William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

“The boy,” he yelled. “The boy. Bailey Slone.” He pointed behind him toward the dark, told them all the boy was dead, frozen in the root cellar. Most seemed not to understand, or not to want to.

A man they called Cheeon—Vernon Slone’s lifelong friend, he’d later learn—rushed past him with a rifle, in untied snow boots and a flannel shirt, in dungarees that had been mended with myriad patches from other denim. Others followed him. Core stayed, bent and panting with hands on knees, attempting to recall the exact age his father fell from cardiac arrest.

When he regained half his breath and straightened in the road, he saw her there at the edge of a cabin less house than hut—the shrunken Yup’ik woman he’d encountered before dawn that morning. He limped to her, his left leg tingling from fatigue, his bared hands beginning to numb. Where were his gloves? He’d left them in the root cellar by the corpse of the boy.

“You knew this morning,” he said. “You knew. When we spoke this morning. You knew what she did to the boy.”

She only stared.

“You knew,” he said.

“What can an old woman know?”

“How could you not say something?”

Above them a makeshift streetlamp throbbed with weakened light, fangs of ice hanging from its shade. The old woman smelled of wood smoke and something foul.

“Go back,” she said. “Leave this village to the devils. Leave us be.”

Core thought to grab her arm, to lead her to the Slones’ cabin to see the boy, to make her understand. But she turned, and on a shoveled path through snow she wobbled behind her hut and dissolved into darkness.

He remained beneath the lamp wearing the one-piece caribou suit and boots that belonged to Vernon Slone. More villagers hurried past him, some saying words he did not know. A snow machine screamed by, its one headlamp coning into the black. He could smell its gasoline fumes in the cold. He tried to follow but his legs wouldn’t work and he sat in the road hearing himself breathe. Beguiled by this climate. Terrified of the facts he’d found and fearing already that he could not explain them.

When he reached the Slones’ cabin he wedged through the villagers amassed at the door. The whispers he heard had no tone he could name and he wondered if they were accusations against him. In the root cellar, Cheeon had taken the boy from his tomb, untangled the cellophane from him, laid him on the earth floor. He and others were kneeling by the body, afraid, Core thought, to look at one another. A washed-out bruise coursed across the boy’s throat and Core knew then he’d been strangled.

In the stagnant cold of that cramped space he heard himself say, “Where is she?”

When no one responded, he asked again, “Where is Medora Slone?”

Cheeon turned to him but would not answer. A brailled scar made a backslash from the corner of his mouth. His black hair was gripped at the nape by a length of clothesline rope. Core could not say what spoke in this man’s face—it seemed some mix of boredom and rage. Cheeon said words in Yup’ik to the teen kneeling beside him, then took his rifle from the top of a crate and elbowed past others on the steps. Some remained kneeling by the body but then they too went.

Alone again with the boy, Core felt a kind of vertigo from the sight of him. Children are full of questions but they do not question their own being, are not troubled by their own living. Like animals, they cannot conceive of their mortality. Living seems to them the most natural state of things. But infants, he remembered, were repelled by the elderly, howled in the arms of the olden, as if they could sense, could smell the elderly’s proximity to decay.

Core saw a woolen blanket inside a crate and used it to cover the boy. He remained there by him for many minutes, attempting to remember prayers he’d discarded long before this night.

Upstairs in the front room of the cabin again, he waited for someone to speak to him. Perhaps to comfort him. But the villagers only whispered among themselves. Most were Yup’ik, some were white, some mixed. All regarded him with an anxiety that felt both personal and old. Their clothing clashed; one woman wore animal-hide pants and a red jacket with the embossed name of a football team. Core somehow understood that police had been summoned from town, an hour’s drive, longer in this snow and dark.

He looked to the whiskey on the shelf, then drank to let it tamp the dread in him. Where were the cigarettes Medora Slone had given him last night? He sank into the same armchair he’d sat in when he arrived the night before. Still no one would speak to him.

He’d never had trouble comprehending how people are what they are. If you live long enough, he knew, you see that the natural world matches the human one. Most are pushed on by appetites no more complicated than a wolf’s. A wolf expelled from its pack will travel hard distances to find another—to be accepted, to have kin. It wants to stanch hunger, sleep off fatigue, make itself anew. He understood that. But Medora Slone. How could he explain this? Why did these people refuse to acknowledge him? They began leaving the cabin by twos and did not come back.

He creaked from the armchair to take another pull of whiskey, alone now in the Slones’ cabin. At the open front door he squinted out into a mass of ebon silence and could not fathom where these people had gone. Shouts came from somewhere in the village. The barking of sled dogs. Another snow machine screaming through trees. When the wind lifted it carried clouds of snow into the cabin and Core closed the door. He built a hasty fire in the hearth, half surprised he could do it with hands so shaky.

He unpeeled the caribou suit from himself and returned to the armchair, woozy from two pulls of whiskey. From the day’s long hunt. He thought of water and food but couldn’t move. The heat of the fire flared against his face and he thought then of the husband, of Vernon Slone. Of how these facts would reach him. Of how a husband and father is ravaged by this.

And what he remembered before he blinked into sleep was his own father just after his mother had left the family for reasons no one knew. Ten years old, Core had thought his father would retreat into drink or Jesus. But instead he went to the cinema every night, that one-screen theater with the neon marquee in their nothing Nebraska town. Oftentimes he stayed in the theater to watch the same movie twice— Spartacus , Exodus , Psycho . Core would walk down to Main and Willow to search for him after dark. He’d steal into the exit door of the theater and find his father there—alone before those colossal talking faces, snoring in the chair with an empty bucket of popcorn aslant on his lap.

Police were in the Slones’ cabin now, three white men wearing civilian clothes, winter hunting garb. Upright in the armchair, Core woke to the sound of their wet boots grating against the wood floor. He’d been asleep nearly two hours, he thought, maybe more. He wiped the spittle that had run into his beard, then stood to speak to the man who looked in command, the one with the crew cut, the russet beard, the cigarette behind his ear.

Donald Marium introduced himself to Core; he had the soft hand of a barber and beneath his beard a creaseless face. Core spoke too quickly—who he was, why he’d come, what he’d found—and Marium told him to sit, to breathe. He went with the two others into the root cellar to see the boy, and minutes later came back to Core, told him to begin his story, to begin where it began. They sat at the table and smoked.

When Core finished his telling, Marium said, “Tell me again, please, why she asked you here.”

“I don’t know that. She’d read my book on wolves.” He glanced about the room for his book but could not see it. From the pocket of his flannel shirt he took the letter Medora Slone had written him and passed it across the table to Marium, who read it in silence.