Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

He envisioned his head as the pinelands entire, the ponds his eyes, and he closed those eyes and gases burst from the waters and floated to the city and suffocated them all, or at least infected those in power with concern for the city’s current and future state.

Overhearing talk on the porch with Braddock and Vermeule, these three old men so concerned with pure water seemed unlike others I had met. Larner had been more bedraggled than these men who sat on the porch looking west as though ready for some entertainment, a parade of quail, anything more than the words I heard while hidden by nearby shrubs. The three of them on the porch in their fine clothes, expressions wizened, eternally unimpressed, resigned yet ever-ambitious, optimistic veterans who respected themselves, their histories of accomplishment, and what remained of their outsized will.

Braddock and Vermeule on either side of Wharton were like stump and vine. Braddock overflowed his seat. He seemed to rumble even when still, finely aware of the imminent threat of a broken chair, the possibility of embarrassment all too present thanks to experience. He tensed his thighs as though channeling weight through legs rather than down through rump. He squatted more so, resting as lightly as possible. Vermeule, with long legs one around the other, seemed lighter than his chair, nimble, as though his entire body might elevate if he raised an eyebrow. Ethereal, half gone, he seemed further along the process of unbecoming, almost angelic, and his voice when he spoke was soft and smooth. Between the two, Wharton was a landlubbering admiral whose presence commanded by virtue of issuing orders for decades, staring down questions and responding with indubitable authority. He wore a beard shaven only beneath the ears so his chin seemed twice as wide as the lipless gash of a mouth hidden by whiskers.

Braddock and Vermeule glanced at one another and toward Wharton as he spoke, but Wharton settled deeper into his reclining chair, squared shoulders, and eyed his land. He seemed like some savant whose words were spoken long ago by the land and filtered through every impression of a lifetime, and then he smiled at a thought, an assertion, and seemed again as present in mind as he was in body.

Their stature and speech were removed from the land more than any I had ever seen, as though stewardship required separation, their dress and gestures too precise, their language honed, whereas the rest of humanity I had encountered—even Dade, the old pastor who cursed my mother—had seemed more like shadows than these broad-based surveyors of the world. I stood on the widow’s walk, perched there some mornings before dawn. There I saw the ocean, the lightening sky, and it seemed that these men enjoyed such sights at all times—sitting on the porch they saw to all horizons—and maybe it was this all-seeing sense that interested me. Unlike Larner with a blanket pulled above his nose when we first met, or Titan and Japhet shrieking in their printing shed, these three might brush me away with the back of their hands.

Ever since my chance to save December Jukes, I had not helped anyone. I once tended to a baby bird fallen from a nest, helped a lost dog find its way home instead of devouring it, but after years with Larner before he lost his faculties completely and came to such an unfortunate end, I spent time alone doing very little, the dress hidden as I explored the territory. New leaves filled out and dried up, year after year, yet nothing like that ever happened to my horns or wings or teeth. I didn’t seem to age in any way, as though I did not exist. But it was during this time that dispersal of my legend truly began.

I flew to the cave and slipped into the dress. It was like showering after months of trekking through mud. It took some time to settle into the flesh, the feet, the hornless head.

The men were still there by the time I approached. Wharton’s eyes were closed. He seemed asleep. Vermeule took more interest in his fingernails than Braddock’s speech, which stopped when he saw me cross the bridge over a dam in the Mullica.

Braddock nudged Wharton. Vermeule untwined his legs.

“Do you see it?” said Braddock.

“I confirm a man in a dress—nothing else,” said Vermeule.

“I see nothing,” said Wharton, “except a sight I’ve never seen.”

I walked toward the men, without timidity, proud of every step. I stood in front of them, just off the low porch.

“May I join you?” I said.

“These are private lands,” said Wharton, “and this is a private conversation.”

“I have lived here for years and would like to help however I can.”

“We have a maid and a manservant. But thank you for your interest.”

“I only appear like this so not to startle you.”

“How less startling might one appear?” said Vermeule.

“Obviously disturbed,” whispered Braddock, “and perhaps in need of a meal.”

“I’m not hungry, thank you.”

“Then why should we not drive you away?” said Wharton.

“Because I was born here more than a century and a half ago, because I lived here with the man who lived here before you restored this estate, because I overheard you talk about delivering pure water to the city, and because I think I can help.”

“Just what we need to overcome the councilmen,” said Braddock, settling into his seat. “A young man in a wedding dress.”

Wharton at that moment may have remembered his speech before the councilmen, the difficulties sustaining their interest after insulting them, and now this young man stood before him. They had sat for hours, making no progress, circling the same notions, the same complaints. Perhaps this appearance was fortuitous.

“I am prepared at least to listen,” said Wharton.

“Do you intend to protect these lands?” I said.

“We intend to save a city with what runs unseen beneath these lands, leaving them undisturbed except in areas where we channel the waters.”

“And so then if you are not enemies I can perhaps influence those who challenge you, for I have uncommon powers when not in this dress.”

“Not of sound mind,” said Braddock.

“I can show you what I mean.”

“If you must,” said Wharton. “We are all eyes.”

I lifted the dress over my head. They stood in protest as though the elasticity of youth were momentarily restored, but I soothed them, saying, “Sit, sit. Let us talk of those who oppose you.”

“Deception of an extraordinary order,” said Wharton.

“Quite an impossible sight,” said Vermeule.

Wharton had heard of course that his land was haunted by the region’s odd spirit, compacted into strange form as though the sky pressed harder and created extra pressure that twisted the trees and expelled this wonder from pockets of hell beneath the pines. The water was one thing, pure, perfect, but then this beast trying to soothe them with civility, despite appearances, was something else altogether.

The skin of the legs intrigued Wharton the most. It seemed covered in crustaceans, stiff and brittle, less bone than iron, like mechanical poles. I figured he looked at my legs to avoid the rest, my neck like a wildcat’s leading into a horse’s head, with collie snout and long teeth, completed by the thick curling horns of a ram.

“No sight can compare to this,” he said, “yet if you focus on its eyes and close off your vision to just its voice, this beast, though inconceivably composed of various animals, seems human in essential areas, the mind and most likely the heart.”

“A most impressive proposal,” said Vermeule, “one to which I respond with astonishment, so intimidating a sight when it opens its wings.”

“How I would have impressed my ideas upon the councilmen had I similar capabilities,” said Wharton. “No sooner had I begun my speech then I stood before them in all my glorious purity until something like this beast spread its wings in City Hall. I would soar to the ceiling of that domed chamber, shadow all light, the way the bright sun of my plans was blocked by the cold and lifeless moon of their interests. I should have transformed into something like this beast, snatching with extraordinary jaws those who walked out, men I would not hire to oversee a scoop of mud in a mason jar, men who now control the city’s future, how I would have dispatched them from their plight. Instead I reddened with displeasure as quorum was lost. Terrible, terrible.”