Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

His pants snagged on a briar bush growing beside one of the old grave markers. He stopped to free it, and muttered “Dammit!” when he felt the thorns tear his fingers.

“You must be a Yankee,” a voice said from the darkness.

They both froze. Except for the slight wind, everything was silent, until the voice spoke again, right behind them. “That’s a green briar that’s snagged you. They grow over Yankee graves. Wild roses grow from the Johnny Rebs.”

Rob’s heart thundered as he freed his pants leg and turned. The hunched, shambling figure they’d seen earlier watched them, holding the plate left outside the cabin. The smell of dry, rotted fabric filled the air. Rob could not make out his face, but his eyes twinkled in the darkness.

“That you, Curnen?” the figure said. Curnen nodded. “And who’re you?” he asked Rob. “You a Yankee or a damn Yankee?”

“What’s the difference?” His voice sounded higher and shakier than he’d hoped.

“Yankees come to visit. Damn Yankees come to stay.”

“I’m her friend,” he said, and nodded at Curnen.

“Dangerous hobby,” the figure replied.

Curnen made an inarticulate warning noise.

The figure did not seem intimidated. “Be careful, little missy. If I don’t eat your sins, nobody will.”

“Eat her what ?” Rob asked. This guy gave him a serious case of the creeps.

“People die, I eat their sin.” He held up the plate. “Last meal. Left beside the body to soak up everything wrong they done. I eat it so they don’t take it with ’em.” He waved what looked like a biscuit at Curnen. “She’s likely to die in the woods, no one to tend her, sit up with her, bury her. I’m the only one who might find her.” Then he pointed at Rob. “You run around with her too much, you’re likely to end up the same way.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said with a conviction he didn’t entirely feel.

He shrugged. “Your life. She’s carrying a curse, you know.”

“I don’t believe in curses.”

Rob’s eyes could just make out the man’s big, full-toothed Tufa grin. “Curse don’t care if you believe in it or not. Do you know what she is?”

Curnen stepped between the two men and growled again.

“She’s a wisp, friend.” The figure illustrated the word with a blowing noise. “Most of her ain’t even there no more. She’ll be all gone soon.”

He turned, walked to the open grave, and sat on the mound of dirt. He sighed and shook his head. “Look at this. Time was, no one would’ve left a grave open overnight. They would’ve been afraid of the bad luck. Now, nobody remembers all them old ways. Nobody cares. Pretty soon, they’ll forget I’m out here just like they have your girlfriend there.” He continued to eat. “Then I’ll be in a mess, huh?”

Curnen snarled in the man’s direction. Then she pulled Rob after her, back into the woods. Rob looked back over his shoulder, and caught one last glimpse of the sin eater. He sat on the pile of grave dirt, shaking his head and laughing to himself.

Low branches forced them to scurry along in a crouch. The bruise across Rob’s shoulders tingled and throbbed. Curnen had less trouble, but in a few places had to stop and wait for Rob to get through a particularly narrow passage. She showed no impatience with him, though, and helped as much as she could.

They slid down a hillside to the bank of a small creek. The water sparkled in the moonlight, and Curnen knelt to drink. She picked up two small, smooth river stones and pressed one of them into his free hand. Then she led him along the edge of the creek until they reached a line of rocks that formed a footbridge across the water. She crossed nimbly, and waited for his considerably slower passage.

The high bank arched over their heads, and they walked under it until they found a gully they could climb. At the top, a vaguely man-shaped boulder jutted from the ground like a sentry standing watch over the creek. The moonlight didn’t reach it, but Rob thought he saw many lines of runelike scratches along its surface.

The moonlight did touch Curnen’s face. She gazed at the rock, and tears silently poured down her cheeks, cutting through the dirt. Her lips trembled with emotion.

“Are you all right?” Rob asked, touching her shoulder the same way he’d touched Bliss’s.

Curnen nodded at the rock, then clasped her hands together and put them over her heart. Then she held up her left hand, made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and slid it over her ring finger. Or what he assumed was her ring finger, since she had the extra digit.

Rob remembered the story of Rockhouse’s fall. “That’s Brushy Dale’s grave?”

She shook her head, hard. She touched her heart, then pointed at the rock.

Rob realized what she meant. “That’s… Brushy?”

She nodded. Her face contorted with sorrow.

He put his arms around her without even deciding to do it. She shuddered against him just as Bliss had done in the Catamount Corner lobby. He stared at the rock, seeing its humanlike shape even more clearly now. Surely not, he thought. Rockhouse couldn’t turn someone to stone. He wasn’t some fucking Medusa… was he?

At last Curnen pulled away and wiped her face. She took a couple of deep breaths, then held up her stone and took it to the boulder. At the base were many small piles of similar rocks. She kissed the one in her hand, knelt, and placed it reverently on the ground. She motioned for him to do the same. He was about to do so when movement caught his eye. He looked up and almost yelled.

Up the slope from the boulder, silhouetted against the night sky on a ridge, stood a deer. No, he corrected himself— a stag, and a gigantic one at that. Two large, wiry dogs accompanied it. Suddenly Curnen howled beside him, and he almost dropped his rock. A moment later, the dogs cried in response, and he realized they were coyotes.

She nudged him and indicated the rock in his hand. Quickly he put it next to hers. When he looked back, the stag king and his coyote courtiers had vanished into the night. He hoped that meant it was okay to travel through their forest.

They moved laterally along the ridge until it opened into a wide and well-marked trail. Curnen scurried ahead up the slope, and although it was easier, Rob still couldn’t keep up. At last he saw her waiting beside a lone tree in the middle of a small clearing.

It took him a moment to realize where they were. This was the base of the Widow’s Tree, the enormous tree that could be seen from just about anywhere in the valley. As he waited to catch his breath again, he saw that the bark was scarred up to a height of about ten feet with names and dates.

“Wow,” he said when he could manage the words, “how long has this been going on?”

By way of answer, Curnen took his hand and pressed it against one carved name. He traced the B, then the R, and realized who it must be. And he also understood that if the name was here, it meant more than he’d initially thought.

“Brushy wasn’t just your boyfriend, he was your husband, wasn’t he?”

She nodded.

He had to swallow past the lump of emotion in his own throat before he could speak. “I’m really sorry.”

She stepped close, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek. She turned away, then impulsively kissed him a second time, on the mouth. It left tingles when she withdrew.

Curnen pulled him around the tree and up the hill. The ground rose sharply until Rob had to release Curnen’s hand and pull himself from tree trunk to tree trunk up the slope. His arms, legs, and spine screamed in protest, especially the hot bruise across his back. Curnen stayed just ahead of him, nimbly crawling on all fours. She glanced back often to check his progress, evidently unaware of or uninterested in the agony she put him through.