Читать книгу The Legend of the Albino Farm - Steve Yates - Страница 8

James felt alarm as he followed Hettienne back to the house, a hand on her shoulder. Fireworks and rockets still lit the trail from the stone jetty in staccato storms of light, detonations thumping the small of his back. Hettienne was shaking, teeth chattering, and yet the night was muggy. Smoke from the fireworks hung like tentacles, blue-gray in the air, probing the house and at last gathering at the Sac River. Transported by two Morgans and a wagon amid much fanfare that afternoon, the tower was fastened to its raft and bedecked with fireworks. At nightfall, David and John in canoes had towed it to the middle of the lake and waited for the signal to light it. When it succumbed at last to flames in all the whirling of pinwheels and spitting of Roman candles, Hettienne began to scream. And not a childish scream of delight but of the mind out of its body and wild with fear.

James scooped her up and clamped a hand over her mouth. Staggering under her weight, he carried her toward the house until, abruptly, she stopped screaming. Though her eyes were wide, she went limp in his arms.

Mortars thumped behind them, nudging the back of his shirt, but she did not flinch. He set her feet on the earth. “I can walk,” she said in that unnerving, mesmerized voice from yesterday’s dinner.

James had tried to catch her in time to shield the family from upset. Even so, her mother followed. He heard the door to the back ell slam and then Charlotte’s small feet scrabbling like no one else’s in the clan. James caught Charlotte’s arms. Hettienne disappeared upstairs—a door shutting in the vast house. James released one of Charlotte’s wrists and pointed to the parlor. Outside, a rocket boomed and its aftermath crackled, a sound like corn violently, expertly husked. He lit a kitchen match and brought a lamp up to steady the light. Charlotte sat rocking herself, a hand buried in her curly hair hiding her face.

“Sss. Sss. Sss,” he whispered.

“Oh, James. Jesus, Mary, Mother of God!”

Charlotte’s face was streaming. While James had witnessed rare upsets from his sisters, this was quite a lot from a grown woman. But he understood it. “Let her get a rest.”

Charlotte snuffled. “What’s gotten into her? She’s seen a thousand times more fireworks on VJ Day over Lake Michigan.”

“I don’t know for sure,” James said. “But when that tower went up, she cut it all loose there and then. Let’s let her sleep.”

Charlotte glanced around as if the parlor were filling with prying Ormonds and disapproving Sheehys, though the bombardment outside continued full force. “Did her father see? Did John follow you?”

James shrugged and watched her for a bit. “Worry about the child. The rest is dross.”

Charlotte sat up straight and eyed him as if she had just received a good slap.

“Wait with me a few more minutes,” James said. “Then go listen at her door. Make sure she has made it into the bed.”

Charlotte nodded. Her eyes pinched. “You are a lovely man and a good uncle. Do you know that?”

He snorted and handed Charlotte a handkerchief. “I’ll be watching out for her.”

She squeezed it and took three deep breaths. “Has this happened to any of you others? John won’t say a thing about his life here or growing up. It’s like he was raised on a moon of Saturn by spacemen from Little Nemo.”

“Simon sleepwalks,” he said, “but only in the winter, when there are fires in the fireplaces and the moon is waxing.”

In a flurry of curiosity, James had once read several articles from Good Housekeeping and other periodicals when Simon had exhibited this behavior. But James didn’t share that information with her, thinking that all those magazines, with their lists and warm and fuzzy paintings and reassurances, seemed a bit saccharine. Especially in that the magazine pieces insisted that sleepwalkers merely did in autonomic fashion many of the same things they did in waking life: cooking, driving tractors and motorcars, setting tables, waiting for streetcars, nothing like screaming bloody murder. “Ten Tips for Waking Sleepwalkers” he recalled in Home Chat, which in the same issue also carried a drawing of a sanguine suburbanite piloting a saucer home. “Flying Saucers for Everybody!” was the sage prediction.

Charlotte worked on her cheeks and nose with the handkerchief. “She sleepwalks,” Charlotte said. “But this zany talking and the rhymes. And that look! Like she’s been hit in the head with a stick of firewood. Any of that, James?” She finished and folded the hankie. “Wait, Helen rhymes for no good reason.” When he did not react to this, she snorted. “Helen is nuts.”

He took the hankie from her as if to protect it from any more rough abuse. “Despite what Simon and your John may think of this noble family . . . strangely and wonderfully made is in fact common to all humanity.” He watched her absorb this. “You and I need to steady up and help her through. And if it keeps on, talk with one of them fine doctors in Chicago. Not any jackass down here. She will get through if we will get through.”

The coffee propelled James as did a worry like none he had ever experienced, an urgency beyond any foaling or calving. Half an hour after Charlotte checked on Hettienne and reported her asleep, the rest of the cranky clan returned home smelling of gunpowder, sweat, and hardwood smoke. They threw their fits and got in their last gibes. Finally all went to bed. But he sat up in the parlor with the kerosene lamp going and a good view of the stairs. To take his mind off Hettienne’s spells, he reread the stilted old novel about the shepherd of the hills and his daughter, a cozy comfort fiction filled with hillbilly characters unlike anyone he knew in the Ozarks. Just as he was coming to the big scene when the heroine fainted, James fell soundly asleep.

He jolted awake. All the comforting sounds of the house, the brassy clicking of the E. Ingraham wall clock in Simon’s southwest bedroom, the swish of curtains in the night’s breeze, seemed a conspiracy to mask trouble. He crept up the stairs, peered through Hettienne’s open bedroom door. Her bed was empty, the sheets twisted in a wad.

Out the back window of the kitchen, a light up in the loft over the stables was flickering where none belonged. James lifted as carefully as he could from the gun cabinet the 20-gauge Remington Model 11. He found a flashlight, bulky and heavy. Then he hustled to the back door. He never walked the grounds of Emerald Park at night in any season without the Remington, for vermin were ample in the dark, and the opossum could be vicious.

He eased down the back steps, the flashlight in his fist, the shotgun at his shoulder. At the stable doors, he heard no crackle of flame, smelled no sharp smoke of hay alight. Up in the vast loft the horse-mad Headleys had constructed above their stone stable to rest nights and keep watch on mares foaling, the orange light flickered. The horses were astir, snorting, bobbing their heads.

At the base of the loft stairs, he listened and dimmed the flashlight by pressing its face against his thigh. He smelled an unmistakable blast of turpentine oil and camphor mixed with an aroma he could not place. A sound then, like a quilt snapped out twice on a porch. The whole air above him stirred. Horses started, circled in their stalls. One kicked out, the crack of its hoof against the wood like a tree limb popping in an ice storm. When he took the first stair, a grunt sounded from up there, then a bark like no animal he had ever heard.

Before his head topped the stairway, the medicinal smell diminished while the other aroma redoubled, thick in the furnace of air above him, heavy like a fruit, melon-sweet, then putrid, rotting. Something long dead. A sound like a broom scuttling across the timbers.

At the top of the stairs, he spied the source of the light, a crusty miner’s lamp, some relic of the Headleys and their cave ride. In the pool of this light, a white, gleaming young faerie girl, opaline white smeared on her elbows, her upper arms, and down her long legs. It was Hettienne, wearing a white, roomy weskit that belonged to Margaret. The camphor-and-turpentine smell came from her sparkling skin and the open crock beside her of Roy Boy’s White Horse Liniment. A steamer trunk blocked his view of half the loft. And back there in the darkness was where he imagined the animal had hidden itself.

Her eyes did not turn to him or his flashlight. Instead they swallowed the air whole with no life at all behind them.

“Hettienne,” he whispered.

She did not stir. There came a riffle behind the trunk and a smell like the metallic stink of feathers, and then the musk of urea and rotting flesh. The aroma clasped the whole loft. Behind the steamer trunk, the head of a buzzard jutted up. Gray, creased flesh and no wattle, but one gray-rimmed black eyeball cocked at him now. Its head was not like the red head and neck of local turkey vultures. Instead the gray head bore scales and a defined bib of gray, scaly armor on its neck. Dull gray scales stretched up to the crown of its head.

“Hettienne,” he called, louder this time.

The girl did not move. But the buzzard, in a ceremony of threat, raised the stiff arms of its wings, extending their tips like massive fingers. On their undersides, glaring feathers of pure white glowed at each wingtip. Its narrow legs, now exposed, were a shocking white. It bobbed its head, making a barking sound, high-unnh, high-unnh.

Setting the shotgun and flashlight down, James moved swiftly. With its wings unfurled, the vulture, just bigger than a tom turkey, could not navigate much. It tottered and hissed to fend off his approach. Then it arched its neck and vomited a splash of amber half-digested matter at him.

He grabbed for its nape just at the bill, hooking his thumb behind its bare head, knotty, prickly, and hard as an oak gall. Wrapping his fingers under its beak and neck, he jerked the bird upward. Then, with all he could muster, with both hands clasped on the thing, he lifted it up off its feet and whirled it around his head until the neck popped.