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Chapter 12 (Excerpt)

Chapter 12

        The going had been the hardest part.

When I returned, I found Ephraim, Moses, and Manasseh waiting for me outside of Mr. Huber’s barn. “You will not believe what we have got,” they said. “Why are you dressed in this manner?”

        I instinctively reached for my wide-brimmed hat only to discover that I wasn’t wearing one. I was dressed in the olive drab pants and shirt of the sanatorium, which had formed their uniform, reducing all of us inmates to something on the forest floor that could only be seen in lamplight. I leapt down from the horse, the mare that Hezekiah and I had requisitioned from the innkeeper, and I led the beast to a tree in order to tie it.

        “You have been away a long while,” said Ephraim. “Come and see what we have got.”

        As I followed the boys past Mrs. Zwinger’s house, which was still shut up, I asked Ephraim: “What happened to Beriah?”

        “Eaten,” said Moses, slowing his pace so that I might catch up with him. “He got eaten right after he was baptized. Seems the Hundings were waiting for him to do it. They are awfully cruel. We found him all ripped to pieces when we ventured to his house the next morning, to look for him. He was supposed to help us repair the back door of Mrs. Nagel’s farmstead. We never did get to it.”

        The wind picked up and Moses had to clutch the top of his head so his hat wouldn’t fly off. Soon the other boys followed suit.

        “We did not think you’d ever come back,” Moses said.

        “I thought I had seen the last of you,” said Ephraim.

        “I didn’t think there was anything left for me here,” I said.

        “What could you mean?” Moses asked. “This is your home. What other home do you have?”

        A girl rode past in horse and buggy, stopping to say to me: “The war is still on.”

        “Just up here,” said Manasseh, looking at the girl only briefly and pointing to a place that was familiar.

        “Here?” I asked. “This is Aunt Helga’s shed.”

        “Yes,” laughed Ephraim. He was still rakish in black trousers that were too tight, too low and showed the line of his drawers, and with the top three buttons of his shirt unbuttoned, displaying just enough of his chest hair to, I imagined, necessitate a meeting of the town elders at the Meeting Hall.

        “We know this is Aunt Helga’s shed,” Ephraim finished. “We have been here a hundred times. A thousand.”

        The shed was really a red-painted barn, only we didn’t call it a barn as Aunt Helga did not have any farm animals or farm equipment. She did not have anything that one might associate with either a farmyard or a barn. As I remembered it, she had some old carriage wheels, some empty barrels, and a big iron cage for the transporting of, I assumed, farm animals, sheep and such, though I had never seen anyone transport animals this way to Burg, nor had I seen any reason why they would.  We all kept our own beasts.

        Moses pushed open the door of the shed; he was tall enough to scratch the top of the doorway with his head and he looked behind to see if we noticed when he bumped it.

        Manasseh was carrying a torch, and this filled me with a sense of foreboding; more than that, of terror, as I felt immediately that the boys had done something that they shouldn’t.

        It was not long before I saw it. “We have caught one,” said Moses proudly. “It is a Hunding.”

        Manasseh past his torch over the cage, revealing a big, naked, hairy creature on all fours that was, without fear, regarding us. The creature had an august visage, an aspect which his well-cared for red fur seemed only to enhance. I knew immediately that this was Wulf, and I instinctively began to back away from the cage.

        “What have you done?” I asked.

        “What do you mean?” asked Ephraim, smiling. “Come closer.”

        I hesitated, but I was encouraged by the tacit agreement of the other boys. We men all had it in us to follow the others, and, though I may liken myself as something cut on a different pattern than they, I often found, after the fact, that I, too, followed. Unwittingly, as it were.

        “You do not know what you have,” I remarked.

        “Of course, we do,” said Ephraim. “It is clearly a Hunding. Look at how big it is. At its fur. It certainly is not human.” Ephraim slid a hand into the iron cage and my heart raced. There was part of me that wanted him to lose that hand, for deluding himself that he had captured the greatest of the Hundings, but then I remembered Ephraim the child, who wasn’t as unlikable as this Ephraim, and I reached forward with my own hand to grab his away from the cage.

        “No,” said Ephraim. “It is all right. We have been doing this all morning. It does not mind.”

        “It is a he,” I explained. “Don’t you see that, that thing between his legs?”

        “Leave it to you, Zebulun, to focus your attention in that area.”

        That was Manasseh.

        “I am only stating the obvious. Why did you—How did you capture him?”

        “It,” Ephraim corrected. “We did not. Well, not really. We heard that a Hunding matching this description had been stalking the area so the town elders decided to set traps for it. We did not expect Helga to join in, as she had finally been shunned and had been given three days to leave town. In spite of that, we heard some movement here a day or so after the shunning, and when we followed the sounds we found this. It. A Hunding.”

        “You mean Helga helped to capture him?”

        “How can we know, Zebulun?” said Ephraim. “When we came into the shed, we found the Hunding already in it.”

        “Do you know who he is?”

        “What do you mean: who he is?” asked Moses, scratching his pimply face with some pinkish-red fingers.

        “They have names.”

        “Well, yes,” said Ephraim. “Obviously, they have names. We all know that. Hunding,” and Ephraim leaned his face boldly toward the bars of the cage. “Do you have a name? What is it?”

        But the Hunding only growled, much more timidly than I had seen in others of his genus. It gave this whole episode the air of a farce. “He is only waiting for you to do something foolish,” but just as I said it, Wulf’s eyes met my own. What past between us was a sort of understanding, a kinship that I had never experienced in this town, where I had always been somehow different from the other boys.

        Looking away from the twinkle in Wulf’s eye, I turned to Ephraim. “What did the elders say when you told them about Wul- this Hunding?”

        “We have not told them. Why should we?”

        “It seems to me that not telling them would mean immediate shunning,” I remarked.

        “What if it plans to have us all gathered here so that it might eat us, all at once? Probably better to keep it a secret.”

        Moses hitched up his trousers. “How could this creature eat everyone in town?” he asked. “Besides, look how timid it is. It has not even tried to escape. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

        When I awoke, I found that I lie upon the sofa in Aunt Helga’s house. I could smell the scent of the wash she used to bathe her red hair, though she was long gone. It was the cold that had awakened me and, as soon as I had gotten up, I heard a knock at the door. The man, not waiting for me to answer, turned the wooden knob and walked in. The door still had that wooden rattle, like Pinocchio shaking his foot. It had always rattled like that, despite the many attempts Helga had made at it, even fashioning a new door and pegging it to the metal hinges. This second door rattled louder than the first.

The man had a look around and then he took a seat in the rocking chair, by the fireplace. “You should be better about answering your door.”

        “It isn’t really mine.”

        “Come, join me by the fire. I will light it.”

        After Mr. Speer had sparked the logs, he retook his seat. He did not look at me when he said: “Many days you have been away.”

        He did glance at me during the minute or so it took me to answer, but I only answered him with a nod. I wondered if my troubles had aged me.

        “You must go and see the elders. You know that.”

        “I do.”

        “Your aunt has been shunned. It seems that you shall follow.”

I glanced at him. I hadn’t been expecting that.

“You are surprised, Zebulun?”

“I have not been called to explain myself. No one wonders why I have been away? Where I have been?”

“There are many stories,” he said. “Forgive me. Ours is a small town. There is little that I can do. In fact, I can do nothing.”

        “It isn’t true,” I said, standing up. “There is much that that you can do. You could save me if you wanted.”

        “Save you from what? Only you can save yourself.”

        I was angry, but I did not have the words to speak it. I thought to tell Mr. Speer that he could not understand what I had passed through, a forest without end; that it was all too simple for him to serve as both judge and jury in a trial where his own perceptions were the evidence. We resided in a forest where all the trees were alike and an evergreen with a branch of purple nettles must certainly go against the common weal. What words could the tree form in its own defense? It did not speak the same language as the others.

        “I see you do not disagree,” said Mr. Speer. He rose, too, walking over to the window.  The panes were covered in a spiny frost. “When one grows to be a man, one must leave all boyish pride behind. It is a manner of childishness, this pride, ant it will impede you from becoming a virtuous member of the community.”

        “Virtue?” I asked. “And what is virtue?”

        Mr. Speer looked at me as one looks at something so horrible and deformed that human instinct compelled one to slay it. His eyes were wide and his face was fixed in a wild look. Even Mr. Speer’s stiff grey-black hair seemed as it had been wind-blown. “Where is your Bible?” he exclaimed. “Where is it?”

        “It is here,” I said, reaching for a small tome of the Psalms that Helga had always kept on a table in a corner of the “general room,” as she liked to call this place.

        “No,” said Speer. “We must gird you in armor stronger than this.” He turned to leave the house, even reaching and opening the door, but he looked back at me, as if he suddenly felt a twinge of sympathy, even though I was a beast, or had become one. “Of course, I do not wish to shun you. No one wishes it. How could we? We have seen you grow into manhood and we cannot reverse the clock to change what you have become. Virtue! You question what it means to have virtue? Why, every man that is a man should understand what virtue is. How came it to pass that you became this boy who understands nothing? My heart bleeds for you, Zebulun. You are as the resident of Sodom who never thinks that his ways are ill, he only endeavors and waits for his own destruction, but of course you would not understand what I mean. Naturally, the only thing we can do is to shun you. I shall not wait for you to meet with the elders. I give you three days to leave the town. You may take nothing with you. You have my sympathy, though I am not certain you deserve it.”

        They were sincere words from a man that had never felt anything. I was too damned to be saddened by them, or enraged. I felt as the condemned man, waiting for the day when my head will be called to be struck from my body, not knowing which day that will be. What could I do but run to Wulf?

        I found him crouching in a corner of his cage. He regarded with me intense interest, seemingly from the very moment that I opened the door to the shed.

        “This world is not for you,” he said. All of the red fur on his back seemed to stand on end, and the smile he gave me was so sinister that I stopped where I was. But my curiosity, and perhaps another sentiment, overwhelmed my momentary revulsion.

        “What game are you playing at?” I asked, glancing at Wulf through a corner of my eye.

        “Candy Land,” Wulf replied, and he laughed a guffaw so long that it shook the walls of the shed.

        I wanted to laugh, too, that was how compelling all of Wulf’s mannerisms were, but then I imagined how Mr. Speer and the other elders would regard it.

        “Is not the world filled with candy?” Wulf asked.

        “Is it?” I wondered.

        “Yes. You know, one day, things shall not bother you as much. All this worrying over tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, you will not care. All one shall think about is when and how one will feed.”

        “It sounds as if you describe yourself.”

        “Perhaps, but I am not very different from you.”

        “Oh, we are worlds apart.”

        “You think so?” Wulf asked, but he still grinned. “Yes, worlds apart. Like Vermont and New Hampshire.”

        “What are you talking about? I have never heard of those townships.”

        Wulf, leaving his corner, approached the bars of the cage. The energy emitted from his body, his taut skin barely perceptible beneath the fur, and the fur itself, was enough to both draw me nearer and send me scurrying away, both sentiments at once.

        “Do I disgust you?”

        “No,” I said.

        “No? So you have become as Eadburh. You want me to eat you?”

        “No, not that. I am not as foolish as Eadburh. I have been close enough to death to understand that we may imagine that we want it, but once it comes we feel terror. I am not stupid like her.”

        “Oh, so you are an expert on the nuances of life?”

        “No,” I said, taking a seat on the floor of the shed, close to the cage. “What did you mean when you said that we were the same?”

        “I did not say that we were the same. I said that we were not altogether different.  Besides, you would not understand,” and Wulf stood up and sort of crawled back to his corner.

        “No, come back!”

        “What is it you want me to come back for?” Wulf asked. “Would you like me to eat your friends? They seem to deserve it.”

        “No,” I said, though I immediately questioned the truth of it. “Leave them be.”

        “They have shunned you, haven’t they, the residents of this accursed little town? You know, it was very foolish of you to come back. But, of course, if you hadn’t you wouldn’t have found me.”