Kindness of strangers by Lou Poster

part one

A three-legged dog is easier to befriend when it’s a hind limb he’s got shed of. The gait is hitched, and the rear haunch follows a vertical parabola in an ungainly manner, sure, but when seated or laid out at the master’s feet there is little to betray the loss. You can get used to being in the presence of that kind of sadness.

Not so with Duncan.

The Tennessee cur’s front passenger side had been ruined while in the care of a previous owner, most likely a resident of one of the hours-distant cities, moneyed enough to finance surgical repairs, with plenty of options at hand to square his abandonment once the sight of the thing had worn thin. Duncan’s curved horizontal scarring, which he was fond of rolling on his brindle back to display, was reminiscent of the double mastectomy scars of my late Aunt Mildred, who in my youth had walked unabashedly shirtless through the clover-filled bottoms near the creek in summer, my brothers and I looking on.

“Ain’t nothin’ left to cover up, boys, and it’s hotter’n Hell’s own wrath.”

Damaged goods like Duncan are brought out this way from time to time, in waxed and well-muffled vehicles, backseats full of tearful children unaccustomed to the dust of gravel roads, to be set free from their comfortable lives, ceded to certain death.

It was Duncan that watched me now, hunched in anticipation and safely five yards distant, as I checked the traps around the house. The critters that these woods produce will decimate the foundation of a home in a single season if left unchecked, as the leaning attitudes of the pitiful and long vacant structures in the surrounding countryside would attest. First chore of every morning, before the bitter film of coffee can dissipate fully from the tongue, is to clear, reset, and bait the half dozen or so traps around this sixty-odd acre property. A .22 caliber pistol forged in the year of my own birth, 1930, the sole kind gift of an otherwise cruel father, has always accompanied me on these rounds. Groundhogs, raccoons, opossum, and the occasional skunk are to be found in the first weak light that trickles down off the ridge to my valley floor. They have been here for millennia; only Duncan and I are novel here.

As I approached a small paw-trap behind the ancient shed, the familiar refrain of a frantic animal locked in steel caused Duncan’s ears to stand tall and swivel front. Rounding the corner, I could see blood in the dirt path worn bare by many predecessors pacing the length that the chain allows, unable to free their tiny humanlike hands from the rusty grey cylinder. The clanging and scratching abated as I approached the raccoon, giving over to low, muffled growls, and I saw that it was attempting to chew through its own forearm in order to free itself. I stood, head cocked slightly, in genuine admiration of the creature, who had finally reached his last resort (for surely what chance has an amputee raccoon in the wild, with coyotes about?) and was hurriedly executing his will. I had seen the evidence before, tiny tragic paws still gripping rancid bait fruit, tendons damp and ragged in the dewy morning air, protruding with blood-matted fur from the snare, itself connected to three feet of linked chain staked deep in the ground. I had not once, however, witnessed the act. An amazing feat, countering eons of evolutionary programming. I looked on intently as the animal growled and gnawed. Brief survival via self-mutilation. An excruciating loss of a part to preserve the whole. No choice.

A sharp crack from the .22 silenced the raccoon, and as I looked back I noticed Duncan had crept ever closer as I’d ruminated, nearer than ever before.

I pulled the spring back on the trap, fished a few chunks of melon out of my pocket and traded them for the mangled paw in the cylinder. Duncan came hopping over to inspect our prize, pushing hard into its gut with his nose, snuffling and whining. I let him have at it for a minute or two while I chewed at a handful of sunflower seeds and looked out over the meadow, watched the breeze trace white lines through the green underbelly.

“That’s enough.”

I nudged Duncan away with the point of my boot, picked up the carcass, and headed to the bone pile.

Part Two

Above the meadow, inside the tree line, the hill slopes steeply to the ridge. From just below the high point knoll there is a ravine bisecting the property down to the bottoms, cleaving it into north and south faces. Deer trails, old logging and mining roads, gas and water line right-of-ways pass above its steepest walls, cut through the brush and old growth. Down in the flat at the end of the ravine, near the creek formed by the wellspring on the south side, is the collection area for the animals I trap. It sits far enough from the house that the smell never reaches the porch in summer, and below the creek so as not to corrupt the water. Some nights I sit with a .25-06 in the shed and spotlight the coyotes that gather around like Thanksgiving family. Those I leave where they lay.

It was on this property that I learned how to walk, fish, ride a bike. Not much later I learned to drive a tractor, then a car. As boys my brothers and I tended the cattle and chickens, cut trees to be sold for support timbers to the mines, plowed the rocky clay until it would yield scrawny corn for feed and trade. I was born here, in this house, along with the past three generations of my family. Sometimes in the waning purple light of evening I’ll think on those older pioneers, squatters in a wilderness not yet described as Appalachia, utterly alone save for each other. I wonder what they had hoped to find here, if this was truly a better life than what they had left behind, whether or not they had a choice. I think about the winter they burned the split rail fence to survive when firewood ran scarce, about the stillbirths, the smallpox, influenza, and farm equipment casualties that populate the family cemetery halfway up the opposite hillside and I wonder if I would have measured strong enough against that standard. There was a time I once carried my older brother Frederick home fireman-style the two miles from our favorite fishing spot. We’d fought after a disagreement involving me popping the eyes off a bluegill with a pen knife. We decided to tell everyone that he had slipped on a rock, breaking his jaw and tearing his ear nearly clean off in the fall. So maybe.

III

On mornings when foodstores are running low I tend to rise early, well before the sun, and hike silently to my favorite hunting spot, a place above the ravine and below the ridge, where the terrain bottlenecks deer as they travel from the grassy fields in which they feed to their thicketed bedding grounds. Taking a spot on the ground below an old oak in the still-dark I’ll watch the woods come alive. First the songbirds cheerfully calling one another, then the squirrels barking and rustling, the distant cluck of a hen turkey. At all times present is the high distant whine of the ventilation-shaft fan at Flat Run, the one that just a few years back in ’68 had quit, filling that mine with gas till it sparked up and blew like the devil himself was coming out of the mountain. Fifty- some-odd men died in it. My maternal grandfather was on the radio with the few of those men who had survived the blast, and who were to be sealed in down there under fly ash concrete to contain the fire, preserve the coal. The fan hasn’t faltered since that. Through binoculars I scan the ridgeline, backlit by the pale sky of first light, looking for any brief, halting movement, the flick of a tail, an ear. A horizontal backline against the cool blue morning. These times allow for quiet reflection, and for the past several days my thoughts have been with a woman.

Her name is Helen, and she is gone from me now.

As a child of seven or eight I wounded a deer on one of my very first hunts. It was last light, the sun well below the crest of the hill, and all I could make out was the silhouette of a buck on the ridge a good eighty yards above me, antlers and an elongated neck swollen from the rut. I laid the ironsights on his neck and squeezed the trigger, and when my eyes returned to the spot where he had stood there was only empty sky. My father and I climbed through the saplings and undergrowth to the water line right-of-way, flat and open above the ravine, and found a six-point motionless in the dusk. We decided to field dress the deer down by the house before the pitch dark took us, makes the dragging harder but the deer was small and we had the downhill slope to our advantage. Halfway down, the buck started to thrash and wheeze, trying to regain his feet. I had heard injured deer before, and they can bleat and cry like wounded children when taken in the night by coyotes. But nothing more than barely audible gusts of air came from this one. My father leapt on its back and, producing his skinner from its sheath, beheaded the animal in three short pulls, save a thin band of flesh above the severed spine, grunting loudly with each jagged cut. The stench of blood and animal shit rose with steam from dark pools collecting at our feet.

I had only managed a shot through the neck, knocking the buck unconscious. “Don’t shoot unless you can hit vitals. No need for an animal to suffer like that.” He did not look at me.

“Yessir.”

After dressing and then hanging the deer for a few days we went into the shed to skin and quarter it. On close inspection we saw that its vocal cords had been obliterated by the bullet, its jaw shattered in the upward trajectory. Then we began the slow process of peeling the hide back from the meat, pulling down hard with one hand while teasing free connective tissue with the razor-sharp edge of a knife made for no other purpose.

Part Three

Helen Cooke almost arrived in Wetzel, West Virginia on a Sunday. Her husband had died nearly a year prior, his body having rejected the kidney she had miraculously been a match for and selflessly given him. In the dark days that followed she tended her ailing mother, reversing their roles as folks sometimes do near the end until the mother, too, passed on. Having nothing left to tie her to the Pennsylvania community in which she had been raised, no employer, no children, no close friends to speak of, she walked straight from the tiny cemetery where they buried her mother, climbed into her car, and headed south along US 19. Maybe she felt the pull of the hills, the gentle rocking drive along switchbacks leading deeper into unknown lands, dark and hypnagogic. Or maybe she had simply reached her end and was still breathing just enough to start the car, pull the transmission into drive, follow the double yellow lines. In her state she managed to lose track of both time and fuel consumption, and as her gauge neared E she pulled onto a gravel road parallel to Baxter’s Run looking for a filling station, a hotel, anything really. Instead she found me.

Helen was shaky and eye averted as she stepped from the old Edsel, struggling to form words into questions.

“Sorry,” she finally got out straight. “It’s been a month of a day.”

“S’alright, ma’am. You get turned around out here?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure.” She looked around at the hillsides, as if that might help. “If you could please direct me into town, I saw a sign a few miles back but it’s rusted out where it should say how far it is, and I’m nearly out of gas.”

“Well, it’s about seven, eight miles on in to Wetzel from here, but there’s not much to it once you get there. Just a stoplight and a diner, really. Tell you what, I’ve got a five gallon can out the shed there, be happy to give you enough to get you on your way.”

“That’s very good of you,” she said, relief cascading over her face, and stepped forward, her hand extended in the default greeting of our tribe. “I’m Helen.” I shook her hand without wanting to, and it folded like a Kleenex in my palm.

“Jacob Baxter, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”

I fetched the gas can down to the car and emptied it into the Edsel’s tank while she looked on. Her nerves seemed to relax a little as the liquid belched and gulped down the filling spout, trading places with the air.

”You look to me like you could use a meal, maybe some rest. I was on my way inside to cook up some rabbit, if you’d like to join me.”

“Jacob, now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve eaten in days.”

Inside, I stood over the cast iron stove, agitating the stew with an old wooden spoon while Helen told her sad tale. An early miscarriage had made her gunshy on the subject of children, so her husband and mother were all the family she had. It seemed as though she was still in a fugue state as she spoke, wide eyed and nearly monotone. I kept my words to a minimum, allowing her silences to linger until she cared for them to be broken. I ladled stew into bowls and placed bread and warm butter on the table, and as I listened I felt an old curiosity building.

“Thank you so much,” she said, finishing a bite. “There’s really not enough kindness to go around these days, is there? Well, not where I’m from anyways.”

“People up Little Washington way, all crowded together, don’t seem to have much room for each other. ‘Least not the couple times I’ve been. Can’t even imagine what it’s like in Chicago or New York.”

“All this technology, it’s just driving a wedge between folks. You sit in a dark room and watch a box full of light and sound for hours and never think to talk to the kid at the grocery store or the clerk at the hotel. They’ve got stories, too, you know.”

“Maybe their stories are dull,” I said, taking another bite.

“Maybe so, but they’re real.” As though it mattered. I had watched a few times when in town, and even I could see that television was meant to sell soap and motor oil, the programs not more than saccharine fruit in the bottom of a commercial snare. Television elevated the art of the story for the sake of the sale.

“I guess so.”

She joined me on the porch for a cigarette as the sun began to set behind the western ridge. We watched the shadows begin to stretch and bend in their encroachment on the house.

“Nearest hotel’s gonna be about thirty miles in the direction you’re headed. Or you could double back north about fifteen.”

“I really don’t know which direction I’m headed. I think I was sleepwalking, almost. I think maybe I still am.” Something in her gaze out over the property in that evening light set a hook in my belly, and I made a decision.

“Well, you’d best be on your way if you’re gonna make Clarksburg before it gets too late, if you decide to go that route. You can use the restroom to freshen up before you go.”

“If you don’t mind? I’ll just be a minute.”

She walked inside and I moved down off the porch to the Edsel and popped the hood quietly. I reached over by the air intake and pulled the coil wire from the center of the distributor cap, just enough to feel the click of disconnection, and gently eased the hood back down. I was lighting a fresh cigarette on the porch when she reemerged, blinking quickly and saying hasty thank-you’s, her eyes avoiding mine once again.

“It’s really no trouble at all, ma’am. Turns out I needed the company. Nice to hear a woman’s voice for a change.” She looked up at me earnestly now, and I could see the redness around her irises as they receded from her pupils, the dark spots dilating even in the growing dusk.

“Well,” she said, “goodnight then.” Smiling for the first time, maybe in months.

I waved from the steps as she sat in her car and turned the key.

Part four

Below the bone pile is a yard-wide furrow about twenty inches deep and ten feet long into which some runoff from the creek collects. The water level never rises above an inch or two, even in heavy rains, due to the drainage dug out years ago to divert water to the livestock that once made this land profitable. Laid across this is a heavy iron grate that keeps the accumulated carcasses from clogging the spillway. As the remains decay, small portions of flesh drip or fall peeling off between the bars and linger for a short while until the water can carry them away, eventually leaving an exposed skeletal array which needs periodically to be cleared. As I prepared to add the raccoon to the pile, I noted that it would soon be time for this unsavory task and looked to Duncan ruefully.

“If you were worth a damn I’d-a trained you to do it.”

The dog looked at me in that quizzical way which likely ingratiated his species to mine eons ago, but quickly turned his head toward the road as we heard the careful approach of unfamiliar tires. I threw the raccoon onto the pile and began the hundred yard walk down to the barbed wire fence-line that runs the width of the property above the road.

Sherriff Jim Stanton was a big son of a bitch, two-hundred-sixty pounds if an ounce, and at least six inches better than six feet tall. His tan and brown uniform never seemed quite able to contain his torso, always on the verge of a terrible collapse. He wasn’t a particularly skilled investigator, at least not much better than anyone else around these hollers at deducing a man’s intentions or the odds of his guilt. Having failed at every other attempt at elected office, he found a home among his high-school-bully-cum-unemployable-adult brethren on the local police force, and flourished. I counted the handful of times I had interacted with Jim Stanton as some of the least enjoyable of my existence, and it wasn’t simply a natural aversion to law enforcement that made it so.

“Well howdy, Jim,” I smiled as he pulled in front of the house. He rolled down his window.

“Jacob, how are you this morning?”

“In need of a second cup, if I’m bein’ honest.”

“I am moving a bit slow today myself. Late night.” He glanced at the sky. “Does it look like rain to you? They’re sayin’ rain today.”

“I ain’t seen the leaves turn over yet, so I’m optimistic.” I stood at the gate, hands in pockets, the .22 visible in its holster on my belt.

“Well, there’s that. New dog?” he asked, and jerked his head toward Duncan.

“Few weeks now, I reckon. Got dropped off up the road a piece, couldn’t stand to see another one starve. Still had his tag on ‘im.”

“Poor bastard.” He spit heavy brown tobacco juice from the driver’s seat of the county truck, staring hard at the dog. “God damn he’s something to look at.”

“What can I do for you, Jim?”

“Had a bit of a dust up downtown last night, Jacob.” Yeah. Downtown. “Seems a lady from up Little Washington went missing last month, only no one noticed till the lawyers tried to divvy up some estate or other, went round looking for her. Found the house open, abandoned. Nobody’s seen her, heard tell, nothin’. The Pennsylvania boys put out the word. Ay. Pee. Bee.”, drawing out the acronym. Jesus, I thought. Self-important prick.

This is what the world does to us-- puts us on sides, teams in opposition, wins and losses, a cycle of energy inexhaustible throughout history. I stared out toward the dirt paths leading down to the creek.

“What caught our notice,” he continued, “was the vehicle. Blue Edsel. Don’t see many of ‘em. Ellen Bishop, though, she says she seen one come up Baxter’s while giggin’ for frogs about a month ago, and damn if I can remember anyone in the county having one, let alone anyone with business up this way.” He leveled a look that I met head on, cold and steady.

Jim, you’d better come up and join me for that coffee,” I said.

He killed the engine and opened the badge-emblazoned door. “Sounds like I might.”

In the kitchen I poured the coffee, offered cream and sugar though I knew better than either of us doctoring a morning brew in front of the other. “Jim, there was a lady driving a blue Edsel stopped by here last month,” I said. “A bit lost, had some car trouble.” I sat at the kitchen table and gestured to the empty seat across. “A Helen, oh,” snapping my fingers. “Baker, or other.”

“Cooke,” he said, pulling back the chair.

“Cooke. She was lookin’ for Wetzel, but I don’t think she knew what it was or why she was a-lookin’. She stayed on a couple nights while I fixed up her ignition coil, up in the cellar rooms out back, and then she went on her way. I gave her all the gas I had in my can out there,” gesturing with a finger looped through the coffee mug’s ring out the window toward the shed. “I figured she was headed back to Washington.”

“Ignition coil, huh?”

“That’s how I started to figure it. Turning over but no spark. Thought I was gonna have to come into town and order one from Ben Shaw, but then I realized it was just the coil wire was shot. Could see it arc inside the insulation once the sun went down. So I took some wire off the tractor and spliced it up, ran just fine. I told her to get a new set of wires soon as she could.”

“And she stayed here.”

“Just the two nights. Out back above the cellar.”

“When’s the last time you saw a woman, Jacob?” Adrenaline tightened my scalp like a bucket of ice water, running down into my shoulders.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, seems to me a pretty young city girl shows up on your doorstep, knowing you, maybe you try keeping her around for a bit? Maybe take your time with the repairs?” He looked knowingly over the rim of his cup with a wry smile. Just needling me. I relaxed into my chair and laughed sheepishly.

“Oh no, now, Jim. I wouldn’t do that. It just had me stumped at first is all. And she wasn’t all that young, neither, damn near my age.”

He smiled and set down his cup and lifted his Stetson, pressed the opposite palm against his growing forehead.

“Thing is, Jacob. We found the car.”

Part Five

I walked back down to the driveway on the seventh try. The flywheel continued to spin as Helen cranked the key and pumped the accelerator, flooding the engine in the process, the singular smell of gasoline filling my nostrils, and the headlights began to dim with each gradually slowing surge.

“Might want to give it a break there. Don’t want to run down the battery.” I could see that tears were starting to form, surface tension alone holding them fast to her lower lids. One good blink and they would start to run.

“This damn car,” she sobbed. “Nothing ever FUCKING works!” She slammed her fists in rapid succession against the steering wheel, hitting the horn occasionally, tears now streaming freely down her cheeks, the tantrum of a woman long accustomed to holding such outbursts at bay, far more fury than a disabled car could possibly warrant. I took several steps back from the car and counted twenty before speaking again.

“Now, Helen, it’s gonna be ok. There ain’t much can go wrong on a car engine that can’t be fixed pretty easy. I’ve got some tools and there’s a pretty decent parts store in town, if it comes to it. Not much I can do out here in the dark though. How about we go on back up to the house and figure out what’s next? There’s a couple rooms off the back of the house you can have all to yourself for the night if you want ‘em. You can stay there and I’ll get you all fixed up in the morning. How’s that?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, several hard heartbeats passing through my collar and into my ears while she stared at her hands, now resting on the wheel. Then she opened the heavy blue door and slid out, came to stand beside me, looking at the car.

“Alright.”

The house was once a three room log cabin, originally built by my great-great grandfather in the mid eighteen hundreds for his family. As his children had children and stayed to work the farm, additions were built. There is a storage cellar in the rear, dug back into the hillside, maintaining a constant sixty-five Fahrenheit degrees regardless of the season, and two cedar-lined rooms were added above it. Eventually the two structures were connected by a porch once the road separating them was rerouted to the front of the home, but a person still has to exit one to enter the other. This is where my brothers and I had shared bunks throughout our childhood. As we grew, Frederick and William tired of the country life and lit out for the west coast. Shortly after our mother suddenly passed, my youngest brother Michael went insane with grief, being only ten at the time, and had been in institutions ever since, leaving just myself and my father to work the land. I had lived in the cellar rooms all my life until I awoke one day the lone occupant of this patch, solitary in the elements at the age of nineteen.

“There are more blankets in the closet there,” I said as I replaced a burned out bulb on the wall by the bed, “and extra pillows in that chest by the wall. My brother’s wife left some clothes behind in the other room there, they’re stale but clean. Might see if anything fits if you’d like to change.”

“I really don’t know what to say, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, Jacob.”

“Oh, now it’s no trouble. I’ll get after that vehicle early in the morning while you sleep in, and hopefully by the time you’re up and about it’ll be out there all warmed up and ready to go for you.”

As I moved past her toward the door she caught my elbow in her hand and looked up at me. “It really means a lot that you’re helping me. Maybe you don’t see it. But it does.”

“Well, alright then. Happy to oblige. You have a good night’s rest, sleep in as long as you like. Goodnight.”

“The restroom,” she said quickly. “Is that the only one? In case I need it in the night?”

“Door to the main house is always unlocked, ma’am. Come and go as you please.”

I cleaned the kitchen and walked into the adjacent bathroom. On the back of the door still hung the leather strop my father used to beat his children. My brothers and I would sometimes joke in gallows tones about the fact that we had never seen him dress the edge of a single blade on its surface. There were whetstones aplenty in the shed. The strop’s sole purpose was the enforcement of his arbitrary and unassailable law. After our mother died what little light he had behind his grey eyes went cold. He rose and set with the sun, mute sometimes for weeks on end, save the beatings. He slowly sold off the livestock, demanded fewer acres of corn until there was nothing left in the enclosing wilderness to suggest that generations of farmers had eked out a living from the unforgiving soil. As I washed and rinsed my face in the sink I could see it hanging dormant in the mirror over my shoulder. Somehow I had not thrown it out with the rest of the old man’s things, a two pound strip of leather weighing six tons. I shut off the light, stepped into the bedroom, disrobed, and crawled into bed. Within twenty minutes she came to me, wordlessly, naked, hair down over her slim shoulders, gliding under the sheets, pressing her mouth over mine.

PART SIX

VII

Sherriff Stanton eased out onto the highway southbound, craning his neck to see around me, checking for oncoming traffic.

“Thanks for coming along, Jacob. The sooner we can get this vehicle ID’d the sooner we can get this thing done with.”

We were driving to the old mine at the head of Bent Creek, just a couple miles away. Jim said that one of his deputies had received a call that the slurry pond had breached, and when they arrived found the blue roof of an Edsel protruding from the surface.

“It’s a goddamned mess up there, I tell you what. Gonna have crews cleaning that shit up for months. But it leaked out just enough to expose our car.”

“Happy to help, Jim.” I’d had to leave Duncan behind, shut in the house, Stanton refusing my request to bring him along with a guffawed “Hell no!” and a look of disgust so thorough you’d think I asked to take a shit in his boots. Had to leave the pistol, too.

“You know, I haven’t seen you much since that business with your father, when he went missing.”

“When he ran off, Jim.”

“Yeah, ran off. Never heard from him?”

“I guess if he wanted to be heard from he wouldn’ta left. Didn’t say much even when he was around.”

“He did decline pretty quickly after your mother. I know I grilled you pretty hard back then, but you’ve got to understand my position. Man just up and leaves his son alone out there, just don’t make a lot of sense.”

“It didn’t make much sense to me either, Jim.” My head swiveled around as we passed the road to Bent Creek. “Think you missed the turn there.”

Stanton did not slow down. “There’s a couple things never really added up for me when it comes to you, Jake. Now we got this thing here. You see, what I’m finding strange about it is…is how does a girl with no idea in the world where she’s at end up with her car in a slurry pond three miles from the main highway?”

“I don’t know Jim, but if I'm gonna ID that car for you you’d better turn us around up here.”

“We can’t get down to the car to tow it out, not just yet. Be a few days while they clear out the sludge. But you and I are gonna sit tight down at the station until we do.” He kept his eyes forward, his right hand at twelve o’clock on the wheel. “Then we’ll see about your little splice job.”

A curtain descends over my mind at times. A dark wash that pushes the thing that pretends to be me into deep corners, cowed in impotence. I can feel my hand reaching for the wheel independent of my will, jerking down hard, sending the county truck into the ditch and rolling it over onto its roof in the creek alongside the highway. This motion is involuntary and inevitable, like falling once you’ve been pushed from a ledge. I can feel my weight being borne in my shoulder by the safety belt, my fingers working to unclasp the buckle and invert myself. I am merely a passenger looking out through my own eyes as I walk around to the driver’s side and find Sherriff Stanton on his back, bleeding into the clear shallow water half-conscious, hear his ocular orbit collapse and grind under the heel of my boot, his strangulated breath giving way to high pitched gurgles as I force his mouth and nostrils into the flowing current.

PART SEVEN

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.

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.

Part Eight

The heat was another mountain that summer I was twelve, another something to be dealt with on the way to and from living. Michael and I lay shirtless in the clover, swatting at sweat bees and picking around for the four-leafers that our grandfather made seem so easy to find.

“There ain’t no damn way,” he said.

“It’s true.” I had seen Margaret Weston at the creek that morning, and she flashed me her white cotton panties from across the water, brave as a bull, and smiled.

“No way.” He squirmed around, lying on his stomach. I couldn’t tell if he was uncomfortable out of embarrassment, or had a hard-on, or what. Reading people has never been my long suit. “She’s too good for you.”

“The hell’s that s’posed ta mean, ya little shit? She aint no better’n any damn one else.” I spit hard at him, right between his shoulder blades, and he hollered and rolled instantly on to his back, wriggling around in the grass trying to scrape the hocker off, and I could see his shorts were swollen. I pointed and laughed. His tears were instant and he ran off to the house to tell mom, his favorite activity.

The beating that I caught from that one was different in that it was delivered by my mother herself. Usually she played judge and jury, our father the grim executioner. I had never heard some of the words that she used in describing poor Margaret before, as she laid into me with her wooden spoon, not even bothering with the ceremony of bending me over a chair, going at my head and hands, neck and chest, and particularly the groin, but I tried resolutely to remember them and their context for later use.

About a week later we were taking some tall grass for hay in the long meadow, Mother scowling from her perch atop the tractor, Michael and I baling away behind. As she turned to make another pass by us, I lay down across her path, just my feet protruding into the cut grass from the tall. Michael saw and started yelling, barely audible over the din of the motor. She slowed to a stop just a foot or so from my head, practically screeching “What in all hell’s gotten into you, boy? What’s the GOD DAMN MATTER with you?” She dismounted and ran around to my side in the tall grass, kicking at my ribs and screaming “Git UP!” and threatening the brimstone violence of my father. But I figured he was tired of beating us, maybe. When she bent down to pull me up by the arm I swung the large rock I had pocketed that morning, catching her solidly on the temple. She went limp and silent on top of me, and I had to slide out from under. Michael looked on, stunned mute. I climbed behind the wheel of the tractor and released the brake, lowered the blades, and eased out the clutch. When I felt the rear tires bump over her I jumped clear of the machine and let it continue rolling toward the trees at the far end of the meadow. I walked back to Michael where he sat blank and wordless in the fresh crimson stubble. “If you ever say a word about this, I swear to God, I’ll do this to Dad, too. And Frederick. And William. And I will save you for fucking last.” Then I ran like hell over the rise toward the house, working up tears as I ran, to tell of the horrible accident, how Michael had fallen in the path of the tractor, that mother tried to help him and the handbrake must’ve slipped again, how she threw him aside and he barely survived. From then on, until he went to that hospital down in Phillipi, Michael never said a word. About anything. The only reaction I could ever get out of him was when I’d sit up in that tall tractor, grinning over the wheel, and wink down at him.

I awoke to the smell of the bone pile choking me, vomit filling my mouth and nearly aspirating my lungs, violently gagging and heaving as I thrashed my head to the side, but there was strangely no sound save the splash of bile on the rock at my back. There was pain in my throat, my face, unbelievable pain, crushing and searing at the same time.

My body tried to cry out, but again no sound would come. I looked up at the sky through the bars of the iron grate and remembered that in my desire to spend our last hours together I had kept Helen conscious for her preparations, and so she would have learned to not only slice the vocal cords but to remove the tongue and lips as well. Stripped naked and chained to the stone I felt the slow trickle of water running down my spine, along the back of my thighs, and turning my head away from the vomit looked directly into the eye sockets of my own father’s skull. To my other side lay Duncan’s broken body, cut through the belly and slowly bled dry. The involuntary hissing sounds emanating from my face intensified. I could hear them like a distant stream, unconnected to any apparent source.

Helen appeared and knelt on the grate, holding my pistol in her remaining hand. She leaned forward so that her disfigured face was directly above mine, our eyes locked in synchronistic oblivion, soundlessly, for what felt like hours, the words “JACOB BAXTER DID THIS” written on her truncated arm in black permanent marker. I tried in vain to plead with her, to say her name once more, to scream for help. She only looked more deeply into my eyes and slowly shook her head. In time she raised the pistol slowly to her temple and ended the long silence, her blood pouring through the grate and filling my eyes, running along my cheeks and into my ears. I knew already what had to be done and set about pulling my wrist up toward my mouth. I worked briefly at it, my jaw making the right motions and wet suckling sounds in the blood, but getting nowhere, and I suddenly had an image of a baby trying to eat an ear of buttered corn. I began to chuckle, and the chuckle grew to uncontrollable laughter, but the only sound was a staccato hissing from my ruined head, from which Helen Cooke had cleverly removed the teeth.

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.