Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  “Indeed it is,” he said.

  “Where’d you get this?” the older librarian demanded.

  “He inherited it,” Lillian said.

  The older woman eyed Charlie suspiciously. “You’re working on a book about the old days, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” Charlie said. “And I’ve got some more work to do.”

  On that note, he departed—without getting the younger woman’s phone number (or giving out any information, either). By then he was thinking he already had everything he needed—especially since his dreams were proving to be real and true.

  When he returned to Bayard Terrace, Charlie skipped lunch and placed Joshua’s death statement on a cookie sheet, then brushed the paper with tea and baked it at low temperature. Of course it wouldn’t pass the test of authenticity. Therefore, he would make a copy and destroy the original—if what he was cooking could be called an original. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he’d do with it, but he’d keep it handy nonetheless. Only one person alive had ever seen its message. One other person, that is.

  Kathleen came into the kitchen looking for her reading glasses. “What are you doing?’

  “Experimenting,” he said. “Trying to see how somebody might get away with something.”

  “I see,” she said, pursing her lips. “Will they?”

  “That’s always the issue, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Another night, another excessively vivid dream, another writing marathon. When he took a break, Charlie glanced at the clock and gasped. The school bell would ring in five minutes! And teachers were already extremely tired of his tardiness. He dashed out the door and sped off in his van. When he was ten minutes away from his destination, his cellphone rang. He winced as he answered.

  “The principal called and asked if you’re all right,” Susan said, her tone flat as a manhole cover.

  “Hey, Suse,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “Just running a little late.”

  “That’s been happening a lot, and it’s not acceptable. They’re not babysitters.”

  “What are they going to do, call Family and Children Services?”

  “Actually, they just might.”

  Ouch. Charlie knew this could be an issue in custody hearings, if it came to that. “I’ll do better. ’Bye.” He pounded the steering wheel in frustration. It wasn’t fair. Couldn’t people understand that he had to write? And write and write?

  Charlie arrived at Gresham and coached himself to remain calm. He apologized profusely to Beck’s and Ben’s teachers and meekly accepted separate but equal scoldings. Bottom line: The next time he was late, he would receive a warning letter, and a copy would go “in the file.”

  Charlie left school ranting about a conspiracy against him, only realizing he’d gone over the top when he saw his kids staring at him in alarm. “I’m writing a story about monsters,” he explained. “Sometimes I practice it out loud.”

  Monsters interested the kids, especially Ben. On the way back to Thornbriar, Charlie told them the story of Frankenstein. It had been two days since he’d showered, and midway through his tale, he scratched a sticky armpit.

  “You stink worse than a monkey,” Beck said.

  “Don’t be rude,” Charlie said.

  “Then don’t stink,” she suggested.

  At Thornbriar, Charlie fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He was pretty sure that the one he made for himself was his first food of the day. On second thought, he had no idea when he’d last eaten.

  * * *

  The next day, Charlie proudly arrived at Gresham Elementary on time only to find Evangeline waiting in the office. He did a double-take, nearly spraining his neck as karmic tires squealed on psychic pavement. “What are you doing here?” he asked, not bothering to be polite. The school secretary watched the two antagonists impassively, as if she might one day be called on to testify.

  “I came to pick up the kids,” Evangeline said. “Susan can’t trust you to do that anymore.”

  He grimaced. “Not true. And here I am. You wasted your time. Anyway, you’re not on the list.”

  “Susan put me on it.”

  “Did she,” he deadpanned, making sure it didn’t sound like a question.

  “She did,” Evangeline replied, making sure he got an answer.

  “I’m gonna get the kids.”

  “I’ll be at the house, waiting for them,” she declared.

  Charlie escaped with Beck and Ben out a side door. He took them to Dairy Queen, then the library. They were at Duck Lake Park when his cellphone rang.

  “Mom’s at the house. She says the kids are missing. She wants to call 911.”

  Charlie pushed Beck’s swing. “No, they’re with me, Susan. Too bad she drove all the way to school for nothing. Hey, wanna eat out tonight? My treat.”

  “Yay!” Beck cheered, waving her arms and almost toppling from her seat. “Pizza!”

  “Pizza!” said Ben, twisting the chains as Charlie gave him a push.

  Susan continued: “The school counselor called today and asked if anything was wrong with you. She said you showed up at school yesterday mumbling to yourself.”

  “Why would Ms. Morris claim that? I didn’t even see her.”

  “The teachers told her. They say you’ve been disheveled and disoriented.”

  Obviously, someone had gotten to them. Satan. And he had evidence! “I’m under a lot of pressure to get the book finished. You have no idea.”

  “Don’t be late again. I can’t be pulled away from here. I’m up for a promotion. I need you to focus on the kids. They need you to focus on them, too.”

  “Fine,” he grumbled. She kept talking, but he quit listening.

  He dropped the kids by Thornbriar after Susan got home. He didn’t bother to go inside, since Evangeline’s Crown Victoria sat fat and stupid in the driveway like an ugly old toad.

  * * *

  Increasingly, Flight was becoming Charlie’s book. The dreams persisted, and like a side effect from the drugs that were advertised on Kathleen’s nightly news programs, they were excessively vivid. Charlie awoke each day at his weirding time of 4:00 a.m. with images and scenes etched into his brain, hearing echoes of rifle shots in the hollow, seeing the fear in a sharecropper’s face illuminated by a nightrider’s torch, smelling armpits and tobacco spit on the crowded courthouse steps. Charlie had come to believe that Flight from Forsyth was a book of lost souls, who now came unto him for deliverance from guilt, shame, and/or injustice—although some of them just wanted to share recipes.

  The only way to rid himself of the pressure on his brain was to download these graphic scenes. Charlie’s compulsion to write was so strong it often overwhelmed his urge to piss. He scribbled frantically on a legal pad while waiting for the computer to boot, certain that his dreams were true. He was extremely grateful to be gaining more in his sleep than he’d lost in the burglary, though it didn’t seem worth it the morning he woke with a severe headache after dreaming the county’s 1910 annual budget meeting.

  The next night, he found himself in a coffin as clods of dirt thudded on its closed lid. Panic rose in his chest and he clawed at the pine box. Splinters stabbed the quick beneath his fingernails. He awoke clutching his chest. He couldn’t describe the horror of being buried, nor could he see its place in Flight. He didn’t even know who he’d been. Then again, maybe all dead people felt alike.

  He went to the bathroom and returned to his cot at 4:02 wishing he didn’t have to write this horror, but there was no escaping death. He turned on his laptop and flexed his fingers. Pain shot through them. He typed slowly, then sped up, surprising himself by writing not a dirge, but a letter to a sister-in-law in nearby Dahlonega:

  October 16, 1912

  Dear Addy,

  The last of the coloreds left Oscarville yesterday. Luther burned down their shacks this morning and plans to plant cotton there next year. He says he got the best claim to the land, but it doesn’t seem right, what folks
been doing. Luther says keep my mouth shut, but everbody knows what’s going on. No use to talk about it. I fear there will be a price to pay. That’s what the Bible says …

  The letter went on to mention an obnoxious mother-in-law and how many jars of applesauce had been canned for the winter, along with the recipe. It would go well with the pork chops from the pig Luther had bought from Lester McCready, the colored man who moved away.

  It made no sense, this mix of death and food, but Charlie kept typing. He yelped in torment as he wrote about sewing a new dress, describing its frilly lace in agonizing detail. He wrung his hands to ease the pain. They felt like nails had been hammered through them. Another knot appeared, this one on the palm side of the base knuckle of his left middle finger.

  The next night he channeled property records, again waking with a terrible headache. Charlie spent six hours inputting data before collapsing in a heap on his cot. When he was done, he checked Talton’s text and realized he’d dreamed the documents that had been stolen from the study. But now Charlie could see black faces and cotton fields, not just names and numbers.

  * * *

  Day and night bled together. Except for his children, all was darkness, and the stress of dream and dungeon took a toll. Charlie now talked to himself nonstop on his daily shamble down to the coffeehouse. He had learned to mask the odd behavior by pulling out his cellphone and holding it to his ear as he walked, so he looked like a man on the go, not one going insane. These trips, his only breaks from the grind, were also a luxury he could ill afford, since he was nearly broke and hadn’t done any handyman jobs in two weeks, having gotten no offers despite leaving his business cards tacked on bulletin boards all over that part of town. He regretted giving Susan his painting money to help pay the mortgage. Meanwhile, Kathleen owed him for more than a hundred hours of work on the manuscript, but she was so crotchety he hesitated to ask for payment. To top off his humiliation, when he ordered a double espresso, Jean told him, “You look like a deliveryman who lost his truck.”

  By this time, Charlie believed he was more electrical conductor than writer—a wire with its insulation chewed off, stretched to breaking between two unseen points (neither one in the living world), and heated to the melting point. Charlie Sherman was a candidate for spontaneous combustion, if ever there was one.

  * * *

  He was an attorney in the old courthouse looking through property records. A young secretary flirted with him, showing him a picture she was drawing of the recently deceased Martha Jean Rankin. When he went into a back room, she followed. Hot damn! A few minutes later, he was running out of the courthouse, tucking his white starched shirt into his trousers with a deputy and another man on his heels.

  Charlie woke up breathing heavily. No wet dream, just running for his life. He cupped his hands over his face. Now he knew that Randall Pryor, the original attorney for accused murderer Bernie Dent, had been caught diddling a secretary in the file room and had to be replaced by an inexperienced young attorney named Jackson Ponder just days before the trial. He also knew that Lillian Scott’s great-grandmother was a hussy. How could Charlie put such scandalous details in the book? There had to be a way—although he’d probably let Lillian Scott’s slutty ancestor have a pass, since she was an artist.

  By now the dreams were connected like pieces in a puzzle. He knew that the deputy who chased Pryor out of town had stood by when the mob descended on Ted Galent’s cell. The other man who’d pursued the horny attorney was named Jim Biddle, a member of Galent’s lynch mob. Biddle would later sit on Bernie Dent’s jury, brag to his colleagues about the lynching, and fall asleep when Jackson Ponder presented Dent’s case, which was not so much a defense as a second-hand confession and plea for clemency. (Ponder had believed Dent was a dead man the moment he’d been arrested, so the outcome was inevitable.)

  Charlie started writing, describing the buildings Pryor had passed by on his sprint out of town. Details, details.

  * * *

  He sat at a table underneath a tree. Everyone in the county, white and black, formed a line that extended all the way to the Chattahoochee River. Each person waited to shove a note card containing personal statistics in his face. He stared at each one for a moment to burn it into his memory, then nodded his head. The person stepped away and was quickly replaced by another.

  This census went on for several nights. Orderly and alphabetical, like dead Talmadge voters in Telfair County, circa 1946. Each morning, he typed the data in courier font at speeds in excess of 100 words per minute. The miracle of photocopying would blur and confuse the source, making it seem authentic, he hoped. He now knew everyone in the county back then, and better still, had backup for the stolen documents on landownership.

  The high-speed stenographic channeling continued to take its toll. He had two more knots in the palms of his hands: Carpal Stigmata Syndrome, he called it. He developed a migraine during his census count. He feared he was growing a brain tumor, and it was doing all the work. But he had to admire such an industrious malignancy, since it certainly was getting the job done.

  The next night, he was in a mob chasing after someone. Couldn’t see who.

  The night after that, he was being chased by a mob. He took down names, then got his ass kicked.

  Then he was a she, complaining about having to do her own wash after the maid left town.

  He spent one night as a feisty cur sniffing hitching posts. Someone who smelled like a Cutchins threw rocks at him. He chased the boy and bit him on his barefoot heel. Barking vociferously, he called the Cutchins a bitch. That was a good dream.

  In the next, he stood in the middle of a stinking, late-summer crowd and felt dull-eyed primitive religion pulsing through the people, sensed an insane hatred of blacks, listened to the brainwashing by Randolph Carswell as the county’s so-called Great Man told whites it was time for blacks to leave Forsyth forever. Then he went out and repeated the lies, and by constant repetition, helped to forge a new reality. Making lies the truth—wasn’t that how people got things done in the world?

  * * *

  The file drawer was full again. Charlie had played God’s own hack and gone far beyond replacing Talton’s purloined documents. He’d lived the story and heard the frightened whispers about a mischievous devil and an angry God. Flight from Forsyth played in his head constantly, swirling around in endless variations on the same theme.

  However, even a feverishly obsessive-compulsive fellow in his manic phase can stare at a computer screen only so long. One Saturday night in early February, he ran out of steam just past eight o’clock. The day was done, shot. Kaput. He turned off his laptop and went to the living room, where Kathleen sat on the couch watching Casablanca for the third time that week. Her eyes glowed in rapt attention as Rick told Ilsa what colors she and the Germans had worn in Paris.

  Charlie sat down in the green chair, wishing he had enough cash to go somewhere. Friday, he’d asked Kathleen for $500—a fraction of what she now owed him for the hours he’d racked up on the project. She responded by claiming she’d already paid him. No point in asking again. Angela, plague-free and re-lawyered, had come over that morning and seized Kathleen’s financial papers, claiming her mother’s failure to take her medications was proof that she couldn’t be trusted with her own affairs. Kathleen explained that she’d gone off her meds to prevent Angela and the pharmacist from controlling her brain. Before she left, Angela told her mother to quit paying Charlie—which happened to be what Kathleen wanted to hear, anyway. So now the Talton Gang was plotting to starve him. How had they learned his secret, that he would gladly finish the book for free?

  When his cellphone rang, he answered in the study.

  “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s been in a terrible mood all day. I wonder why that is.” His tone was dry.

  “She thinks you’re going to keep asking her for more money.”

  “I am going to keep asking her for more money.”

  “She’s paid you
enough,” Angela spoke gently, as if she was a nurse telling a terminal patient that he’d be getting no more painkillers.

  “That’s not the deal. I never would have signed on for that amount.”

  “It can’t be open-ended. I’m looking at the contract right now. My God! What is this? ”

  “Red ink,” Charlie guessed, though he had no idea what Kathleen’s copy looked like. His contract, as gruesome and sopping wet as a pound of raw liver, was now packed away in a plastic tub in the dungeon. The vat, he called it. And now he felt the weight of it on his shoulders every waking moment—and even when he slept, for that matter. He assumed the document was saturated with the blood of those lost souls who gave him his dreams. He still needed to get the stuff tested. But not until they’d fed him all their stories.

  “It says, ‘The party of the second part will succeed, or die in the attempt.’”

  “Hey, don’t blame me for that.”

  “Die trying?” she said, her voice dripping with disbelief. “No way this holds up in court.”

  “Who’s going to challenge it? I thought you agreed—”

  “I never agreed to anything. I just had a setback when my attorney was killed. I’ve got a new attorney. Sandra Hughes is redoing the contract.”

  So she was back to boxing with God. “Knock yourself out.”

  “By the way, Mom thinks she has superpowers.”

  “Not that again. She also thinks she has a cat,” Charlie said. “Bounce. I keep kicking the food dish.”

  “We had to put her to sleep just before Christmas.”