Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels)

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Ain’t nothing to me,” he said as he turned off the old radio and settled into the wooden rocker before the fire. He picked up an old quilt and arranged it over his legs. “She turned her back on me when I needed her most. When the last leaf falls off the Widow’s Tree, she’ll be gone. No more of that damned howling all night.”

  Bliss knelt and shoved the chair around so that he had to face her. “You made a big tactical error with her, Rockhouse. You backed her into a place where she doesn’t feel like she has anything to lose. What happens if she decides the hell with you and your rules?”

  “Hmph,” he said. He spit into the fire, and it sizzled. “That girl ain’t got long. Then it won’t be nobody’s problem no more.”

  She stood and walked away, fighting the urge to make him follow his saliva into the fire. It was hard to remember that this tired, pathetic creature was also the mean, vindictive monster who sowed malice and spite from the post office porch. What did it feel like to live alone, in one room beneath the top of a mountain so isolated, no one ever visited unless they were pissed off enough to make the climb? To know that you inspired only hatred, fear, or disgust? But then she remembered all he’d done, and her pity burned away like his spit.

  A small object on the table caught her eye. She picked up a tiny ax, no more than five inches long. Its metal head gleamed, and the edge shone like a scalpel. Beside it rested a walnut. “Reliving past glories?” she said, with no attempt to minimize the sarcasm.

  “Kiss my ass, Bliss,” Rockhouse mumbled without looking.

  “And we got Yankees, too,” she said. “There’s one that Curnen’s been sniffing around.”

  “Ain’t Curnen that brought him to y’all’s barn dance, now, is it?”

  She ignored him. “And Stoney’s picked up a Yankee girl with a husband. That was stupid, Rockhouse, even for him. Now there’ll be all sorts of attention.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna find nothing they ain’t supposed to find. Always been the way. Still true.”

  “What if it’s not? What if things are slipping? What if the night winds want it that way?” When he didn’t reply, she slammed her hands on the table, and he jumped. The tiny ax fell to the floor. “Dammit, Rockhouse! This affects us all, not just your people! All the Tufa stand to lose now. If there’s any chance, we have to work together to stop it, or at least turn it aside so it glances off.”

  “Yeah?” he said contemptuously. “What’ll you do about it, Bliss? Sing a song?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I know the right song to sing.”

  “You know part of it,” he said. “And you can’t find the rest, not without Mandalay’s permission. And that little girl ain’t even bleeding age yet. And as for them Yankees…” He trailed off with a cold little smile.

  “What?” she asked darkly.

  Now the Rockhouse everyone in Needsville feared turned and smiled up at her, his feebleness replaced by smug arrogance. “I know what that boy with you found out behind the fire station. I know he done told that other Yankee boy, the fat one with the wife, all about it. You think them rubbings are dangerous, but I done took care of them. And as for that gee-tar-playin’ boy … well, even though he’s probably caught up in your sister’s curse now, I didn’t want to wait. I done took care of him, too.”

  “What did you do?” Bliss demanded. Rockhouse’s grin faded, his eyes closed, and his chin dropped to his chest. “What did you do?” she repeated, and shook him. But although he still breathed, she knew he was no longer in the room.

  She drew back and slapped him so hard, it knocked him from the rocker, then left him sprawled on the uneven plank floor. The wind whined through the chimney when she threw open the door, momentarily causing the fire to flare up. That same wind rustled the trees above her all the way down to her truck.

  * * *

  Rob considered his strategy as he drove the deserted highway back to Needsville. He turned up the music, which always helped him think. Sirius was tuned to an all-bluegrass station, and he sang along with a sprightly version of “Shenandoah.”

  There was one solid hint about how to proceed. Something about that line from the epitaph had stopped Stoney dead the previous night, and even gotten Old Man Rockhouse’s attention. Why?

  As he topped a hill, an emu stood in the center of his lane. He didn’t want to pass it on the left, because he might collide with another car coming over the next rise. He stopped ten feet from the bird and honked, but the animal stayed put.

  He put the car in park and got out. He waved his hands at the bird. “Hey! Move, will ya!”

  The bird blinked. Then its head turned slightly, toward something behind Rob.

  He caught just the hint of a movement in the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him duck, and the ax handle swished through the space an instant earlier occupied by his head.

  He spun around. He was being ambushed.

  Well, fuck me, he thought. He looked Hispanic and had attended a Kansas City public high school, so he knew how to fight when he had to. And if they were swinging ax handles at him, he definitely had to.

  Rob dived right at the man who’d tried to blindside him and tackled him to the pavement. The ax handle skidded away across the blacktop. He straddled his attacker’s chest and punched him in the face, sending a jolt of pain through his own hand. The guy clutched his nose and cried, “Shit!” He had black hair and dark Tufa skin, and looked barely old enough to drive.

  Then someone else hit Rob hard across the back with what felt like a baseball bat. He cried out in agony and surprise, then reflexively jumped to his feet. The blow made him gasp for air. He kicked the fallen man hard in the groin to put him out of commission, then turned to face the second attacker, his fury rising until it blanked out any sensation of pain. “Come on, you son of a bitch!” Rob croaked.

  The second man, also a young Tufa, brandished a shiny aluminum bat and took a wild, clumsy swing that Rob easily avoided. Despite the pain, he body-blocked the second man into the car’s fender. The bat clanged off the hood and landed in the road. Rob head-butted the man and drove his knee hard into his crotch. With a thin moan of pain, the second man joined his friend on the ground.

  Rob blinked, momentarily dazed by the skull-to-skull contact, then retrieved the baseball bat and stood over the two men. Both curled fetally and clutched their groins.

  His back felt numb and hot, but he knew the pain would return soon enough. The urge to pound them into hamburger was incredibly strong, but he managed to hold back. “What the hell!” he yelled at the two. “Who the hell are you guys?”

  “Get … the fuck out of Needsville,” the first man wheezed.

  Rob slammed the end of the bat against the pavement next to the man’s ear so hard, the tarmac cracked. “Says who? Stoney Hicks? Rockhouse?”

  “You just need to go, man,” the second man added, his voice whiny from pain. “Ain’t no songs for you here.”

  Rob felt under the driver’s seat for the can of spray paint he’d gotten from Doyle. He put one knee on the first man’s chest and sprayed bright red paint all over his hair and face. “I’ll know exactly who you are if I see you again, asshole,” he snarled. “Tell Hicks Junior and Senior that they need to send full-grown hillbillies next time.” He turned to mark the second man, but he’d already staggered off into the weeds, and Rob didn’t feel like chasing him.

  Beyond him, for just an instant, Rob thought he saw a third figure, wide and distinctive. But the shadow he imagined to be Rockhouse Hicks vanished the moment he looked straight at it.

  Breathing heavily, Rob got back into his car and, hands shaking, drove into town. He repeatedly counted to ten until his temper got back under his control.

  * * *

  Back in his room, he went into the bathroom and gently removed his shirt. A purple bruise ran across his shoulder blades, and it was already tender to the touch. A few inches up, and the guy would’ve knocked his head clean off. He dug out the piece of paper Doyle ha
d given him with Bliss’s phone number on it. He got no answer, and no machine picked up.

  Whom could he go to? The police would do nothing. Doyle had his own problems, and Bliss was unavailable. Even the only other stranger, Terry Kizer, had left town. He was on his own.

  He paced for a long time, trying to walk off the rush from the fight. Finally an idea struck him. He turned on his laptop and searched for the address of the closest public library. He wanted archives of the local newspapers, to verify Doyle’s story of Stoney Hicks’s former flames. If he could show Stella that the big lunk was such bad news that his girlfriends actually died, perhaps she’d find the strength to break free of him.

  Needsville had no library or newspaper, which didn’t really surprise him, but a quick search revealed a library located in the nearby town of Cricket. The link to the library went through the town’s main Web site, where he found the odd description under the title, “Welcome Ye to Historic Cricket.”

  The world watched in 1875 as famous British author, statesman, and social reformer Roy Howard dedicated the new town of Cricket. It was to be a cooperative, class-free society, a Utopia where artisans, tradesmen, and farming families could build a new community through agriculture, temperance, and high moral principles. Today, in a gentle mountain setting little changed by twenty-first-century technology, this would-be Shangri-la survives. More than two dozen of its decorative, gabled buildings remain, and Cricket’s dual Victorian and Appalachian heritage is everywhere visible.

  A Victorian village in the middle of the Smoky Mountains? Why had he not run across this before? He clicked on the link to the library.

  Visitors to the Roy Howard Library will find it just as it was more than a century ago, when Cricket’s early colonists enjoyed its reading pleasures. The collection of Victorian period literature and all furnishings are original to the building. The library was the pride of the colonists and many first editions were donated by admirers and publishers, along with unique and notable works of art.

  He Googled directions, checked the library’s hours, then logged off and tried Bliss’s phone number again. He still got no answer. If she had caller ID, she’d think he was stalking her.

  21

  It took Rob an hour to drive to Cricket on the winding mountain roads. He had to sit ramrod straight the whole way, because reclining against the seat was too painful. The bruise across his back was now livid black, with purple and yellow edges, and it hurt to take deep breaths. This was turning into the most violent vacation of his life.

  As he approached the strange little town, he noticed that the area felt completely different from the countryside around Needsville. It was nothing he could identify, yet the sun seemed brighter, the breezes cleaner, and the trees less gnarled and voluptuous. It felt, he realized, normal.

  Finally he rounded a curve and arrived in Cricket. He felt as if he’d driven into a storybook. A dozen small, elaborate buildings lined the highway, all built in an unmistakably English style. They were painted in colorful pastels, and connected by wooden sidewalks. He parked next to the visitors’ center and went inside to ask directions to the library. The docent indicated the next building.

  A churchlike spire rose from the metal-plated roof of the Roy Howard Library. Despite the docent’s assurances, Rob thought at first the library was closed, since no light showed from within. When he tried the door, though, it opened with a gentle chime.

  The library’s interior consisted of one big room, with shelves along every available bit of the walls. There was, in fact, no real lighting, only the tall windows that managed to provide enough illumination, at least on a sunny day. There appeared to be no other patrons.

  The librarian, a tall woman with freckles and glasses, blinked in surprise at his black eye, but quickly masked it behind a professional smile. The nameplate on the circulation desk said THELMA BREWER. “Welcome to the Howard Library. I have to tell you not to touch anything without putting on these.” She tapped a box of disposable cotton gloves. “Were you looking for anything in particular?”

  Just before he asked about the newspaper, he had an idea, and dug out his phone. “Tell me, does this—” He showed her a photo of the tombstone with the inscription clearly visible. “—look familiar to you?”

  “The stone, or the words?”

  “The words.”

  She took his phone and looked it over. “I can’t quite make it out.”

  The inscription was perfectly clear to Rob, and he smiled wryly. “Hang on. Here’s what it says.” He quickly retrieved the cloud file with the transcribed words.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Yes, this is very familiar. Now where’s that book—?” She went to the card catalog. “Part of our charm is our complete lack of anything useful like a computer, on top of which the books here use an obsolete cataloging system. There’s not a volume here more recent than 1880.”

  “You must get a lot of requests from researchers.”

  “Not really. Most of what we have here is available in later editions in regular libraries. The physical volumes themselves are unique, but their contents aren’t. Except for, ironically, the one you want.” She found the card and went to one of the freestanding shelves.

  Rob patiently waited as she searched for the book, until a painting on the end of the shelf unit caught his eye. It was a small canvas, displayed in an outsized, carved wooden frame. A group of fairies—here we go again, he thought—stood among flowers and weeds, watching the fairy in the center. This subject’s face was hidden, but he wore an odd cap, and he raised a double-bladed ax above his head. Hickory nuts, scattered at his feet, seemed to be the blow’s target.

  Rob moved closer. It was really hard to see clearly, but he swore that the figure immediately to the right of the woodsman, watching with adoring eyes, looked familiar, down to her seeming awkwardness in her clothes.

  When he realized why, he got goose bumps along his arms. Even with the painting’s stylization, it was clearly the image of Curnen Overbay.

  That wasn’t the only familiar face, he realized. Directly across from the man with the ax, with an expression of mixed petulance and apprehension, was the old man from his dream, who’d sat on the stump of the gall-afflicted oak tree and complained about his foot. Here he hunched with his hands on his knees, a look of uncertainty and fear on his pointed little face.

  Rob was still staring when Ms. Brewer discreetly cleared her throat behind him. “Sir?”

  He turned around. “Did someone local paint this?”

  “My heavens, no. That’s a famous painting by Richard Dadd. The Fairy Fellers’ Master-Stroke. It’s one of our most prized pieces. And that’s not his watercolor copy, either. You’ll find that in London’s famous Tate Gallery. This little treasure is the original.”

  Rob looked around at its isolated location. It couldn’t be seen from the door, or even from most places in the room. “You don’t believe in showing it off.”

  “You’re not the first person to say that,” she chuckled. “We’ve left it exactly where it was when it was first placed here. The original residents of Cricket didn’t show it off, either. Now, watch this.” She took out a small pen-sized flashlight and moved the circle of illumination across the painting.

  The image was almost done in three dimensions, with layer upon layer of heavy oil paint creating a sense of depth. “Holy shit,” Rob whispered, then added quickly, “I mean—”

  “In this case, that reaction is entirely appropriate,” Ms. Brewer said. “Dadd painted on this one canvas for eight years while he was confined in an asylum after he killed his father.” She seemed happy to share information with someone who appreciated it. “Now, would you like to see your poem?”

  He followed her back to a reading table, where she opened a large and ornately illustrated book. Words in elaborate calligraphy covered the two displayed pages.

  “This book is The Secret Commonwealth. It’s a collection of Scottish fairy folklore written in 1690 by an Episcop
alian minister. It’s pretty well known, and the text itself is available on the Internet. But this particular edition has one very special addendum.”

  Gently she placed the book facedown and opened the back cover. A folded piece of paper lay nestled into the spine. Yellowed with age, it was thicker than normal paper and covered with handwritten words. The top edge had been glued to the inside of the cover.

  She very carefully unfolded it. “This poem is called ‘The Fate of the Tyrant Fae,’” Ms. Brewer said.

  “Who’s Fay?” Rob asked.

  “‘Fae’ is another term for fairy. Not in the Tinker Bell sense, but in the sense that the Fae were the original ancestors of the Celtic tribes. They occupied places like Ireland long before the Irish settled there.”

  He fought to sound nonchalant. “Fairies, eh? No kidding.”

  “Well, it’s folklore, of course, not anthropology. Although a lot of those New Agers claim that fairies are real, and that they can see them. I think they just spend too much time at their Renaissance Fairs and not enough time in the real world.” She tapped the poem with her cotton-gloved finger. “This is a verse epic about a man named Caisteal Guineach, who left Scotland to find the islands to the west, where people lived forever. There are many versions of this type of story in Gaelic literature.”

  Rob recognized two of the middle stanzas as the epitaphs, and smiled when he realized he’d been right about their order. Then he read the whole poem.

  A tyrant fae crossed the valley

  His list of pains he could not tally

  To his cause no one would rally

  And so he left to lead no more.

  His old and feeble feet did fail him

  His eyes grew dim and ears betrayed him

  The error of his ways assailed him

  As he came to a stranger’s door.

  With weakness spreading, he called aloud

  “I have no place to spread my shroud

  My folk are all beyond me now

  May I stay with you until I die?”