The Remnants

by Robert Hill

  A fever on a breeze is a random thing; it can blow this way or that and take hold here or wherever. It can blow through an open window and over the sleeping body of a child and leave her be like a pie cooling on the sill, and instead make a nuisance of itself down in a part of a house where no breeze was meant to meander. A fever, unlike a name, doesn’t have to remind you of anything other than itself. It’s a bad deed done once and gone. What it leaves behind, the effect of it, that’s the part of it that lingers, that’s the real story, perpetual and life-lasting. Random and done-and-gone is a fever blowing into town late one night and out of all the pairs of parents asleep in their beds it picking Frainey’s parents to take in a single breath. The story, the one Frainey has never been able to untell herself, the perpetual part, is how a daughter who was already sisterless and brotherless was made motherless and fatherless before sunup, and who became an animal almost overnight and almost stayed that way for life.

  People stand around fresh holes in the ground and do what sheep do. They look down in the hole, down on the box in it, curiously, as if there might be something down there to eat, then they glance over at the mounded dirt that came out of the hole and will go back on top of the box. A chill wind ripples by and they shiver a bit and pull their fleece linings tight, they hear a tree limb crack and fall on a bed of forest moss not too far off and they look around to try and see where, they turn their attention back to the hole in the ground and the box in it and they stare awhile, and while they do, they do what they were too sheepish to do at first, they think about themselves.

  Not a tear was shed for Etingem Saflutis, not by Agapanthus, she was cold and wanted to get back home to her lap rug and her cats. Petie and Loma Soyle dropped a few drips in the dirt in earnest near the hole where Hephelonious lay—Petie for the petty treatment her sister would surely now give her with their mother now gone, Loma for the smaller percentage of affection that she received from their mother compared to what her sister basked in, but now that it was gone with the box in the hole it came to her: it was better than none. Kennesaw’s bluer-than-blues weren’t gunked up or watery at all; you could see it in his eyes and in the clenched set of his cleft and chisel it was delayed justice to take Porcine at last, after all she hadn’t protected him from. He almost buried her with his father’s belt, that strip of an unjust god, but that was going too far. Mola Whiskerhooven shook her head with the regret that her son would no longer pepper her mashed potatoes with tadpoles, she’d grown to like the taste, and Hunko Minton was glad his own eyes weren’t set so far apart on his face like his friend Brisket’s were that when he blinked his ears wiggled, and around the hole and even now all these years since, some of us still blush recalling Brisket’s lisp echoing in the darkness that warm still night in his first squirting days when he was down on the rocky shores of Grunts Pond and grunted out “Knotsthy!” like a flick of thunder. His loss is a living thing. As to that horse’s ass Boyle Lope—the best his litter of daughters could say of the loss of him was oh well and there you have it and ‘bout time!

  Awe more than anything might have been granted to the double departing of Salomee and Wuzz. Since neither had been all that special on their own at least going out together was an occasion. But Frainey did not strike us as all that sad-hearted that her parents were in a hole and gone for good. She was restless by that hole. Sucking in air and hissing it out. Rocking on her heels. Mad and impatient, as though someone had done her a wrong and was taking their sweet time making it right. True placed a tender hand on Frainey’s shoulder to console her friend but the girl exploded from her reach like a frog you don’t see till it jumps. She had brought with her Chippewa and it was Chippewa she turned to for whatever comfort she’d allow—stroking the goat’s neck, its beard, holding onto a horn. The only sign she gave that something pulled at her heart was when she pulled Chippewa’s rope tight when the goat tried to nibble on her mother’s box as it was lowered into its hole.

  Around a graveyard there are the usual politics of grief: who stands nearest the next and dearest, who kicks in the first clod of dirt, who’s happiest that the body in the box isn’t theirs. So important at the time are such logistics; later on, the simplest facts survive. Holes were dug. Passages read. It was cold for May. Chippewa dunged. Everyone for the most part went back to their homes and resumed their chores and their grievances and their lives; True wanted Frainey to come home with her to stay, the goat they’d make a place for later, but Frainey mulishly said no. Her parents weren’t really gone-gone, she told herself. They were away-gone, off somewhere, not that she knew the difference, not that they’d ever gone off somewhere without her, not that anyone she’d ever known of had gone off somewhere never to return, though there was a rumor about Kennesaw, yet here he was, and, so, too, could her parents be: they were away-gone but they’d be back, they weren’t really in that hole, they were at home, waiting for her, that’s where they were. She had found them stiff and cold, she had run to town for help to rouse them, later when they were carted off and she was shooed to True’s, she knew something bad had happened like when lightning struck and the whole house shook, then the shaking stopped and all was back to normal, so all would be back to normal, they’d be back like nothing had struck, she was sure of it. True’s concern trailed after Frainey and the goat as they left the boneyard for their long walk back to who-knows-what. Few others gave a second thought to the who-knows-what that would become of the orphan and her goat.

  The graveside gathering had started at noon and was over by half-past (why linger when what’s done is done?), and it took most of the rest of the day for Frainey and Chippewa to make it back home. The goat was grazing on rogue grass and garlic and spring asparagus and she didn’t like to eat in a hurry. At home a few chickens skittered about on the front porch, and some of the cracks in the floorboards were sprouting a gash of moss green with a touch of gold in it like they had an infection. Frainey went in the house expecting to find her mother by the cookstove skimming fat off the pork roast and boiling water and pushing the hair off her face with her forearm and it falling back like it always did, but the only life in there was a fly circling the cold stew pot. If Papa was anywhere he was in the barn, in the back stall behind Chippewa’s stall, where he kept the big wooden trunk with the lock that was always locked. It had belonged to Wuzz’s father. Frainey knew where he hid the key to that lock. He never carried it on him unless he was away from home for longer than a morning, and when she looked for it and expected to not find it because she was certain he and Mama were away-gone and would be back before dark she found it hanging from its peg on a beam and something in her seized. What had made her mad before made her scared now; could away-gone and gone-gone be the same thing?

  No explaining why you sometimes do things because they just feel right, like your hands know a secret they haven’t told your head. Frainey took that feeling that seized her in the barn right into the house and over to the stuck shut window in the downstairs bedroom where Wuzz and Salomee once slumbered. She couldn’t get the upper sash down with her fingertips or the lower to lift up with the butts of her palms so she bashed it with her father’s bootjack and shattered every pane. The air allowed in hit her face like a slapped hand. Any stray breeze with a demon on its breath would now blow through that room and spare its occupants of any further fevers—that’s what happened in hers. All hands and no head, Frainey next lay down a carpet of straw over every exposed inch of floor in the room and even on the bed, and dragged in a tin tub that her mother had used for washing and filled it with fresh water, and from that mourning day on, Chippewa never spent another night out in the barn.

  Frainey tried spooning her small body against Chippewa’s that night to feed off her warmth, but Chippewa flicked and twitched in her sleep and every time she shook with a goat dream a horn jabbed Frainey, so Frainey gave over the bed to Chippewa and curled into a ball on the straw floor beside it.

  It didn’t take long for Chippewa to take to her new sur
roundings and her place in them. She had full run of the house, ground level and half upper, and Frainey let her do whatever she liked. What she liked was to sashay from room to room grazing, tasting and spitting out bits of this ‘n’ that (sash weight, saucer, settee), depositing her doings here and there, giving up her milk to Frainey now and then. Chippewa took to staying in not only on wet mornings, but on cold mornings, too, and hot mornings, then it was all mornings, and eventually all days and every day became like that first day with Frainey out foraging foliage and toting fresh water and she learned to hopscotch the growing mounds of pungent dung and swat her way through the flies that settled in that hilly territory like early man on the move and made the wooden house hum like a living thing.

  The goat was in hog heaven. She had no need to leave the house for any reason at any time. She could eat her fill and empty it, wander, slumber, when and wherever. She was no longer an animal in suffrage to mankind—the animal kingdom had been turned on its crown at last and now goat kept girl. Frainey was her fetch dog and beast of burden all in one, feeding her, grooming her with the hairbrush she no longer used on her own head, balling up in a corner away from Chippewa when the goat wasn’t feeling herself. If Frainey had had it in her, she might even have lactated her own sweetness for the goat’s daily enjoyment, in fact she took to pulling at her own eensie-teensies in hopes of stimulating their flow.

  May flowed into June as Frainey became what she never dreamed humanly possible. From that first day home the rain rained and it didn’t let up, and Frainey like she did that first wet day took to her daily habit of dashing out for the daily forage while Chippewa remained inside dry and her needs high priority. Frainey hadn’t learned beans about sowing or reaping or frying or baking or mold or maggots or mites. When the little food she had left began to squirm, she took to dining on whatever Chippewa turned up her dented nose at, and when what went in leafy and lush green came out of her mute-green and mossy they were both intrigued. Chippewa was growing rounder and more self-satisfied with every day while Frainey in no time at all gave gaunt a scare. Her belly collapsed like a rotten pumpkin. Her hair fell out in shanks. If the looking glass in the hall hadn’t fallen and shattered she might have noticed her eye whites turning raccoon brown and her pink cheeks gone wolf gray.

  Noah had collected two of every living thing on earth and bunked them by species so they’d keep to their own kind. He’d been around the sand dunes once or twice himself and knew that some mammals might stray from their own back yards and take up with a reptile next door. These things happen sure as bushes burst into flames and oceans split in two. But such unusually close solicitude between girl and goat was perhaps not what Noah spent all that time afloat for. True said as much the day she came to pay a call on Frainey and was overwhelmed as much by the disquietude that met her eyes as by the stench only Satan himself could belch out.

  Frainey had all but given up hopscotching the dung piles and had stopped doing her own doings outdoors, bringing the outhouse in and throughout. The sight and smell of her young friend filthed and numb-glazed in a haze of flies squatting in the front hall of the house over a mound of her own fresh moss was bad enough, but seeing the goat lounging resplendent on what had been the parlor davenport, her bag belly big as a slattern’s ransom, lunching on the last of the horse-hair stuffing and giving True the evil bone button eye—to True’s orderly stomach, that was the last straw. No, the last straw that broke her stomach was the moving straw, and the walls a-squirm with life.

  Mayans baked adobe in the hot south sun and slathered on plaster that outlasted them all. True didn’t take a trowel to Frainey, just the opposite—the dung and dirt on her was caked solid as a ruin and would take an excavation to remove. A chisel, she’d have used one if it didn’t all come off with water and a horse brush and hard scrubbing and more water and more hard scrubbing and a ghost dusting of lye to burn off what water didn’t exterminate. Frainey didn’t make a sound, her body juddered this way and that with every hard scrub, she was something underwater in a rip tide being pushed and pulled in place. It took almost a full day to unearth the orphan under all that grime and bring her back to a being that didn’t smell or look like it lived in a hole.

  Forty days was all it had been since Salomee and Wuzz went in the ground and in that time Frainey had descended lower. True figured a mood must have settled on Frainey’s skin like a swarm of bees and stung her sadness numb so she could open her eyes and see her way ahead without tears. From there it bored through the barrier of muscle and tissue on every inch of her to saddle every corpuscle in her bloodstream and ride them down the evolutionary trail to a place where bees had tusks. Forty days of suspended floating in an island-sized boat had saved two of everything living in their natural states, each being as recognizable stepping off as the day they boarded. In the same not-so-long length of time, Frainey had shipped out a girl in the early-early of becoming a woman, but left parentless and bereaved and bunked with a beast she called friend, the girl bested the beast in unashamed atavism. True reasoned that, for whatever reason, something in Frainey retreated to a place in her grief where only a beast could show her that wild was better than weeping. If her parents were truly gone-gone, a memory instead of something recognizable, what was to stop Frainey from becoming a memory herself? Sometimes, the hand doesn’t know any better than the head, so a child who doesn’t know to save her own life will simply ruin it instead.

  10: Kennesaw

  A small town approaches the doings of its past with a heel on a spade in the dirt, digging up where you set it or leaving set what you’d rather not unearth.

  When people want to know your business, in time they make it their business to root in your dirt and come up a fistful. If it’s something you have and they want it they’ll step hard on that spade and grind their boot heel on its edge for as long as it takes to break the hardest earth to get at it. But if it’s something you’ve done that they’ve done themselves or want to do, then that spade turns tender tungsten around the tiniest roots and leaves alone what they’d just as soon not have you stir up in them. So, a child gets hit or bit or worse in a house across town, or a dalliance in the shadows produces one man’s sprout from another man’s seed, or a suffering love that was already secret is snuffed out in secret with no chance to suffer it out in the wide open, or a spooking is blamed for a man gone ghost, or half a dozen more doings the Good Book says are bad get done, get done again, and again, and again, and no one says one word, and more than likely it’s happening in more than one house. Time notches its bedpost on comings and doings like these.

  As a town digs, so does a single man. When the game of Adam and Abel first began, Kennesaw was too young to understand what was happening to him, happening upon him. He thought perhaps that this was as it should be between fathers and sons, he didn’t question it or even speak of it, an unspoken voice in him said don’t, so he didn’t. His reasoning was sound for a boy who followed his father’s orders. If you dug a hole in clay, clay is what you’d find and clay, as his father assured him, is as normal as dirt. He had no reason to suspect that if he dug down deeper, there might be clay of a deeper hue, more rust than brown, like dirt mixed with blood. Or, if in another spot entirely he shivved his spade into soil of an exotically different composition such as the mulch of decayed plants, the fistful he’d find would be a version of the story altogether different than the one his father learned him. But if Kennesaw had believed wholeheartedly what his father said, if all clay was indeed as normal as dirt as his father had assured him, he might have traded stories with Carnival or Luddy or Mawz as one would boast openly about a first slug of applejack or a stolen toke on a briar pipe. An open boast would have echoed across Grunts Pond, and had it, a groin-busting Godourfather! would have been as often a grunt-out out there as the more common yeahverily! and comeallyefaithful! and even Brisket Whiskerhooven’s nasal, but potent, Knotsthy!

  Yet, as Kennesaw matured, he sensed that an open boast this was not.
Open boasts were Columbine Buckett and Russet Aspetuck and their mutual mooniness over his ax and his long thumb, or the seventy-two hours in an airless shack when Hock Hackensack marinated his new bride Anamana in the ever-funky musk of his skunk loving. Open boasts are titter-makers even a spinster can approve of, they’re gasps and giggles straight out of the Good Book chapter and verse that come at you winking like a drunken limerick. Open boasts get passed with the peas at Sunday Sit Down, they’re stitched like an old dress hem into a trousseau quilt to inspire the next bed, they’re stories the old folks bring out into the night without mosquito netting on them that raise the kind of bumps nearly everyone present is happy for.