Dreamthorp

by Williamson, Chet

  Suddenly from the bottom of the stairs came Frances's shout. "Hey, you two! Come on, hurry up, the meat's going to get dry!"

  A cloud passed over the boy's face. Tom had lost him. "We better go down," Josh said.

  "Damn the meat," Tom growled. "Never mind her, Josh. What is it?"

  "Nothing. It was . . ." The boy shook his head as if shaking away a bad dream. "Nothing . . ."

  It was something, Tom thought savagely. It was everything, and now it had been lost because of some goddam fucking roast beef that she always overcooked anyway. Josh began to get up, and Tom stopped him. "Wait. Wait a minute. There's something I want to tell you. I want us to . . . to go into therapy together."

  Josh looked at his father's hand on his arm, then at the man's face. "Therapy?" he said, as if the word were new to him.

  "Yes."

  "You think I'm crazy?" The fear was back now, the same fear that Tom had seen when the boy woke.

  "No, no, of course not, I just think that—"

  "I won't," Josh said, pushing away Tom's arm and sitting up on the bed. "I just won't do it."

  "Can we at least talk about it?"

  "No!" the boy yelled, then leaped off the bed and bolted though the door.

  "Josh, wait!" Tom went after him, but Josh ran down the stairs, jumping down the last few steps, and dashed outside, the screen door slamming in his wake.

  "Good heavens," said Frances, "where is he off to? Doesn't he know it's dinnertime?"

  "Sure," Tom said coldly. "He knows. We all know. We just don't happen to be hungry right now." He walked to the cellar door and opened it. "I'm going down there to work. I don't want to be disturbed. Not for anything."

  He slammed the door behind him, leaving his mother, for once, speechless.

  Tom found no solace in his work. The chunk of wood that he had abused several days earlier looked raw and lifeless. He picked away at it nonetheless, trying to clear his mind of everything but the chisel, the mallet, and the wood.

  It was futile. He kept thinking of Josh, wondering what his son had been going to tell him, what he had finally decided to share with him before Frances had ruined everything with her cry from below.

  A cry from below.

  And what, he wondered, could he create to make his own cry heard?

  With that thought in mind, he bent over the block again, pleading with sharpened edge and heavy mallet for something to come out of the wood, for something to be born. But as he pummeled and battered and gouged, he realized that nothing would come out of this particular piece of wood. It was wrong somehow. He needed something more.

  He needed size.

  Yes. That was it. He needed bulk and heft and mass. What he wanted, needed to say, was something that could not be bound by the size of a bird, even an eagle. It would have to be man-sized. The size of a man. Of a man's cries. Of a man's pain.

  Josh leaned against a tree and sobbed. He had run all the way down Emerson until he came to the woods, and then, without hesitation, rushed into them. No one saw him go.

  "Mom . . ." he whispered, as if expecting her to be there, to put her arms around him and hold him like she always did when something went wrong.

  But she wasn't there, and he turned his back to the smooth-barked oak and slid down it, until he was sitting on the dry ground, his back against the trunk. He had almost weakened, and it made him angry. He had almost surrendered to the man whom nature had made his father, had almost cried in his arms and told him everything, told him what he had done and was going to do again. That would have been a mistake, because he knew his father was lying to him when he said he loved his mother. He didn't love her, he couldn't have, and then done the things he did with those women—first the kid, the one almost as young as him, and now this older one. She was nicer at least, but still it wasn't right.

  Josh knew all about how things should be. He had read Hamlet. Not the whole thing, just the Classic Comic from a boxful that had been his dad's when he was a kid, but Josh had understood the story all right. Hamlet had loved his father and had gone crazy when he died and his mother got married right away to his uncle. It wasn't so much the uncle part that had made Hamlet mad as it was that his mom couldn't even wait until his father was cold in his grave. In Josh's case, the mother and father roles were reversed, but otherwise it was the same. He hadn't even seen his father cry, not once. Not at the funeral and not later at home, when the slightest thing would bring tears to Josh's eyes.

  When people got married, they stayed married. That was the way it was supposed to be. Sure there were divorces, a lot of his friends' parents were divorced. But that was because they hadn't loved each other enough to begin with. And his dad wasn't divorced, he was a widower, and that meant that he was supposed to grieve, and he hadn't, and Josh didn't know why.

  Married people were supposed to love each other, not just forget about the other one when they died, not just go on to other people the way his dad had done.

  Married people were supposed to love each other, and he wanted to see that.

  He thought about Mrs. Goodwin. She was married, and she probably loved her husband. He was sure they made the old mattress jump, like Artie Huber used to say when Artie was still his friend. Made the old mattress jump. Just like Mom and Dad had done when she was still alive. He had heard them sometimes in the night when he got up for a drink of water or to go to the bathroom. At first it frightened him, but when he was old enough to know what they were doing, he had felt okay about it. It meant that they still loved each other, didn't it? And when he knew that those noises his mom made were happy instead of hurting, that was okay too. He wanted his mom to be happy, and he realized that you couldn't marry your mother yourself. It was okay.

  But when the mattress started jumping with his dad and that little cunt from the college, well, shit, that was different. Josh kept thinking that they were doing it on the same bed where his dad had done it with his mom, and that seemed so damn wrong, sacrilegious, really. And she was so loud. His mom had never been that loud.

  The first night after he heard his dad and that Karen together was the night that he dreamed about his mom. He had had wet dreams before, but never about his mother, and he woke in the middle of the night, sticky and tired and immeasurably guilty, for he distinctly remembered that it had been his mother, naked and warm and so soft, to whom he had been doing things, and who had been doing things to him.

  Oh Jesus, his mother.

  It seemed so sick and wrong, but he brought it back to mind—all the details—and after he tossed his soiled pajamas in the hamper and lay in bed once again, he thought about it over and over, and masturbated into a handful of tissue, which he then rolled up and put under his bed. That was the first and last time that he dreamed about his mother.

  But he did not forget about her, and projected her onto other women, older women, with whom he came in contact. Such a woman was Mrs. Goodwin. She was in her mid thirties, tall and slim, with a pretty, prim, patrician face set off by ash blonde hair tied at the nape of her neck, where soft tendrils fine as spun gold trailed down over her collar. She got her gas at Ted's Mobil, and was always friendly to Josh, never missing a chance to talk to him when he served her. She drove a little red MG. When Josh asked her about it, she told him it was a 1967 model that her husband had restored. Josh had seen her husband once or twice, a short, balding man who wore suits and ties during the week and muscle shirts on weekends, and drove a gray Audi. He seemed nice too, though he didn't talk to Josh the way his wife did. They lived three blocks away, up on Longfellow, in a heavily wooded lot.

  At the thought of Mrs. Goodwin, Josh pushed himself to his feet and began to walk up the side of the hill through the woods. When he reached Longfellow, he came out of the brush and walked down the street. The Goodwin's cottage was the fourth one from the end, and Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin were sitting on their front porch. Mr. Goodwin was smoking a cigarette, and Mrs. Goodwin was drinking something that Josh thought might have been ice
d tea. She waved to him when she saw him, and her husband raised a hand in greeting.

  "Hello, Josh," she called. "Patrolling the streets tonight?"

  Josh smiled. "Nah, just a walk." The front, he thought, was no good, so he walked to the end of Longfellow, went up Elm, and went back in the direction he had come on Alcott, past the cottage whose backyard met the rear of the Goodwins' place.

  This was better. The trees were thick here, and the cottage on Alcott was empty and for sale. He walked through the brush to its rear and saw the Goodwins' cottage through the trees. Pines predominated, but there were also large oaks, easy to climb. Josh calculated that a person could look into, maybe even reach, the upstairs windows by climbing up that large oak next to the little woodshed.

  He licked his lips, then looked around. Dusk was coming on, and the community was getting darker and darker. His time of day, he thought.

  Josh turned and walked down the street, heading for home. He was hungry and tired, and would not come back tonight

  But he would come back later, even though he hated the thought of it, and the guilt weighed down upon him like lead. He had almost told his father about it, caught himself just in time, and that was good. His father would not have understood. No one, Josh thought, would understand. He was not even sure if he did himself.

  A great . . . tree . . . grows out of tradition and a past order of things, and is pathetic with the suggestions of dead generations.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  "So you think you ought to wait a few weeks to start treatment?" Charlie Lewis asked Tom. It was late afternoon of the following day, and the two of them were picking their way through the tall weeds that surrounded the site of the old sawmill.

  "I think so," Tom answered, bending back a branch and holding it until Charlie, following, could grab it for himself. "I've brought up the idea now, so I figure he can use some time to get used to it."

  "Maybe," Charlie said, "but if he's really in as much pain as you think, I'd guess the sooner the better."

  "Well, I want to wait until my folks leave."

  "That's understandable. When will that be, Christmas?" A thin twig swatted Charlie across the forehead, and he cursed. "I knew we should've taken that dirt road."

  "You're the one who said you wanted a hike, Charlie," Tom said, laughing. "Something about walking being good for the heart?"

  "And you listen to a senile old man?"

  "I don't even know why we're doing this."

  "Morbid curiosity. Pretend we're the Hardy Boys and we're going to find some clues that Inspector Lestrade missed."

  "Inspector Lestrade was in the Sherlock Holmes stories."

  "Details, details," Charlie muttered.

  In another minute Tom and Charlie pushed through a final clutter of brush and found themselves in the clearing. "This is it?" Tom asked.

  "Yep. Welcome to the Haunted Forest. And there's the tree, most likely. Only one big enough."

  They walked over to the huge white pine, one of the largest Tom had ever seen. He guessed it to be over three feet thick through the center. The bottom five feet of the trunk were considerably darker than the upper portion, and Tom examined it closely. "Somebody threw water on it," he said.

  Charlie nodded. "To wash off the . . . whatever, I suppose." He squinted at the bark. "You can still see it, though. Good God, pieces of him."

  Tom looked. In the fissures of the rough bark, things moist and organic glimmered in the sunlight that slipped through the treetops. A spot darker than the others, two and a half feet up, caught his attention. "The nail hole," he said, inspecting it. "And blood."

  "There's blood all over the ground too," Charlie said. "You can see where they tried to rake it over. Did a lousy job." He shook his head. "Unbelievable. Even when you stand here and look at it, when the evidence is right in front of you, it still seems unbelievable that anyone would be insane enough to do something like that to someone. Jesus. They can't cut it down too soon to suit me."

  "Cut it down?"

  "That's what Bret told me. They've got all the evidence they need—took a lot of photographs, I gather. I wouldn't want to see them, either. I pity the jury when they find the guy and the case comes to trial."

  "But why are they cutting it down?" Tom asked so intently that Charlie looked at him.

  "I don't know, maybe they're superstitious, maybe they don't want to be reminded of it, maybe they simply don't want thrill seekers doing just what we're doing."

  Tom looked at the tree again, then took out a pocketknife, opened the blade, and dug into the bark.

  "I didn't know you collected souvenirs of evisceration murders," Charlie said.

  "Not a souvenir. It just struck me that there might be a hell of a good, big block of wood locked up in this tree."

  "That's more than a trifle morbid."

  Tom picked away a large chunk of bark and scraped at the wood he had revealed. "It's nice," he said. "And if they're going to take it down anyway . . ."

  "My God, mother, the man is serious about this. Tom, come home with me, have a beer, let them chop up and burn this son of a bitch."

  "It's just a tree, Charlie. And I've been needing a piece this size. I'm damned if I couldn't get a six-foot-high, two-foot-square block out of it."

  Charlie sighed. "Don't tell me about it, tell Bret. He was going to send some boys out the end of the week to drop it. But maybe if you offer to do it and save the taxpayers some money . . ."

  "That's not a bad idea. He might go for it."

  Bret Walters did go for it, but made Tom promise that he would not use the provenance of the wood as a selling point for whatever he carved from it, and Tom agreed.

  The next day he and Charlie went back out to the site, this time on the overgrown dirt road in a pickup truck borrowed from Ted's Mobil. They had two young men with them, a pair of Tom's better sculpture students, to help them saw down the tree with a crosscut saw. It was over fifty feet tall, and when it fell it took several smaller, younger trees with it. Then they sawed it up into eight separate sections, the largest of which was the trunk, which they loaded, grunting and sweating in the dry heat, into the bed of the pickup. The other sections they hauled further into the brush and left there.

  The men at Burke's Lumber yard in Lebanon shook their heads in bemusement when Tom drove into their compound with his tree trunk. He stood by as they prepared it to his order, shaving off the bark, then slicing the arcs off on each side until all that remained was a block a little over six feet long and roughly two feet wide. The students and Tom lugged it back into the truck, and they and Charlie drove back to Tom's cottage. They muscled it off the pickup, and, after Tom removed the screws that held his jigsaw to the floor and moved the heavy piece of equipment out of the way, they managed to cajole it through the basement door into the workshop, parking its massive bulk next to the carving bench.

  Tom thanked the boys for their help, and gave them each a ten dollar bill. He drove them back to campus, and then returned with Charlie to his workshop, where the block sat waiting.

  "Well, there it is, Michelangelo," Charlie said softly. "David's in there just waiting to be born."

  "David was marble," Tom said. "This is wood."

  "Okay, Pinocchio's in there. Happy?"

  "Not really." Tom reached out a hand and let his fingers trail down over the rough-grained wood. "I don't know who's in there yet."

  Charlie shrugged. "Give it time. You'll find out." He watched Tom staring at the wood, then cleared his throat. "Well, I guess I'll leave the two of you alone now that the ice is broken."

  Tom turned and faced him. "Thanks for the help, Charlie."

  "Sure. Hauling five-hundred-pound blocks of pine is my specialty."

  "I'll get you a case of beer, okay?"

  "I'd settle for the ten bucks you gave the kids." Then he grinned. "See you," he said, and left Tom alone with the wood.

  For a long time he examined it, walking around it, touching it
from all sides, gauging the direction of the grain, probing the knots with his fingertips, looking for areas of softness, patches of rot, but finding none. The wood seemed as hard as iron.

  It's in there, he thought. It's waiting for me. Up to me now. I have to bring it out.

  Then he sat on a stool and looked at it some more. But it was silent. It said nothing. It gave no indication of who it was, who it might have been, or who it might become.

  We are our own despots—we tremble at a neighbor's whisper.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  On the monitors, the bear reached out and grabbed an auto-mobile muffler as tall as he was. He turned his pale, shining snout to the viewer and grinned a grin that showed at least twenty teeth, then popped the muffler, which suddenly shrank to the size of a football, into a beehive the bear was holding. Then he went skipping down the aisle, and the monitors went black.

  "So," said the engineer, punching buttons on the control panel as he spoke, "what do you think?"

  Laura Stark sighed and sipped from her Styrofoam cup of coffee. "He's still skipping," she said wearily. "Why is he still skipping?"

  "He's not really skipping anymore, do you think?" said the bald man next to the engineer. "I mean, I took the skips out. You told me to, so I did. What do you think, Billy?"

  The engineer shrugged. "Hell, I don't know."

  "He's skipping," Laura said, annoyed.

  "I think he's hopping," the bald man said insistently. "What do you think, Billy?"

  Laura breathed out with a hiss. "Billy's not your client, Kevin—I'm your client. And that goddam bear is skipping. When the foot hits the ground twice on each step, that is out and out skipping. Now I told you yesterday that the Renco Bear does not skip—that's not my opinion nor my prejudice, that is the opinion and prejudice of the president and owner of Renco. And he happens to be my client. I try to do what he wants, and I expect you to do what I want, okay?"