Consumption (15 page)

Fifteen miles from Cavus, Pill Verrity closed his wife's journal for the last time.

“I'm sorry, Jessi,” he mumbled, thinking of how he'd acted toward her at her death. How he'd thought her crazy. How he had, on his worst days, wished she'd hurry up and die from the slow cancer so he didn't have to listen to her insane rantings anymore.

“No!” he answered himself. “I never did that. Never!”

But didn't he? Didn't he, especially at the end, wish that his wife would stop going on about her damn journal, would stop telling her stupid stories and informing him that he was The Keeper? The Keeper, The Keeper, always on about him having to be The Keeper.

“I dreamed it, Pill. You and the girl. And white. A woman in white.”

Which was bullshit. Didn't matter at all even if she had dreamed it.

Except that he'd dreamed it, too. Last night, he'd dreamed it again, but he'd started dreaming it months ago. And since then, he'd set out to prove himself wrong. To prove himself and Jessi and all the craziness wrong. He could at least give his dead wife that.

It'd seemed an easy task at first. Keep an eye on Cavus. Watch for any changes. Changes like what Jessi talked about. Little changes. Changes that most folks wouldn't recognize.

The retirement of the young police officer had been the first sign for him that all was not as it should be. He'd followed the man home from work. Watched him. He hadn't seen anything definite, only the man going out at odd hours, bringing unusual people home. Once, he thought he'd seen the man bend over, pick a clump of dirt off the ground, and put it in his mouth. But that might have been his imagination.

Speculative stuff, all of it, but then the phone lines had started disappearing.
Watch for ways of communication to be impeded,
Jessi had said. And so he'd watched. Hadn't been hard. He'd just gone to a pay phone each day at the highway gas station and dialed a random sampling of twenty numbers that he'd written down from the Cavus phone book, and one by one there'd been fewer people picking up the phone and more of that tin-can voice telling him that she was sorry, but the number he was trying was no longer in service or had been disconnected. Pill had started to dream about that voice.

After that, he'd gotten the CB, bought it at the junk shop in Custer, and then he'd started listening to the truckers as they passed by. Because the truckers saw, and the truckers talked.

“Man running west across the field in just his skivvies and a raincoat! Crazier than a pet coon!”

“Anyone seen Tosha or Bonnie around the pit? Red Hog wants to know.”

“Ain't seen those girls around in over three weeks. Over.”

All these and others through the airwaves. Reports of more people than should rightly be off their rockers and running around along the roadside after dark doing just that. Other things, little things that didn't add up. Like the spoiled milk at the gas station. Or a black and white just sitting on the side of the road and not stopping a fellow who was an easy twenty over the speed limit.

Now he was here, sitting behind the wheel of his pickup truck with six sticks of illegal dynamite and three cans of gasoline, and his dead wife's journal in his lap with a shotgun resting like a bookmark between its pages.

He'd picked up the dynamite weeks ago from a survivalist he'd found online. The man had offered to sell him many other things, had had an entire bunker full of grenades and the makings of dirty bombs, but at the time, Pill hadn't really believed his own paranoia. The dynamite had seemed less real, especially since it was old and harmless looking, and so he'd taken only that.

It was finally reading the pages of Jessi's journal in their entirety that had put the nail in the coffin of whatever choice he'd thought he had. He'd put it off, only reading bits and pieces of it until now, when he'd sat in his truck this last hour and read, hoping that in some way the journal might prove his original theory: that Jessi was just crazy. It hadn't.

Jessi's book consisted of her journaling via pictures and writing the entire story of the town fire of 1937. Not the official story, the real one. The way Jessi told it in her pictures, she'd been a plain-looking little girl when she arrived in Cavus. She'd drawn herself as a spindly, terrified-looking kid with ragtag clothes and ratty hair. Pill knew differently. His wife had been and always was beautiful.

Not wanting to, Pill had spread Jessi's pictures out in front of him on the truck's seat, alongside the shotgun and dynamite. They were in charcoal, an unusual medium for her, and as such, they showed no color. But it wasn't hard to imagine. Pill's mind easily filled in the orange of the tiger's fur, the red of the circus tent, the different color of red that was Jessi's hair. When he allowed himself to do that, he almost couldn't go on. Not with thinking about her wearing those scarves wrapped around her bald baby bird's head at the end. Pill shook the image away. He couldn't afford to be sentimental. Not now.

There was a time when a good many newspapers would have paid for Jessi's “real story.” She was, at least historically, the only survivor of the 1937 mine fires. She'd been sixteen at the time. Publicly, and to all the papers, she told everyone that she'd only been lucky, passing out near the entrance to the mines while everyone below burned, or died from smoke inhalation and lack of oxygen.

The big mystery that all the papers wanted to know about was why were so many people from town down in the mines.
Hundreds,
they'd stressed, down in the mines. It just didn't make sense. Jessi always said that she didn't know exactly what had happened, only that there'd been a fire and maybe the townspeople went down into the mines for safety.

But there, in his wife's unsteady handwriting, was the real story. Not that any of those damn reporters would've believed it if she'd told it to them. They had a hard enough time understanding why she'd stayed. Stayed even after everyone else from the circus she came with was dead. Stayed until a new town built up around her from the ashes of the old. But Pill knew.

Now, the cover of the book firmly closed, Pill turned the key in the ignition and listened to the engine roll over as the truck sprang to life. “Jessi, my love, I hope this is just one crazy old man out on a fool's errand.”

But he knew he wasn't a fool, just as he knew that Jessi had never in her life been crazy. In the distance, he heard the church bells ringing, their voice making its way across the still grassland to find him.

He allowed himself a final thought of happiness: Jessi. Jessi looking up at the church, a smile on her face as the bells rang, Jessi with her shoulder tucked snugly beneath his own, Pill grinning at his good fortune, watching his wife tilt her face back to the sound of the bells, her red hair whipping hard against the blue sky, the wind seeming to push the two of them together.

He held the thought for a second. Ten. Twenty, and then he let it go.
Enough.
With a steady foot, Pill gave the truck some gas, and pointed its nose toward Cavus and away from his house. The truck gunned to life and Pill pushed the speed to thirty.

He did not look back.

Throughout Cavus, the church bells rang. They gathered, the people, streaming into the church as one, coming together to worship, to celebrate. Amongst them walked the man in a yellow slicker, and those he counted as his children were many. They were many and they were hungry.

The church bells rang again and again, calling the masses. It was time to gather together. The same bells that had called their fathers and grandfathers called the people of Cavus, called them to come into the church and be thankful. Called them to worship and to break bread as one.

Come quickly! Come quickly!
the bells chimed.
The Feast is about to begin!

I'm writing this to tell you about the Feeders. But I don't want to start there. I want to start somewhere nice. Before that happened. I want to start with Jimmy.

He made me feel pretty. Right from the beginning, I knew that I couldn't help but be in love with Jimmy. Mama said not to do it, said that if I were to get involved with any of the miners it would make them think I was loose. Except
“une femme de la nuit”
is what she said. Even after sixteen years off the boat she couldn't break herself of the habit of speaking French now and again.

Jimmy wasn't dangerous. He was a nice boy. I believed it then, and I believe it now. And Pill, if it's you reading this, honey, I want you to know that I'm going to be as honest as possible in here.

Here Pill's heart almost broke. His hand trembled, and instead of turning the page, he very nearly shut the book. Shut it forever and let whatever was to come in the outside world come. He couldn't read about both the terror that Jessi had to tell and how she'd once loved someone else. He thought he already knew what he'd find in these pages, but what if he didn't? What if there were worse terrors to be uncovered? What if she also told him that she'd never really loved him? That while their marriage had been good, it had not been enough?

It was too much. He couldn't read it. No one could be asked for that much. But he went on, let his eyes continue as he turned to the next page.

I have to be. So that you'll understand. But you also have to know that I love you more than I've ever loved anybody. And if you're reading this, it probably means that there's a reason. If that's the case, then you'll need to remember how much I love you to keep going.

Remember it, Pill. I love you.

He read on.

My mother was the snake woman in the show. She hated snakes, so she refused to let me train to take her place. Instead, I had to go to school. It didn't matter how long we stopped in a place for a show, Mama would shove me into the local school, and I'd be expected to learn. Each night, I'd have to show her my lessons. Even if I finished all the work my teachers assigned, my mother told me to go on and do the next exercises in the book.

“It's good for you,” she said.
“C'est bonne. Tu est une femme intelligente.”

“Mama, there isn't any point,” I'd tell her. “I'm not going to need to know all this.” Even then, I'd already decided that I wanted to be an artist.

“C'est necessaire,”
she'd tell me, shaking her finger at me.
“C'est très nècessaire.”
I kept going to the schools for her, which is how, one day, I met Jimmy.

He was too old for the schools himself, nearly twenty by the time we met, but he came each day to walk home with his little sister, a girl two grades below me. She was a sweet girl; Clara was her name, and we became friends almost immediately. Clara always wanted to know more about the circus.

“What do you do there?” she'd ask. The town couldn't quite believe that we'd actually stopped there in the first place. Cavus had only really sprung up when the coal mining began; before that it had just been a few homesteaders' houses, and even those kept falling empty.

“I don't get to do much of anything except watch the others,” I told her. “Sometimes Mother will let me take the tickets, and once, when she didn't know I was doing it, Auntie let me read fortunes with her for a night.”

“Your aunt can tell fortunes?” Clara's eyes went as wide as dinner saucers.

“Of course she can. We all can. Gypsies are born being able to tell people's futures,” I lied. Dear Clara didn't know the difference, though. She'd believe anything told to her, which often got her in trouble with some of the boys.

“Do you feed the tigers?” she asked. The tigers, two ancient things that my parents hadn't even brought over with them but bought from a traveling Indian couple, were everybody's favorites. They were really ugly things, both of them missing most of their teeth, and neither with a mean bone in its body. There were also two lions, but nobody paid much attention to those, as they both had mange and came off looking more like house cats.

The tigers were the highlight of the circus, and after them people mostly liked to see the fat woman (my aunt Marie), her husband, Li'l Tim, a man who only came up to her waist, and then Squirrel Master Sacha. Sacha used to be the Strong Man, but when the act wasn't doing well (there was a one-armed woman in Poughkeepsie who beat him in not one, but two arm-wrestling contests), he started to look for something new. He'd found the squirrels up in Canada, the circus wintering once in Montreal to pick up two new trapeze artists and speak a little French. The squirrels were unique because they were pure black. Sacha dressed them in gentlemen's suits and ladies' ball gowns and taught them to dance with one another. When he found out how much Americans enjoyed belittling negroes, he dressed two of the squirrels up to look like they were wearing blackface and taught them how to serve the others, the ladies and gentlemen whose faces he'd started to powder.

There were twenty of us when we came to Cavus. It's hard to believe that a group of twenty can be a family, but we were. Most of us weren't French either, not by that point, most everyone came from people my family picked up along the way. We had all kinds in our French Phantasm Circus of the Damned (always there was a hell theme, my mother painting the snakes she danced with red, like the devil), but we kept the name and perpetuated our original French heritage to set us apart from other shows. The circus was dying—we were part of its last heyday, people returning to it as the Depression raged on, but as America pulled out of it, we saw ourselves falling apart. If the fire hadn't happened in Cavus, I don't know that we would have been able to continue. At least the fire left us a legend. They celebrate us to this day, although it's Sacha's squirrels that get most of the credit. The people here think of them as survivors, like themselves.

I didn't get to do much, but I did get to draw the posters. My mother knew I was a good artist, and even though she didn't think I could make a living at it, she encouraged me to continue drawing.

“For
divertissement,
” she'd say.
“Les livres première
and
après,
the drawing.
”

I agreed with her, but I lived for those posters. They were all destroyed with the fire, but God, they were beautiful. My mother reimagined at her youngest (or as I hoped I'd grow to look, really) her body twisted in agony and ecstasy against the red fire of the snake's scales, her hair falling to conceal, only barely, a nipple.

“Too much, Jessi,” she said when I showed it to her, but secretly she was pleased. I saw her stooped over the table studying it that day, when she thought no one was looking. She had a little smile on her face, and I could almost hear her thinking that she wished Papa were still alive to see it.

I drew, and it was my posters that got the Cavus folks all worked into a frenzy. We'd only stopped there on our way back east, hadn't even planned on performing, but when the mining men saw that poster hung on the side of one of our trucks, they went about crazy trying to get us to stop and do a show. You have to understand that there were hardly any women there yet.

So we stopped. When we did a show, we did it up right, taking at least a night to set up and then running the show for three days. It was because of the care we took that customers often returned for all three nights.

Before the night we started setting up the tent; we'd been camped in Cavus for a week just resting. Mama being Mama, I was in school on the first day of our arrival, and I got to where I looked forward to the end of the day and walking with Jimmy more than any other part of it.

Clara couldn't understand it, although she figured out my crush on her brother right away.

“But he's just so goofy,” she'd say, grinning.

“I think he's sweet, that's all,” I said. Truth was, I thought Jimmy was much more than sweet. There was just something about seeing him that had me planning on ways to run away from the circus, get left behind when everybody else rolled out and then be left to the mercies of the town folk.

Which I guess I was, in the end, although not the way I'd imagined.

The first night of the show was so crowded that my mother told me there was talk amongst the circus of extending it for a fourth day. We hardly ever did that, not even in big cities.

“I think that would be just fine, Mama,” I said.

“Getting to like Cavus,
ma chérie?
”

“Yes,” I said, and then hung my head before she could see the whole truth.

Mama had her snake out and was oiling it. She called the snake
“l'arme d'enfant,”
a joke that I did not understand until much later, when she was no longer there to tell me. I laughed at it then, and I remember wishing she could see me figuring it out, that we could laugh about it together. But that just wasn't how it was going to be.

Only Three Trees did not want to stay.

“But why not?” asked Mama, getting exasperated with him. “We're making so much money here, Trees, and we can't afford to turn our noses up at it. Not now.”

Mama was Three Trees's lover. I wasn't supposed to know this, but I did. He wouldn't sleep in our tent. No matter what the weather, Three Trees slept outside. But there were plenty of times he visited, and most of these times Mama found an errand for me to run. Also, since I was a baby, Three Trees had been doing most of the things for me that fathers did for their girls, like teaching me how to tie my shoes and scrub down the tiger cages. So it didn't really surprise me any when he pulled me over our second day in Cavus and told me he had to talk to me.

“Little Bear,” he said (he was always calling me that, saying I was as sluggish as one in winter), “come with me. Bring your paper and pens with you.” I followed him without question, although I remember being annoyed. The night's show was getting ready to start in a few hours, and I wanted to find a spot near the entrance to watch for Jimmy coming in. I had it on good authority, from Clara, that he was planning on attending that night.

“My mom won't let me go,” she'd complained to me. “But my brother promised to tell me all about it.”

So I was in a flutter, hoping to see Jimmy, and when Three Trees asked me to go with him, I don't mind saying I didn't want to. But you didn't disobey Trees, and you wouldn't want to, anyhow. He so rarely asked anything of anyone.

Trees never did tell me what tribe he was born into. Mama guessed Navajo or Hopi—somewhere from the Southwest almost surely, because Trees talked about these lands from his childhood. But he said he was no one's man now, a lost person who wandered with us because we were as good as anyone else to wander with. He said he had a great sin for which he must pay, and that until he did he would not bring shame upon his family by naming them. Trees wouldn't tell me what the sin was, just as he wouldn't tell me how he intended to pay for it. I suppose there really is only one sin so great that one would count his life a shame. That's what I thought then, anyway. I assumed Trees must have killed somebody. But Cavus has shown me that there are many other sins than this, some of them far worse than killing another person.

Although Trees claimed allegiance to no tribe, he often stopped at the reservations we traveled through to speak with the people. He was known by some as The Mailman. Our show traveled far and wide, and Trees carried messages between The People, between tribes and families that had been split up, between leaders and chiefs who wished to speak not through the white men's devices. I think it was part of his penance, though he'd never said so directly. Trees also often heard his own news from the reservations, his own stories that he passed down to me as lessons, or information that he used to help the show out in small way. Like the fact that in Sarasota there was a man who would let people camp on his land for free if they joined him in evening prayers, or in Austin, where a man could trade wood like diamonds. Three Trees knew all manner of things.

When he asked me to join him that day, he was just returning from an overnight trip to see some people on a reservation up north. I assumed whatever he wanted to tell me had to do with that, and I wasn't wrong.

We went to the outskirts of town and found a nice big rock to lean ourselves against. We had to be careful because in many places people didn't like to see us together, him forty-five and dark, me a white schoolgirl. They thought…things about us. Things I'm sure you can guess, and so I won't repeat them. Trees pointed to the flour sack I'd brought, motioned for me to take out my pencils and paper. I did.

“As I speak, Little Bear, I want you to draw what I tell you.”

“I can't do that,” I interrupted him. “I can't just draw what you're thinking, Trees. It's not how I work.”

He only nodded at me.
Yes, I understand. Yes, you will do it, all the same.
It was near to impossible to put Trees off when he wanted something. So I took my pencil in hand and waited. “I have spoken with my brothers last night, and they had a great story to share.”

I knew he was going to tell me the story without me asking, so I just waited and started to doodle with my pencil. I started drawing the grass around us, and the cliff in the distance. I put some wisps of clouds in the sky, although there weren't any yet. The day was as clear and blue as water. Trees began his story, and I drew.

“The men, they were Crows, or that is what you, the white people, would call them. This particular tribe, or what was left of it, also felt themselves to be Keepers of something. They said that the land on which we now reside is an evil land. ‘A bad place,' they called it, and said it was why they never lived here, why only newcomers like the farmers and miners who didn't know better lived here, although The People tried to warn them.”

On the paper, I drew a picture of a miner. I gave him a hat and a gleam in his eye like he was looking for gold. I knew that's why most men went anywhere, and Clara had told me the story of how Cavus got put on the map because of the gold seekers and then the few farmers and settlers coming later. Clara had also told me a fairly terrifying story about a woman here long ago who went mad. The kids at school still sing a song about her. I drew a woman in my picture. Lucy had been the name of the one in the story Clara told me. I put her way out in the distance, her face peeking over the horizon, watching the miner arrive.

“My brothers, they tell me that they have kept this land for many seasons—not always cleanly, for they are but human—they kept it as best they could. But when the miners came, they spilled blood in violence on The Bad Land and opened up the earth's wound to feed it this blood. This was a very bad thing.”

In the ground of the picture, I drew a great gash. I could almost see it then, the earth sleeping, a darkness just beneath the ground, and on top, a place waiting to be cut back open, a scar. I drew the line until it disappeared into the cliff, right beside the figure of Lucy I'd drawn. Behind Lucy, I drew a large, black hole. I was tempted to put teeth in it, it looked so much like a mouth, but I did not.

“The People, they were able to put the evil that awakened back to sleep, but it was hard. This evil, it is like nothing The People had seen before. It walks in the skin of humans—steals the skin to wear over itself and destroys the human within it. At first, The People thought maybe it was the ghost of a shaman, a skinwalker whose magic had gone bad. But when they met the evil, when they killed it and put it back to sleep, they knew it was nothing human. It was greater, they said. The evil was a new god, one they had never seen, but not new to the world. Old to the world. Old and jealous. The god wanted to spread himself. So he left his seed under the earth, and waited for a human to let it loose and carry it on to others. The evil wanted children. It wanted us to become his children.”

“Trees,” I interrupted him. For a second, I thought he was joshing me, putting on the “Wise Old Indian” act like he did for the rubes. But I knew he wasn't. I'd never seen him so solemn before. Usually, even during his most serious stories, there was a smile for me, a reassuring pat of his hand on my arm to let me know that everything was all right. Not now, though. Now he sat there looking off into the distance, almost like he was seeing the exact same thing that I was drawing on my page. It scared me then, but I was young. More than my fear, I thought about the show that night, and Jimmy. “Trees, I don't want to rush you any, but I've got to get back to help Mama.”

He looked at me then, and what I saw scared me more than if he'd been angry. He looked at me and he looked sad. So sad, like I had no idea what was coming, or what I was asking him. No idea, but I'd find out just the same.

“Draw, Little Bear,” he told me. “I am almost done.”

What could I do? I drew. I drew something coming out of the rock, out of that dark hole beside Lucy's head. It wasn't anything concrete, not yet, it was just a shadow. A shadow that looked a little like a man, and in the shadow I began to draw tiny faces, faces to make out the shape of The Shadow's arm, his leg, his hand, which was reaching toward the place in the grass where little Lucy crouched. One of the heads looked a lot like Jimmy's, and this made me smile. Then it made me smile. Now it makes me shudder. How could I have known?

“My
Apsáalooke
brothers, they told me this story because they believe that although they are here now to protect the land from this Evil God, they won't always be. Their numbers grow small, their blood weakened. Even now many of their children turn against the old ways, refuse to believe the stories of their elders. They told me because they had a vision. Their shaman, a man old enough to have seen the last awakening, he had a vision, Little Bear, and you were in it.”

I stopped filling in the detail on the tiny Jimmy face I'd been working on. I felt a coolness brush across my brow as sweat popped out there. I didn't like this. I didn't like it one bit. I tried to laugh it off, but Trees gave me that look again, that sad, sad stare.

“That's stupid,” I told him. “What did he do, exactly? He came up to you and said: ‘I had a dream, Trees, and this girl named Jessi was in it, she and this bad man that tried to eat her up?' ” I laughed again and bent my head back over my drawing so that Trees couldn't see how scared I really was.

“No, Little Bear, that is not what he said.” I felt Trees's hand on me, and I leaned into it, grateful for the comfort of his touch. I turned to smile at his face, tell him that well, then, he'd got it wrong. No need to worry about it, but probably we should be getting back to the show. Probably I should be getting back to Jimmy.

But Trees wasn't done. He squeezed my arm and looked me right in the eyes. “The shaman told them that in his vision he saw a great army of these Children of the Bad Seed. ‘Feeders,' he called them, because they were fed upon by The Evil and then fed for The Evil. The Feeders steal our bodies and use the evil that is already in us to be born. They feed not just on flesh but on the evil within us. They grow strong with it. This shaman, in his vision, saw a great army of Feeders, and in this army there was only one warrior standing against them and the world. Only one. A girl. Young and with the face of a white child but the spirit of The People. She fought against the army, though their number was many.”

“So what?” I said. I was shivering now, and I'm sure Trees could feel me, shaking in his grasp. “That doesn't mean anything. That doesn't mean anything at all!” I'm ashamed to say that I was shouting at him. I'd never raised my voice to Trees before, never for anything, but I did so then. I felt a tear on my cheek. I'd started to cry without even knowing it.

“The shaman named the girl,” Trees continued. “He called her ‘She who Fights with the Spirit of the Bear.' ”

Then Trees pulled me to him, and I cried until all the tears were gone. He held me, and I held him, and I thank God that no men came by then to misinterpret the desperation with which we clung to each other.