The Savage(32)

Days of silence piled up after. Days of hunting with no planes in the skies above. Few vehicles trespassing from roads to town. Of visiting neighbors who’d gone into hiding. More and more there was nothing. Though the flies came. Nesting and rooting, creating hollows of space. Sounding like hands digging in buckets of hardened beans, lifting and dropping them.

Dorn kept the Widow’s bedroom door closed. Unable to remove and bury either, always telling himself, They’re resting. While their reek filled the home.

As he walked the woods after sitting in that room, the inhale of death furrowed his nose.

Memory of squeezing his father’s hand with no return of his father’s clamp. Only the crunch of mortis.

Some days the silence was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was just brainless moments without interaction.

But a month after the calm, he traveled through the wilderness to the steep overlook where below, years before, Horace and he had laid Gutt to rest. Taking the depression down to the bottom, he saw that the rock lay off to the side atop of the loose and piled soil. The earth had been disrupted. The deep hole dug but empty. Dorn couldn’t believe what he was seeing. And the sounds came as those of his father but from Dorn’s mouth instead. “Looks as though Gutt’s body has been dug up. His bones erected.”

Someone had trespassed. Dorn could only imagine as to who had done so.





NOW

Sweaty, Van Dorn limped behind the red and rusted International Harvester tractor that chugged and coughed, while muscling the hound, cradling him in his arms, the feeling of the dog’s eyes following his every step returning. Only this time, he felt as though they were whittling wormholes into his spine.

Knobbed tires trundled over the land, the engine popped. Bill had winched the swine’s hinds with a calcified log chain. Attached it to the hitch and dragged the weighted and hairy boar back to a shack built for the purpose of butchering.

Four cresol-covered planks of wall with a slanted tin roof sat surrounded by a graveyard of beat and wrecked automobiles. Chevy trucks. Ford Mustangs. Toyotas and Hondas. Hoods raised, engines removed. Transmissions dropped. Interiors rotted. Windshields split and webbed. Things that had not been here upon prior visits with his father. In the center of the rural salvage yard sat a stone home the color of a vanilla wafer. Its shingled roof faded and sunken in places. In others tar paper showed like a worn-out punching bag, its leather flaking and creased with rips.

Bill killed the tractor’s engine. Stepped down. Walked to the shack and slid open a door attached to a track. Romex wire rained from the rafters with pull strings and dusty bulbs. The foundation was particles of solid, with drainage holes cut that led out the rear. Muddied the earth with whatever slop or fluid was diverted from feral or farm-raised animals killed for sustenance. And the smell that wafted from the interior was demise.

Holding the hound, Dorn asked, “Where can I let him be?”

Bill studied Dorn, offering an eerie quiet, then pointed. “Over about that mess of hay.”

Stringy and matted, three females came as though sprouted from the earth. Each stood facing separate directions. They were scavenger-like and rough, their clothing was denim pants, work boots, and wifebeaters. There were no curls of hair or makeup. Nails painted by grime and dirt. One carried a butcher’s cleaver, the other a hatchet, and a third carried an axe. Farm-raised like the meat and vegetables they ate, they were Bill’s daughters. Martha was fifteen, Myra was sixteen, and Mary was seventeen. Each had hair the shade and texture of spent bearing grease. Their lids lay blackened as though they never slept.

Dorn laid the dog in the hay. The three daughters watched his movements, studying his footfalls. Forgetting how his father always told him to never turn his spine on no one, Dorn turned his back. Fear sketched the scene of an axe lifting, a hatchet chopping, and a cleaver cleaving.

Skin drew tight and erect as Dorn walked to the boar, helping Bill remove the chain as he motioned at Martha: “Get me my gambrel stick.”

Martha disappeared inside the shack, came back with a thick length of barked wood, little more than shoulder width in length, its ends pared to points and bloodstained. Handed it to her father, who worked the lumber into the rear tendons of the boar’s hinds.

“Get the kettle for the leaf lard,” Bill ordered Myra. He eyed Dorn. “Let’s drag ’em inside the shack. Hang ’em up, ready him for scraping the hair from his hide.”

Side by side, each gripped the gambrel stick. Hefted the swine over the ground. Walked backward into the shack. With the girls’ help they lifted the hog to the ceiling, where a large tarnished meat hook was lodged into a rafter. Mary had leaned her axe against a wall. Came with a boiling bucket of water in her gloved hands, began dumping steaming water over the boar’s hide. Loosening the hair for scraping. Bill turned to a diminutive table constructed from walnut, grabbed two knives. Handed one to Dorn and they began abrading the skin of its fibrous tresses.

“Seeing as your people found they end, I’m to believe you’s up this far north ’cause of what? Boredom?”

Dorn hesitated and said, “Partly … to find the Sheldon girl, but also to help those taken prisoner, to find others like myself.”

Bill held something in his tone, the change of sounds rolling from his mouth, through his lips, something akin to deceit. Working the cordite-colored blade back and forth over the rough hide, he questioned with “You’re speaking of those who’s encaged?”