by Jim Shepard
“Don’t tell them where I went,” I said. “Far as you know, I never came home.”
“I should be so lucky,” she said.
I changed into dry clothes and put on like twelve layers and got together a rain fly and a cooking stove and a tent and a big pack full of cans of food and other shit and got out of there. “You taking your dog?” she called, but I never heard what she said after that.
It took me an hour to get to the end of the logging road because I was covering my tracks with a pine branch as I went, and then another hour to find the duffel bag in the snow, and from there I followed a creek uphill way into the forest. I found a spot I already knew they had good cover and visibility and got everything set up and then started going through what I had and just what it was I thought I was going to do.
There was a trail fifty yards below that did a hairpin, and snowmobilers used it and cross-country skiers. Farther down was a waterfall and swimming hole and I remembered a notice on the library’s Christian Outings bulletin board about a faith hike for teens called the Polar Bear Mixer.
I figured, Well, if I’m going to jail I might as well get something to eat first, so I made some stew. And while I was eating I started thinking that once the cops had me one thing would lead to another and I knew what went on in jail, I’d heard stories. So I emptied the duffel in the tent and got all geared up. I had stuff I didn’t even know I had. A bipod mount for the rifle and a winter camo wrap for the stock and barrel and scope. Even winter camo field bandages. When I was finished I felt like this way I was at least ready for whatever.
But nobody came down the trail. It got dark. I got some sleep. Nobody came the next day, either. I had little meatballs for breakfast and sat around and waited and finally went out looking for rabbits but the snow was too deep so I had to come back.
I’d stepped in the creek and even with three layers of socks my feet were freezing. In the credits part of Boys Town right at the beginning there was a kid in an alley warming his hands over a fire in a bucket. I’d forgotten that.
The guy that gets electrocuted is the one who gives Spencer Tracy the idea for the orphans’ home in the first place. When they’re getting ready to take the guy to the chair the governor tells him he owes a debt to the state, and the guy goes nuts on them. He asks where the state was when he was a little kid crying himself to sleep in a flophouse with drunks and hoboes. He says if he had one friend when he was twelve he wouldn’t be standing here like this. Then he throws everybody but Tracy out of his cell.
I spent the afternoon keeping the stove going and sitting on a tarp and squeezing my head with my hands. The difference between where I was and my mother’s house was that where I was I didn’t have to listen to TV.
I had everything I needed in front of me and I still couldn’t let well enough alone. That night it sleeted again and the next morning my stove was covered with ice. I washed my face and changed my socks and got my Desert Eagle and hiked back down to the road and through the woods to the culvert that led the back way into town. It was sunny and I was sweating like a pig by the time I climbed out of the culvert at the turnaround at the end of Janice’s street, but I didn’t want to hang around for too long so I stood there for a few minutes with my field jacket open, flapping it to dry myself off, and then went up to her house and rang the bell. The Eagle hung in the big inside pocket like a tire iron and I thought, I don’t know what you brought that for. A guy swung the door open like he’d been waiting for me. He had to be the ex-husband. He looked me up and down and said, “What can I help you with?” But I let it go and just said, “Is Janice here?” And he gave me another look and I remembered how sweaty I was and that I was wearing four shirts under my field jacket. Collars were sticking up all over the place.
He said, “Yeah, she’s in the back. What can we help you with?”
I stood there bouncing my leg for a second and reached under my coat like my Eagle might’ve fallen out. Then Janice came up behind him and I saw her get a good look at me. And I just said, “Nothing. I’ll come back,” and I left.
“Hey,” the guy called from behind me, and I heard Janice laugh. Halfway down the block I cut through somebody’s yard into the culvert. My heart was going so fast I was sure I was having a heart attack. She was probably still laughing. He was laughing with her. It was a comedy. I crouched at the bottom of the culvert and stepped around like a midget taking a walk. Even my outside shirts were soaked. I can never believe how fast I sweat through my clothes at times like that.
I worked my way up the culvert to Janice’s backyard and then ran up to their window but it was too high to see in so I just reached up as far as I could and squeezed off four rounds. From that angle, I probably just hit the ceiling. The Eagle’s so loud that at first your ears can’t believe it. Somebody yelled something but I couldn’t tell what. After the last round I was booking back through the yard for the culvert. I could hear somebody whooping from the next house over. They probably thought it was fireworks. And while I was hauling down the culvert to my path through the woods I got to hear sirens from every cop car in upstate New York.
The whole way back through the woods and up into the hills I thought, You’re going to be hard to track. I mean, the snow was three feet deep. Even the town cops weren’t going to be able to screw this up.
I had to rest on the logging road and again along the creek but finally got back to the tent. I pulled out my sleeping bag and threw my rifle and the Eagle and all the rounds I had on top of it. I could hear guys on the logging road already, the sound carried that far.
People talk about, Oh, this kid’s sick and that kid’s bipolar and this and that and I always say, Well, does he piss all over himself? And the answer’s always no. That’s because he chooses to go to the bathroom. Because he knows better. He controls himself. People control what they do. Most people don’t know what it’s like to look down the road and see there’s nothing there. You try to tell somebody that but they just look at you. I don’t know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but they do.
Guys are breaking through the brush down below to my left and right, which tells me they’re not only coming but they’re coming in numbers. I can start to see them even through the trees.
I haven’t cleaned the rifle. Mr. Logistical Planning. Even when I try to make lists for myself I can’t follow the lists.
At least I tried, though. I tried harder than most people think. But what I did was, in life you’re supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn’t.
I can hear even more sirens, off in the distance. The cops down below have stopped short of the hairpin. They’re keeping their voices low. They might be starting to catch on. I dig deeper into the snow, wipe my eyes, and put my face back to the scope, sighting back and forth. I don’t even know if I’ll open fire. I never know what I’m going to do next. They’ll probably just come up here and pull me to my feet and push me all the way down the hill. Another scene that always got me in that movie was when the kids were waiting for Spencer Tracy to bring something home for Christmas. Of course he didn’t have any money so all he can pull out and show them is a package of cornmeal mush. And this one little kid just stares at him. And then the kid finally says, like he wants to kill somebody, “What else you got in that bag?” And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn’t have anything else, the kid goes, “I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.”
Classical Scenes of Farewell
As a child who could barely hold myself upright without tottering, I was steeped in my mother’s belief that our tumbledown farm was serried about and tumid with devils. In my mind’s eye they stood in a ring and clasped one another’s taloned hands and leered in at me while I slept. My fourth summer was the year that Sophie, the stonemason’s daughter, was seized with a helplessness in her limbs until her father conceded her diabolic possession and took her to the Church of Our Savior, where the priest found five devils residing inside her, whose
names were Wolf, Lark, Dog, Jolly, and Griffin. The devils confessed they’d conjured hailstones through her by beating the surface of well water with her hands and that they’d additionally concocted the tinctures and ointments she’d used to blight her neighbors’ apple trees. They said they’d requested, and been denied, a special grease that would have turned her into a werewolf. When asked of whom they’d made their appeal, they said only “The Master.”
When I was twelve, the man from whom we rented our pastureland—a lifelong bachelor whose endless mutterings were his way of negotiating his solitude, and whose imagination extended only to business; the sort who milled his rye without sifting it, so it might last longer—was found in the middle of our lane one winter morning, naked, his feet and lips blue. He said a demon had appeared to him on a pile of wood under his mulberry tree, in the likeness of a corpulent black cat belonging to the house next door. With its front paws the cat had gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him down, and then had fastened its muzzle on the man’s mouth and would not be denied. The man claimed that for nearly an hour he’d remained that way, swooning, speechless, and open to the cat’s searching jaws, unable to make even the Sign of the Cross and powerless to diminish the urgings of its tongue. He had no memory of where his clothes had gone, or how he’d ended up in the lane.
My mother had long since taken to enfolding a crucifix in the bedcovers when she turned down my poor linens for the night. My chamber was in our barn’s loft, attached to the back of the house, and from this, the highest point on the hill, I could view the Delorts’ farm to the west. Their daughter, Katherine, was the continual object of my confused nightly agitations as well as the focus of my joy.
And then one sunstruck August afternoon when we were passing through the village, my mother and I investigated a disturbance on the church steps, a crowd squabbling over who had sufficient schooling to interpret the document posted on the doors before them. A sacristan emerged to provide assistance and to read aloud what he declared to be a juridical confession lately obtained through the harrowing of some of our neighbors. Said neighbors had been identified to the ecclesiastical investigators by other neighbors.
The confession stated that Marie Delort along with her daughter had for three years been giving herself over to a pair of demons, from Friday midnight through to Saturday dawn, and had assisted at a series of conjurings in the company of others. According to the deacon Katherine had testified that her association began when one evening, washing her family’s linen outside of town, she saw before her a man with a curved back and pointed ears whose eyes were like emeralds in an ash pit. He called for her to give herself to him and she answered that she would. He then gentled her cheeks with both hands, his palms softly furred, and flooded her mouth with his breath, and from then on each Friday night she was carried to a gathering from her own bed, simply by willing herself free. At the gathering place she shed her night-dress and was approached, every time having been made to wait for a period alone in the darkness, by the same man leading a gigantic he-goat, which knelt before her, and to both apparitions she abandoned herself.
The sacristan then read her mother’s corroboration of this account, which further detailed the strange trance during which she was also transported from her bed, and their mutual adoration of the goat and the man, and their not only bathing in but also taking in all sorts of offensive liquids, with satiation being the object of their every clutch and gesture.
I was born Etienne Corillaut of Pouzauges, in the diocese of Luçon, and am known as Poitou, and I am now of twenty-two years of age, and here acknowledge to the best of my abilities the reasons for those acts that have made this name along with my master’s the object of hatred throughout the region. I here also address the questions that my kinsmen hear from every stable hand, every innkeeper, every farmer in his field: What transpired in his mind that allowed a young person to have acted in such a manner and then to have lived apparently untroubled among his fellows? What enabled him to have stepped forward into the sunlight and Nature’s bounty for six years of such iniquity?
My master is Gilles de Rais, whom I have served as page and then bodyservant for these last six years; and for the past three, since he first offered access to the full chamber of his secrets, he and I with five others I will name have been responsible for the entrapment and mutilation and dismemberment and death of one hundred and forty-two children between the ages of five and fifteen. Coming in the Year of Our Lord 1440, this admission dates the full vigor of my offenses back to the winter of 1437. But even before he chose to sweep back the curtain on the full extent of his ferocity, I knew myself to be already standing outside the ring of salvation, having failed so signally as a neighbor and a brother and a Christian and a son.
My father failed no one, having been brought up in honesty and industry with a mild and peaceable disposition, and my first memory of my mother is of the two of us gathering into her basket rue and southernwood in bright sunlight. I remember her saying one sweltering morning that the forest, our edge of pastureland, and a hive of bees were our only livelihood. I remember her tears. Later there was a shed and a little tower with a dovecote. We raised rye and beans and pot-herbs. As I grew stronger I was given suitable responsibilities, my first being light weeding during the day and laying the table and filling the hand basin after sunset. Before that my contributions had been limited to fanning the wasps out of my little sister’s sweet milk.
At that time I was devout. I retired each morning to pray and refused refreshment for a quarter of an hour afterward. And I displayed other singularities. My brother and sister avoided me, which I attributed to acts of stupidity that somehow had discredited me forever. I played alone, chopping at roadside weeds with my special stick. “Still fighting your cabbages?” my brother asked one day, having seen me thrash some wild collards.
My mother liked to claim that all she brought to the marriage was a bench, bed, and chest, and I first registered their sadness while hiding in the fields watching my father cut clover. My mother brought him soup, ladling it out in the shade of an elm, and he said, “Will you kiss me?” and she answered, “We all have our needs.” He then told her to take back her soup, for he didn’t want it, and scythed all the clover without eating and returned hungry to the house.
He complained later that it was as if his accounts were tallied small coin by small coin. She confided in my brother, her favorite, that she lived in dread of bad weather, during which his father would pass the hours in the kitchen, his resentment turning from the weather to her. We slept with pounding hearts when they fought.
And during a rainy October the day after my eleventh birthday my brother fell sick of a malady of the brain. We moved him to a room off the kitchen with a hearth that backed on to our stove, where during sickness or bloodletting or weaning, a greater warmth could be maintained. My mother made him an egg dish into which she chopped dittany, tansy, marjoram, fennel, parsley, beets, violet leaves, and pounded ginger. He was seized with convulsions and his writhing was such that she couldn’t stay in the room. He died at cock’s crow two mornings after he was first afflicted.
She afterward seemed so bereft and storm-tossed that our neighbors called her “the Wind’s Wife.” November imprisoned the farm with its load of ice, sheathing both sickle and hoe. In our little pond fish hung motionless and petrified with cold. My mother kept to herself in the kitchen, puzzled and drained by our questions, her smile gloomy and terrible in its simplicity. Our father sat on a stool drawn up near the door, a hermit paying his visit to a sister hermit.
And even after the winter seemed well ended it suffered a relapse, piling snow deeper atop our work. My sister and I offered ourselves to our mother without success. On this side and that, she seemed to find only sore constraint and bitter captivity. Her blood turned thin as water and she developed scrofulous complaints. When at her angriest, she wiped my nose, violently, and said it was oppressive to be looked at so reproachfully by children. If we
asked for too much, her panicked response frightened us further.
Her own presence seemed to distress her. She fell endlessly behind in her work. She was found at all hours bent in half and rubbing her back. She couldn’t warm her hands. One palm on the table would quiver, and, seeing us notice, she’d cover it with the other.
Our animals sickened as if bewitched. Our cat died of hunger. When the weather permitted my mother sat in the field as far as possible from the house. When storms drove us inside, on occasion I glimpsed her before she had composed her expression. One sleeting morning she taught my sister a game, based on the stations of a woman’s life, that she called Tired, Exhausted, Dying, and Dead.
At night when I was visited by strange dreams and pleaded for her company, she told me she’d seen witches lying in the fields on their backs, naked up to the navel. She fixed on a story from a neighboring town of a man who’d confessed that he’d killed seven successive boys in his wife’s womb by means of his magic, and that he’d also withered the offspring of his father-in-law’s herd. She told us that lost girls were cooked in a cauldron until the flesh entire came away from the bone, from which the witches made an unguent that was a great aid to their arts and pleasures. She followed closely the sensational story of de Giac, the king’s favorite, who confessed he had given one of his hands to the Devil, and who asked when condemned that this hand be severed and burned before he was put to death.
She took her life with a series of plants that my father said she had gathered from the most sinister localities. We discovered her early one bright morning. I remained in place near her bed, remembering her hand slipping off my inhospitable arm the evening before when she’d been trying to negotiate some ice on our doorstep.
I was fourteen. My sister was nine. We discussed what had happened as though it all belonged to a period now concluded. Our day-to-day world having fallen away, something else would take its place.