by Tony Earley
Jack snorted. “I don’t think you owe me anything else, considering.”
“You’re right. I don’t owe you a thing. But now that it’s clearing up you’re gonna need to set out here pretty soon.”
Jack hadn’t noticed that the rain had stopped. He stood and stared up at the sky. The cloud still pondered by just above the level of the treetops, but white shreds of it had begun to waft loose and skim away. Water nattered down through the leaves of the laurel on the ridge behind the yard, and dripped from the wood of the balsam firs and oaks and rhododendron fronting the house. Somewhere farther off a creek loosed from its banks uproared through the countryside. Funny, as soon as he realized that the rain had passed, he began to cold-shimmy inside his soused overalls.
“I don’t care to set out,” Jack said. “This has been one toilsome tale and I am fain to settle. Can’t I just light here for a spell?”
“’Fraid not, Jack. The old woman’s people’ll be flying in here directly and they’re gonna want to eat your liver, and since the storm stopped squalling that black dog is bound to be about. You need to leave this settlement and cross the creek before the water gets up over the bridge.”
“What’s on the other side of the bridge?”
“Yonder, I reckon.” The old man picked up a chamber pot and wrinkled his nose and slung it aside. He hoisted a frying pan by the handle and tested its weight before tossing it after the chamber pot.
“Well. What’s in Yonder?”
“I can’t witch it out, Jack, to be fair with you. Nobody knows what lies in Yonder. All I can tell you is, it’s where you got to go.” The old man lifted a soup pot smashed nearly flat and looked at Jack through a jagged hole ripped in its blackened bottom. “The old woman used to boil squirrels in this. Have you ever eat a boiled squirrel?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Jack said.
“I don’t endorse it,” the old man said. He dropped the pan onto the rubble at his feet and gave it a kick.
“So what happens if I don’t cross the bridge?” Jack asked. “What if I don’t go to Yonder? The last time I tried to cross a bridge, all hell broke loose.”
“Jack, honey, listen to me. I hate to say it, but you don’t matter up in here no more. Your name is almost forgot. If you stay in this settlement, the black dog’s gonna run you to ground, and nobody will never hear tell of you again. At least in Yonder there might be a new tale for you to set out in. Surely a character with your qualifications is bound to catch on in some kind of story.”
Jack considered the proposition. He was still that Jack enough to desire whatever attention he might find setting out in a new settlement, but he wasn’t sure he had the courage to cross the bridge. What if worse things happened in the stories over there than the bad things that were happening over here? And worse yet, what if there weren’t any tales over there at all?
“You think I might turn into a regular man over there?”
The old man cocked his head and considered Jack for a spell. “Well, that’s a thought,” he said, “or you could stay a story man and a giant could gobble you in one chomp like you was a hushpuppy. Ain’t no telling.” The old man picked up and eyeballed a saucepan, then tossed it over his shoulder.
“I’m afraid to go to Yonder,” Jack said, surprising himself. It was the first time he had ever said those words out loud.
“Well, you oughta be.” The old man pawed into a splintery pile of roofing shakes and extracted a five-gallon wooden bucket that looked as ancient as the old man himself. Its slatted sides were gray and splintery, its rope bail frayed. The old man lifted the bucket triumphantly and grinned. He picked his way out of the wreckage and presented the bucket to Jack. “There you go.”
Jack looked down at the pail, then up at the old man. “It’s a bucket,” he said.
“Well, it’s all I got. Just hush and come on.” The old man led Jack up through the yard toward the ridge, where behind the last of the empty outbuildings he showed Jack a water pump. “Fill it up.”
“Is it magic water?”
“Naw, it’s just water. Go on. Pump. All the way to the top, now.”
The pump handle screeched each time Jack lifted it, but a staunch stream of water spurted from the pipe nonetheless. Astonishingly, the pail didn’t prove porous. When water began to spill over the lip, Jack grabbed up the bucket and put it back down. “Old Man?” he said. “A five-gallon bucket filled with water makes for a portly pail. Do vessels such as this come in a smaller displacement?”
The old man stared at Jack. “No,” he said, with clear distaste.
“How about I pour out half this water, and in effect make it a two-and-a-half-gallon bucket? You know, travel-sized.”
“Listen at you,” the old man said. “These are dark days.” He turned and started down the hill.
“It ain’t no silver sword, I’ll tell you that right now,” Jack mumbled to himself. He picked up the bucket and scuffled after the old man. Both men stopped to gaze at the dead tree growing up out of the house rubble.
“Mercy,” the old man sighed. “Ain’t that a sight?” He continued down the hill toward the woods, but Jack stayed where he was.
“Aw, don’t tell me I gotta set out through a forest,” Jack whined. “You know nothing good ever happens in a forest. Giants clearing new ground, witches waving the flies off their candy houses, unicorns looking to horn you. And without magic truck to tote I’d have to run like a beagled rabbit.”
“Boy, don’t make me come up there and throw a snake at you.” The old man pointed at a narrow path striking out through the trees. “You’ll be all right in these here woods,” he said. “Just keep to the trail till you get to the muddy red road.”
“The muddy red road?”
“Yes, follow the muddy red road.”
“Follow the muddy red road.”
“Correct, but let’s not say it again,” the old man warned. “It might grow tiresome.”
Jack gazed down the darkening path. From the distance came the continuous breathing of water-roar. “I don’t want to go down in there,” he said.
“I know you don’t, honey,” the old man said. “But you need to get on. You ain’t got many pages left this side of the bridge.”
“Why don’t you come with me?” Jack asked. “Think of the adventures we could have, the mischief we could make, the swag we could swipe, the tales people would tell after we passed on through. Jack and the Mostly Good Witch. Why, you could spell us up a flying boat and off we would go.”
“You know I can’t make flying boats no more, Jack. And besides, I’m a subsidiary character. I’ve took you as far as I can take you. I’ve done what I was supposed to do. I give you what I had to give.” He pointed at the pail. “And whatever you do—and you listen hard, here, boy—you keep that bucket full of water. You hear me?”
“I will. I promise,” Jack said.
“And it will grow wearisome heavy. I am sorry about that.”
“I’m still that Jack, somewhat. I’ll manage.”
The old man grabbed Jack’s arm, his witch’s grip hard as a hawk-strike. His eyes bleared over with tears, and his chin began to jitter. “Jack…” he began. He swallowed hard and started over. “Jack, if I’d ever had a son of my own, I would’ve wanted him in some ways to be a little like you.”
Jack opened his mouth to thank the old man, and to ask him to let go of his arm, but the old man vanished as suddenly as the sisters in the wheat field, as thoroughly as Tom Dooley into the tempest. He whirled around, slopping a little water out of the bucket as he spun, searching this way and that, but he found that he was alone. “Gotdoggit!” Jack barked. “I’m getting tired of that trick.”
Jack found that the clearing had sprouted over with broom sedge and waist-high blackberry briars, and the outbuildings had moldered away. The tree lay on its side, its lone remaining limb beckoning from the bramble like the waving arm of a drowning giant. Only the chimney pile, barely visible in the brush, suggested
that a house had ever stood there. Jack choked back a hiccupping sob, his heart iced over with grief. Aside from Mama and his good-for-nothing brothers, the old man had been the first person he had ever known. Sometimes, as he sidled into sleep, it seemed as if there had been another, a somebody else, calling his name, but he was never able to find her.
Just as he stepped onto the forest trail he heard behind him the unmistakable thump of a brick hitting the ground. When he turned he saw, wafting above the toppled chimney, the smoky revenant of an old woman holding a brick over her head. She wound up and heaved another after Jack, although it didn’t travel far. He tapped his brow at her in salute. Good, he thought, every fell-down homeplace needed a haint, and a witch haint would be better still. He hoped some lonesome stranger would stray back this way some moonless midnight and she would fright the shit out of him.
Jack eased warily through the woods but no sound reached his hearing save the rush of the flood rising ahead and the bucket chafing against his overall leg and raindrops ticking leaf to leaf on their way down to the forest floor. No giants crashed out of the laurel bellowing their poorly rhymed, Englishman nonsense; no witches stepped into the trail smiling their snaggle-toothed sex smiles, cooing their murderous invitations. The ground was devoid of unicorn sign, and not even a squirrel cast aspersions in his direction. It was disorienting, traveling through a dark forest without running up on something that needed to be outsmarted, diddled, or killed. Waiting for something to happen when it didn’t happen proved to be about as scary as the happenings that had.
By the time Jack reached the muddy red road his shoulders were searing from boosting the bucket, and the skin had begun to peel from his palms. He put the water down, cupped his hands, and took a long drink from the pail. What difference could one draught make? He was, after all, toting water to a flood. Jack couldn’t yet see the cataracting creek, but the pounding sounded nigh. He stood on the roadside and looked this way and that. Which way was up the lane and which way was down? The old man had told him to follow the muddy red road, but hadn’t told him which direction. It was just like a daggum witch to make a riddle out of something as simple as turn left or turn right. And the bridge was as likely to be upstream as it was down.
Then Jack noticed the black dog’s tracks headed down the pike (or up, depending) in a rabid path as straight as a plumb line. Each of the prints was as wide as a pie plate, with claw marks long as penknives. His first impulse, of course, was to light out in the opposite direction. Since the black dog was looking for him, going where the dog wasn’t seemed only intelligent; intuitively, though, he knew that in order for this tale to reach its denouement he had to track it to where it was. In the cruelest of conundrums, he had to cross the bridge to get away from the dog, while the bridge was exactly the spot the dog would be. And he had to get to the other side before the flood made the crossing impossible. Jack glanced at the bucket sitting at his feet and briefly considered leaving it behind (typically he never bore any load more burdensome than a bite of dinner), but it was the last thing the old man would ever give him, and worth carrying for no other reason. He hefted it with a wince and set out after the dog.
The road-mud measured ankle-deep and within steps it mounded around Jack’s boots into blocks of mire roughly the size of baking-weight possums. His brogans glopped from the muck with sick sucking sounds. The dog tracks filled with seep and looked painted onto the road rather than sunken into it. He rounded each crook expecting to sight the convergence of road, creek, bridge, and dog with which this story was destined to collide, but instead beheld only the next bow in his path.
Just as the torrent’s tumult grew so clamorous that Jack’s brain began to shout the thoughts inside his head so that he might hear them, the flood bucked into view on his right, walloping wildly through the woods. Young trees caught in the careen slapped at the rising water, while stinking slicks of bank trash sluiced among them. The waves out in the main channel seemed to Jack to rear higher than the ground on which he stood, leaving him with the unsettling impression of looking up at the rapid. He could have been facing a giant so seized with fury that no amount of magic truck could’ve held it at bay. Rather than running away from the giant, however, Jack struggled alongside it. He wrenched one foot at a time free from the ooze, and the bucket banged at his knee. The mud prevented him from quickening this clumping pace, and he watched with rising worry as the water lapped ever closer the road. He hoped the bridge was a high one with mighty timbers and planking cut from ancient trees. A galvanized washtub rode regally atop the rapid as it shot downstream. A pair of raccoon kits clung forlornly to a sweet gum swaying twenty yards out in the current. The body of a yellow cat bobbed in an eddy atop a sodden platter of broom straw and sticks. Jack spewed profane invective at the old man for abandoning him in such a place.
When Jack spied the dog he stepped behind the nearest tree and scouted the situation with the cool eye of a practiced plunderer. It paced stiff-legged before the approach to a narrow wooden bridge that spanned a wide hollow almost topped by the fusillading flood. The dog was behaving strangely, even for a talking beast. Every few feet it stopped pacing, shook each one of its paws, looked back over its shoulder at the heaving creek, and started pacing again.
Across the bridge the muddy red road disappeared into the Yonder woods (which to Jack looked no different from the woods of the settlement) but reappeared in the distance switchbacking up a green hill toward an edifice at the top that Jack could not identify. The building was one story high and three stories long and seemed to be made out of metal. If it was a castle, it was the strangest one Jack had ever seen. The sight of it, however, inexplicably jolted his heart with joy. He didn’t know what the container contained, but was certain that it toted treasure of the rarest kind, the riches he had sought in all his setting out, the hoard he had hoped for all of his days. And it seemed to him, too, in a way he could not explain, that the treasure it held had once been his. But his longing for it made little sense. Jack was not the nostalgic type. To him one kind of boodle was as good as another, and all of it was easier to spend than to shoulder. Yet he knew that if he ever got his hands on the treasure in the metal box he would never let it go; if he ever made it to the top of that hill he would never come down again.
He switched the bucket from his right hand to his left and attempted to form a plan to get himself across the flood unchewed. All he came up with was walking toward the dog hoping that he would think of something along the way. As far as plans went, this one seemed ill-considered, even by Jack’s lax standards.
When the dog saw Jack it checked over its shoulder once more, took a few brittle steps toward him, and sat down on its haunches as if it were a good boy. Jack looked again at the white box on the hill and felt the dark rooms inside his chest warming with lamplight. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and started forward; the dog sat still and stared at Jack as he approached. It was even uglier in the daylight than it had been in the dark. Its head was as big as a salt block, but the tiny ears perched atop it looked as if they had been appropriated from a much smaller dog—perhaps one wearing a sweater. Beneath its pounded-flat pug face swung a tongue long enough to outfit two treeing redbones and a yapping fice. Opalescent slings of slobber dangled from its chuffing jowls. Jack stopped twenty yards or so away. The water had risen to roughly a possum tail from the bottom of the bridge.
“Howdy, Daddy,” Jack called.
The dog squinted and mouthed, “What?” but Jack couldn’t hear its voice over the boom of the flood. He willed himself to move closer and raised his voice.
“I said, ‘Speak, boy!’”
The dog growled a spitty laugh. “Your adolescent jabs at humor wound me.”
“Good dog!” Jack said.
The dog cocked an ear slightly toward the water boom, took three steps forward, and sat down again.
Jack backed up a corresponding distance and pointed at the far side of the creek with his chin. “Look, Toto, I need t
o get over there,” he said.
“We’ve been over this bridge business, Jack. Do you want me to latch you now with my rabid bite, or after we watch the creek wash the bridge away?”
“Let me think on that.”
“Take your time,” the dog said. “The water’s risen six inches in the last ten minutes.”
“Bingo, I don’t have time for this. I have business to tend to in Yonder.”
“Oh, please, Jack. I find your delusions almost touching. There’s nothing for you in Yonder, as there is nothing for you here. Nobody tells stories anymore. The time of your kind has passed. Let’s get this over with.”
At that moment, the italicized voice of the old man spoke clearly inside Jack’s head: Jack. Use the bucket. Jack looked down at the water he had drawn from the old man’s well, then grinned up at the dog. Bless you, Old Man, he thought.
“What’s in the bucket?” the dog asked.
“It,” Jack said.
“What’s ‘it’?”
“It says not to tell you.”
“I’m not stupid,” the dog sneered. “Pronouns don’t talk.”
“You don’t say,” Jack said.
“That’s enough!” snapped the dog. “You go too far with this wordplay.” It craned forward and snuffled loudly. “Truly, what’s in the bucket? Tell me now or suffer for your reticence.” It stood slowly, its hackles high. As it growled a bouquet of slobber and foam bloomed from its nostrils and mouth.
Behind the dog the flood had almost reached the bridge deck.
“Okay, Sparky,” Jack said. “You win. It’s water.”
The dog’s spine ridge unhackled. It looked at the bucket, then up at Jack. It backed a step toward the flood. One at a time it lifted and shook its paws. “I don’t believe you,” it said. “You usually travel with a bite of dinner but not a drop to drink.”
Jack carefully poured a small stream from the bucket onto the ground. “That’s water, all right,” Jack said. “Cool, clear water. Now I know why you didn’t get after us in that rainstorm.”