A Season of Whispers

by Jackson Kuhl

  “More moving the feet,” said Rose, “and less moving your gums.” He shoved Lyman forward.

  The group resumed in funereal silence. The trail soon led to a road, which they followed another half-mile. Grosvenor became dimly aware of a distant crashing of breakers on the shore when Rose pointed up a pine-covered hillside.

  Tracking its upwards course was effortless: the furrows hewed by it bulk and the bark scraped from the trunks blazed a trail for blind men. The slope, mild at first, inclined quickly, and under the glow of their lanterns and the dappling moonlight the great divots clawed by its mole-like nails grew in number and depth. Gradually it had made its way uphill through the orange needles and the dead lower branches of towering white pines.

  As they crested the hill, the volume of the waves increased. The trail vanished. Frantically Grosvenor waved his lantern high, worried their quarry might have escaped into subterranean safety before entering its throes.

  And then they noted the slope below them, where the ground leveled flat before descending again toward the Sound. In the flashing beams, they saw the earth torn and loose, and in its center, surrounded by a berm like a crater, lay a dozen melon-sized globes with speckled shells.

  There was no intimation of where their creator had gone.

  “I had expected them to be buried, as reptiles will do,” said Grosvenor. “But here they await us openly, like sprouting fruit.” He turned to Rose. “Take your egg, as agreed, as well as your man, and go.”

  Rose didn’t budge. “Thank you, Mr. Grosvenor. I’d be happy to oblige except for one thing. It occurs to me that in any litter, there’s always a runt. How do I know this egg isn’t a runt?”

  “I cannot warranty anything,” said Grosvenor. “You may take whichever egg you prefer. We must hurry.” He surveyed the surrounding woods in anxiety. Somewhere out there, in the night, the thing was helpless from its ordeal—but as with the other factors, he could not guarantee for how long.

  “Well now,” said Rose, “it’s difficult to choose one egg from another. I mean, when you’re raising and training pups, you need to take the pick of the whole litter. But with hen’s eggs, that decision can’t be made until they’re hatched. I believe I’m going to have to take them all to be sure.”

  The barrel of the pistol pointed toward Grosvenor’s chest. “Oh,” he added, “I’ll be relieving you of that gold nugget too.”

  Grosvenor stood; fists balled at his sides. “You’re nothing but a highwayman.”

  “I’m a lot of things, Mr. Grosvenor. And a rich man is what I intend to be.”

  Rose moved toward the clutch of eggs, pulling the rope connecting Minerva and Lyman. Impulsively Grosvenor lurched to interject himself.

  Too late he noticed the insidious ring around the eggs. The soil there, more air than earth, dissolved beneath their soles, and like driven stakes the four dropped straight into the ground. Rose’s pistol flew away and the lantern spilled. The surrounding dirt raced to fill the vacuum around their bodies, pinning them tight.

  For some minutes each of them struggled and shouted, trapped in their personal oubliettes. The three men wriggled desperately, their arms trapped at their sides, chins level with the eggs, three throats shouting a chorus compounded into a medicine of nonsense. Only Minerva made any advance, for she had thrown up her hands over her head as she fell. As her wrists were bound, she had little success digging, and instead only progressed by thrusting her elbows into the dirt before her and shimmying upwards by scant inches before resetting and repeating. In her palms she still held Bitty’s medallion, which she had carried with her the whole night.

  She was the first to hear the scratching. She froze, leaning all her attention toward that sound, and one by one the others likewise halted as they grew aware of the insistent chipping noise.

  Among the clutch, an egg cracked and a piece of the shell tore off. A reptilian beak poked out.

  How clever is the trap, Minerva wondered just then, when the wolf doesn’t even realize he’s been caught? No ruse is more cunning than the one in which the flimflammed doesn’t recognize the swindle. For just as the artist’s character might be intuited by scrutinizing the brushstrokes and composition of his paintings, so too the transcendentalists believed something of God’s nature could be intuited by studying His Creation.

  Yet in turn they were studied as well, except not by God. It occurred to Minerva they were understood by their deeds and their actions and, most of all, by their words. Each of them brought there to that precise place, at that specific time, lured by greed or ambition or indebtedness or threat. And Minerva, what had brought her there? Some combination of curiosity, love both daughterly and otherwise, and yes, suspicion—but there isn’t a single sphinx’s riddle in this world that wasn’t untangled by suspicion. The bait varied by the fish, but each of them hooked nonetheless, and deposited on the riverbank.

  To be eaten.

  So consumed were they by the panic of the moment, none of the four understood their predicament until that firstborn hatchling slid from its slimy bed, full of claws and a hungry snapping mouth. It was joined by a second and a third, and within minutes only a singular egg remained intact. The mass of them yowled and snipped until finally they discovered the means of locomotion, and they crawled from their crib toward the milk provided them.

  Deep beyond her vision, tumblers fell into place, each syllable like the tooth of a key, opening a lock. For a split-second Minerva felt an attention shifted onto her and her alone, and with rising dread she understood that focus to be equally malicious or benign according to its mood. Such was a tendency shared by everything on this planet—by beast and storm, by plant and stone—and which determined, often unpredictably and arbitrarily, whether we stood at the end of each day whole and successful or maimed and injured, or even dead.

  Her initiation into the mystery was complete. “Hobomoko,” Minerva said.

  Free to the waist, Minerva leaned toward Lyman. She pressed Bitty’s medallion into the earth, stamping the daisy wheel totem into the soil before him. She stretched and stamped the ground before her father.

  Rose shook and thrashed at the earth about him, feverish for some purchase, but his arms remained imprisoned as if by chains. By slow measures the hatchlings descended upon him, blind to the other three. The first to reach him lashed savagely at his face, tearing off a long strip of his cheek. Another gouged his scalp. A third swiped off his nose in a single bite.

  Rose howled. Minerva pushed and pulled her way free, and plunged her hands into the soil around Lyman, scooping and digging. In a moment his arms were extricated, and in another his whole body. Their efforts doubled, they freed Grosvenor twice as quickly. As she grabbed the lantern, Minerva glanced at Rose. Only his mouth was visible, opened wide to plead, or maybe scream, the rest of him buried beneath the pale maggoty bodies.

  And then he did scream, louder than any heretic broken on a Spanish wheel, like nothing ever uttered by a human throat.

  The Bonaventurists spilled and slipped their way down the hill, reckless and immune to bruises and knocks. More than once, the rope binding Lyman and Minerva caught on some tree or obstacle, and one or both of the pair fell, only to leap up immediately, disentangle, and resume their escape.

  At the edge of the road, the trio paused to catch their wind and untie the rope and relight the single lantern that somehow escaped with them during their dash. Only then did Minerva observe what her father carried: slung over his shoulder, the rucksack brought from the toolshed contained the final unhatched egg.

  She nearly grabbed him by his collar. “You cannot think to bring that—that thing—back to Bonaventure.”

  Grosvenor drew a deep breath. “Minerva,” he said, “you must believe me when I tell you I can control it. Now it is but a formless yolk—but in time it can be trained, just as any beast. It can be disciplined. I will make it my instrument.”

  “Instrument for what? Murder?”


  “For Bonaventure’s success, of course. Think of it. Who needs men and oxen to waste their days plowing a field when one of these creatures can do it in minutes? Who need bother sinking a spade for a building foundation when it can do the task for us? And the gold, Minerva, I tell you—you cannot believe what lies beneath our feet—”

  “And what will you raise this servant on? It doesn’t subsist on carrots and onions.”

  “We can grow the hogs to feed it. In turn, it will labor for us just as Bessie does.”

  “You speak of the offspring. Yet what have you fed the parent during this time?”

  Grosvenor shook his head. “The parent is redundant now and I cannot see an alternative to bringing the pup to Bonaventure. Should I destroy it? Or would you have me risk my life to return the egg to its nest? To leave here in the wild, where it will hatch and grow into a ravenous monster that would plague the countryside?”

  “I’m told there are lions in Africa,” said Lyman, rubbing his naked wrists, “that occasionally will eat men. I cannot begrudge the lion for its character. I only insist it remain in Africa.”

  Minerva stepped closer. “Father,” she said, “do you remember the morning we learned that Mr. Sutton departed the farm?”

  Grosvenor snorted in exasperation. “Minerva, now is not the time for reminiscences. You must let it go.”

  “Who wrote the note nailed to the door?”

  “Mr. Sutton, of course.”

  Minerva said, “Did you write it?”

  “Minerva.”

  “Was it ever even nailed to the door? Or was the ink still drying as you read it aloud to us?”

  Grosvenor looked at his daughter, an apparition of conscience manifested solidly before him, and felt a leaden yoke descend upon his shoulders.

  “You’re too young. You don’t know what it is to fail.” He gasped, trying to find words. “If Bonaventure fails, it’s all anyone will talk about. It’s how they’ll remember it.”

  Lyman, who knew something about failure, felt the man’s discomfort as his own. “We can leave the bag in the ditch,” he said, “and just go.”

  “No,” said Minerva. “He must answer my question first.”

  Grosvenor opened his lips to speak, and had an honest reply passed between them—whatever its content—a great deal of consolation would have assuaged his daughter’s soul.

  Yet at that moment there was a crack like thunder and a tree beside them burst into particles. Grosvenor, thinking to shield himself, leapt away, but the shape from beneath the road lunged straight for him.

  The thing thrashed among the wreckage. Lyman grabbed a splinter of wood and jumped between it and Minerva, stabbing. With each successful piercing it squealed like a bow dragged across fiddle strings. Then its jaws caught the spar, pulling it from Lyman’s grip to grind it into kindling. It exploded from the ruined tree, now just sticks and firewood, its tail swinging like a heavy chain. Lyman toppled backwards as it rushed past him, the sack in its mouth, to burst through a fieldstone wall into the pasture opposite the hill. Clods of earth flew in every direction, and with a rumble it was gone.

  Lyman picked himself up, shaken, as Minerva raised the wick of the recovered lantern. She screamed.

  Among the debris lay her father, his hips and legs twisted behind him, his spine bent forty-five degrees. Blood streamed from his face and he mouthed inaudible syllables, his eyes fixed on Minerva. The extent of his wounds was beyond him—in his gaze lay nothing except shock and confusion. He tried to crawl toward her in supplication but simply managed to spin himself in circles, like a coin accidentally dropped to the floor. Again, his lips opened and closed as if to impart some vital message, but the only issue was scarlet bubbles.

  For a long moment the two of them witnessed this strange pantomime, Minerva shaking and sobbing. Then finally Lyman went over to the shattered wall and lifted a stone. Raising it high above him, he brought it down again to make himself a murderer twofold.

  FOUR

  The afternoon before the verdict was to be read, Minerva paid a visit. The constable stepped outside, and because the only other resident was a drunkard dead asleep, they had a measure of privacy.

  “I hardly know how to address you,” said Minerva through the bars. “Should I call you Tom, or by your other title?”

  The briefest of smiles passed across his face. “I would like it very much if you called me by my Bonaventure name.”

  “Then I shall. Hello, Tom.”

  “Hello, Minerva.”

  Visitors were allowed to bring food to prisoners, and having passed inspection by the constable, she now handed the contents of a small basket through to him, hard-boiled eggs and apples and a small wedge of cheese. She explained each item as if he were a foreigner from some land where such produce didn’t exist and Lyman listened carefully, knowing her words were uncontrollable waters that gushed from a broken dam. This was their first meeting since that night.

  There then followed some obligatory questions about the conditions—the constable treated him well, he said; a few church ladies had come around from the meeting house to give him a blanket for the cold nights—and where he expected to be sent next. There was no question of how the jury would return. The sentence would be delivered immediately afterward and off he would be taken. A noose wasn’t likely, not after Minerva and a string of Bonaventurists had paraded through the courtroom asking for leniency.

  “I wanted to thank you, Tom, for not leaving me.” She stared down at her clasped hands. “I think—I often think that you may not be in that cell if you had simply vanished into the night.”

  Lyman said, “It would have hurt you terribly if I did.” He had thought about it, just slipping away. But what then? Where would he find some new Bonaventure to hide himself, to create a fresh repetition of damnation? Instead the local farmer who owned the broken stone wall, responding to the commotion, had found them in the road, Minerva in his arms, standing over a scene of death and ruin. Unlike some monsters, he couldn’t just leave her there.

  “That’s true. I would have probably hated you for it. But at least you would be free, somewhere. I often daydream of that other life, and what it would be like, and if it would be better than this one. I feel it’s something out of one of my novelettes.”

  When questioned by the judge, Minerva had stuck unerringly to the truth—all of it. And yet when it came to be Lyman’s turn, the ridiculousness of it falling from his lips couldn’t even convince himself. He gave little fight against the version of events delivered in the courtroom: about how he had followed Grosvenor and his daughter as they made their way under cover of deepest night to New London to sell the gold nugget found on the Grosvenor property; only instead of merely waylaying them on some lonely stretch of road without witness or interference, he had engineered their hypothetical wagon to crash into the wall, obliterating it completely, snapping Grosvenor’s spine, and knocking Minerva senseless. Only after completing the job with a stone had Lyman been overcome with remorse at the sight of an addled Minerva spouting nonsense and so surrendered himself to justice.

  “I think yours,” said Lyman, “is a common daydream. I often wonder how my life would’ve differed if I’d never entered that first error in Mr. Tallmadge’s ledger and pocketed the difference.”

  Minerva said, “I tell myself again and again that any difference in action would likely produce the same result. And yet I cannot but wonder if I hadn’t asked you to come with me, then my father—”

  “Your request had nothing to do with the outcome. I would’ve gone anyway—I had already bet the devil my head, remember? It knew what your father planned with its eggs. It protected me from my hunters, and in repayment I was to thwart him. Neither of us could’ve predicted its true motives.”

  “It would seem as you stand behind those bars that consequences are what matter most.”

  “And yet your intent was laudable.”

  “My intent, once you
told me what he intended, was to stop my father from returning to Bonaventure with the prizes he coveted. Instead, he failed to return at all.”

  Lyman was silent a moment and then said, “Having little else to think of, often I lie at night wondering if we should’ve returned up the hill and smashed them.”

  “Doing so would have opened you to vengeance.”

  “And I would not have dared any risk to you. As for me—” Lyman shrugged. “How many souls have we damned for the price of mine?”

  Minerva said, “Emerson wrote that there are just two things: The Soul, and outside of it, Nature. Even the devil, therefore, is a thing of Nature.”

  The court, for reasons of its own, was reluctant to surrender the nugget of gold found in Grosvenor’s pocket; yet eventually, after the grieving widow made several statements to the press that caused them embarrassment, they returned it. It was too little, too late. Upon sorting through Grosvenor’s study, Minerva discovered—beneath books about animal migration and naturalist volumes authored by the likes of Georges Cuvier and Reverend William Conybeare and Charles Bonnet—her father’s accounting ledgers. Bonaventure faced bankruptcy. The farm was subdivided and sold at auction, with the neighbor Whitney smugly picking up several choice acres. Likewise; the equipment, furniture, tools, and the rest, and Grosvenor’s scientific collection of stones and books generated a few dollars, particularly an odd crocodilian skull discovered hidden behind a shelf. Between these proceeds, Minerva and her mother had enough left over to purchase a small home in New London where they lived comfortably, if modestly.

  Bonaventure disbanded, each member going his or her own way. The Albys, after the birth of their son, joined a group of Shakers in Maine where Mrs. Alby rose quite high in the leadership. At the age of eighteen, Judith Alby left the colony and eventually became a renowned author—of fiction.

  Presley moved to the former Fruitlands along with several survivors of that commune, where they attempted to make their livings as members of a commercial farm. Just before his departure, Mr. Presley sheepishly approached Minerva.