Wild Things

by Clay Carmichael

  The once-silent woods grew noisy with twigs snapping, leaves rustling, and Bessie’s name shouted in every octave. Flashlight beams sliced the darkness. Henry and I headed farther north. I tried to split off alone so Wil might find me, but Henry refused to leave my side. At first it irritated me. Wil wouldn’t show himself with Henry near, and we’d never find Bessie without Wil’s help. But as Henry and I tramped along together in the deep light, stumbling over the same roots and snagging our clothes on the same branches, each calling to the other to watch out for this low limb or that rotted log, I was glad to have Henry beside me. I mean, what did I think I was going to do if Wil wasn’t around when I found Bessie and she was bad off and couldn’t walk? Just what could one scrawny kid do?

  Dawn haloed the tree line when Henry and I stopped a minute in the gray light to listen and get our bearings. He scanned the woods in all directions, squinting hard at anything that might be Bessie’s crumpled shape. The land here was rocky, and from a distance the big, lichen-covered boulders looked almost human.

  “What do you think Bessie meant, saying she wanted to see the cabin before she died?” I asked him, barely able to speak that last word.

  He hesitated.

  “The truth,” I said.

  “The truth,” he said, and heaved a big sigh, “is that Bessie’s lived far longer than anybody thought she would.”

  “Because of you.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. His gray eyes met mine. “I’m not being modest. Bessie’s hung on beyond all reason for a very long time. Her heart keeps going beyond medical understanding.”

  We tramped along in gloomy silence after that. I thought about Mama dying and how hard it had been to lose somebody I didn’t love. I wasn’t ready to lose the first person I did.

  Suddenly the sheriff yelled Henry’s name back of us, saying his deputy’d gashed his head. Henry told me to wait there and took off toward the sheriff’s voice at a trot. The distance grew between us until Henry disappeared and I was finally alone.

  A few seconds later, I heard excited voices from the opposite direction. Thinking it might be Fred and Harlan or some of the other searchers, I headed for the sound. The voices were coming from the far side of some large boulders, but when I got close, I stopped, recognizing one voice’s ugly sound. Quiet as I could, I crept to the rocks, found holds for climbing up, and shimmied on my stomach to peer over the top.

  I nearly cried out at the scene below me. Hargrove and his daddy, the mayor, stood in a big clearing about fifty feet from Sister, who was tied by her neck to a tree at the clearing’s edge. Without Wil to calm her, she was out of her mind with fear, but the harder she yanked to get free, the more the rope rubbed her neck bloody and raw. I scanned the trees for Wil, trying to see where he was, knowing he had to be the one who’d tied her there and wondering what idiot idea made him leave her that way.

  Hargrove stood right below me, turned toward the pale roped creature struggling before him. I couldn’t see his expression, but beside him, his daddy, a shotgun by his side, beamed with pride, reminding me of Ray and the pleasure he’d taken in killing animals.

  “I don’t have a white deer on my trophy wall,” he was telling Hargrove. “Wouldn’t she be perfect?”

  “But Daddy, she’s—” Hargrove said.

  “She’s what?” his daddy interrupted. “Don’t be soft, Hargrove. You’re too much like your mother that way. In fact, you take her,” his father said, handing his shotgun to Hargrove. “It’s time you took your first prize.”

  Hargrove accepted the gun, and his daddy backed away.

  “Well?” his father said. “Hurry up.”

  “But she’s so beautiful,” Hargrove told him.

  “Of course she’s beautiful,” his daddy said, as if that was obvious and Hargrove not very bright. “That’s the point. If you take her, she’ll be beautiful forever on the wall of my den. And you’ll be able to say, ‘I did that.’”

  “Look what I found,” a voice called from the far side of the clearing. Curtis, the hunter from Thanksgiving, appeared, holding up Wil’s bow and arrows in one hand and nudging someone forward with the other. Wil staggered before him into dim light. I wondered why Wil seemed so unsteady, and then saw he was carrying something heavy stretched across both his arms. The weight of his load kept him planted, though he twitched in horror at the sight of Sister and the gun in Hargrove’s hands. I was about to shout to Wil when I made out what he was carrying. It was Bessie—Bessie, limp and still as death.

  “I’m claiming that reward!” Curtis shouted.

  “Hurry up and take your shot,” the mayor told Hargrove. “Then I’ll call the sheriff on my cell phone and say you’ve found Mrs. Montgomery and the boy who shot you. You’ll be the hero of the day.”

  Hargrove squirmed and shifted from one foot to the other, not at all sharing his father’s rush. I remembered the afternoon behind the school when I’d seen Hargrove scratch Sparky’s belly and rub behind his ears. Hargrove looked from Sister to his daddy to Wil, from Wil to his daddy and back to Sister. Sister, though still bug-eyed with fear, had stopped thrashing since Wil had come into the clearing. My heart grew sick and near bursting with rage at the thought of what would happen next.

  Hargrove surprised me then. He leaned the shotgun against the boulders behind him and walked slowly over to Sister, talking to her sweet and low, trying to reassure her. She stood quivering, wary and breathing quick, watching to see what he would do. He walked a wide circle around her and slipped a folding knife from his front pocket. Glaring hard at his daddy, he sawed through the rope at the tree and cut Sister free.

  She stood for a moment, not sure of her freedom, but when the mayor lunged for the shotgun, she bolted into the woods.

  I wish I could say I thought about what I did next, but I didn’t. As I stood up on top of that rock, Wil and Hargrove caught sight of me, amazement and horror on their faces. Curtis saw Wil glance up, and as Curtis looked up too, I shrieked and threw myself off that boulder right on top of the mayor as he turned to aim at Sister. I hit hard, felt a sharp pain, and heard the shotgun go off with an earsplitting blast just as Henry hollered, “Zoë! No!”—the last words I heard for a good while.

  19

  Bessie lay in the hospital bed not seeming at all like herself without her headscarf and quilts, looking more like a wrinkled child. I’d never seen her without a scarf. What hair she had was silver and close-cropped like a man’s. Tubes ran from the inside of her elbow and her right side to plastic bags hanging on metal stands. Her skin was as gray as rain, and her nose and mouth were covered with a mask connected to a tank beside the bed. I had to keep reminding myself it was Bessie.

  A machine next to the bed gave off a steady beep, beep, beep, and I watched the raggedy rhythm of her heart on the little screen and found it reassuring. It meant I didn’t have to watch the shallow rise and fall of her chest to make sure she was still breathing. I focused all my energies on giving the Padre’s Lord God Almighty, reportedly in Heaven, a piece of my agitated mind. Maybe we all had to die sometime, I told Him, but please not Bessie, and not at Christmas, not after everything else that had happened. If He took her now, He could take His stingy, stonehearted love and shove it for all time. A kid can only take so much.

  Fred was off having a conference with Henry and the other doctors about Bessie. She was out of the woods for now, but Dr. Miller, who had set my broken arm, said we’d have to wait a while to be sure she’d stay that way. I liked Dr. Miller. She listened to me like I was a grown-up.

  “You’re Dr. Royster’s daughter?” she asked while she wrapped my arm.

  “Niece,” I told her.

  “There’s certainly a resemblance. I don’t know what we’d do without his help every week at the free clinic.”

  She told me Bessie would surely have died if Wil hadn’t found her when he did. “All of you got her here just in time,” she said. “Your friend Wil is a hero.”

  Bessie shifted
under the covers, and her eyes opened, bright as ever. “Baby, what are you doing here?” she asked, real soft.

  I could hardly hear her through the little mask. I leaned in closer.

  “Henry said to come get him if you woke up. Want me to?”

  She shook her head. “Not just yet. Remind me how I got here so I don’t sound like an old fool.”

  I told her what I knew. How after she’d got it in her mind to take a midnight walk, Wil had found her in the woods and tried to carry her to get help. How Hargrove had stood up to his daddy, and how I’d had to jump off some boulders onto the mayor’s head. The mayor was okay, more or less, I said, but I wouldn’t want to be Hargrove after what had happened with his daddy.

  “I wish I’d been awake when everything happened,” Bessie whispered.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’m putting it all in my memoir.”

  “I want somebody pretty to play me in the movie,” she said. “Where’s the boy now?”

  “Gone. Nobody knows where. He ran off after his deer in all the confusion.”

  “Good for them.” She caught sight of the cast on my left arm.

  “I broke it when I jumped. It doesn’t hurt much, though.” I paused, wanting to say something else.

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “Henry said you nearly died.”

  She softly patted the mattress between us. “Come up here.”

  I climbed carefully over the rail and lay on my side facing her, my back against the gate.

  “You know what I’m going to remember most about today?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “What I’m going to remember is the best day I’ve had in a long time.”

  I thought it was a strange thing to say.

  “The absolute best day,” she went on. “I busted out of my jail cell and actually walked beyond my own backyard, far beyond it! That may not sound like much to you, but honey, I was living! When I walked into those woods, the first thing I thought was how long I’d let Fred and everybody worry over my poor heart so much that it had about stopped beating. Not today.”

  “But you didn’t make it to the cabin.”

  “But I tried, didn’t I? I threw off my chains and tried. You taught me to do that. Taught me not to let anything or anybody keep me from doing what my spirit was made to do.”

  She smiled a weak smile. When she turned her face full my way, I saw that the left side was stiffer than the right. Her eyes closed just a little. “From now on, nobody’s keeping me from doing what that spirit moves me to do. And right now, it’s moving me to lie here next to you and take a little nap.”

  She fell asleep almost at once. I lay in the bed thinking about what she’d said. I thought about Henry, and the hard time Fred and the sheriff had given him about letting me do what I needed to do. I’d ignored him, disobeyed him outright, scared him half to death, kept the truth from him, and brought a stray cat, a wild boy, people with guns, and two of Mama’s loser friends into his life. Not that I thought I could’ve done any different. And still he’d left the reins loose and the barn door open.

  I drifted off to sleep for a while, and when I woke, Henry was standing at the side of the bed, frowning over Bessie’s chart. He was wearing his surgeon clothes and was as clean as I’d ever seen him.

  He looked so grim and serious that for a minute I was sure he was still furious with me. But when he saw I was awake, he set the chart on the bedside table, leaned over the side rail, and lifted me in his strong arms. He hugged me hard to him, the way you hold somebody when you feared you’d lose them and didn’t. I lay my head against his chest and breathed in his faint grease, turpentine, and metal-dust smell, the Henry smell that no amount of scrubbing ever washed away, the smell I was beginning to love.

  Fred stayed with Bessie at the hospital that night, and Henry and I rode home to get some sleep. It was nearly five in the morning when we got there. Henry went straight up to bed. Before I headed to my room, I fed and rubbed Mr. C’mere, who was waiting for me on the porch. I scanned the woods’ edge for Wil, both hoping he’d come and hoping he wouldn’t.

  The mayor had upped his reward for Wil’s capture to ten thousand dollars. Sheriff Bean told the mayor that he’d better prepare to explain his decision to bring a shotgun to search for Bessie, a gun that had gone off and might have killed any one of the searchers nearby. The mayor countered that the gun had been for protection from delinquents with bows and arrows and that the gun’s firing had been my fault—claims, the sheriff said, he’d let the district attorney wrestle with. The sheriff doubted that the mayor’s allegations would stick if Wil was found. He had saved Bessie’s life, and winging Hargrove, who was drunk and trespassing, had been his first offense. But because Wil was a nobody migrant boy, he wouldn’t have options or a moment’s peace with everybody trying to catch him and cash in. If he was caught, the sheriff thought, he’d likely be sent to a state home. His best hope was to move on, disappear.

  My heart was heavy thinking about Wil and Bessie as I climbed the stairs, but what I found when I switched on my light about made me shout with joy. I stood in my doorway and stared. The whole room—the floor, the window seat, the dresser, the bedside table, the bookcase—was covered with Wil’s prized possessions: birds’ nests and eggs, beautiful rocks, a turtle shell, pinecones, animal bones, lichen-covered twigs, and dozens of feathers in every color of bird.

  On my bedside table was Wil’s cigar box, the one I’d found in the cabin when I was first there, and Wil lay fast asleep in my bed.

  He woke and smiled a little as I came in, but I saw how exhausted he was. I shut the door so Henry wouldn’t hear us, switched off the light, and lay down facing him on the bed.

  He ran his fingers over the cast on my arm. “That was a dumb thing to do,” he said, looking pleased I’d done it.

  “You should talk,” I said. “They’re all looking for you. Two-thirds of them want to give us medals and the other third want to lock us up. How’s Sister?”

  “Safe for now. That lady was right.”

  “What lady?”

  “The one I found. She said I should put Sister somewhere safe and get as far away from here as I could. Gave me two hundred dollars. Said the mayor’s a dog with a bone. That sooner or later he’ll see Sister dead and me in jail.”

  “Where will you go? You got family?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll move with the pickers, like always. It’s no big thing.”

  I could tell that last part was a huge lie, that his heart was hurting at the very thought. “Well, it’s a big thing to me.”

  Wil smiled.

  “Won’t you let the sheriff, Fred, and Uncle Henry see if they can help you?” I asked. “Finding Bessie made you a hero to most. Won’t you let them try?”

  “Dog with a bone,” he repeated. “That lady’s smart.”

  I looked into his weary eyes. Deep down, I knew he and Bessie were right. “Will you write and let me know where you are?” I asked him.

  “Don’t read or write.”

  “Well, you better learn,” I told him and he grinned.

  I reached for his hand then, and he let me take it. We lay together quietly after that for the half-minute it took us to fall asleep.

  Wil was gone when Henry woke me the next morning, like I knew he would be.

  He’d left every one of his treasures, though, exactly as they had been the night before. They were even more beautiful with the sun streaming in like honey through my windows. Henry took them in, not at all surprised by the news of Wil’s visit—though I didn’t let on he’d stayed the whole night.

  I took the cigar box off my night table and lifted the lid. Inside, in a bed of dry leaves, were the six carved animals: otter and squirrel, possum and mouse, raccoon and deer. I showed them to Henry one by one, and then showed him the carving of Mr. C’mere and the second one of Sister. Henry turned each one in the light and marveled, saying how lifelike they were and how gifted Wil w
as. Underneath them, the face of the boy’s mama peered up at me, the photograph I’d seen the first day at the cabin. I handed it to Henry and read him the single word scrawled on the back. “That’s Wil’s mama,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”

  Henry nodded sadly and handed the picture back to me. I started to set it and the little animals back in the box, but caught sight of something else in the bottom under the leaves, a second photograph that wasn’t there before. I brushed it off and held it to the light so Henry and I could look at it together. It was a wedding picture, but a sorry one, made sorrier by the bent corners and creases, like Wil had carried it in his pocket. The bride was the same woman as in the first photograph, Wil’s mama. Her dress and veil weren’t white or new, though they looked clean and pressed. This time, though, she seemed happy with the man she loved beside her, and she smiled into a skimpy bouquet of wilted roadside flowers.

  The man was different. His face was turned away like he was looking over his shoulder to see what fearsome thing was gaining on him. You couldn’t see but the far right side of his face, just a cheek, the tail of an eyebrow, a sideburn, a misshapen ear. His suit swallowed him and seemed old-timey, like the thrift-store specials Mama’s friends used to buy. The woman’s left hand was reaching for her husband’s, but he stood on tiptoe, leaning away from her, looking hollow and light, like a man-sized balloon about to take flight. One look would have told any sensible person that this fella wasn’t a stayer, that the first thing he’d do on arriving anywhere was look for the exits. I’d had half a dozen or more stepdaddies exactly like him.

  I handed the picture to Henry, who turned it over to see if anything was written on the back. His eyes widened at what he read. He leaned in close to show me what it said.

  For the longest time the best thing about never knowing my daddy was that I could picture him how I liked. I could imagine he was funny, handsome, or kind. I could dream he was the sort of man who found his little girl in a dark wood and carried her home. I could kid myself that only something real important kept him from tucking me in at night or tending me when I was sick, and that he lost sleep over the thought of all he was missing by being away from me. Stupid, I know, but all evidence to the contrary, I’d dreamed it just the same. Till now.