by Sheri Holman
She stops her ears against them talking, marking their spot for later.
Up the slope, beneath the kaleidoscope of silver and olive pinion leaves, she is searching, but she has forgotten for what. She’s lost the excitement of looking, left with only the dull fear of what she might find. Her red face holds the heat like the swollen berries held the sun. And then she sees it. The snake is coiled on the ground just in front of her and she freezes with a pang of primal fear. A hatchling, it must be, slinky and brown. No, she thinks. Something is not right. A wild rattler, even a baby, would have whipped away in terror by now. She inches closer, then kneels down, lifting the shoelace between her fingers, tugging it gently where it disappears into the leaves. Now she sees the metal eyelets, the hank of rotting leather. Yellow-green moss has preserved its shape and there is no mistaking what she’d flushed out. Not ginseng, nor a snake, but the remains of a grown man’s shoe.
A second round of gunfire. Closer now. The hunting dog barks again. Why did she imagine they were all alone in these woods?
“Wallis?”
She starts at her father’s voice, calling from far away. She rises, dangling the shoe from its string. She has walked farther than she thought, behind her is a high fence of trees.
“I’ve found something,” she calls back.
“Where are you?” he shouts again. “Don’t dig anything. Wait for me.”
It’s too late, she wants to say. She tugs the moss away and the tan leather underneath is cracked and dried like jerky. She turns it over, looking for a size, as if that will tell her what she needs to know about who wore it.
“Why did you run off like that?”
Jasper is behind him; now that he’s had some success, he scans the ground like a bloodhound. He’s not even paying attention to her. Wallis places the shoe in her father’s hands.
“What’s this?” Eddie asks.
“You tell me,” she answers.
He turns it over, not answering, but she sees in his face that he recognizes it. “People dump all sorts of crap in these woods,” he says.
“It’s his, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Wallis, stop playing around,” Eddie says sternly. “Let’s go.”
“Why does Jasper know things I don’t know?”
Eddie looks reproachfully at Jasper, who has stopped at the edge of the blackberry slope. Jasper looks down and kicks aside a tangle of briar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her father protests.
“I found the other one,” says Jasper.
She had passed right by it, but Jasper digs into a low mound of dirt and exhumes another leather oxford. This one is better preserved, the sole intact, the laces petrified in their original, tight double knot. Eddie takes a step toward Jasper then changes his mind and pushes past Wallis in the other direction, dropping the shoe at her feet.
“Where are you going?” she demands, stooping to pick it up. Her father doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed on the ground now, scanning what’s left of the chestnut graveyard. He kicks aside loose stones and dry-rotted branches. The clearing of dead azalea is left behind as the forest closes in once more, casting cool shade over her arms and naked legs. She has never seen her father move so fast, like he knows exactly what he’s looking for and where he’ll find it. Without turning, she hears Jasper walking swiftly behind her.
Eddie is talking to them but talking to no one, restlessly moving forward, veering off uphill. She strains to hear him.
“I waited all those years,” he is saying angrily. “For a postcard, a letter, anything. I walked these woods and dug up sang and waited for him like a goddamned idiot.”
“Look,” Wallis points to the right of her father, to a fall of eroded boulder that was once a part of the mountain above. Beneath the bottom layer, a filthy cuff peeks out, buttoned by a random acorn. Eddie lurches over and Jasper gains ground and together the three of them lift the stones away. Eddie rolls the heavy bottom off the chest, sending a web of pink earthworms squirming for cover. With her ginseng hoe, Wallis lifts the mud-caked, decomposed fabric, flinging it to the ground. The shirt is buttonless and shredded nearly to ribbons. She kneels before it, brushes away the dried mud, fingering its rust-colored tatters. A wild animal did this, she thinks. Only that sort of fierce hunger might rip a man to shreds.
“The kids started in on me at school after the sheriff came looking for him. He’d last been seen with my mother at the general store. They all knew the stories about the women of our family, and when I told her they were claiming she conjured a panther to kill him, she didn’t deny it. She let everyone in the hollow think whatever they wanted to about her. I lay in bed, eight years old, wanting so hard not to believe it was true. If she did that to him, what would she do if I ever tried to go?”
“Eddie, over here,” Jasper calls. He has jogged ahead, close up on the edge of a steep ravine. Trapped inside the fork of a chestnut stump that has cankered and died, resprouted and died once more, dangles a mauled pair of trousers to match the shirt. Jasper wraps his hands around the orange-stained linen as if to tug a sword from a stone. Wallis rushes up to help, slashing with her hoe at the gray fork of tree flesh around it, but weakened by time and weather the pant leg easily rips away in a cloud of shreds and spore.
“They never found a body,” Eddie says, watching them. “He never wrote. I didn’t know if I was living with a murderer or if I was nothing but a hit-and-run. And those kids kept saying, Cora Alley tore him up.”
Jasper holds the fabric, no longer recognizable as pants. The stitching of the pocket with its heavy cotton lining is intact, but nothing else. He reaches in and hands Eddie a dime, three wheat pennies, and a square of melted paper. Carefully unfolding it, Eddie traces the faded route of an old road map. Its writing is unreadable.
“You don’t believe she did it,” Jasper says.
“Fear made her famous in this hollow,” Eddie says, “but that kind of fame is hell on a child.”
Wallis walks a few yards beyond, to where the mountain drops away in vanishing tiers of dun-colored parabola. Great walls of fossil limestone, trilobite, and ammonite and the bleached, cemented skeletons of untold extinct creatures from when these mountains were beneath the sea. Far below, water carves through the gorge. Are his bones down there? Where else could he be? Across the way, the woods reel out, identical and dark, unreachable from here.
“There’s a house,” Wallis says. “Across the gap.”
Eddie and Jasper join her at the edge, shading their eyes to see across the deep ravine. Half hidden in the shade of a tall, white-blossoming tree, it glows like a jeweled heart. Red, blue, green, amethyst. Someone had sunk chips of brilliant colored glass and gem in amber sap, worked into a pattern that completely covered the tiny cabin from roof to foundation, twisting and repeating, childlike and insane.
“My candy house,” Jasper says. “That’s the house I dreamed last night.”
Around each window, the pattern continues in chestnuts, three rows deep. The door, too, has been covered in repeating rows of spiny chestnut burrs, like the plated back of a prehistoric animal.
“What’s that?” Wallis asks, squinting at a metal hoop hung above the lintel. Sunlight filters through its tiny holes, casting a net across the yard.
“A winnowing sieve,” Eddie answers. “To keep the witches away.”
“He lives there,” Jasper states. “He has to.”
Wallis is still holding his shirt. She knows Jasper is right. “We should call the police,” she says, looking across to her father. She wishes Mom were here to tell them what to do.
Eddie stares at the tiny, encrusted house, his eyes filling.
“I was such a dumb little kid,” he says.
Back at the cabin, Wallis folds Tucker’s ruined clothes and leaves them on the kitchen table. Better to have them in the house than strewn along a mountain path where they might rise up in the night. No one feels like eating and so they take their turns rinsing off
in the spring before settling down to bed. Her father thought he was being considerate, giving her a room to herself, but she doesn’t want to be alone tonight. She’ll sleep anywhere they are—on the floor, on the porch, she’ll invite them in to sleep across her grandmother’s bed with her. The woods have moved closer to the flimsy house, she feels pressed in on every side.
Her father was silent and preoccupied on the walk back. Jasper asked questions. What was Tucker Hayes like? Was he a man who could live alone for decades deep in the woods? Was he a coward? Her father answered as best he could. He had a wife with him, who disappeared as well, Eddie said. It feels like I dreamed them both.
“Tuck me in?” Wallis asks him now. He nods, glad to have something to do, she thinks, and follows her into his mother’s room. When she was little Mom would sometimes sit with her until she fell asleep, but rarely her dad. He was always working.
“Turn around,” she orders him, taking the nightgown from its peg. She lets Cora’s green dress fall to the floor and shivers when the thin white linen brushes her flesh. Before it was a relic, but now it feels like something alive, sending shoots into her own skin. She stretches her arms overhead and curls her fingers like claws.
“I wish you wouldn’t wear her things,” her father says to the wall.
“Tell me not to,” she replies.
“Don’t wear her things,” Eddie answers.
“Too late,” says Wallis, climbing into bed.
The moon is rising in the window, its light meandering around the room, touching the wooden leg of the dresser and her clothes on the floor. It misses her father when he sits next to her on the bed; he is nothing but a voice.
“When I didn’t see you,” Eddie says, “I was worried I’d lost you, too.”
“That would have made Jasper happy. Then he could have you all to himself.”
Her father strokes the hair from her eyes and tucks it behind her ear. He shakes his head.
“You’re too hard on Jasper. He’s alone, he wants a family.”
“He can’t have mine,” she says. Eddie doesn’t answer. He is too distracted to talk about Jasper or anything else. She can tell he is remembering.
“Why did you tell him before you told me?”
“I don’t know,” her father says. “Maybe I wanted him to know other kids didn’t know the truth about their parents.”
“So, what do you think?” she asks. “Did that man go AWOL or did your mother conjure a panther?”
“I think he dodged the draft and forgot all about us,” Eddie says.
“I think she conjured the panther.”
“You’re young,” says Eddie. “Think what excites you.”
“Tell me a bedtime story?” she asks. She feels the sagging mattress in the hollow of her back and squirms to get comfortable. “One like she would have told you.”
“Parents shouldn’t be scary at bedtime,” he says.
“Really, Captain Casket?”
He laughs because he would rather fright be forgiveness between them. In an odd way she thinks finding Tucker Hayes’s clothes has been reassuring to her father, like watching Psycho a second time might help you feel less crazy for being so scared the first go-round. He sits silently for long enough that she is about to prod him again, but then he speaks.
“Once there was a woman of our family,” he begins, putting on his storytelling voice, like the one he used down by the railroad tracks or trots out for his skits. She’s learning where it comes from.
“Who had a beast of a husband and half a dozen beastly children.”
“Is this a true story?” Wallis asks.
“My mother never told untrue stories,” he says. “If she said every night this woman’s husband came and took a deep gulp of her, and every morning her children suckled and sucked, until this woman’s well ran dry, then that is how it happened. As my mother told it, this woman of her family found herself used up before her time. Her cheeks wrinkled, her heels cracked, the ends of her lustrous hair broke off. She looked in the mirror and instead of her fresh sweet self, she saw a wicked old witch. So, one night, while her whole family slept, she crept out into the woods by moonlight and threw three stones over her left shoulder. Satan, she whispered in the dark, get up here, I need you. The women of our family are hard to refuse, so the Dark Man roused himself and trotted up the woods near Panther Gap. What can I do for you, sweetheart? he asked, with honey in his mouth. I want to fly, she answered. I want to fly away.”
“I’m never getting married,” Wallis says. Her father pats her hand and continues.
“You don’t need me to fly, said the Dark Man. Just unfasten that old skin of yours and hang it on a low branch where you can reach it again when you get back.
“So she did. She stretched a bit to loosen it up, then stepped right out. Just for a spell. Just for a little rest from the troubles of home. Without it, she found she could take her wild, raw self wherever it was she pleased.”
“She took her skin off?” Wallis asks.
“So the story goes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Maybe the first time,” he answers. “But each time she shrugged it off, it got easier and easier to leave it behind. So while her husband snored beside her and her children thrust their feet in one another’s faces, fighting over the few scraps of blanket, she took to tiptoeing through the dreams of all the men in the valley, trying out their unlocked doors, and when she’d found a man she fancied who’d laid down without turning his lock, she’d slip through his keyhole and whisper in his ear. Come, let’s ride, she’d say. Mostly they were curious and mostly they would follow her. The minute they let her in, she’d leap upon their backs and ride ’em till they dropped.”
“Where did she go?” Wallis asks.
“To have a destination would spoil it. It was for the thrill, to see what they might see. She rode all the men of her hollow, each in turn, as if they were her own private stable. Pretty soon all the other women were angry and discontent because they couldn’t get any work or love out of their men. I don’t know what’s got into me, all these fine, strong husbands and sons would say. I’m just wore out all the time. She had the whole hollow anxious and upset, but no one could say quite why.”
“If I had those powers,” says Wallis, “I’d ride someone to a bank and steal enough money to live on for the rest of my life.”
“This witch had trouble thinking past her own neighborhood. You, my modern little sorceress, have scope of vision.”
Now it’s Wallis’s turn to laugh softly at the compliment. Telling this story he is forgetting his own troubles and that is what she’d hoped for them both. She doesn’t want to think about the clothes or who lives across the gap. She doesn’t want to think of Mom back home wondering whether she should call the police.
“One man she especially fancied,” he continues, “she rode near to death coming through his keyhole every night, driving him farther and farther. He was all worn down to bone with just a few greasy tendons holding him upright. Got to where he couldn’t think straight, started making bad business decisions, picked feuds with his kin. All he wanted was rest, but he was forced back into service night after night until, finally, he propped himself up behind the door, one bleary eye upon that keyhole, and when she slipped through, with his last bit of dying strength, he jumped her. Lord, it was sweet revenge, whipping and pushing as she’d pushed him. He rode her all the hours from midnight to sunrise, fast and furious, to teach her a lesson. Just because you’re bursting full of wants and desires doesn’t mean you get to slip out of your skin whenever you feel like it. He rode her till dawn, until at last she collapsed alongside him, nothing but sweat and bubbling white slather.”
“And that’s what finally stopped her?” Wallis asks.
“Stopped?” asks Eddie, bemused. “Then she wouldn’t be a woman of our family.”
Wallis mumbles in the dark. “That was more funny than scary.”
“I used to think so, too.”
He kisses her forehead and tucks the sheet under her chin. His face is spotlit by the moon for a brief instant before he passes again into darkness on his way to the door.
“Dad,” she says, stopping him. “Look in the bottom drawer.”
Eddie turns back and kneels before his mother’s dresser; Wallis hears the slide of wood on wood. She can’t see his face to know if he is surprised or mad that she kept the old projector a secret these past few days. He shouldn’t be mad. It’s just a movie, after all.
“It’s not lost,” she says. “Maybe he left it here for you.”
The room is silver when she wakes, hours or maybe minutes later. She had only closed her eyes and she was back home showing her mother the clothes they found. Ann had taken them and stuffed them in the washing machine and when they came out of the dryer they were whole again and good as new. Wallis opened her eyes expecting to find her mother standing over her with the laundry basket—You and your father, so melodramatic—but she is alone, in Cora Alley’s bedroom. Her eyes light on Jasper’s thick black cable snaking under the windowsill up the wall to the bare-bulb ceiling fixture. It continues down the other side and through the wall to the front parlor where Eddie has made his bed. Low yellow lantern light leaks through the space above the floorboards.