A Natural History of Hell: Stories (23 page)

“I want a raise,” said Johnson, and he and the chief laughed as they loaded the corpse onto the flatbed.

It was past ten when they entered, by the back door, the oven that was their home. Emmett began to sweat the instant they stepped into the kitchen. His father said, “Christ,” in a mournful sigh. They moved through the house into the parlor, lit by a single candle. All of the windows were open and the beetles and moths outside bounced and fluttered against the screens. Emmett’s mother, dressed in her white cotton shift, lay back in the cushioned chair, mouth open, arms folded, feet up on the hassock, lightly snoring. Her hair was down, draping over her shoulders, and a fly circled her head. On her lap, folded in half, were a few pages of last week’s newspaper.

The boy took a step toward her, but his father grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “It’s a gift to fall asleep in this weather. Don’t wake her.”

Emmett stared at the unmoving flame of the candle on the table next to her and forced himself not to mention his tea. His father’s hand stayed on his shoulder till the boy turned around and headed for his room.

“Good night, son,” said a voice in the dark.

Emmett stripped to his underwear and got into bed. He used the corner of the cover to wipe his forehead and neck before pushing it into a pile at his feet. There was no cool side to the pillow, just one less warm. He lay down in the dark on his back, and before he’d settled his head, he was thinking of Jimmy Tooth. Bits of gristle on the ribs, mouse turds dotting the blood-smeared shreds of blue shirt, cavern openings where the eyes belonged, pencil-sharp fingertips, and that rattling medal. Without the thyme tea, he knew his dreams were sure to be full of demons. He breathed deeply as his mother had taught him when he’d wake screaming from one of the nightmares. “Think logical,” she’d repeat, “think logical,” and so he tried to.

It didn’t make sense that the blacksmith’s assistant would be drunk and all the way out at the Addison place when he lived near the center of town. It was a couple miles or more. And with drink in him, he’d be less likely to stray from Main Street, where Emmett knew Jimmy liked to spout lewd sayings and songs in the presence of ladies. Emmett traveled in his mind from farm to farm and house to house throughout town, thinking of each neighbor and what his or her chances were of having committed murder. This had the same effect as counting sheep, and before he was half through the Threadwell of his imagination he fell into a sweat-drenched sleep.

The demons that hunted him in dreams were shadows with teeth. At times they surrounded him, but he never got a clear look at one, only aspects of their silhouettes—a horn, a wing, a mane, a darting serpent tongue. As insubstantial as they seemed, he felt every bite and scratch, every kick and head butt. He was on his bike, pedaling hard, but the road had turned from packed dirt to deep sand. They swept down out of the sky crying like roosters for dawn and snatched him up into the night. For the first time in weeks, he felt the wind in his face. The next he knew, they were flying over the Addison place beneath the stars. They cleared the barn, and, not slowing in the descent, they plunged into the well with Emmett in tow. The pitch-black hole had lost its bottom, and he knew he was headed for that distant place Pastor Holst referred to as perdition.

He woke thrashing and screaming. Before he opened his eyes, he felt a pair of arms around him instead of the clutches of the demons, and he heard, “Shhhhh.” With that assurance, he caught his breath and stopped writhing. A moment later, he opened his eyes, and though he expected it to be his mother next to him in the bed in the dark, he slowly came to realize it was his father. “It’s all right, I’m here.”

A moment later, candlelight seeped into the room and a globe of it encircled his mother as she entered, her white shift glowing. As she spoke, she wiped the sleep out of her eyes. “I hate to start the stove up, but I guess I should brew him a cup of thyme.”

“No,” said his father. “I’ll stay with him. Go on to bed.”

Emmett watched, in his mother’s expression, her weighing of his words. She lifted her hand holding the candle and wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her wrist. Finally, she nodded. “It’d be better not to light the stove.” She turned and left, darkness reclaiming the room. The boy wanted to reach for her, but he didn’t. Instead his father placed an open hand on his chest and gently pushed him back onto the pillow. “Lay still,” came the voice. “I’ll be here.” Emmett closed his eyes. Once sleep rose up around him like water, and once he felt himself on the verge of falling into it. With both instances, he reached for his father and both times he was there.

The demons didn’t slip into his ears again till dawn, but when they did, Emmett came screeching out of sleep from the pressure in his head. His heart pounded, and he gasped for breath. With the faint light seeping in the windows, he saw that his father had gone off to bed and left him. Even after waking and regaining composure, his head still spun with the circular motion, thinking, and torment of his phantasms. A memory of Jimmy Tooth in skeletal form farming three hundred burning acres in hell kept flickering behind his eyes. Instead of wheat, his crop was flames, and at harvest, he took them to market to sell to the devil.

He got out of bed and slipped on his overalls. Tiptoeing through the kitchen, he avoided the spots where the floorboards squeaked. Quietly opening the back door, he stepped out into the early light. It was so humid, he felt as if he were at the bottom of the pond. Nothing moved. The birds were too hot to sing, and the creepers must have turned to dust. He made his way to the kitchen garden, knelt down and grabbed a handful of thyme, and tore it out by the roots. Part of the jumble was still green but part had burned in the glare of the sun. He brought it to his mouth, but then heard his father and mother up in the house. Emmett took off and ran around behind the barn. With his back to the wall, listening to the noise of his mother heading out to the well pump to fetch coffee water, he stared into the field, waiting for her to be done.

At the boundary where the rows of corn met the yard there was a disturbance in the air. It wasn’t a breeze, as the corn stood stock-still. At first he thought it was some large insect, hovering—a moon moth late in fleeing the sun. But no, the very air seemed to pucker there and grow a vertical seam. When two bony hands clawed through the fabric of the air, Emmett shoved the handful of thyme from the kitchen garden into his mouth and chewed, his teeth sparking off grains of dirt, the green peppery taste of the herb mixing with his saliva.

Sharp skeleton fingers pried an opening through which the boy saw fire and heard distant voices crying for mercy. The corpse of Jimmy Tooth stepped through that hole into the day, left foot missing, still dressed in the shreds of shirt and jeans. It moved toward Emmett unevenly from foot to tibia end and back, lurching forward with clear intent. The boy chewed faster as it approached and faster still. After two more steps, the grim skeleton evaporated, leaving no sign that it had come for him. He sighed, and when he did he noticed the corn ripple slightly in a breeze.

He wore a starched white shirt and a tie, his short hair pushed up and stuck in place with Bear Wax. The ride from home in the buckboard—his mother and father up front and him in the back watching the wake of dust trail behind them—was glorious. The early evening fields swayed with the motion of the newborn wind and brought him smells of the creek, wildflowers, and honeysuckle. The tiny chorus frogs had found their old rhythmic thrum and two saw-whet owls perched in the dead tree next to the bridge that crossed a shallow gully just before town.

The church seemed stuffy in comparison with the coolness of the evening outside. The coffin, made of simple pine, rested on a pair of sawhorses draped with a red cloth and flanked at head and foot by tall candle stands each holding three lit tapers. It was a closed casket, of course. Mrs. Williams, the local carpenter, who’d taken on the business when her husband had passed away, could be overheard to say she’d worked on the box half through the night. As a special touch in honor of Jimmy, she’d chiseled out the likeness of a locomotive on the lid. “Well, he can finally be a conductor,” Avery Cross said and smiled. Mrs. Williams patted the blacksmith on the shoulder. Mayor Fense was present and Chief Benton, Officer Johnson, Mr. Dibble, and all the neighbors, men and women and girls and boys. Mothers and wives brought food, and once the pastor had said his piece for the unfortunate young man, the mourners would convene at tables on the lawn and feast in the miraculous breeze. As Emmett looked around the church, he noticed no one was crying, and no one was standing near the coffin. There were pockets of people milling in the aisles and sitting side by side in the pews, but the conversations looked so casual and offhand that it was obvious they were discussing the weather. Miss Billie Maufin, the schoolteacher, said to Emmett’s parents that the windless weeks reminded her of a poem wherein a ship was becalmed upon the sea. “‘The Ancient Mariner,’” said his father, and Miss Maufin nodded. “Like a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” she said. “That’s what we were.”

Mayor Fense, holding his bowler under his arm and frequently stroking his beard, told anyone who would listen to him about his theory of where the wind had gone. In his no-hurry drawl, he said, “Down in Kentucky, on July the seventh they had a biblical windstorm that flattened buildings, killed dozens, and tossed the trains from the tracks in Cincinnati. They said they never saw the like of it. But don’t you know, that’s where our wind went to. It got used up in that storm and we had to wait some weeks for another crop.”

“Poor Jimmy Tooth,” said Mr. Peasi, the barber. “Last I cut his hair—he had strong hair—he told me that he was soon gonna run off and get married to a secret sweetheart. Daft, but a likeable fellow nonetheless.”

“I recall him being gentle with the horses,” said the pastor.

When all the gossiping and talk of the wind diminished into silence, Pastor Holst put on his hat—a broad-brimmed affair with a black satin handkerchief stitched to the front of the inner brim so that the material hung down, covering his face to midchin. He’d taken to wearing it for funerals, baptisms, and marriages, after having read a story about a preacher who wore one in a book he got from the barber’s library. When wearing it, he assumed a stiff posture and intoned his words in a voice from the distant past. “Ridiculous,” whispered Emmett’s mother.

“Jimmy Tooth, you were one of us,” said Holst, the satin lifting slightly with every word. “We thank you for sharing your days with us. We thank you for your hard work at the anvil. We forgive your indiscretions and offer prayers to carry you to your just reward.” The pastor stepped away from the coffin, and his wife stepped forward. She carried a basket at her side. With her free hand, she reached into the basket and brought out a fistful of dried thyme to place in a small pile at the head of the coffin. This she did three times so there was a sizeable mound of the green powder. “Go forth in peace,” she said, as she always did at wakes. The words and the ritual had been passed down from the grandmothers of grandmothers. The herb that brought peace in sleep also offered courage in death.

There was an amen from the pastor that echoed through the church, and a feeble response. Then the doors were thrown open and the neighbors of Threadwell filed out. Emmett was slow to get up, thinking about, as Holst had put it, Jimmy Tooth’s just reward—a fire farm in hell. “Em,” his mother called to him from the center aisle, and he looked up. She waved her hand for him to follow, and he did. With the doors open before them, the wind swept in and down the aisles of the church to snuff the candles.

There were three long tables set with white tablecloths and napkins held down against the breeze by utensils and plates. These along with eighteen long benches were set up on the lawn of the church. The sun was going down, and the pastor’s wife was lighting candles in glass globes. Kids were running in circles on the dry lawns. The trees at the boundary of the churchyard shook their leaves in the wind. People chose seats along the three tables, and the potato salad, chicken, coleslaw, and biscuits were passed. Chief Benton leaned against the giant wooden cross in the center of the lawn, smoking a cigarette, and Dr. Summerhill smoked his pipe. Emmett told his mother he was going to go run with the other kids for a few minutes and she said, “Fine.” He left her side and bolted across the lawn, where kids from his school were chasing lightning bugs. On his way toward them, though, he was stopped cold. His body registered it before he was even sure what had frightened him. There, sitting at the end of the third long table, the one farthest from the church door, was Jimmy Tooth, not a ghost but his gnawed skeleton as it had been dragged from the well. Mr. Dibble sat next to the corpse but didn’t seem to notice it was there. Across from the specter sat Miss Billie Maufin. She buttered a biscuit and smiled and listened to Mr. Peasi, who was next to Dibble.

Emmett dropped to his knees on the dry grass. He was already trembling and was having trouble catching his breath. He watched, trying to croak out the word
help,
as Jimmy Tooth’s skull swiveled around, taking in the crowd. Thinking that if he averted his eyes, he wouldn’t be seen, the boy turned his face to the ground. The realization came to him then that no one else could see the skeleton in jeans and blue tatters. He looked back to check if his nightmare had vanished. At that moment, Tooth’s empty eye sockets seemed to take him in. The skeleton stood awkwardly up from the table, holding on with one bony hand and righting its imbalance. Once the figure was stable, it started in Emmett’s direction, limping along on foot and tibia stub.

Suddenly at his side was a girl from school, Gretel Lawler, who sometimes sat quietly next to him and read, as he did, on the bench beneath the oak during recess. “Are you all right, Emmett?” she said.

He looked up into her face, stunned with fear. At any other time he’d not have minded her being so close, but it was almost as if he was afraid that she’d see the reflection of Jimmy Tooth in his eyes.

“I’ll get your ma,” said Gretel.

Emmett shook his head. “I’m fine,” he managed. He felt her hand on his shoulder, and he looked up at her. She was smiling down at him, and her green eyes and dimples and freckles diverted his fear for an instant. He was about to say thanks, when from behind her sweet face, Jimmy Tooth’s skull descended into view and his jaw squealed open. A burst of adrenaline went off in the boy’s chest like a half stick of dynamite, and he scrabbled up off the grass and ran, his heart pounding, a ringing in his ears.

The gathering shadows of twilight covered his retreat, and everyone was preoccupied with the dinner and conversation. Emmett didn’t look back to see if the corpse was following him. Opening the oak door of the church, he slipped inside and let it swing shut behind him. Someone had relit one of the tapers in the candelabra at the foot of the coffin, and that meager flame was the sole light he had to navigate his way to the altar.

When he reached the coffin, he heard the church door open behind him. He didn’t turn but reached up onto the top of the pine box and with his right hand swept the top half of the pile of dried thyme to the edge of the planks. Cupping his left hand he caught the dark green powder and then brought it directly to his mouth. He chewed on it like he was chewing on dust. It stuck in his dry throat, and he momentarily choked. Thyme sprayed out onto the altar at his feet. Still he didn’t turn, but swept the remainder off the coffin. Swallowing hard with little spit, he poured the second handful into his mouth and resumed chewing.