In the hedge of November vanilla sky, the tangle of leafless timber, vanta-black, runs before one on and on like tackle and teeth, rigid spiders upended. Night wasn’t so far away now, its star-spangled curtain slow on the draw, sheltering us like a pall.
The autumnal bitterness of dying cabbage, the sickly sweetness of pumpkins gutted and left for dead, the earthy dust of broken leaves abounded through the day’s final breaths. Ravens crowded the eaves, crowing out deft lines of apochrypal commands and warnings. The belfry over at St. Theresa’s tolled for the procession of the Dead passing by in transparent clouds. The horizon undercast below the belt of oncoming evening shone in all its gloomy nakedness. Emblems all of the Melancholy Season.
I couldn’t hit Jedidiah’s fastballs, and he was my age, but I would be damned, god-damned, that he get my goat. Perhaps his family of theologians, the “betters”, the hypermoral, perhaps his rib, all of it, and my family, the decidedly “have-nots”, all was beginning to take effect.
It was time to go in. The pallid sky dyed in its own blood, the eye had begun to shut at Marcia’s demand. We were absolutely not to play outside after dark, and, exclamitorily, not to veer near the woods for ANY reason.
Whopppp!
The ball gone soaring, up, up, far beyond the boundary of the trees, and like a skidding comet, plummeted once more through gravity, driven into the earth, provoking magma, thudding on contact, whooshing along an expanse of compost. A flood of excitement provoking incitement, I took off, unabated. The tail end of Jedidiah’s plea had failed utterly to apprehend me as I went sprinting. The blood drained, the corpse a husk, mist had arisen, holy incense.
“If They Call Your Name, Never Answer”
Jedidiah’s words scattering down my back as I mindlessly foraged, pricked by thorns and swarmed with burrs, shaking them away with all utterances of warning.
“Gregg!”
I must have disoriented myself. Facing south rather than north, east rather than west, or, whatever, but what? I was certain I beelined it, keeping my back to the house and my eyes on the cadaverish horizon.
“Gregg”.
Why was his voice resounding from the wrong direction?
“Gregg…”
And getting closer?
“Gregg…”
Piping down to a whisper? Why secrets now?
Now the sun had gone and the night seeped into the sky like ink and the heavy mist shrouded the woods in all directions. I thought to myself that I had made too many turns roving for the ball and now I don’t know which direction I’m facing, and the alarm continues to soar through the forest directionlessly.
“Jed!”, I cried out, having given up the search. “I’m coming, but where are you???”
“Gregg!”
“I’m here!”, I shouted, pacing in the directed path from whence the shout issued. “I’m coming out!”
“Gregg!” The sound was fainter, so I switched directions, and doing so, caught myself up in a cord of roots. The pain shot through my leg like an arrow and surged up my side and back. Concentration a lost cause. My eyes watered and I could taste the salt of tears. My mouth had gone dry and I was becoming over-exerted.
“Gregg!” Switching directions, I stamped toward the chiming of the voice that carried a more irregular, gentle tone.
“Wolves”, his dad said. Randall, axe thrower, archer, bear wrangler. Though I can’t account for the latter, it had occurred enough in dreams. That has to mean something, right?
“Gregg?”
The peal of a bell, or the chime of a little girl?
“Yes?”, I Answered To The Saying Of My Name. Whatever of it was personal had become impersonal, then graduated to a closeness, an intimacy. The voice was circling me in the fog. It fell upon me from above, but how could it be? I should have listened.
“Gregggg….”
Chills up my spine, I sensed its movement, and could only pray for a curious, docile wolf, but Wolves don’t exist in Pennsylvania. Something was with me, breathing its icy breath down my neck, bucking and retreating as I swatted at it, evading me like a fly.
Gregg………………Greggggg……………..Greggggggg
All voices as one, residing on all sides, in perpetual motion. I could smell flowers, overbearing. Striking with its ethereal wand, as it descended. I crouched down, cowering, with nowhere to run or to hide. Icy fingers prodding me head to toe to head. A sudden eruption of noise, something barreling toward me from the nether - regions. Fast, hard, determined.
Footsteps rushing, stamping like madness personified, the mist swirling, deep, deep into the shag and convex, I hear the fog alarm blare. The sun is dead. The Heavens atheistic. Nothing but death and darkness, and little feet. Dragging along the forest floor, a spill of light hits me, the silvery, spark-relective fog, and I see it. Two little bare feet, dangling from out of a little dress, the toes dragging sluggishly along the mud.
I’m wrung by the arm, squeezed, vice-like, and the words, some words shouted in anger, vehement rage over my head. I don’t know who’s doing it. We break the threshold, burst through the catacombs, surge into the house. The surly Randall breathing in vowels. Struggling to lock the doors, underarms dark with sweat.
“You don’t even know what’s out there, you just dont!”
This definitive dictum would guide me thereon, on and on, forever.
He didn’t scream, shout, get angry. He was a grown man. An Implacable presence, ham-fisted, thick-bearded, dust-knuckled middle class laborer, mill worker, railway conductor, among other classifications. That night, I’d scarcely seen a child as terrified as he was. Not even Marcia scolded us. They were all chomping at the bit to extinguish the lights.
That night, I lay awake on the floor of Jedidiah’s room, forced to watch the image relentlessly, over and over, whether with eyes shut or opened. Jed must have fallen asleep. Laughs like distant pennies jingling in the sky passed like disquiet on the mend of a breeze, and then moved closer.
I was frozen, absolutely static. The laughs ringing around the house, the Rosie, pockets stuffed with posey. Laughter of children in the middle of the night. My pulse burned away at my optic nerves as if doused with kerosene, searing away the nerve, reaching for my eyes with flaming claws. Sinking? How! Jedidiah, the messiah, I supposed, willed to sleep by the touch of the Holy Ghost as my depth had dried like the lowest of valleys.
And then, it ceased. This was the most horrifying moment of the ordeal. What is it about abrupt silences that follow incorporeal laughter that positively erupt the bladder? Magma, again, all over myself, at least doing some work to thaw my flesh. Tick tock….tick tock….
An hour passed, maybe three. In this state, time was nothing more than a frozen moment. I began to drift at a glacial pace before being torn away from my oblivion by the gentle sound of fragmented tapping at the window. Tapping, and then the screeching of claws. I may have pissed myself again, but there was no going back.
“Just ignore it”, whispered Jedidiah, who, more shockingly than the outside caller who had miraculously ascended to the second story window of our room, revealed that he’d been just as awake and just as frightened as I had - all this time.
Dawn came in a yawning gray haze. All distortions to a standstill, and, somewhere at some time, ages later, my blood had begun to circulate again.
When I opened my mouth, a sound registered in question, but Grandma Lois stopped me, and put a finger to her lips. She said, “the property may belong to the family, but the woods belong to them.
“If They Call Your Name, Never Answer”