by Jeff Chapman
Her cries multiplied. Her movements became erratic. Her fingers dug into Salton’s shoulder blades. Equating her response to his prowess, he redoubled the fury of his lovemaking, his hooves clacking against the floor in time with his thrusts. Feena cried a long, diminishing scream, and then her arms went lax, sliding off Salton’s shoulders. Her eyes rolled back as white as snow, and she vanished, leaving Salton to thrash about in the pool of flower petals, unfulfilled and alone.
He leapt to his hooves, cursing whatever magic Lerhem had used to summon his daughter and defile their agreement. He grabbed his flute and ran toward the hemlock grove, shouting curses. “I’ll strip all the bark from his bole,” he swore, “and set a fire at its base.”
Dusk fell as he ascended the knoll to the grove, hoarse from running and shouting. The sun burned red to the west above the treetops. Salton stopped. The fading light flooded the grove unfiltered. Seven stumps, their tops hewn roughly with axes, sweeping to points and ridges like snow-covered mountains, marked what had once been. Sticky rivers of sap oozed from the wounds and trailed to the ground where woodchips lay scattered around each stump. Gold and green needles littered the ground, the hallowed ground of Salton’s love.
The great trees lay where they had fallen, all pointing east as was the woodsmen’s custom, some paean to the gods that Salton did not understand. He stumbled among the remains and counted six logs. The woodsmen had shorn the branches from two of them.
He knelt beside Feena’s stump. They had taken her. He roared, wrapping his arms and legs around her decapitated trunk, and mixed his tears with her sap until the sap liquefied and Salton’s tears and Feena’s blood ran together.
He rose when the moon shone overhead, its gray light touching upon the hallowed ground for the first time in centuries. The grove was silent and empty. Feena’s words echoed in his head. You brought the woodsmen. We shouldn’t leave them alone. But he had seen the woodsmen work before. Tomorrow, they would bring horses and more men.
He followed the trail left by Feena’s log, where the woodsmen had dragged it through the forest. The trail reeked of Feena. When he stepped from the woods into the garden behind the woodsmen’s cottage, a pair of dogs barked, but Salton silenced them with a few notes from his flute.
Stepping over the sleeping dogs, he searched the yard but Feena’s bole was gone, too valuable perhaps to leave unsecured.
Following her scent brought him to the woodpile where her smaller branches had been stacked to cure with the other firewood, pieces of his beloved reduced to kindling, fuel for the family’s cook fires.
He knelt before Feena’s remains, took up his flute and played a tune in a minor key that leapt and fell with a building frenzy. At first his body tingled, then it ached, then his blood burned through every vein, a poison to him and any creature.
With the last of his failing strength, he gashed his neck with his claws before collapsing across the stack of Feena’s branches. His blood boiled out of his neck and soaked the wood with toxins. The satyr’s body diminished and evaporated. Salton’s flute lay where he had dropped it, beside the woodpile and free of blood.
~~~
“Doran. Doran,” called his father from outside. His mother nodded, so Doran left his porridge to attend his father.
“Old Mrs. Cowper wants two bundles of wood. Take a satchel. She’ll have seven onions for you.”
He nodded and hurried inside to fetch a bag. An errand meant a trip through the village, a chance for something out of the ordinary to happen. His mother bade him to count the onions, and as he passed through the doorway, he met his older brother carrying firewood.
“The new hemlock,” said the eldest brother to his mother. “Father says it’s ready. That it’ll burn sweet and hot.”
“What?” said Doran. “I should be here when it burns.”
“There’s plenty of it to burn, little brother. We have all winter.”
“Your brother’s right,” said his mother. “Now you have a reason not to tarry.”
Doran frowned. Arguing would get him nowhere. He stomped outside where he tied the bundles of firewood and slung them over his back. He took off for the village, resentment driving his legs to a trot. He had led them to the hemlock grove. He should be the first to smell the wood burn.
Inside his tunic, the flute he had found beside the woodpile months before thumped against his chest with each stride. At least he had held the gold coins that the man at the mill had given his father for the logs. His father said they were now a rich family.
His trot slowed to a walk. He greeted the neighbors he passed but to their surprise did not stop to talk. The old woman Cowper put seven onions in his satchel, one at a time with a trembling hand. He set off for home, intending to follow the road and brook no distractions, but a sweet, young voice at a turn in the lane stopped him.
Amilee, the blacksmith’s daughter, beckoned to him from a stand of birches. Doran left the path for the trees. What was some smoking wood to Amilee’s bosom and lips? He had kissed her once, a hurried peck, but the memory had lingered for days. Her family guarded her virtue like a king his crown jewels. The father had ambitions for her marriage and a woodsman’s son did not figure into them.
But maybe, Doran thought, with the wealth of the hemlocks, his prospects had risen.
“Why haven’t you come to see me,” Amilee said, “to tell me all about the hemlocks?”
“You know why I don’t come to see you.” They threaded their way deeper among the birches. As always, she teased him without mercy.
“You should ask my father to be an apprentice.”
“And sweat over a hot fire all day?”
“And see me every day.”
“Apprentices aren’t rich, Amilee, but a finder of golden hemlocks is.”
“Will you find more? I would love to see one.”
“I don’t know. I might have a knack for it, so maybe.”
Doran sat beneath two birches whose boles joined at the ground. Purple and yellow wildflowers stared at the sun amid the grass cropped short by flocks of sheep on the common pasture. Amilee tucked her skirt under her legs as she joined him. Her black hair was braided into plaits tied behind her head. As an unmarried woman, she did not cover her hair.
“How did you find them?” she asked.
“It’s a secret.”
“Even from me?”
Doran touched the flute as he scratched his chest. “Listen to this. I’ve been practicing.” Notes tumbled from the flute as Doran blew into the reeds and some coalesced into a melody.
Amilee giggled. “You plan to be a bard now?”
Doran ignored her. Amilee swayed, weaving to the current of the song; her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. Doran played more as the music inspired him and Amilee seemed to enjoy it. She scooted closer, pressed her bosom against his arm and crossed her legs over his. The heat of her breath inflamed his cheeks like the bellows in her father’s forge.
He stared at the tops of her breasts exposed above her bodice and followed their curves to the crease in between. So close he could touch them with the slightest move of his hand from the flute. Her softness stirred his heart to beat in rhythm with his playing.
Amilee knocked the flute from his mouth as she smashed her lips against his, pushing with her legs as if to climb into his body. Doran had spied on his brother with a girl once, so he knew something of what to do, but Amilee took him for a ride. He held on to her, simultaneously aroused and put off by her aggression. He’d thought her a virgin; coy as a spring flower, maybe; but still a virgin.
Amilee turned her back as she tightened the lacings to secure her bodice. A red bruise marred her shoulder where he had bitten her. She fiddled with her sleeve to cover it but the fabric slid down after each attempt and the bruise peeked over the edge of the linen, like a red fox at the entrance of its den. Her bosom trembled as she sniffled.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
She turned to him and her eyes filled
with tears. One spilled over her lashes and streaked down her plump cheek. Never had she looked so beautiful and vulnerable, no longer the teasing flirt perpetually out of reach. He wanted to feel her again. He sat up and reached for her shoulder. Amilee slapped his hand away, striking his wrist so hard that he yelped. She jumped to her feet, pulled up her skirt, and dashed through the birch trees toward the road.
Doran rubbed the red mark on his wrist, wondering what he had done wrong. When he saw the bag of onions, he cursed himself and the girl. How long? The sun had passed noontime. His mother would be furious if she wanted those onions for supper, and she would tell his father to use a switch on him.
He took three long strides through the birches, stopped, cursed, and came rushing back to find his flute among the crushed wildflowers.
No smoke rose from the chimney as he approached the cottage. Very odd for midday. A sick sense of dread ushered away his fears of punishment when he stopped before the partially open door, hanging idly from its hinges. No talking, no clatter, no noise at all spilled from the house.
He pushed the door and it creaked. He had never heard it creak before, had never opened the door to silence. He stepped inside and let loose the bag of onions, which thudded on the floor. One rolled out and stopped against his brother’s arm. His family lay across the floor boards, their faces swollen and purple, their eyes bulging. An acrid smell fouled the room and wisps of yellow smoke wavered in the sunlight streaming through the windows. His eyes burned and he doubled over coughing.
He backed out the door and tripped, falling over and tumbling away from the cottage. As he lay on his stomach retching, he felt the flute against his breastbone...the flute that he’d found beside the woodpile, beside the hemlock wood.
Sutter’s Well
“You go on in and tell him what you told us.” Tom and his father stood on the weathered boardwalk outside the Sheriff's office. Tom’s father wore a helmet with a lamp affixed to the front and carried a shiny lunch bucket.
“What if he don’t believe me,” said Tom.
The man pressed his lips together with grim determination. His clean-shaven face was pale and washed, not like it would be when he came home, smudged and black. “Ain’t nothing wrong with telling the truth. It’s up to others to believe. Tell him what you saw and did.” The man slapped Tom on the back as he turned away and strode toward the mine.
Tom watched his father until he rounded a bend and disappeared behind the mining company store. The door handle beckoned like a hand offered. He couldn’t run home. His mother would bring him right back and his father would give him a switching. The Sheriff had already talked to the doctor. Jumping into the water after Hank, into the creek with that thing, he was beginning to think, was easier.
“Is that you out there, Tom?”
The Sheriff’s voice struck him like cold spring water to his face. “Yes, sir.” He tugged the handle of the screen door, which always swelled and stuck in the spring.
~~~
Tom and Hank topped Dead Mule Ridge with the morning sun warming their backs. Each boy carried a metal bucket—paint-chipped and rusted—and over their shoulders bamboo fishing poles bounced with their steps. A cord of rope cinched their patched and mended trousers whose hems stopped well above the boys’ ankles. They would outgrow the pants long before their mothers would allow them to fall apart. They wore no shoes and black dirt outlined the edges of their toenails.
For the last thirty yards the trail to the crest rose sharply and to conserve their breath for the climb, the boys had stopped talking about their brothers and sisters and the endless chores their mothers devised to keep their idle hands out of the devil’s influence. They shivered as they plunged into the shade of the ridge’s shadow among the pines whose needles still dripped with the morning dew. Like their grandfathers and fathers, they were destined for the coal shafts and their subconscious shuddered at any sudden withdrawal from the sun.
In the narrow valley below, little more than a crevice between the ancient mounds of rock, Whipahonic Creek splashed over stones in a slashing white fury stoked with spring rains and snowmelt. Only Tom’s grandmother remembered a winter so furious with snow, but all the men had found extra work digging out trains caught in snow drifts, a rare chance to ply their shovels under the bright sky instead of the dark mountains.
“The water’s high alright,” said Tom.
“John Roy said last week that you couldn’t see the stones.”
“Sutter’s Well’s gonna be chock brimming with fish,” said Tom.
The boys raced down the trail to the base of the ridge, flying over the ground falling beneath them. Pebbles tumbled in their wake. At the creek’s edge, they picked their way among flat stones as the water rushed past in foamy white stripes and stretched over smooth rocks poking just above the surface. Twigs and branches packed together in lines along the banks marked the high water of the floods. The boys stepped around a dead trout swarming with flies, its desiccated eye caved in. The water gave and the water took, without thought or conscience.
A low rumble thrummed through the mountain rock and vibrated through their feet. Tom looked askance at Hank.
“My Pa said they’re blastin’ a new shaft.”
Tom nodded. He imagined the mountains as hollow as honeycombs and wondered if someday the mining shafts would all cave in and the mountains would collapse into the earth in heaps of black dust and rock. Tom had told Hank his fears one day, about the tunnels falling in. Hank got older that day or maybe Tom grew younger. A man didn’t say he feared such things. Every morning when his mother told him to look for chicken eggs under the porch, Tom steeled his nerves and wriggled through the dirt in the tight places beneath the porch. His mother needed the extra eggs and someone had to find them.
The water slowed and spread out as the boys descended the valley toward Sutter’s Well, a deep hollow before a mile of cataracts. The bole of a long-dead tree—its bark stripped and the wood blanched and cracked—had lodged across the creek in rocks above the water line, a testament to the flood’s power. The boys tottered across the natural bridge, their arms outstretched for balance, with the cold mountain water whirling beneath them.
Another rumble troubled the earth.
“What’s that?” Hank pointed at the creek bed. “I never seen nothin’ like that before.”
Tom laid his bucket and pole amidst the rocks and joined Hank craning over the edge of the creek.
A rose-colored slab of granite flecked with black lay embedded in the slaty creek bed. Gravel and river rocks obscured the slab’s rounded edges, which suggested a disk. Carved stick figures—part human and part animal: birdmen with hooked beaks, fishmen with spikes along their backs, wolfmen with fangs—spiraled over the granite surface. Other marks, possibly letters, bearing no anthropomorphic reference that the boys knew, marched with the bestiary.
“Must’ve been the Indians,” said Tom.
“Ain’t no Indians around here made things like that.” Hank stepped into the water, which soaked his pant legs to above his knees. He thrust his arm into the current until his fingers touched the granite. “It’s polished. Smooth as glass.”
“My sister says they make some strange sculptures at that artist’s colony,” Tom said.
“You think they’d dump this in the creek? That place is way down the valley and this thing’s bigger than a wagon wheel.” Hank rocked forward and back, following the symbol’s circular progression with his gaze.
Ten yards downstream, the surface of Sutter’s Well rippled. Tom jerked his head toward the movement. The creek bed widened around the Well and sloped gently from the bank before plunging into a dark blue pit. No one knew its depth. No one had a rope long enough. The water’s surface rolled as thick and smooth as molasses toward the first cataract. Eddies spun beside rocks. Sunlight that filtered through the trees dappled the Well’s surface.
Fish after a bug, Tom decided. And a big one. He turned back to Hank who rocked in a circle
, rotating at his hips. His gaze followed the swirling march of the half-beast half-men. His lips moved, mumbling a silent chant.
“Hey, Hank. You okay?”
Nothing. Hank raised his hands like the faithful at chapel.
Tom stepped back, an instinctual fear boiling up as the familiar metamorphosed into the weird. “Hank? This ain’t funny, Hank.”
Still nothing.
Tom’s breath trembled. The shadows of the forest deepened and grew together, squeezing the dappled sunlight to slivers of gray on the dark water. The black clouds of a squall spread over the valley, curling around the mountain tops, gripping the peaks. The clouds rolled above like a black ceiling, like coal seams under the mountains weighing on him, shutting out the sun. He wanted to run. His body told him to flee. Nothing would have been easier than racing into the trees, but his conscience, or whatever bound him to his friend, wouldn’t move.
Another fish, or something, broke the surface in the shallows on the opposite bank and then sank to the slaty rocks.
Tom gasped. He held his breath without thinking. The thing in the water looked to be the length of a man but like a crayfish with a back and tail of mottled gray fading to white. A row of black, almond shapes spread across its back in a half circle and from a bulbous ganglia at the tip of its tapered head protruded three pairs of feelers that twitched beneath the water. Two rows of white, spongy appendages held it to the river stones against the current.
Hank rocked to a rhythm inside his head. Tom sensed the rhythm too, but only faintly, like it came from another valley. He didn’t hear it so much as felt it, recalling its memory from beyond his consciousness. The beast, the giant crayfish without pincers, scuttled across the creek and stopped before the disk. The shorter feelers caressed the granite while the longest ones wrapped around Hank’s ankles.
“Hank!” Tom screamed. He grabbed his metal bucket by the rim and launched it at Hank, overhead, like the big-league pitchers on the radio. The bucket’s lower rim thumped the back of Hank’s head.