by Jean Rabe
Axel felt the chill in the Wisconsin air as well as the cold shoulder from the new Mrs. Boyce when they arrived home well after midnight. Moss and leaves crusted with frost crunched beneath their feet. It was apparent the honeymoon was over when Muirgen threw open the flimsy door to the house trailer and peered inside with a look of utter disgust.
“I insist you remove these repulsive creatures.” She growled as she waved an arm around the room, indicating his taxidermy trophies. “I refuse to look at these dead things another minute. The idea of wild animals being slaughtered to adorn this dump makes me cringe.”
With great care Axel dutifully packed each of his prized specimens and neatly stored them in the boathouse.
But the tirade was far from over. The next to be evicted was Blitzkrieg. Now banished to a ramshackle shed, the dog’s mournful cries could be heard around the clock.
Early one October morning shotgun blasts heralded the start of another duck hunting season.
By November several feet of shimmering snow swirled across the woods. The dull copper leaves that clung tenaciously to the giant oaks were thoroughly encased in ice.
From his tree stand a mile or so away from home Axel shot a buck on opening day, but hid the carcass in the back of the shed. This way he could trick his wife into thinking he was still chasing some elusive deer when in fact he was chasing the elusive Leinenkugal beer at the VFW Club.
Ice fishing gave him a reprieve from the daily arguments, while he and Blitzkrieg sat in their makeshift shanty on the frozen lake. No longer did pangs of guilt bother him when he left the trailer to hunt rabbit and squirrel. Every morning he tiptoed as quietly as he could to the door, trying not to wake his slumbering fishwife.
“I’m tired of being left in this tin can while you and that dog are hunting or fishing every minute you’re not at work. Why can’t we move to Las Vegas where at least the weather’s perfect?” his wife constantly harped.
“My job is here, and I’m too old to start over somewhere else. When I retire we can spend the winters there, I promise.” He tried his best to placate her. By midwinter he was ready to promise her anything, including a trip to Disneyland to celebrate their anniversary, in exchange for a short truce.
The diminished daylight and the blinding white of the snowy landscape depressed the mermaid more each day. Sunlight barely filtered through the ice that heavily glazed the back door. By February the north woods was virtually cut off from the rest of the world. Glistening heavy icicles hung like prison bars outside the cold window glass.
During the next few weeks the mermaid acted more and more secretively. She claimed to be lonely during the cold winter days, but multiple sets of footprints in the snow caused Axel to wonder what happened while he was at work and who was coming to visit. The phone rang unanswered when Axel called home during the day. One afternoon, while he rifled through the shed to locate the gasoline can for his snowmobile, he stumbled across a suitcase packed with some of her things, clearly hidden away.
The next day he arrived home several hours early to take his wife to a movie only to find her missing. She returned later that evening but adamantly refused to account for her whereabouts. It broke his heart to think she was having an affair.
Muirgen stomped angrily around the disheveled trailer with Axel in quick pursuit. A screaming match and intense battle of wills raged for several hours until finally Axel promised they would return to Las Vegas.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Well leave tomorrow morning.”
In exchange for this concession his wife agreed to accompany him to his shanty on the frozen lake for a bit of ice fishing that evening.
Ten years later on his wedding anniversary, September fifteenth, the fisherman sat on a threadbare sofa, with his work boots propped upon the worn coffee table. Blitzkrieg’s large gray muzzle rested on his master’s knee as Axel scratched the coarse thick fur of his trusted friend. The aging Chesapeake suffered from an arthritic hip, as well as aches and other annoyances that accompany old age. Axel was starting to feel the effects of time himself.
His eyes drifted to a picture of Muirgen, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, smiling at her happy groom. He glanced away, surveying the multitude of stuffed furry and feathered specimens that adorned the trailer walls and shelves. The crown jewel of his collection hung above the wood burning stove—his trophy sturgeon. Pale silvery skin sported white triangular points that jutted from its prehistoric-looking back.
Each crisp September evening, while he gazed into a blazing fire, Axel Boyce would hoist a Leinie’s beer in salute, a toast to his trophy wife, the catch of a lifetime.
FAIRIES WEEP NOT
Linda P. Baker
Linda P. Baker is happy to live in the boondocks (sort of), where the pace of life is slower and filled with birdsong, and where the oak tree in her backyard has a raccoon in residence. She is the author of The Irda and Tears of the Night Sky with Nancy Varian Berberick, and has short stories in more than a dozen anthologies, including Pandora’s Closet, Timeshares, and Spells of the City. Linda and her husband, Larry, and Airedale terrier/dragon, Grady, live in Mobile, Alabama. Grady has been known to also scare up a possum or two in the backyard.
My grandmother and grandfather’s place had seemed the same to me as when I was a girl, even though it was night when I returned. The first good, full breath of air that I had sucked in had smelled of dirt and dust and pine trees, and it was as welcoming as lemonade on a hot summer day. As I’d walked up the short path to the house, my feet finding the ruts for guidance, I remember thinking, “Ha! You can go home again.”
But looking out the kitchen window, watching the sun paint a thin streak of pink along the horizon, I could see that the breath of air had lied.
This wasn’t the yard I’d grown up in. The majestic old oaks, the tall pines, even the old magnolia that my grandfather had built our tree house in, had no leaves. Spring was just breaking, but the trees shouldn’t have been as naked as that even in the dead of winter. In the dim morning light, the branches looked like they were pointing arthritic fingers at the sky.
I’d seen trees that looked like that before, twisted and tortured, on the coast after they’d been underwater during a hurricane. But if this area had suffered a surge like that, all of Florida and half of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia would be gone. No hurricane had done this.
Gran’s garden wasn’t in any better shape. The wisteria that had grown out of an ancient stump was shriveled. The honeysuckle that had taken over the old fence, growing in and out of the chicken wire, was hanging like overcooked spaghetti noodles. And I could barely make out the beds where marigolds and zinnias and petunias had reigned. One sad and drooping sunflower, sans seeds, hung its head over the fence.
“Gran, what’s happened to your garden?”
I looked back, but it wasn’t Gran whose slippers had whispered into the kitchen behind me. It was my grandfather, called G-Pop since the first time he bought us popsicles. I could still see Lydia grinning, her mouth stained orange, trying to keep her hair from flying into the dripping popsicle as we bounced along in the back of G-Pop’s old truck.
G-Pop didn’t answer me. He just ducked his head, making his rounded shoulders look even more round, and shuffled through the kitchen onto the back porch. The screen door slapped shut behind him, and his soles shushed, shushed, shushed across the porch until he stepped off into the yard. The door to his workshop opened with a little snick and closed the same way.
I sighed. He was one of the reasons I’d come home for what looked like a prolonged visit. Gran had told Lydia that G-Pop had grown silent and odd and spent all his time in the workshop. But Gran, too, had seemed odd when we talked to her on the phone. Of late, the tinkling laughter that had made my grandfather fall in love with her was missing from our conversations.
We’d agreed that I would come home and check on things. It was easier for me to get away. Lydia was an office manager with a computer company, whereas U ...
Well, since times had gotten so hard, I was basically unemployed. When money’s tight, nobody’s interested in buying a handmade pot, no matter how beautiful it is. It was no great imposition to shove a few things in a backpack and make a quick trip home.
Except that home looked like it was the dead of a hard winter, ’stead of pushing into spring.
I poured a cup of thick black coffee and followed G-Pop out to the workshop, tapping before I opened the door. He sat astride a bench, bent over his worktable. He had two tiny paintbrushes in his mouth and a third between his gnarled fingers. The birdhouse he was putting the finishing touches on looked like a fairy castle decorated in a delicate lavender just a shade lighter than wisteria.
“That’s really beautiful, G-Pop,” I said. “You know, birdhouses are pretty popular right now. Maybe I could take a few back to town with me and sell them in my market booth.”
He didn’t even look up. He just barely grunted.
I don’t know what I thought when Lydia told me that Gran had said G-Pop had stopped doing any work around the house and was spending every waking moment making birdhouses. I sure hadn’t expected this odd, unresponsive, bowed little old man so caught up in painting the roof of a birdhouse that he didn’t even look at me when I spoke.
As I trudged back across the dried-up grass, the sun peeked around the edge of our Indian mound.
Lydia and I had claimed it as ours from the first day we’d come to live with Gran and G-Pop. The archaeologists from the university had come, years before we were even born, and said it actually was an Indian mound. They’d done some digging in it and said that it was a shell mound, more like the one found down on Dauphin Island than the other inland ones. Gran still had copies of some of the pictures, showing the mound with a pie shaped piece of its side carved away, raw earth exposed, little grids laid out around the bottom with twine.
By the time we came to live here, the scars from the digging had already disappeared, and it became our fort, our castle, our mountain; one Halloween, it was a volcano that shot fire into the air, courtesy of the sparklers G-Pop had bought in town.
It was the only place in the yard that still had green grass.
There were a lot of good memories attached to this pile of earth and shells. Lydia and I pretended we were climbing Mount Everest here. We’d done the blood sister oath on top in the moonlight, cutting our palms with a knife we stole from G-Pop’s toolbox. I’d had my first kiss up here, also in the moonlight, from a boy named Allan, whose face I could no longer remember.
I climbed it a lot more slowly now than I had when I was a kid. I didn’t have the wind to run up it as I once had, and I was enjoying the feel of the grass on my bare feet.
I waited until I was on the tiptop before I turned around.
The view took my breath away, squeezed my heart like a fist had tightened on it. Had it been so long since I’d been home? The land, the beautiful woods that we’d played chase in, hide and seek, forest ranger, the little creek that snaked through it all, the pecan orchard. It was all gone. There was nothing but plowed fields, and one lonely oasis of trees, and the poor, dying yard left.
Was it really more than a year since I’d visited? Could this much have happened in a year?
What had been our creek was a dry ribbon snaking toward the house. It looked like it had been dammed up out in the middle of a field of raw earth.
Where our pretend fort had stood and far beyond, there were rows and rows of plowed earth. All the way to the small ridge that marked the end of our land. Rows of ... something ... plants so gray and drooping I couldn’t tell what they were. Surely Gran would have told us if they were planting on this wide a scale?
I started down the mound. Caught my toe on a clump of grass. My coffee cup went flying, coffee arcing up into the air. I flailed my way down the last few feet of the incline and had to run several steps when I hit bottom to keep from falling flat on my face.
The screen door popped the wall as I went tearing into the kitchen. “Gran! What happened to the woods? What’s all that ... crap planted all around us?”
But Gran wasn’t in the kitchen.
I stormed through the house, bare feet slapping on the floors. When I was a kid, my shoes squeaked on wood floors polished and shined to a mirror like sheen. The floors now were scratched and rough. In the corners, where there was still a hint of polish, I could see dust.
“Gran!”
“Here, child.” Her mild voice came from the living room. She was sitting in a rocking chair at the window with a cup of coffee balanced on the arm. A cane with tripod feet was sitting beside her chair. The morning sun was glinting on her silver hair. In the unforgiving light she looked ... old. So old, and as dried up as the wisteria.
“What’s all that cr—” I caught myself in time. I might be grown, but I would bet she’d be quick to tell me I wasn’t too tall to get a whipping. “—stuff growing in the pecan orchard?”
Guess it wasn’t a pecan orchard, though, since there weren’t any trees there anymore. “What happened to the orchard?”
Gran gave a little shrug, picked up her coffee mug, and blew on the top of it, just like I had earlier. “Oh, honey, those old trees were just worn out. Mr. Dennehy, over to the west, wanted to plant some extra fields, so he paid us to let him use the land.”
“Dennehy,” I said his name with disgust.
Gran had always teased me that the reason I disliked him so much was because I secretly liked him. He was my type, fair enough, though I’d never told her that. Tall and broad-shouldered, beautiful silver hair. I liked his looks just fine. It was the heart of pumice that I couldn’t stand. He cared nothing about land for the sake of the land. All he thought about was how he could make money off it.
“Why would you do that, Gran?”
“Well ...” she said, as if she wasn’t quite sure herself. “We haven’t picked up the pecans for a couple of seasons ... Just didn’t seem to feel like it ...”
“And he dammed up the creek?”
“Well, yes. It was ... He said ...” Her voice trailed off, and I thought for a moment she wasn’t going to finish, but then she seemed to perk up. “He said ... something about his crops.”
For the first time, I saw that maybe it wasn’t only my grandfather who’d grown odd with age. The light, the beautiful blue life that had twinkled in her eyes, was dull. Her skin looked gray and tired and dry.
There was no point telling her what I thought of it all, that I was furious at Dennehy for talking her into letting him farm her land, that cutting the house off from that lovely trickle of water that had wandered through the yard made me want to cry. First off, it wasn’t my land. Second ... I didn’t think my distress would filter through her cloudiness.
That same voice that had been so cocky in my head last night as I walked down the rutted dirt road to the house now said, “This, Aurora. This is what they mean when they say, ‘You can’t go home again.”
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” I said quietly.
“Some toast would be nice, dear.” She cupped her fingers around her cup and stared out the window. I wasn’t sure she even knew who I was.
The night was quiet. Too quiet. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
All day I’d been so focused on the dying grass. the missing flowers, and my grandparents’ fog, that I hadn’t even noticed the silence. Where were the rasping, chittering bugs, birdsong, the hoots of the night owls, the violin scrapings of the frogs? All I could hear was the loud crunch of my footsteps on dry grass.
The moon was full, shining blue-white overhead. It was bright enough that I could actually see a wavery shadow trailing along in my wake.
I had tried to sleep. I was dog-tired after the bus trip. My eyes would close, but my brain wouldn’t shut down. I had gone out onto the porch, thinking some night air might help.
And the moon-silvered wall of trees, all was left of our woods, called to me.
A greeny orange pinpoint o
f light pricked the darkness in the field ahead of me. Another one winked, then another.
Lightning bugs.
Lydia and I used to play a weird game of shadow tag with them. We pretended they were fairies, and on summer nights when the moon was full, we pretended that if we were quick enough, we could touch their shadows. I hadn’t seen lightning bugs in years.
I hesitated as I reached the edge of the woods. “Too long in the city,” I chided myself. Afraid of the dark.
After a moment, I forged ahead. The brush wasn’t as thick as it had been when we were kids, when there were areas of the woods that we had to crawl through on hands and knees. Still, there were enough crackly twigs to snag my hair, to scratch my arms as I pushed through.
I could almost hear Lydia giggling ahead of me, taunting me to hurry.
The imagined sound drew me on, until I found the area that was still green. I could tell because the branches that touched me were soft and living, instead of crackly dry. The scents of cedar and pine and damp earth, as sweet as fresh bread, filled my senses.
I breathed in deeply, peace filling me. This was how the woods were supposed to smell, green and living.
Without even needing the light, I found the boulders that marked our “cave.”
We’d always wanted to go in a cave, Lydia and me. But there were no caves in southern Alabama, because there were no limestone deposits. To make a cave, nature had to have soft, water-soluble rocks. So we made our own. Our pretend cave was a pile of boulders on a high spot in the woods. We’d excavated around and under, carrying out the soft red dirt in milking pails until we’d had a hole big enough for both of us to crouch in.
We’d been planning improvements when Gran realized what we were doing and told us we’d get a switchin’ if we went in there again. She said the dirt might collapse with us in it. So she’d cleaned out a closet and made us a cave in there instead.