Nightcrawlers

11

Later that night, an old woman, with the aid of her cane, left her farmhouse, sniffed the damp air and considered the dark sky. She knew, absolutely knew in her bones that trouble was coming, trouble like she hadn’t seen in ages.

She stood on the back stoop of her house, nervous about going out after dark, as she had been her whole life. Something that had only gotten worse and more deeply entrenched as the years had flown by, like the yellowing leaves of an ancient book. Night was a bad time out on Bellac Road. A time when things that should not be, were, and those that should have crawled like graveworms walked tall like men.

Earlier, she had heard the commotion and the shooting in the night, far distant in the outer reaches of the Ezren land where it butted up to the Pigeon River State Forest. She knew it was the police nosing about and making a fine mess of things, sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted and getting themselves in a fix at the same time. It was only a matter of time. When she had seen that big, dirty bulldozer cutting a path through Ezren lands and peeling up what lay below, she knew it was coming.

They’re going to get everything stirred up, that’s what they’re going to do. We’re going to have bad days and terrible nights like we haven’t had since—

Eh? Was that a sound? Sure it was. They were out there. She was only glad that the sky was overcast and there was no moon to brighten up the yard and the pasture beyond. The moonlight had a funny way of lighting up their eyes and she did not want to see them. She was three months shy of ninety-six and she could have happily spent what time was left and gone to her grave without ever seeing those eyes again. She had seen them first when she was a child shining like silver coins in the tall grasses, and ever since, they had come in her dreams, bright and forever watching.

She stepped down off the stoop, dragging a hefty bag of scraps behind her, the kind of things they liked. She would put it out for them as her mother had and her mother’s mother and on down the line. If they were kept fed, less chance they would start causing trouble.

The old woman paused, three feet from the stoop, just off the flagstone path in the grass. God, it was not so easy at her age. There had been a time when she dragged the leavings out for them and was back inside within a matter of minutes, doors locked and bolted, windows shut tight so she wouldn’t have to hear those perfectly awful sounds they made.

Now it took time.

She felt a slight spike of dread in her chest, but there was no real fear because she knew they would not harm her. They were dogs that would not bite the hand that feeds.

As she paused there, listening to the crickets and the peepers calling out, the calls of herons and nighthawks, she thought, You’re too old for this and you know it, but like your mother, you’re too damn stubborn to admit it. Yes. Maybe. Possibly. But she had decided long ago that she was born here on this farm and she would die here just as her husband had some seventeen years previously after a life of hard, honest work.

Not that her children were accepting of that decision.

She had three of them. Only her daughter was left now. Her eldest son had passed of an embolism not three years before and his brother had died in the war. That left only her youngest and she was always at the old woman about going off to a retirement home.

“You would want such a thing for me?” the old woman would say to her. “Your own mother? You want me to sit around with those old farts, watching them drooling and pissing themselves, talking about days long gone while food runs down their chins and they shat themselves?” She always said “shat,” thinking that “shit” sounded undignified somehow. “Is that the life you want for me? Sitting around gossiping with the old hens until I just give up and don’t get out of bed anymore?”

Betty would tell her that’s not what she wanted at all and tell her all the benefits of such a place—medical care, activities, companionship. There was a world of possibilities. But the old woman would have none of that because she had watched her own mother die in one of those places. The last two years of her life she spent in such a place until she finally lost the will to live and rolled over and died.

“And when I die,” the old woman told Betty, “it will be of my own choosing, not because I’m locked in one of those prisons.”

“But Mom…”

“Don’t but me, young lady.”

Which was kind of funny because Betty was sixty-seven on her last birthday but it did not matter to her mother because she was always going to be an unsure, coltish girl whose head was not screwed on quite right and didn’t have the common sense of a yard mouse. Not that she didn’t love her because she did, but her choices were not always the best ones for herself or for others.

“You want me to go into a home? All right, I’ll do it on one condition and I think you know what that is, young lady.”

At this point, Betty would always shake her head and silently mouth “no” because she didn’t want to know, she just didn’t want to know.

But the old woman wouldn’t let her off that easy. “You move back here, back to your home. You get out of that city and tend to things.”

“I don’t want to know about any of that.”

“It’s necessary that food and scraps and meat that has turned be left out for them.”

“No, I don’t want to know about any of that. I’m not about to leave my life so I can pick up the pieces of yours,” she’d say and instantly regret it. “What I mean is… I don’t want to know about that stuff. I can’t live here knowing that… they… those things are out there. I just can’t. Why do you think so many of us leave and never come back? I don’t want to know about Haymarket and its rotten past. I don’t.”

“That’s the problem with you young people—no sense of tradition, no responsibility to the old ways that are the right ways. If those from below are not seen to, they’ll rise up and—”

“No, Mother, no more.”

Yes, that was how those conversations always began and ended.

As the old woman made her way through the grass out to the edge of the forest, pausing every few minutes because she was feeling her years, she knew that Betty was right about one thing: Haymarket’s past was rotten. The whole goddamn town was built on yellowed skeletons tucked in closets and mortared with secrets. That’s the way it had always been. A great big diseased sore that was now being picked at by the police. They were digging out at the Ezren place and everyone knew you didn’t dig out there. It was bad enough that now and again some bones would be found out in the mud flats of the Pigeon during the August dry spell, washed there by the spring flooding. But you didn’t go digging for them and not on Ezren lands. Now that sore would open up and its foul blood would start running again.

When she made it to within thirty feet of the trees, she squatted down uneasily and dumped the bag out. The stink of it was appalling but it was what they liked.

“It’s here!” she shouted in a dry rasping when she’d finally gotten back on her feet, which took some doing. “Come get what’s yours…”

She could hear them out there, rustling about in the underbrush. Worse, she could smell them. And that made her move back to the house a little bit quicker despite the protesting of her hips and knees and bad back. By the time she reached the stoop, she was dizzy from the exertion. Well, maybe she’d sleep through the night for once.

And maybe I’ll sleep beyond that right into eternity.

She turned, expecting to see their hunched, dragging forms, but they were shy. They did not like to be seen any more than she liked seeing them. “Come, then!” she cried out to them. “Take what I’ve offered and go on back with you, back to your slimy holes!”

As she made it up to the stoop and through the screen door, the smell increased and she heard them crawling out of the woods, hissing and gibbering. One of them was giggling.