Through the curtain was the shadow of Oletta Putman flailing away. And there were the sounds of skin and stiff old bones coming together. Jacob walked around the curtain.
This time he was sure of it. His Grandmother’s head had turned and she was looking at him. Her lips were curled into an expression of pain, or maybe exertion. With stiff movements, she was now moving both arms. Her right arm was flailing into her left, brushing hard against the thick pink bracelet that she always wore. Her left forearm was already turning red against the pressure.
Jacob took hold of those arms. “Grandma. Is there something you want to tell me?”
He gazed into her frightened eyes and watched the green iris change in size.
“If there is, can you blink?”
For nearly half a minute he stood there and waited for her. Then he felt her arms grow limp in his hands. He set them down in her lap.
“Sara?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been with my grandma?”
“Oh. I suppose about ten months now.”
“And you never saw her do anything like this?”
“No, hon. Never.”
“You ever seen her try to talk to anyone or communicate in any way.”
“No, not lately. Used to be that she wrote. But she stopped that a couple of months after I came along.”
“Oh really? What did she write?”
“Mostly things like she wanted a cup of coffee or her bed was wet.”
“I see. And you say she stopped?”
“Yes sir. I think it made her kind of tired. It took her forever to write the littlest of things. I don’t think she can do it anymore, the way her right arm is always flying around like that.”
“You don’t say.”
Jacob went to his grandmother’s dresser. In the second drawer he opened he found various odds and ends. Among them was a cup full of writing utensils from which he took a red crayon. He also grabbed a big white notepad. He set the notepad on a dinner tray and sat the tray on his grandmother’s lap. Then he tried to lodge the crayon in between two of her fingers.
When his grandmother began to slap at his hand, he moved it away. But she kept moving the same hand she had hit him with. He saw her fingers and thumb curl slightly and knew what to do. He placed the crayon upside down in her fist. He met no resistance. He closed that fist around the crayon and felt it stick there. He nodded at her and then walked out.
#
Jacob was very aware of every second they had to wait for their waitress to come. He noted every idiosyncrasy of the orders that would draw out the time he had to spend there. He made no attempts at discussion himself, and he answered all questions as succinctly as possible, not caring about whether he offended anyone. Then, when their plates finally arrived, he forced his food down against the excitement in his stomach that was telling him that this was no time to be eating. He left them all sitting there with their plates still barely touched.
Again, everything seemed to draw out as he hit the red lights and church traffic. Inside the nursing home, he felt the stares of everyone he passed and had to wonder if they somehow suspected that he was up to something. But he moved past them and toward the only thing he could think of at the moment.
Sara came to from her nap as he walked into the room without knocking first. She said something incoherent and then closed her eyes again. Jacob walked right into the eyes of his grandmother. They were now half-closed and dull with exertion. On the lunch tray sat her inflected hand. The crayon was snapped in two against her now purple pinky. Jacob gently removed that crayon. He fetched a pillow from her bed and rested her hand on it. He looked down at the notepad.
Most of the page was covered with indiscernible scribbles. In between those scribbles were choppy strokes that came together to form the letters. The letters were spread about the page, but Jacob thought he could discern some order. He took the page under that one and began to write with one broken half of the crayon.
“J and A. Those two go together. That’s for Jacob, right Grandma?”
Oletta Putman’s eyes did not give him the answer. They were starting to fade even more. Jacob wondered if she was awake.
“M and Y. That’s probably my.”
The last letter was written in the bottom left hand corner of the page. It was difficult to tell but Jacob thought it could be a W.
“Jacob my W.”
He looked again at his grandmother. Her chest had picked up speed, and he could hear the strain of her breath.
“Grandma. I don’t know what this means.”
At first the movement was slow and slight. Oletta Putman’s hand began to edge down the pillow. Then it slid a little faster with the decline, until her two hands were touching. Jacob watched her sit motionlessly for a minute.
Finally, her eyes closed all the way.
“That’s fine for now. Maybe you can tell me more later.”
He stripped the colored page from the notepad and threw it, along with the crayon, in the garbage. He tried to open the door quietly, but Sara still awoke and made eye contact again.
“Sorry.”
He saw Sara close her eyes and then he heard the blood curdling sound of his grandmother’s voice. It sounded like a scream muffled through several thick walls. Jacob turned around.
His grandmother’s eyes were wide open again, but they were still dull. Her right arm brushed against her left, like it had done earlier that morning, but this time the movement was weak and the thud not near as loud. Her mouth was slightly open, releasing the terrible sound.
“What is it Grandma?”
She stopped moving and screaming for a few moments and only stared at him. Then she started making a new sound. It was very quiet. He moved his ear right up to her mouth.
“Yaaahob. Yaahob. Yaahob. Yaahob.”
“Yes, Grandma. I can hear you. What is it?”
“Ruuu. Ruuu. Ruuu.” She stopped. Then, after a few seconds, she said it clear in a whisper. “Jayacob. Wrisss ban.”
Jacob looked down at her right hand on top of her left. He remembered the movements. And now it all made sense. Carefully, he removed her right hand and replaced it on the pillow. Slowly, he lifted her other hand and then moved the pink wristband up to the bottom of her hand. There, on her left wrist, about two inches long, was skin folded over skin.
“That’s why you always wore the bands. You slit yourself.”
A memory of an old photo album came to Jacob. His mother had shown it to him at one time or another. He couldn’t remember exactly when. He just remembered seeing the old black and white photograph of a young woman and knowing immediately who it was.
“You’ve always wore these things. You cut yourself a long time ago.” Jacob remembered the gun he had held to his head. “Grandma. What’s happening to me, happened to you, didn’t it?”
Jacob looked at her and saw that her eyes were half shut again. Then he saw the lids fall the rest of the way down. As quietly as he could, he dug the paper out of the trash and left the two old women to their slumber.
#
Jacob pulled up the driveway of his granduncle’s farm a little after five o’clock. After an afternoon of limbo, knowing he needed to do something but knowing that he couldn’t until after this step, he was drained of mental energy.
The old man met him on the porch with his forever-fixed smile. Jacob didn’t feel his usual annoyance upon meeting him. Instead, he felt the energy rise back into the anticipation and knew that he was in the right place.
“Jacob, my boy, it’s so nice of you to come. I got desert and coffee inside.”
They walked into an immaculate house. After being asked to have a seat, Jacob moved onto a large comfortable sofa. In front of him sat a metal tray with two matching cups and a decanter. To the side of this were two plates with two forks. Uncle Luke soon returned with a round covered tray. He lifted the cover revealing the perfect cherry pie.
Jacob was satisfied to sit and an
swer his uncle’s superficial questions for a little while. The taste of the desert combined the increasing anticipation electrified him inside while he faked normalcy on the outside. Most of the pie and most of the coffee were gone, when Jacob started to look for an inroad to the necessary conversation. He didn’t have to wait long.
“You know, Jacob, it has always pained me that you didn’t get to meet your grandfather. He was such a good man.”
“Oh really.”
“An incredible man, and quite well off.” The old man’s neck wiggled as he laughed. “I suppose he had to be with Oletta.”
“Why’s that? I mean I never really thought Grandma was materialistic.”
“Oh no. Not a bit. But she was different. She was different for a woman at that time.”
“How?”
“Well, you just wasn’t going to catch your grandma doing the things that a woman was expected to do. She never was much of the housewife type. She wasn’t that much of the mothering type either. She was just always kind of in her own little world. Kind of like she is right now.”
“How did she get away with that?”
His uncle smiled affectionately. “Well, I suppose when we were kids, it was me. Our dad, your great granddaddy, didn’t much understand the way she was. I think he sort of expected her to take household things over when our mother passed on. He and Oletta didn’t get along too well.” Uncle Luke laughed again. “But the damndess thing was that he never hit her. He had no problem taking a switch to the rest of us, but for some reason he wouldn’t do that to her. I don’t really understand that, but I think it was just because of how she was. There was something about the girl.”
“Yeah. I think I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, they would fight. At least, he would fight. He would yell at her for a little while and then give up. I think it irritated him that he just couldn’t get under her skin. Oletta just didn’t care. And I don’t mean in a happy-go-lucky way either.”
“Do you mean she was depressed?”
“You know, it’s funny, but I can’t really say. She was never one to smile much. But she was never one to tell you what she was frowning about.”
Jacob laughed before he could stop himself. “Yeah, I think I can relate to that.”
His uncle was still smiling at him. But Jacob thought he could see just a little bit of inquisitiveness there.
“So how did that come back to you, Uncle Luke?”
“Well, I was the one who took over for mama. I did my stuff and her stuff too. Being the oldest boy, I helped dad with the farm. Then I would help take care of the house and the other kids.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“Oh it was. I suppose that’s why I never finished school. But you know, I never really minded it a bit. I always thought it was just my place.”
The next thing that happened was Uncle Luke’s voice changing. And with it, so did his mannerisms. But most of all, it was the smile. It was not the same old please-everybody-and-keep-the-peace smile. All together, Uncle Luke was very scary for a few seconds.
“And we all have our place, don’t we Jacob. I have my place and you have yours. And it all works out in the end.”
Jacob struggled not to change his expression. And he struggled not to run out of the house. He waited for the man in white to leave the room.
And soon he did. Uncle Luke regained his usual appearance and continued his story. “Your grandpa eventually came along. He was a rich fella, and he loved your grandma. Spoiled her. Just like anybody who loved her did. Oletta Putman was the only woman in the county with a live-in maid. Then, when your mother came along, she was the only person with a live-in nanny.”
“Mom never said anything about these people. I mean, you would think that since she lived with them and all—”
“Your mom wouldn’t have been old enough when they left. She was just barely walking about time your grandpa died.”
“So Grandma couldn’t afford the house help anymore?”
“No. She could have, easily. Your grandpa left her with a tidy sum.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You’d never know it by the way she lived her life, but your grandma was and still is a wealthy woman.”
“Then why did the help have to go?”
Uncle Luke sighed. “I don’t know really. Maybe it was because she took your grandpa’s death bad. I don’t know for sure. But after that point, Oletta became the biggest hermit you ever met. For years, your mother and I were about her only social contacts.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was kind of like she had some deadly disease, and she was afraid she would contaminate everybody with it.”
Jacob felt a sudden rush of heat. Then it was like a breeze came through the room and cooled him down quickly. “Uncle Luke?”
“Yes, Jacob.”
“When did grandma try to kill herself?”
He shook his head. “I don’t—”
“I saw her wrist. I asked her about it and she wrote this.” Jacob fished the colored paper out of his pocket and handed it to his uncle. “You see the way the letters come together?”
“Q. U. I. E.”
Jacob snatched the paper from his uncle’s grip. Then he silently read the rest of what was on the backside of that paper, mixed in with the red scribbles. Quiet to all.
“No. The other side.”
His uncle looked at him with a bewildered and somewhat frightened face. Then he eyed the paper again. When he was done, he hesitantly handed it back to Jacob.
“This is something that is known only to Oletta, your mother, and myself. Oletta always wanted it that way. But now it looks like she wants you to know.” He took a deep breath. He frowned and looked very old. “She was seventeen years old. She walked down into the woods by herself one day. She came back up later, blood running down her hand and spilling all over her clothes. But she looked just fine for all the blood she had lost. She didn’t look like herself at all. She looked—”
“Invigorated?”
Uncle Luke looked at looked at him inquisitively. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
Jacob only nodded at him.
“They put her in a mental hospital after that. She was gone for almost a full year. A doctor there told Daddy that she had some kind of psychosis or something. That she was seeing things. But they must have cured whatever it was, because after she got out, she never spoke of such a thing again.”
His uncle looked deeply dejected. Jacob decided he had all he needed from the old man. After a little while, he commented on a painting hanging there in the living room. They talked for a little while until Jacob thought things had lightened up enough. Then he made an excuse to leave.
On his way out the door Jacob could only think about the flipside of the letter. He hadn't seen it at the hospital. Quiet to all.
Chapter 7
The sun was just beginning to show that it planned to set sometime in the near future, and Jacob was driving on the quiet highway. He had left his uncle’s house riding on an emotional roller coaster. The high part came from the knowledge he was gaining. The low was from something he could not identify. He was doing something terribly wrong. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted to know what that was.
Then the lows dwindled. Soon, they were gone completely. The high remained, but it had changed too. Jacob became indifferent to knowledge. It became a meaningless game to him.
The outside was beautiful. He stared out of his window at the open plains. For miles there were nothing but fields. Then there were the taller buildings and the grain elevators of the distant towns off in the vista. At first it had been just enough to notice. Then there was the loose feeling that came in his legs and beckoned him to stop. He was able to resist it for a short while. He knew he had somewhere to be.
Jacob was a couple of miles outside of Nescata when the need to stop took him over. He pulled off the highway onto a dirt road, drove about a mile to the first
intersection and pulled his car off to the side. Jacob felt like running.
#
As Jacob stretched, reasons came to him. It made symbolic sense that he had a psychological need to escape and was expressing this need physically. It made sense that he had just ingested a great deal of sugar and caffeine at his uncle’s house and that these things gave him restlessness.
But the reasons drifted like smoke, out of his mind. He marveled at how his thoughts seemed to move into the background. He got up quickly from the last stretch, red dirt sticking to his sweaty skin. He started slow and worked up into a near sprint.
Jacob was pleasantly surprised to feel the spring in his legs. It was strange, because he knew he couldn’t be in very good cardiovascular condition. He lifted weights on a weekly basis and supplemented that with an occasional pickup basketball game—in which he could only play about three minutes before he stopped sprinting and started jogging up and down the court.
By all logic, he should have started cramping up after about six-hundred yards. But he was sure he must have had the first mile done in, at most, six minutes, but possibly as low as five and a half. And he wasn’t done either. He felt as if he could do equal or better on the second mile. He felt good. He felt alive. Then he stopped hearing his feet hit the earth.
#
There are footsteps coming from behind him, and there is the raspy sound of unconditioned breath. A figure smaller than his own comes into his peripheral vision. But this figure is not complete, so Jacob decides to let it develop before he tries to look at it again.
But he does not need to look at it at all. It comes into his vision anyway. He is passed on the left.
The runner turns his head back and forth as he runs. In his beet-red face and in his oily matted hair, Jacob sees the ascetic indifference of a young boy. The boy runs with the force and tightness of inexperience, and he makes a terrible sound as his wind connects with the loosened phlegm of his airway. Jacob wishes the boy would stop.
Jacob sees the boy’s bare back and the way his narrow rib cage moves up so heavily and wonders how the boy moves at all. His stride is short, and on the back of his legs, blue veins protrude ominously in glistening sweat. Jacob thinks he can actually see cramps forming there.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 56