December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  Then I wished that I hadn’t clapped my hands, because they were really cold and it really hurt.

  I knelt beside the head of the deer and blew warm air onto my palms.

  Dr. Nelson moved a little slowly, but she came to where I was kneeling and looked down.

  “Here,” I pointed briefly, “is the bullet wound. You can see that it’s dried, as opposed to these more fresh wounds everywhere else.”

  She leaned over a little. Her face was slightly contorted, and I was momentarily afraid she might be sick. She straightened up very quickly, turned away, and took a few steps down the slope.

  “What makes you think it was the boy who shot this animal?” she said thickly, not looking my way.

  “Nobody around here hunts on my property. Some people are afraid of me, which is nice, but mostly they avoid this land because they know I’d object. And there are plenty of places that are better for hunting anyway. Add to that: this animal is very young and I think there must be some kind of lower age limit in general, which is something that a sort of wild boy wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care about, but most of the hunters around here take very seriously.”

  “Okay,” she said, but she sounded unconvinced.

  I stood up and headed her way.

  “And finally,” I said, “the wound on the deer’s head looks very much like it might have been caused by a Remington 700, the kind of rifle the boy used to shoot at us.”

  She turned to stare at me. Her face still betrayed a trace of uneasiness. “How in the world would you know that?”

  “I may have mentioned that I’ve been shot at lots of times since I returned home. After it happened a few too many times, I started doing what any good quasi-academic would: I did the research.”

  The truth was that I had only guessed about the bullet wound in the deer’s head. I might have been greatly exaggerating my powers of observation in order to convince Dr. Nelson that I wasn’t crazy. Or I might have been doing it to impress her. Either way, my behavior was confusingly uncharacteristic.

  “All right,” she said, but it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. “But if we don’t head down the hill right now, we’ll be late for our meeting with the sheriff, who doesn’t seem to be in the mood for any shenanigans from the likes of us.”

  “Shenanigans?” I repeated. “Is this really the word that you want to use?”

  We began to walk down the slope.

  “I like that word,” she insisted. “It’s funny.”

  “It’s hilarious,” I agreed, “but I’m telling you right now, most people would not want to be diagnosed by a doctor who uses it.”

  “Oh,” she said breezily. “Well. Point taken.”

  10

  Back in my living room, fire stoked, shoes off, feet up, all three of us were slumped down in our seats close to the hearth.

  Skid had, indeed, arrived at my house before Dr. Nelson and I, but only by a few moments, so his ire was somewhat dampened. He’d announced that he had important news, but would say nothing more without hot coffee and a warmer fire.

  “So,” I said, sipping from my espresso cup, “what’s the big news?”

  “You’re not going to believe it,” he told me, gulping from his coffee mug. “I didn’t.”

  He shook his head and stared into the fire.

  “Are you going to tell us, or do we have to guess?” I asked impatiently.

  “Not— can’t be more than five hundred yards below your house, after the slope starts to get steep? After your backyard ends? There’s a big old cave down there.”

  I sat up a little. “A cave?”

  “I mean a big one,” he went on, a little excited. “It looked to me like it’d been all covered up by vines and shrubs for a hundred years, but somebody found it. Somebody opened it up. Because, well, there’s furniture down there. And supplies, and a fire pit and two sleeping bags.”

  “That’s not possible.” I sat all the way up and set my cup down on the table.

  “I know,” said Skid, clearly amazed himself.

  “I mean,” I went on, “I’ve been— you and I have both been over every inch of this part of the mountain. For all our lives. How could it be that we never found a cave that big?”

  “I know!” he repeated, only louder. “It was weird. I marked it off with yellow tape, so I can find it again. I called Melissa to get out here. We’ll go down together and search the place completely quick as she gets here with some better flashlights and some better equipment. Maybe it’s just some tramp living down there for the winter, but it’s fairly organized. That boy could be living down there. I asked Melissa to check on any missing persons or runaways before she comes up. You all see anything?”

  Dr. Nelson just looked at me.

  I held my breath for a second, not certain if I should say what was on my mind or not. Then, a bit reluctantly, I let it fly.

  “I saw the woman again in the woods, just now.” I sighed. “She— actually she told me that she and her son were living in a cave. Down below my house.”

  Skid’s eyes shot to Dr. Nelson. She shook her head.

  “I didn’t see her,” she reported, “but I did lose sight of Dr. Devilin for at least five minutes, and in that time…”

  “No,” Skid said to me, now also sitting up, irksome mood returned. “No. See, if you’d told me right away that you’d seen the woman, and that she’d mentioned the cave, before I told you I found one, that might have made me think twice. But when you wait until after I tell you about it, I don’t believe you even a little bit. You understand that, right?”

  He stood up to punctuate his dismissal.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked, a little haplessly.

  “I’m going to examine the cave,” he said, as if he’d told me a dozen times already. “No matter what, it’s odd, and it constitutes, at the very least, a criminal trespass of your property, so Melissa and I are going to go over it pretty good. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the vagrant who’s trying to live there will show up. Happens.”

  At that moment we heard a car pull up in my yard. A quick glance revealed Deputy Melissa Mathews, chestnut hair up in a tight bun, hat under her arm, climbing out of her patrol car.

  I was always glad to see Melissa. She was lovely, kind, braver than most human beings I’d ever met, and, also, she’d saved my life. A recent bout with cancer had left her thinner than she ought to have been, but the disease was in complete remission, and she looked quite strong as she strode confidently toward my porch.

  Skid was at the door before she knocked, pulling up his boots, one arm of his coat on and the other dragging the floor.

  Melissa stood in the doorway, smiling sweetly.

  “Hey,” she chirped.

  I stood. “Melissa, this is Dr. Nelson.”

  But I was prevented from finishing the more lengthy explanation of Dr. Nelson’s presence.

  “Ceri,” Melissa said, stepping around Skidmore and coming into the living room.

  Melissa and Dr. Nelson embraced briefly, and smiled at each other.

  “Melissa, you look fantastic,” Dr. Nelson said.

  Melissa blushed. “Too skinny.”

  Melissa was the shyest person I had ever met. Scores of young men buzzed around her all the time, but she seemed oblivious to their advances. She loved her job and had been a deputy for a good number of years. In that time she’d been in danger of losing her life at least five times.

  Melissa patted Dr. Nelson’s arm lightly. “You take care of Dr. Devilin, hear?”

  “Will do,” Dr. Nelson replied.

  “Let’s go,” Skid mumbled, heading out the door.

  Melissa smiled my way. “You take care of Dr. Nelson, too, right? We can’t have her get all shot up.”

  “Agreed.” I smiled back at Melissa.

  Without further ado, she was out the door behind Skid.

  Dr. Nelson immediately sat down again, this time on the floor, close to the fire as she had before.
/>   “Now then,” she said, all business, “what is it you’re not telling me?”

  I stared at her as if I’d never seen her before in my life.

  “What are you talking about?” I complained.

  “I have a spectacularly strong sense that you’re not telling me something.” She sat cross-legged, hands folded in her lap, staring into the flames.

  I rolled my head to loosen my neck. My neck crackled like popped corn.

  “Look.” I sighed, collapsing onto the sofa. “I’m sorry I ever mentioned that my parents took me to the Rhine Center when I was little. I don’t think I really— I don’t believe in this psychic— in the— not in the way that you do, at least.”

  “Well,” she answered archly, “at least you’ve honed your thoughts on the subject into a nice coherent argument.”

  “You don’t have a sense that I’m not telling you something,” I snapped back. “You just want to get me talking so that you can diagnose me.”

  “Well, that’s always a possibility,” she admitted, still staring into the flames, “but in this case, there is something you’re not telling me.”

  I started to answer in two or three different ways before I gave up and admitted it. “Yes, all right, there is something I’m not telling you, but it’s something that the woman told me and you don’t think there was a woman so I’m naturally loathe to exaggerate your already looming suspicions that I’ve gone around the bend.”

  That made her look at me. Her gaze bore into my eyes.

  “Brother, that ship has sailed; you live around the bend,” she said without a trace of humor. “You just have to know that most people don’t.”

  “You think I’ve lost my mind.”

  “I do.”

  I hadn’t expected her to be so— blunt. I was momentarily knocked back on my heels.

  “You do?” I finally managed to ask.

  She turned back around and stared, once again, into the flames. “Not all of it. But you lost a part of it when you died. I’m going to help you find it.”

  “Then I’ll be all right, you think,” I said.

  “Depends on your definition of ‘all right,’” she told me. “You don’t have much hope of being what most people would call normal, but you never had much hope of that.”

  “Or desire for it,” I chimed in.

  “Right,” she sang out, “but we can get you back on an even keel. So. Whether she’s real or not—and you have to believe me when I say that I haven’t made up my mind about that yet—you have to tell me what the woman in the woods said to you.”

  I settled back. I was a bit self-conscious that my feet were closer to her than my head, owing to the way I was laying on the couch. I wondered why I would think a thing like that.

  The fire popped. She sat silent and motionless. I took a deep breath.

  “She started in the same vein as before, I think,” I said softly, “apologizing to me for something she’d done, and wanting me to forgive her. Then, very oddly, she brought up a person from my distant past, or, my family’s distant past. She wanted me to forgive a man named Tristan Newcomb.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He was a modestly famous sideshow attraction whose family, the Newcomb family, owned most of the land in these mountains. Tristan bought a traveling show called the Ten Show that employed my parents. That’s how they met, in fact, my parents, in the traveling show.”

  “What did they do?” her voice was a little hypnotic.

  “My father was, or became, a well-known magician. My mother was a snake charmer who became his assistant. She was also well known, but primarily for her prodigious promiscuity.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was often rumored that my mother’d had an affair with Tristan Newcomb, and that Tristan was my biological father.”

  “And was he?” she asked. “Was this Tristan Newcomb your father?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain.”

  “Nearly one hundred percent,” I assured her.

  “Why are you so certain?”

  “Because Tristan Newcomb was a little person. He’d made his fame as ‘The Newcomb Dwarf.’ And I don’t carry any of the genetic properties generally associated with dwarfism, not achondroplasia; not growth hormone deficiency.”

  “All right, but there are a few other causes…”

  “He wasn’t my father,” I interrupted. “He was, however, by all reports and from the very few childhood memories I have of him, a genuinely kind person.”

  “So maybe the woman in the woods wants you to forgive him owing to the rumors about him and your mother?” she suggested.

  “How would she even know him? I mean, I think she was claiming to have been in love with him, but he died when I was a child, and as far as I can tell, the woman in the woods is younger than I am. Although it’s hard to know for certain.”

  “She said very specifically that she wanted you to forgive Tristan Newcomb,” Dr. Nelson pressed.

  “Her exact words were, ‘Why can’t you forgive Tristan?’” I insisted.

  “Hm.” Dr. Nelson shifted a little in front of the fire. “Fascinating.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she told me, “I’m just tossing this out there, but is it possible— I mean try to look at this, for a moment, like the academic that you used to be, and try to be objective in some way. But is it possible that this woman is somehow a manifestation of your mother when she was young, and she’s asking you to forgive her?”

  “God,” I moaned loudly. “Way too Freudian—too Freudian by half!”

  “Just throwing it out there.”

  “Well,” I said, sitting up a little, gaining strength, “here are my several responses in no particular order: I quit being an academic because I didn’t like it; I think it’s impossible for me to be objective about my own life, by definition; and I’m not really so much a Freudian as I am a Jungian. And, add to that, the woman is real! She’s not a manifestation of anything. She’s a walking, talking time bomb. Eventually she’s going to explode, and we’re in her broadcast radius. That’s what I’m worried about—not my mother, not my past, not my academic career.”

  She appeared to be unaffected by my vehemence. “Just tossing it out there,” she repeated.

  “You’ll at least admit that the boy is real,” I prompted.

  “I’ll admit that I saw him,” she answered. “Whether or not that makes him real is really a trickier ticket.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I growled.

  “Why did you stop?” she shot back. “Why did you stop your so-called academic career?”

  I settled back onto the sofa. “How much do you know about it?”

  “You were the head of your own folklore program,” she said, “and then you quit and came back up to Blue Mountain, which was, as far as I’ve been able to determine from my investigations, the only place on earth that you didn’t want to be.”

  “Well.” I folded my arms across my chest and stared up at the ceiling. “In the first place, the university shut down my program, because it was the general belief that folklore was an increasingly irrelevant course of study at the beginning of this new century. I could have continued teaching a few folklore courses and mythological literature in the English Department.”

  “But you didn’t,” she said, “or, I mean, you chose not to.”

  “I chose not to because I disagreed with the concept,” I said. “My contention was that folklore and mythology are foundational aspects of our culture. To ignore them is to ignore the basis of all societies, all psychologies, all religions.”

  “So, instead of staying and fighting for that proposition,” she said, “you chose to quit your job and come back to the home you had escaped—and I use that word deliberately. You hated growing up here.”

  “I did not hate growing up here,” I corrected her. “I hated aspects of my life here, most of them having to do with my parents, specifically my mot
her.”

  “And here we are back to your mother again,” she said, a little amused. “I’m not making these things up, then.”

  “No,” I objected, “that’s not— this is very irritating, your constant— I also hated being so strange in this community. I thought that I would fit in better in a more urban environment, and I thought that my more intellectual observations would go down easier in an academic environment.”

  “And how did that work out?”

  I closed my eyes for a second. “Sometimes—some parts of it—it was great.”

  “So you left here, bound for college, when you were…?”

  “I left home when I was sixteen, the year I graduated high school.”

  “And you shot away from Blue Mountain like a cannonball,” she said, “that’s the way you’ve described it before.”

  “Yes.” I closed my eyes. “Skidmore was the only one there to say good-bye. He shook my hand and told me he’d never see me again. And I agreed with him. I was very glad to think it was true. I knew I would miss him, but the rest of the place? I sloughed it off like a snake sheds old skin. I jumped onto that train out of town, threw open the window; let the air blow away all the caked remnants of hearth and home. That moment might have been the happiest I’d ever known.”

  “Nice bit of melancholy,” she said, still amused, “but let’s return to your real reasons for leaving the halls of the academy.”

  “All right,” I acquiesced. “I believe the phrase I may have used in the past is: ‘hellish pit of flesh-eating vipers.’ It not only captures my perception of the university, but has the added delight of alliterative consonation.”

  “I don’t think that consonation is a word,” she insisted.

  “But you see what I mean,” I responded. “The sh sounds, the v and f and p sounds.”

  “Oh, it’s a nice turn of the phrase,” she admitted, “and very sort of poetic—in an academic sense.”

  “Oh, look who’s talking,” I snapped. “You don’t have a doctorate? You don’t run a department?”

  “Not anymore.” She sighed, and it was a singularly satisfied sound.