Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  She swallowed a yawn before it could even start. Her day had been long despite the shortness of light. People were catching cold in the wake of the first frost, a wildfire of red-raw throats tearing along the ridges. People in the hollers were hacking up a yellow-green phlegm. They came to see her in cars, by horse, on foot. She handed out lumps of sugar soaked ruddy in bloodroot juice for the taming of coughs, and vials of the cough syrup she made from rabbit’s foot. She boiled pine needles for a tea that thwarted colds. She roasted more onions that morning than she could count, hammering them into spun-wool rags for mothers to drape upon the chests of their younguns, saving others for people to wear tied round their necks to draw the sickness out. She had them gargle salt and vinegar for their throats or rub pine-oil into their Adam’s apples, and she boiled wild ginger for the flu.

  The kitchen was filling up. People paid in paper money, sometimes, but more often in eggs or milk or lard. Sometimes in jarred honey or good dark bread, in wild roots that were hard to gather, in promises of painting outbuildings or fixing roofs. Other times—more often than Rory knew—they didn’t pay at all. But she, like all of the granny-women before her, knew that what you gave into the world came back to you in kind, and you could wear what you were owed like an armor into the darker times. She could have called on fifty good men to stand with her this night—men she’d delivered from sickness, from the terror of virginity or their mother’s own stricken wombs. But she didn’t. This was a night she could handle well enough alone.

  She drew again from her pipe, the wind speaking to her through the trees. It spoke of cold in the months to come, of forests laid naked to the bone, and she let it fill her nose with the hard bite of woodsmoke. The folds of the hills glinted here or there, secret fires sparking through the leaf-thinned trees. It was a dangerous time for stilling. Sound carried farther through the trees, and light, and mash took twice as long in the cold. Still they carried on, Eustace among them, for men grew only thirstier as the days turned dark and cold.

  Just then she caught movement at the edge of the meadow, a form that seemed to detach itself bodily from the trees, emerging onto open ground. She brought the shotgun into her lap. She looked not directly at the phantom but slightly askance, in that old hunter’s trick to better her sight, and the figure seemed to waver in and out of visibility, collected sometimes into the greater backdrop of night only to be thrust out again, closer each time, its limbs silvering under the moon. She laid the barrel in its path. Only closer did she see it was lurching and weaving, slinging its arms like a man wading a creek, and she did not think death would come drunk to her porch this night—not unless it wanted to be sent home with a heart full of shot. She leaned forward, shouldering the gun, steadying her elbows on the bony caps of her knees.

  “You,” she said down the barrel. “One more step, there’s gonna be two of you, each flopping round in the dark for the other’n.”

  He jerked to a stop, his upper half rebounding over his planted feet.

  “Granny? Is, is Eli.”

  She felt something leap inside her at his voice, a tickle at the backs of her legs. She let down the hammer on the gun.

  “Well hell, son, how come you didn’t say?”

  He stepped closer, tottering slightly in the angled panes of light thrown from the windows.

  “I was waiting—” He hiccupped. “I was waiting to see if you was asleep or not.”

  “Sleep ain’t a thing I’m doing tonight.”

  He straightened a little.

  “You ain’t?”

  She set the shotgun back on the side table.

  “Bad night for panthers,” she said. “And they ilk. What brings you?”

  He took his beard in hand, the veins standing out in his fist. He looked at the ground.

  “I, I just come for a remedy.”

  “Come sit a spell,” she said. “Tell me what it is ails you.”

  He nodded, still holding on to his beard, and dutifully climbed the porch steps, setting himself in the rocker next to hers. His head was down.

  “Well?” she said.

  He put a fist to his mouth, coughed.

  “I got this little cough crept up on me,” he said. “I was thinking some that rock-candy syrup you got—”

  She held up a hand.

  “Son, twenty-some years I had boys feigning coughs for a taste of that liquor-medicine. You ain’t fooling me for a damn second.”

  Eli scratched the top of his thigh.

  “Well, there is this other thing.”

  She squinted at him.

  “You got the clap?”

  He bolted upright.

  “Hell no, I ain’t got the clap.”

  “Crabs? You got them crabs?”

  “No, it ain’t anything like that.” He pulled on the inner seam of his trousers. “Well, maybe a little like it.”

  Granny waited. “It ain’t nothing I never heard before, I can tell you that.” She reached out, touched his knee. “Just let it out, son.”

  Eli leaned forward, setting his elbows on his thighs. He had one fist on top of the other, gripping his beard.

  “It being Saturday night, I had me a few nips of the white stuff down at the garage. The days is getting shorter, reckon I was feeling a little”—he hiccupped—“little lonely. Figured I’d go on down to Hell, see if I might could find some company for the night.”

  “The roadhouse?”

  “Yes’m. It’s not too difficult to find some company there, long’s you got twenty dollars in your pocket. This girl, Edna-Lynn, I gone with her a couple times before. She makes you feel like—I don’t know—like she’s your girl or something. Acts excited to see you, like you’re just the one she’s been hoping would turn up. I might be a little sweet on her. Hard not to be, she acts like that. So I give her my money, and we start to fooling around, but I keep on thinking of this son-bitch I seen coming out her door, tucking in his shirt. I can’t help but wondering if he gets the same treatment as me. And I’m thinking all that and I start going soft.” He cleared his throat. “Down there. She starts to tugging and everything, even using her mouth on it, and it’s nothing happening. When we try and get down to it, it’s no better than a roll of bread dough.” He shook his head. “I never had something like this happen before.” He looked at Granny, silver welling in his eyes. “You think it’s broke?”

  “Hell no, it ain’t broke, son. You just got too up in your head. Your big head.” She set her hand on his knee again, squeezed. “Sit right here, I got just the thing.”

  She rose and pushed through the door and into the house. Behind the kitchen was a small pantry shelved floor to ceiling, populated with motley ranks of jars and jugs and bottles and flasks. Vials stood together like ammunition, and there sat fishbowls jumbled full of roots and herbs. There were powders of every color, meant to be smelled or snorted or blown into the back of the throat with a goose-quill, and oils and essences and spirits of various strength and provenance. There was jimsonweed for asthma and mayapple for constipation, catnip and ground ivy for the bold hives, burdock to purify the blood. There was stumpwater and bug-dust and brimstone, breath-killers like wintergreen leaves and birch twigs, and even a bucket of switches for a cure she called peach-limb tea—otherwise known as a good ass-whipping.

  She slid sideways between the shelves and unscrewed the zinc lid of a large jar, removing one of the ginseng roots she’d gathered that morning, then took down a vial from the upper shelf. When she walked back onto the porch, the organlike root lay across the open flat of her hand, glistening with oil. She sat and proffered it.

  “Your remedy.”

  Eli’s eyes grew big. He picked it daintily from the palm of her hand by the stem, holding it dangling between the two of them in his pinched fingers. He twisted it back and forth in the light.

  “What’s that coating it?”

  She cleared her throat.

  “Holy oil. Off that priest from the church in Boone, trades it for saltpeter
to curb his urges.” She paused a moment. “You anoint yourself with it.”

  “Anoint … yourself?”

  “You rub your pecker with it.”

  He looked down at his crotch, then up at her. His eyes were wide.

  “Here, now?”

  Granny breathed in, a slight shudder on her outbreath. She licked her lips.

  “No, son. You best take it on home, do it there.”

  He swallowed, his shoulders sinking slightly from his collarbones. “Oh.” He sat a minute longer, as if hesitant to rise, and when he began to stand she stayed him a moment, her fingertips light on his knee.

  “That don’t work, son, you just come on back. That ain’t the only remedy an old woman’s got.”

  He stared a long moment at her hand.

  “Yes’m, I surely will.”

  * * *

  Granny drew her fingers from beneath the blanket that covered her lap when she heard the big ambulance motor come grumbling up the mountain. The eastern ridges were cut jagged against the light of an impending sun, a whitish glow that promised clear weather this day, skies a cold blue. She was thankful for the hot-dark visions that had kept her awake through the night. She stood and removed the sling of shells, draping it over the coatrack just inside the door, and she set the shotgun back in its rack above the mantel, as if it had never come down. She was sitting again in her rocker, her blood cooling, as Rory’s coupe turned the curve at the bottom of the drive.

  The spirit-bottles were just beginning to catch the light, a faint twinkling in the fall-darkened crown of the tree, like the electric bulbs townspeople weaved through firs in their windows at Christmastime. A pretty sight, even as the wind came tumbling down off the mountain, rocking the bottles on their strings, and she thought how easy for one to fall, bursting in a hundred glassy teeth, and what spirits would out.

  Rory hauled himself from the car and came up the steps. He stooped to kiss her on the cheek and frowned.

  “You ain’t got a fever, have you?”

  “Fever … why?”

  “You look a little flushed.”

  She jerked her chin.

  “Where you been? Church?”

  He leaned on the doorframe and crossed his arms.

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Them Holy Ghost people, I don’t know.” She blew smoke from her nose. “They know what it is you do for a living?”

  “I think that preacher has an inkling.”

  “Asa Adderholt? He ought to.”

  Rory squinted.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He wasn’t always no preacher, I can tell you that.”

  “What was he?”

  “Whiskeyman, like the rest of them. Rumor was, him and his brother was the ones leading them valley people that fought the government.”

  Rory’s arms crossed tighter against his chest.

  “He’s only got one eye.”

  “So?”

  “So he might could be the one,” said Rory.

  “The one that what?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. I got a right to see that eye.”

  “How come you care so much all the sudden?”

  “It don’t matter why. I just do.”

  “It’s too late, son. I popped it in my hand one time, so mad I couldn’t help it. Run through my fingers like an egg yolk.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ah.” She pointed to him with the shank of her pipe. “Good you can see that. You gonna need a real good bullshit-detector, you spend any time down in that godbox. Now tell me this, what’s got all this pop in your step? The Spirit, or this girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “Bullshit.”

  He couldn’t help but smile. He rubbed his shoulder against the doorframe.

  “Little of both, I reckon.”

  She set the pipe shank between her teeth and scratched a match to life, inhaling as the weedy ball glowed red. She spoke from the back of her throat, exhaling.

  “Ain’t a thing to get confused, son.”

  “I’m not confused.”

  “Your age, maybe you ought to be.”

  He pushed his hands into his trouser pockets.

  “I seen a few things.”

  She nodded.

  “I know you have, honey. I know.” She tapped the ashes out of the pipe. “But you ain’t seen everything.”

  Rory’s hands balled up inside his pockets.

  “I haven’t, now have I?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Rory had just fallen asleep that morning when he heard a motorbike throbbing in the yard. The twin hammers of the pistons beat like a heart: thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. He’d been riding such a machine across the landscape of his dreams, a great snowfield cut by a long dark road, cobbled lead-gray under a white sky. The bike was slamming and wobbling over the giant cobblestones, each the size of an infantryman’s helmet, and he knew there would be blood soon, come guttering across the snow in crooked scrawls or welling up from the road itself. He came hard awake, as if to escape. He sat up in bed and pulled on his leg.

  The machine sat chugging in a white cloud of itself, the fenders and tanks gleaming night-black under the sun, the rider clad likewise in that color: leather jerkin and knee-high jackboots, a scarf around his neck, a pair of leather-padded goggles pulled up on his forehead. He was leaning between the wide handlebars of the machine, smoking a cigarette, chatting with Granny. The rear tire wore a gleaming chain for traction on the rough mountain roads.

  Rory stepped onto the porch.

  “Sleeping it off?” asked the carrier.

  “Till you showed up. Don’t Eustace know it’s Sunday? Even God rested the seventh day.”

  “Rest? That man would tell God himself to quit his skylarking.” The rider dabbed something from his tongue with the tip of his thumb, the cigarette smoking in the crux of two fingers. “Anyhow, he says there’s a sugar shipment coming in today. Wants you and Eli to pick up a thousand pounds.” He zipped open the asymmetric flap of his jacket and tossed Rory a folded envelope of bills. Rory thumbed through the money.

  “Who we buying from this time?”

  “Some bomber pilot.”

  “Bomber pilot?”

  “Flying into a little farm-strip over in Wilkes County. You’re supposed to be there at noon. Directions in the envelope.”

  “A whole planeload coming in, huh? Who’s gonna buy what we don’t?”

  “Every bootlegger and whiskeyman around, I imagine.”

  Rory folded over the envelope and stuffed it in his back pocket.

  “Well, shit.”

  * * *

  They drove east toward Wilkes County, Rory at the wheel. The road glittered before them, a hard thin river rushing down out of the mountains, dropping now and again through dynamited swallows of rock where the air was suddenly cooler and darker, then breaking open again to the light, thrust along sheer ridges over a model-trainman’s world of tiny square fields and toy houses, herds of cattle positioned just so in their valley pastures. The silver-barked trees at the higher altitudes looked almost brittle, like skinny-limbed old men reaching for the sky, the leaves already browned and fallen from their upthrust hands. But soon the road descended into greater cover, the late-peaking hillsides clouded in honey and rust, here or there a smoky patch of purpled ash.

  They were chewing Bazooka bubble gum, their jaws pulsing. Eli had a look on his face like he was chewing on a wad of cud.

  “How come you to forget a new carton last night?”

  Rory bought them a carton of Lucky Strikes each week from a shothouse at End-of-the-Road. The cartons sold at a heavy discount, rumored to be gleaned from a tractor-trailer that slewed off a mountain road some time back.

  Rory blew a bubble.

  “I don’t know how. Just forgot.”

  Eli squinted at him.

  “You never forgot before. You were distracted is what it wa
s.”

  “Could be.”

  “You were thinking with your wrong head. Your little one. It’s this girl, what’s-her-name.”

  “Christine.”

  “Christine, hell. Sabotager of the heart, is what she is.”

  “Saboteur.”

  “Don’t be a snob.”

  “Least the car hasn’t been sabotaged again.”

  “Till that one-eyed preacher wants otherwise. You said yourself that boy of his come in the church that time with a streak of grease down his arm.”

  “So?”

  “So that was the same night your coolant hose was cut. Pretty damning, you ask me.”

  Rory looked at him. “I didn’t ask you, now did I?” He turned and spat his gum out the window. “Could be he’s waging some kind of righteous war against the whiskey business.”

  “This preacher?”

  “Yeah.”

  Eli shrugged. “Sure, that’s a theory. Another is he’s in cahoots with his brother, taking down trippers to end the milk-runs, making the both of them a little something extra on the side.”

  Rory’s thumb tapped on the wheel.

  “Yeah, I thought of that, too.”

  * * *

  At the county line they passed a prowl car decked in flashers and spotlights, a golden seal emblazoned on the door. GREAT STATE OF WILKES, IMPERIUM INTRA IMPERIO. The deputy gave them a hard frown as they passed, one elbow perched on the door. The black reflection of their machine flitted across his mirrored sunglasses.