But I’ve quit talking, and done gone to preaching. I was saying how we lived. And I was saying about all the game. Then too, there was the Goat Man. Half goat, half man, he liked to hang around what was called the swinging bridge. I had never seen him, but sometimes at night, out possum hunting, I thought maybe I heard him, howling and whimpering down there near the cable bridge that hung bold over the river, swinging with the wind in the moonlight, the beams playing on the metal cables like fairies on ropes.
He was supposed to steal livestock and children, and though I didn’t know of any children that had been eaten, some farmers claimed the Goat Man had taken their livestock, and there were some kids I knew claimed they had cousins taken off by the Goat Man, never to be seen again.
It was said he didn’t go as far as the main road because Baptist preachers traveled regular there on foot and by car, making the preaching rounds, and therefore making the road holy. It was said he didn’t get out of the woods that made up the Sabine bottoms. High land was something he couldn’t tolerate. He needed the damp, thick leaf mush beneath his feet, which were hooves.
Dad said there wasn’t any Goat Man. That it was a wives’ tale heard throughout the South. He said what I heard out there was water and animal sounds, but I tell you, those sounds made your skin crawl, and they did remind you of a hurt goat. Mr. Cecil Chambers, who worked with my daddy at the barbershop, said it was probably a panther. They showed up now and then in the deep woods, and they could scream like a woman, he said.
Me and my sister Tom — well, Thomasina, but we all called her Tom ‘cause it was easier to remember and because she was a tomboy — roamed those woods from daylight to dark. We had a dog named Toby that was part hound, part terrier, and part what we called feist.
Toby was a hunting sonofagun. But the summer of nineteen thirty-one, while rearing up against a tree so he could bark at a squirrel he’d tracked, the oak he was under lost a rotten limb and it fell on him, striking his back so hard he couldn’t move his back legs or tail. I carried him home in my arms. Him whimpering, me and Tom crying.
Daddy was out in the field plowing with Sally, working the plow around a stump that was still in the field. Now and then he chopped at its base with an ax and had set fire to it, but it was stubborn and remained.
Daddy stopped his plowing when he saw us, took the looped lines off his shoulders and dropped them, left Sally Redback standing in the field hitched up to the plow. He walked part of the way across the field to meet us, and we carried Toby out to him and put him on the soft plowed ground and Daddy looked him over. Daddy moved Toby’s paws around, tried to straighten Toby’s back, but Toby would whine hard when he did that.
After a while, as if considering all possibilities, he told me and Tom to get the gun and take poor Toby out in the woods and put him out of his misery.
“It ain’t what I want you to do,” Daddy said. “But it’s the thing has to be done.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
These days that might sound rough, but back then we didn’t have many vets, and no money to take a dog to one if wanted to. And all a vet would have done was do what we were gonna do.
Another thing different was you learned about things like dying when you were quite young. It couldn’t be helped. You raised and killed chickens and hogs, hunted and fished, so you were constantly up against it. That being the case, I think we respected life more than some do now, and useless suffering was not to be tolerated.
And in the case of something like Toby, you were often expected to do the deed yourself, not pass on the responsibility. It was unspoken, but it was pretty well understood that Toby was our dog, and therefore, our responsibility. Things like that were considered part of the learning process.
We cried awhile, then got a wheelbarrow and put Toby in it. I already had my twenty-two for squirrels, but for this I went in the house and swapped it for the single-shot sixteen-gauge shotgun, so there wouldn’t be any suffering. The thought of shooting Toby in the back of the head like that, blasting his skull all over creation, was not something I looked forward to.
Our responsibility or not, I was thirteen and Tom was only nine. I told her she could stay at the house, but she wouldn’t. She said she’d come on with me. She knew I needed someone to help me be strong.
Tom got the shovel to bury Toby, put it over her shoulder, and we wheeled old Toby along, him whining and such, but after a bit he quit making noise. He just lay there in the wheelbarrow while we pushed him down the trail, his back slightly twisted, his head raised, sniffing the air.
In short time he started sniffing deeper, and we could tell he had a squirrel’s scent. Toby always had a way of turning to look at you when he had a squirrel, then he’d point his head in the direction he wanted to go and take off running and yapping in that deep voice of his. Daddy said that was his way of letting us know the direction of the scent before he got out of sight. Well, he had his head turned like that, and I knew what it was I was supposed to do, but I decided to prolong it by giving Toby his head.
We pushed in the direction he wanted to go, and pretty soon we were racing over a narrow trail littered with pine needles, and Toby was barking like crazy. Eventually we run the wheelbarrow up against a hickory tree.
Up there in the high branches two big fat squirrels played around as if taunting us. I shot both of them and tossed them into the wheelbarrow with Toby, and darned if he didn’t signal and start barking again.
It was rough pushing that wheelbarrow over all that bumpy wood debris and leaf and needle-littered ground, but we did it, forgetting all about what we were supposed to do for Toby.
By the time Toby quit hitting on squirrel scent, it was near nightfall and we were down deep in the woods with six squirrels — a bumper crop — and we were tuckered out.
There Toby was, a dadburn cripple, and I’d never seen him work the trees better. It was like Toby knew what was coming and was trying to prolong things by treeing squirrels.
We sat down under a big, old sweetgum and left Toby in the wheelbarrow with the squirrels. The sun was falling through the trees like a big, fat plum coming to pieces. Shadows were rising up like dark men all around us. We didn’t have a hunting lamp. There was just the moon and it wasn’t up good yet.
“Harry,” Tom said. “What about Toby?”
I had been considering on that.
“He don’t seem to be in pain none,” I said. “And he treed six dadburn squirrels.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, “but his back’s still broke.”
“Reckon so,” I said.
“Maybe we could hide him down here, come every day, feed and water him.”
“I don’t think so. He’d be at the mercy of anything came along. Darn chiggers and ticks would eat him alive.” I’d thought of that because I could feel bites all over me and knew tonight I’d be spending some time with a lamp, some tweezers and such myself, getting them off all kinds of places, bathing myself later in kerosene, then rinsing. During the summer me and Tom ended up doing that darn near every evening.
“It’s gettin’ dark,” Tom said.
“I know.”
“I don’t think Toby’s in all that much pain now.”
“He does seem better,” I said. “But that don’t mean his back ain’t broke.”
“Daddy wanted us to shoot him to put him out of his misery. He don’t look so miserable to me. It ain’t right to shoot him he ain’t miserable, is it?”
I looked at Toby. There was mostly just a lump to see, lying there in the wheelbarrow covered by the dark. While I was looking he raised his head and his tail beat on the wooden bottom of the wheelbarrow a couple of times.
“Don’t reckon I can do it,” I said. “I think we ought to take him back to Daddy, show how he’s improved. He may have a broke back, but he ain’t in pain like he was. He can move his head and even his tail now, so his whole body ain’t dead. He don’t need killin’.”
“Daddy may not see it that way, thou
gh.”
“Reckon not, but I can’t just shoot him without trying to give him a chance. Heck, he treed six dadburn squirrels. Mama’ll be glad to see them squirrels. We’ll just take him back.”
We got up to go. It was then that it settled on us. We were lost. We had been so busy chasing those squirrels, following Toby’s lead, we had gotten down deep in the woods and we didn’t recognize anything. We weren’t scared, of course, least not right away. We roamed these woods all the time, but it had grown dark, and this immediate place wasn’t familiar.
The moon was up some more, and I used that for my bearings. “We need to go that way,” I said. “Eventually that’ll lead back to the house or the road.”
We set out, pushing the wheelbarrow, stumbling over roots and ruts and fallen limbs, banging up against trees with the wheelbarrow and ourselves. Near us we could hear wildlife moving around, and I thought about what Mr. Chambers had said about panthers, and I thought about wild hogs and wondered if we might come up on one rootin’ for acorns, and I remembered that Mr. Chambers had also said this was a bad year for the hydrophobia, and lots of animals were coming down with it, and the thought of all that made me nervous enough to feel around in my pocket for shotgun shells. I had three left.
As we went along, there was more movement around us, and after a while I began to think whatever it was was keeping stride with us. When we slowed, it slowed. We sped up, it sped up. And not the way an animal will do, or even the way a coach whip snake will sometimes follow and run you. This was something bigger than a snake. It was stalking us, like a panther. Or a man.
Toby was growling as we went along, his head lifted, the hair on the back of his neck raised.
I looked over at Tom, and the moon was just able to split through the trees and show me her face and how scared she was. I knew she had come to the same conclusion I had.
I wanted to say something, shout out at whatever it was in the bushes, but I was afraid that might be like some kind of bugle call that set it off, causing it to come down on us.
I had broken open the shotgun earlier for safety’s sake, laid it in the wheelbarrow and was pushing it, Toby, the shovel, and the squirrels along. Now I stopped, got the shotgun out, made sure a shell was in it, snapped it shut and put my thumb on the hammer.
Toby had really started to make noise, had gone from growling to barking.
I looked at Tom, and she took hold of the wheelbarrow and started pushing.
I could tell she was having trouble with it, working it over the soft ground, but I didn’t have any choice but to hold on to the gun, and we couldn’t leave Toby behind, not after what he’d been through.
Whatever was in those bushes paced us for a while, then went silent. We picked up speed, and didn’t hear it anymore. And we didn’t feel its presence no more neither. Earlier it was like we was walking along with the Devil beside us.
I finally got brave enough to break open the shotgun and lay it in the wheelbarrow and take over the pushing again.
“What was that?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It sounded big.”
“Yeah.”
“The Goat Man?”
“Daddy says there ain’t any Goat Man.”
“Yeah, but he’s sometimes wrong, ain’t he?”
“Hardly ever,” I said.
We went along some more, and found a narrow place in the river, and crossed, struggling with the wheelbarrow. We shouldn’t have crossed, but there was a spot, and someone or something following us had spooked me, and I had just wanted to put some space between us and it.
We walked along a longer time, and eventually came up against a wad of brambles that twisted in amongst the trees and scrubs and vines and made a wall of thorns. It was a wall of wild rosebushes. Some of the vines on them were thick as well ropes, the thorns like nails, and the flowers smelled strong and sweet in the night wind, almost sweet as sorghum syrup cooking.
The bramble patch ran some distance in either direction, and encased us on all sides. We had wandered into a maze of thorns too wide and thick to go around, and too high and sharp to climb over, and besides they had wound together with low hanging limbs, and it was like a ceiling above. I thought of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch, but unlike Brer Rabbit, I had not been born and raised in a briar patch, and unlike Brer Rabbit, it wasn’t what I wanted.
I dug in my pocket and got a match I had left over from when me and Tom tried to smoke some corn silk cigarettes and grapevines, and I struck the match with my thumb and waved it around, saw there was a wide space in the brambles, and it didn’t take a lot of know-how to see the path had been cut in them. I bent down and poked the match forward, and I could see the brambles were a kind of tunnel, about six feet high and six feet wide. I couldn’t tell how far it went, but it was a goodly distance.
I shook the match out before it burned my hand, said to Tom, “We can go back, or we can take this tunnel.”
Tom looked to our left, saw the brambles were thick and solid, and in front of us was a wall of them too. “I don’t want to go back because of that thing, whatever it is. And I don’t want to go down that tunnel neither. We’d be like rats in a pipe. Maybe whatever it is knew it’d get us boxed in like this, and it’s just waitin’ at the other end of that bramble trap for us, like that thing Daddy read to us about. The thing that was part man, part cow.”
“Part bull, part man,” I said. “The Minotaur.”
“Yeah. A minutetar. It could be waitin’ on us, Harry.”
I had, of course, thought about that. “I think we ought to take the tunnel. It can’t come from any side on us that way. It has to come from front or rear.”
“Can’t there be other tunnels in there?”
I hadn’t thought of that. There could be openings cut like this anywhere.
“I got the gun,” I said. “If you can push the wheelbarrow, Toby can sort of watch for us, let us know something’s coming. Anything jumps out at us, I’ll cut it in two.”
“I don’t like any of them choices.”
I picked up the gun and made it ready. Tom took hold of the wheelbarrow handles. I went on in and Tom came after me.
The smell of roses was thick and overwhelming. It made me sick. The thorns sometimes stuck out on vines you couldn’t see in the dark. They snagged my old shirt and cut my arms and face. I could hear Tom back there behind me, cussing softly under her breath as she got scratched. I was glad for the fact that Toby was silent. It gave me some kind of relief.
The bramble tunnel went on for a good ways, then I heard a rushing sound, and the bramble tunnel widened and we came out on the bank of the roaring Sabine. There were splits in the trees above, and the moonlight came through strong and fell over everything and looked yellow and thick like milk that had turned sour. Whatever had been pacing us seemed to be good and gone.
I studied the moon a moment, then thought about the river. I said, “We’ve gone some out of the way. But I can see how we ought to go. We can follow the river a ways, which ain’t the right direction, but I think it’s not far from here to the swinging bridge. We cross that, we can hit the main road, walk to the house.”
“The swinging bridge?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Think Momma and Daddy are worried?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Reckon they are. I hope they’ll be glad to see these squirrels as I think they’ll be.”
“What about Toby?”
“We just got to wait and see.”
The bank sloped down, and near the water there was a little trail ran along the edge of the river.
“Reckon we got to carry Toby down, then bring the wheelbarrow. You can push it forward, and I’ll get in front and boost it down.”
I carefully picked up Toby, who whimpered softly, and Tom, getting ahead of herself, pushed the wheelbarrow. It, the squirrels, shotgun, and shovel went over the edge, tipped over near the creek.
“Damn it, Tom,”
I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It got away from me. I’m gonna tell Mama you cussed.”
“You do and I’ll whup the tar out of you. ‘Sides, I heard you cussin’ plenty.”
I gave Toby to Tom to hold till I could go down a ways, get a footing and have him passed to me.
I slid down the bank, came up against a huge oak growing near the water. The brambles had grown down the bank and were wrapped around the tree. I went around it, put my hand out to steady myself, and jerked it back quick. What I had touched hadn’t been tree trunk, or even a thorn, but something soft.
When I looked I saw a gray mess hung up in brambles, and the moonlight was shining across the water and falling on a face, or what had been a face, but was more like a jack-o’-lantern now, swollen and round with dark sockets for eyes. There was a wad of hair on the head like a chunk of dark lamb’s wool, and the body was swollen up and twisted and without clothes. A woman.
I had seen a couple of cards with naked women on them that Jake Sterning had shown me. He was always coming up with stuff like that ‘cause his daddy was a traveling salesman and sold not only Garrett Snuff but what was called novelties on the side.
But this wasn’t like that. Those pictures had stirred me in a way I didn’t understand but found somehow sweet and satisfying. This was stirring me in a way I understood immediately. Horror. Fear.
Her breasts were split like rotted melons cracked in the sun. The brambles were tightly wrapped around her swollen flesh and her skin was gray as cigar ash. Her feet weren’t touching the ground. She was held against the tree by the brambles. In the moonlight she looked like a fat witch bound to a massive post by barbed wire, ready to be burned.
“Jesus,” I said.
“You’re cussin’ again,” Tom said.
I climbed up the bank a bit, took Toby from Tom, laid him on the soft ground by the riverbank, stared some more at the body. Tom slid down, saw what I saw.
“Is it the Goat Man?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s a dead woman.”