Whitey's girlish scream sounded comical and for a second I thought it was a gag, but then his eyes fluttered back and the boot slipped from his fingers as he collapsed. I tried to move but I couldn't, transfixed by the boot resting on its side on the bloodstained grass.
"What is it?" Benny asked, but my mouth wouldn't work. I looked around and in a moment of stark clarity, I couldn't believe we hadn't seen the clues. They were faint but patently obvious now. The ruffled swaths of grass. The rust-colored ring. The scratch marks in the dirt where something had been dragged into the forest. My shocked brain wasn't fully registering what I was seeing, but I suppose I knew even then that what had been dragged was Whitey's dad.
My memory gets foggy after that. I remember some women shouting, hands grabbing me by the shoulders, and Benny's mom's face in mine asking me what happened. I just pointed to the boot in the grass. Then I remember being dragged back towards town while two other women struggled to lift Whitey to his feet.
Then my mother was there, and she had me under the arm. She led me and Whitey, now conscious and stumbling under his own power, back to our house. She had just seated us at the kitchen table when the porch door flew open and my father barged through. He grabbed his padded flannel and the rusty spade we used to feed the stove. My mother asked what was happening. "We're going after it. Stay put," he said and disappeared out the door.
My mother paced the kitchen. None of us spoke. She put her arms around our heads and drew us to her while she murmured something about things being okay. "Whitey, your ears are freezing," she said and placed a hand on his face. "Your cheeks, too. Let me grab a blanket." She disappeared into the bedroom.
I looked at Whitey who was staring past me. He leaned so far to one side I thought he might fall off his chair. "Whitey," I said in a small voice. "You okay?"
He focused on me as if just realizing I was there, then shook his head. We sat in silence for another moment and I heard my mother quietly curse as she rummaged through the linen closet for the heavy blankets we only broke out in the deepest winter.
Whitey's eyes met mine again, then he bolted from his chair like a frightened deer. The porch door hadn't even had a chance to slam shut before I was after him, my mom's shouts drowned out by the wind in my ears.
"Whitey, stop!" I yelled as I ran but I knew he wouldn't, and honestly, I didn't want him to. Chasing him would be my excuse to follow the hunting party, and I knew it.
Whitey raced past his house and the field and I was on his heels as he headed into the trees. As we reached the far end of the forest where it opened to the pond, we heard men shouting and the crash of a shotgun.
Whitey stopped dead at the frozen edge of Pochman's Pond and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. I skidded to a halt behind him and together, silent except for our panting, we watched the events unfold.
A dozen men stood in a wide semicircle twenty yards away out on the ice. All of them wielded some type of make-shift weapons-hatchets, hoes, Benny Carper's dad and two others carried shotguns-and they surrounded a broad, four-legged creature. At first, I thought it was a black alligator, but I knew alligators weren't that big and didn't have long snaking tails with a spade at the end. Plate-sized ridges ran the length of the creature's back.
The winter air exploded with a confusion of sounds: the men shouting over each other, the creature's low growl like an engine that won't catch, and the deep groan of the ice under their weight. The tips of the men's weapons glanced off the thing's hide with metallic clanks. Its tail whipped high and low to fend off the attackers; it swept out the feet of one man. The creature scrabbled to attack him but thankfully its claws couldn't find purchase on the ice. Mr. Carper fired the shotgun into the creature's side and it jerked its head around, seemingly more at the sound than in reaction to being shot. And that's when we saw its face.
The face looked hauntingly human despite its oblong shape, the mouth crowded with sharp teeth, and its black leathery skin. The eyes burned like embers and there was an unmistakable intelligence behind them, perhaps even cunning. Worse, the face was grinning in pure malice. The creature's eyes locked on us across the pond and I swear it licked its lips. My stomach fell into my shoes and I felt sick.
Mr. Carper shot the thing point-blank in the face and it just flapped its head, like a dog getting water out of its ears. It whipped its tail over its head at Mr. Carper, who fell onto the ice. The spade came down and crushed the ice between his legs instead of his skull.
We heard a rumble we thought was thunder, then dark cracks spider webbed across the ice. The men bolted for shore but they couldn't get more than a few yards before the whole ice sheet collapsed with a sharp crack and groan, dumping them all into the water in a cacophony of shouts and splashes. The thing sprayed a plume of water like a whale then sank out of sight.
"C'mon Whitey," I screamed, barely noticing he hadn't followed. I found a downed branch and extended it into the open water where the men half-swam, half-pulled themselves towards shore. The ice broke beneath me and I plunged into the pond up to my waist. Air burst from my lungs with the shocking cold, but I managed to hang on as the men used the branch to pull themselves to shore.
"W-what are you d-doing here?" my father stuttered as he stood shivering, his beard already frozen. He turned to look at the hole in the ice. No bubbles broke the surface, no signs of movement in the water. "C'mon," he said and grabbed my collar with a wet and freezing hand.
We stumbled back, each man's family collecting him at the edge of the forest. "Come with us, Whitey," dad said in a tone that brooked no argument. Whitey paused to look at the shack where he lived, then to the long grass where he'd found his father's foot. My dad caught Whitey under his arm and held him close.
Even though my dad was a block of ice by then, Whitey didn't pull away.
Us kids were under complete lock-down for the next week. No school, no leaving the house, no nothing. My dad said they never found any sign of Mr. McFarland, but parents sometimes forget kids are neither stupid nor blind. They couldn't hide the black tendrils of smoke rising from the field bordering the forest and we all knew it wasn't dried leaves they were burning.
Oswego hunkered down for the winter like northern towns do and the months passed, cold and harsh. Whitey spent time with a number of different families, ours the most, until one clear, freezing February morning the county sheriff arrived with a wiry man who said he was Whitey's uncle, come to bring Whitey to live with him in Wausau. You could tell Whitey didn't want to go but those were lean times for everyone and getting leaner, and no one wanted to interfere with what boiled down to a family matter.
My dad wore a pinched expression but, in the end, said nothing. He had his hands on my shoulders as I waved to Whitey who looked back out the police car's rear windshield. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last time he saw the world from that perspective.
The mill closed that March and we moved to Marquette, Michigan before the thaw. Just a few years later, my dad would be called up for World War Two and killed in combat. I never got the chance to ask him about that afternoon at Pochman's Pond.
As a teenager, I wrote Whitey McFarland a letter to see what he remembered from that November afternoon. Six months later, Whitey's uncle responded with a curt note informing me Whitey had been sent to the juvenile home in Rhinelander and wasn't accepting letters. The note was accompanied by my envelope, still unopened.