The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  “I’ll walk him out,” Elijah said. He didn’t bother with any coat as he opened the door and walked beside me out on the porch after I got my shoes and coat on. “You sure you’re okay to drive home?” Melting snow dripped from the eaves, but at least the rain had stopped. The aura lit up my whole world, like I walked among angels.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. I zipped up my parka, Bible in hand. The cold woke me. I could breathe again. I had an emergency baggie with sumatriptan and Percocet in the glove compartment of my car.

  “I hope you weren’t bothered by anything Brian said. He came home from basic training down in Hattiesburg with a little brain damage after a chopper he was riding in crashed. Everyone died but him. So he says the oddest things at times, but don’t pay it any mind.” Elijah gestured at the trailers. “This here is home for many of us. It’s a good place. Mother Sophie named it The Land, because it’s a safe place. Maybe the last safe place in the coming days. You know where we are now. You’re welcome here anytime, Meshach.”

  “Your whole family lives here?” Here was my chance. I thought of what I needed to say, the real reason I had come here.

  Elijah frowned. “My daughter is with some of the older children. I should join her for lunch.” He rubbed his face with his hands and yawned. “Ever since her mother went away, she gets nervous if I’m gone too long.” He spoke like Caroline hadn’t even gone ahead of him to care for Sarah. Had he already replaced Maura with another woman and now he was embarrassed about it?

  “Went away?”

  “What you said in there about the shadow that lies over the world. That’s true. And sometimes the shadow finds its way into people.” He set a hand on my shoulder and we stepped out from under the eaves. “Can I ask you a favor? Pray for my family.”

  I swallowed. I needed to press this without sounding suspicious. “Where did your wife go? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at me, his small eyes glittering, his mouth clamping hard enough to grind his teeth before he breathed out again. “I really don’t.”

  He looked off toward the Airstream where he must be living with his daughter. “What’re you doing for Thanksgiving?”

  When I looked at him blankly, he continued, “Turkey Day? Two days from now? If you haven’t made other plans.”

  “Okay,” I said, my voice barely audible.

  “Okay,” he said. “We eat at noon. You know the way.”

  A Grave in the Woods

  Kaiser’s bellowing bark boomed throughout the house when I came in through the front door. I called and called Arwen’s name, not hearing any answer. Kaiser’s barking alternated with low, ominous growling, beckoning me to the lower level. Halfway down the spiral staircase, I spotted the source of the old dog’s distress through the bay windows: an ancient stag, his antlers like small trees, was gorging on the neat rose-hedge borders along the birches. He must have sensed me watching because he lifted his heavy head, his jaws slowly grinding, and peered myopically in my direction through eyes filmed over by cataracts. He was the largest whitetail buck I’d ever seen, another marvel in a winter of wonders. Had the stag come so close to the house because he was both storm-blind and starving?

  Kaiser yapped as he clawed at the door of his kennel. I let the dog out and tried to hush him as he went to the windows and climbed up on his back legs to bark at the stag. His barking grated on my frayed nerves, so I opened the door, meaning only to shout and chase the stag off before it destroyed the Krolls’ rosebushes. Before I got a word out, Kaiser shot through the gap.

  Kaiser bounded into the sleet and barreled up the icy path. With that immense rack, and weighing several hundred pounds, the stag could have stomped the German shepherd into hamburger, but you don’t grow old in these woods unless you know when to fight and when to run. His black nostrils flared and he snorted once, a dismissive sound. Then he turned and vaulted over the hedges, vanishing into the woods. I shouted at Kaiser to come back, but he bolted after the deer.

  I turned back to the house, the windows like dark eyes on this gray day, my senses flooded with foreboding. I thought I felt someone watching from within. Or had I seen a ghostly reflection of myself in the glass, urging me to turn back? Vertigo tilted my world on its axis. The last place I wanted to be if a migraine took hold of me was out here in the snow again, but I had to bring Kaiser home. I had been charged with keeping the old dog alive.

  I hobbled after him up the well-trodden path, past the frozen-over koi pond, the ring of birches and rose hedges, and into a forest of white and red pine where I was at least partly shielded from sleet that had begun falling from a slate-colored sky. My hands in my coat pockets, my hip aching, I trudged after Kaiser down a worn deer trail. The stag was long gone. Amid the pines I sank in deeper pockets of snow and ended up leaning against one of the trees when nausea made my world spin. I inhaled the terpene scent the bark released, a vanilla fragrance that grounded me, and called after Kaiser.

  His age caught up to him in the pines, the old hound floundering chest-deep in the drifts. Yet he refused to heed my voice and turn around, instead plunging on. This was farther than we’d ever been, to the very border of the eighty-acre property, where the Wind River carved out its deep-bellied gorge. I heard the song of it far below, angry and tumbling with snowmelt, ice, and boulders cracking like knuckles. Bone on bone. Kaiser halted here at the edge of the world. As I came closer, I saw why.

  Low iron fencing surrounded a small cemetery on a knoll that overlooked the river, iron posts jutting like black spears from crusty snow, gray tombstones within furred with moss and lichen. Kaiser’s breath came raggedly; ice clung to his belly and bearded his muzzle. Beyond the shelter of the pines, I felt the full force of the wind sweeping out of the North, a wind that smelled of snow. The old dog groaned softly as the gate swung open, rusty hinges whining in invitation. Kaiser knew this place.

  He ambled beside me as we stepped past the gates—black iron to keep out evil spirits—my breath torn from me in ribbons. I knew from the old man that the Krolls had bought this land a hundred years before, the original homesteaders, the only Germans in a valley settled by Finns. This had to be a family cemetery.

  The tombstones had been sculpted by wind and seasons of hard frost into leaning, tortured shapes. We were moving through time as we walked deeper into it, the first graves the oldest, going back to 1879: Heinrich. Gretel. Hans. The names became increasingly anglicized as I went along. Arnold. Helen. Gregory. The Krolls did not appear to be a long-lived people: Arnold died in Ardennes, a hero of the Battle of Bulge according to his tombstone. Why had they buried him here instead of in a veteran’s cemetery? His sister, Helen—if that’s who she was—only lived into her fifties. No wonder the Krolls had been desperate to snowbird to the South Padre Island. I kept going, tracing the names with my bare hands, reading the story of a family in the mossy braille. It was not a happy story, but they had brought me here, the stag and Kaiser.

  I stumbled at one point and dropped to my knees. The grave before me occupied the very edge of the cemetery. A stone angel crouched on a small tombstone, an androgynous form with wings, head bowed in sorrow. So close to the ravine whoever slept here would have a good view of the river. This grave was one of a few someone had tended recently, leaving an urn of plastic begonias before it. It was also the only tombstone with an angel on it, so I knew before I read the name that I was looking at a child’s grave, though the dates were buried in a snowdrift.

  Vertigo swept over me once more, and I stepped out of the shell of my body, rising on dark wings into the winter sky, until man and dog were mere specks on the ground, tiny things rooted before a chasm, so high up the wind brought flakes of snow mixed in with sleet, and then it felt like I was falling down and down into my own body, the shock of it knocking my breath from my lungs and bringing me to my knees.

  A brief darkness.

  Kaise
r must have nuzzled me awake. I clung to his ruff, drawing warmth and strength from the watchdog. I didn’t want to look at the angel anymore.

  The name printed on the stone: Arwen Kroll.

  “You knew this whole time,” I said to the dog. “If she’s buried here, then who is that back at the house? Who is playing the part of a dead girl?”

  I don’t remember the long journey home with the dog, nor taking off my boots, nor swallowing the pain pills that now fogged my thinking. I couldn’t remember any of it and those gaps bothered me when I woke the next morning.

  I woke to Arwen knocking on my door. “Lucien? There’s someone here to see you.” With my skull throbbing in time to her fist, I could hardly process Arwen’s voice, my mind still half-planted in a dream world.

  When I pulled back the covers and sat up, I saw that I was wearing the jeans and sweater I’d worn out to The Land. A lingering residue of pain leftover from the migraine yet held me in thrall. I rubbed my face in my hands, trying to wake my brain from a narcotic fog, as I struggled to remember.

  “Lucien?” Arwen knocked again.

  “Just a minute,” I called in a hoarse voice. I took a couple of long breaths to calm myself, inhaling through my nose and breathing out through my mouth. “I need a few minutes.”

  After Arwen went away, I tried to get my bearings. I didn’t want to see whoever was here. I needed to figure out what the hell was happening. If that was Arwen’s grave, then who was this stranger who had invaded the house and my life? My mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton. I needed water. I needed grub. When had I last eaten? I needed peace. What I didn’t need was another visitor at the house or any more mysteries. For a moment, I wondered if Roland had followed me home, or if my mother had flown up from Chicago because she was worried about me. Whoever they were I just wanted them to go away. Still, I stood and opened the door.

  From the hallway I heard Arwen’s sharp laughter and a male voice so low it was more growl than speech. I knew that voice. Noah Larsen, one of a few friends I had since I was an introvert on a college campus where everyone fled for the Cities on weekends, a reverse migration. With his darker skin, he should have been a misfit on a largely white campus, the only black hockey player I’d ever met, but Noah had an easy way with people. He sported mutton-chop sideburns and drove a rebuilt 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, a genuine hardback T-top just like the one on Knight Rider, which Noah could tell you all about in his best imitation of the Hoff. Shit. How had he tracked me down here?

  I shuffled down the hallway, the pain sharp in my hip. It sure as hell felt like I’d been on a long journey.

  Arwen perched on one of the counters, her shapely legs swinging out. She was dressed in a faded black Ramones t-shirt and a denim skirt that drew my eyes to her bare legs and feet. Whatever Noah had said to make her laugh caused her to tilt her head back and expose her pale throat. Noah sported a tight turtleneck with a thick gold chain around his neck, acid-washed jeans, and his trademark Doc Martens as he leaned casually against the kitchen table, wrapping up his story. I felt a flash of jealousy that I didn’t fully understand. Maybe it was how natural they looked together. Maybe it was that I’d always envied Noah. Back then I only saw how being black made him special. There was so much I didn’t know.

  Noah grunted “Hey,” when he spotted me and gestured at the six-pack of Dr Peppers he’d brought along—my favorite drink, which I imbibed at parties while everyone else got soused on beer and tequila—slipping one from the plastic ring and tossing it my way. I caught it by the fingertips and cracked it open while Noah glanced sidelong at Arwen and then back at me, crooking his left eyebrow as if to say, nice job. He didn’t know the half of it. Noah had not been a fan of my involvement with Maura.

  I took a long drink and tried to smile. His being here complicated things. I could no longer imagine Arwen as a ghostly seductress, my winter priestess. His being here made her real, a flesh-and-blood problem. I felt disoriented, my mind mixed up between dream and memory. “How’d you know where to find me?” I said. No one was supposed to know where I was.

  He frowned at the unfriendliness of the question. “I called your mom.”

  I nodded—Noah had come home with me to visit Mount Greenwood and Chicago one winter break, so he had the number. I took another long sip, hoping the sugar and caffeine would cut through the muddle of my thinking.

  Arwen watched me curiously, no longer smiling. “So . . . you guys met in chem?” She looked between us as if she couldn’t figure out our friendship. It was a mystery to me as well.

  “I was going pre-med,” I said, pulling up a seat at the kitchen table because I needed to sit down. “But it didn’t work out.” Part of what I’d learned in college is that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

  “Lucien’s a computer geek,” Noah said. “Pre-med just wasn’t his path.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, anyhow,” Arwen said, somehow detecting the undercurrent of self-pity in my statement.

  Whatever happened the night before, the warmth between us seemed to have dissipated. Or was I losing my hold on reality? The ancient stag, the journey through the woods, the cemetery at the edge of a chasm? My mind wandering in and out of the black-and-white movie of my life, dark wings at the edge of my vision. All a dream?

  “I don’t picture you as a doctor or scientist,” Arwen continued, hopping down from the counter to help herself to one of the Dr Peppers. “A priest or poet, maybe.”

  “You’re traveling further and further down the pay grade,” I muttered. “Next you’ll have me playing violin on the street corner for pennies.”

  Noah chuckled but not Arwen. “It’s not that you’re not smart enough. That’s not it. You just don’t have the hardness that science requires.” She paused, her cheeks coloring. “That cool detachment. You’re one of those people who feel things too much.”

  “You’ve only known me for a week.”

  “Our Lou is a gifted programmer,” Noah cut in, calling me by the nickname he’d given me shortly after we first met. “He tell you about the game he’s designing?”

  “She’s seen it,” I said. “What’d she tell you about herself?” I nodded toward Arwen, hoping to change the subject.

  “Just that she came here from Bellingham. And that her parents own this place.”

  I looked at Arwen and tried to put a fix on what I’d seen out in the woods. A grave. A grave with her name on it. “Your parents will be surprised to hear about your return.”

  Arwen’s brow furrowed, but she didn’t try to defend herself.

  “I mean, some places are harder to come back from than others.”

  “Okay,” Noah interrupted, not liking my tone. He rapped his fist on the table. “So, I need to get going here. I just wanted to check in with you, my man, because I’ve been thinking of you. I also wanted to see what you’re doing for Thanksgiving. My mom says you’re more than welcome to join us down in Duluth.” He glanced over at Arwen. “And you, too. We always keep one empty chair at the table for an unexpected guest.”

  An unexpected guest. That certainly described Arwen. And I wasn’t surprised he was leaving so soon, since Noah couldn’t stand tension or conflict. Everyone got along in his copacetic world and that was how it should be.

  “Thank your mom for me, but I’ve made other plans.” The way Noah studied me I knew I had to say more. “I’m eating with some people from church.”

  “You go to church?” Noah couldn’t keep the suspicion out of his voice.

  “Place called Rose of Sharon,” I said.

  “It’s one of those Christian Identity churches,” Arwen added, not so helpfully because Noah still looked puzzled. “A church for white people.”

  She half made it sound like I approved of such notions. Truthfully, they had only made passing mentions of race in my presence so far. “There are some Indians ther
e, too,” I said. “Ojibwe from the reservation, I think. Anyhow, you know I’m not a racist. You know why I’m going to this church.”

  “Oh,” Noah said, but as understanding sunk in he looked no less troubled. He knew that Maura’s husband had been a pastor, knew about the man’s violent past and white supremacist connections. “Oh, shit.”

  I rose from my spot on the table when he got ready to leave. I wanted to walk him out, make sure we parted on a decent note. It should have been a happy reunion, but with an assist from Arwen, I’d soured the mood. “Thank you for coming here. For finding me.”

  In the foyer, Noah plucked a black leather coat from the rack and shrugged it on. “You should call your mom,” he said in a flat voice. “She’s worried about you, Lou.”

  “I will.”

  Noah set a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think you should be hanging around those people. It’s a shit idea. You have to let some things go.”

  I didn’t say anything because he was right. He squeezed my shoulder—the uninjured side—and stepped out into the cold, where sleet had changed over to a sugary snow that powdered his Trans Am.

  Arwen hadn’t waited around in the kitchen, so I boiled water for Top Ramen, cracking an egg on top of the noodle-brick. Downstairs I heard the grainy crackling of the projector starting up.

  I felt guilty for how I’d behaved when Noah visited, so I took two Dr Peppers and wandered into the den. The cans were growing lukewarm, but I passed her one as a peace offering and sank into the opposite La-Z-Boy beside her. On the white screen, Orson Welles played Harry Lime, a baby-faced raconteur in a black suit and rakish black hat, pacing inside a Ferris wheel gondola rotating high above a divided post-war Vienna. His friend Holly tries to confront him with the evil he has learned about and to remind him that he once believed in God.

  “The Third Man,” I said. I had watched it before on the old man’s Betamax collection. “This—”