In the morning, he returns. The queen has granted an audience, he finds.
Her room, when he enters, is simple and cheap and smells of disinfectant and sickness. A bed, a walker, an ugly couch. A big expensive high-definition television set in contrast to the cheapness of everything else—there is pleasure to be found in something, isn’t there? Here it is the mind-deadening glamour of Fox News set to mute. She sits in a chair by the window, looking out at the soft mountains rolling beyond the parking lot. Majesty framed in the humdrum. Cromwell has done the math in his head. Mollie Dethero is ninety-five years old.
“Mrs. Tackett, my name is Cromwell, and I’m from the Library—”
“I always knew someone would come,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would take this long.” She’s withered and unlike how Cromwell pictured her. Fatter, and softer. Wobbling skin slack at her neck and on her forearms. Aging isn’t like desiccation, Cromwell thinks, where the flesh is drained away, leaving only the bones. It’s the baggage of life hanging from your frame, it’s the fat, it’s the fused vertebrae, the skin full of scars and tears and liver marks.
He sits down near her. She says, “This is about Parker, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Cromwell says. “Of course it is.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Did you ever listen to the recording?”
“No. How could I?”
“You had the SoundScriber for weeks. It’s a simple enough machine.”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t want to hear it all again.” She looks away from Cromwell and out the window. “Once was enough.”
“The recording was not very revealing.”
“Young man, you sound like you’re accusing me of something.”
“No,” Cromwell says. “Of course not. I am just curious. Could you have been playing a trick on Parker? Speaking for the—”
“The wind?” She laughed. “God help me, I wish I had played that trick on him.”
“Why did you call it the wind?”
She remains quiet for a long while. “It was eighty years ago. I was just a girl and full of myself and scared. Calling it the wind was easier than saying death.”
“Death? What—”
“What isn’t about death, mister? It’s all about death.”
“When you ran away, you wrote you saw a man standing before a black wall,” Cromwell says.
“I don’t know what I wrote,” she says. “It was a long time ago.”
Cromwell stops, examines the woman. She breathes through her mouth and he can see, on the parchment-thin skin on the back of her hand, she’s had an intravenous drip recently: blue and purple bruises bloom around a white bandage. Her head is wrapped in a multicolored floral silk scarf, and she’s a riot of different fabric patterns on her dress, her sweater. Her feet outrageously swollen and painful for Cromwell to look at.
“All right, Mrs. Tackett. I just have one more question for you,” Cromwell says. “What do you think happened? Was Parker crazy?”
“He most definitely was that.” She laughs. “But, just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”
“So, the second voice. Was it him?”
She reaches up and unpins the scarf around her head. Slowly she unwinds it. Her hair has been pressed to her skull in a misshapen and ugly clot. It’s a garish shade of red, and not white.
“Curl up and dye,” Mollie Dethero says. “That’s my motto. Ever since I was a girl.”
Cromwell stands. He has wasted his and her time, and she does not have much left. “Thank you, Mollie, for talking to me.” He turns to leave.
“It ain’t far away, Mister Government Man,” Mollie says. “Cidersend. All you gotta do is use one of them computers and find Hell Creek. Ain’t more than ten miles away. You can ask the angel all the questions you’ve got. All by yourself.”
“Thank you,” he says, and leaves her. In the car he wonders when was the last time her hands held a slingshot, the last time she shot a squirrel from a bough or a sparrow from the sky, as she bragged in her testament.
He opens his phone and brings up Google Maps and enters Mountain View, Arkansas, Hell Creek and as easy as that, his phone begins to give him directions.
In thirty minutes, he’s at a home on a ridge. It’s a stone house, made from local rocks nested in a copse of pine trees, and there’s a large antenna scrabbling at the sky and two satellite dishes. A truck sits on blocks, and there are ATVs and Polaris vehicles in a grease-stained cluster by a garage. A thickset man leaves the motocross bike he’s working on and wipes his hands on a shop rag and approaches Cromwell’s car with a wary and questioning expression on his face.
Cromwell gets out of the car and introduces himself. “I’m looking for Hell Creek and a place called Cidersend,” he says, adding, “For governmental records.”
The man looks puzzled. “Don’t know why the government would need that, but Hell Creek ain’t but a half mile that way. Ain’t never heard of no Cidersend.”
“It’s a place where there’s an orchard of apple trees,” Cromwell says.
“Aw. Right. My girls call it Applesauce on account of the smell.”
“Could you take me to it?” The man looks dubious but brightens when Cromwell says, “I’ll pay you for your time.”
“What’re we talking ’bout here?”
Thinking of Harlan Parker and the Detheros, Cromwell says, “Fifty dollars okay?” The man smiles.
They climb aboard a rattling Polaris ATV and drive down raw-red trails recently cut into the mountain. The man is dressed in Carhartt, with thick mud boots, and stinks of stale tobacco and sweat and petroleum. Within minutes, they’re deep in the woods and moving away from any paved road or house. He can smell it before he can see it. They’re in a steep gully, climbing a switchback trail, when Cromwell scents apples on the air.
“We’re on government property now, I reckon. National easement,” the man says. “We hunt deer around these parts. And turkey. Ain’t nothing in that direction for twenty miles but trees and rocks.”
This astounds Cromwell—Cidersend belonged to the government all along. They reach a plateau that’s heavily wooded with deciduous trees. A single stone chimney remains standing; all the wood is gone. “Here we are,” the man says. “Crisscross Applesauce.”
“Give me a moment, will you?”
“Sure, no problemo, mister,” the man says. He lights a cigarette and opens his smartphone, leaning back in the Polaris’s cushioned, mud-spattered seats.
Cromwell leaves him and approaches the chimney. Here was a home; he can see the faint outlines of a foundation, but a mature oak stands where there might’ve once been a kitchen or parlor. There is no orchard, though the smell of apples fills the air. It’s pure forest here, full of thick undergrowth and crowded trees. Cromwell looks up at the sky, observing the crown shyness, and then moves on.
Black apples at his feet, releasing their smell. And farther, two brick bases with rusted wrought iron jutting upward. The arch that once read idyll’s end is gone. Mosquitoes swarm him, and he slaps at his neck.
A little farther, he stumbles, his foot catching upon an overturned granite stone.
He brushes away the litterfall. nadine hines, she knowed fifty-two more songs than anyone, died 1861. And farther on. emanuel evenson, suffer the little children to come unto me. born 1831, died 1899.
Before him rises a thicket, strewn with heavy vines and thick brush, in the shadow of an oak tree. He is not dressed for this excursion, he realizes, but cannot stop himself. He reaches forward, pushing aside the vines and brush—a hundred bloody pricks spring along his arm, tearing through his button-down—and his hand encounters stone. He traces the stone upward, and rising up, he finds a face with his hands. The vengeful angel, Mollie called it.
Cromwell returns to the man at the ATV and offers him more money. By nightfall, the angel gravestone will be cleared of all vines and detritus, the ground around it bare, and the man will
be three hundred dollars richer. They are both pleased with the bargain.
He has to drive to a town called Fifty-Six on the county line to get the wine; the rest he buys at a local grocery. The shovel he buys at Walmart, along with cheap work clothes. He’s amazed at the prices. He rests in his motel room, letting the air conditioner belch out frigid air to condense in droplets on the windows.
The man with the Polaris—my name’s Dexter Reece but everyone calls me Dex—greets him at sundown, looking happy but exhausted. He’s drinking a cheap light beer—“Natty Lite, you want one?”—and Cromwell finds that he does and they begin drinking in the machine shop.
“If I’d knew there was an angel statue out there in the woods all these years, I’d have been taking folks out on tours.”
“It’s a piece of historical value, Mister Reece,” Cromwell says. “Just a reminder.”
“It’s one helluva statue, that’s for damned sure,” he says.
They drink a twelve-pack of beer between them. It reminds Cromwell of his youth, killing time with cheap alcohol, waiting for life to begin. Out on the edges of fields and away from anything that happens. But no more.
“I guess it’s time. Take me out there.”
“You on a schedule?”
“I am,” Cromwell says, and laughs. For no reason, Reece shakes his head and joins in.
They take the Polaris once more, and the journey has changed in the darkness. The headlights move in small patches of illumination through the woods. The darkness deepens.
When they arrive, the wheels of the vehicle churning in the mulch of fallen apples, Cromwell disembarks with his bags and shovels and asks the man to come get him at dawn. Reece is being paid enough he doesn’t question but gives Cromwell his cell phone number in case he changes his mind.
The night is full of mosquitoes and biting insects but Cromwell ignores them and sets up his lantern at the foot of the angel’s gravestone and begins to dig.
Digging a grave is much harder than it seems on television and takes much longer. He is glad for the gloves and mouths a silent thanks to Harlan Parker for taking the time to describe the state of his hands at the end of things.
The earth does not come easy. It is three in the morning when Cromwell realizes there is no body buried here. Whatever soul lies interred at his feet, it has returned to dust.
He sinks to his knees, exhausted. The wine is cheap. The backwoods liquor stores of Arkansas are not known for their selections of Malbec. It is a pint of fortified port wine. Cromwell says the words anyway and drinks it all down. From the bag, he removes the bread and cheese and eats them down to rind and crust. And then consumes them.
“I’ve drunk the wine of her body. I’ve eaten the rind of her cheese, and kissed the crust of her bread,” he says.
The oaks and birches, the cedars and apple trees, shift in the night breeze. A dog barks far away in the distance. A branch snaps. And then nothing.
“Let me speak to my wife!” Cromwell cries. “My boy!”
There is nothing. No wind, no sound.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. On his knees, he bows his head until his forehead touches raw earth. His tears mix with the grave mold. “I’m a bad man. I’m such a terrible man.”
He stays like that until the dawn breaks against the sky. He unfolds himself painfully from the grave he’s dug with his own hands. He thinks about his end, his wife’s and son’s ends, all ends. There is nothing left him except guilt. There is no more story left to unspool. He is empty.
There are no endings, only beginnings.
Like this one.
THE END
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due, of course, first and foremost to my agent, Stacia Decker, who agreed to represent me so long ago and more recently agreed to try to sell a weird little novella, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky; my thanks to Stacia again for her fine and steady hand as my first and most trusted editor; also to David Pomerico and his team at Harper Voyager for buying the novella and trusting me to write My Heart Struck Sorrow and work on its development. At every turn, David and his team have shown their support and enthusiasm for this book and I’m so grateful to work with a publisher that understands what, as an author, I’m trying to do. I’m grateful to Chuck Wendig for agreeing to write the foreword and Laird Barron, John Langan, Daniel Kraus, Daryl Gregory, Michael Moreci, Michael Patrick Hicks, and all the other folks online who supported The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky’s ebook release.
I’d like to thank my favorite artist working today, Jeffrey Alan Love, for providing the striking cover art. His workups for this duo of tales blew my mind. I have lectured online and elsewhere about the importance of cover art for genre books, and I am extremely pleased Jeff was able to contribute to this. I can scratch one more thing off my bucket list.
Have Jeff Love do your cover.
My thanks to Todd Harvey of the Library of Congress Folklife Center. Todd curates the Alan Lomax collection and his guidance and works—especially his wonderful multimedia book Michigan-I-O—provided a surfeit of granular detail for My Heart Struck Sorrow and my story of a demented, insane Alan Lomax–like character.
I am deeply indebted to Eduardo Arias and Mónica Ramón Rios for reading The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and to Kwame Mbalia for reading My Heart Struck Sorrow, with an eye toward any sort of issues of cultural insensitivity. Without them, I would not have been confident enough to see this book to publication.
Thanks to Dave Oliphant for helping me deal with some rights issues. Thanks to M. L. Brennan for information about the ins and outs of faculty at university. And to Fabio Fernandes for advice regarding South America, and how Americans speaking Spanish (or Portuguese, in Fabio’s case) sound to native speakers.
My thanks to Duke Boyne for information regarding motorcycles—I have ridden one, and enjoyed it (I didn’t die, or peel all the skin from my body), but I know nothing about them.
Any mistakes of culture or language, or any detail that is amiss regarding Argentina or South America—all my fault. Should you feel strongly enough about any of my errors to want to inform me of them, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].
Of course, thanks to my wife and kids for understanding the demands of the day job and the night and weekend job and tolerating the ghost-haunted life of a writer.
Source Books and Inspirations
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky
Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, by Tanya Harmer
Chile History and Pre-Columbian Civilizations: Wars of Independence, 1810–18, Civil Wars, 1818–30, Constitutional History, The Society and Its Environment, Economy, Tourism, Government, Politics, by Henry Albinson
The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, by John Dinges
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, by Isabel Allende
A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, by Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, by Peter Kornbluh
Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present, by Lessie Jo Frazier
Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, by Macarena Gómez-Barris
The works of Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Lihn, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges
My Heart Struck Sorrow
Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934–1997, by Ronald D. Cohen
Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, by John Szwed
Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents, edited with an introduction by David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, by Robin D. G. Kelley
The Land Where the Blues Began, by Alan Lomax
Michigan-I-O, by Todd Harvey
Ozark Magic and Folklor
e, by Vance Randolph
Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series, by H. L. Mencken
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry
The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs, and Music, by Tom Piazza
Stagolee Shot Billy, by Cecil Brown
Stories of Survival: Arkansas Farmers during the Great Depression, by William D. Downs Jr.
A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People, by B. A. Botkin
Library of Congress website
About the Author
JOHN HORNOR JACOBS’s first novel, Southern Gods, was short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. His young adult series, The Incarcerado Trilogy, comprised of The Twelve-Fingered Boy, The Shibboleth, and The Conformity, was described by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing as “amazing” and received a starred Booklist review. His Fisk and Shoe fantasy series, composed of The Incorruptibles, Foreign Devils, and Infernal Machines, has thrice been short-listed for the David Gemmell Awards and was described by Patrick Rothfuss like so: “One part ancient Rome, two parts wild west, one part Faust. A pinch of Tolkien, of Lovecraft, of Dante. This is strange alchemy, a recipe I’ve never seen before. I wish more books were as fresh and brave as this.” His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Cemetery Dance, and Apex Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @johnhornor.
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Also by John Hornor Jacobs
Fisk and Shoe
The Incorruptibles
Foreign Devils
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 32