by Lee Klein
“Better to react than force unfortunate action,” Jermaine said.
The next shot they heard made them fall to the mud and slip in it and curse. Like a surprised pigeon I leapt into air.
“My god—” December pointed toward what hovered above them, wings open as though the sound of their commotion kept me airborne. They hushed and I fell on them, my body warm and meaty and soft, wings enveloping them.
“Stay here, stay here,” I said, as though they had a choice. Another shot was fired and I heard it ricochet off a rock and snap a branch of a tree along the river.
A musket was fired into the flesh that protected them. I swarmed into the air and for a second gave a look of violence to the smaller boy who held the smoking rifle.
Another shot came from the direction of the house as Gus reloaded his musket and December screamed at all and no one. Larner came through the woods between the house and the river. He was unkempt, unshaven, altogether gray, bedraggled, armed. He yelled something the Jukes could not hear. I flew at Larner. Jermaine fired but I was out of range. The old man fired again. Jermaine fell into the river. Eyes wide, mouth shut as though holding her breath underwater, hair wild, December pulled him toward the banks as Gus ran at the old man. I airlifted Larner to the house as Gus pursued. December stood over her eldest brother. She held her hands to his chest where the ball had entered. Her brother might have been looking at eternity. He tried to say farewell to his sister but all that emerged was hemorrhaged air. She pulled her brother from the river another foot. Her father had led them into an ambush.
Gus crashed ahead toward Larner’s door. He threw his shoulder into it, possessed. He ran into the house screaming as though if he demanded it with sufficient emphasis Larner would offer his throat and a sharp blade to ease the extraction of revenge. He ran through rooms, overturning chairs and knocking over vases and bowls, a whirlwind loose in the house. He ran down a corridor, turning sharp corners down one corridor after another. He opened doors on empty rooms and furnished bedrooms covered in dust.
The water seemed a translucent sort of brown, reflecting the white sky. She seemed to sense nothing more than Gus screaming in the distance. I reappeared beside her and did not do anything but look at the long-limbed boy in the muddy banks, the life already left him. To keep his body dry, I picked him up and carried him through the air to the bridge where I stood over Jermaine’s body and spread my wings and howled again, softer, a different lament this time. How would she relate the news that Jermaine had been killed, Gus had chased the killer, and the beast her father had hunted now tended to her brother’s corpse?
“If it laments,” she said to no one, “how is he not our father?”
III
They may have found her sooner if the wind had blown toward Umbria. The ferryman may have discovered her kneeling beside her brother as a tower of smoke emerged from Larner’s estate, a twisting monument atop an era of my life. The sight meant more to the girl than it did to me. I wanted to comfort her as she scanned the trees. This was her birth into worst possible times. But no one who sees me ever seems relieved. I am never welcomed, not even when needed.
I could have shepherded her from above, a protector out of sight, ready to swoop. Meals I could have provided, raw or charred. I could have followed her so she sensed my presence and thought herself under my wing. Or I could have overcome my fear of fears of me and openly escorted her.
Right when I resolved to fly her to the outskirts of Umbria, she started home, entranced, as though her eyes no longer adjusted to darkness. A wolf stalked her. She would have attracted the attention of innumerable predators had I not emitted frequencies only they could sense. It would take the night to return. I could carry her though air without disturbing her if she stopped to sleep. Her eyes were open as she walked, yet it was clear she only saw the moment she became finally and totally alone.
Rain fell as I hovered above her, wings spread, doing what I could to keep her dry. Riverbank mud sucked down her shoes. She didn’t even notice, not walking fast enough to feel much pain. She thought I was her father, a man who had said he was me. I would do what I could to protect, if not parent, her. The word was a riddle thanks to what I had done to my own mother and the uncertain identity of my sire.
Larner, in his lattermost years, had developed a theory about my father. It was conjecture I argued against by lifting a finger and poking his belly with a horny nail. Crackpot described the theory in general but it proceeded along these lines: I did not exist as anything more than legend. My father was neither William Leeds nor a seductive Briton soldier but a man of lasting importance who initiated a hoax to discredit the name of his chief competitor. Like the almanac and the colonies now known as the United States of America, I was a composite of disparate parts. I was known as the Leeds Devil because Poor Richard, another figment of this great man’s imagination, had wished to slight the popularity of the Leeds American Almanack. Franklin had concocted his attendance at a witch trial in Mount Holly around the time of my birth. Some say the famous key–kite–lightning experiment was also a hoax. Larner attributed my existence to Franklin, the genius around whom all revolved, from whom all emerged, a black hole that devoured credit for all human progress and emitted such a bright and lasting light, my humanity only a mercurial, competitive glimmer in the eye of a founding American father.
But what were the chances that none of this was happening? Was I the one now with post-traumatic stress syndrome, as they’d eventually call it? Hovering above the girl, I was no more than a poor beast, worrying all the time about my so-called humanity when I should have been concerned that I didn’t exist, that none of this was real.
The scent of smoke traveled on the wind, but neither the wind nor the smoke existed? Heavy mist sogged the hair of the child I protected, but neither rain nor child existed? The town of Umbria existed and did not exist? Yet every day our eyes opened on a world that never questioned its existence.
If Franklin were my father, if I were only a legend he had sired, if my existence had derived from his wish to smear his competition by associating it with a ridiculous bestial composite, my origins could have been worse. My father could have been the thief who begot this child now drawn home through the night, her trouble just begun.
What a state the girl was in, and yet she made it to the outskirts, the first shack farthest from the church, the homes of those most removed from the town’s center, the roads unformed and pocked with manure and great stinking fissures and gaps. She continued to the center, slower now, automatic. I rose out of sight to see all below: an imperfect grid along the Mullica, civilization only a feat of pruning, optimistic woodwork, shale roofing against the suffocating forces of endlessly surrounding wilderness. To the east, the ocean mocked them all. If only they could see such a sight, how would they behave, how would they transform, how renounce unrealistic expectations of perfection?
The next stage in the girl’s life would require supreme patience. How would she withstand questions and accusations, criticisms and conclusions regarding her character, all mixed with self-congratulation among those who had doubted the Altruists’ instinct to reform the Jukes?
At first she’d had fresh skin, sparkling eyes, a smile that calmed stirred emotions or gained someone’s favor who may have intimidated her. The unmistakable rightness of her youth, open, curious, unfiltered, in part made the Altruists help the Jukes after their father’s disappearance. Elders remembered Branley’s youth before harsh weather eroded him inside and out.
Everything charred, razed, cleansed in a way. The house had been about to crumble well before Larner had lost his capacities. And from those ashes rose in Umbria a force directed against the innocent arrogance, they believed, of the Altruists. Their moral obligation to serve created a superior air, their imitation of Christ a sinful pretension. They solely wished to reinforce their standing with transparently manipulative outpourings of charity. The dynamics of their do-gooding were altogether loathsome, their opponents contende
d. There was no such thing as generosity. All giving was tainted by expectation of equivalent return. In that respect, the Altruists, it was argued, were as impure as any degenerate they sought to reform.
As though an aftershock of the rift between Confederacy and Union, the town split at first on what to do with the girl. Arguments, editorials in the Crier, raised voices at the Bucket, sermons, hushed conversations by candlelight, all were shot through with concerns for the girl. There were infinite complexities to their lives in terms of health and sustenance and any number of the consequences of the minor cruelties of life, but instead they focused on December Jukes.
One side suggested she be sacrificed how her father had sacrificed Nathaniel Leeds. Be done with her and the Jukes lineage forever. The other side insisted that her treatment would filter through all aspects of their existence, through large and small decisions thereafter, to how they spent their days. The girl’s shadow in the town darkened as her existence attracted suspicions of super-natural powers she would use for good or evil per what what those who invoked her name believed. And they all invoked her name.
December was not accused of anything, although many blamed her for numerous maladies. Ignoring shouted objection from her Altruist family, she was held, not in prison with thieves and drunks, but in a single windowless shack with a rolled dirt floor. They kept her there as though caged. The Dorwoods seemed relieved that she hadn’t been killed outright.
Whenever released for exercise or to bathe, crowds jeered her, and others rose against her detractors, the town so unsettled by her presence that many among the Altruists began to think they should send her to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, or Boston, somewhere she could be anonymous, where the history of her family would not follow. It was in everyone’s interests, most agreed, for December Jukes to leave Umbria. The town may otherwise erupt.
Never had a child taken such a hold. Some sensed they were infected by her, the girl caused sorrow, enflamed passions, the empty look in her eyes reflected the gazes of those who reveled in worst thoughts and feelings. With this virus in the air, more became infected or fought the infection. Arguments emerged in favor of the girl’s innocence, the need to keep her in town and rehabilitate her to teach everyone a lesson. With consistent and thorough application of our best instinct, we could change the world. To such peaceful, positive arguments, the Anti-Altruists countered with vehemence, with such hatred toward the girl, that they seemed maddened with whatever condition they’d developed since December returned from that doomed trip up the river she’d taken with her brothers.
The Altruists in turn became possessed with their opposing force, animated by their enemy’s furor. Those aligned against the Altruists, anticipating imminent aggression they perceived, dragged December’s mother through the streets, displayed her as a monster infected by copulation with Jukes, the devil himself, father of the spawn that led to the death of good old Larner, someone they now championed as representative philanthropist and dearly departed righteous entity all should emulate. They knocked December’s mother in the street, pelted her with refuse, the first real move toward open violence the town had ever taken. It was clear that something had happened to the mother’s nervous system. She now only played the armonica as though through those sounds she accessed paradise—and otherwise she seemed in an accelerated state of decay. The mother’s corruption was obvious by the way she no longer recognized her own daughter, the girl in effect orphaned, the essence of her mother’s brain a sort of charmed mush.
Such hostile parading of the Jukes mother led many to believe the only way to restore order was to put the girl, and thereby the entire town, out of their collective misery.
It was one young life, they argued, damned to a future of criminality and outright insanity. It would be charitable to drown her in the Mullica.
The idea spread. The call for it sobered passions. It was a sort of capital punishment levied against the girl, her father, the untold history of horrors perpetrated through time by their progenitors. By staunching something in this girl, her brothers both dead, her father presumably dead, her mother of no blood relation to the Jukes, a victim more than anything, they would cleanse humanity of an impure link. It was all for the best: the girl would be released from her trauma, the town’s conflict would end, and the Jukes’ mad spark would be snuffed. If the Altruists were genuinely interested in bringing about the best possible world they would support the plan.
The Altruists argued however that putting December Jukes to death, to even consider it with any seriousness, was the first step into an abyss from which Umbria would never emerge. The Worthen father gave a speech and was pelted with mud and rotten vegetables, ridiculed so obscenely that he moved his family to a saner settlement to the north. Worthen had been an initial proponent of redemption for the Jukes, but once he crumbled, the other Altruists fell silent one after the other as the rest of Umbria articulated a rationale for the elimination of a thirteen-year-old girl.
December seemed almost feral, lost in chaotic thoughts, removed from pleasant encounter with anyone. I kept an eye on her when I could, overhearing everything, the town failing to consider the possibility that their rationalizations for murdering a child were no match for justice levied against them by the so-called Leeds Devil. The Umbrians were in no hurry to do away with her. Holding the girl as a centerpiece for their hatred brought them together. She was an unlikely unifying force, a figure around which to rally. Once she was gone they would only achieve a similar state if they found someone or something else to oppose as one. For now, the plan was to walk her to the Mullica after dressing her in a white gown and transform her murder into ritual sacrifice. They would pave her way with cherry blossoms and rose petals and release white doves as her feet touched water. They would wed her to the river, return her to the water, and by doing so, restore their community to its former state. Sacrifice of a young girl was a beautiful idea, most thought. The town joined together like a happy family detailing every last element. It would be unforgettable, beneficial to all. For an air of seasonal rebirth, they chose the first of May, when days lengthen and the green of the world embodies tenderness itself.
Until then, they treated her as a rising queen. Attendants brushed her hair and oiled her limbs. December became a daily remainder that all have only so long to live. No more than thirteen years old and yet the day of her death is determined.
As her treatment improved throughout the winter, December emerged from her trance. It would have been best to hibernate within herself until water filled her lungs, but now she understood and replied to speech. She would not say what she had seen, but she responded to her attendants, who were not much older than December, rewarded for good behavior with positions as handmaidens of the doomed girl. By proximity to her, it was thought they might comprehend life’s fragility.
As December regained her faculties, her privileged attendants began to covet what they could never secure. They too wanted to succumb to the coppery waters of the Mullica and thereby benefit everyone. Each was willing to martyr herself if promised elaborate, maudlin, festive ceremonies, especially if it assured a season of peace in Umbria.
The attendants decided that for each to attain and surpass December’s stature, they needed to cause a disturbance for which each would be put to death before December’s proposed marriage to the Mullica. No one expected these girls would aspire to exceed December’s reputation. The attendants were the sort who had forced December to dig a burrow of secret tunnels inside herself, like a mole. Yet now these girls seemed charmed, even worshipful. They treated December like a hidden gem, the search for which they devoted their short lives.
“December,” they said—in their mouths her name was an aphrodisiac—“What can we do for you? How can we please you?”
They outdid one other with garlands of compliment. These girls, their scents, the absolute bouquet of them, was cruel reward. The sight of her father hanging by his wrists. Her own wrists circled in bright
rings the girls made of strands of dyed hemp. Her return from mist and creek mud. That mansion in black inferno. Its dark roar.
IV
I could have reduced her cell to splinters or removed the roof and snatched her out, but then I would have needed to fly throughout the country, an omniscient, bestial crime-fighter who righted all wrongs. Who has ever come to free me, to save me, to release me from history? Why have I been damned to access the thoughts and feelings of all those with whom I have an affinity? A gift and a curse, extrasensory and inhuman, akin to flight and never seeming to die. That everyone I’d known had aged and died supported theories of my non-existence. It is a particular sadness of the immortal to outlive everyone. Consider the weariness of Poseidon surveying the ever-changing coastline, nostalgic for the shape of Pangaea, the ecstatic appearance of islands upon their fiery steaming birth above water. If I were a sort of god, I could influence December’s situation without detection. Have paparazzi ever captured Poseidon surveying the Atlantic coast? I’m more of a beast of a man, alas, possibly immortal and definitively aware of the fragility of those unlike me.
Sheriff Hopkins was found in bed, hands flat against his chest, middle fingers meeting at their tips, his black mustache a covenant with death across his grimace. It was unexpected, considering his age and health. Nothing was out of order in the room but this was no natural death. A delicate cut ran across the stomach. A fine knife or needle had left a tattoo of dried blood. The mark looked like the head of a ram, its curling horns bracketed by wings like mine. Some called it the mark of the beast.
They wouldn’t openly slaughter. Their actions required artfulness. If they had hacked the sheriff in the street, they would have been overtaken and destroyed, stamped out by the men they wished one day would sacrifice them. To supplant the sacrificial virgin they needed to make her forgettable. Branley Jukes had murdered two men—they would exceed that number until everyone feared for their lives.