As he surveyed the developing situation, he felt Anna’s warmth at his side.
“What’s going on?” she asked sleepily; she had been napping with the rest of the children.
“I don’t know,” Micah said. “There’s a settlement a bit up ahead, but some Indians are standing in the way. They haven’t moved or said a word. It’s an odd set of circumstances, to say the least.”
The two teens watched as their fathers stopped to greet the Indians. They were too far away to be heard, so they had to settle for interpreting, solely through body language, how the conversation was proceeding.
The eldest Indian clearly shook his head “no”, and pointed at the skull mounted atop the totem.
Then Lemuel began shouting, his words indistinct but nevertheless clear in their meaning, as they scattered in the dry prairie wind. He was angry.
Micah’s father began to gesture urgently, clearly pleading for a peaceful resolution to the disagreement. But again the old Indian shook his head, and crossed his arms in a way that said there would be no further discussion.
That was when Lemuel brought the butt of his rifle up to his shoulder and shot the frail old man point blank in the face. His head exploded into nothingness, as the sharp report echoed across the plain.
The headless body stood its ground for several seconds more, arms still crossed, before finally collapsing onto the ground in a lifeless heap. Sam stared at Lemuel, mouth agape, but Lemuel was already busy reloading his weapon as the other three younger Indians stared in frozen shock at their fallen comrade. Micah felt his blood run cold as he realized that the Indians hadn’t moved so much as a finger in a threatening manner, none had presented a weapon. He had just been witness to cold-blooded murder. Anna let out a whimper beside him, and clutched his arm in fear.
Samuel spun around, waving his arms in confusion. Before he knew what was happening, a second shot rang out and a second Indian hit the deck. Then the remaining two were running, each in opposite directions, and Lemuel was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Kill ‘em, Sam, kill ‘em!” he shouted, “One of them gets back to the tribe and we’re all dead.”
Moments later, two final thunderclaps, one after the other, shook the stillness of the plain, and then it was just the settlers, alone on the prairie once more, with their three wagons and hungry oxen. The commotion woke the children from their slumber, and their wails carried from within the wagon as a few started to cry.
“Shut those kids up and keep ‘em in the wagon,” Lemuel barked at Sarah, as he strode back towards them. “Go help your father cover the bodies,” he ordered Micah with a withering glare, his eyes crazed and bright with murder. “Anna, get away from that boy and tend to the children.”
Anna put her head down obediently and walked away.
He’s gonna kill us all before it’s over with, Micah thought as he grabbed a shovel from the supply wagon to help his father tend to the bodies. He knew his father would never have killed a man in cold blood like that, not unless he had to – and now, thanks to Lemuel, he had been forced to do just that.
He toiled in sober silence with his father, piling the dead into an obscene heap, twisted carcasses tangled together. When they were finished, they covered the shredded corpses with large flat stones and spread loose dirt to cover the four separate puddles of blood, trying their best to hide what had been done here. But they both knew that carrion buzzards would be circling within the hour, making it clear to anyone for miles around that death had visited this spot.
II. THE GARDEN
IT WAS NEARLY an hour before Micah and Samuel rejoined the group. They climbed down to the valley, and the houses waiting below, along a steep and winding trail that was cut into the side of the ridge. As they emerged from the dusty path onto a smooth green lawn, Micah noticed the entrance was well-marked, oddly enough, by a grotesquely shaped wooden bush, its knurled branches resembling a man with limbs tied into pretzel-like knots.
Lemuel had already brought the wagons, along with the women and children, down into the small valley. The horses and oxen were grazing contentedly as the children played, running and laughing in the soft grass carpeting beneath the canopy of the massive trees. Micah spotted two small ponds nearby, one in the midst of the grove and another, further back towards the edge of the valley, near the smallest of the three homes. Beyond the ponds stood a smokehouse - seeing it made him smile with fond memories - and a few other small wooden buildings.
Lemuel stood straight and tall, waiting for them with hands on hips, beaming with pride. “The good Lord has blessed us,” his voice boomed. “He has delivered all these blessings to us, his most faithful servants!”
“What do you mean?” Samuel asked, puzzled. “Where are the owners? Are we welcome here?”
“We are the owners, my friend,” Lemuel said with absolute certainty. “We’ve checked the houses and they are vacant, every one. There’s no death, no disease, no sign that anyone has lived here for a very long time; yet both dwellings are furnished and tidy, the pantry fully stocked with provisions and seed, the trees above us burdened with fruit – it’s as though the Lord God himself came down from heaven and prepared this garden especially for our families’ blessing.”
Sam gave him a dubious look, but said nothing. Lemuel, noticing his friend’s skepticism, laughed heartily and slapped him on the back. The two men had been best friends since early youth, but it was clear to Micah that his father had lost faith in the soundness of Lemuel’s judgment since this journey began.
“You’re not fearful the Indians will return, seeking their own and thirsting for vengeance, when they discover their dead?”
“God is on our side. We will remain vigilant, and he will protect. Come, my friend,” Lemuel said, gesturing to the two-story house with plank siding that he had claimed for his own. “Even now our wives are preparing the homes the Lord has given us.”
Micah watched as his father followed Lemuel up onto the small porch and into the house but decided not to follow. He was having a hard time accepting the reality of everything that surrounded him; their fortunes had changed so quickly. He gazed up into the fruit-laden trees that soared above, the branches mingling so thickly. It was impossible to tell where one tree ended and the next began. He surveyed the well-built houses that stood on either side and marveled at his brothers and sisters and their friends, playing barefoot in the silken grass as if they were in the city park back home. It all seemed too good to be true. Had he died? Was this heaven?
Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed movement in the second-floor window of Lemuel’s house; for a fleeting moment he thought he saw Anna between the curtains, looking out. Had she been watching him? He hoped so. Lately all he could seem to think of was the day he had found her in the smokehouse, touching herself.
He wanted to see her like that again.
* * *
Over the next three days, Micah traded shifts with Lemuel and Sam, standing watch along the ridgeline for any sign of approaching savages. The rest of the group worked hard as they unpacked the wagons to set up home in the valley, at least for a little while.
The houses, although mostly tidy, were in dire need of dusting and airing out; it was evident they had been vacant for quite some time. All the furniture and belongings of those who had lived there before, even their clothing, had been left behind. Lemuel and his family had taken over the house closest to the trail down from the ridge. Samuel and the rest of Micah’s family moved into the house on the far side of the orchard. The third house was less well provisioned than the others, and they decided to leave it as it was for the time being.
The women and children worked hard to clean the houses, washing sheets and clothes in a barrel of clear water, drawn from the clear pool at the end of the valley. The pond that lay in the middle of the orchard was full of stagnant yellow water that had a sweet, syrupy aroma about it. Meanwhile, Lemuel and Sam took stock of all the supplies they could find on the premises.
In the small barn by the smokehouse, they found bags and bags of dry crop seed, enough for twenty harvests, if not more, as well as enough hay to get the animals through the cold months, if they decided to winter here. There was also a small sawmill and some roughhewn lumber set up at one end of the barn. Timber for the houses had been cut from trees on the side of the ridge.
They also found a wooden shed tucked behind each house, each yielding an abundance of glass jars of preserved food. But strangely enough (and especially to young Jacob’s bitter disappointment) despite the gigantic apple trees in the yard laden with fruit, there were no jars of apples to be found. There was no applesauce, no cinnamon-sweet apple butter, and no cored apples for pie filling - only scores of glass jars, stuffed with pickled vegetables. There were turnips and squash, green beans and carrots, as well as a variety of other roots and greens that must have been grown in the now-fallow fields that lay on the plain just outside the entrance to the valley. The smokehouse was likewise delightfully stocked with smoked hams, salted and ready to eat, dried sausages and more meats hanging from its rafters.
In the evening, the children enjoyed playing underneath the branches of the mythically large apple trees; they were so enormous that Samuel joked that maybe Johnny Appleseed himself had gotten lost out on the prairie, and had died on this exact spot. “With a pocket full of seeds and a pot on his head, trees probably grew right up out of his rotting corpse,” he said, laughing, taking a hard pull on his pipe and winking merrily at Lemuel. His friend, however, was too busy dictating his own version of the Scriptures to Anna to appreciate Samuel’s sense of humor.
Micah sat near them at the top of the steps, whittling a stick and listening to Lemuel’s nonsensical ramblings as he blathered on about new Eden and God anointing Lemuel to be his last true prophet. Every now and then he would sneak a peek at Anna, as she diligently transcribed her father’s every word, a silken twirl of hair caressing her cheek.
If it weren’t for her, Micah knew he would steal a horse and gallop back east on his own that very night. But he couldn’t leave her. Something inside him insisted that he could never live happily without her, so he stayed, finding enjoyment in the sugary-sweetness of the cool evening air in the orchard and in his dreams of a future with Anna in his arms.
* * *
The second day in the valley came and went with no sign of Indian scouts searching for their missing comrades. Late in the afternoon, Micah’s father sent him to fetch the bodies of the four slain Indians from where they lay covered in rocks up on the ridge, lest members of their tribe eventually discover them.
Micah toiled in the hot sun, prying the stiff corpses from the ground, untangling the fetid, festering mass of decaying limbs and torsos from each other. He struggled with each unwieldy load of dead flesh, dragging the heavy bodies up into the wagon one by one. The headless old man had been drained almost entirely of blood, his figure like a piece of driftwood cast far from shore, shriveled and knurled. It reminded Micah of the twisted bush at the entrance to the trail, and he shivered at the thought.
As he was about to climb up to drive the oxen and their death-laden wagon back down into the valley, Micah stopped and looked back at the totem with the skull and the fire-red rope that stood as an ominous guard at the top end of the trail. Not wanting that reminder of murder looking accusingly down on him day after day, he tore it down, and tossed it into the cart to be disposed of with the rest of the mess.
Once back in the valley, he directed the oxen to pull the wagon alongside the smokehouse. He began to dig the graves, his shovel cutting through the soft dirt as effortlessly as a spoon through fresh chocolate cake, making much quicker work of it than he had expected.
Once he had dug four side-by-side holes, he laid the corpses on their backs in the dirt. He refilled the holes as quickly as he could, to cover their shameful contents.
III. THE SERPENT
EVERYONE FELT JOYFUL as the sun rose on their third day. Now fully rested and restored from their stretch of hunger and the travail of their journey, the full extent of the blessing that had been bestowed upon them finally sank in.
Even Lemuel, who had shown some restraint, despite the occasional vociferous proclamation of faith in God’s protection, began to let his guard down. He came striding down from his turn at watch atop the ridge with a jaunty gait, to announce that he felt that maintaining constant guard was no longer a necessity and that he intended to have a feast of celebration that very evening.
“Our wives are in the kitchen of my new home even now, preparing a feast of celebration,” Lemuel told Sam as they sat in the rockers on the front porch. He was still firmly gripping his rifle, but no longer kept his finger on the trigger. “It is my pleasure to invite you and your family to dinner this evening. Tomorrow we will plan for the sowing, for the fall harvest, my friend.”
Within the hour, fires were lit in the kitchen, the stoves crackling from the perfectly dried kindling the previous tenants had been gracious enough to leave stacked neatly on the porch. Dozens of full-grown chickens had been found, running wild, out back behind the house. One soon destined for the table, plucked clean and boiling in the syrupy-sweet yellow water drawn from the pond at the base of the trees.
As the women prepared the evening meal, Jacob pestered Micah relentlessly to show him the bodies of the dead Indians he had buried. Eventually Micah relented, despite his better judgment. First making sure that no one was watching, he grabbed a shovel from the tool shed and led Jacob out to where they were buried. The outlines of the freshly dug graves were clearly visible, four dark brown rectangles of upturned soil that contrasted sharply with the green grass.
Micah quickly scooped loose earth from the head of the first grave, where he knew the body of a tall, fierce-looking warrior lay, his intention only to uncover the face long enough to allow Jacob to have a quick look.
He dug gently, so as not to inadvertently damage the corpse’s face. After he had dug only a foot or so into the ground his shovel struck something solid, causing the metal blade to ring. It surprised Micah so much that he jumped back alarmed.
“What is it?” Jacob asked, eyes widening.
“There’s something hard, but there shouldn’t be,” Micah said.
“It’s only the lid of the casket, right?” the young boy asked.
Micah shook his head.
“Ain’t one. Put ‘em straight in the dirt.”
After a moment he picked up the shovel and began gently clearing the dirt from along the top of the grave to expose whatever it was he had struck.
The body was gone, replaced by a thick tree root the width and length of the hole he had dug the day before.
His mind reeled at the discovery. He hadn’t encountered a single obstruction when digging, but now this massive tendril of wood ran straight through the freshly dug grave as though it had been growing there, undisturbed, for centuries.
He brushed the loose dirt from atop the root to get a better look. The shape of it almost made it look as though a human figure was bound tightly inside it, like a snake recently gorged, its belly pregnant with food and molded to the shape of whatever poor animal it had swallowed whole.
“Get on back up to the house, boy, get,” he snapped at Jacob, as an unsettling feeling gripped him. “Don’t tell anyone I showed you this, or else I’ll give you a beating my damn self, you hear me? I knew I shouldn’t have shown you. Now I gotta go tell Pa.”
Jacob readily agreed, eager to keep the trust of his hero and happy to have a secret shared between them. He ran off to the house as Micah trudged up the barn to tell his father and Lemuel of his discovery. Micah stood outside the barn a bit before entering. He listened to the men as they talked inside, trying to think of what he would tell them.
How could he possibly explain what he had found? He knew his father would listen and try to understand, and would hopefully believe him – but Lemuel? Never.
Micah put his hands on the barn door to push it open, but then
hesitated.
He should go back to the graves for one last look before sharing his discovery with anyone, he decided. Perhaps he had been mistaken.
He walked back down to the smokehouse, and stood by the half-covered grave.
It was empty.
No root. No dead body. Only an empty hole filled with loose dirt.
Micah grabbed the shovel and began to dig furiously into the other freshly-filled graves, frantically spooning the soil away.
All were empty. The bodies were gone, as though they had never been there at all.
A cold chill ran down Micah’s spine as he pondered what to do next. Tell Lemuel? He was confused about what had happened. Had Indians come and carried their dead away? It seemed unlikely. The graves had been completely undisturbed. Why would they have taken the time to refill the holes so they would appear unmolested?
A vision flashed into Micah’s mind - a giant wooden python, wrapped around a man, devouring him whole. He tried to shake it off, but still the haunting image lingered. He knew he couldn’t tell anyone what he had seen. They would think he was crazy.
Shaken and no longer wanting to be alone, he quickly refilled the now-empty graves and ran back to join the others, eager to find comfort in the company of the others.
IV. THE SIN
LATER THAT EVENING, several hours before sundown, the two families joined together for a celebration and feast at Lemuel’s house. During dinner, the adults talked about their hopes and dreams for the future, about whether they should stay here permanently or press their luck by continuing the journey west.
Lemuel had become convinced that God had led them to the site of the original Garden of Eden, that it had been revealed to them at this precise time as a reward for successfully enduring the hardships that the Lord had tested them with. Lemuel said it was a sign that God had chosen him as his prophet on Earth, to lead the chosen people into the new age of Eden, a golden millennium of plenty that would last a thousand years.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 45