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December 11th, 2007, Dog's Run, Tempest, West Virginia

Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court? _________ William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene i

The first time Bligh realized that he was more than what he thought he was, he was alone - he did not have his best friend Drew with him, his loyal retainer, or his dog, Duke, his steadfast squire. Duke was due to be taken to Dr. Barnes' vet clinic to re-up his rabies shots, but his grandfather - the whole town called him Pappy, even men and women older than he was - had been adamant that Bligh hunt for a squirrel to be tomorrow's dinner, since he himself had hunted dinner to be served that day. So Drew, in the pattern of almost-marriage they possessed years before either of them were ever brave enough to admit that was precisely what it was, had volunteered to take the dog to the vet himself, because Dr. Barnes' daughter, Betsy, was his girlfriend. It was just as well: even though Dr. Barnes liked Bligh, and had even helped his mama birth him because nobody else back then could help - born in a vet's office like a damn dog, how bout that - Betsy never took a shine to Bligh...too jealous, he guessed, how close he and Drew were. So Bligh was alone. No cell phone, that was another rule of Pappy's - hunting takes concentration, no intrusions by the frivolity of text messaging allowed. Pappy expected him to grow up and be a man and really at all of sixteen Bligh was a man already, the itchy clouds of black beard starting to form on his face, conscious imitation of his grandfather - thick blue flannel, squirrel gun, poke over his shoulder. He was the image of coalfield youth - the ruggedness inherited so soon, so quick, being young was too good to last here in the mountains, a small town nobody had ever heard of where weird things went on in whispers and legends. It was December, the first week, when the spooky pumpkins of Halloween and Samhain were all carved up and eaten, spiced and baked, for Thanksgiving pies - now all that was left was the desolation, the reckoning, the trees barren and naked, branches clawing at the overcast skies in supplicating prayers never to be heard. The smell of distant woodsmoke admixed with the clean, fresh wintry mountain air. It was a quick walk down the little hill that ridged up neatly and then leveled off where his house was - if Bligh had gone the opposite way he'd end up going up the mountain next to his house, where proud turkeybirds used to strut and a rare kind of herb that was useful for slaughtering hogs when Bligh had been a youngster grew...but now it was a dangerous place, a family of mountain lions lived up there even though the State of West Virginia was absolutely certain no mountain lions lived in West Virginia at all. But that was a lie - Bligh had to kill one, the very first animal he'd ever shot, many years ago, because Drew and he had blundered their way into its home. His grandfather said there weren't no mountain lions up yonder, but great big cattywampus - whatever they were, he didn't elaborate and Bligh and Andrew were too scared to ask why he'd said that...they hadn't been up there since. He had warned them with something Bligh had kept close to his heart - Ain't tellin what ye find in em woods, and that was the final say, the sagest advice you could either give or receive in their town. So Bligh went the other way - his grandfather was strict about him keeping up his shooting skills and being self-sufficient enough to catch and kill your own food. Bligh would get the meat, and his grandfather would cook it in the big electric crockpot they had just inherited from Cousin Bobby, Pappy's nephew, in Huntington...God rest his soul, his heart finally did what the diabetes couldn't and killed the poor man dead. It was very cold and Bligh was hungry and frustrated - he missed Duke and he missed Drew, he had been hunting alone only a few times in his life and now he felt awkward, like he didn't know what he was doing...maybe that was Pappy's plan all along, to show him how to do things by himself, and be self-reliant. At the thought, Bligh rolled his eyes - Pappy was convinced of the rightness of his positions and it was really hard to argue with him because, incidentally, he was almost never wrong...but goddam, couldn't they just order a pizza? But he was like his grandfather in many ways and each year it became more and more obvious he was his grandfather's grandson, an undeniable Lynch. Looking at Pappy was like looking a much-aged Bligh, and looking at Bligh was like peering into the past of who Gustavus - his real name - had been, all those decades ago... ...it should have warmed his heart, but the air was too cold for that, and his irritation too fresh. At lease Bligh could like the cold, because he was used to this time of year being right airish and he liked it when the breeze blew his too-long hair gently into his ears under his new Baltimore Ravens cap he had bought at the Greenbrier Valley Mall on Black Friday. The chill on the air is lovely if you expect it, if you know where you are. Bligh had been keeping time with his steps to stalk squirrels as he had been taught to. He could faintly make out some in the distance by a big walnut tree on the closer side of Dog's Run his movements were slow, quiet, pausing for some minutes when he saw the squirrels tense and look his way. He knew this area well, but if he got lost, he could tell where he was by the owl, louder and louder as the town got further behind him, calling from the forest past the border of the languid flow of the creekwater. The creek's flow was lazy and slow these days, soon enough it would cease altogether, choked by fine splinters of ice, and set apart on its banks by ermine shawls of the first snows. December even in its morbidity was not without its beauty. On the breeze you can hear him, the barred owl, lonely misshapen creature of feathers, forced to call out: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! It is not a full question that seeks to know, it is a taunt, a demand, a conversation that begins and ends by offending and abusing who it is asked to. He would love to say something else, his brothers in the wood with their long feathery eyebrows merely ask Who? Who? and you can gather from this something perennial, the philosopher's troubling wrestle with how life is drawn into existence in the universe - he has relatives that utter no human-like words at all, but mere tremolo, long and low and mournful, not as sad as the wolf's howl or the fox's wail beneath them as they are perched on their branches but a little more striking: on the breeze, a plea to listen. These owls are the wisest creatures in the forest because they have things to say. Listen to them: they will ask you things because the chill on the air is never, ever sufficient to itself, it must have accompaniment, a fiddler at your banquet table as the food is served and the whiskey poured. A meal fit for a king. The forest is a monarchy, after all, it is an empire that stretches and reigns forever, a world without end. The people here when Bligh's grandfather was very young used to get married outside under trees, and they'd say they were married in the big church, their ancestors' genetic memory curdling in their blood and released as an unconscious homage in their words with the phrase: knowing and understanding that no structure built by humans, large or small, can contain the majesty of nature, the big church_is where one worships because one is compelled to, there is nothing to replace it, long live the king. The colors in the forest this time of year are a reminder that the world is dying and that misery comes with the cold - in some months there will be ripples of pink and white, there will be bloom, the bare branches will be decorated delicate with the promises of life's return, _there over yonder, the path is new the world is free...before giving way to a death-afore-death, behold how the phoenix renews himself, so too will the trees, the feathers, the leaves: embers of gold and crimson. And then - the end. December in West Virginia is an empress-queen with a baritone roar - the femininity of her beauty so crushingly powerful to the eye that it makes one's soul hurt, the demand for obeisance for merely looking upon her evoking a terrible goddess from the first, pure days of humanity when one could still read by starlight... ...stark, savage pulchritude. Up north from here they called a place the Canaan Valley, a sequel to the paradise from the Bible that Bligh's grandfather would preach from - for, surely, they had found what must have been a newfound Earthly paradise, summits bathed in glory like our Prince Immanuel's Land. And there are many places in America that are called God's Country and so it was here, but in West Virginia which god is never specified: whomever it be, it is ancient, it is feral. Bligh took a breath, billowing out faint vapor - the air was cleaner over here, away from town, a single paved road going out, out, stretching until it picks up 63, then 219, Lewisburg, bigger cities and bigger places far away from the creek, the forest, the owls. The creek had, by its occupation of geology, drained the area around it and turned it into grassy, shrubby flatland - its waters formed a drawn border between the meadow plain, marred by the occasional bare spot of rock, and the hilly woods. Next to the meadow, the road plunged out toward the shifting hills on the horizon, on a clear day you really could see forever. After the road and the meadow the woods appeared and the hills resumed their climb, inhabited in the uneven transition by squat shrubs, cruel briars, and, in happier times of the year, billowing, fragrant herbs and wildflowers that bees would excitably buzz about. Great jagged boulders jutted out like the bones of the prehistoric ground sloth who once reigned here, and tangles of dead vines would crawl and creep, up and over the exposed rock. Way on up ahead the creek broadened, and on its banks sat the ruins of an old mill, sometimes a beaver dam, alongside a rabbit-bitten plain that dipped into a holler as Dog's Run disappeared into the Earth. Bligh stopped where he was, listening for the owl - Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! - to tell him where to go. He could measure by the owl how far away he was from town, and where the squirrels were. Head away from where you hear the owl, his grandfather had told him, for when he goes quiet, that is when he has found prey - where is he noisiest there are no animals for him to catch... ...in the woods. The entrance to the woods was a doorway to somewhere else, one false step across the creek and into another realm, you'd stumble. He heard from Pappy once that a boy who courted his mama had taken sick and the night he was supposed to have died a whole big passel of squirrels sat by his window, and then his mama had seen him, healthy but changed into a half-squirrel hisself, watching her sadly from a bush or a tree. His mama used to tell that story as a funny thing, she couldn't be sure if it was a dream or not. But Pappy thought it weren't no dream - Pappy believed her. That was the kind of weirdness and strangeness and blurring of lines that took place here, this town, Tempest, West Virginia - really all over West Virginia, everywhere you went there was stories and tales and whispers and secrets. That was what you had to watch for in these woods. Was it real or was it all just imagination? You'd never know - you'd never know. The woods surround you and hug you and clutch you tight, a bereaved mother deranged from watching her child age - the woods listen to your heartbeat and watch you, always, as you pass through. And the woods grant wishes, but they are terrible wishes. Best stick to the creek, best stick to the road. Most of the animals now in December are gone. The crows are left, because they never leave, and so are the cardinals to complete a bucolic scene of Appalachian Christmas. They dress up as Richelieu, hopping about the snow and singing about the closing year, they will speak of all that has happened - the deaths, the births, the endings and the beginnings - they will speculate on what the new year will bring, and laugh to think of their cousins that flew south to escape the cold. The owl, too, is left. This time of day, when dusk was creeping and the clouds conspired with the darkness, the squirrels weren't as active, and the larger creatures - the mighty bear, the slender fox - had hid themselves in their yearly ritual of hibernation. But the owl still calls: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! It breaks into a stillness that is at once preternatural and yet expected: the chorus becomes not one of birdsong and katydid as it is in Summertime but rather of silence itself, each voice is muted but still singing, it will fade back in, it will return - for others may see a dying world but the mountaineer sees a world merely asleep, for now, for now. Bligh was out past that old abandoned church where he had found Duke, that the woods rose up behind and the creek ran through underneath its wormy, decaying floorboards - floorboards with old and rusty nails, Drew had stepped on one after Bligh had goaded him and goaded him to come along with him exploring, and boy Pappy got mad as a hornet, really jerked a knot in his tail... ...tail. Almost involuntarily, Bligh found himself frowning - he wanted a tail, he wanted to be a werewolf, get on all fours like Duke and hunt his food with his nose and his mouth. That was the old - oldest thing about him, what he retreated to when he first came to live with his grandfather after his daddy and mama crashed their Cadillac car in a rainstorm. He was so, so young then - from then on it was just him and Pappy against the world. And Drew - Drew too. But Drew didn't know - Pappy once thought he knew, but didn't really know - none of his guys on the football team would know, either. It was his own interior world, his private place - howling at the moon, staying out late with Duke and sneaking back in. Someday he'd tell Drew, he'd tell him all about how he knew that werewolves always belonged to the Devil according to the legends, and how he could never face Pappy because Pappy was a man of God like that, never knowing his own grandson badly wanted to be something so opposed to what he practiced, that's why Bligh would get sad every Sunday, that's why, secretly, he weren't Christian no more... Not that he didn't believe. He surely did - haints and monsters were just as real as you and me, yes sir - and maybe there weren't a Heaven, but by golly there was probably a Hell. But Drew didn't believe, he didn't believe in nothing, that's what made telling him so hard - Bligh pretending he was a werewolf like he'd always done, that part of him, that stayed religious and inflexibly spiritual even after he'd stop being really sure whoever Jesus Christ was - Bligh was still certain that the world around him was hardly all the world he got, and he never doubted werewolves were out there somewhere, that animals had souls...and the woods took care of their own. He just never figured it all out yet - maybe he never would. The ramshackle church, and his thoughts on religion, passed behind him. Bligh sucked in a breath through his nose, stopping where he was - the crunch of leaves ceasing beneath his boots, deep up to his ankles - to look about him. His eyes were of a different color than everyone else's in town, different than anybody else he'd ever really met, but they were the same color as his grandfather's and his daddy's too, who Bligh remembered only faintly before he died - they gave the impression of seeing everything by seeing past it, into it, X-ray eyes, strange magic, blue the color of ice, blue the color of the cold itself. And his eyesight was, actually, more excellent than most anyone he knew - it's what made him a good quarterback, it's what made him a crack shot. Like his grandfather, he could see what others couldn't. He smirked at that - he never really smiled, Drew's wily little brother Stevie said that all the time and he was right, he smiled like his grandfather smiled, crooked, a little proud, a little bashful...a smirk. Now he stopped to squint and try to sharpen his focus - the squirrels he'd thought he'd seen were becoming clearer, a rare passel of them, there, not far, the edge of the woods, but on the nearer side of the creek, two, three, four squirrels. How lucky! He'd have to tell Pappy: one climbing the base of a great big walnut tree, one on the branch that made it shake as it moved - two on the ground. This would be easier than he'd thought - maybe he did know what he was doing. He approached them stealthily - Drew always said he was good at sneaking up on people, an unconscious skill he never remembered learning, but which he put to adept use out here on the hunt - he raised his gun, he took his shot. The noise erupted into the stillness and startled a murder of crows that flew off, cawing raucously, from a tall beech tree near the walnut where he had felled one squirrel, then another - only two, felled with one shot each: "New record," Bligh muttered to himself. Their compatriots fled for their lives into the forest, their peace of tail-twitching and squawking at each other ruined by violence and bloodshed. Bligh took his time walking to reach them, inhaling deep again, another airish breeze coming up and grazing his skin - it was getting colder, because it was quickly getting darker. He reached down to pick up the pair of small, furry, lifeless bodies - he murmured the prayer that Pappy had taught him, thanking them for their lives and now for their death, that he could live on because they had given themselves up. That was the way of the woods...Pappy talked all the time about salvation and the Good Lord and what the Bible said, but sometimes Bligh would wonder - putting the squirrels in his poke to carry home - if Pappy didn't put his own take on the Good Book, something like the Indians that intermarried with the first settlers out here used to practice, about being with nature and being in balance. Bligh was supposed to have some Indian in him - that explained the black hair. As he rose from the grass, adjusting the poke over his shoulder, he thought he heard the owl again, louder, somewhere near him - Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Loud - louder - close. He whipped around him - where was it coming from? He gripped his gun, hearing it - rising - nearer, nearer... Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Then - a chaos, a rushing whoosh, stronger and stiffer than the breeze. Bligh spun on his heel to see it, pouring over the grass and the leaves, a noxious, spreading shadow that darkened the ground - above him came a flapping of wings, deep and ominous, the sound shuddering into the Winter air. And then, attacking the tallest branch to make a perch, there it was: a thing, a giant thing, a thing - that looked like an owl. Its wings were enormous, so large that had they been fully outstretched Bligh in his panicked fear wondered if they could have blotted out the feeble Winter's Sun - its talons were sharpened to a point, scaled legs and feet digging into the branch it held deeply enough that it would surely leave marks. It had been crafted out of the very forest itself, as though spat out of every fitful nightmare every scurrying creature on the ground once had, and now come to life: Tall, antler-like bundled feathers gave the impression of horns jutting off of what should have been his eyebrows, above eyes that, themselves, were ablaze with a psychedelic, ever-changing opalescence, never looking the same way twice, like lava captured in glass. But the worst part was its face - no beak, no feathers, just skin, too smooth and healthy to be like a vulture's but too uniform to have been plucked off. Taking it all in, his mind racing, Bligh's own eyes widened in horror as he realized: the face looked vaguely, passably - human. The owl he had been hearing was no owl at all. This was a monster, a creature of the woods from the fantasies of the first settlers and from the febrile fears of the Moneton - primeval, prehistoric, awful. Its feathers were shaggy, unkempt, bristling with poorly-molted plumage, the color of the leafless branches, perfectly camouflaged in the wild tangles of the treetops it leered down from. Bligh raised his gun, finding to his fleeting relief that even in his state of total bewilderment, even looking into those fiendish, hypnotic, fiery eyes of the creature, he was not scared - all the preparedness his grandfather had instilled in him had worked. The thing seemed to threaten him, and Bligh meant to defend himself. Again the question came, from the branches clenched in its talons, down to Bligh, through eyes of relentless fury that threw off fiery sparks of molten orange-yellow wherever they turned: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! Bligh's breathing steadied, and he lowered his gun - slowly, very slowly, never taking his eyes off the monstrous feathered thing. The words - and they were words - echoed, hard, in Bligh's ears. He could understand them, he could make them make sense in his own head, the voice with a far more rich timbre than any owl's should be. His eyes were still wide with bewilderment but the fear was being replaced with something - something he would never think to feel out here, alone, confronted with a giant owl that leered at him from a walnut tree, with a gun in his hand. He felt - guilty. He felt that he should be able to understand this creature and that not being able to was making it sad and desperate, like he wasn't keeping a promise, like Bligh had been entrusted with something important, dire, and had carelessly forgotten it. Yet again the owl-thing hooted at him - again it leered at him. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! In the woods you are always trespassing, in the woods you are always being watched - the owl hooted and hooted its outrage, the only words it knew, transmuted, translated, into human-like words that Bligh understood as an inchoate, unanswerable question: the portcullis was lowered, and now Bligh, whose people were meant to be kings of this land even when Drew's people were the ones who bought and sold and enslaved it, was an exile in his own realm, for heavy is the head whose crown has fallen. He felt foolish, foolish enough to answer an owl - or what looked like an owl - or something that was half-owl, half-boy... He gritted his teeth, he cocked an eyebrow, he shrugged his shoulders: "I dun - I dunno?" A silence passed, tense and chastened, between he and the plumed beast above him. He repeated: "I dunno! I dun - I dunno!" The owl-thing withdrew - it did not take its great, staring eyes off of him, but held him in a gaze that was accusatory, angry - sad. That was not the answer it wanted. It hooted out the same thing - again now, distraught, defeated, in disbelief, as though trying to make sense of what the human beneath had just said: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! And then Bligh knew. The mournful siren of the owl, the same phrase - Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all! - over and over and over, had an inescapable meaning: he was too inexperienced, he was irresponsible with his duties - he was not worthy. In the silence that was not stirred by any caw, tweet, cricket, rustle - in this silence, this perfect silence of West Virginia's December, at the border of the real and the unreal, the known places where humans lived and the unknown places of tree, wood, and leaf, he understood, looking into the eyes of the owl that he was sure was no owl at all...he understood, ashamedly, perfectly, what had happened. _ _ Bligh had wanted this, something like this, to be close to this, be a part of this - he had wanted to be a beast himself, a werewolf to roam the forest, and yet here he was, at the very gate to the forest, with the wood itself so full of shining eyes and creeping feet, beckoning him with long clawed fingers...and he had no idea what to do. _ _ The owl-thing flew off, off into the distance, spread its wings so wide its shadows could have killed the Sun - it bore itself aloft, far, far from where Bligh stood, his gun, and his defenses, his confidence, all down - the predatory shape the owl-thing took melted into the treetops, its bushy plumage indistinguishable from the branches and the leaves. _ _ The encounter had lasted no more than three, four minutes - and yet it seemed so much longer, it had seemed like forever, several forevers, it seemed like time and its dimensions had simply ceased to be, and that the friendly world of logic and understanding, Planet Earth, had let open a small pocket of weirdness so potent it undid reality itself. Worst of all was how, staring after it, trying to put everything together, how Bligh felt - different. He felt, somehow, and for no rational reason, that this would not have happened to anyone else, that this was destined, doomed, for him to find and for him to experience, alone. Not Drew, not Pappy, not Duke - only him, for whatever reason. He started back for home, quickening his pace as he went - that owl-thing's awful face, awful voice, refusing to leave his tortured mind's eye. When he got home he was still shook up, and as he opened the door to come in, doffing his boots and hanging his Ravens cap on the wooden rack nailed to the wall, putting up his gun, he tried to right himself once more, steadying his face and his emotions. Pappy was waiting for him in the kitchen, the whole house alive with lusty smells of seasoned cookery stewing in the crockpot. He came to meet Bligh in the little hallway that led to the dining room with its big window next to the kitchen, salt-and-peppered eyebrows arched and together as he nodded his greeting - dressed in his usual flannel, like Bligh, and workaday jeans with house slippers, he looked nearly like Bligh in the face, a full chinstrap beard to accompany the same rugged handsomeness, but creased and aged. "Ya shoot us some dinner fer tomorrow night?" He had a powerful voice, honed for decades in the preacher's pulpit. "Yessir," Bligh answered. "Squirrels - pair of em, whole passel out down past the ol church." "Well bring em over, lemme clean em - ya done yer homework?" "Yessir," Bligh repeated, bringing his poke to the counter to leave for his grandfather. "Done it afore I went out." "Aight," Pappy answered with another nod. "Drew came by n'dropped off Duke - I gave em some o'them preacher cookies fer his trouble, weren't much but yanno he loves em." He motioned with his head to a closed door where their living room was. "That dawg o'yers is sleepin in ere, he waitin fer ya." "Thank ya, Pappy," Bligh said, forcing a grin, hoping he wouldn't notice the worried expression that had riddled into his face all the way home. As he turned to move on, Pappy removed the squirrels from the poke and called out after him: "Clean kill, son! I'm impressed!" Bligh sniffed in spite of himself - his grandfather's praise elated him, even this close to actual manhood. As he opened the door into his cozy, wood-paneled living room he could feel, and see, a fire burning in the fireplace, and Duke, a huge, shaggy, bearded thing who always looked noble and aloof but who was also unfailingly sweet-natured, rose from his spot aside it to greet him - a little logy from his shots at Dr. Barnes', his furry ears went limp to let Bligh scratch the top of his head, he made a rough O with his snout and growled out a long hello. "Hey, boy--" Bligh murmured back, embracing Duke tightly. Not far from him in the kitchen Bligh could hear his grandfather hum a tune familiar to them both, sometimes with his voice rising to sing pieces of the words - "Oh! He led her over mountains, and valleys so deep..." Now he shut his eyes - hearing his grandfather, feeling Duke, his fireplace-warmed fur against his own hand - it brought Bligh back to reality, to a groundedness that the open spaces by the road, the gates that led to the forests and up into the hills and then even further up into the mountain that loomed above his house, had all, momentarily, taken away. Here in his home nothing could hurt him, the gleaming eyes or stealthy paws or the big, billowing wings of bird-creatures that spoke near to a human's words - he let himself sigh, an outrush of air to release the day, into the protection of the wooden walls. Duke did the customary face-licking, a laving of Bligh's lips and budding beard, and he responded with one of his strange, delighted laughs that Drew's brother Stevie - again - would make fun of...he scratched Duke's neck, the big hound leaning back to show his pleasure. Now he, Duke, sat down by one of the armchairs and, enormous though he was, sat in Bligh's lap, near as big as Bligh was - Bligh hugged him close and buried his face in the dog's fur, remaining like this for several minutes, Duke waiting patiently, letting his human hold him as close as he needed to. At some length he relinquished his hold on his dog and with a muffled growl-bark - mruf! - he rolled over, signaling to Bligh he was demanding a bellyrub, and Bligh obliged, and wanted to smile down at him, ask him how his day was, he always talked to dogs like that, pretending that they had the full command of the English language and could hold a witty conversation...he'd wonder sometimes if anyone could really talk to them, understand, hear what they'd have to say. But right then he couldn't smile - because he could have used someone to talk to. No matter how cute Duke was being, tucking his head down and looking at Bligh with those heterochromatic eyes, one mud-brown and the other a crystal blue similar to his, he still couldn't shake being so bothered, being so puzzled. Pappy called him to dinner in the next room, and he signaled for Duke to roll back over and join him - as Bligh left the living room Duke trotted past him, assuming his usual position under the table between Bligh on one end, Pappy at the other. The dinner was squirrel, killed by Pappy the day before, in the crockpot - he'd been so tickled to have a new kitchen appliance and he had been putting just about everything in the crockpot for a whole week - seasoned with all the smells Bligh had encountered when he first walked in: ramp, vinegar, pepper, salted just a little, with some buttered biscuits and, as a special treat, some muggins that Pappy had been saving. He was hungry - he felt his mouth water just looking at his plate. He knelt his head and joined hands across the table in the prayer his grandfather led: "Dear Lord we jest wanna thank ye fer the bounty afore us, n'thank ya Lord fer keepin Bligh safe - please keep us in yer grace, Lord, n'we ask this in Jesus' name--" Bligh let bloom the last little flower in his dead garden of Christianity by joining in: "Amen." His first few bites were enthusiastic, the taste of the squirrel-meat so well cooked, the muggins perfect with a little butter - but as he ate the face of the owl-thing, bitter and mean and near-human, reappeared in his mind's eye...the bewilderment at what he had seen returned in force, and he slowed his eating, bit by bit, enough that Pappy took notice: "What's ailin ye, son?" Bligh shook his head. "Ain't nuthin..." "I know when I'm bein told a falsehood - n'ye know that's a sin." Bligh sighed. "I - I saw sumthin real weird in the woods. Right after I got them squirrels. It - got me afeared." Pappy nodded. "What ya see?" Bligh told his story and Pappy listened, nodding along, letting Bligh speak. When he was finished he took a deep breath, the images reemerging, and he shifted uncomfortably - the painful memory of being accused, of being scolded, still made him feel dirty and ashamed. His grandfather laid down his knife and fork, seeming to escape into his own deep thought and contemplation. Some seconds went by before he turned his head back to Bligh and answered: "Ya say a big ol owl?" "Yessir, big ol son of a gun," Bligh affirmed, his throat suddenly dry - he took the glass of water Pappy and poured him and downed half of it. "Kept - hootin at me, n'hootin at me, making all this noise like I...like I weren't s'posed to've been there." "Hmm..." Pappy said, folding his arms - and then again: "Hmm." "What is it?" "Well...I jest hafta say, that's - that's sumthin." "It - it is?" Pappy did not answer at first - his face took on an unusual aspect, the eyes that saw everything suddenly seemed to encapsulate the entire universe and reduce it into his icy eyes. Bligh laid his fork down across his plate - Duke, perhaps sensing his human was upset, appeared beneath him, leaning his head back to get Bligh to scratch him more. "I wanna - tell ya a story." Pappy began to murmur, sighing some. His voice became commanding, lilting with his accent, the sound of a polished raconteur, a master storyteller. "Long time gone...when I was a boy..." His face did not change, as though his gaze was now peering directly into the past. "Right bout the time Ol Patrick Lynch - my granddaddy's granddaddy - came over here from Ireland, he met a young man, not yet two-and-twenty, by the name o'William - William, ah..." He shut his eyes now, as though trying to remember - a bemused look came to him as he chuckled to himself. "Naw - I can't recall - anyhoo..." He grunted in self-affirmation. "William come up to Ol Patrick's one day, sayin he was witched." "Witched?" Bligh repeated. "Yessir - witched. Said a lady he was tryin ta court cast a spell on em and he was right sick - wudn't say how. Asked Ol Patrick fer help, said he wanted em to cook up sumthin that'd make em not witched n'more. Well - what's Ol Patrick gonna do? Ol Patrick believed in witches jest like everybody else but - he knew William was lyin - he'd done that woman a terrible wrong and his chickens were comin ta roost." "Done sumthin bad ta that women?" Bligh ventured. Pappy nodded. "And Ol Patrick knew it - seen right through that story William was tellin. So - he tell William to g'on and go - get on bout hisself." At this he motioned with his head, again, as though he was Patrick, shooing off the man, William - he paused now, as though for effect. "Well - here's where it gets a li'l quare, now. Come ta find out, there's a big ol owl livin down ere by the creek - this bout a month later - and folk say it weren't no owl t'all, but William hisself up ere, in the trees, all feathered and with big claws - waitin, waitin fer sumthin." He paused again. "Whether it be that girl that witched em ta take the curse off, or - sumthin else, I..." Now he shook his head, slowly. "They, rather - they never say." Bligh was bewildered - he stared at Pappy, mouth agape, both hands on the table, speechless. "I heard that story growin up - passed down through the years - fer the longest time, thought it was - yanno, ol folks jest tellin tales..." He grinned. "Nuthin wrong with that now, but--" The grin faded. "I heard a whole lot over the years about folk seein an owl - weird-lookin, big ol thang, up ere in them trees, hootin and hootin loud as can be." He seemed to ponder the idea a moment, and then: "When I tell ya ta listen fer the owl - that ain't the owl I'm talkin bout." At this, Bligh was beset with a feeling he had never experienced before - the story that his grandfather had told him, the tale of some unlucky sap being spurned and cursed by a witch and turned into a half-man, half-owl, doomed to haunt the countryside forever, seemed familiar to him, so much so he was near-spinning with something like déjà-vu, like a disused vault in his head had been thrown open, and there, long-forgotten, was the complementary facts to accompany his grandfather's narration. He had never, not once, ever experienced anything like this - a regression, a joining, from nowhere to nowhere, pieces falling together that were all blank, collecting together to form some indecipherable picture. The owl-thing had asked him questions and it had been like being in school and being called on by a teacher, expected to know the answer when you hadn't even read the book. This was similar: it was like he had known about this the entire time and had it, somehow, completely obliterated from his memory. But where had it come from, and where had it gone? And why? Who was William? His abrupt, unwelcome introspection was cut into by his grandfather's voice: "Boy - boy." Bligh jerked his up from staring at the table to stammer out his new revelation: "I know - I know all about that." His grandfather was nonplussed. "Zat so, now?" Bligh nodded. "I dun - I dunno why, but I do." Pappy took a drink of water himself. He set down his glass, and gave his grandson's remark a judicious look. "Ain't like much ever happens round here, and people talk - n'talk n'talk - I ain't sayin what ye saw was that William feller up ere in em trees." His voice had grown soft, almost comforting. "But sometimes..." Pappy began, seeming to choose his words carefully. "What we see - ain't what really is." He raised his eyebrows to end the sentence. Bligh stared at him, unsure - he glanced away, past his grandfather to the window behind him, where the darkness of the wooded mountain was pouring through, shimmering dimly with reflected firelight. "I ain't--" He cleared his throat. "I ain't sure what ye mean, Pappy." "What ye reckon I mean?" Bligh considered the thought before shrugging. "Reckon ye mean - reckon ye mean my mind saw sumthin, but my eyes_didn't--" "T'ain't what I'm sayin t'all, boy." Pappy leaned back in his chair, his eyebrows still up. There was a twinkle in the corner of his eye that Bligh knew meant he was withholding something, that he knew something Bligh didn't and that he'd have to figure it out himself - this was how his grandfather taught him critical thinking. Bligh sighed through his nose, drawing his lips together in a deep frown - he shook his head. "I dunno - I--" He tried powering through the congealed mass of questions, confusions, frustrations - but he failed, he shook his head once again. For the second time that day, he had to admit: "I dun - I dunno." "Ye thought ye'd seen an owl, zat so?" Bligh nodded - Pappy's eyebrows finally went down. "Well mebbe it weren't no owl t'all - maybe it was sumthin else." He seemed to read Bligh's tormented confusion, and gave one of his own crooked smiles back. "Ya gotta _think, boy - were it that tale I told ya bout Old William - come ta life now? Ya said ya heard it from somewheres, n'ye could be right." He cocked his head some, challenging his grandson. "Or ya could be wrong. Mebbe - s'jest a reg'lar ol owl, nuthin more, nuthin less." "Why--" Bligh frowned, this time sadly, feeling as though his grandfather was, for the first time in his entire life, letting him down. "Why ain't ye tell me the answer?" Pappy leaned back in. "I dunno the answer, son. I ain't gonna tell ya what ye seen cuz I ain't the one that seen it - ye gotta be the one." He leaned back as though to survey his grandson, whose head came down slightly to contemplate what the old man had told him. "All I know is this town has some nutty stuff goin on round it - n'ye deserve ta know. But ye also know I love ye, boy, I'm here ta help ya--" For a moment, just a moment, his eyes seemed melancholy, his face turned helpless, and the confidence and certitude he projected melted back to reveal something actually worried. "But sometimes - a man has ta decide on his own. I wanna tell ya what ya saw ain't nuthin ta be afeared of, but - I can't rightly tell ya that, honestly. Jest be careful - what I been tellin ye all these years?" Bligh cleared his throat. "Ain't - uh - ain't no telling what ye find in em woods." Pappy smirked. "I mean it, too. Be careful, Bligh - n'tell me if'n ye see that bird again." He sniffed, reaching for his grandson's hand - Bligh slid it to him and he squeezed it gently. "What I always tell ye, all these years - all these years ye've been livin here?" His smirk became a grin. "I'd never let nuthin happen ta my boy - not ever." He paused. "Monster or no_monster." Bligh nodded, smirking himself, humbled and loved - he sensed the conversation had come to an end. "Y-yessir - I - I understand." He smirked, embarrassed at the attention. "I love ya too, Pappy." He tried to cheer up, because he could his grandfather searching him, wanting him to reach a conclusion, even if the conclusion was not a conclusion at all, but a question mark. In the instant, he realized the method behind the disjointedness of Pappy's reply - the story that seemed to confirm something but only added to the confusion, so that the question would be left forever open. They returned to their dinner - savory squirrel, the meat tasty, well-seasoned, Pappy was an excellent cook as he was, probably, everything else. Duke curled underneath the table to watch for scraps, and for the moment Bligh tried to push seeing the owl-thing - _William - out of his head, to enjoy the December evening with his grandfather. When the dinner was over and Bligh told Pappy how much he enjoyed it, he offered to clear the table and wash the dishes - Pappy retired to the living room to read his Bible and wait for him, so that they could watch Law & Order together, their nightly ritual, guessing whodunit, trying to take their minds off whatever happened that day. Duke would join them, laying by the fire, rolling over with all four paws in the air, snoring. Bligh had plenty to think about as he scrubbed the plates and silverware and set them aside on the waiting towel to dry. Next week they would go out and find a Christmas tree together, still alive and not cut down, so that they could, when the season was over, plant it on the slope of their mountain. Pappy would light candles in the house and he and Bligh would clean together for Baby Jesus' birthday - you know all the farm animals face east on Christmas Eve? It's true, Pappy would say, like he said every year, adding that anyone around here will tell you that - all the animals know, better than the humans they live with, that it's time to wait for the Lord to be born. Some say they talk, too, but Pappy ain't ever heard a cow say his own name. Pappy would see to it that Bligh, living in a town with such savage strangeness pulsing beneath it, without parents and facing down a world which would not understand the way he was raised and the way he spoke, was still, at least for a time, safe - and loved. Bligh thought about that the whole time they watched television together - he hid a grin as he cuddled closed to Duke, he and his grandfather's favorite show flickering on the screen. Then the hour grew late he and Pappy said good night to each other after they watched the news - Bligh lay awake in his bed, Duke on the floor, curled on his rug like he always was, still exhausted from his day at Dr. Barnes'. When he heard Pappy's bedroom door shut, Bligh's eyes went open, his face creased with perplexity - and a little fear. He had tried to sleep, but couldn't - he always slept real good when it was cold out like this, and cold in his house, but he couldn't, he couldn't sleep at all. He'd always known his town was a strange one, he'd always heard that weird things went on, he'd even seen that big mountain lion - cattywampus - but he had never expected something like this, something he couldn't deny, something he couldn't explain...right in front of him... What made it weirder, harder to believe it wasn't all in his head, was - his mom had the same experience. Some crazy half-man half-something looked down at her from a tree...what little he remembered of his mom was that story, and how Pappy telling her it weren't no dream, it was real, because she had seen it. Now the same thing had happened to her son - Bligh. She'd been alone, no one around to tell her if she was crazy or telling the truth. And right then, Bligh had been all alone too. No Drew - who would tell him it was just an unusually big owl he'd seen, nothing more, no need to worry about it too much, people don't turn into owls and there is definitely no such thing as a forest-guardian. No Duke - who would growl and charge and courageously defend him, not leave him vulnerable to be questioned by whatever the Hell had roosted in that walnut tree. And no cell phone, not that his own cell phone was all fancy and had a camera like Drew's but even so, it would have helped to know he wasn't so isolated out yonder... ...like he felt isolated now. Just as he felt out near the woods, he felt different, he felt apart from his bed and his bedroom and his house and his town, like he had experienced something nobody else was supposed to, just him, only for him, the woods, the mountain, the whole universe staring at him, waiting for him to speak, waiting for him to answer that owl-thing's question...a question that, deep inside him, he was sure he knew the answer to, somewhere, somehow. It made him important, that way - to know the answer, to be entrusted, to be the one who kept the promise but maybe wasn't ready yet, maybe wasn't old enough. But being important isn't always a good thing - having all this weird attention on him, or feeling like he did, wasn't a good thing. Drew had told him once: eventually everybody looks at themselves and wonders who they really are. That's the point of being human, he said - and he was coming from a place of his science books and all his smarts which Bligh didn't have, and not knowing Bligh winced at the idea that he, too, was a human being... So then who was Bligh? The guy that talked to monsters in the woods? All his people except his daddy, Lord rest him, had been woodsmen - was that it? Something about his family, way back when...? Bligh shut his eyes, the day finally catching up to him at long last, a welcome feeling of tiredness coming to him - what had happened, what he had seen, the riddles left all unsolved, not yet, not today. As sleep finally shrouded his mind he thought he could hear it, one last time, the hooting, the call from beyond, close to his ears, inside his head, nearer to his heart - a secret, a door to which he had a key but did not know how to turn the lock, not yet, not just yet... Who cooks for you? Who cooks for all!