Winter by Heart

A low moon slummed among the briars, providing nightwalking light but not much else. In the dead end of the year, dark came so early. Dark and the desire to dig up the slimmest fringe of heat, coax it out of the surface of any cooling object: car windshields, polished granite, black paint. This was when Luke Messer would press his bare palms to the warmth still living in any such surface and touch his lightly whiskered face, imagining combustion when it seeped through his skin down into his hustling blood.

Once he passed by the ticking hood of his black Lincoln Town Car, his hands already growing cold from where they had lain above the engine, he staggered up through the totterings of old family headstones, stepping over graven names that meant nothing to him. Kin but not kind. He’d read that somewhere, taken the lesson from among his father’s forgotten books, but now it supplied nothing more than wasted breath.

Luke knew Old Carter Marsh camped on the other side of these woods, hunched in one of these pocket ridges, making do year round in little more than a  dugout, stirring meal and wild meat over an open fire, seemingly untroubled by a world that allowed no place for him. Tonight Luke would find him, speak with him, have this damn thing done, and then live with whatever sins might ensue.

He had come out this way for several nights before, always at this early evening hour and always alone, mending his fear with whiskey or cigarettes, drugging good reason into stupor. But even the benefit of a fogged mind could not turn back fright when he beheld Marsh beneath the slung tin roof, still as Sanskrit. All resolve would seep away, abetted by the darkness between them, and he would go back the way he had come. But not this night.

*

No torture was worse than loving a woman you shouldn’t. Luke knew that the moment his father brought Alice Forester home, that Sunday afternoon just a few months gone. She had stood in the doorway in the May heat, tall and picnic pink, speaking his Christian name as though there was some impressive weight in its saying when she came forward and shook his hand.

She and his father married three weeks later.  A ceremony under heavy June boughs, followed by a white tent reception with buckets of bottled beer. Luke, still only nineteen, secreted a few extra bottles and went off by himself under a tulip poplar to drink the sweating beer while he watched the others dance until the twilight lowered. All that evening he tried to pretend he did not think the warm thoughts he did as his father and Alice turned beneath the festive light, embracing one another under the summer balm.

In early autumn, his father began to travel, gone from the house sometimes a week or more at a time. Since leaving high school, Luke had gotten hired on in the early morning shift, preloading boxes into the backs of UPS trucks. He settled into the work, liking the predawn drive into the warehouse, sodium lights flickering over empty streets. When he quit after four short but busy hours, the rest of the world was just waking up, and as he drove back across the stream of incoming workers, muscle tired and satisfied, he felt he’d discovered some secret knowledge about how a man could make himself happy with his own idea of what was right and necessary.

After sleeping through most of the day he would deer hunt up on Stoneman’s Ridge in the late afternoons, walking the treeline where the shed acorns were likely to draw prey. Luke had never been a good hunter because he became easily restless and could not stay put for more than a few minutes at a time, so the outings were really nothing more than long walks through the woods, stopping and listening, the rifle levered over his shoulder. Sometimes, he would flush an animal out. Often a rabbit scuttling through the underbrush or maybe a squirrel treeing and shouting down at him for his trespass.

Once he had been thus spied, he would find a good flat place to sit, a stone or downed trunk, and burn a smoke or disgorge a little whiskey from his flask before heading back down the hill to the house.

He had just been outed by a pair of crows who were cawing furiously when he decided his hunting for the day was very well done. Leaning against a big pine, he cradled the Marlin across his body with the barrel trained upwind in case anything happened upon him, and pulled out his matches and Camels.  A thrice struck match caught behind his shelter hand. He took one long, perfect draw, and then, as though it had been bestowed noiselessly from the earth, a black bear cub appeared no more than a dozen yards away.

The first hard stab of shock quickly gave itself over to nerves. Luke scanned the area, looking for signs of the protective mother, but he heard nothing, saw nothing. Nothing saw him back. The cub remained, posed in cartoonish curiosity.

Luke spoke to the cub, laughing, yelling nonsense, idle threats. When that did not dissuade, he barked and windmilled his arms, anything he could imagine to spook the bear, but that too only invited the cub’s bemused attention. He squatted at the base of the tree, finished off the cigarette and warmed himself with a bubbling of the whiskey.  Then he raised the Marlin and fired a shot through the cub’s heart.

The cub went down immediately. Luke walked over and looked at him a moment before toeing him over to see the exit wound in the back. No wicked bone or pinkly torn flesh, just a larger darkening of blood than the smaller darkening where the bullet had gone in. He gathered the cub by its hind paws and headed back down towards the house.

By the time he came down to the edge of the yard it was already full dark and all the house lights were on. He was halfway towards the old barn before he realized Alice was sitting outside on the porch smoking a cigarette in the gentle abrasions of the evening shadows.  He stopped and they looked at one another for a full minute without speaking.

“That’s a hell of a thing you’ve done,” she eventually said.

There was no correction in her voice, he noted. He came forward and laid the corpse at the edge of the porch, just a few inches from her brightly painted toenails. For a moment, he thought she might reach down and begin to pet it.

“What do you plan on doing with that?”

He shrugged his shoulders and leaned the rifle’s barrel against the porch and placed his hands over the cub’s lifeless eyes. Then, not knowing what caused him to do so, quickly drew back. “I don’t know. I want to keep it though.”

She exhaled lung smoke. “I imagine you would. Take it on out there. I’ll go get your Daddy’s skinning knives.”

He watched her go inside then hefted the cub and went out to the barn.  The only lighting was a single yellow bulb hung from a long wire. He flipped the switch on and the barn’s interior became an uneasy sea of swaying illumination as the gusting wind set the light bulb in motion. He laid the cub down on its side and witnessed the lengthening shadows stretch out and away as the bulb swung back. Not liking this, he moved the cub onto its back so that the foreshortened silhouette could not appear to belong to anything other than the dead thing it did.

When Alice came, she had the knives wrapped in a white hand towel. She set them aside then doubled the towel, drew her dress to her thighs and knelt on it. When Luke did not reach for the smaller knife, she took it up and slit the cub’s crotch, detaching the wormy penis and slicing up until the pale belly was bared. Then, she repeated the meridian of the cut, this time slipping the blade into the muscle and fat until the innards began to swell up through the smiling incision.

Her hands worked quickly and Luke could hear the gentle suckling noise as the diaphragm separated from the bear’s cavity and slopped onto the straw ground. She was blood dark from fingertips to wrists.

“You go on and bury that,” she said, nodding at the pile of entrails without looking at him. “I’ll take care of the hide.”

He did as she instructed, catching the warm organs into his arms and holding them close as a baby as he walked around back and rested them among some creeping vine. He found one of the shovels back near the rear door that had been nailed shut and began digging by the slim cracks of light than shone from between the vertical slats. The earth was soft and black and he met few stones. He dug deeper than he needed to, not wanting to go back inside too soon. Even when the grave was ready, he smoked a cigarette and studied Ursa Minor above without knowing that the constellation had such a name nor understanding the portent if he had. When the smoke burned his fingers, he nudged the guts into the hole along with the butt, covered them and went back inside.

Alice greeted him with a smile, the black skin spread out as neatly as a pair of child’s washed pajamas. The corpse was naked except for the head.

“You’ll need to salt this down if you mean to keep it,” she said. “I’ll wrap everything else up for the freezer. Go fetch the handsaw.”

He did so. She talked to him as she set the teeth of the saw across the small neck, decapitating the cub and quartering what remained.

“You wouldn’t think by how I look I would know how to do this, would you? My Daddy, he was a layabout, always up in the bed with books. Left my Mama and me to make do. He couldn’t work, said he had these migraines. Said it was a curse of being a brilliant man. So when Mama couldn’t make enough waiting tables in town, she’d send me out with a squirrel gun to fill up the soup pot. Here, grab that ham.”

Luke pried the cub’s quarter towards him. He felt the motion of the saw shiver up through his hand as Alice bore down.

She continued, “I learned quick you never waste any meat. I couldn’t think of a worse sin. Not than to let yourself suffer because you’ve gone squeamish.”

She rinsed the quarters by the outside spigot and carried them inside and wrapped them in plastic while Luke nailed the hide to the inside of the barn wall with the white skin facing out so that he could massage salt in to dry the pelt. By the time he had come into the house everything had been put away and he could hear the soft needles of the shower behind the closed bathroom door at the end of the hall. He sat at the kitchen table and thumbed through one of his father’s copies of Field and Stream.  There was an article about the effects of climate change on the migration habits of Canadian elk and moose that showed many bright pictures of the animals fleeing increasingly populated and hostile territories. The photographer had taken great pains to make the creatures utterly beautiful amidst the larger backdrop of their tragedy.

The door at the back end of the hall cracked and Alice’s turbaned head poked out from a billow of shower steam.

“You smell bad. I’ve left a little hot water for you.”

He watched her step out, cased in a short pink towel, and cross the hallway before turning into her bedroom, the light catching the spangling traces of moisture along the backs of her long slim legs.

After showering, he went to his room and lay on the bed in his boxer shorts and a white tee shirt, holding one of the Foxfire books he always kept on the shelf but rarely opened. But while his eyes looked at the print and the pictures, his mind registered neither. He could think of nothing but Alice and how she had done what she had with the cub without question or complaint, and he thought too what it might be like if they stood together under the shower head, their compliant bodies meeting under the hot water and finally welding fast.

There was a tap at the door, rousing him. As he sat up, the heavy book slid from where it had been spread over his chest and thumped against the floor.

“Are you alright,” Alice asked, opening the door. “I saw your light still on. Don’t you have to work in the morning?”

Luke said that he did, his words coming slow from his recent waking. She stood in the doorway for a moment, regarding him. The hall light shed the false dimensions of Alice’s hanging night gown so that Luke could clearly see the true shape of her underneath. The smoke from her cigarette coiled over her head like something being written in the air.

“Daddy doesn’t want us smoking in the house,” Luke said.

She laughed. “This little bit won’t hurt anything. I promise. Here, I’ll put it out if it bothers you. I don’t want you to get me in trouble with your Daddy.”

She began to leave.

“No, that’s fine. Here, wait a minute.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and took his own pack of Camels from his night table drawer. Before he could find a matchbook, Alice leaned forward and struck her lighter for him, their hands incidentally touching. She took his palm in hers.

“You look like a man, but your hand is soft as a boy’s.”

Luke shrugged. “I know it. Never would take a callous, just blister and peel.” He became self-conscious, studying the intersecting lines on his palm. Slowly, he drew away.

“You should find some kind of work that you’re better suited to, Luke. Loading boxes isn’t fit for a monkey. I worry that you don’t think well enough of yourself. Your Daddy thinks the same thing.”

Luke’s eyes could not find her face.

“You and him talk about me?”

“We’re concerned.”

“I’m fine. I don’t know why you’d care.”

They sat together on the edge of the bed. A gentle lick from a night singing bobwhite interrupted the silence and then ceased, the elocution of its voice seeming to shrink the world and make all souls within it suddenly beyond reach.

“I worry that you’re lonely,” Alice said. “I know what that feels like. Do you think all loneliness feels the same?”

Again, Luke shrugged his shoulders.

“Do you want to touch it and see?” she said, taking his hand once again, but with a difference this time, with a firm guidance that conveyed the dry warmth and assurance of her touch. “To see if my loneliness is like yours?”

A giddiness rose in Luke’s chest, an awareness that was like a joke only he understood. When his fingertips grazed the soft pimpling of her aureole, he could not suppress a nervous laugh. She covered his mouth with hers then took his hand lower.

Luke could not remember her leaving when she eventually did, the two of them beside one another for a long fogged time, dragging shallow wrinkles in the top sheet of the still made bed while their hands made urgent movements against each other. Finally, sleep had taken him and before waking, the night had taken her.

With daylight the house seemed enormous. Luke moved cautiously over the pine floor, trying not to betray himself before he could see if Alice had gone out. Standing there and seeing and hearing nothing, he realized he’d slept through his morning shift work, but this didn’t worry him. He went back to his bedroom and dressed.

Coffee had been made. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup and then went out to the sun polished porch, pulling on a stiff Carhart jacket against the cold. Gelid light pulsed across the yard and mockingbirds cut aerials from the branches above, casting quick shadows on the ground. Alice’s car was still in its place.

Luke liked the emptiness of the morning, the sense of time abandoned, and he drew himself into one of the corners of sunlight, leaning into it as though it was a patch over something broken in him.

A sound from the barn ended his reverie. The scrabbling of claws and a throaty growl. He set his coffee at the porch railing and immediately went out to it. The darkness of the barn took his eyes for a moment so that all he could make out were the antic shapes of low slung monsters circling one another and snapping their jaws. In a moment their forms became a brace of raccoons warring over the joints and pulp that remained of Alice. A few feet beyond lay the forgotten cub’s head, left unburied from the night before. It had drawn some vengeful beast out of the night.

*

The wind could not reach Carter Marsh in his dwelling, carved as it was into the cutbank, the firelight scaling its walls, playing shadows there as ancient as brimstone. The dumplings and squirrel boiled softly in the blackened Army surplus mess tin. Luke watched him stir the potion with a long wooden spoon then rest it crosswise on the wobbly handle.

“I seen you come out this way before,” Carter Marsh said finally. “I seen you studying on me.”

He was not as old as Luke had suspected him from a distance. He seemed to still have most of his teeth, and by the corded muscles in his forearms, he could tell the old man commanded some measure of physical strength.

“I don’t think you believe you can run me off. Not if you’ve got good sense, anyhow,” Marsh said, hocking phlegm. “This stretch of woods used to be my Daddy’s place. See that old chimney right there,” he pointed out into a black night that could reveal no standing architecture. “That was the old homeplace before it burnt down in fifty-seven. I be damned if some pup thinks he can run me out of the holler where I was born just cause some goddamn chit of paper says something different.”

“I’m not trying to run no one off,” Luke answered. “I need you to do something for me. Something I got coming.” He brought out the hatchet still in its Army green scabbard and slid it gently towards the hermit.

Marsh studied Luke deep, not moving save for the slight shuffling of his eyes, as if they were turning the pages of whatever truth lay behind the image before them.

“Son, I just believe you might be crazier than I am, and that’s something sure enough that scares me.”

*

His father invited what little he knew of Alice’s family to the funeral, a sister up in Boone and a pair of semi-retired female cousins who ran an antiques and curio store over in Brevard, but they did not come the day she was lowered into the ground nor did they send their regrets. He told Luke that Alice had spoken rarely of her kin and when she had the telling had not been the kind of stories he would wish to repeat.

The attendees then, had been the same cousins and uncles that populated every gathering of bereavement Luke could remember from the time since his own mother had died from the sleeping heart murmur more than a decade before. Their condolences seemed well worn in their mouths, as if the words had been brought down from familiar closets and fitted into their silver jointed throats. Recordings of recordings, played out with the grim monotony of static.

After the benediction had been spoken and Alice lowered into the family ground beside Luke’s mother, his father had opened the door for Luke to get in his truck and they had driven away from the shocked expressions of those relatives preparing to bake proper funeral meats and gather at the Messer household. Luke watched the dusty commotion receding in the rear view mirror but said nothing to his father, pleased to be driving away from Alice’s death rather than towards the false remembrance of it. He did not speak to his father because his own voice could not be so easily harnessed as the words of those who did not know Alice had, knowing as he did the accumulation of true sorrow and the terrible ringing silence at the center of remorse, a captive sonic place that was even worse for its solitude.

They drove for hours, following the interstate down from the mountains and into the calm winter brown ocean of Tennessee. The radio crackled with occasional country music and, as they moved further west, the imperious voices of Baptists. Concrete islands of corporate truck stops stumbled past.

Luke’s father exited onto a rural highway and they rode down the long pine corridor, passing the occasional hump of roadkill. On each side orange survey tape girding the tree trunks marked trail heads for late season deer hunters, their farm trucks and half-crippled sedans parked hood to trunk along the narrow shoulder.

Amid the similarity, Luke’s father turned down one of the clay drives and bounced the truck hard over the rain cut surface. Within minutes they came into a clearing with a simple brick ranch home with a spread of cut timber reaching out beyond to a short, bristling horizon. There were no cars to be seen.

“This look familiar to you at all?” his father asked.

Luke said that it did not.

His father got out of the truck and slammed the door, drawing a pack of cigarettes from his blazer pocket, offering one to Luke before he lit his own.

“Thought you’d quit,” Luke said.

“Yeah, me too.”

They went up to the house. His father leaned over an empty flower bed, picked up a silver key and turned it in the lock.

The air inside was stale, heavy. The few furnishings sat under a skin of dust. No pictures hung on the wall.

His father drew a vertical stripe across the clouded television screen. “Thought you might have remembered from some of the old family albums. House your mother grew up in. It became hers when her folks passed back when you were a baby. Then it became mine. A house I didn’t want. One that doesn’t mean the first thing to me.”

He tossed Luke the key and went back towards the kitchen. Cabinets creaked and banged while he looked for something. It was cold in the room. Luke went to the fireplace and jimmied the flue open with a poker and began feeding sticks in. By the time it was ready for a match, his father had turned up a couple of containers of homemade wine sealed in vodka bottles. He drew a penknife around the wax crown and handed it to Luke then opened the other bottle for himself.

“Most worthless shit on the planet,” his father said, drawing his sleeve across the raspberry stain on his lips. “But there’s plenty of it back there. Don’t be shy.”

Luke drank the wine. The sweetness overwhelmed whatever else might have settled into it over the years. He opened his palm to look at the key his father had given him.

“That’s yours to keep,” his father said, reaching past him and striking the lighter to set off the kindling. Dry as it was, the wood took within seconds and popped as the pitch exploded within. He laid heavier logs and soon the warmth was a real and living thing at their backs.

“Why you want me to have it?” Luke asked.

“Because it’s your inheritance, not mine. Never was.”

Luke looked round at the thin wainscoting, the dimensions of uninhabited space that pulsed from where they sat, wrinkling outward like some veil of polite despair.

“You don’t want me to live with you anymore,” he said, pocketing the key. “You blame me for everything, don’t you?”

His father tipped back the wine, bubbling it down to the label.

“I’m not about to have this conversation.”

“No, I didn’t figure you would. What if I don’t want to move here? What if I don’t want any of this?”

His father shrugged, raising the bottle once more.

“It’s what you’ve got to deal with now.”

That evening Luke drank sips to his father’s swallows and when the night had worked its wear on them both, his father went in to one of the bedrooms and crawled across the bed with one of the empty bottles still in his hand, disappearing into the blank sleep of drunkenness. When all his idle tossing had stopped, Luke went out to the truck for the things he would need.

*

As he drove back from Tennessee and came into Sanction County, daylight caught Luke just as he passed over the narrow wooden bridge above the Plum River.  Once he had crossed, he pulled the truck over to the flat clay bank and got out to see what he could make of the water this morning. The sky was low and seemed that it might carry wet weather, potentially good for fishing. He had known this river all his life and his return to it after the long night warmed him. He edged down towards the river with one leg cocked back against the slope to keep from falling in. He put his hand in the water, knowing it must be cold. Even during the summer the water could chill, running off the bottom of a lake as it did. But this morning the pain to his hand was simple electrocution. He bit down hard on his bottom lip as he tried to keep his hand in the water. It would not numb, the pain instead learning increase until he could stand it no longer and drew back from the stream, folding his hand against his chest like something hopelessly wrecked.

He wondered at the pain his father endured when Luke had entered the bedroom and splashed the gasoline on his sleeping body. So great when he’d risen up in utter shock, the flames whirling around his head, coming from some source he couldn’t explain, as if it were the manifested agony of something breathed out through his howls. And then the impossible whiplashed movements of his father’s body as he tried to lurch free from the fire consuming him. So great and dangerous and pitiful that Luke had closed and locked the door on the suffering animal and gone out to the truck, leaving with the first tickling of flames beginning to take the rest of the house.

His father had been the wick for all the rest.

*

With the house in Sanction County as his own, Luke did not leave often. When he needed food or supplies, he would find something of his father’s to sell. A rifle or antique that could be converted to ready cash at the pawn shop. He surrendered the possessions, giving them into the oblivion of his own routine survival, liking the growing emptiness. The spareness of this new world enticed him.

His evening walks took him often by Carter Marsh’s hermitage. For so long the old man had been a myth, a gnome of local repute who was simply tolerated among the landholders of the area. Luke had seen him a few times in the woods through the years, but never spoken to him. Since coming back to Sanction County, though, his walks took him closer to Carter Marsh each evening. So he had been coming out, drawn to him with the sense of some newfound kinsman. Someone who might understand this self-invented language of all things meeting their correct end.

*

“Why is it you want me to do this?” Carter Marsh asked, looking through Luke now, seeing through to the other side of the moment, time disfigured and all masks laid aside.

“My hands,” Luke said. “My hands have become too heavy.” As he spoke the words, he reached his hands out with palms turned up like skin moons on the flat stump. “They aren’t mine. They don’t belong to me anymore.”

Carter Marsh, knowing that the boy may have been speaking the truth for the first time in his life, took up the hatchet and slung the canvas scabbard free. He brought the head down swiftly across one wrist and then the other, two clean strokes to separate the young fool from all things that were never meant to be his.