Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  "Do as I do," said Marietta.

  She took the black ribbon now and tied two knots in it. Then she crouched and dug a fistful of dirt from the ground, placed the ribbon in the hole she had made and covered it with the dirt. Beverly, who was still shivering from the cold, quickly tied a single knot and buried the shoestring.

  "How many knots did you make?" Marietta asked her.

  "What difference does it make? A knot is a knot, right?"

  Ethel considered this. Then she tied four knots in the rickrack and buried it. When she finished the other two were staring at her.

  "Might as well be safe," she said.

  "Why?" Beverly said. "You think a squirrel might dig up your rickrack and untie it?"

  "You shouldn't make fun of the spell," said Marietta.

  "You should hurry up," said Beverly. "Say the oath and let's get out of here."

  In turn each repeated the oath they had spent most of the week writing:

  "On my soul and by the name of Miss Knocks in the heart of these woods, I swear to never let another one such as myself issue forth from the sacred temple of my body."

  Each girl, in turn, grinned at this bit. They were a little embarrassed by the word "body" in relation to themselves, but they were also proud of the time they'd spent writing the oath. They had stolen phrases from TV shows and from books at the school library, combining them into a speech that was impressively solemn when spoken on a cold afternoon in the gloomy woods.

  "By all that is sacred to me, I will keep this vow until my whole life is over and done."

  Ethel was the last of the three to repeat the vow. Despite the density of the canopy overhead one raindrop fell through, cold, plump, and glistening, onto her face as she began. It quivered there, broke, and ran down. She looked up with a grimace. The raindrop coursed the length of her neck and dribbled inside her cotton dress. High in the trees there was a pattering rain, but it would take time to soak through the canopy.

  Marietta broke the circle, jumped and turned around. She looked over her shoulder and stared off into the shadows.

  "What?" Beverly asked. "What happened?"

  "Did you see it?"

  "See what?"

  The other two stared at Marietta. Beyond the dark layer of leaves, above the branches and debris swaying over them, the blackened clouds moved and thunder rolled in. The clouds seemed to jostle and murmur overhead. Beverly's voice broke through the rumbling sound:

  "Fire!"

  Several leaves had blown flat against the small arch of cedar shingles and stuck there. Catching the flame and then dislodging, the leaves tumbled across the forest floor, conjuring a thin corridor of smoke as they rolled. The girls stamped their feet at the leaves outside the circle, but it only stirred up more smoke.

  "We can't put it out!" Ethel screamed.

  A clap of thunder made all of them jump.

  "The rain can put it out," Beverly said. "I don't care. Let's go!"

  "Rain's not even touching the ground here," Marietta said.

  Beverly wasn't listening. She turned away from the other two.

  "I'm late for supper! Let's go!" She yelled.

  She leapt free of the encircling smoke and darted off through the woods, back the way they had come. Ethel and Marietta went on stamping at the dirt and leaves, burying the shingles with a shallow pile of dirt. They kept scratching their ankles and calves on stray nettles as they worked. The smoke rolled up around them, making it hard to breathe.

  Ethel peeled off her sweater and began swatting the ground with it. She took a step following the flames, and another step. Bundling her pitifully charred sweater, she pressed it against a clot of weeds at the base of a cedar and held it there while smoke rolled out underneath. When it seemed that the fire was extinguished she lifted the sweater. Something on the ground caught her attention, and she poked at it with a twig. Then she let out a cry.

  Marietta crowded next to her and peered over her shoulder. Both girls gazed down at what was unmistakably a slender, blackened jawbone protruding from the earth in the spot where Ethel had chased the fire. Like tiny hematite chips several crooked, human teeth jutted from the bone. Neither Ethel nor Marietta moved.

  Finally Ethel said:

  "Who do you think it belonged to?"

  Marietta shook her head.

  "I don't know," she said. "Could be really old. Maybe there was a cemetery here, or a logging camp. Or it might be a Cowlitz relic."

  "Should we take it?" Ethel asked.

  Marietta shook her head. She pushed some leaves and dirt over the jawbone and patted them into place.

  "No. Whatever was buried here ought to stay put," she said. "Leave it alone."

  Ethel hesitated.

  "It's a bad sign, Ethel. Leave it alone."

  The smoke was rising once more and shifting in the air around them. Smoke shimmied out of the leaves under their feet. Everything seemed to be moving at once. Every scrap of the forest shuddered. More leaves were starting to smolder. A spark shot up from the cedar shingles and Ethel screamed:

  "We have to go!"

  They ran, with thin fingers of smoke winding upward in the woods behind them. They tore through ferns and shrubs that cut their legs. Back through the fir trees and undergrowth, across the leafy floor grasping at their ankles, down the ivy-covered incline. Marietta slipped and fell on her backside. Ethel scooped her up under both arms and pulled her the rest of the way. They hit the kickball field running.

  "I have to go home! My aunt's going to be mad if she finds out!" Marietta shouted.

  Then she took off and left Ethel standing on the muddy field. The sky split open, tearing like a sheet, letting the rain down. Ahead of Ethel, across the field, Marietta turned and called to her through the torrent. Ethel couldn't hear the words. She could only see Marietta's mouth gaping.

  Ethel looked down at her mud-spattered dress and the charred sweater hanging, sodden and ruined, from her right hand. Marietta shouted again. This time her high, keening voice cut right across the field:

  "Don't tell anyone!"

  Marietta turned away and Ethel took off running. All the way home she practiced what she would say if her mother questioned her about a fire in the woods:

  "Must have been lightning split a tree, but I wasn't there, so I don't know."

  Marietta

  To an unfamiliar eye the town of Skillute would have appeared dense with cedar, western hemlock and Douglas fir. The timber companies were still thriving. The lumber and aluminum firms were making money and hiring help almost every quarter. Their employees commuted from five counties for good jobs they considered themselves lucky to get.

  To people that had lived in Skillute all of their lives, however, the gaps and scars on the land were visible. Some of the routes cut by three generations of timber companies had been abandoned. Others were never used, leaving wide gravel roads to narrow and dwindle away, leading nowhere. In a few spots these routes were marked by new growth, with alder springing up along forgotten paths.

  Here and there the hills were split in half, leaving their interior exposed. The stratified walls ranged as high as twenty-five or thirty feet. From their dirt hundreds of tree roots emerged and dangled in the air.

  Longtime residents of Skillute and nearby Kelso and Longview tended to be tight-lipped, hardworking descendants of loggers and farmers. They were self-sufficient and proud of it, and they kept to themselves as much as possible. They repeated time honored cautionary tales for the benefit of their kids, who didn't listen. Boredom made the children restless but their parents didn't worry overmuch. Experience would trim their wings.

  Out of the five thousand or so residents only a handful of people knew how the legend of Miss Knocks began. One of these was Delphine Dodd, and what she knew she would eventually pass along to her niece as the girl grew up and was able to make sense of it. What Marietta knew from the start was that the last stand of old growth in Skillute, the place Miss Knocks was said to haunt by night,
was strictly off limits.

  "Did you bury it?" Delphine asked at least ten times.

  "We buried it," Marietta answered every time.

  Her hands trembled at the memory. She could still feel the smooth arc of the blackened jawbone against her fingertips. Despite herself she had yearned to keep it. She knew her aunt would have flown into a rage, although she wasn't sure why.

  She didn't dare tell about the spell or the oath she had taken. Casting spells on her own was forbidden, too, and the excuse that she did it to please her friends was worse than no excuse. Delphine lectured Marietta constantly about not taking outsiders into her confidence, and the old woman considered anyone who didn't share their name and lineage to be an outsider.

  Marietta never intended to tell her aunt where she had been that day. The old woman sensed it the second she looked at her face. She knew the girl had seen something, touched something. So Marietta decided on a partial truth. She told her aunt about the woods and what she had found, in the hope that Delphine might explain it to her.

  "How deep did you say you buried it? Did you touch it?"

  "Yes."

  "You touched it with your bare hands?"

  "I had to. Only to cover it with dirt."

  "How deep did you bury it?"

  "Deep enough."

  "How would you know what's deep enough?"

  "I put dirt over it. I buried it and I ran away."

  "You never go there again. Do you understand?"

  "Yes."

  "Look at me and promise. I told you a hundred times, and you nodded: yes, yes. And then you didn't do what I said. How can I believe you?"

  "We just wanted," Marietta began.

  "Don't want. That's what brings women to misery. Hear me? Want nothing. Every woman who comes to me comes in despair over something caused by a man. I'm not telling you to hate men. Just keep your wits. Don't long for things you don't need. Why did you go into the woods?"

  "We got lost. We were playing hide and seek, and we walked too far, is all."

  "Why do you tell me lies? I'm your keeper, Marietta. The only person you can trust. What were you doing there?"

  "Nothing. We got lost playing a game."

  "You're too old to play games. What were you doing?"

  "We got lost."

  The old woman sighed. She looked the girl in the eye.

  "There's wickedness, Marietta, dark as night. There are things that are wicked and if you touch them, they know you. They know where to find you now."

  "I won't go there again," Marietta promised.

  Delphine didn't answer. She burned the clothes Marietta wore that day, and cleansed the house with incantations and with burning chicory wood and sage.

  Ethel

  Ethel ran along the dirt path toward the trailer where her family had lived since her dad lost his job as a foreman at the paper mill. Drinking on the job, the boss said. Her dad said the boss was a liar, but the company let him go. A few months later the bank claimed their house. That was when the real trouble started.

  Ethel didn't mind the trailer. Her mother Shirley said it was trashy. She said they were living like hicks. They couldn't even afford one of the mobile home parks over in Longview, and Shirley said that was as low as anybody ought to go. Instead they had to get by on a vacant lot owned by a relative. They were a charity case.

  "Someday we're leaving this goddamn town," Shirley said every time she got drunk. "We'll pack one suitcase and clear right out!"

  After several months the paper mill was busy enough to add a night shift. They re-hired Ethel's dad for the late shift, but only at half what he was making before. The boss warned him that one mistake would be his last.

  "Mouse or man?" Shirley asked her husband at least once a week. "Are you a mouse or a man, Newie? What kind of man crawls back to people that treat him like dirt?"

  Newell Burney held his tongue until he had a couple of shots of vodka. Then he reminded Shirley that he earned every penny they had, and she didn't lift a finger if she didn't feel like it. He told her to go ride some other jackass, if she could find one. Here he would smile in an ugly way, leering at his angry, young wife until Ethel had to look away from both of them.

  The dirt path ran alongside the woods. The rain had let up for a moment, but the wind still whipped Ethel's brown hair across her face. Voices chirped from the darkened fir trees, the forest-muffled noise of frantic birds. She hated birds, especially owls.

  Once, when she was seven, she had seen a screech owl swoop down in moonlight and disappear into the lower depth of a grassy trench. The owl emerged seconds later, with a shriek and a mighty flap of its wings. It held a field mouse clasped tight in its left claw, and as it climbed the air beside Ethel, preparing to take full flight, she saw in one blink the terror-struck eyes of the mouse caught in the owl's momentum, snatched clean out of its world.

  She had stood there, in the middle of the road, breathing hard, with her ribs aching. She wanted to outrun the awful rush of wings, so she spun with her arms out, again and again, until she fell sideways and was sick in the grass. When the ground stopped spinning, she saw it again in her head: the mouse forced quiet in the owl's grip.

  Against her will and despite a vain desire to be grownup, Ethel scurried along, facing forward the way the little kids in school said you were supposed to:

  "Keep your eyes to yourself. Be home before dark. Or Miss Knocks might find you and catch you in the woods with her long, long arms."

  Ethel tried to think of other things while she hurried home, but her imagination kept circling back. She didn't like to admit she still felt afraid of Miss Knocks, afraid of the way Shirley lowered her voice when she told the stories. In Shirley's hands Miss Knocks became a hateful, hungry thing nesting in treetops. At night she was looking down, licking her lips and waiting for the chance to drag little girls like Ethel to her tree house, surrounded by the ink-black sky:

  "Chh-shh! That's the sound of another child's skin catching fire! Chh-shh!"

  Whenever Shirley made this sound the hairs on Ethel's arms tingled. Shirley always looked away, licked her dry lips, and laughed.

  Today every strand of Shirley's hair was sprayed stiffly into place. Her mascara was already starting to smear. A cigarette dangled from her lips, unlit.

  "I told you: don't get stains on your school dresses or you can do your own damn wash!"

  Shirley caught Ethel as she darted up from the path to the concrete back steps of the trailer. She swung a wooden spoon with one hand and clubbed Ethel on the back of her left thigh. A welt formed, the color of a new strawberry. She followed Ethel into the trailer, waving the spoon and shouting:

  "I'm not bothering any more! Hear me? You get your clothes filthy playing kickball at that damn school, and see who does the laundry! Not me!"

  The scent of drugstore cologne clung to the furniture. It was called Eau de something, and Shirley said it came from London, England, where people knew how to have a good time.

  Shirley was dressed to go out: crisply ironed, pleated mini-skirt; a cotton blouse with shaggy ruffles; chunky go-go boots that zipped up the side; a shocking pink scarf tied over her spray-stiffened hair to keep the rain off. Nothing went together and most of it was out of style by a couple of years, but Ethel wasn't going to point this out. Every time she noticed a thing like that, Shirley went wild.

  "You say you're better than me? Go on, then, little girl. You're so smart? I'll show you smart."

  Ethel said nothing about her mother's outfit. She went to her room, peeled off her wet dress and changed into a hand-me-down pair of red corduroy slacks and a ratty t-shirt. Most of her home clothes were from the Salvation Army. Her school clothes came from Sears because Shirley wasn't about to let "those dumb hick kids" make fun of her daughter's appearance. That would mean Shirley didn't know how a girl ought to dress.

  Ethel went to the kitchen, got a can of pineapple slices out of the fridge and peeled back the wax paper covering it. She slurped the le
ftover pineapple juice from the can. The heavy sweet syrup made her teeth hurt. She grimaced and took another swig.

  Without saying goodbye Shirley put her lipstick and wallet into her good purse, left the trailer and slammed the front door. A few seconds later, Ethel heard the crunch of go-go boots on gravel as Shirley dashed through the rain to the car. Now it was coming down hard.

  The gears began grinding away on the beat-up Impala in the yard. Her dad was forever fixing it up for her mother to drive another fifty miles until it broke down. Then Shirley would scream that he couldn't do anything a hundred percent, and he was old enough to be her grandpa. She said he was keeping the car the way it was on purpose, keeping her trapped here. Late at night she would stride off into the woods to smoke cigarettes until she was freezing and worn out. She'd come back with bloodshot eyes and Ethel could hear her crying, a sort of throaty whisper, late into the night.

  This evening mud and wet gravel sprayed the outside wall, telling Ethel she wouldn't see her mother for a few hours. Her dad was working. She was free. She decided to eat grilled cheese sandwiches with Pepsi for supper. And she could watch cartoons on the portable TV if she reshaped the ball of foil attached to the antenna.

  Tonight she was happy to be on her own. It was Star Trek night and she could stay up late. There was only the rain spattering the trailer outside, and Ethel lying on the couch in the blue glow of the little TV.

  She lay on the couch after cartoons and the early news ended. Next came High Chaparral, then The Name of the Game, and then Ethel's favorite, Star Trek. After that was nothing but the news and weather.

  Finally the buzz of the TV signal began to lull her into drowsiness. She tried to let go all the way and sleep but her brain kept buzzing. She watched the TV sideways with her head resting on a flat, velveteen cushion.

  Shirley was probably at the nearest tavern with one of her boyfriends. Newell would sneak a couple of shots of vodka at work on his break. Ethel didn't want to know these things. She didn't want to be their daughter.

  Some nights, half sleeping, dreaming of wings and black sky, Ethel pretended her parents didn't exist any more. With their fights and name-calling and Shirley's habit of wandering off into the woods to sulk, they were like children. They threw the kind of tantrums Ethel wasn't allowed to throw. And when they made up, it was worse. They would lock themselves in the bedroom with the TV and a case of beer for hours at a time while Ethel played alone outside.