by Robert Hill
Even after True had given Threesie the pink velvet ribbon from the night she never went to a dance, and Threesie promised to always cherish it, to never lose it, to never give it away, only to claim so many years later that she misplaced it who-knows-where, True never would be certain that her friend was really her friend. All of life was puss in the corner to Threesie Lope, a fakeout that got another mouse trapped, and True suspected that as far as Threesie was concerned, maybe Frainey had a point about the Lopes and their animal heritage, and that deep down in the cesspool of the Lope family genes, all cute little mice were really rats.
Threesie was slippery with another feint, too, a fooling, a fakeout behind True’s back. She was careful to keep secret that once a year she helped Mawz Engersol keep a mourner’s ritual, out on the ridge above Grunts Pond where he had built a mound of boulders over the tomb of Bull and horse. Once a year on the anniversary of his father’s spooking, Mawz would roll another stone over the hole to force the bones down lower. Threesie hoped to win him over at last; she helped him pick jack-in-the-pulpits to lay upon the rocks to rot, and following his lead, she dug down deep in the pit of her feelings for him and ushered onto the spot her spit to join his. In thirty years of silent service, she hoped Mawz would finally say to her the words she longed to hear from him, but he never did say boo. Instead she only heard him utter one sentiment ever, and he’d say it every year, over and over, to the bones beneath the stones: if only it wasn’t true … if only it wasn’t True … if only it wasn’t: True. Threesie didn’t need a prospector’s map to understand the lode buried in that claim. She had horse sense enough to accept when she’d been pussed. Mawz was forever on the threshold of True’s front porch with jack-in-the-pulpits in a mound to take her in his arms to a dance. He was never more than a stone’s throw from that night all those summers ago. And no one had been more careful in all the years since to keep True away from the man who broke her heart than this man who broke her heart. Such a hard rock was his fidelity to True that it finally beat Threesie’s heart into something approaching human. And so to Mawz she gave a sign, not in words, not with spit, nor with claws drawn or manure piled high, that the girl his grief was tied to was still as tied to him.
It was a snake a bear a snapping limb a funnel cloud a gunshot that lay to rest the spook that haunted Mawz Engersol. Buzzards had come early to snack on him in the small hours of his annual pilgrimage thirty years to the day, and Threesie didn’t feel right leaving her armfuls of jack-in-the-pulpits on top of him where the birds would only scarp away the blooms to peck at his guts. She carried the mound down the ridge and across two fields and laid them on True’s front porch as gently as she might a baby, she rummaged a scrap of brown paper from the burn can in the yard and with soot on her finger wrote the letters M and E and tucked the note under the neck of a pink bloom.
By that evening, fatigue would wear down True’s gall to a nub and air the raw wound at the root of all those rotten blooms. In the morning had she known it was Threesie she would have marched across two fields and given her friend a piece of her mind and a slap. But by nightfall, her tongue had lost its urges and her palm was too busy as an eye sop to swing itself. It was days and days before Luddy Upland found the desiccated bits on the rocks on the mound on the ridge, and he told Kennesaw to tell Carnival to tell Jubilee to tell Threesie to tell True.
What he kept to himself was a slender bit of business that only a ghoul would find comforting. There was a hand there; it had fallen between two rocks, out of reach of pecking beaks, where maggots weren’t turning it white it was going black. Luddy poked it from its crib and saw a clot in its craw, a flash of color that wasn’t blood. The stiff blackened fingers held something soft in a grip that wouldn’t let go. It was a pink velvet ribbon. Luddy thought of prying it loose, thought of burying it, thought of leaving it alone. In the end, he let nature make the decision. He’d found the hand there with the ribbon in it, so maybe that was the way it was meant to be. Mawz Engersol spent his life just out of reach of that ribbon, stopping himself from grabbing it, and once he’d had it, he’d had it. Luddy figured Mawz would have left an entirely different impression on folks if only it wasn’t true.
15. Rutherford, Rufus, Roo, and Ruff
The sun was hot in its slate blue sky and in no hurry to get itself anywhere. Rufus Drell was the one who said to his father and his son as they neared the lone oak and its wide brim of leaves: let’s stop here before we go on. Rutherford Drell was a man who remembered hot days, always had a hotter one to compare the present one to, never missed a chance to assure that comparing, but even he’d have been hard pressed to recall a day hotter; maybe not. He’d walked this field many a hot day, cold too, and was around as a boy when this field was teeming with trees. Oaks mostly. His old skin wore every hot day since then. His bald head and thick neck, summer and winter, were permanently aglow as a roasting chestnut. Rufus had sense enough to wear hats, but he wasn’t one to wear sleeves, so he had arms the color of his Pop’s top and a neck like a bathtub ring. And then there was his boy, Roo, thick in the head and thicker in the calf. Wore a hat, wore a neck rag even, had arms that cottoned to a sleeve, but couldn’t fit a full trouser down his legs for all the denim in dandyville. Had to cut half the slack to above the knee, shorts high, for only a thigh’s width could make it over the boy’s shin hocks. And those hocks like his Pop’s arms and neck and his Pop-Up’s top were colored you-guessed-it. Roo’s dog, Ruff, fit right in with those three—wheat stalk limbs and a trunk the color of bark, which, incidentally, he couldn’t. If you put the pieces of all four together, they made up one dark man from deepest elsewhere.
Where they were headed is like asking a nomad for directions. They were a family who had it in their blood to walk and walk, in circles mostly. Wanderlust is usually a fine trait in a farmer. Yoke him to a plow and set him bent on adventure and acres will line up for the kind of back and forth he’s crack at. Drells had the back and forth down, had the roundabout, were cartographic when it came to the hither and home, but yoke them to an actual purpose and they could not track. Rutherford Drell was the last of the three to physically have a yoke strap bound round him and a cut blade between him and a steaming team, but that was so long ago the sun was a teenager. He’d taken it up the one time, day after his Pop’s box was dropped, and before the sun dropped he dropped that plow and never did a drop of work from whence on. He’d have a life pinned on aimless, and he’d pass it on to his son who’d pass it on to his son whose dog didn’t need the lesson, he was born fetch-less.
As the sun came of age, Drell farm was left to become unfecund. Tangle berries and broom straw grew wild where corn should have stalked like pickets. Violet-vine had full run of the underbrush and took a stranglehold of anything that needed air. What was wheat back whence the winds suffused with sucker willows, and all manner of thistle and needle and prickler, until every bit of well-tended earth was taken captive by vagabond greenery as aimless in its back and forth, in its roundabout, in its hither and home as the creepers, who let it all live.
Not a day faced the Drells when they didn’t turn their backs on the farm. A phalarope sputtering to them from a marshy bog was all the birdcall they needed to commence a day’s hunt for nothing. Rutherford hatless, Rufus sleeveless, Roo half pantless and Ruff hardly dog, they’d wander yonder and beyond with no more reason than that first curious cave dweller from deepest elsewhere had the first time he set off furry to the bone searching for the shriek he heard in the dark. The sound maker wasn’t dweller’s goal any more than it was the Drells’. It was mere flint for wanderlust to strike against—as good a directive as any to get a man going to wherever it is he currently isn’t.
And wherever they weren’t is where the Drells went daily. In ambling forays through fields and wood, one day a valley, a dell the next. They’d walk a day west of where they trod a day before because the slightest shift in longitude gave them an altogether different take on their surroundings. Trek after trek aft
er so many years they’d circumnavigated every square acre of New Eden and New Eden only, not a step beyond for beyond be dragons. And once they’d covered all the ground, they’d set off to cover it again. They were aware of a world beyond the invisible border to the who-even-remembers-how-many square miles of the only world they wanted to know, but why did they need to explore any world beyond theirs when not a solitary square acre of theirs ever stayed exactly the same year after year, so never twice was a scene seen the same way. Season after season after so many years the landscape itself gave space to the inevitabilities of life’s deciduous cycle—birth and its opposite—happening over and over, sprout retiring to husk, husk making the bed for sprout. Cousins and cousins of cousins altered, too, the townscape in incremental ways as they clear-cut and cultivated and carved their acreage to suit the needs of their day. Change—by nature or by hand—was forever turning the familiar into someplace the Drells weren’t on a daily basis, and as long as that unknown called to them, they’d come to it. It was all they needed.
They’d accident upon discoveries. There’d be bones to find, ancient ones, unearthed by a fresh rivulet—pelvis, femur, jaw with tooth. Fresh bones also, of a diurnal wanderer from only a night or so ago, meat still on the rib, eye open. They’d pause and wonder for what refreshment did these carcasses pause in their sallies that made them vulnerable to an instantaneous end? What ordinary impulse were they following? Were they taking in? Were they leaking out? Did they hear the hiss? See the flash? Gather in a split second’s recognition that after this, that’s that? Roo would nudge the finds with his boot toe, separate an eye from a dry socket, unburden a scapula, but the collective curiosity would end there. Not even Ruff had much interest in sniffing out further details; smell was not one of his four senses. Together, they’d put an end to any wasted intrigue because after this find would be another, and another, and one more after the next after that and there are only so many answers one can hold in one’s head. All four would snort their version of well, I’ll be while they’d already be on their way to wherever it was that they’d next find whatever it was they wouldn’t be interested in. Absolutes were not where they were headed.
Wandering is as much rootedness as aimlessness is ambition. Had the screech in the night not drawn dweller out of his dark cave, nor hunger, nor a tingle in his loins that pointed the way to something he couldn’t quite put his opposable thumb on, he’d have grown restless on his haunches no matter what and been out of that rock hole just because out was not in. It’s the need for a single moment to shift in shape if only slightly from now to then, here to there, this to that—the unknowable that—the gloriously unknowable that—that compels the every twitch, blink, sniff, step, and reach. There is a world so foreign to here it may as well have started from its own celestial scratch back when that was a concept this hadn’t even considered. Following such a course, a single footfall, a breath, a turn of one’s head, the feel of invisible wet or sharp on the underside of what your eye can see is all the motion necessary to satisfy the most basic want of then to be a different experience than now.
Different, yet not entirely unrecognizable. There is comfort in discovering what we already know by heart. The Drells were upright walking proof that the same ground covered trek after trek can be as stimulating to the trekker the thousandth time as it was the tenth, if only infinitesimally altered the tenth time from how it was the first. Dweller went in search of the screech and found rock, tree, water, dune, mountain, desert, tuber, berg, and beast. He felt rain on his hairy head and snow on his hairy feet. The sun seared the pink tip of his hairy spear and drought parched dry as hair his inarticulate throat. He found all these things as he followed the screech from the night, and with every new screech he followed, he’d find the new in the familiar, a new rock, tree, water, dune, mountain, desert, tuber, berg ,and beast. Different though every new thing may have been in proportion, in contour or color from the version he already discovered, it was a relief to dweller that the rock over there, while sparkly with mica and not at all hairlessly smooth like the rock over here, was nonetheless rock, different but the same. It was like New Eden: a Drell may have been a Drell over here but it was a Lope over there, and the Drell beyond that Lope was a Minton, different but the same.
The only real difference between dweller and Drells was that dweller had no plat map or marker stakes to let him know the defining limits of his world. It was accidental that he sparked fire with two rocks and bog rot, but with no notion of home he was as mindlessly aimless as the flames he inadvertently created. He heard the screech in the distance, he emerged his dank and hairy self from the cave into the prehistoric morning, and off he went into sulfurous air that no one else before him had ever breathed. He walked and he walked across sands and over mountains, tasted the ice-fresh waters that flowed earth’s blood to its many parts, cut his hairy soles on savanna reeds and volcano rock, witnessed a boulder roll from its perch and crush to pulp the skull of a beast below and the next beast he met he brought down his own rock upon to mimic the crush. He walked and he walked across lands of brilliant greens and snows so white and obliterating that his furry self became nothing but a single hair lost in the unfathomable sameness. He ate, he defecated, often at the same time, he found an outlet for his loin tingle and she tagged along. He found an additional outlet for his loin tingle and he too tagged along, and soon both outlets began to weary him with their unfathomable sameness. One day his inarticulateness raised a war cry, first with the mates, later with all they met, he chipped out a bowl, he dipped a finger in his own excretion and drew an arrow on the side of a cliff, he scraped a pelt and draped himself in it, with a honed stone he punctuated all his aimless discoveries with a question mark etched in a fossil and never gave a thought that all of this could end.
Every day that he trekked, he crossed paths with more and more dwellers just like himself. Loin tingle will do that: fill up the world with more of the same. Aimlessness became a worry to him. He was a dweller among many dwellers now in one large expanse. One dweller among so many he could no longer smell his own smell. He began to miss the solitariness of the lone cave, the safety of contained flames, the quiet refuge from the screech in the night. He devised a subdivision and defined within the large expanse a smaller expanse all his own. And when that grew too crowded for his likes he mounded a bouldered berm around an expanse even smaller. And then a perimeter around lands less ample than that. And when he felt himself too much the same as all the other dwellers, he then parceled for himself a tract within a tract within a tract. And there he built his rock walls, and his white pickets, and marked for his own all the world he’d ever want, New Eden. Such comfort he took from this side-by-side solitude. His plat, his little place, with neighbors all around but not within. He hoped white pickets were enough to keep the next door black-eyes at bay, the clanging empty jack jugs, the dark deeds at the back of the corn crib. But white pickets are only good for keeping chickens out of the corn. Out in the wide, wandering open, vastness gave definition to the expanse between here and way over there, and it insulated Rutherford Drell and his brood from the black-eyes and clanging empty jack jugs and dark deeds that made miseries for their fellow townsfolk, their town of cousins. As long as no other humans and the human frailties that beset them happened upon these three men and their dog, these three men and their dog could go rest their sun-splotched bodies beneath the yawing expanse of the lone oak and believe in their unhurried hearts that they could rest like this, untroubled and unmolested by fellow humans, forever. But heaven had other plans.
16. Kennesaw
Intervals of rest—on a rock, on a stump, and farther on, past where the woods thin and end and give way to a brief clearing of broom straw, against the moss-bound trunk end of a broken lone tree that hasn’t seen green for years. It’s all that’s left of the tree that felled the Drells. So the story goes, that tree outlived the forest it was seeded from until the afternoon so many years ago when heat lightning ended it
s sesquicentenniary life. So the story goes, a hiss across the sun aimed for a moving target and missed, and brought down this tree with the biggest boot of all. Every limb cracked off as it flattened to the ground, and so the story goes, flattening to a splatter beneath it the four generations of Drells. Four Drells felled in the middle of nowhere on a high summer day by a string of lightning hitting the only tree standing that they were napping under for shade, or so the story goes. Flummox Belvedere swore on the Good Book he saw it happen, but no one saw him see it, so no one knows for certain. Leave it to a hunch—that’s history. What is known is that so shaken was he by the randomness of the hand that hissed the sky, a punishment that seemed to follow no crime, that Flummox from that day on was never seen without his neck craned to heaven, always on the lookout for the next spontaneous act of judgment. The broken limbs from the tree that felled the Drells dried out first. Within the year, Flummox hung himself out to dry, too. Kennesaw’s old man came to know what happens when you take off a belt and fasten it around your neck and nail it to a beam in the barn and kick out from under you the only thing that keeps you from knowing what will happen. It was Kennesaw who found him; and he kept that belt, that strip of an unjust god that showed some mercy at last, kept it so he’d always remember.
The hole that Flummox’s box was dropped into was as close to hell as a hole could be dug. Hunko dragged a sledge out to the tree that did the felling and gathered all the limbs he could carry to begin building Kennesaw’s heavenly gates.