bare black twigs and branches, in the chill gloom that at this time of year persisted in the deeper woods even in day. Nearing my trap, I sensed some queer vibration, as if a rabbit struggled, and with it, that shift and imbalance in the air. I moved forward in a crouch, then on hands and knees.
In a hickory hollow where low sunlight fired the shagbark, a rough shape mantled my trap like a huge owl, hunched motionless, transfixed in its deep listening. Slowly, then, a tattered head turned in my direction, crest burning in cold rays of autumn light. When the thing rose soundlessly as smoke, clutching my rabbit, I retreated in horror, fell backwards over a log-
Though I had no idea what I would do next, I was desperate to get there first. Rather than leave the cover of the woods, the creature was bound to circle the long way around and approach its den through the west wall of the ruin, which was half-fallen and wide open to the weather. Panting from the run, I crept in through shaggy boxwood to the east wall window. Peering and listening, sick with fright-what did I hope to do without a weapon?-I was on the point of flight when the bulky silhouette loomed up in the jagged opening in the west wall, in failing light. Passing through without sound, it sank into the blackness. The frozen rabbit thumped onto a board. A tinder scratched, a small blaze flickered, jumped to life, casting nervous shadows. The fire glinted in the thing’s red eye, lit matted arms and chest and neck and the rough head of stubbled feathers. At the sound of my expelled breath, it rose like a great owl on man’s legs and vanished through the wall.
Scrambling backwards, slashed by the hard briar, I screamed to fright the creature that even now was circling the outside of the house, rushing through the shadows of dusk to strike me down. Making its kill, it would hunch upon my body as it had my rabbit, shifting bloody talons, the wintry moonrise glinting on its beak.
When I burst in, Papa jumped up, his ring eye crimson. Gold-red locks matted with sweat, his head loomed huge and wild. “Curse you, boy, don’t bang the hinges off my door!” Confused by grog, he would not sit down again to his thin gruel and stale biscuit but swayed beside the table, coughing thickly in the fumes from the oil lamp. He lost his balance, staggered again, bellowed, “What ails you, boy?” into my face. By the stove, Mama made no move to come forward. In her cupboard, Ninny Minnie whined.
Gruff and sullen, I told Papa that I needed the rifle. He stamped the earth floor like a bee-stung horse. “Banging in here demanding my damn rifle? Show some respect!”
“Your father is upset, Edgar. He’s been dismissed from Graniteville again.”
Not now, Mama, not now! How I hated the excitement in her face. Since leaving home, I had never been sure which parent I resented more, the red-faced violent male or this pale vindictive female who teased her spouse as a child picks at a scab, until it bleeds. But this day, my father was sick with failure, rotten with bad moonshine, and merely groaned at his wife’s queer satisfaction in their straits. He sat down hard and blinked and squinched his nose, vented a hacking cough; he drew his knife from his scuffed boot and hacked at the stale bread, gave that up, too. “We ate better on the battlefield.” Elijah Watson glowered at his bowl, as if in the bottom of this cracked clay vessel of insipid soup he might descry every last sad gobbet of a hopeless life.
“Papa? Please. I need it.”
Lige Watson heaved around, brow furrowed. “What’s got you so scared, boy? You never been the scairdy kind.”
Indifferent to my fear as well as his fatherly show of concern, Mama got back to business. “Who is to provide for us this time, Mr. Watson? Should this boy come home as head of his father’s household?”
“He don’t even live in his father’s household, last I heard.” Papa scowled at the bitter memory of my assault. “I asked a question, boy.”
I blurted out what I had seen, a strange man-thing, inhabiting Deepwood. A trap-robber. Mama told me I’d imagined things, but the man said, “Godamighty.” He kicked his chair back, lurching to his feet. His illegal musket was dragged down from the beams as its oily sacking fell to the earth floor; he slammed out of the house. The big roan, left saddled, snorted as it wheeled, and the carom of its hooves on frozen clay diminished in the darkness.
“Deepwood?” she inquired, turning from the door. “Is that where-”
“No,” I said. “He’ll go first to Major Coulter.”
“Of course. Where else?” With Papa gone, her eyes had softened and she tried to smile. “How are you, Edgar? How are you getting on?”
Still standing, I was wolfing Papa’s soup. She told me to sit down while I was eating. I ignored this. A moment later, she chastised me for wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I belched loudly just to see her shudder. Because she did not really care, I did not answer when she asked again how I was faring at Clouds Creek. She feared me a little now, I saw, which gave me no satisfaction, only made me feel more lonesome than before.
Mama and Minnie and Aunt Cindy were ready to leave for Florida at the first opportunity. Had I changed my mind? When I said I had not, and wished them well, she took my hands across the table and held my gaze long enough to make quite certain that her son had been full witness to a mother’s sorrow. I withdrew my hands. She saw the coldness in my face and straightened up, blew her nose smartly. “Never mind,” she said. “We’ll do just fine.”
Toward midnight, Papa came home long enough to wrap his musket in the sacking and return it to the rafters. He appeared clumsy and shaken, his red brow glistening with sickly sweat, red ring-eye pulsing. At the door, he turned, pointing a finger at Mama’s face. “I was home all evening. I slept here. Don’t forget that.” He lurched into the night and rode away.
THE OWL-MAN
Retrieving the musket, I set off at daylight with the vague idea of driving the Owl-Man off what was left of my precious rabbit. But turning into Deepwood’s narrow lane, I was racked by dread of what might have taken place the night before and what I might stumble into.
At the edge of the greening carriage circle, a trail of dark stains led to an old boxwood where something had lain bleeding. Later it had crawled toward the ruin, moving along a shaded wall under an old lilac choked by vines. From the dung and hoof prints, I pieced the rest together. Blowing horses, torches, and wild shots had flushed the surrounded quarry from the ruin. In the dark, they could not track the blood, having rushed here without dogs. When their quarry crawled into the dense boxwood, they had lost him. They had not persisted, being superstitious and afraid.
The blood trail led around the corner toward the hole in the fallen wall. Creeping forward, picking my way through the winter briars, I struggled to keep the musket barrel disentangled.
The wounded creature was alive inside its hole, that much I knew. I checked my load, I cleared my throat, I took a mighty breath. “Come out,” I croaked. From behind the wall came the slight scrape of something shifting, followed by a dry ratcheting cough like a raccoon. I forced myself to lean and peer inside.
On a charred board by the dead fire lay my hoarfrost rabbit, stiff as furred wood. Behind it, taking shape in the cold shadows, stretched a man’s ragged legs and broken boots. The crusted head, tufts twisted askew, and a swollen black hand more like a talon clutched the heavy bloodstain on the stomach, and there was a sinuous dark stain where blood had probed and found a passage back into burned earth. A road walker, I thought-either that or the skin between patches of crust was black with firesmoke and filth. Black or white, the Owl-Man was surely on the point of death. A broken voice grated something like, “The Coward… Watson.”
The Owl-Man watched me through raw slits in a mask. A rude scar showed where the head had been half- scalped, then sealed with boiling tar, then crowned with feathers. The mask had no expression. Nostrils and lips scarcely emerged from the leprous stubble. Then the mouth hole opened slowly, stretching dry strings of slime between dry broken teeth. A choked gasp: “Finish it.”
The creature’s agony was horrifying, it was unbearable-
