Mick Leigh

The night Enoch died I went to give my infant suck and he was dead too. Later I dreamed that the little one had not perished but had only been cold. I rubbed his tiny limbs before the fire and he came to life again, a most cruel vision from which I woke to an icy dawn with the bark roof leaking and the ground too stiff for burying.

After two days it thawed. I scraped out a shallow hole and put them in it as the rain fell on their pearly faces. For two nights I sat out, sheltering beneath a moldy bear robe and holding the musket Enoch had brought back from the war. Enoch was hateful and I could not mourn his passing, yet that child, unnamed as he was, promised to be a light for me in the darkness of this infernal wilderness. Sitting by the grave, shivering, my ears pricked for wolves, I watched the smoke from my fire spiral into the black sky and spied the twisted limbs of trees looming over me. Starting from a doze, I thought one of the branches was reaching down to take me. I said, “Ye won, didn’t ye?” I had long believed I could hear them talking, whispering among themselves how they’d like to murder us and grind our carcasses up fine. Once, I shared my suspicions to Enoch. He called me a foolish woman and averred there was a time not long past when that kind of talk would get a person burned as a witch. I answered, “What about Hannah Stovall and her two girls, wandering off into the woods and never seen again, or that branch that fell atop Benjamin Tupper on a still day, smiting him like the hand of the Lord?” “Hush ye,” said Enoch.

After they was in the ground, I took sick and lay sweating and writhing upon my simple pallet, and all the time listening to the trees plotting. One of my eye teeth come loose. I wriggled it out and held it before me so that the moonlight showed it all bloody and tusk-like. They was naught about it to suggest it come from a child of God, and mayhaps I weren’t no more. Mayhaps the Almighty had turned his face from me. The first two days I was fevered I could hear the cow bawling in the barn, only I was too poorly to milk her. Then I didn’t hear her no more. When I at last could stand and stagger about, I went out and the cow was gone. The horse too. Chickens and the geese all dead, slaughtered by foxes.

How the others learned of my misfortune, I am at a loss to say. We were all of us scattered in that godforsaken wood, excepting four families still bunched together along the Ohio. They lived in the fort we’d built when we first come to keep the Mingos and the wild beasts at bay. Yet somehow it was found out. This I know because that damnable mixed-blood Half John came skulking about with his spidery way of walking from the musket ball lodged in his hip bone. He wanted to know if there was something he could do for me, even as his eyes raked me up and down as if I weren’t wearing a stitch. When I told him nay, he lifted the side of his mouth, showing a row of sharp teeth like a possum’s. He said they’d put me off soon enough, for we were tenants of Colonel Asher’s and with Enoch gone there was no profit in me alone. “Asher can have it as far as I’m concerned,” I said to him. He showed his teeth again and went spidering away, no doubt reporting my temperament to the colonel.

Saturday came and just past midday I heard someone outside. It was the one called the Horror, but he called himself Florian. I swung open the door and stood athwart the frame with the smooth-bore dangling from the ends of my arms. He was mounted atop a black plow-horse. They weren’t nothing else could carry him, for he was what could fairly be called a giant. Near seven foot tall he was. Rain sheeted off his slicker and guttered over the low brim of his hat. His face, a tracery of scars, was fish-belly white, though what you noticed most was his nose, a queer appendage fashioned from whale bone patterned with scrimshaw and hitched on with a leather thong. I could feel his yellow eyes upon me as if he’d laid the tips of his fingers on my flesh, albeit his way of looking weren’t the same as Half John’s.

Florian had come among us last spring. He rode into the fort one day, two pack-mules a’ trailing. The people nearly went mad with the sight of him, declaring him monster and fiend on account of his unnatural aspect. Some of the women picked up stones, but he looked them off that notion. He said he intended to go on west over the next ridge and there he aimed to settle. Colonel Asher informed him that was past the treaty line. When he declared he would go nonetheless, the colonel and the others were secretly glad of it; they hoped the Mingos would murder him, only they did not. We come to learn that they considered him a being apart and refused to raise a hand against him.

Florian had been at our ‘stead twice to trade with Enoch, who said he’d seen worse whilst serving with Gates. The first time I laid eyes on him, his hideousness caused me to flinch. Seeing my reaction, a sorrow come to his face that made me feel unchristian, and so I mustered the grit to meet his eyes and to bid him good morning. He asked if I would kindly fetch him a drink of spring water. When I did, the ladle trembled so in my hand that nearly half the water slopped out.

Yet now, with him appearing uninvited and me by myself, I flung him a narrow look. His horse snorted plumes of foggy breath and stomped its hoofs so hard you could almost feel the weight of them. His hands gripping the reins were missing some fingers. “Ye can’t stay here,” said he, as if it were a plain fact.

“And how is my state of affairs any concern of yours?” said I in answer.

He turned his ghastly face toward the empty barn, as if the direness of my situation was obvious and not worthy of remarking upon. And while I knew he was right, I preferred to reach that conclusion on my own. Mayhaps he reckoned as much, for he touched his hat brim and rode off unhurried, guiding his horse into the darksome forest, following no path I knew of save his own. Three days later he returned and, having had more opportunity to meditate on matters, I chanced to accompany him and did not bother to close the door behind me.

His place was situated along the Savage Branch, about three miles upriver from the Mingo village. More of a den it was, like something a bear would build if it could. Still, it was dry inside and smelled of whale oil and sage, and the fireplace, fashioned from river stone, drew well. Above the mantle hung a piece of gleaming, handsomely shaped wood. He saw me admiring it and said it was a tiller from a ship.

I asked him, “Was ye a seafaring man?”

“Aye,” was all he chanced to reply.

Spring came and we walked together in the forest, despite my being loath to do so. I shared with him my suspicions about the trees, and he did not mock me as Enoch had done. Florian’s manner lightened considerably when we were in the wood. He would mimic the sounds of birds, inform me of their names and provide some description of their habits. He showed me fox dens, elk wallows, and the footprints of bears and panthers and deer. He would lift some ponderous flat stone as if it weighed nothing, such was his strength, and bid me examine the insect life teeming beneath it. He took delight in the wild flowers and medicinal plants, plucking specimens for pressing in a book in which he would enter notations in a fine hand.

Once, we climbed to a long, high ridge. From this height you could see all the way to the Ohio, glittering and winding in the far distance, the forested hills tumbling toward it from both sides. At the uppermost portion of the ridge stood a twisted lightning-blasted wreck of an oak covered with boles and fungi and bored by insects. He approached it and patted its trunk tenderly, as if they were old acquaintances. Observing him do this altered something in me, and my fear of the forest lifted in that moment. When I made this known to him, he seemed pleased and was moved to assert that all of creation is one vast tapestry, from the tiniest unseen thing to the planets and the farthest stars. “There is no evil aside from that which we make,” he declared.

Florian would on occasion spout philosophy, citing the names of personages with whom I was unacquainted and oft-times uncorking some twaddle he said was Latin. Whilst I was unable to follow him, I’d listen nevertheless because his way of declaiming bore a musical quality, like verse, and stirred sentiments in me that weren’t troublesome. He offered to teach me how to read and write, although I declined, informing him I was weary of the intrigues of men. My answer amused him, as if he took my point.

One fine morning that summer as we sat together outside the cabin, I said, “Pray, what befell ye?” I had speculated on this since first laying eyes on him but was finally moved to dare the question after glimpsing him bathing in the river. Modesty should have caused me to avert my eyes from the sight of him standing there unclothed in the shallows along the bank with the sun shining full on his form, only I was powerless to do so, such was the awful wonder of his disfigurement.

He paused in his whittling and regarded me from beneath his brow. His ivory nose glowed a dull yellow in the morning light. “I’ve slew men for asking me that,” said he, and I believed him. Gesturing toward his face with the hand grasping the knife, he said, “I was stitched together from the parts of many men, no different than you might employ needle and thread to fashion a rag doll.”

Reckoning he was having sport with me, I jested in return: “That being the case, might I say that your maker ought to have graced ye with a proper nose.”

“He did so,” came his retort. “Alas, it fell off some time back.”

We got to sniggering about this, and I was prepared to abandon the subject and accept that he considered my curiosity impertinent. Then in a solemn vein, he said, “We are all of us composed of parts.”

I snorted and waved him off.

“Consider it, woman,” he said. “What are we but an aggregation of form, thought, emotion, experience – all assembled in such a way as to make us appear as one thing, no different than yon wagon. Yet picture that conveyance disassembled into its constituent portions. Holding that image in your mind, I challenge ye to name the one part that possesses the essence of the wagon entire.”

Wrinkling my nose at his philosophizing, I said, “Ye failed to mention the most vital share of this aggregation of which ye speak, our eternal soul.”

Presenting me with a mystified look, he said that though he had attempted to discern this element within himself, his efforts had been in vain.

“We all have a soul,” I protested.

He studied the ground between his feet and said nothing.

That autumn Colonel Asher brought men against the Mingo village and they slaughtered every man, woman and child. Florian fell into a fearsome rage at this wickedness, roaring like a gut-shot bear and tearing at his own clothing. In a dreadful voice that chilled me to hear, he vowed to storm the fort and smite the murderers. Tearfully, I begged him to stay his hand. “They’ll slay ye certain,” said I. “Then what, pray, would become of me?” When I put this to him he ceased his raving and studied me in a new way. He let me coax him into sitting and, after a time, agreed to forego his vengeance. Whilst he didn’t say as much, I reckoned it was for my sake that he did so. After the massacre we picked up and moved west. What followed was a string of sojourns in lonely cabins on the fringes of the frontier. We’d abide in each one until civilization caught up and people’s hatred drove us off.

Time passed and my hair grayed. Florian’s great frame became bent. He lost one of his hands, then an ear and the sight in his left eye. “I’m coming undone,” he’d say, although he seemed untroubled by it. Eventually we settled in the Missouri Territory, and he took to sitting silently for lengths of time, either by the fire or in the sun, and always with a tranquil countenance, his still form like that of a ruined statue or that lightning-blasted tree he showed me on the ridge above the Ohio.

Over the years I attempted to draw him out about his past. He would divulge only that in his early life he had been filled with a consuming hatred that led him to commit evil deeds for which he now repented. Though I encouraged him to pray for God’s forgiveness, he would not. At first I took this to mean he was some species of infidel, only to abandon that sentiment because I could sense in him a depth of spirit of which I’ve seldom encountered. If his yarn about being assembled from parts was to be believed, I would venture that the heart that had been put in him was a good one. He would return from the forest with some flower or plant to press in his book, or with a gift for me of fresh berries or nuts. He’d keep seed upon his person and feed birds from his hand. Seeing him standing there, smiling peacefully with hungry birds flitting around his ponderous head and shoulders, put me in mind of one of them saints of old.

‘Twas in early April when he died. He’d been sitting on a bench in the sun, his back resting against the wall of the cabin in his habitual pose of contemplation. Only when a titmouse lit upon his shoulder, seeking food, did I come to understand. I made a pyre and burned him on it as he had instructed me to do some months before. When he’d expressed this wish, I’d argued that burning was a heathenish and blasphemous practice. But he insisted upon it, saying, “I will not have my carcass pickled and displayed in the public square.”

Years have gone by since his passing. I am old and crippled. As you can see, I have learned my letters. I live simply in a small settlement and have vowed not to move again, for I have lost the will to keep beyond a world that continues to so swiftly advance, leveling whole forests to make way for the farmer, the surveyor, the road builder. Them trees I once feared never stood a chance. I’ve taken to sitting quietly at times, as he did, feeling the shadows shift beyond my shuttered eyes and allowing the muddiness of my mind to settle so that all of the torments of the past and present can gain no purchase in my awareness. In those moments I find peace, though my mind turns on a single question: If each of us is made of parts, then what, pray, does that make us to each other?

Bio

Mick Leigh is a writer from the Midwest who has worked as a print journalist, copywriter and technical writer. His fiction often deals with nature, particularly its dark, mythical side. His work has been published in The Broadkill Review, The Rockvale Review, New Reader Magazine, El Portal, Apricity Magazine, Marrow, Allium, and The Broad River Review.