A Natural History of Hell: Stories (3 page)

He squinted.
“I can
’
t see shit.”

“Come on, we
’
ll go check it out,” she said and killed the headlights.

“What if it
’
s Moxioton?”

She opened the door and got out. He followed her. They walked across the sand beyond the swing set. The lake smelled of spring and stirred in the breeze.

“Tell me honestly,” he said. “When the Blameless first spoke of Moxioton, did you ever think he was gonna pull that demon from her big toe?”

“That one will come from lower down,” she said in the reverend
’
s voice and laughed.

“If you
’
re right, and it
’
s an act, it
’s genius.
”

“The gun was a surprise.”

“Next time we get an invitation to one of these, say no.”

Helen raised her arm and motioned for him to be quiet. They were getting closer to the bench. “Walk soft,” she whispered. They drew within twenty feet, and the moon came through the clouds. The girl
’
s dress shone like a beacon in the sudden light. Grace and Morrison Zeck, slumped shoulder to shoulder, both asleep. Tom and Helen quietly moved a few feet closer. She took his wrist when she wanted him to stop. They stood in silence for a moment. Tom leaned down and whispered in her ear, “That Zeck kid is a goofball.”

Helen shook her head.

“Do I call Ina?” he asked, taking out his cell phone.

It took her a while to answer. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“They
’
re too young to be lovers. They must be friends.”

When the moon went away, they walked back to the CRV and drove home. Later, the rain started in again. The sound and smell of spring came through the screen of their bedroom window while he dreamt in the language the angels dream in, and she, of the land without worry.

Word Doll

Every morning I take the back way to town, a fifteen-mile drive on narrow two-lane roads that cut through oceans of corn. The cracked and patched asphalt is lined on either side by telephone poles shrinking into the distance. Sometimes I pass a hawk on a line. Every few miles there’s a farm house, mostly old, like ours. In the winter, the wind is fierce, whipping across the barren fields, and I have to work to keep the car in its lane, but in summer, after I get my cigarettes in town and stop at the diner for a cup of coffee and a glance at the newspaper, I drive home and go out back under the apple trees, sit at a little table, and write stories. Sunlight filters down through the branches, and there’s always a breeze blowing across the fields that finds me there. Sometimes the stories flow and I don’t notice the birds at the feeders, the jingle of the dog’s collar or the bees in the garden just beyond the orchard, and when they don’t, I stare out into the sea of green and daydream into its depths.

In late September, on a Monday’s journey to town, I passed this old place at a bend in the road like I’d passed it every morning. It was a Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound screened-in porch, painted blue and white. The house was in good shape, but the barn out back was shedding shingles, and the paint had weathered off its splintered boards. I’d often seen chickens bobbing around on the property, and a rooster at times dangerously close to the road. There were blackberry bushes tangled in a low wall on either side of the entrance to its gravel drive. As I rolled past, I noticed something partially covered by those bushes. It looked like a sign of some kind, but it was faded and I was going too fast to catch a good glance.

On the way back from town I forgot to slow down and look, but the following day I woke up with the thought that I should stop and investigate that sign. Nine times out of ten, I could drive to town and back and never pass another car, and that day was no exception. I slowed as I got close to the place, and right across from the sign, I stopped and studied it—about two by three foot, made of tin, fading white with black letters. It was attached to a short rusted post. The berry bushes had grown up and partially over it, but now that I’d stopped I could make out its message. It said—WORD DOLL MUSEUM—and beneath that—Open 10 to 5 Monday thru Friday.

The next morning I got up, and, instead of driving to town, I took a shower and put on a white shirt and dress pants. I took a cup of coffee out under the apple trees. Instead of writing, I sat there, smoking and wondering into the heart of the cornfield what the hell a
word doll
was. At 10:30, I got in the car and drove toward town. The sun was strong and the sky was clear blue. The corn had begun to brown, it being summer’s end. At the bend in the road, without hesitating, I pulled into the driveway of the Victorian. The chickens were in a clutch over by the corner of the house. The place was still. I didn’t hear any television or radio playing. I walked slowly to the porch door, scuffing the gravel in the drive in order to let anybody listening know I was there. The screen door on the porch was unlatched. I opened it and called in, “Hello?”

There was no reply, so I entered, the screen door banging shut behind me, and walked to the main door of the house. I knuckle-rapped the glass three times and then folded my arms and waited. The lilacs bordering the porch gave off a strong scent, and a wind chime in the corner over an old rocker pinged in the breeze sifting through the screen. I was about to give up and leave, when the door pulled back. There was a thin old woman, a little bent, with a cloud of white hair and big glasses. She wore a loose, button-up dress, yellow with white flowers.

“
What do ya want?
” she asked.

“I’m here for the Word Doll Museum,” I said.

My pronouncement seemed to momentarily stun her. She reached up and gently grabbed the door jamb. “Are you kidding?” she asked and smiled.

“Should I be?” I said.

Her demeanor instantly changed. I could see her relax. “Hold on,” she said, “I have to get the keys. Meet me over by the barn.”

I left the porch, and the chickens followed me. The entire gray structure of the barn, like some weary pachyderm, was actually listing more than a few degrees to the south, something I’d not noticed from the road. The door was hanging on by only the top hinge. The lady came out the back of the house and walked with the help of a three-pronged cane over the lumpy ground of the yard. As she drew closer, she said, “Where you from?”

“Not far. I pass your place on the way to town every morning, and I saw the sign the other day.”

“My name is Beverly Gearing,” she said and held out her hand.

I took it in mine and we shook. “I’
m Jeff Ford,
”
I told her.

As she passed by me toward the ramshackle barn, she said, “So, Mr. Ford, what’s your interest in word dolls?”

“
I don
’t know anything about them.”

“Well, that’s OK,” she said, and opened the broken door.

I followed her inside. She shuffled over the hay-strewn floor. Swifts flew back and forth in the rafters, and the holes in the roof allowed sunbeams to cut the shadows. On one side of the barn were animal stalls, all empty, and on the other there was a wall of implements and tools and a small room built within the greater structure. Over the door to it was a wooden sign with the words
Word Doll Museum
burned in script and shellacked. She fished in the pocket of her dress and eventually came out with the key. Opening the door, she flipped on a light switch, and then stepped aside, allowing me to enter first. The room was painted a light blue. There was a window on each wall that looked out at nothing but bare plywood, and inside, window boxes fixed up with plastic flowers.

“Have a seat,” she said, and I sat in a chair at the card table at the center of the room. She worked her way to the other chair at the table and half-sat/ half-fell backward into it. Once she was settled, she took a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket and a black lighter. She leaned forward on the table with one arm. “Word dolls,” she said.

I nodded.

“You’re the first person to ask about the museum in about twenty years.” She laughed, and I saw she was missing a tooth on the upper right side.

“You can hardly see your sign from the road,” I said.

“The sign’
s a last resort,
” she said. “I have a permanent spot in the
What’s Happening
section of three of the local papers. In January, I send them enough to run the ads for a year. Still, no one pays attention.”

“I’m guessing most people don’t know what a word doll is.”

“I know,” she said and lit the cigarette she held. She took a drag and then pointed with it at the left wall, where there were three beige file cabinets. The middle one had a golden laughing Buddha statue on it. “What’s in those nine drawers over there is all that remains of the history of word dolls. This is the largest repository of material evidence of the existence of the tradition. When I’m gone, knowledge of it will have been pretty much erased from history. You live long enough, Mr. Ford, you might be the last person on earth to ever think of word dolls.”

“I might be,” I said, “but I don’t know what they are.”

Beverly put her cig out in a half cup of coffee that looked like it had been on the table for a week. “I want you to know something before I start,” she said. “This is serious to me. I have a doctorate in anthropology from OSU, class of ’63.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I seriously want to know.”

She sat quiet for a moment, eyes half shut, before taking a deep breath. “A ‘word doll’ is the same thing as a ‘field friend,’ they’re interchangeable. Their existence is very brief measured in anthropological time and also very localized. Only in the area that’s now roughly defined by our county border was this ritual observed. It sprang up in the mid-19th century and for the time in which it ran its course affected no more than fifty or sixty families at the most. No one’s certain of its origin. Some women I interviewed back when I was in graduate school, they were all in their 80s and 90s then, swore the phenomenon was something brought over from Europe. So I asked, where in Europe? But none could say. Others told me it originated with a woman named Mary Elder, back in the 1830s. She was also known as The Widow, and I have a picture of her in the cabinet, but her candidacy for the creation of the tradition is called into question by a number of factors.

“Anyway, back in the day, I’m talking the mid-1800s on, in rural areas like this, kids, when they reached a certain age were sent out to participate in the fall harvest. By about age six or seven, they were initiated into the hard work of the fields during that season of long hours well into the night. It was a difficult adjustment for them. There are a lot of writings from the time where farmers or their wives complain about the wayward nature of their children, their inability to focus through the hours of toil. Training a kid to endure a harvest season with no real prior experience appears to have been a common problem. So, to offset that, someone came up with the idea of the word dolls. The idea in a nutshell is to allow the child to escape into her imagination while her physical body stays on the task at hand.

“Whoever came up with it really could have been a psychologist. They attached a ritual to it, which was a smart way to embed the thing into the local culture. So, in September, usually around the equinox, if you were one of those kids who was to be sent out in the fields for the first time come harvest, you could expect a visit from the doll maker. The doll maker came at night, right after everyone was in bed, carrying a lantern and wearing a mask. As far as I can tell, the doll makers were usually women in disguise. There’d be a knock at the door, three times and then three times again. The parents would get up and answer the call. When the child was finally ushered into the dark room and seated next to the fireplace, the doll maker was already there in her own seat that faced his. Her hands were reportedly blue, and bejeweled with chains and a large ring, its carnelian etched to show an angel in flight. She was wrapped in black velvet with a hood sewn into it to cover her head. And the mask, the mask was a story unto itself.

“By all accounts that mask was dug up on one of the local farms. It had deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, and a large oval mouth opening bordered by sharp teeth. It was an old Iroquois False Face mask, and could have been in the ground a hundred years before it was plowed up. It was made of basswood and had rotted at the edges. One of the farmers painted it white. I suppose you’re starting to see that the whole community was in on this?”

“Everybody but the kids,” I said.

“Oh, the tenacity with which the secrets of the doll maker were kept from the young ones then far exceeds what’s now done in the name of Santa Claus.”

“So they wanted to scare the kids?”

“Not so much scare them as put them in a state of awe. Remember, the promise was that the doll maker was coming to them with a gift. The competing qualities of her aspect and her purpose no doubt caused a heightened sense of tension.”

“Do you know anything about the False Face mask?”

“The False Face was a society of the Iroquois tribes. Their rituals dealt with healing. There were two ways to join the society—if you were cured by them or if you dreamed you should join them. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the word-doll tradition. Just an artifact that was appropriated by another culture and put to another purpose.”

“OK, the kid is sitting there next to the fireplace with the doll maker
. . .
”

“Well, the parents leave the room. Then, as I was told by those surviving members of the ritual back in my graduate days, the doll maker tells the child not to be afraid. She’s going to make the child a doll to take into the fields with him or her, a companion to play with in the imagination while the hard work goes on. The doll maker cups her hands in front of her like this.” Beverly demonstrated. “And then leans over so the mouth of the mask is right over her palms. You see?” she said and showed me.

“The voice was a kind of harsh whisper that none of my interview subjects could hear well or follow completely. The words poured out of the doll maker’s mouth into the cupped hands. One woman told me a string of words she remembered her whole long life that came from behind the mask. Hold on, let me see if I can get this right.”

While Beverly thought, I took out my cigarettes and held them up for her to see. “OK?” I asked. She nodded. I lit up and drew the coffee cup closer to use as an ashtray. She held her hands up and snapped her fingers. “Oh, yes. I used to have this memorized so good. It’s like a poem. My mind is scattered by age,” she said and smiled.

She was still for a second. Her eyes shifted and she stared hard at me. “
The green sea, the deep down below the sweep of rolling waves, whales and long eight-legged pudding heads with eye over which the great ship glides, and Captain Moss spinning the wheel . . .
That’s the part she remembered, but she said the whole, what was called, ‘talking out of the doll,’ went on for some time. The average I got was about fifteen minutes. When the doll maker spoke the last word, she rubbed her hands together vigorously and then reached over and covered the child’s ears with them.”

“You mean as if the words were going inside the kid’s head?” I asked.

“I suppose, but from that night on, the child had, in his or her imagination, this word doll that had a name and a form and a little bit of history. The more the child played with it during work, the clearer it became till it had the same detail as dreams or memories. Word dolls all had a one-syllable name attached to whatever its profession was. So you had like, Captain Moss, Hunter Brot, Milker May, Teacher Poll. The woman who was given the Captain told me she’d never seen the ocean but had only heard about it from elders and travelers passing through the area. She said the Captain turned out to be a man of high adventure. She followed him on his voyages through her childhood into adulthood and then old age. Another interviewee said he’d been gifted Clerk Fick, but that as he followed the days of Clerk Fick while toiling in the fields, the doll slowly became a glamorous woman, Dancer Hence. He hadn’t thought of her in years, he said. ‘She’s still with me, but I put her away when I left the farm.’”

Beverly got her cane under her and slowly stood. She walked to the files, bent over, and opened the second drawer down on the left hand. Reaching in, she drew out an armful of stuff. I asked her if she needed help. “Please,” she said. I went to her side, and the first thing she handed me was the white False Face mask. After that she gave me a rusted sickle with a wooden handle. “OK,” she said, closed the drawer with her cane, and we started back.

“I can’t believe you’ve got the mask,” I said, laying it down. I put the sickle next to it.

She sat and shoved her pile onto the table. “The mask came easy. A lot of this stuff I really had to dig for.” Pulling an old book out of the pile, she opened it, turned a few pages, and took out a large rectangle of cardboard. She turned it over and laid it in front of me. It was the picture of a woman in a high-collar black dress. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled severely back. Her glasses were circular. She wore a righteous expression.