In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  (young woman)

  but a grown adult on the Channel 3 news, standing beside a map displaying thick, thick clouds hovering over an outline of Virginia and rubbing her compass. Telling everyone the cold was coming and the snow with it, but neither of those really mattered. It’s the wind y’all need to watch, Marshall could hear her say, because it’s gonna blow, and you better hold tight to the ones you love.

  Allie finished with a report on the wind gauge outside her bedroom window, telling Marshall she and Sam didn’t think a ten was bad at all. She squirmed as another shock of pain rushed through her deep places.

  “Tummy okay?” Marshall asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “Did you . . . you know. In the bathroom? Before we left?”

  Allie winced at the memory of taking that stupid old bag (which, coincidentally enough, had been delivered by The Stupid Old Bag) into the bathroom and opening one of the packages. Turning the pad over in her hands. Trying to remember which way it went. Having to sit on the toilet and fish the messy one from her underwear before wrapping it up in half a roll of toilet paper so her daddy wouldn’t see. “I don’t really care to speak on what I did in the bathroom, Daddy. It was bad enough having to do it.”

  Marshall looked back through the windshield. The silence that followed was broken not by Sam, but by the sound of Life Savers being crunched. Marshall wished for a drink and the dark curtain it turned down over his life, making everything seem smaller and farther away.

  Cornfields and woods yielded to the manicured lawns and still-empty homes at the edge of town. Marshall turned left at the sign and eased through the iron gates. Much of Oak Lawn still bore the scars of what had happened. Allie had always considered Oak Lawn a happy cemetery before. Now many of the aged oaks and magnolias that had guarded the gravestones were reduced to splintered stumps. Many more had simply been uprooted and flung away, never to be seen again. Only a few remained, lonely and whole. It was the trees that had gone untouched that angered Allie most. Sometimes she dreamed of cutting those survivors down and using them as kindling for the fireplace. In her darkest heart, Allie thought it would have been better if everything and everybody had been taken. That would have at least been fair.

  The truck weaved along the slender lane that snaked its way among rows of the numbered dead and stopped at the foot of a knoll. A sudden wind whipped against the driver’s side door, shaking both the truck and Allie. Sam yelped and crowded close.

  “Ready?” Marshall asked.

  Allie’s reply was both immediate and the same as it had been all the times before: “I’d rather not, sir, seeing as how that ain’t her over there.”

  And just as he had all the times before, Marshall smiled and said, “I think you should try. You might find you feel better after.”

  “You don’t ever feel better after.”

  Marshall looked down, nodding again. Allie shook her head. That was all her daddy ever did nowadays. Nodded. It was like someone he couldn’t see kept punching him in the face, and he was just trying to stay upright.

  “There’s value in getting things off your heart and out in the open,” he said.

  Allie sank deeper into the seat. Her right hand found the compass on her left wrist. “Ain’t got nothing on my heart needing let off,” she said. “What’s in there’s just stuff worth hanging on to.” Then, under her breath, “No matter what other folk think.”

  “Sure?”

  Allie said the one thing she thought would put the matter to rest, at least for this visit: “My stomach hurts.”

  Marshall glanced down the row of stones and (of course) nodded. “All right, then. I’ll leave the truck running. Getting cold out here.”

  “It’s gonna blow.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” he promised. “Soon as we get some supper in us. Deal?”

  Allie didn’t say. Marshall leaned over Sam and pecked her between the pigtails, then gathered the flowers from the seat. Cold wind enveloped the inside of the truck when he opened the door. Allie’s eyes bulged. Her hand pressed down over the compass. Marshall offered a quick thumbs-up that made Sam bark and Allie turn her head.

  She looked only when her daddy’s back was to the side window. Marshall walked hunched over against the increasing weather, past a collection of headstones and marbled crosses that stretched back generations. Here and there, tiny flags flapped—stars and bars for those who’d fallen from Yorktown and Normandy to Khe Sanh and Helmand province, the battle flag of the Confederacy for those who’d succumbed to what many in Mattingly still referred to as the War of Northern Aggression. The banners were faded and their edges frayed, barely clinging to the cold earth.

  Midway down the row rested a headstone that had required no righting after the tornado struck on Carnival Day five hundred and forty-three days past. In many ways, that fury had placed the marker there. Fifty-seven similar headstones could be found spread out over the twelve acres of gray grass and rolling hills called Oak Lawn. That’s how many souls had been taken that day. And of those fifty-eight, the wind had kept only one.

  Allie watched as Marshall set the flowers into a metal vase built into the side of the marker, removing the withering bouquet he’d placed there a week before. Mary Granderson’s name was carved into the center of the stone, along with September 21, 1974—the day she’d entered the world. The day she’d left stood blank. Allie refused to let her daddy have the date of Carnival Day 2012 carved there, nor any other. And though she believed Marshall Granderson had made a great many poor choices since her momma left, he’d shown right judgment with that. Allie had done more than enough in allowing a funeral service for one pink tennis shoe.

  Allie pushed her checkered scarf to the side and eased up the left sleeve of her coat. The plastic bubble over the compass was scratched and dented. A thin layer of fog—likely from washing her hands after that terrible business in the bathroom—partially hid the black needle inside. A thick circle of cardboard lay beneath, curled and moldy. The once-dark letters marking the cardinal points had long faded, but Allie had no need to see them. The compass had never actually worked. Really, an old thing your momma won from some carny game couldn’t be held up as a bastion of reliability. The needle had swung free at first but never really pointed anywhere, then had frozen altogether sometime after the tornado hit. It had been stuck ever since, pointing down.

  “Pointin’ southward, Samwise. I do believe there’s a sense of irony to that, don’t you?”

  Sam whined.

  “Daddy’s wrong, though, what he said to Miss Howard. Only false hope in our house ain’t mine. It’s his. That’s what he keeps in those bottles hidden in his closet. This here compass, though? Momma put this on me and said that’s how I’d find her that day. You remember that?” She looked at Sam. “No, ’course you don’t. You were just a little guy on a farm, way away from all that. But she did, Sam. That’s what Momma said.”

  She looked out the window to her father, all slouched over in front of that grave with his hands clasped in front of his work clothes, head down and face straining. His lips moved. Marshall always talked to that tombstone. Sometimes, if the weather was okay and if Allie didn’t start leaning on the horn, he’d stand there half an hour or more. Allie could never tell what he said, and he never volunteered. She thought maybe her father was just saying how much he missed her momma and how he had a hurt that wouldn’t go away, but maybe that’s fine because that hurt at least meant he was still alive. Or that their baby girl was growing up now, and that scared him because he had no idea how to train a baby girl up to be a woman.

  In fact it was all of those things and more that Marshall Granderson touched upon while standing all alone in the cold. Mary had always been the only one he could ever really talk to. Her and Grace, at any rate, though Marshall would not dare admit that, not to anyone and especially not standing in front of his wife’s grave. He looked to Allie (who looked away) and began speaking to the only thing of Mary Granderson’s the
wind had left behind, telling the pink tennis shoe buried inside the coffin that Allie hurt just as much as he did, and that was the thing that had crept between them. That pain was wide and tall, and neither of them could see around it to each other. He told the gravestone the reason Allie was so sad and scared was because she was just trying to keep believing. He said their little girl had been cleaved in two, part of Allie believing her momma was gone and the other part believing her momma was not gone forever, and sooner or later one half would grow strong enough to eat the other.

  “I don’t know what’ll come of it,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to do. What do I do, Mare?”

  The plot of ground didn’t answer. Allie believed it never would; her momma wasn’t in there at all. Yet Marshall remained there for a long while just in case, his feet set against the dead grass and the wind gathering around him. Tears fell hard against his cheeks. Allie watched until her daddy finally turned back. The only thing she said when he climbed back into the truck was to look out the windshield, where the first flakes of snow sailed in the breeze.

  5

  Supper was never much. Mary Granderson was (is, Allie was quick to amend) known to the people of Mattingly as a Good Woman—a vague term that combined many attributes in many ways, but in which knowing how much sugar to put in the iced tea and just when the rolls were baked through played a vital part. That responsibility had been passed to Allie since her mother left. By most accounts, and her own especially, she had failed that task miserably.

  Allie and Marshall had been visited by most of Mattingly’s residents in the weeks after Carnival Day. Most had arrived bearing the proper offerings for the grieving. Casseroles abounded, along with meat and vegetables and more pies than Marshall could count.

  Allie had near starved out of her refusal to eat any of it.

  Having all those people stop by just to cry on about how sad and awful Allie’s world had become was a horrible thing to endure. The cavalcade of preachers was worse. They rolled in one by one, making sure Allie and Marshall didn’t stray from the flock in light of what they termed “the unpleasantness.” Marshall showed them the door right away. When they appealed to Allie’s sensibilities by asserting there was no graver condition than being fallen away from the Lord, she merely asked them why the Lord had taken her momma away. Five hundred and forty-three days later, Allie had yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

  On that night—the night when everything that had ended would begin again—it was mac and cheese from a box with boiled hot dogs mixed in. The entire meal was eaten with the usual silence and in the usual presence of the empty plate, glass, and chair between Marshall and Allie. Marshall pushed away from the table sometime after, deeming the meal a masterpiece. Allie respected her father too much to entertain the thought of that praise being more for her effort than the final product. He never told Miss Howard any of the meals she brought over were masterpieces. Then again, Allie thought her daddy would likely praise Miss Grace’s cooking if he bothered to take the fork out of his mouth long enough to say so. The cold from the drive had left him near starved, but as Allie cleared the table, she saw half of her daddy’s food scooted to the side of his plate.

  “Some masterpiece,” she said.

  Much of Allie’s own meal had gone untouched as well, though for different reasons. Her stomach had started up again when they’d gotten back from town; the business she had to do in the bathroom again had taken care of what appetite she’d had left. She scraped both plates into Sam’s bowl. He sniffed and snorted and finally ate, no doubt cursing his dog’s life. Marshall excused himself, promising there was still plenty of time to care for the Nativity before company came. If Allie harbored any hope that her father would honor that pledge, it disappeared as soon as she heard his bedroom door close and his closet door open.

  The hard wind from outside and the clanging of the dishes in the sink drowned the sound of the arriving truck sometime later. All Allie heard was the front door opening and a slurred voice that called, “Marshall?”

  Sam reared up and ran, his long claws clacking as they searched for a grip on the kitchen linoleum. The deep bark he offered came more from the beast he believed himself to be than the pup he mostly was.

  Beyond the kitchen wall came a shrill laugh, followed by, “Marshall? You come on out here. Cujo looks hungry.”

  Allie dried her hands and her compass with a dish towel and poked her head around the corner. Bobby Barnes stood with his back near the front door, rubbing his beard with three soiled fingers. A beer can shook in his other hand. The trucker’s cap he always wore sat cocked on his greasy head, the front smeared with so many stains that whatever it advertised had long been erased. Flakes of snow dotted the brim and melted into brown streaks. His jeans were frayed and pocked with holes that teased the two pale, skinny legs beneath. Sam secured his position in the empty place where the living and dining rooms met. His mouth pulled back to reveal rows of sharp, white teeth.

  Bobby looked at Allie long enough to say, “Don’t you know manners, girl? You’re supposed’a keep hold of something like that when you get comp’ny.”

  Allie draped the dish towel over her shoulder. “It’s manners for company to knock instead of barging on in, too, Bobby Barnes.”

  She walked to Sam and laid a hand to his head. He hid his teeth. The growl remained.

  Bobby stayed in his place. “Where’s your pa?”

  “Back in his room.”

  “You ain’t gonna invite me in?”

  “I would,” Allie said. “Doubt if Samwise would, though. He’s the one you should probably mind. He might be small, but he’s brave.”

  Bobby smiled and rocked back on his heels, knocking himself against the back of the door. He pointed his beer at Allie. “That’s funny. You’re a funny girl.” He looked past them to the table beyond. “Cleanin’ up supper, I see. That empty plate ’n’ glass for me?”

  “It’s spoken for. Ain’t no food left, neither. Daddy ate it all. Said it was a masterpiece.”

  “Bet it was. I bet it was just that.” Bobby took a step forward. His eyes fell on Allie in that strange way they always did, like he was looking at her but trying to imagine something else. Sam leaned against his back legs and growled louder. Allie loved her dog for that, no matter if she wasn’t supposed to love him at all. “You doin’ well with what you been given, Allie Granderson. I’ll give you that. You’ll make a fine woman one day, as your momma was. I ever tell you that?”

  He had. And each time Bobby’s eyes got that same look in them as Allie’s daddy when Miss Howard brought over a roast or a plate of fried chicken. It was a hungry look, the gaze of a man who would gorge himself once he got the chance to eat. Bobby took another step forward and bumped against the Christmas tree.

  Allie was about to turn Sam loose, yell out that drunk old pervert probably tasted a lot better than mac and cheese from a box. But as those words came over her mouth, the bedroom door down the hall opened.

  There were times when Allie thought her father kept something more powerful than a few bottles hidden in his closet; he kept another him in there as well—someone who looked just like himself on the outside, but was mean and hurtful underneath. That way, when the Marshall Granderson who praised Allie’s meals and visited the empty hole at Oak Lawn grew weary of the mark God had left upon his family, he could retreat to that closet and let the other Marshall take his place. When Allie saw the tall shadow moving toward her from down the hall and those deep, glassy eyes, she knew which of him had walked out. A silent argument between two opposing voices broke out in her mind.

  Don’t think ill of him; that’s just Daddy drawing down his curtain after going to Oak Lawn, said one.

  Marshall Granderson’s got no qualms letting his daughter see that Other in him, but he’d do most anything to keep that away from Miss Grace, said the second.

  Allie normally took a keen interest in such inner conversations, paying close attention to which voice turne
d out the victor. That night she didn’t care which won. All that mattered was that someone looking like her daddy was coming and Bobby Barnes was backing away.

  “What the world’s all that yapping for, Allie?” Daddy asked. “You get hold a’that dog before I get hold a’you.”

  “Acted like it wanted to kill me, Marshall,” Bobby said. “Don’t you feed that mutt?”

  Marshall moved into the living room past Allie without so much as an excuse me. His knee bumped Sam’s head, and the dog jumped, confused. Allie reached down and rubbed Sam’s side.

  “Feed him what we got,” Marshall said. “Which ain’t as much as we used to have.”

  Bobby said, “I hear that. You ready? Car ain’t gonna fix itself, and I got a cold in me that needs warming.”

  “Come on, then.” Marshall took the flannel coat from the hook by the door. “Allie, you finish up the dishes. Get your homework done before you go to bed.”

  “Don’t have any, Daddy,” she said. “It’s Christmastime.”

  “You mind me now.” He looked at her and then at the glowing tree in front of the window as though it had sprouted up through the carpet.

  Bobby opened the door, letting in the light from the porch.

  “Daddy? You said we’d take care of her.”

  He turned. Those eyes, big and shiny.

  “It’s gonna blow,” Allie said.

  “Marshall.” Bobby took hold of his sleeve, pulling him. “What the world’s she talking about?”

  “Never mind,” Marshall told him. He turned to Allie. “We’ll get it. Bobby and me.” He stepped onto the porch as Bobby spoke again. Marshall’s answer wasn’t one he counted on Allie hearing, but the wind carried the words inside: “Just shut up. It don’t matter anyway.”