Love was cruel that way.
ArborEATum
By Evans Light
Evans Light has been in love with the written word from an early age, and works in a wide variety of genres, including horror, thrillers, sci-fi and humor - but stories of the "Weird Tales" variety still remain his favorite.
Frequently drawn to uncommon experiences, Evans has thrown himself headfirst into a wide range of unusual situations, from testing low-level-entry parachutes with British Army Airborne units to travelling the vast reaches of inner space using sensory deprivation tanks.
Evans has lived here and there across the United States, from the mountains to the beaches to the desert, and currently chooses to reside in a southern state where the weather is warm and living is easy. He is the proud father of fine sons and the lucky husband of a beautiful wife.
His brother, Adam Light, is also a bestselling horror writer, and the two frequently collaborate as The Light Brothers.
I. A FLAMING SWORD
Dirt is edible.
It could even be considered delicious, especially if your last meal was several days ago.
Fifteen-year-old Micah Jenkins became acutely aware of this simple fact as he lay on his belly, scooping soft gray clay from the bottom of a cool running stream as if it were ice cream.
The clay was the first thing he had found to eat since his family had run out of food three days before. There wasn’t much in the way of roots or berries to forage for here in the middle of the prairie, far west of Missouri; the wild game was small and nimble, mostly a waste of ammunition to try and shoot – and a rabbit or a gopher certainly wouldn’t provide enough meat to feed everyone anything close to a proper meal.
He wished that his family had stayed with the main group, but no – Lemuel’s creeping mental shift had blossomed into a full-blown messianic delusion. No surprise there. He was always rambling about finding the Garden of Eden and other such nonsense.
It had all reached full boil when the family heads of the wagon train had flatly rejected his frantic demand to follow his “revelation” and veer off the established trail. That was when Lemuel had struck off on his own, dragging Micah’s father Samuel and the rest of the family along.
Micah hadn’t seen a trading post, another wagon, or even a halfway decent watering hole since he and his family had started travelling through this uncharted prairie. Now he was pretty sure they had fully completed the transition from travelling through to being stranded in this endless expanse of nothingness. The year eighteen thirty-nine hadn’t been a good one so far, and he hoped it wouldn’t end up being the one carved on his headstone.
They had passed a handful of sod huts during the previous days, but they never got within more than a hundred yards or so of any of them. Each hut featured a scrawny man or a tattered couple in front, clutching a gun and possessing a powerful case of the thousand-mile stare that suggested maybe they had eaten some - maybe all - of their children during the winter before, and that any visitors, invited or otherwise, might end up on the menu for dinner that night.
The thought gave Micah the shivers. If ever there was a man who would gladly eat his young to save himself, it was Lemuel. He hoped they found food and shelter before Lemuel got really hungry.
He plunged his hand into the water and dug up a second handful of creamy clay from the streambed, sucking the goop hungrily from his fingers.
The clay had a strong mineral taste, like the medicinal tonic his father forced him to choke down whenever he got the fever; the only thing missing was the warm sting of alcohol on the back end. He also thought it tasted a little bit like blood, though that may have been from the growing number of open sores inside his mouth, Micah wasn’t sure.
He stopped eating for long enough to glance at the other children, who had gathered around, watching him intently. There was a total of nine children in their wayward caravan, including himself - though he hardly considered himself a child.
He offered a forced smile to the children, clay smeared around his mouth like smudged lipstick.
Micah shoveled out another handful from the bottom, and offered it to the kids with a silent shrug, to see if anyone cared to share. He couldn’t actually ask them if they wanted any, because the last mouthful had stuck to the roof of his mouth, gluing his jaws together momentarily as he struggled to swallow.
Anna frowned down at him, hands on her hips as her ankle-length dress struggled to flutter in the gentle breeze.
“No,” she muttered, rejecting his offer, her voice stern but glum. Her response was only half-directed at him, more at the other children.
At sixteen, Anna was the oldest of the six girls in the group, a self-ordained authority who enjoyed pretending she was everyone’s mother. Even Micah’s younger sisters - Ruth, Esther and Chastity - followed Anna around like her very own little flock of ducklings, as did her own two younger sisters, Piety and Lydia.
Anna’s brothers, Jacob and Nathaniel - also younger than her and Micah - weren’t quite so obedient. They looked up to Micah as their role model most of the time, not Anna.
“I’ve been praying, and I’m confident God will provide,” Anna told the children piously, “He always does. If God had wanted us to lie on our bellies and eat mud like worms, he wouldn’t have given us arms and legs in his own image.”
Her proclamation dimmed the bright look of hope rising in the younger children’s eyes at the prospect of having something to eat, even if it was only clay. When Anna said “no” to something, they usually listened or they ran the risk of her taking out her budding maternal instincts on them with a thin plank, when their real parents weren’t looking. She had her ways of making the young ones pray forgiveness for not respecting their elders – which really meant her.
“I’ll have some, Micah!” shouted nine-year-old Jacob, Anna’s enthusiastic little brother, who thought Micah was possibly the most fascinating person on earth, and who also relished any opportunity to displease Anna.
“God made me an animal, so I’ve got no choice but to obey the animal urges he gave me. Gonna have me a good couple helpings,” the ruddy-faced boy said mischievously, as he flopped onto his belly beside Micah. He began digging with gusto into the streambed, gobbling massive gray blobs of clay from his fingers with a hearty “mumsh mumsh mumsh” slurping sound, that he hoped was making Anna feel ill.
Micah looked up at Anna and smiled sheepishly, but she only crossed her arms and humphed at him. The other children took a step back quietly.
Micah knew that he and Anna had a sort of private truce between them, unspoken but always present whenever their eyes met. She had bossed him around relentlessly when they were younger, but since the unspoken agreement between them began, she hadn’t given him much grief.
He liked to imagine that the truce between them was at least partly due to the fact that she genuinely liked him and respected his smarts, but deep down he really knew it was mostly because he caught her last summer, in the smokehouse, with two of her fingers buried up to the knuckle between her legs.
He still remembered the moment like it happened yesterday. She just stood there frozen when he discovered her; stood there and stared at him, fingers deep inside herself, as though not knowing what to do next. Micah had found himself frozen too, as he stared in amazement at the spectacle on display before him.
After an awkward few seconds of gawking at each other, Anna gathered her wits enough to drop her leg and skirt, and pushed her way past Micah, running from the smokehouse without saying a word.
Micah never told anyone about that day, and the two of them never spoke openly of it, not even once; but every time her gaze met his, he knew that they were both thinking of that secret moment, now shared forever between them.
Micah took a deep drink of the cool stream water to clear his throat of the gooey muck. At any rate, he was in no mood to fight with Anna. His fighting spirit was diminished with hunger and exhaustion. The way their trip west was going so far, he fig
ured he might end up stuck out here on the prairie with her as his only choice for a wife, and there was no point in making her dislike him any more than she already did. Of course, he’d have to survive if he wanted to marry someday, and staying alive for long in their current predicament was starting to seem more unlikely with each passing hour.
He sat up on the bank of the stream and smeared the clay from his hands onto his tattered trousers, giving Anna an earnest look to show that he was serious.
“Honestly, Anna, we’re all very hungry,” he said. “This clay might not be the best thing that the good Lord could give us, it may not be proper sustenance as such, but at least it will make our bellies feel full. You really should have a couple of bites, and let the others get some, too. Maybe it’ll stop the cramps for a couple of hours, let us think straight. Who knows when God will provide something else fit to eat? Maybe this is his provision.”
Anna considered his argument for a moment and then looked towards their parents, who were busy trying to construct a makeshift bridge for the horses and oxen to cross the stream. Micah followed her gaze, and shook his head in dismay at the incompetence of the adults who had led them into this wilderness. The journey west had been one long series of disasters. If God was trying to tell them anything, it was probably that they should not go west.
Anna gazed wistfully at the arguing adults for a few seconds more, conflicted. Realizing that no guidance about eating clay was likely to come from them, she turned back to Micah.
“Is it dreadful?” she asked softly.
“It’s not flapjacks and molasses, but it’s a ton better than sand and grass, which is likely to be the only thing we’ll find to eat for the rest of the day, if we even make it past this stream before sundown,” he said.
Anna pondered this for a moment and then reconsidered her previous opinion.
“Perhaps you’re right and this is a gift from God,” she conceded. “It could be that God is testing us, to see if we will accept the least of his gifts with gratitude, before he leads us to fields of plenty.”
Micah said nothing, realizing anything he could say would only jeopardize the other children’s chances of getting a few hours respite from the gnawing pain in their bellies.
“Just one handful,” Anna said to the other children sternly. “It’s God’s will, I’m sure, but don’t be greedy.”
Within seconds all the children were digging hungrily into the clay, some shoveling it into their mouths with abandon, while others tested the taste and texture before committing themselves to the feast completely.
Micah scooped out a pristine lump of clay, not a hint of sand or rock at all, and formed it quickly into the shape of a little pie. He held it out in the palm of his hand, offering it with a wry smile to Anna.
“Imagine it’s your grandma’s apple pie,” he said kindly.
She took it and nibbled at the imaginary crust, evaluating the taste only briefly, before spitting it out and wiping the offensive goo from her lips with the back of her hand.
She handed the mud pie back to him, as though gracefully refusing. “The Lord will provide,” she stated again, though with less certainty than before.
Micah heard his father calling for him to come and pitch in with the work, so he smiled and jokingly made a curtsey to her, before running upstream to help.
It took a while, and it meant destroying one of their four remaining wagons to make a bridge strong enough for the oxen to cross. Eventually they managed it. After everything had been taken across, they loaded the remnants of the deconstructed wagon, in case they should need to use it again.
The children climbed up into the second wagon together, bellies full, quickly quieting down and falling asleep as they started forward once again, the adults happy to have respite from their grumbles, as they chased the sun on its journey west across the plain.
Lemuel sat perched atop the front of the lead wagon, resolute in his rightness. Even still, he seemed to froth to the very rim with a zealous fervor, which stewed inside him like a violent rage. He claimed that the purpose for his westward quest had been delivered to him straight from God, and so far neither Micah’s father nor the wives had dared to challenge him about it.
Micah’s father Samuel dutifully followed Lemuel in his wagon, his wife Rachel seated resolutely beside him, silent in rebuke, despite knowing they had long ago lost their way.
Micah brought up the rear of their tiny train, his wagon loaded with supplies, pulled by the slower, stronger oxen.
As the sun reached its highest point in the sky, a dramatic shift in the formation of the landscape presented itself in the distance ahead. The heat shimmered above the dry, stony ground, making it difficult to see clearly. However, one spot stood out strongly from the background of uniformity surrounding them in every direction, drawing them instinctively onward.
They approached the formation, a singular long rolling ridge dropped several hundred feet or so down a cliff they could not yet see. It appeared as though the ridge curved around into the distance for a mile or so, before dropping into the unending flatness of the prairie beyond, but distance was hard to gauge in the wide open spaces. As they travelled closer to the ridgeline, the ground began to slope slightly upward.
Micah heard Lemuel call the caravan to halt. He strained to see into the distance, the brilliance of the sun blinding him as he looked ahead.
Atop the edge of the ridge stood several indistinct figures, silhouetted against the sky. It was as though they had materialized out of the haze and now stood, unmoving, directly in their path.
Lemuel leapt down from the wagon. He had recently taken to wearing a long black coat, and it flowed behind him like a priest’s vestal garments as he boldly strode towards the figures, his M1812 flintlock musket clamped in his hand. Micah saw his father checking the ammunition in his rifle as well, motioning to Rachel to stay put as he hurried to catch up with his trusted, lifelong friend.
Micah jumped down, bringing his own rifle along, and came to stand by the wagon where his mother stood watch with the children. He had a better view of the figures in their path now: four Indian warriors, one old and three young, with bright feathers in their headbands and war paint streaked across their faces. Micah was surprised to see them; the last of the savage native hordes had been relocated to the western reservations several years before, after the agreement of the tribes.
In the midst of the four warriors stood a totem of some sort, built of long upright wooden beams. Some sort of rope, dyed the color of fresh blood, was strung across the beams like a gigantic red spider web. A single human skull perched atop the construct. From a distance, it resembled a giant flaming sword.
Along the edge of the ridge, three large flat stones had been inserted into the ground in an upright fashion - like tombstones - several yards apart from each other. Odd-shaped letters, apparently derived from English, were etched on the face of each stone: O-A-N on the first, the letters A and T on the second, and C-R-O on the last. Micah wondered what they meant and thought perhaps they were markers for Indian graves.
The four Indian warriors stood in a line, unflinching as Lemuel and Sam approached. In the distance, directly behind the Indians, was the terrain anomaly where the families had been heading, not knowing where else to go. From his current vantage point, Micah could clearly examine the landform they had been marching towards: the curved ridge of earth was shaped like an enormous open “V” lying sideways on the prairie, creating a verdant-looking, shaded valley, in which was nestled a grove of the most enormous trees Micah had ever seen.
The green valley sparkled below him like a giant emerald in the wilderness, everything about it screamed life. He felt like a parched castaway, stumbling upon a fresh-water lagoon on a desert island in the middle of the sea. That newfound sense of hope welled up even further as he saw three houses, clustered around the edges of the massive trees. They weren’t sod huts, either, but real honest-to-goodness houses - larger than any he had seen so far o
n the prairie.
Micah fought the sudden urge to run straight down the ridge to the first house he could reach and bang on the door until someone let him in. He imagined the occupants serving him a welcoming feast of smoked ham and roasted chicken, pictured himself snuggling up in a plump bed, stuffed full of freshly plucked goose down, and dreamed how heavenly it would be. It had been weeks since he had slept on anything softer than dry hay.
His eyes refocused on the band of Indian warriors that stood, unmoving, between them and the newfound prairie paradise, and his daydream evaporated like dew in a desert sunrise.
“Should we go around them, Lemuel?” Micah’s father, Sam, asked. “We’ve not got much shot, perhaps prudent to avoid confrontation.”
“We will not let the children of Satan deter us from receiving this gift God has delivered unto us,” Lemuel said as he, too, surveyed the houses in the green valley below. “These savages will either provide assistance, or step aside. They are intruders on sovereign government territory and have no right to challenge our passage here. Is your weapon at the ready, my good Samuel?”
Samuel nodded in reply, but even at a distance Micah could see that his father’s face held a look of deep concern.
“Then we best get this over with, Sam,” Lemuel said.
“Stay with the women and children,” Samuel called back to his son, his voice somber, fear painted boldly across the elder man’s face. Micah knew his father was slow to anger and loathed violence, a trait that Lemuel in no way shared.
He wondered what was going on. He wanted to go with the men to speak with the Indians, but he knew his place all too well. He stood fast by the wagon as his father and Lemuel strode forward, the barrels of their rifles barely turned away as they approached the Indians. Micah had some understanding of why his mother Rachel and Lemuel’s wife Sarah obediently followed their husbands wherever they went, but in his heart he wished that - just once - his father would act like a man and tell Lemuel what was what. But he never did, and that disappointed Micah immensely.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 44