by Noreen Doyle
The cracks in the stove gave me firelight for groping back into my clothes. The wind had not calmed at all. I stumbled to the west window, buttoning up, and found it a white blank. Snow had drifted above the lower sash. On tiptoe I could just see over it. A light appeared, dimly illuminating the snowfield beyond. That would be coming from a lamp in the Ryders’ bedroom, shining through the nursery room and so out, weak and diffused, into the blizzard chaos.
Yaaarrhh!
Now it had drawn horribly near. From the north windows of the parlor I saw black nothing. Harp squeaked down to my door. “Wake, Ben?”
“Yes. Come look at the west window.”
He had left no light burning in the kitchen, and only a scant glow came down to the landing from the bedroom. He murmured behind me. “Ayah, snow’s up some. Must be over three feet on the level by now.”
Yaaarrhh!
The voice had shouted on the south side, the blinder side of the house, overlooked only by one kitchen window and a small one in the pantry where the hand pump stood. The view from the pantry window was mostly blocked by a great maple that overtopped the house. I heard the wind shrilling across the tree’s winter bones.
“Ben, you want to git your boots on? Up to you—can’t ask it. I might have to go out.” Harp spoke in an undertone as if the beast might understand him through the tight walls.
“Of course.” I got into my knee boots and caught up my parka as I followed him into the kitchen. A .30-caliber rifle and his heavy shotgun hung on deerhorn over the door to the woodshed. He found them in the dark.
What courage I possessed that night came from being shamed into action, from fearing to show a poor face to an old friend in trouble. I went through the Normandy invasion. I have camped out alone, when I was younger and healthier, in our moose and bear country, and slept nicely. But that noise of Longtooth stole courage. It ached along the channel of the spine.
I had the spare flashlight, but knew Harp didn’t want me to use it here. I could make out the furniture, and Harp reaching for the gun rack. He already had on his boots, fur cap, and mackinaw. “You take this’n,” he said, and put the ten-gauge in my hands. “Both barrels loaded. Ain’t my way to do that, ain’t right, but since this thing started—”
Yaaarrhh!
“Where’s he got to now?” Harp was by the south window. “Round this side?”
“I thought so . . . Where’s Droopy?”
Harp chuckled thinly. “Poor little shit! She come upstairs at the first sound of him and went under the bed. I told Led’ to stay upstairs. She’d want a light down here. Wouldn’t make sense.”
Then, apparently from the east side of the hen-loft and high, booming off some resonating surface: Yaaarrhh!
“He can’t! Jesus, that’s twelve foot off the ground!” But Harp plunged out into the shed, and I followed. “Keep your light on the floor, Ben.” He ran up the narrow stairway. “Don’t shine it on the birds, they’ll act up.”
So far the chickens, stupid and virtually blind in the dark, were making only a peevish tut-tutting of alarm. But something was clinging to the outside of the barricaded east window, snarling, chattering teeth, pounding on the two-by-fours. With a fist?—it sounded like nothing else. Harp snapped, “Get your light on the window!” And he fired through the glass.
We heard no outcry. Any noise outside was covered by the storm and the squawks of the hens scandalized by the shot. The glass was dirty from their continual disturbance of the litter; I couldn’t see through it. The bullet had drilled the pane without shattering it, and passed between the two-by-fours, but the beast could have dropped before he fired. “I got to go out there. You stay, Ben.” Back in the kitchen he exchanged rifle for shotgun. “Might not have no chance to aim. You remember this piece, don’t y’?—eight in the clip.”
“I remember it.”
“Good. Keep your ears open.” Harp ran out through the door that gave on a small paved area by the woodshed. To get around under the east loft window he would have to push through the snow behind the barn, since he had blocked all the rear openings. He could have circled the house instead, but only by bucking the west wind and fighting deeper drifts. I saw his big shadow melt out of sight.
Leda’s voice quavered down to me: “He—get it?”
“Don’t know. He’s gone to see. Sit tight. . .”
I heard that infernal bark once again before Harp returned, and again it sounded high off the ground; it must have come from the big maple. And then moments later—I was still trying to pierce the dark, watching for Harp—a vast smash of broken glass and wood, and the violent bang of the door upstairs. One small wheezing shriek cut short, and one scream such as no human being should ever hear. I can still hear it.
I think I lost some seconds in shock. Then I was groping up the narrow stairway, clumsy with the rifle and flashlight. Wind roared at the opening of the kitchen door, and Harp was crowding past me, thrusting me aside. But I was close behind him when he flung the bedroom door open. The blast from the broken window that had slammed the door had also blown out the lamp. But our flashlights said at once that Leda was not there. Nothing was, nothing living.
Droopy lay in a mess of glass splinters and broken window sash, dead from a crushed neck—something had stamped on her. The bedspread had been pulled almost to the window—maybe Leda’s hand had clenched on it. I saw blood on some of the glass fragments, and on the splintered sash, a patch of reddish fur.
Harp ran back downstairs. I lingered a few seconds. The arrow of fear was deep in me, but at the moment it made me numb. My light touched up an ugly photograph on the wall, Harp’s mother at fifty or so, petrified and acid-faced before the camera, a puritan deity with shallow, haunted eyes. I remembered her.
Harp had kicked over the traces when his father died, and quit going to church. Mrs. Ryder “disowned” him. The farm was his; she left him with it and went to live with a widowed sister in Lohman, and died soon, unreconciled. Harp lived on as a bachelor, crank, recluse, until his strange marriage in his fifties. Now here was Ma still watchful, pucker-faced, unforgiving. In my dullness of shock I thought: Oh, they probably always made love with the lights out.
But now Leda wasn’t there.
I hurried after Harp, who had left the kitchen door to bang in the wind. I got out there with rifle and flashlight, and over across the road I saw his torch. No other light, just his small gleam and mine.
I knew as soon as I had forced myself beyond the corner of the house and into the fantastic embrace of the storm that I could never make it. The west wind ground needles into my face. The snow was up beyond the middle of my thighs. With weak lungs and maybe an imperfect heart, I could do nothing out here except die quickly to no purpose. In a moment Harp would be starting down the slope to the woods. His trail was already disappearing under my beam. I drove myself a little farther, and an instant’s lull in the storm allowed me to shout: “Harp! I can’t follow!”
He heard. He cupped his mouth and yelled back: “Don’t try! Git back to the house! Telephone!” I waved to acknowledge the message and struggled back.
I only just made it. Inside the kitchen doorway I fell flat, gun and flashlight clattering off somewhere, and there I stayed until I won back enough breath to keep myself living. My face and hands were ice-blocks, then fires. While I worked at the task of getting air into my body, one thought continued, an inner necessity: There must be a rational cause. I do not abandon the rational cause. At length I hauled myself up and stumbled to the telephone. The line was dead.
I found the flashlight and reeled upstairs with it. I stepped past poor Droopy’s body and over the broken glass to look through the window space. I could see that snow had been pushed off the shed roof near the bedroom window; the house sheltered that area from the full drive of the west wind, so some evidence remained. I guessed that whatever came must have jumped to the house roof from the maple, then down to the shed roof, and then hurled itself through the closed window without regard
for it as an obstacle. Losing a little blood and a little fur.
I glanced around and could not find that fur now. Wind must have pushed it out of sight. I forced the door shut. Downstairs, I lit the table lamps in kitchen and parlor. Harp might need those beacons—if he came back. I refreshed the fires, and gave myself a dose of Harp’s horrible whisky. It was nearly one in the morning. If he never came back?
It might be days before they could plow out the road. When the storm let up I could use Harp’s snowshoes, maybe. . . .
Harp came back, at 1:20, bent and staggering. He let me support him to the armchair. When he could speak he said, “No trail. No trail.” He took the bottle from my hands and pulled on it. “Christ Jesus! What can I do? Ben . . .? I got to go to the village, get help. If they got any help to give.”
“Do you have an extra pair of showshoes?”
He stared toward me, battling confusion. “Hah? No, I ain’t. Better you stay anyhow. I’ll bring yours from your house if you want, if I can get there.” He drank again and slammed in the cork with the heel of his hand. “I’ll leave you the ten-gauge.”
He got his snowshoes from a closet. I persuaded him to wait for coffee. Haste could accomplish nothing now; we could not say to each other that we knew Leda was dead. When he was ready to go, I stepped outside with him into the mad wind. “Anything you want me to do before you get back?” He tried to think about it.
“I guess not, Ben . . . God, ain’t I lived right? No, that don’t make sense. God? That’s a laugh.” He swung away. Two or three great strides and the storm took him.
That was about two o’clock. For four hours I was alone in the house. Warmth returned, with the bedroom door closed and fires working hard. I carried the kitchen lamp into the parlor, and then huddled in the nearly total dark of the kitchen with my back to the wall, watching all the windows, the ten-gauge near my hand, but I did not expect a return of the beast, and there was none.
The night grew quieter, perhaps because the house was so drifted in that snow muted the sounds. I was cut off from the battle, buried alive.
Harp would get back. The seasons would follow their natural way, and somehow we would learn what had happened to Leda. I supposed the beast would have to be something in the human pattern—mad, deformed, gone wild, but still human.
After a time I wondered why we had heard no excitement in the stable. I forced myself to take up gun and flashlight and go look. I groped through the woodshed, big with the jumping shadows of Harp’s cordwood, and into the barn. The cows were peacefully drowsing. In the center alley I dared to send my weak beam swooping and glimmering through the ghastly distances of the hayloft. Quiet, just quiet; natural rustling of mice. Then to the stable, where Ned whickered and let me rub his brown cheeks, and Jerry rolled a humorous eye. I suppose no smell had reached them to touch off panic, and perhaps they had heard the barking often enough so that it no longer disturbed them. I went back to my post, and the hours crawled along a ridge between the pits of terror and exhaustion. Maybe I slept.
No color of sunrise that day, but I felt paleness and change; even a blizzard will not hide the fact of day-shine. I breakfasted on bacon and eggs, fed the hens, forked down hay and carried water for the cows and horses. The one cow in milk, a jumpy Ayrshire, refused to concede that I meant to be useful. I’d done no milking since I was a boy, the knack was gone from my hands, and relief seemed less important to her than kicking over the pail; she was getting more amusement than discomfort out of it, so for the moment I let it go. I made myself busywork shoveling a clear space by the kitchen door. The wind was down, the snowfall persistent but almost peaceful. I pushed out beyond the house and learned that the stuff was up over my hips.
Out of that, as I turned back, came Harp in his long, snowshoe stride, and down the road three others. I recognized Sheriff Robart, overfed but powerful; and Bill Hastings, wry and ageless, a cousin of Harp’s and one of his few friends; and last, Curt Davidson, perhaps a friend to Sheriff Robart but certainly not to Harp.
I’d known Curt as a thick-witted loudmouth when he was a kid; growing to man’s years hadn’t done much for him. And when I saw him I thought, irrationally perhaps: Not good for our side. A kind of absurdity, and yet Harp and I were joined against the world simply because we had experienced together what others were going to call impossible, were going to interpret in harsh, even damnable ways; and no help for it.
I saw the white thin blur of the sun, the strength of it growing. Nowhere in all the white expanse had the wind and the new snow allowed us any mark of the visitation in the night.
* * *
The men reached my cleared space and shook off snow. I opened the woodshed. Harp gave me one hopeless glance of inquiry and I shook my head.
“Having a little trouble?” That was Robart, taking off his snowshoes.
Harp ignored him. “I got to look after the chores.” I told him I’d done it except for that damn cow. “Oh, Bess, ayah, she’s nervy, I’ll see to her.” He gave me my snowshoes that he had strapped to his back. “Adelaide, she wanted to know about your groceries. Said I figured they was in the ca’.”
“Good as an icebox,” says Robart, real friendly.
Curt had to have his pleasures, too: “Ben, you sure you got hold of old Bess by the right end, where the tits was?” Curt giggles at his own jokes, so nobody else is obliged to. Bill Hastings spat in the snow.
“Okay if I go in?” Robart asked. It wasn’t a simple inquiry: he was present officially and meant to have it known. Harp looked him up and down.
“Nobody stopping you. Didn’t bring you here to stand around, I suppose.”
“Harp,” said Robart pleasantly enough, “don’t give me a hard time. You come tell me certain things has happened, I got to look into it is all.” But Harp was already striding down the woodshed to the barn entrance. The others came into the house with me, and I put on water for fresh coffee. “Must be your ca’ down the rud a piece, Ben? Heard you kind of went into a ditch. All’s you can see now is a hump in the snow. Deep freeze might be good for her, likely you’ve tried everything else.” But I wasn’t feeling comic, and never had been on those terms with Robart. I grunted, and his face shed mirth as one slips off a sweater. “Okay, what’s the score? Harp’s gone and told me a story I couldn’t feed to the dogs, so what about it? Where’s Mrs. Ryder?”
Davidson giggled again. It’s a nasty little sound to come out of all that beef. I don’t think Robart had much enthusiasm for him either, but it seems he had sworn in the fellow as a deputy before they set out. “Yes, sir,” said Curt, “that was really a story, that was.”
“Where’s Mrs. Ryder?”
“Not here,” I told him. “We think she’s dead.”
He glowered, rubbing cold out of his hands. “Seen that window. Looks like the frame is smashed.”
“Yes, from the outside. When Harp gets back you’d better look. I closed the door on that room and haven’t opened it. There’ll be more snow, but you’ll see about what we saw when we got up there.”
“Let’s look right now,” said Curt.
Bill Hastings said, “Curt, ain’t you a mite busy for a dep’ty? Mr. Dane said when Harp gets back.” Bill and I are friends; normally he wouldn’t mister me. I think he was trying to give me some flavor of authority.
I acknowledged the alliance by asking: “You a deputy, too, Bill?” Giving him an opportunity to spit in the stove, replace the lid gently, and reply: “Shit no.”
Harp returned and carried the milk pail to the pantry. Then he was looking us over. “Bill, I got to try the woods again. You want to come along?”
“Sure, Harp. I didn’t bring no gun.”
“Take my ten-gauge.”
“Curt here’ll go along,” said Robart. “Real good man on snowshoes. Interested in wild life.”
Harp said, “That’s funny, Robart. I guess that’s the funniest thing I heard since Cutler’s little girl fell under the tractor. You joining us, too?”
“Coffee’s dripped,” I said.
“Thing of it is, if I’d’ve thought you had any objection, I’d’ve been obliged to get me a warrant.”
“Thanks, Ben.” Harp gulped the coffee scalding. “Why, if looking around the house is the best you can do, Sher’f, I got no objection. Ben, I shouldn’t be keeping you away from your affairs, but would you stay? Kind of keep him company? Not that I got much in the house, but still—you know—”
“I’ll stay.” I wished I could tell him to drop that manner; it only got him deeper in the mud.
Robart handed Davidson his gun belt and holster. “Better have it, Curt, so to be in style.”
Harp and Bill were outside getting on their snowshoes; I half heard some remark of Harp’s about the sheriff’s aching back. They took off. The snow had almost ceased. They passed out of sight down the slope to the north, and Curt went plowing after them. Behind me Robart said, “You’d think Harp believed it himself.”
“That’s how it’s to be? You make us both liars before you’ve even done any looking?”
“I got to try to make sense of it is all.” I followed him up to the bedroom. It was cruelly cold. He touched Droopy’s stiff corpse with his foot. “Hard to figure a man killing his own dog.”
“We get nowhere with that kind of idea.”
“Ben, you got to see this thing like it looks to other people. And keep out of my hair.”
“That’s what scares me, Jack. Something unreasonable did happen, and Harp and I were the only ones to experience it—except Mrs. Ryder.”
“You claim you saw this—animal?”
“I didn’t say that. I heard her scream. When we got upstairs this room was the way you see it.” I looked around, and again couldn’t find that scrap of fur, but I spoke of it, and I give Robart credit for searching. He shook out the bedspread and blankets, examined the floor and the closet. He studied the window space, leaned out for a look at the house wall and the shed roof. His big feet avoided the broken glass, and he squatted for a long gaze at the pieces of window sash. Then he bore down on me, all policemen personified, a massive, rather intelligent, conventionally honest man with no patience for imagination, no time for any fact not already in the books. “Piece of fur, huh?” He made it sound as if I’d described a jabberwock with eyes of flame. “Okay, we’re done up here.” He motioned me downstairs—all policemen who’d ever faced a crowd’s dangerous stupidity with their own.