People of the Dark

by Wright, T. M.

  The farmhouse Erika and I bought had been on the market for nearly two years, so we got it cheap. It's old but solid, and was completely renovated ten years ago. It has a new black tile roof, new aluminum siding (a light aquamarine that blends well with the evergreens, maples, and walnut trees around the house), and someone had once even made an attempt at landscaping, though what remained of that attempt when we got here was only a line of uncared-for privet hedges alongside the driveway and a wide circle of bricks just to the south of the house, with a fieldstone walkway leading from it.

  The house sits three hundred feet back from the road, at the crest of a small hill. Our "mountain"—all one hundred and fifty acres of it—looms behind the house. This is the Finger Lakes Region of New York, fifty miles or so from the Pennsylvania line, so what we call a mountain is actually no more than a steep hill littered with dead trees and eroding fast. The real estate agent told us, "The land is useless, of course," and we told him that that was okay, that we'd have privacy, at least.

  There are two other dwellings on our one hundred and fifty acres. One is just a stone foundation with some uprights remaining from the original frame. The other is a sad, three-room log cabin whose walls tilt and tar-paper roof sags precariously. It sits in a small clearing a thousand feet north of the house, also at the base of our mountain, so it's level with the house. It's just far enough from the house that hunters can sit in it unnoticed and wait for deer or opossums or raccoons to wander by. Erika and I discussed getting a permit to burn the place down, but it was an idea that never got beyond the talking stages.

  Erika and I are good together. We get a kick out of pretty much the same things; our sex life is usually exciting ("Our bodies fit together nicely," we say), and for six years we've been very happy. We have had our ups and downs, of course. Everyone does.

  She's left me several times. Not for other men. Other relationships never seemed to be a problem for us (she looks at other men, of course, and I at other women, and we often like what we see, but it's never threatened to go further than that for me, and I think for her, too). She's left me because of her ideas. She left me once, for instance, to go live with a cult that had cut off contact with society, much as the Shakers did, in Pennsylvania, but the group that Erika got involved with did it much more completely, with a great deal more gusto and cynicism. And that, I believe, is what finally drove her from them—that constant loud aura of superiority, the idea that because they were apart from society and were living according to their own rules and their own ideas, they were, of course, somehow above society.

  She was gone for two months, and although I knew where she was—she'd left me a letter—I realized it was something she'd have to work out for herself. And when she got back and we were talking about the whole thing, she told me, "We all come from the same mother, don't we, Jack? No one can deny that. They certainly can't deny that." I agreed, though the remark mystified me, then. It doesn't, now.

  And another time she left, for not quite as long, for a religious group that had developed what they called "A Live-in College for the Spiritually Enlightened" in the Berkshires, in New Hampshire. It wasn't a typical college, of course. It was a very large and pitifully ramshackle farmhouse that the group—which totaled about sixty men and women, ranging from sixteen to eighty years of age—had covered with a coat of light lavender paint. A large, rectangular sign over the front doors read, in lavender on a white background, GOD LOVES YOU—PASS IT ON. Below that, in simple black block letters, COLLEGE FOR THE SPIRITUALLY ENLIGHTENED. When Erika came back after that encounter, she was confused.

  "Who has to go anywhere, Jack? I don't understand that. No one has to go anywhere."

  "They're going somewhere, Erika?" I asked.

  "Sure. They say they're going to heaven. They say they're going to be with God. And I don't understand. No one has to go anywhere for that."

  She is short—about five feet five, dark, curvaceous, and very smart. She used to say now and then, "You still think you're smarter than I am, don't you?" And I used to shake my head glumly and admit that I wasn't. She never believed me; she always thought I was humoring her.

  She was the one who made the decision to buy the farmhouse. A week after seeing the house, we were watching reruns of The Good Neighbors on TV, and she said, without looking at me, "I want to buy that house, Jack."

  "Which one?" I asked. We'd looked at six or seven houses in the past couple of weeks.

  "That big farmhouse," she answered. "The one with the privet hedge."

  "Oh," I said. "Why?"

  "Because I think it's charming," she answered, and she glanced quickly at me, smiled, added, "And I think we can be happy there."

  "Aren't we happy here?" Here was a townhouse apartment just south of Syracuse, New York.

  "Happier, there," she said.

  We moved in a month and a half later. Jim Sandy came over with his backhoe to dig a trench and lay ceramic tile and PVC pipe two weeks after that.

  Erika was in the city that day, working. She owned a small record shop that kept her away from home quite a lot because she was devoted to it and felt that with enough devotion it might make a good deal of money someday.

  I watched as Jim Sandy towed his backhoe up the long, steep driveway, started it, unloaded it. I expected that he'd come and announce himself, but he didn't. He chugged around to the side of the house, the treads of the backhoe chewing up the lawn and spitting out huge divots. Then, with a great thud, the shovel sank into the earth and he started to work. From a kitchen window, I watched him for a few minutes. He looked at me once; I smiled and waved at him. He nodded stiffly from the cab of the backhoe. It made me feel instantly that, even from behind the window, I was somehow in his way, so I busied myself with some unpacking and listened to the grinding chugga-chugga of the backhoe.

  That chugga-chugga stopped a half hour or so after it started. I waited for it to start again, and when, after a few minutes, it didn't, I went to the kitchen window and looked out. The backhoe was a good fifty feet from where it had been a half hour earlier, and its shovel was stuck into the earth. I didn't see Jim Sandy and decided that he'd probably had to relieve himself and felt more comfortable behind a tree or the garage.

  I pressed my face into the kitchen window. I looked right and left, but I didn't see him. And when I turned from the window, thinking that whatever he was doing was his business, anyway, I saw him at the screen door, his hand raised, fist clenched, ready to knock. He knocked once on the screen door, opened it, knocked again on the inside door, saw me through its window, opened the door, and came in.

  "Hi," I said. "What's up?"

  He nodded, again stiffly, to indicate the area he'd been working in. "I dug up somethin' out there," he said.

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Yeah. I dug up an arm. I dug up someone's arm."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Erika screwed her face up and said, "That's disgusting, Jack. Did you look at it?"

  "Sure I did," I told her. "Why not?"

  "What did it look like?" she asked. "Was it a skeleton? Was it just bones?"

  "Mostly," I said. "There was some skin attached to it. It looked like a rolled-up grocery bag, Erika. There was nothing upsetting about it."

  "And was there anything else?" Now, her look of disgust was mixed with curiosity.

  "Anything else?"

  "Sure. You find an arm and you'll probably find other things."

  "Nothing yet, Erika."

  She rolled her eyes. "That's comforting."

  "This bothers you, doesn't it?" I said.

  "Huh?" she said, clearly incredulous.

  "I asked if this bothered you." I paused very briefly. "I guess it probably does."

  She reached up and patted the top of my head. "Yes, Jack," she said. "It bothers me."

  I felt very foolish.

  She had an accident once that scared the hell out of me. She was cleaning the cellar floor of our townhouse in Syracuse. It was particularly
dirty because we'd been gone for a week and a half, and our cats' litter box had grown too filthy for them, so they'd started using the floor. The smell was awful.

  I was upstairs, making dinner, when the accident happened. She'd been moving some aluminum screens and windows that had been leaning against the wall—the cats had utilized the area behind these screens and windows—when one of the windows shattered. A shard of glass put a nasty gash in her arm, just above the wrist, and when I got down there, after hearing her scream, I found her holding the arm tightly, eyes wide, mouth open. I realized she was going into shock.

  The gash was bleeding badly; my first thought was that an artery had been severed, so I led her to the cellar steps, sat her down, ran upstairs and grabbed a dishtowel, ran back, and made a tourniquet.

  "I'm taking you to the emergency room, Erika."

  She shook her head.

  "Erika, this is a very bad wound; you might have severed an artery."

  She shook her head again. "No," she whispered.

  "You're being stubborn."

  "I'm not," she managed. "The bleeding will stop, Jack." She sounded very sure of herself. "It's not bad."

  I believed her. I told myself that I was being foolish. "Yeah, and where'd you get your medical degree?"

  And she said, with that same stiff self-confidence, "I know my body, Jack."

  I sat beside her. I saw that much of the towel, which was white, had turned a deep shade of red. "What were you doing, Erika?" I asked, merely for something to say.

  "I was moving one of those windows, Jack. The cats crapped behind it."

  "This is foolish," I began, and she interrupted, "I know my body, Jack."

  I was nervous, of course; I nearly said something suggestive, something to lighten the tension between us. Instead I asked, "Am I being overly protective?"

  "Yes. But it's okay. The bleeding has stopped."

  I shook my head. She took the towel off her arm. The bleeding had indeed stopped. I shook my head again. "Keep it wrapped up, Erika, please—"

  "No," she said. "It's okay."

  And it was. A narrow, almost invisible scar is all that remains.

  Several days after Jim Sandy's discovery I told her, "Jim Sandy said that other . . . body parts have been found in the area."

  We were in bed. I felt her stiffen up beside me; she said nothing for a few moments. Then: "On our property, you mean?"

  "I think so. I'd have to check."

  "Check what?"

  "The survey map. I'd have to pace the boundary out, I think. What does it matter?"

  "It matters," she said, her tone very earnest. "I don't care if they find 'body parts' somewhere else, Jack. It's no concern of mine. But when they start finding them on my property—" She paused. When she continued, her tone was softer. "It's spooky, Jack."

  "It gives the place atmosphere," I said.

  She said nothing.

  "Don't you think it gives the place atmosphere, Erika?"

  "No," she whispered.

  "Do you think we should move?"

  "Not yet," she said.

  "When, then?"

  "When they start finding heads and torsos and thighs and eyeballs and . . ." She paused. "Then we move!"

  "It's a deal," I said.

  But we never moved from the house. In retrospect, maybe we should have. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, after all, but the effort might have given me some brief comfort.

  I'm a commercial artist. In college I studied fine arts—it's what I got my master's in, in fact—and I had grand ideas of making some kind of living as a painter. I didn't care if it was a good living, or even a poor one. I was willing to suffer. I did suffer. For ten years, I went from one lousy job to another—I laid sewer pipe; I washed dishes; I was a gardener's helper, a carpenter's helper, a plumber's assistant. And all the while I told myself, and believed it, that I was doing it "for the sake of art." I did hundreds of paintings. Landscapes, mostly, and a few dozen portraits (when friends or relatives pleaded with me to do something with my painting that would get me some money). I sold five of the landscapes in ten years (earning a total of $825.00 from them), and all of the portraits, because they were, in a sense, commissioned. And one morning, seven years ago, I sliced my face up while shaving with a razor blade that should have been replaced weeks earlier, but I literally did not have the money to replace it. I looked at myself in the mirror and whispered, "Enough! This has gone far enough!" A week later I had a position as an apprentice commercial artist with an ad agency in Elmira, New York.

  I was still working for that agency when Erika and I bought the farmhouse. The agency had moved to Syracuse, a good 125 miles from the house, but they trusted me to do much of my work at home, so it wasn't a matter of commuting that distance every day. Once or twice a week would do it.

  My work is fairly well known. I've done jobs for Coca-Cola, for Pampers, for IBM, and NIKON, and Burpee Seeds, plus several dozen others. No one knows that the work they're looking at is mine, although I've managed to slip my initials into a few ads (check the rectangular reflection of white light on the Coca-Cola ads that feature a koala bear). I've resigned myself to anonymity.

  Jim Sandy never finished his trench. He came back to the house the day after he'd begun work and told me, "Sorry, Mr. Harris, but you gotta get yourself someone else to do this work."

  "Who, for instance?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Beats me." Then he loaded up his backhoe and left. I think the cellar leaks to this day.

  Life at the farmhouse was going to be rustic, I realized. We had no trash pickup, for instance. We got a permit from the town clerk that allowed us to use a sanitary landfill three miles east of the village. This weekly job started shortly after we moved to the house. We put a half-dozen plastic bags filled with trash and garbage into my Toyota and carted the whole stinking mess to the landfill, which, we found, was down a half-dozen narrow dirt roads. It gave us a chance to scout out the area, anyway, which Erika enjoyed. There were a lot of mobile homes, most of them with makeshift the roofs—I guessed that it was a town zoning ordinance—a trailer looked less like a trailer and was indeed more stationary and therefore a more permanent part of the tax base if it had an extra roof on it. There were also several small, crudely built houses, some with tarpaper roofs and windows covered with plastic—most apparently had fallen into years of disuse. A few were inhabited. We saw several scruffy children standing around, looking bored, their equally bored-looking mothers behind them; this bothered Erika a lot. She said that children who had to be so close to the earth should learn to enjoy it. I accused her of naïveté, and the subject was dropped.

  We saw a couple of joggers, too, which I didn't expect. I had assumed that jogging was an urban pastime and that rural people did enough hard work that jogging was unnecessary. "You're a snob," Erika said, and I agreed.

  "These people do seem to put more into it, though," I said. And it was true. One of the joggers, a man apparently in his late thirties, legs and arms and chest well-muscled, head bobbing, dark hair flying this way and that, looked wonderfully involved in what he was doing.

  "Now that man's serious about it, Erika," I said. "He's not just fooling around."

  "Of course he's not fooling around," she said. He obviously knows the value of what he's got."

  "The value of what he's got?" I asked.

  She nodded. "Yes. His body. He knows how precious it is." She gave me a quick once over, reached and patted my stomach. "You could use a little self-appreciation yourself, Jack."

  I glanced at her, grinned. "Oh? I thought you liked that . . . "—I looked down briefly at the slight protrusion of my belly—"that small proof of my imperfection."

  She laughed quickly. "Jack, I love what makes you human. I wouldn't change any of it." She patted my stomach again. "Even that."

  "Thanks." I said, grinning. I glanced in the rearview mirror; the jogger had fallen. I stopped, looked back; Erika looked, too.

 
; "He'll be okay," she said, an edge to her tone that surprised me.

  I started backing up; the jogger was lying motionless face down in the road, his arms wide and his legs straight.

  "Jack." Erika said sharply, "he doesn't need your help. He'll be all right."

  I looked at her, surprised: "What are you saying, Erika?—'Don't get involved'?"

  "Oh, of course not!" She was angry, now; I had rarely seen her so quick-tempered.

  The jogger pushed his upper body off the road, then, as if he were doing pushups. I stopped the car, watched him bring his knees forward so he was on his haunches, take a long, deep breath, and stand.

  Erika said, "These people can take care of them—selves, Jack, you'll see."

  "Thanks," I said testily, "for you old-time country wisdom."

  She sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry with you." She reached, patted my belly yet again in an effort to lighten things up. "C'mon, let's go home and make love, paunch and all."

  The area around the house is starkly rural. The road in front of it is paved but badly rutted, and our nearest neighbors, when we moved in, were an old German couple named Alnor who lived in a huge and immaculate white Victorian house a good mile and a half north of our house. The Alnors ran an antique shop in their small white barn, and we soon found that they were friendly enough if we looked to be on the verge of buying something, but became stiff and cool if we just wanted to talk. We never got to know them well. When the trouble started, they didn't come to us for help; they toughed it out for a while, all by themselves (I give them credit for that). Then one day I saw that their house had a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck on it and a distinct air of abandonment about it.

  The nearest town is called Cohocton. Once a year the locals stage what they call the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival, which involves neither trees nor sitting. Local men stand for twenty-four hours at a time on small platforms at the top of fifty-foot tall wooden poles. Lots of beer and handicrafts are sold at these festivals, and everyone involved seems to realize the kind of gritty charm they hold for city people, which Erika and I were. We've attended the Great Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival only once, shortly after moving into the farmhouse. It was a sublimely simple diversion from the confusion, of moving in and getting things straightened around. The men on the poles wore broad, clownlike smiles, as if they realized the idiocy of the whole event. There was no real purpose to it. No one won anything for the longest time standing on a pole. It was merely something pointless to do, and even more pointless to watch, and everyone enjoyed the hell out of it.