Darkansas

by Jarret Middleton

  Rubin sat at the front of the stage with his semi-hollow heaped in his lap and cleared his throat into the microphone. “I would like you all to raise a glass to the beautiful bride, and the considerably less attractive groom.” The crowd cheered with laughter. “I known this boy here since before he could walk, so I can rib him like that, see. It’s all part of the blessing.” Rubin squinted through the lights and rain, eventually finding Malcolm and Elizabeth in the crowd. “I had the good fortune to play music with your father some forty-five years ago. Can you believe? We were on top of the world then, made some great music together. Didn’t we, Walker?” He searched the crowd until he found his old friend. Walker nodded his beard, flush with longing and joy. Rubin returned to Malcolm. “I knew your mother before she passed.” His solitary address echoed through the speakers. “She was as beautiful spirit as there ever was. I seen her bring so much joy each day to your father and you boys when you was little. She gone that better way, but she would have been so proud here today. I can feel her, smiling down. You boys took after her, talk about blessed. Jordan looks a bit more like her. That’s all right, Malcolm. That just means you are cursed to turn out like your father, wrinkled as a hide.”

  Clapping and hollering corralled the front of the stage and Rubin called on Walker to get up there and join him in playing a song. “Let’s do a song for the new couple, Walker, and a few more for the rest of these freeloaders.” At the prodding of friends and the Truitt women, Walker obliged Rubin’s request and made his way to the stage. “Well, would you look at that,” Rubin called over the clapping and yelling of the crowd. “Now, where’s Jordan?” Rubin scanned the crowd until he found him. “How’s about playing one with your old man, son?” Jordan waved him off, but Leah pushed him by the shoulders and parted the crowd.

  Jordan smiled at his father and joined his side under the bright light. Rubin got a lick rambling and cued the boys in the band to follow suit. Rubin came back to the front and faced the crowd. Jordan yelled in his ear, “What song are we doing?”

  “An old one of your pa’s, called ‘Sanctimony.’ Just sit backup to the first chorus and you’ll figure it out.”

  “I know it,” Jordan said simply.

  Malcolm swayed with his arms around Elizabeth and listened to his father’s ethereal voice as it was backed by his brother’s natural harmony. They finished the tune to a thunder of applause and the dancing couples called out for another.

  “No, no,” Walker grumbled through the speakers. He leaned off to the side and told Rubin and Jordan that he was not feeling well. “I’m awfully tired from an eventful couple of days,” he said. “Tell you what. I am going take a break for just a little while— when I come back, we’ll sing a few.”

  “That’s a deal,” said Rubin. Walker and Jordan embraced before Rubin helped him to the stairs at the side of the stage.

  “I guess I’ll play a few more then,” said Jordan. Rubin slung his guitar over his head and handed it over to Jordan. He threw the leather strap over his shoulder and looked out on the people in the drizzling night. He planted himself in front of the microphone and steadily strummed, heat breaking in his chest, unknown weight falling away. Leah watched from the foot of the stage and listened to his coarse divination rumble atop his twanging guitar and roll across the yard. Walker looked on for a moment, immersed in an utter dispensation of peace. He had grown tired and heaved his way through congratulatory guests, who shook his hand and patted his shoulder as he passed. Jordan watched his father break free from the crowd and take his time crossing the grass up to the house, alone.

  As Walker undressed in his room, the cacophony of the party was reduced to a murmur. He shed the exhaustion of incessant talking and constant socializing and reveled in the momentary quiet of the upstairs. The fast pace of the wedding had caught up with him, as well as an unexpected torrent of emotional relief. He hung his suit in the mahogany wardrobe anchored in the far corner of his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed, removing his cuffs, watch, and rings, placing them on the nightstand. He switched off the bedside lamp and drifted to sleep.

  Soft light glared through the fog blanketing an unfamiliar field. Walker stepped lightly on stiff stalks of grass and wild brush. Frosted straw brushed the sides of his legs. His breath melded into the haze. Cold and confused, he kept walking, each step heavy and slow. He did not know where he was or how he got there. The feeling of being followed burned at his back and he looked around, uneasy. He strained to see behind him, but there were only hazy flows of mist trapped by dark forest. He knelt in the grass to get a handle on his nerves, closing his eyes and steadying his breath. A quick, ephemeral sound cut the air ahead of him like wind once more before it disappeared.

  His heart pounded on the back of his tongue and struggled to siphon blood to the tips of his numb extremities. He felt like a sitting duck, so he shot up and broke into a dead run, straw and horseweed whisked like insects as he charged past. He turned to look behind him, and a slow terror pulled his mouth apart. A shadowy figure was running after him through the fog. Walker quickened his pace, his only motivation to make it out of the open field and back into the cover of the trees. The remaining distance of the grove took a distorted amount of time and effort to dissipate and Walker feared that he wasn’t going to make it out. The light that illuminated the field began to fade beneath the canopy that lay just ahead. Weakness fought to get a hold in his chest and the pain that rang through his legs pinched in his joints and knifed his body with white heat as he stumbled over uneven depressions that opened in the ground. Walker bounded over patches of mud and dead wood felled on its side. His speed decreased and the beast came closer. A root that was twisted above the ground caught Walker’s foot and sent him crashing upon wet leaves and fallen branches.

  He laid still, swallowing small, wheezing breaths. He gazed at the understory. The forest cracked and dripped, hidden nocturnal creatures howled and shrieked. He screwed his eyes closed again and huddled his knees to his chest in fear, like a child. The air sagged with the heat of another body, he could taste the residue of salt. He knew the creature was standing over him. The adrenaline that fueled his flight had waned and left in its hollow a pleading, defenseless, all-consuming dread. There was nothing left to do but face the unknown beast.

  A muscular body rose out of the night covered in white ash, chest scored with symbols and scars. Circles divided by two lines dissected his stomach and abdomen. Walker scurried on his hands and knees back through dirt and leaves, petrified as the creature covered the ground that separated them with one giant step. Resolved upon the stratagem of its kill, the figure produced a blade. It hoisted the knife high in the night sky and a flash pierced the innermost chambers of Walker’s heart. In that moment, Walker saw into the heart of the man who stalked and breathed like a monster. The shape of his body and the language of his sleek, lethal movement had felt eerily familiar, but it was not until the raising of the blade that the killer’s face was laid bare. In the scoria of his eyes and the tough, blank canvas of his expression, Walker recoiled with horror as he deciphered the unmistakable face of his son.

  Bluegrass rolled over dancing, writhing bodies. Elizabeth wrapped Malcolm’s maroon sweatshirt over her dress to protect it from the rain, though the white hem was already soaked with muddy water. The interlocking floor panels bowed under stomping feet, slick with a film of rain, mud, grass, sweat, and spilled drinks. The gyrating mass of smiling dancers huddled together so they wouldn’t slip and fall. Mary and Ashley Truitt danced in a group around Elizabeth while she kissed her new husband and swung her weight back and forth from his neck. “We did this, you and me,” she said. “We brought all these people together. You should be proud. You know, you have another reason to be proud.” Elizabeth began to mist with tears and grabbed Malcolm by the chin to be sure that she had his undivided attention. “You are going to be a father,” she told him.

  Malcolm’s face froze with surprise. Then he kissed Elizabeth hard, dipping h
er down in a hug until they fell over together. He helped her to her feet as she oscillated between crying and hysterical laughter. “Dance with me,” she pleaded, lacing his sky-blue tie through her fingers, rocking them close. Mary handed them both a fresh glass of wine, which they clanked together and sipped. Then Malcolm stepped on a slick floor panel and slid off balance, spilling the glass of cabernet down the front of his suit. He held out his glass, shirt and hand stained red.

  Elizabeth laughed. “Don’t you worry about that,” she said, “just dance with me.” She urged him closer, but Malcolm pulled back. “You’re no fun,” she said, directing his eyes to hers as she held her palm to his cheek. “Hey, look at me. It’s a bit of spilled wine at a wedding, our wedding, in case you forgot.” Malcolm calmed himself down. “Go get yourself cleaned up, a toothbrush and a little baking soda should do the trick,” she instructed. “When you’re done, you better get your ass back down here and dance with me.”

  Jordan let loose on Rubin’s Gretsch, but as the evening wore on damp set in his bones, his fingers strickened with the cold, and he could think of nothing else but his conversation with Andridge Grieves and his insistence that Walker’s life was somehow in danger. He worried where Andridge had gone after he disappeared from the hotel. He could not have taken kindly to Jordan’s brief kidnapping and could be off somewhere plotting his revenge. He or Cob could be there right now, watching them. Though Jordan was worried about his father, he promised Malcolm that he would leave it alone, at least until after the wedding. He did what he could to put it out of his head, but it kept roaring back. He was not even sure what was in danger of happening, he only knew they were involved in something that was out of his control. All that speculative, horrid thinking was beginning to take its toll.

  As he continued to play, he asked himself whether or not he really could have imagined the entire ordeal. If that were true, he was far more troubled by the prospect that he was losing his mind.

  Walker returned from the depths of his dream scoured with sweat. He wiped threads of gray hair from his face, wildly eyeing the room. The bathroom door sat opened a crack. The dresser topped with pictures and a vase lamp stood heavy in the corner. A mahogany mirror reflected the far side of the room, where two red orbs with diamonds cut out of them hovered past the end of the bed. White chalk textured the skin around the eyes and Walker grew petrified as Malcolm’s face emerged from the dark. Malcolm crouched low in the corner, seething like an animal, his naked skin shocked white with ash. Their line of vision connected in the mirror across the room and Walker froze in his bed, unable to move. Malcolm remained in the corner, oscillating his limbs as though ready to attack, clutching the same beveled dagger he had wielded in the dream. Walker could no longer tell if he was awake or asleep, but he knew that if he did not break from his paralysis and run for his life, the demonic aberration that appeared to him as his son was going to kill him. He struggled to toss back the blankets and fell to the floor with a thud. Malcolm remained in the mirror like a static, glitching still-life as Walker crawled past him, then rose to his feet and ran for the door.

  The bathroom light shone into the hall, water ran from the faucet. Walker forced a dry swallow in his throat and whipped around, scowling behind him, but nobody followed. Trembling, he pushed the bathroom door open a couple of inches before it swung open from inside. “Didn’t see you there, Dad,” said Malcolm. He stood at the sink, using a wire brush to work the crimson stains from the front of his suit. When Walker gazed upon his son, he saw the brush as the knife from the dream and the burgundy tint of wine appeared to him as blood. Even the foam lathered from the baking soda translated into white ash crawling up his forearms to each elbow, same as the demon lurching in his room only a moment before.

  The wet shirt was draped over the porcelain sink. Malcolm’s pectorals were split by a lick of hair, his stomach and chest bare above the belt of his trousers. “You okay, Pa?” he mouthed. “I was trying to be quiet, thought you were asleep. What’re you doing up?” Malcolm was not sure whether or not his father had heard him, so he repeated the question a second time. Walker staggered back, ripped apart by disbelief. He leered back down the hall, where he had seen his son crouching in the corner of his bedroom with a knife, then back to the bathroom, where Malcolm stood plain as day. He backed away from the bathroom, unsure and afraid, holding out his hands to shield himself as Malcolm came into the hall. Walker tried warning him to stay away, but the chords in his throat wrested together and struck him mute, so he gasped silently in horror.

  Malcolm moved slowly toward him, asking if he was all right. Walker emitted a wounded sort of howl, an awful noise Malcolm had never heard before in his life. “Calm down,” he consoled him. “It’s okay, try and breathe.” Malcolm’s forearms dripped with white foam and he still had the wire brush in his right hand. Walker fixated on it, pointing, trying his best to scream. Walker struck out and shoved Malcolm away, continuing to back himself toward the head of the hall. Malcolm saw the trail of rain and wine his shirt had left as Walker set his bare heel down in it on the edge of the stairs. He lunged forth, reaching out to catch his father, but his hands closed on thin air as Walker crashed backward down the flight of stairs.

  Outside on the stage, an electric crunch rang from an amplifier. Jordan held a low chord that vibrated his guts and turned to feedback through the speakers. When the heavy crash shook inside the house, Jordan dropped his guitar with a discordant clang, jumped off the stage, and ran through the crowd, shoving people aside as he ran up the porch and through the kitchen. He came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, where his father’s body lay contorted in a heap. Jordan held his fingers to the side of Walker’s neck, looking for a sign of life, and when he didn’t feel a pulse knock back against his fingers, he leaned over his father’s motionless body and looked up the stairwell at his brother sprawled out on his stomach, arms reached out in front of him. Malcolm and Jordan both laid there in a moment of quiet with Walker’s corpse, each hoping they were at the apex of some nightmare from which they could still wake.

  EIGHTEEN

  1862—ORIGIN

  The town of Carrollton had seen better days. The meager community, poised as it was on a difficult passage of the Ozarks plateau, once grew in multitudes—cattle was bred and fed, building financed, iron smithed, grocers and saloons traded in wares of necessity and vice. The hearts of the townsfolk broke when mothers watched their sons leave in equal droves for Rebel and Union camps. Neighbors that had been kind and dependent on each other for generations bickered and fought, families turned on one another. Frigid relations became permanent when boys from either side did not return from the fight. They did their best to persevere, but in the matter of a year, no more than two, Carrollton was destitute, a degradation from which it would never recover.

  The war had taken a pernicious toll, undoubtedly, but a new scourge was upon them. The Confederate defeat at Prairie Grove that past December saw the nearby counties soaked in blood. Thousands dead, some local boys, others from as far away as Ohio and New York, fallen by each other’s side as northwestern Arkansas fell to the Union. As word spread, morale was decimated, and a dread swept through the countryside worse than any disease. Confederate troops retreated back to Little Rock with their dead in tow, the force of life choked from each pallid, miserable face, while at the same time the Union moved their dead, treated their wounded, and restocked food and munitions from cracker lines in Missouri. It was a bitter winter out in the elements and any movement was slow. The dead were mourned and forgotten, the sick carried themselves once more, and eventually food, water, and rest enlivened the men enough to march east. General Blunt was bent on maximizing the gains of such a decisive victory. As locals and broadsheet headlines speculated, he planned to drive his men across the north of the state until they sat outside fortified Confederate positions across the Mississippi.

  First, Blunt needed to reinforce and expand his corps of troops. After food and medicine came down t
he resupply, General Herron led an army of twenty thousand Union soldiers to set up camp on the outskirts of Carrollton, and their presence threw the town into immediate chaos. Fights plagued the local taverns so many nights that those who did not close their doors for good imposed curfews and hired private security. Quarrels born in those late hours saw their resolution in the dark and mudded streets. Pistols were easily drawn and fired, leaving corpses to bloat in the sun until they were dragged from sight and thrown in a pit behind the cemetery.

  Tavern owner Jed Turrion was found in the alley behind his bar, shot through with a reckless spray of bullets, appearing to certain citizens of stature that he had been murdered for sport and nothing more. Not two weeks later, Mary Edin, a widowed mother of three, was gang raped by four Union soldiers on the very table where she served her children dinner and still set out a plate for her slain husband. The shame led her to hang herself from the gable of her one-room home as her three bright-eyed children watched from below. More women were beaten and raped. Carrollton’s only bank was raided and burned to the ground, the body of its financier, John H. Faraday, found in the rubble. Finally, a group assembled in secret to decide what was to be done.

  The meeting was called by a young smith named Andridge Sampson who operated one of the most frequented shops on the east edge of town. Andridge knew the widow Edin and her late husband well. His smithery was credited to in times of need by the generous Mr. Faraday and Andridge kept the profits he had earned in his bank, all of it now gone.

  In ’61, Andridge caught a bullet in his thigh at Wilson’s Creek and was discharged with a shattered femur. He relocated to Carrollton at the behest of his friend, Benjamin Dunn, who suggested the sleepy plateau might be a place to live out his days in peace. Some businesses had continued to thrive in Carrollton, despite the war—smithing, milling peter, caskets and burial, the Lord. He formed a partnership with Ben and the Dunn-Sampson Blacksmithing Company was born. Andridge had been content to keep his head low and work, put the horrors of the past behind him, but now the northern barbarians were again at his doorstep and he could ignore them no longer. At night his mended wound ached and his mind flashed red with their unending trail of dead. He knew in his heart that there would be no peace until they were forced to leave. He convened the first meeting of concerned townsfolk, personally offering his hand to kill as many of those out-of-control scoundrels as he could.