“Nigh.” Euclid dropped us off at this unpromising-looking bump in the blacktop. “Yall behay, heah?”
60
Henry led me into the roadside brush: the blackberry vines, the pokeweed, the mimosa seedlings, the no-name stickery shrubs that snagged your cuffs and sent macelike burrs to hitchhike your socks. The rain’d slackened, thank God, but our shoes sank-often with sucking PLOOPs-both in the jumbled vegetable mulch and Alabama’s oozy pasta-sauce clay. I began to think I’d gone off my nut to ride to this muddy natural chessboard of weedy rubbish and cut-bank arroyos, especially with a set of crutches. I had a train ticket back to Oklahoma-so why’d I let Henry pied-piper me to the redneck boonies? “Where we goin, Henry? Henry!”
He just forged ahead, a driven upright bundle of backwoods energy-like a bear, or a Sasquatch, or a mad semi-human spawn of the land. The rain, more drizzle now than gullywasher, held all nasty winged insects out of the air, but the fight to keep up without sinking kept me from relishing their absence.
“HENRY!”
He looked back. “A dry side-channel of Tholocco Creek-our destination. We’re nearly there.”
The “dry” side-channel, when we reached it, had water in it-not a full beck’s worth, but enough to put a cold squelch under your toes.
Anyway, squelching along in this tall gully, Henry led me to his hideaway: an earthen house tunneled into the bank of a drought-emptied creek. This shelter may’ve begun as a small cave, but, if so, Henry’d dug it out deeper and wider over the past two years, honeycombing the red earth with chambers. He’d also covered the creekbed doors with wild azalea, Allegheny hawthorne, and pine boughs. Nutlets from the hawthorne floated in the runoff sluicing down the cut. We waded into the earth house’s flooded entrance, then replaced the damp foliage that’d hidden it. A second chamber lodged higher and drier, and in that room, with coffee-can lanterns to see by, we spent most of the rest of the night.
Henry sat braced against one wall with his knees drawn up to his chin. I sat shivering on my duffel, my crutches stacked in front of me.
“Why have I brought you to this dank retreat?” Henry said. “I don’t doubt you must wonder.”
After looking around-at the coffee tins, the mats, the baseball equipment used for ornament-I said, “You could’ve given ol Worthy Bebout some decorating tips.”
“I did.”
“Well, he must not’ve listened.” Why’d Henry brought me here? Despite its homey touches, it would have been a fine place for him to crack open my skull with a rock and feast on my brains with his fingers-if he’d been a meat-eater. Even in his eighteenth-century reign of error, though, he’d liked nuts and berries better than animal flesh, and his time among the Oongpekmut had corrupted his vegetarianism only a bit. But for the chill on my body, the clammy damp of my clothes, I might’ve enjoyed the coziness of Henry’s Tholocco Creek warren, his coffee-can lanterns throwing shadows around, the mizzle outside hardly even hearable.
“Your father deserted you, Daniel, as mine did me. He fled from and forgot you, as my maker fled from and sought to forget me. Your sire-as did mine-renounced any part in your making and defaulted on his obligation to educate you.”
“Dick Boles taught me how to play ball.”
Henry shut up. He’d caught himself up in a riff of jazzy comparisons, though, and my tribute stunned him. He shook off the stun: “No small thing. No inconsequential pedagogy.”
“But what were you driving at?”
“Recently, your father died. You may have smoldered these past several years with unspoken anger, but you have not yet mourned your father-as I, early in my second life, grudgingly mourned Victor Frankenstein.”
“So?”
“So the process must eventually occur in you too, Daniel, or much of what hereafter befalls you, or occurs as a result of your own enterprise, will curdle on your palate.”
“All right. How do you do it?”
The question caught him off-guard. “Do what?”
“Mourn.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He crawled away from the wall and nodded into a farther chamber. “Follow.” And he led me on a duck-walking tour that took us to a kind of dug-out viewing room. Here, when he set down the candle holder he’d brought, I saw a peculiar human shadow-like a straitjacketed Egyptian king-stretched out on the chopped-down shipping crate of an upright piano.
When Henry lifted his candle to show me the makeshift bier, I saw these words stenciled on the crate: MENDELSSON / Ship to 486 Mims Street / Opp, Ala. The letters danced in the candle flicker. The figure atop the crate resembled a mummy. It was a mummy. And it would’ve been the strangest mummy I’d ever seen, even if I’d never seen one before-which, as any fool could guess, I hadn’t. And forget that that mummy embodied the remains of a whacko Swiss chemist a century and a half dead.
I leaned into my crutches and reached out to touch the corpse-it looked barely five and a half feet from soles to crown-of Henry’s creator. The wrapper encasing it was a patchwork of smooth white pieces of horsehide-beaucoups of scraps stitched together with thousands of S-shaped seams. Henry’d made the sleeping jacket from the scrubbed, rubbed, and flattened skins of discarded CVL baseballs. Some of these horsehides were smudged with infield dirt, or pocked with bat marks, or roughened like old suede-but the shroud as a whole, under Henry’s lantern, shone ivory. The lovely weirdness of it made my nape hairs tingle.
“Out of Alaska, Daniel, I trekked into Washington with my dead creator (newly retrieved from a volcanic cave miles from Oongpek) slung over my shoulders. I bore him much as Aeneas bore his aged father, Anchises, out of the burning shell of Troy.” Henry closed his eyes. “Sang that hero,
‘Come then, dear father, up onto my back.
I will bear you on my shoulders-you will be
No burden to me at all, and whatever befall us,
One and the same peril will face us both,
And there will be one and the same salvation!’ ”
Henry opened his eyes. “Of course, as I came southward through the American Northwest, a thaw set in. Limbs once as firm as stone lost their durity, tending towards a malleable and aromatic decay. I confined them in the skins of animals-a dead elk the vultures had not yet begun to pick, a bison felled by drought-and remade Frankenstein’s protective case each time I moved. During my last off-season with the Hellbenders, I made the sheath you see here. Denuding each ball and laying out its leathern wings wanted tedious labor. The needle-hooks I broke were virtually uncountable.”
Henry gave his father an admiring look. “Don’t you think he makes a handsome long pig, even though we feast on him only through our eyes?” He seemed to expect an “Amen!”
“Sure,” I said. And Henry’s stitched-up daddy definitely was a sight.
“Kneel here, Daniel.”