Now that I had invested the energy in coming back, I felt there was something at stake. I would hear anyone coming. I climbed over the gate.
I approached slowly around the side of the house. Six posts on a wooden portal.
I looked around in the bushes but I didn’t find Oppie’s bag of bones. Maybe some other dog had dragged them off.
I stepped onto the portal and stood in the black doorway. Bad shit had happened here.
When my eyes adjusted I stepped inside onto the trash-strewn floor. Who had been the last occupants? Why had they left in such a hurry? The ruin of the mattress was there in the first room. What would make me lie down on that filthy bed? Nothing.
When I crossed the threshold and walked out in the middle of the floor, over my shoulder came a loud squeaking like the sound of an old bicycle.
I stood stiffly in place. What am I doing? This isn’t a game. I’m trespassing. Someone might take this seriously, some insane or homeless person. Just because a house is abandoned doesn’t mean that it’s unoccupied.
I was ready to look over my shoulder and see a deranged old hippie or angry Hispanic twirling a rusty chain crank, ready to hit me with it, but when I turned the room was empty except for the trash on the floor.
The squeaking abruptly stopped, and the interval of silence allowed me to briefly collect my senses. I took a step and the sound came again from the ceiling. I saw a clod of mud and straw suspended from a viga in the center of the room.
I stepped closer. The sound hadn’t been squeaking; it was chirping.
I stood under the nest, holding my hand up to block the light from the entrance. Three little beaks peeked out: three blind baby swallows. When I passed in front of the window, my shadow fell over the mouth of the nest and the chicks thought their mother was home.
I felt penetrated by exhaustion, a narcotic fatigue. The sunlight and sound of grasshoppers flooded in every window, suffusing the room with soporific warmth.
The laptop, the camera, Kitty’s cruelty—none of it bothered me now. I felt good. It was such a quiet valley, such a dozy afternoon. I had not slept more than a couple of hours each of the past three nights.
I lay on the floor to rest my eyes.
* * *
In the dream my father showed up—my father as he was at forty, when I was still a boy, before he went to Fair Oaks.
I heard myself speak.
What are you doing here?
I kept coming here too. I couldn’t help it. One taste and I was hooked.
That’s impossible. You never in your life got out of the Northeast. For the last five years you never left Fair Oaks. Whatever remains of you lies in St. Theresa’s Catholic Cemetery along the cold clays of the Passaic.
He gave me a loving smile and said,
We all come here eventually. That’s why it feels so familiar. But when you go in the last room and try telling anyone about what you saw, they shut you up, they call you crazy, they try to lock you up. They can’t face it.
My father kneeled and placed a hand on the back of my head, gently stroking my hair like he used to in the night when I was a little boy. Then something made him look over my shoulder.
Here comes
, he said. My father exited the dream, and when I turned and peered through the window, I saw a great cloud of ash and smoke rising over the mountains.
I woke in a panic. From the darkness beneath a broken plank of flooring, a pair of rodent eyes stared at me.
I scrambled to my hands and knees. The mouse disappeared beneath the house. Jesus, Oberhelm, what has become of you? You are a wreck sprawled on the floor of a dirty old house.
Out the window I could see the beautiful mountains, the tops of the pines glowing green-gold in the afternoon sun. No smoke.
I had to get out of there. The trill of a cricket stuck in the room with me drowned out all other sound.
I looked at the padlocked door. Before I left, I wanted to see in that last room.
I headed out to the Spider and reached under the seat for the tire iron, and then I went back in the house to the padlocked door.
I slipped the tire iron in the gap behind the hinge that held the lock in place. I leaned on it a little and the hinge snapped off, splintering the rotten doorframe.
When I opened the door, cold air sucked me in with a gasp. The one window to the outside had been bricked up. The only light inside came in with me. There were three plain mud walls and one covered with paper; otherwise there was only a rustic table where someone had left a book. Bound in black vellum: the Bible.
I flicked my lighter and flipped through the pages. On the back I found an inscription in black ink:
Draw on the power of these mouldering pages to finishe what we started
.
Nice word choice. They’d gotten the feel right: moldering meant rotting, and spelling it with the extra vowel made it sound even mealier: mould. Like mold in your mouth. And “finish” with an e? Like olde Englishe?
What had made someone write this in the back of the Bible? Hard to tell what it meant. I left it on the table where I’d found it.
I looked at the wall that was papered, pages torn from a magazine stuck to the crumbling plaster.
I flicked my lighter again and saw something familiar in the typeface, the layout: high-quality photos and plenty of white space to set off the meager sustenance of the story. The words looked familiar.
That’s when I saw. A thing in the lettering drew my eyes.
Those are my words. I wrote those stories. They are pages torn from
Surge
. My name stands out at the top of every page.
I
pulled into the Mustang parking lot and bought a four-pack of Kahlua Mudslides. Then I got back in the car, shook up a Mudslide, and opened it. I sat in the Spider and drank.
The taste of the sugar and milk solids gave my heart a lift, and then easing the jitters came the Kahlua and the vodka. Was it really even vodka? I checked the label:
Contains Real Vodka
! I felt better already.
Why would my articles be on the wall of that house?
I removed the other three Mudslides from the carton, turned the cardboard inside out, and found a pen in the glove compartment to work my way through the names and associations.
Sunshine
didn’t know me before today
doesn’t want anything to do with the houseMel Woburn
weak connection with the house
six years pot dealerBlood tech
got me out there in the first place
didn’t show up
I had left the pages hanging on the wall, part afraid to touch them, part afraid of what would happen in my head if I admitted I was afraid to leave them there. It would be an acknowledgment that I suspected this had been deliberate, something depraved.
Two Mudslides down and I started to relax. Copies of
Surge
, bundles of them, get dumped all over northern New Mexico like so many
Thrifty Nickels
. Someone just tore a few up and tacked those pages to the ugly mud wall to cover it. Ridiculous to think of it as anything more than a coincidence. I live over the mountain in Los Alamos—just drive away.
Ready to get back on the road, I opened another Mudslide and pulled out of the Mustang parking lot.
When I got back to Los Alamos it was going on dark, and I found a note Kitty had written in the kitchen.
Where the fuck have you been???
At the top of the stairs, the bedroom door was closed. I listened. Oppie did not get up and I did not bother going in.
I went down to my study, rolled a joint, and woke up the PC.
Googling
Mora
and
Johnson massacre
got me nothing, and
New Mexico
plus
Johnson House
yielded thousands of hits, but nothing on the first page more relevant than the newspaper headline,
Johnson: House Stays on Schedule.
What if I looked up the owner in county files? Resources sucked online, and even if I made the special trip to Mora it might not lead to anything worthwhile. There were thousands of absentee owners in these valleys.
Sometimes it was because the grandparents willed the house to kids or grandkids they never saw in Albuquerque, and Albuquerque changed people. They might say,
Oh, I’ve got a beautiful patch of land up in Mora County I’m going to retire on and farm someday.
But someday never came because the SUVs, the Cottonwood Mall, and the fast food on Central Avenue was the way they really wanted to live.
Sometimes it was because the titular owner was someone up the valley in a McMansion who wanted a pristine view of an old adobe without any junk cars on it and without any redneck renter shooting guns and running four-wheelers.
Sometimes the entitled were distant relatives of the former owners, heirs who barely knew they owned a place in the middle of nowhere—sometimes they didn’t know they owned a place at all.
I got on LexisNexis and the Lab’s username and password autofilled. Straight to WorldCat, search entries containing
Johnson
and
Mora
and
New Mexico
, and limit results by publication date before 1900. I got a hit with full text online:
Mora marriages, births & deaths: Book no. 1, February 4, 1856, to December 1875; authors: Padilla y Baca, Luis Gilberto.
I searched the text for
Johnson
, and there he was on Aplanado Road: J. Johnson. In 1860 he married Maria Montoya. She gave birth to children listed in the registry as
male, 1861; fem., 1865; fem., 1872.
The deaths of the mother, the son, and the two girls were all recorded as 1874. That would have made the son only thirteen years old.
There was no death recorded for Mr. Johnson, at least not by 1875. I searched again to see if I could find a
Book no. 2
, but I got
No documents found matching your request.
Book no. 1
was the only volume available online.
Could a thirteen-year-old have done something like that? Maybe the contemporaneous deaths had been caused by disease.
OCLC FirstSearch. Votre session est terminée.
The sky was lightening in the east. Shivering under the effect of the Mudslides and the bourbon, I lay down on the living room couch.
My nightmare did not begin right away. It came on gradually like a virus. Maybe if I looked closely I would have seen that milder symptoms had already set in. Or maybe if I had never gone back to the house, the nightmare would never have started in the first place.
It happened more than a hundred winters ago, when the snow got above the roofline. The month of January 1874, the average temperature 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The high 21 degrees, and the lowest recorded -23. The snow down in the valley had measured 84 inches. It’s hard to imagine what the snowdrifts of Ledoux had made of a baseline seven feet of snow.
You come to this valley to farm. The land is good and cheap for a homesteader, and if the Spanish people didn’t understand you, all the better that they should leave you alone. Idle associations and casual conversations lead to blasphemous speech, sinful ruminations, and evil actions. It is good when you arrive with your family in the spring and good to work hard and be outside all day in the summer. Just gathering wood goes on hours after dark on moonlit nights, and you come home so exhausted there is barely energy for the meal and Bible study before the onset of a sleep like death. Then, with the first light of dawn and the rooster’s strangled cry, back to work.
Autumn brings the harvest and opportunities to instill with prayer and instruction the knowledge that rewards are not from our labor alone but for the glory of God. The more His favor was upon us, the more we needed to pray. Sometimes for hours in the dark, and if one is caught dropping off, you have a willow switch with which to administer penance to the flesh that God might spare their souls.
Winter is all that you did not foresee. The days are too cold to work the earth. There is only so much wood to split. And the nights are long, and even with prayer petitioning blessings in the spring there are still many idle hours to fill between sleep. The Spanish families fill them with card games, marble tournaments, and telling legends from their wicked folklore—idolatries, blasphemies. You will not let your children fall into such corruption. If you had been able to look at it clearly—if your brother in town had been able to see you—you might have realized that which torments you is not the soul and the spirit, but a variant of cabin fever. Instead, you enforce a code of silence among family in the winter. You do not believe in idle talk. The only book you keep in the house is the Bible. Deciding that speech is the inception of vice, you forbid speaking altogether.
You impose a strict code of silence among your wife and three children—a son, a young daughter, and a baby girl. You had better eat right in the Johnson house, because even a rumble of the stomach adds up against you on the way to a beating. The house becomes a tomb. No sniffling, hiccupping, or sighing. You catch a cold, you go out to the barn to cough.
The wind ducts in from the chimney, and it howls down to the floor in the corner where the boy sleeps with the dusty blanket his mother knit for him from churro wool. He looks up at the mica pane that serves as the family’s only window—covered with snow.
It is one room, no portal. Although the isolation makes days terrible, the nights are still worse: fourteen-hour stretches of pitch darkness beside tepid coals. You forbid burning wood at night when the mother isn’t cooking and everyone has their cobijas. The boy can hear his brother and sister breathing, but they cannot steal glances to console each other. These fleeting glimpses of humanity are all that keep him from slipping into the trap of forgetting that he is not your slave, that the world is not his father’s dominion. This is what you want them to believe. This is how you control them.
You stand up and look at the son. You have to milk the heifer, and you communicate as much by picking up the bucket and shovel before going to the door and putting on your high boots. Her udders are swollen, and soon this will make her sick.