Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Such departures call for speeches. One started to rise in Branley, words by which his children would remember him—his epitaph, if the image he cut were a gravestone. He looked at these people taking their last look at him and remembered his last look at his father’s feet not three strides from where he now stood. Just standing there he burned himself into their memories. In that way he inched the Jukes line a step ahead, sparing them a memory like what he had seen and ceaselessly saw of his father hanging from the rafters. They had only seen him hang from his wrists, an exercise in sorrow. He wanted to rid the world of sorrow as it was caused by the beast who had a hand in his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, everyone’s death, Jukes or not.

Nothing was what his father had left the world with, and Branley Jukes would leave the area surrounding Umbria with not much more: the impaled account of the origin of all its evil his only possession other than the knife that had pierced it.

It came from his bones, his blood, somewhere that rarely spoke: “I am the Leeds Devil,” he said.

His children heard him as they stared at the fire. In those flames they saw something more steady and peaceful and altogether fatherly than the form that said these words that made little sense. Before they could break their focus on the fire and pull a log from beneath the cauldron and smack their father across the jaw with its molten end, he slipped into a morning that was bright-shining and warm, if not eternal paradise.

HE JUKES stuffed what they had into sacks and followed Sheriff Hopkins and his men to Umbria, surrounded like prisoners, like they were the ones who had murdered. Once in town, they were deloused, separated, and distributed among families optimistic about raising the children and restoring Georgia’s respectability. Children expressed good and evil if they encountered either principle in excess. Umbria would err therefore on the side of benevolence. Charitable dominion would amount to justice. Socializing the Jukes out of existence would avenge Nathaniel Leeds—even Merkins. It was a matter of security: something had to be done before the children became like their father. Trouble need not be inevitable, argued the Altruists, although they worried that the widely considered satanic father may soon return to claim his wards in person or spirit. Each adoptive family ignored at first concerns about the lineage but the threat of transformation opened fissures over time. They might not become volatile, depraved, wicked adults, forever in pursuit of illusory monsters, but they would experience some ever-extended childhood in which they failed to take responsibility for themselves and others. All was done to make the Jukes feel welcomed and cherished and capable of evolving from their near-feral state. But there was a condescension to this. It became something of a competition to see which family best polished the raw material they had found in the woods.

The Greers, the family that hosted Georgia Jukes, led the others. She had been raised unlike her children and this socializing experiment offered another life. Accustomed to so much daily labor, she worked on the house’s upkeep and her studies as she learned to play a musical instrument that spun a telescope-like construction of thirty-seven tuned bowls on a spindle powered by a foot pedal. Moistened fingers pressed to the spinning bowls enabled the player to sustain melodies and harmonies, an advancement on the art of those who made music on the rims of wine glasses. The armonica had once been popular, played by Marie Antoinette and Mesmer and its inventor, Benjamin Franklin, among thousands of others. Georgia took to this pastime, hypnotizing herself with rolling glass bowls and the tones a light touch of her fingers produced. It was extraordinary how a savage beast could soothe itself playing this instrument. She rendered simple melodies popular at the time, slowing them so each note hung in the air as long as possible. Since each bowl was coded with a stripe according to the spectrum along the rainbow, she seemed to see tones suffusing the space above her with color as she played. She blended them and maneuvered them and interjected a white-striped bowl so the sound shifted toward dissonance. She lingered on these white bowls and saw round sounds in the air dent and collapse. Her time with Branley had seemed like one long white-striped dissonance that turned her into mud he molded into something she never imagined she would be. He had changed her and she had allowed herself to be changed.

It was a remarkable form of therapy, one the family who housed her had not anticipated. She sat for hours at the armonica and played in a way that seemed therapeutic for the inhabitants of the house, as well. In its most popular era, the instrument had gained a reputation for casting listeners into obscure states from which they never emerged. Glass bowls on a spindle held a strange power. Many heard something so haunting and gorgeous and eerie and pleasurable it was believed that in certain hands this instrument might cause turmoil, even madness. After disappearing into such open tones, what would one rather do than return to that realm of pure spirit? It was no secret that players and listeners alike often suffered depressive states. They had listened too long to the celestial spheres. Sensual messages reached them and romanced them with the suggestion that perfection were achievable in life as in sound. That life was far from harmonious intensified the temptation to return to an enchanted state. It soon became evident that aversion to dissonance can be a kind of madness.

Three years of regular exposure to benevolence had passed since their father disappeared. The boys were sixteen and seventeen, the girl almost thirteen. Although divided among separate families, the Altruists allowed the Jukes children to maintain close enough contact. Once every couple weeks they reconvened to walk the sand trails their father had haunted as they indirectly considered his demise and their uncertain and by all accounts inevitably tragic future. They often explored near the coast, attracted to the ruins of a doomed village. Unchecked vegetation overwhelmed abandoned iron works and random houses charred by wildfire. What once had been Leeds Points now offered endless adventure. The Jukes kids found shards of pottery and tarnished plates among the ruins. Last time there they even discovered a locket in the shape of a coffin.

The Umbrian Altruists were excellent educators who’d installed fanciful language as the boys’ favorite recreation. December tried to pierce the sails of their wind-blown phrases, but speculation about the tiny silver coffin sent armadas of talk into battle.

“The tomb of the king of a race of diminutive natives!”

“Opening it curses the discoverers with certain misery!”

“The pines swarm with minuscule combatants fiercer than tigers!”

“Everywhere we don’t look, there they are!”

“They possessed our father, slipped into his bloodstream!”

“Only our mother’s tears kept us from this peculiar infection!”

“Now so long without her, opening the coffin will release the curse!”

“Let it loose,” said December, “if it shuts your mouths.”

“She said let it loose, Brother,” the older Jermaine said to Gus. Already taller than their father, a recent spurt had made the elder’s spine, neck, and limbs seem overgrown. There was something lupine about his movements as a result, emergent jerkiness inherited Jukes to Jukes, and adolescent volcanism still marked his face. “But do you have the courage to open the tomb of the tiny king?”