VIII
“Jacob, I think I’d like to stay.”
She stood on the porch that third day, watching me fuss with the Edsel.
“What’s that?” I asked, wiping my hands on a shop towel and walking around the front of the car.
“I’d like to stay here awhile, with you, if that’s alright.”
Two days later we found Duncan loping through the clover, covered in fat ticks, gaunt and dehydrated. We fed and bathed him, her nurturing demeanor a magical effect, and he thrived. I built a swing in a tree up the hill where we could watch the sun set longer together, ease into our evenings, playful those first few times but gathering in intensity like winds through the valley heralding storms. Some nights I found myself gasping and exhausted, the leather strop still in my hand, her body welted and bruised from waist to knee, asking for more. We filled our days tending the garden in the flat beside the driveway, canning vegetables, reading aloud to each other from the medical books old Mildred had left behind, hiking around the steep ridges. And then, just as suddenly, it was over.
We sat in the kitchen and I listened to her soft crying.
“It’s just time, is all. It’s time to go. Please, try to understand. I’ve been here near two weeks, and this has been wonderful, you’re wonderful, but this is not my home. And I’m too old now to stay in someone else’s home.”
I walked around behind her chair, rubbing her back with my thumbs, small circles near the spine, broadening out around the shoulderblades, and pressed her deltoids with my palms. I leaned down and kissed her neck, just below the earlobe. “It’s OK baby, don’t cry. Shhhh. Don’t cry. No one’s leaving here today.”
I pulled the pistol from my belt and struck down hard at the base of her skull.
IX
I made my way back up along the low creek bed nearly two miles until I reached Baxter’s Run, half dragging my right leg. The kneecap had dislodged in the crash and settled in on the lateral side of the joint. I sat in the stream and banged it back into place with a smooth flat rock, but it would barely hold weight. Checking for traffic I clambered across the highway and onto the pitted gravel road, lurching toward home. How many times had I crossed this way? On bikes, in cars, in dreams? Thousands, surely, maybe tens of them. Days like pond-ripples in time, a perpetual wave, back and forth, passing through old memories of yourself.
As I approached the house I saw that the side door was open and there was a trail of fresh blood smeared through the grass leading up to it. I followed it down into the house, past the cellar doors, and into the kitchen where an acrid haze of burned flesh filled my lungs. On the cast iron stove was a smoldering ring of cauterized skin and gristle, and here the blood trail ended. I called her name as I searched the bedroom, living room, the dining area where yellowed photographs hung, their stoic subjects yet keeping a watchful eye. I heard Duncan whining from across the yard and pushed myself back outside. Struggling up the embankment past the old cattle trough to the bone pile I found that the iron grate had been removed, shoved aside, and Duncan lay bleeding at the bottom. Next to his nearly lifeless body there in the furrow, staked into the rock, lay a riveted shackle encircling a blue-tinged hand at the wrist. I got on my knees and reached down toward the poor dog. His eyes rolled over to meet mine as I placed my hands under his belly. He looked at me briefly, raised one eyebrow, then the other, and then he turned his head and was gone. Tears came warm and fat to my cheeks and I cried out, sobbing hoarsely as the stench of the pit overwhelmed me, and I began to get dizzy, felt the strength leave my body, trading places with pain. I could barely turn my head as I heard rustling in the brush behind me and saw her bare feet emerge, covered in dried putrescent flesh and human waste. I felt a heavy blow land below my ear, caught a flash of white light, and slipped into syrupy opioid darkness.
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Tune in to Dispatches Every Sunday to Continue Reading “The Kindness of Strangers” by Lou Poster.
Start from the beginning of “The Kindness of Strangers” on SVJ’s Features.
This is Lou’s first published piece.
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Lou Poster is a Native West Virginian, current resident of the poorest county in Ohio. Appalachian songwriter/singer/storyteller. Son of a third-generation coal miner.