“Yes,” said the boy slowly. “I think I would like to have my mother here, in spite of everything.”
Ala frowned. “It’s wrong for men and women to live together, unless they are members of the same lineage.”
Death laughed, showing his dung-brown teeth. “You are thinking of mating and reproducing. I represent undoing rather than doing. That being so, I can neither mate nor reproduce. Think of me as an old uncle or great-uncle, an eccentric member of your family, tolerated and possibly loved.
“In any case, you are in no position to talk about right and wrong. There is a lot about morality you need to learn, though I do admire your cleverness. It might prove helpful the next time someone tries to trick me.”
Ala looked at Death. He wore nothing except a cape, pushed back over his shoulders, and seemed to be a smooth, hairless man, though lacking any genitalia. She knew he was frightening, but at the moment he looked harmless. “I will stay,” she said.
Death laughed again.
Ala kept her word and stayed with Death. For the most part, she was happy. So long as she stayed close to Death’s house, she felt alive, able to eat and sleep and defecate. If she moved any distance, she began to feel herself grow thin and unreal. So she returned to the house.
She cooked meals and sewed clothing, told stories and helped raise her son. When Death came in with his bag, she tried to ignore the sorting process. Gradually, however, she began to watch. The boy had seen the ghosts in Death’s sack as glowing body parts. But when Death took them out, they looked like badly snarled tangles of thread or yarn. They came in all colors, but most were black, white, gray, or red. Using his clumsy hands, which were surprisingly deft at this task, Death pulled the filaments apart. When he was done, the gray and black threads rose into the air and wove themselves into an image of a person.
“Thank you,” the person said, rose to the ceiling and vanished. That was the good part, going to an unknown place.
As for the white and red filaments, they wove themselves into the image of an ugly, angry person with burning eyes and a mouth full of tusks. Saying nothing, it stormed out through the door.
What about the threads of other colors? They lay on the floor awhile, then faded and were gone.
“Most people have fur that is either black or gray,” Death told Ala, “and these are the colors of ordinary virtues, such as thoughtfulness and cooperation. Red is the color of rage and greed. White is the color of selfishness and indifference. These are the traits that destroy families and societies.”
“What a moralist you are,” Ala said angrily.
“I am the being the Goddess made,” Death replied. “Maybe she shat her morality out, after she finished making the world. It isn’t always clear to me that the universe is moral now. But I am. I have to be, in order to divide the dead.”
“What are the other colors?” Ala asked.
“Yellow and green and so on? The ones that fade? They are the parts that have nothing to do with morality. A liking for flowers. An ability to sing. Good reflexes. They go back into a general pool of traits, from which they are taken by future generations. Nothing is wasted here.”
When the boy was twenty, he left to find his own life. It is never easy to be a man alone, with no kin. But he found a job as a soldier, working for a large and contentious family that quarreled with all its neighbors. He was good at what he did, being strong and quick to learn, with an even temper and the good manners Death had taught him. In addition, he was not afraid of Death, though he certainly respected him. His calmness and lack of fear made him a very good soldier.
He and Death met from time to time on battlefields and in field hospitals. The man could always see his foster uncle, though no one else could, except those who were actually dead. They chatted before Death put the man’s comrades and enemies into his bag and carried them away. Both Death and the boy, now a man, took comfort from their conversations.
As for Ala, one day Death said to her, “I think I could divide you now. You seem to have learned something about morality over the years. There is more good in you, and it’s less mixed with the bad.”
Ala considered. It seemed to her she was as selfish as ever, though she liked and respected Death, who had a hard job and did it carefully. “I’d rather stay here. I have no desire to leave the world; and I am terrified of becoming an angry ghost. Even though I am not entirely—or even mostly—alive, I can still take pleasure in flowers and food and in telling a story.”
“Very well,” Death said after a long silence, during which he frowned mightily.
They remained together like two old relatives.
Ala’s son became the leader of a war band, respected by all. When he was sixty-five, a stray arrow killed him; and Death came for him. The man’s spirit rose from his body, looking no more than twenty. “It’s good to see you,” he said to Death and embraced the old monster. “Do I have to get into the bag? I didn’t like it the first time.”
“No,” said Death. “Though I will put the other soldiers there.”
They traveled home slowly, talking. In the mean time, many people on the edge of dying remained alive. Let that be as it was, Death thought. He treasured this journey with his foster nephew.
Hah! The forests they saw! The rushing rivers and tall mountains!
At last they reached Death’s house. “Your mother is inside,” Death said.
“Let her remain there,” the man said. “She is afraid of dying, and that is what I’m here to do.”
They sat down on the bare ground in front of the house. The man looked his age now, still solid, but no longer young. The long guard hairs over his shoulders were silver-white, as was the soft, thick fur around his mouth and along the line of his jaw. “Go ahead,” he said.
Death reached in and pulled out the threads that were the man’s spirit. Only a few were red and white, the colors of anger and selfishness. Many were gray and black, the colors of responsible behavior. Most were other colors: yellow, orange, green, blue, purple.
The red and white threads were too few to become anything. They faded at once. The black and gray threads wove themselves into the image of a person, who nodded politely to Death, then rose into the sky and vanished.
The rest of the threads wove themselves into another person, this one blue-green, dotted with yellow, orange, and purple. The person floated on the wind like a banner. “What am I?” it asked Death.
“I don’t know. I have never made anything like you.”
“Then I must find out, but not here. I will come back for a visit, if I am able.” It flew off on the wind, soaring and rippling.
Death rose and went inside, where Ala waited by the fire. Here the story ends.
Translator’s note # 1: The hwarhath live in large families. A few are solitary, mostly because of their jobs: a forest fire-spotter or herder, the operator of a lift bridge in a remote location. But women with children are always surrounded by relatives. A hwarhath reader would know at once that something was disturbingly wrong about Ala, though we never find out why she is living on her own, except for her son.
Translator’s note # 2: Several human readers of the translation have complained that the story does not close the way a human story ought to. Ala has learned nothing from her experiences and does not suffer any consequences for her really awful behavior. The hwarhath (and the translator) would reply (a) some people do not learn from experience and (b) Ala does suffer consequences. At the story’s end, she is trapped in Death’s house, unable to go any distance from it; and she is stuck between life and death, not entirely dead, but not really living. In spite of all her cleverness, has she escaped the thing she fears? Do any of us escape the things we fear?
Close Encounters
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan [https://sites.google.com/site/beluthahatchie/] was born in South Carolina in September 1964. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and worked as a journalist for the Greensboro News & Recor
d before studying creative writing at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama.. He previously was the senior editor of Overdrive, a magazine for truck drivers. Duncan’s short fiction, which has won the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, is collected in World Fantasy Award winner Beluthahatchie and Other Stories and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. Duncan also co-edited Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic with F. Brett Cox and wrote non-fiction book Alabama Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff. He currently lives with his wife Sydney in Frostburg, Maryland, where they are on the English faculty of Frostburg State University.
She knocked on my front door at midday on Holly Eve, so I was in no mood to answer, in that season of tricks. An old man expects more tricks than treats in this world. I let that knocker knock on. Blim, blam! Knock, knock! It hurt my concentration, and filling old hulls with powder and shot warn’t no easy task to start with, not as palsied as my hands had got in my eightieth-odd year.
“All right, damn your eyes,” I hollered as I hitched up from the table. I knocked against it and a shaker tipped over: pepper, so I let it go. My maw wouldn’t have approved of such language as that, but we all get old doing things our maws wouldn’t approve. We can’t help it, not in this disposition, on this sphere down below.
I sidled up on the door, trying to see between the edges of the curtain and the pane, but all I saw there was the screen-filtered light of the sun, which wouldn’t set in my hollow till nearabouts three in the day. Through the curtains was a shadow-shape like the top of a person’s head, but low, like a child. Probably one of those Holton boys toting an orange coin carton with a photo of some spindleshanked African child eating hominy with its fingers. Some said those Holtons was like the Johnny Cash song, so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.
“What you want?” I called, one hand on the dead bolt and one feeling for starving-baby quarters in my pocket.
“Mr. Nelson, right? Mr. Buck Nelson? I’d like to talk a bit, if you don’t mind. Inside or on the porch, your call.”
A female, and no child, neither. I twitched back the curtain, saw a fair pretty face under a fool hat like a sideways saucer, lips painted the same black-red as her hair. I shot the bolt and opened the wood door but kept the screen latched. When I saw her full length I felt a rush of fool vanity and was sorry I hadn’t traded my overalls for fresh that morning. Her boots reached her knees but nowhere near the hem of her tight green dress. She was a little thing, hardly up to my collarbone, but a blind man would know she was full-growed. I wondered what my hair was doing in back, and I felt one hand reach around to slick it down, without my really telling it to. Steady on, son.
“I been answering every soul else calling Buck Nelson since 1894, so I reckon I should answer you, too. What you want to talk about, Miss—?”
“Miss Hanes,” she said, “and I’m a wire reporter, stringing for Associated Press.”
“A reporter,” I repeated. My jaw tightened up. My hand reached back for the doorknob as natural as it had fussed my hair. “You must have got the wrong man,” I said.
I’d eaten biscuits bigger than her tee-ninchy pocketbook, but she reached out of it a little spiral pad that she flipped open to squint at. Looked to be full of secretary-scratch, not schoolhouse writing at all. “But you, sir, are indeed Buck Nelson, Route One, Mountain View, Missouri? Writer of a book about your travels to the Moon, and Mars, and Venus?”
By the time she fetched up at Venus her voice was muffled by the wood door I had slammed in her face. I bolted it, cursing my rusty slow reflexes. How long had it been, since fool reporters come using around? Not long enough. I limped as quick as I could to the back door, which was right quick, even at my age. It’s a small house. I shut that bolt, too, and yanked all the curtains to. I turned on the Zenith and dialed the sound up as far as it would go to drown out her blamed knocking and calling. Ever since the roof aerial blew cockeyed in the last whippoorwill storm, watching my set was like trying to read a road sign in a blizzard, but the sound blared out well enough. One of the stories was on as I settled back at the table with my shotgun hulls. I didn’t really follow those women’s stories, but I could hear Stu and Jo were having coffee again at the Hartford House and still talking about poor dead Eunice and that crazy gal what shot her because a ghost told her to. That blonde Jennifer was slap crazy, all right, but she was a looker, too, and the story hadn’t been half so interesting since she’d been packed off to the sanitarium. I was spilling powder everywhere now, what with all the racket and distraction, and hearing the story was on reminded me it was past my dinnertime anyways, and me hungry. I went into the kitchen, hooked down my grease-pan, and set it on the big burner, dug some lard out of the stand I kept in the icebox and threw that in to melt, then fisted some fresh-picked whitefish mushrooms out of their bin, rinjed them off in the sink, and rolled them in a bowl of cornmeal while I half-listened to the TV and half-listened to the city girl banging and hollering, at the back door this time. I could hear her boot heels a-thunking all hollow-like on the back porch, over the old dog bed where Teddy used to lie, where the other dog, Bo, used to try to squeeze, big as he was. She’d probably want to talk about poor old Bo, too, ask to see his grave, as if that would prove something. She had her some stick-to-it-iveness, Miss Associated Press did, I’d give her that much. Now she was sliding something under the door, I could hear it, like a field mouse gnawing its way in: a little card, like the one that Methodist preacher always leaves, only shinier. I didn’t bother to pick it up. I didn’t need nothing down there on that floor. I slid the whitefish into the hot oil without a splash. My hands had about lost their grip on gun and tool work, but in the kitchen I was as surefingered as an old woman. Well, eating didn’t mean shooting anymore, not since the power line come in, and the supermarket down the highway. Once the whitefish got to sizzling good, I didn’t hear Miss Press no more.
“This portion of Search for Tomorrow has been brought to you by…Spic and Span, the all-purpose cleaner. And by…Joy dishwashing liquid. From grease to shine in half the time, with Joy. Our story will continue in just a moment.”
I was up by times the next morning. Hadn’t kept milk cows in years. The last was Molly, she with the wet-weather horn, a funny-looking old gal but as calm and sweet as could be. But if you’ve milked cows for seventy years, it’s hard to give in and let the sun start beating you to the day. By first light I’d had my Cream of Wheat, a child’s meal I’d developed a taste for, with a little jerp of honey, and was out in the back field, bee hunting.
I had three sugar-dipped corncobs in a croker sack, and I laid one out on a hickory stump, notched one into the top of a fencepost, and set the third atop the boulder at the start of the path that drops down to the creek, past the old lick-log where the salt still keeps the grass from growing. Then I settled down on an old milkstool to wait. I gave up snuff a while ago because I couldn’t taste it no more and the price got so high with taxes that I purely hated putting all that government in my mouth, but I still carry some little brushes to chew on in dipping moments, and I chewed on one while I watched those three corncobs do nothing. I’d set down where I could see all three without moving my head, just by darting my eyes from one to the other. My eyes may not see Search for Tomorrow so good anymore, even before the aerial got bent, but they still can sight a honeybee coming in to sip the bait.
The cob on the stump got the first business, but that bee just smelled around and then buzzed off straightaway, so I stayed set where I was. Same thing happened to the post cob and to the rock cob, three bees come and gone. But then a big bastard, one I could hear coming in like an airplane twenty feet away, zoomed down on the fence cob and stayed there a long time, filling his hands. He rose up all lazy-like, just like a man who’s lifted the jug too many times in a sitting, and then made one, two, three slow circles in the air, marking the position. When he flew off, I was right behind him, legging it into the woods.
Mister Big Bee led me a ways straight up the slope, toward the well of the old McQuarry place, but then he crossed the bramble patch, and by the time I had worked my way anti-goddlin around that, I had lost sight of him. So I listened for a spell, holding my breath, and heard a murmur like a branch in a direction where there warn’t no branch. Sure enough, over thataway was a big hollow oak with a bee highway a-coming and a-going through a seam in the lowest fork. Tell the truth, I wasn’t rightly on my own land anymore. The McQuarry place belonged to a bank in Cape Girardeau, if it belonged to anybody. But no one had blazed this tree yet, so my claim would be good enough for any bee hunter. I sidled around to just below the fork and notched an X where any fool could see it, even me, because I had been known to miss my own signs some days, or rummage the bureau for a sock that was already on my foot. Something about the way I’d slunk toward the hive the way I’d slunk toward the door the day before made me remember Miss Press, whom I’d plumb forgotten about. And when I turned back toward home, in the act of folding my pocketknife, there she was sitting on the lumpy leavings of the McQuarry chimney, a-kicking her feet and waving at me, just like I had wished her out of the ground. I’d have to go past her to get home, as I didn’t relish turning my back on her and heading around the mountain, down the long way to the macadam and back around. Besides, she’d just follow me anyway, the way she followed me out here. I unfolded my knife again and snatched up a walnut stick to whittle on as I stomped along to where she sat.
“Hello, Mr. Nelson,” she said. “Can we start over?”
“I ain’t a-talking to you,” I said as I passed, pointing at her with my blade. “I ain’t even a-walking with you,” I added, as she slid off the rockpile and walked along beside. “I’m taking the directedest path home, is all, and where you choose to walk is your own lookout. Fall in a hole and I’ll just keep a-going, I swear I will. I’ve done it before, left reporters in the woods to die.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 5