by Daniel Mills
For the whole of that Sabbathday I tested the iron twists between my hands till the workings of my mind came to mirror the shape of the puzzle and I saw at once how it was done. The pieces separated and fell from my hands. They struck the ground, skittering, but I did not move to collect them. I did not move at all, being like John at Patmos when the Revelation was visited upon him, wonder mingling with awe in that moment and Heaven’s weight pressing down.
Years later, and it was the same when Jerusha told me of her final dreams, the two of them together, which came to her on a night in September and which she kept secret from all but me. She would not confide even in the Eldress but contrived a meeting between us in a place beyond the cornfields where the rubble wall was highest. By then the peak of summer was past and the year had slumped into autumn. The wall was over our heads, and we were hidden, but the brothers were at their work amidst the corn so Jerusha was obliged to whisper as she spoke.
In the first of the dreams, she said, she woke to find the Garden crumbled into chalk. The earth was barren and gave no life and the beasts had gone from it, breeding til their numbers stripped the land bare of sustenance whereupon they resorted to cannibalism so there remained but a single wolf, a male, who fell upon himself in his hunger, consuming his own flesh. The pain was such he screeched and moaned but appeared unable to stop till his bones, licked clean, settled into the ash which was the soil and always the wind blowing dust like snow.
For if they do these things when the tree is green what will they do in the dry? There was soot in her mouth, its bitter taste on her tongue, and her doll’s house had caved in upon itself. No roof, the sky’s open maw overhead, and even Mother had deserted her.
“I was alone,” she told me. “And then I saw him.”
The man roamed naked through the wild, solitary now where once God had walked beside him. He covered his face and wept for grief and saw his way through the gaps in his fingers. He was tall, muscled and sleek with fine hairs bristling down the length of his body.
She went to him, though she did not see his face, and afterward she slept in his arms and woke to a damp bed, a freezing room. The rain which had delayed so long now tapped upon the window to call her from the Garden. She thrashed beneath the blankets. She shivered and prayed til sleep returned to her and with it the dreaming.
The Garden was transformed. The soil was dark and rich, the color of spent coffee, raked and plowed and planted by unseen hands which had sowed the earth with new growth. Blue blossoms shaped like stars surfaced from the black and bloomed themselves inside-out, forming the trees which groaned for the weight of fruit upon them: white lemons, green plums. All was fruiting, all fecund. There were pumpkins and squash the size of a man’s head and the corn-stalks all round soaring to a height of twenty feet and laden up and down with corn like knobs of polished silver.
She hungered: she ate her fill. The plums were crisp but with a flavor like new-churned butter and the corn was sweet as berries picked at summer’s height. She filled her belly then took to wandering in the Garden and was not surprised to find the man beside her. They walked together, hand-in-hand, though she could not discern his face or that of the girl-child who danced toward them out of the rows of sweet corn.
“My daughter,” Jerusha said, though she could scarce believe it. Her body was a fallen thing, made of flesh and sin, while the child before her was a being of radiance knit from threads of light, or joy, or the laughter which trailed behind her as she whirled and spun and came to a halt before Jerusha.
The child giggled, nervous. She joined her hands and lifted them together with an apple cupped between them, an offering. The skin was smooth, without blemish.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I had no choice,” she said. “What could I do but take it?”
All this she told to me. She leant forward, expecting no answer, but whispering with her face concealed for the hair which hung before it.
Her words were as a blacksmith’s puzzle: it twisted in my hands with the meaning of her dreams. In June her first dream showed the creation with the naming of the colors like the naming of the beasts and all the world made blessed and new. In August her second dream portrayed the serpent, which was lust, and the sin which was our Fall. Her doll’s house buckled beneath its weight and so too did Man when he yielded to temptation.
Then came autumn and she dreamt of the Garden in ashes, seared down to bedrock and lost beyond reclaiming when Man fell and Christ Himself was dead. He had gone up on the tree as was prophesied with the two thieves beside him and even Mother was in the ground.
But Jerusha had dreamt again. In her early dreams she beheld the Creation and the Fall but this her final dream was a Day of Resurrection, the spirit and the body together and the Garden made new from the rubble of itself. Sweet corn thrusting from the earth and blossoms unfolding in a riot of color, rippling as they spun, like the robes of the world's dead emerging clean from the earth, arrayed in robes of the spirit like the invisible garments worn at meeting.
All this I told to her, but Jerusha smiled and shook her head. Her body, she said, was made for more than dreaming, and she took my hand in hers. I was shaking—she was too—and the future opened before us to give onto a world of endless flowering. Tree of Knowledge. Tree of Life. Her hand in mine as the child, our child, danced out of the corn, and the puzzle slipped and separated in my hands, a revelation.
That sensation.
I am thinking of it now to recall the graves in the pine-grove, the river with the dead man in its grasp. His body in its tattered clothes. The boots which sit beside the wood stove.
“Take my coat too, will you.”
My thoughts turn to the soldier, the man who had lived in this house with his family and who had left it to the forest when it was full to the rafters with his belongings: furniture, farm-tools, the journal in which I write these words. He had torn the pages from the front and burnt them in the basin, leaving only a name by which to remember him.
August Fitch. He had flown to war and arms and returned with his sergeant’s stripes to find his house deserted, his wife and child gone. He must have stalked the woods like a wild thing only to return to the vale after all these years wearing boots with his initials and a dead man's stench upon them. Perhaps it happened in this way. Fitch came over the snowy pass in the latter days of winter. He lingered at the forest’s margin, watching. Without question he was an able woodsman and left no tracks nor sign of his presence, but Judah sensed him, his nearness, and was afraid. He feared the man as he feared nothing else, and hated him, and followed him, and went to the man as though to his master, his first master, the man who had abandoned him to that shallow pit with the red roots closing round.
A final image. Blackened leather, white bone. Rotten soles carved with a man's initials: not IV as I had thought but AF, the letters inverted, the finer lines erased by rot. A.F. August Fitch. He had seen me with the drowned corpse and returned at night to dig the body out of the ground. He had wrenched off the boots to have them cleaned, and stretched, and later he donned them himself for all they still carried the reek of decay. The drowned man, then, was not Fitch. He could not have been though he wore his boots, and Fitch had reburied the bones after the theft, tamping down earth to give no sign.
All nonsense, of course, but I see no other explanation, and Fitch is real enough. He stole from the dead as he stole from the living, and last night, he meant to take from me this house and all it holds within it. And I did not let it go. I fought him for it and with a fury I had not thought possible so that I believe I would have died for it and for nothing where there is nothing left to save. Only this season’s emptiness, ghosts of winter’s ending.
The hour is near. Dusk is upon me, smell of spring upon the air. Some few birds in the orchard, wind in the shattered frame. I will go back to the grove. I will take the hatchet with me, a spade to open the ground wherein the drowned man lies.
In my hands, the puzz
le-pieces twist and bend, will not be parted.
Things I have witnessed—
Evening, and the sun was gone, the moon as yet unrisen, when I stole from the house. I dropped from the broken window and scuttled away on all fours to the shelter of the apple-trees. I expected a shot from the woods, which did not come, and regained my feet within the shadow of the trees. Orchard’s edge: I paused with that stretch of open grass before me, the blood pulsing in my ears and throat. Then sprinted for the tree-line.
I reached it. I covered my face to breach the wall of branches with buds like thorns which whipped at my hands then yielded to the dark and silent spaces of the night. I slowed. I strained my eyes for gaps in the leaf-cover where I might walk and go unheard. For the man had my rifle whereas I carried no weapon save the hatchet at my belt and the spade which I held with both hands, the steel head gleaming with the bands of moon through which I passed.
The distance to the pines is scarcely a mile but I had to be quiet, careful, and did not reach the grove for hours. The moon was up and wreathed with stars like the brow about an open eye, round at the full to scatter its glow about the pine trees’ canopy. The light shone back flashes from the ground, glinting off damp needles and the rain-washed cross which marked the dead man’s grave between two dead trees.
I was quick. I crouched in the moonlight, exposed on all sides, and chopped at the ground with the spade’s sharp edge. The grave was shallow, the frost melted away, but the work proved harder than anticipated, for the ground was tangled in wiry roots that ran in knots beneath the leaf-mold so my spade was near-blunted by the time the first bones surfaced, looking like old ivory or fish-bones hauled up in nets of red root: they severed down the spade's head, releasing gouts of dark fluid to stain the spine, the ribcage compassed about with suspenders and hung with cloth fragments turned brown with their days in the earth.
The skull appeared. The jaw was broken, hanging, cracked by roots which massed like red wires in the hollow of the cranium. They pushed out from the mouth, writhing with the moon behind my head and my shadow stretching before me. The stench—
I coughed up strings of bile but did not cease from my labors. The spade was useless and so I chopped at the root-mass with the hatchet til all was soaked through in the same dark fluid and the pelvis lay exposed: half-fleshed, the blue-gray trousers clinging. The boots were on his feet. They were warped with rot, toes tapered to points and I.V.—A.F.—cut into the sole. They were identical in all respects to those Fitch had left behind him and indeed the corpse was clothed as Fitch had been in gray pants and suspenders and a linen undershirt.
The air whistled over my head, the clap of a rifle following. The shot struck the trees beyond and I threw myself forward, striking my elbow and jarring loose the hatchet. I reached for it but could not get hold and besides there was no time: I heard from behind me the scrape of the rod in the breech, the hammer drawn back with a click. I slithered forward on my belly, tumbling into the grave even as Fitch’s second shot set the earth in clots to spitting.
I was cornered, a fox at bay. I burrowed with my nails in the roots which walled the edges of the grave. From above I heard the rifle primed and cocked then the crunch of old needles as Fitch drew near my place of hiding.
He walked with an unhurried ease and paused to whistle cross the dead wood. Three shrill notes: a huntsman’s call. I raked my fingers through the earth, searching for aught which might serve for a weapon. My hand closed round the skull, and I clutched at the eye-holes, tearing it free of the spinal column and the roots which held it fast.
The skull was in my hands. The moonlight wavered, dimming, and I waited for his shadow to cover me. The air soured in my lungs. I tasted bile but still there came no shadow, though I listened hard for his breathing and did not dare to raise my head until I heard the din of movement from the living trees at the pine grove’s edge.
Judah. His muzzle black with dried blood, his coat streaked and matted as he staggered toward the grave, favoring his good leg. Fitch had vanished. Even in the dark the man’s bare footprints were visible, approaching the grave then ceasing abruptly, as if in mid-stride, and the rifle and cartridge box lay nearby, abandoned.
My grip relaxed. The skull slipped from my hand.
“Judah,” I said. He whined but turned from the hand I offered. I retrieved the cartridge box and shouldered the rifle. “Come,” I said, and he fell into step beside me, the moon riding high to light the way. Soon we were out of the dead-wood with the river-sounds fading behind us, but the stench of mud clung to my hands and nails and lingers there still, hours later, as I write these words, though the whole of another day has passed and the dusk is settling in.
I returned to the pines at dawn. Judah accompanied me. He was scarred and limping, seemingly half-starved, but his fear had left him and he trotted beside me with ears erect and nose to the ground and even chased a squirrel to the mouth of its hiding place, pulling it up shrieking. I winced at the snap of its neck, the silence which followed. I sat down, aching, and trembled for sleeplessness, cold and wearied at the core. I closed my eyes to hear him gut the beast in his teeth and sup the heart out of its ribs. When it was done he deposited the ragged thing before me. He pawed at the mud, whining, imploring me to eat, but I shook my head. I could not touch that ropey mass of fur and could not meet Judah’s gaze.
His dark eyes were half-obscured, cupped in a face which was puckered and swollen where Fitch had cut deep and the lash-wounds down his side were beaded with clear fluid, dry blood. I covered my face with my hands and would have wept, I think, but felt the warm tongue lapping at my fingers and knew we must go on.
We gained the dead wood, the drowned man's grave with the earth heaped up round it and the skull mired in muck at some yards’ distance. The eyeholes were packed tight with soil while scraps of flesh clung to the forehead and red shards of root and vegetal matter protruded from the teeth. I knelt to collect it from the ground then straightened up with its weight between my hands.
Judah growled, barked. He hovered over the open hole with his snout in the dirt and his tail whipping about, yelping till I saw them, the tracks which surrounded us, wolf-tracks. The pack had passed through in the night but lingered on finding the open grave and fell upon the corpse with unusual savagery. I inspected the grave. The wolves had gnawed through the roots and sucked the last of the flesh from the bones, lapping out the marrow then leaving the cracked remnants in white chips scattered like pebbles surfacing from the soil.
The ground, I observed, was curiously warm, damp with a greasy substance like half-congealed blood. The dead man’s undershirt was similarly red and sopping where it lay half-shredded in the mud and his boots were stiff with it, as were my own, when last night I crouched within that open grave with the severed roots belching warm fluid in rhythmic spurts, as with the beating of a great god’s heart.
The skull I placed upon the ground behind me then inclined myself over the grave with one arm extended. My fingertips brushed the broken roots where they breached the earthen wall. They were soft and yielding, fibrous. Red liquid dripped from them, staining the earth and filming on my skin. I raised my hand to my mouth but the substance, whatever its nature, was without taste or odor. I stood. I wiped my hands upon my trousers then picked up the skull and carried it before me as I descended the bank to the river’s edge.
I did not hesitate. I heaved in the skull and watched it sink and did not look away till the water’s surface again was smooth. Then I struck away to the west, moving upriver, following the course of it for some hundred yards along the boundary of the dead and dying wood.
I found the place without difficulty. The soil was stripped, washed out where heavy rains had flooded down the bank and left the earth a mess of exposed roots: ruddy and dull and sheathed in bark. Some were grown thick as a man’s neck though the ground all about was barren, flooded clear of vegetation but for withered sedge, sagging elms, and below them, the roots of a great pine tree which
was always spreading, finding its anchor by doubling its shape in the ground.
Here I had digged Judah out of the earth. Two years and more have passed since then and the pit has vanished into the root mass. I looked eastward to the pines, which were plainly visible, even at this distance. They burst out of the spring wood, unfolding on a slate sky and somehow taller than I remembered, as though they had never ceased from growing.
My mind was full of dreaming. I made my way back toward the tall pines and did not notice Judah as he appeared and walked alongside me. We reached the pines, that forest of snags and rubble with the black grove at its center, pine-boughs like rafters high above.
The sun was out. It tilted through gaps in the greenery to fall in bars on the barren ground where wolf’s tracks joined and tailed like the script upon a page. I counted the tracks of at least half-a-dozen beasts weaving in and out of one another and circling the blooded pit where the man’s bones had lain. Some tracks were broad as a mule’s while others appeared far smaller. Among them I discerned the naked footprints of a human child, a baby’s feet, and her palm-print too where she traveled on all fours, nails like claws making furrows in the earth.
The light shifted: I was on the ground.
My face was in the mud, one arm outthrust to touch my palm to hers and cover it completely. The shadows moved round me, curving toward the grove at dead-wood’s center, and the sun had passed from view when I stood with the pines behind me, looming up taller than the Stone House and older than its granite, soft wind shaking down dust and the fallen needles glinting. Judah whined, anxious to be away. The palm-print had vanished, obscured by my own, and her footprints had faded from the earth.
PART FOUR
