by Gary Braver
He turned, and behind them the ground was burning with green fire—as if alien lava were seeping out of the ground. The path in front of them was still black, but behind them their tracks left an incandescent trail, as if they’d been walking in liquid radium.
He pulled Sarah forward. The stuff stuck to their shoes and the bottoms of their pants like phosphorescent mites. Aglow with millions of them. She stomped her foot, and her running shoe lit up.
“What the hell is that?”
A sign. Thank you.
He gripped her shoulders. “Sarah, calm down. It’s called fox fire. Will-o’-the-wisp. A chemical reaction that takes place in fungus and wood rot. A chemical phosphorescence. Pure biology.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Faerie fire,” his father had called it, and it all came back to him for real. The last time he was up here, his dad had walked him and Jake down this same path one night. He had turned off his flashlight to show them the phenomenon. “My father.”
They moved ahead. Behind them the fox fire followed them, silhouetting sods of dirt, saplings, and fallen limbs and splashing with each footfall as if just below the surface were a thin lake of Day-Glo fire.
“You see?”
She nodded, looking back at their glowing trail, fading slowly in the dark.
“You okay?”
She didn’t respond. He took her hand, which was cold and wet, and he pulled her along. The drizzle was making a cold aspic of his skin. They went another several feet when she stopped dead.
“I can’t go on. I can’t.”
“I understand,” he said, and hugged her. She didn’t understand. How could she? “We’re almost there.”
“You keep saying that. I wanna go back.”
“Please trust me. Just five more minutes. I promise for real.”
They stumbled on, and soon the faerie fire disappeared, leaving only black woods. He followed his flash as a worm of doubt slithered across his chest again.
Please, don’t abandon me.
Suddenly Sarah stopped. She was trembling, and in the light her face was a tight white mask of itself. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “No.”
“Just a little ways more.”
“No, and you’re scaring the shit out of me.”
“Smoke.”
“What?”
He snapped his head around. “I smell smoke.”
“I don’t fucking care.”
He walked a few feet into the dark. “There.”
In the distance was a dull orange glow. He looked back at her. She was standing with her hands clutched to her breast, her hair matted by the falling rain. She looked as if she had turned to stone. He went to her and held out his hand.
For a long moment she stared at him, then she put out her hand. They walked maybe another thirty yards, following his light.
“My God,” he whispered. “I’m home.”
86
“Is this it?”
Zack looked at the cabin with a shock of recognition. “Yes.”
He could barely believe what his eyes were recording. He hadn’t been here since he was a child, and the trees had probably increased their girth, but it all rushed back. The cabin—a dark brown box of vertical wooden planks, the pitched roof—the rough, thick tangle of woods, the old oak stump for splitting logs, a long-handled spiked ax embedded blade down, a sharpening wheel beside it, the stack of wood alongside the cabin. Also an artesian well his father had built, drawing water from an aquifer from the nearby creek.
To the right of the front door was a small window, glowing from interior light. Smoke rose out of a chimney pipe someplace in the rear. As he was taking it all in and trying to sort out recall from psychic flashes, Sarah whispered his name. He looked, and she was aiming her torch on something. He moved to her. Sitting in the circle of light was the same black van.
Zack moved to the front door and tapped. No answer. He tapped again. “Dad, it’s me, Zack.”
Nothing.
He tapped again. “Nick Kashian. It’s your son, Zachary. Please open up.”
Someplace in the distance a loon cried out.
“It’s locked,” Sarah whispered.
A stainless-steel combination lock hung from the latch. He slipped his fingers under it and held it up to Sarah’s torch. He tried the tumbler. Then, as if his fingers had a mind of their own, he turned it to the right three times to 24, then once left to 8, then twice right to 14, and the lock opened up.
“How did you know?” Sarah asked.
He shook his head. The numbers just came to his fingers. He removed the lock from the eyehole and pushed open the door.
The interior was lit by a single kerosene lantern. And the immediate impression was clutter. Stuff collected over years of occupancy. Empty plastic kerosene containers hung in clusters from a ceiling support beam maybe ten feet up. From another beam hung slabs of dark dried meat and fish wrapped in cheesecloth.
A makeshift bed sat against the left wall, a gray pillow and rumpled soiled bedding covering it. A small wood-burning stove sat at the far wall. He could feel its heat.
The air was laced with the odor of sweat, smoke, and musty wood. One wall held shelves full of canned goods, jars of food, cooking pots, a few hand utensils, dry goods. His father’s old Nikon. Telephoto lenses sat in cylindrical cases.
On another wall were three racks, two holding shotguns. Boxes of ammo sat on a nearby shelf. Near the door hung sheathed knives and a machete. And from wall pegs, hooded jackets, tops, and a pair of wading boots. A small workbench and chair sat in the rear right across from the bed. Several tools were lined up on a pegboard.
“Zack.”
Sarah shone her flashlight on some discolored photographs pinned to the wall above the worktable. Photographs of him and Jake or the four of them—the same family portrait that sat on his mother’s fireplace mantel. One of them was a shot of Zack as a young boy proudly holding up a brook trout nearly as big as he was, a body of water in the background. He’d never seen that photo. It had to have been taken someplace around here.
But what caught Zack’s attention sat on the wall over the bed. It was a water-stained drawing of Jesus preaching to his followers, below which in triptych was the Lord’s Prayer in English, some foreign script, and an alphabetic transliteration. Zack pulled out his cell phone and played what he had muttered in his coma.
Avvon d-bish-maiya, nith-qaddash shim-mukh
Tih-teh mal-chootukh. Nih-weh çiw-yanukh:
ei-chana d’bish-maiya: ap b’ar-ah.
Haw lan lakh-ma d’soonqa-nan yoo-mana.
O’shwooq lan kho-bein:
ei-chana d’ap kh’nan shwiq-qan l’khaya-ween.
Oo’la te-ellan l’niss-yoona:
il-la paç-çan min beesha.
Mid-til de-di-lukh hai mal-choota
oo khai-la oo tush-bookh-ta
l’alam al-mein. Aa-meen.
“Word for word,” Sarah said.
Zack nodded. “Except that’s not my voice.”
Before Sarah could respond, the cabin door slammed open and a figure stumbled inside.
87
He could barely recognize him behind the shotgun. “Dad, it’s me, Zack.”
His father’s face was shadowed under a gray hooded slicker. Stringy hair hung over his brow, and the bottom of his face was buried under a scruffy beard. But those eyes were the eyes of his father—piercing green gemstones that Zack had inherited.
He glared at Zack, the shotgun wavering at him.
“Dad, it’s me, and this is my friend Sarah. We’re here to help you.”
For a frozen moment, Zack could not tell if anything was getting through the wild glare in his father’s eye. He could be totally demented and blast them for intruding.
Some would say they be a little light on top—maybe too much isolation.… Whatever, we leave them alone, they leave us alone.
His father jerked the barrel upward toward Zack. Then Sarah. “Who’r
e you?” His voice was scratchy from disuse.
“This is Sarah Wyman. She’s a nurse. We came to help.”
He kept the shotgun barrel aimed at her midsection. He was wavering and grimacing, his mouth moving under the gray-and-black scruff as if he were carrying on a conversation inside.
He gaped at Zack, squinting and wincing as if trying to register recognition. The shotgun swayed from Sarah toward Zack, sending a shock to his midsection. He doesn’t recognize me, Zack thought. His mind is gone and he hasn’t got a clue who I am—just a midnight intruder here to rob him. In a chilled moment, Zack wondered if he had through some deep recall stumbled upon the demented, shabby remains of someone who used to be his father and who might turn the next moment into bloody mayhem. As he watched the black hole of the barrel jerk in the air between them, he considered making a grab for it. But if it went off, they could be hit by the blast. “Dad, please…”
Before he could finish, his father let out a pained cry and slumped to his side, landed on one knee, wincing and gasping. The gun clunked to the wooded floor. Zack caught him by one arm as Sarah took the other. Slowly they moved him to the bed. He groaned as they removed the slicker and raised his feet onto the bed. Gently they laid him on the mattress, a thin, stained pad that was sour with body smells. Sarah grabbed an old sweater for a pillow, and Zack lowered him onto it.
“Jesus,” Zack muttered. The right side of his father’s pullover was dark with blood.
Zack didn’t know if the shock rose from the realization that his father had in fact been shot as presaged in the NDE or from the hideous wound the bullet had left.
He tried not to react to the rancid odor of decay as they removed a dressing made of a rag and duct tape. The bullet was probably still lodged inside of him, and where it had entered was a fetid puckered hole of draining pus, haloed by a raw, angry swell of discolored flesh.
Zack’s first thought was gangrene. His second thought was that it had spread to his father’s brain, rendering him delirious and incapable of recognition. He was shaking with fever and dehydration. Without antibiotics, he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. “We have to get him to a hospital.”
“No hospital.” The syllables scraped out of his father’s throat.
“But the infection’s spread,” Sarah said.
“Not dying in a hospital,” his father said in a wheezing voice. It was the first lucid statement he had made.
“Okay,” Zack said, relieved. From his jacket pocket he removed a vial of Percocet he had brought, left over from his release from the hospital. He slipped two tabs into his father’s mouth and raised the water bottle to his lips. “This will make you feel better.” His father swallowed the pills.
Meanwhile, Sarah removed Nick’s shoes and pulled the blanket over him. She added some wood to the stove to take the chill out of the air.
As they waited for the drug to take effect, Sarah shook her head to say that Nick’s condition looked bad.
Zack held his father’s hand while he closed his eyes, wincing occasionally against the pain and waiting for the medication to kick in.
As Zack studied his father, things came back to him. The way the blue vein on his forehead was visible, now pulsing with a labored heart. The small chip on a front tooth, the result of a fall from his bicycle when he was a boy. The slightly crooked third finger on his right hand, which he had broken in college during a fraternity prank. Little features he had forgotten. Yet the green eyes still blazed with a fire he could never have forgotten. They stared back at Zack every time he looked in a mirror.
He could also see how he had aged—the deeply scored crease lines around his eyes, the cleft between his brows. The liver spots on his forehead and the backs of his hands. Various cuts and scars on his arms. His chipped and blackened fingernails, the grime in his matted hair. The whitened scruff of a beard. He had lived in this wilderness, renouncing the “civilized” world like some latter-day Thoreau, subsisting on the land that he loved—this sanctuary of Magog.
But what squeezed Zack’s heart was the certainty that these were the last hours he would spend with the father he barely knew. So much to say, so much to ask, so few heartbeats left.
In a few minutes, the drug took effect. Nick opened his eyes and nodded that he felt better. He drank more water.
Sarah got up to give them some privacy. The interior was small, but she moved to the other side of the cabin, where she found some napkins and duct tape to make a clean bandage.
“I knew you’d find me.” He spoke in a feathery rasp. “Felt you coming.”
“Me, too. I saw them bury you alive on Sagamore. I saw you dig yourself out. I was with you.”
His father’s eyes filled up. “You have the gift, too.”
“The gift?”
“You see the unseen. You touch the spirit.”
“But how?”
His father began to speak but got caught in a coughing jag that turned into a fusillade of wheezing gasps. Sarah shot over, and they raised him up and held him until he could catch his breath. Sarah poured him a cup of water from a five-gallon jug rigged up in the far corner. Nick took small, pained gulps. When he was finished, they propped him up with pillows. For a few minutes he lay still with his eyes closed.
From a table against the opposite wall, Sarah returned with a thick cardboard box with a strip of silver duct tape across the top and ZACK printed in a bold hand.
Inside was a photo album containing black-and-white shots, the first of which showed Zack being handed his B.A. diploma at graduation. It had been taken not by the official school photographer, but through a telephoto lens in the crowd, probably from one sitting on that shelf beside the old Nikon F.
And there were others, all of Zack—playing pickup softball at the field on Columbus Avenue; high school graduation shots of his accepting a scholarship check from the principal; Zack pinning opponents in high school wrestling matches; Little League shots of him catching a pop-up. There were dozens of them—each an event from Zack’s young life and all shot from a distance. His father had been there, unseen.
“You made me proud,” his father whispered.
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I didn’t belong in your life.”
“That’s ridiculous. You were my father. I needed you. We needed you.”
“Not the man I should have been.” Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes. “Couldn’t handle things. Your brother’s dying … bringing you up, being married. Too weak. Too weak. I wasn’t worthy of being your father.”
“You were worthy.”
He shook his head. And in a failing whisper he muttered, “Couldn’t live in a world I didn’t understand.”
“So you joined the monastery.”
“For God to forgive me, help me understand … My penance.”
“For what?”
“Jake’s death, bad father, bad husband. All my weakness.”
“Why didn’t you at least answer my letters?”
“I did.” He pointed to a wooden cigar box on the shelf with books and shotgun shells. “I have them all. Something else.”
Sarah moved to the shelf and got the box for Zack. Her eyes were wet.
Inside were all of Zack’s letters sent from the time he’d learned where the monastery was. They were bound together with string. Also unsent letters addressed to him from his father. No stamps on the envelopes. Also a small, ledgerlike diary. When Zack removed that, his father whispered, “No. After.…”
Inside was also a thick manila envelope addressed to Adam Krueger at a Boston address. “Adam Krueger. I know that name. He’s an insurance guy.”
Nick shook his head. “Lawyer.”
“The guy who signs all the checks to Mom. We thought it was insurance money after they said you died.” They regularly received payments from two separate sources, which his mother had assumed were from two different life insurance policies. “Where’d the money come from?”
&nbs
p; “Luria,” his father whispered. “Wanted to find Jake. They kept paying me.”
“And you paid Mom.”
He nodded. “Also, when I pass … where to put me. ’S’all in there.” He could barely talk and winced against the pain.
Zack moved closer to his father’s ear. “Dad, I saw the deaths of Volker and Gretch.”
His father turned his head a little but said nothing.
“I saw them get killed.”
Still no reaction.
“Was that you?”
After a moment, he nodded. “In the letter to Adam. He’ll know what to do.”
“You killed them.”
“Revenge is the worst evil,” he whispered. “Why I became a brother.”
“You joined because of them?”
“Wanted to find peace. Forgiveness. But couldn’t protect me from myself. Maybe He was angry I abandoned you and Mom.”
“Who?”
“God.”
“Why…”
“Maybe killing them was my penance for not being your father.” Then he added, “Not blaming God. Should have forgiven them. But couldn’t. Also couldn’t forgive myself … abandoning you.”
“I forgive you.”
He nodded as tears ran from the corners of his eyes. “You’re a better man than I ever was.” He struggled to catch his breath. With what little strength he had, he squeezed Zack’s hand.
Zack kissed him on the forehead.
“Love you, sport.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“Take good care of your mother. Good woman.”
Then he nodded at the cigar box in Sarah’s lap. He wanted Zack to flip through the photographs. He did, and when he reached a particular one, Nick stopped him. The shot was of a granite pinnacle in the woods. Zack recognized it—a place he had visited with his brother and father years ago. What he had glimpsed in suspension.
“Where you take me when it’s time.”
Nick again motioned for Sarah to find another photo. When she reached the correct one, he fingered it from her hand. It was a duplicate of one pinned to the cabin wall above his bed—a shot taken in front of their Carleton home. The four of them: Nick, Maggie, Jake, and Zack, who was maybe eight at the time—all beaming from a happier era. With shaking fingers, he slipped the photo into his breast pocket to be buried with him.
