A Natural History of Hell: Stories (5 page)

That night, while the village slept, Mira and Jon left home and carefully made their way across the fields to the forest. They carried no torch or lantern and said nothing. When they reached the tree line and passed into perfect night, where neither the stars nor moon were visible, they tied one end of a length of twine around his waist and the other end around hers. Groping blindly forward, they went in search of the sacred den.

They bruised their shins and cut their arms and faces on the grasping branches. Although she was frightened and exhausted, Mira took heart in the fact that they’d been in the forest so long without a sign or sound from the dogs. She wanted to trust the recipe given to her in the dream. Jon, on the other hand, doubted everything and was certain they’d end the night being devoured. He tugged gently on the rope attaching him to his wife. She drew close and put her hands on his shoulders. She traced the direction his arm was pointing. Mira turned and squinted into the dark. Off in the far distance, she detected a smudge of light.

As they approached, the glow of the den allowed them to first distinguish the movement of shadows and eventually to see each other’s faces as if by candle from another room. The light poured forth from a wide hole in the ground. On either side of the opening lay the sleeping mastiffs. The desperate squeals of animals issued up from the tunnel that led to the angel’s den. Jon and Mira held their breath and hesitated only yards from the snoring beasts. They looked at each other. Finally she tugged the twine and moved them toward the bright underground. He shook his head but followed.

At the same moment, both dogs scratched a dream itch with a back leg as the couple passed. Mira nearly cried out, for it was precisely at this point that her dream ended. She put her arm around Jon, and they both closed their eyes and continued, descending into a tunnel of light. The walls around them were coated with a thick wax that glowed of its own accord. As they inched forward, expecting Seems to appear around every turn of the snake-like passage, a strong, hot wind pushed up toward the surface, lifting their hair behind them, causing them to sweat.

The den was deep and at its center was a crystal fountain like a tree growing, dripping water from every glistening branch into a surrounding pond. The thing reached nearly to the ceiling of the enormous cavern. From where Mira and Jon hid behind a heap of firewood, they could see an old man on a floating couch drifting through the rain in the fountain pond. He had a long white beard, a mere ring of hair, his head resting on blue pillows. Even from the distance of their hiding place, they could see he was in torment.

Twenty yards away from the fountain, Alfrod Seems was sitting in an ornate chair at the edge of a pit, slaughtering deer with a long knife. More than a dozen of the creatures stood in line, dazed, with the eyes of sleepwalkers. Each stepped forward to have its throat cut, lose its blood into the pit, sway, and then fall, making a place for the next. The angel moved with grace and expert precision in his work. Only once did he hesitate. He turned, sniffed the air, rested his free hand briefly on the head of his walking stick, which leaned against the arm of the throne, and with a brief ruffle of his wings went back to his work.

Mira tugged on the twine, and Jon looked at her. She waved her hand, signaling that he should follow. He shook his head. She waved her hand. He couldn’t move. She slipped a knife out of her apron and cut the twine. He reached for her, but she was already gone out from behind the woodpile. With fingers covering one eye, he watched as Mira crept closer to the angel, hiding herself amid the line of deer. As each of the beasts gave their gurgling death cry, she used the noise to cover her next move forward.

When she was no more than two from the angel’s throne, a small beast, Jon at first thought it a pig, appeared from behind the fountain. He could tell it had noticed Mira and was hobbling awkwardly toward her. It’s bird calls alerted Alfrod, who halted his infernal work in mid-slice. Without thinking, Jon rushed from behind the woodpile, screaming, swinging a stick of kindling. He saw Alfrod notice him, and he remembered the sight of Marsh on the ground crying blood, which stopped him dead in his tracks. The angel rose from the chair and reached for his stick. As he did, it vanished.

Mira was upon him with the ivory spike. She drove it with all her might through his chest, which cracked like the shell of an insect. He gasped, his wings buzzing frantically. Then she turned it as he had done to the baker, tuning his heart. He stumbled forward to grab her, but the strange beast that had given her away, leaped, chirping, off the ground and tore at the angel’s stomach. Mira recognized the freckled face of the Childs lad. Alfrod sliced its throat with the knife, and then the two of them, angel and beast fell back into the pit.

Mira staggered away and turned. Jon moved again, running to hold her, and just before they embraced, a fierce wind rose up from nowhere and swallowed them in its fury. They spun apart as the shrieking gale echoed through the cavern. And the next thing they knew, they were back in the village, standing side by side, clasping hands, and the old man from the couch in the fountain stood beside them. The sun was rising and the birds were singing. The couple shook their heads as if waking from an unexpected nap.

“I’m God,” said the stranger in a tired voice. Only then did they notice his sky blue wings, composed of feathers. The ends of his beard seemed to fizz in the air. His eyes shone.

The first question the villagers had, once they heard that the angel had been done away with, was, “What about those two damn mastiffs?”

“I’ve destroyed one,” said God. “The other is left to roam the woods. Be wary of him.”

They were confused by his response. Some scratched their heads, others rubbed their chins. They then wanted to know what Mira’s dream had been. She spoke about a woman with a window in her head, through which the stars were visible. “I saw the plan in her head. The stars and planets told me what to do.”

They shrugged and asked God if Alfrod Seems was an angel.

“I met him some centuries ago in the Far Islands,” said the old man. “He was an explorer, and I was there convalescing. We spent many nights drinking grog on the beach, pondering the workings of the universe. We became fast friends, and I thought I knew him. To prove to myself that he was true, I tested him. “I will grant you a wish,” I told him, and to my astonishment he accepted.

“You made him an angel?” asked Relst, the carpenter.

“Well, I’m God,” said the old man. “Still, Seems turned on me in the moment the wish was granted, and I’ve been his servant ever since.”

A mumble ran through the crowd.

“In the end, did the lion not lie down with the lamb?” said God, trying to catch sight of the few who were snickering.

“Why was the angel slaughtering deer?” asked Jon.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m so weary. I need to lie down.” His couch appeared beneath him, and he lay upon it, resting his head against the blue pillows. “Tomorrow, I will give you my ten commandments.” With this, he closed his shining eyes, his wings went still, and a light snoring could be heard.

The villagers exchanged no words, but all shared a look. They went back to their homes and readied their weapons. That night they moved against God. As frail as he appeared, he still put up a fierce battle. But the sheer number of villagers and the force of their determination was a weapon the old man could not withstand. He was beaten down to nothing, and all that remained of him come sunrise was his long, fizzing beard, which was hung from a pole like a flag. From that night forward the savage incident would forever be referred to in the village as the Eleventh Commandment, and its memory sustained them through floods and fires.

As for the remaining mastiff, he roamed the remote places, and every so many years a report of him would find its way to the village. It seems the dog no longer had a taste for human flesh and gave up killing for the joy of it, with the exception of the time those in Cleneth sent a hunting party to trap him. The last he was seen was on the day of Mira’s funeral. Jon lost her to the plague one spring, and the snapping of the twine that joined them was heard far off in the heart of the forest. The beast appeared at the tree line of the last field and bayed as the corpse was set aflame. By the time the smoke cleared, the dog had vanished.

Mount Chary Galore

Mrs. Oftshaw was best known for a liniment of her own concoction,
Mount Chary Galore
, that had no other curative property than to make you feel generally
right
and was suspected of being some part of the black lace mushrooms she gathered by the light of an orange moon. She was a strange, solitary old bat, who’d been around so long she was part of the landscape. She’d swoop into town out of the deep woods at the base of the looming mountain, swerving all over the asphalt in her rusted Pontiac. Even the young boys with new driver
’
s licenses and stupid with courage cleared the road when they saw her coming. Sheriff Bedlow wrote her a stack of tickets through the years, but he was not particularly fearless and would only stick them under the busted windshield wiper when the car was parked and empty. She’d just crumple them in her boney hands and toss them in the dirt.

When she arrived in town, nobody ever came out to greet her, but eyes gazed from behind curtains or betwixt blinds. Those who relied on the Galore were watching, silently counting their nickels and dimes. She eased out of the front seat of that jalopy and gave a little hop down to the ground. She was short and bent with age, but she had a quickness to her—bird-like. Her outfits were layered, mostly the same for either winter or summer, except in the snowy part of the year, when she’d add an oversized sailor’s peacoat to the getup—blue leggings, a loose billowing dress, wooden shoes, and a voluminous kerchief draped around her head, a tunnel of fabric you had to peer into to see her pale, wrinkled face like some critter living in a hollow log.

If you got close enough, as I did when she came to deliver a jar of Galore to my poor ma, you could catch a whiff of her scent, which was not old or ugly or rotten, but beautiful, like the smell of wisteria. Ma always served lavender tea with honey at the parlor table. Mrs. Oftshaw was partial to a jigger of Old Overholt in hers, and she kept a pint in the pocket of that peacoat when the weather got raw. They whispered back and forth for a time. When I asked my ma what they talked about, she’d smile and say, “Men.” “Like Pa?” I asked. She sighed, shook her head and laughed. Just before leaving, the old lady always slipped a jar of Galore from her pocket and placed it next to the tea cup, never asking for a cent.

On the 27th of every month, she came to town, the Pontiac’s trunk full of cardboard boxes, each holding six Ball jars of a bright green paste that smelled like, as Lardner Scott, Charyville’s postmaster, had described it, “A home permanent on the Devil’s ass hair.” Once liberally applied to the chest or the back of the neck, the Galore had a way of easing you down, as if taking your hand and whispering, helping you to sit back into the comfy chair that, amazingly enough, at that moment, you would just be realizing was your life. For a woman who was much feared and much gossiped about, Lillian Oftshaw had a lot of customers—some steady as sunrise, some seasonal, some just passing through. The fact is, she never left town at the end of the month that those boxes in her trunk weren’t entirely empty.

On the other hand, during those liniment runs, her passenger seat was never empty, for she was accompanied each time by a large gray hog, nearly three hundred pounds, named Jundle, who sat upright, resting his spine against the seat back, crossing his short hind legs, the right over the left, and leaning his right front leg out the open window. I saw it with my own eyes. That remarkable creature sometimes smoked a fat roll-up of a cheroot, holding it in the split of his cloven hoof and every now and then bringing it up to his snout to take a long drag. Jundle got out of the car and accompanied her to each doorstep as she delivered the Galore and collected her cash. Once a couple of smart-alec kids thought they’d have some fun with the old lady and then make off with her velvet sack of quarters and dimes. Legs were swiftly broken, and, as it’s told, those boys were lucky it wasn’t necks. Jundle was a jolly creature, but he had a serious side when it came to the well-being of Mrs. Oftshaw.

A jar of the Galore cost fifty cents, which, at the time, was a dear price. There were folks with steady income who went for a jar of the green mystery every month, and there were others who had to use it sparingly, skimping on the application to achieve at least half-rightness half the time. Mote Kimber, a veteran of the Great War, who had seen the fellows of his regiment mowed down like summer wheat at the Belleau Wood in France and when captured was tortured—a thin, white hot iron inserted into the opening of his pecker—slathered the Galore onto his bald noggin like he was painting a fence post. After a while the crown of his head had turned jade green, and he could be counted on at any hour after that of breakfast to usually be way past
right
. He was a bona-fide war hero, though, and drew a nice pension for his courage. Before being taken by the enemy, he’d rescued three men who’d been wounded and pinned down. Mote would tell you himself that he bought two jars of Galore a month from Lillian. “Either that or kill myself,” he said, and everybody knew he meant it.

There were a number of folks in town who used the liniment for medical purposes—gout, heartburn, bad back, aches and pains of the joints, the head, the heart. Even Dr. Shevin used it. When asked about its unscientific nature and reliance on backwoods hoodoo, he smiled as if realizing his guilt, shrugged, and said, “When I get a crick in my neck, which I do often enough from a bad sleeping posture, just a dab of that Galore on the stiff patch and all’s well and then some. Now, if you’re asking me if I prescribe it for my patients, I’d have to give you an unequivocal ‘No.’ I’m a man of Science. I don’t suggest anyone else use it, but if they do . . . ?” The discussion never went any further. There was no point. If the doctor had been laying it on like old Mote Kimber and was too
right
all the time, now that would have been a problem, but as it was, he used it like most everyone else—“Pro re nata,” as he said, which Postmaster Scott translated for us as, “When the bullshit gets too thick.”

Old lady Oftshaw was mysterious, that’s for certain, but I wouldn’t say she was evil. There were a lot of folks who just couldn’t afford the Galore, and some of them were the ones that needed it most. My ma was one of them. Ever since my daddy ran off on us, she had to work double shifts over at the chicken-packing plant in Hartmere just to keep the house, put food on the table, and gas in the Chevy. And it wasn’t just me and her. There was Alice Jane and Pretty Please who also lived under our roof. They were the kids of the woman who Daddy ran off with. Their mother simply abandoned them—something no wild animal would do. Instead of letting Sheriff Bedlow cart the kids away to an orphanage in Johnston, the county seat, my ma asked him to leave them with her. I was there when she made her case. “No sense in having everybody suffer,” she said. “They’re just kids, and they need to know a little love before they get too old.” The sheriff, though short on courage, was long on heart, and he trusted her. He closed his eyes to the law, something that could never happen today, letting Alice Jane become my sort of sister and Pretty Please become my sort of brother.

I suspect you want to know something else about my daddy and why he left Ma, but I truly don’t know anything to tell. I was happy to see him go. He was a moody fellow. Quiet. Never did anything father-like with me that I can remember. Although I will say he did buy me a 22 rifle and taught me to shoot out in the prairie over by the creek on the way to Mount Chary. But it wasn’t like he did it to get closer to me, more like he was teaching me to take the garbage out to the curb or how to make coffee so he didn’t have to get up quite as early in the morning. Although she never said anything about him, I remember Ma
’
s eyes being red a lot and more than once a big yellow-blue bruise on her neck.

Mrs. Adler had no man at the time Daddy ran off with her, and Alice never had any stories about her pa or photographs for that matter. The whole thing was a mystery I never got to the bottom of. If I’d asked my ma, I know she’d have told me, but I came to avoid that question, afraid it might leave a wound, like a bullet from the 22.

I was fourteen the year our family declined by one and then grew by two. Alice Jane was the same age as me, but born in summer while I was born in winter. She had long hair braided into pigtails and a freckled face with sleepy green eyes. I thought she was nice, but I didn’t let on. She could throw a hard punch or climb a tree, beat me in a race. Her brother, Pretty Please, was “something of a enigma,” or at least that’s what I heard Postmaster Scott whisper to Ma when she told him she’d taken on responsibility for the Adler children. We were at the counter and I was standing next to her while Alice and Pretty were standing over by the private mailboxes. Men of all kinds seemed to make my sort-of-siblings both shy and scared. “The girl’s cute enough, but that boy is . . .
pe-culiar
,” said Scott. “He just looks a sight,” said my mother, “inside he’s true.”

I turned and looked at Pretty Please. He was fifteen, and not but an inch or two taller than me, but he had a big old head, full-moon pale and shorn close, looking like a peeled potato with beady eyes. He wore a pair of overalls with no shirt in summer. He seemed always busy, looking around, up and down and all over, rarely fixing on any one sight. Whenever somebody said anything to Ma about him, she’d nod and say, “He’s OK,” as if trying to convince herself. The only words he ever said were “Pretty please” in a kind of parrot voice. We didn’t know where he learned it from, but he seemed to have a vague sense of how to make use of it. Ma asked Alice Jane if he’d always been simple, and she just nodded and confided that their mother used to beat him with a hair brush. His real name, Alice told us, was Jelibai, and Ma asked us to call him that but we didn’t.

The fact that my ma took in the kids of the woman who ran off with my pa was, even to me, downright odd, and to the rest of the town she was either touched by God or touched in the head. I think some thought she had nefarious purposes in mind, maybe to torture them in the place of the woman who stole her man? But in Charyville the rule was to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. Things had to get really out of hand for someone to pipe up.

The first summer of our new family came, and Alice Jane and I were out of school, on the loose. Pretty Please didn’t go to school. The reason Principal Otis gave Ma for not letting him in was, “That poor boy is gone over the hill.” Pretty was delighted for us to be home every day, ’cause usually, when school was in session, he’d have to be by himself, locked up in the basement with my dog, Ghost, a mop head with legs and a bark. Ma would make Pretty peanut butter sandwiches and he could listen to the radio or look at books or say Pretty Please to the dog a hundred times. He liked to draw, and you shoulda seen his pictures—yow—people with scribbledy heads and no eyes.

There was a bathroom in the basement, and it was cozy enough and lonely enough. Ma just didn’t want him getting to the burner of the stove, where he could leave the gas on and blow the place up or set himself on fire. But when
we
were on the loose, Pretty was on the loose. We all liked to be free and always had something to do from the time Ma left in the morning for work to when she came back at night and Alice Jane and me cooked her dinner. I could tell she was worried about us on our own, but I told her, “We’re not babies anymore. We can watch out for each other.” Her hand that held the cigarette shook a little, and Alice patted her back soft like Ma did for us at night as we went to sleep.

The summers were fine for fishing, fist fights, shooting guns, drinking pop, catching snakes, swimming the creek, riding bikes, playing baseball, bottling lightning bugs, and watching the big moon rise. When on Sundays the minister spoke of Paradise, all I had to compare it to was summer vacation.

Then on a bright morning in late July, the three of us were out early, and Alice Jane and I decided we would find the day’s adventure by just letting Pretty Please run up ahead of our bikes. We followed him wherever he went. It didn’t make any sense, and we all laughed, even Pretty, when he ran ten times in the same tight circle. We wound up traveling all the way to the edge of town to the red brick arches of the entrance to the church’s side garden. We went there a couple times a week in the early morning. There was a fountain and a bench within those walls. Tears issued from the eyes of a sculpted woman. The water trickled down, plashing from level to level quieter than a whisper. The aroma of the roses was almost too much.

One bright morning, following that scent without hesitation, Pretty walked right in there. Alice Jane and I left our bikes on the sidewalk and followed. We found him standing still as a store manikin, staring up at Minister Sauter, who stood over him looking annoyed. When the preacher saw us enter the garden, his expression quickly changed to a smile. He took a seat on a bench by the fountain and motioned for us to sit down as well. We did. Alice and I were on either side of the minister, and Pretty, watching ripples in the water, slumped on the bench next to his sister.

Sauter said, “How’d you kids like to make some money?”

“Whata we gotta do?” asked Alice.

“Well, I want you to ride out to the woods beneath the mountain and find that old woman Oftshaw’s house.”

“Pardon,” I said, “but she’s an old witch, ain’t she? My ma says she’s got spells.”

Alice smacked herself in the forehead for my ignorance.

The minister laughed. “The old lady’s a Christian, I think,” he said.

“How much money?” asked Alice.

“Let’s see,” said Sauter. “I want you to go out there and I want you to watch what she does. I want you to remember it and then come back and tell me.”

“Easy,” said Alice Jane. I nodded. Pretty Please said, “Pretty please.”

“One thing, though,” said the minister. “You can’t let her see you watchin’ her.”

“That’s spying,” said Alice.

“It would be,” said Sauter, “but I’m gonna make you all deputy angels before you go. As a deputy angel, you can do my bidding and not get in trouble with the law or God. The Lord has put his trust in me, and so must you.”

“I don’t want to go to heaven,” I said.

“Do you want to make twenty cents?” asked Alice.

We took the oath, and then Alice Jane took it again once for Pretty. I kept messing up the words, and at one point the minister put his hand at the base of my throat to steady me, but in the moment I wasn’t sure he didn’t intend to strangle me. As soon as we were deputy angels, he shooed us out of the garden. As we mounted our bikes, he whispered to us from the entrance, “Report to me tomorrow at this time. Tell no one. The devil is listening.”

Mention of the devil scared us, and we rode silently and with great determination straight north toward Chary Mountain. Pretty Please ran ahead along the side of the empty road, never tiring. That morning the dew had covered everything, made everything glimmer. The sky was deep blue, and there were just white wisps but no real clouds. It was a good couple of miles out to Chary, and so eventually we slowed down and Alice told Pretty to also.