The Winter People (6 page)

January 13, 1908

It was Clarence Bemis who found her, early this morning, nearly twenty-four hours since she crept out of bed to follow her papa.

When the three men—Clarence, Martin, and Lucius—came into the house, tracking in snow, at ten past eight this morning, I knew from their faces. I wanted to send them away. Bolt the door. Tell them there must be a mistake—they had to keep looking, they could not come back until they brought me my little girl, alive and well.

I hated all three men just then: Clarence in his overalls, his hair too long and shaggy and the stink of whiskey on him; Lucius with his earnest face, good shoes, and carefully trimmed mustache; Martin, who limped in, shoulders slumped, looking pathetic and ruined.

Go away
, I longed to say.
Get out of my house
.

I wanted to turn back time, keep Gertie wrapped up in my arms, soft and warm under the covers.

Martin took me by the hand, asked me to sit down.

“We found her,” he said, and I covered my mouth, thinking I would scream, but no sound came.

All three men stood frozen, hats in their hands, six sad eyes all on me.

T
here is an old well at the far-eastern edge of the Bemises’ property, something that ran dry years ago. I remember Auntie and I went there once, when I was a girl not much older than Gertie, to drop stones down and listen for the sound of them hitting bottom. I leaned against the rough circle of stones and tried to see the bottom, but it was too dark. There was a dank smell coming out of it, and I could almost imagine feeling a cool breeze.

“How far down do you think it goes?” I asked Auntie.

Auntie smiled. “Maybe all the way through to the other side of the world.”

“That’s impossible,” I told her.

“Or maybe,” she said, tossing another pebble down, “it leads to another world altogether.”

I leaned farther down, desperate to see, and Auntie grabbed the back of my dress and pulled me upright. “Be careful, Sara. Wherever it goes, I don’t think it’s anywhere you want to be.”

C
larence said Gertie was curled up at its bottom so sweetly, as if she’d just fallen asleep.

“She didn’t suffer,” Lucius said, his voice low and calm as he put his hand on top of mine. His hand was soft and powdery, not a callus or a scar on it. He was there when they hauled my Gertie out, and this seemed all wrong to me, that Lucius was there when they pulled her out, and not me. They sent Jeremiah Bemis down by rope, and he tied it round her waist. I closed my eyes. Tried not to imagine her small body swinging, banging against the curved wall of the well, as they hoisted her up out of the darkness.

“She died instantly,” Lucius said, as if it would be a comfort.

But it is no comfort. Because, over and over, I think of those stones I once dropped, and how long it took for them to reach the bottom.

I imagine what it must have been like, falling.

Surrounded by a circle of stone, falling, falling into the darkness.

The snowflakes were spinning, drifting, doing their own drunken pirouettes, illuminated by the headlights of Buzz’s truck. The studded tires bit into the snow, but he took the corners fast enough that they fishtailed dangerously close to the high snowbanks that lined the single-lane dirt roads.

“Turn off the lights,” Ruthie said, because they were close now, and she didn’t want her mother knowing she was out past curfew again. She was nineteen years old. Who did her mom think she was anyway, giving Ruthie a goddamn curfew?

Ruthie reached down, grabbed the bottle of peppermint schnapps that Buzz held between his thighs, and took a good slug of it. She rummaged through the pockets of her parka and pulled out the Visine, tilted back her head, and put three drops in each eye.

They’d been out partying at Tracer’s barn, finishing up the keg left over from the big New Year’s Eve bash. Emily had brought pot, and they’d huddled around the kerosene heater, talking about how much winter sucked and how everything was going to change in the spring. They’d all graduated the June before, and here they were, still stuck in West Freaking Hall, Vermont, the black hole in the center of the universe. All their friends had gone on to college, or moved to big cities in warm places: Miami, Santa Cruz.

It wasn’t that Ruthie hadn’t tried. She’d applied to schools in California and New Mexico, places with good business-administration programs, but her mother said that it wouldn’t work right now, that they just didn’t have the money.

They’d always lived pretty close to the bone, making ends meet by selling vegetables and eggs at the farmers’ market. Her mom sold hand-knit socks and hats there, too, and at craft shops and shows around the state. Her mother was big into bartering. They never bought anything new, and when something broke, they fixed it rather than replacing it. Ruthie had learned at a young age not to beg for stuff they couldn’t afford. Asking for a certain kind of sneaker or jacket just because all the other kids in her class had it earned her serious looks of disapproval and disappointment from her parents, who would remind her that she had perfectly nice things (even if they had come from the thrift store and had some other kid’s name written inside).

Ruthie’s mom decided it would be best if Ruthie stayed in West Hall and went to community college for a year; she even offered to pay Ruthie to help with the egg business. It was now her job to keep the books, feed the hens each day, gather the eggs, keep the coop clean.

“You want to study business, isn’t this a much more practical way to learn?” her mother had asked.

“Selling a few dozen eggs at the farmers’ market isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Well, it’s a start. And with your father gone, I could use the extra help,” her mother had said. “Next year,” her mother promised, “you can reapply anywhere you’d like. I’ll help pay.”

Ruthie argued, said there were student loans, grants, and scholarships she might qualify for, but her mother wouldn’t fill out the paperwork, because it was just another way Big Brother was watching. The feds were not to be trusted, even when they were loaning money to college students. They’d get you caught up in the system, the very system her mother and father had worked so hard to stay free from.

“Things would be different if your father were still here,” her mother said. And Ruthie knew it was true, though she found it unsettling that whenever her mother spoke of him she made it sound as if he’d gone off on a trip, up and left them on purpose, not dropped dead from a heart attack two years ago. If her father were still alive, she’d be off at college. Her father understood her as no one
else had, knew how much she’d wanted to get away. He would have found a way to make it happen.

“Is it so bad?” her mother had asked, smoothing Ruthie’s unruly dark hair. “Staying home one more year?”

Yes
, Ruthie had wanted to say.
Yes! Yes! Yes!

But then she thought of Buzz, who hadn’t even applied to college and was working for his uncle at the scrap-metal yard. It was shit work, but Buzz always had money and found lots of cool pieces for his sculptures—these amazing monsters, aliens, and robots made from welded-together car parts and broken farm machinery. His uncle’s front lot was full of Buzz’s creations. He’d even made a little money selling a couple to tourists.

She and Buzz had met senior year at a keg party over at Cranberry Meadow. It was early October, and going to the party had been Emily’s idea—she had a huge crush on a boy named Adam who’d graduated the year before, and Emily had heard he’d be there. It turned out Adam had come to the party with his cousin Buzz, and, somehow or other, the four of them ended up drifting away from the bonfire by the pond and going up to the cemetery. Adam and Emily were making out under a granite cross while Ruthie made awkward small talk with Buzz, annoyed at Emily for getting her into this. Buzz said his dad and uncle lived in West Hall, but he was living with his mom in Barre and going to school there. He was enrolled in the Barre Technical Center, in the automotive program.

“Cars are okay,” he’d told her with a shrug while they sipped cheap beer out of plastic cups. “I guess I’m pretty good at fixing stuff. I’m on the pit crew for my cousin Adam—he races out at Thunder Road. You ever go out to Thunder Road?”

Ruthie shook her head and started stepping away, thinking she’d leave Emily and go back down to the bonfire. She had no interest in a redneck gearhead, no matter how cute he might be.

“Nah,” Buzz said. “Didn’t think so. How about the Devil’s Hand? You ever been up there?”

This stopped her.

“I live right next to it,” she said.

“No shit? It’s a damn strange place. It’s almost like the rocks
were put there by someone, right?” Buzz leaned against a lichen-covered headstone.

Ruthie shrugged. She’d never really thought about it that way before.

“You believe in aliens?” he asked.

“You mean, like, from outer space? Um … no.”

Buzz looked down into his cup of beer. “Well, personally, that’s my theory for how the rocks got there. I go up there all the time. I’m actually making a sculpture of it in my uncle’s shop. You should come check it out.”

“A sculpture?” she asked, stepping closer again. They spent the rest of the night talking about art, UFOs, the pros and cons of getting a business degree, movies they’d seen, how they both felt they were stuck in families where they were totally misunderstood. They wandered around the cemetery, checking out the names and dates on the stones, trying to imagine what kinds of lives these people might have had, how they’d died.

“Look at this one,” Buzz had said, running his fingers over letters on a plain granite marker. “Hester Jameson. She was only nine when she died. Just a kid. Pretty sad, huh?”

They’d been together ever since that night. Staying with him one more year sounded all right—more than all right, maybe, especially in moments like this, when they were side by side in the cab of his truck, stoned, cocooned and warm, careening through the darkness like nothing could stop them.

“You don’t think your mom’s up, do you?” Buzz asked.

“Hope not,” Ruthie said.

“Yeah, she’d have a bird.”

Ruthie laughed at the expression, but she knew it was true.

It wasn’t just her mother—the whole town was worried, uptight, keeping their kids locked in at night. Back in early December, a sixteen-year-old girl named Willa Luce had disappeared without a trace, walking the half-mile home from a friend’s house. Just before that, two sheep and a cow were found with their throats slit. And of course, before that, there had been the other disappearances: a boy who went missing in 1952 after his friends watched him crawl into a cave no one could find again, a hunter back in 1973 who’d been
separated from his friends and never returned to camp, and the most famous, the college girl in 1982 who’d gone hiking with her boyfriend. The young man had come out of the woods alone, catatonic, and covered in blood. He was never able to say what had happened, and had been charged with her murder even though no body was ever found. In the end, he was deemed insane and sent to the state hospital.

The West Hall Triangle, people called it. There was talk of satanic cults, a twisted killer, a door to another dimension, and, of course, aliens, like Buzz and his friends believed.

Ruthie thought it was all a crock of shit. She wasn’t sure what was up with the livestock, but guessed it was just bored kids screwing around. The little boy and the hunter probably just got lost in the acres and acres of forest. You get lost, you get cold, find someplace warm to curl up, and the next thing you know, your bones are being dragged off by coyotes. The college kid obviously went wacko and killed his sweetie—tragic, but it happens.

And Willa Luce—well, she’d probably just kept right on going that night, walked out to the highway and caught a ride with a trucker going west, going anywhere but here. Hadn’t Ruthie herself spent years fantasizing about doing the exact same thing? What kid in West Hall hadn’t? There just wasn’t anything here that begged you to stick around—the world’s smallest grocery store, grungy hardware store, cutesy bookshop, overpriced café, antique shop full of creepy moth-eaten shit, and a run-down dance hall that was mostly used for old ladies playing bingo and the occasional wedding reception. The biggest excitement of the week was the Saturday farmers’ market.

She reached over and took Buzz’s hand, entwining her fingers with his, which were rough and callused, always stained black with grease, no matter how much he washed them. She studied him in the dim light of the dashboard—baseball hat with the alien’s face on it pulled down low, his eyes squinting out at the snowy road, battered Carhartt work jacket with its pockets stuffed full of all things Buzz: smokes, lighter, Leatherman multi-tool, bandanna, mini-binoculars, penlight, and cell phone.

These were her favorite times with him, when they were off
alone in his truck. He’d take her up into the mountains to go UFO hunting. They’d park for hours, sharing a thermos of spiked coffee or a six-pack of Long Trail, while he told her about what he and his best friend, Tracer, had seen once, out behind the Bemis farm. A strange light that winked and pulsated, starting up by the rocks, then moving down to the cornfield. Then he claimed they saw a little creature almost flying through the cornstalks: pale and quick, its movements too fast and erratic for any human.