'Of course she'd had the coughing sickness, so that accounted for a part of it, I mean that Birka was strange to me even after she got most of her strength back. Now I never suspected that she'd been touched by an unclean, an accursed Spirit. What call did I have to believe she'd been deceived in her heart and couldn't love me? I'm sorry I was brought up as ignorant of the Bible as I am, but it's too late to be sorry. Well, you know your verses pretty good, Birka did see to that. I know it says in the Good Book somewheres there is Deceivers that will rise up and preach a different gospel, there is Deceivers will make you believe their torment is another kind of Paradise. Anybody that's looked into his eyes, I'm telling you now of him who turned her, Theron is his name, anybody that's seen him in the flesh and knowed the power of his unclean Spirit, then they know his other name is Torment."
(Saying this to the boy, his voice rough and low; they have traveled less than half a mile from their last campsite and already Big Enoch's footsteps are ponderous, dragging; he stumbled through the woods as Arne tries to steady him, keep him from falling. But Arne is laden with all of their gear, the handax, the awkward bundle of strangler fig, and the going is treacherous for him, too. Breakfast was meager, and he could not chew for the swollen, excruciating bulk of his macerated tongue. His thirst is enormous, but tears continue to course down his cheeks. When they must stop to rest and his father's eyes close, his head droops, Arne prods him desperately to keep him awake, and talking. He is shocked by the heat of his father's skin, by the fact that Big Enoch has wet his pants and doesn't seem to know it.)
"Well, she took to talking in her sleep, and it was that other language that she knowed, which I understand a word or two of, but that's all. She never taught it to me. I only heard the language spoke those two weeks I was up there in Maine State for us to get married. That were in Zipporah, Maine. Twenty-six miles from Portland, where my brother was there in the hospital just lingering on after he was burnt so bad in the ferryboat accident. Anyway she'd talk in her sleep, which I heard her do, maybe it was three or four nights in a row before she took to getting up and going outdoors, what I reckont was she had a problem for which she needed to use the privy. But she didn't come back, and she didn't come back. I'm a sound sleeper with Birka beside me, but when the other half the bed's empty, it be enough to bother me. That second night she were gone so long, I followed her. The privy was empty, but the barn door was standing open. And she were in there in the dark, talking a blue streak, just a-talking her own language to that damned crate! I'm telling you, the hairs stood out like porcupine quills on the back of my neck. When I called her she wouldn't come, and when I went to drag her out of there she fought me like the devil."
(The boy shuddering at this image of violence between the two people he loves most dearly; he looks at the putrefying marks on Big Enoch's cheek, then touches the decomposed flesh. Big Enoch lurches, howls, throws Arne onto his back with a sweep of his right arm and gets to his feet. He trudges on, muttering to himself, without looking back. It is no trouble for Arne to catch up to him. But he follows behind his father, afraid of both his strength and his pain—afraid that each step Big Enoch takes will be his last. A horse, a mule in his sad condition would lie down, refuse to budge.)
"Before I could get her on into the house, she fainted on me. Carried her to our bed and laid her down. Had 'nother thought, and tied her up so she couldn't leave the room. Because her eyes was open by then, and glaring at me. All she would talk was that language. I knowed she was a-cursing me, even if I couldn't understand exactly. If I'd let that go on, she would have waked you for sure. So I bound up her mouth and hoped she wouldn't choke on her tongue. Once I done that, well, it wasn't like she fainted again because her eyes never closed, she just lied there so still and, oh God, I never did see her again in her right mind! You'll forgive me for doing it, won't you, Arne? Tying up your poor mama thataway? Because I swear to you, warn't no other—you forgive me, don't you?"
(Enoch's strong right hand on Ames shoulder, squeezing, too close to his throat, and the boy is nearly convulsed. The stump of his father's wrist almost in his face, he can smell it, the vile blackness, the bone-deep rottenness the cautery couldn't reach; he is sick to his stomach. His father releases him and he goes down in a crouch at Enoch's feet, trembling, unable to look up, hearing:)
"I saddled Hob-Nob and I want you to get up now and ride to your great-uncle Carl's and ask him for the borry of his crosscut saw. They'll invite you to stay the night and that's okay, it be too much of a trip for Hob-Nob back and forth in one day."
(Hearing this, and looking around as if he expects to see the saddled chestnut horse right there with them, and then in his weariness and fear remembering:
No, I did that already!
Rode the better part of fifty miles up to Long Cane, Tennessee, for a crosscut saw his father could have had for the asking just down the road at the Oakmans'; but pleased that his father trusted him to ride so far alone on their best horse, excited by the prospect of an overnight visit with his red-haired cousins. So excited he didn't notice anything unusual about his father, who dogged his every step until Arne was mounted. Even then his father walked with them a few hundred yards in the brightening dawn, finally reaching up to squeeze Arne's hand before giving Hob-Nob a soft whack on the rump. And the next time Arne saw him—
(—No, wait! There is more he hasn't heard, more he wants to know.
(Getting to his feet again. Taking his father by the hand. Just holding him, walking him, as if Arne is the father now, Big Enoch the child. Leading his father this way is preferable to the deathlike stillness—the vacancy in Enoch's eyes. Walking. Until, looking down from a ridge through evaporating mist, the modest steeple of the white church in Dante's Mill, the shining, wet twenty-foot wheel in the swishing millrace, become visible to them. Dogs bark. A rooster crows. A neglected cow lows to be milked. There is no human voice but his father's, who speaks up suddenly, loudly, causing Arne to jump.)
"I seen you out of sight, then I went straight away to the barn. It were cold in there, Arne. Cold as Christmas, just like it will be down underneath. We got to go in there anyhow, because that's where they'll all be in the daytime. Where they all live now, where
she
is. But 1 was a-sayin', I had to pull on gloves to lift that crate into the wagon bed. I don't know why it was so cold to the touch, on a summer morning. I can't account for a thing that's happened, before or since. All you got to do is believe me, until you see for yourself. . . Well, I did know I had to get it off my property and into the ground somewhere in the woods, where no 'un's were ever likely to find it. That's just what I did. Drove clear t'other side of Coachman to the high hills and into woods so deep there weren't a track no more and Ol' Vol by himself couldn't haul the wagon past the thickets. I cleared a space of ground with ax and shovel, and put that crate down in a hole I was near four hours digging without hardly a pause. And all the time wondering, What's in it? What's in it to make her act like she did? But I wasn't about to open that crate and look inside. I was afraid. That's the bald truth. Even though it wasn't what you'd call cold no more, or maybe because I piled some cut-off branches on top of it while I was clearing ground. Some white ash and box elder and shumard oak. Done the right thing without I knowed why."
(Sunlight. The trees swaying in a soft morning breeze. Pine warblers overhead; Arne hears the gobble of a wild turkey not far away. His mouth waters. Roast turkey. Hunger in the pit of his stomach like a piece of smoldering charcoal, but he is too despondent to make the effort to find something to eat. Only a couple of bullets for the rifle. Maybe he could get more in town. He has money to buy all the bullets he wants, another rifle if need be. He has a five-dollar gold piece at the bottom of his pouch of valuables and lucky pieces, the gold a christening present from the grandfather in Maine he has never laid eyes on. Maybe he can buy something to eat, down there. He has never been to Dante's Mill.
But his father said—His
eyes are on the town, the sunstruck pond, the shimmering line of the falls over a rock dam beside the gabled millhouse. It must be almost nine o'clock in the morning, yet there's not a soul to be seen. The breeze tickles the hair on his forehead. His father has slumped down, breathing through his mouth, the vacancy in his eyes again. Arne's shoulders and back hurt. He puts down the bundle of cut vine. The leaves are beginning to dry out. He does not want any bullets. He won't go down there in search of food even if he starves to death. He is terrified of this silent town.)
"I'm telling you I was fair whipped when I was done. All I had left to do then was push the crate into the bottom of the hole and shovel it over with dirt. See, I wanted to go straight home. But I couldn't—well, by then 1 didn't have no more fear of it. It were just a box I was buryin'. So I had my tools with me and I thought, couple minutes more. Just to satisfy, and not always be a-thinkin' what could it of been in that crate. I weren't meaning no harm. So I fetched the crowbar. If it'd been hard, why, I'd of left off and just piled on the dirt. But it were like sliding open a bureau drawer. No more trouble than that. Like the lid had been pried off once already. Maybe Birka—but I don't see how, with what little strength she had lately. Anyhow. I pried, and off it flew. And, oh God! I looked inside."
(Cold and trembling as his father speaks, knowing that he is the one,
he
is guilty, if not for him they wouldn't be here, none of this would have happened.)
"It were after dark when I fetched on home. Birka was a-lyin' on the bed where I'd left her all tied up, not moving, she just watched me with her eyes. When I set down beside her she commenced to cry, so I untied her hands and feet and took off the rag I'd stopped her mouth with and the first thing she asked me, 'Did you do it?' And I said, 'It's done.' Then she told me what it was, what
they
was, some poor creatures from way back at the Creation, four thousand and four years ago, children of Eve, and God done give to them a hell of their own. She asked me if I touched the vine around its neck, and I told her I couldn't touch none of it. I didn't want to be a thinkin' about it ever again. Well. After that we—we done what men and women do when they're married, Arne, reckon you already know about that, we—done it twice, and that finished me off,, for the night, I thought.
"But it were still dark when I heard Ol' Vol snort, woke up to the wagon creaking dead slow past the window. I got up and saw Birka on the wagon seat. When I hollered she just raised up the whip and laid it across Vol's back like he never knowed before, and he took off at a run that was bound to kill him before he traveled far. I looked around for my boots but couldn't find 'em—clothes nuther. She'd taken ever stitch of mine with her. Didn't stop me for long. I just lit out after Birka, naked as the day I was born."
(Something unseen, but big, stirring in the thicket off to their right. Hairs standing up on his neck, Arne reaches for the model 1904 Winchester and their remaining bullets. His father oblivious, eyes on a circling hawk of Heaven, mouth slack, throat muscles working as he tries to put this new ordeal into words. Arne works the bolt, drops a .22 cartridge into the breech of the rifle, closes it carefully. The other, the very last bullet, is clenched in a sweaty palm. The rustling continues. Up on one knee beside his father, he strains to see into the tangle of laurel and baneberry and young vine twisted around a half-fallen and rotting tree. Some little birds, worm-eating warblers, burst from concealment like a blizzard of dirty snow: something coming, all right, coming directly at them—)
"I never should've told her where the crate was at. And she had a good start on me, although the way she was driving 01' Vol proved to be the death of him. I come across the wagon off the road near the burial place; he was down in the traces, covered with foam and blood, breathing his last. By then it was all I could do to hobble, for the pain in my feet. But she'd left the clothes throwed in the wagon bed, boots, too. I couldn't get my boots on, my feet was swole. By then the sun was up, and I followed her track through the woods. Now she never knowed from me exactly where at I dug, yet she went straight for him. Maybe it had to do with the moths that was still fluttering around, or the cold air in that hollow. There was a frost everywhere. It covered the heap of dirt she'd throwed off the crate with my shovel. The lid was a-lying off to the side, and wasn't nothing left in the crate but excelsior and a piece of old dried-out strangler fig, cut in two with a knife.
"Birka was on her back, still holding the shovel with one hand. Her skin was dead-white, but blue where the bones showed through. I couldn't bear to touch her, she was so cold. She were a-breathing, but so slow I almost couldn't tell. I knowed I had to get her to a house, put her in a hot bath. Or else
—
"
(Scarcely listening to Enoch now, all of his anxiety concentrated on the thicket where the unseen beast is blundering, crashing, coming closer, sounding, in the quieted wood, like a steam tractor he once saw on the road to Nashville. He raises the rifle butt against his shoulder, finger on the trigger, thinking of how small the bullet is, undoubtedly all but useless against whatever horror is about to show itself; his left eyelid twitches, his breath is like teeth in his throat, his penis spurts. But he is between his helpless father and the thicket, he will not turn and run.)
"Nearest farm were about two mile, a old hardscrabbly place like to fall to ruin; only one old couple there, and him with the rheumatiz so bad he needed a crutch to get around. But she was all right, little bird of a woman who reminded me of my ma. Them kinda eyes cold as nailheads that'll send a chill straight through to your backbone. Bless her, she didn't waste words asking no questions, just hotted up some water on the cook stove and we 'uns got Birka into the tub. That old woman scrubbed with a brush fitten to scrape the hide off a scalded hog, but it were just what Birka needed. By and by some color come back. We poured hot tea into her and she opened her eyes and said a few words. She didn't make no sense, it were more of that damned language, but at least she was a-talking. We put her to bed, and I set there with her most of the day, so wore down from commotion I couldn't move nor eat a morsel of food. Then—
oh God! Oh no! Shoot! Kill it! Kill it, Arne!"