Shelter (1994) (29 page)
But that was a dream. Parson has never seen Christ, only felt in himself powers he couldn't own or direct without permission. He thinks something entered him long ago and pulled him back from darkness, but the memory of that darkness lives inside him like a stain he can bleach with light. Even before he lived with Harkness, desperate creatures appeared to him, creatures that feared light. He knew the creatures were bad and thought he was one of them. But the fire burned Harkness's farm to singed rubble and the creatures were driven back. They feared what fought them, and Parson began to dream of flames. At Proudytown he set fire to the chicken coop, but the moldy straw was old and wouldn't catch. Then, from the first time he heard Preacher speak, Proudytown became a sanctuary: Parson knew he could name the creatures and oppose them. Preacher told the boy his visions were knowledge, warned him not to speak of what he saw except to the elect, in services, and Preacher began to negotiate with the officials to let Parson leave, live in the home of a Christian man and study the Scripture he'd learned to quote so extensively. Parson began to lead prayer meetings. He did speak well, though he'd come to the institution a nearly silent ten-year-old.
So at sixteen he was released into Preacher Summers's foster care, with the stipulation that he finish high school the next year. And he did, class of '53, in a brick building near the same river in Calvary that ran by Preacher's weathered porch. His classmates were those whose Scots and Welsh forebears had left hardscrabble mines and famine to settle the hollows and mountains; they were ruddy and fair, cared for football, called him Dago or Wop. The boys were passionate warriors who might have borne Parson's different look and silent ways if he'd joined their cause. He was big and the coach asked him to watch practice, the pounding and grunting in pads and helmets. At Proudytown the boys had worked hard, raising food in the gardens, caring for animals raised as food, cleaning the halls and the floors, and washing the worn sheets and towels before feeding them, wet, into the mangle that stood like a grotesque engine in the center of the basement laundry. But they hadn't played on teams, dressed in uniforms: they fought each other to maim and defend, not to score touchdowns. Parson watched the team line up to lunge at sandbags impaled on wooden frames; behind their shouting and grunting he heard some whispered chorus he couldn't make out, a breathy music that rose above their heads, rich and various with female voices. Parson heard that gravid hymn ebb and swell while the boys in helmets shouted a punctuation by turns:
Kill! Kill!
and the hard bags quivered under their lurching shoulders. The boys turned round in frantic, identical scampers, growling, oblivious of the clouds of mist swirling about their feet. They hit the bags, hit, hit, and the air furled whiter, pearlized, until the dusty field was banked in cloud; Parson turned and left.
He'd kept his mouth shut at Proudytown, and in Calvary, but he was never confused by what he saw or heard. Even as a child he had known what was real, and what was more than real. His visions were opaque, as though made of different, unbound matter; they spoke in symbolic objects and charged the air with an electric moisture, a rainy smell. The Devil and his wraiths smelled of vague rot, of flesh reduced in some far place. They reeked of dread. Only the mist had confused Parson, when he was young, first seeing it in his room at Proudytown. Just arrived, he'd thought the place was on fire, like his last rooms in Harkness's house. He'd thought the slow white furls were smoke, but there was no acrid odor of fire, no choking sensation. He came to understand the mist was like a promise, like the laden smoke from Harkness's burning roof. Parson remembered the slant of those warm shingles, and running back into the barn to open stalls. The white goats had circled once, like dancers, before they streamed out in a line.
After Preacher died and Parson waited in jail for the trials to finish, his visions deserted him. He was blinded in those months, only heard Preacher's voice, heard Scripture trapped in his head. But in Carolina everything came back, stronger than before. He was Preacher's emissary: seven years in the silence of the barred tomb, in the realm of the man beasts. He hurt one of them and the others left him alone: the men were like the rock of the walls, pulsing with the rage of the ages. Parson waited, did as he was told, and in the second year Carmody came, rife with the knowledge of evil. He could not see or hear as Parson did, but he seemed to sense any presence, any power.
You got that look on your face, you loon, you fuckin nut case. So do it, bend the bars, deliver us sinners, God man.
Carmody knew, and his taunts and whispered jeers drew the visions forth, stronger and more lustrous.
But why should you, you ain't even here, you ain't here like us, you God loon. Leave when you want to, won't you, walk out when you're fuckin ready.
Carmody knew that Parson saw through him, into his head, his thoughts. During the months they shared a cell, he thought Parson sent him the pictures in his nightmares. He would wake up at night, raging or contrite.
Damn you how do you know, you stop her talking, you make her put me down, make her, you loon.
Carmody wept and begged like a pilgrim but he was wholly damaged, what was in him plummeted and sucked, a presentation of the Demon, a work long tended, and during the time they shared a cell Parson waked and slept in clouds of glory. He could move his mind as never before, unbound, free to oppose the Demon.
Carmody's voice says things in the shack at night, things Carmody might say if he were saved.
Deliver me,
he says, and,
Let me lie down.
Let me sleep in the Rock of God,
he says,
the Lamb is lame.
Mist envelopes the words, whatever they are, as though Carmody, saved, becomes a prize beyond value, a treasure loved above all.
There is no mist in the shack now. Parson's legion moves above him, comes together in the quiet. He thinks of the snake, its animated form, and he hears Carmody weeping. He knows the sound is inside his head; he hears it because it's the truth, not because it's real. The stone buildings in the camp, the boards and rope strung for a bridge over Mud River, are real, like the road and the sky. Within this frame the dark forms wander in their sphere—singular, hungry, and fervent.
Parson stands still in the center of his wooden room. The shack is a cave in the woods, a sacred place. He raises his arms and feels a renting of veiled air across his flesh, as though he touches these lit forms, saved, all of them, their limbs and faces mixing, pulsing. Torn back from harm, from the rot of the Devil's smell and need. There is a fast chattering beyond the walls of the shack, a frantic, guttural patter; Parson feels its vibration through the floorboards. He breathes slowly, steadily, feels himself move through his hands, lifted, drawn up. He sees an extended pattern of colors and shapes, and the pattern tilts like a broad view glimpsed from above, the land, the country, pine forest and stands of chestnut, wild-grown fields and stripes of rippling water. Onslaughts of light and dark, rising and falling through a rush of days and nights. He climbs the swept air of Shelter County and sees below him a ribbon of pavement, the gleam of a silver bridge. Closer, and he hears the shudder of the weight-bearing beams and pylons. Hidden, blinded, panting, and wet, he is under the bridge in the shelter of its weedy arch. It is dawn in another, colder season and he hears the water sluice and stream, an engine grinding of gears, the carcass of an automobile drawn up by its snout through muddy water. There is a massive chain and a hook, movement and shouting on the bank. Parson lets himself sink into Mud River, for he recognizes this place, and he swims, instinctively, away from the voices, deeper into the maw of the brown river. But when he feels earth beneath his feet and walks out of water, he finds himself on the oval shore of Turtle Hole. An electric tension gleams along the lines of his body and he knows he has slipped through, gone off. Near him on the ground sits the carefully folded sack of his possessions; he has brought it here and yet been elsewhere.
Twilight has fallen; Turtle Hole reflects the early risen moon. Parson touches the surface of the water and the image shies away from his flattened palm, quivering.
He can see the shack through the trees. Only because he knows how to look, he knows the shack is there.
He stands and begins to walk the rim of the shore. Turtle Hole plummets to its center, rounded and dense, an egg of water nested deep in its rocky cropping. Parson circles, moving and listening. He must stay here now: meant to do. He hears Carmody cry out and locates the sound in his own chest. The great boulder that overhangs the water looks nearly blue in the fading light and the ground is littered with worn stones. They are old stones, stones that have surfaced, and Parson touches them. Slowly, deliberately, he begins to stack the rocks, balance them in conical shapes. He will build seven shapes from stones, for in Revelation there are seven churches, seven stars, and seven lamps of gold. Seven years he waited in prison before coming to this place. Far up in the hills he hears the sound of some cacophony, a drifted blaring of mixed noises, and he looks up from the work of the stones to see Harkness's six white goats across the water. They stand quite still, the evening pale and thickened around them, small clouds of breath at their muzzles, and then they turn and clatter off through the snow.
She emerged from the wooded trail having walked it fast, leaning forward into the narrow ascent. She carried no burdens and so used her hands, pushing off the trunks of the second-growth saplings that bordered the path. The common area of the clearing was nearly empty. All the girls seemed to be in their tents, as though activities were suspended, and the few who were milling around took no notice of Lenny. Perhaps she was invisible. But she could hear herself panting now, breathless; her pulse pounded in her temples. She'd flung herself the rest of the way up the mountain, racing the green-shaded trail to get here, be back inside, but camp looked different, removed, as though glimpsed from outside the group. She thought of retreating onto the trail, backward from this place. But she stood still and the pull of the trail fell off behind her.
Highest trail was steepest in the last hundred yards, before it emptied into their rocky, ever ascendant campsite, twelve tents clustered on their platform floors in a staggered semicircle. There were three rough-hewn picnic tables, the same weathered type supplied to roadside parks by the state, and a broad fire pit centered exactly in the middle of the clearing like a bull's-eye. The pit was scooped out slightly and circled with rocks. Successive troops of campers had built up the stone ring, balancing more rocks until the ring itself rose perhaps two feet off the ground. At night Girl Guides and their counselors sat by the fire on their low stones, singing rounds or hymns, cooking meat on sticks or marshmallows that caught fire and blackened, tracing strings of light in the dark as the girls waved their sugar torches. Lenny liked the sticky globs black and crisp, with the sweet white insides hot enough to burn her tongue. She'd suck the sweet white goo from its black shell in flickering light while they all sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers," probably the most maligned and ridiculed forced march in their repertoire, but they'd learned a soprano harmony on the high notes everyone liked:
with the cross of Jesus
drawn out and trilled at length, falling off to the ponderous tromping of
going on before.
They sang out in the dark and it seemed they clung to the side of the mountain in their settlement, with their fires and chores and tents, while the oblivious peak soared on above them. The trail ended with Highest camp and any progress farther up was slow and picked out, hands and knees, more like climbing than hiking.
The top of the mountain was not so far, Lenny thought, they were all nearly living there. The big rocks on top looked pushed up, squeezed from below by some brute force, just as the diving rock at Turtle Hole looked to have been dropped there from an immense height. But the tall boulder must have emerged slowly, a dense, upright egg, and the flat water at its edge was that same oval shape. Turtle Hole held still in Lenny's mind as she skirted the clearing of Highest and turned to the left along the row of tents whose rear walls faced the drop of the hill. She reached the last one over and stood in the entrance. Only one of the rear flaps was raised and the interior was darker than usual. Cap stood in the center of the space, simply waiting.
"Where have you been?" she said. "If the counselors had been here to know you weren't back, you'd be in trouble."
"Guess so," Lenny said.
The tent seemed so familiar. Not welcoming, exactly, but plain, singular in purpose. Cots, trunks for tables. Sticks and rocks they'd saved, arranged just so. Dirty clothes in a pile. Lenny felt as though she'd been gone for days, that she should have stayed here in the woods with Cap, with the sounds of the crows at sunrise and the stirrings of the group filtering through like the start-up of a tiny village. So many people, and so much room, like the woods and the vault of sky went on forever. Home in Gaither seemed so small, the four of them cramped together so tight the others felt it when anyone moved. Staying up high was easier. Lenny walked to the back of the tent and looked down on the field weeds and the border of the woods, and the trees and the woods, descending plateaus of colors. "Cap," she said, "how can we leave here?"
"We're not leaving," Cap said. "We've only been here ten days."
"Right," Lenny said.
"Are you OK?" Cap stepped closer and stood toe to toe, surveying Lenny's feet. "You find your shoes? Your shoes were your mission."
Lenny let her head drop forward and pressed her brow to Cap's. Sometimes they played at staring each other down until they both saw spots, but now Lenny closed her eyes. "Does it look like I found my shoes?"
"Well, no. But you can have those. The length is OK. You'll just tie them up tight."