My bladder let go, and the scuffed brown the dead bee was lying on went a darker brown. I was hardly aware of what had happened, and I couldn"t take my eyes off the man standing on top of the bank and looking down at me, the man who had walked out of thirty miles of trackless western Maine woods in a fine black suit and narrow shoes of gleaming leather. I could see the watch-chain looped across his vest glittering in the summer sunshine. There was not so much as a single pine-needle on him. And he was smiling at me.
"Why, it"s a fisherboy!" he cried in a mellow, pleasing voice. "Imagine that! Are we well-met, fisherboy?"
"h.e.l.lo, sir," I said. The voice that came out of me did not tremble, but it didn"t sound like my voice, either. It sounded older. Like Dan"s voice, maybe. Or my father"s, even. And all I could think was that maybe he would let me go if I pretended not to see what he was. If I pretended I didn"t see there were flames glowing and dancing where his eyes should have been.
"I"ve saved you a nasty sting, perhaps," he said, and then, to my horror, he came down the bank to where I sat with a dead bee in my wet lap and a bamboo fishing pole in my nerveless hands. His slick soled city shoes should have slipped on the low, gra.s.sy weeds which dressed the steep bank, but they didn"t; nor did they leave tracks behind, I saw. Where his feet had touched or seemed to touch there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoeshape.
Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up from the skin under the suit the smell of burned matches. The smell of sulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were hideously long.
He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands so they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fingers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.
"You didn"t answer my question, fisherboy," he said in his mellow voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. "Are we well-met?"
"Please don"t hurt me," I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely hear it.
I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid than I want to remember...but I do. I do. It never even crossed my mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I suppose, if I had been older. But I wasn"t older; I was nine, and I knew the truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a hawk from a hand-saw, as my father would have said. The man who had come out of the woods on that Sat.u.r.day afternoon in midsummer was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were burning.
"Oh, do I smell something?" he asked, as if he hadn"t heard me...although I knew he had. "Do I smell something...wet?"
He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like someone who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; as the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the gra.s.s beneath it turned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants and sniffed. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled some sublime aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.
"Oh, bad!" he cried. "Lovely-bad!" And then he chanted: "Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary"s lemonade!" Then he threw himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was the sound of a lunatic.
I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties away from my brain. I wasn"t crying, though; I had wet my pants like a baby, but I wasn"t crying.
I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew that I was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was that that might not be the worst of it.
The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.
He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at me solemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there was a sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense of laughter about him.
"Sad news, fisherboy," he said. "I"ve come with sad news."
I could only look at him the black suit, the fine black shoes, the long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons.
"Your mother is dead."
"No!" I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying across her forehead and just touching her eyebrow, standing there in the strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again...but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she"d looked when I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorway with her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me in that moment like a photograph of someone you expected to see again but never did. "No, you lie!" I screamed.
He smiled the sadly patient smile of a man who has often been accused falsely. "I"m afraid not," he said. "It was the same thing that happened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee."
"No, that"s not true," I said, and now I did begin to cry. "She"s old, she"s thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny she would have died a long time ago and you"re a lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"
I had called the Devil a lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d. On some level I was aware of this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormity of what he"d said. My mother dead? He might as well have told me that there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But I believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.
"I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argument just doesn"t hold water, I"m afraid." He spoke in a tone of bogus comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity. "A man can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know, but does that mean mockingbirds don"t exist? Your mother"
A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, then pointed a finger at it. The trout convulsed in the air, its body bending so strenuously that for a split-second it appeared to be snapping at its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was floating lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the waters divided, spun around twice in the whirlpool eddy that formed there, and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, the terrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lips pulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.
"Your mother simply went through her entire life without being stung by a bee," he said. "But then less than an hour ago, actually one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking the bread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool."
"No, I won"t hear this, I won"t hear this, I won"t!"
I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath, but the stench was foul beyond belief clogged sewers, outhouses that have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens after a flood. My hands fell away from the sides of my face.
"Good," he said. "You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who pa.s.sed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed." He pursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsktsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. "So, although I don"t like to speak ill of the dead, it"s almost a case of poetic justice, isn"t it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger."
"No," I whispered. "No, it isn"t true."
"I a.s.sure you it is," he said. "The bee flew in the window and lit on her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she was doing you were wiser than that, weren"t you, Gary? and the bee stung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That"s what happens, you know, to people who are allergic to bee-venom. Their throats close and they drown in the open air. That"s why Dan"s face was so swollen and purple. That"s why your father covered it with his shirt."
I stared at him, now incapable of speech. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn"t want to believe him, and knew from my church schooling that the Devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, just the same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, looking in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutching at her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barking shrilly.
"She made the most wonderfully awful noises," the man in the black suit said reflectively, "and she scratched her face quite badly, I"m afraid. Her eyes bulged out like a frog"s eyes. She wept." He paused, then added: "She wept as she died, isn"t that sweet? And here"s the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead...after she had been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no sound but the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee-stinger still poking out of the side of her neck so small, so small do you know what Candy Bill did? That little rascal licked away her tears. First on one side...and then on the other."
He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereavement disappeared like a dream.
His face was as slack and avid as the face of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his sharp little teeth between his pale lips.
"I"m starving," he said abruptly. "I"m going to kill you and tear you open and eat your guts, little fisherboy. What do you think about that?"
No, I tried to say, please, no, but no sound came out. He meant to do it, I saw. He really meant to do it.
"I"m just so hungry," he said, both petulant and teasing. "And you won"t want to live without your precious mommy, anyhow, take my word for it. Because your father"s the sort of man who"ll have to have some warm hole to stick it in, believe me, and if you"re the only one available, you"re the one who"ll have to serve. I"ll save you all that discomfort and unpleasantness. Also, you"ll go to Heaven, think of that. Murdered souls always go to Heaven. So we"ll both be serving G.o.d this afternoon, Gary. Isn"t that nice?"
He reached for me again with his long, pale hands, and without thinking what I was doing, I flipped open the top of my creel, pawed all the way down to the bottom, and brought out the monster brookie I"d caught earlier the one I should have been satisfied with. I held it out to him blindly, my fingers in the red slit of its belly from which I had removed its insides as the man in the black suit had threatened to remove mine. The fish"s glazed eye stared dreamily at me, the gold ring around the black center reminding me of my mother"s wedding ring. And in that moment I saw her lying in her coffin with the sun shining off the wedding band and knew it was true she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm, bread-smelling kitchen air, and Candy Bill had licked her dying tears from her swollen cheeks.
"Big fish!" the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedy voice. "Oh, biiig fiiish!"
He s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from me and crammed it into a mouth that opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later, when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five because that was the summer I retired from teaching), I went to the New England Aquarium and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit was like that shark"s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blazing red, the same color as his awful eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come pushing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I didn"t imagine that heat, either, I know I didn"t, because just before he slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook trout between his gaping jaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator. He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing a sword. He didn"t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort. The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gullet, and now he began to cry tears of his own...except his tears were blood, scarlet and thick. I think it was the sight of those b.l.o.o.d.y tears that gave me my body back. I don"t know why that should have been, but I think it was. I bolted to my feet like a jack released from its box, turned with my bamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over and tearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hand in an effort to get up the slope more quickly.
He made a strangled, furious noise the sound of any man with his mouth too full and I looked back just as I got to the top. He was coming after me, the back of his suit-coat flapping and his thin gold watch-chain flashing and winking in the sun. The tail of the fish was still protruding from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it, roasting in the oven of his throat. He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along the top of the bank.
After a hundred yards or so I found my voice and went to screaming screaming in fear, of course, but also screaming in grief for my beautiful dead mother.
He was coming along after me. I could hear snapping branches and whipping bushes, but I didn"t look back again. I lowered my head, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branches along the stream"s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step I expected to feel his hands descending on my shoulders pulling me back into a final hot hug.
That didn"t happen. Some unknown length of time later it couldn"t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but it seemed like forever I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves and firs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettle which has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank and charged up to it.
Halfway to the top I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder, and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white face pulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splattered with his b.l.o.o.d.y tears and his shark"s mouth hung open like a hinge.
"Fisherboy!" he snarled, and started up the bank after me, grasping at my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fishing pole at him.
He batted it down easily, but it tangled his feet up somehow and he went to his knees. I didn"t wait to see anymore; I turned and bolted to the top of the slope.
I almost slipped at the very top, but managed to grab one of the support struts running beneath the bridge and save myself.
"You can"t get away, fisherboy!" he cried from behind me. He sounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. "It takes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!"
"Leave me alone!" I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge"s railing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling my hands with splinters and b.u.mping my head so hard on the boards when I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over onto my belly and began crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of the bridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. I ran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It felt as if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride, and for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the righthand wheelrut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyes pulsed in their sockets, ran until I had a hot st.i.tch in my left side from the bottom of my ribs to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood and something like metal-shavings in the back of my throat.
When I couldn"t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over my shoulder, puffing and blowing like a windbroke horse. I was convinced I would see him standing right there behind me in his natty black suit, the watch-chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out of place.
But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Stream between the darkly ma.s.sed pines and spruces was empty. And yet I sensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with his gra.s.sfire eyes, smelling of burnt matches and roasted fish. I turned and began walking as fast as I could, limping a little I"d pulled muscles in both legs, and when I got out of bed the next morning I was so sore I could barely walk. I didn"t notice those things then, though.
I just kept looking over my shoulder, needing again and again to verify that the road behind me was still empty. It was, each time I looked, but those backward glances seemed to increase my fear rather than lessening it. The firs looked darker, ma.s.sier, and I kept imagining what lay behind the trees which marched beside the road long, tangled corridors of forest, leg-breaking deadfalls, ravines where anything might live. Until that Sat.u.r.day in 1914, I had thought that bears were the worst thing the forest could hold.
Now I knew better.
A mile or so further up the road, just beyond the place where it came out of the woods and joined the Geegan Flat Road, I saw my father walking toward me and whistling "The Old Oaken Bucket." He was carrying his own rod, the one with the fancy spinning reel from Monkey Ward. In his other hand he had his creel, the one with the ribbon my mother had woven through the handle back when Dan was still alive. DEDICATED TO JESUS, that ribbon said. I had been walking but when I saw him I started to run again, screaming Dad! Dad! Dad! at the top of my lungs and staggering from side to side on my tired, sprung legs like a drunken sailor. The expression of surprise on his face when he recognized me might have been comical under other circ.u.mstances, but not under these.
He dropped his rod and creel into the road without so much as a downward glance at them and ran to me. It was the fastest I ever saw my Dad run in his life; when we came together it was a wonder the impact didn"t knock us both senseless, and I struck my face on his belt-buckle hard enough to start a little nosebleed. I didn"t notice that until later, though. Right then I only reached out my arms and clutched him as hard as I could. I held on and rubbed my hot face back and forth against his belly, covering his old blue workshirt with blood and tears and snot.
"Gary, what is it? What happened? Are you all right?"
"Ma"s dead!" I sobbed. "I met a man in the woods and he told me! Ma"s dead! She got stung by a bee and it swelled her all up just like what happened to Dan, and she"s dead! She"s on the kitchen floor and Candy Bill...licked the t-t-tears...off her...off her..."
Face was the last word I had to say, but by then my chest was. .h.i.tching so bad I couldn"t get it out. My tears were flowing again, and my Dad"s startled, frightened face had blurred into three overlapping images. I began to howl not like a little kid who"s skun his knee but like a dog that"s seen something bad by moonlight and my father pressed my head against his hard flat stomach again.
I slipped out from under his hand, though, and looked back over my shoulder. I wanted to make sure the man in the black suit wasn"t coming. There was no sign of him; the road winding back into the woods was completely empty. I promised myself I would never go back down that road again, not ever, no matter what, and I suppose now G.o.d"s greatest blessing to His creatures below is that they can"t see the future. It might have broken my mind if I had known I would be going back down that road, and not two hours later. For that moment, though, I was only relieved to see we were still alone. Then I thought of my mother my beautiful dead mother and laid my face back against my father"s stomach and bawled some more.
"Gary, listen to me," he said a moment or two later. I went on bawling. He gave me a little longer to do that, then reached down and lifted my chin so he could look into my face and I could look into his.
"Your Mom"s fine," he said.
I could only look at him with tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn"t believe him.
"I don"t know who told you different, or what kind of dirty dog would want to put a scare like that into a little boy, but I swear to G.o.d your mother"s fine."
"But...but he said..."
"I don"t care what he said. I got back from Eversham"s earlier than I expected he doesn"t want to sell any cows, it"s all just talk and decided I had time to catch up with you. I got my pole and my creel and your mother made us a couple of jelly fold-overs. Her new bread. Still warm. So she was fine half an hour ago, Gary, and there"s n.o.body knows any different that"s come from this direction, I guarantee you. Not in just half an hour"s time." He looked over my shoulder. "Who was this man? And where was he? I"m going to find him and thrash him within an inch of his life."
I thought a thousand things in just two seconds that"s what it seemed like, anyway but the last thing I thought was the most powerful: if my Dad met up with the man in the black suit, I didn"t think my Dad would be the one to do the thrashing. Or the walking away. I kept remembering those long white fingers, and the talons at the ends of them.
"Gary?"
"I don"t know that I remember," I said.
"Were you where the stream splits? The big rock?"
I could never lie to my father when he asked a direct question not to save his life or mine. "Yes, but don"t go down there." I seized his arm with both hands and tugged it hard. "Please don"t. He was a scary man." Inspiration struck like an illuminating lightning-bolt. "I think he had a gun."
He looked at me thoughtfully. "Maybe there wasn"t a man," he said, lifting his voice a little on the last word and turning it into something that was almost but not quite a question. "Maybe you fell asleep while you were fishing, son, and had a bad dream. Like the ones you had about Danny last winter."
I had had a lot of bad dreams about Dan last winter, dreams where I would open the door to our closet or to the dark, fruity interior of the cider shed and see him standing there and looking at me out of his purple strangulated face; from many of these dreams I had awakened screaming, and awakened my parents, as well. I had fallen asleep on the bank of the stream for a little while, too dozed off, anyway but I hadn"t dreamed and I was sure I had awakened just before the man in the black suit clapped the bee dead, sending it tumbling off my nose and into my lap. I hadn"t dreamed him the way I had dreamed Dan, I was quite sure of that, although my meeting with him had already attained a dreamlike quality in my mind, as I suppose supernatural occurrences always must. But if my Dad thought that the man had only existed in my own head, that might be better. Better for him.
"It might have been, I guess," I said.
"Well, we ought to go back and find your rod and your creel." He actually started in that direction, and I had to tug frantically at his arm to stop him again, and turn him back toward me.
"Later," I said. "Please, Dad? I want to see Mother. I"ve got to see her with my own eyes."
He thought that over, then nodded. "Yes, I suppose you do. We"ll go home first, and get your rod and creel later."
So we walked back to the farm together, my father with his fishpole propped on his shoulder just like one of my friends, me carrying his creel, both of us eating folded-over slices of my mother"s bread smeared with blackcurrant jam.
"Did you catch anything?" he asked as we came in sight of the barn.
"Yes, sir," I said. "A rainbow. Pretty good-sized." And a brookie that was a lot bigger, I thought but didn"t say. Biggest one I ever saw, to tell the truth, but I don"t have that one to show you, Dad. I gave that one to the man in the black suit, so he wouldn"t eat me. And it worked...but just barely.
"That"s all? Nothing else?"
"After I caught it I fell asleep." This was not really an answer, but not really a lie, either.
"Lucky you didn"t lose your pole. You didn"t, did you, Gary?"
"No, sir," I said, very reluctantly. Lying about that would do no good even if I"d been able to think up a whopper not if he was set on going back to get my creel anyway, and I could see by his face that he was.
Up ahead, Candy Bill came racing out of the back door, barking his shrill bark and wagging his whole rear end back and forth the way Scotties do when they"re excited. I couldn"t wait any longer; hope and anxiety bubbled up in my throat like foam. I broke away from my father and ran to the house, still lugging his creel and still convinced, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to find my mother dead on the kitchen floor with her face swelled and purple like Dan"s had been when my father carried him in from the west field, crying and calling the name of Jesus.
But she was standing at the counter, just as well and fine as when I had left her, humming a song as she sh.e.l.led peas into a bowl. She looked around at me, first in surprise and then in fright as she took in my wide eyes and pale cheeks.
"Gary, what is it? What"s the matter?"
I didn"t answer, only ran to her and covered her with kisses. At some point my father came in and said, "Don"t worry, Lo he"s all right. He just had one of his bad dreams, down there by the brook."
"Pray G.o.d it"s the last of them," she said, and hugged me tighter while Candy Bill danced around our feet, barking his shrill bark.
"You don"t have to come with me if you don"t want to, Gary," my father said, although he had already made it clear that he thought I should that I should go back, that I should face my fear, as I suppose folks would say nowadays. That"s very well for fearful things that are make-believe, but two hours hadn"t done much to change my conviction that the man in the black suit had been real. I wouldn"t be able to convince my father of that, though. I don"t think there was a nine-year-old that ever lived who would have been able to convince his father he"d seen the Devil come walking out of the woods in a black suit.
"I"ll come," I said. I had walked out of the house to join him before he left, mustering all my courage in order to get my feet moving, and now we were standing by the chopping-block in the side yard, not far from the woodpile.
"What you got behind your back?" he asked.
I brought it out slowly. I would go with him, and I would hope the man in the black suit with the arrow-straight part down the left side of his head was gone...but if he wasn"t, I wanted to be prepared. As prepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible in the hand I had brought out from behind my back. I"d set out just to bring my New Testament, which I had won for memorizing the most psalms in the Thursday night Youth Fellowship compet.i.tion (I managed eight, although most of them except the Twenty-third had floated out of my mind in a week"s time), but the little red Testament didn"t seem like enough when you were maybe going to face the Devil himself, not even when the words of Jesus were marked out in red ink.
My father looked at the old Bible, swelled with family doc.u.ments and pictures, and I thought he"d tell me to put it back, but he didn"t. A look of mixed grief and sympathy crossed his face, and he nodded. "All right," he said. "Does your mother know you took that?"
"No, sir."
He nodded again. "Then we"ll hope she doesn"t spot it gone before we get back. Come on. And don"t drop it."
Half an hour or so later, the two of us stood on the bank looking down at the place where Castle Stream forked, and at the flat place where I"d had my encounter with the man with the red-orange eyes. I had my bamboo rod in my hand I"d picked it up below the bridge and my creel lay down below, on the flat place. Its wicker top was flipped back. We stood looking down, my father and I, for a long time, and neither of us said anything.
Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary"s lemonade! That had been his unpleasant little poem, and once he had recited it, he had thrown himself on his back, laughing like a child who has just discovered he has enough courage to say bathroom words like s.h.i.t or p.i.s.s. The flat place down there was as green and lush as any place in Maine that the sun can get to in early July...except where the stranger had lain. There the gra.s.s was dead and yellow in the shape of a man.
I looked down and saw I was holding our lumpy old family Bible straight out in front of me with both thumbs pressing so hard on the cover that they were white. It was the way Mama Sweet"s husband Norville held a willow-fork when he was trying to dowse somebody a well.