The whole way back through the woods and up into the hills I thought, You’re going to be hard to track. I mean, the snow was three feet deep. Even the town cops weren’t going to be able to screw this up.
I had to rest on the logging road and again along the creek but finally got back to the tent. I pulled out my sleeping bag and threw my rifle and the Eagle and all the rounds I had on top of it. I could hear guys on the logging road already, the sound carried that far.
People talk about, Oh, this kid’s sick and that kid’s bipolar and this and that and I always say, Well, does he piss all over himself? And the answer’s always no. That’s because he chooses to go to the bathroom. Because he knows better. He controls himself. People control what they do. Most people don’t know what it’s like to look down the road and see there’s nothing there. You try to tell somebody that but they just look at you. I don’t know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but they do.
Guys are breaking through the brush down below to my left and right, which tells me they’re not only coming but they’re coming in numbers. I can start to see them even through the trees.
I haven’t cleaned the rifle. Mr. Logistical Planning. Even when I try to make lists for myself I can’t follow the lists.
At least I tried, though. I tried harder than most people think. But what I did was, in life you’re supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn’t.
I can hear even more sirens, off in the distance. The cops down below have stopped short of the hairpin. They’re keeping their voices low. They might be starting to catch on. I dig deeper into the snow, wipe my eyes, and put my face back to the scope, sighting back and forth. I don’t even know if I’ll open fire. I never know what I’m going to do next. They’ll probably just come up here and pull me to my feet and push me all the way down the hill. Another scene that always got me in that movie was when the kids were waiting for Spencer Tracy to bring something home for Christmas. Of course he didn’t have any money so all he can pull out and show them is a package of cornmeal mush. And this one little kid just stares at him. And then the kid finally says, like he wants to kill somebody, “What else you got in that bag?” And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn’t have anything else, the kid goes, “I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.”
Classical Scenes of Farewell
As a child who could barely hold myself upright without tottering, I was steeped in my mother’s belief that our tumbledown farm was serried about and tumid with devils. In my mind’s eye they stood in a ring and clasped one another’s taloned hands and leered in at me while I slept. My fourth summer was the year that Sophie, the stonemason’s daughter, was seized with a helplessness in her limbs until her father conceded her diabolic possession and took her to the Church of Our Savior, where the priest found five devils residing inside her, whose names were Wolf, Lark, Dog, Jolly, and Griffin. The devils confessed they’d conjured hailstones through her by beating the surface of well water with her hands and that they’d additionally concocted the tinctures and ointments she’d used to blight her neighbors’ apple trees. They said they’d requested, and been denied, a special grease that would have turned her into a werewolf. When asked of whom they’d made their appeal, they said only “The Master.”
When I was twelve, the man from whom we rented our pastureland — a lifelong bachelor whose endless mutterings were his way of negotiating his solitude, and whose imagination extended only to business; the sort who milled his rye without sifting it, so it might last longer — was found in the middle of our lane one winter morning, naked, his feet and lips blue. He said a demon had appeared to him on a pile of wood under his mulberry tree, in the likeness of a corpulent black cat belonging to the house next door. With its front paws the cat had gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him down, and then had fastened its muzzle on the man’s mouth and would not be denied. The man claimed that for nearly an hour he’d remained that way, swooning, speechless, and open to the cat’s searching jaws, unable to make even the Sign of the Cross and powerless to diminish the urgings of its tongue. He had no memory of where his clothes had gone, or how he’d ended up in the lane.
My mother had long since taken to enfolding a crucifix in the bedcovers when she turned down my poor linens for the night. My chamber was in our barn’s loft, attached to the back of the house, and from this, the highest point on the hill, I could view the Delorts’ farm to the west. Their daughter, Katherine, was the continual object of my confused nightly agitations as well as the focus of my joy.
And then one sunstruck August afternoon when we were passing through the village, my mother and I investigated a disturbance on the church steps, a crowd squabbling over who had sufficient schooling to interpret the document posted on the doors before them. A sacristan emerged to provide assistance and to read aloud what he declared to be a juridical confession lately obtained through the harrowing of some of our neighbors. Said neighbors had been identified to the ecclesiastical investigators by other neighbors.
The confession stated that Marie Delort along with her daughter had for three years been giving herself over to a pair of demons, from Friday midnight through to Saturday dawn, and had assisted at a series of conjurings in the company of others. According to the deacon Katherine had testified that her association began when one evening, washing her family’s linen outside of town, she saw before her a man with a curved back and pointed ears whose eyes were like emeralds in an ash pit. He called for her to give herself to him and she answered that she would. He then gentled her cheeks with both hands, his palms softly furred, and flooded her mouth with his breath, and from then on each Friday night she was carried to a gathering from her own bed, simply by willing herself free. At the gathering place she shed her night-dress and was approached, every time having been made to wait for a period alone in the darkness, by the same man leading a gigantic he-goat, which knelt before her, and to both apparitions she abandoned herself.
The sacristan then read her mother’s corroboration of this account, which further detailed the strange trance during which she was also transported from her bed, and their mutual adoration of the goat and the man, and their not only bathing in but also taking in all sorts of offensive liquids, with satiation being the object of their every clutch and gesture.
I was born Etienne Corillaut of Pouzauges, in the diocese of Luçon, and am known as Poitou, and I am now of twenty-two years of age, and here acknowledge to the best of my abilities the reasons for those acts that have made this name along with my master’s the object of hatred throughout the region. I here also address the questions that my kinsmen hear from every stable hand, every innkeeper, every farmer in his field: What transpired in his mind that allowed a young person to have acted in such a manner and then to have lived apparently untroubled among his fellows? What enabled him to have stepped forward into the sunlight and Nature’s bounty for six years of such iniquity?
My master is Gilles de Rais, whom I have served as page and then bodyservant for these last six years; and for the past three, since he first offered access to the full chamber of his secrets, he and I with five others I will name have been responsible for the entrapment and mutilation and dismemberment and death of one hundred and forty-two children between the ages of five and fifteen. Coming in the Year of Our Lord 1440, this admission dates the full vigor of my offenses back to the winter of 1437. But even before he chose to sweep back the curtain on the full extent of his ferocity, I knew myself to be already standing outside the ring of salvation, having failed so signally as a neighbor and a brother and a Christian and a son.