by Josh Kent
He got in the door and put down the woven sack and got all his gear. He rolled out his gear on the bed and checked to make sure it was all there: the long rifle, all his pouches, his bullets, extra silver-lode, the powders, the hatchet, and the other pouches with specials in them. He glanced it over, his eyes picking out each detail. He rolled it back up and strapped it on his back.
Once he got it all together and strapped up on his back, he turned to go out the door. He’d decided to take the old trail all the way to the river and then burn and distribute the ashes of the head there. It was a strong river.
He reached down by the door where he put the sack and pulled it up.
It was empty.
Jim whirled back around and scanned the room across—table, chair, bed, window. There, just in time, a dark form, a watery shadow in the corner of his eye, slipped out through the half-cracked window, and he watched it float lazily off into the woods.
Then, once it melted into the thick woods, he felt immediately the eyes staring at him. His neck, chest, and belly got heavy again with the jitters.
The eyes of something waited just beyond the edge, out the window, just up in the tree line. Something he couldn’t see, but something that could see him. The eyes winked, bright with evil.
He wanted to run back down to the Hills’. To run down there and bang on their door and scream at them to get out, get out! He’d dump his special powder in a circle around the house; he’d catch up Violet over his shoulder . . .
He didn’t budge. His gut told him that Bill was not a maker of idle threats. He fully expected to be shot and killed if he came down by that house again.
No.
His word was his own to keep. He said he’d leave Sparrow and he would.
He’d leave Sparrow, but he’d go by way of these woods. He’d go right at those killer eyes and find out.
He looked back in the corner by the door where the woven sack sat. He looked at the space where the dead head used to be and knew beyond doubting that the Evil One had taken an interest in Sparrow.
Then he looked out the window into the woods.
Through the night, the howls came again and again.
Benjamin Straddler sat at his table with his wife and listened.
They were eating some pork chops, and both of them were looking at each other.
“Do you want another pork chop?” Lane asked.
“There haven’t been wolves in Sparrow since I was a boy.” Benjamin watched her fork over a chop.
Lane got up from the table and went to the stove. “There’s two more sitting in here, and I won’t be able to eat another.”
“I might go over to Huck’s tonight.” He waited for her to reply, but she busied herself. “There’ll be men over there talking about the wolves, and there’s a bright moon tonight too, Lane. A bright moon,” he said and turned his head a bit toward the window as another round of baying struck. “And there’s wolves.” Something far away caught his memory for a moment.
“Well, what am I supposed to do while you’re there?” she snapped suddenly with a flick of her long, brown hair. “Lock the doors?”
Lane turned back to the sink and then back to Benjamin. She didn’t care how many men got together to sit around and drink and make decisions. A few years back, when the snows had come and the wolves came down from the mountains looking for food, those men sat around drinking and deciding and nothing came of it then except some decisions about who would get what house in case the other died.
She looked in Benjamin’s good eye. “What if while you’re down there talkin’ something comes through here? What if a pack of them gray wolves comes through here? Or what about what if the Hills are right?”
She looked down at the floor and then back up at him. Her brown eyes were watery. “Benji, what if them wolves are bringing with ’em what they brought before? What if the Hills are right?”
Benjamin Straddler held closed a place in his mind that kept a memory. “Lane, no one really knows what all happened back then. This is a different time. Things aren’t just like they were back then just because we’re hearing wolves in the night. I’ll come back. I won’t be far off, and I won’t be long. I am going to go and see and then I’ll be back. I’ll come back and we’ll sit together.”
She paused in memory and squeezed her eyes together and remembered all those years ago.
All those years ago, Benji came home one night during that big blizzard, that big blizzard that froze off Vernon Mosely’s ears, and Benji was screaming and carrying on something awful. Usual times when he was doing this sort of thing, Lane would either run out the back and wait it out, or yell at him until he was shut up, or even please him until he was shut up depending on how it was he reacted to things.
He came in.
It was cold and he was standing there and his eyes were red and his skin was white and blue. He went forward and backward.
She ran to him and threw a blanket on his body and he slumped down on a wood chair and she started some hot water in a pot.
He stared at the floor of the house and, after a while, a long stream of vomit came up his throat and slapped at the floor of the kitchen. It stank, it stank bad.
She started to clean it anyway and he started to talk.
“There was a way they could find animals,” he slurred and stood teetering looking out the window and shaking his head. Almost sobbing, he sat back down only to stand again, his eyes wide, his finger pointing at the window. Then he sat down again and mumbled something and was still for a long time.
Then suddenly he shouted: “Did they know it? No!” He moved his hands around as if there were a lot of people listening. “They didn’t know the way! I knew it!”
“I know, Benji,” she whispered. This was an old story to her. She’d heard it from all angles—sober, drunk, asleep, and in prayer.
She kept cleaning, and small, hot tears traced her cheeks and dangled from her chin.
“Them stupid, greedy animals!” He pounded his foot near her head, pinching her long hair.
“Them stupid, dumb-as-dogs-and-pigs animals!”
When her finger, through the cloth, got warm on the vomit, she gave up. She retreated to the kitchen table. She put her head on the table.
“I was just a little boy! ‘I don’t care!’ I said! ‘I’ll tie you up! I’ll eat you alive!’”
Lane was sobbing now, surrounded by her dark hair, sucking in air over the table.
“Tie ’em up. Tie up their mouths!” Benjamin Straddler stood up in his kitchen and took off his coat and his shirt and his pants.
“Lane!” He looked at her sad and poisonous. “Don’t look at me. Go to bed. Go to bed! You can’t see me! You can’t see me!”
Now she was done crying. Her fury was bright, but her words came in a whisper. “You’ll die this way, Benjamin Straddler. You’ll die like this! There’s nothing on this earth can save a man so poisoned!”
Benjamin reeled in hot, drunk anger. The door to his bedroom clapped shut and locked as Lane fled from his swinging arms.
He wet himself and fouled the kitchen, all the time thinking about the black, hot heart of the wolf filling his mouth.
This night, Lane waited, standing in the middle of the kitchen. Benjamin didn’t return from Huck’s this night.
She held her rifle straight at the window until she could barely see light coming up through the woods. The thing that had been rasping just below the window seemed to fade away as the dawn rose. Whatever it may have been, she was glad that she didn’t have to find out. She fell asleep in the chair with her shoulders hunched up around her neck, the weapon across her lap.
The sun rose and played in the dust of her kitchen and brightened her face, but Benjamin didn’t come back.
Chapter 6
Nobody was at the bar because everybody left, except for Simon and the chicken man, and Benjamin Straddler who just came in.
The wolves had been going on for a while
and the place had emptied out. Huck and May stayed, though. May was asleep in a safe place and Huck had his gun close.
“Tell him,” Simon said and looked at his friend, Benjamin Straddler, and then looked at the chicken man.
Benjamin looked at the chicken man and winked his eye at Simon. “Them chickens you sold way back is still around here,” Benjamin told him and looked at his half-cup of whisky, “or at least the sons and daughters of ’em.”
“Yup,” the chicken man said and took a bite of an apple. It was small and green and far from ripe.
Huck watched the three men. Huck was tired and leaned on the wall. Sometimes his wooden leg still hurt his knee. The chickens were good, Benjamin was right, but the chicken man himself had an eye for May. On top of that, Huck knew the routine of the wolf story. It ended in Benjamin Straddler getting kicked out of his shop. He’d hoped that Benjamin had maybe had his fill at home tonight, or that maybe Lane had helped him get to sleep or convinced him to stay home.
Benjamin Straddler had that wolf story about his pa and the wolf, yes. But there was also something that had happened to old Benji during that blizzard. Huck had lost his beautiful wife, Vernon Mosely had lost his ears, but Benjamin Straddler had lost his mind. Something had happened to Straddler that night that had set him to drinking and drinking hard. Harder, Huck thought at times, than he’d seen any man ever to drink.
“Them Moselys that run the church? They been takin’ good care of them chickens you sold ’em. Sometimes the church does up a meal and them chickens is good eating chickens too,” Benjamin said.
“Yup,” the chicken man said and gnawed the hard apple. His eyes focused on Benjamin and on something far away at the same time. It seemed as if he was more spitting out the apple on his chin than really eating it.
Outside there was a yipping and then the wolves joined in together. Because of how the wind was blowing that night, everyone had trouble telling which direction and how far away the wolves might have really been.
They all listened, though, looking up into the air. The chicken man, Simon, and Benjamin all looked up and left and right, as if, through the roof of Marbo’s Bar, they could see the wolves’ howls moving across the night sky.
“The chicken man knows his chickens are good,” Simon said after a moment. “Don’t tell him about his chickens. He knows about his chickens.” Simon smiled and took his shot of whisky too. “He’s the chicken man.”
Benjamin Straddler scratched at his stubbled chin. He was red and wet looking.
Simon listened to the howling, and it seemed somehow to please him. He looked over at Benjamin Straddler and chuckled a bit and said, “Tell us how you killed them wolves.”
“What’s the chicken man wanna know that for?” Benjamin put some reddish coins on the bar and tapped on the bar with his forefinger and leered at Huck, who leaned his gun against the back counter as he grabbed the bottle.
Huck poured more whisky in Benjamin’s cup.
Benjamin drank it right away, all of it. He looked the chicken man up and down. The chicken man was bony and pinkish with a spiny fin of white hair on his head.
“Huck!” Benjamin shouted suddenly.
“Yes, Benjamin?” Huck said.
“Huck, where’s May?”
Huck placed both his hands on the bar and leaned into Benjamin Straddler. “There’s no need to bring her name into this conversation.” Huck looked at the chicken man. The chicken man’s eyes were pink too. Huck looked back at Benjamin. “And if you ask me one more question tonight about her, I will make sure you never come in here again without walking like I do.”
Huck was dead serious and hinting at his leaning shotgun. Benjamin leaned back and the chicken man looked around stupidly.
“Well, chicken man,” Benjamin Straddler said and smiled but wiped it away quick with his thumb, “when I was a youngun, and I was workin’ for my pa, we was horse raisers and had us some horses.” Benjamin blinked and looked up. “All them horses is gone now, but we raised ’em. Ponies too. Folks are superstitious about raisin’ and keepin’ horses around here these days, but this was back in the early days, when Sparrow wasn’t much of anything except a place to stop between here and there.”
Huck Marbo went back to being far way and standing by his gun.
Benjamin leaned into the chicken man. “But see, my pa had to go out and get wood for us in the woods. See, they used to have a thing in this town that you had to go out and get wood for a preacher. And it come up his turn, so he goes out.” Benjamin squeezed his eyes for a few seconds as if he saw something far away. “Then he didn’t come back for a long time.”
He squeezed again and took a little more whisky from his glass. The chicken man, who was sucking on the core of the apple now, locked his pink eyes in on Benjamin Straddler’s eyes.
Benjamin kept on. “A few days passed and then we started looking. It was a group of men from the church that first headed it up. Old Marley Upton, Bannings Driver, Wise Moore, and Donny Trim and his boys. Huck, you remember some of them, don’t ya? They’ve all passed now. Trim’s boys moved up to the Ridges. But they looked six days for my pa up there in them woods and never found him. Strangest thing. I thought he liked t’fell in the river, or been killed by a man from over there on the other side of the mountainside, maybe even by a bear out from the country. Sometimes, too, there were certain men would come down and they were killers and they killed a lot of folk in the early days when us Straddlers first got here. Weren’t none of them first people either, so I thought maybe one of them killers killed him. Maybe too, I thought a native coulda killed him, like one of the River People from the other side of Make River.”
Benjamin Straddler’s eyes got a little wetter. His one bad eye was especially red and twinkling. “I thought a new thing about my pa about every time I blinked. I saw a new way for my pa to get killed. I even thought about him killing himself with his buck knife”—he was whispering now—“but couldn’t think of a reason why.”
The chicken man was squinting hard trying to figure out what Benjamin was trying to tell him.
Simon’s teeth were white, smiling there over Benjamin’s shoulder.
Benjamin took a pause and got a smoke. He lit it with a match and started smoking it. “So, a young boy as I was, I hated all the waiting. I waited for three days, and I went to the men in the church and asked them why my father wasn’t looked for, and they said that he was found. ‘He is dead,’ they said, ‘he got killed by wolves.’”
Simon waved a hand at Huck. “Give us all some shots, on me. Whisky.”
Huck was quick for Simon, and the chicken man noticed how much they smiled as the money went back from Simon to Huck, even though Huck looked as if he didn’t like smiling right now. Somehow that Simon had a lot of money. Since no one was really sure exactly what it was that Dan and Elsie Starkey had left behind or how they came into it, there was always a kind of rumor that the walls of Simon’s house were stuffed with treasures.
They all shot the whisky down.
“Them men from the church, I told ’em all how stricken with grief I was. Stricken! I sat in that little church and bent my head and told ’em. They told me that things were in mystery and how God’s ways was God’s ways. They sat there and tried to explain to me the way one world crossed into another world. You know all that nonsense they start to say when they don’t know what to say because they don’t know what to say. They start in on telling you there’s a purpose for this and a purpose for that. Ain’t no purpose! Ain’t no purpose! There’s just cold, evil death. That’s all! There ain’t no purpose! Spells and stories! Ain’t no purpose!”
Simon had not ever heard that come out of Benjamin before, and a funny look came over his face.
“How?” Benjamin said and looked down at his empty shot glass in his hand.
Simon filled it up for him.
Benjamin looked around and around. “You tell me. How does a good God cause a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves?
You tell me!”
There was a sudden and small breeze through the place that they all took notice of. Maybe someone had opened one of the latched windows. They all looked in different directions, almost expecting to see that someone had passed by them all sitting there.
“My heart was sick for my father.” Benjamin looked up at them.
They turned back to Benjamin.
“For a man like my father,” he said, drawing them back into his memory, “for any man to be eaten by wolves.” He clenched his teeth, the little glass of brown liquor shook in his fingers, his face twisted and pinched into an awful grimace. “For a little boy’s papa to be eaten by wolves!”
Chapter 7
Pretty sure that Bill was looking out his bedroom window and up at the back house, Jim slid out the same window where the dark shape had gone through.
He dropped low on his knees as dusk was coming in over the yard and cleared his head. It was really cold out now. The winds had earlier brought in a cold that would turn to frost by morning. Due to the cold, the feeling of the eyes and the heavy jitters were lifting. Jim’s body and mind were closing up. The cold had a strange way of covering up those things that lived in the shadows.
Seeing that he was about to go hunt, he couldn’t afford this cold snap lifting away of his sense of the thing.
Jim crawled around to the backside of the back house where he was sure he couldn’t be seen by Bill Hill. There he unrolled his satchel and got out more leaves and chewed them. He remembered again what the old woman had told him and what his pa had told him. He remembered again what Spencer Barnhouse had told him—that it was taking longer and longer to make the batches. He chewed and chewed and swallowed the bitter juice and the spiky strands.
He looked at the woods and remembered more things about being at Huck’s the night before. He remembered how he’d caught eyes with May Marbo, how her brown eyes had glinted with deep greens just as her father’s, how she’d taken his arm. In his memory, when he looked down at the arm of the girl, he saw instead his mother’s arm, the hand grasping, grasping.