Summer Sons(102)

“Don’t play games with him, Andrew,” Riley whispered so low as to be almost inaudible.

Before Andrew could respond, Sam called from the kitchen, “What are you doing here so early, cousin of mine?”

The fridge slammed. Riley glanced at Andrew and responded in a raised voice, “I finally got my hands on a copy of that monograph, but Andrew wasn’t home when I got back to show it to him and neither of y’all answered my texts. So, I figured he was probably out here with you.”

The kitchen light cast Sam in a dull yellow halo, beer in hand and barefoot, as he stopped on the threshold between rooms to regard the tail-tucked pair standing across from him. Andrew recalled their earlier fight in abrupt, scorching detail. He didn’t know if Sam had spoken with Riley or not in the interim—if he’d told him to stop looking, after Andrew hadn’t said a word.

“You should be glad I interrupted,” Riley grumbled.

“I got that ring straight from Jane Troth,” Andrew said.

“Table the spooky shit for a second.” Sam cut him off with deceptive calm. “I thought we talked, boys. I thought we each had a clear and cogent discussion about risk management. So how’d you go and end up being the person who found that book, Riley?”

“Sam, do we need to do this right now?” Riley said, agitated.

“Yeah, I think we do,” Sam replied.

Riley said, “I called around to a ton of used bookstores and libraries, nothing fancy, nothing dangerous. Calm your bullshit.” His hand flapped in the direction of the front door, where his bag lay abandoned. Rain wetted the porch up to the storm door, splattering on the glass. “But I did skim through it in the store, and—”

“Fuck you is it bullshit.” Sam pointed a finger at his cousin from around the neck of his bottle. “The last guy we know who read that book is dead, and we don’t know who the fuck killed him, so I’d appreciate some more caution on your part.”

The room tilted on its axis as Andrew put one careful foot behind him after another until he bumped against the couch, taking a seat. Sam and Riley continued their bitter stare-down without noticing his wilting to the side.

Riley argued back, “I’m the only one who could have found this book, not that either of you were trying. While I was tracking it down, you idiots were warming up for a really, very, extremely bad hookup because neither of you had a clue that ring is, like, cursed. Please don’t talk at me about dangerous when I’m taking care of the boring shit neither of you want to handle.”

Wrenching, eerie hissing continued to twist and knot in the seams of Andrew’s skull. The energy was stymied, but it hadn’t vanished from the room. He interrupted the cousins’ bickering to ask, “What’s in the book? I assume there’s something, if you drove all the way out here on the off chance I’d be around when you couldn’t get me on the phone.”

“So, I don’t think the dissertation or his research were the reason someone stole that book from his shit, and I also don’t think it’s why they killed him anymore,” Riley said, irritated expression melting into excitement. “Based on the monograph? I think maybe he was killed for the curse itself.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Andrew said.

“I’m not done with what we were talking about,” Sam snapped at them as he took a step toward the couch.

Riley reeled on him and said, “I swear to god, you are not my dad.” He stepped up to meet Sam in the center of the room and stole the beer from his hand, knocking a swig of it down. “I told you I’d keep a low profile, and I have been, but this shit is too important for me to sit it out. I’m going to class, I’m teaching, and I’m a straight-A student, so please let me do my thing. I haven’t asked you to quit trapping.”

Sam jammed his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. He asked, “What if I said I was going to?”

Riley shouted through his teeth, a gear-grinding sound, and stalked back across the room to grab the bag. He dug the book out and tossed it underhand to Andrew, who had melted into the embrace of the couch cushions under the weight of his migraine. He fumbled the catch, book thumping onto his sternum, anxious anticipation making him shake. The monograph fit neatly into one palm: taupe with frayed corners, the stitched binding loose from the board backing. A bright pink page-flag stuck out at a jaunty angle.

“How about we have that argument again after we get him fixed,” Riley said to Sam as Andrew opened the book to the marked page. “Because I’m not sure if you’re blind or something, but the ghost stuff, it’s getting worse. It’s like, hurting him.”

“I had to dig his ass out of a deer carcass he cuddled up with a couple weeks ago,” Sam said. “I think I’m aware of the situation.”

“What the fuck?” Riley asked, both existential and specific.

Andrew read: Elias Fulton is the center of the tale, though differing versions of the story disagree on the specific points of his culpability. There are, though, shared elements: in each version, Elias embraces the curse. In each version, the larger family appear to have agreed he was mad, and to have imprisoned him in their ancestral home. Madness is, after all, often displaced onto supernatural causes. Furthermore, the Fulton curse narratives as a whole deviate from traditional folkloric norms in their emphasis on heredity, bloodlines, and land ownership over and above individual fault or hubris. While the element of the supernatural bargain itself is a familiar motif, the nature of the deal shifts across the various tellings available to us. In one version, perhaps the most urbane, Elias bargains for his wife Tiffany Fulton’s life, and their descendants are cursed. In another, he bargains for power over her death, with a similar outcome. But in the last, he bargains instead for an affinity to death and to the dying, becoming a sort of sorcerer—and it is in this story that he preserves her life, not by using his gift on his wife, but by sharing it with her and inducting her into the heredity of the power. She is, through a witchcraft that is not recorded, made blood of his blood and inheritor of the curse. It is the transferral that either heals her illness or makes it moot, as a secondary effect.