“Cecy!” he cried, to everything, everywhere. “I know you can help! Shake me! Shake me!”
Standing with the downtown cigar store Indian for conversation, John shook his head violently.
What if he never found her? What if the winds had borne her off to Elgin where she dearly loved to bide her time? The asylum for the insane, might she now be touching and turning their confetti thoughts?
Far-flung in the afternoon a great metal whistle sighed and echoed; steam shuffled as a train cut across valley trestles, over cool rivers through ripe cornfields, into tunnels, under arches of shimmering walnut trees. John stood, afraid. What if Cecy hid in the cabin of the engineer’s head? She loved riding the monster engines. Yank the whistle rope to shriek across sleeping night land or drowsy day country.
He walked along a shady street. From the corners of his eyes he thought he saw an old woman, wrinkled as a fig, naked as a thistle-seed, among the branches of a hawthorn tree, a cedar stake driven in her chest.
Something screamed and thumped his head. A blackbird, soar
ing, snatched his hair.
“Damn!”
He saw the bird circle, awaiting another chance.
He heard a whirring sound.
He grabbed.
He had the bird! It squalled in his hands.
“Cecy!” he cried at his caged fingers and the wild black creature. “Cecy, I’ll kill you if you don’t help!”
The bird shrieked.
He closed his fingers tight, tight!
He walked away from where he dropped the dead thing and did not look back.
He walked down into the ravine and on the creek bank he laughed to think of the Family scurrying madly, trying to find some escape from him.
BB-shot eyes lay deep in the water, staring up.
On blazing hot summer noons, Cecy had often entered into the soft-shelled grayness of the mandibled heads of crayfish, peeking from the black egg eyes on their sensitive filamentary stalks to feel the creek sluice, steadily, in veils of coolness and captured light.
The realization that she might be near, in squirrels or chipmunks, or even … my god, think!
On sweltering summer noons, Cecy would thrive in amoebae, vacillating, deep in the philosophical dark waters of a kitchen well. On days when the world was a dreaming nightmare of heat printed on each object of the land, she’d lie, quivering, cool, and distant, in the well-throat.
John stumbled, fell flat into the creek water.
The bells rang louder. And now, one by one, a procession of bodies seemed to float by. Worm-white creatures drifting like marionettes. Passing, the tide bobbed their heads so their faces rolled, revealing the features of the Family.
He began to weep, sitting in the water. Then he stood up, shaking, and walked out of the creek and up the hill. There was only one thing to do.
John the Unjust, the Terrible, staggered into the police station in the late afternoon, barely able to stand, his voice a retching whisper.
The sheriff took his feet down off his desk and waited for the wild man to gain his breath and speak.
“I am here to report a family,” he gasped. “A family of sin and wickedness who abide, who hide, seen but unseen, here, there, nearby.”
The sheriff sat up. “A family? And wicked, you say?” He picked up a pencil. “Just where?”
“They live—” The wild man stopped. Something had struck him in the chest. Blinding lights burned his eyes. He swayed.
“Could you give me a name?” said the sheriff, mildly curious.