The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (30 page)

Timothy doesn’t like to think of it—or of Martha. He believes she deserted him & maybe she did in a way. But he won’t visit her grave & it falls to me to keep it tended & clean.

Aunt Sarah fell silent. Her story was finished, but I could think of no response. I told her nothing of what I’ve seen & experienced since coming here. I think it might have given me some solace, the same as this diary, but words spoken aloud cannot be crossed out or blotted away.

She said: You’re trembling.

I did not reply.

She went to the basin & washed her hands, scrubbing the skin raw.

***

She could not see the table-knife in my hand or feel the weight of it. See me driving the tip through her belly again & again, though the edge is dull & jerks like a saw for to cut the babe from inside her. Then I hold the thing in my hands, still living: the slaughtered lamb, the Body & the Blood. Take, he said, and eat of it

***

It is not yet dawn.

I slept poorly for dreams of the fields beneath the storm. Again the sun beat down on me, wilting the grass & turning it yellow as I approached the circle where the beasts lay slaughtered, their bodies black & stinking in that heat.

The woman was there. The screech owl, Aunt Sarah called her.

She would not look at me but cradled something in her arms & sang to it as to a small child. Her voice was low & pretty though I did not recognize the melody & soon could hear nothing for the roar of the storm around us.

I came nearer to her. I saw the thing she carried.

***

not a child but a lamb which she had pulled, half-formed, from its mother’s womb. The small bones were shattered & the face was missing, eaten away, and the un-beating heart sucked out of it

***

23rd July. Saturday.

The house is quiet. My Aunt & Uncle have not yet returned & this room is empty of all but my thoughts. Visions swim out of the dusk & I can hear her calling, singing to me as to the lamb of which I dreamt—

The morning was clear, the barometer creeping up. Uncle Timothy worked through the morning & in the afternoon we went up Bald Hill. My Uncle was first up the path with Mary laughing on his shoulders while Aunt Sarah followed behind with a mildewed parasol.

The path bent sharply then followed the ridge over the valley. The slopes had been cleared of trees years ago but there were some berry bushes beside the path which blocked our view until we reached the summit. Then the bushes fell away with the landscape & the whole of the valley lay open before us, green & yellow & misted with heat.

Uncle Timothy stopped to admire the view. There was a cliff here & a long drop to the valley below, but Aunt Sarah joined him at the edge, quite un-frightened. My Uncle looked back at me with the wind rippling his beard & Mary’s fingers twined in his hair.

Come & look, he said to me. But isn’t this God’s country?

Aunt Sarah asked if I might bring the picnic basket, which I did, though I stopped short of the edge & would not approach any closer. We sat in the grass. My Uncle said a grace. He thanked the Lord for the beauty of His creation & for His Son who saved us with His precious blood. We ate & afterward we lingered near the overlook.

Uncle Timothy produced a psalter from his pocket & proceeded to read some words of praise aloud. He meant them for his wife’s ears, I think, though she wasn’t listening. She stretched out alongside him with her eyes closed & the sweat glittering on her face.

And then I saw Mary. The child had made her way to the edge of the overlook. She stood there, swaying, about to fall & her curls blowing about in the wind.

I leapt up. I ran toward her.

My Uncle, alarmed, shouted for me to stop. I reached the child where she stood & gathered her into my arms even as Uncle Timothy came up behind me, his boots pounding in the grass. The child squirmed & kicked against me, crying out as I turned toward the valley—

***

And saw the whole of Creation awash in its impurity with man coupling with woman & child & beast & all while the sun poured down upon them, blisteringly hot, blackening the flesh & causing the fat to run, fusing all together in the moment of their ecstasy—a sea of open mouths—and still they did not cease from their depravities.

My parents were there & the Batchelders. My Aunt & Uncle & the baby Mary. And always the Woman passed among them, unnoticed, wearing white like the Lamb & making for the pine-wood. Once she looked back as to make sure I was following, and I was, and I saw the two of us as from a distance, walking hand-in-hand—

***

My Uncle was behind me.

I heard his breath come quick & gasping & glanced back over my shoulder. Aunt Sarah was on her knees, white with terror: the fear of what might happen, what I might do.

I tried to explain. I said: I wanted to save her.

I know, said Uncle Timothy.

She was going to fall, I said.

Please, James. Give her to me now.

***

I ran from him & from the sunlit fields & did not stop until I reached the farmhouse where I collapsed at last, hot & panting & dripping with the stink. That was nearly an hour ago.

Now it is nearly night. The cool of the pine-wood waits for me, the woman called Lilith, the screech owl. She knows the thing that is in me & still she beckons.

I think I will go to her.

Brushdogs

Stephen Graham Jones

J
unior wasn’t even forty-five minutes into the trees when his son Denny called him on the walkie, to meet back at the truck. Denny was twelve, and Junior could tell he’d got spooked again.

He wasn’t going to get any less spooked if Junior called him on it, though.

So, instead of staking out a north-facing meadow like he’d been intending, waiting for the sun to glint off some elk horn, Junior tracked himself back, stepping in his own boot prints when he could. And it’s not that he didn’t understand: coming out an hour before dawn, walking blind into the blue-black cold, some of the drifts swallowing you up to the hip, it wasn’t the same as watching football on the couch.

The bear tracks they’d seen yesterday hadn’t helped either, he supposed.

Since then, Junior was pretty sure Denny wasn’t so much watching the trees for elk anymore, but for teeth.

He was right to be scared, too. Junior was pretty sure he had been, at that age. But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.

One thing Junior knew for sure was that if he’d been in walkie contact with
his
dad, then there wouldn’t have been any meets at the truck.

Junior was doing better, though. It was one of his promises.

So he eased up to the truck, waiting for Denny to spot him in the mirror. When Denny didn’t, Junior knocked on the side window, and Denny led him fifteen minutes up a forgotten logging road to a thick patch of trees he’d probably stepped into for the windbreak, to pee.

“Whoah,” Junior said.

It was a massacre. The bear’s dining room. At least two winters of horse bones, some of them bleached white, some of them still stringy with black meat.

Junior had to admit it: this probably would have spooked him, twenty years ago.

Hell, it kind of did now.

“They’re supposed to be asleep,” Denny said. “Right?”

Junior nodded. It was his own words. The tracks they’d seen yesterday, he’d assured Denny, would lead them to a musty den if they followed them.

“Let’s go work the Line,” Junior said, and Denny was game.

The Line wasn’t the one that separated the reservation from Canada, but from Glacier Park. It was just across the road from Chief Mountain.

Twenty-five years ago, Junior had popped his first buck there, across a clearing of stumps he’d been pretending just needed tabletops to make a proper restaurant. That had been his secret Indian trick to hunting, back then: to not hunt. The same way you never find your wallet when you’re actually looking for it.

Just, keep a rifle with you.

Junior dropped Denny off right at the gate, told him to walk straight up the fence, and keep an eye out.

“Check?” Denny said into his walkie, stepping out, gearing up.

“Check,” Junior said into his walkie, his own voice echoing him.

“Just walk back to Chief Mountain if you lose the fence,” Junior told Denny. “You’ll hit the road first. I’ll be up at that other pull-out. Maybe you’ll scare something my way, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Denny said, looking at the tree line with pupils shaped like bears, Junior knew.

Junior left him there, pulled over a quarter mile or so up the road.

He hadn’t been lying about them scaring elk or some whitetail into each other’s paths, either. It was how he’d learned to hunt, his uncles pointing down this or that coulee, telling him to slip down there, make some noise, they’d shoot anything that spooked up.

Denny wasn’t just a brushdog, though.

Really, Junior was half-hoping to scare something over to
him
. Every animal on the reservation, it knows to run for the Park when Bambi shooters are in the forest.

The kid deserved an elk this year, or a nice buck. Something to hook him into
this
way of doing things, instead of all the other ways there always were, in Browning.

Junior pulled his gloves on, locked the door, and beat his way through the brush, keeping his rifle high like he was a soldier fording a river, not a latterday Indian with a burned arm and forty-percent disability.

Maybe a half hour into it, half-convinced the world was
made
of trees all blown over into each other, the ground under his boots tilted up sharply. Junior followed, eager for an open space.

Like was supposed to happen, the trees thinned the windier it got—the
higher
Junior got—until he stepped out of the crunchy snow, then onto the blown-flat yellow grass of… not quite a meadow, but a bare knob, anyway. One of a hundred, surely, if you were flying above. But, standing on it, it was the only—no, it
wasn’t
the only one: directly to the west of Junior, like a mirror image, like he’d walked up to his own reflection, was another bare knob.

Except this one, it had a little pyramid of black rocks right at the very crest.

Junior looked away to search his head for the word, finally dredged it up:
cairn
.

Like what you arrange over your favorite dog, when the ground’s frozen and you can’t cut into it with a shovel. Like what you put over your favorite dog for temporary, promising the whole while to come back in spring, do it right.

But you never do, Junior knew.

Because you don’t want to have to see.

Except—who would bury a dog way the hell out here?

Maybe this was some super-old grave, some baby from the Lewis and Clark clown parade.

Or maybe it was older. Maybe it was real.

Junior brought his rifle up, leveled the scope on the
cairn
and steadied the crosshairs against the wind, gusting like it knew Junior was trying to draw a bead.

The rocks looked just the same, only closer up now, and trembling, the scope dialed up to 9.

Trembling until they smudged out, anyway.

Junior took an involuntary step back, pressing the scope harder into his right eye socket—
stupid
,
stupid
, he said to himself—and then got things focused again.

When there was just blackness again, a
fabric
texture to it, Junior lowered the scope, looked across with his real eyes.

Denny.

He’d lost the Line, it looked like, was falling up through the trees as well, his rifle slung over his shoulder.

Instead of doing it like Junior had taught—two steps, stop, listen, look, wait, then two more steps—Denny was just stumbling across the yellow grass, his face slack like he’d been out there for hours, not thirty minutes. One of his gloves was gone, Junior noted.

His first impulse was to put the scope on Denny, so he could give a report later.
Saw you out there, Cold Hand Luke. Didn’t you see me?
Except, even if he drew the bolt back on his rifle, just the idea of putting his son in those crosshairs made him feel hollow under the jaw.

Saw you out there, son. By those black rocks.

Junior said it aloud, the wind pulling his words away.

And Denny
was
lost, Junior could tell. With Chief Mountain looming behind, the Park right there to the west, and Canada just a rifle shot to the north, if that, the kid had managed to get off-track somehow. Again. And in spite of how the Line was a three-strand
fence
for the first couple hundred yards. All you had to do then was walk where the fence would have been, if it went on. It didn’t even take a sense of direction. The Park Service had come through with chainsaws back when, shaved a line through the woods, to tell the Indians what was America, what wasn’t. Just follow the stumps, kid.