Page 52 of Stay Buried

The knackerman and I were tolerated, and I suppose that wasenough, the best we could hope for; we were bound by the invisible strings of our otherness. We each knew what it was to feel distrustful eyes on us, to hear the questioning and even cruel remarks as we left the room. The children didn’t run and hide when they saw me coming, but they did sometimes stare and whisper, skip away tittering.

And now here I was, part of the hunting party.

I knew full well that even with Uncle Thomas and myself there to try to stop them, the other men would shoot the knackerman on sight if we found him at home.

Benjamin had ordered the factory closed so that the men could help search for Clarice, Emile, and the knackerman. Michael Knapp had led a group of men to search the north side of town and the woods behind the St. James farm. Another group was searching out by Chickering Pond. Other men stayed in the village, armed and patrolling, keeping the women and children safe. Chauncey had wanted to come up the hill with us, but Benjamin said no. “Do me a favor, son,” he’d asked. “Go back to my house. Pearl is there alone. Stay with her. Keep her safe.”

As Chauncey shouldered his rifle and turned to leave, he glanced my way with a quick smirk. I bit the now-ragged inside of my cheek, the metallic tang of blood mixing with saliva.

I envisioned doing terrible things to Chauncey. Unspeakably terrible things that involved sharp scalpels and suture needles.

Now I trudged up the hill, feet slipping in the slushy snow. The air was cold and my breath came out in moist clouds. A low fog hung in the valley, keeping the cold trapped in. During the spring, it usually did not burn off until midday, if then. Sometimes, like now, I felt as if the fog were a living thing, pressing down on us, creeping in through cracks in doors and windows, slipping through gaps in coats and sleeves, shrouding the whole town in cold and damp, a quiet hush that wasn’t truly quiet; if you listened hard enough, there were whispers in the fog.

Spirits, some of the older women in town said. I remember when Iwas young, Charlotte Albone looking at the thick fog outside and saying it was a good day for the dead to come prowling.

And what of the knackerman? Was he a spirit of a sort? A dead man walking through the fog?

I shivered at the thought of it, pulled my hat down over my ears, and wrapped my scarf around them so I would not hear any whispers.

The knackerman could not have been truly dead, I told myself. His heartbeat must have been too faint for Uncle Thomas and me to hear.

I thought of the frogs and toads that burrowed deep into the mud each winter, barely alive, in a sort of suspended animation until the warmth of spring. Perhaps it was the same with the knackerman, with Clarice and Emile too.

Part of the sickness, I told myself.

But what sort of sickness mimicked death so closely, made people attack each other, run naked through the snow?

I longed to turn back; every fiber of my being was telling me to run back down the hill, go home and lock the door.

I reached for the charm around my neck, realizing how foolish it was: How was a little silver eye going to protect me from whatever was waiting at the top of the hill?

We were following two sets of prints, both barefoot. One of the sets was smaller.

“Clarice,” Benjamin said as he looked down at them with his one good eye. “He’s taken her.” He pointed to the much larger footprints beside them.

I peered down at the footprints in the snow, and though I am no expert tracker, I saw no sign of a struggle, no sign of Clarice being dragged. I did, however, see drops of red blood in the snow, like frozen flowers blooming.

Luther led the way up the hill, through trees draped in a blanket of heavy wet snow, bent down, forming a dense canopy over the road. It was like walking through a tunnel. The snow and fog muffledeverything.

I tried to imagine walking barefoot through the snow, how it would be so cold, then your feet would grow numb. Then frostbite would set in. I remembered when Gerard Pipp got lost in the woods last winter—by the time he found his way back, his fingers and toes were frostbitten. Despite my uncle’s attempt to save them, the tissue turned black and he had to have four fingers and three toes amputated. I’d disposed of the blackened fingers and toes in the burn pile, tossing them into the hot fire, where they popped and sputtered.

The tunnel of trees seemed to get closer, darker, as we climbed the hill.

The path was just wide enough for a wagon to get down. I doubted an automobile could ever make it up even on the finest summer day. Whoever ventured here would need to be on foot or horse.

I thought of the knackerman, of his trips down the hill into town with his horses and cart, pulling a load of dead animals back up on his return. I’d once seen him load his cart with a draft horse from the Prichard place. It had taken five men to get the beast onto the wagon. How, I wondered, did the knackerman unload him once he got home? The answer dawned on me as I recalled the rattling knives, cleavers, and saws that adorned his cart. I couldn’t help but imagine how the knackerman might butcher a horse: sawing off each limb, beheading the animal at the lowest point of the neck. Opening its rib cage and abdomen, removing the organs and entrails, perhaps saving the heart for last, still warm in his hands.

I held still, listening, sure I could hear voices far off that drifted down the hill like whispers, like wind through the trees.

The whispers turning into a raspingcaw, caw, caw.

A crow sounding the alarm.

“He knows we’re coming,” I said aloud, surprising myself, not sure where this thought had come from.

The woods opened up at last and we found ourselves in a large clearing.

“This is it,” said Luther.