The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  Smelly little shits!

  A Black Clay Boy might be just the ticket, she thought. Might scare ’em. They’d run to their mommy, their father would come over to have a serious talk. She’d pretend to be a tired and desperate old woman, scared to death of his vicious brood.

  No need to pretend, Willa.

  Muttering under her breath, she hobbled down to the cellar, and with popping joints and many a gasp, she troweled a bucketful of the rich black bottomland that did for a floor. Then she lugged the bucket upstairs to the kitchen and set it on the table. The kitchen whined, buzzed, and hummed with the workings of small appliances and the electric motor inside the cold box…or could be the hum was the sound of her mind winding tight, getting ready to spew out shattered gears and sprung coils.

  The wall clock ticked loud and hollow like someone clicking her tongue over and over.

  Willa made the Boy’s torso first, patting a lump of clay into a fat black lozenge. She added tubular arms and legs, rolling them into shape between her palms the way she did with dough before flattening it into a crust. Finally she added a featureless oval head. The whole thing was about two and a half feet long, and it reminded her of those shapes left by frightened men crashing through doors in the Saturday morning cartoons. Black crumbs of it were scattered like dead bugs on the white Formica. She reached into her apron pocket for a pincushion and…Steam vented from the teakettle with a shriek, stopping Willa’s heart for a dizzy split second.

  Oh, God! Now she’d have to get up again.

  It took her three tries to heave out of the chair. Sweat broke on her forehead, and she stood panting for almost a minute. Once she’d regained her breath, she crossed to the stove and shut off the flame. She kept a hand on the stove, stretched out the other hand to catch the edge of the table for balance, and hauled herself back across. She dropped heavily into the chair and nearly slipped off the edge.

  One day soon she’d do that and fracture her damn spine.

  She plucked a pin from the pincushion, and, hoping to hear a distant scream, she shoved it into the Boy’s face. Pressed it home until the pinhead was flush with the clay, a tiny silver eye. It shimmered and seemed to expand. She blinked, denying the sight. It expanded again. Somehow it didn’t resemble an eye any longer. More of a silver droplet, a silver bead. Her memories would be that way, she thought. Hardened into pearls. The bead melted at the edges, puddling outward like mercury (Don’t tell me I need glasses!), and a memory began to unfold.

  It was rich, clear, and full of juice.

  “Oh, God!” she said. “It’s a miracle.”

  The recollection rolled out from fifty years ago, during her marriage to Eden McClaren, the wealthiest citizen of Lyman, Ohio. She hadn’t wanted to marry him. He was old, fiftyish, and even older in spirit, a dried-up coupon-counter. But her father had persuaded her. Man’s so rich he builds his house on the finest piece of bottomland in the state, he’d said. You won’t do any better than a man who can afford to waste land like that. Marry him, marry him, marry him. And her mother, who’d had her doubts, what with Eden being an atheist, had eventually chimed in, Marry him, marry him, marry him.

  What was an eighteen-year-old girl to do?

  Eden courted her in a manner both civil and distant. He’d sit on the opposite end of the porch swing, as far from her as possible, gazing out at the hedge, and say, “I’m quite taken with you, girl.”

  She would stare at her clasped hands, watching her fingers strain and twist, wishing he’d blow away in a puff of smoke. “Thank you,” she’d say.

  After their wedding supper of overdone beef and potatoes and stale bread pudding, he sat her down and informed her that she would have to perform her wifely duty once a week. More would fray the moral fiber, and less would be unsalubrious. Then he took her upstairs and deflowered her in a perfunctory fashion, propping himself above her, thrusting in and out, maintaining a rhythm of one, two, one, two, regular as a metronome, until he sighed and gave a quiver and rolled off-, leaving her with a fair degree of pain and no pleasure, wondering why people made such a fuss over sex.

  But she knew why.

  Knew it in her heart, her loins.

  She wanted a lover like lightning who’d split her wide open and leave her smoldering. And if Eden couldn’t give her that pleasure, she’d pleasure herself. She’d done it a few times before, despite her mother’s depiction of the horrid consequences. She didn’t care about the consequences. But she had been frightened by having so much pleasure without someone to hold on to afterward, and so she decided to do it in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. That way at least she’d have her reflection for company.

  She stripped and posed before the mirror. She was a beauty, though she’d never understand how beautiful. Red hair, green eyes, milky skin. Pretty breasts tipped with pink candy, and long legs columning up to that curly red patch a shade lighter than the hair on her head. She cupped the undersides of her breasts, thumbed the nipples hard, and ran her palms down her hips, her flanks. Then she touched the place, already slippery and open to its hooded secret. Her knees buckled, weakness spread through her, and she hung on to the corner post of the mirror stand to keep her feet. Her eyelids fluttered down, her breath came harsh. She forced herself to hold her eyes wide, wanting to see what happened to her face when the pleasure started to take. Her cries fogged the mirror, and her mouth twisted, and her eyes tried to close, tried to squeeze in all that good feeling, and…

  “Slut!” Eden shouted from the door. “Bitch!”

  Despite his rage, he seemed to have enjoyed the show. His face was flushed, his crotch tented.

  “I’ll not have it!” he said. “I’ll not have you trailing your slime…your filth. Fouling my house!”

  For the next three days he railed at her, and on the afternoon of the third day he suffered a coronary and was confined to bed by Dr. Malloy, who tsk-tsked, and warned her to prepare for the worst.

  “Curse you!” Eden said when she went into his room. As weak as he was, he warped his mouth into a frown and spat out, “Curse you!”

  She wondered then what sort of curse a godless man could lay, but later she concluded it must have been one of rules and joyless limits.

  They buried Eden in a corner of the bottomland. In a dream she saw his bones floating in blackness like the strange money of a savage isle. And from that dream she knew him more than she ever had. She followed the track of his blue-faced primitive ancestors with their bone knives and their terrified little gods hiding in the treetops, and she trod the rain-slick stones of Glasgow town, where black-suited Calvinists screwed their souls into twists, and she crossed the great water with a prissy man of God and his widow-to-be, watched their children breed the bloodline thin and down to this miserable cramped sputter of a soul, this mysteryless little man, sad birthright of the clan.

  Scratch one McClaren, sound the horn.

  Willa wanted to sell the bottomland and move to the city. She wanted to live free, to kick up her heels, to have life take her in its arms and then to a nice restaurant and maybe afterward to a hotel. What harm could come of that? Twenty-two, and she’d never had any fun.

  Sell the bottomland? her family said. That’d be like selling Plymouth Rock! Bottomland’s something you hang on to, something you cherish. We won’t let you do it.

  And they didn’t.

  She did Eden widow’s service for a year, and for a year after that she hardly set foot off the land. One day her high-school friend Ellie Shane came to visit and said, “Willa, there’s gonna be a party Friday at the old Hoskins place.” She glanced left and right as if to defeat the wiles of eavesdroppers. “Gonna be college men and coupla businessmen from Chicago…and every one’s a looker. You gotta come.”

  Willa couldn’t say no.

  This was in October, the air crisp, the leaves full turned. Bright lights sprayed from the windows of the old house, outshining the moon, and inside couples danced and groped and sought out empty rooms. W
illa’s man was lean and dark. He had a sharp chin and the Devil’s toothy white grin, and he carried a silver pint flask that he kept forcing on her. She saw his thoughts working…He’d get this townie ripped, slip it to her quick, and leave her spinning. But Willa passed on the liquor. He’d read law at Michigan, he said, but had left school to run his father’s nationwide trucking firm. He tried all night to impress her with his money, never knowing he didn’t have to try, that it wasn’t his money she wanted. He guided her out onto the porch. A blond man was sitting with a girl on a bottomed-out sofa there, his hand hunching up under her skirt, a rat-sized creature looking for its burrow. Willa stood by the porch rail, gazing at the moon-dappled woods. Her man hemmed her in against the rail, moved in for a kiss. Willa slipped away and went halfway down the steps.

  “My kisses are for my husband,” she said. “But all the rest is yours.” And with that she skipped down from the steps and ran into the woods.

  She found an old oak with gnarly bark and a lightning scar, and leaned against it. Moonlight streamed through the webbed branches, illuminating the red-and-yellow leaves…Wind seethed through them, and they looked to be shaking in separate dances, red-and-yellow spearpoints of flame. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse and touched the slope of her right breast. God! The chill of that touch went through her like something sharp and silver. She undid a third button. The wind coiled inside the blouse, fondling her. She lifted her skirt, skinned down her panties, and flung them behind the oak. She could feel herself moist and open. The man’s footsteps crunched in the dead leaves. He peered into the shadows, his mouth set grim. Probably angry at her, thinking her a tease. He spotted her and came forward at a slow pace. Dark head, gleaming eyes. When he saw that she had unbuttoned the blouse, he walked faster. Stopped and tipped back the flask. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice. He tossed the flask away and reached inside her blouse. His hands moved over her breasts, squeezing, molding, knowing their white rounds from every angle. “Christ,” he said. “Oh, Christ.” She closed her eyes and arched to his pressure. Moonlight penetrated her lids. After a few seconds she pushed him off and hiked up her skirt.

  The man swallowed hard at the sight, made a soft noise deep in his throat. He tore at his buckle, ripped down his zipper, sprung out at her, a needle seeking its pole. He lifted her the necessary inch, settled into place, and plunged into her. She threw her arms back around the oak trunk, dug in with her fingers. Rough bark scraped her buttocks, but even the pain was good. He battered at her. The leaves hissed, the limbs shook, and a vibration went through the oak, as if what was going on between Willa and the man were threatening to uproot it. “Go slow,” she said, the words pushed out hoarse by a thrust. “Slow, slow.” That made him treat her too gently, and she told him how she needed it to build, guiding his moves. “There,” she said. “There…like that.” And even before her pleasure came, she cried out just for the joy of finally having a man hot and urgent inside her.

  Afterward she went back to the party and paid no attention to him. He couldn’t understand her, and his lack of understanding anointed her a mystery. He trailed her around, saying he had to see her again, he’d fly her to Chicago. Willa could have owned him, married him, and secured her future. But she had lights dancing in the miles of her eyes, and she wasn’t worried about the future.

  More’s the pity, Willa.

  Ah, God, Willa thought. Why hadn’t they let her live? That part of her, that need, it was nothing sinful. How could they have wanted to be with her and not accept her all in all? She shook her head, ruing the wasted years, then glanced at the Black Clay Boy.

  Was it her imagination, or was he quivering a little, as if he’d been trying to roll himself off the table?

  Calm yourself, Willa…that’s just the trembling of your head on its feeble stalk of a neck.

  The Boy’s silver-dot eye stared up at her. Hmm, Willa said to herself. Wonder what’d happen if I give him another. She plucked out a second pin and rammed it home.

  The pinhead shimmered, began to expand into a memory.

  “Lord Almighty,” said Willa. “I can do magic.”

  After that night at the Hoskins place, Willa cut a wild track through the tame fields of Ohio possibility. Roadhouses knew her, hotels took messages for her, and midnight dirt roads where nobody drove echoed to her backseat music. Rumors smoked up from her footprints, and the word went around that while she wouldn’t kiss you, you just hadn’t lived till Willa McClaren doctored your Charlie. The people of Lyman scandalized her name. That Willa, they said, she wasn’t never nothin’ more than hips and a hole, and I hear it was her evil needs what put ol’ Eden in the ground. Willa didn’t care what they said. She was having her life in sweet spasms, and for now that was enough. When the time was right, she’d settle down.

  Tom Selkie, a supervisor at the seat-belt factory over in Danton, knew Willa’s reputation and asked her out to get himself a sample of that real fine Charlie-doctoring. That was all Willa’d had in mind, but in the back of Tom’s Packard they experienced one of those intoxicating mistakes that people often confuse for love, and Willa let him kiss her. His tongue darted into her mouth, and though she liked how that felt, it startled her more than some.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom asked, and Willa blushed and said, “Me and Eden never did it with tongues.”

  Well, knowing this innocence in her made Tom feel twice a man, and he asked her straight off to marry. “Yes,” said Willa, confident that fate had finally done her a turn by giving her both a good man and the Power of True Romance. But True Romance lasted a matter of weeks. Tom kissed better than he tickled, so to speak, and was more interested in drinking with the boys after work than in getting prone and lowdown with Willa. When she tried to awaken his interest, he rejected her; his rejections grew more and more blunt, until at last he suggested that something must be wrong with her, that her needs were unnatural. Bored with marriage and having little else to engage her, she got pregnant with her firstborn, Annie. The year after Annie, she bore a son. Tom, Too, his proud dad called him. The kids grew, Tom’s belly sagged, and life just dragged along.

  It was at the age of thirty-six that Willa next had Big Fun. She left the kids with Tom and caught the train to Cleveland to talk with a broker about some stock Eden had hidden under the fireplace bricks. On the train she struck up a conversation with Alvah Medly, a pricey hooker with silkburns on her hips and fingers prone to breaking under the weight of her many diamonds. She was a big sleepy cat of a woman, her languid gestures leading Willa to believe she had syrup instead of marrow in her bones. Voluptuous to the point that it seemed an ounce more weight would cause everything to slump and decay. She had long black hair and big chest problems and a rear end just made for easy motion. But she was no finer a looker than Willa, who had held on to beauty and could still pass for her twenty-two-year-old self.

  Willa was curious about Alvah’s fancyhouse life and asked dozens of questions, and Alvah, perhaps sensing something more than mere curiosity, said, “Honey, if you wanna know all about it, whyn’t you give it a whirl?”

  Willa was flabbergasted. “Uh,” she said, “well…” And then, finding refuge in the dull majority of her life, added, “I’m married.”

  “Married!” Alvah said the word like it was something you’d scrape off your shoe. “Everybody’s been married.” She inhaled from a slim black cigar and blew a smoke ring that floated up to the corner of the compartment and spelled out a lie. “The life ain’t nothin’ but one long lazy lack of limitations.”

  The train rattled as it went over a crossing, and everything inside Willa’s head rattled. Could what Alvah was saying be true? The whole vital world was barreling east, shaking side to side, and blasting out its warning to the sexless villages of the heartland.

  “You come on over to Mrs. Gacey’s tonight,” said Alvah, “and I bet she’ll give you a try.”

  “I don’t know,” said Willa distractedly.

  “’Course you don�
��t, honey,” said Alvah. “How you gonna know ’less you explore the potentials?” She chuckled, “And believe you me, there’s some mighty big potentials come through the door of Mrs. Gacey’s.”

  Willa couldn’t think of anything to say. Her mind was miles ahead in Cleveland, in a room with a dark and faceless stranger.

  “You come on over,” said Alvah. “Mrs. Gacey’ll fix you up with a room and a trick or two.”

  “Well,” said Willa hesitantly. “Maybe…maybe just one.”

  That night she lay amid perfume and shadow on a harem bed draped in filmy curtains, wearing a scrap of silk and a few of Alvah’s spare jewels. The door opened, and a gray-haired monument of a man walked in. His face had a craggy nobility that looked as if it should be printed on money. Willa was tense, but when she saw how the man stared…Oh, she could almost see how she appeared to him. A red-haired, green-eyed bewitchment with her silk pushed up to reveal a hint of that down-pointed curly patch of fire between her thighs. The man parted the curtain and sat on the edge of the bed, drinking her in.

  “Good evenin’,” he said.

  “Evenin’,” said Willa, a little confused. She hadn’t thought she’d have to talk.

  “Now where in the world did Mrs. Gacey find a girl like you?” asked the man.

  “Lyman,” said Willa.

  “Lyman.” The man loosened his tie and seemed to be trying to locate the place in some interior atlas.

  “It’s near Danton…that’s the Winton County seat.”

  “Ah, yes. I carried Winton three to one.”

  “Whatcha mean you carried it?”

  The man looked at her askance. “You don’t recognize me?”

  “No,” said Willa. “You famous or somethin’?”

  “I’m the governor,” said the man, unbuttoning his shirt.

  “You are? I voted for you!”

  The man unbuckled his belt and smiled a warm professional smile. “I trust your enthusiasm for my candidacy has remained undimmed.”