Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

* * *

  Water is a fugitive force in West Virginia, hard to trap and tame. There is only one natural lake in the whole state and it ain’t much. Lots of springs and running mountain streams green the land and fall beneath the bedrock, carving out the myriad caves that attract tourists and spelunkers from as far as New York City and D.C. The low worn hills conceal intricate sculptures of devastating beauty and dangerous enticement. Thermal springs and fast-running streams resist freezing and if you’ve got those you can water stock and if you build near one you can have running water in the house year round. But not many folks want to build in the damp dark spots where the streams want to run. Sometimes you got to build higher than the water source to catch the sun’s warmth and that means pumping your water and that means the electric co-op for a generator and probably frozen pipes at least part of the winter. Some folks just make do with a cistern.

  Sara had gone back to the site of the old commune to camp for the summer. There was a cistern by the old house, what they had used for water before piping it in from a spring up the hillside. But she didn’t go there now. She set up her campsite in the dark woods by the stream. She avoided the old house all covered with overgrown grasses, wild roses and elderberry trees and probably crawling with copperheads. But she had to pass close by it to go down Ewings Run or the other way to the big cave and the waterfall. Towards the end of the summer a powerful smell came from the cistern always overflowing with rusty rainwater and she found a dead chicken in it and she knew someone had put it there as a sign. She’d gotten the sense that Robert or maybe Henry himself was stalking her when she went into the store at Paint Bank and there was one old man too many and no one introduced her, they just all got quiet and later she thought she heard someone ask after Mary, but she couldn’t be sure, the voice was so quiet and distant, she could have imagined it. Robert had been there but hadn’t spoken to her like he usually did, had just looked at her while he continued whispering to the old man she didn’t recognize but sensed was Henry.

  It was August and the locust trees seemed already to be turning or maybe Sara imagined it. It had been so long since she had felt herself consumed in the electric color of the West Virginia autumn. She hoped Robert wouldn’t do anything before she left at the end of the month. She even thought about going back early. Something else told her it wouldn’t matter. He had nowhere in particular to go and he could follow her anywhere and just might. It didn’t occur to her that he might back off just shy of a really big city. She hadn’t gone back to see Mary after seeing the man in the store.

  Robert showed up not unexpectedly, but still giving her the creeps. She always wondered how long he’d been watching her before he’d emerge from the woods to tell her his fantastic stories. But even though she asked him outright, he wouldn’t say anything at all about Henry’s whereabouts. It was just the look that he got and the way he changed the subject like he was speaking in some special code just for her that made her think Henry was watching her and Robert was watching them both. She stayed on but packed her things, was ready to drive away on a moment’s notice if she decided to.

  She began to carry a rifle that had leaned against a wall in a corner of her old cabin, now abandoned, for years. She cleaned it and bought shells and practiced with it, like everyone did, shooting at cans atop fence posts and the letters on state road signs. She wasn’t very good but she got better every day and if anyone was watching her, it wouldn’t hurt to be seen shooting that thing. It was a preventative measure. Had it not been for her isolation in the woods she might not have felt so frightened, but she would have been wrong not to feel frightened. Hadn’t she herself made a point of how these isolated communities didn’t trust institutions like the police and the courts and so felt themselves free to carry out justice as they saw fit. Although it was Robert who turned up in her face periodically, her own guilt made her fear Henry as well. He’d shot the boys for what they had done to his daughter, might he not want to shoot her for what she had done to him? Even though he’d confessed, he’d confessed only because he was caught and he was caught because of her big mouth.

  The last time she encountered Robert it was right there where she had set up her camp. And he was snooping again, unabashedly, just laughed when he was caught and told her he was looking for books. She decided she would leave the very next day and spent the afternoon loading her truck. The empty tent would be easy to dismantle and most of her food and cooking supplies were already boxed and ready to go. But she waited until she thought Robert had completely left the area before she began. With him walking, not driving everywhere, it was hard to know when and where he stopped. She walked a ways up the road after him and saw him crest the next hill and disappear over it.

  She lay down trembling in her sleeping bag, leaving her shoes on and holding the rifle. Several times she thought she heard steps coming up from the county road, but she waited to be sure and realized it was only some small animal from the forest seeking food at her campsite. Once she awoke in a panic from the realization that she had fallen asleep and been dreaming that Robert was stalking her along a street in some European city. She caught her breath and waited, wanting rest and daylight to make her long drive, and she waited until it was almost too late.

  It was in the middle of that clear, starry night when Henry came around meaning business. It was the full moon and the road wound clear and light through the night. She woke up when she heard a truck with no headlights sliding, brakes grinding, down the road above. This time not a dream, no mistake. A truck with the engine turned off and no headlights could mean only one thing and she was almost relieved, she’d been expecting it so long.

  Sara had slept fully dressed with the rifle next to her. She sat up slowly, quietly and put on her shoes. She knew she was watched. She did not know if he knew she had the rifle but chances were he did. She knew where she was going. Away from the road the woods hadn’t changed, not for years, whole generations. Before she moved away Sara had walked all over the mountainsides finding sinkholes and cave openings, places where the boulders formed shelter and the trees that, once dead, had been hollowed slowly and took years to fall, forming still more hiding places. Even years later, she knew this place literally like the back of her hand, like another body it had been to her, and she had dreamed of wandering in this place so many times it felt like she still lived half her life there.

  She would follow the creek, blending the sound of her steps with the sound of the water and where she hit the marshy land where the spring branched five different ways she’d go straight west up the ridge to an old logging road edged in stones so scattered now as not to be recognizable as a road at all. She had been an archaeologist studying the very recent past, fast swallowed by the forest, the loggers, the farmers, the moonshiners, all leaving their peculiar traces, like those stones weathered by water before being carried uphill to line the sides of a raggedy road now maintained solely by the shade of the trees overhead.

  She crossed the road lit by the moon and kept it in sight as she traveled south again until it too reached the crotch of a fork, joining it with a deer path going west. She recited the directions to herself. Walking softly on a straight southwest diagonal she found the sinkhole. She didn’t know it, but she had lost her pursuer in the creek. He hadn’t expected to find himself sinking in the marshy area around the springs that fed several creeks and he lost track of Sara there. While Sara climbed down into the sinkhole and found the small opening to the cave system that underlay her land, Henry made his way back down another creek to the county road and had to walk a mile or so back to his truck. He slept through the day waiting for night to try again. Sara spent the night trying to keep warm in the sinkhole, afraid to venture out in the moonlight.

  The next morning Sara came back and lay down for a brief nap that lasted longer than she would have dared. Then she took her tent down and packed it into the truck and started driving away from this place, sad because she knew it w
ould have to be forever. She didn’t notice that her spare tire, exposed in the back of the truck, had been punctured. She discovered it when a front tire blew barely a hundred yards from her campsite. She knew someone was playing with her but she had no choice: she had to walk to the nearest neighbor, rolling the tire in front of her and request a ride into town to get it repaired or maybe trade it for a newer used tire, and a spare. This task took most of the day and it was already dark by the time Sara was ready to go. But tired as she was, she would leave immediately. She had had enough of this game. She was putting the rifle in last when the shots came.

  This time when she crept to the creek, he shot at her and shot several times before she got to the marsh. Then she waited while he reloaded and followed the same precise path she had taken to the sinkhole the night before. Sara was barely able to scramble down into the sinkhole and wedge herself into the narrow opening to the cave below, before he appeared on the road above. He was clearly lit by the moon and very still as he looked for her, listening for her step. She moved the rifle quickly to her shoulder, took careful aim at his hand on his gun and fired. The first shot went wide of him but gave him pause. He was raising his gun and taking aim at the source of it when the second shot killed him.

  In the dark, Sara wasn’t sure she’d seen him fall, maybe it was an illusion or a deliberate trick. She wedged herself further into the cave opening and barely drew breath as she waited for the dawn. In the silence, she thought she heard soft animal steps running swiftly from the scene.

  Then with the speed and magic of a dream Sara was sitting awkwardly in the fork of a large tree. Down below wild dogs and birds of prey pecked and tore at Henry’s body while she watched, terrified and freezing. There was no way for her to count the hours but she could count the dawns and it took the wild animals seven days and nights to complete this ritual of nature while Sara stood guard in the tree. Before the carrion birds and dogs had done there was a drenching rain that cleaned the bones and battered the killer in the tree and then a hot dry day that bleached the bones and warmed the woman who waited one more day because it wasn’t the kind of thing to be rushed. “Fire or water?” she was asking herself when the stench of death awakened her.

  Sara unfolded herself and all her aching joints from the cave opening and for a few minutes forgot what part of her life she was in and why she was here in the forest in the misty dawn. She could barely make out the body that lay dead in the gray morning light. The odor that had awakened her was not Henry but a dead possum on the logging road that ran above the highest rim of the sinkhole. She walked back slowly to her campsite and sat awhile thinking before returning to her truck. She had carried the rifle with her quite automatically, not even noticing it, and she dropped it behind the seat of her truck and threw the sleeping bag over top.

  At midmorning the sky relaxed its tense grayness and let fall the snow. Quiet, large wet flakes filled the air and covered the ground, inches in minutes. Briefly the sun shone faint through the grayness, looking dirty and old and worn-out. It flickered like fire…briefly, dying out.

  Expecting to kill a second time for vengeance, Henry had covered his tracks. Robert had told everyone days ago that Henry had gone to Boone County. By the time Sara stopped for breakfast in New Castle, Henry’s body was buried deeply, softly, reverently in the first snow of autumn.