In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  No matter how hardened Allie’s world had become since her momma left, she greeted each sunrise with a dare of hope. Night frightened her just as much as everything else; nights with a strong wind frightened her especially. She held her eyes closed and smelled the heavy stench of dog breath close. A wet nose bumped her cheek. There was a smile hidden in Allie’s flinch as she pushed Sam away. The nose came back harder and wetter.

  “Get away from me, you old dog,” she said. “Go brush your canines.”

  Sam snorted as though offended and buried himself under the blankets. He tickled Allie with his tail, tempting her to peer out from behind her eyelids. She clenched them tighter—not yet.

  “You ain’t ever in a bad mood, are you, Samwise?” As far as Allie knew, that was the chief difference between them. It was also a point of existential agony. “Maybe that’s why Daddy brought you home. Maybe he thought you’d teach me to be how I used to be.”

  From beneath the blankets, a low yawn.

  “You be still now. Gotta see where I stand from where I lay.”

  There was a time (five hundred and forty-four days ago, in fact, back when it was Mary Granderson’s chore to wake Allie every morning rather than a smelly dog’s) when the first order of business for any day was prayer. Nothing extravagant or drawn out like the speeches Allie had to endure in church; a simple hello and thank-you was usually enough. Those prayers had continued on in vague fashion after Mary left, though by that point they were expressed more through Allie’s mouth than her heart.

  And then one morning—this was three days after the funeral and the night after Bobby’s first visit to the Grandersons’ shed, when he’d looked at Allie in that hungry way and asked what she’d done to anger the Almighty so much, because God had marked her—Allie had merely stared at the ceiling. Hello and thank you seemed the two worst things she could say. To her reckoning, God had gotten mad at everyone in Mattingly. He’d tried to kill them all and had murdered some and had taken her momma away. Allie hadn’t known what Bobby meant by a mark (nor did she still, except that it conjured an image of Cain wandering in the land of Nod, always looking back to see who was gaining on him). And yet God had marked her sure enough—Allie could feel it even then, that sensation of always being watched. To her reckoning, no one could be expected to have a thankful heart while in the possession of such information. Saying hello to the Lord on that long-ago morning felt about as smart as a deer abandoning a good hiding spot from the hunter chasing it. And so Allie had just stared at the ceiling with her eyes clenched, too afraid to utter a single word. To her mind, it was the best prayer she’d ever offered. It was also her last.

  Yet even the most worldly soul longs for the comfort of ritual, and Allie was no different. What came to replace her morning prayer was a kind of silent inventory covering everything from bodily functions to daily to-dos. Allie gave no thought as to why this small act had grown to contain such great importance, though she was smart enough to understand it was a way of reminding herself she was basically on her own now, and therefore responsible for herself. She still had her daddy, of course. But often the best Marshall Granderson could offer was the weaker half of himself, the one who needed his food cooked and his clothes washed and a stern reminder to put the toilet seat down. Sam at least offered a whole self and did not possess some inner evil twin. But that whole self was still nothing more than a beast incapable of knowing that a world in which he peed upon nearly everything could just as easily pee on him.

  That left Zach. Zach was enough.

  So Allie finally opened her eyes that morning to the very ceiling that had once caught her prayers and took an account of her life as it was. The date was December 20—five hundred and forty-four days since her momma left and five days until Christmas. Her stomach did not hurt so bad at all—a welcome surprise on a bodily level, even if deep down Allie knew it was never about the pain anyway, at least not really. She peeked under the covers. Thankfully, the only wet thing she felt was Sam’s nose. The light oozing through the slats of her blinds looked more yellow than white. That meant the snow was over. Already she could hear the steady drip of water down the gutter. The house was hers until evening. Bobby wouldn’t be coming over, nor did Allie expect Miss Howard. All things considered, the day bode well.

  “I wouldn’t trade it for a ham sammich.”

  She rolled to her side and turned the rod on the blinds, letting the outside in. Sam crawled from beneath the covers and laid his front paws on the sill. Allie saw his ears perk and his head cock to the right. His tail, which had come preset to speeds of fast or dangerous, hung limp between his legs. He whined.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Allie sat up and nudged him away. The world beyond lay bathed in a melting layer of white that served as a frame for what sat in the front yard. Allie tried to blink the sight away, certain it wasn’t there. It came back even brighter.

  A blue tarp had been draped over the place where the Nativity sat, pinned to the ground by a ring of heavy brown rocks. Its plastic skin rippled over a low breeze that sighed through the spaces between the rocks. That wind rose and was trapped, making the topmost part flutter like a banner.

  “Vandals,” Allie said. “Vandals hit.”

  She bolted from the bed and ran, stopping only to pull on her Chucks. Sam bounded after her and barked, wanting Allie to stop, to explain things. There was not enough time and too much anger. Allie made the turn into the living room too fast and slammed her shoulder into the wall, making the ceiling lights shake. She stumbled toward the door. There she stopped.

  Taped at her eye level to the back of the front door was a single sheet of paper bearing the quick, jagged scrawls of her father’s handwriting. Allie tore it away, leaving a bit of tape behind. Sam barked once, if not demanding an answer, then protesting the sudden end to their play. As Allie read, his heavy breaths were drowned out by her own:

  Allie, snow got on your Nativity. I covered it up to keep them warm. Please don’t bother them, okay? Promise me. We’ll take care of them when I get home.

  Love,

  Daddy

  P.S. Don’t look, okay? I’ll call when I’m on break.

  She studied the words again, then lowered the note. Sam moved forward. He sniffed the page, then placed his nose against the door.

  “He don’t want me to. See here? Daddy says stay away. It weren’t no vandals at all, Samwise. They was just cold is all.”

  Sam whined and scratched at the door. Allie leaned behind the Christmas tree and moved the curtain aside, peering out of the big double windows.

  “Guess you gotta take care of your business, though. ’Course you do. Daddy probably figured that.” The tarp (the one off the woodpile, Allie guessed) flapped over the Mary, her husband, and their child. It reminded her of a finger extended from a closed fist, beckoning her to come see. “I gotta let you out, right, Sam? Can’t have you messing in here.”

  She laid the note on the television stand. Sam waited until Allie cracked the door and bolted out. Whatever business he had to take care of that morning apparently could wait. He ran straight for the tarp, leaving Allie alone on the porch.

  “I didn’t know.” She looked around, almost expecting someone to accuse her. “How’s I supposed to know Sam would do that? Now I gotta go get him.”

  She moved off the steps, telling herself that was all she was doing, just fetching her dumb old dog and nothing more. It really wouldn’t be disobeying if she just did that. Sam moved around the tarp in circles, nose pressed to the ground, tail stiff and still. Allie walked to the front of the Nativity. Gooseflesh broke out on her arms and neck. The cold, she thought. And then she thought no, that wasn’t it. Not the cold. Not that at all.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  She didn’t know what, couldn’t pin it to any specific thing. It was more everything. It was how Sam made his laps around the Nativity, sniffing at the rocks her daddy had laid to keep the tarp in place. It was the footprints
all over the yard—behind her into the ditch and the road, over to the driveway and the bushes in front of the house, around the back. But it was the wide swath of pressed snow leading from the side of the house to where Allie stood that bothered her most. She didn’t know what that could be.

  “The rocks,” she told Sam. “Bet that’s what it was. Daddy had to bring the rocks out and decided to drag them on the tarp instead of carry them. That’s smart.”

  Sam finished his sniffing. He took his place at Allie’s side, looked at the cover, then to her. Whatever their next course of action, it would be his master’s decision.

  “Looks like it’s pretty warm underneath there, huh? Bet it’s near toasty.”

  Allie looked up at a clear sky washed in reds and yellows. The sun would peek over the mountains soon.

  “Gonna be warm today, Samwise. They say might even hit fifty before it starts snowin’ again tonight. Fifty’s awful hot for Christmastime. Maybe too hot. If you think about it.”

  She touched the tarp. Just a brush of the finger, nothing more than that and not really disobeying at all.

  “Lotsa snow out here to melt. Oh, you might not think so, you being a simple beast. You might even call it a dusting. But it ain’t, Samwise. It’s all over the roofs; you see that for yourself. Bet plenty’s back there on the shed too. Sun’s gonna come up and take all that snow away, and what’ll happen then? It’ll all melt, that’s what. That snow’ll turn to water and flow down on our firewood. You can’t build a fire outta wet wood, Samwise. That’s science. So it wouldn’t be disobeyin’ at all if I went on and put this here tarp back where it belongs. It’ll be serving its function, you see. We’re gonna need that wood nice and dry. Snow’s coming tonight. It’s gonna blow.”

  It all made perfect sense, and Allie felt a certain pride in piecing it all together. She touched the tarp again. This time her fingers curled around a fold and tugged a bit before they drew back. One of her Chucks settled against a rock. Before she knew it, that rock had slipped off the edge and into the snow practically on its own. Allie frowned upon that bit of unfortunateness.

  “Well, it’s messed up now. I leave it like that, the wind might kick up again and carry the whole thing off. And where’s that gonna leave us, Sam? Right in the middle of downtown Trouble, that’s where.”

  And so Allie did what she must, all in the name of her and her father’s warmth. She pulled the tarp away in one motion—quick, before her conscience could tell her no. The rocks anchoring the bottom scattered. The breeze kicked up once more, blowing the cover over her. At once the world became bathed in blue and the smell of old oak and the sound of Sam barking, along with a tumbling sound that had no place there. Allie wrestled the tarp away from her face and looked down. The scowl on her face melted in a succession of twitches. Her lips parted. What words they formed were both partial and silent.

  Chunks of firewood lay scattered at Allie’s feet. Piled, she now understood, by her father, who’d done his level best to get away with a lie. Emotion flooded her—grief and guilt and loss and rage, all pressed into a fiery iron ball that settled deep in Allie’s chest. The plastic Joseph could not look at her. He stared at the ground instead, laying all of his imaginary weight against the imaginary staff painted over his cloak. And the Baby Jesus, whose mouth had once been crafted into a smile of joy and peace by some unknown genius, now looked ready to grimace and cry out.

  The Mary was gone.

  In her place were the remains of the oak pile Marshall had crafted to conform to her shape. Allie could only look as the Joseph looked, frozen and unblinking. And the Jesus—the child—could only hide behind the shut eyes of one overwhelmed at knowing that he would now have to grow up all alone. Of his mother being exchanged for something fake, something less. Something that could never replace what had been lost.

  In a way Allie could not explain but only feel, her mother had just been taken away all over again. The only difference was that God had done it before and her own drunk father had done it now. Marshall had thrown the Mary away, just as he’d told Bobby Barnes he would the night before.

  “Can’t let Allie run ever’thing. Dad-blamed house looks like white trash as it is.”

  It was cruel and mean and hurtful and just like the man Marshall Granderson had become—a broken soul who’d long given up hope. Not only of finding Mary again, but of finding himself.

  That was when Allie knew she was going to cry and cry finally, right there in the middle of her front yard with Sam sniffing all that spilled wood. Her lips quivered. Her nose turned on like a faucet. Sam looked up as she pushed back her tears.

  “I ain’t gonna cry. Cryin’ means it’s over.” She sniffed hard. “Can’t be over, Samwise.”

  Sam laid his ears back and lifted a paw against her leg. Far from comforting, that show of solidarity only made Allie want to cry more. So this was it, then. This was where Allie Granderson would finally break down. Not in the middle of the living room with Mary walking through the door, smiling and bursting at the seams to tell her daughter and husband all about her grand adventures over the rainbow. It would be in the front yard instead, on a silent morning just five days before Christmas, half naked and cold. Allie hated her life. She hated the God who had marked her and the father who could never raise her, and she hated them both for taking her momma away.

  The tears pooled, ready to spill, and Allie thought, Let them come because they were there whether she wanted them or not. Her hands went to her eyes and stopped when Allie caught a brief movement somewhere near the ground. No—

  —not the ground. Her arm. Something was moving on Allie’s arm. Her mouth made a series of low squeals that backed Sam away.

  It had been nearly two summers since Allie Granderson had held faith in the magic some said had fallen over the town of Mattingly. What had replaced that assurance was the cold and lifeless desire to merely carry on as best she could. But now the very magic she had shunned came upon her in a whisper only she could hear, and despite all of the pain believing could bring, that spark flashed and caught in her once more.

  She moved her left arm away from her face and leaned her head back, wanting to be sure. Impossible, yes. Maybe even crazy. But there was no doubt.

  Her compass was working.

  2

  Sam uttered a sound that was equal parts bark and cry and laid his ears against his head. It was a reaction Allie had witnessed plenty of times before, mostly during those awful summer thunderstorms that always seemed borne up in the night and left them both huddled beneath her bed. It was wonder tinged with the fear of something too big to fit in such a tiny world. Allie thought if there was ever a time for that expression, it was now.

  “Because this here’s a wonder,” she whispered. “It’s a genuine supernatural experience, Samwise, and if I could feel my legs I’d just about get on my knees right now, snow or not.”

  She brought her arm closer. Beneath the plastic cap of a compass that hadn’t worked since the day her mother left, the thin, black needle now spun in a lazy, unbroken circle. Allie tightened the band and slid the compass around her wrist, reading it like a watch. The needle turned and floated, trying to find north. When it couldn’t, it stalled at the brick house across the street.

  “No, don’t you stop again.” Yet even as she spoke those words, a cobwebby place long forgotten in Allie’s heart spoke up, telling her to wait. To just hang on.

  The needle turned again, slower this time. Past the house across the road to the ranch next door, then to the pile of wood scattered in front of her. There it stopped again, though not completely. The tip jittered no more than a hair’s breadth to the right and left, like a second hand gone stuck. Allie lowered her head, studying it. It was almost like

  “It’s trying to get my attention.”

  The needle spun again, this time from what Allie called twelve o’clock over to three, where the sun sparked over the mountaintops. Then to six o’clock.

  “No,” she said. “
Not that. To me. It spun to me.”

  Sam’s ears perked. The needle moved away again, back to the empty place at the Nativity.

  “Mary?”

  The word came out soft and stuttered, as though Allie feared even the small hope of hearing herself utter the name. Seconds passed that felt like hours, more than enough time for her to decide a cheap, old carnival compass didn’t have to be stuck to be called worthless. Plenty of things were busted beyond repair but still moved around just fine.

  “Like my daddy.”

  With such thinking, the needle could have done most anything next and still be called busted. But then it moved once more, sweeping back across the driveway to settle back toward the mountains, where the sun looked like a yolk being spilled down over a deep-blue pan. Allie swung her body around and faced the light. The needle held.

  “That ain’t north,” she told Sam. “The sun rises in the east and compasses point north, Samwise. Science.”

  Sam couldn’t argue with that, but the compass could. The needle moved again, faster now, the way clocks sometimes turn in movies to show time passing quick. It spun to Allie’s house and to the empty spot and to Allie and then the mountains, over and over, and the morning was so still and Allie so quiet that she could hear the tiny clicks of the compass as it struggled to . . . what? Work?

  “No. Talk.”

  When it stopped at the mountains one last time, it was with such force that her wrist twitched.

  She stepped away from what was left of the Nativity, toward the porch. The needle beneath the compass’s plastic bubble shook as Allie ran. She cleared the three wooden steps to the porch in one jump and flung the glass door open. Sam barked as the door shut in front of him. He scratched the glass, wanting in, but Allie didn’t hear. She ran to her room and tore through the pile of clothes on the floor, finding a pair of jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt with RIVERA 42 on the back. Her Chucks would have to do for shoes; there was no time to dig through the closet for boots. The white sleeve of the parka Allie had gotten the year before poked out from a pile of clothes on the floor. She ignored this and grabbed the jean jacket on top, forcing herself to slow long enough to straighten the sherpa collar, and then rolled both sleeves exactly twice. Just enough of the pink leopard lining inside showed at her wrists. It would be colder, leaving the parka at home. But Allie knew she was going to have to look her best when she went in search of a favor. Showing up like the Pillsbury Doughgirl wouldn’t do. She would need wiles of her own. And if Allie knew anything, it was that a wily female could get near anything she wanted with a little pink leopard print.