Wild Things

by Clay Carmichael

  I read the spidery handwriting four times before the meaning sank in, and twice more after that to be sure—though what it said made perfect sense when I thought about it. I looked up at Henry, who flipped the picture back to the front side to know for the first time the face of his brother, Owen, while I gazed for the first time on my real daddy and the daddy of my brother, Wil, who was this minute following in our father’s footsteps, taking flight. Henry put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. I wrapped mine around him and did the same.

  Mr. and Mrs. Owen Royster, read the woman’s delicate handwriting, on ther weddin day.

  The boy left the house before dawn. He and the cat regarded each other—the boy standing for a time on the porch, so that the cat noticed, for the first time, how much he resembled the man.

  The boy did not hurry. There was something lonesome and adrift about him, and the cat followed as he climbed the path to the cabin. There, the boy walked to the dogwood where his mother was buried and stood for a while. After that, he rolled the two-wheeled machine off the cabin porch and poured an acrid-smelling liquid into its stomach. He climbed on its back and brought it briefly to sputtering life, then silenced it. He pushed it quietly through the woods, back to the man’s house. He glanced up at the girl’s window, turned to nod at the cat, and then pushed the machine down the dark drive.

  The boy’s leaving unsettled the cat, disquieted the very trees. The girl wouldn’t be up for hours. The cat headed off beyond the stone garden to the steepled house to hunt rats.

  When he got there, a terrible racket resounded from the building’s insides. Bright light streamed from the high windows into the near yard. Behind them, heavy objects crashed to the floor, glass and pottery shattered, metal rattled and clanged. Whatever was trapped inside bounded from one end of the building to the other, one minute thrashing in front, the next galloping to the back, the next climbing high, toward the steeple, as if it were learning to fly.

  At dawn, a truck drove up. The man’s helper guided the old man with the cane to the building’s arched front doors. They unlocked the doors and opened them. The white deer bounded out, wild-eyed, knocking both men on their rears, and vaulted into the far trees.

  20

  Henry’s New Year’s Eve opening in New York was a big success, even by Lillian’s standards. Lillian was put out that there were only “fourteen legitimate Roysters,” as she put it, Henry and I having included our Crazy Deflector Wild Thing at the last minute; but when it sold first, she shut up and took the check. When Henry said that the money was mine to add to my rubber-banded bankroll, I nearly died. After deducting Lillian’s piggy fifty percent, I still got four thousand five hundred dollars—or will, when Lillian gets around to forking it over.

  “Congratulations,” Henry said. “You’ve sold your first work of art.”

  By the end of the night, nearly every sculpture had sold and everybody was saying how it was Henry’s best work ever. Henry behaved himself, mostly, except when Lillian told him that one of her best clients wanted to buy one of the big pieces, but only if Henry would paint it hot pink. I smiled to hear Henry hollering across the crowded room, “If she wants it pink, she can buy a flipping can of Rust-Oleum and paint it herself.”

  I thought: That’s my uncle Henry.

  I hated to admit it, but it was a good party. Those snooty people’s rich and famous brains were swimming in high-dollar alcohol, the extra expense not making them one bit brighter than any other drunk. Half the women flirted with Henry, but I didn’t blame them. When the band churned up around eleven to play something we could move to, Henry scooped me up and set me on the bar and we danced along it and back, people laughing and moving out of the way and cheering us on. I told Henry he moved pretty well for an old man, and he said I shook it all right for a girl with no hips. Franklin cut in then and Henry danced with Helen, who had hips aplenty. Knowing Bessie was in the hospital back home didn’t let any of us take anything too seriously.

  I’d read to her from my journals every day over Christmas and after, right up until the day we left. She liked hearing about herself, especially the part where Wil rescued her and I hurled myself onto the mayor’s head. We’d spent nearly every minute of Christmas in her hospital room. She was coming along slowly and had trouble remembering things, and Fred said my reading to her from my journal was about the only thing that cheered her. I read her favorite parts to her over and over, and every time she’d laugh like she was hearing them for the first time, which maybe she was. That’s what friends are for, she told me, to remember all the things you’ve forgotten. Fred called right before the gallery opening to say she could hardly wait to hear what happened at the end. He said Harlan was busy cleaning up the church after Wil had shut Sister inside. Wil must’ve been thinking of the Japanese boy hiding in the temple when he put her there. That was the last anybody had seen of him or the deer.

  Just before midnight, Henry and I escaped the party to sit on Lillian’s gallery roof. Henry drank champagne right out of the bottle while I sipped hot cocoa. We were twenty stories up in the freezing cold with easily ten or twelve zillion lights above and below us, sparkling and winking in all directions. I was on top of the world.

  I huddled up to Henry and thought of the beautiful sculpture he’d given me for Christmas—the one that had spoken to me that day in his studio—saying it was for all the holidays and birthdays he’d missed. He called it Wild Thing, set it right in the front yard. Fred said it looked just like me and announced that, come spring, he was planting a flowerbed around it, with bleeding heart, love-in-a-mist, and heartsease.

  I smiled, thinking about the laptop computer Franklin and Helen had sent me to write on. I’d also found a beautiful quilt under the tree from Bessie with the wonders of my new life stitched into the nine pieced squares: Mr. C’mere, Henry’s farmhouse, a log cabin, the Padre with a crooked halo, Fred’s red truck, Sister and Wil running through the trees, a pack of Juicy Fruit for Sheriff Bean, an embroidered representation of my journal with Zoë’s Memoir stitched on the cover, and a red and silver sequined heart with wings. For his present, I’d shown Henry the dedication page of my memoir on my computer screen. To Henry, it said, with love. First time I’d ever written that to anyone.

  A chain of firecrackers went off somewhere, yanking me back to the present, and all of a sudden hooting and shouting and horns blowing down below us signaled the start of the New Year, making me officially twelve.

  Henry jumped up and gave me a twirl, saying “Happy New Year” and then singing “Happy Birthday,” and as the New York night whirled by I thought about all that had happened in the last year—things happy and sad, mean and kind, terrible and wonderful, things beginning and ending, all in some measure all the time. I’d been trying all day to think of the word to describe that everything-all-at-once feeling, the one I’d had nearly all my life, the way I felt when I thought about Mama, or looked at my half-brother’s carved animals or the picture of his mama and our daddy, the feeling I saw in Henry’s face when he was remembering his dead wife or in Fred’s when he was worrying over Bessie, or in Hargrove’s when he set Sister free.

  Bittersweet, it seemed to me.

  Right as I was thinking that, Franklin came up behind us and whispered into Henry’s ear.

  The crunch of gravel woke him as the long black car crawled up the snowy drive.

  For several days, strangers had come to fill his bowls. Missing the girl, he slept lightly, one ear cocked, curled up at the base of the shiny new object in the yard.

  The object was unmistakably the girl. An oval of delicate silver outlined her face, traced truly the shape of her wide eyes, sat atop her graceful neck. Fine strands of coppery hair blew back from her face. The metal sketched her arms, torso, legs. She seemed as light as air, running headlong, her arms flung back, fierce with life, and at the center of her chest spun a silver heart with two tiny outstretched wings, each cupped to whirl the heart in the slightest breeze. And bounding
beside her, in sinuous silver, the cat.

  The day the man set it there, the girl careened out of the house. The man stood smiling, letting her dance around it, open her gift before he twirled her in his arms. Soon after, they drove off together, and in the lonesome days since, silence had been the music of the day. Snow had fallen, spread its white blanket over the woods and trees. The place grew quiet as death.

  Now a squat man got out of the car and buttoned his coat against the cold. He walked to the door and knocked, stomped the snow from his shoes. He peered in through the glass, shaded his eyes with one hand, then walked to the steps to survey the snowy yard. Seeing no one, he walked back to the man’s workshop. The cat jumped on the hood of the car and looked through the glass inside. Instead of a long box, a large, lidded pot sat on the front seat.

  Hello, kitty, the squat man said, coming back up the path. Guess they’re still at the church. Terrible to be late to your own funeral, but we’re all behind, what with the snow.

  Cars began pulling into the drive. The old woman who’d stuck the cat’s behind with a needle got out and walked around to help the old man with the cane.

  The man drove up then, his helper in the seat beside him, and the cat’s heart leapt to see the girl jump out and run to him. He let her scoop him up, legs in the air. She kissed him between the eyes, then set him gently in the drive. Seen Sister? she asked the old woman.

  The old woman nodded. Every day. Likes the salt lick I got her. Any word from your brother?

  The girl shook her head.

  The man went around to his helper’s door. His helper looked shrunken, crumpled as a dry leaf. The small group gathered around him as a car with flashing lights drove up. More got out, front and back. Everyone talked and embraced. The man and the girl spoke together, deciding things.

  Shall we then? the man said.

  They walked in slow, silent procession across the snowy field. The sky was overcast, considering the gray matters of clouds, whether to snow or rain. A sudden wind spun the whirling parts of the man’s makings. A few whined or creaked as they turned, like singing. The man walked beside his helper, who hugged the covered pot. The others followed, two by two, the cat and the girl last.

  They crowded inside the stone garden, circling a small, perfect square dug deep. The helper set the pot tenderly into the hole. The girl opened the book she was always scribbling in, took a long breath, and spoke softly for a time, pausing to wipe her wet cheeks, turn a page. All of their faces grew wet then, and the cat glanced up at the gray sky. And it began to snow.

  21

  Bessie’s service was beautiful—the Padre’s church full of fresh flowers even in winter—and afterward those I loved came to the house for the burial. A miraculously goodly number, a number that had been zero only a few months before. Only Bessie herself and Wil were missing.

  I had to hand it to my brother: when he wanted to disappear, he vanished like a dream in daylight. There wasn’t one single sign of him anywhere. Despite local and state law enforcement searching the highways and byways and the greedy citizenry combing the small towns and wild places in between to collect the mayor’s hateful bounty, Wil kept out of sight.

  Helen and Franklin flew in from New York and Sheriff and Mrs. Bean got back from Christmas with their daughters just in time for the service at the church. Maud actually wore a dress. We all sat with Fred and Fred’s cousin Henrietta in the front rows reserved for family. Every pew was filled—a huge turnout for someone who’d hardly left her house in years.

  Bessie had given Fred and the Padre strict instructions about how her service should go, threatening to come back and haunt them if they didn’t do as she said. Unlike the solemn services I’d attended with Manny’s mother, Bessie’s had joyful music and laughter. The Padre spread one of her quilts over the altar. He said how God had walked again on this earth in the person of Bessie Parsons Montgomery, as surely as Christ had walked here two thousand years before. Heads nodded. Amen, those present said, and God seemed a hair friendlier to me then, if only a hair.

  I stood on a communion wine crate at the lectern and read the parts Bessie liked best from my memoir, though it was all I could do to read without crying. I read the part where she said folks were starved for beauty. I read how she’d refused a heart transplant, saying she wouldn’t be herself with someone else’s heart beating inside her. And I read the Thanksgiving entry, where Bessie had spoken the truth about little Garland Bean’s rescue and laid the local lie bare.

  People stood and clapped when I was done. I knew they were clapping for Bessie.

  I read from more recent parts of my journal at the burial—about Henry’s New York opening and Sister’s brush with religion in the Padre’s pews—because Bessie hadn’t lived to enjoy them. I liked to think she could hear. Henry had her grave dug next to Mama’s, just like she’d asked. Bessie thought that she and Mama might have things to say to each other, if such conversations were possible. That they might become friends.

  The snow started again right after the burial, and for a while everyone looked a little lost and kept to themselves. Fred lingered at the graveyard with Bessie. He couldn’t get it out of his head that she’d be lonely there all by herself. When he finally came up to the house, he headed mechanically for the kitchen and stood staring at the cabinets, the refrigerator, and the stove like he was standing on the moon.

  Maud led him to a chair. After that he stayed quiet, the way anybody’d be when his whole reason for living had been yanked away. He hardly seemed to hear when people spoke to him. Henry kept close by him, and though I didn’t hear them exchange twenty words, I understood whole conversations taking place in the silence between them.

  The Padre sat by the front room fire sipping sherry. By the second glass he’d declared Bessie beatified and by the third glass sainted. To my eyes, his collar didn’t afford him any more protection against loss than the next person. He looked plain and simple, like a man who’d just buried his best friend.

  Harlan paced and muttered to himself about Wil’s taking the motorcycle, sure something bad would happen because he hadn’t had a chance to check the air in the new tires or replace the old brakes.

  Then people started to come, some who’d been at the church and some who hadn’t, though no invitations had been issued, no formal reception planned. “People know,” Helen said. “It was like that after my mother died. They just come.”

  And come they did, in snow-dusted dribs and drabs all the rest of the day: farmers who knew Fred and who had brought Henry their plows to weld, people who’d bought Fred’s flowers and whose hearts Henry had mended, people who’d known what Bessie had meant to one or all of us. They filled the kitchen with casseroles and the house with happy memories of Bessie and speculation about Wil.

  Near day’s end Ms. Avery came, saying there was somebody outside who was too shy to come in. I put on my coat and went out. At first I didn’t see anything but falling snow, but then I saw Hargrove, hunkered down next to Mr. C’mere under the sculpture Henry had made for me.

  I walked out toward them. “Hey, Hargrove,” I said.

  “Hey.” He stood up, hands in his pockets.

  “That was a good thing you did for Sister,” I told him.

  He nodded but stared at his feet. “How is she?”

  “Fine. Ms. Booker’s looking after her. Is your daddy mad?”

  He looked off toward the end of drive. “Mad doesn’t describe it.” He went quiet for a few seconds, then mumbled, “He’s sending me away.”

  “What!”

  “To school.”

  “Oh.”

  He pulled a small brown sack out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. He turned away as I took off the paper. My red journal. “Sorry I took it,” he said. “Sorry about the cabin, too. Wasn’t me who tore it up, but I don’t guess that matters.”

  “It matters,” I told him, and then we just stood there together watching it snow.

  I remembered what Harlan
had said to me about Mama, the good her dying had done me. Maybe being sent off to school would be the best thing that could happen to Hargrove. Maybe getting away from his daddy would give the art- and animal-loving boy inside him a chance of coming to light. Like me getting away from Mama. But I didn’t know Hargrove well enough to say that out loud.

  “You’re a good drawer,” I said instead. “You ought to keep doing it.”

  For the first time he looked at me.

  “You want to come inside?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Okay if I stay out here and look around?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “See ya,” he said, waving a little, wandering off toward the sculptures in the side yard.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” I said back.

  He and Ms. Avery left a little while after that, and soon the others left too, and it was just Henry and me, Fred, Maud, Franklin and Helen. We sat by the fire wondering about Wil. I brought down his little carvings from my room, and we passed them carefully from hand to hand as if they were holy objects. Everyone marveled at Wil’s exquisite work, Henry most of all. He said how grand it was to have another artist in the family and wondered if Wil had any notion how really good they were, far better than anything he’d done at Wil’s age. Maud got quiet then, saying Wil made her think about my daddy, Owen, and whether she’d done right by him, giving him up.

  I listened some while they talked, but I felt far, far away. I was mourning Wil’s loss as much as Bessie’s, maybe more. Though Wil wasn’t dead, I felt cheated of him.

  I tried to convince myself that he wasn’t gone for good. I knew what the north woods meant to him. Since the morning Wil left, I’d walked up to the cabin every day I could, sure I’d find another little carving waiting for me, warm ashes in the fireplace, the bed slept in, any sign he was still around, though I found none. Sometimes I’d think I had glimpsed him in the trees because of a flash of white, a boyish trick of the light, but a second later I’d know otherwise.