Unseaming (13 page)

My father taught at a high school in Sullivan County while my mother quietly seethed at home, a college educated woman bound to cooking, cleaning, and chasing after an awkward, oversensitive and insolent brat. My dad would build up ferocious squalls of temper in the gray-bricked classrooms and release them at home in full glory once they were seeded by my mom’s resentful needling. Was it any wonder I spent so much of my childhood alone in the wood,s exploring the endless web of well-worn footpaths, a mite scaling the surface of our country’s oldest mountains?

Nothing had delighted me more than landing that art scholarship at UNC in Asheville. That, folks, was my great escape. And a setup for complete failure. I loved dabbling in art, but not living it under a professor’s dictatorship. Even the grace of the brush between the fingers, the high-inducing turpentine stench, changed into something sickening. After my terrible grades wrecked my scholarship, I managed to stick around a semester and a half, reinvented as an English major supported by a student loan. If anything, I performed even worse, and quit before midterms with most of my spring loan still in the bank—and that became the funding for my trek out of civilization.

“You’re starting out pretty late for a thru-hiker,” Mr. Crabbe said. “By the time you hit Massachusetts, you’ll be knee-deep in snow, boy.”

I told him that a good friend from my recently left-behind school and his lovely wife awaited me in Pennsylvania—though this was half-truth. I’d winter with them, I said, then finish the journey once the world thawed. In fact, I planned to look up my friends, but had no idea if they’d take me in, or what I’d do after that. I was lost.

The Crabbes listened to my tale of loserdom with the rapt attention due a death-defying war story. Whenever I stole glances at the doorway I still saw the ethereal webbing.

“But you seem like such a smart boy,” Gertrude said, pursing her lips. “Why’re you even struggling in school?”

I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth next.

“I kept having nightmares after I left home. Just about every night. I couldn’t remember what happened in them, but I know they were bad because of the way I kept waking up. My heart would be pounding. Sometimes I’d scream. I burned through four roommates my freshman year. I started to…well, I dabbled in substances, to try to get it under control. But that wiped out the focus I had left.”

“That’s a shame,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked. “A good woman would’ve taken care of that.”

“Nightmares,” Mr. Crabbe said dreamily. Unbidden, I saw the ghost-boy’s face scream.

There had been a woman, named Yolanda, whom I’d lived with up to and after my academic implosion. She was a candle-burning new-agey type who loved weed, and she started calling me Panther, like my grandmother had, though I couldn’t remember telling her about that, and finally I asked her to stop. Our cohabitation was the last thing to go sour before I took to the trail, the thing that made me decide I had to leave for the forest. I wanted to return to my roots, but not, absolutely not, to go home.

I was trying to explain this, without indulging in too much uncomfortable detail, when Herman Crabbe floored me.

“You got some Melungeon in you, I think,” he said.

It took long seconds for my startled brain to even form a response. “Wow, that’s…I don’t think anyone’s ever…I’ve had people ask me if I’m Turkish. Or Arab. Or Greek. Or Indian. Even mulatto. No one gets it on sight.”

Mr. Crabbe snickered. “You ain’t no Arab.”

“My grandmother,” I said. “She was full Melungeon, if you can really properly apply such a term.” Both of them nodded as if I was confirming facts they already well knew.

“Sure is a shame about that boy,” Mrs. Crabbe said, with no transition, as if it were the topic we’d been addressing all along. “I hope they at least find his body before the animals get it.”

I nearly fell right out of rickety chair.

Herman sighed and shook his head as he straightened the assortments of candy, crackers and trail mix next to the cash register. “Probably too late.”

When I recovered my balance, I asked, “What boy?”

Herman stood and licked his crooked teeth. The couple exchanged glances. Gertrude asked her husband, “You bring the paper?”

“Yep, sure did.” The old man ducked behind the counter and started rummaging. “Here somewhere.”

“Sad, very sad,” Mrs. Crabbe tsked, picking up her duster again. “A city boy from east of here, I think. The paper might’ve even had his name. Fell off the top of Angel’s Leap, about fifteen miles north of here. Surely you’ve heard of Angel’s Leap?”

When I said I hadn’t, she was all too ready to explain it to me. Its real name was McGlothlin’s Knob—that, I’d heard of—but everyone referred to it as Angel’s Leap: a craggy outcrop of rock with a popular but strenuous path winding to its peak and a 100-foot fall off one side waiting for the careless, of which there were no shortage. It was the biggest attraction on this part of the AT, in part because of its evil reputation. Bad things happened in the woods beneath its shadow, Mrs. Crabbe told me.

Her husband reappeared, spread newspaper pages on the counter and crooked a finger to invite me closer. Gertrude stayed at my side, filling me in on the lore of Angel’s Leap as Herman guided my attention to a block of type.

I spotted a name, Thomas “Tommy” Wayne Saunders, 9, of Hillcrest.

Seven years ago, Mrs. Crabbe told me, a couple from Montana had been found dead inside their tents, their throats cut. Five years ago, a boy who wandered away from his family’s campsite escaped with his life, barely, from a man wearing a white mask. A year later, baffled police made a public appeal for help catching the suspect, and revealed the boy had been molested before he got loose. Two years ago, a missing college student turned up dead. An anonymous source quoted in the paper said his body was naked and impaled on a crudely carved pole.

Gertrude counted off the horrors on her bony fingers as I tried to read. “They’ve never caught whoever did these things, whoever did any of it,” she said.

The boy had vanished two nights before. His parents told the rescue workers they last saw him standing at the wooden railing at the top of McGlothlin’s Knob. No one saw him climb over or fall. A team of two dozen searchers still hadn’t found him.

“Those parents should never have taken him up there,” Gertrude said. “They should know better. It’s a bad place.”

“I keep telling you, woman, it ain’t the place that’s evil.” Herman had kept his hand on the page to hold it flat. Now he moved his fingers, uncovering the black and white school photo above the story’s headline.

I had guessed what I was going to see. But it still chilled me to the marrow to see his face smiling up at me. His unmistakable face.

I fought to keep calm but didn’t quite make it. “That poor kid,” I said. “I bet his parents are devastated.”

I became acutely aware of how close their faces were to mine, how they’d boxed me in on either side. They couldn’t have missed the way my eyes widened, the goose bumps that stood the hair on my arms on end.

There are some things I just never wanted to believe. But I’m not stupid. They knew about the boy. They knew I’d seen him, seen his ghost. I didn’t understand how they’d read my mind, but I was sure they had.

Abrupt as a warning, I noticed empty eye sockets staring at me from the shelf behind and below the counter. An astonishing number of deer skulls, something like forty, sans their antlers, sat in regimented stacks down there. Quite a few of the eye sockets were occupied with dusty cobwebs, like leprous cotton.

How long had I been talking with them? I had to get out. But an instinct I couldn’t explain told me that a hasty exit would be a bad move, a very dangerous move.

“You know,” I said, “I think I do need some more water. And some dried fruit would be good. Do you have anything freeze dried?”

The old man gathered my order while his wife went back to dusting.

As Mr. Crabbe manned the cash register I noticed an acrid, unwashed smell that undermined the comforting scent of old wood. It originated from
him
. I hadn’t noticed it before.

One last surprise lay in store, when the old man handed me the bag. Two of the fingers on his right hand were malformed. They were oddly bent, insect-like—plastic substitutions for a missing pinky and ring finger. Skin had been grafted over these prosthetics.

He grinned when he noticed the grimace I failed to suppress, and waggled his grotesque appendages in front of my nose. “That’s what happens,” he said, “when you don’t put food on the table quick enough for the missus.”

Gertrude Crabbe cackled hard enough to trigger a coughing fit. While she was recovering, I quickly thanked them both and left, suppressing another cringe as I passed through the ethereal webbing across the door.

I set off at a brisk pace, just shy of a trot, my mind and stomach churning all the way down. The sun had lowered considerably, its light sparkling faintly through the trees.

When I reached the main trail I opened the box containing the notebook for hikers’ messages. A ratty, spiral-bound pad lay inside, nearly filled with pen scrawls. Nothing that I skimmed help to enlighten me, though the final message read: “The Crabbes are creepy.”

Beneath that, I wrote “Amen!” and signed my trail name, a concession to my long-gone grandma: Panther.

* * *

Two hours later, with the sun banished beneath the mountains, my reason overcame the urge to put as much distance as I could between myself and the Crabbes, I sought a place to camp for the night. I came upon a wooden shelter that had once been used as a smokehouse. Inside, the crusty smell of salt mingled with a fruity hint of tobacco.

I should have been laying out my sleeping bag, donning an extra shirt and calculating how much of my crackers and jerky and dried fruit I could afford to eat that night. Instead I sat on the bench inside the shelter, my pack on the floor beside me, opening and closing my Buck knife, listening to my own heartbeat, thinking.

Crickets and peepers provided an eerie soundtrack to the film spliced together in my head. The ghost-boy. The webbing. Herman licking his teeth. Then I broke the spell by swearing. In my preoccupation I had managed to slice the pad of my thumb.

I held my hand up to the light of dusk drifting through the doorway and watched my blood form a bead. It threatened to drip.

That happened. It all happened.

A memory welled in that drop as it fell. A small boy exploring the collapsed shell of a mountain cabin, feet crunching on rotten boards. A noise rising in my ears like the plaintive dial tone after a hangup. Darkness congealed into a face. The freezing fire of a ghost’s touch.

I remembered: my tiny foot settling on a board that snapped even beneath the slender weight of a five-year-old. The sudden noise froze my heart. Inside the cabin, that hollow moss-caked husk that squatted in the woods above the ancient cottage of my mother’s mother.

Even in my childhood my grandma’s house creaked with disrepair, central crumbling landmark on the farm gone to seed since my grandfather died, years before I was born. Her house fascinated me with its unending supply of nooks and crannies, with its leaning outhouse, with its chickens behind frayed wire, with its covered well.

But nothing fascinated me more than that dark relic in the woods, its shadow always drawing my eye from beneath the elm trees whenever I slipped out the back door to play.

Grandma was a tiny woman, her waves of grey and black hair always tied back in a frayed ponytail, face chestnut brown with wrinkled webs around her eyes and mouth, eyes a startling blue beneath thick black eyebrows. She frightened me; I didn’t like to be alone with her, though she was always kind. There was a tension between her and my mother, who took after her late, lighter-skinned, taller husband; a cold barrier that I sensed in some instinctual way but did not catalogue consciously until I was much older and noticed how mom fell quiet on the rare occasions someone spoke of
her
mother. Not so dearly departed, I could see. I came to believe it was all about skin color.

But, when grandma was alive, she had insisted on visits, insisted on every opportunity to see her grandson, and my parents had dutifully obeyed, making the long trek on those horrible rutted roads in the rusted VW Beetle that was all they could afford when they were young.

I asked Grandma many times about the caved-in cabin in her woods, and when she answered it was always the same. “Leave it alone, little panther.”

I never asked her permission, but decided I would see for myself all the same. Toward the end of one week-long stay I snuck away from my cot in the middle of the night. I had no flashlight, but the moon was bright enough to let me find a way in.