by Steve Vernon
Granny Jill must have tossed all night.
It sounded so loud from her room like she was moving furniture. Once he even heard her moan, long and low and shuddersome, like somebody was drawing a hunting knife in and out of her body.
The next morning there was cold oatmeal for breakfast. There were lumps in it, like bad wallpaper paste, and it tasted funny. Timmy tried to peanut butter himself a slice of bread, but Granny Jill said “No, that’s for somebody else.”
Timmy knew that she was going to give the bread to the tumblebug man.
He ran to the cellar and got a bucket of paint.
He cracked it open and he stirred it like his Granddad taught him.
“That fence needs painting,” he told Granny Jill. “It’s time I got to it.”
Timmy had heard his Granddad use that same phrase time and again, when the roof needed patching or the grass needed cutting, or the branches of the big swamp oak wanted pruning. He used these words now like a magic charm, and it seemed to work. Granny Jill paid him no mind, as he walked through the kitchen with a brush and a bucket of green paint.
But the gatepost drank the paint just as quickly as it had drunk Timmy’s blood. The bristles come off the brush like the brush was over a hundred years old and it drank them too.
“Thirsty old writing, isn’t it?” there came a voice directly from behind Timmy’s left ear.
It was the tumblebug man, standing there and shadowing over Timmy like a mountain that had learned to walk.
“It ought to be thirsty. That there writing has been waiting a long time. Writing like that there was old and forgotten way back when God was still figuring how to count to seven.”
He leaned a little closer.
“Do you know what I am going to do to your granny, boy?”
He started to whisper. Low and wet and hot, pouring the words into Timmy’s ear, and all Timmy could do was stand there and listen, having no more say in the matter than a pinned caterpillar. He kept on staring at the writing on the gatepost. He kept on watching it move and twist like a bundle of snakes.
A small horde of tumblebugs crawled across the writing, dancing like a tangle of scuttling waltzers.
Then the tumblebug man went to the house and walked straight in without bothering to knock.
Timmy waited in the shadows of the lilac grotto. When he felt strong enough he walked to the porch. He stood there for a very long time, like the house wasn’t his anymore. He felt the heat of the sun upon the planked porch. Felt the soles of his shoes sticking to the ancient paint.
Then he reached out for the door knob. The brass and glass felt hot to his touch. It felt like it would brand him if he wasn’t quick and careful.
He pushed the door open.
It swung on its hinges like a forgotten wish.
Then he walked into the front hall. He walked down the hall and past the parlor and up the stairs.
He knew where they’d be.
He knew they were in Granny Jill’s bedroom.
He stared at the bedroom door, not daring to touch it. The marks were there too, moving like reflected light. Dancing like fireflies over the wood. Timmy heard the moans coming from the behind the door. They were the kind of moans he’d heard not a few years before his Granddad passed away. Only these moans sounded dirtier, like they had been spoiled and tainted with something older and fouler than sin itself.
The door swung open.
The tumblebug man stood there, nakeder than Adam. Those marks, that writing was scrawled in something darker than ink, all across his body, letters squashed so close they looked like scales on a snake.
Only they were moving. Scuttling and crawling all across his body.
“I get done with her, I’ll come for you,” the tumblebug man said.
Timmy ran, leaving Granny Jill there, alone with the tumblebug man, but not before he caught a look of Granny Jill lying in the bed naked, stringlets and gobs of gray moldy slime, dangling down from her hair and mouth. She looked like she was dead and fished out of a swamp, only Timmy could see she was breathing.
Timmy waited until the moon hung its hat on the highest skyhook it could find, and then he slunk back into the house.
He felt bad for leaving Granny Jill like he’d did, but there wasn’t anything he could have done.
He tiptoed up the staircase, eyes glued on the bedroom door like moths to fire. Before he did anything, he had to make certain sure Granny Jill was okay.
She wasn’t anywhere near okay. She just lay there, making a wet whistling breathing sound, naked and gray and greasy cold like a chunk of dropped bacon. The mold and slime had grown across her, forming the marks that the tumblebug man had carved into the gatepost. Hooks and scrawls warped across her ribs, looked like they’d been rooted and gored into her flesh, and through it all the tumblebugs crawled, scuttering dirtily about in her navel and her mouth and her ears, and some spots Timmy didn’t want to look too close at.
“Granny Jill?” Timmy called.
She opened her mouth like she might speak, but all that come out was the kind of moan a dying shadow might make, kind of moan made you think of thirsty dirt, and worms twisting on a hook. Dark sounds hid behind that moan. Timmy felt she was saying whatever words or signs the tumblebug man had carved on her soul.
Timmy went to the closet and he laid Granddad’s old hunting jacket over Granny Jill. Then he went to her jewelry box and he found Granddad’s old pocket watch. He wound the pocket watch and he set it by her bed, and alongside the watch he placed the standup photo he’d got from school last year.
That was all.
He had done all he could for her.
Next he went downstairs to the basement workshop.
He knew just what he was looking for.
He was looking for Granddad’s bucksaw.
He picked the bucksaw up. He felt the heft of it, like a Cree Indian hefting a hunting bow.
There was a soft tattery blue glow in the corner of the workroom. Timmy saw his Granddad, standing there in the shadows, for half an instant, coaxing him onwards, like he knew what the boy was up to.
It was time to deal with the tumblebug man.
Timmy knew just where to find him. He knew there was only one place that was low enough for a man like that to linger. He knew that there was only place where he might find welcome.
The hobo jungle, Granddad used to call it. The place where the travelling men would live and stay. The men from the trains, and the drifters and the gamblers and the layabouts. Granddad warned Timmy never to go down there. There was things could happen to a boy who wandered too close to the hobo jungle.
“Men who live too long out of doors get lonely for strange things,” Granddad said. “It ain’t right nor safe for a boy to stray too close to the hobo jungle.”
That’s where the tumblebug man would hide. That’s where he would go. And that was where Timmy had to go too.
But first he had to deal with the gatepost.
He carried the bucksaw upstairs.
Out the door and down the stone walkway his Granddad painted. Each one of those stones glowed in a soft warm greenish sort of a glow, like there was magic in each of them.
The gatepost never looked so large, standing there like a long white worm. There wasn’t a trace of the paint Timmy had covered it in. Every drop of that paint was soaked clear up.
Timmy knelt at the gatepost. The writing on the post was moving, twisting like it wanted to bite him again.
He dug the saw into the wood, and the gatepost pulled away. Timmy leaned into it, digging the teeth into the gatepost, back, forth, until the saw was singing sweet and clear through the wood. The gatepost throbbed, like it was hurting. It bound the saw, the fibers of the wood gritting down like they were trying to eat the blade. The hooks and the curls of the writing leeched out, catching at Timmy’s hands and arms, stinging and burning where it touched him.
Then he noticed how the lilac trees had leaned out and where kind of catching
at the gatepost, like they were holding it still for him to cut.
Timmy started to yell.
The wood was eating him, sucking him in, pulling him under. There were tumblebugs all around it, big as rats.
He kept yelling, focusing all of his hate and his love behind that yell, making that yell a motor to move that saw lightning fast, deeper, deeper, deeper, until the gatepost chunked to the ground.
It lay there like a fallen beast. Timmy was afraid to touch it.
He wrapped his coat around the post, picking it up like it might explode.
Then he ran for the woods. He ran for the woods, down to the hobo jungle, down to the railroad tracks.
He found the tumblebug man sitting by the fire. His skin hung all loose, like he was relaxing. He had a big hungry mouth with flabby liar lips, and he was sitting in front of a large rusty oil barrel. There was a fire blazing in that barrel, and in the shadows Timmy could see all the other hoboes are sitting a little ways away from the fire, like they’re afraid of getting too close.
“You found me, didn’t you?”
Timmy just stood there, afraid to move.
“Come on in to the fire,” the tumblebug man said. “It’ll keep you warm.”
Timmy didn’t budge. He was as close as he wanted to get. Close enough to see what was burning in that oil barrel. Not wood, but bones. Looked like human bones.
“I burned your mom and dad, Timmy. I burned your Granddad too,” his voice was something that sounded like a snake crawling through dead wet leaves. “I’m burning your Granny Jill, and when I’m done with her I’ll come for you. I got writing all ready to carve on that big old lilac bush you hide in.”
The railroad tracks were flexing and breathing, like they were trying to rip themselves from out of the dirt and sometimes they looked like a fence and sometimes they looked like a cage; and the tumblebugs were as big as dogs and chittling and rattling and dancing about like their feet were on fire.
And then the tumblebug man lunged at Timmy, streaming across the dirt like there was a rope attached to him, his big mouth and nose wide open, and it looks like he was sucking up the earth and the sound that came from his mouth sounded a lot like Timmy screaming, only just before he got too close Timmy yanked the gatepost from under his coat and heaved it up into the fire barrel.
The barrel started simmering and cooking and heaving and then all at once it exploded like a dozen cannons shooting themselves, and the night wind was alive with a thousand unpronounceable words, screaming and crawling across the sky like a feast of burning tumblebugs.
That’s where they found Timmy the next morning. The sheriff and a dozen townsfolk found him lying in the heart of the hobo jungle. Six dead mean, and more roasted tumblebugs then they could count.
Now there are an awful lot of folks who believe that Timmy was abused by a wandering hobo, and there are some that believe he crawled there alone, but most folks just don’t know what to believe, and in time the whole town did its best to bury the secret with the bodies of those half dozen hobos who’d been caught in the blast..
Granny Jill had recovered completely, although her hair never again achieved its old sheen, graying out like dust on a broken blackboard. She was worried sick, but when she saw what Timmy had done to her gatepost she whipped him with his Granddad’s belt, but it was more like she was trying to whip something out of herself.
That was the hurt of it.
The belt buckle left a kind of scar that kind of looked like the mark the tumblebug man left on the post. Timmy carried that mark until he became an old man, and the years crept on and at nights he could hear the scar talking like it was getting set to crawl.
FIDDLELEGS
Daddy lit the tithe-fires, smoky blue and gray. The house stank like burning pork chops. The foundations creaked and groaned like fat Mr. Plackard at last summer’s blueberry pie-eating contest, his suspenders stretched and creaking like they were getting ready to snap.
Davey knelt in the living room, playing with his cars and trucks and his Sword in the Stone jigsaw puzzle, listening to a lonely cricket squeaking out a song. The cricket spoke from somewhere unseen, somewhere underneath in the darkness, between the cracks of the floorboards and the hidden rib beam rafters.
There was always something moving down under the floorboards of the house, especially when Daddy lit the tithe-fires. It was like the house was hungry for the heat. Sometimes Davey heard the house shudder, like there was something inside that scared it; something that crawled in the dark below the basement, creeping in the cracks of the stone foundation.
Davey looked at his puzzle. He knew there was a piece missing. There always was. Granddaddy had been up to his old tricks, pocketing the missing piece, so that just as Davey was about to complete the puzzle, Granddaddy could roll into the living room with the very last piece.
Davey heard the cricket, dragging its legs together. Daddy called it fiddling. The cricket is fiddling, he’d say. It means there’d be gold coming into the house. Davey didn’t mind the fiddling. It kept him company.
Of course, Granddaddy would have clacked his teeth and said the cricket was fiddling because it wanted some women flesh to fiddle with. Then he’d snigger that low wet Granddaddy laugh of his that always made Davey a little scared to be around his Granddaddy for long.
It was mostly Granddaddy’s wheels that frightened Davey. The wheels on his big, high-backed wicker chair that he squeaked around the house in; the wheels that left tracks on the wooden floorboards. They looked like large snail trails, all dark and smelly. No matter how much Davey coated that big fat axle with lard and beeswax, Granddaddy’s old wheelchair still squeaked and creaked like it was rolling over a road paved with baby mice and dead frogs.
The cricket kept making its noise. It didn’t sound like fiddling to Davey. There was something too meaty and greedy in the sound. It sounded like Granddaddy used to sound when he would clack his false teeth together and gum his lips, while Daddy carved up the Thanksgiving turkey.
“Bones and meat,” Granddaddy would always say. “Good gods, let’s eat.”
Granddaddy always wanted the drumsticks. He swore that if he ate enough of them, he’d grow back his legs.
“Like needs like,” he would always say. “Sacrifices must be made.”
Davey sat there and listened to the cricket sing. The aluminum blinds painted prison bars across the wooden slats of the living room floor. It looked like a giant crossword puzzle, with the floorboards running one way and the blind shadow-stripes running the other. Davey ran his trucks and toys along the floorboards and the shadow-stripes, following the road formed by the scattering of jigsaw puzzle pieces; crashing trucks and cars and airplanes, bodies flying, meat burning. He liked imagining crashed trucks.
He thought he heard the rolling of wheels and he shuddered, but it was only the wind rattling up against the shingles. He grinned and swallowed, something hard going down. It was easy to be scared when you were all alone, especially in this room. There were corners of the room that never learned how to light. Corners, where the shadows grew like mildew moss and soft dark knives, like the holes inside Daddy’s blue-black razor blades.
Davey looked at the razor blade in his own hand. He’d stolen it from Daddy’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Between the green bottle potions and the black tubed ointments, where Daddy kept the little stack of razor blades stuck together by invisible string. Davey had taped one side of the blade off with a slice of Daddy’s black electrical tape, but the blade still bit him when he used it. He worked it across the floorboards, making small hex signs in the boot polished wood.
There used to be dances here, back when Momma still walked. Daddy used to bring in a fiddler and old Jed Harkins from up the holler would pluck his guitar, and sometimes a long skinny black man in a stained white shirt and a tall black top hat would shake a tambourine and blow big puffs of smoke from a fat smelly cigar. Momma would shake and dance and Daddy would step with her, guiding her about the flo
orboards, like a large man guiding the doll of a child across a patch of treacherous ground.
Davey looked out of the window. It was too hot to play outside. It was hot enough to melt you, right down to your bones. It would have been all right if Davey had been out by the swim pond, but the swim pond was a long hot walk away from the house, and he just didn't feel like walking that far today and certainly not crossing the road.
Sometimes he didn’t mind the hot summer walk. He liked to imagine he was on patrol with the Foreign Legion. One by one his brave comrades would fall to the heat. Sometimes he’d drag and carry one of them, half dead, half alive, across the burning Sahara mirage. Sometimes he’d leave them behind, or cook them up in a great imaginary stew pot, if he was that hungry.
Sacrifices must be made.
That’s what Daddy always said, every time the going got a little harder. Every time there was one more slice of bill mail posted in the tin mailbox. Every time the crops grew a little more poorly. Sacrifices must be made. Like the chess game Daddy played with Granddaddy; the white and the black moving against each other.
Daddy taught Davey how to play as well, but Davey never learned to like it. It was way too hard, the rules too far beyond his understanding. Davey would take two or three of his Daddy’s pawns, really fast, maybe one of Daddy’s horse pieces, and then Daddy would move a piece and say, "Checkmate,” staring at Davey with those great light swallowing eyes of his and Davey would look down at the floor and his Granddaddy would laugh that wet creaky giggle.
Davey always played alone. There just weren’t any kids nearby, on this side of the road. That’s what came from living so far from the town, his Daddy said, but the land and the house had been in the family for longer than most folks could remember.
“It’s our burden, our blessing, and our cross to bear,” Daddy always said.
They used to have men to work the land, Granddaddy said. Slaves and chains and horses who would do what you told them to. It was a better time, the blacks in the fields moving like slow well-trained harvest ants, and the white men sitting in the shade of the old hungry house, rocking on squeaky willow rocking chairs.