by A. R. Moxon
For his own part, Love kept from the fountain through winter, and waited, and pondered, awaiting spring. The river was solid as an anvil, and so too would be the ground. There could be no digging, not yet. The main portion of his time he spent, to the surprise of all, in whichever cabin the women gathered each day, enduring their prattle and gossip, learning from them all the hereditary chores passed from mother to daughter. He made a patient apprentice as they dyed and cooked and scrubbed, churned and quilted and knitted, darned, mended. He attended to each tedious detail, eschewing nothing. The women shook their heads and chuckled behind their hands; the men, not knowing what to make of it, said nothing and put it from their minds, for the village, having become accustomed to this behavior, counted it among the peculiarities of a strange but indispensable man.
Spring that year snuck in like a slow odor; not until early March could they discern the receding snow; a flood unlocked slowly, churning the village into a morass, the water eventually running down to meet the swollen river. Water stains on their outer walls now showed high above the drift line; brackish water leaked into their paths. They lay down planks and logs to connect their homes so the sludge would not suck away their boots.
The sun remained shy until the day the pigeons came. It lay hidden beneath a dome of unbroken slate cloud stretching blanketlike, unchanging in its eversame grayness from any genesis of horizon to any other. Each day the sun would not so much rise as light up the low oppressive mantle, a lamp hid behind a wool screen. The sky bore down on them now as the snow had done, with a weight of its own, at once less immediate and more troubling, as if representing their abandonment not by the earth but by the heavens, for they knew on the other side of that barrier lay a dazzling brilliance which had been denied them. They stumbled about in their duties, lethargic, distracted, unsure, trapped between sky and mud in this strange amidships season which was no winter any of them had seen but still was no spring either.
On the day of the pigeons they woke to find the evil cloud gone as if it had never been, blown away on a sweet spring wind bruiting their deliverance even before confirmation of sunrise, a barometric change felt in the skin, even from sleep. They came out as one entity to watch the sun rise triumphant above the trees, watched the cloudless sky first dark, then pale and yellow, and then deepening blue, and all the while the sweet favonian wind on their doughpale faces, and then it was they knew at last they had truly made the passage safe. They gathered out in the field of thawed mud churned to muck by their feet, and felt, in the rays beating down without weight or portent, a sense of a great burden lifted, a vernal salvation bought and paid for by the will of a chieftain who bore for them no particular love, who now, without their knowledge, already toiled for a different salvation. For Love was beneath the earth already, caught in the fever of digging, removing clay by the bucketload from around his subterranean door.
Even Frankton Jay felt it, tending to the forge by the river, apart from the rest, silent and dour and aloof, a comportment which left his former comrades baffled through the long winter. They ascribed his newfound mordancy to the shared seasonal melancholy, but even so he pained them. Always before he had been the spirit of good cheer in their midst, wag-tongued, jolly, but he now spoke no word, not to any of them. The only one he would ever approach was Love, and even then, he held his silence; if ever he spoke even to the smith, none saw it. But it seemed, to those who considered the matter, that the man and the boy had some means of correspondence, for the boy had become Love’s apprentice, working the forge with talents none had known him to previously possess.
Now Frankton Jay stood in springtime at the forge, saw the blue deep enough to drown in, felt the sun rise for the first time in long months, and felt relief and joy with keenness the others could not match, for to his own reckoning his life began only sixmonth prior, his meager store of knowledge regarding the vagaries of seasons and their passage allowed him to conjecture more vividly, to believe as fact what others had in whimsy imagined: This is all there is, this cloud sky, the sun will never return never…Jay stood on the banks of the creek swollen to a brown river and allowed the sun to caress his face, and felt the same sense as the rest of having come through some treacherous and narrow passage, but still he stood far apart, around the river’s bend, and let the easy joyful chatter of the hated others come drifting to him. He yearned for such ease, yet kept by the forge, maintaining the wounds of a wronged deaf-mute, keeping to himself the secret of his cure from an affliction he had never suffered so completely as to mimic that affliction’s symptoms. Jay closed his eyes and looked skyward to the source of the warmth, watched insubstantial shapes move across the warm inner redness of his eyelids. He heard the beating of many wings, and marveled—what a fine thing it was to be able to hear! A miracle to hear anything, much less the sound of wings, or of water rushing past, or the ding of metal on metal, or even the joy of the hated ones downriver. Jay scowled. They would push him away, if given the opportunity; they would drive him from their midst. He had seen the strange looks shot his direction, the behindhand whispered mocks. No matter. Love had promised their day would soon come.
Intermittent shadows came between his closed eyes and the sun. He opened them and saw the birds flying above and around, hundreds of them, and now thousands, and now vast multitudes, and as he looked farther above, multitudes more, birds without end coming upon them, amorphous shapes like dark clouds forming and reforming with speed of thought. Within minutes thousands blanketed the ground, millions of them perhaps, gray of back and rufous of belly, splay-toed walking with their glass black eyes like two round pinheads in a cushion. Plump-chested passenger pigeons migrating with the warmth, resting for the day perched on the banks like stones, and perched like fat gray fruit in trees until the branches sagged to the ground, and perched on the backs of their fellows when their feet could find no branch, perched everywhere, perched even on the forge, stupidly giving their call, kek-kek, kek-kek. They had come in a mass, in clouds of feather and sinew and meat, untouched by humans and unafraid. Occasionally a branch would creak and snap with the weight of them. Downriver, Jay could hear excited yelps of villagers, meat-hungry and racing for sacks and nets, or fashioning crude trammels from Love’s store of mosquito netting. A blunderbuss packed with fine ball shot discharged in a puff of blue smoke, and the massacre commenced. Jay, famished like the rest by a winter’s worth of salt meat and hard bread, salivated at the sound of the bird-call and beating of wings, at the sight of so much stupid flesh plunked down on the banks like manna. He felt a stirring for the human yelps heard downriver, and here too in the happy clamor of citizenry was something like the appearance of blue sky, a chance for something like salvation. As if the white thickness of winter and his blindness and muteness had all been transmuted into animal substantiality and sent to them for communion, for sacrifice and sustenance. He thought of going with the rest—indeed, his feet had begun to tread the path downstream—but then he halted, belayed once more by resentment, supposing their laughter held traces of mockery.
Let the rest fend for themselves. Jay caught two birds and crushed their skulls, then repeated the task. He caught and killed with ease until he had twelve birds, then fell to plucking and dressing them. He used his hunting knife to fashion spits from sapling twigs and set six of the birds to roast over the forge and then, when the meat smell became too much to bear, he ate them half-cooked and hot off their sticks, the still-bubbling fat burning his fingers and his mouth. He heard the shouts and whoops from the village, the reports of the shotgun dispatching five or ten at a time, the crackle of the bonfire, the music of fiddles and of banjoes as an impromptu revel began, the celebration of simple joys that had, quite literally, landed upon them: meat for the belly, fat for butter, oil for the lamp, fresh feathers for mattress and pillow, and sport for the boys, who, bellies filled, slaughtered now for the bracing enjoyable suddenness of death and the powerful sensation of the fowling piece’s stock kickin
g on the shoulder, for the orgiastic sense of impossible plenty—so many birds you could kill from sunup until sunset and not reduce the number.
Frankton Jay listened to it all, but he never moved. He listened all through the deep clear blue day as he sweated at the forge, as he sharpened at the whetstone the hoes and plow blades needed to cultivate this newly arrived spring. Once, an old man came by and wheedled at him, hoping to coax him down to the party, and later a pretty young lady cried for a while at him. Both played most convincingly at being his friends, but he paid them no mind and presently they departed. He listened in the evening dusk as he methodically killed and ate more of the idiot birds crowding still around the stream banks and the forge and even his ankles, oblivious to the burnt and scattered ribcage charnel of their brothers lying on the ground among them. Jay listened and yearned and hated, the sky darkening until the fiddle music slowed—though the chatter did not—until the only light was starlight, save for the ember glow from the forge and the orange halo rising above the treetops from the bonfire, and still from all around him kek-kek-kek from unseen birds, who walked the earth and brushed up against him. He listened to his tormentors downriver and knew he could doubtless reach down without looking and pluck up a bird and murder it without complaint from its fellows.
Love returned to camp. In the firelight he looked like a golem, hands and face and hair and clothes caked with clay. He washed in the river, then took the six roasted birds the boy had saved for him and ate them cold off the spits. As Love first ate and then smoked his pipe, he spoke, slowly, without inflection or expectation of response, as if he were speaking to darkness itself, as though he were merely reminding himself of something already decided, which required no further discussion, only clarification.—There is no way inside I have yet been able to discover. Digging to the sides yields only the outer walls of the tunnel upon which it must open. No portal into the tunnel save that door which refuses to budge, no chink in the stubborn rock. It will not yield to the pick, the spade will not scratch it. The door itself as unbreakable as the stone. I begin to fear it is a mindful thing. Does it mock me? Some days I imagine it does. It whispers to me from a place on the other side of its fastness. Tells me I have not yet deserved entry. I return here, and I see a scattering, a diffusion. A roister of fools praying to their golden calf. The whispers call for their purification. I have put it off, but I will put it off no longer.
The glow of Love’s pipe waved in the darkness, indicating the campfire downriver, the shadow of caper and dance, the tickle of fiddle-string. His speech now seemed to Jay a form of trance, a device for hypnotism, some incantation the man had devised and practiced, shamanlike, throughout his daylong dig in the cellar. —Look at them. Dancing while meat to feed them forever lies at their feet all around; made promiscuous in the moment’s freedom from strife. As though striving itself were conquered. As if there will never again be winter. As if there will never more be hunger. The moment plenty comes to them through no work of their own, they put from their minds the truth that plenty will leave as it came. They climb a cliff and halfway between ground and summit find, in the comfort of a toehold, a reason to cease climbing. Their weakness I have purged from myself, but it is not enough. It is through their fault that fault has been found in me. This is not unjust; how could it be so? They are mine, to me they have come, to me they have been given. Only through their perfection can I be sanctified.
Afterward, Love left Jay to go downriver and give the villagers instruction for the next day. Frankton Jay stoked the fire and stayed up far into the night at the whetstone, sharpening knives, hatchets, axes. By morning, the smell of burned and consumed birds hung in the dawn air; thousands of avian survivors encumbered the boughs of trees and gathered in gormless clusters around the ring of settlements and among the holocaust of hollow bird bones scattered around the smoking black ashes in front of those structures. The killing continued well past dawn and into morning. Slow learners even still, many a dull-witted or slow-footed pigeon made a villager a handsome breakfast, effortlessly captured in the large nets the men had fashioned the previous day, or shot while in easy range.
The village paid no mind to the meat. Their amnesiac bellies, after one day’s fill, now remembered only surfeit and nothing of lack, and they chewed without further thought of occasion. Their talk was all of Love, and the instruction he had given last night, standing before the bonfire, his body in silhouette against it, his features undisclosed, their umbric messiah commanding them, arms raised. They debated what it might signify, this sudden invitation into Love’s heretofore forbidden woodland sanctum. All of them were aware by now of the cleared path in the forest behind the forge. Down this path their leader found whatever strange employment had kept him absent these last weeks, but it was also known beyond intuition to be the territory of Love alone, and that to intrude upon his secret would be to risk one’s soul and bones. Save for the night-whispers of wives to husbands, it was by unspoken consent a topic unbreached.
Yet now they were commanded to go to the forge and follow the path beyond it, to gather where it led, a place none of them had ever dared or hoped to go. None of them spoke of fear; concentrating instead upon their discourse, a pabulum of safer topics—how far into the woods the path may lead, what might be found there, what food to bring, how much water to carry. But none dared betray their own misgiving, none of them save one, the lady Margaret, to her husband, Isaac “Barefoot” Runyan.
A picnic?
So he said.
I won’t go.
You will if I say.
Who is he that we trust him? Who is he that we must obey?
I won’t have it, woman. All the others will go. So shall we.
If we stay they may stay as well.
If we stay I’ll be mocked again. “There goes Runyan. Afraid to work, afraid to lead. Now afraid of a picnic.”
You trust him?
He leads us.
He drives us without care. Haven’t you seen, he doesn’t look at a body, he looks through. Like sunlight through a window.
I fear the eye of no man.
Often they rest on me.
Don’t talk foolishness.
You must have seen it. He wishes me to exchange one Isaac for another.
Foolishness.
He has said as much to me.
Women’s foolishness. I won’t speak of it again.
In the hours before noon the village made ready to meet Love, packing picnic lunches of pigeon meat and bread in paper packets nestled in bark baskets. Isaac “Barefoot” Runyan emerged from his shack, forced, to his consternation, to drag Margaret his wife by the arm. She struggled only briefly, her countenance pained and betrayed, but soon she settled and walked limply beside him, eyes straight ahead. Runyan, perturbed, could not comprehend why it had to be his woman, of all people, to act as stormcloud. He could not deny to himself (even if he would deny to her) his discomfit at the notion another might have designs on his woman, particularly a man strong of will and of body…but Love was no seeker of affections; he was a force like wind. He seemed as much a rival in human matters of passion as did a mountain. No, this was a fancy, a tale fed by vanity, no more. Here was a beautiful warm spring day, the sun out and a sweet cool breeze on the air, and heaven-sent pigeons still moiling about on the bank…but Runyan grew aware of the density of the silent forest growing beside them. Margaret slowed, and Runyan, piqued, nevertheless permitted her to set their pace, and thereby they soon strayed to the rear of the company.
When they reached the forge, they saw Frankton Jay standing beneath the lean-to dressed in heavy leather overalls. Beside him lay a small mound of sharpened tools and blades. The large boy watched them with suspicious little eyes. They shuffled past the forge, and before them now lay the path carved into the thickest of the forest, a chute barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. Here a congestion formed, as those who first reached t
he entrance to the tunnel halted, quailed, attempting to cede their order to those behind, and as he and his wife mixed in with the milling crowd, Runyan thought with such vigor he surprised himself it is not too far gone yet, we can yet turn back and we need not there need be none of us need go down this tunnel we can picnic down by the river…
He almost spoke then. Almost called out.
But then one went in, and the others followed in among the close-grasping thicket while Margaret rolled her eyes sheeplike and plaintive toward Runyan, who wondered why women must put on airs to so affright him, make his breath tight in his chest, jackrabbit his heart, and as they approached the fresh-cut dark-leaved trees of the entrance he could feel the moist breath of the wood like a live hungry thing and he thought I won’t go in and then they were in, side by side, his hand still on her arm but limply now, a nominal propellant only, and they were between the thick dark green trees with people before and some behind all on their way to the place Love had gone ahead to prepare for them, where they would have their picnic, so he had said. Runyan attempted a smile; the sun was high above, and some light managed to filter down even here. He was a tracker by trade—what fear could a forest hold for him on a bright day in spring? In sudden relief, he saw his panic was his alone, that the silent fear he had seen writ in the visages of others could be ascribed to no more than the imprint of his wife’s alarm upon his own fickle imagination and suggestible nature. He found himself thankful now he had not given voice to his fear, relieved he had spared himself the taunts of his fellows.