The Jabberwock

by Ninie Hammon

  Their haircuts were ridiculous, the buttons on their shirts and pants didn’t match and most of them were in dire need of serious dental work.

  The kiln they built was a six-by-six-by-six-foot marvel with stone walls a foot thick and a door that sealed airtight. She and her friends had watched from the window of her room as the Amish men cut the stone pieces from larger pieces of stone and fit them together so tight you couldn’t slide a piece of paper between them — “as tight as an Egyptian pyramid,” or so her mother claimed.

  Her mother’d paid to have a lock installed on the door above the handle and she kept it locked whenever she wasn’t using it, didn’t want some kid to wander in and get trapped there.

  A company from Louisville had come down and installed the guts of the kiln that fit inside the stone walls. A control panel just inside the garage was equipped with all manner of dials, knobs and gizmos to set the temperature. The kiln had its own designated gas line from the big butane tank that used to sit in the backyard.

  A couple of months after the kiln was complete, Charlie was stunned to see a horse and buggy clip-clopping down Barber’s Mill Road. Her mother told her the Yoders had liked Nower County so much, they’d moved to a little farm down the road. Charlie didn’t know if there were still Yoders living in the county, or if they, too, had drifted away.

  Nower County was a good-sized place in terms of landmass and geography. But it was in the mountains and the majority of its acreage was uninhabitable by virtue of it being — duh — on the side of a mountain. Farms like the Yoders’ were sandwiched into narrow hollows.

  A handful of small communities dotted the landscape.

  One was called Killarney in the southeastern part of the county, where the mountains were steep, the hollows deep and the residents standoffish and clannish. The Tackett family had lived in those mountains for generations.

  One of the communities was called simply Twig. It was a collection of houses, a Pentecostal church building and its accompanying cemetery. The building had been vacant when Charlie left and it still was, so dilapidated now it looked ready to collapse. But the cemetery appeared to be a growing concern. Clearly, there were three or four times as many dead people in Twig as living.

  Wiley was a community in the northwestern part of the county near the Rolling Fork River, which snaked along, back and forth between Nower and Beaufort Counties. The Wiley Bridge was an authentic covered bridge that spanned it in Nower County, a historic structure that was ruled unsafe for school buses when Charlie was still in grade school. There was no way to get the kids from the northern part of the county to school in Persimmon Ridge without crossing the river. So the bus stopped, the kids got off, the bus crossed the bridge, the kids crossed on foot behind it and got back on the bus.

  Ten miles south of Wiley was the community of Persimmon Ridge, which was neither on a ridge nor boasted the presence of a single persimmon tree. It had been for a time a real, legally incorporated town. Known only as “the Ridge,” it had had a post office, a small courthouse that housed the property valuation administrator’s office, the county clerk, the office for the circuit judges who rotated through a four-county circuit, a big high-ceiling courtroom that took up most of the second floor and the sheriff’s department that served the whole county with a handful of deputies and half a dozen cruisers.

  The Ridge had even had a “jail,” a small building not a whole lot larger that a two-seater outhouse with bars on the lone window where you could lock somebody up until the state police had time to pick them up and transport them to Carlisle. The Ridge had a small hospital/nursing home, two resident doctors and a chiropractor, three dentists — an old man who had brought in the younger men so he could retire — a volunteer fire department, three schools — elementary, middle and high school — a Masonic Lodge and a funeral home.

  Main Street in the Ridge had boasted a couple of banks, real estate offices, attorney’s offices, a restaurant or two, furniture stores and clothing stores.

  Then the coal mines closed, which had provided steady employment to a huge percentage of the working men in the county. Three factories in neighboring Crawford County to the east — an underwear factory, a casket factory and a factory that built cupolas and church steeples, called the Steeple People, shut down, and put the Nower County residents who commuted there every day out of work. An industrial complex in Lexington had employed a surprising number of Nower County residents. When it downsized, they all lost their jobs.

  Then the parkway that would have brought the world back to the county was built in Beaufort County instead.

  There were probably dozens of other reasons — Charlie was no sociologist — why the town and the county had died. They just had. Victims of the domino effect of economic circumstances. The jobless moved away, looking for employment, the young left after school, never to return. With fewer and fewer customers, the small businesses closed. The dwindling tax base and smaller number of students forced the schools to close. Not enough patients for the doctors, the dentists and the hospital. The post office was shut down. One thing after another had reduced the Ridge to … not a ghost town, that would have been better, Charlie thought, more scenic. Everything gone, doors on broken hinges, shutters blowing in the wind, a tombstone on the site of a dead community. What had actually happened to the Ridge and to the rest of the county in other individual ways, was they hung on. Almost everything closed … but a store or two here and there managed to make it. A beauty parlor. A pool hall. No official community services, but the sheriff’s department still employed an elected sheriff and a couple of deputies … and Charlie had no idea how they were paid or where the department got the funding for the upkeep of an office or vehicles. There were fire trucks and perhaps volunteers to man them. Charlie’d seen the trucks at the fire station when she drove by. But on the whole, starting long before Charlie graduated from high school and accelerating in the years afterward, Nower County literally became Nowhere County, its people nowhere people. And with the passage of years, the county slowly sank below the horizon of the consciousness of the outside world. Like it didn’t exist.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  What followed her return in E.J.’s van from the mirage on the county line to the parking lot of the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere was the longest day of Charlie McClintock’s life. Every minute seemed to take an hour and as the hours stacked up one on top of the other like a pile of cordwood, the world got stranger and more unmanageable.

  By virtue of — Charlie didn’t know what; nature hates a vacuum, maybe? — she and Sam Sheridan had fallen into the role of “in charge” at this disaster scene, which was what it rapidly became. It was as if a tsunami had crashed down on the county and the Dollar General Store parking lot was where the survivors had washed up on shore — in various levels of incapacitation.

  Oh, she and Sam weren’t forced to take the job. They could have bailed, left, gone home — shoot, Charlie had tickets on a plane back to Chicago tomorrow night and she’d barely started going through her mother’s things. But you didn’t just turn your back and walk away from a catastrophe and leave the victims lying there sick and bleeding. You helped. You did whatever you could. That was the price of admission to the human race.

  Charlie loved football — had loved it even before she’d married Stuart. She understood the phrase “calling an audible.” That was when the quarterback’s play wasn’t working and he called out a new one on the fly. She and Sam hadn’t had much of a play designed in the first place — a hasty “I’ll take care of the new arrivals” from Sam and an “I’ll see to the walking wounded” from Charlie. And that play quickly disintegrated into all the players calling audibles all the time. Controlled chaos. Controlled most of the time. Some of the time.

  The moniker Fish had hung on the phenomenon became more fitting by the hour. The people of Nowhere County had somehow been pulled through a mirror into a whole new world where the usual principles of the functioning of
the universe flat out did not apply anymore. And the foreignness of it all — each new person who looked at them with confused eyes and asked “Where am I? How did I get here?” couldn’t have been any less frightening than wandering through Wonderland, fearing an attack any minute by a monstrous dragon called the Jabberwock … and you’d left your magical “vorpal sword” in your other pants.

  When Malachi’s brother Neb — short for Nebuchadnezzar, which it was rumored he never did learn how to spell — arrived to pick up Malachi and his mother, Malachi refused to leave.

  “They need help here,” he said, to which his mother replied, “This ain’t none of your concern, boy.” To which he replied, “Then whose concern is it?”

  Charlie didn’t know what Malachi’s rank had been in the military — didn’t even know which branch he’d served in — but he was as good at giving orders as he was at taking them. He was good at organizing, too, and devised systems and some semblance of organization as they assembled the growing number of volunteer helpers into teams to assist Sam and Charlie in caring for the fast-growing number of Jabberwock victims, getting them back on their feet and into the shade of the roof overhang on the line of empty strip mall businesses. When they were finally able to stand and think, they used E.J.’s phones to call someone to come get them or found a ride home with somebody already there.

  A warning would have done no good, of course, but Sam had been right in suggesting they could get the word out on the phone, neighbors calling neighbors. It was testimony to the hardy nature of the county’s bird population that the ones perched on phone lines didn’t get fried by the friction of all the calls suddenly going through the wires.

  Word of the phenomenon spread like a grass fire. When people heard, they did one of three things. They blew it off and went on with whatever they’d been doing. They raced out to their nearest juncture with the county line to prove that it was just some made-up story that didn’t have no truth at all in it. Or they showed up as gawkers and looky-loos at the Middle of Nowhere crossroads, wanting to see the “popping into existence” part with their very own eyes.

  Those were the ones that got under Charlie’s skin. Rubber-neckers. Many — not all of them, but a lot — were the kind of people who stood below some poor soul out on a ledge and yelled, “Jump!” They had come to see the show and when she looked at their faces she could find not a speck of compassion for their neighbors. They’d spent their lives rubbing elbows with the sufferers, but in Nower County there appeared to be a sizable chunk of humanity who knew little more about their neighbors than their names — and whatever piece of juicy gossip happened to be attached to their family history.

  There was an onslaught of teenage boys for a while who’d wanted to “take a ride on the Jabberwock” as soon as they heard. Since the phenomenon was clearly a fluke, some freak of nature that wouldn’t last long, the teenagers were determined not to miss the excitement while it lasted. A group of half a dozen of them had raced out to the county line somewhere and dispatched the driver’s girlfriend to the Middle of Nowhere to pick them up so they could all go out and ride in again.

  When she arrived, her boyfriend’s buddies were sick as dogs. Vomiting. Nose bleeds. And all the shine went completely off the pumpkin for the poor girl when she found her Studley Do-Right boyfriend suffering from bloody diarrhea. When word about that got out, the number of teenage “incoming” fell off markedly, though the number of gawkers in the Middle of Nowhere continued to grow at a steady rate, as folks decided it was safer to come see what had happened to other people before subjecting themselves to the effects of the weird, shimmering mirage that encircled the whole county.

  At some point, Malachi had started “requisitioning” clean clothing and other supplies from the Dollar General Store. The owner, Howie Witherspoon, was nowhere to be found. The teenage checker who had not one time ventured out into the parking lot put up little resistance, particularly after Sam handed her a credit card and said she’d pay for whatever they used. Charlie knew Sam didn’t have that kind of money to throw away. Charlie did, of course, but her credit cards were in her purse in the airport rental car … wherever that was. Eventually, the checker just walked out, left the door open. Maybe she locked up the register … or not.

  Pete Rutherford put himself in charge of what he called the Yuk Squad.

  “I don’t get no credit for being self-sacrificing,” he said. “I got almost no sense of smell no more. It was a shame at first not to be able to smell bacon fryin’ or coffee brewin’ or the air after a spring rain. Went and bought myself some baby powder, dusted it all over my hands, put them over my nose. Nothing. I liked to a cried.” He looked out over the parking lot. “But it’s definitely an advantage right now.”

  Sam was soon overwhelmed with trying to care for all the desperately sick people. Their maladies ranged from projectile vomiting, nosebleeds, bleeding ears, confusion, disorientation, temporary loss of hearing and/or vision to migraine headaches and bloody diarrhea. The symptoms and their severity differed dramatically from person to person — for no apparent reason, with no pattern they could discern.

  Two healthy teenage boys and a farmer named Judd Phillips, who was as strong as — and built like — a bull, had been totally incapacitated for more than two hours, too sick with vomiting and headaches to move. But five-year-old Timmy Bessinger, whose mother was taking him to a dentist appointment, had gotten off with mild disorientation and a kind of blank stare that lasted for about half an hour — much like Merrie’s.

  Seventy-nine-year-old Grace Tibbits showed up with her son Reece, who was taking her to Carlisle for her twice-a-week appointment for dialysis.

  It hit Charlie then, and she saw it sink in with the others, too, that being locked up within the boundaries of Nowhere County had better be a brief, unexplainable phenomena. It needed to vanish back to wherever it had come from soon, because if it hung around, there’d be severe consequences — and not just in missed dental appointments or a foiled trip to Walmart.

  While Reece lay incapacitated by a splitting headache and a bloody nose, Grace recovered from vomiting quickly enough that she piled in beside Sam and Charlie tending to the “wounded,” brushing off Sam’s urging to sit down and take it easy with, “Don’t be ridiculous, child, I’m in better shape than ninety percent of the people for a hundred yards in every direction.”

  Sam caught Charlie’s eye when she saw Grace, nodded toward Pete Rutherford and whispered, “Pete takes weekly chemotherapy treatments in Lexington. Cancer. He’s in remission now. But if he stops taking the treatments …”

  When Abner Riley recovered his vision, he hung around to help. Abner had a cleft palate and at some time in his life, somebody — and probably not a doctor — had sewn up the split lip part of the condition but left the rest. He had been an orderly in the hospital in the Ridge before it closed and was on his way to work in the hospital in Carlisle.

  Thelma Jackson got her nosebleed under control pretty quickly and she stayed, too. Even taller than Sam, Thelma had been a high school history teacher — back when the Ridge had a high school — whose hobby was genealogy. Hers was one of only a handful of black families in the county. Her husband, Cotton, had played football for the University of Kentucky years ago and now commuted to Lexington six days a week to work as a foreman in a sewing machine factory. She was glad he hadn’t been with her … the Jabberwock and all. He had high blood pressure.

  Other people stayed, too. A few. Rodney Sentry, a pig farmer. Roberta Callison, who raised chickens and sold eggs at a roadside stand. It didn’t escape Charlie’s notice, and it didn’t surprise her, either, that the ones who stayed to help out were generally folks who had managed to make life work somehow in Nowhere County. The majority of the people transported by the Jabberwock to the parking lot were like most of the rest of the population of the county — they lived on government checks and food stamps, expected a handout and felt entitled to it.

  As the day wore on, it be
came clear that the delivery truck that didn’t show up that morning to deliver disposable diapers to the Dollar General Store had been a harbinger of things to come. The rural mail carriers didn’t show. Rodney Sentry’d been waiting for delivery of a hog he’d bought from a farmer in Drayton County. Since the fellow didn’t answer the phone, Rodney’d decided to go see what’d happened to him. Roscoe Tungate and his twin brother, Harry — as alike as two ears of corn picked out of an Iowa cornfield — were waiting for their cousin to bring them four cases of beer from Lexington, and when he didn’t show up … the list went on and on.

  Clearly, the Jabberwock gate to the world was locked on both sides.

  Nobody could leave. Nobody could come in, either.

  Abby Clayton had taken that understanding hard. She’d been counting on somebody to swoop in and rescue her so she could go get her baby. Charlie felt sorry for the young woman, even though if looks could kill, Charlie would have been pushing up daisies, courtesy of the daggers Abby was firing at her. It was unnerving, but about the middle of the afternoon, she noticed that Abby was nowhere to be seen. Someone must have given her a ride home.

  In truth, there was really nothing anybody could do to help the people who’d lost a battle with the Jabberwock. All Sam, Charlie, Malachi, E.J., Liam, Pete, Grace, the Tungate brothers and the handful of others could do was get them cleaned up — as best they could — and keep the place hosed down — as best they could — and make them as comfortable as possible until the symptoms abated on their own.

  Liam had summoned the volunteer fire department and they’d come roaring out of the Ridge, lights flashing and siren screaming. They likely didn’t get an opportunity to do that very often and they took advantage of the thrill whenever they could. They were, after all, volunteers, summoned by beepers from the fields where they were milking cows, the backyard where they were hanging clothes on the line or the fry kitchen at A Salt and Battery, the fish and chips place in Twig. They operated the dilapidated equipment that would be used until it fell apart, and then so would the department because there were no funds to replace it. They had arrived and hooked a hose to the fire hydrant behind the Dollar General Store, and then helped to keep the parking lot and the bus shelter hosed down and as sanitary as possible. Luckily the strip mall had been built on a hill and the water off the lot ran down the nearby ditch and into the creek and was carried away.