How the West Was Weird, Vol. 2

by Barry Reese

  One thing's for sure, poor Miss Shayes, she passed in silence; she wouldn't have screamed, wouldn't have begged, not in the sense as you or I would understand it. There would have been fear in her eyes and the skitter-whack of her heart, and the taste of something that's not quite blood at the back of her throat, that bitter flavor we all get when the body recognizes threat and we're suddenly faced with loss and suffering. Her mouth would have stretched wide enough to count her teeth for sure, but she wouldn't have made a sound.

  Mute her whole life, there's no reason Isobel Shayes would be different in death. And besides, when you're dead, Pa says, you're done talking.

  Dumb Tom and I were in the meadow catching crickets in jars and talking dirty when word came down that some fisher had snagged Miss Shayes' body and hauled her on out of the water. She'd been weighted down with rocks, mainly in a wheat sack tied around her ankles but also in her mouth and stomach. That's been the nub of the hearsay these past few days since she was discovered, that the stones in her gut came spilling out of the critter holes when she was dragged up onto the bank, like coins from a city lady's purse. Reckon there's plenty of ways a killer could stuff a belly with rocks, but the talk I heard, with ranch hands being men and all, turned to the lurid pretty quick that first day. Made me and Dumb Tom sick and pale to think on it, whether it was true or not.

  Isobel never liked to hear us kids call Dumb Tom by that name, and not just because dumb is another term for mute. Tom speaks up fine, he's dumb in the other way. All the same, Miss Shayes, she'd get that frown on if she heard it, especially from me. She'd make those angry, wordless gestures of hers, whether it was in the schoolroom or in the street. For a woman who couldn't speak, there were times when she never shut up. I guess she thought I should treat him kinder, being his friend, but I don't reckon she ever understood. Dumb Tom was Dumb Tom from the age of eight or so, when everyone realized he was never going to write or count so good, no matter what. There's no shame in that, half the adults in town can't put two written words together worth a damn, but Miss Shayes was a good teacher and she wanted better for us youngsters. Maybe she thought us calling him Dumb Tom was our way of keeping him down and making the rest of us feel good about ourselves, especially considering he's a quarter Cherokee and all, but I can genuinely say that isn't the case. Every-one likes Dumb Tom, he's funny and he's strong as logs, and that's just his name. We sure don't give two sticks about his Indian blood, I bet half of us kids got the taint somewhere in our family line.

  Even so, I reckon some part of Tom appreciated her concern. He loved Isobel Shayes. I mean, deep in the heart love, the kind no one really understands even though people build their damn lives around it because it's apparently so precious. All us kids liked her, the boys in our own special way, the late at night in bed way, concentrating so fierce on the possibilities if only God was cocking an ear and would take pity on us just this one time. Isobel was pretty as honey, see, with hips like bone china and milk jug curves above and below. Kids make deals with God like nothing else, with such sweet sincerity, it's no wonder so many grow up to be sorrowful and mean when no one answers. God's got no mind for prayers, especially those served up by boys who don't really understand why their bodies react the way they do to a woman like Miss Shayes, the way her dark hair caught the light from the window when she sat in a certain way and read poetry as we worked, the way her wrists were so slender and the way her hands always smelled of soap, the way she slipped off her shoes and tucked her bare feet together off to the side of her chair when she was listening to one of us recite. She came to school with painted toenails one day, red as winterberries, like some rich-as-aces city girl. Something about the sight of them got me anxious, like I'd been running uphill and couldn't catch my breath. For the next two weeks I fidgeted at my desk every morning, staring at her feet in her plain brown shoes and wondering if her toes were colored or clean, but she never painted them a second time, not that I saw. And then she was gone.

  It makes me sad to think of her in terms of what was, not what is. I can only imagine how it feels for Dumb Tom. When Miss Shayes disappeared it must have cracked his heart like lake ice in spring; now they've found her dead I reckon it's broken it clean through. I guess that's why he didn't put up much of a fight when Pa came for him this morning and told him they knew what he'd done, and how they'd found her locket in his room, in the box under his bed with all his dirty drawings and poorly written love letters he'd never sent, all dedicated to a woman who'd since turned up dead and full of rocks. Tom's life is done anyhow, without Isobel, without the possibility of her. If he's thought ahead to the noose, as he surely must have, it isn't with fear. And I guess he's done praying anyhow.

  That first night Dumb Tom's in jail, Pa comes home and sits me down at the kitchen table, and he pours me a virgin double shot of whisky. He says days like this are the making of a man, and how a man is what I need to be now, like it or not. That's when he tells me about how beautiful women always die the hardest, and in doing so we share a secret, that he thought Isobel was as lovely as I and Tom had done. He talks about murder, about some of the things he's seen as sheriff here in town and in the city, where he was a lawman before my ma fell with me and we left all that behind. Murder's murder though, he says, big city or small town. It all hurts. He drinks deep, his eyes full of pain and shame. He asks me if I blame him for how things have worked out. I don't, I say, honestly. It's his job. He just stares at me, so sorrowful. He's my father, he says, and he places his hand on mine. This is what fathers do for their sons.

  And then we sit awhile, and we think of Isobel Shayes, and we think of Dumb Tom, and I guess we wonder how everything turned so bad.

  It's not long after this that the screaming starts. Listening to it, it's obvious that whilst God doesn't care enough to listen to folks like me and Tom, Isobel Shayes herself surely does. And, again, for a mute woman, she's got a lot to say; it's the fact she's not silent now she's dead that turns everything I believed upside-down.

  You ever sit out on your porch or hunker up in bed with the skylight open just so you can watch a storm coming in? Late afternoons are the most dramatic, when the skies darken over as if night's fallen early and the first thunder barrel rolls in the distance like the grind of wagon wheels. Sometimes you'll see a lick of lightning up behind the blackest clouds and the hairs will stand up on the back of your neck. It sets the horses in the meadow frisky, gets them braying and the goats bleating. I used to love storms, but my favorite part was always something else: the wind. See, our family homestead is the westernmost of the whole town, with nothing but the expanse of flat meadows be-tween us and the toe knuckle where the smoke-blue moun-tains begin to rise. The wind that gathers before the true storm moves in and smacks us down with the back of its hand… hell, it's sudden and it's harsh, and when it rips through the tall grass and the briar and the trees it sounds like something's coming for you and it wants your bones and all your wet, red parts. Something hungry. Never scared me until now, though.

  The screaming tonight, it's worse than the wind. Not least because when I scramble out onto the porch and stare away into the distance I find myself looking on cloudless skies shot through with nugget silver, and on fields of dark grass that barely sways. There's no storm, no building gale. But the scream carries on the night chill like the scrape of fork on teeth, cutting through the sward so cleanly I'm expecting to see the pastures bleed and fingernail-thin gouges advancing through the dirt, ready to claim me. It's a harsh thing, a physical thing.

  It's a woman's goddamn dying scream is what it is, six weeks too late. And it's as angry as it's full of pain.

  I slam the door and lean against it, chest and arms forward and flat, face imprinted against the wood. I make sounds of my own. Plenty sounds. I can't swallow past the lump of my heart. I try and call for Pa, but the whisky rises in my chest and I retch instead. I'm thinking of Isobel Shayes, full of rocks and bleached white in the creek waters, mouth wide enough to count her te
eth. She was buried two days past but send me to hell if there's not something of her out on the porch right now, shrieking about how she's been wronged and spilling bloody stones from her critter bites.

  The scream slams into the door like an animal, knocking the breath from my body and sending me staggering. The sound splits into two distinct wails, one for either ear. It's searching for a way in. Into the house and into me. Some-thing slithers under the door, in the narrow gap between the door and the floorboards, and it suckles slyly at my bare toes. Makes me think of Miss Shayes on that day she varnished her toenails. Dumb Tom got so mad when I told him about it after school. He hadn't seen and he was jealous as all get out. Jealous enough to kill someone. He believed Isobel already belonged to him.

  I look down but there's nothing to see, not even the dark slap of wet footprints on the wooden floor. But she's there all the same. I feel her invisible touch slide up the inside of my nightshirt, featherlight on my skin, and my groin clen-ches in some ghoulish pretence of pleasure. Miss Shayes, coyly running her bare, pretty feet up and down the insides of my legs. But Miss Shayes is dead. I wriggle free and fall against the stairs, coughing and eyes stinging. My hair and face feel damp all-a-sudden. Taste it too. Like I'm drowning. But my senses are lying, it's all the scream. I put my hands to my ears and they come away red and wet.

  I shriek for Pa, like when I was a kid and I woke with the night terrors, especially in the months after ma's heart burst and she passed on. My cheeks are burning at my own feeble nature, but I don't care. I clutch myself, shivering. It's cold in the creek water. And rocks in the stomach, that's like carrying a litter of dead babies who'll never speak their own names. Isobel wants me to know that, wants us all to know. I still feel that ungodly screaming inside my ears, literally so, and I mean it when I say feel it rather than hear it; it's pricking me with needles, or maybe pencils, something thick enough to ache and stretch, with a sharp point that hurts fifty times as bad. I think I feel something pop, and in that instant the agony's even worse.

  Through the snot and the blood I weep that this isn't fair, that the dead are supposed to be silent. The dead can't utter a word, any more than Isobel Shayes could in life. Because when you're dead, Pa says, you're done talking.

  I get ready to give in to what's coming…

  …but then, suddenly, it's gone. The scream draws back and fades, and all that's left is me, quaking and bloodied and weeping. A victim, just like her.

  I think of Dumb Tom, alone in his jail cell, awaiting his fate. That dirty Cherokee quarter-blood. He's why Isobel's come back, I know it. She can't just let things take their natural course. I wonder if he's heard the scream, if he's been ravaged just like me. I have to go to him. I have to end this. That's what this is all about, I'm sure. But when I try to move, the sound of my own footsteps is muffled and makes my ruined ears sting, and the sound of my weeping is worse. I curl into a ball and, just like Tom, I wait to die.

  This, I guess, is how Pa finds me. The next thing I know the town doctor is tending me in my own bed, and my head's swathed in bandages, padded thickly about the ears. I can't hear much of what's said, at least not clearly. Pa's frantic. Says he was sleeping but my crying woke him; my screams, not Isobel's. Her voice wasn't for everyone then. Pa mentions the liquor, as if something so ludicrous could explain this. The doctor, he seems more curious than con-cerned. I think he asks me what in God's name I've done to myself, what I've put in my ears, but I'm struggling to understand him. Does he really believe these injuries are self-inflicted? Maybe he prefers to consider that than wonder if it's Pa who's hurt me, believing his badge gives him protection from the law it represents. The truth's even more bizarre. I'm sure in no hurry to suggest I was a victim of Isobel Shayes' phantom scream, for Pa's sake as much as anything.

  So I roll over and feign sleep, and I reckon this is a relief for all concerned. Soon enough I'm drowsing for real.

  And then, later that same night, the scream comes again, just as loud as before, and this time I know it'll be the last thing I ever hear.

  I sit up in bed and light a lantern. I see scuttling on the ceiling of my room and I think it's spiders at first, before realizing it's crickets, just like the ones Dumb Tom and I were catching in the meadow the day Miss Shayes' body was discovered. I can't remember what we did with them, but there's an empty jar on my pillow, close to where my head was resting. There sure are a lot of them, and more emerging from the cracks in the wood. The scream's attracting them like music, and every chirp they give in response melts into the unrelenting, overall howl. I crawl out of bed and feel them crunch underfoot, hard and soft all at once. I see twitching in my pillow casings and movement beneath the undersheet. There's a tickling in my hair. I grab the lantern and run from the room. In the hallway I catch sight of myself in a mirror, and although there's no crickets on me there's a churn's worth of pinkish blood seeping through the bandages around my ears.

  She won't shut up. That woman, that whore, silent in life but so strident now her bones have been dredged up and laid to rest…

  No, not a whore. I shouldn't be so crude. It wasn't Miss Shayes' fault that someone fell in love with her and became so consumed with obsession that he ended her.

  The scream's outside, circling the house. I can hear her devil's hooves on the roof. I can hear her claws digging in the scrub grass. I look out of numerous windows in turn, running from one to another in increasing desperation, but I see nothing untoward; again, not even a flicker in the meadows, and the starry skies remain clear. The room at the end of the passage is empty, Pa's bed not slept in, so I move on down to the kitchen and find him at the table, slumped in his chair, an empty bottle at hand and a shattered glass at his feet. His head's lolling against his shoulder, his lips parted. But it's not through being drunk. He looks at me, even though the light's gone from his eyes. He tells me he's sorry, that he's tried his best to make things right, but that the shame's eating him up from the inside. Shame, and something else. As I watch, a black cricket crawls from his open mouth, followed by another, and then another. Another begins to emerge from his ear, tiny legs twitching as it squeezes free. They chitter like laughter, an accompaniment to that hideous scream. They're in Pa's brain, and in his belly, like rocks. When they eat their way through his gut flesh they'll come rushing out like stones spilling from Miss Shayes' body the day they pulled her from the creek.

  The scream goes on. Isobel's calling. Pa's paying the price for his part in what happened; I know he'll be dead long before sunrise, and that this in itself is a mercy. I weep, and my tears are tinctured with dark pink, my eyes now bleeding along with my ears. Not long now. But I can't rest, I've got a job to do. I take Pa's gun, and his ring of keys, and I think of Dumb Tom in his jail cell. Dumb Tom, with his box of filthy drawings and letters, and his jealous heart. Miss Shayes died because of misplaced love, and there's a sadness in that, but murder's murder, and it needs to be avenged. I know what Miss Shayes wants of me.

  I shrug on my coat and slip on my shoes, and I head out into the night, into town, down the trail towards the jail-house. The scream dogs my every step, and it means to punish me; with each tread it scores me from instep to heel as if with the points of a rusted garden rake, peeling back tiny layers of flesh one by one. Then it starts on the backs of my ankles, as soft and intimate as a kiss, but quickly burning and leaving dark red circles in my skin, travelling upwards over my calves and then past my knees. I can smell myself cooking. The scream whips me and stabs me and pulls my hair out by the roots, but that burning sensa-tion is the worst because it feels like Isobel's mouth, and up until then I'd only associated her kiss with imaginary passion, not wrath. She bites me and scratches me, and when I fall to my knees in the dirt road outside the jailhouse, the undersides of my feet black and red with grit and reduced to a bloodied pulp, the scream doesn't immediately gather beneath me to help me to rise once more, even for its own ends. It first takes the opportunity to kick me and stamp on me and to shed the fleshy
rind from the back of my neck to halfway down my spine. With every blow I remember Miss Shayes' angry, wordless gestures every time one of us kids had done something wrong, in class or in the street whilst in her presence. Her scream is wordless too, but the sound of it hurts so very much.

  Eventually I half-crawl and half-stagger into the jail-house. There's a deputy in residence, slumped against the wall. There are crickets nesting in his eyes. His hands are moving uselessly, indicating that he's still alive, but surely not for long. He's peeling the skin from his own hands as if he's trying to remove a pair of gloves. One of his fingers is missing. The scream's nursing him, encouraging him. Isobel wants to punish us all, it seems.

  Dumb Tom is cowering at the back of his cell, his massive hands and forearms curled about his head. He's a big lad is Tom. Strong as logs. That and the natural prejudice shown him by older folk, with his Cherokee blood and all, makes it easy to believe he did Miss Shayes wrong. I wonder if he watched awhile as the deputy mutilated himself, or whether the scream drove him back before then. He's not aware of me until I announce myself, and then he eyes me in disbelief, seeing my bandaged head and my bloodied face and body. He doesn't understand, of course. Dumb Tom's never understood much at the best of times, least of all something like this.

  I hold up Pa's keys and unlock Tom's cell. Then I handle Pa's gun, as he taught me last summer when we went up the mountains and shot hawks. Reckon he was proud of me then, another one of those rites of passage from boy to man. Like the whisky earlier tonight, but without the regret and sense of unspoken horror between us.

  Dumb Tom doesn't take the opportunity to leave his cell. He says he belongs there. He tells me he's ashamed, and that he deserves everything that's coming to him, noose and all. He said as much to Pa and his deputies when they came for him earlier today, and that made Pa's job easier. It was a confession, an admission of sorts to everything he'd done to poor Isobel Shayes; Dumb Tom, strong and clumsy, a victim of his own uncontrollable passion, forcing himself on his beautiful teacher and killing her when she'd resisted his advances. Accidentally, maybe. But murder's murder. He then panicked, and weighted her corpse down with rocks so that he could sink her in the deepest part of the creek. That was the deduction, substantiated by the discovery of the box beneath his bed.