by Jack Ketchum
“Call up the evening news? Get somebody in from the University? I suppose you could. If it was me, I’d just leave well enough alone. See what happens. Long as they don’t burn the woods down, what’s the difference?”
Hans thought on that. Maybe there was a difference and then again maybe there wasn’t. Leave that for awhile too, he thought.
“Okay, then explain to us how come we got snakes not eating mice, we got cats not eating birds, we got cats, lynxes for godsakes and wolves not tearing the living shit out of each other. Explain that.”
She smiled again. “Peaceable Kingdom,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Old testament passage, a kind of prophecy, it might be Isaiah. A lot of nineteenth-century naif painters favored the subject. Edward Hicks, Henri Rousseau. There’s this bucolic scene, a lion sniffing at the muzzle of an ox, a wolf lying down with a lamb, leopards lying next to a goat, that sort of thing. I only remember one line from it. ‘And a child shall lead them.’ There were usually some kids in the paintings too. Peaceable Kingdom. Interesting.”
Hans wondered what naif was and what bucolic meant. It sounded to Hans like a disease.
He wished he could taste his Heineken.
That was yesterday. Nighttime fell and they’d gone up the mountain, little after midnight, and instead of half a dozen trucks parked where the road left off and the trail began there were cars and trucks all over the place and he and Homer Devins had to walk about a quarter of a mile from where they left the Dodge.
This time some of them, the original crowd from the Bar None Grill and a handful of others, were armed with shotguns, rifles. Despite their embarrassment and efforts to conceal what they’d done word had got around about their headlong flight down the mountain. Even Hans had his over-and-under.
His neighbors and friends were already standing two-deep in the shadows along the perimeter by the time they arrived. Women and children too this time. He and Homer moved in close beside Gert and Dot Hardcuff and Jack Musiel where they could see. The hush was the same as the night before. The inexplicable made flesh. Nobody could believe their eyes.
There were a lot more animals this time. A big wild black-and-white dog. Another wolf, smaller, a female, maybe the mate of the first one. Two more cardinals and a half dozen sparrows. A pair of bullfrogs. A bluejay. An owl and a rooster. A pair of water moccasins from down by the river. A hawk.
And they weren’t just basking by the fire either. They were moving in a slow irregular circle in either direction around it. Frisco Hans watched the lynx brush shoulders with the she-wolf and a mouse crawl right on up over the back of a water moccasin sliding in the opposite direction. The moccasin didn’t even turn its head, didn’t blink an eye.
“What in the Lord’s name are they doing ?” whispered Dot. Hans noticed that her husband wasn’t there. But then again neither was Fogarty. He wondered if they’d up and shot one another. By now half the town knew it was Dot and Ray Fogarty who’d barrelled down the mountain last night, bursting in with the news to the Bar None Grill.
“They’re moving,” said Gert, as if to say, how in the hell do you expect me know what they’re doing, you damn fool? which with a few more beers in her she might have. You could almost hear the click in Gert’s head sometimes when she’d been drinking and then she wasn’t so polite anymore.
It didn’t matter much what they were doing though because whatever it was, they stopped. It was as though some prearranged signal had passed between them. They stopped on a goddamn dime and they did it all at once.
And that was truly scary. You could hear safeties click and bolts thrown on rifles all along the periphery. Everybody thinking, you gotta bet they know we’re out here. Everybody nervous as a virgin in a whorehouse, wondering if the animals wouldn’t turn and move against them. Even tame animals reverted. These were wild.
But what they did was, they sat down.
Just like the night before. As though the people in the shadows didn’t matter one damn bit. As though they weren’t even there. They just curled up in front of the fire. A wing fluttered. The she-wolf sighed. You could hear the soft raspy coil of a blacksnake.
And it was strange then, Hans thought, even he was aware of it, as the fear passed off them there was something maybe about the way these creatures who were supposed to be frightened of men with guns were ignoring them instead, or maybe it was just them all being out here in the first place, to what end nobody could say, scaring them, scaring humans, but a feeling passed through the crowd that felt like a kind of collective shame or guilt or something, as though the animals had made them smaller somehow, humbled, a damn sight less significant. You were aware of a dull resentment of that. It moved across the crowd like a pale moon rising.
And there was a moment when he knew, just knew it was going to get ugly. In all his experience with people of every nation on the face of the earth there was a link between pride and humiliation and an aftermath of bloody violence. He’d seen it in Singapore bars and Polish whorehouses, on docks and freighters, over and over, everywhere. You could almost feel the bodies tensing, fingers tightening on triggers.
“Guess the show’s over for the night,” said Gert—loud, so everybody could hear. “You can’t help but wonder what in the world they got for us tomorrow, though.”
People laughed here and there. The tension eased.
In front of them by the fire not an animal stirred.
They got their own business, Hans thought, not even sure what he meant by that but pretty certain it was true.
Then one by one they filed down the mountian.
And now they watched for the third night.
Gert wasn’t with them. What with standing out in the cold last night her authritis had kicked into overdrive. She’d called Natty Horner and said she could barely walk. He felt bad for her but worse for the rest of them.
Because the mood was getting ugly again.
This time it was the sheer size of the damn thing that had them spooked.
To Frisco Hans it looked like the entire forest was there.
Squirrels, chipmunks, birds, ’coons, moose, bears, weasels—there were even plenty of farm animals this time. Pigs, chickens. He recognized Tom Mullins’ old black goat Henrietta from the tufted white spur on her forehead. The flames were taller too, the circle of stones which enclosed them widenened out to maybe six feet across. The entire snowy clearing was brightly lit and shimmering. Only the trees fell gradually into darkness.
The trees and them, standing there.
It was as though they were hiding in the trees. As only nights before the animals might have done. There was that same sense of reversal again. Now they were doing it. Humans, hiding.
While the animals, packed four and five deep and lying close together, stared deep into the shifting flames.
And what bothered Hans was this. What’s gonna happen if they got up on their feet again like they did last night and began to move, fifty, maybe sixty of them this time, enough, spread out, to fill the whole damn clearing, and practically everybody armed this time except the women and children—too damn many children to Hans’ way of thinking—and no Gert around to crack wise and ease the tension?
“I don’t like this,” he said. “I think we should just get out of here. Gert was right. Leave ’em be.”
Homer Devins looked up at him. “You know better’n that, Hans. Hell, you can’t just leave ’em be. This is . . .” He struggled with the idea. “This is just . . . plain unnatural.”
How do we know? he thought. Who in the hell knows what’s natural in a world up to its butt with poisoned lakes and streams, with poisoned air for chrissake, with normal-looking guys not a whole lot different from Homer here walking into a K-Mart and shooting up the customers with some fancy thousand-dollar automatic weapon, guys who like to kidnap and murder little children, a world where you get a doll for Christmas and it eats your hair, a world so crazy and nonsensical that you can jump off a goddamn lifeboat
and lose your sense of taste forever? Who says what’s natural and what’s not?
He was thinking this when they began to rise, spread out across the clearing, and dance.
It was not, God knows, like any dance he’d ever seen but he still saw it for what it was, a dance, pure and simple, at the center of it the original seven—two mice, two snakes, the cardinal, lynx and wolf—the mice on hind legs skittering around the fire, the snakes risen high and skating across the hard packed snow, the cardinal’s wings spread wide, his beak pointed to the winter stars the same as the muzzle of the wolf was and the black flat nose of the lynx, both of them up on their hind feet too with their front paws spread wide and heads thrown back in abandon—and similar scenes all around them, as though the forest had suddenly come alive with a music only they could hear and which was denied those standing black and shadowy amid the trees.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Homer whispered.
It was as though they were watching some dark unholy magic unfold and it stunned and frightened. You could feel waves of fear sweep the crowd. They took an instinctive, collective step or two back into the brittle tangle of trees. Women gasped. An infant cried. He could hear a shotgun pump a cartridge, triggers cocked all around.
A bloodbath, Hans thought. It’s going to be a goddamn bloodbath.
Because we’re scared. Nothing more than that.
Damned if it’d be the first time but it was wrong—wrong and incredibly stupid. He got it now, what Gert was saying. Maybe everything was changing. What was scaring hell out of all the rest of them was filling him with wonder.
They’re like us, he thought. Like what we must have been thousands and thousands of years ago. We must have crawled out of caves on nights like this and done just the same.
He was witnessing the dawn of a whole new time, a whole new nature.
He saw Ray Fogarty a few feet away raise his double-barrel shotgun and aim and thought, no no, please but others were rising in the darkness, other weapons glinting in the firelight, while the dancers in the clearing whirled around the flames in some bright joyous rapture of celebration that was impervious to danger, oblivious to harm, and Frisco Hans stood frozen in a fundamental horror at what his species was capable of doing here tonight so sudden and sad and profound that it would not even permit him to shout out a warning, yet another sense gone and him left wondering if it would ever return and if he’d give a damn when it did.
Which was exactly when little Patty Schilling broke free of her mother’s arms, ran to the fire and joined them.
You couldn’t very well shoot a little girl—not even one who had the habit of stealing crullers from Manger’s Bakery when Tillie Manger wasn’t looking. And pretty soon some other kids broke away and joined in too and you had kids out there dancing with mice and squirrels and whatnot and then some of the women. He saw Dot Hardcuff dancing around with a big brown bear and not even her husband or Ray Fogarty was going to argue with that choice of partners.
Hans stood his over-and-under against a tree and turned to Homer Devins.
“Hey, Homer,” he said. “I just got a helluva notion. I bet you never seen the hornpipe.”
Afterword
People will often ask a writer, where do your ideas come from? The answer for me is just about anywhere. Everything from a nosebleed to a love affair to a TV ad can trip the wire to a story. But some come unbidden from deep memory. And memory like writing can be an odd and mysterious thing.
It’s well over a year since I wrote the introduction to this book and over five years since I wrote the final story but I just a few nights ago had a kind of well . . . what the hell, call it an epiphany.
I was watching a good, highly annoying documentary on PBS about Elvis’ gospel music—good because the documentary was good, annoying because it was one of those godawful pledge weeks where every twenty minutes they interrupt for ten minutes and the damn thing just goes on and on. I’d give them a hundred right now not to have pledge weeks.
Anyway. The film spent a good deal of time on the first gospel EP, relased in 1957. I’d been a boy of only eleven when I first heard it and one song in particular has remained one of my favorites ever since. For my money it’s as good as “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” or “Money Honey” and a billion times better than, say, “Hound Dog.”
But you know how it is sometimes that when you know the lyrics to a song as well as you know your mother’s maiden name you somehow stop actually hearing them for awhile? Well, listening to this one again on this fine and tedious special I did hear them for a change and thought, my God, that’s where it all came from.
The song was Thomas A. Dorsey’s haunting, bluesy “Peace in the Valley,” written in Georgia in 1936. The lyrics go like this . . .
Well the bear will be gentle
And the wolves will be tame
And the lion shall lay down by the lamb
And the beasts from the wild
Shall be led by a child
And I’ll be changed
Changed from this creature that I am
By now you’ve presumably read “Firedance.” Sound familiar?
When I was working the story it certainly wasn’t the song I was thinking of—it was that Alan M. Clark’s painting, on which I was basing it, reminded me so much thematically of a darker version of the nineteenth-century naifs’ “Peaceable Kingdoms” I’d first seen easily twenty-five years before. Because I’d enjoyed them so much at the time I’d searched out the passage in Isaiah. And then enjoyed the passage so much because it had clearly inspired “Peace in the Valley,” something I’d never known before.
Then I proceeded to forget all about it.
But I have to think now that going back in time through the twists and turns of mind, the title of the book you are holding derives from a story written about a painting, then a school of paintings viewed many years before, inspired by a passage in the Bible and finally to a blues and gospel lyric which captured the imagination of an eleven-year-old surburban kid who loved his Elvis early on.
So here’s the epiphany.
Do the math.
I’m fifty-six.
And I think that I’ve been waiting for, gradually coming to and then writing down the title of, this book for forty-five years. If that’s true, could be that child is still in here somewhere, leading on the beasts in me.
—Jack Ketchum, 2003
Copyrights for individual stories:
“Introduction” © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
“The Rifle” © 1996 by Dallas Mayr
“The Box” © 1994 by Dallas Mayr
“Mail Order” © 1994 by Dallas Mayr
“Luck” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“The Haunt” © 2001 by Dallas Mayr
“Megan’s Law” © 1999 by Dallas Mayr
“If Memory Serves” © 1996 by Dallas Mayr
“Father and Son” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“Mother and Daughter” © 2001 by Dallas Mayr
“The Business” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“When the Penny Drops” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“Rabid Squirrels in Love” © 1997 by Dallas Mayr
“Sundays” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“Twins” © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
“Amid the Walking Wounded” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre” © 1998
by Dallas Mayr
“The Holding Cell” © 1993 by Dallas Mayr
“The Work” © 1997 by Dallas Mayr
“The Best” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“Redemption” © 1996 by Dallas Mayr
“The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard” © 1998 by Dallas
Mayr
“Chain Letter” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“Forever” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“Gone” © 2000 by Dallas Mayr
“Closing Time” © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
“The Rose” © 1994 by Dallas Mayr
“The Turn
ing” © 1995 by Dallas Mayr
“To Suit the Crime” © 1992 by Dallas Mayr
“Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis is Still Dead” © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
“The Visitor” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“Snakes” © 1995 by Dallas Mayr
“Firedance” © 1998 by Dallas Mayr
“Afterword” © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
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Table of Contents
page 416
Introduction
The Rifle
The Box
Mail Order
Luck
The Haunt
Megan’s Law
If Memory Serves
Father and Son
The Business
Mother and Daughter
When the Penny Drops
Rabid Squirrels in Love
Sundays
Twins
Amid the Walking Wounded
The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre
The Holding Cell
The Work
The Best
Redemption
The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard
Chain Letter
Forever
Gone
Closing Time
The Rose
The Turning
To Suit the Crime
Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead
The Visitor
Snakes
Firedance
Afterword