Denis Johnson - Train Dreams

“A bloody mess?” Grainier asked, terrified in his soul.

“Don’t ask me what it was. A bloody mess is all. But Bob the Kootenai feller said some of them want to believe it was the afterbirth or some part of a wolfchild torn out of her womb. You know they believe in Christ.”

“What? Who?”

“The Kootenais — in Christ, and angels, devils, and creatures God didn’t create, like half-wolves. They believe just about anything funny or witchy or religious they hear about. The Kootenais call animals to be people. ‘Coyote-person,’ ‘Bear-person,’ and such a way of talking.”

Grainier watched the darkness on the road ahead, afraid of seeing the wolf-girl. “Dear God,” he said. “I don’t know where I’ll get the strength to take this road at night anymore.”

“And what do you think? — I can’t sleep through the night, myself,” Peterson said.

“God’ll give me the strength, I guess.”

Peterson snorted. “This wolf-girl is a creature God didn’t create. She was made out of wolves and a man of unnatural desires. Did you ever get with some boys and jigger yourselves a cow?”

“What!”

“When you was a boy, did you ever get on a stump and love a cow? They all did it over where I’m from. It’s not unnatural down around that way.”

“Are you saying you could make a baby with a cow, or make a baby with a wolf? You? Me? A person?”

Peterson’s voice sounded wet from fear and passion. “I’m saying it gets dark, and the moon gets full, and there’s creatures God did not create.” He made a strangling sound. “God! — this hole in me hurts when I cough. But I’m glad I don’t have to try and sleep through the night, waiting on that wolf-girl and her pack to come after me.”

“But did you do like the Indian told you to? Did you shoot your dog?”

“No! He shot me .”

“Oh,” Grainier said. Mixed up and afraid, he’d entirely forgotten that part of it. He continued to watch the woods on either side, but that night no spawn of unnatural unions showed herself.

For a while the rumors circulated. The sheriff had examined the few witnesses claiming to have seen the creature and had determined them to be frank and sober men. By their accounts, the sheriff judged her to be a female. People feared she’d whelp more hybrid pups, more wolf-people, more monsters who eventually, logically, would attract the lust of the Devil himself and bring down over the region all manner of evil influence. The Kootenais, wedded as they were known to be to pagan and superstitious practice, would fall prey completely to Satan. Before the matter ended, only fire and blood would purge the valley …

But these were the malicious speculations of idle minds, and, when the election season came, the demons of the silver standard and the railroad land snatch took their attention, and the mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley were forgotten for a while.

Not four years after his wedding and already a widower, Grainier lived in his lean-to by the river below the site where his home had been. He kept a campfire going as far as he could into the night and often didn’t sleep until dawn. He feared his dreams. At first he dreamed of Gladys and Kate. Then only of Gladys. And finally, by the time he’d passed a couple of months in solitary silence, Grainier dreamed only of his campfire, of tending it just as he had before he slept — the silhouette of his hand and the charred length of lodgepole he used as a poker — and was surprised to find it gray ash and butt ends in the morning, because he’d watched it burn all night in his dreams.

And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

Just such a dream woke him in December his second winter at the new cabin. The train passed northward until he couldn’t hear it anymore. To be a child again in that other world had terrified him, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He stared around the cabin in the dark. By now he’d roofed his home properly, put in windows, equipped it with two benches, a table, a barrel stove. He and the red dog still bedded on a pallet on the floor, but for the most part he’d made as much a home here as he and Gladys and little Kate had ever enjoyed. Maybe it was his understanding of this fact, right now, in the dark, after his nightmare, that called Gladys back to visit him in spirit form. For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.

He put his right hand on the little dog stretched beside him. The dog didn’t bark or growl, but he felt the hair on her back rise and stiffen as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook. Around her the shadows trembled. And then it was Gladys — nobody else — flickering and false, like a figure in a motion picture.

Gladys didn’t speak, but she broadcast what she was feeling: She mourned for her daughter, whom she couldn’t find. Without her baby she couldn’t go to sleep in Jesus or rest in Abraham’s bosom. Her daughter hadn’t come across among the spirits, but lingered here in the world of life, a child alone in the burning forest. But the forest isn’t burning, he told her. But Gladys couldn’t hear. Before his sight she was living again her last moments: The forest burned, and she had only a minute to gather a few things and her baby and run from the cabin as the fire smoked down the hill. Of what she’d snatched up, less and less seemed worthy, and she tossed away clothes and valuables as the heat drove her toward the river. At the lip of the bluff she held only her Bible and her red box of chocolates, each pinned against her with an elbow, and the baby clutched against her chest with both her hands. She stooped and dropped the candy and the heavy book at her feet while she tied the child inside her apron, and then she was able to pick them up again. Needing a hand to steady her along the rocky bluff as they descended, she tossed away the Bible rather than the chocolates. This uncovering of her indifference to God, the Father of All — this was her undoing. Twenty feet above the water she kicked loose a stone, and not a heartbeat later she’d broken her back on the rocks below. Her legs lost all feeling and wouldn’t move. She was only able to pluck at the knot across her bodice until the child was free to crawl away and fend for itself, however briefly, along the shore. The water stroked at Gladys until by the very power of its gentleness, it seemed, it lifted her down and claimed her, and she drowned. One by one from eddy pools and from among the rocks, the baby plucked the scattered chocolates. Eighty-foot-long spruce jutting out over the water burned through and fell into the gorge, their clumps of green needles afire and trailing smoke like pyrotechnical snakes, their flaming tops hissing as they hit the river. Gladys floated past it all, no longer in the water but now overhead, seeing everything in the world. The moss on the shingled roof of her home curled and began to smoke faintly. The logs in the walls stressed and popped like large-bore cartridges going off. On the table by the stove a magazine curled, darkened, flamed, spiraled upward, and flew away page by page, burning and circling. The cabin’s one glass window shattered, the curtains began to blacken at the hems, the wax melted off the jars of tomatoes, beans, and Canada cherries on a shelf above the steaming kitchen tub. Suddenly all the lamps in the cabin were lit. On the table a metal-lidded jar of salt exploded, and then the whole structure ignited like a match head.