Moonbane

Something caught my eye from the shallow ditch that bordered the road.

In the ditch was a pile of clothes similar to the shirt. They were worker’s garments, mostly, though there was a young woman’s pair of jeans and a tank top, along with a little girl’s pink dress. All shredded, with pieces missing.

Ten yards up the shallow ditch, the sun glared whitely, and when I reached the source of the glare, my mystery was solved.

I have already described the roughly conical pile of bones I found in my driveway. Here was a miniature pharaoh’s graveyard of them. I counted thirty, and a coldness went through me because I could no longer deny what they were. I found a stick and pushed at the nearest pyramid. It collapsed, bones falling aside to reveal a gleaming human skull beneath, mouth locked open in the final screaming grin we all wear beneath the flesh. There were enough bones, cleaned spotless of meat, to assemble an entire human skeleton.

I could imagine what happened. The truck must have been filled with migrant workers, illegal aliens, possibly, and perhaps it had sideswiped the station wagon the night of the meteor shower. A young mother and her daughter in the station wagon; they get out, the driver gets out, maybe the workers are still in the trailer because they were told to stay in there no matter what. They know what will happen if they are caught.

The meteors fall. The truck driver, probably, investigates, and one of the wolves comes at him. The woman and daughter begin to scream; by now, one of the illegals says the hell with this and opens the back of the truck. The woman and girl get in; maybe they get the door closed but it doesn’t make any difference because one way or another the wolves get in. Maybe it took hours.

Then…

I retched into the sand, dropping my stick into the ditch beside me. I had known all along what the heap of bones in my driveway had been—who they had been—but now, in this killing field, I was faced with it squarely.

I knew now what had happened to my dear Emily; if I had tumbled the pile of bones in our driveway I would no doubt have found her skull. And I had seen the ferocity of my transformed son when blood scented his nostrils.

I vomited the untasted remains of my breakfast, and, long after, I continued to vomit when there was nothing left in my stomach.

I moved away from that place. I covered a half-mile, and when I looked back, the truck, still a fallen dinosaur, was curling down the line of the curving road. I cursed its existence.

I walked on, the sun at mid-morning height now.

CHAPTER 11

The Dying Man

The first house I reached belonged to a man named Briggs. He was my closest neighbor, and though we were not friends he had never refused my company, nor I his, when we had met. His wife had died twenty years ago; he was a retired schoolteacher and he helped orient me when we had first moved in. It was he who had steered me to the right stores, told me who the “crooks” were (I remember he included my landlord in their number after he had wheedled the amount of rent I was paying out of me) and told me where the roads would wash out in spring when the rains came. Though he was a teacher he was not a bookish man, and our interests were incompatible enough that our acquaintance had never blossomed into friendship.

I wondered what had become of him.

I soon found out. His bones were near the porch, piled neatly in a front vegetable garden where he had grown radishes and cucumbers (this was one of the reasons I knew we could never be close: a man who plants radishes in the front of his house just doesn’t care much for the beauty in life). A brown felt hat he had nearly always worn was torn to bits nearby.

A mere thirty yards from Briggs’s home—an oddity in this part of the country since dwellings tended to value their spread—was a house belonging to one of the most interesting, and strangest, men I had ever met.

He was a hermit named Cave. That alone had intrigued me enough about him to want to know more.

The story was that Cave had been a painter of some merit in the 1930s, and that something had happened to him involving a woman, and that he had shut himself up in 1938, vowing to have nothing to do with humanity again. He never left his home; he brandished a weapon at anyone (including myself, the one time I had tried) who came nearer than the front gate. It was said he painted incessantly, screamed in the night, and that most of his paintings were the same portrait of his lost love, done again and again. His food and supplies were delivered once a week by the same clerk from the same grocery store; the bags were left on the porch, the bill always paid by check, left on the porch under a rock.

Briggs, in his gruff way, had been only too happy to clear up some of the romance for me. “It was just before I moved here, 1938,” he told me. “Cave was shacked up with some little piece, and his brother came to visit. The girl left with the brother. Period.”

But for me, Cave was still a romantic figure, a man who had been spurned by the world and so spurned it back. I began to imagine him in there with his paints and his canvases, composing the same portrait of his “little piece” over and over, as madness claimed his mind.

He was the perfect subject for poetry, of course. I had written about him, or rather my idealization of him, in a number of poems:

~ * ~

Man an island,

Soul lost in storm

Surrounded by great weight of land.

~ * ~

I had wanted badly to know Cave, to see his paintings, and here was his house, the gate unlatched, front door open.

I went in.

It was a house similar to Briggs’s, a farmhouse, with just enough room for everything essential and little room for more. I did not see Cave’s remains near the peeling porch of the house; I admit that I did not look very hard.

But I did find Cave’s trespasser-chasing shotgun, leaning just inside the door with an open box of shells next to it, and, as I looked through the house, I found what I fully expected to find, but not what I had wished. Cave was a filthy old recluse; the house was not the self-centered castle of a rejected artist, but the home of a man who had lost touch with civilization. In the kitchen, the sink was brown with stains. Roaches retreated from my steps, and the entire house exuded the odor of garbage and uncleaned toilet. One room was filled with empty cereal boxes stacked in tall, rickety piles. There was barely space to enter. I found no paintings anywhere; no hints in books, or dust-covered supplies, that he had ever been an artist.

There was no attic, but there was a storm cellar. Most of the houses in this area had well-built basements in deference to tornados. Take the toughest, strongest man in this part of the United States and mention the word tornado: fear will rise into his eyes. I once saw a town not twelve miles from my house taken off the map; two twisters, one of them by accounts a white tornado (this is no joke; a white tornado obtains its color from white dust) touched down a quarter mile from the outskirts, did their business, then lifted up a quarter mile outside what had been the town of Parker. Nothing was left standing but a single stone arch from the front entrance of what had been the elementary school. Automobiles had been wrapped like letter C’s around trees. One looked as though it had been put through a car compacter. Tin roofs had been peeled from housetops like banana skins and left in treetops. Telephone poles along the line of the town were bent at the same forty-five- degree angle to the ground. Tractors had been angrily bent and crushed; barns torn to shreds the way a child petulantly treats a paper toy that won’t do as it should. Parker had been dusted from the face of Earth.

It was from the cellar in Cave’s house that I heard him speak.

“Come down,” he growled as I stood in the dark doorway. I knew it was he; it was the same voice that had encouraged me, with more strength, and with the help of his shotgun, to “Get off my property.”

The cellar door was loose on its hinges; a damp moldy smell pushed up from below.

“Are you hurt?” I called.