Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  Thorne turns for home along a path that will take him through the heavy woods that adjoin his property. Here the forest is a tangle of beech and fir and maple trees, leavened with the occasional hackberry or black oak. He pauses where shafts of sunlight pierce the heavy foliage overhead, stands with his arms spread wide, the walking stick upraised. There is magic in this forest. He can feel it. Odd creatures are birthed here, fully formed from the first moments of their existence, luminous and fantastical beasts, scales and skin and fur still damp from their birth, gliding down from the highest branches to caper in the shadows below. For a few moments, he can see them clearly, their lavender stripes, spiraling golden horns, and six-armed bodies. They drift down, their flanks quivering in the breeze. He peers up into the trees, watches as they sail one by one like seed pods and land gently in the thick vegetation around the roots of the trees before they prance away. Their large golden eyes gaze at him from the shadows, the stick in his hand seems to rise toward them of its own accord — then the light shifts and they vanish.

  The creatures are symptoms of his dementia, surely. He cannot summon them simply by lifting his wand like a modern-day Merlin. Yet strange events are afoot. The rational man in him is giving way to something else, and in this forest all that he has learned is transformed in ways he still cannot grasp.

  Thorne raises his staff into a shaft of sunlight, feels it tremor and dance, and then he hears it, that steady, low-pitched thrum . . . thrum . . . thrum, a sound he never hears unless a storm is on its way.

  ~

  On the trail of the Sasquank

  Skeeter and Moe have to abandon the Great Sasquank Hunt for a few days because Alf, in one of his unpredictable bursts of energy and dedication to the camp, has decided to teach the boys how to paddle a canoe on the lake. Skeeter and Moe already know what to do, because every summer, Alf has one of these phases where he actually tries to do something for the kids.

  Moe loves the canoe. Alf says that he takes to it like a rat to water. It’s the best place he knows, out on the lake, slipping along, as nearly soundless as a human can be, paddle left, paddle right, his own center precisely balanced between the two. He is strong for his age, and on this lake he finds something he has never known in his life: silence. Not complete silence, because there are bird cries, shouts from the other boys, bullfrogs croaking, the slosh of water on the shore. But it feels like silence to a boy who has spent all his life listening to car alarms, noisy arguments in the apartment next door, ambulance and police and fire sirens, the howls of the mad, frightening screams in the night.

  Most of the boys don’t care for Alf, even though they adore Maeva, but Moe is on familiar ground with the man. He’s known guys like Alf all his life: sly, furtive, watchful, always working the angles, convinced that they are at least twice as smart as the law and that people who play by the rules are chumps — a trait that lands most of them in jail, sooner or later.

  The canoeing makes for a handful of flawless summer days, but with Alf, it’s only a matter of time until he reverts to form. There’s a party, people turning up in noisy cars long after midnight and departing at dawn, Alf and Maeva still sleeping it off at nine o’clock, the boys free to go hunting the beast. Skeeter and Moe have both taken to calling their quarry the Sasquank. Moe likes the name because it’s different, even though it isn’t in the books. The beast they’re trailing is unlike any other, not Bigfoot or the Yeti or even the Sasquatch, but the Sasquank.

  Poe, his day’s work on the wall done, ambles toward home. A quarter mile behind, Skeeter and Moe blunder along, heads down, following the broad footprints in the dew. They hear Poe’s song and pull up, sudden chills bringing out the goosebumps on their hairless forearms. Skeeter grabs Moe so hard he leaves a bruise on his bicep. “That ain’t no human sound. That’s the Sasquank!”

  They crouch down, using a tall growth of cattails as cover, and creep along for another quarter mile, following the song. Skeeter sees him first, Poe in silhouette two hundred yards off, framed against the paler sky in the west, a massive creature with a wild cry like nothing he’s ever heard, even in monster movies. Skeeter drops to his knees, quaking from head to toe, afraid he’ll wet himself. “Holy Mother Mary. It’s the freakin Sasquank, Moe.”

  Moe nods solemnly. “I think you’re right, Skeeter. We found the Sasquank.”

  “Yessir! I had a dream about this right here, catchin the beast. Now we got him, what we gonna do with him?”

  “Do with him? Well, I guess we’ll put a dog collar round his big old neck and lead him home, sweet as you please. Is that what you mean?”

  “No, fool. I mean, are we gonna tell somebody? Alf and Maeva, maybe?”

  “No way. Maeva is alright, but Alf — he’d sell his mother for five bucks. We don’t tell him nothin. This one time, you got to keep your rabid mouth shut tight. What we’re gonna do is, we get a camera and take us a picture. Can’t nobody argue with a picture.”

  “But we ain’t got no camera.”

  “I know that, fool. That’s why we go back to the camp and we borrow us a camera. We come out Sasquank hunting tomorrow, pick up the track again, then we get close and take our pictures.”

  “What if nobody loan us a camera?”

  “Then we steal one. I don’t go for stealin, most times, but this is special. We’ll put it back when we’re done.”

  As they watch from behind the cattails, the great beast turns and looks their way. Skeeter has to stifle a shriek.

  “Oh, man! He can smell us! He’s gonna eat us, sure. Ate by a Sasquank, that’s what it’s gonna say on our tombstones.”

  “Sasquanks don’t eat people, Skeeter. He could grab you by the ass and throw you up in that tree, but he ain’t gonna eat you.”

  “How you know Sasquanks don’t eat people?”

  “Because Sasquanks are vegetarians, that’s why. I read it in a book.”

  “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “We’re gonna run, that’s what. Pick ’em up, lay ’em down. When I count three, we are outta here. But we got to run quiet-like.”

  “How we supposed to run quiet? Don’t nobody run quiet. You gotta run, you run, that’s all.”

  “Okay, so run loud, but run hard. You ready? One. Two. Three . . . RUN!”

  ~ IV ~

  Deluge

  Live music Saturday night

  Rose sings with Matt Harrow and the Green Mountain Boys at Gillespie’s Tavern in Belle Coeur every Saturday night. It started years ago when the boys were playing bluegrass and Texas swing at the tavern; Poe was just back from the army then, and Rose happened to hear the music as she was passing by and went in for a listen. The Green Mountain Boys were pretty good amateur musicians, but not one of them could sing a lick. Rose listened to a set and when they started the next set, she asked if she could join in. Matt Harrow was used to folks thinking they could sing, and he motioned for her to come on up and croon a tune. She asked if they could play Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” in C with the shift to C-sharp on the last verse, and Matt gave her an intro. When she wrapped her powerful voice around the tune, the musicians grinned and nodded to one another, knowing they had found their singer at last. Rose ended up doing six encores that night, with the crowd begging for more. She was back the week after, and the week after that. After a few weeks, Dan Gillespie hung a new sign in the window that advertised: Live Music Saturday Nite, Rose Didelot & the Green Mountain Boys.

  The sign was still there, faded and forgotten in the flyblown window because no one in the county needed to be told that Rose Didelot sang at Gillespie’s on Saturday nights. It was the highlight of her week, and she never missed it unless she was too sick to move, which was pretty much never. She had started out making twenty-five dollars a night, and over the years, Dan had bumped her all the way up to a hundred. A hundred dollars for a night spent doing something she would have done for free.<
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  On the hottest night in August, Rose and Poe walk the four miles to Gillespie’s, Rose leading the way along the dusty road, Poe shambling along a dozen paces behind. They arrive a few minutes after seven and take a table near the fireplace. Rose waves to Dan, who fetches a bottle of Schlitz beer for her and a cream soda for Poe. Poe doesn’t dare touch alcohol because Rose says it makes him wild and he’s apt to get carried away and tear up the place. Dinner and drinks are on the house. Rose has a steak-and-kidney pie, Poe has the New York steak with extra fries and onion rings and three hamburgers on the side, and they settle down to wait for Matt Harrow, Earl Conlin, and Dave Quenneville to set up their instruments. Matt is on the dobro and mandolin, Earl is a pretty fair flatpicker, and Dave, a hardware dealer from across the border in Quebec, plays the fiddle. He’s the only one Rose has never taken to her bed because, as he explained to her one snowy night when she had invited him to keep her warm, he prefers to sleep with gentlemen.

  The Green Mountain Boys are gray-haired now. They are better musicians than they used to be, but they still can’t sing. It doesn’t matter, because they have Rose. They always do an instrumental set without her to show off their picking, then around nine o’clock when the crowd is starting to peak and folks are through eating, Rose joins them for their second set. Tonight, she whispers “Sweet Dreams” to Matt, bows her head as Dave does the first few bars on the fiddle, and then her voice fills the room above the clack of pool balls, the roars of laughter, and the occasional crash of a beer glass hitting the floor. “Sweet dreams of you . . .” They are a hard-drinking bunch, the crowd at Gillespie’s, and sometimes they’re a hard-fighting bunch. They work hard all week and when Saturday night rolls around it’s time to howl, but they always quiet down for Rose. She sings with her eyes closed and her head thrown back, rocking to the beat, the music they are making so honeyed that at times it makes her shiver.

  Between sets, Rose dances with all comers. She never lacks for partners, although half of them barely come up to her bosom. She can waltz and jitterbug and do a mean Texas two-step, and if she runs out of guys who want a whirl, she’ll grab a gal and carry right on. As the night wears on, some of the dancers cop a feel here and there, squeeze her bosom, or grope her buttocks. Rose doesn’t begrudge them their pleasures. There’s precious little solace for a working man or woman, never has been. Rose is generous with her favors because the way she sees things, if she has it to give, it would be a sin to withhold it. If the Good Lord didn’t want a person to make love, why did He make it feel so doggone good? Now and then the wandering hand on her bosom belongs to a woman, and Rose will accommodate her, too, even invite her to stop by when Poe is out working on the wall, because we’re all God’s creatures, no matter how the twig was bent, and we all have our needs.

  Near one o’clock in the morning, when the drinkers have drunk until their legs wobble and they are lining up to puke out back, someone takes up the cry. Dance, Poe, dance! We want a dance! Dance, goat-man, dance! Dance, Poe, dance!

  Poe grins and shakes his big bald melon-head over and over, No no no, not tonight, but they will not be silenced until they’ve had their dance. He pushes the table back so he can stand and, to rhythmic clapping from every patron in the joint, rises majestically from his seat, his face lit with something that can only be called rapture. Poe is transformed. He tilts his head back. He thrusts out his arms and listens to the beat, nodding in rhythm, and then he begins to move, one toe tapping lightly on the floor and then the other. The patrons know enough to stay well back, out of his way. When he flings those mighty arms around, you need to keep your distance.

  Poe will dance to whatever tune Matt and the boys want to play, but “Wabash Cannonball” is his favorite, and “Wabash Cannonball” it is tonight. The occasional strangers who have blundered into Gillespie’s and have never seen Poe dance expect the human equivalent of a dancing bear, the fascination lying not in the dance itself but in the fact that he’s able to dance at all. They gape with the rest when Poe displays not only a precise sense of rhythm and a light-footed agility, but also a genuine grace in motion, as though his size and bulk somehow vanish the instant he begins to dance. He prances. He whirls. He leaps. He stomps until the floor shakes. His six-toed feet fly in their size-eighteen boots. Glasses hanging in racks above the bar clank and tremble and sometimes fall and shatter. The drinkers stand and clap as one, urging Poe on. Dance, goat-man, dance!

  Poe dances on and on without pausing for breath until at last, when he’s had enough, he hoists his arms above his head like a triumphant boxer, bows to the applause, and leaves the floor with his best work shirt and his OshKosh B’gosh coveralls soaked in sweat. Rose says goodnight to the Green Mountain Boys, takes up her handbag, tucks the hundred-dollar bill Dan Gillespie hands her into her bosom, and guides Poe to the door and out into the night. They’re halfway home before Poe catches his breath.

  The wind is almost still and the sky is a wild splash of stars from one horizon to the other. A buttermilk moon rises over Manitou Mountain as they walk. Rose points to the Big Dipper and to Orion’s Belt. Poe gawks happily. Rose keeps a firm grip on his arm to prevent him from bumping into a tree or a lamppost as he gazes at the stars.

  They’re half a mile from home when Rose lifts a hand. She stands still for a moment, then turns in a full circle, her head up, sniffing the air. It’s a balmy late-summer night and everyone in the pub talked about the fine weather they’ve been having, but Rose senses something else on the breeze. “Rain coming,” she says, even though there is not a cloud in the sky. “Hard rain coming.”

  Poe nods. He has never known Rose to be wrong about the weather. If she says there is a hard rain coming, then it’s going to rain.

  ~

  On a raft in the river

  Thorne’s sheets and blankets are soaked with sweat and knotted around his body, as though he’s just broken a fever. His fingers clutch and tear at the sheets so hard that he will discover in the morning a broken nail dangling from his index finger. He kicks out with his feet, trying to free himself, but the more he struggles, the more tightly the damp sheets bind him.

  The dream has him in a powerful grip, and it won’t let go. His eyelids flutter. His head thrashes back and forth on the pillow. He throws up an arm, as though blocking an unwelcome vision, but he can’t free himself. He is shouting, trying to warn someone, but no sound escapes his lips. He sees himself on a mountain crag, a thunderstorm bearing down on him, black cloud towers and lightning flashing, and a wind that threatens to tear his clothes from his body, and he is directing it all. He thrusts his staff at the sky and commands the tempest, bringing it down on the heads of the tiny figures he can see below, the toy churches in the toy villages, cars the size of insects scuttling to and fro on pointless errands.

  “Rain, goddamn you!” he bellows into the wind. “Rain! Bring down the deluge! Let the heavens open and rain! Swallow all the unholy works of our hands! Let the thunder roar and the lightning flash! Rain, dammit!”

  He looks on as the elements obey his command and a catastrophic storm tears across the valley. He sees the flood with startling clarity, every droplet of water and blade of grass in high relief. Hail beats down. Great trees bow and crack in the wind. The crops in the fields are scythed to the ground by the hail, and after the hail comes the deluge, and the sea is upended over the earth. Everything will be washed away. Nothing will remain. Nothing.

  The scene shifts and the storm bursts on a stark, arid landscape somewhere in the Southwest, in a valley that is nothing at all like the Belle Coeur Valley. The land is parched and arid, rocks and sand in high relief. In the heart of the valley there is a deep canyon and in the bed of the canyon there is a river, or what is left of it, a narrow trickle of water after years of drought. A man sits cross-legged on a makeshift raft that has lodged in the mud at a bend in the river and cannot be moved. He is shirtless and barefoot and his blue jeans are ripped and worn. He has th
e deep desert tan of a man who has slept outdoors for decades. His hair and beard are long and white and tangled. The man on the raft looks exactly like Thorne himself, except that he is thin and hard as a steel blade. He wears dark glasses and on his head a torn, greasy do-rag in the pattern of the American flag. He is meditating, legs crossed, forearms resting on his thighs, palms up.

  The cloudburst hits eighty miles upriver, but there is no sign of the storm in the canyon. The man on the raft hears the roar when it is less than a mile away, a thirty-foot wall of water bursting through the canyon, bearing down on the raft. He remains motionless in the sun, face upturned, waiting.

  Thorne understands. The deluge at his command will sweep him away with the rest.

  ~

  Black clouds topple the moon

  The massive oak tree next to the house moans and stirs in the breeze. The leaves on its lower boughs stroke the roof of the house like brushes on a snare drum. Out back, the tarp on Poe’s rowboat works loose and flaps against the hull. The bedroom curtains billow, the blinds rattle. The geese in the yard pelt one way or another in honking confusion, then hunker down for shelter beneath the overhanging roof in the lee of the pigsty. Towering black clouds topple the moon, pale sheets of lightning tremble ahead of the first slash of rain that precedes the storm like a harrow preparing the dark earth for planting.

  Rose wakes to the moan of a hard wind and peers at the old clock on her bedside table. It’s a quarter past five. She’s been in bed less than three hours. She waits to be certain the storm is going to hit, lying with her head buried deep in the pillow until a bolt of lightning flares in the window like a stage prop, then swings her bulk out of bed. Her feet are on the rough pine of the floor before the clap of thunder shakes the window pane. She puts a pot of coffee on to perk, and stands at the sink watching the storm barrel across the valley. The sky before daybreak is just pale enough so that she can make out the first iron slant of the rain, the maple and spruce trees’ dark shadows bowing before the wind, the jagged traces of lightning striking mountain to mountain across the valley, rain in long sheets washing across the river far below, a dove tossed across the sky like a scrap of paper.