by Steve Vernon
Now things had changed, and the government tried to pretend that it knew better. Trucks rolled by regularly, like fat angry beetles, heavy and black and laden with cargo. They had forgotten the old ways, the old rituals. Paths grew over in old dead forests, and footsteps blew away in the dust, painted houses faded in the sun, and shadows learned to walk.
Davey had heard this, time and again, as his Daddy and Granddaddy would rant their old arguments back and forth like songs psalmed out in an empty church.
“Why can’t I have any friends over,” Davey would ask.
“Friends? What do you need friends for anyway? You’ve got your Daddy and your Granddaddy. Friends will only eat you out of house and home, take your time and your talk and whistle it to the winds. Stay alone, stay strong. Sacrifices must be made. Your Daddy played alone when he was a boy. Your lack of playmates don’t hurt you any.”
Davey had heard it all before, and he would hear it again. There just wasn’t much else to listen to in the old house.
“Solitude builds character,” Daddy would say. “A man stands strongest alone. Just use your imagination you can build whatever playmates you need from the stuff floating between your ears.”
Daddy always spoke in rules and commandments, using his words like hard-edged bricks in a wall of perfect sensibility. Daddy was a man of character. Davey wasn’t sure what character was supposed to be, but he knew a heck of a lot of ways to build the stuff. Raking leaves and dead grass built your character. Washing the dishes built character. Carrying extra bags of groceries from the long black horse wagon built character. There were lots of ways to build the stuff.
It seemed to Davey that character must be the easiest and hardest of things to build. It was easy, because Daddy knew so darned many ways to build the stuff. Hard, because every one of Daddy’s character-building activities seemed to involve an awful lot of work.
Chopping firewood built character, stacking it even more so. Picking weeds and digging up roots built a whole whack of character. Skinning cats, and dragging the first born pig to the hecate stone, singing the meat into the tithe fires, that built mountains of character. Hauling up the Green Lodger and dancing the may-ropes before the burning harvest bonfires built character every year sure as sunrise followed set.
“Sacrifices must be made,” Granddaddy would say. “There are less of us old folk left every year, so we got to work even more harder than the rest.”
Davey figured he had way more character than a boy ever needed. If he built much more of the stuff he might die from an overload of character. He imagined himself being squashed down, like an ant under a thumb, flattened by his weight of hard-sacrificed-for character.
Daddy didn’t quite see things that way. “Burdens build strength,” Daddy would say. “Pain seasons a man like sun dried timber.”
A spider scuttled out across the floorboards. The old house was full of them. They bring good luck, Daddy always said, luck and money.
Davey squashed the spider beneath his truck wheel. It took some doing to catch the scuttling little blackness, but a quick u-turn, and a jig to the left cornered the little bugger. He rolled right over it with the small rubber wheels of his favorite yellow truck, hearing the bug squish like an over ripe blackberry, grinding it into the cracks of the floorboards.
“Sacrifices must be made,” Davey whispered. “Meat brings meat.”
The cricket squeaked its lonely song.
And then Davey wept, remembering the day his mother had walked from the house and had stood in the road before the oncoming truck. The growl of the heavy rubber treads over hard tarred gravel. The hollow flat sound the wheels made as they rolled over her body.
He stared through tears at the spider, as the bit of crushed meat disappeared into the hungry pine boards.
Crickets and spiders - both meant money. Gold, Granddaddy said.
Spiders meant rain, too. Rain could be bad luck when Davey wanted to go swimming, but it was good luck when Daddy wanted Davey to do yard work, and the best luck of all when it came to growing things.
Everything had two sides and two edges, just like Grandpa’s flensing knife. Two edges, to cut both ways. Good, bad, it didn’t matter.
The cricket kept squeaking, down in the floorboards.
Daddy sometimes blamed it on squeaky floorboards when his bum was blowing bean farts. “Hmm,” He’d say. “Must have stepped on a duck. Have to oil those floorboards for sure tomorrow morning.”
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Davey had heard squeaking like that once in Momma and Daddy’s bedroom, back before Momma had walked into the truck and stopped moving. Squeak a squeak a squeak, like somebody was jumping on the bed, and bang-bang like someone knocking on a door. When Davey opened the bedroom door to see who was knocking he saw his daddy’s legs shimmed between Momma’s legs, with the bed head banging like a big flat hand against the wall, and then his Daddy rose up like a magic dark giant, roaring at Davey and growing out big punishing arms, and Davey had ran for it, diving into the shadows.
Davey’s Daddy could do that, could change into a giant, but he didn’t do that too often. It was a trick he saved for special times, like when Davey had taken his saw and tried to cut his breakfast chair legs even so that the chair wouldn’t wobble.
He’d never liked that wobble. Tipping back and forth, in between, like a teeter totter.
Daddy had caught him at it and had changed into a giant and dragged Davey down into the basement, into the shadows, and then he’d given Davey a brand new stripe on his back with his belt, but Daddy didn’t do that too often, giving stripes or giant changing. Like the magic only worked at certain times. That was something Daddy explained a long time ago to Davey.
“There are seasons in a man’s life,” Daddy had said. “There are times when everything just makes sense. Times when you have to laugh, or just let your eyes rain tears down into the dirt. Times when you grin over meat, and times when you have to let it all go. Times when you tithe, and times when you reap. Times when the house is hungry, and times when it sleeps.”
Davey could see his Daddy on the television screen of his imagination, standing there as tall as an unharvested tree, the sleeve of his left arm pinned over the stump like a folded flag.
Daddy used to have both of his arms, back when Momma used to walk. He’d pick Davey up like a sack of seed and toss him high up into the air. Then he’d made a special sacrifice. He’d burned the arm in the tithe fires, trying to barter Momma back.
“It was too much to ask,” Daddy had said. “Or maybe I just didn’t ask it right.”
The cricket kept on squeaking. It sounded kind of scary and restful, like an alarm clock getting set to ring. Like native drums in those old Tarzan movies beating out loud and steady. Trouble was brewing, just like a tea kettle, getting ready to scream.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Something was coming.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
There was trouble in the wind.
Davey stood up. He took a single step. The floorboard squeaked. Long and low like a door squeaking open. Like in one of those old black and white horror movies with Vincent Price.
Sqeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaakkk.
“Take me,” Davey whispered. “Take all of me. Give her back.”
But the house wasn’t that hungry today.
Davey knelt down. He could see the cricket now, nestled in a loose joint between two boards. He covered the cricket and the crack with one of his left hand fingers. He pushed the razor blade down, working it into the finger, just above the knuckle bone.
Davey bit his scream off in a tight hard grin, the tears turning to shards of glass in his eyes and slicing at his vision. The razor blade worked down through the joint, almost all by itself, severing the finger and sliding into the cricket’s spine. The cricket split wide open, and black juices shot out, and the cricket screamed.
Davey kept pushing. The meat of the cricket was tougher than it should have been. The cricket
kept screaming, high and light like a tea kettle. Davey kept pushing down, biting his own pain, teething furrows in his lower lip, the meat growing soft and red and wet.
The razor blade worked a little deeper, coming up against the bone of the floorboards.
Davey picked up the small sacrifice.
It was slippery and wet, and something in its touch made him cry.
He pinched off the bleeding in the hem of his shirt.
He knew what his Daddy would say. His Daddy would tell him that he should take the finger up to burn in the tithe fires, so that a little more of Momma would come back. Daddy had brought the arm, and Grandaddy the legs, and the cats and lambs and dogs had filled in the many other spaces.
But Davey swore he’d keep the finger tucked in his pocket like a marble for the rolling. He would hang onto it until he could put the very last piece in.
SILENT STONES
It was one of those natural cathedrals in the woods where you could hear the crickets and peepers and leaves gossiping with the wind. A thicket of alder clustered around the clearing like onlookers at an accident scene. A slumber of cool green ferns and dew-fattened moss masked the dirt with an inviting patch quilt.
I took my boots off. I wanted to make no impression on the dirt, no sign that I had been there, no trace of my existence. The moss felt comforting and welcome on my bare feet. It gave the whole clearing a soft muted quality and helped me find the gentle grey amnesia I yearned for. I could sleep on moss like that, better than any hotel mattress.
I was an expert in the field of hotel mattresses these days. Six weeks ago I’d come home to an empty house, everything swept away but a few random dust bunnies and a popped brown button lying on the faded green rectangle of carpet where my marriage bed had once stood. Her brother’s cube van had swallowed everything. She was gone. She left the marriage certificate and a broken book of matches. I used the matches on the certificate and walked away, not even waiting to hear the red roaring sirens howling out.
It was over and I wanted to find out what came next.
The last six weeks I’d been wandering, hitching down the highways, grabbing the occasional Greyhound bus as the mood moved me, and spending a lot of time wondering why everything had disappeared. I told myself that sometimes life happens that way. Things up and vanish when you don’t expect them to go. Something was there and then it wasn’t.
I learned to live on the road, spending nights in funky little motels and hotels along my path of travelling the roadway. Not the Travel Lodges or the Holiday Inns, but the flea pits and mom and pop dives that hunkered down on the highways to nowhere worth mentioning. I kept expecting to meet Norman Bates and be massacred in a spectacularly bloody fashion and maybe even dumped in a nearby swamp. No one would find me. No one would remember me. Maybe I’d like it that way.
Later on, as my money situation looked a little more dubious, I invested in a tent and a backpack and a sleeping bag. I leaned south, figuring that the good weather and a fool’s luck would see to my needs.
I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular, you understand. I was just sort of following the declining law of entropy, allowing my road to dwindle down into a vanishing point, at which I’d either figure out how to start over or maybe just evaporate into pointlessness.
I’d left a job and the memory of a marriage that just hadn’t worked out. I would look up at night and the stars seemed to echo that smile that I’d fallen in love with, that smile that broke my heart. Sometimes I wanted to climb up into that sky and find the gift of amnesia and the hope of possible extinction in those dark quiet spaces that stretched between the stars.
This is what happened to the dinosaurs, I think. It wasn’t comets and it wasn’t global warming. They died of loneliness and a lack of photo albums. Trees fell and no one heard them. Memories scattered and blew like leaves in the wind.
I lived on canned beans, because they were cheap and easy to prepare. The fibre kept me regular and the gas warmed my tent. My newfound flatulence seemed a kind of banal poetry, a tuba solo heard by none that drifted upwards into the night. It didn’t matter if I stank up my sleeping bag. There was no one here to share it with. Besides, I liked beans.
Some nights I’d lay in my sleeping bag listening to a coyote howl or the screech owls shriek. One night I heard a bear rummaging around my campfire ashes. and I thought about heading back anywhere north of this damn fool place. Then in the morning I checked my arms and legs and found myself still basically intact and un-bear-eaten.
Why change?
It was a kind of self-imposed disintegration; a slow grey unproductive exile. Maybe I’d just wander until I came to the South Pole. Maybe I could talk to the penguins, or meet Morgan Freeman. I followed no road map. No sextant or compasses were my guides. I trusted my feet and learned nothing.
And then I found here.
Here is a funny place, isn’t it? Here is wherever you find yourself. Here is where your feet are. Here is what you’re looking at. Walk as far as your feet will carry you and you’ll find yourself right back here.
Right now, here was one of those quiet spots you find in the woods when you’re wandering alone. A hush of trees clumped around a bit of a clearing as if the woods had yawned too hard and swallowed themselves. Maybe no one else in the world has had ever seen this spot. Maybe a whole safari of badge-hunting Boy Scouts just trooped through here five minutes ago, but if they did they were already somewhere else.
Of course somebody had been here before. There were stones to witness their passing; ancient grey tombstones, probably centuries old. Or perhaps they were some sort of unambitious Stonehenge, reared up by a mystical Masonic tribe of midgets.
If gravestones, I wondered how old they were. How old could they be? How long had men lived on this world? Columbus found us in 1492. I remembered that from school days. I knelt and looked at the stones, rubbed clear beyond the reach of any pencil-rubbing technique known to Ticonderoga. How old were these stones? How long had they rested here? Who slept beneath them, and who had tucked these anonymous bodies into their final goodnight camping ground?
It was far quieter and more desperate than any ghost town imaginable. These stones, so far from any sign of life, clustered in the shadows of this quiet little mossy hollow like a fungal fairy ring.
I knelt down in the moss, peering at the mute granite placards before me. I could not see a trace or shadow of identity. The history of this forgotten little graveyard was obscured beyond recollection. I envied it. It looked heavenly to me. So peaceful and so unremembered; each stone seemed to smile up at me.
I pushed my hands down deep into the moss, half expecting to feel someone’s hands reaching up towards me from out of the ground. That was impossible, of course. Beat a thousand voodoo drums and shout a million Hail Mary’s and it remained an exercise in sheer futility. Any bodies buried here so long ago had surrendered any hope of re-composition. Rot and decay had eaten them down into nothing more than a cradle /grave /hole stacked full of accumulated belly button lint.
I smiled at the thought, reaching down into the moss. It was deeper than I could have imagined. I thought of quicksand and all of those old scratchy black and white Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies I had watched in my childhood. I couldn’t remember a thing about them, beyond the sight of a fat man in a loincloth swinging through the trees.
And then I kept on sinking. I was elbow deep and up to my knees in the cool forest moss. A part of me panicked, kicking and screaming. No one could hear me scream. I felt the comfort of quilts, eiderdown and cotton batting packed around my mouth and ears and eyes. All of my panicked shouts were swallowed up by the muting walls of the calm blank tombstones.
The last thing I thought of was my ex-wife’s smile, and I grinned wistfully as I sank, remembering how I’d once fallen in love with that smile, and I was surprised that I couldn’t even remember the colour of her eyes. I sank deeper into the dark moss, and then there was nothing, like being swallowed by the sound of
a seashell pressed tightly against your ear.
I looked up one last time. The stones grinned high above me, and I felt another newborn stone push upwards past me to mark my vanishing passing . I tasted dirt and nothing and the ground about me made a sour rumbling sound like a fat man growling happily over a plate of beans.
Everything went silent and I finally…
BEAT WELL
Let's play a trick...
DONTCALLME...
on old punkinhead.
THAT.
nyah nyah punkinhead
YOU BROKE IT.
nyah nyah pun...
I GOT YOU NOW.
letgoletgoletgo
I'LL SHOW YOU A TRICK, I'll SHOW YOU
* * *
(I remember poppy, he showed me how, he showed me first. First you slice opent the top. Dig out the pulp, thank god no seeds. Gouge out eyes, nose, and mouth. There. Oh. One more thing. There. Jack o' lanterns.)
* * *
Old John lived way up on Carpenter's Hill, so it wasn't until morning when they found them. Propped against old John's freshly whitewashed fence, staring sightlessly down upon the town below. The town where they had lived. The three boys still wore the costumes their folks bought at the five and dime. Shattered upon the ground was the remains of a broken jackolantern. The boys were dead. Hidden within the skull of each boy was a tiny candle, flickering quietly, where once only childish dreams burned. They found old John in the kitchen, making pumpkin pie.
SOMETHING AFTER SATURDAY
I think it’s Sunday, or at least the tattered chunk of calendar that Daddy tacked up on my bedroom wall says it is. I’m writing this down because old Ben the plow horse kicked me today and Daddy says I’m going to be in bed for a while and I need to fret the time away.
I guess old Ben kicked me because I was standing where I shouldn’t have been, right behind his right behind. I can still see his hoof, about as wide as Daddy’s big old manure shovel heading at me quicker than I can think about it. I tried to duck, but I guess some things are just too big and strong to get away from.