Visitation of Spirits, page 2
Do you recall the two or three women who stand out in the middle of the field—a field not planted in the winter rye grass that has just begun to peek from the stiff earth? They stand about the hole the men dug the day before, a hole as deep and as wide as a grave. The women stand there at its edge: one holds a huge intestine that looks more like a monstrous, hairless caterpillar. She squeezes the thing from top to bottom, time after time, forcing all the foul matter down and out, into the hole; and when the bulk is through the second woman pours steaming hot water dipped from a bucket into one end of the fleshy sac as the other woman holds it steady. She sloshes the gut gently back and forth, back and forth like a balloon full of water, until she finally slings the nasty grey water into the reeking hole in the ground. All the while they talk, their faces placid, their fingers deft, their aprons splattered with fecal matter, the hole sending steam up into the air like a huge cooking pot, reeking, stinking.
Surely someone told you of the huge vat of water over the fire, the blue-red flames licking the sides. Here they will dunk the fat corpses, to scald the skin and hair. Four men, two on either end of two chains, will roll, heave-ho, the thing over into the vat and then round and round and round in the boiling water, until you can reach down and yank out hair by the handfuls. They will roll the creature out and scrape it clean of hair and skin, and it will be pinkish white like the bellies of dead fish. They will bind and skewer its hind feet with a thick wooden peg, drag it over by the old smokehouse, and then hoist it up onto a pole braced high, higher than a man.
Then someone will take a great silver knife and make a thin true line down the belly of the beast, from the rectum to the top of its throat. He will make a deep incision at the top and with a wet and ripping sound like the bursting of a watermelon, the creature will be split clear in two, its delicate organs spilling down like vomit, the fine, shiny sacs waiting there to be cut loose, one by one. The blood left in the hog will drip from its snout, in slow, long drips, dripping, staining the brown winter grass a deep maroon. But I’m certain you’ve witnessed all this, of course . . .
At the same time, beneath the shed, the women would be busy, with knives, with grinders, with spoons and forks; the greasy tables littered with salts and peppers and spices, hunks of meat, bloody and in pans to be made into sausages, pans of cooked liver to be made into liver pudding. Remember the odor of cooking meats and spices, so thick, so heady? Remember the women talking? Their jabber is constant and unchecked, rising and falling, recollection and gossip, observation and complaint, in and out, out and in, round and round, the rhythm, the chant, a chaotic symphony.
I need not tell you of the hog pen? It will be a fenced-off place with a shelter jutting off from the barn. The hogs will all be closed off in their stalls. And the men will stand around the fence, talking, gossiping, bragging, complaining in the crisp air, their breath rising, converging in a cloud about their heads, and vanishing.
Some older man will give a young boy a gun, perhaps, and instruct him not to be afraid, to take his time, to aim straight. The men will all look at one another and the boy with a sense of mutual pride, as the man goes over to the gate and with some effort moves the three slats that close off the hogpen. Then with a beanpole he beats all the hogs back except for the largest, and he will proceed to corral it into the outside area, saying: Gee there, Hog! Whoa! Get, now, get! The hog, a rusty, rough-hided, brown hog, shambles out into the yard and trips over a plank, letting out an all-too-human, fat sigh as its belly hits the ground. The man pops it on the behind with the beanpole and it clambers quickly to its feet with a grunt, a snort, a squeal. It circles the fence, eyeing the standing men with something less than suspicion.
Then the hog will stop and uncannily eye the boy who holds the gun, unmoving and solid; you might say it resembles a rhinoceros or an elephant about to charge. It lets out another snort, steam jetting into the cold air. But it remains still. Its eyes are tiny and mean, but bewildered just the same. The boy will, carefully, take his aim slowly, slowly, taking his time. He squeezes. The gun fires. The hog jumps, snorts: you will see a red dot appear on the broad plain between the eyes, hear the bang of the gun. The hog rears up on its hind legs like a horse, bucking, tossing its head, but only once, twice. It seems to land miraculously on its front legs, but only for a split second. It topples, hitting the ground with a thud, and lets out a sound that you might call a death rattle—all in a matter of seconds. Its eyes fix intensely on nothing. Its breathing comes labored; the dot in its forehead runs red. The man pulls out a long, silver knife, rushes to the expiring mound, catches the flesh under the thing’s great head, and, with a very steady hand, makes a deep and long incision in its throat, slicing the artery there. The thick, deep-red blood, steaming in the cold December air, gushes, bathing his hands and shoes. The hog shivers: trembles: quakes: its legs spasm and thrust in the air like a sleeping dog’s until, in a few minutes, it ceases to twitch, lying in a pool of red.
But you’ve seen this, haven’t you? When you were younger? Perhaps . . .
Of course it’s a way of life that has evaporated. You’d be hard-pressed to find a hogpen these days, let alone a hog. No, folk nowadays go to the A&P for their sausages, to the Winn Dixie for their liver pudding, to the Food Lion for their cured ham. Nobody seems to eat pickled pig’s feet anymore and chitlins are . . .
But the ghosts of those times are stubborn; and though the hog stalls are empty, a herd can be heard, trampling the grasses and flowers and fancy bushes, trampling the foreign trees of the new families, living in their new homes. A ghostly herd waiting to be butchered.
April 29, 1984
11:30 am
. . . What to become?
At first Horace was sure he would turn himself into a rabbit. But then, no. Though they were swift as pebbles skipping across a pond, they were vulnerable, liable to be snatched up in a fox’s jaws or a hawk’s talons. Squirrels fell too easily into traps. And though mice and wood rats had a magical smallness, in the end they were much smaller than he wished to be. Snakes’ heads were too easily crushed, and he didn’t like the idea of his entire body slithering across all those twigs and feces and spit. Dogs lacked the physical grace he needed. More than anything else, he wanted to have grace. If he was going to the trouble of transforming himself, he might as well get exactly that. Butterflies were too frail, victims to wind. Cats had a physical freedom he loved to watch, the svelte, smooth, sliding motion of the great cats of Africa, but he could not see transforming himself into anything that would not fit the swampy woodlands of Southeastern North Carolina. He had to stay here.
No, truth to tell, what he wanted more than anything, he now realized, was to fly. A bird. He had known before, but he felt the need to sit down and ponder the possibilities. A ritual of choice, to make it real. A bird.
With that thought he rose, his stomach churning with excitement. A bird. Now to select the type. The species. The genus. He knew the very book to use in the school library; he knew the shelf, and could see the book there in its exact placement, now, slightly askew between a volume on bird-feeders no one ever moved and a treatise on egg collecting; he could see the exact angle at which it would be resting. Hadn’t the librarian, Mrs. Stokes, always teased him that he knew the library better than she ever would? And wasn’t she right?
He was sitting on the wall at the far end of the school campus, on the other side of the football field, beyond the gymnasium, beyond the main school building. He had wanted to be alone, to think undistracted. But now he was buoyed by the realization that he knew how he would spend the rest of his appointed time on this earth. Not as a tortured human, but as a bird free to swoop and dive, to dip and swerve over the cornfields and tobacco patches he had slaved in for what already seemed decades to his sixteen years. No longer would he be bound by human laws and human rules that he had constantly tripped over and frowned at. Now was his chance, for he had stumbled upon a passage by an ancient mystic, a monk, a man of God, and had found his salvation. It was so simple he wondered why no one had discovered it before. Yet how would anyone know? Suddenly, poor old Jeremiah or poor old Julia disappears. Everybody’s distraught; everybody worries. They search. They wait. Finally, the missing person is declared dead. And the silly folk go on about their business and don’t realize that old Julia turned herself into an eel and went to the bottom of the deep blue sea to see what she could see. There are no moral laws that say: You must remain human. And he would not.
His morning break was over. The other students were hustling back to third period. But he decided to skip. What did it matter? In a few days he would be transformed into a creature of the air. He could soar by his physics class and listen to Mrs. Hedgeson deliver her monotone lecture about electrons; he could perch on the ledge and watch the biology students dissect pickled frogs; hear the Spanish class tripping over their tongues; glide over the school band as they practiced their awkward maneuvers on the football field, squawking their gleaming instruments. All unfettered, unbound and free.
As he walked down the hall he suddenly realized he had no hall pass and that the vice-principal might walk by and demand it. But no. He was Horace Thomas Cross, the Great Black Hope, as his friend John Anthony had called him. The Straight-A Kid. Or once, at least. Where most students would be pulled aside and severely reprimanded, he could walk unquestioned. In his mind he could see his Cousin Ann smiling her cinnamon smile and hear her say in her small, raspy voice: But don’t you know it yet, Horace? You the Chosen Nigger.
The library was empty except for old Mrs. Stokes, who stood by the card catalogue and smiled at him, nodding knowingly. If she only realized—her grey hair would turn white. He walked straight to the exact aisle, the exact shelf, selected the exact book, and took it to a table in the back of the library, even though he was the only other person in that large room. He sat by a window overlooking the long, sloping lawn, spring green, that dipped into the pine-filled woods.
It was a huge book. White cloth with elegant gold lettering: Encyclopedia of North American Birds, a book he had known since elementary school, with its crisp photographs and neat diagrams and its definitions upon definitions upon definitions. Because it was a reference book he couldn’t check it out, so for long hours he would sit and read about migratory paths, the use of tail feathers, the gestation periods of eggs . . .
As he opened the book he felt the blood rush to his head, and the first color plates cranked up his imagination like a locomotive: gulls, cranes, owls, storks, turkeys, eagles. He flipped through the book, faster and faster. Which bird? Sparrow, wren, jay. No, larger. Mallard, grouse, pheasant. Larger. Goose, swan, cormorant. Larger. Egret, heron, condor. Pages flipped; his heart beat faster; his mind grew fuzzy with possibilities. Raven, rook, blackbird. Crow . . .
He slammed the book shut, realizing that he had been riffling through the pages like a madman. Mrs. Stokes looked up quickly, startled, then gave him that brief, knowing smile.
He closed his eyes and thought of the only way he could make his decision. He thought about the land: the soybean fields surrounding his grandfather’s house, the woods that surrounded the fields, the tall, massive long-leaf pines. He thought of the miles and miles of highways, asphalt poured over mule trails that etched themselves into the North Carolina landscape, onto the beach, the sandy white, the sea, a murky, churning, the foam, spray, white, the smell of fish and rotting wood. He thought of winters, the floor of the woods a carpet of dry leaves, brown-and-black patchwork carpet. He thought of the sky, not a blue picture-book sky with a few thin clouds, but a storm sky, black and mean, full of wind and hate, God’s wrath, thunder, pelting rain. He thought of houses, new and old, brick and wood, high and low, roofs mildewed and black, chimneys, lightning rods, TV antennas. He was trying to think like a bird, the bird, the only bird he could become. And when he saw a rabbit, dashing, darting through a field of brown rye grass, and when he saw talons sink into the soft brown fur, he knew.
But he had known before, had realized when he stumbled across the pact the old monk had made with the demon in the book, that if he were to transform himself, irrevocably, unconditionally, he would choose a red-tailed hawk. He opened the book to the hawk family—pausing at the eagle, but knowing that was too corny, too noticeable, not indigenous to North Carolina—and flipped to the picture of his future self. He could not help but smile. The creature sat perched on a fence post, its wings brought up about its neck, its eyes murderous. Many times he had admired the strong flight of the bird, the way it would circle the field like a buzzard, but not like a buzzard, since the rat or the rabbit or the coon it was after was not dead—yet. Talons would clutch the thrashing critter tighter than a vise, its little heart would beat in sixteenth-notes, excited even more by the flapping wings that beat the air like hammers and blocked the sun like Armageddon. Then the piercing of the neck, the rush of hot, sticky blood. The taste of red flesh. He felt a touch of empathy for the small mammal, its tail caught in the violent twitching of death thralls, but he was still thrilled.
He turned and looked to the woods and sighed, the sigh of an old man, of resigned resolve and inevitable conclusion. A sigh too old for a sixteen-year-old boy. He rose and replaced the book. The bell rang, signaling the end of third period. He thought of never walking down this aisle and past that shelf again; he would read none of these volumes again. He allowed himself to swell up. Not with sadness, but with pride. He had found the escape route, of which they were all ignorant. Mrs. Stokes once again gave her knowing nod. He winked at her and did not look back.
He sat through the rest of his classes, taking no notes, not listening, more as a matter of form, a fare-thee-well. No one bothered him. He had noticed that for the last few weeks people had been staying away from him, whispering behind his back that he was acting strange. But it was no matter. Soon it would all be over.
He rode the bus home in peace. Track practice was over. There were only two weeks left before summer vacation, but he would have skipped practice anyway. He sat back and watched the other students in their horseplay and shenanigans, the girls lost in their gossip, the boys bragging and arm-wrestling, playing cards. From the window he watched the land, the land over which he would soon rise. Soon and very soon.
Looking out the window, he felt a brief wave of doubt flicker within. Had he gone mad? Somehow slipped beyond the veil of right reasoning and gone off into some deep, unsettled land of fantasy? The very thought made him cringe. Of course he was not crazy, he told himself; his was a very rational mind, acquainted with science and mathematics. But he was also a believer in an unseen world full of archangels and prophets and folk rising from the dead, a world preached to him from the cradle on, and a world he was powerless not to believe in as firmly as he believed in gravity and the times table. The two contradicting worlds were not contradictions in his mind. At the moment it was not the world of digits and decimal points he required, but the world of messiahs and miracles. It was faith, not facts he needed; magic, not math; salvation, not science. Belief would save him, not only belief, but belief in belief. Like Daniel, like Isaac, like the woman at the well. I am sane, he thought, smoothing over any kinks in his reasoning and clutching fear by the neck. He had no alternative, he kept saying to himself. No other way out.
When he got home, he went straight to his room and closed the door. His grandfather was out, but he didn’t want to risk tipping his hand. His room, the entire house, smelled of hard pine and the lingering smell of paint and floor varnish, of cypress window frames and heavily oiled oak furniture and dust trapped in the curtains, the farmhouse dust from the dirt road and the fields—but more than anything there was the ever-present smell of pine. Heart pine, the old folks called it. The hardest there is. Better than oak. A seventy-one-year-old smell he had smelled all his life, through the many coats of antique white paint, through the well-coated floors, through the dust. In his mind it was the smell of prayer, the smell of childbirth, the smell of laughter, the smell of tears, dancing, sweat, the smell of work, sex, death.
On the white walls of his room hung his many friends. Over the bed was the Sorcerer—the Conjurer, the Supreme Magician. His eyes were a mysterious blue, piercing and all-knowing. Over his eyes hung a great shock of black hair, showing his virility; the hair at his temples was snowy white, showing his wisdom. His great red cape was caught in a wind, making it billow as dramatically as a thunderclap. His stance—you could tell he was commencing to cast a spell because his hands were surrounded by an electric blue glow—resembled a pouncing tiger’s. His body was well muscled and lean, covered in skin-tight blue leggings and a blue tunic with an Egyptian ankh on its chest. A huge amulet was suspended from a chain about his neck, a half-open eye peering through.
On the other walls hung a huge green monster-man so muscled he appeared to be a green lump, with huge bare feet, clad only in tattered purple pants, giving an animal leer; a woman whirling a golden lasso, wearing a brassiere shaped like an eagle and zooming through the air atop an airplane made of glass; a Viking with long yellow hair and bulging muscles, swinging a hammer as large as he, his icy blue eyes flashing a solemn warning; a man dressed in a midnight-blue cowl with pointy ears like a cat and a midnight-blue cape to match, which billowed even more than the sorcerer’s, the emblem of a bat planted across his chest. There were posters of little creatures with hair on their feet as thick as rugs, who possessed round bellies and smoked huge pipes. There were designs for starships, and diagrams of battlestars, star maps and star charts, a list of names of demons and pictures of gryphons and krakens and gorgons . . .
