Gods of Howl Mountain

by Taylor Brown

  Rory folded a rag on his knee, set it on the workbench.

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All you need is some strange, son. Beats anything for forgetting your troubles. Beats electroshock.”

  “When did you get to be such the expert?”

  “I had a couple stumbles in that area lately, but I turned over a new leaf. Got it all squared away.”

  Rory looked up.

  “What kind of stumbles?”

  Eli looked down, tugging on his beard.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  * * *

  Suppertime and the sky had that violet glow, the trees conspiring in the coming dark, melding into jagged battlements that lined the road. Rory was headed home. The Ford complained its way up the ruts, squeaking and groaning and clanking as it went. It was no easy task to cut a road out of the mountain, out of long-buried rocks and hardwood roots the size of men’s thighs, and once you did it was under constant threat. No matter how smoothly graded the road started out, the mountain seemed always to turn it into a battered washboard that threatened to beat you to death.

  A wagon was coming down the mountain, turning a switchback above him, and Rory pulled partway onto the shoulder, slowing for the car to pass. The driver’s window was down. A tall bearded man sat behind the wheel, long-jawed over a loosened tie, while a shorter man rode shotgun. Their faces beamed in the failing light, their eyes red.

  “Hallo!” shouted the driver as he passed. He held up a giant white hand in greeting. “Tot ziens!”

  Rory stopped, but the wagon kept bouncing down the road, jaunty, the brake lights flaring now and again against the grade. The rear bumper had been caved, a chromium smile.

  When Rory pulled under the chestnut, the tires crunched. Broken glass.

  “Hellfire.”

  He looked up to the porch. Granny wasn’t in her rocker. He got out of the car and found the old poke in the backseat and knelt, picking the shards from the grass, quickly, dropping them in the bag. It was a cobalt-colored bottle that had fallen. The best for catching spirits, Granny said. The wreckage glittered blue in the bluing dusk, like a burst planet. No mark in the chestnut’s trunk, but he guessed the wagon’s bumper had met the tree in reverse. He wondered what wares the salesmen had been hawking. Bibles, probably, with Christ’s words stamped in red, or encyclopedias. As if either could survive the page-swelling damp of a high spring on the mountain.

  “Ouch!”

  A red slice in the meat of his thumb. The offending shard lay smiling, proud of itself. The cut began to bleed. Blood spattered the riblike sections of exploded glass, and Rory worked only harder, faster. He couldn’t have Granny knowing what had happened, that one of the bottles had dropped. Anger crackled under his skin. She carried around such notions, such a truckload of lore and superstition he was forced to shoulder. Despite himself, he worried if bad luck was seeping invisibly from the blue wreckage of the bottle, uncoiling like a waking curse.

  “Cut ye self?”

  Rory looked up. There was Granny, armed with dustpan and brush. Her face shone like the salesmen’s, as if smeared with oil.

  “Got-damnit!” He was caught. He punched the door of the Ford, hard. He could feel the blood from his cut, squishy in his palm.

  “Boy, what the hell’s got into you?”

  “Nothing,” said Rory. He could feel the anger welling yet, his mouth shut like the safety valve on a steam boiler. He took the dustpan and brush from her. “Not a damn thing.”

  He finished cleaning up the glass and stood, the shards shivering in the pan.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “I ain’t stopping you.”

  “How was it you let my mother grow up in a fucking whorehouse?”

  The light fled from Granny’s cheeks, quick as a lamp put out. She looked suddenly old and gray, sad. Still, her chin was high, unfallen.

  “Easy,” she said. “I was a whore.”

  Rory wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He couldn’t stop himself, the words bubbling hot from his chest.

  “You hadn’t, wouldn’t none of it happened to her.”

  “And you wouldn’t never been born.”

  Rory stood.

  “Well, ain’t that convenient for you.”

  He turned and slung his body toward the house. The bottle shards rattled in the pan. The eye in the jelly-jar watched him come.

  VI. HALF-MOON, WAXING

  The cool shadows along the river became their place. They would cut out early from school, riding into the valley on crooked paths used by bootleggers and truants. They would pass the old nip-joints, many of them empty now, and smell the smoke of wood-fired stills. They would hear the crack of ax-felled timber, of rifles. Logging crews with strange accents were clearing the land, readying the valley for flood. There was talk of violence, even war. One time a string of men with painted faces crossed the path before them, quick as deer, carrying shotguns and clubs. Another time they saw men on horseback, wearing sackcloth hoods, rifles slung across their backs.

  Still, they were never afraid. The valley was theirs. Their love gave them dominion. They were cloaked in power, fearless but for the throbbing heart of the other. Heedless but for the taste of mouth and tongue and sex. They were invincible, burned free of the shadows of death and men. The valley was being emptied just for them. Each day they looked for the parakeets, watching for a miracle of green fire from the hollows of a doomed tree. Bonni imagined the birds sweeping heavenward on the sound of Connor’s violin, safe from the flood to come. He was writing a man in Washington about them, a museum curator, who had friends in office.

  Each day they swam in the river, and Bonni kissed the purple storms of bruise on her lover’s body. She ran her tongue in the grooves between his ribs, along the keel of his prick. She could not be sated. They tasted each other again and again, curled gasping in the leaves. They grappled in the green water, on the riverbank and under the trees. They were breathless, desperate, as if they knew such agonies must end.

  CHAPTER 22

  Granny May rose early, an hour before sunup, and began assembling the fire pit in the yard beneath the chestnut tree. First frost had come and gone, and the moon was growing fuller every night. It was up there yet, halved low in the sky. It would be full again in a week. The Hunter’s Moon, when the beasts of the mountain crunched through the fallen leaves, the woods nearly naked of cover, and rifles cracked the brittle air. She had always held with killing a hog on the growing moon. It made the meat swell up when you cooked it. Kill one on the new moon, or when it was waning, and the meat would shrink in the pan, popping and spitting like a baby devil.

  For the fire pit, she used the same stones she and Anson had collected in times long ago, the ones she kept stacked against the hog-house. Rory was up before long, yawning as he came out the door, drinking the coffee she’d left him on the stove. He left his cup steaming on the porch rail and dragged the cast-iron wash pot from behind the house—a wedding gift from her mother. She had the fire crackling and smoking as the dawn light broke jagged over the hills. Rory set the pot on the fire and began sloshing it full of water hand-pumped from the well. He carried two pails with each trip, the water quivering in silver discs as he rocked his way across the yard.

  Eli turned up soon, emerging from the trail at the edge of the meadow. He and Rory disappeared inside the hog-house, and she heard the pop of the pistol shot. They dragged the fatted animal across the yard, each holding a leg. They spread the hind-legs and pierced the ankle tendons on the outer hooks of a singletree, then threw a rope over a low-hanging branch and hauled the animal off the ground like they would an engine.

  Granny stepped forward with her razor and sliced the big vein in the neck, just back of the jawbone. She set out a stone jug to catch the streak of blood, life-bright in the gray dawn. She would use it for making blood sausage. Once it was bled, they lowered the animal into the near-boiling water of the pot,
going to work on the bristles as they heaved it steaming from the water. They dunked it again and again this way, scraping down the hide.

  “Not too long,” Granny told them. “Don’t let them hairs set.”

  The sun found the bare skin glistening over the wash pot, pink-scalded and ready for the knife. Granny made the cut, a long red vent from nethers to chin, careful not to puncture the organs. She cut the entrails out, letting them fall glistening and ropy in the tub at her feet. She went to work cleaning them for use as sausage casing, and Rory and Eli disassembled the carcass with saw and hatchet. They put the fat they trimmed into a lard pot for rendering, and they got the tenderloins and fatback and middling meat, the shoulders and hams. They cut the ribs in two-inch sections on a board table they set up.

  They worked over the carcass all day. They salted the meat white, their red-stained hands leaving little prints on the icelike shapes and hunks. They stuffed the casings with ground trimmings and tied them off into links to hang in the smokehouse rafters. They hung the rest of the meat on rafter hooks to cure. They talked little as they worked, and Granny didn’t know if it was the nature of the work or something else.

  She thought about what Rory had asked her, about his mother growing up like she had. In a whorehouse. He had every right to ask. For years, she’d turned it over in her own mind. But it never seemed so bad back then. She’d had to keep a sharp edge on herself—anyone did around whiskey-drunk men—men with twice-broken knuckles and pinching fingers, cocks like billy clubs. But Bonni’s room was high above the working rooms, hardly in earshot of the moans, the wincing of bedsprings. Only the girls even knew she lived up there.

  She knew there were rumors among the men of a raven-haired beauty who stayed in one of the upper rooms, a white virgin kept from lesser eyes. But these were halfhearted, few. The men got what they needed downstairs, and cheap, and Granny and her kind taught them it wasn’t a virgin they wanted. It was the talented few.

  Still, she’d come over the years to wonder about the one theory she didn’t want to. The one she could never say. She’d come to wonder if the townspeople were right. If her Bonni had turned to doing what her mother had done. If that’s what she was doing with that mill boss’s son. More than once, Granny had climbed gin-buzzed and sore up the stairs and stopped outside her daughter’s door. In those late hours, the house empty of men, she’d sensed the girl was not in her room. That she’d slipped out the window, shimmied down the tree. That she was out, gone.

  Never once did Granny twist the knob, check the room. She thought the girl should have a life of her own. Bonni was too quiet as it was, staying always up in her room, unaccompanied but for the birds and beasts she painted for herself, a kingdom perched shining on their white leaves of parchment. If she snuck out, then good. Granny never thought something so terrible would happen. She was dumb.

  She was relieved when the baby was a boy, a quiet child like Bonni but harder to hurt, a body filled as if with grit and sand instead of softer jellies. He fell down the porch steps at two and never cried, poking at his bruises with a studious look. She was relieved because he would be better protected from the world, or so she thought. She’d forgotten how quick men could strike off in ways their own, heedless, giving no account of themselves or the things they sought.

  Granny sighed and tried to think of other things, better things. She tried not to look at Eli’s hands, how he went about salting that ham hock.

  * * *

  Eustace showed as the sun was falling, spilling red down the mountains like blood on teeth. He was not in his old flatbed. He was driving a deuce-and-a-half, a six-wheeled military cargo truck. Rory was sitting on the porch, trimming hog’s blood from his fingernails with a penknife. Seeing the truck, Eli set down his flask and hopped from the porch, nearly skipping across the yard.

  “What happened to the old one?”

  Eustace climbed down from the cab and spat in the grass. He looked at the black scar in the fire pit, still smoldering, and the dark-dried blood that flecked the stones.

  “Hog.” He looked at the sky. “Moon’s about right.”

  “Your truck,” said Eli.

  Eustace looked at him.

  “Threw a rod last week.”

  “I could of rebuilt it.”

  “I know a man,” said Eustace. “Quartermaster down at Fort Bragg. Got this one for next to nothing from him.”

  Eli was walking around the machine, squatting and eyeing, poking and prodding.

  “Two-seventy straight-six,” he was saying. “Two-speed transfer case. Rated for five thousand pounds off-road but they say she’ll haul twice that.”

  Eustace watched him.

  “Tailpipe’s in back,” he said, “if you’re wanting to fuck it.”

  Eli straightened, jutting his jaw. His beard bristled like hackles. Eustace ignored him, pulling the tarpaulin back on the night’s whiskey.

  “Well, boys,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “Y’all best hop to it. I got business to attend to.”

  He hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls and rumbled up onto the porch, dipping to kiss Granny’s cheek before stepping through the door. She got up and followed him, blowing smoke from the side of her mouth. Eli watched them, arms crossed, the wires of his forearms twitching beneath their thin forest of hair. He gripped his beard.

  Rory leaned against the bumper of the truck, grinning.

  “You ain’t jealous, are you?”

  Eli wheeled.

  “Jealous? I got a date tonight. What I got to be jealous about?”

  “I was meaning the truck.”

  Eli’s hand dropped from his beard.

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  * * *

  Dark came fast into the valleys, a flood of shadows, daylight cut ever shorter as the season stretched on. The trees cascaded down from the mountaintops, skeletonlike, pooling rust-crowned in the valleys. The air bore an edge, an October bite that promised harder cold. Rory let it sting him as he drove, his face growing so cold he could hardly feel it, the skin stretched pale and taut as drum hide. A face that would not blush or skew, staring grimly on at the world skirling through the headlights.

  He was into town early. He drove past the shothouses, the whorehouse, the filling station at End-of-the-Road. Past everything, down to where the road really did end. It led right on into the water, spearing into the shallows. Rory drove the car to the edge, the lake lapping at his front tires. He got out and sat on the hood and looked out across the flooded valley, the half-moon and attendant stars puddled on its shifting roof.

  His lighter snapped. A cigarette burned from his lips.

  He toyed with the little bandage at the ball of his thumb, looking at the lake. He thought of his days at Parris Island before being shipped out. He made friends with a Georgia boy, Coosa, raised in a family of turpentiners who spent their days in the lower flatwoods of that state, cat-facing pines for resin. One night Coosa took him to the Gutbucket, a long shotgun shack that squatted under the oaks of the Harbor River. Warped walls, salt-rimed sheathing, moths braining themselves against the yellow bulb over the door. The place seemed almost to throb, the pine planks given second life. He could see red fireflies of ash swirling in the darkness. Coosa went ahead of him, clad in the sharp creases of his service khakis, his overseas cap set rakish over one eye. A flat hand kept his tie in line.

  They walked through a dark forest of limbs, men and women open-mouthed or grinning at the sight of Rory’s skin. Their cheeks shone as if varnished. Blue reefs of smoke distorted the low-wattage bulbs. In one corner a man sat on a milk crate, playing the guitar. He was picking the strings with bulletlike fingertips. On his fret hand, a glass slide cut from a bottleneck. He slid the glass down the frets, and the instrument cried in his arms. The strings jounced and twanged, and the man rocked stiff-necked, eyes mashed shut, as if listening to a sermon. Finally he raised his face, features all twisted, and sang.

  “Wish I-I, I was a catf
ish Lord.

  Swimming down, down in the deep blue sea.

  I wouldn’t have nobody, nobody settin out hooks for me.

  Settin out hooks for me.

  Settin out a hook for me.”

  Rory thought of prowling the black river bottoms, his body bullet-sleek, finned for grace, and he thought of the deep of the lake. He imagined himself weightless down there, gilled and tail-flicking, hunting for the man that sired him, the girl his mother had been. He would glide over the valley as it once was, moonlight shafting down on old tin roofs and copper pots, junked cars and tractors and hillsides cavitied with the gravesites of the evacuated dead. His troubles a world away, muffled and small, heard as if from the dark of a womb.

  He opened his eyes and unscrewed the lid of a jar. A sharp odor, dangerous almost, like nitro or cordite. A spirit that tasted like water lightning-struck, electrified.

  He sipped.

  A dream, he thought. If he ever made it to the bottom of the lake, it wouldn’t be as a fish.

  * * *

  “Oh,” said Granny. “Yes. Right there.”

  She was striving to put conviction in her voice. Eustace hulked red and huge above her, his fists driven into the mattress on either side of her head, his great white thighs slapping against the backs of her legs. He smelled not like a man, but something wild and old. There were beasts rumbling beneath his skin, loosed and unbroken, and great ageless stones. His sweat was oil that would crackle in a pan. His teeth wet, as if freshly honed. White gobbets hung at the corners of his mouth. He labored on, and she was wondering how her Anson would have been had he survived the war. How cold, bestial. She wondered how her Rory really was.

  She looked up and saw beads of sweat quivering in the white-gray curls of Eustace’s chest, a red apron flaring down from his neck. Getting close. He wasn’t reaching where she needed him to—he never did—and she began to inch her hand down her belly, over the puckered flesh of her navel and down the long slope to the woolly mound between her legs.