Strange Seed (10 page)

“Hank!
 
It’s me—Paul Griffin!”

To the south, a grouse hurried into the shelter of some thickets.
 
Ahead—west—from the lower branches of a huge sycamore, a gray squirrel, obviously annoyed, chattered briefly and disappeared around the other side of the tree.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Paul muttered.
 
“Hank!” he shouted.
 
“Where are you?”

Silence.

He moved quickly up the shallow slope, stopped and glanced to the east, at the house.
 
He found himself momentarily startled by the fact that only with effort could he distinguish it from the land around it.
 
The top of the stone tile roof—dull red because of the setting sun—was clearly visible, but it was not sufficient to immediately suggest that a house lay beneath.
 
The normally bright green shingles—so cheerful in daylight—now were muted, now blended almost perfectly with the flat near-darkness of the fields, the thickets, and the scattering of trees.
 
It was a vaguely disorienting sight; Paul turned quickly from it and moved with caution into the forest.

“Hank?” he called.
 
“Where are you?”

Several minutes later, after stumbling occasionally over darkness-obscured roots and vines, he heard a gurgling, low-pitched moan and plunged forward toward what he knew was its source—the small grove of honey locusts he’d paused at a month earlier, the grove of honey locusts that Lumas—in, Paul realized in retrospect, was a fit of temper—had ordered him away from, as if he had been some nameless trespasser bent on the destruction of private and valuable property.

*****

Rachel’s brow furrowed in confusion.
 
She had known something about this child sleeping so peacefully on the old couch.
 
No, she decided—she hadn’t merely know
something
about him, she had known
everything.
 
But just briefly, not long enough, now, that the knowledge was anything more than a dim, elusive feeling she could appreciate just fleetingly.
 

Why, for instance, had she told Paul that Henry Lumas would “understand”?
 
Understand what?
 
Was the child his?
 
That was stupid.
 
If Lumas “understood,” it was an understanding identical to what she had experienced only a half hour ago, an understanding—a feeling—which would soon dissipate completely, like the heavy, then static, then completely absent aura of a particularly distasteful dream.

She’d acted as if in a panic, she remembered.
 
She had pointed stiffly at the child and pleaded, “Get hold of him, before…”
 
Before what, for God’s sake?
 
Had she supposed he could walk through walls?

And a minute or two later, as Paul prepared to look the child over, when the lamplight had fallen on the child’s face—what had she seen there that had caused her to run, frightened, into the kitchen, and bring her to the point of tears?
 
There was nothing in the child’s face to elicit such a reaction.
 
It was a
perfect
face.
 
As perfect, she thought, as the face of a wildflower.

“Damn!” she whispered tightly, more in frustration than anger.

She rose from her wicker chair and went into the kitchen, to the back door.
 
She opened it and peered into the soft, nearly liquid darkness beyond.
 
It was a harder, heavier darkness at the horizon.
 
Paul was there, in the midst of that darkness.
 
He had vaulted into it from the shelter of the house.
 
But why?
 
Was something wrong with Lumas?
 
Obviously, Paul knew something he wasn’t telling her—hadn’t had the time to tell her.
 
Because this was the first time since he and Lumas had discovered the ravaged deer that he had left the house after sunset.
 
It had to be true—Henry Lumas was ill and needed Paul’s help.
 
And Paul, apparently unmindful of the very real danger to himself, was going to give it.
 
Paul must care a great deal about the old man, she thought.
 
Perhaps, with his stories of living alone in those woods and his intense hatred of “civilization,” Lumas reminded Paul of Paul’s father, though, of course, not in a physical way (but such things actually counted for very little.
 
You had to look beyond the eyes and the structure of the face to really know a person.
 
Just as, her thoughts continued, she had done upon encountering the child.
 
She caught herself on the thought.
 
She had, then, almost
sensed
his presence more than she’d actually seen him.
 
And that was when she’d known, however briefly, all there was to know about him.
 
Later, the yellow lamplight on him, it had been the grotesque perfection, the inhuman
symmetry
of his face that had caused her to run from him; it had harshly confirmed what had, just moments before, been only subliminal.

She closed the door, went into the living room and stood by the couch, her gaze on the child.
 
She supposed he was sleeping.
 
His large, oval, pale blue eyes were lightly closed; his firmly muscled chest—how like a man’s it was, except that it was totally without hair—moved almost imperceptibly, his rhythmic breathing incredibly shallow.
 
His body, Rachel saw, was in precisely the same position Paul had forced it into forty five minutes ago.

She noticed the blanket folded at the child’s feet and chided herself for not having the good sense to cover him.
 
she unfolded the blanket and brought it slowly up over his ankles, over his knees, his thighs.
 
She paused.
 
Yes, she thought, how like a miniature man he was—a miniature, yet strongly developed man whose body bore no traces of hair, except lightly, on the forearms, and lavishly, on the head, but nowhere else, not even around…
 
She quickly finished covering him, stepped back and stared at him silently, wonderingly.

“Where did you come from?” she whispered.
 
She smiled.
 
The words were part of a poem she’d learned as a child:
 
“Where did you come from baby dear?” she said aloud.
 
“Out of the everywhere, into here?”

It was past ten when Rachel, trying unsuccessfully to nap in the wicker chair, heart footfalls on the back steps.
 
Paul,
she realized.
 
But he was moving so slowly and heavily, as if in pain.

“Rachel,” he called, “open the door.”

Rachel bolted from her chair.
 
“Paul?” she yelled as she ran through the kitchen.
 
“What’s wrong?”
 
She threw the back door open.

In the dim light, Rachel couldn’t see who it was that Paul carried, fireman style, on his shoulders, but she knew that it was Lumas.
 
She hesitated, confused, then—as Paul stepped awkwardly to his right—she pushed the screen door open.
 
Paul moved past her, into the kitchen, and looked about anxiously.
 
He nodded at the table.
 
“Clear that off, would you?”

“Paul…is he…”

“No, he’s not dead.
 
Just the clear the table off, please.”

“Our bed, Paul—put him on our bed.”
 
She hurried past him into the living room, stopped, looked back: “Well?”

“Yes,” Paul said.
 
“Of course,” and he stepped sideways through the narrow doorway and followed Rachel into the living room: he hesitated a moment at the couch and nodded: “How’s the boy?”

“Asleep,” Rachel answered quickly, “ever since you left.”

“Good.
 
That’s good.”

He followed Rachel into the bedroom and quickly scanned the bet.
 
“Get the goddamed cat off it, okay!”

Rachel pushed at the fat’s flank a couple of times.
 
“C’mon, Mr. Higgins,” she said.
 
“Shoo!”
 
Mr. Higgins meowed in protest and moved slowly off the bed.

Paul shifted Lumas’s body around so he carried it for a second in his outstretched arms, then carefully lowered it onto the bed.
 
He straightened, took a deep breath.
 
“My God”—on the exhale—“I don’t ever want to go through
that
again!”

“What’s wrong with him, Paul?”

“Damned if I know.”
 
He took another deep breath, then knelt on one knee beside the bed.
 
Rachel switched on the lamp on the dresser.
 
It didn’t work.
 
“It’s that fucking generator,” Paul told her.
 
“Just get the kerosene lamp, I guess.
 
And some cloth for a bandage.”
 

Rachel nodded and went into the living room.

Paul took hold of Lumas’s left hand and tried to examine it.
 
“Can’t see a goddamned thing,” he whispered.
 
“Rachel,” he called, “the lamp!
 
Please!”

“I’m trying to find a bandage, Paul,” she answered peevishly.

“Well, bring the lamp first!”

“How am I going to find a bandage in the dark?”

“For God’s sake, we’ve got more than one lamp in this house, don’t we!”

“I’ll only be a second…”
 
She rummaged about in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
 
“Here’s one,” she called.
 
A moment later, she reappeared in the bedroom doorway, lantern dangling from one hand, a white strip of cloth from the other.
 
She held the lantern out.
 
“Here,” she said.

“No, hold it over him.”

She moved closer to the bed and held the lamp over Lumas.

“That’s right,” Paul continued.
 
“Now give me the bandage.”

She handed him the bandage.
 
He glanced at her: he had Lumas’s left hand cradled in his hand.
 
“Pretty messy, huh?” he said.

Rachel’s face tightened.
 
“What happened to it, Paul?”

“He put a thorn through it,” Paul said.

“A thorn?”

“From a honey locust.”
 
He started to wrap Lumas’s still-bleeding hand with a bandage.

“Oh,” Rachel said.
 
“That’s a tree, isn’t it?”

“Yes.
 
A tree with thorns on it.”

“Like a rosebush,” Rachel whispered.

Paul glanced confusedly at her.
 
“Yes,” he said.
 
“Like a rosebush.”
 
He tied the bandage into a knot over Lumas’s palm and studied the results of his work.
 
“This is no good,” he said.
 
“His hand’s still bleeding.
 
Don’t we have anything else, some cotton or something?”

“Let me do it,” Rachel said, and handed him the lamp.
 
“You’ve got that bandage all wrong.
 
And you’ve got to clean the wound first.”

Paul stared blankly at her a moment, as if he intended to give her an argument, then straightened.
 
“I’ll get a pan of water,” he said, and stepped away from the bed.

“Yes, good,” Rachel said.
 
She leaned over Lumas.
 
“And see if you can find another strip of cloth and a thin piece of wood so I can fix a tourniquet.
 
He seems to have lost a lot of blood.
 
Has he been bleeding ever since you found him?”

“No.
 
I helped him back to his cabin and he seemed okay for a while.
 
We talked—I’ll tell you about it—and then, all of sudden, he was out.
 
His hand must have started bleeding again because of the way I was carrying him.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, and picked at the tight knot Paul had tied in the bandage.
 
“That’s possible.”

*****

Paul leaned forward in his winged-back chair.
 
“That’s the whole story, Rachel.
 
If you can make any sense of it, I wish you’d share it with me.
 
He said you’d understand.”

“Really?
 
Why would he say that?”

Paul shrugged.
 
“Who knows.
 
He seems to think quite a lot of you.
 
He said you had a gift.”
 
Another shrug.
  
“You should be flattered, I guess.”

Rachel attempted a smile.
 
“He gives me more credit than I deserve.
 
He makes me feel like I can’t help but disappoint him.
 
If I do have some sort of gift, it’s certainly not very dependable.”

“What do you mean?”