at the back door. She set the unfinished letter down, listened, heard nothing.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “Lumas, Mrs. Griffin,” came the barely audible reply. “Henry Lumas.”

  *****

  The narrow path that skirted the northern edge of the fields—from the road in front of the house to the forest—ended at a swiftly moving stream. A few yards west of the stream, the land angled slightly upward; the irregular perimeter of the forest lay several yards beyond.

  Paul stepped gingerly across the stream and hesitated. The land here, on the slope before the forest, was not as heavily clotted with weeds as were his fields—just scatterings of horsetail, like tiny, freakish pine trees, and patches of stunted quack grass. About fifty feet to the south, close to the forest’s perimeter, were two flowering dogwoods—they seemed strangely out of place, Paul thought—and just beyond, lying at a right angle to him down the slope, the mottled gray trunk of a long-dead conifer, stripped bare of branches by insects and time.

  It was the darkness that struck Paul most forcibly as he looked north and south, studying the forest’s perimeter. The sun’s light reached only a few yards into the forest and seemed to assume a distinctly paler color, as if some curious entry fee had been taken from it.

  Paul moved up the slope, cautious of how he carried the ax and the rifle—both strange burdens. He stopped. To his left, the full and overhanging branches of two beech-trees side by side formed a perfect natural archway. He studied the trees a moment, aware that they beckoned to him in a nostalgic and oddly comforting way. Then he saw two figures moving up the slope and he remembered. They were his father and himself, two decades before.

  The image vanished. Paul smiled. He gripped the axe tightly and passed beneath the archway, into the forest.

  All around, small white, three-petaled flowers—trillium—had pushed through the brownish covering of leaves and pine needles. But they were as inadequate a relief to the abrupt, nearly palpable aura of melancholy as the random and anemic shafts of daylight that slanted to earth through open spaces left by slaughtered trees.

  There was, Paul thought grimly, ample evidence of man here. Although the forest was centuries upon centuries old, and many of its trees has long since succumbed to disease and weather and insects, man had picked his way through and selected only its finest and strongest specimens. Man hadn’t destroyed the forest, his selective cutting had merely thinned it, but the results—the insect-hollowed stumps, the anemic shafts of daylight—spoke harshly of mortality.

  Here and there new growth had started; sapling hemlock—it could proliferate in the cool darkness—spruce, smatterings of ivy, climbing dodder, shelf fungus. It wasn’t enough. Twenty years before, the forest had seemed so vast and incorruptible and eternal. Now it was involved in the incredibly slow, but inexorable, process of decay.

  Trying to shake the mood that had settled over him, Paul glanced around at the beech-trees. He saw that he’d made an irregular path for himself by shuffling through the damp covering of leaves and pine needles. He’d already crossed other paths—the paths of grouse and deer—but they were narrower, more sporadic. There was no chance, he told himself, that he’d become confused upon his return.

  He remembered, suddenly, that there was a clearing of sorts—several acres of smaller, more easily managed trees. The idea of felling and stripping of the towering, wide-girthed white pines did not appeal to him, for several reasons. Most importantly—Lumas had told him, and Lumas knew what he was talking about, didn’t he?—although the forest housed several hundred of the trees, it was also one of the few remaining accessible stands in the country. A butternut-tree or a birch or an
oak—Lumas had also told him—would serve his needs handsomely. Or at least, he amended, the needs he had told Rachel must be met: “We can’t have enough firewood, darling.” It had been a transparent deception, he knew.

  “Hello,” he called suddenly. The word echoed and reechoed for a few seconds and the forest’s discomforting, portentous silence returned.

  He realized, suddenly, his apprehension, realized that ever since he and Lumas had found the ravaged buck he’d been apprehensive, that his casual manner with Rachel had merely been a show of bravado, an act. What did he know about wolves and how to hunt them? He asked himself. How could he be expected to? And if he knew nothing, then what was he doing here? It was a question for which he had no answer.

  *****

  Lumas, Rachel had decided weeks before, was one of those easy-to-be-with people who, unselfconsciously, allowed no lapses in the conversation; his face—regardless of what else could be said about it—was wonderfully animated, as expressive as his words. Indeed, she had often found herself more intrigued by him—the man, the character—than by his words. She very much hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  She glanced furtively at her watch: four o’clock—Paul would

  be home within an hour and would expect dinner to be ready. She’d have to excuse herself soon. Building a fire in the wood-burning stove was no easy chore. She hoped they’d be able to replace the stove with something a bit more modern before long. That is, if their experiment—Paul’s word for their move to the house—didn’t prove to be a failure. As yet, she considered, there was no indication either way. It was too soon…