I was sixteen when I took sick. That’s how my grandmother said it, “took it” like it was plucking something off the shelf down at Goodreaus’s Hardware, a fleeting choice made without consideration.
It was 1984 and I’d been out hunting with Eddie Volin. Eddie was driving deer toward me, down off Morrison Hill, which is where the big bruisers holed up in the dense poplar growth when they took a break from chasing during the rut, when the moon was full.
Eddie had flushed a corker – two-sixty if he was a pound, at least that’s how I remember it. But memory is a funny thing that way. You think things are bigger than they were and when you revisit them, with the benefit of years, they seem impossibly smaller. I had seen him coming and lifted the old .30-06 to my shoulder and fired and it struck flesh but it wasn’t that twelve pointer.
The bullet sliced through Eddie’s neck and he had coughed, choked, and wheezed as his blood spilled out onto the dying foliage beneath his body. Eddie would often hunt by himself and it was just as likely that he’d been out there alone as it was that he was hunting with me. And wouldn’t it be like some Masshole up here looking to get a real deer and not one of those jackrabbits they have down there to shoot a local and leave him for dead?
I didn’t touch a thing, save for scooping up my shell casing. I went home and when I got there I went to my room and fell facedown into the pillow and cried. When the tears were spent I went over to Eddie’s house with the rifle slung over my shoulder. I knocked on the front door and Mr. Caliendo answered and I asked if Eddie might like to go out looking for a deer before dark came and Mr. Caliendo said he’d already trudged out the backdoor with his .22 shortly before legal shooting hours started that morning.
He hadn’t seen him since and maybe he thought maybe he managed to get himself a buck and was having some trouble dragging it out. I thanked him and went home and my father’s chipped beef on toast went down even more difficult than usual.
At dinner, my father looked at me with suspicious curiosity. He could smell it on me, I thought. I realized that was foolish, and it wasn’t until later on that I realized he could see it on me.
When I crawled into bed, I stared out the window across the river and saw the stacks from the mill belching out their plumes, the tallest of them with a blinking red cyclops eye, shrouded in smoke from the shorter ones. I heard the hollow, rapid thumps of logs falling off a conveyor into an empty metal hopper, without a discernible pattern, pounding rapidly like an irregular heartbeat.
And when the ten o’clock whistle blew at the fire station, it sounded like the bleat of a foghorn from a ship in dense fog.
The scritch scratch scritch scratch at the window in the middle of the night woke me, a craggy fingernail moving across the pane, beckoning me. They called it Cancer Valley for the clusters that would pop up here, which everyone attributed to the mill. My great-grandfather had come over before the Great War as the old folks called it, and at first had worked the log runs when the town was something out of the Old West. Gun fights and saloons, stabbings, brothels on every corner. When the paper mill had opened, gentrification came with it.
When my grandfather went to the Pacific and came home with a mangled leg and a 50% disability, he got a job on the number ten paper machine and my father had done the same after Vietnam. After the country had chewed them up in the war machine as best it could, the mill took what was left and every night before bed I laid there looking at the lights and wondering when it would take me.
When Eddie hadn’t returned that night, Mr. Caliendo called the sheriff and in the morning the game wardens brought a dog in and a bunch of people formed up a search party. I decided it would look odd if I didn’t join, so I casually wandered toward the base of the ridge where I knew Eddie was, trying to make it appear as if I didn’t know where I was going but still wanting the Caliendos to be able to give him a proper burial in good time.
Jim Haskins found him, and fired his rifle in the air and set to blowing on a whistle. They hauled Eddie out and as his body passed, carried on a makeshift litter, I thought his eyes stared right through me and I could still hear the gurgle in his throat. Eventually, the woods cleared out, the search party returned to town, now as a makeshift funeral procession.
I stayed in the woods because I knew I had to. The scritch scratch scritch scratch had been playing in my mind like a drumbeat since the night before and I had a debt to pay. I sat on a log and waited and when I finally looked up, I saw the casebearer, hanging on the branch of an oak tree. I stared at the tree and the larval sack seemed to grow before me. It was made from silk and bits of wood and what emerged from it, I couldn’t say. Because putting words to such horror was not possible, which is why no one in town ever dared speak of what was in the these woods.
Because if you were to speak of it, to acknowledge that it existed, that would somehow be worse than doing what it asked of you. It wasn’t a craggy old man that crawled out of the sack and it wasn’t a monster and it wasn’t evil, because what kind of evil visits in the night at your window and does you no harm?
When it sat down beside me, I looked over and it was a woman and she was beautiful. She asked me if I knew the choice I had to make and I said I didn’t but that was a lie. I guess I just hoped it wasn’t what I thought, and maybe it was something else. But it wasn’t.
Since I had summoned the evil it was now on me to decide what to do with it. I could accept it and it would consume me, devouring my soul. Or I could simply pass it on. That’s what most did. They didn’t accept responsibility, so evil spread, like the diseases that permeated the blood and bones of those that sucked in the noxious fumes from the mill.
So I made my choice and she leaned over and kissed me on the lips. That was my first kiss and it left a taste in my mouth like match heads. That night I slept as soundly as I had since my mother passed.
Over the next couple of months as the snows came and the winter rime formed, darkened by the mill’s soot, the evil grew inside of me. No one acknowledged it or even spoke of it. Because how do you acknowledge such evil?
On Christmas Eve, after we’d returned from Midnight Mass, my father got into his Seagrams and Ginger a bit more than usual and looking at my ravaged frame he confessed that he knew what I’d done because he’d seen me and Eddie heading out to the woods that morning as he’d been walking to work.
He asked if I recalled the boy when I was ten, Charlie something-or-other, who had been killed in that hit-and-run accident. I said I didn’t and he said that’s probably because it was right before my mother took the cancer and died. He told me that my mother had hit Charlie, drunk, on her way back home from her sister’s house, having a few too many Allen’s Coffee Brandys.
She’d left him there, dying in a ditch up past Three Pools. He had begged my mother to pass it to him but she wouldn’t. My father now begged me to pass it to him and I said I would think about it. Dennis just sat in the easy chair, staring silently at the low embers on the hearth.
Well before dawn, my father shook me awake and told me I had to come with him because he wanted to forget those things that he’d done over in Vietnam. Every night he laid away, begging for the casebearer to come to him. But the scritch scratch never came to his window, and he reasoned that maybe he had summoned the evil too far from this place.
So we went out, a fresh crust of snow on the ground that Christmas morning, the stars still arching above us. And when we got to the log where I’d sat in the fall it climbed out and came to us and sat there.
When I looked over, I saw her and told her I wished to pass it, as my father had asked me to. So that was when he took it from me and we buried him when the ground fully thawed in early May. But not before I had locked him in the basement that whole winter, as he begged for me to let him pass it on.
That was a longtime ago and I’m getting old now and I finally have the courage to do what I should have done all those years ago. So I’m going out, two sets of footprints in the snow, breath bellowing out of us in the cold. And I’m going to accept what I’ve earned because now it is my turn. I’ll take it and it will consume me and I can already taste that sulfur in my mouth but then, I suppose, it has never really left, just like the gurgle from deep in Eddie’s throat.