by Rio Youers
“Heart attack.”
“Terrible.”
Dr. Alex said something else but I didn’t catch it because I was imagining Bobby sitting at my computer, reading my journal, his pudgy hand folded over the mouse as he scrolled through pages. I muttered something and pushed the thought away. It wasn’t important anymore. I’d dealt with it, although I still felt the crease in the filing cabinet, and so had to imagine the icicle again, slowly melting.
I picked up my mail and parcels from the post office (Vern Abbott told me about Bobby, looking suitably sombre, and I expressed my condolences and told him how shocked I was). Then I bought an ice cream—vanilla fudge ripple—and ate it like a child, grinning, licking drips off the cone. I drove home, slept until early afternoon, swallowed two Vicodin, and then opened my mail. Mostly business correspondence. There was, however, one letter, very few words, that touched something deep inside.
We need to talk. Call soon.
Regards,
Kip Sawyer.
I sat down and didn’t move for a long time—not until my body started to hurt again and I needed another Vicodin. My mind buzzed with conjecture, but behind it was a certainty that things were culminating. First Matthew coming back to town, then Bobby, and now this. The mountain’s energy was growing. It was reaching out.
I called Kip’s house. His helper answered the phone and told me that Kip was very ill, and in no condition to speak to anybody.
“Tell him it’s Oliver Wray.”
“He’s sleeping at the moment, Mr. Wray.”
“Wake him up.”
“I’ll do no such thing. When he wakes up, on his own, and after he’s eaten, I’ll tell him you called.”
“It’s very important.”
“I’ll relay your message, Mr. Wray.”
I hung up and wanted to pace but my foot was throbbing, so all I could do was sit and wait. Abraham’s Faith trembled. I sensed, in every reverberation, a suggestion of closure. It was like riding a dying horse. A cracked vase, holding water for years, finally breaking.
The phone rang just after seven P.M. I leapt at it, forgetting my pain.
“You can visit Kip tomorrow morning, Mr. Wray. Ten o’clock.”
“Very good.”
“He’s weak. I ask that you’re not too demanding.”
I’ve seen the helper around town. She has a pinched face, doughy eyes, and iron-grey bangs. She walks like a man and looks like her voice: severe and professional. I wished for a strong electrical current to travel down the phone line and zap her in the ear.
“He wrote to me,” I said through gritted teeth. “I have no idea what this is about.”
“I am fully aware of the correspondence, Mr. Wray. I typed and mailed the letter. All I ask is that you conduct business efficiently.”
I snarled. She may have heard me. I didn’t care.
“I’m sure you understand,” she said.
“Ten o’clock.” I hung up.
I sit here now, writing this, the mountain sounding like a constant bell—clanging, clanging—and my mind is littered with images, like the dead, clogging plague-torn streets, while the living cry and the bell tolls. I wonder why Kip Sawyer wants to see me. Will he finally spill his secrets? Is the mountain touching him, too?
I’m tired, but I can’t sleep.
My eyes are drawn to the crease in the filing cabinet and I think of Bobby Alexander sitting in this chair, and it’s not so much what he read, but that he read—that he invaded my home and my thoughts. I feel the same crease in my mind and know that changing the filing cabinet won’t be enough. I need to change this chair, this computer, this study. Maybe I’ll redecorate, or move to a new room. Maybe I’ll bulldoze the house and rebuild. Whatever it takes to remove that crease from my mind.
Imagining him on the slab helps. Have they performed the autopsy yet? Has his brain been examined? Internal organs removed? Such thoughts, however macabre, are like the cream Dr. Alex gave me for my sunburned skin. Soothing.
It’s almost midnight. Ten hours until I see Kip.
It’s going to be a long night.
August 5, 2010.
It’s late. My body is weary and hurting. Abraham’s Faith is a constant sound. If I had time and energy I would return to the wild to cleanse and attain tranquility. I have neither.
I am not writing now; I am purging.
Imagine a plant deep in the forest, something fresh and green, but vulnerable, always seeking light. The trees surrounding this plant are broad and tall and their branches create a thick canopy, so that everything below is caught in darkness. But the plant doesn’t wither, and it never gives up. It draws nutrients from the soil and stretches its green hand, and sometimes it is knocked down, but its roots are strong and it keeps growing, leaves springing from its body as it twists and spreads, determined to find light. And one day a huge storm blows through the forest and the larger trees are uprooted and cast aside. Suddenly the sky is open, and the little plant—kept in the dark, sheltered, for so many years—has all the light it will ever need. A gift of fate.
I am that plant. I see nothing but blue sky.
And I bloom.
The storm is Kip Sawyer. Thunder and lightning, rains of knowledge that sweep away all obstruction. Ironic that someone so feeble can harness such power. I arrived at his house at precisely ten A.M. and the helper scowled and led me to his room. It was a comfortable temperature and the blinds were drawn. A lamp on the nightstand offered pale light. Kip sat up in bed, propped against a pile of pillows. His ruined eyes followed my footsteps. There was an oxygen tank beside his bed, a mask looped over the headrest. He wore his nasal cannula, as he had when I last spoke to him at the doctor’s office, more than three years ago. He had been frail then, dusty skin covering brittle bones and a heart that beat because it didn’t know how to do anything else. But here he was, still alive. His chest hardly moved as he breathed.
“Hello, Mr. Sawyer,” I said.
Our meeting lasted almost two hours—longer, I’m sure, than the helper would have wanted. But there was no way around it; Kip took a long time to say anything, and when he did it was all but unintelligible, so he would have to repeat it, or scribble the word/sentence blindly on a notepad, his brain recalling the shapes of letters, even if his eyes couldn’t see them. Awkward, childlike uppercase slanting across the page.
I sat on the edge of his bed. His body appeared too small beneath the covers. I thought, if I pulled them back, that I would see something half-formed, barely human.
“Oliver,” he said, a broken sound that I was able to decipher from the way his mouth moved, his tongue knocking off the roof of his mouth. He said something else. “Child,” I think.
“It’s good to see you again, Mr. Sawyer.” I wondered if I should squeeze his forearm, thinking that’s what you do with the infirm—squeeze them, gently, for some reason. My hand twitched but I kept it in my lap. “I called as soon as I got your letter.”
He nodded.
“I assume you wanted to discuss—”
“The town,” he said, pushing the words out. “The mountain.” He started to write it: MOUN. I guessed the rest.
The room revolved. A single, slow circuit, and I had to close my eyes and imagine a level surface, concrete, bolted to the earth. My spine rippled and the air pressed moist hands against my skin. I sensed obstructive trees being blown away, all around me, branches tearing.
“You’ve done wicked things,” he said. Words mumbled. Words half-scrawled. I filled in the blanks.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t know what, and have no desire to be enlightened. But I know Abraham’s Faith is cruel, and that it has a will to reach out . . . to touch people. You feel it, don’t you? You’ve been touched.”
I started to cry. I don’t know if Kip heard, or if he felt my tears spl
ashing on the covers. He sat silently for a moment, perhaps waiting for me to stop, only the sound of the oxygen hissing through the tubing.
“The mountain speaks to me,” I said, adjusting my weight on the bed. “It has since I was fourteen years old. Not in the same way that people speak. It booms . . . puts images in my head. Sometimes it’s all I can hear. I thought, if I could find out what happened up there, that I could make it stop, but nobody wants to tell me anything. It’s as if the truth is deliberately being kept from me.”
“It is,” Kip said. “But not just you. It’s being kept from the whole town. The whole world.”
“I need to know,” I said.
He lifted his head, mouth open, a grey semicircle in the ashen rag of his face. I recalled our conversation in Blueberry Bush Park, how he had been so bright-eyed and articulate, ninety-plus years old (or so I thought then, but was about to learn differently), and positively robust compared to the withered mummy he had become. Again I felt the urge to reach out, clasp his hand, and squeeze.
Seconds passed. His mouth moved. The oxygen hissed. The air conditioner clicked on and maintained the room’s cool temperature. I wiped my eyes and tried to breathe easy. The mountain rumbled in the east.
“I can still feel it,” Kip said with great effort. “Can still feel him.”
“Who?”
“Coming from the mountain . . . darkness.” Every word was clumsy and brick-shaped. His papery hands trembled. “The whole town feels it. I don’t have to tell you. We’ve had this conversation.”
“Yes,” I said, recalling, again, our exchange in Blueberry Bush Park. What’s wrong with this town? I had asked, because I sensed—and always have—that the wind blows differently in Point Hollow. The beauty is cosmetic. Something lives beneath the surface. Something cruel.
“The town is cursed,” Kip said.
I blinked fresh tears onto my cheeks, wiped them away. Kip rested his head against the pillows, eyes closed, mouth still open. I waited, and it occurred to me that he could die, right there and then, with all his secrets caught inside. What an unkind twist of fate, to be taken to the threshold of understanding, only to be denied at the last. I felt a surge of panic, as raw as white water, and spoke his name . . . twice, three times. No response. His eyelids didn’t flicker. I studied his chest and couldn’t be sure it was moving. His oxygen hissed, escaping from his open mouth like a broken valve, and now I did reach out and squeeze him—the thin pole of his left leg. His eyes opened.
“Bird,” he said.
I exhaled heavily, unaware that I’d been holding my breath. Kip pointed across the room (unusual to see a blind man pointing, but there was nothing wrong with his coordination), either at a painting, or at the door to a walk-in closet.
“What?” I asked, and managed to decipher the words “closet” and “top” and he wrote down the word “SHELF.” I limped across the room, opened the closet door, and looked on the top shelf. Folded clothes, shoe boxes, a leather briefcase.
“The briefcase?” I asked.
He nodded.
I lifted it down. My sore shoulders protested and I felt one of the blisters pop and trickle down my back. I carried the briefcase to the bed as Kip scrawled down the six-digit combination. I entered it with trembling fingers, opened the case. Inside was a sheaf of correspondence, mainly journals and letters. There were some newspapers and photographs. It smelled dry and old.
“It’s all there,” Kip said. “The answers to all of your questions. Every secret. Every sin.”
“And you’ve held these secrets all along?” I whispered. “Only now, after all these years, all this suffering, do you decide to share them?”
He nodded. Such a simple response, yet everything inside me screamed. The room compressed with a grinding, crunching sound and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I shuffled to the window, ducking under the blind, throwing it open, my lungs snatching at the warm air. I stayed there until some trace of calm found me.
Kip’s window, blessedly—certainly deliberately—faces west, where the peaks are greener, kinder. Not that I couldn’t hear my old friend booming from the other side. A deranged inmate challenging the bars of his cell.
I closed the window, limped to Kip’s bedside, and sat down. I wiped sweat from my brow, then looked from the caseful of secrets to the man who had kept them. I wanted to smother him with the pillow, but knew that, like me, he was a victim. The mountain had touched him, too. I reached into the briefcase, pushing aside journals and scraps of paper, and found what I was looking for—what I knew would be in there: a photograph of him. Mr. Fishhook. Original me.
It was a close-up of his face. An actual photograph, as opposed to a reprint. My heart dropped with a metallic sound and sweat moistened my upper lip. I looked at him. His eyes were light-coloured, too far apart, and the bridge of his nose was flattened. His cheeks were sprayed with tiny, cross-shaped scars and his mouth—as in my picture of him—was hooked to the left. It wasn’t the way he smiled, but obviously some mild deformity. Bell’s palsy, perhaps. His hair was the same colour as mine, but short at the sides, falling messily across his brow in front, where I could see more of those cross-shaped scars.
“It’s all been collected, hidden away,” Kip said/wrote. His eyelids fluttered and he appeared to be smiling, but it was simply the shape of his mouth, working to form words. “The letters, photographs, journals . . . anything that could defame our town and serve as a reminder. This is all that remains. I’m the last survivor from that time, and peace is overdue. Take these memories, Oliver. You’ve earned them.”
I wept again and this time Kip heard. He tried to reach for me but I pulled away. My tears fell on Mr. Fishhook’s face, as if we shared sorrows. I turned the photograph over and saw a name printed on the back in tight script:
Leander Bird.
His name. I spoke it and the mountain shook.
“He came to Point Hollow a preacher,” Kip said. “With light in the palms of his hands. He left in flames, burning on the mountain, cursing us all.”
I couldn’t look at that twisted mouth, or into those burning eyes. I put the photograph back in the briefcase, facedown, and lifted out a journal bound in taupe leather. It cried when I cracked it open. A sound like wood stretching. The pages were creased, filled with faded type.
I read:
From Trey Moffatt’s Journal.
April 25, 1917.
I ask you: is belief enough? Unto God, who sacrificed His only son, is the act of prayer, and adhering to the Holy Scripture, sufficient to walk alongside Him in the Kingdom of Heaven? Should our faith be tested, and to what degree? And more importantly, by whom?
There is a fragility to Point Hollow, a harmlessness, like a child that seeks direction. Should I, then, be watchful of this stranger who has come among us? He offers salvation, and his methods are alluring. He sermonizes with striking character. I have witnessed him heal pain.
Leander Bird. Even his name is exotic. The Holy Trinity Anglican Church echoes with emptiness. The Reverend Walter Geller prays alone. His flock stands in the field behind Ade Mooney’s barn, because that’s where Leander Bird sermonizes. The townspeople come to him. They fall to their knees in the mud, and they pray. But not for long; the preacher has asked that they construct a new house of worship. “Bring tools and materials, and build in the name of faith.”
And so they build, desperately seeking direction. This child of a town.
What else will he have them do, in time?
I am reminded (and perhaps it is unfair of me) of Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.”
And I ask again: is belief enough?
“We thought he was a man of God.” Kip said. He looked at me with moist, sightless eyes. “We were wrong; Leander Bird was . . .” He stammered, and then wrote EVI in shaky let
ters, and I said “evil” and he nodded.
I wiped my eyes, seeing all too clearly the children in the mountain. The skulls. The bones. Piled high, leaning against one another, melded into new shapes, new creatures.
“One man,” I said. “All those children. So many children.”
“Therein lies our sin,” Kip said, taking as deep a breath as he could manage and fixing his watery eyes on me. “It wasn’t just one man . . .” He trailed off. Another deep breath, and then he said, “It was the whole town.”
“What?” I shook my head. Numb. Dazed. Hurting.
“He possessed us,” Kip said. “We killed our children. We killed them all.”
A scrap of paper from the box:
And the preacher turned his orange eyes upon me, and laid his hand upon my brow. I felt, then, something pass from him into me, an inexplicable thing, but powerful, and although my body turned cold I thought it could only be the Lord . . . and so I grasped dear Daniel’s hand and led him into the mountain, both of us crying, and came into a vast stone chamber where the floor was slick and the faith visible. We crouched together, and prayed, and then I took my son and placed the knife to his throat, waiting to hear God’s voice, for Him to intervene as He had with Abraham, but there was only silence. “It is God’s will,” I said, and drew the blade across Daniel’s throat, and felt him die in my arms.
Kip shuddered and wept with me, his tears trickling to the hollows of his temples.
“The whole town,” I said. My voice was so small.
He nodded. “And now you know why we have kept this hidden away. Our sin continues, and our suffering is our own.”
From Trey Moffatt’s Journal.
June 18, 1917.
He recites from the Book of Genesis, and we listen in grief, in faith: “By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son; that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.”