Twisted Tales Contest

The wind blowed day and night through that bitter October dang near two year ago, long after Pa failed fixin’ the rock-snapped wagon wheel of Grandee Holy Water Council’s eager gift, pulled by a single bag-a-bones nag we ate early last Spring. It were a church farewell for me and my kin to push off through a perilous wilderness, to another faraway post anywhere else but there where Pa were exiled and stranded thirty mile short of our forced Promised Land.

The wares for the lean-to shelter were already laid out for a five-day tent’s stay, until Pa’s lodge came to be. And Ma, a small frail-faced plough-ox of a woman in a flowered calico shawl, rejoiced from the calling. “After devoted prayer and communion with our Lord and Savior, your Pa and me’s decided to stay out here in God’s Creation through a second winter, boys.” She softened her voice a hair. “And it’ll be a harder test of faith in divine authority over our earned protection from Satan’s temptation to despair, God willin’.” She nodded at my little brother Isaac and me, both, but with an eagle-eye lock on me.

The lodge Pa built that summer first, made of hewn pine, oakum and moss, stood firm and sure, and the woodstove warmed us well enough through the coldest of times. And Ma kept us bundled up evenins’ with heavy wool wraps, and in denim darned and cut into trousers that’ll last forever, Ma always said. The gust wails were what bothered me most, miserable banshees rolling down from the mountain and swirlin’ round like hungry condors in waitin’, but it were home now, two summers passed our expected arrival in Gavlin that Fall, and we made the best of it.

I learnt quick awhiles back there was places there guarded from our touch by the threat of the rod. Ma and Pa’s cot room were one of em,’ an off-limits nook where grunts and squeals in the dark kept me up at nights, some. More than the hoot owl or them wolven cries, even.

“But it don’t sound human,” said Isaac. “Don’t sound nothin’ like Pa, neether, Ish. More like a bear, and Ma sounds crazy scared and stinging from pain.”

“Nah, Izzy.” I chuckled in the dark to make it seem like it weren’t nothin’ serious. “That’s just daddy pretendin’ to be a bear, and Ma playing along, that’s all.” Isaac didn’t say nothin’ more about it after that.

The other place were the cook’s floor, a dark sooty corner where Ma whipped up the fixins and neither one of us were allowed a gander whiles Ma flicked the powders and stirred up the pot with the ladle, let alone to steal a taste when she weren’t a lookin.’ I knowed, for sure.

“Reverend Moses Maynard, Ishmael’s fallen to temptation again.”

Pa, a labor-made mountain of man, never failed to pass judgement and dole out the punishment.

“Thank you, Sister Agnes. I’ll be there in a whiff.”

Got cracked in the head once or twice by the hardwood bowl of Pa’s Ozark Mountain pipe, and knocked silly dozens of times by the back of Pa’s hand whenever Ma shrieked away at me. A regular blue-black mark on my cheek below the eye from Pa’s silver weddin’ band were enough to grow me up some, and make me want to help keep Isaac from learnin’ the same hard way. He were a scrawny wisp of boy, not taller than a tree stump, and dumber’n a night crawler, so he needed some soft teachin’ about the family ways, only by then we hadn’t seen Pa’s knuckled southpaw a day short of two weeks. He’d been hibernatin’ in the cot room since the front-end of winter come, before the sky sprinkled the grass and frosted the evergreens with white crust.

Ma were weepin’ at the supper table that day, quiet as an early mornin’ sparrow a mile away, whiles her acorn-knuckled fingers cupped and clawed at her brow, and she hadn’t spoke a single word.

“Pa done got himself nipped by a badger on the backside,” she later said. And he didn’t look none too good for it, either, when he staggered in that last Friday dusk. We hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him for a better third of a month by then, and we worried there’d be no huntin’ gettin’ done, and meat’s a good thing for heatin’ up the body during the cold times.

“The Good Lord will mend your Pa, body and soul,” Ma said, “for the blessings of heavenly judgement will lead him through.” Ma didn’t seem so sure about it, even then.

Mend or no, the meat were right there quakin’ on the stove, tenderizin’ and whitenin’ in a nervous boil of spiced snow water. Me and Isaac could smell sweet flesh waftin’ out from underneath the rattlin’ of the lid against the lip of the pot, chatterin’ like a hungry coon in the bush. I couldn’t keep from takin’ myself a quick peek into that hot iron cooker, hopin’ for a look at the feast from the Heavens offered up by the Good Lord Himself, but alls I saw were a wrinkled, milky-white foot and a shriveled hand with a stiff curled finger donnin’ Pa’s silver weddin’ band.