Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2) (22 page)

At the bottom of Otter Creek we followed the Dry Fork up to its junction with Red Run. The rocky banks were low to the water. All around us mosses and ferns fought for moisture. The bluets speckled the green banks with faint blue pinpoints creating a galaxy in miniature. Wild bleeding hearts stared, sleepy eyed, at hawthorns, oaks, and ash, perhaps looking for fairies, perhaps just readying the ground for the Indian pipes and Pink Lady’s Slipper that would pop forth any day now.

On the slopes of Mozark Mountain, we bounced through a weedy clearing where an old logging town had once stood. The only recognizable structure was the stony foundation of an old hotel where wood hicks and gandy dancers could drink and fight without worrying about their bosses. We passed long-dead coal shafts where miners had labored beneath the earth, dreaming of daylight and fresh air.

When we reentered wilderness, we left behind any ties we had to the modern, mechanized world for good. We knew all we had was all we carried with us. If things got really bad we could only rely upon ourselves.

The forest lining Red Run was greater than any I’d ever seen. Monster oak trees, ten feet across at the height of a man’s waist, crowded the old green path we followed up to the camp. Giant poplars stretched hundreds of feet into the air, quickly stifling any talk of redwoods and giant sequoias.

We bumped up the path. The streams were wilder, the cliffs rockier, the laurel hells thicker than any I’d ever seen. This forest wasn’t the product of conservation, planning and management. This forest was the product of seeds and sunlight. Thunderstorms and blizzards.

This forest and its dark, woody depths held secrets. Held fables.

This was a fairy tale forest, an abomination of imagination and nightmares. Every tale that began ‘Once upon a time’ has a forest like this present at its birth. Demons and devils evolved from the wolves and serpents that played midwife to the birth of such tales. Thorny greenbrier served as the cradle.

In all of this our role was a small one. We were nothing more than a small drop of milk sliding down, down, down to the navel.

Fenton and his brother, Ray, had established camp where Red Run fell from the high country in a dramatic series of cascades. Just upstream from the falls, the water arrived from a turkey foot of three streams. Ray had set up two large, canvas army tents and had been waiting for the poles from our truck to begin setting up the third. Fenton tended to the fire. Preston sat near the fire ring, like he wasn’t so sure what to do without a guitar in his hands. As soon as he saw Jamie he drifted over to help unload the truck.

Airborne moisture painted the forest air with the scent of dissolved minerals and tannic acid from the bogs on the mountain top plains. The tea-stained water swept through the narrow walls of the gorge like cold wind through a thin jacket. Even though it was clean my pap refused to drink it. Said he could taste his little sister in it, even though they found her body further down in the Blackwater. He’d only drink spring water from the farm anymore. Or his stump hole whiskey.

Wood smoke from the campfire cast sepia shadows over the shallow floodplain. A chill crept down from the heights in a fog that mingled with the smoke to block out the freshly peeking stars. I shivered a little as we finished unloading the old pickup.

“Frost tonight,” Fenton said, as he poked at white hot coals with a long stick. Over a dozen small venison steaks sat in a heavy old cast-iron skillet waiting to be cooked up with onions and peppers and a green tomato piccalilli. “Did you bring something warmer?”

“Nope. This is pretty much all I got left.” My teeth clattered a little when I spoke.

“Colder than a witch’s tit. Here,” Fenton stood up and took off his coat. “I have another in the tent.”

“No, man. I can’t,” I said, but he was already handing it over the fire to me. I gave in, put it on and buttoned it all the way up to my neck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him still looking.

“Thank you.” I said, “I mean it.”

“C’mon, buddy. Everything’s going to be all right. Rachael and Katy are taking good care of your sweetie. We got these bastards, okay? The law’s with us. They just need to figure that part of it out.” He kept poking the coals, although his gaze was somewhere else.

“I don’t know, Fenton. Things almost always go the other way. Kind of makes me think the universe has it in for me.” His jacket was warm, but a little tight. I moved a bit closer to the fire.

“What kind of talk is that? You and your girl are safe, right? Property comes and goes. Life goes on and that’s a beautiful thing. Hear me? And as far as the Jane stuff…you have a chance to avenge her and end this. You got a clean slate coming your way, buddy. Right here, right now, life begins for you. Trust me. Most people never get that chance.” He nodded his head slightly, waiting for me to do the same.

He added, “Trust us. Look at all this.” He jerked his head back at the tents. “This is for you. Don’t think for a second I’d do more for Chloe or Katy.”

“Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“No problem. I believe you’d do the same for me.” He slapped my back twice. He put the skillet into the coals and covered it with a beat-up lid. “Here we go. I’ll give you dibs.”

“Hey,” I asked, not sure what came next. My mouth got real dry and I waved the question off. “Never mind.”

“Go ahead, it’s okay.” He set the stick down and clasped his hands between his knees, giving me his full attention.

“I was wondering…” I rubbed my temples and said, “You heard from my dad through all this?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Henry.” “It’s okay. I figured as much.” “Sorry.”

One by one the party shifted from the tents to the fire. Ben came first, followed by Jamie and Preston, who trailed Jamie like a puppy. Ray came from the trees carrying more firewood. Greg arrived with my pap. They were all content to stare into the fire without saying much of anything while dinner cooked.

Ben picked at bread and apples and other things that could be eaten as is. My pap and Ray wouldn’t sit down, which made me a little skittish. Conversation stayed light for a very long time. Then, as dinner finally started to smell like dinner, Jamie tuned his fiddle, conversation picked up. I was so hungry my belly thought my throat had been cut.

My pap stood behind Fenton with a hand on his shoulder and said, “How’s the ackempucky coming along?”

“She’s coming along just fine. I know how much you like ramps, so—”

“Stop acting ugly. The thought of eating those weeds makes me sicker than a dog on a gut wagon.” He used Fenton’s shoulder as a handrail to help him take his seat on the log. “Straighten up and act like you have some sense or you’ll be sleeping on the ground.”

Fenton grabbed the skillet’s handle with an old chamois and lifted the lid for my pap’s approval. He reached his fork in and lifted a small steak onto his plate. Fenton invited everybody to help themselves.

Only Greg, who didn’t really know my grandpap, didn’t know he was playing with Fenton. He quietly chomped on some of the bread and cheese he had left over from yesterday. Greg fixated on Jamie’s fiddle, and started a side conversation by rattling off a list of requests.

“’Forked Deer’?”

“Too easy,” Jamie said, lifting the fiddle to his chin. He played a cheap, store- bought fiddle tonight, not one that was irreplaceable or had sentimental value.

“’John Henry’?” Greg said while chewing. He seemed to be looking for something, like a jug of wine or a snifter of brandy.

Jamie glanced at my pap, who sat up a little straighter at the mention of his namesake tune. “Of course.”

Greg, now faced with the challenge of stumping Jamie, said “My father used to love ‘Walkin’ in the Parlor’ and ‘Jo Bones’. Do you know those?”

My pap interrupted, “Jamie’s traveled far and wide collecting songs. God put the good stuff where the lazy people can’t have any, you know. Been in hollows I ain’t ever heard of. Met people that should’ve been dead a hundred years ago.”

Greg paused in a pool of deep thought, then cocked an eyebrow. “’Two Sisters’?”

Jamie kept his jaw clamped shut and stared into the fire. After a moment of reflection, he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “Don’t know it.”

Greg gave it another go. He rolled up a bit of ham, shoved it into his mouth and wiped his hands on his pants. “It’s also known as ‘Dreadful Wind and Rain’?”

“I said I didn’t know it.” I knew Jamie was lying.

“Surely you must have…here,” Greg said, then began to sing, “A young fiddler he went a courtin’ there, oh, the wind and rain—”

My pap intervened, “Not to be rude, but that’s not a song we sing. Hits too close to home. I lost a sister and a daughter and a granddaughter to the river. Part of that song’s in a drowning spell those Johnny Bull Lewises use.”

“I meant no harm,” Greg said, obviously embarrassed. “If I would’ve known… you must think I’m very rude.”

“Fucking Lewises,” I said, motivated by the reference to Jane. I could never tell my pap about Alex being a distant Lewis relative. Ever. In my mind, the best thing for everybody involved would be if I ran off to finish this myself. They could keep their hands clean and I could be the scapegoat. I knew how I’d do it, too, going down to Elkins to the Lewis Lumber offices with a shotgun.
A bunch of witnesses, no accomplices
.

“It’s okay, son,” my pap told Greg. “You didn’t know.” Then he added awkward to awkward with an even more somber anecdote. “My ma said if any of us kids ever went into the woods at night, witches would find us and put us into a barrel with ten- penny nails pounded all through it. Then they’d roll us down the mountain to their caves or to old mine shafts or coke ovens.”

I believed he was trying to lighten the mood.

“Brutal,” Ben said. He leaned back, feet up on a rock next to the fire, hands in his pockets. “That’s some hard living. Talk about some mean bastards.”

Greg raised a finger, signaling a question. He said, “So we’re talking about Black Bibles and all that?”

I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely interested or just trying to keep the witch talk going to hide his earlier
faux pas
.

Personally, I’d had my fill of witch talk, and interrupted, “Sorry guys. I’m going to bed. This has been a shit day, and the superstition…I’m getting sick of it.” Sparks from the fire flew past my face.

My pap held his hand up to cut me off. “Henry, sometimes you’re dumber than a mud fence. How do you know you don’t need to hear this? Like it or not, some of this pertains to you. You’re young, and I can understand your skepticism. But the Lewis clan—out of all of us here, you probably need to hear this the most,” my pap said, quite adamantly. He patted the log beside him, a signal to sit.

I sat out of respect to him, not because I believed any of this crap. Champ rested his head on my leg and watched me with sad, old eyes. “What is it, huh?” I gave his neck a good scratching.

I looked at Jamie for some kind of sign that this was all bullshit. He said, “You need to listen. Ben, you too. Preston found out the hard way this winter that the difference between believing and not believing can be very dangerous.”

Preston didn’t say a word. He stared right into the fire as if Jamie were talking about somebody else.

After a moment to compose his argument, Jamie went on, “Why do you think every old house between Oakland, Maryland and Boone, North Carolina has a SATOR square pinned above their windows? It’s to keep the devil away. To knock witches. The reason the old magic is still around is because it works.”

“What kind of square?” Ray said, acting only half-interested. He passed Jamie a bag of peanuts and poked the fire with a stick. “I’m a bit bumfuzzled.”

Jamie picked open a pair peanuts then threw the shells into the fire. “SATOR squares? I don’t know. They’re like puzzles I suppose. They’ve been found on the walls of buildings destroyed by Vesuvius at Pompeii. Early Christians say it was a message from God saying their savior was on his way.”

He gestured for Ray’s stick and began drawing rows of letters in the dirt. “Five lines of five letters arranged in a square that form multiple anagrams.

I tried to read the letters, but it was difficult in the low light. I leaned over to see. It read:

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

“Some people say the words are nonsense, but when rearranged in a cross they spell out ‘paternoster’ flanked by an ‘A’ and an ‘O’.” Jamie handed Ray back his stick. “Our father and the Alpha and Omega.” Jamie stomped the letters away with his foot.

Silence fell over the camp. By now the crickets were in full swing. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. “In my life I’d never seen anything to prove magic was real. Magic would’ve kept my mom around. Would’ve kept Jane alive.”

My pap spoke up again. I wasn’t trying to disrespect him, but his tone told me he felt I was. He said, “Well son, you ain’t going to like what I’m fixing to tell you. I know what I saw. And I’m an educated man, too. Not a doctor, but I put my time in and earned my degree. All so my boys didn’t have to work in a coal mine.” It came out before he could catch himself. He opened his mouth, but couldn’t force an apology out. And he didn’t have to. I knew why my dad ended up in the mine.