The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH

When the war was over the living came home. Not a rifle among them but those that had been transformed into crutches or canes, but rifles would not have mattered to men who were tired of war and wounds and death. Their bellies were empty and they broke their swords into plowshares, and they embraced a land they remembered and people they could not forget and wished the simple wish that they had never gone to war.

Of course, the dead came home, too. They came at night, and warily… their bellies bloated with grave worms, their hearts as heavy as fallen fruit. They marched in tattered battalions beneath willows that whispered in the sultry summer wind, and they paused at forgotten crossroads bordered by thorny brush and bayonet bramble, and they marched on and made their camps in cemeteries where mortal footfalls were seldom heard, far past the place where the woodbine twineth.

That was how it was with the living and the dead. But others came home, too. Men like John Barter. Barter had seen many places since leaving the South. Places to the north, places with names that he could never forget. Gettysburg… Cemetery Ridge… Devil’s Den…

But John Barter did not speak of those places. He spoke hardly at all. He came home with a mouthful of bone buttons that he had sliced off a Union sergeant’s uniform. He chewed and sucked those buttons all the way from Virginia, tramping the lonely miles in sunshine and in shadow, and he came home with rags on his feet and seven toes, and he came home with a sword that was as sharp as an officer’s tongue.

He came home with a fiddle, too, an instrument given him by his wife on the day of his enlistment. A single nail pierced the fiddle’s neck, the wood scissored around it like the slivered hand of Jesus on a crucifix. Still, the fiddle made sweet music. All Barter’s comrades said so… both the living and the dead. Even a Yankee at a distant outpost could be moved to tears by the sound of Barter playing “Aura Lee” on the eve of battle.

So Barter brought the fiddle home, just as his wife knew he would. He carried it all the way from Virginia wrapped in a mildewed regimental flag, and her heart beat a little faster at the sight of the instrument in her husband’s hands. Of course, the nail that pierced the fiddle’s neck had rusted since she had driven it home on that far-off day, but she had expected that. Time rusted all things.

Her name was Loreena, and she was a woman only seven years gone from a country very different than this one. That was the reason she knew the things she did. In Loreena’s country, the land was so very green and the shadows so very long that in the end everything was nearly black. Heavy clouds held the people to the land and did not let them stray, but the clouds could have been as heavy as iron and still they would have been unable to hold Loreena. She was a woman made for other places, and she did not fear the heavens and she did not fear the earth.

Loreena did not fear much of anything. Not the living. Not the dead. As a girl she had learned many secrets from her grandmother, a woman who spoke only in whispers. Loreena kept those whispered words in her head and in her heart. She listened to them still, as she practiced the craft her grandmother had taught her. The old woman’s whispers told her that the world held a place for all things, and Loreena wanted nothing more than to stake one small corner of it for her husband and herself, for she loved John Barter as she could love no other.

When Barter’s ragged feet crossed the threshold of their cabin. Loreena took the fiddle from his hands. Even before they embraced, she took it. Barter’s picture hung on the wall, secured by a nail grown nearly as rusty as the one that pierced the fiddle. Barter hardly recognized himself, for the picture had been made before the war.

Loreena took that picture off the wall as if it were something dead and threw it into the fireplace. Then she grabbed Barter’s fiddle by the neck — as if it were something alive — and she nailed it to the wall in the picture’s place. Finally she parted her husband’s lips with gentle fingers and, one by one, took the bone buttons from his mouth and placed them on the mantelpiece.

Still, John Barter did not say a word, so Loreena kissed him deeply, and she kissed him long. And when their lips parted she stripped the ragged uniform off her husband’s back and tossed it into the blazing fireplace, and then she took off her clothes and guided her husband’s fingers over her naked flesh until they found the tight circle of silk around her neck.

Barter’s hands circled that ribbon and his fingers disappeared in Loreena’s long black hair, and beneath that hair at the back of her neck his fingers found a black velvet bag knotted to that silk ribbon, and in that bag were eleven nails — just a little rusty — that pricked Loreena’s neck on moonless nights and brought bad dreams.

But now those bad dreams were banished… or so Loreena thought. For she believed in magic. And she believed in a twelfth nail that had bound a portrait to a wall of the home she shared with John Barter, just as she believed in the power of a thirteenth nail that was driven through a fiddle’s neck.

A thirteenth nail now driven into that very same wall.

A nail that bound a fiddle to that wall.

Yes. Loreena believed in magic.

Just as she believed in a man’s soul.

One that had never been allowed to wander.

But Barter was a different man now. He didn’t want to be different at all, but he was. He wanted to sleep with the dark wings of Loreena’s hair brushing his face and the wild scent of her on his lips… and yet he did not want to sleep at all, wanted instead to steal his fiddle from the wall and serenade his fallen comrades by a blazing campfire, slicing the bow back and forth while Yankee blood gleamed on his fingernails in the firelight.

Barter wanted to share these strange thoughts with his wife, but he could not do that. When he tried he found that his words had gone, and yet sometimes he was afraid that they would spill from his lips before he could stop them. So he took a few bone buttons from the mantelpiece and put them in his mouth, and then he could not speak a word.

But he could listen well enough, and he found that there were many things to hear. The voices of the living, telling him that he needed to forget. The voices of the dead, telling him that he had forgotten too much already. He heard these things clearly, the same way his wife heard the whispers of her dead grandmother.

And in this way one year passed, and then another, and then a third. And in that time Barter discovered that there were many things he could not do. He could not beat his sword into a plowshare. He could not drive its sharp blade into the earth. And he could not keep his eyes from the fiddle nailed to the wall, just as he could not keep his fingers from the nail that held it there, a nail with a flat head that flaked rust like dead skin.

Though he touched it — gently, the way one would touch the stem of a flower — Barter never tested the strength of that nail.

He knew what it meant to his wife.

One day Barter carried his sword to the livestock pen. He was surprised to find that the pen was full of Yankees, smart and tall in the crisp blue uniform of the victor.

The Yankees taunted him, making sport of his tattered clothes and his tattered ways. Barter wanted to ignore them, but that was impossible. Their blue suits shone like the night, and their brass buttons gleamed like the sun. Their pink faces were rosy with laughter, but their words lashed Barter like his own memories.

Barter sucked bone buttons and tried not to listen, but he could no more do that than escape his own thoughts. Finally he could stand no more. He charged the Yankees with a rebel yell, and he struck them down with a terrible swift sword no Northerer’s hand would ever hold, and when he had finished with them he sliced the gleaming buttons off their blue uniforms and stuffed those buttons into his mouth along with the buttons of bone.

The taste of brass was very much like the taste of blood. Something sharp, a slap to the face, a trumpet call to a sleeping man. The taste set Barter’s senses on edge. Soon he noticed that many of the fallen Yankees had faces like pigs. Their officer, a captain, was as big as a bull. Most of the Yankees were dead, but some of them still breathed. Barter spit buttons of brass and bone from his mouth and asked the Yankees if they were men or animals, but they only screamed and screamed and screamed.

Loreena ran to her husband’s side, the silk ribbon tight around her neck, the nails in the velvet bag pricking her spine. She screamed, too, but Barter did not hear her. He only heard the music of eleven nails dancing, a sound like rainfall going to rust.

Loreena grasped his bloodstained hand, but Barter could not feel her fingers. Her fingers fell away like rust, like rainfall.

Twilight had come and gone, but Barter felt that he was knee-deep in it. That was all he felt. But it was not all he saw, or heard. Dead soldiers marched through scarlet shadows. He heard their every step. They came — their bellies bloated with grave worms, their hearts as heavy as fallen fruit — and they ringed the livestock pen, and they stared at Barter and they stared at his sword, and they saw that both were stained with the blood of pigs and cattle.

“That is a poor use of good steel,” said one of the soldiers, and Barter nodded in agreement.

He knew the soldier was right. Everyone knew. The truth of the soldier’s words was reflected in the faces of his fallen comrades. Pity shone in their dead eyes. Barter tried to look away, but found he could not. He stood there with the sword in his hand, with slain beasts at his feet, and he knew that his comrades saw him for what he had become.

There were no buttons in Barter’s mouth. He looked for words there, but found none.

But his comrades had words. One of them stepped into the livestock pen and took Barter’s hand.

“Come with us,” the soldier said.

Barter nodded, but he could not move. He wanted to go with the men, even though he knew he did not belong with them any more than he belonged with Loreena. His portrait had tasted flame a long time ago, and his fiddle had been nailed to the wall for three long years. Barter could barely remember “Aura Lee.” Sometimes he tried to hum it around the buttons in his mouth, but it never sounded the same, and Barter knew that it never would —

The dead men turned away.

The moment had passed, and they could wait no longer.

“Goodbye,” was all they said.

In the livestock pen, dying Yankees screamed their last. In the woods, just past a forgotten crossroads bordered by thorny brush and bayonet bramble, dead men sang “Aura Lee” as they marched to a cemetery camp where mortal footfalls were seldom heard.

In John Barter’s cabin, Loreena placed her husband’s hands flat on the table that stood beneath the fiddle. A hammer lay above Barter’s bloodstained fingertips. Loreena took the silk ribbon from around her neck. She opened the velvet bag that was attached to it. spilling eleven nails into her open palm. But all that remained of the nails were brittle shards and rusted flakes, and they sifted through Loreena’s fingers like sand.

Loreena started to cry, because time rusted all things.

Even magic. Even men.

But Barter smiled at his wife. He took the fiddle from the wall. That was not hard to do, for the nail that held it in place was very weak.

Barter tossed the fiddle into the fireplace. He watched it burn the way he had watched his unfamiliar portrait burn, and he took the last of the bone buttons from the mantelpiece and placed them in his mouth and sucked on them with Loreena standing close by his side but so far away, and he didn’t say a word as the fiddle popped and sizzled in the flames.

He listened, instead, to the sound of a flickering campfire… far, far away.

Far past the place where the woodbine twineth.

(For Manly Wade Wellman)