Joey Mills

by Crowe (epub)

  “It’s our time, Johnny. I need you to lead the army I’ve prepared against these hurtful people. Think about it. You’ve seen what they do to one another, not just the small sleights here in Fiddler’s Picket, but the big hurts as well. You’ve seen what happens when they go to war. You can help me end this, once and for all.”

  Johnny looked into Scratch’s eyes and saw that the light inside them had softened. Still, the light that lit them came from Hell itself, Johnny was sure of that. It’s just a trick, he thought. Not all that different from the one he used that first night when he took off my arm in the woods. Ain’t that funny? Here we are again, standin’ in the woods, only what is it he wants to take from me this time?

  Another thought crept into Johnny’s head. The voice that spoke sounded nothing like Grandpa Crowe, he thought it sounded a little like the old Mr. Scratch, or maybe Saul Samuels. Does it matter? You saw her kissin’ someone else. Do you have anythin’ left to lose?

  “Fine,” Johnny said.

  The Devil straightened and roared with laughter. Around them, Johnny heard the flames crackle and trees snap and fall. “I knew you’d see reason! That’s why I gave you that head of yours.”

  “Uh… no,” said Johnny. “What I meant was, ‘fine… take it all back’.”

  The Devil looked down at Johnny in stunned silence. He seemed somehow diminished, as if Johnny’s words had taken something out of him.

  “You realize that I won’t put you out this time?” Scratch snarled. All around, ghoulish surgeons stepped out of the flames, their sinister knives drawn, awaiting their master’s orders.

  Johnny looked from the imps to the surgeons and back to Scratch, a faint smile touching his lips. I knew I hadn’t made it all up. “Like you said,” Johnny droned, “I can’t feel anythin’.”

  The truth of the matter was that Johnny felt every bit of it. Every stitch torn. Every bit of flesh and bone sawed through. Soon, the maddening pumping and hissing was replaced with the familiar ah ha ha’s, oh ho ho’s, and hehehehehehehe’s, but still Johnny made no sound. Yes, he felt the pain of it all when the imps dug their claws into his skin, holding him down and the surgeons hacked away. In spite of the pain, a smile touched Johnny’s lips. He realized he felt one other thing as well. Regret.

  The next morning, folks in the town of Fiddler’s Picket and the surrounding farms awoke and went about the daily business of living. A few of them also discovered that someone had pinched a few items from them in the night; a burlap sack here or a broom there. Farmer Dugan was missing a fence post while someone had swiped a pair of britches from the line that ran in back of Doc Lawson’s place. No one knew what to make of the thievery, and since it wasn’t much, no one raised too big of a fuss, no one except the Doc.

  Anna Lee awoke and went out into the field to finish the work she had started the day before, which had been interrupted when Mr. Samuels had snuck up on her and kissed her. She hadn’t slept well that night. The fact that he would be expecting an answer soon gnawed away at her in the darkness of the night. Plus, there were the dreams, too. When she had managed to drift off to sleep, she had dreamt that the orchard next to their place had been burning and that somehow Johnny had been trapped inside. She had heard him screaming in her mind and had sat bolt upright in bed. In the sanity of the new morning, she looked across the field and saw that the orchard looked just like it always did. It was so real, though, she thought, remembering the fire from her nightmares.

  She had been so caught up with the orchard and her own visions that Anna Lee startled to see someone standing alone in the middle of the field. Fear gripped her and her insides felt all watery. It’s him, she thought, but knew right away that it couldn’t have been Mr. Samuels. Whoever it was, this fella was much thinner and taller than Mr. Samuels. She waited for the stranger to approach, but he made no move to do so. This is silly, she thought. This is my father’s land. I’ll not be afraid to walk around it.

  Anna Lee started across the field, realizing just how silly she had been. This wasn’t some stranger at all. She had let her mind slip away for a minute, what with that creepy Mr. Samuels poking around somewhere, and hadn’t even recognized what she had mistaken to be a man for what it really was. A nervous laugh escaped her and Anna Lee felt tears of relief spill down her cheeks. Her father must have put up the new scarecrow before he left for town this morning. She studied the burlap sack head and the broomstick that served for an arm. She ran her hands over the cloth of its shirt and pants, feeling the posts that were the scarecrow’s legs underneath the fabric.

  Anna Lee smiled. It was like a talisman, as if her father had known that something had troubled his daughter and he had put it here just for her, to ward off bad spirits. Or bad men, she thought with a shudder. Having it here already made her feel safer, and she began to hum a hymn while she got to work.

  “Hey, Stupid.”

  Johnny opened his one good eye and looked around. The world had taken on a fuzzy, unreal quality when looking at with a burlap sack over one’s head. It was still morning, judging by the quality of the light, the chill in the air, and the frost still covering the ground. Johnny could have sworn that he heard someone talking, but a quick scan of the field revealed no one and no footprints in the frost. Johnny closed his eye and tried to go back to sleep, hoping to escape the pain and the cold that wracked his body.

  “I said, ‘Hey’.” Something sharp stabbed Johnny on the cheek, drawing blood. “You there, Stupid?”

  Johnny turned his head toward the voice. When he did, great black wings flapped in his face, followed by a raucous “Caw!”

  Johnny looked across the field once more, but still didn’t see anyone. Won’t be able to get back to sleep now, he thought. Johnny heaved a sigh and turned his eye toward the house, waiting for Anna Lee.

  For the past few weeks, Johnny had hung here on this pole, watching over Anna Lee while she worked the field, doing the chores of the small farm. A time or two he had seen the man that she had been kissing, usually in the evenings around supper time, going to and from the house, but had never gotten a good look at the guy. Not that it mattered much to Johnny. Anna Lee had found another man while he had away, that was what mattered. After all he had been through and all he had done to get back home to her, she had gone off and found someone else. Johnny felt like little more than a shell of the man he had once been. It seemed fitting to him that after those demonic surgeons had their way with him, removing all the pieces and parts that the Devil had fitted him with, that Johnny had taken what he needed from the surrounding farms and houses and crawled up here on this pole, a living scarecrow, forced to watch over Anna Lee until the day she married and left with her new husband. Johnny didn’t know what he’d do when that day came; maybe he’d crawl into a ditch somewhere and wait for the winter to worm its way into his bones and take him away from all the pain and suffering he had known.

  After a time, Johnny wasn’t sure how long since time didn’t mean much when you spent your days hanging from a pole, the crow returned and landed on the ground in front of him. Johnny watched it turn its head first to one side, then the other, as if trying to decide whether the hanging man was a threat. The crow hopped forward, then back, quick as a hiccup. The black bird cocked its head to one side, then took flight. It circled once, then landed on Johnny’s shoulder.

  “Hey, Stupid,” the crow said.

  Johnny turned his head, more slowly this time, to look at the bird. It hopped back along the broomstick that jutted out from Johnny’s left shoulder and served as his arm. The two looked at one another in silence, then the crow hopped back up onto Johnny’s shoulder.

  “You gave me a start, just then,” the crow said.

  “Yeah, well you gave me a bloody cheek.”

  “You can talk?” asked the crow. “I never heard of a scarecrow that could talk.”

  “Well,” said J
ohnny, “I never heard of a talkin’ crow, neither.”

  The bird cocked its head again. “Ain’t that something?”

  Neither spoke for a time. Johnny had gone back to watching the house and had forgotten all about the bird on his shoulder, when it spoke again.

  “You ain’t a real scarecrow, are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way I see it, real scarecrows don’t move their heads. I been in a lot of fields and poked a lot of real scarecrows in the head and said ‘Hey, Stupid’ to them, and ain’t none of them never turned round and looked at me before.”

  “Plus,” added the bird, “you ain’t all that scary.”

  Johnny chuckled, which caused the bird to fly off again. The laughing hurt, it sent a wave of pain throughout his chest and started him coughing, which hurt even worse. He hung from the pole, tired and sore, feeling as though he might pass out again. Johnny had started to doze off when the crow returned and landed on top of his head.

  “Don’t do that again,” said the bird.

  “Yeah,” agreed Johnny, “I’ll try not to.”

  “So, like I was saying, you ain’t a real scarecrow.”

  “Maybe I am,” said Johnny, “and maybe I ain’t.”

  “You ain’t,” said the crow. “So then, why you up here? Just hanging around?”

  Johnny thought about how silly it would look to anyone who came upon them right then, him talking to a crow. Of course, the only one who might see them would be Anna Lee, coming out to the field. If he kept his eye on the house, then he would see her coming long before she’d ever hear him.

  “I was in love,” Johnny said.

  The crow cawed, “Yeah, I was in love once, too.”

  “Well,” Johnny said, “I went off and left her. I joined the army. Wanted to be somebody. While I was gone, she found someone else. I seen them kissin’ out here a few weeks ago.”

  “That straw-headed girl that lives here?” the crow asked.

  “Anna Lee,” corrected Johnny.

  “Yeah. I seen her and her man about. He came in before it turned cold, a little more than a moon ago.”

  Johnny considered what the crow had said. If I’d made it back even a month earlier... But it was no use thinking like that. All part of the Devil’s plans, I’m sure. “I guess she just got tired of waitin’ on me,” he said. “Guess she didn’t think I was ever comin’ back.”

  “Did she love you?” asked the crow.

  “Yeah,” said Johnny. “She said she did.”

  “And did you believe her?”

  Johnny nodded, careful not to upset the bird.

  “Then it don’t sound to me like you ever should’ve left,” said the crow.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, you said you took off so you could go be somebody. Sounds to me like you already were somebody, at least to that straw-headed girl.”

  The crow cawed once more, then took flight. Anna Lee was coming down from the house to the field.

  The sky turned overcast by mid-day, blowing in a cold, fine mist with it. Anna Lee didn’t stay in the field long, what work she did was distracted and haphazard. Johnny noticed that she kept looking over her shoulder, as if expecting she was expecting someone. Her hair was pulled back like always, but Johnny noticed that it, too, was a sloppy job, as if she had gotten dressed and out here in a hurry this morning. He figured that she must have been planning to meet her suitor out here all alone, but for whatever reason, he never came. Maybe it was the weather.

  When she had gone back up to the house, the mist turned to a steady drizzle. Johnny thought about the way she had looked. She hadn’t been singing hymns while she worked, which she was wont to do. No, he thought, she looked less like she wanted to see someone and more like she was hidin’ from someone. She looked like she was trapped and was tryin’ to figure out how to get out.

  Evening came early. The clouds that had covered the sky throughout the day had settled even lower, blanketing the ground in a thick fog. Johnny was soaked through, but took some consolation in the fact that the fog would keep the frost away tonight. Though he couldn’t see the moon, Johnny knew that it was nearly full. It was going to be one of those nights where true dark never could set all the way in. The fog blurred the edges of shapes and washed the color out of the nighttime world, giving it a haunted look.

  A dark shape circled twice past Johnny’s head, gliding by in the eerie light. He heard the beating of its wings as it slowed its descent and perched on his broomstick arm.

  “You still here?” the crow asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnny replied. “Still here.”

  “Thought so. Hard to see in all this fog, but you’re hard to miss, you’re so damn ugly. Anyhow, I found your friend.”

  “What friend?” Johnny asked, but the crow didn’t hear him.

  “Over here!” it cawed into the fog, then took off again.

  Something made its way across the field toward Johnny. Coming closer, Johnny recognized it as the silhouette of a man, though he couldn’t imagine who the crow had meant when he said it belonged to Johnny’s friend. All of his friends were dead and gone. The form became more defined and the lines sharpened until he recognized the ghost standing before him.

  “Emmit!”

  Emmit smiled and nodded. “What you doin’ up there on that pole, Johnny?”

  “Ain’t got nowhere else to be.”

  Emmit shook his head and his smile faded. “Well, ain’t that just the saddest thing.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  Emmit thrust his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet, which left no trace in the cold soil. “After you ‘elped us, me and the others tried to return to our ‘omes. See, we weren’t scared to… pass on, you might say.”

  “Pass on?”

  “You know… move on to whatever’s next. It’s lonely bein’ a ghost. You ‘ang around and try to ‘ang on to life, but you ain’t really livin’ no more. You ain’t really ‘ere.” Emmit kicked the ground with the toe of his boot and it passed through the ground without disturbing the dirt. “You see what I mean?”

  “Yeah.” Johnny nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “Bein’ together at the camp… that ‘elped a little. We was with others like us, so the loneliness weren’t so bad. But we was scared. Some of us knew we was dead and some of us didn’t, so we ‘ung on. We was afraid to face the truth and let go, so we kept fightin’ and ‘angin’ around just a little while longer. Only you put an end to that.”

  Johnny swallowed the hard lump in his throat. “Listen, I only thought… I’m sorry if ---”

  Emmit raised a hand and cut Johnny off. “Don’t say that. It was a good thing you done for us. You freed us up so we could move on. Only…”

  “Only that didn’t happen, did it?” Johnny asked.

  Emmit gave Johnny a rueful smile. “If it ‘ad, I wouldn’t be standin’ ‘ere, would I?”

  “No,” Johnny shook his head.

  “We tried to get on. Some of us went ‘ome to settle our minds… see our families one last time and so on. Some of us ‘ad graves to welcome us, others of us just planned to lie down and wait the angels to carry us to ‘eaven. But we was restless. There weren’t no peace for us, so we took to wanderin’ again. That’s when a bunch of us met back up.”

  “You fellas got back together?”

  “Yeah. You see, us ghosts are drawn to death. We’re like a dog ‘untin’ a rabbit. It’s like we can smell it or somethin’. So, a bunch of us came up on a pile of dead bodies a ways back.” Emmit pointed off to toward the mountains. “Back that way. It weren’t a pretty sight. There was crows all around, pickin’ at what flesh was left on them bones.”

  Just thinking about the scene made Johnny’s stom
ach sour.

  “But that weren’t the strangest part of it. We started rootin’ around those bodies, lookin’ to see if there was any ghosts in there, and you know what we found?”

  Johnny nodded. He knew what Emmit was about to say before his friend said it.

  “They wasn’t bodies at all. Just body parts, all wounded up. Like someone ‘ad dumped them there. Some of them was fresher than the others, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “Anyhow,” Emmit continued, “there was this one crow, talkin’ about this fella ‘e saw pretendin’ to be a scarecrow ‘cause the girl ‘e love done went off and left ‘im. Well, I got to listenin’ in, and when the crow started describin’ this fella, I got to thinkin’ about you and remembered that you was from around these parts. And when ‘e said that ‘e’d found a bag with “War Department” on the side layin’ on the edge of the orchard, well, I just knew it ‘ad to be you ‘e was talkin’ about.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Johnny said.

  “I know,” said Emmit. “I never ‘eard tell of a crow that could read. Well, I went up to this crow and asked ‘e could take me to this scarecrow fella, and ‘e said yeah, ‘e could… and ‘ere I am.”

  “Listen, Emmit… I ---”

  “No,” Emmit interrupted, his tone much more serious, “you listen to me, Johnny Crowe. You done me a good turn by givin’ me my papers, now I’m goin’ to do right by you. Some of the fellas, well, they weren’t content just to sit back and accept that a pile of body parts just managed to up and discard themselves in a ditch off of the main path through the mountains, so they went nosin’ around. I got to tell you, Johnny, there’s a war a comin’, and we need your ‘elp again.”

  Johnny shook his head. “I’m done with the war, Emmit. I did my time and look where it got me.”

  “Not that war,” Emmit said. “The Devil’s war.”

  “I know,” said Johnny. “He wanted me to lead his army.”

  Emmit’s eyes grew wide. “’e did?”