Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Each account is recorded as fact in my notebook.

  Then I can travel up through light and become more intimate with

  its star.

  3.

  I wake and see out the window a ball of light swirling above the

  trees.

  A woman stands under the trees, where certain plants grow; she

  knots leaves into a symbol using streamers of light, and as I watch,

  I know I’ll remember.

  My window is the same as light going through it; luminous is a

  better word than translucent.

  When I try to describe her, I draw a star; I saw stars like children’s

  stickers on the window glass; I know if I draw one, I can go there.

  Darkness is light’s resting state in deep space; transparence can

  occur all at once: the way a face lights up with understanding, or a

  light wave passes me to Andromeda with the swiftness of near and

  far at the same time.

  Consciousness may be such a light source with metaphoric power;

  thread is a feeling of spiritual connection, sunlight is love.

  Language and energy interchange; we can experience a physical

  event by association, by algorithm.

  A star visitor could be the attribute of such an association.

  Seeing starlight is seeing the visible in the invisible, that fragile

  imaginal cloth holding planet and existence together.

  When I ask if she’s literally an extraterrestrial or a metaphor from

  inner realms, she says there’s no difference in significance.

  I loosen my ego boundaries to transcribe what she chooses

  to recall, real from the standpoint of our mutually raised

  consciousness, a vehicle like a star ship

  4.

  Their skies are full of life.

  She describes starlight as scalar, without properties of distance or

  time.

  Any spirit in matter she calls star walking: remote viewing,

  meditation, intuition, plants she was shown, and any soul

  possessing a certain shine she calls starlight.

  The power of relation came through her extraordinary yellow eyes,

  she tells me.

  You’re looking into a star, convex, immense, flashing colors

  through opalescent, flowing nuclear fusion.

  I feel separated from home now; I look up at night with great

  longing.

  They showed me earth through their eyes; their oneness extends

  to us.

  Whereas, I’m in the dark, then it opens onto luminescence; there’s

  a lot of “snow.”

  There’s a lot of stars, huge, no horizon and very bright.

  I see the Pleiades; I feel like a wolf looking toward home.

  Whew! a shooting star just dropped there onto snow, so I go over

  to it.

  A crystal has dropped on the snow, and there’s light, a face in the

  stone; it’s as if I’m looking up through the sky and things are very

  clear, and I’m coming up through the ice.

  I’ve been below all this time, and now I see stars.

  The House at the End of the Night

  Steven Potter

  When they heard the uncle’s tires in the gravel driveway the brothers abandoned their cereal and crept into the living room, where their mother and her boyfriend were asleep on the couch. The older brother climbed onto a chair, lifted their father’s rifles off the pegs above the TV, and handed the younger boy the smaller of the two. Its name was Angel and it was a Winchester .308 with iron sights and an old lusterless stock. For himself he kept Matilda, a .264 Magnum, same company, 4x4 scope. They were eleven and thirteen years old. The weatherman on TV said it was going to be warm today, mid-fifties, sunny. But what I recommend, ladies and gentlemen of the North Country, is that you skip school, skip work, and finish your leaf raking, because come eight this evening it’ll be too late. Their mother stirred. A grimace, a cough. She patted amongst the coffee table’s cans and ashtrays for her watch but it wasn’t there. Shit, she said. Do you want breakfast? As if in answer the uncle outside laid into his horn.

  Draped in gear and weaponry the boys tumbled across the frosted lawn. The uncle was leaning against his truck with his ankles crossed, taking powerful drags off his cigarette and regarding the boys with a drill sergeant’s stylized doubt. They grew fidgety under his gaze. Their father, the uncle’s brother, had been a feller of trees for the old McIntyre Paper Company until he was himself felled by one. Like the uncle, the boys wore hunter-orange ball caps, jeans, sweatshirts. The younger boy, admiring the silent feet of TV Indians, wore a soft pair of old sneakers. The older boy wore his father’s Kodiak work boots, ancient and too large. The boys were just four and two years old when it happened, and their father’s memory was a point of contention between them. The younger boy said he remembered, among other things, his father’s smell, a friendly stew of sap and wood dust, but the older boy said his brother was just remembering what he’d told him. Some years later, the uncle had stepped into their existence, bringing with him slingshots and the smell of axle grease and tales of bars and wildernesses that he promised would someday resemble their lives. The uncle forced smoke through his crenellated grin and produced from his back pockets two cardboard boxes, bullets for Angel and Matilda, which he slapped onto the hood. Let’s go slay some deer, he said.

  They rode shoulder to shoulder in the pickup’s cab. At Rick’s they got coffee, sandwiches, and a twelver of Labatt to keep me awake, the uncle said, on the drive home tonight. Sixteen miles south of town on the state highway they turned west onto a two-lane dirt road, hammering over the washboard, rear wheels drifting wide on the corners. When Van Halen disappeared into radio static, the younger brother, seated bitch, began turning the knob, each twist unearthing a different strain of chaos. The uncle let the boy search for a few minutes before waving at the low forested hills. Nothing comes in out here, he said. Then to fill the silence he began dispensing advice. The thing is don’t trust your eyes. You see a pair of horns what you do is you look away. Take a breath. If the cocksucker’s still got a pair when you look again, waste him.

  Six miles down the access road they turned onto a smaller private road with a grass strip down the center and a locked chain-link gate across the entrance. A rotten wooden sign identified this as the McIntyre Preserve. There were NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to the trees. The boys’ hearts quickened. They grinned. Seeing this, the uncle pretended to forget the key and made the boys start looking for it. It has to be in here somewhere. They opened the glove box. They checked beneath them on the seats. Eventually the uncle sighed and lit a cigarette and said, At least we got beer. The younger boy’s chin began to wobble. The older boy gazed at the gate. Do we have time to go back for it? The uncle laughed. Who do you think I am? he asked. Then he isolated the gate key from the ring of others on his belt and handed it to older boy, who grinned, opened the passenger door, stepped down from the truck, and handed the key back up to his younger brother. You’re already out, the younger boy protested. Yeah, but you’re already the bitch, the older boy said. The younger boy looked for arbitration but the uncle just grinned and lit another cigarette. This is between you fuckers, he said. The key sat in the older boy’s raised palm, black grease in its brass teeth and rivets. The usual violence ticked behind the calm front of the older boy’s eyes. Someday, the younger boy said, some fucking day. He clambered out over the rifles, took the key, jogged to the gate, and stood aside while the pickup drove through. He was swinging the gate shut when, in the cab, the uncle turned to the older boy and asked if they should leave him. What? You know, drive ahead. The older boy was delighted. Yeah, he said, teach the fucker a lesson. The uncle knocked the truck out of gear and let it roll away down the gentle grade. In the rearview mirror the younger boy was pretending to
laugh, bending at the hips and slapping his knees. You’re the boss, the uncle said, how far? I say we go a mile, the boy replied. What happens in a mile? We park and hunt. And your brother? Dipshit back there can walk. The uncle, laughing in his disappointed way, stopped the truck and threw it in reverse. Your father was better than that, he said.

  There were no mountains, no valleys, no grand sights. The road wound through lowland tamarack and black spruce. They passed a ghastly bog of grass and moss, the bones of trees, beaver houses reflected in the glassy black water, and then climbed into hills of maple and yellow birch. Seven miles, eight, nine. The uncle drank the first of his Labatts. Then he stopped to inspect a beaver-clogged culvert, kneeling on one side, then the other. A job for spring, he said, and drove on, very slowly, whistling. The older boy knew not to voice his sense of urgency, but the younger couldn’t help it. How could they be sure Lorena wasn’t there? But then was there any chance they’d be caught? Why had the paper company moved out west, weren’t there still plenty of trees here? The more fidgety the younger brother was, the slower the grinning uncle drove. The older brother told the younger to shut the fuck up and look for deer. Oh let’s just mosey, the uncle said. Plenty of day left. Finally they entered a clearing beside a varnished lake and the boys saw the largest wooden building they had ever seen. The uncle turned down a white driveway of imported shells that wound between outbuildings and withered autumn gardens. He stopped the truck in front of the mansion. That’s a body of water, he said, that’s never felt a motorboat.

  The lake, the mansion, and the fifty-six square miles of surrounding land were owned by the uncle’s employer, Lorena McIntyre. She was the aging daughter of paper tycoon Connor McIntyre, who, though he made his fortune by dismantling the northern wilderness, had loved it here, journeying north by train in the gilded long ago to hunt and fish and drink on the porch and treat fellow millionaires to an authentic outdoor experience. The mansion, one of the fabled Great Camps, was actually a pair of colossal buildings linked by a covered breezeway. The clearing’s other structures were old stables and barns, sheds with tar roofs and angled floors, a series of gray scaffolds where deer and bear used to cure. The property had teemed with staff back in the days of Connor McIntyre, the uncle told the boys, but now it was just him and a criminally worthless house cleaner. He was the handyman. He came out and mowed the lawn, replaced broken shingles, ran the water to keep the pipes clean, and killed the mice that kept stealing hair from the taxidermy—all against the rare event that Lorena McIntyre, aging, riddled with illnesses, decided to visit that year. It was against every rule for the boys to be here but the uncle had decided fuck it. When Lorena died all this would change. Word was she had deeded all her lands to the state. He wanted the boys to see the place first. I ain’t seen that cleaner woman in three years, he said.

  The uncle had some work to do before deer time so they entered through the old servants’ dining room, which was dusty and full of greenish northern light. Take your shoes off, the uncle said. The boys did. The uncle knocked his own boots twice against the doorjamb but left them on. It was several degrees colder inside than outside and they could see their breath. They entered a vast dim quasi-industrial kitchen where pots hung from the beams. The uncle gestured at one of the sinks. That water comes clean from the lake, he said, unfiltered, and there’s no one ever got sick from drinking it. He gestured to the kerosene lamps hanging in brackets around the room. The world spun along just fine without electricity, he said. While the uncle was in the basement draining the water from the tanks and pipes so they wouldn’t burst in the coming cold, the boys sat wide eyed in ornate chairs in a swanky dining room. The walls were papered with cedar bark and the table, set with silver forks and crystal glasses, awaited ten more guests. Then they all three went around opening the taps and dumping antifreeze into sinks and tubs and toilets to protect the U-bends. The servants’ side alone had four bathrooms. They left through the dining room’s second door and walked across the breezeway. A mercury thermometer nailed to one of the posts said it was fifty-two degrees. When they reached the door at the breezeway’s end, the uncle told them to close their eyes. Each boy stood with one hand over his face, the other over his balls. They heard the lock click. They heard the house gasp as the door opened and felt cool air slithering past their knees. You never seen anything like this, the uncle said.

  They saw dead animals, hundreds of them, on walls, on tables, on little stands, deer heads and moose heads, the heads of elk and caribou and bison, a half dozen antelopes, a zebra, a water buffalo, the long neck and head of a giraffe. Standing on the big beams between swooping owls and eagles were bobcats and minks, porcupines with disheveled quills, coyotes gazing through the dust on their green marble eyes. A polar bear roared silently, arms raised, cobwebs strung between its teeth. Curled like a dog at the foot of the couch was a wolf wearing a sign around its neck that said it was the second-to-last confirmed member of its species shot in the State of New York. There was a crocodile closing its mouth on a mangy long-beaked seabird. There was a wooden tracing of a twenty-eight-pound lake trout that had been taken from the lake, a plaque said, by young Dalton Finley, son of Judge Warren Finley, both guests in August 1917. The boys turned in circles while the floor groaned underfoot, awed by this flesh-and-bone evidence of the tales they’d been raised on—tales of an older time, a time of surplus and extremity, romantic passions, big logs, big bucks, a time when American titans came here to do the things that they themselves, the fatherless sons of a logger, had grown up aspiring to do. The fireplace was so large you could step inside without ducking.

  They moved down a hallway walled with antlers and tufty foreheads, past a library and some first-floor bedrooms and two sets of stairs that rose toward higher floors, and finally into a second living room where the walls were hung with trophies of another kind: the visages of famous-looking men, in oil, striking various huntsman poses. McIntyre had paid an artist to be here every summer to paint his guests, the uncle said. Them were painted right here. His studio is in the old icehouse in the servants’ side, still full of weird shit. That’s McIntyre right there. That’s Teddy fucking Roosevelt.

  They turned the water off in the camp’s living side, draining the pipes, adding the antifreeze, and then the uncle taught the boys to light the old oil lamps. He showed them the gigantic bed that had been custom-made in anticipation of President Taft’s three-week stay in 1920. He showed them the garage, where there was a horsedrawn buggy and a rusty collection of logging tools. They stood on the front porch, hands on the aged spruce railing. Listen, the uncle held up his hand. Stop shuffling around. Just listen. They listened. Literally nothing, the uncle whispered. Hear that? They heard only the ringing sound of their own listening ears.

  While the uncle stood pissing in the mossy lawn, the boys circled the house toward the truck and encountered, just waiting for them, four deer. The boys froze. All four were strong and autumn plump, ears erect and turning. Two were does. One was a yearling, still spotted. The fourth, sniffing the truck’s very fender, was a lanky spikehorn. Holy shit! Horns! They couldn’t get to the truck where the guns were without spooking the deer so the older boy drew his knife and the younger boy did the same. They crouched and began stepping slowly through the grass. Behind them the uncle began to laugh. Them are my deer, he called. The boys straightened. The deer stood chewing. Susie, Lauren, Stanley, and Twerp, the uncle said. I feed them behind the shed there. Apples and molasses and grain, twice a week. Greedy bastards hear the truck and they come right in. He made a sucking sound with his mouth, and the young buck stilted over to him. The uncle offered it a cigarette filter. Go pretend to be a wild deer, you fucker, he said.

  The road beyond the mansion was rougher, and somehow frailer, subscribing to the contours of the land it penetrated. There were washouts and precipitous turns and encroaching trees, saplings that leaned out to slap at the windshield. It balanced on low causeways endangered on either side by beaver meadows. Her
e and there it sprouted a lesser road that set off on its own wobbling journey into the wilderness. There used to be things out there, the uncle explained. Hunting camps, logging camps, even a full-on town on the old railway. Saloons, churches, schools, stores, brothels. All gone. Wilderness again. Seventy years ago this exact spot was a field of stumps. They drove for about fifty minutes, very slowly. The older brother had his rifle pointed out of the window. Look for deer, the uncle said. They looked. You’re not looking, the uncle said. Then, without warning, he stopped the truck.

  The boys’ stomachs lurched and they scanned the woods for light brown, for swishing tails. The ferns and ground pine, the spruce and hemlocks, the moss on the shady sides of trees—these withheld some blighted measure of summer green, but everything else in the woods was winter drab and leafless. That scrape there, the uncle whispered. He pointed to a yellow birch sapling with a section of bark rubbed away. That’s a four-inch-diameter tree. What does that tell us? The boys didn’t know. Tells us it was a big motherfucker who did that. They shut the doors quietly, their feet loud in the gravel. See the flies in the wound? They’re feeding on the sap. Why is that important? The uncle turned a slow circle, veined eyes inching about. When the boys didn’t answer he continued, It takes time for a tree to bleed, right? Especially when it gets below freezing at night. That’s a good deal of sap so I’d say this happened yesterday morning or the night before. You see that there? He pointed to a bath-mat-sized swath of scraped brown loam. Neither boy had noticed it. Paw bed. He pisses in it so a doe when she’s hot will know he’s been here. The uncle knelt with his nose to the earth and then made a face. Hooey! he yelled in a whisper.

  The uncle’s plan was for the boys to sit in the woods several football fields apart while he walked a mile up the road, cut in, and looped back around. If they were lucky he’d jump the buck and push it toward his nephews, otherwise he’d be back to the truck in an hour or so and they’d have lunch from the cooler then go cut for more sign. The boys loaded their rifles. They had killed before, both of them. They had killed trout with rocks and knives, with wooden boppers, had marooned them on stream banks and in the gunnels of fiberglass boats, watching as they flopped in panic, drowning, coating their sticky skin with spruce needles and dirt, mouthing at the useless air. As younger boys they had killed mice and chipmunks with slingshots, killed robin redbreasts arriving in the still-snowy spring. You eat what you kill was the rule the uncle had handed down, but the boys didn’t think it quite applied to life so small. No one ate black flies. No one ate the mice their uncle said he trapped by the dozen in buckets of oil. There wasn’t anything worth eating on a redbreast or a chipmunk. But killing them was good practice, the boys thought, for the time when they could kill larger things. When the uncle bought them pump-action .22s for their eighth birthdays, they shot squirrels in the pine forest behind their house, aiming for the head and missing a lot at first. They did eat these. For years they cooked them on little hard-won fires in the woods, gnawing at the half-charred meat until one day their mother caught them at it and repossessed what was left and with the help of some carrots and potatoes whipped them up a nice little stew. Neither boy had hunted big game before this season, which had only just begun. They’d been raised eating venison, mostly chuck and bottom rounds donated by the uncle and various neighbors, an occasional heart sliced thin like pastrami and flash fried with oil, and it was their goal now, as self-envisioned young men, to bring the finer cuts home to their mother. Safety on? the uncle whispered. The boys nodded. He offered the older boy his almost-finished cigarette. Rather than looking appalled, the older boy reached for it. The uncle laughed and rescinded the offer. Oh and one last thing, he said, leering down at the boys and stamping out his last cigarette. Take a good look at me. What don’t I have? The boys looked. He wore jeans, work boots, a red flannel shirt, an orange cap. There was a buck grunt hanging around his neck. I don’t have antlers, the uncle said.