2
Arne took fishing line, two hooks, and a sinker from their knapsack and left the campsite. He carried a gnarled club of hornbeam, the hardest wood that grew in the Tennessee forests, for reassurance and protection—he was almost nine years old now, largely on his own, although Hawkshaw was somewhere around and would catch up to him before long.
He worked his way up from the creek bottom to the ridge line, chewing a handful of spearmint leaves to give his stomach something to be grateful for. It was cool where he walked through the oak and hickory forest, bathed in fuming mist that condensed in his hair, on his forehead, while the dew on the ferns that grew, luxuriantly, everywhere, soaked his pants as high as the knees. Wood pewees and vireos flickered in sunspots but it was dark, still, up in the rafters of the great trees. He heard woodpeckers and saw more red squirrels than he could count. His mouth watered when he thought of plump, fried squirrel, almost his favorite meal next to roasted tom turkey. As always, and without constantly thinking of the necessity of it, he kept track of landmarks: two half-fallen trees sagging against each other and overgrown with clematis, forming a natural arch; an outcrop of limestone with a cave centered like a watchful eye. He would never lose himself in the woods, no matter how far removed he was from home.
From the summit he looked east. There was a golden haze in the valley where the Cumberland and Harpeth rivers joined; he could make out the copper spire of the new Baptist church in Sublimity, the town where he attended school and hung around the stores two Saturday mornings a month. He felt heart-tugs, sadness. Closer, there was smoke from isolated cabin chimneys. Although he didn't reckon distance in terms of miles, Arne knew how far he could walk in a day, and most of the cabins as well as the town of Sublimity were within reach. But his father, obsessed by unnamed dangers, continually glancing at the night sky while he fed wood to the fires, had warned him to stay away from everyone. To hide, even in daylight, from strangers, or those he knew as friends. Children his own age.
He couldn't think of a single boy near his age he had cause to be afraid of; he could lick them all. Girls he never paid attention to.
Crazy.
Crazycrazycraz—
Arne swallowed the word like a stone, like bad medicine, and was sullen, heartsore, trying not to think very hard about his—their—predicament as he walked a little way through an understory of redbud and dogwood toward the sound of trickling water. He located the spring which fed the stream that coursed through their campsite below. There were deer tracks around it. The water flowed clear and inches deep over velvet-green slabs of limestone. Runners of purple violet and watercress drifted in small eddies. He went to his knees to drink, shivering as the water touched his face, his tongue quickly going numb.
He had not quite satisfied his thirst when he heard something, larger than a rabbit or a woodchuck, moving down the leafy slope behind him.
Arne looked around, instinctively raising his club. But it was Hawkshaw, and he was okay. Arne hugged Hawkshaw, his hands on the liver-spotted dog's prominent rib cage. Hawkshaw had a wood tick feeding behind one ear, but before Arne could do anything about it the dog squirmed loose and began lapping water from the spring.
Arne opened his barlow knife and got down to business. He was soon fully absorbed in doing familiar and pleasurable things, so that all of the unpleasantness, the confounding and difficult events of the past week, while not fully forgotten, were put aside in his mind.
He cut a fishing pole, as his father had taught him, from a straight piece of rattan. Then, taking care not to disturb a couple of ground-level nests of yellow jackets, he dug around in a rotted stump until he came to a teeming mass of beetle grubs. There was life everywhere around him, buzzing, singing, pulsating, life that renewed his spirits. He began to sing a song his father loved.
"Life is like a mountain railway
with an engineer that's brave;
you must make the run successful
from the cradle to the grave."
Nearby, growing in the fertile, dark litter of the forest floor, were tempting mushrooms, and Arne licked his lips. He'd eaten succulent, white-capped mushrooms like those. But he was afraid to choose, to try his luck. If they were the mushrooms called destroying angels, they killed with the certainty of a bullet to the heart.
Arne carried the beetle grubs in his pocket down the stair-steps of the broadening stream until it tumbled six feet into a pool that lapped, in a sun-filled vale, around the old dark knees of river birches. He baited his hook with a grub and anchored the pole on the bank, wedging it upright in a vee of a young Cottonwood's branches.
Not far away he located plum trees the birds hadn't stripped and gobbled handfuls of the ripe fruit, almost swallowing a couple of stones in his hunger. He washed the plum juice from his chin to keep the midges off and located a stand of white oak in a dry area not far from the creek. With his knife he cut numerous oak withes, then sat down cross-legged to fashion his baskets, one to fill with hickory nuts and spring beauty tubers and plums, the other with the fish he hoped to catch. There was not much good fruit to be had in this month: it was late for all but highbush berries, too early for bittersweet black cherries, persimmons, or the custard-flavored paw paw of which he was uncommonly fond.
When Arne returned to check his line he found it taut from the tip of the pole to the roiling water, and pulled out a good-sized carp. By late morning he'd added three more to the basket and was humming again. The day was fair, the deerflies had almost disappeared from the woods, and mosquitoes were few; he thought poignantly of home, of hilly cultivated fields and ripening corn, and almost made himself believe that if—when—they went there again, it would all have been miraculously restored. The healthy ears of corn; his mother's smile. But the power of his faith was not equal to what he knew was lost, unrecoverable. The killing frost had come ten days ago, riming the windows of their house, shriveling what had been a lush acre of vegetables, turning the newly tasseled corn tobacco-brown as far as the eye could see.
On the morning of the frost, his mother was gone. His father was frightened, and the strange marks that would slowly deepen in putrefaction were on his cheeks. But nothing had happened to his hand yet. That was later—Arne didn't know for sure just when he had frozen his hand.
He must know where she is,
Arne thought.
The humming stopped, and his mood took a sudden turn; he felt even worse than he had on awakening.
Why won't he tell me?
The truth chewed in his breast like a fox to be let out. Stoically he denied it, and walked back to the campsite with Hawkshaw leading the way. He carried the baskets at each end of the pole across his shoulders. As he started down from the ridge line he heard his father scream, scary as dynamite.
3
Hawkshaw stopped and bristled, whining.
Arne, throbbing from terror, dropped his baskets and went skidding downhill on his tough naked heels with the barlow knife open in his hand.
He found his father stretched out on his back next to the dwindling fire. He was twitching but breathless, as if he'd fallen out of a tree. The tar pot had overturned, there was an odor of seared flesh in the air. His father was still holding the handax. Bright blood spotted the blade. Even so, Arne was slow to comprehend what had happened until he saw that his father's left arm now ended at the wrist in a clot of smoking tar. The hand he had crudely amputated, partially wrapped in dirty streamers of bandage, lay palm up a few feet away.
Then Arne, understood the tone of the nerved-up scream he'd heard, could visualize his father with his left arm laid just so across the windfall, and—raising up, reaching high with the ax and bringing it down as he screamed, the hand flying away (long squirts of blood glistened on the smooth weather-bleached wood of the windfall and on the ground). His father must have had just enough courage left to plunge his pumping wrist into the tar pot. His face was sweaty suet, veins had popped, the decaying flesh of his cheek coruscated like dragonfly wings.
"Had to," his father groaned. "Gangrene. Wouldn't last an hour if that poison . . . reached my heart."
Arne sobbed helplessly. His father let go of the ax and grasped him weakly by the shoulder.
"I know . . . where they are. Know what to do. But I need two hands. You'll have to help me . . . put them all to sleep."
The boy nodded, not understanding him. Tears fell on his father's tremoring hand.
"Cut you some strangler fig. Twist it into loops. We need . . . thirty, forty piece of that green vine. God, there's aplenty more of them than I thought I'd find. Huh? Must be . . . every last soul in Dante's Mill. The son of a bitch . . . turned the whole town."
"Turned? What? Who?"
"Theron."
The boy shook his head, slowly at first, then with a motoring agitation until his father stopped it.
"The Dark . . . Man. That's his name. Theron."
The damp hairs on the back of Arne's neck stirred, then fear bolted up to electrify the base of his skull. "The Dark Man . . .
woke up?"
His father nodded.
"How?" But Arne remembered his mother telling him what could happen, should the dried vine clutching his neck be loosened. The legend was specific, the consequences—and he knew.
"Mother?"
"She could have done it. That's been my suspicion right along. She cut the fig."
"Why? Why would she do that?"
"I don't know."
"Did the Dark Man make her go with him?"
"I—I'm not sure. I ain't seen Birka since—"
"You must have seen her!
Don't tell me a lie!"
"No . . . no, Arne. I wouldn't lie to you." He found the strength to tighten his grip on the boy's shoulder. "Get busy. Huh? Bring me that vine. But remember .. . the sun. After the sun sets, look up. Always be alooking up, because they don't make no sound when they come."
His last words were nearly lost in a sigh. And he was out again, slumped heavily across Arne's thighs.
"Look up for what?" the boy asked futilely.
He tried to make his father more comfortable on the ground, covering him with his own blanket because his father felt so deathly cold despite the noonday heat. He thought, Vines . . . no, strangler fig. He knew what to look for, his father had pointed it out to him growing in the trees not far from their farm. Wrapped around and around the trunks, taking a mean choking grip from which the name derived. Crushing the life from the trees.
The sun was overhead, he had hours yet. He added wood to the fire, cleaned and fried his fish, and made a soup, pungent with thyme and wild onion. He pounded slippery elm, blackberry leaves, and chamomile flowers to pulp and mixed the pulp with water. His father was in and out of consciousness during the early afternoon, his coldness yielding to a rattling fever. In his wakeful moments Arne made him drink. Only after his father had taken some nourishment did Arne eat, choking down part of the fish. The rest, with a couple of hush puppies, he gave to Hawkshaw.
He had been trying not to look at the cut-off hand, the moldered fingers. His father was a cripple now. How would he be able to handle Ol' Vol the plowhorse, flatbreak their fields come next spring? Finally Arne nerved himself to pick up the severed hand between two pieces of charred firewood. He carried the hand to the edge of the campsite, batted the inquisitive Hawkshaw away, dug a hole deep and buried the hand, then set a large rock on top of the filled hole. He wondered if he should say something, like at a funeral, but couldn't think of any words from the Bible that would do. Funeral for a hand. But his father was still alive, praise God for that.
He was ready then to search for the strangler fig he'd been told he must find.
4
Arne scrubbed the handax with creek sand and moss and took it with him. Now it was mid-afternoon, hot and still in the woods along the looping streambed he followed. The air was humid, and felt thick as paint in the shadowed hollows where no breezes stirred—only the frying hum of insects mimicked the sound of wind. Hawkshaw growled at a six-foot black racer twined around a bare limb on a windfall. It was swollen and sluggish from feeding on voles or frogs.
The anthracite sheen of the snake, its lofty, sinister eye, reminded Arne of the figure lying on its side in a deep bed of excelsior, hands clasped between the drawn-up knees, sleeping the Black Sleep of the legend. The boy's stomach tightened into a fiery knot. What was true, and what was a story? How could something that looked like a statue of hardened tar be up and walking around now; and if he—
it—
was, what had become of Birka, Arne's mother? Was she dead? He felt a little dizzy from apprehension and stooped to splash cool water on his face. The dizziness went away, but the heated, almost panicked churning of his brain continued.
Dead?
Dead?
Was that what his father knew but couldn't bring himself to tell?
Panting, Arne sat down to rest, the ax in his lap, its edge (he reminded himself, flicking it carefully with the ball of his thumb) more than equal to the tarry strength of the Dark Man if they should meet . . . he couldn't make himself believe in what he had not seen with his own eyes although, while he rested, he was looking, searching the hidden places of the wood.
He didn't know how far he had come, but he wasn't concerned about finding his way back before sunset. And he had Hawkshaw—but the bird dog had disappeared. Arne couldn't recall when he'd last seen him. As for hearing him, Hawkshaw was trained not to bark.
Arne forced himself to get up. He crossed the creek where it was divided by small sedgy sandbars. Some tiger swallowtails were playing in the sun; one of the butterflies alighted on the back of his hand and he carried it, gravely, a little way up the bank to a stand of shagbark hickory and mixed oaks. For some reason the butterfly made him uneasy. It was beautiful and harmless, but he had dreamed of butterflies recently . . .
No, moths . . . lunas, prometheas. And they had been huge, with the eyes, or eyespots, of human beings.
Arne surveyed the trees, which had been invaded by wild grape, Virginia creeper, and the tenacious vine he was hunting. He blew on the butterfly, which vanished, and set to work, chopping, sizing, his hands becoming sticky and the ax dulling from the sap that oozed with each slashing. He stopped when he had two large bundles of shoots.
With his work finished, despair returned. If there was only one Dark Man, why did they need so many vines? Hawkshaw was still missing. Arne slung the bundles of strangler fig across his shoulders and began to call as he worked his way down to the creek. The day was nearly sunless now, in the deep hollow where he'd spent so much of the afternoon.
"Hawwwkshawww!"
His dog gone, all he needed with his other worries. Standing in midstream, watering down sore feet, Arne had an attack of the shudders. His father must be awake by now, and agonized. How could he live through another night of the numbing frost? They needed to move on before it was too late, establish another camp. But Arne was already tired; his right arm and shoulder ached from the effort of hacking the tough vine.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something, and stiffened. But it was Hawkshaw, moving downstream, more at home in open fields than woodland but graceful nonetheless as he slipped through a thicket of hydrangea and spice bush at the water's edge. He was carrying something in his mouth—a bird or small animal, Arne thought, but when the dog took to the middle of the creek and came splashing closer the boy made out a childlike shape; dangling arms and legs dressed in blue calico, a square sewn-together face with button eyes and a yellow mop of yarn curls.
"Where did you find that?" Arne said crossly. "C'mon, we have to go."
Hawkshaw stopped a few away from him, not letting go of the corn-shuck doll, not making any sound, just watching Arne as if he were in the mood for teasing. The boy had a good whiff of his dog, who, in spite of his partial bath, smelled awful, worse than pigshit mixed with buzzard vomit, how could he stand himself?
The dog turned as if put off by Arne's expression and lunged, high-headed, upstream.
"Not that way! Come with me."
Hawkshaw continued to the far bank before turning to give Arne a solemn look. But the boy was impatient with dog habits and dog wiles.
"Hey you, dog! Come back here to me right now!"
Arne had a premonition then, inspired by the doll in Hawkshaw's mouth and the rotten stench of him, that he didn't want to know any more about. But Hawkshaw appeared anxious for Arne to follow him. No, he couldn't waste time, there was too much to do . . . the bird dog waited remorselessly for him, hindquarters dappled by a volley of sun motes through overhanging leaves.
"This better not take long," Arne muttered, and splashed his way up the creek behind Hawkshaw, the bundles of vines rubbing against his back and shoulders, ax swinging free in his right hand.
They had to cross the ridge line and descend into a valley with few open spaces. Arne, unhappy, fighting brambles, lopped a few branches and kept an eye on his landmarks. A deer path wandered through a ravine overgrown with huckleberry and then sumac, almost as hard to get through as a tangle of fence wire; abruptly the undergrowth gave way to red cedar and a lone Judas tree growing beside the road to Dante's Mill.
From the position of the sun over the empty road, Arne calculated that it was past five in the afternoon. His forehead smarted where a branch had lashed it; he was running a good sweat.
"Now what?" he asked Hawkshaw, but the bird dog already was off at a fast pace up the road, going in the direction of Sublimity and not Dante's Mill: toward home. Arne chewed his lower lip and followed.
They had covered a couple of hundred yards when Arne became aware of two things: a slow float of buzzards close to the treetops and a frost-bitten patch of woods, and a clouding of the air, dreadful odor, dead things but not newly dead.
An unplaned log bridge crossed the branch that ran beside the road, then a track entered a cove where a decrepit wagon was standing, the wagon sheet almost in tatters on the wooden hoops that supported it. Arne had seen relics like this wagon in the courthouse square on market days. Hill people, those who lived so far back in forested crannies there was almost nothing that could be called a road, still used them for transportation on those rare occasions when they went anywhere.
Except for the low notes of a mourning dove, it was very quiet.
Arne saw a chestnut horse down in the trace chains of the wagon, not moving. Flies circled around the bloated corpse and a beaky scavenger was jerking at something tough and unyielding, pinkly purple as new sausage in the hazy drift of sunlight through the trees surrounding the cove. A part of the horse's intestines burst with a fetid popping sound, but the odor already concentrated in the cove was nearly enough to knock Arne over. The grass was cold-burned, and nearly all of the leaves to the highest tree limbs hung lifelessly, grayish-green, a touch of bleak horror. Except for the heat and humidity, it might have been a winter's day: like "Old Christmas," when horses talked at midnight, and cows walked on their knees. And ghosts just walked.
Arne went slowly to the cookpot, suspended over the blackened heap of fire, staying as far from the horse as he could. Last night's—last week's?—stew had congealed in the pot, not even the bluebottle flies were interested in that grease with more attractive meat strewn on the ground behind and to one side of the wagon. Two, no, he could make out three bodies: a man, for sure, the dark full beard lively with red ants was unmistakable even though he was bald from the eyebrows up, or:——(scalped?——My Jesus!) . . . and two women
(they had the shapes of women but blunter, fantastical, without all the skin)
one of whom had the sunshine-blond hair of his mother. Arne was strangling, hand pressed against his nostrils to smell dirt,
anything,
dirt and sweat weren't strong enough to block that other odor but he had to go closer to see, to make sure it wasn't her.
Flies roared up from the nude, skinless torso except for one, pulsating, embedded like a jewel in the navel pit where a scarce patch of skin (there, on the ears, around the eyebrows) remained. The woman's open eyes were as cold as stars, her bared teeth thickly lacquered with her own blood. The corpse appeared bitten in places, perhaps by wild animals or Hawkshaw the dog. No, it wasn't, couldn't be, his mother! A fly squeezed out of her mouth through a space where a tooth had been and walked across her lip. Arne turned with a bawl of distress and ran, throwing up on the dead run, past other flayed corpses: little ones, all in a heap. By the road the air was better and, bless the mercy of the Lord, someone was coming, help was on the way.