Part I
The decision made that night was to drink liquor. Whiskey: cold, hard, clarifying—in the drawing room, upstairs. Her father-in-law selects it. Reaches up from his wheelchair, shaking hand, tendons vibrating—cello strings. He pushed up the stairs to the drawing room by Thomas—Thomas Bradle—the accountant, himself like a slave. Pale man, still, under the chandeliers: he is sweating lightly. Unsteady irises rimmed with wire lenses. His damp eyes flick around, land on her. He smiles.
Her husband already pacing by the fireplace. Over the mantle the head of a bear, black eyes glittering in its sockets. A deer on one side, a boar on the other, both broken horns and stale ivory. Red velvet underneath them, her husband pacing, saying to her: “Elise.” Calling her by name. “Elise, Elise.” But nothing more. How he wants to smoke. Black windows all around them, white crosses grafted over the void.
“Got something better to do?” her father-in-law cracks. “Nothing better to do.” Thomas Bradle wheels him over to the fireplace, the old man clutching the scotch in one hand, the whiskey aged the last thirty-five years—not half as old as him. In the other hand the four empty glasses clattering, fingers hooked into each one of them. He sets them on the end table and raises the bottle. “Been waiting a long time for this.”
Scotch poured in their glasses: it looks burnt. Diamond etchings for the fingers warp it like the stained glass of church windows. Elise takes a glass in her thin fingers, raises it to her lips. Through the glass the fire glares, pops. Husband, Hubert, with his own drink. He does not stop pacing but he puts his mouth on it, takes it in with little sucking noises. Just sweating through his silken shirt. His father takes him in with silver eyes, unblinking.
“Perhaps you should sit,” suggests Thomas. He is standing by the old man’s wheelchair, one hand on it, whiskey in the other.
Hubert does not. Neither does Elise. Slightly away is where she stands, just outside of the rim of light they all sink in. Elise is caressing the dark oak rim of one of the sitting chairs. Tall, red-backed upholstery, blood leather. Nobody sitting but the old man. He has not touched his own scotch yet and here his son with half of it already down his throat. Thomas swirls his around, drinks like he is afraid it will catch in his gullet and sizzle. Elise grows hot. A sip. There is an old cello that sits in the corner, rich wood, grown dry in proximity to flame, the strings stiff to touch.
At last the father-in-law drinks—all of it he has there. Thirty-five years waiting now gone. He pours himself some more and offers to them something they already knew: “Something out there.” Something, something—something out in the forest, something out past the withered fields of cotton and wheat, something stalking through their dead stalks. Something out there somewhere, always, out beyond the trees which surround their home. Babies taken from their homes, crying in the night, dragged out to the Blackshawe woods. The place named after them: the old man, his boy. Village folk gone missing. Never much left—little fingers, you stepping over them, thinking they were pinecones—dried, brittle under the Virginian sun. How the days would turn from yellow to grey. Remember: a woman hanging from the branches, a passive observation. Thinking that it is time. Maybe it—something—will clamber up the pillars and fold itself over the balcony, lizard-like, and burst through the glass: a presentation, a lecture.
As for Thomas his head sways back and forth on its neck as it does when he agrees with the old man. Such is his wont—afraid always. He knows that which he always had. Scotch lapped with his tongue. Hubert stops for a moment and looks at Elise. Eyes like his father: silver, black-lining, black as the pupil therein—don’t look real. He drinks to her and she does not. “What will become of us?”
“You want to do something about it,” says his father. There are spots on his head and little hair.
Hubert drinks the last of his glass and sets it down on the end table. He is a tall man, muscle wrapped underneath his skin, juxtaposed to his father like a man to a monster. “I want more.”
“Sure, sure. Take what you want.” The old man finishes his own again and pours them some more, steady hands under drink. “Nothing will come to you unless you make it so.”
“Ought to go find it. Hunt it down,” says Hubert.
“Ought to sit yourself down.”
“You know they blame us? Out in the village? If it don’t come for us they will.”
“The slaves. Let them come. They’ll see that they’re wrong.”
“They’re not slaves. Not anymore. Never liked you. They don’t.”
In his skull the old man’s eyes roll back. “If they come back here they are slaves. What could they do then? What could they say? Nothing that would change anything.” He drinks more. His boy glaring at him—wants to do something. This can be see in the his jaw. Elise is look at her husband. Thomas gulps in his throat and then says, “Hubert, maybe if you took a seat—”
“Thomas—the cello, hm? Play it for us, will you?”
Thomas blinks. Elise can see that he is afraid. He has not played in some time. He sets his glass down—nearly full—and goes to the corner, shuddered out of the warmth. He takes up the cello and bow and seats himself on a stool. Scraping across the strings. It is a rusty noise and his fingers twitch. Everyone watching him and he sweats but they can’t see it.
“They can’t make a livelihood, they’ll come here.” Her husband.
“As ever.”
“We’ve got stores for a while. They don’t: dying by attrition.”
A chord or two is found, a rhythm plucked unevenly across the body, curving and groaning in the heat in rediscovered exertion. “You know what your mother said to me when she died?” The boy’s father pouring himself a drink. “Right before. She said we got five hundred acres and under you a family name. Send the boy to college and he comes back in the summer dull as ever and he couldn’t even find his way back on his own. I seen old dogs do better and less years of life in them. Couldn’t write a letter any better than he can break a horse. Like a cock wrangled at the neck. What’s he going to do when he finds a woman? Likely as not that he’ll get kicked in the skull and be dead. All that expenditure wasted.
Elise cups her drink in both hands. At her eye level the rim of the glass is a translucent horizon rested atop a transparent plane, molten core quivering underneath; it weirdly distorts that which she observes: her husband—rippling jaw now unhinging—the horizon cuts in half. For Thomas, a head above water, him holding the surface in the bow and bobbing just above it, hair curling at the surface. The old man is drowning, his face separated and multi-faceted under the grooves; him warped younger, the gold smoothing the lines, filling up the creases.
“Couldn’t find it if you tried,” the old man says coolly.
The boy has had enough. He says so: downs the scotch, places the scotch back on the table. Restraint nestled uncomfortably under his arms. His father pulls the empty glass towards him, doesn’t look as his boy—his only son, first and final—leaves the room. Elise limply tugs on his sleeve as he passes her by, not seeing her, but not ignoring her either. Thomas falters on the cello, confidence seeping out of his skin. “Keep playing,” says her father-in-law. Thomas looks confused. “Keep playing,” the old man says again, and Thomas shakes his head and resumes. He is smoother now.
Elise must go after him. She walks over to the end table. The room is large, high-ceilinged, a chandelier dangling over their heads. She looks at the chains, sees them move silently and then stop. She looks at the glasses and her eyelids flutter in hesitation, and then she takes a drink. She sets it down, half-empty.
“Don’t bother going after him,” the old man says. With a finger he pushes her glass to the edge. “Not worth the trouble.”
She walks away, heads down the stairs. Her father-in-law is pouring more scotch into her husband’s glass. Two full cups. “Keep playing,” he says to Thomas, closing his eyes. A high note is scraped. He is gliding. “Keep playing for me.”
Downstairs, and the door is already swinging open on its hinges. Night air breathes in, a steady pulse with it and so, so assured. She steps into the blue, heedless of the star-pocked night, swings her head around breathlessly. Hubert is nowhere to be seen. Crickets chirp. The forest looming over the house from the north. Under grim constellations the wheat fields rustle in portent.
Noises from the shed. The light slipping out from underneath the side door like a beacon. She goes to the she and enters and there he is: shirt unbuttoned, his back to her, rolling a cigarette. Underneath and unseen to her is his back, so slick and pale and the back so creviced, like the hills tilled—not by him, not by him—and how she would like to pull the shirt back by its sleeves and press herself against him and hold him there, work her hands downward.
She can’t. He stands by the tool bench. Here are many bladed tools, scythes and knives and hand saws, implements of hacking and reconstruction, the moonlight glimmering off their blades and the moonlight entering from the main doors, thrown open. Like a mouth. A short stretch of grass is all that separates them from the field. Hubert licks the cigarette, puts it in his own mouth. He strikes a match and it flitters like a bright ghost in front of him. Then out again, inhalation of smog—extinguish: and then light again. Beside him on the bench lays a double-barreled shotgun, a Remington, chipped stock, his father’s. The dust on it still unsettling: Elise can see the spot Hubert plucked it from, the imprint above the pegs where it hung; and above that the old Winchester lever-action rifle of his father’s father: in this the line of primogeniture, in this selection a statement of what is useful and what is no-longer-to-be.
Hubert has no gun of his own. He has broken the neck of his father’s shotgun and it is empty. Elise can see down its black bores.
“Why did you ever bring me here?” she asks.
He flares and doesn’t respond. He is stuffing shells into his pocket.
“We could have stayed in Michigan. Gone up north to the sand and the sea. The dunes roll there. The trees are in the sky. The water you can always see through. There are pearls at the bottom. You remember how I’d like to pluck them out, one by one? I told you: I did that once, found a white pearl and kept it.”
“I heard you. I’ve always heard you.”
“Don’t go.”
“You know every word he says is bullshit,” Hubert says. He turns to her, still stuffing shells into his pocket. “He says true things to tell lies. He’s so convinced of it himself.” He grabs the gun, slides two silver-backed shells into its neck, them staring back at him like a mirror.
“I know.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” he says. “I’m not ashamed of him, either.”
“I know.”
“I hate him.”
“Hubert.”
“Why should I be ashamed of that?”
“You don’t know what’s out there,” she says. “Don’t go.”
He sucks on the cigarette: once, twice. Quick succession. Already the thing burned short. “If it’s a thing that desires flesh and blood then it’s a thing natural and it can be undone by that fact of its very existence,” he says, prophesizing. He snaps the shotgun shut, pulls the cigarette from his mouth, breaths: “But I’ll make sure it’s done on my account.”
“Hubert,” she says. “What if it’s nothing?”
He smiles at her and heaves the shotgun up onto his shoulder. His other hand has the cigarette still—can’t touch her. He turns around and walks away. Stretch of grass, silk shirt rippling in the night air, the tall wheat brushing against itself, beckoning to him. He doesn’t even kiss her, so confident he is that he will return. The moon gleams through the double barrels of his gun. He draws from the cigarette one last time and flicks it away, forgotten, forever, and disappears into the field. Faintly from the house the cello can be heard, and it has just now found its rhythm, full and complete.
Part II
“Never should have gone out there,” says her-father-in law. It is what the old man has been saying for a week. Now: “Can’t even bury him. My own boy.”
Elise suspected his death the night of, was told of it by the breath of the wind, the blackening lights of the village so far in the distance; told of it by faces she had not seen, could not see. She went back inside to do the dishes after he left, dunked the plates and glasses into the sink. Cold water, clear, hands in a lake, searching for something: calms her nerves. Just by her head was the dusty window; outside the silent wind returning. Gives life to things. And so the tree branches tapped their fingers on the windows: dink dink dink.
Hello.
He’s dead.
She knows. It didn’t take very long. Become accepting of it. That is a fact. These are things that cannot be changed. Say it to the old man, make it true. He rejected it. “Elise,” he said. “Not now.”
But now collectively the three of them have decided that he is dead. It took them the whole week.
“Gone, out there. Eaten away. Bones all scattered about.” The old man shakes his head.
She is alone with the two of them now, that fact made material in the watery smile of Thomas Bradle. Briefly the accountant glances up from the old man to look at her. She clutches at the arms of her dress. They aren’t there. Just skin. Little red marks from her nails scraping off.
Thomas smiles.
The last of the scotch from that night is in the old man’s glass. He drinks it and says, “When I die, bury me here. Under the floorboards, under the stone. Drive down and bury me in a cast of iron. Let the roots entangle me.”
What could it be? It only comes out at night. They have broken out another bottle. Elise fetches the ice cubes, drops them in: plunk. Plunk plunk. This scotch: thirty-eight years old. Dust it off and it can still look pretty, good as new—good as the day it was malted. Watch the old man through the diamonds. How it gives him youth: his mouth grows larger. The wind is sucking in around the window frames. She drinks and she sways. The bow is wobbling over the strings of the cello. Look at it go, like a sea-saw in the sea: she has never been to the ocean. Not really. She stumbles, thumps into the end-table, rattles the glass. The music stops.
“Really, Elise, you should sit down. Yes, in the chair.”
“Good chair,” she says, and she thumps down. Big thick arms of the chair, blackening. She shuffles the ice in her drink. The cubes like shelves now, at the bottom of a dried-down ocean. “More?” she says. “I want more.” Thomas looks at the old man by the fire. He waves a hand impatiently, his own drink teetering. He wants to get back to his speech, to his talking. So, more drink: cork popped off, glug-glug, spilling over the glass rim. Messy. “Dirty,” says Elise. “Like dirty water.” Stagnant. Drink up.
“The cello, Thomas? Keep at it, will you?”
Thomas returns to the cello, shifts his spectacles, tests the strings with the bow. They screech like bats. The old man frowns and Thomas tucks some hair behind his ear, dislodges the symmetry of his frames. Plucking, plucking—there: finding a chord. He keeps at it.
Her father-in-law is under the heads of the animals. The question: What is it? What could have killed his son? Could kill them all? First, a family history. He who is ignorant of it is doomed to repeat it. From there, understanding: the answer uncloaked, like the curtain of night pulled back for daybreak.
First, the boar: “This one here killed by my grandfather. Not before he killed it, mind, but it stuck him and they couldn’t stuff his innards back in after they fell out. Son-of-a bitch has got horns from its mouth, see. You’d almost think the thing isn’t natural—you can see why it has historically been considered a test of bravery to hunt one. They used to hunt the beasts with spears.”
“Your grand-daddy killed that boar with a spear?” asks Elise.
“No. Smoothbore musket. Right through the eye. Window to the brain.”
Elise considers it, looks into both eyes, both of them black orbs. As such they are inscrutable; they are solid all the way through, like black pearls, and in a minute reflection she is inscribed on to them, her figure full but warped, strangely incomplete. “Window to the soul,” she says, but the old man is drowning in the periphery. He is grunting, guttural, maybe dying, but no: just calling for Thomas. Can’t well wheel himself over to the next animal one-handed—steady, his drink clutched right in his veiny, knobby hand.
“Beasts don’t have souls. When they die it’s like a light gone out.” The cello folds with a clatter and the old man is wheeled under the head of the deer. Skip the center for now. There is a reason to it, an order: the deer is the least impressive:
“This one killed by my uncle. Good man, brother of my father, fed from the same bosom. A gorgeous kill, this one: see the antlers? How beautiful the stag. But what does it do? With those antlers does it threaten us, gore us? Did this beast kill my boy, hang him up in ribbons from those spikes? No, not even him. For the deer these weapons are posturing, a sense of pride, and a sense of lineage. In that sense it is a noble kill. Functionally the deer is a useless unto itself; to us it is utility. It bears no threat, no need for conquering, and in fact discourages it; already it is accepting, docile. So not this one.”
Not this one. Like plucking stones from the beach: be selective. No clock there, no clock here. Stand still for a while. On the shore, white bay of Michigan. Bright sky: bleed on them all, boys and girls, naked but not nearly naked enough, water lapping at their toes. How they will sweat under the sun, sweet, sweet skin. He found her there—Hubert did—her sifting through the sand, picking at stones. Dip them in the water for clarity, watch them get wet, see what color they can really be. Then—whoosh—let them go. The sea takes them. This is Hope—this is where she was, where she had been, attentive to the place where she grew up, just new at the university in Holland. Too old to be playing with stones like this on the beach. This he knows, and she can see that he knows when he sees her. He’s been at college for three years now, soon to be four. See the sun on her back. See the other students, wet in the water, so close—
What are you doing?
Why are you here?
The wheels on her father-in-law’s chair are squeaky. Listen to them go as he is pushed. Thomas is ready this time, holding his hand behind his back, his fingers plucking at the chords he wishes he could pull. Light sweat, not even out in the sun. He takes the old man by the handles and wheels him in front of the great bear, black head, silver-eyes—like that old thing the bear looks upon, in front of him now: drunk, steady, equidistant from all things caught in the half-arc of flame melded to the floor.
“The black bear—a great terror to us, to man. They are protective and preemptive: they will seek out those that wish to harm their children and slaughter him, pull them him screaming into the trees, rip them apart and dole him out in equal measure to the mouths of their babes. Most of all they are a terror to us because, despite being beasts, they have the common sensibilities of man. Bear walked the earth with man and in days of yore they hunted man and in their eyes you can see that ancient intuition which they have yet surrendered to us by force of our own will and which we yet keep.
“This is where my uncle died.” The old man seems almost reverent of this fact, this moment lodged in its niche in time, like it is some passage from the Bible: the passing on of the unworthy, having been outlined previously in a sketching of their disgraces, and so their fate as a worthy cumulation of those moments unforgotten. “He and my father, Blackshawe boys, they went together: a trial. Right here, outside these own woods. I was but a child. Smoking gun, bloody face: I seen him come out as I had a thousand times before.”
What have you done? Hubert had asked her. Tell me all that you have ever done.
She didn’t know. Where was she to find a full history of herself? What record of her passing was there, what dusty pages were there to sift through? Before him, before Blackshawe, what etching of her name was there in the world? She tried to tell him this but could not: two tired parents and a life by the sea. That was all. But maybe even in that sat a like, like a pearl sunk to the bottom of the ocean, somewhere she had never been. She watched the water of Lake Michigan, glittering, glistening off her toes; watched the slow suck of the tide, of things being pulled away. No choice in the matter, no choice at all.
I’ll take you back with me, he said.
That’s right, there, she finds the reason: I will take what you bring on to me. Take you in, never let go. Take me. Then: Don’t take me away. Not yet.
What’ve you got here? he said. Don’t be afraid. Leave the shores, leave the sand, leave all the pearls that were never there.
Both men, Thomas and her father-in-law, have turned to her in expectation: revere the bear and most of all the facts of the bear. It is unfair of them to think that she might have said something to any of this. Ignorant of history, they might say—uninterested, uncaring, bringing on apathy: watch the soul wriggle and drown. Even this cannot dim the glow of esteem from the old man’s face. He dismisses her, admires the bear, contemplating its teeth and its tongue. Bravely, Thomas ventures an offering: “You think a bear did it? You think a bear killed your son?”
The old man’s face falls. He frowns. “No.” He sighs, waves a hand. “Keep playing.”
Thomas falters, looks uncertain. The old man doesn’t pay him any mind. Thomas tugs at his collar and retreats to the corner. The cello, at least—an old friend, how it will become familiar again. He plays a sad song, shakes the remaining rust from the strings.
Elise, she lets her head sag—jerk it up. See the bear, many fangs, awful snarl, wants to eat: eat, eat, eat, kill—kill with a purpose. Undo the flesh, let go the blood.
“Do you think Hubert was afraid when he went out there? He didn’t look afraid.”
The old man wheels himself around, bald-faced, looks at her—takes a drink. His face is screwed up, warped, she not even looking through the glass—and he is older. She can see the whiskey stiffen in his throat. “Thomas,” he says. “Thomas, take care of Louise, will you? Take her to bed.”
She feels as if her head is under water but she has enough agency to realize that maybe she should not let another man put her to bed. But then again, why not? Besides, Thomas is too scared to do anything. She holds out a limp wrist, lets it flop. He pinches it, tries to lift her. How squeamish. She giggles. “Thomas, Thomas, take care of her,” says the old man, and in the end she must stagger up the stairs herself, now suddenly so tired and more tired for the consideration of that fact. She takes her glass with her. The old man follows her with his eyes, watery, washed out all the color. He turns away to look at the bear and then says, “Goodnight, Louise.”
She raises her glass to him in answer, looks at him through that. She supposes that seeing him like that—hidden in the grooves of her glass, watching him grow young in bourbon, vibrating under diamonds and the time-worn patches of skin melting away into one—he could be her husband. Repellent: the idea of union.
Watch the blackening night on those nights that you are not subdued by the drink. Sleep will come at the end of expenditure, a death in its own right, wasted just before the breaking dawn. Nothing will come of it: not the monster, not the villagers, not Hubert. She stands in their bedroom now, rubbing the skin from her arms and staring out Hubert’s window: the more she looks out, the less there is to see. Just the wheat, the narrow paths through it all, now being overtaken by overgrown stalks—a mess on the pathway, hardly a way through. That’s all that’s left now. From up here, she can’t even hear the fields rustle.
And past the fields: there, the village, black on the horizon. Barely she can see the hovels, lit by orange little eyes, little fires in the night, blinking out. She can see them huddle together, the once-slaves: different sets of eyes, a confluence and there a discussion in fear that they will have their freedom revoked—that which they have been so recently granted, that thing whose name they did not know as they watched their parents whipped to death, sweat to death—that somehow forces from beyond will take it all away from them—their freedom, their will—that in the blackness of the night which ever encloses them, snuffs out their fires, closes their eyelids: there is the maw that will eat their very humanity. Leave them dried as husks in a field.
To that end a discussion of what should be done.
Scratching of nails—not her own. She looks around. She thinks of Louise, her mother-in-law, that creature that dwelled in their doorway as if carved from stone until she was not there. Louise who always so disliked her, who always made sure she would not bespoil her boy. When she died Elise did not see it. When she died they put her in a box and buried her out in the graveyard near the forest and then Elise thought she heard the scratching of wood, the scratching of nails—or instead of then, now: there it is again, dragging, sharp, like something gnawing: she cannot find the source. She hears it again: something behind her, something above her, something around her. Talons on wood, heavy breaths, laboring through the woodwork. Then the silence of the night. Across the room the window by her bed is open. Perhaps it has already climbed through. Perhaps it is nothing. She scratches her skin. Nothing here, must be—
Her mother-in-law said they would never come back, that they were better off without them. The slaves. The villagers. But her father-in-law, when she was not around, always said they would come back, them from the village. This in contrast to what he claimed now. But if they did come back, then there would be something here, a multifaceted presence. Hubert said the same thing, that night; maybe he is there with them, maybe they have found the beast, and maybe when they come they will bring Hubert back with them.
Maybe they will bring back a corpse.
From the empty chambers of the walls there is a sound, a scream, a high-pitched yawn from the night. It surrounds the room, closes her in. Elise looks around, slowly, little steps—don’t want to disturb it: it is likely to be fragile. Wind from her window shifts the sheets on Hubert’s bed—separate from hers—as if there a phantom nests.
There is something here after all, something in the woodwork, something inside them all.
Oh the mornings. Rung hollow from the dew, the windows fogged: misty crystal. She washes the glasses in the sink, day by day, pours out the brown stuff, the black stuff, whatever. Scrubs the dishes, put your elbow into the yeast, scrape away before it crusts, see what you could’ve seen all along. This one is no different.
The days are hooked together, bound by iron chain, the links melted together, nearly solid. It’s just one running whole. At night they take more whiskey in the drawing room, the taste never not bitter, but always familiar; the old man spins around in his wheelchair, splashing, saying: “Louise, Louise. See the bear? See the walls? There is something out there, always. See the boar and its ugly head, horns in its mouth? It can’t bleed from them.” Or elsewise a new topic, still familiar, still the same, keep them discussing and philosophizing into the drunken night, Thomas running blade over string: what could be out there? The merits of bravery, the merits of caution, the price of vanity. Then: “Louise, where is my son? Why have you let him go? You yourself said he was not ready.” Why not do something about it? Sometimes: “You sent him away. God damn you, and you knew better.”
And then he reminds them both again where he’d like to die: in the cellar, bury him there, under the rocks and stones.
From that same place their storage, where they keep their food, how they mean to weather the circumstance. There they must go when the pantry runs dry, and it does, Elise’s cracked fingers peeling from baking oat and yeast in the oven over and over, feed them both—the men—watch them swallow whole. As recompense Thomas will take you to bed when you’ve drunk as much as you were ordered. You know that your stomach is shrinking, little bit. One night Thomas will take you to bed and reach into your mouth with his two fingers and smiling the whole way he will pluck out that shrunken organ that is your stomach. Perhaps you would like that.
Now her fingertips crackle on the wooden doors of the pantry, them chipping away. She bites her lip: empty.
So down in the cellar now, with Thomas. Watch his hair curl, he keeps tucking it behind his ears. It is wet and dim and too warm. The walls masoned out of stone block like an old medieval castle, sanctimonious fortress, mortar oozing from the cracks like saliva. If she displaced them they would spit at her but the fortress would fall all the same. They move about, rats, caught in the glow of a lantern. Their shadows bend weirdly up walls, get caught in the cracks: mirror reflections of their beings that live only in the dark. Thomas is hunched over and the lantern squeaks and drips on the floor. The noise matches their footsteps, leaves tiny black holes in their wake. Don’t step on them: you’ll never see them again.
“He wants to be buried here?” She has been thinking about death a lot lately: her father-in-law’s death, Hubert’s death, her death—how it happens to you and you alone. She looks at Thomas: she would like him to die. So meek, so afraid. He tugs at a lock of hair, owl eyes blinking under the frames, he must be thinking: let us keep going, let us just sift through the oats and the grain and the yeast, let you bake it for me and I will feed it back to you and fatten you; I will take you up the stairs, pull you by a thread, give you quiet company and in that the only company you will have earned and could hope to want.
So then maybe not: maybe he shouldn’t have to die. Maybe he should be kept around. The air feels dirty and it clings to her arms. Still she will not bathe for this.
“What?” Thomas says—this after a moment of silence.
“Carmen. Why here. There’s a family graveyard, I know it. They’re all there now.” Except Hubert. Suppose that he feeds the grain now, soaked into the wheat in the fields.
“Oh. Well, yes. That’s what he says.”
“Why?”
“I think he prefers it down here—” he taps on the stone walls as they pass by, tick tick tick, “—the essence of construction. You know?” There is grime in his fingernails. He frowns and tries to pick it back out.
“I’ve never seen him down here.”
Thomas clears his throat. “Yes, well, the stairs…” and nothing more to say than that.
They’ve come to their stocks at last, walking down that ancient endless corridor, rusted vambrace of foundation. But of course it ends—why shouldn’t it? And there are barrels and fat sacks of grain and yeast and water probably repellent by this point. Anyways it is ample. Thomas sets the lantern down and is light from below, a ghostly shadow not his own grown from him as he bends to pick up as much as he can carry alone: just one sack of yeast, look at its bloated belly quibble, all bound up. Elise stands there and rubs her arms, the skin moist, feeling she could peel it back just a little. How long will it all last? she wonders. Not nearly as long as Thomas or the old man think, not as long as the village-folk think. That’s what Hubert said: only a matter of time before they show up, angry for food and water. There the answer: longer than most. The supposition that that is adequate. Why shouldn’t it be?
The topic of conversation this night: extermination. This derived from the theory posited by the old man that there are bats in the woodwork: nesting, writhing about—furry babies, black eyes, take the night in through their maws. And so chiefly it is the old man postulating: “This is the precursor of extinction,” he says. Here he looks at her pointedly, makes sure she understands. “That the absence of existence, all deeds made void.” Another bottle from the shelf by the mantle, another bottle from another occasion, time long since passed. Tick, tock, watch it go. So many gone now. There is no clock in the drawing room. Have it sit still for a while in golden glow. Elise standing by her chair, her arm on the crest, feeling each and every brass embellishment on the rim. In her other hand the drink. Enjoy the drink: black stuff, brown stuff, burnt stuff, old stuff. She drinks it and hates it still. Thomas Bradle is playing the cello. He has gotten quite good at it. Listen to the bow break, how smoothly—just the natural order of things.
“This is the ultimate change,” says the old-man. He is swinging his arms and casting himself in grandeur, sitting under golden light and burning in front of the fire and so casting his shadow, stately thing, up on the velvet, there embossed, there forever to hold audience to the slain beasts similarly tethered. “An act of order, where, by the enacting of the lesser—of the precursor of the greater—comes the transition to the ultimate, and there man reckons as God. And from this: dominance, stability. In all of this the shaping of wills and the breaking of them and so revealed the very rules of nature.”
Elise is drunk. “So you want to kill the bats?”
“Weren’t you listening?”
Elise sits in the chair and grabs at a bottle. It slips, clacks vacantly on the table. “Oops,” she says. “This is empty.”
“Louise,” says her father-in-law. “God damn you.”
“Yes. I suppose you are right.” She looks out the window, black night. Where is the monster? Where is the thing? Why won’t it come for them? Why hasn’t it shattered the glass, gnawed through the woodwork, stripped the old man in his flesh from his skeleton? Where are the men and the pitchforks and their torches, come to burn them out? Take her, beat her, string her up by the branches—watch the legs twitch: only ever clarity unto the self in that breathing moment, niched in premonition—circumstantial. Elise grabs the bottle by the neck, sets it back on the table, sets her drink on the table. Folds her legs, touches her fingers together.
“The bats,” she says. “You want to kill the bats.”
“I told you, damnit, I told you.”
She shrugs. “You’ll have to find them first.”
The old man sighs. “Thomas,” he says. “Take Louise to bed.”
In deep night she is enclosed in herself. There is something out there. A single lamplit bulb on the nightstand: between the two beds a tiny beacon, blinking back at the myriad lights out there, at those things in the dark whose lives shall run so short, so short. She is laying in her nightgown on her side uncovered, staring at Hubert’s bed. They never looked at each other when they went to sleep. Or: she looked at him, or he looked at her, but never at once. Consequence of their circumstance, or so he said. They mustn’t truly see each other, mustn’t truly feel each other—under his parents’ roof. Under the canopy of his ancestors. Mother wouldn’t have approved of that, would she? Her—Louise—standing in the doorway, bathed in light from the foyer, forgotten. But all that watching wasn’t much good in the end, was it? What Elise would have liked, what she would still like: pull the beds together, pull the sheets off, pull the night things off: be naked.
Why did you ever bring me here? He always looked so comfortable over there, nestled in the blankets, his mother’s bright face just outside the door. Louise, she peered in every night, her face and body expanding in the door frame until her figure loomed over their nighttime bodies. And he so relished that. Elise begins to scratch at the mattress with her fingernails, then at her skin. Her nails are long, bringing with them now little tearing noises: always so satisfying. Hear the mattress rip? See the stuffing. Try your skin. Now: imagine her at the door. Louise. There she is, in this very moment, at the door, opening it, fresh from the grave with each time her name is invoked and just a shadow under the lantern she carries—no light could catch there, no light could catch there—and then she slowly expands to the fill the frame—there, a crack, a scream—
But no—stop. Elise looks up. The door is closed. There are always noises in the night when it should be quiet, always something not her. Something, not in the room, clicking about, erratic—she can’t place the noise. She clicks the lamp off and rolls over and the night—the night settles in. As easily as if it had found her at a beach, decided to take her away. The window on her side of the window is open just a crack because it always is. From there the cold breath of the monster on her—let it. Let it breathe on her, let it lick her with its tongue. She is lonely. Has been, will be.
Count the days and nights on your fingers and count them over again. It will always be. She twists her back around and looks at his bed. Nothing there. Has been, will be. A sibilant screech from the windowsill, a silent scream. Come in, come in.
Elise bites her lip, clutches at her gown around her throat. No whiskey tonight. The old man fell asleep early as he sometimes does. But without drink now she yearns to have it down her throat, to have it burning inside her. Scratching in the walls—there it is again—tear at yourself, rip the nightgown—and she does. Thomas, moist skin, telling her the old man had already taken to bed for the night. He was probably warm to touch, Thomas. What about him, here, take the place on that empty bed, feel the blank spaces on her skin, how warm—
A swoop, a sick-stab: a betrayal, that. More so, he is likely impotent and, worse, wouldn’t be able to satisfy. Satiation is key. Wanton consumption of the inadequate is liable to bloat you, slow you down, leave you pondering the oversaturation, how it came to be and how it bled from your own skull underneath you skin. Sustainability—keep that in mind: one must be lean.
Part III
From the steady pulse of the forest beyond them comes morning, as ever. Elise has been busy baking: little muffins, knead them first in your palms, watch them bloom in flame. She peeks at them through the oven door, feels the oven’s breath, watches the pastries puff up. At their rising the sun shifts through the single, lonely window like an eye lens, flaring on her face. The tree branches are brushing up on the window pane, clicking: Hello. She cocks her head at the branches. She has never been out in the forest. It is inconvenient to get there, the back of the old manor pushed up so close, almost as if the tree trunks were the beams of a massive, green wall. But, no: she looks: there a gap in the trees—everywhere gaps in the trees—and the branches, hanging low and wet with dew: a passage, a gateway. For her. Here, the forest is saying. Come here. A place where the dead stay dead.
She pulls away. She can’t go. There is something out there.
With the muffins there is some dried pork from storage and nothing more. She goes to the drawing room, passing through the dining room—narrow, unused, and unlit—and takes the stairs. There red velvet, there dead eyes of dead things mounted above. She greets them silently, wants to feed them, nurse them back to restoration and turn them out, but she cannot.
At the end of the room the doors to the balcony are open, thrown wide, each square of glass inset between the wooden ribs reflecting light on to the other and then back again. Her father-in-law is sitting out on the white balcony, bathing in the stark sun: old man, hands clasped over the armrests, spinning curling fetal; old sentinel, he is spotted in the light, weary from it, more vigilant for it. He is lord over a great expanse, gatekeeper to the day born again. The clouds curl through the light, both fat and wispy over fields of wheat and cotton. So many hands once working on those hardened stalks, browning palms, bleeding brows—the pain, the sweat, there thriving, there always a beating pulse—now gone. The day is white, a light wind blowing. Below, the fields are rustling, cannot be heard; he cannot feel the wheat and cotton bend under his breath. The people: maybe they are still down there, maybe they had never came and went and came and went again. His son: still down there, still lost, always would be—maybe always had been.
She is standing there watching him. Then he says, “I can hear you.” He turns around in his wheelchair. His cheeks red. His eyes watery. “Nobody is ever as quiet as they think they are.” He smiles at her. Beside his wheels there is already a bottle of whiskey half-gone.
She goes to him, quietly hands him his plate. “Thank you, Louise,” he says.
Elise: see the field, see it move, the day quiet to you, now more quiet than the night, here restless slumber. Look past, see the carven paths, how they come overgrown—no one to tend them, only that which is there to rely upon and like weeds the crops entangle themselves in each other. And then the village: see it, smoke rising black from it, the burning of something unnatural, choke the sky, darken the clouds, and then little silhouettes, ghost from the past, gathering for a haunting.
“Do you seem them?” says the old man. “They are still out there. They will be coming for us. As ever. It will not be long now. Do you see, Louise, do you see? I always told you.”
“It’ll rain soon,” Elise says.
The old man nods. “We’ll have to kill them.” He sighs, runs a hand over his gnarled face, his fingers catching in the cracks and falling out like dead spiders. “No choice. It’s a fact, and facts negate choosing. Hubert—Thomas, I mean, good Thomas—he’s grabbing the rifle, my father’s old Winchester. You know it, Louise—remember how we shot it in the trees when my legs went out? I can still see the air rippling. Just the way we left it. Go help him, will you? Thomas. Haven’t seen him since before dawn.”
Elise goes down the stairs, goes outside. She can taste in the air how it wants to rain but the sky refuses to crack. She is tugging at the neck of her dress. It is hot, silver-eyed sun; the light wind, listen to it go through you, go through the fields; she the clouds, how they darken, swell into themselves ponderously. At the shed—haven’t been there in some time, remember the last time—the doors are thrown open—had they ever been shut?—through them the day presenting in all of its clarifying heat, spilling inward. The innards stuffy, uncomfortable: all those tools of reaping there and now they take the sun and cast it back at her and clatter with the coming wind and she has to squint through it all and tugs at her shredded short sleeves, not sure if she should pull them closer or pull them off. How tight she feels, how closely drawn. She tugs at her dress again and it is like pulling at the ends of a drawstring and how tempting it would be to yank on it, to pull the string out all at once and have it come undone and the contents spill outward. On the worktable the silver-backed shotgun shells, still rolling on their edges in miniature arcs, they hit each other: clack, clack—steady: she touches them, feels them with her hands. They stop.
The point of it is that Thomas Bradle isn’t here and nobody is and they shouldn’t be. She calls his name but of course he does not reply. Instead in answer: a gust of hot wind against the thin walls—it is not insulated, the shed—and with it the sting of coming rain, cold piercing the heat. On the back wall of the shed is the gun, the old Winchester, stuck there on little black pegs. In the stock in script Blackshawe is carved. As before, as before. There is a thick layer of dust over all of it, but around the barrel there is one long scratch curling to the tip and it shines through it all. She takes the gun from its pegs, twirls it in her hands, watches the scar catch the light, a little bead running down the length of it like a pearl and she has it run backwards and forwards and then down again and then that little orb faded as the sun is sucked from the sky even as it is hidden from her and the clouds stretch wide over the blank firmament and spit water. Elise looks up, watches the rain catch the roof of the shed and slide sideways over the doorway and ripple like a ragged curtain. In that moment what little light is left is swallowed up overhead but as it dwindles she sees it catch on two frames of glass, there, by the wheat fields, same one that her husband walked into. She walks out into the rain, gun in one hand, pulling at her torn sleeve with the other. Her arm is itchy, wet, and she comes to the very edge of the field, nearly steps on them: a pair of spectacles, one of the lenses cracked, a broken window, resting on a twisted rim and broken arm.
In the dining room, the both of them that are left. Outside is the rain, clean; there is no thunder, no lightning. Dark: no golden lights, no velvet, no drapery, no hung heads, no colors—they sit at the long table, at the end, just before the kitchen, the old man at the head and next to his own head the kitchen window; in the distance, the forest beyond dripping wet. There is an unlit chandelier over their heads and Elise is not certain it has ever been lit and candlesticks protruding from the walls. The walls: narrow, constrictive, slanted things, built sideways, made that way to be oppressive and always feel like they were moving in, once-wide, now closing in on your skin, scrunching up your skeleton, ready to flatten you into nothing in a moment—even though they were static.
On the table between them two glasses, a bottle of scotch—age forgotten, already open and partly gone, burning, harsh, dirty—down the old man’s throat—he is already very drunk, how many bottles gone and his hands are shaking and he knew he should have drank more today. Thomas’s glasses are centered as best they can be. They left a puddle on the table but it has since dried. The Winchester is upstairs, out on the balcony, and it is being rained on, the water spilling into the drawing room through the still open doors—forgotten. Elise, sitting there, rubbing at her arms, picking at them, her dress is all ripped up. Pluck at the threads. Pull them, watch them unravel and go—how long?—but then stop, let them dangle, and now like strands of white hair sprouting from her dress. The old man is watching her, head tilted forward—angry, or maybe his spine has just curled forward so much, under so much pressure that it’s going to snap very, very soon, and his head will fall right off.
“Elise,” he says. “Stop that.”
Elise stops. She looks at him, watches his eyes quiver, colorless, almost not there now. She sips at her scotch and sticks her tongue out at it and sits it back down. Her entire life has been building up to this moment.
“This damned dark,” says the old man. “Why is it so goddamn dark?”
“Thomas lit all the candles,” said Elise.
“Never knew he did that,” says the old man. He looked at the glasses, reached out for them, then drew back—never touches them. He finished his glass and poured himself another one. A little bit of scotch splashed over the rim and stained the shattered glasses. He didn’t notice. “Louise would do it, too—but you won’t, will you?”
“I’m comfortable as it is,” says Elise.
“Meticulous,” says the old man, “that’s what he was. You know that about him? Highly meticulous. Good trait in any man. That’s what got him into Brown. Highly mathematical mind. Of course he went there to study math, to hone it, but how else do you think he was so good at music? You ever heard someone play the cello like that? Listen: I can hear it now. Like he ribbed into the very walls—it’ll never leave, it’ll always be here. Listen! Can you hear it?”—the old man was pouring himself another drink at this point, Elise winding the threads of her dress around her finger— “Damned good at it, damned good at everything he did, and he did a lot mind you. They wanted him to stay there at Brown, right, to teach, told him he could if that’s what he wanted.” The old man took a drink, spilled some down himself, little spasms running through his tendons, made his finger vibrate weirdly in the dark air when he pointed it at her: “You I never seen do a thing.”
Elise jerks at the threads, feels them all snap off, one by one, each leaning into the other. “You’d never seen me before I came down here.”
“Don’t pretend you were anything more than you are now when you were up there at Hope just because my eyes don’t reach that far. You wouldn’t be here if it were elsewise. A person is defined by their history and that history lives in them—drives their actions, their meaning: a constant. You can’t escape that. So all the same I seen it all. So: nothing. That’s you.”
“You can’t walk,” she says. “What’s your history got to say about you?”
“So he married a bitch, then.” He leans back in his wheelchair, fixes only one eye on her. “Suppose he must have thought that was good for something.”
“You’ll never be anything more than you are. You never have been. Going to carry on this way for you,” she says. She stands, pushes her glass away. “You do it to yourself.”
The old man slams his hands on the table, makes his drink spit over the rim, claws his way closer until the table’s edge pushes through his belly, touches his crooked spine. “Loyalty. He came back, you know. Both of them. Both of them had the good sense to at least do that. What about you, eh? I suppose now that your husband’s dead you’ll find another one, be rid of me.” He pawed around for his drink, spilled it down his throat, wavered there, unsteady eyes.
“He’s been dead for a long time. Stuck with you now,” says Elise. “There’s something out there.”
The old man laughs and drowns in it and then his head falls to the table. Dying then, maybe, nobody to call to anymore—or maybe already dead. It is quiet but for the rainfall. Elise goes over to him, grabs the handles of his wheelchair and pulls him from the table and takes him up the stairs. Each step is an effort, each one jarring the old man’s brittle head, it lolling about, drooling, catching the stagnant air in his gaping mouth and gargling on it. They come to the drawing room. The floor is wet, the rain pouring in. The Winchester is washed up to the velvet’s edge in a great puddle, a big wet tongue leaving a stain on the uncovered floor. She hears something squeal outside, pathetic; something on the shingles, above them, behind them. Elise doesn’t move to close the doors. She wheels the old man to the carpet and takes him in front of the fireplace and leaves him there underneath the heads of the slaughtered animals. Of the boar and the deer their eyes glitter like black pearls, little voids to be filled in themselves and reflecting the silver rain. In the bear’s eyes there is nothing—they have gone out.
Suppose that there are bats in the woodwork. Hear them: tick tick tick: they crawl around between the boards, crouching in the dust, wings folded, molding on their faces a sneer. Out, above, inside, over her head: there. There is one on the ceiling, on its top, clambering on the roof. Orb overhead, hung from the canvas of night, dipped below the stars but, even still: above them all. Glistening, just plucked from the sea. There is the bat—she can hear it—on the shingles, in the rain, soaking wet, bent wings, tapping around, tick, tick. It is a giant thing, bigger than her, bigger than Thomas, bigger than Hubert. Perhaps him it has clasped in its murderous jaws. He is crunching in there, snapping, popping. Can’t scream. There it is again, through the water: tick, tick, hook nails scratching at the shingles blindly. Those are its fingers. It occurs to her that it doesn’t know how to get in. Can’t figure it out, can’t see—that’s all: two pearls for eyes. Has to wait, drink the rain.
Hear it scratch: tick tick tick. It snuffles.
I wonder if you would care for me now.
Drizzle in the morning, the sky receding, this a long time coming. From down in the drawing room the clattering of bottles, cursing; faintly, the squeak of a wheel, the cutting of liquid, the mechanical tinkering of fine machinery. Acutely she is aware of everything that is happening down there, hears it all with crystal clarity: it’s the old man drinking the remnants with unsteady fingers. It is the old man picking through the innards of his father’s gun and pushing bullets while looking for his old name. It is the old man in his creaking chair propelling himself towards certain oblivion.
As she stands naked at the windowsill with her hands upon it she allows this all to happen downstairs. The forest is outside only a breath away and yet from her perch the fall would kill her. She watches the sky solidify and become milk. Downstairs the sounds become muddled as one. The bottles: a whole sea of them being sifted through, the sound of a single ocean, the thumping and the drowning. The rain trickles to a stop, only water dripping from the open window like a string of drool from a mouth open too long and it spills cold on her hands. She leaves them there. The water drips. The water stops. She puts on her nightgown and the threads drag on the floor and she descends.
In the drawing room a puddle of rain rancid and yellowing on the floor. There the old man has made himself the epicenter. He has wheeled himself into the water and around him are empty, some broken, shattered crystal like the teeth from his own head and his wheels are stuck in them. There are some bottles still with alcohol in them swilling darkly and stuffed in the sides of his wheelchairs around his form—him, shrunken man, forming a union with his own inadequacy. The old man has now in his shaking hands the Winchester and he is trying to load it. The bullets he often fails to place in, maybe one or two at a time, not consecutively. Those that slip from his hands drop dead in the water and stay there. Elise walks over to him, looks past him to the balcony and below she can see a group of men coming with pitchforks and shovels and hammers and other farm implements. In the dull light they do not glimmer but they will be here soon—they are not so far away.
She thinks to let them come. Another bullet dropped. The old man wails.
“Louise,” he says. “Louise, Louise—won’t you help me?”
Consider this man. Now consider the men coming to your doorstep—through the fields of wheat, through the fields of cotton, through the teeth of the monster. That shadows o the trees are stretching over the rooftop, over them, holding them all man and woman and beast alike inside of it.
“Louise.”
The old man whimpers over the gutted weapon and inadvertently pushes the open lever against Elise. Now consider this: from the old man she takes the gun, twirls it in her hands. Faintly a spark along the scar, one last silver pearl runs down the line of Blackshawe. She pushes in the lever, feels the chamber filled. She takes a step back, levels the gun at the old man’s head. “I’m not your wife,” she says. She closes one eye and another she has on the rim of the gun, staring with singular vision down the silver bore to the old man, him looking sightlessly into the empty black hole at the end, uncomprehending.
“Nothing’s changed,” he gurgles.
Trace the trigger: smooth, curved, a pointed tip at the end. Just a twitch—all it would take. But then, soundlessly, the old man’s head drops. Elise opens her eye, lowers the gun. A partition from the sky allows the hot sun of a suffocated morning to penetrate the room from the open balcony and it its light that old, sightless sentry, his skin illuminated translucent over his brittle and ineffectual bones. Asleep now, or dead, maybe. She does not know. Does not care.
Elise puts her hands on the still-cool barrel of the gun. She looks around: rich wood, blood velvet, glowing chandeliers all diminished in this light. There are the heads of animals on the wall stitched to empty sockets. A reflection in their eyes of all things surrounding them, and in that there is nothing at all to see. She grabs the Winchester by the barrel and walks away.
The door: final gateway. It is being knocked upon, almost polite. Elise opens it. There they are: all of those men, marched down from the village and leaving their women and children behind for the better. They are one single bristling entity of worn cloth stitched together and stained wet from their morning walk through the field. At angles there are many arms brandishing farm implements like pikes. Underneath dark skin and dozens of lurid eyes.
“Hello,” says Elise.
The men do not answer. They shift around their tools, a few in the rear nodding back uncertainly. Elise looks behind her, sees the narrow dining room, the kitchen, the forest behind it all.”
“That’s right,” says one of the men. He’s grim, very serious, has a pitchfork stained with dried, black spots.
“You shouldn’t go in there.”
The man smirks. He looks behind him and huffs in disbelief, turns back to her, gathers nods. “You aim to stop us, Miss?” They are a collective, a union without fear and borne of singular purpose to that very door, each derivate of the next, none of them armed with anything more meaningful than a scythe: utilitarian, tool of reaping, instrument of reclamation.
Elise smiles at them. She is holding the gun behind the open door, just out of their sight. She moves her fingers down the barrel, fingers the old name still etched onto the gun, still will be when she forgets about it. Her arms are pocked where her own nails scraped her skin. She touches her face. It is very smooth. She supposes this is appropriate, that this is enough. “No,” she says. “I’m leaving. I just don’t think you should go in there. That’s all.”
The men look around at each other: silent deliberation among the whole. Elise takes her gun and pushes into them, pushes past them all. Not one of them tries to stop her, not one of them thinks to: there is nothing to argue. She moves past them and they move past her, all of them making for the house, getting stuck on each other in the doorway and spilling inward as a mess and already a clamor begins from within. Before Elise is the field in the wind but it is silent, already drowning from the noise within the old mansion. Elise leaves it all behind, turns backwards and heads into the forest.
As a professor of Composition at Ferris State University, Joseph Conrad Payne consistently thinks about how any one piece of writing may come together. He otherwise enjoys thinking about how things move through the world. His fiction has been published by Fleas on the Dog, Light and Dark, the Arlington Literary Journal, and others. Besides writing, Payne enjoys bathrobes, drawing, and long bike rides. Once upon a time he could fence—it is likely he still can.