A Natural History of Hell: Stories Read online

  There were a number of folks in town who used the liniment for medical purposes—gout, heartburn, bad back, aches and pains of the joints, the head, the heart. Even Dr. Shevin used it. When asked about its unscientific nature and reliance on backwoods hoodoo, he smiled as if realizing his guilt, shrugged, and said, “When I get a crick in my neck, which I do often enough from a bad sleeping posture, just a dab of that Galore on the stiff patch and all’s well and then some. Now, if you’re asking me if I prescribe it for my patients, I’d have to give you an unequivocal ‘No.’ I’m a man of Science. I don’t suggest anyone else use it, but if they do . . . ?” The discussion never went any further. There was no point. If the doctor had been laying it on like old Mote Kimber and was too right all the time, now that would have been a problem, but as it was, he used it like most everyone else—“Pro re nata,” as he said, which Postmaster Scott translated for us as, “When the bullshit gets too thick.”

  Old lady Oftshaw was mysterious, that’s for certain, but I wouldn’t say she was evil. There were a lot of folks who just couldn’t afford the Galore, and some of them were the ones that needed it most. My ma was one of them. Ever since my daddy ran off on us, she had to work double shifts over at the chicken-packing plant in Hartmere just to keep the house, put food on the table, and gas in the Chevy. And it wasn’t just me and her. There was Alice Jane and Pretty Please who also lived under our roof. They were the kids of the woman who Daddy ran off with. Their mother simply abandoned them—something no wild animal would do. Instead of letting Sheriff Bedlow cart the kids away to an orphanage in Johnston, the county seat, my ma asked him to leave them with her. I was there when she made her case. “No sense in having everybody suffer,” she said. “They’re just kids, and they need to know a little love before they get too old.” The sheriff, though short on courage, was long on heart, and he trusted her. He closed his eyes to the law, something that could never happen today, letting Alice Jane become my sort of sister and Pretty Please become my sort of brother.

  I suspect you want to know something else about my daddy and why he left Ma, but I truly don’t know anything to tell. I was happy to see him go. He was a moody fellow. Quiet. Never did anything father-like with me that I can remember. Although I will say he did buy me a 22 rifle and taught me to shoot out in the prairie over by the creek on the way to Mount Chary. But it wasn’t like he did it to get closer to me, more like he was teaching me to take the garbage out to the curb or how to make coffee so he didn’t have to get up quite as early in the morning. Although she never said anything about him, I remember Ma’s eyes being red a lot and more than once a big yellow-blue bruise on her neck.

  Mrs. Adler had no man at the time Daddy ran off with her, and Alice never had any stories about her pa or photographs for that matter. The whole thing was a mystery I never got to the bottom of. If I’d asked my ma, I know she’d have told me, but I came to avoid that question, afraid it might leave a wound, like a bullet from the 22.

  I was fourteen the year our family declined by one and then grew by two. Alice Jane was the same age as me, but born in summer while I was born in winter. She had long hair braided into pigtails and a freckled face with sleepy green eyes. I thought she was nice, but I didn’t let on. She could throw a hard punch or climb a tree, beat me in a race. Her brother, Pretty Please, was “something of a enigma,” or at least that’s what I heard Postmaster Scott whisper to Ma when she told him she’d taken on responsibility for the Adler children. We were at the counter and I was standing next to her while Alice and Pretty were standing over by the private mailboxes. Men of all kinds seemed to make my sort-of-siblings both shy and scared. “The girl’s cute enough, but that boy is . . . pe-culiar,” said Scott. “He just looks a sight,” said my mother, “inside he’s true.”

  I turned and looked at Pretty Please. He was fifteen, and not but an inch or two taller than me, but he had a big old head, full-moon pale and shorn close, looking like a peeled potato with beady eyes. He wore a pair of overalls with no shirt in summer. He seemed always busy, looking around, up and down and all over, rarely fixing on any one sight. Whenever somebody said anything to Ma about him, she’d nod and say, “He’s OK,” as if trying to convince herself. The only words he ever said were “Pretty please” in a kind of parrot voice. We didn’t know where he learned it from, but he seemed to have a vague sense of how to make use of it. Ma asked Alice Jane if he’d always been simple, and she just nodded and confided that their mother used to beat him with a hair brush. His real name, Alice told us, was Jelibai, and Ma asked us to call him that but we didn’t.

  The fact that my ma took in the kids of the woman who ran off with my pa was, even to me, downright odd, and to the rest of the town she was either touched by God or touched in the head. I think some thought she had nefarious purposes in mind, maybe to torture them in the place of the woman who stole her man? But in Charyville the rule was to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. Things had to get really out of hand for someone to pipe up.

  The first summer of our new family came, and Alice Jane and I were out of school, on the loose. Pretty Please didn’t go to school. The reason Principal Otis gave Ma for not letting him in was, “That poor boy is gone over the hill.” Pretty was delighted for us to be home every day, ’cause usually, when school was in session, he’d have to be by himself, locked up in the basement with my dog, Ghost, a mop head with legs and a bark. Ma would make Pretty peanut butter sandwiches and he could listen to the radio or look at books or say Pretty Please to the dog a hundred times. He liked to draw, and you shoulda seen his pictures—yow—people with scribbledy heads and no eyes.

  There was a bathroom in the basement, and it was cozy enough and lonely enough. Ma just didn’t want him getting to the burner of the stove, where he could leave the gas on and blow the place up or set himself on fire. But when we were on the loose, Pretty was on the loose. We all liked to be free and always had something to do from the time Ma left in the morning for work to when she came back at night and Alice Jane and me cooked her dinner. I could tell she was worried about us on our own, but I told her, “We’re not babies anymore. We can watch out for each other.” Her hand that held the cigarette shook a little, and Alice patted her back soft like Ma did for us at night as we went to sleep.

  The summers were fine for fishing, fist fights, shooting guns, drinking pop, catching snakes, swimming the creek, riding bikes, playing baseball, bottling lightning bugs, and watching the big moon rise. When on Sundays the minister spoke of Paradise, all I had to compare it to was summer vacation.

  Then on a bright morning in late July, the three of us were out early, and Alice Jane and I decided we would find the day’s adventure by just letting Pretty Please run up ahead of our bikes. We followed him wherever he went. It didn’t make any sense, and we all laughed, even Pretty, when he ran ten times in the same tight circle. We wound up traveling all the way to the edge of town to the red brick arches of the entrance to the church’s side garden. We went there a couple times a week in the early morning. There was a fountain and a bench within those walls. Tears issued from the eyes of a sculpted woman. The water trickled down, plashing from level to level quieter than a whisper. The aroma of the roses was almost too much.

  One bright morning, following that scent without hesitation, Pretty walked right in there. Alice Jane and I left our bikes on the sidewalk and followed. We found him standing still as a store manikin, staring up at Minister Sauter, who stood over him looking annoyed. When the preacher saw us enter the garden, his expression quickly changed to a smile. He took a seat on a bench by the fountain and motioned for us to sit down as well. We did. Alice and I were on either side of the minister, and Pretty, watching ripples in the water, slumped on the bench next to his sister.

  Sauter said, “How’d you kids like to make some money?”

  “Whata we gotta do?” asked Alice.

  “W
ell, I want you to ride out to the woods beneath the mountain and find that old woman Oftshaw’s house.”

  “Pardon,” I said, “but she’s an old witch, ain’t she? My ma says she’s got spells.”

  Alice smacked herself in the forehead for my ignorance.

  The minister laughed. “The old lady’s a Christian, I think,” he said.

  “How much money?” asked Alice.

  “Let’s see,” said Sauter. “I want you to go out there and I want you to watch what she does. I want you to remember it and then come back and tell me.”

  “Easy,” said Alice Jane. I nodded. Pretty Please said, “Pretty please.”

  “One thing, though,” said the minister. “You can’t let her see you watchin’ her.”

  “That’s spying,” said Alice.

  “It would be,” said Sauter, “but I’m gonna make you all deputy angels before you go. As a deputy angel, you can do my bidding and not get in trouble with the law or God. The Lord has put his trust in me, and so must you.”

  “I don’t want to go to heaven,” I said.

  “Do you want to make twenty cents?” asked Alice.

  We took the oath, and then Alice Jane took it again once for Pretty. I kept messing up the words, and at one point the minister put his hand at the base of my throat to steady me, but in the moment I wasn’t sure he didn’t intend to strangle me. As soon as we were deputy angels, he shooed us out of the garden. As we mounted our bikes, he whispered to us from the entrance, “Report to me tomorrow at this time. Tell no one. The devil is listening.”

  Mention of the devil scared us, and we rode silently and with great determination straight north toward Chary Mountain. Pretty Please ran ahead along the side of the empty road, never tiring. That morning the dew had covered everything, made everything glimmer. The sky was deep blue, and there were just white wisps but no real clouds. It was a good couple of miles out to Chary, and so eventually we slowed down and Alice told Pretty to also.

  “Why’s this lady live all the way out here by herself?” asked Alice, slow pedaling beside me.

  “I don’t know too much about her, but she had a husband who either died or ran off.”

  “Probably ran off,” said Alice.

  “Ma says Mrs. Oftshaw’s from some other country.”

  “Which one?”

  “From across an ocean.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, and Alice asked me, “Is that all you know?”

  “Oh, you must’ve seen her. She’s got a smoking hog name of Jundle.”

  We laughed, and when I focused back on the road, I spotted Pretty Please, way up ahead, making for the tree line.

  Alice no doubt saw it before I did and had taken off, pumping her legs furiously. I worked to catch up with her. Every once in a while, Pretty would get what we called “the urge.” Sometimes he just bolted away. It didn’t happen often, maybe once every couple weeks. This time he was really moving at a clip, and we both saw him reach the boundary of the woods and slip inside. We left the road and cut across the short field that bordered the tree line. Riding our bikes amidst the trees was slowing us down, so we dropped them and went forward on foot. Alice’s voice could be ear-splitting, and she used it every few steps. “Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Please,” she called.

  She grew more frantic the farther we went. “I can’t lose him,” she said to me.

  I tried to tell her he’d turn up, but every time I spoke those words, she shook her head and walked faster. By the time I had to take her hand to calm her down, we’d come to the top of a rise. We stood at the crown of the hill and looked down through the trunks of cedar pine and birch trees at a glittering pond. Sitting at the water’s edge was Pretty Please, investigating something in the sand. At the sight of him, Alice sighed and turned in toward me. I put my arm around her and froze. She shrugged me off and took a seat a few feet down the incline. I followed and sat next to her.

  “I want to ask that brother of yours, pretty please to not run off like that anymore.”

  “My old ma, not your ma, told me once that Pretty was a bag of flesh filled with wind.” She took a couple breaths, staring down at her brother. “My Ma was a mean bitch.”

  When she said that, we both broke out laughing. That one knocked me over. When I sat back up I took her hand in mine again. She didn’t make like she noticed. We sat there quiet, taking in the smell of the cedar pines and the sound of goldfinches. The glitter on the water was diamonds and stars. She turned to look into my eyes and said, “We should kiss.”

  At the moment, I couldn’t think of one good reason not to. So we did. And before long she stuck her tongue in my mouth and then we were rolling on the ground rubbing each other up. So much rubbing—we had “the urge”—I thought the two of us would be erased. We reached a point where I had my hand up her shirt, and she had just grabbed my pecker down my pants, when out of the blue, she gets suddenly still, turns her head, and yells, “Pretty Please.” In a heartbeat she was off the ground, fixing her clothes. Pretty was gone, and it was the only time I ever wished him ill.

  We ran through the woods, toward the base of the mountain, and the undergrowth grew more tangled and difficult to manage. We’d follow a natural path through the trees and then eventually be stopped by a wall of thorn bushes and turn back to find another way forward. Alice was frantic again, and I had to keep her a few times from trying to find passage through the heart of one of those bushes that would rip her to shreds. Eventually we came to a clearing in the shade of the mountain. It was, by then, late afternoon, but dark as twilight where we stood. I was happy just to have some open ground before us.

  Alice noticed it first. The place was so covered in ivy and some other trailing vine I didn’t recognize it as a house. Only when she pointed to where lamplight glowed through a small window, one mere corner of its glass not covered by leaves, did I see it. Then I noticed that there was smoke issuing from inside through the metal chimney of a stove. The house wasn’t huge but it had two floors and seemed out of place in the woods—more like a home you might find in a big town. It had a slate roof, and you could make out the fancy wood carvings they call gingerbread beneath the ivy.

  “Should we do some spying?” I asked Alice in a whisper.

  I know she was thinking about Pretty ’cause she hesitated for a second. “Twenty cents is twenty cents,” she said. “We’ll just peek in the window and see what we see. Then we gotta get. Whatever we see, we’ll tell the minister.”

  “What if it ain’t much?”

  “We’ll make something up like good deputy angels.”

  “Stay quiet,” I said to her and tried to take her hand. She pushed me away.

  “I can do this myself,” she said, and we proceeded side by side.

  As we approached the back of the house we heard noises coming out from inside. I realized the back door was slightly ajar. The closer we got, the smaller the steps we took until we were only inching along a little at a time. I felt cold in my gut, slightly dizzy, and my legs felt weighed down like in those dreams where you need to run but can’t. Alice was breathing quickly, her eyes focused on the light coming through the sliver of an entrance.

  Sitting on a tree stump, right outside the back door, there was a little painted box with a design like fancy wallpaper. Alice lifted it quickly, tipped the lid up, and peered inside. She slipped it into her pocket. “That’s thievery,” I whispered. She shhh’d me and showed me the back of her hand as if getting ready to smack me.

  No less than a breath later, the door suddenly flew open and there stood old lady Oftshaw without her tunnel scarf, her pale face and wild hair unhidden. She was lit from behind, and the glow made her seem some kind of spirit. I stopped dead in my tracks and froze. Alice grabbed my hand and spun us around. She started to yell “Run,” I think, but whatever the word
was it vanished, ’cause standing right in our path was Jundle. Alice took a step, and the hog made a noise from deep inside his huge body that sounded like the earth grunting. He came at us, plodding slowly, and we turned and walked toward Mrs. Oftshaw. I couldn’t get any spit in my mouth, and my legs were like two dead fish.

  “Come in, children,” said the old lady, and she stepped back and held open the door for us. We stepped into her kitchen, first Alice and then me. We stood right next to each other and kept some distance between us and Mrs. Oftshaw. She let the door go, and it slammed shut, making us start. I don’t know how, but I was able to look up at her face. I’d never seen it clearly before. In that moment, I saw that she wasn’t a homely old woman but just an old woman.

  “You kids here to spy on me?” she asked and smiled in a way that made me scared.

  I was all set to spill the beans, but before I could open my mouth, Alice stepped forward and said, “We brought my brother out to the pond in the woods, but we lost him. Can you help us find him?”

  The old lady said, “He’s not lost.”

  “We really don’t know where he is, and I have to find him.” Alice said.

  “He’s not lost, child. He’s on an expedition.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “He’s travelling far,” she said. “But I can help you. I’ll send Cynara, the world’s oldest heifer, after him. She’ll bring him home.” She went to the door, opened it, and whistled. With her hand, she motioned for us to come and join her by the entrance. In a few moments, Jundle slowly came waddling into sight. He stood in front of us, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, smoke issuing in pigtails.