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.
- 6 -
The flashlight seemed diminished, rocking there on the slats of a floor. All else was very still, and yet there was over the whole space around him a great whirring sound like the band for a sawmill attached to the flywheel of a steam engine and running full out, thrumming low and loud. He had fainted. In the loft above the stone stable. Fainted.
The bird he had flung from him, he knew not where. He put the flashlight on Hettienne, who stared back at him with that same wide, blank look from before. James thought it was like being stared at by someone dead, the shock so great that he pointed the light to the rafters, raking the yellow cone across the roof decking. No gaps, all solid. How had the creature gotten up here with her?
“Hettienne,” he said, shining the light back on her.
Like holes down which the tail of something dark-scaled has just vanished, her blank eyes consumed him. He crawled toward her. Her pupils shrank, the eyes bounded and grew focused, the irises blooming. She gasped and clutched her legs to her chest. Then she scooted backward, gulping.
“Hettienne?”
Hettienne raked her knees and arms, gaping at her ointment-smeared palms. The bell sleeves of one of Margaret’s weskits rolled back. She remembered the fireworks, then putting this weskit on, swaddling herself in the family armor of a roomy hand-me-down. Awful dreams, and then she awakened here. Downstairs in the stables, a mare grumbled.
Gripping her ankle, James whispered, “Darling child? How did you get up here? Like this? And that thing up here with you?”
She shook her head, found herself breathing hard and rough as an animal on the run.
He put a hand out to her, and to his surprise she grabbed it and hurtled herself against him. “I’m right here,” he said, grunting at her force. “You’re in the loft. Nothing’s wrong.” He gathered her shoulders, and the salve clung to his shirt and overalls and stung his forearms and chin. Questa Volta grumbled low. “Well . . . almost nothing is wrong.”
“I have all this burning stuff on me,” she moaned. “What is it?”
“Sss. It’s that horse liniment. The stuff you’ve put on Questa Volta after a hot walk.”
To keep her nose from running clean out, she took in a great big slurping snort that made her sound to James just like her mother. “How do I get it off? If Simon finds out, if Mother finds out!” She was clutching the weskit and making snorting animal noises of frustration. “They’ll give me electroshock. They’ll throw me in Dunning! What am I going to do, Uncle James?”
“Listen.” He shook her hard.
The shake stopped all the whirling and the fear. She was with him, listening.
“Nothing
