Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2) (23 page)

So he went on. “Belsnicklers came to our farm every Christmas, dressed in sackcloth with coal dust all over their faces. Scary sons of bitches. Us kids had to just stand there while they threw candy on the floor. If we fidgeted they whipped us with switches. I’ve even seen elder spring from the frozen ground on Old Christmas Eve—”

“He wasn’t trying to refute you, Dad.” Jamie wiped his hands on his pants then held his palms up. The firelight reflecting in his lenses made it difficult to see his eyes. “He just hasn’t seen the things you saw.”

Ben sat up, ready to come to my defense, too, if need be. Wood sparked and popped as it burned. The rush of water from Red Run was louder than it had been all night. I didn’t like the noise, because it hid other noises, like whispers and footfalls. I didn’t want Ben telling them what we saw the night we buried Jane.

Pap looked at Jamie. “The first time I saw Old Christmas,” he paused to put in some chew. “Up in the barn they started to bray. All of them, awake and on their knees. The sounds were words. Chants. Prayers. It sounded like church when the nuns pray the rosary. The sky was clear, there was no wind. Starlight and a full moon lit up the night. All the fields glowed with fresh, white snow. We got scared and took off back to the house.”

He spit into the fire and took off his hat. “And out in the snow there were hundreds of sets of footprints. Human footprints and other footprints. Into the fields over the fences and stone walls. They went right up to the barn. Like a thousand people converged on the barn while we were in there and were watching us. So we ran. When we got further away we could see the footprints up on the steep barn roof. We reckoned the devil was up there having a laugh at us.”

Fenton threw a log onto the fire, sending a spray of sparks into the sky. Ben nodded in agreement.

“There’s still plenty of women in these hills who can get a full pail of milk from an ax handle or an old rag. And Mary Lewis was one of them. I seen it done with my own eyes a hundred times.”

Fenton passed around a jug of wine. My pap spit into the fire. Then he pulled the plug of tobacco out and threw it onto the coals. He motioned for the jug of wine, but didn’t drink. He just held onto it while he talked.

“When the magic starts you can smell them. I’ll never forget that smell. Like…cucumbers maybe?”

He passed the jug along without drinking. As the silence wore on, he slipped his hand into his jacket and pulled out his whiskey.

I had no problem drinking up as much wine as I could. I gulped it, rather than sipped it, in fact. Anything that’d help me be someplace else right now. A long time passed before I handed it off. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Long enough to change my mood. I passed it to Ben, who didn’t drink. He acted like he was listening for something nobody else heard. After a minute or two I motioned for him to pass it back.

“Wine magic,” I said, finally breaking the lull in discussion, not that anybody was paying attention to me anyway.

“This.” I swung the jug on my thumb, “This is magic. Tell me the fuck it isn’t. You know—”

Fenton cut me off. “Henry. Quiet.” He cupped a hand to his ear then put his finger to his lips.

At some unseen signal, Ray went to his truck and grabbed a shotgun from the seat. He slipped into the trees on the other side of the tents. Ben drew his pistol from his waist band as he retreated into the darkness near the stream.

“What is it?” I whispered, still not getting the hint.

Jamie stashed his fiddle behind the log he was sitting on. Fenton set his hunting rifle on his knee and flipped the safety off. Preston’s head was cocked to the side, listening. I stood up, not sure what I was supposed to do, and my pap grabbed my jacket and pulled me back down to the log.

We waited for a long time without hearing anything from the forest. I strained to hear, but my ears couldn’t discern anything unordinary. Just crickets and the stream. Occasionally the wind washing through the leaves of the highest trees. Fenton stopped putting logs on the fire. The fog seemed to clear, and stars appeared through breaks in the canopy.

“Hey there,” a dusky voice called from the dark.

I jerked myself awake. Everybody else stood up. A moment later, I was on my feet, too. I said, “Was that Ray?”

My pap shook his head and pointed. Champ sat up and stretched, and trotted into the trees.

A man in a camo jacket stepped into the dim glow of fire. He had a pair of hunting rifles slung over his shoulders. He carried an old duffle bag.

It was my dad.

My pap said, “Come to join us, have you Levon?”

He’d trimmed his beard and cut his hair. His dark eyes gleamed from beneath the visor of his old trucker hat. Except for the deep lines that flared from his nostrils to the corner of his mouth and the creases on his brow, he looked like he could’ve been thirty years old.

He said, “I come to finish this.” His words cut through the chill. No ornamentation. No misunderstanding. I hadn’t heard him speak so clearly in years.

Ray drifted over from the tents. He lit a cigarette and said, “Gave us a hell of a good scare.”

Jamie called Ben over.

“Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to rouse you all. Just figured this is something I needed to be a part of.” His voice still sounded like sandpaper. He could barely be heard over the stream.

He didn’t look like my dad, or sound like him. His eyes found you when he talked to you. He didn’t shuffle his feet or stutter.

He was sober.

Jamie said, “Glad you’re here, Levon.” He gave my old man a hug. “Hopefully this blows over and we’ll get back and teach these boys how to build a house. We got all kinds of food here. Enough to last a week or so. Let me fix you something.”

My dad set his duffle on the ground and carefully laid out his rifles next to it. He pulled a revolver out of his waist band, and another pistol out of a shoulder holster, and laid them on his bag. He took a seat next to the fire and Fenton handed him a plate. My pap sat next to him and cautiously offered him a sip of radiator whiskey from his flask. My dad waved it off. He took a bite and chewed it real slow.

We all relaxed. You could almost feel the warmth return to our circle. Fenton even threw another log onto the fire.

Just when I started feeling comfortable, my dad swallowed and said, “There won’t be a lot of waiting around after tonight. Like I said, I came to finish this.”

I thought he was being symbolic or metaphorical until he went on.

“Won’t be an intervention from the law either. And as much as I appreciate you all taking care of me and mine for the last few years, I plan on doing this myself. No need to spill any more blood.” He looked at me, and spoke to me for the first time in years. “You too, son. You did a good job carrying the torch after Janie, but you need to go on home tomorrow.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Lewºis is looking for me. Running home won’t bring nothing but trouble.”

“You won’t find any trouble back at the farm.”

“How do you know?” I said. Years of doing my growing up without fatherly concern made me cold to him and his gestures.

“I know, because I brought it with me. I made damn sure of it.” He pointed his thumb at the trees behind him. “We got a few hours until they show up here.”

NINE

I’d gone to bed knowing it would be over soon, just like a March blizzard. Even when snowdrifts covered the front porch you know the sun is still moving closer to equinox each day.

I’d fallen asleep with a shadow over my dreams. I could only toss and turn, a losing fight against the old quilts. My mind kept inventorying everything I’d lost: family, property. At this rate, my future would be the only thing left for them to take.

I’d gotten up before everybody else. While looking for my sandals I remembered that I’d left them by the fire. I pulled on my shorts, by now a little stinkier than I would’ve liked. I threw the flannel shirt over my shoulders, left it unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeves. I put my old ball cap on last.

The world that I stepped into was exactly the same as yesterday. Red Run rushed through the gray sandstone. Rhododendron buds swelled, prepared to bring a shower of pink and white to this green mess. Fog filled the stream valley like a washtub with too much rain water in it.

The world that I stepped into was the same as yesterday with one tremendous exception.

Yesterday when I woke up, Alex hadn’t been waiting for me.

She sat in a halo of sunlight, shivering next to the dwindling fire, wearing an old Carhart jacket that’d been passed down from Jane to Chloe. Her cowboy boots sat propped up against the fire ring rocks. When I stepped from the tent she stood, revealing a thin cotton dress that fell to just above her knees. She clutched Jane’s envelope, much thicker than when I’d last seen it. Rachael and Katy had added to it, no doubt. On her right hand, she wore the claddagh I’d found in my dad’s closet.

“Henry.”

Her bare feet danced over the soft pine needles.

“Hey.” I breathed deep to take in ocean-sized breaths, but oceans of her were not nearly enough. In her hair, on her skin and clothes, was the profusion of earth and river, sunlight and dew, wood smoke and green tea. She smelled like she’d soaked in everything we had ever known together, every sight and conversation we’d ever shared.

The hair on my neck and arms stood when she kissed me. Her breath was cool, like the wind that twisted the spruce on the huckleberry plains above. When she said my name I couldn’t tell if I was hearing words or the arrival of summer.

Somehow, in the time since I’d last seen her, she’d been reborn. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You,” I stammered. “What are you doing here?”

I laid my fingers against her cheek. Champ came out and sniffed at Alex. I turned toward the tent.

“Henry. What’s going on here?” My pap called from inside the tent. He shuffled, then pulled the old canvas flap aside. “I feel—”

“John Henry,” Alex said.

“My God, girl. What are you doing here?” Pap turned around and quickly pulled his pants on.

“Rachael said I needed to find you. She said I could help you.”

“Rachael said that, huh?” My pap tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. He pulled the flask from the pocket of his jacket and drank a few sips of breakfast. I could smell that panther’s breath all the way over here. “Well if Rachael sent you…if Rachael sent you then things are about to get worse than I thought.”

Over the next hour the rest of the gang awoke and were briefed. Plans were discussed and dismissed and half-assembled and set. We loaded food items and blankets and tents into the trucks, then filled our packs for a double-time ramble up the mountain. Most of what we carried consisted of shells for the rifles and pistols. Food became an afterthought. For the most part, if it wasn’t preserved or couldn’t be eaten raw we loaded it into the truck to be taken home.

The plan was for Preston and Ray to take the trucks up to Canaan Valley Loop Road and wait for us up there. With any luck, they’d get help on the way. Local authorities were out of the question, though. Fenton told them to try to get state cops, if at all possible. Our plan was to lose the Lewises, maybe find a place where we could use the landscape to our advantage. In our best-case scenario, we detain the Lewises until help arrived from the outside. We didn’t plan for a worst-case scenario.

Saying goodbye to Ray and Preston wasn’t easy. They felt guilty for leaving. We even decided the dog would go back with them. If I had my way, everybody would be rolling home. No matter what anybody else said, I couldn’t help but feel that this whole episode was my fault.

By nine, we were heading further up the same trail that we’d driven in on, basically an old railroad grade. Large rocks made travel by anything other than foot nearly impossible. The trail turned steep fast. The laurel brakes grew thicker, the spruce more abundant.

The forest was a constellation of earth tones caught in the particulate light that filtered through the trees. Shafts of white light trickled through the thick canopy here and there. Shadows breaking up the beams gave the appearance of movement in the distance. Every now and then I stopped to wait for Jamie or my pap. As the morning warmed, I shed the heavy, quilted jacket Fenton lent me and carried it. Eventually even the flannel shirt became too warm. I had to roll up my sleeves and unbutton the top few buttons.

Everybody dealt with the march in his or her own way. Alex hummed as we walked, a haunting and melodic old tune. She twisted ash twigs into small figurines, little four- or five-pointed shapes. She’d make one, become dissatisfied with it, then drop it to the ground before beginning another one. Greg mumbled poems. Jamie shoved his hands into his pockets and chewed on peppermints. He walked with my dad, and their conversation was private. Fenton rubbed a brass shell casing. It caught the sunlight and reflected it like the scales of a darter. He spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder. Ben was out front somewhere, breaking trail.

After an hour or so we pushed through the laurel and found sky instead of pine needles above. Magnificent outcrops of white rock stood before us, impenetrable, like a wall. We scrambled along the base, looking for a crack to lead us to the top. We moved quickly, knowing as the rocks warmed rattlesnakes and copperheads would swarm to the heat.