Chapter 55

A breeze shakes the weeds; and Lee shivers, hating her, hating them all. “Come on now....Please?” “I’ll go look,” Joe Ben volunteered. “I’m still up rearin’, and Jan’s asleep. Shoot, I’ll find that dog in no time.” Hank was skeptical. “Last I heard her was east, up in the direction of Stamper Creek; you sure you want to head off up there by yourself?” “You talk like I’m scared of ghosts or somethin’.” “Ain’t you?” “Goodness, no. C’mon, Uncle; we’ll show ’em who’s scared an’ who ain’t.” Hank grinned. “Right sure now? It’s terrible dark, and remember what day it is now...last of October...” “Foo. We’ll find her. You go on back to the house.” Hank started to further tease his cousin but was stopped by the pressure of Viv’s nails in his arm. “All right,” he agreed hesitantly, then winked at Joe. “I don’t know how come it is but every time the woman here gets a little sniff of alcohol she wants to celebrate.” Joe took a sandwich and a cup from the knapsack. “Oh yeah.” He nodded out at the night beyond the fire. “No tellin’ what a perceptive man’s liable to find out yonder first wee small hours of Halloween day. All manner of things.” But once the others had left, his enthusiasm cooled quickly. “Dark, ain’t it, Uncle,” he confided to the dog tied to the shack. “Well, you ready?” When the dog didn’t answer Joe decided to have another cup of the burned coffee, hunkering over the coals with the tin cup steaming between his hands. “Quiet, too...” Though it was neither. The moon found holes in the clouds with skilled agility, making the forest glisten with frost, and the night animals, as though sensing their last chance of the year, were having a session equal to the event. The tree toads sang bright good-bys before burrowing into their nice snug mud; the shrews darted about the paths, uttering shrill squeaks of last-minute hunger; the killdeers flew jerkily from meadow to meadow, calling, “Dee! Dee! Dee,” with clear, sweet, reassuring optimism about the state of this beautiful frosty night. Joe Ben was not reassured; in spite of his show of bravery before Hank, rain or shine, fair or foul, daytime was his time. And the forest at night might be beautiful, but if it was dark how was a man to know that? So he put off the search for the missing dog for one cup of coffee after another. Not that he was scared of the woods after dark—there wasn’t a beast produced by all the northern wilds that Joe Ben would have hesitated tackling, barehanded, with every confidence of winning, day or night—it was that, some way or other, alone at night, with the prospect of walking up to Stamper Creek he got to thinking about his father.... After a long time Molly moves, trying to stand in the shallow water. Most of the fire in her hips is out now. And the pain is numbed by the cold. And it is no longer unpleasant to lie in the water. But if she does not go home now she knows she never will. She falls a lot at first. Then she begins feeling her limbs again and stops falling. She frightens a possum right in her path. The animal hisses and rolls to its side, twitching. She walks past without sniffing it . . . Because if there was ever ghosts in this world, then old Ben Stamper’s ghost walked those woods out there right now, Joe was sure. It didn’t cut ice whether that ghost happened to be solid or not—Joe had never feared harm from the corporeal side of his father, even when the man was alive. Ben had never threatened his young with physical violence. It might have been better if he had; the threat of violence can be escaped by simply getting out of range of it ...but the threat Joe had felt it necessary to escape was the dark portent he had seen stamped into his father’s face—like an expiration date stamped into a borrowed book—and since Joe carried the same face he had felt stamped with the same portent; changing the face had been the only way to change the stamp. “All right, Uncle, hush your whining; this one more cup and we’ll have a look.” So wouldn’t it be a pity to be wandering around and it so dark that you couldn’t see the change? ...She comes to the log she had jumped so easily before; now she drags her body over it, a leaden piece at a time: COLD. Cold little moon. Cold and hot and a long way.... Joe cut himself a nice pitchy pine bough and shoved it down in to the fire. When it was blazing brightly he untied the dog and started off down the trail, leaning back against Uncle’s pull. But those pine boughs don’t work like they do in the moving pictures with the villagers out by the hundreds storming through the woods after some kind of monster that nabs the first guy without a torch and pinches his head off like a grape! Ten minutes later Joe was back firing up his torch again . . . Hard and cold and small as a stone. Could just lie down. On the soft moss there. Sleep there. No . . . This time he tied Uncle’s rope to his belt and carried two boughs, one in each hand. And lasted twenty minutes. Or under the tree in the pine needles. Tired and cold and burning a long way. Sleep for a long time ...No... The third time Joe and Uncle made it as far as the slough bottom. The moon feinted this way and that, trying for a shot past the clouds. A beam of light threaded down through the trees and found a shrew ripping to pieces a frog twice its size, spotlighting them as though they were the main attraction of the evening. Uncle took one look and made a lunge that jerked Joe Ben free of his torches. They hissed to darkness in the deep, wet fern ... in the pine needles for a long time lie down, just sleep and not be cold or HOT ever again. No . . . And it’s black. At the house Viv cries with a feeling of terrific and uncomprehending release, trying to understand what has just happened between Hank and Lee downstairs. Hank fumes angrily in the kitchen with a beer. Lee stands at his window, looking out across the river. “Where are you, moon? You and all your nonsense about magic macaroons? I’d like a word with you, if you don’t mind. . . .” “Uncle! Father! Jesus!” Joe Ben stood petrified while Uncle consumed shrew and frog both. He tried some scripture—“Be thou a light unto my lamp,”—but it just didn’t satisfy. Not when there was . . . something out there! something always out there big and black and waiting to pull you under . . . where the MOON won’t burn any more and the COLD and heavy hips won’t drag. No ...No! Viv stops crying and turns to confront her room, where it seems she hears a mocking black-crow laugh somewhere behind her. There is just the empty cage. Old Henry, up in his bed, fights to whip a shadow with a knife in its boot, young, and nimble, and twice as elusive as usual because he dodges in and out of the years, first in the past then in the future where Henry can’t even see the cheating young sonofabitch! And Lee finds his hack-magic moon hiding sheepishly behind a crackling cloud: I spat a contemptuous oath in his direction: that for your hearts and flowers and bury-the-hatchet baloney! And that for your dose of Alice’s Patented Pituitary Stimulants you conned me into swallowing with a mouthful of cream—nothing but carnival hokum, medicine-show quackery that leaves a man worse off than he started! Uncle began to whine at standing still so long, and Joe booted him in the rump to shut him up. The moon flashed off and on, signaling; in the mountains to the east silent lightning answered. Uncle whined again. “Shut up, dog! We’re all in this thing together, every one of us. He’s out there!” HEAVY heavy COLD cold tired easy in the pine needles never cold any more. No! Yes; rest . . . and Joe stood listening down into his fear for the booted tread of the man who never could walk the woods quietly—“But he won’t come after me, the devil; he knows; he’s waiting for me to come to him!”—and heard only the wind in the frosted red alder leaves. Lee turned from his window, leaving the moon and its medicine: I was going back to good old Shazam or its equivalent. Maybe the right magic word was harder to find than the right magic macaroon, but let’s face it, moon; those carbohydrates and polysaturates may put on weight and sweeten the disposition, but they’ve never been known to create instantaneous biceps of steel. I want power from my magic, not a pastry paunch. And lightning is one hell of a lot more powerful than leavening. That lightning left a taste of pennies and a slight ringing in the air. Joe swallowed the taste and stretched his neck forward to hear the ringing better. “Uncle! You hear that? You hear something just then?” . . . and it’s heavy heavy cold easy yes WHAT? yes just rest ...hear WHAT? Down from the hill it came again, a thin, keen whistle that rose sharply at the end like a curved brush-cutting knife. “That’s Hank at the shack!” Joe exclaimed. “Let’s go meet him, Uncle, let’s go!” Jubilant, they trotted back up the path in the direction of the sound as though the way had suddenly become brightly lit with floodlights . . . yes WHAT? Molly lifts her muzzle from her paws and turns her head stiffly toward the sound of Hank’s WHISTLE WHAT? The air around smells heavy with BEAR, but the smell is not right now. This is the smell where the BEAR had first made a STAND. Right here. And she has run him. The WHISTLE cuts through the dark to her again WHAT? HIM? she pushes her front quarters up, and the one good hind leg, and starts WALKing once more HIM YES ...WALK. As Lee prepares his writing tablet and rolls his three small cigarettes: “Dear Peters . . .” and Viv doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand . . . Hank was sitting on the sack of decoys, smoking, when Joe Ben came into the firelight. “Why, I sure didn’t expect to hear you whistlin’ at the night,” Joe called jauntily. “I thought you’d be sawin’ wood down there a long time ago. Oh yeah. I mean I woulda. Nearly dozed off just walkin’ around...” “No sign of Molly?” Hank continued to stare into the coals. “Not hide ner hair. An’ I combed the Stamper Creek territory high an’ low.” He took a deep breath to stop his panting, lest Hank know he’d run all the way back to the fire, and walked to tie Uncle back to the shack, watching Hank stare at the fire. . . . “An’ what’s gnawing your bones?” he wanted to know. Hank leaned back, lacing his fingers about one knee. He squinted against the smoke of his cigarette. “Oh ...me an’ the kid kinda got into it.” “Oh, no, why?” Joe asked reproachfully, then suddenly recalling how fast Viv and the boy had jumped apart when they showed up, asked, “What about ...?” “What about don’t matter. Shit. Some little unimportant argument about music. That ain’t it.” “It’s too bad, too bad. You know? You and him been hittin’ it off so good. After that first day, I said to myself, ‘This here maybe was a mistake.’ But then the ice thawed and everybody was goin’ along and—” “No,” Hank told the fire. “We weren’t hittin’ it off that good. Not really. We just wasn’t fightin’. . . .” “You didn’t fight now, did you?” Joe asked, afraid he’d missed something. “I mean a fist-feet-and-fur-flyin’ fight?” Hank continued to stare at the settling fire. “No, we didn’t fly any fur. Just yelled back and forth some.” He sat up and spat his cigarette into the coals. “But, by God, I think that right there is the bone that sticks in both our craws. Maybe that right there is the real thing that always keeps us from hitting it off. . . .” “Yeah?” Joe Ben yawned, getting closer to the fire. “What’s that?” He yawned again; it had been a full day and a fuller night for Joe. “That we didn’t fight. That he won’t, and I know it and he knows it. Maybe that right there is the thing keeps us just like oil and water.” “That back East livin’ is made a coward out of him.” Joe’s eyes had closed, but Hank didn’t seem to notice. “No, he’s no coward. Or he wouldn’t come on to where somebody’s gonna bust teeth out for him someday. No. It ain’t that he’s a coward...even though he might think he is. He’s big enough he knows he ain’t gonna get too bad a lickin’ even if he was whipped. I used to see him in grade school take crap off kids half his size, kids he knew couldn’t whip him. ...But even when he knows he ain’t gonna get whipped, he acts like he knows he can’t win neither!” “That’s right, that is right. . . .” Joe’s head was beginning to wobble.