by Ron Shiflet
The critters of the forest all sang their rhythmic tunes and the men settled down to a few beers and talked about how the Vols had once again gained national prominence this fall.
“COOTSY!!”
The loud call brought both men to their feet.
“Get yer gun,” cried Carl and set for the front door.
“Wait a minute now, Carl. Let’s just see what this is.”
“I already know. Get yer damn gun, Amos.”
Amos reached over and grabbed the rifle and followed Carl out the front door. The sounds of the forest were stilled.
“COOTSY!” The call came again. Closer.
“What in the name of—”
A chorus of calls engulfed them. Carl got off a round just as three of the little beasts attacked. Ol’ Amos, terrified at the sight brought his gun to bear and shot another one that was closing fast on Carl.
“Amos!” screamed Carl, “Help! They’re tearing me to shreds. Help.”
Amos could see the blood. It was running down all over. Suddenly a red spurt. Good Lord, they must have hit his jugular! Amos dropped the gun and ran over to Carl, pulling the monsters from him. But all at once they turned their attack to Amos. He stood trying to brush them away, getting savagely bitten all the while.
My God, thought Amos, why didn’t I believe the boy. This is the worst shit I ever been in.
Both men were now covered by several of the Cootsy. They were both down on the front porch, losing blood, losing strength, losing their very lives.
The calls grew louder once more. Another group of Cootsy arrived and took up battle with those already there. The Cootsy withdrew a bit and battled mightily amongst themselves. Amos crawled over next to Carl. He was alive—barely. Amos drug him across the porch and into the house, slamming the door behind them, as the Cootsy continued to battle amongst themselves.
They sat there for some time, hearts beating in terror. There was no place to go. No way to call for help. If they could get to the truck, maybe then they—
A window smashed at the back of the house. A fluttering noise could be heard. Carl and Amos both jumped up and ran into the pantry behind the kitchen where there was no window. They sat on the floor panting as windows were heard crashing throughout the whole house. And then something slammed into the pantry door—then again. The sound of many bat-wings, still reminding Carl of a herd of deer running through the woods, but it was the flutter of bat wings.
Slam! Again the door was struck, but it seemed doubtful, even in this hour of fear, that the Cootsy could break down a door.
There was nothing to do but wait for dawn. They would be gone then. Carl and Amos settled down on the floor of the pantry, cramped and weary. Both men tore their shirts into strips and dressed their wounds as best they could. Carl lamented he’d left the tincture in the bathroom, but Amos hush-hushed him and said they’d both go to Doc Henshaw’s come the morning anyway and get fixed and stitched there.
”In the meanwhile, Carl,” Amos said. “Settle down now so’s you don’t bleed to death afore we can even get there.
Slam! Another one of the Cootsy hit the door.
“Persistent little shits, ain’t they?” said Carl.
“Not to worry, Carl. We’re safe here.” Amos replied.
Morning came. They could see a sheen of light come from under the pantry door through the kitchen window. They rose slowly up and needed to steady one another. Carl was light-headed from loss of blood. Amos felt twice his seventy-two years. He was way too old for this shit.
Carl and Amos stumbled through the kitchen and out the back door. They walked around the house and made for the pickup—when suddenly a shrill cry came through the bright morning air—COOTSY!!
SLEEPING IN THE KISATCHIE
A. C. WISE
Nan listed to the high sweet song for a long time before she began to make her way down the green slope to the water’s edge. She could hear the river running fast over smooth rocks and braced herself on slim branches so she wouldn’t fall. Everything around her was green and gold and almost still; save for the song—out of place this far into the woods.
There were no campsites or scenic picnic spots here. This was officially off the beaten trail. The only trails here were hers and those left by her few neighbors or her ancestors who had come before her. Her family was old in this land. As were the families that lived around her, most of them, but few of them ventured down to the river bank; only her.
She could see glints of water through the trees; more gold in the green. Something else flashed too, skin and blonde hair—the source of the song. Nan paused a moment to catch her breath. She wasn’t as young as she had once been; evidenced by the lined hand that showed veins where it gripped the young sapling to keep her from falling.
She recognized the girl, Buck Hawley’s daughter. She was just a slip of a thing, too young to be down by the riverbank alone, which by all evidence, she was. Nan shook her head. Folks these days would breed like rabbits and give no thought to all the raising that was due after the birthing was done.
Approaching softly so as not to startle the child; Nan made her way down to the water’s edge. She was even with the child now, though still a few feet away and the girl had not yet looked up. The child’s eyes were on the water, where her high sweet song was directed and she was stripping leaves from a slender branch to cast them onto the flowing current.
“Well, hello there, sweet thing. Are you down here all by yourself?”
The little girl looked up and Nan almost caught her breath at the dazzling blue-green of the eyes that met hers. They were the same color as the Kisatchie itself, on just the right kind of summer’s day. They reminded her of Lissey’s eyes. The child nodded solemnly then turned back to the river. Nan took a few steps forward and then tried again.
“Where’s your momma, child.”
“She’s sleeping in the river.”
The girl never took her eyes off the water and Nan never took her eyes off the child, though she caught her breath again and her heart doubled its time in her narrow chest. Nimble fingers continued to flash in the sunlight, too pale by far, stripping the leaves and letting them fall on the waves to be carried away.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s sleeping in the river, that’s what Daddy says. I came to sing her a song, in case she has bad dreams.”
The words were spoken effortlessly and in all innocence; enough to break Nan’s heart. Silently she watched the girl, looking at her—really looking now. Her blonde hair was tucked behind one ear and beneath the pale skin the older woman could see the faint tattoo left there by a fist.
“Damn it all, Buck.” She murmured under her breath and edged closer.
Her bones popped as she squatted beside the child.
“Did your daddy say anything else to you?”
“No.”
“Well,” Nan held out her hand, “why don’t you come up the bank with me and I’ll fix you some iced tea and put on a biscuit. Are you hungry?”
The child nodded and Nan wondered when the last time was that the girl had eaten a decent meal. It would be just like Buck to forget to feed his child, on top of everything else he might have done to her.
After the last of the leaves had been tossed on the flowing water, the girl put her narrow hand in Nan’s old one and let herself be led up the bank. As they walked, Nan cast one last look back at the running water, sparkling between the trees. She shook her head and led Buck Hawley’s daughter up the slope to the small one-room cabin she called home.
While the girl was happily eating her biscuit with some of Nan’s homemade mayhaw jelly and sipping fresh-brewed iced tea, Nan reluctantly picked up the phone. It took nearly ten rings before Buck picked up and he sounded hungover at the least, if not flat-out drunk.
“I got your little girl over here, Buck.” Nan spoke brusquely, choking back all the things she wanted to say. “You best come pick her up.”
Buck grunted something unintelligible, w
hich Nan took for assent and then hung up. Nan glanced at the little girl again. The Hawleys were new blood in these parts. For the most part folks in the area were decent; kept to themselves like Nan, but then there were those like Buck who couldn’t help gunning their motors in the dead of the night and shooting off their mouths and treating kin and strangers alike as their personal punching bags.
About half an hour later, Nan heard Buck’s pickup crunch the gravel in her yard and she took Sabina by the hand and led her out to her father. Buck glared at Nan as if his shortcomings were somehow her fault, but he looked uneasy too. He took his daughter a little too roughly by the hand. Once again, Nan bit back her words and forced herself to let go of the little girl even though everything in her screamed to hold on tight until she had got out her shotgun and filled Buck full of lead.
Buck narrowed his eyes at her as he led his daughter away and Nan could see the warning sitting clear on his tongue, just behind his teeth. He swayed a little and she watched his superstition win out over his bravado. He hadn’t yet got enough beer in his belly to challenge her out on her own turf. Dust kicked up from the pickup’s wheels and Nan watched them drive away.
Sabina looked too small in the front seat, far too fragile for what she was going home to and Nan clenched her hands into fists at her side. Not for the first time, she had to remind herself that this was not her fight. Of course, she smiled grimly as she turned back into the cabin, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t give a helping to one whose battle it was.
It was dark when Nan made her way back to the bank, but that didn’t matter. She knew these trails by day or night; they were in her bones and they were in her blood. Should—the good Lord forbid it—she go blind, she could find her way down just by the feel of the trees and the sound of the water waiting below.
The moon was near to full and there were only a few clouds in the sky, snagging themselves on the sharp points of the stars. Where they touched the moon, the clouds broke the light into a rainbow haze, rippling as from a stone thrown into still water. A few bats flitted overhead and somewhere a night bird called. Nan had no doubt that any number of luminous eyes watched her from between the trees, but as she had no quarrel with them, they had no quarrel with her and they left each other alone.
At the shore Nan crouched again, wincing at the popping of her joints and the creak of her bones. When had she gotten so old? When the world refused to stand still and kept stubbornly spinning around the sun, she thought bitterly to herself and then smiled. Her age was no fault but her own, for not being some reckless fool who died young.
A dull ache set up in her heart that had nothing to do with age and the smile on her lips turned to bitter memory. She had an image of her sister in her mind and she could not say one way or another if it was truth, but it was the way Nan always saw it in her dreams.
In her mind Lissey staggered up the bank to the side of the road, barefoot on the gravel, running away from the water flowing far below. Her feet were already cut by the time she reached the roadside and the cuts only deepened on the crushed stones. The headlights washing over her made her pale and luminous. She was trying to wave down a car, trying to get someone, anyone, to take her away to anywhere but here. Her eyes were blurred from crying and she misjudged a car swinging around the corner of the road.
She stepped out and there was a heavy sound and she rolled back from the edge of the road, down the slope a little ways, to where Nan found her the next day. Her blonde hair, showing dark roots, straggled across her face and when Nan had brushed it away, she found it mirrored by lines of blood that trailed across Lissey’s pale skin. Nan had cradled her, but she was already cold and the police came to take her away to the parish morgue by the end of the day.
Nan shook herself, pushing the thoughts away and plunging her hands into the icy water, holding them there and letting the current sweep past. The water murmured under her touch and left her shivering. There were cold things sleeping beneath these waves, bones and other things beside and she could feel them all. Unable to bear it any longer, she lifted one of the river rocks worn smooth by time and pressed it to her lips. The faint impression of moss and things beginning to rot beneath the waves lingered as she drew the stone away and pressed it to her cheek, soaking the sense of it through her skin.
“Where?” She whispered, scarce breathing the word.
And the river answered. Nan closed her eyes to see pale flesh sleeping beneath the flashing waves; now heavy with moonlight instead of the sun. Lanie Hawley was laid out long, with the water seeking her bones beneath her fish-pale skin. Her hair snagged at stones like the weeds that sometimes grew there and swirled around her.
Her eyes were river-rock pale and open, but they would not remain so for long. The fish would find them soon; the fish that loved bright things and darted even now around the glint of her wedding band, which Buck had not even bothered to pawn, before darting timidly away.
Nan opened her eyes and they were damp for a moment, glinting with the light of the stars. She imagined the beautiful fairy tale that Buck might have told his daughter, if he cared, about a princess that went to sleep beneath the waves in a magical kingdom. Slowly she straightened and faced the place the river-stone had whispered into her mind.
“Come home now, Lanie Hawley.” She murmured. “It’s time to come home.”
In the dark, Nan listened to the wind stirring in the trees outside on her lawn. She listened for one tree in particular, where bottles broke the sunlight into a thousand rainbow colors and stretched them into strange and beautiful shadows on the grass below during the day. At night they gleamed with borrowed starlight and slivers of the moon and they were haunted and strange.
Even though a slight breeze stirred the trees, the bottles were still and would be until the one she waited for passed by. She was waiting for Lanie, but it was not Lanie she was thinking of. She was thinking of Lissey, just before she died, when she had come to Nan in her little one-room cabin, after being so long away. Relentless memory played itself out behind her eyes and Nan sighed, letting it take her—knowing the futility of fighting after so long.
“You have to help me.”
Those were the first words out of Lissey mouth, even before hello. She was standing in the door uncertainly, as if by crossing the threshold she would be breaking the last promise she had made to herself—never to come home. Nan could see the doubt in Lissey’s eyes, but she could see fear as well. Her face showed strain. Her cheeks were hollow and her hair wild, as if she had run all the way here.
Without having to ask, Nan could see the source of Lissey’s fear written clear in her flesh. Despite the bulky sweatshirt she wore, even in the heat, Nan could see the swell of Lissey’s belly pushing towards full. She didn’t ask about the father; the hollowness in Lissey’s eyes told her it was too late for that question. Instead Nan took her sister by the hand and made her sit while she brewed a pot of hot tea.
“It’s too late,” Nan told her as she pressed a steaming mug into her sister’s hand, already knowing what the answer would be.
“Not for you.” Lissey’s eyes were burning.
“You can do things. I know you can. I saw you and Gram…”
She trailed off and Nan felt something tighten deep inside.
“I can’t. I won’t. It’s too dangerous.”
I don’t want to lose you for good, is what she didn’t say aloud. Perhaps she should have, but if she had, Lissey would have found another way. She was always stubborn.
In the end Lissey had convinced her, though Nan never quite knew how. She took Lissey down to the river and did it there in the flowing water. The river carried the blood from between Lissey’s thighs and from Nan’s hands as well.
But the memory of it remained and the loss echoed in Lissey’s dreams. She was haunted and it was only a few nights later that she had staggered up to the road, trying to run away.
Nan had told the story of the princess sleeping beneath the waves to the p
rincess herself; washed away from between Lissey’s thighs. And she had mourned two lives, instead of one, crouched in the river alone and joining it with her tears.
The bottles stirred at last with a musical chime—glass upon glass and Nan sat up, stirred from her reverie, clutching the quilt her Gram had made tight under her chin. Just because she was old and no stranger to the strangeness of the land, didn’t mean she wasn’t still afraid.
She listened to the dark with her heart in her throat. She imagined Lanie Hawley, gleaming in the moonlight; skin almost the same color as that light that touched her. Nan imagined her with silver eyes and tiny minnows darting through her gaze and river moss wound her in hair. She imagined darkness underneath her skin, as cold as the icy water she had bathed her hands in and tried not to scream.
For a moment, just a moment, she imagined Lissey and Lissey’s little girl, coming up from the river instead of Lanie and her heart ached and tears started in her eyes. Something touched the window and Nan jumped. Rivulets of water ran in sinuous curves from four fingers pressed against the glass.
After a moment Nan discerned the drowned face through the shadows. Lanie’s eyes were dark in the darkness. She was shivering. If Nan was scared, then the woman who had woken up in the river was terrified.
Without further hesitation Nan threw the window open and leaned out. She could see the bottle tree behind the drowned woman, the glass still swaying and glinting in the moonlight; drops of water glistening where Lanie’s hand had brushed the smooth curves.
“Come round to the door.” Nan’s voice was scarcely a whisper, hoarse in her throat.
She pulled the quilt from her bed and when Lanie hesitated on the stoop, Nan wrapped it around the dripping woman and pulled her inside. She made a gentle tsking noise and steered the woman towards the rocking chair near her stove.
“There now, I’ve got the kettle on for hot tea, so you just sit down there and don’t worry about a thing.”