The night before Grandaddy Burl died, Colly dreamed of a flathead catfish swallowing him whole.
Summer storms had been rolling in since June; the mountain air sitting heavy like flannel on fevered skin. Splashes of sunbeams illuminated verdant pockets, but the inevitability of more rain coaxed the shadows out from crevices and caves to smother into the green. And in that gloaming gray, Colly found himself hunched in the river with his bare toes searching the mud for sinkholes.
“First thing ya do, boy.” Grandaddy’s heavy form jutted out of the water. “Is check for hollow places in the mud. Sometimes it’s ’tween rocks. Sometimes the mudcat’ll burrow into the bank itself.”
He submerged himself in the river, so low that his beard floated on the surface like Spanish moss, green eyes glimmering in the sunlight.
Colly felt the mud sucking at his toes and then an unseen cavity that gaped around his foot. He could sense it there, down in the murk. A barbed remnant of a more violent time.
“And when you find that hole, you’re gonna have to go under to see it for yourself.”
Grandaddy took one great inhale of air, then bobbed under the water. All was still, the ripples growing slower. Seconds, minutes, then he emerged from the water, laughter ringed in childlike joy.
“Ya see, Colly. Noodlin’ takes faith. Blind faith like what that Preacher talks ‘bout.”
Colly cocked his head.
“So, it takes Jesus?”
“Naw,” Grandaddy chuckled, “It takes trustin’ yourself. Conversatin’ with the dregs of knowin’ that rest in your bones.”
In the storm-brewed twilight, Colly drew in an aching breath.
His neck went under.
Then his mouth.
His nostrils filled with liquid sediment.
And then his eyes opened underwater and beheld everything cast in green and black slurried light.
Colly let himself sink to the bottom; flooded ferns and moss-heavy tree limbs outstretched to meet him. He reached his hands out; fingers stirring up mud like tadpoles in a creek’s trickle. There. There was the hole. Its darkness yawned wide as Colly hesitated, then plunged his fisted arm into its depths.
“Now watch good, Colly.”
Grandaddy ducked under the water again. A powerful presence settled into the air, hovering above the river like heat lightning poised to pop across the sky.
A violent splash echoed off the trees like a gunshot blast as Grandaddy burst from the water, arm hooked through a raging catfish’s gill-plate.
The fish thrashed; gilted tail sling-shotting as if it had the power to uproot rocks from the riverbed and hurl them at its captor.
Grandaddy laugh-growled as he hauled it onto his shoulder, the mud-cat’s mouth gnawing at his wrist. His fisted hand splattered with blood and river debris.
“At Mamaw’s church, they pick up timber rattlers and drink rat poison, claiming God’ll heal ‘em.”
The catfish’s gills bristled blood-red against Grandaddy’s arm as it attempted a death roll.
“Out here, in this water, we wrestle river monsters and trust that our own power’ll subjugate ‘em.”
Down,
down,
down.
In the rushing oblivion of the river, Colly’s arm seemed to reach forever. He felt nothing for a long while, and then out of the abyss, a cold snapping suction as a catfish’s mouth clamped down around his narrow wrist. Colly panicked, gasping dirty water like it was air. The fish tugged on his arm, trying to pull him down into the labyrinthine caverns running along the roots of the mountains. He tried to brace himself against the riverbed, but the mudcat yanked him violently, and Colly fell, gurgling silent screams into the catfish’s gaping mouth.
“So you don’ believe in Jesus?” Colly watched the slowing movement of the gills. “Mamaw says people who don’ believe in Jesus are goin’ to hell.”
Grandaddy lumbered back to the riverbank.
“Colly, I don’t fault her for believin’ what she wants to. But I believe in the life-givin’ green of these woods. I know the crevices in these mountains hold more wicked things than any man could write in a book. I’ve seen shadow people crawl up barns and clamber onto porches. I ain’t afraid of hell. I’m afraid of the dark places.”
As Colly slid into the gullet of the catfish, he thought of the caves his granddaddy had told him to stay out of, and the knots of dark cloistered in clearings. The shadows pulsed against his eyes, and he panicked and tried to clutch onto the acid-wet flesh of the fish’s guts, but he fell faster, screaming as he went
Down,
down,
down.
###
Colly woke up hollering, legs flailed out atop the rumpled quilt like he’d been dropped onto his bed.
It took him seeing the dawn trickle through the window to realize that he was no longer in the fish’s belly. But it didn’t seem to be home either. There was no greased trace of bacon drifting to his tongue. No lilting notes of Mamaw’s church hymns. No rooster proclaiming to the sunrise that his flock had survived another night.
Colly sat up in the bed that didn’t quite feel like his. His arm was sore, compressed muscles burning, but there were no marks on it, and he had the horrible thought that maybe he was stuck waking from one nightmare into another for the rest of forever. Colly’s throat felt like some invisible hand was wrapped around it, pressing on him, choking him. Enough pressure to panic, not enough to suffocate. This is how it would be—an eight-year-old boy perpetually stuck in limbo by a terror he couldn’t name.
THWACK
THWACK
THUD
The familiar rending sounds of splitting wood emanated from outside, and the chokehold’s reverie slipped just enough for Colly to inhale a gasping breath and stumble from the bed.
In the foggy gray-yellow morning, there was no definition. Beyond the porch railings, everything faded away into a thick mist. Just dark clumps of things; a hulking shape at some unmeasurable distance that might be the barn. Scraggly shadows that could be Mamaw’s berry bushes. And there—to the side of the crooked outline of what should be the chicken coop—a shadow swinging an ax over its head.
“Come here, son,” the shadow called, voice stuttering as the ax connected with the log.
Colly didn’t want to go towards the shadow. But the pressure on his throat yanked at him like there was a bit embedded in his esophagus and he had no choice but to obey its leading.
The fog swirled around him like smoke.
“Here son. I’m here.”
The voice scratched at some memory he’d picked raw years before. It was familiar, deep as a mineshaft—a sharp edge like shattered glass.
“Here. I’m here.”
Colly was close enough to make out the shadow’s features now. Its back was turned to him. Overalls pock-marked with rust. Boots with leather so old it wrinkled like his grandaddy’s skin. A wide-brimmed straw hat with something writhing in and out of the holes.
“Look how big you’ve grown.”
The shadow turned.
The eyes were gone. Black pools of roiling pus stained its hollow cheeks in oil-tinged teardrop trails. A gaping hole where the nose should have been, maggots scurrying towards the light at the prospect of new flesh. It seemed to smile at him, but its jaw was sitting crooked, and a black rat’s head poked between rotten teeth. It came out as a grimaced mockery.
Colly tried to claw out a scream. The memory flooded back in a rush of terror. Him playing under the kitchen table, accidentally hitting the leg and knocking his daddy’s jar of shine to the ground. Glass shattering and Daddy’s screaming making his heart beat to bursting and his teeth ache. Daddy’s hand gripping his scalp and hauling him to the old mine. Tossing him in there like he was a sack of potatoes and not a toddler. Leaving him there to scream in the cold dark and feel river rats sniffing at his toes and fingers until Daddy’d sobered up and come back to get him the next morning.
“Now that ain’t a nice way to greet your daddy,” the shadow chawed. “I guess Burl wouldn’t have taught ya how to respect your elders. Since he killed me.”
Grave dirt spilled out of a gunshot wound on its chest as not-Daddy reached down to grab another piece of wood.
“Glad the bastard’s dead.”
It dropped a slab of knobby wood onto the stump.
No.
Not wood.
Grandaddy’s head, eyes bulging, mouth lolling. His neck severed like a chicken’s that’d stopped laying.
The mist swirled closer around Colly, chokehold tightening. He felt dizzy and heartbroken.
“Better go back to the house, son. Mamaw’s callin’ ya.”
Not-Daddy lifted the ax handle above his head, swung, sunk the blade right in between Grandaddy’s dead eyes, splitting open the flesh like it were a pumpkin.
Colly balked, the fog spinning closer and closer, and he crumpled to his knees like a crippled rabbit last-chance leaping into its burrow and falling
down,
down,
down.
###
It was evening when Colly found himself back on the porch, opening the door.
Mamaw was sitting at the kitchen table, red-ringed eyes staring at the oil lamp’s flame. Grandaddy’s corpse laid on the table, cold and pale. His head was still attached, river pebbles placed over his eyes.
“Where the hell you been, boy? I been hollerin’ for ya all day.”
Her anger was hollow, tinged with more worry than fury.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Mamaw pointed towards the door.
“Pawpaw’s gone, though to heaven or hell I can’t decide. Preacher won’t come out ‘til tomorrow. You’re the man of the house now. It’s your responsibility to sit up with him ‘til the mornin’. Go get ya a big old hickory branch.”
Sit up? He half-remembered seeing Mamaw brushing his mother’s hair, sitting next to her as she was laid out upon the table. Clutching a walking stick with a snake carved into the wood. Watching the door.
“A hickory branch for what?”
Mamaw walked towards the back bedroom.
“For keepin’ away the rats and the shadows. You gotta make sure there’s somethin’ left of him to bury when the preacher gets here. Don’t let nothin’ turn that stoop anything other than blue.”
A fly landed on the rim of the oil lamp, hypnotized by the gentle movement of the flame it got closer and closer, Colly watched as the insect got too close and was caught by the slope of the hurricane glass, flame billowing higher as it tumbled
down,
down,
down.
###
Evening had set in as Colly pushed the hickory stick against an invisible foe.
He was Robin Hood, fighting on a log with Little John, wielding a stick from the forest.
Colly spun, slicing the air.
He was King Arthur and the sword was Excalibur, the gift given to him by the Lady of the Lake.
Colly thrust the stick twice on the wood floor and flung his arms open.
He was Moses, parting the Red Sea with the shepherd’s staff he’d been holding when God called him from a blazing thicket.
THUD
THUD
THUNK
A rumbling roll sounded and suddenly he was Colly again, standing scared shitless with a branch clutched in his shaking hands.
Grandaddy was still dead, lying still on the table.
The door rattled. Colly tried to convince himself it was just the wind.
Flames flared up from the fireplace’s coalbed and Colly moved to heap ash onto it.
“I’m here, son.”
The voice, a gnarled echo of Daddy’s brittle rage, came from the other side of the door.
“Open the door, son.”
Colly froze, one hand wrapped around the cast iron shovel.
The door jostled against the thrown bolt at the top.
“Let me in, son. Let me in now.”
Colly stared at the bolt, mouth moving as he silently pleaded with Jesus to keep it latched.
A sound like a rock rolling down a hill came from the table and he turned, desperately clutching the shovel and stick.
Grandaddy’s head tumbled to the ground, landing at Colly’s feet.
With a crash like lightning, the heavy oak of the door splintered—the lock ricocheting around like a rogue bullet. Not-Daddy stood in front of the blue door stoop, grave-dirt and worms leaking onto the porch.
“I see you don’t listen no better now than when you was little. You deliberately disobeyed me, son. Now look what you done.”
The rat-tongue leapt from Not-Daddy’s mouth, claws skittering as it ran towards Grandaddy’s head.
Colly remembered how the river rats’ coarse whiskers felt against his bare feet. The little bites like bramble-pricks as the rodents nibbled on his toes in the dark. His eyes aching as he huddled wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting for his daddy to sober up and love him.
The rat-tongue drooled at the raw stump of Granddaddy’s neck, looking like a vulture deciding what part of a bloated carcass to gorge on first, and Colly snapped.
The brunt of the shovel came down onto the rat-tongue’s swollen middle, trapping it there as it squirmed and squeaked.
Colly swung the hickory stick as he pinned the rodent down, beating the rat-tongue until it burst open in an eruption of guts and flesh.
Colly picked up Grandaddy’s cold head, nestling it in his arms like it was a puppy, and kicked the lump of tissue as hard as he could towards Not-Daddy.
Not-Daddy hissed, a copperhead slithering between coal lump teeth.
“I’m gonna bleed you, son. For every one you kill, I’ll send in three more creatures of the dark.” He spit onto the floor, a swarm of cockroaches and spiders scurrying across the doorframe. “Them bats’ll gouge your eyes out. The bobcat’s wails are enough to make your heart stop, and she’ll gouge a hole in your chest and leave it for the owls to pick at your bones and organs.”
Not-Daddy spit again, a mole bursting through the wood of the porch, its pink mouth appendages spreading wide like skinned fingers.
“I’ll paint this stoop copper with your blood and then all them haints’ll get in and you’ll be tormented for the rest of forever. What Burl didn’t know ‘til now; hell is real and it’s in those dark places he was so scared of.”
Colly was stomping on the bugs, grinding them into bloody bits of tar. More and more seethed through the walls and windows until there was only a small circle of floor visible around his feet.
In the distance, Colly heard a shriek like a woman discovering her child dead, and the shadows outside grew larger.
“Just give in, son. You’re postponin’ the inevitable.”
Colly ground the edge of the shovel into the mole’s distorted head.
Not-Daddy raised his arms wide, as two wildcats stalked across the threshold.
“I did wrong to you, son. Shouldn’t have let the guilt gnaw me up like it did. Ought to just have left you in that mineshaft for hell to claim you.”
The cats weaved closer and Colly watched as a spider bit his hand.
The room wavered as the venom began to squirm towards his heart, and Colly saw the carpet of dead things swirling dark beneath him, luring him inside like a coal mine that only goes
down,
down,
down.
###
Colly gripped the hickory branch, chest heaving as he woke up hunched at the kitchen table. Grandaddy’s eyes were open; two dull windows on the precipice of being boarded up. The rocks had fallen from his sockets sometime during the night. Colly reached out for the one laying on the pillow closest to him, and his wrist twinged. He looked down and saw, almost to his elbow, bleeding gashes. Catfish sting.
Colly felt nauseous.
He grabbed the stone, placed it back over Granddaddy’s left eyelid, and then moved to the porch. Sunlight was pushing the shadows back, liquifying to seep into woodpecker holes and badger burrows. But it was quiet. No birds greeting the dawn. It didn’t feel quite like home. A pile of half-life insect husks littered the porch. Some unnerving knot of knowledge gnawed at the back of his throat. Colly leaned the hickory stick against the porch railing and sat
down,
down,
down.
