A Mountain Walked, page 18
For some time now I’d had the impression that my short story was taking over its own writing; now we seemed to be building to a climax I hadn’t foreseen. I had to be direct. “Your husband was buried, wasn’t he?” I asked. “Didn’t he want to be cremated?”
She seemed to take an age to sit up; her eyes were on me all the while. “How did you know that?” she demanded softly. “You gave yourself away there, didn’t you? You are one of his! I knew it before you got to the door! Yes, he’s buried, where you all should be. Go on, go up and be with him, I’m sure he’d like you to be. He must be able to feel them coming by now—I hope he can. Yes, he was always on about his Eihort, but he doesn’t like it when they come for him. You go and look after him, you—”
I didn’t know what she might be capable of; I retreated hastily, seeing her watching in the mirror and sneering when she caught my eye. Somehow I dislodged a heap of magazines and buried the cat, which fought its way out and tangled my feet in its chain. “Don’t you touch my cat!” she screamed. “She’s worth a million of you! What is it, darling, come to mummy—” and I escaped, running down the hall, an inflamed intestine, and through the grass, careless of what I might tread in unseen.
Suddenly I was on solid pavement. Down the street an ice-cream van was playing “Greensleeves.” This time the intrusion of mundanity didn’t seem so tasteless. I walked home.
By the time I reached the typewriter I’d glimpsed the paradox. Even the supernatural-story writer who believes what he writes (and I’m not saying I don’t) isn’t prepared for an actual confrontation. Quite the reverse, for every time he fabricates the supernatural in a story (unless based on experience) he clinches his skepticism; he knows such things can’t be, because he wrote them. Thus for him a confrontation would be doubly upsetting. It would at least force him to re-think all his works. Is this desirable? From the self-completion angle I suppose it is. At any rate, I’m going. “Go up and be with him” she said—it must be the cemetery on Mercy Hill.
Tomorrow.
EU
(Undated, unaddressed)
I don’t know what
(Foregoing deleted, does not appear on carbon; page apparently withdrawn, carbon attached, reinserted into typewriter) Nonsense. Of course I can write about it. The very fact that I can write proves that I’m still functioning.
I took the bus up Mercy Hill at the height of the day. Few things moved; flies and pedestrians crawled, and the workmen climbed sluggishly on the skeletal school. At the intersection with Dee Terrace I saw the house; it seemed swallowed up by grass, forever isolated from its surroundings.
I want to get this over. The caretaker directed me down an avenue, and when I reached— No. Description of graveyard. Why write as if this were my last page? Willows, their branches glowing stippled curves, were spaced carefully toward the Hill out of which the cemetery was carved; in the Hill itself were catacombs, black behind ivy or railings, and above stood the hospital, a grey reminder of hope or despair. What awful irony juxtaposed hospital and graveyard? The avenues were guarded by broken-nosed angels yearning heavenward; one showed a leprous patch where her left eye and cheek had sloughed away. Urns stood here and there like empty glasses at a sick-bed, and a young woman was kneeling with a wreath at a shining memorial; I wonder how long before she shakes him off? And then, toward the catacombs, I saw the new headstone and its bed of pebbles. They gleamed beneath the high sun. I read Franklyn’s name and the framing dates, and waited.
It eventually occurred to me that I didn’t quite know what I was waiting for; not in that sunlight. Yet the air had hushed. I paced around the grave, and the pebbles shifted. My shadow had moved them. I’m still capable of an anticlimax! My God. I thought: Franklyn is alive down there—or perhaps no longer. Then I saw a possibility. I looked back down the perspective. The young mourner was passing through the gates. I lay down on the grass and put my ear to the pebbles. They ground together, then there was nothing. I felt vilely uncomfortable. Suddenly I realized that I was visible all the way down the avenue to the gates. I went hot all over and scrambled to my feet.
And on the way up I heard something. Something. If only I knew. It’d be better if I had something to confront, anything but this uncertainty which sucks the confidence from me. It could have been the foreman at that school calling over the noise of riveting. Or it could—yes, must write—it could have been someone imprisoned, paralyzed, summoning a last muscular spasm, screaming thickly for help and beating his fists in the dark as he was dragged downward, downward.…
I couldn’t run; it was too hot. I walked. When I reached the school the girders were rippling in the heat-haze as if they were alive. I wish I hadn’t seen that. No longer could I trust the surface of the world. It was as though it had been instantaneously revealed to me that there were countless forces awake in everything, invisible, things lurking in daylight, shifting, planning— What had they built into the school? What would stalk unseen among the children?
I walked. Of course I was visualizing too much, but I could imagine, I could feel the pavement thin as ice, ready to engulf me in a world where life crawled. I sat in the parks. It was no good; I didn’t know what watched from the trees; I didn’t know how many of the passers-by might be masked, agents not of this world, preparing the way for—what? Who had Franklyn left behind? The peril of the writer: he can’t stop thinking. He may survive by writing, but he doesn’t really survive. Why am I no— mustn’t give in—I wandered until dark, found a café, I don’t remember. I was in a deserted street of shops with one red window lit above a darkened store. I don’t know why, it seemed evil. Franklyn’s hall, I suppose.
So I came back and typed this. The street is empty; only the shadow of the streetlamp seems to move. The window opposite is dark. What may be there, waiting?
I can’t turn round. I stare at the reflexion of the room behind me. The reflexion—like a framed photograph about to be split open by something climbing forth. When I’ve written this I shall turn round.
“I don’t dare,” I have just said aloud.
Where can I go where I don’t sense movement behind the scenes?
(Unsigned)
WHERE YIDHRA WALKS
WALTER C. DEBILL, JR.
A hundred April winds disperse her fragrance,
A thousand wet Octobers scour her footprints,
The ruthless years assail the ancient memory of her presence, yet
Where Yidhra walks the hills do not forget.
—Jean Paul LeChat
I
The river was swollen to a mad torrent, the water brown and opaque. I watched a jagged clump of brush sweep by with terrifying speed; three water moccasins twined in its sodden branches. The rain had grown heavier for three days while the wind mounted steadily and, though the eye of the hurricane was expected to pass a hundred miles east and the violence of the storm decrease as it moved further inland, I knew it would be a week before the river could be crossed here even if the decrepit trestle bridge survived. It was shuddering periodically from the strain of the current, and the broken remnants of two of the trestles dangled uselessly.
As I stood on the bank a muddy pickup truck pulled up and two men in ponchos and cowboy hats began blocking the entrance to the bridge with sawhorses. One saw me eyeing the bridge and called out, “Good thing you didn’t try it, mister; we already had three people drown today when a bridge washed out over by Iverston.”
“Is there another bridge across this river that might still be safe? I hate to go all the way around through Barrett. That’s a hundred miles out of my way.”
He flashed an unsympathetic smirk, plainly intending to say no, then paused. “Well, there’s an old bridge upstream five miles, where the river’s not so wide. It’s on the old road through Milando.” He said it in a tense, subdued voice.
His companion stopped tinkering around the truck and stepped over beside him, “If you go that way I’d recommend you keep movin’. Those folks up around Milando never did like outsiders much, and what this hurricane’s doin’ to their orchards ain’t gonna improve their hospitality.” They both chuckled.
I remembered seeing Milando on the map and didn’t ask for directions. I glanced in the rearview mirror as I drove off and saw them both watching me curiously from under their dripping hat brims.
I don’t know why I was so anxious to avoid a detour and keep driving doggedly through the storm. My cousin in Brownsville wasn’t expecting me by any fixed date, and even losing a week crossing Texas wouldn’t have inconvenienced me particularly. Yet the monotonous downpour lulled me into a mental torpor where thoughtless stubbornness pushed me on, and something about the mysterious raging river demanded that I cross it. And of course the peculiar attitude of the men at the bridge had aroused my curiosity about Milando. So I wound my way five miles north on a pitted blacktop road roughly paralleling the river and clattered across the plank floor of an ancient truss bridge. Less than a mile beyond the river a culvert spanning a tributary creek was under a few inches of water, but my little station wagon had a high road clearance for a small car and I decided to risk it. The wheels kept losing traction, letting the car slip sideways in sickening lurches, but I made it. I heard a groaning sound and a huge crash behind me and turned to see the culvert tube bounding jerkily downstream. I could no longer go back.
The road was tortuous and narrow as it wormed upward into the labyrinth of limestone hills, alternating gloomy tunnel-like passages overhung by gnarled live oaks with barren stretches below steep cliffs. The striking appearance of the stunted mesquite trees writhing along the cliff tops continually caught my eye in spite of the hazardous driving conditions, or I would never have seen the hooded figure against the darkening sky. Somehow I knew that it was a woman, though the hooded rain cape concealed both face and figure. A large dog sat at her feet. I barely had time to wonder what she was doing out there in such abominable weather before I rounded a sudden curve and had my first sight of Milando.
II
Through a lull in the rain I saw the town spread out below me in a wedge-shaped cleft in the hills. The road snaked down a steep hillside and passed along the mouth of the cleft, where the town was perhaps a mile wide. Almost all of the town lay to the left of the road where the streets wandered aimlessly upward to the point of the wedge, nearly level with the surrounding cliffs.
As I entered the town I slowed to a crawl and began searching for a place to get something to eat. It was darkening rapidly and the slope above me was dotted with lighted windows, but every window and doorway along the main street seemed black and deserted. I almost passed the one business still open because the glow at the windows was so dim. The painted sign said ‘Saloon-Grocery-Meat Market,’ so I parked and mounted the concrete porch, catching a stream of rainwater in my collar from the edge of the overhanging roof. Behind the display windows, which featured pyramids of dusty canned goods and an array of cheap pocket knives, a chest-high partition blocked most of the light and the dingy glass filtered the rest to a sickly yellow. But once I rattled my way through the heavy door it was evident that I had found the center of Milando’s night life.
To my left several groups of men sat around heavy circular tables playing dominoes. Through an archway at the rear I could see more tables and dominoes. The bar ran along the right-hand side and behind it the wall was lined with rows of canned and packaged foods rising almost to the ceiling. There was no one behind the bar, but as I moved over to it an uncomfortable lull spread through the room and a bald, burly specimen detached himself from one of the games and stepped around to the beer taps in front of me.
“What do you want?” No amenities, no smile.
“Just passing through. Any place in town where I can get a meal?”
“Nope. I’ll sell you some of this stuff.” His long ape-like arm gestured toward the shelves, apparently indicating some grimy boxes of shotgun shells, while his flat eyes kept me fixed.
“I guess that will have to do.”
“Say, which way did you come from?”
“East. The main bridge was about gone and I didn’t want to go around through Barrett.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to go back that way. The low-water crossing west of town’s under six feet of water.”
“But a culvert washed out behind me not far this side of the river. You mean I’m stuck here for the night?”
The room was silent now. “More than that. Several days, I’d say.” Under the bushy brows the eyes had taken on a suspicious cast.
“Plan to check out any old Injun stories?” jeered a beery voice from one of the tables. It seemed to emanate from a set of crooked yellow teeth just below the sharp shadow of a tin lampshade.
The bartender shot a murderous glare in that direction before explaining, “Don’t pay no attention to Maynard’s warped sense o’ humor. He’s talking about a fellow name o’ Harrison from Barrett, from the university, that came up here lookin’ for Indian relics and traces of folklore. Seems this used to be some kind o’ medicine place, somethin’ to do with a cult called ‘Yidhra,’ but people around here don’t know anything about that. The dam’ fool got himself lost up in the hills, never was found. This country’s full of caves, deep pools, heavy brush. Well, I got potato chips and stuff like that, sardines—but I don’t know where you’re gonna stay till the water goes down. No motel or anything here.…”
A tall man setting alone at the end of the bar stood up and turned stiffly toward me. “You can stay with us. You’re welcome to have dinner. My name’s Wilhelm Kramer.” The bartender was not pleased and I heard Maynard chuckle nervously.
“Thanks,” I said, “that would sure beat sardines and a cold night in my car.” Besides, I sensed that the antagonism between him and the others might make him a good source of information about the town. He picked up a heavy rubber raincoat and a canvas fisherman’s hat from the jumble of rain gear hung on a set of mounted deer antlers and we left.
In the car he didn’t speak except to give terse directions to a rather small unpainted house about halfway up the slope. Crossing the screened-in front porch we entered a neat and cozy living room, warmed by a large radiant heater and the subdued, almost amber light from beneath an opaque cardboard lampshade. From a door at the left emerged a small pale woman who gave me a startled look.
“How do you do, I’m Peter Kovacs,” I said, remembering that I hadn’t introduced myself to Kramer at the store.
“Mr. Kovacs is staying with us until the creeks go down. The Moreno Creek culvert’s washed out and the low-water crossing’s under six feet.”
Her colorless eyes looked even more startled and after telling us that supper would be ready in a few minutes she disappeared into the kitchen. We hung our coats on hooks by the door and Kramer settled into a threadbare but comfortable-looking armchair while I sat on the overstuffed couch.
“You seem to be the only one in Milando that cares much for strangers, Mr. Kramer,” I said, hoping to draw him out about the town. He smiled.
“Yes, the others are pretty hostile to any kind of outsider.” He was about forty, with rugged features just beginning to soften around the sharp lines. “Actually they still think of me as an outsider, though I’ve been here eighteen years. I’m originally from Iverston … met Georgia, that’s my wife, at the junior college in Mesquite City and came here to take over her father’s business when his health went bad. I sell oil and gas to the farmers on credit. They never did like me.” He gave the impression of a normally taciturn man become garrulous under the influence of beer and fresh companionship.
I saw the little goblin faces of three small children peep through the door to a darkened rear hall, then fade away. They seemed to take after the mother.
“Are all the small towns around here this inhospitable?”
“They’re all pretty clannish and ingrown, mainly because there’s nothing to attract new blood, and tend to peg outsiders as ‘city slickers’ or beatniks, but Milando’s the only one that’s downright hostile to anybody that wasn’t born and raised here. Always was. It was settled right after the Civil War by a bunch that came out together from Georgia. Never did hit it off with the other settlers around here, and then their dealings with the Indians …”
