Fiends (10 page)

3

Instead of a visitor a letter, addressed to Birka, arrived at the end of June.

"It says," she told them at supper, "that Professor Ayres is on a field trip to the South Pacific, and will not return to the university until the spring term, nineteen seven."

"A year?"
Arne said, scowling.

"What do they want us to do with his crate?" Enoch asked.

"They don't say." Birka folded the letter and glanced at Arne with a slight frown. Arne interpreted her look as conspiratorial, and said nothing more as he carefully separated the skin from a drumstick in his chicken and dumplings.

Arne's father shook his head. "Reckon it can just sit there in the barn. Ain't likely to be in the way. Maybe he'll give us a few dollars' storage when he does come."

"Or a reward," Arne suggested, his mouth full.

His father grimaced, working a fingernail between two teeth where something was stuck. "I don't think those professors have a right smart of money. Not much more than we've got, anyhow."

"If he doesn't have money," Arne said, "then how can he take such a long trip to—" He looked at his mother. "Where did you say he's gone to?"

"The South Pacific."

"That where China is?"

"No. If you don't want the chicken skin—"

"You can have it."

"I just don't like leavings," Birka said.

4

After supper, with three good hours of daylight remaining, his father took the shay down the road a third of a mile to help a neighbor who was drilling a new well, and Arne went out to the barn to mix whitewash for the fireplace, a chore he'd been neglecting, and to mend old harness with an awl, a hammer, and some brass rivets. While he worked at the anvil in one corner he glanced often across the barn at the crate, until the sun no longer came in the back door and it was too dim inside to make out the stenciled lettering. He said exotic words to himself with each hammer stroke, as well as he could pronounce them, and tried to visualize the land of crags and smokes and glaciers—and scarce, green valleys—where the i rate had originated.

At twilight his mother crossed the barn lot with a coal-oil lamp. He looked up despondently from where he sat on a hay bale with a lap full of the mended harness.

"Arne, what's got you like this?"

"It'll be a whole year before we know what's inside!"

Birka hung the lamp on the side of the stall where the family's Jersey cow was overdue to freshen, and sullen about the waiting time. Arne made room for his mother on the hay bale. She put a hand on his knee.

"I need to do a job of patching. Those pants are almost worn through."

"Can't we open it?" he pleaded.

There was a rustling of barn swallows, chirps in the rafters. The pregnant cow shifted about in her stall, looking morosely at them. The plow horse, Ol' Vol, munched fodder in an adjacent stall. Instead of an immediate "no", Birka was silent. Her fingers tightened a little on Arne's knee. He put a hand on top of hers, making her a prisoner of his intention.

"You know Enoch wouldn't approve."

Arne also knew there'd be a jug after the well-drilling, and his father would drink his part, and come home chewing spearmint leaves so Birka would never suspect. "He won't be back for 'nother hour anyhow. I can pry the lid off and nail it back so slick you'd never guess."

"Arne, it's just like telling a lie." Her tone was, if anything, apologetic, not final, and Arne pressed what he realized was an advantage.

"It isn't if we don't never tell!"

She moved her hand to the top of his head, a familiar soothing gesture, and fingered the hair that was long over his ears.

"Time to take a scissors to that," she said, but her eyes too were on the crate and Arne, glancing at her, saw a pleasurable tension in the set of her lips, a certain mischief in the narrowing of her eyes.

"We'll just take a peek inside," he assured her, "and not say a word."

She hugged him then, and laughed.

"Arne, you're a rascal. But neither one of us could ever wait for Christmas morning. Get the pry bar—
two
pry bars—and the hammer."

Arne was already halfway to the tool chest, saying, over his shoulder, "Maybe you'd better shut the yard door!"

Prying off the lid of the crate without leaving chisel marks or splintering a board was a tougher proposition than Arne had reckoned.

"It's rowan wood," his mother told him. "I knew that right away."

"What kind?"

"It is—special. A wood with magical properties. Here they call it ash, I think. My mother had a little box of rowan wood in which she kept our photographs—the three girls. She believed this would keep us from harm as long as we lived."

"Where's the box now?" Arne said, fighting a stubborn nail.

"Vigdis has it. But why make an entire crate of rowan wood? That must have been very expensive." A little later she said, "Arne, I've been thinking. Maybe we shouldn't—"

"I've almost got it!" In twenty minutes of careful work, going from one end of the crate to the other, he had raised the cover by half an inch. Now be was sweating in the closeness of the barn. "Mother, help me. Use the other pry bar. Be careful where you set the lantern, you don't want to knock it over." He sounded like his father. Birka, despite misgivings that came and went like gray mice, smiled and glanced at the barn doors.

"Enoch will come along anytime now—and he will be so mad at us—"

Their eyes met. Birka shrugged and picked up the other pry bar.

"Ready?" Arne asked her. "Go."

The long nails made a lot of screechy noise coming out of the tough wood. Arne went around the crate on his knees, prizing, then rose to his feet, seized the lid and pulled it off with one jerk. He backed away from the crate as Birka gasped, crossing her arms in front of her body.

"What's that?"

She said something in the Icelandic language, backing away too, her foot brushing against the lantern she'd set on the dirt floor.

"Mother!"

"My God, my God, what have we done? Cover it, Arne, nail down the lid!"

"But what
is
it?"

Birka picked up the lantern. She held it over her head. The dark thing huddled in the crate, lying on a bed of dry excelsior, leaped into gleaming relief.

"Huldufólk,"
she whispered, dreadfully, and setting the lantern down again, she fled to the barn doors. Flung them open, listened suspensefully on the threshhold. No one was coming. Birka retraced half her steps into the barn, leaving the doors open behind her. She gestured at the crate, speechless. Arne had picked up the nail-studded lid and was holding it like a shield, staring down into the crate. He wanted to see the thing better. He was frightened but fascinated, blood throbbing at his temples. Ol' Vol was snorting and stamping in his stall as if something had flown up his nose. His mother breathed through her mouth, straining for air as if the croup had recurred.

The body in the crate was the blackest man Arne had ever seen— hairless, rubbery skin that gleamed as if oiled. Skin and mostly bones, prominent beneath the skin. A naked body, complete even to the knobby glans of uncircumcised penis, to reflective toenails, lying on its side in the plentiful excelsior and a litter of what looked like small dried leaves. Cushioned like an egg in the nest. It was apparent to Arne that, whoever he was, he'd been dead for a very long time. But there was a vine twisted around the dead man's neck (not tightly enough to have choked the life out of him), and the astonishing thing was, the vine seemed almost fresh, recently cut—three or four tiny green leaves had begun to unfold as if responding to the nourishing light, the spring air let into the opened crate.

"What's
huldufólk?"
Arne asked his mother. "Close it!" she demanded, her face averted.

"It's just an old nigger," Arne said lamely, not knowing what to make of her distress; now that his heart wasn't racing and he'd seen all there was to see, he felt disappointed. He set the lid in place and picked up the hammer.

5

His mother said nothing on their return to the house. In the kitchen she put kindling into the stove and lighted the fire to heat coffee. Her hands were trembling and Arne could see the blue veins in her wrists and arms.

"Mother?"

She looked almost unwillingly at him.

"There was a vine around his neck. Did you see that?"

"I didn't have to see it," Birka said, "to know it was there."

"There were new leaves on the vine. How could that be?"

"I don't know. As long as the vine lives, we have nothing to be afraid of."

But she was afraid, and her fear made him uneasy. Arne took an oatmeal cookie from a crock and ate it, silently watching his mother rub the skin of her arms as if her circulation had stopped.

"What would the professor want with a dead nigger?"

"It isn't a nigger. The skin is black because of the vine. And Professor Ayres would not want the body if he knew—"

"Knew what?"

"That it isn't dead, can never be."

Arne felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffening. Then he laughed at this absurdity, spraying cookie crumbs on the table.

His mother turned and gripped him by the shoulders. Arne nearly jumped out of his chair. Her normally blue eyes looked colorless, as lightning is colorless in a seething sky.

"Arne—it is one of the unwashed children of Eve! How could we be so unfortunate—" Her voice rose.
"I don't know what to do!"
She let him go and gestured, wildly, toward the barn. "We should take it away, bury it where nobody will ever find it. Yes. The rowan wood can never rot, it'll be safe in the ground, of the earth again."

Arne's throat had dried out. He got up and put his arms around his mother, pressing his head against her belly. Trying to quiet her.

"We can't tell Enoch. He shouldn't know. We'll wait for a time when Enoch is away from the farm again. Soon, it must be soon—then we'll be shed of this curse."

"What curse?" Arne said, his skin prickly again. Her hands worried the top of his head, cold fingers stroked his ears. "We didn't do anything! Opened the damned crate, is all!"

"No, no . . . don't be upset. It's going to be all right! But I don't want that thing here another day. Even in the Black Sleep, it might still do us harm."

They heard harness bells; Big Enoch was home. After putting the mare in her stall in the barn and washing up at the pump, Enoch came in bare to the waist, drops of water beaded along the jawline. He sat down, pulled off his boots, smiled at a solemn Arne, then Birka, who placed a mug of coffee, an opened jar of peach pickles, and half a loaf of spice bread in front of him. She started for the cupboard to get the broom and sweep up the traces of mud that had come off his boots, but Enoch stopped her.

"Looks like you took sick again."

"No. But I need to go to bed now. Arne, you, too."

Arne yawned, not convincingly, and didn't look his father in the eye. "I mended the harness."

His father nodded, dunking a piece of the sweet bread in his coffee. "Nathaniel Ballard wanted to know if you'll play baseball with them Saturday."

"I reckon I will," Arne mumbled.

"They need a hard thrower like you. Birka, leave the sweeping-up to me." She smiled slightly—it was a rare man who would so much as touch a broom in the house—and bent over her husband for a kiss. Arne followed her from the kitchen. In the big room he climbed a ladder next to the hearth and looked down from his sleeping loft.

"Ma—”

"Shhh." She shook her head dispiritedly, went into the bedroom, and shut the door.

Arne pulled off his trousers, was reminded he hadn't visited the outhouse and used the chamberpot instead. Then he lay on his back looking at the stars through the small window of his loft. He couldn't close his eyes. After a while he went on his hands and knees to a leather-covered chest against one wall for a deerskin bag that contained everything lucky and protective he owned: the hind foot of a cross-eyed rabbit, a polished buckeye, dried four-leaf clovers pressed between pieces of vellum, a five-dollar gold piece. He took the talismans and his Old Testament back to bed with him but continued to lie there wide-eyed and weak in the hands, as weak as he'd felt while driving the nails of the crate lid back into their holes. Had he knocked the lid home solidly in his haste? He imagined it thrown easily aside by a tarry hand. He heard his father's tread on the floor below as he made his way from kitchen to bedroom. Arne almost called to him, wanting company, his father's arm around his shoulders. But his father would know the mood he was in meant something was wrong . . . he wouldn't leave until Arne had told him everything.

6

Arne tossed restlessly on the feather-stuffed mattress long after his father began to snore behind the bedroom door.

The black man was dead, he could believe what he'd seen with his own eyes—but what about the vine around his neck? How could the vine be fresh, even greening, after so long? Maybe river water had seeped into the crate and revived it. But the excelsior and the other leaves that had withered and dropped off the vine were perfectly dry; there was no stench of mildew in the crate.

The unwashed children of Eve.

What children did his mother mean?

Arne opened his Old Testament. His eyes were sharp enough to read by starlight, but he was already familiar with the creation story and the generations of Adam as told in Genesis. Adam "knew" Eve (screwed her, Arne thought, but the Bible couldn't say it like that because it was the Good Book) and she conceived and bore Cain. After Cain, there was Abel. Cain "slew" Abel because he was jealous of Abel's offering to the Lord, the firstlings of his flock. And the voice of Abel's blood (Arne couldn't figure that one out) cried to the Lord from the ground.
God said to Cain—When you till the ground it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
Arne shuddered. He knew all this, but it didn't explain the body in the crate, which couldn't be either Cain
or
Abel because they had died so long ago, in Bible times. Even before the Flood, he thought.

Who were the other children of Eve, born on the East of Eden?

Arne wasn't sure. There was Seth, then—the Bible said only that "the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years." Arne read slowly, unenlightened. No more names were provided in the text of Genesis—nor were the additional children condemned as "unwashed." But they must have been the children his mother had referred to. Did "unwashed" mean something really bad? Sleepy at last, he fell into a fitful dose.