by Aaron Gwyn
Jonathan glanced at McCoin a few chairs away—his frail-looking neck, his eyes magnified by thick lenses. It seemed McCoin was less enthusiastic than his companions, as if, though he raised no objection to the outing, he would’ve much preferred staying behind. This bothered Jonathan, for he was moved by his grandfather’s words and could see his grandfather was also moved when he’d spoken them. He studied the thin sprawl of hair atop McCoin’s head, the ashen look of his skin, angry that the man was not properly grateful for what his grandfather was trying to accomplish. He grew so absorbed in these thoughts that he failed for a moment to perceive the deacon had become aware of his being observed.
Jerking his eyes to the floor, Jonathan steered them about the room, returning warily to McCoin’s face. The man was looking directly at him. Crossing one leg over the other, he smiled broadly at the boy and winked.
THE AREA IN which they made their camp was heavily wooded, and Jonathan had never seen its like—black oaks crowding a steep embankment with a creek running beneath, evergreens on the far side and a hill grown with moss. The men and three boys had hiked for hours under the canopy of leaves, Beauford leading them into denser wood, farther upstream to the hills. Midafternoon, they struck a trail that skirted a series of large boulders and made their way under the high wall of a cliff. There they found a shallow cave of ten or twelve feet into which the boys could walk without stooping. Beauford told the group he’d often camped in the location, and as they looked about they saw a leaf-choked ring of stones, blackened by fire. The others unbuckled their packs, and Cochran began to tell how he and Beauford had used the site as a hunting camp, taking shelter inside when a tornado came through in ’68.
The remainder of the day was spent settling in. Kesterson climbed the hill and dug a latrine while the others gathered firewood or spread dried leaves as cushion for their sleeping bags. When evening came they built a fire—the boys roasting franks on hickory spits and the men boiling coffee atop a grate. As it became darker, the elders began to relate stories of their youth, and the boys listened, encouraging them to go on, asking would they repeat certain parts or tell others they’d heard before. Jonathan saw that McCoin sat apart from the rest, sipping into a porcelain mug. He turned at a certain point and caught the man’s eyes, red and strange-seeming in the firelight.
The next morning, he awoke at the mouth of the cave and saw that the men were gone. His friends lay on either side of him and he heard voices that he recognized as those of his grandfather and the others. He worked his way out of his sleeping bag and crawled into the light, craning his neck around a corner of rock. On a group of stones just down the path the men sat with Bibles opened on their laps, Beauford leading them in discussion.
Jonathan crawled back into the cave and stared at the two boys in their bedding. He went to the larger of the two, a sandy-haired, obese child, named J.W.—covers thrown off, shirt hiked high on his belly—and began to squeeze his shoulder. The boy’s eyelids split slightly and he regarded Jonathan with disdain.
“Whayouwan?”
“Get up,” Jonathan told him.
“Why?”
“It’s time.”
J.W. pulled his shirt down and rolled onto an elbow, shading his eyes with a hand. Jonathan knelt beside him.
“Where’s your granddad?” J.W. asked. “Uncle Tim?”
“They’re out talking.”
“They gonna let us swim?”
“I think so.”
“We don’t have to pray with them all day?”
Jonathan shook his head. J.W. yawned and looked over to the third boy, nothing visible outside his bedding but a tuft of red hair. He judged where his face should be and delivered a backhand to it. A muffled cry came from the covers and the form inside them composed itself into a ball.
“Scoot,” said J.W., delivering a kick. “Get up.”
One end of the ball moaned.
J.W. grabbed Scoot’s covers, yanked them off, and straddling the thin figure now exposed, began rubbing a knuckle across his scalp. The boy tried to fight off J.W. and then started to scream. Jonathan was pleading with both of them, when his grandfather’s face appeared at the mouth of the cave.
“What’s wrong with you all?”
Three pairs of eyes stared back at him blankly.
Stooping with his hands on his knees, Beauford delivered an impromptu lecture, telling the boys if they didn’t behave, he’d separate them; that they’d not be asked to go camping again; that he’d tell their fathers when he took them home. J.W. climbed off of Scoot and crawled dejectedly toward his sleeping bag. Jonathan looked up at his grandfather.
“Can we swim?” he asked.
“I’d hoped you all might kneel with us awhile. You know how sick Brother Jude is.”
Jonathan nodded, and soon the three boys were sitting cross-legged inside the circle of men, listening as different ones quoted Scripture, extended words of encouragement to their dying companion. McCoin attended to each, periodically nodding, thanking the men for their thoughts. Beauford said they’d done right in coming out to the location, that since the task was laid upon his heart, God’s own word proclaimed that as long as they continued in their vigil, McCoin could not help but be delivered. Jonathan considered this, feeling proud of his grandfather. He looked, now and again, at the other boys: Scoot staring open-mouthed at the branches, J.W. digging mud from the grooves of his sneakers with a twig. Jonathan felt contempt for them, wondering how they could be so callous, and when the men kneeled and began their supplications, he joined them, occasionally looking up from between his folded hands to watch the boys snigger quietly to one another.
But after a half hour had passed, his mind too began to wander, and the men—some clustered together making appeals to God, others kneeling a little apart and muttering softly with eyes clenched—showed no signs of ceasing. Finally, he rose to his feet and walked down to the creek where the two boys had snuck away to toss pebbles at crawfish, hands on mouths to suppress their giggling. Glancing anxiously up the hill, Jonathan reluctantly joined them. Little by little, however, he forgot, and after several more minutes—one boy pushed, another pushing back, playful threats, a clump of mud thrown—all three of them were in the stream, splashing and shouting back and forth in shrill voices. They heard, of a sudden, a sharp whistle and, looking up, saw Beauford striding determinedly down the hill. He lifted his grandson from the water, gave him two firm swats on the backside, and told them if all they wanted was to play, they should go farther downstream to do it, to at least have that much respect for the Lord and His work.
J.W. and Scoot walked up onto the bank and stood there quietly dripping while Beauford pulled his grandson aside.
“I don’t mind you having fun,” he said. “I know you’re kids. But I want to say I reckoned a little more from you.”
Jonathan looked down at a patch of moss growing on a nearby rock, trying to think of what to say. When it finally came to him and he lifted his head to do so, he saw his grandfather walking back toward the other men, his shirt pulled tight across his shoulder blades, his neck rigid, perfectly straight.
THEY WENT OUT among the blackjacks, shuffling through fallen leaves, ducking the fingers of low-reaching branches. Scoot, younger by several years, would travel a little ahead of the other two, sprinting out in front of Jonathan and J.W., sometimes running back to circle them, his arms spread winglike at his sides, his lips rumbling. Jonathan watched him, looking back, now and then, toward the outcrop of rock where his grandfather and the other men knelt in prayer.
The stream at their left, they crossed a trench of dry and splintered clay, walking until they found an enormous gray sandstone, lichen-covered and worn concave. Scoot ran ahead, jumped, and landing in the stone’s center, rolled onto his back and stared at the morning sky.
“The rock is hot,” he announced.
Jonathan and J.W. came to either side of him and sat, extending their legs and regarding the patch of azure framed by oak
limbs. They started talking of the stories they’d heard the previous night, stories of tornadoes and wildcats and men who’d sought refuge in this region. J.W. claimed that what they had heard was nothing, that the men simply didn’t want to scare them, that his uncle had recounted stories better than anything his grandfather had said all evening. He lay over onto his side.
“Uncle Tim told me there were caves down here bigger than even the one we slept in.”
“Bigger than last night’s?”
J.W. nodded. “He said back in the West days, Jesse James and his gang hid there.”
Jonathan gave him a sharp look. “He didn’t either.”
“He did,” J.W. told him.
“Unh-uh.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No.”
“You calling Uncle Tim a liar?”
“No.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said.
“You want to wrestle for it?”
“No.”
“All right then.”
Scoot rolled onto his stomach and stretched his arms out in front of him. He reached back and lifted his shirt, exposing his skin to the rock.
Jonathan watched this and then, curling his legs, shifted his weight and sat on his ankles. “How do you know Jesse James was there?” he asked.
“They say his name is spray-painted on the walls.”
“They didn’t have spray paint.”
“Yes, they did,” J.W. told him.
“No, they didn’t.”
“Carved then.”
“Carved where?”
“Carved on the cave wall.”
“How far?” Jonathan asked him.
“I bet if we keep going we could find it.”
“I bet we get our rears tanned.”
“They’re supposed to be just downstream.”
Jonathan went to ask another question, but Scoot interrupted, wanting he and J.W. to look at something. They looked. The child was still lying on his stomach, but now beamed an expression of complete wonder.
“What is it?” said J.W.
“It’s cool,” Scoot told him.
Jonathan and J.W. looked at each other. They asked him what he was talking about.
“The rock,” Scoot explained. “When we came here it was hot. Now, with me lying on it, it’s cool.”
They sat staring at him, and then J.W. exhaled slowly, rose to his feet, and began brushing at the backside of his jeans. He looked away toward some hypothetical location.
“Fine,” he told Jonathan, already walking, “I’ll go look at Jesse’s hideout. You can stay here with the professor.”
THE BOYS WALKED for what seemed hours, sometimes leaving the stream, sometimes following a path that traveled directly beside it. They made their way through a thicket of briars, over a tumble of rocks, and emerged at last onto the shelf of a vast gorge—flanked on all sides by the green of oak leaves—as if a great hand had reached from the sky and scooped away ten acres of land, leaving behind an enormous brown chasm. The ground dropped sheer at their feet and the stream fell over a sandstone lip to a pool thirty feet below, rushing over a series of falls at the pool’s far end. At the bottom, all around the canyon, cave openings pocked the cliff face.
They stood marveling at the discovery—pointing out the various caves they would venture into, hurling rocks at the water below—and then began seeking a way down. Urinating off one of the cliff walls, J.W. found a slope graded just so that they could half slide, half stumble their way to the bottom, and when all three had done this, they crossed the stream on a series of treacherous stones and began making for the entrance to the nearest cave, an opening much wider than it was high. It was barely twenty feet deep, and they came out to explore another, their excitement steadily increasing until they went at a dead run—darting into this cavern to look hastily about, scurrying into another like creatures in pursuit. When Jonathan asked what would happen if they stumbled on a snake, both boys shot him a look. He didn’t ask a second time.
The first caves were little but overhangs in the surface of the rock, areas of deep erosion or boulders that had arranged themselves so as to create sandstone shelters. But there were others that went far back into the hillside, narrowing as they went, the light behind them growing ever fainter, even Scoot unwilling to venture further inside. They found the scattered remains of animals, and in one cave they uncovered the entire skeleton of a coyote or fox, half buried in the dirt floor, its bones fragile and thin, as if carved from chalk. J.W. picked up the skull and held it for a moment, then hurled it at the wall: fragments of splintered white and a sharp echo, silence and a brief cloud of dust.
They had surveyed their tenth cave when Jonathan spotted on the far side of the gorge one with a narrower entrance. J.W. panting, wet with perspiration, seated himself on a boulder and told them to go on, that he would catch up in a moment. The two boys made their way quickly across the ravine, Jonathan feeling himself growing winded. He looked at Scoot walking beside him, hoping to see signs of fatigue in him as well, but the only indication of this were a few strands of red hair plastered wetly against his forehead.
Reaching the cave’s opening—about man high, three feet in width—Jonathan allowed Scoot to go in ahead. They walked inside, their eyes adjusting to the dim light, and saw that the walls were covered in spray paint—names and figures in palimpsest, numerals anticipating graduation dates, a bizarre mosaic of colors wherein Jonathan could just make out the head of an Indian chief, the town’s high school mascot. They saw also that what had seemed to be the cave’s rear wall was only a corner. Moving forward, they tracked across a fine dirt the consistency of powder, a floor littered with beer cans, and then, rounding the corner, stood looking into the next chamber. It was darker there, but a shaft of light fell from a crevice high in the ceiling, illuming, to some degree, the sandstone room. They were walking farther in, their eyes still focusing, when they heard a sound—the grunt of what they took to be an animal in pain.
The boys came to a halt, listening as the noise rose steadily in volume. Then, as if snapping from a hazed background into sharper focus, they saw a form struggling on the cave floor, two forms, the shapes shifting in Jonathan’s mind from one animal into another—dog to wildcat, coyote to wolf—and then coalescing, finally, into their reality: two men—one on his elbows and knees, the other behind him in a modified kneel. Both were groaning and they faced the same direction, but did not see, for their eyes were clenched. The boys stood watching them, trying to understand what it was they were doing. Something in Jonathan made him lean forward to better view the scene, a simultaneous nausea rising in his stomach, a prickling along the hairs of his arms and neck. He had begun gradually backing from the room when, in front of him, Scoot let out a long, piercing scream.
Then he was running. He did not look back to his friend, and he did not have to, for Scoot quickly passed him, the boy making for the other side of the gorge, his arms and legs a blur. Jonathan’s heart pounded and he could hear the wind droning loudly in his ears, the blood rushing in concert there, and looking ahead, saw Scoot pass the rock where J.W. sat, bewildered. Jonathan lowered his head and ran. He could hear shouting from behind him, the voices of men, though he did not understand what those voices said. Passing J.W., Jonathan managed to pant the word hide.
Scoot had crossed the stream—splashing through the shallow creek, looking as if he were running on top of the water—and was already scrambling up the hill where they had descended an hour before. Jonathan followed, not seeming to feel his body, only a warm sensation at the crown of his head. When he reached the foot of the hill, looked up to see Scoot attain its summit and disappear from sight, he thought, I won’t be able to climb it; I was barely able to get down. There followed a distorted period of clambering upward, scraping against rocks, the grasped end of a tree root, and the next thought Jonathan had came to him as he sprinted into the black oaks, dodging trunk and t
ree limb, hearing shouts in the canyon below.
Scoot was not to be seen. Jonathan continued running but after some time reduced his pace, for all he heard now were the leaves crunching under his feet. He ran slower, and then more slowly, and then was walking, his breath coming to him in gasps. He stopped, finally, and collapsed at the foot of a gnarled pine.
He sat there, trying to calm himself, to convince a part of his mind that he was safe. His breathing had all but returned to normal when he realized he was not sure in which direction the creek lay, which direction the canyon or camp. He rose and began walking, not recognizing anything he saw. After a while he took another course, and then another. A rush of panic went through him and he began running blindly among the trees. Woods and the occasional clearing went strobing past, each more foreign than the one before it. He entered a sunlit stretch where the oaks thinned and, quickening his pace, felt his foot go down too far into a drift of leaves. His vision seemed to tumble and he fell, skidding several feet on his arm and shoulder. He lay for a few moments with his chest heaving and then grabbed for his ankle. It throbbed, already swelling. Rising up on a knee, he rested his heel on the ground and tried to stand. A tremendous pain shot from the ball of his foot to the shin, and he went to the ground, his vision swarming with translucent specks.
Jonathan rocked back and forth, rubbing his ankle and glancing nervously at the woods around him. He realized he had begun crying but made no effort to wipe his face. Using his uninjured leg, he pushed himself against the trunk of a large oak, and keeping his ankle, as best he could, clear, began to shinny up the tree. The forest floor shrank, and he ascended through branches less and less thick, coming to rest twenty feet from the ground, concealed in the tree’s fork. He straddled it, leaned his face and body against the trunk. He was beginning to wonder about J.W. and Scoot when he heard the familiar sound of leaves crunching.
Peering through the limbs, he saw two men walking toward the tree where he was hiding, talking together in hushed tones. One wore a black T-shirt, the other a green pullover. On this jersey was the number twelve, the profiled head of an Indian chief embossed in glittering white.