Tim Curran - Resurrection

“You’ve come to warn me of the terrible fix this town is in…but haven’t I smelled it coming for weeks?” she said to them. “There are things you can know and things you can only guess and then there are those which your heart and spirit tell you which cannot be denied. Am I right? Right as rain! I saw it coming, young Mister Barron, indeed I did! Long before Hillside Cemetery gave up its dead, I saw it coming, a nasty surprise all trimmed out in black satin! It was a black ice winter with an early thaw followed by a hot locust summer asprout with devil grass! Such things always bring about a darkmoon autumn bleeding with rain and an angry sky veined with lightening. And what do we have out there? We have a town-more yours than mine-that’s going under like a brick in a bog! Surely, going under and a mind gets to wondering if it will ever, ever come up for air again! Now…are we on the same page here, Mitch Barron, neighbor of mine who can never can be troubled to stop by and while away the time with a crazy old lady?”

Mitch just nodded, couldn’t seem to find his voice.

He had never heard her talk so much. It was as if tragedy was the oil that freed her jaw. Here he thought old Mother Sepperly was just an old bag wrinkled and deflated by the years, but truth be told, that bag was filled with gas so hot it might burn you if you strayed too near. Yes, her face was old lady sallow and thin-skinned, her knuckles liver-spotted and she was more dry-wood than woman, but she was certainly alive. There was a vitality in those twinkling eyes you could not deny and a spirit haunting those bones that no oblong box could hope to contain. Those arthritic, knobby hands of hers had spanked naughty children to bed and pinched apple-pie crusts, they had harvested corn and slopped hogs, read tea leaves and whittled love charms. They were skeleton and skin worn smooth and thin as wax paper, but there was still a snap and a punch in them that ninety-six summers had not been able to steal away completely.

Standing there with his mouth open and Wanda Sepperly’s spicy tongue weaving a rich and heady spell over him, he could do nothing but compare her to some fine old wine stored in dust and cobweb and flaking time in a hidden cellar. A bottle that had now been uncorked and, damn, if it didn’t smell sweet and have enough kick left to put you on your ass.

“Well, Mitch Barron, are you going to speak or am I going to have to root around in yer head like my Finnish grandmother and expose all your dirty secrets as those of my bloodline always can?”

Mitch sighed, found his voice. “We just came to tell you that-”

“Yes, yes, yes, boy, I know, to lock my doors and bolt my shutters,” Wanda said as if it was all too apparent. “I saw it coming for weeks, did I tell you that? I felt it in my bones like the shivers and the rheumatism. Something’s coming, I said to myself many weeks gone. Oh be sure of that, old woman, there’s a big black pot being stirred and what crawls out will not be that you’d want to meet this side of the grave. I told myself these things, felt them, saw them, knew them. From that bad winter to that awful summer, oh, the signs were right and the planets aligned and the stars trembling in heaven. Oh yes, boy, oh yes, old Mother Sepperly was aware as I’m always aware. And when those storms started a-brewing, I knew as much. Back in farm country, yes, we would look for the signs and find them. It would have been no surprise to my kin if calves were stillborn and their placentas an electric blue. And if one placenta held a two-headed birth? Yes, yes, and yes! Such things always follow a pattern. The wind comes before the storm and the seed pops long before the harrow. Ain’t it the truth?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Tommy was looking at Mitch as if he was wondering what in the Christ he had gotten him into and where the exit might be located. But Mitch could only shrug. They’d come here to do a neighborly duty, more or less, to warn old Mother Sepperly of what was and what could be, but she seemed to know all that.

“You,” she said to Tommy, narrowing her eyes, “I can guess your name and all that sideshow bullshit, but I’d rather you confessed. Simpler that way.”

“Tommy Kastle,” he said.

“As I thought. Now reach in your front shirt pocket and share your tobacco with me. Go ahead, go ahead, and wipe those silly thoughts from your head, Mitch Barron. Smoking can’t hurt something as old as me. The cancer needs something healthy to chew and it would find nothing but jerky and gristle in this old frame. Ha! It’s more afraid of me that I am of it, hear?”

Tommy brought out a cigarette and Wanda snapped the filter off and lit it with a match. She took long, deep pulls off it, sending the smoke out through her nostrils. “Better,” she said. “Better. Now you boys have been playing at warning the neighbors of what might crawl out of the darkness this night? And what have they said?”

“They’re not answering their doors,” Tommy said.

Wanda smiled, showing them both her nubby yellow teeth. “Of course they’re not. They sense things and feel things, they know that a darkness is coming and maybe that it’s already arrived. Some have fled and others are hiding. For Halloween has come early and there will be a tricking and a treating tonight and certain revelers you dare not open the door to.” She sat there smoking, her eyes glazing over and when she spoke, the years clung to her like carrion birds to rotten meat. “When I was a girl, yes, in Haymarket, Bayfield County, it was. A tombstone winter was followed by a mad dog summer and that October, Matthew Donnegan went insane, did he not? He took an axe after his wife and three children. A cold and windy October it was. No more came the Donnegan’s into town to church nor market, they stayed out at that farm and it was in the icehouse back yonder that Sheriff Wick found them. Those children all lined up like mummies in a Mexican catacomb, frosty and blue and staring, their mother squatting beside them frozen stiff as a shank of beef. Matthew could not say why he did what he did, only that a grave whispering had come through the corn as it does and he had listened. You recall that year? You recall the wild tales and wilder rumors? Oh, it was bad, bad, bad!”

Tommy and Mitch just stood there, wondering if she had slipped away on them. And as they thought this, her eyes-which seemed to be closing as her mind drifted through the years like dandelion seeds in a good blow-snapped open.

“Ha! I ain’t senile, Mister Tommy! Far from it!”

And maybe Mitch had never been exactly adept at reading minds, but right then he could read Tommy’s just fine. That old lady, Mitch, she just read my mind. And Mitch wanted to tell him that, no, of course she hadn’t. It was just that old people are very sensitive, intuitive, but he didn’t say a thing because he knew right down in his bones that what Wanda Sepperly practiced so effortlessly was more than that. It wasn’t some carnival trick; it was the real thing.

Maybe to add substance to this, Wanda said, “You’re right on that, Mitch, goddamn yes, but you are.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and butted it. She looked from Mitch to Tommy. “Ah, you poor boys! You’ve seen them, haven’t you? You’ve seen those things that tonight will turn this town into a graveyard?”

There was no point in lying to Mother Sepperly and they both knew it. Lying to her was like lying to yourself, like looking into a mirror and proclaiming, that’s not me in there! It’s someone else! You knew better and so would she. So Mitch told her about their experiences at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy, the dead woman in the culvert pipe, all the rest.

“Yes, as I thought, as I thought,” Wanda said.

Tommy stepped forward now, feeling they were indeed on the same page here. “What the hell are they? Zombies?”