The Voices in Our Heads (2 page)

“Papa!” she said, eyes widened, nostrils flared.

“Jonathan Claypool, that’s personal to her.” Mother came into the room, one of the twins in the cradle of her arm. “I’ll speak to her myself—”

“No,” Katie said. “Jean Marie lost Baxter again, gone into the wood all barking and loping after a field rabbit. She called to my window, and I only had time to throw on a dress. Ask her.”

“Sit down,” Papa said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Sit, Katie. I need to speak to you of adult matters.” Mother had come forward and taken a chair. Katie shifted her eyes back and forth between them both for a moment, came forward, and sat quietly. Papa cleared his throat for a speech, and given that he was a man of few words it was going be dire news, Katie knew.

“Thorndale’s closing down,” he said. “Lord knows I’ve put my time in. Most of the boilerplates ’round these parts and five states south bear the iron run through my shift.” He took a deep breath. “Today, a new man, Jacob someone, a puddler’s helper, was taking out a buggy of hot coals. He slipped on a plate and fell with the buggy tipping toward him. Lucky it had a crust on, or else he’d have been covered with live cinder. Still burned him bad. Broke his arm and both ankles too. I think that was the final straw for Mr. Bailey. We’d been working for wages cut by twenty percent anyway, and there’d been too many accidents, too much liability, let alone the lack of contracts. We were told at the end of the second shift that the doors will be closed by December. All that will be left are the muck rollers and furnaces.”

Katie pouted.

“You already take most my wages. And Mr. Drake won’t let me work overtime until I’m eighteen, ’cause of some stupid new rule. You want my allowance too?”

Papa looked at his hands making dark shapes before him.

“I ain’t talking about the spice factory, Katie, Lord if it were only that simple.” Mother leaned forward, the baby’s tiny fingers twisted into a lock of hair that had come free down her cheek.

“Things are changing, dear, you’d best understand it.”

“Sarah, let me finish—”

“But if you’d just let me explain to her—”

“Quiet. I’ll handle this.” He looked up, eyes firm.

“I want to talk to you about Ezra Fletcher.”

“What about him?”

“He’s taken a liking to you.”

She jumped to her feet.

“He’s fifty years old!”

“Forty-five. Sit down.”

“I won’t! What are you saying?”

He looked over at mother, and she nodded him on with her eyes. He tapped the table lightly with his thumb.

“You’re to be wed. It’s a favorable match. By the time you’re thirty, he’ll be gone and all he has will be yours. You’ll be of middle age, but then you can do as you please. The decision’s been made.”

She had her arms rigid at her sides, fists tight.

“But Papa, I don’t like him! He’s spindly and crooked, and all those times I went to his store he was eyeballing me over the edge of his glasses, looking at my bum when I bent over to get the molasses, or staring at my bosom when I stretched sewing fabric across it, even when I was eleven. He’s lecherous. And he’s been waiting for his chance, don’t you see?”

“Now, all men look,” Papa said, “they can’t help it, and I’m sure he never meant nothing by it but making sure you weren’t about to tip over a lamp display or knock into the crockery.”

“I won’t do it,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a say-so.”

“You
will
do it. There’s no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Not this time!” He’d let his tone heighten, and Katie backed up a step. He regained his calm, turned his hands to her, palms up.

“Katie, be reasonable. Times are bad. We ain’t had a boarder for half a year, and next winter’s gonna be colder than the last. The twins can’t lay quiet before the fireplace, it’s too dangerous. Now, I can put in cast iron radiators and fuel them with a good coal-fired basement boiler, but I can’t afford the initial installment of the ducts.”

He looked at Mother and spoke this bit at her, as if they’d rehearsed it together.

“Ezra Fletcher can give you comfort in his place up on the hill there. And he’s promised me a job at his brother’s sand quarry, washing, drying, and screening. It’s a living, and it’s done. Take me for my word, I wouldn’t decide this unless I’d put my prayers to it.”

“But my heart is saved for another.”

“Who?”

“Adam Rothman.”

Now Papa stood, tall and thick.

“I don’t like him,” he said darkly. “His mother is mad, and his father is always off at the tavern. There’s unhappiness in that household; I’ve walked past and heard the yelling. And they know nothing of the farming they’ve undertaken. The main house is falling apart, its chimney leaning, and the yard’s overrun with rank weeds and pigs. It’s no place for a girl.”

“But I love him.”

“Not anymore, you don’t.”

A knock came at the door then, and Katie went to it. A stiff blast of wind came in, and a tall, thin-faced figure stood in the frame, bent over a bit, gray waistcoat, close-set eyes, small beard twisted to a point.

“Speak of the devil,” Katie whispered. He removed his octagon-shaped nose-pinch eyeglasses and slid them carefully into his pocket.

“I wish to have a word with your father.”

“Fine,” she said, “but I wouldn’t marry you even if you owned the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers!”

She flounced to the stairs under the baleful glare of her parents, and Ezra Fletcher stepped forward. His eyes looked nervous, but his voice held steady.

“I must tell you what I have seen,” he said quietly. “In private, with all due respect.”

Mother took the baby away, and the two men had a whispered conversation before the cold fireplace. It intensified and almost turned to blows. After the door slammed shut on Ezra Fletcher’s exit, Mother came in to see what was wrong.

“Bring my daughter to me,” were Papa’s words.

He’d said them straight through his teeth.

Adam Michael Rothman swore to himself that the second time would be slower, more meaningful, more for her pleasure if he could make himself last. He crossed the creek and retraced their steps from the night before, pine needles making soft melody beneath his boots, birches pressed close like lovers. He hoped he didn’t have to wait for her, since she’d be so lovely on his approach there in the high clearing, like a painting crafted in shadow and moon. There had been no ribbon left on the yard pump, their signal to abort, and he was not disappointed when he crested the rise.

She was there by the well, hands folded before her, black hair loose and flowing in the night breeze.

“Sweet Katie,” he said, and he approached, and she held her hands out to him, and he didn’t see the tears on her cheeks until it was too late, when the dark figures came from behind the trees at the edge of the clearing, her father stepping around the northwest corner of the demolished carriage house, club in one hand, burlap sack in the other.

“Get her out of here,” he said softly, and just before Ezra Fletcher made to lead her away down the path, Adam croaked out to her,

“No sign, my darling, no ribbon? But why?”

She put her knuckles to her trembling lips and looked down at the ground, Fletcher regarding him darkly and turning her.

Adam didn’t wait a moment longer. He sprung to the side suddenly and made to run off as fast as he was able, but there were more of them than he’d at first thought, and he was grabbed from behind and shoved over to the well. Someone clenched a fistful of his hair and pushed his face hard to the stone, breaking off a tooth that went half down his throat, cutting more and more inward each time he snuck a swallow, and through it all he only wished to be granted the moment he could cough it loose or choke it down. There was a rain of blows, and the yanking and ripping of his coat and shirt. Cold, gloved hands reached inside the slits in his back, and while a few backed off refusing to touch him, there were those who continued, muttering the name of “Holy Jesus” over and again.

They snapped the left wing off at the base of the humerus, and the right halfway up the ulna, the point of the second digit piercing one of them through the palm, sending him shouting and cursing and shaking it as if a snake was attached. For poor Adam, it was a thick swirl of black and dark red, and there was a plea to end it quickly and a stronger argument that claimed murder was a sin before God. If he bled out, he bled out, but they were to steer clear of the brain, the heart, and the jugular. One oily voice protested that they would be caught and tried, and the more guttural tone Adam recognized as that of Mr. Claypool said they had to make it look like ritual, the way them zealots up in Coatesville did to them other Jews.

Adam wanted to choke out that his mother was from Ireland and didn’t that count for something, and they turned him over. Someone put all his weight, palms down, upon his shoulders, and Mr. Claypool came into his vision on a slant with a pair of tin snips.

“It was of her own free will she gave you up,” he said gently, “once I explained how aberrations like you can poison the mind.”

There was nothing left between them but a thick kind of silence, and so Claypool took a breath through the nose and bent to it, the others helping him intermittently, and by the latter half of the rough surgery Adam Michael Rothman finally passed out. By the time they took his eyes, he lay dead.

They were tired and sweat-drenched and blood-covered, and half down the path to the birches, a hand fell on Claypool’s shoulder.

“Did you check his pulse, John?”

He shoved the hand off and fought back a shiver.

“It’s done.”

“You sure?” They’d made a small ring now, blocking the way. John Claypool turned, pushed through them, and trudged back up to the clearing. And there lay scattered the results of their grisly work in the pale, cross-hatch spill of the moon: a farmer’s sack coat rumpled next to two broken wings, base bones angled, jutted up like fractured Chinese architecture, dark feathers soaked and flattened, a litter of digits, one boot laying on its side, blood stained down the side of the well in half-dried streams following the rough contours of the mortar lines between the field stones.

And no corpse.

Adam Michael Rothman had vanished.

April 2011

“And ever since then, these woods have been haunted.”

“That’s it?” Kyle said. Brandon had been doing his best straight scary face, and he still tried to hold the sincerity.

“Yes. And every twenty years or so, someone goes missing back here. Never any evidence left, just a witness or two that sees a figure dart between the trees, or a shadow pass overhead.”

Everyone kind of shrugged, and he poked the fire with the knobby stick he’d found down by a short ravine choked with elderberry and pricker bushes. A burst of sparks twirled up toward the sky, which had gone all but dark between the pitch and cast of surrounding trees.

“But what happened to the father?” Melanie said.

“Yeah,” Krista added, “and how about the perverted old store owner?” Robbie leaned forward and gave that crafty, goofy grin he was known for.

“I’ll bet he broke a hip fucking her on their wedding night!” He rolled back in peals of laughter that the boys joined in with and the girls did their best to show they didn’t appreciate.

“Pig,” Valencia said. She adjusted the rubber band at the back of her braces and tried to turn her marshmallow. It slid off the stick and hissed into the fire.

“He got them all,” Brandon said, even though his little audience really knew it was over at this point, the best part at least. Here he was just making up shit as he went. “He killed Ezra Fletcher that following year when the old geezer went out to the privy to take a dump, and he got John Claypool when he went hunting for deer the next winter. All the body parts they cut off Adam Michael Rothman grew back on him bigger, thicker, tougher, more akin to his ‘bird’ side. But even turned ninety-nine percent beast, he never went back after Katie Claypool for revenge.”

Why not?” Melanie said.

Brandon shrugged. “It was a backward curse. They’d made a promise to love each other forever, remember?”

“That’s lame,” Robbie snorted.

“Shut up,” two of the girls said simultaneously. Brandon dug in the fire for a moment, searching back for the creepier tone that had shaded most of his prior narration.

“But you can bank on the fact that he never forgot how he died, the torture, the disfigurement, the idea that he was bound by the dark magic of the wood to pass over the one who betrayed him.”

“
Might
have betrayed him,” Valencia interrupted. “The father could have grounded her, making it so she never had the chance to put her spirit ribbon on the pump in the first place.”

“They didn’t have spirit ribbons back then,” Robbie said.

“Whatever.”

Brandon looked up, the reflection of the fire dancing in his eyes. “Doesn’t matter what the truth really was. It mattered what Adam Michael Rothman
believed.
Fact is that Katie Claypool was exempt, Rothman didn’t like it, and no one else was safe from there on in. No one. And she knew it when she got the general store, when she remarried, when all those long years made her old and bitter, twisted up in guilt every time someone new went M.I.A. She lived until 1975, always rocking on her porch, warning anyone who would listen about the betrayed, angry spirit lurking around up here in the woods.”

“It’s a good story,” Ashley said. She stood up and brushed off her butt. Her shirt had ridden up a bit, showing off the new dragon tattoo she’d gotten a few weeks ago, snaked there along her hip and the right side of her belly. The guys were all staring out the sides of their faces. She looked good at her middle; flat and hard, and she was a blonde.

“Be right back,” she said. She had to “wee,” and she wasn’t going to do it too close to the campfire. Too easy for Brandon, or Dana, or especially Robbie to get it on a cell phone and post it on YouTube. They’d title it “Squatter’s Rights,” or something that would really make Daddy proud. She sidestepped down the short incline and walked a few paces along the path, almost tripping and taking a header when she bumped her toe against an overgrown root raised there like some corroded old vein. She found a thick bush, made her way behind it, dropped her drawers, and delivered there in the shadows.