Those Who Went Remain There Still (4 page)

I swear by all my upbringing, and by my own mother. I swear
by my own wife, mother of my own young, and I swear by every-
hing I ever learned about heaven:
I do not know what we ever did to rile her
.

***

All I could figure is there must’ve been a nest someplace, and we must have stumbled through it. But if that’s how it went, why did she try so hard to keep us? Why wouldn’t she let us move on? We would’ve been more than happy to leave her be, if we’d just known how. But she chased us, she harried us. During the day we shuffled ahead of her, chopping down a swath because that was our job and we were so close—if we didn’t finish then, someone else would have to come behind us, and I never left anything unfinished.

No one cleaned up after me and no one ever had to finish up any job of mine.

The rest of the men agreed. Most of them were Scots-Irish, and before they came to the colonies they spent their lives fighting hard for a place in Ulster, and they didn’t run from anything any sooner than I did.

We were scared and we were mad, but we were not getting run off, no matter what that crazy creature did. We hardly had three miles left. We could do it. We could finish it.

But she was making us think again about
how
we were going to do it.

One night, she came down hard—right up close to the fire. That’s how we all got our first almost-good look at her, and saw her shape. The details were fuzzy, but that’s how it is when you’re in danger. Your body moves before your eyes have time to tell you what the trouble’s about.

It started the same as always. She waited until it was getting late enough that half of us had nodded off, and the watch-keeping half was tired from staring. It hurts your eyes, after awhile—peering into blackness that doesn’t move and doesn’t brighten. It hurts them just as bad as if you stared into the flames for hours.

And then, the fellows who were awake said it got real quiet, like when there’s a cat or a wolf. They turned their faces to the treetops above us, and they waited to hear those first cracks of something heavy settling down, and pushing up, and taking wing.

They didn’t have long to wait. She was coming, from not too
far away.

Most of us woke up when the first loud snap happened. Me and these fellows had all been logging before, and when the big branches fall but you’re underneath them, and there’s no time to move—they call those limbs the widowmakers. So you hear that crack, loud as half a tree coming down, and a lot of these men knew to jump right up. They were ready to move before they were even awake.

We all stood there, running our hands along our axe-handles and panting, like sleeping had been real hard work and we’d just stopped it long enough to see what was going on.

Nothing happened, not for a few minutes. Wherever she was, she kept bouncing around up high, tree to tree, breaking branches and flapping those huge, horrible wings. Sometimes she’d make that cry, too—half honk, half scream. It wasn’t a warning. It was a threat.

***

But none of her threats made sense. They never did. If she wanted us to leave, she sure wasn’t making it easy for us. If she wanted us to leave her alone, she needed to quit attacking us.

It must’ve been something else, then, more like a war whoop. She didn’t want to chase us off, she wanted to kill us all.

Little Heaster told me he thought maybe she’s hungry, and that’s all it is. I didn’t know if that should make us feel better or worse about it.

***

That cry came up closer on us, and real fast, real sudden. She’d been out a ways, and then she was right on top of us. She moved over us like a shot. She bounded around between the branches, dipping down low—and when she swung close, that scream was enough to break your ears.

When she landed, near above us but high, a massive spray of leaves doused us all. And we shuddered and shook them off, and we realized that it wasn’t leaves alone that hit us—the damn thing
was pissing on us, too. Her piss was milky and it smelled rancid.
he must have a bladder like a salt pork barrel, because she drenched a couple of the fellows in such a way that they were soaked just about to the bone.

There was a great outcry from our camp, and a couple of men fired shots into the air, trying to score a hit right up her underside to pay her back.

Something must’ve hit, because she squawked and beat her big old wings so hard it felt like a storm; but she did herself wrong when she thrashed around so hard. The force of her feathers fanned our fire like crazy, scattering a few small logs and bright sparked shards of kindling. We ran around kicking at them with our boots, knocking them back into the cleared spot for the dirt. It wouldn’t do anyone any good for us to burn the whole forest down.

***

Mind you, I thought about letting the bright sticks smolder—
just for a minute there. I don’t mean to tell you we were getting desperate, but we were thinking about all our options. She took us, one after the other like she was plucking eggs out from under a hen. She swooped up to the trees with the bodies of my men, and she tore them up so we were splashed in their blood, and her piss, and the spittle she flung while she brought her face through their ribs and into their hearts.

And I didn’t mean it, not really, but I mumbled and maybe Little Heaster heard me. I said, “We ought to let it catch, and clear the trees the faster way. Let her hide from us then.”

Little Heaster gave me a look and I shook my head. “No. I’m just talking to hear myself. Help me catch these things and push them back. We don’t really want to burn Kentucky down. We’re not finished cutting through it yet.”

The boy nodded and cringed when the shrieking squawk pierced the campsite again, but he charged after the nearest rolling log of fire and ash, and with the back of his axe’s head he tapped it back over to the fire pit. The log rolled as clean as a croquet ball and stopped, and I told him it was a good job.

He’s a good lad, but I wondered if I ought to have brought him. He was awful young for work like that; and yes he was bigger than the rest of us, and yes he had arms that could crush a bull’s ribs, but he was still just a boy. He’d been keeping close to me since things got strange, and I hadn’t said a thing about it.

All of them were my responsibility, and I meant to keep them all safe if I could. But I especially felt the need to look out for that one, who was the same age as one of mine back home.

***

While her wings beat she was cawing, and kicking, and bark shreddings were raining down with leaves but at least her bladder was empty and those of us who dodged fast enough the first time were staying dry.

And after a few seconds she was gagging. It sounded exactly like a cat my wife kept, a big orange Tom who’s a better mouser than any trap I ever heard of. But that noise, it sounded like a bird the size of a bear trying to hock up a cat’s ball of fur. We all cringed and we wanted to run off but there was nothing we could do except hang close at the fire’s edge and kick back all the little coals that were scattering, rolling, falling away from the pit with the force of the wind she gusted up with her wings.

And then, dear God above, she coughed a wet, jumbled-up pile of bones and gristle and hair right down into the middle of us.

It plopped down on the edge of the fire, and where it landed the flames licked it and it sizzled.

Maybe the thing above us was resting. Maybe it tired her out to throw up something so huge, and it
was
huge—roughly the size and shape of what’s left over when you gut a big deer. Anyway, she quit her flapping and quit her shrieking, but she didn’t leave. She was still hanging up there, hulking her big, ugly body on whatever branch was strong enough to hold her.

It was like she was waiting for us to investigate. She wanted us to take a look at it. She wanted us to see what she’d done.

And it was right there, lying by the fire so we could see it just fine.

I pointed my finger around at my men all slow-like, so they knew I was pointing at all of them. And I said, “Everyone hold your axes or your guns right and ready. And keep looking up, I don’t care what she throws up or pisses down. You watch for her.”

And I crept between them, my own axe in my hand, but I held it down and low. When I got to the mess on the ground, I used the axe head to nudge it out of the ashes a little bit, because it was getting black and dampening the flames.

Mostly the steel head pushed at the mass and dented it, like pushing a spoon against thick pudding, or gravy that’s gone too cold to pour. But then I heard a little knock—a sharp sound that told me this wasn’t all hair and wet. That’s when the skull toppled out, round and eaten clean until it was perfectly white.

I looked closer.

And I saw cloth with stitching on it still, even where the creature’s stomach juice had eaten it into rags. At the top of the pile, tied and tangled into slimy brown knots, were a pair of leather
bootlaces.

Here and there ribs poked up through the mess, and here and there were little pebble-like bones from toes or fingers; and I could make out a handful of teeth. I tapped them with the edge of my axe, and they crumbled away from the jawbone that held them.

I was so mad I could hardly see straight. I could hardly hold my axe without shaking the head right off the handle.

But I didn’t have time to stay mad. I think she was watching me sort through that clump of leftovers she’d spit down into our camp. I think she was waiting for me to figure out how she’d savored what she wanted and threw out the rest, just like an owl does when it’s finished with a meal.

Again I remembered making fun of someone for saying it was
an owl.

And now I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been wrong to laugh so fast.

She wasn’t any owl like anything I’d ever shot, seen, or heard about, but maybe that was as close as we were going to guess it
without bringing her down and taking her apart for ourselves.

But once I stood up straight, wondering what I was going to do with what was left of whoever it was she’d coughed up, she gave a big lunge—we heard it, the bough she was perched on snapped and broke, and fell—and she lifted herself up into the night.

V

The Trip and the Task

Titus and I left first thing, next morning. My wife didn’t like it any, but she understood and I kissed her good-bye with a promise I’d be home in a few weeks. That was all she asked, really. She wanted me to be home before the next baby came.

In some respects, it was much easier going from east to west. That’s the way the world expects you to go—following gold, or land, or whatever other opportunity you see fit to chase. But getting back to Kentucky from Iowa was a hop, skip, and jump affair of trains, carts, and borrowed horses. It felt like swimming upstream.

On the way back, by way of passing time and trading gossip, Titus told me everything he knew about what was weird and wrong about Heaster Junior’s will.

***

Heaster’s daddy, a man of the same name, had owned a couple hundred acres there in that county. He’d bought some of it, and some of it had been offered to him as a commission after the American Revolution. Rumor had it, he’d worked with Daniel Boone on the Wilderness Road, cutting through Virginia up to the big brine lakes in Kentucky, around where I grew up.

***

I didn’t know if that was true or not, though. Everybody and his brother in Kentucky makes some claim on Boone. Everybody knows someone who knew him, or worked for him, or put him up for the night. Everybody claims they’re kin to him, somehow down the line. And as I heard it, Daniel was one of a dozen kids or so—and he had ten or twelve of his own. So I’m not saying everyone’s lying, I’m just saying that lots of people can say things that might be hard to prove.

But as I know it, Boone got around all over the Commonwealth. He liked to cut his name into trees and rocks when he went surveying for the government, and it was his job to explore the territory and clean it up for living on. So it’s possible Heaster Senior worked for him at some point.

I’m not saying it’s a fact.

But one way or another, Heaster Senior ended up with a whole passel of property, and all it took was a few generations to fill it up with the squabbling families that produced me and Titus.

And when the old man died, his holdings went to Heaster Junior.

***

Heaster Junior was 99 years old when he finally passed, or that’s how Titus counted it. It’s a wonder we tend to be such a long-lived bunch, given how little we ever had to eat and how little medicine we ever got. When I think about my own children now, living in good farm country, with good farm food and even a doctor when they need one…I think that maybe, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, they’ll live to see a century themselves without any trouble.

But those men, the Heasters (as folks used to call them collectively, when they were both alive), they were tougher than leather.

Now they’re both gone. It’s like the end of a chapter in a history book.

Don’t misunderstand me. It didn’t break my heart that they weren’t around anymore. I never knew Heaster Senior; he died before I was born. But Junior? Junior was a mean old devil.

Deep down I know that once, Heaster Junior must’ve been a young man. Once, he must’ve been a little boy, and maybe he laughed or giggled at his momma or his sisters. Maybe once he picked a flower or roughhoused with a puppy, and maybe once he’d been a handsome young man.

But as long as I knew him, he was ancient and hateful. If there was any good reason for how mean he was, I never heard it.

Some people said it was because he never had any sons, just those four girls. Some people said he’d got his heart broke by a woman. My mother said his ornery spirit was due to the way he’d turned away from God, and he was getting the happiness he deserved; but my mother would say that about anyone she didn’t like.

Maybe there wasn’t any good reason.

Anyhow, he beat his first, second, and third wives—and he would’ve beat the fourth if he hadn’t been so old and frail by the time he married her. He hit his girls to the point of crippling the oldest one, and she walked with a cane the rest of her life. He’d ride a horse to death just because he felt like it. He shot two of his sons-in-law, but he only killed the one and the justice of the peace agreed it must’ve been self defense. Of course, that justice would’ve agreed the moon was made of cornmeal with Heaster standing over him with that rifle.