Errata

(This story deals with the aftermath of childhood sexual assault, but not in a graphic way. It also deals with the mental pain of a survivor trying to reclaim herself.)

Someone’s lips almost touching her ear. The moist plosive. A light current of warm air.

“You . . . don't . . . belong . . . to . . . you.”

A message from the underworld. She knew whose voice it was, just--she hadn’t heard it in a while. No use springing from bed, running around, checking closets and locking doors.

The communication didn’t seem to work both ways. She’d tried. It was a very old spell, inflexible, no return address. She understood that it was never going away, something attached to her mental immune system like a slow-growing tumor. She had her own creatures of the dream world, their suggested forms. But they just didn't seem awake or strong enough to show themselves. To help her.

The curse she carried was deeply engraved in her bone, like a malignant scrimshaw. And how did that even happen? It turned out he wasn't even related to her, so it certainly wasn't by blood. She had her own ideas about how and why he had insinuated himself into her grandmother’s family. Her father wasn't his child.

How does one remove scrimshaw from a bone without destroying the matrix? Reshape the matrix? Reshape the bone, no matter how painful? Plane it smooth. Start again and carve your own pattern.

She unlocked the sculpture department doors. It was too early for senior staff or undergraduate students to be around. She kept a watchful eye as she rummaged around in the general supply crate, boosting what she needed. She didn't want to use her own tools, in case . . . in case there was a contamination of sorts. It would sound silly to try and explain. But she had twelve hours to come up with something plausible.

She stuffed the tools into her nylon holdall. Didn’t think there would be any consequences as long as she returned them as soon as possible. Last minute, she added a flat head hammer to the mix, then lugged her bag out to the parking lot. Her old Scirocco sat there, faithful and campus parking ticket-free. She took this as a divine imprimatur.

She returned home. Her two housemates were quiet, still asleep or goofing off on their phones, so no one bothered her as she packed a quick lunch of sorts: two desiccated pizza slices, a marginal banana, string cheese, and tap water with a tea bag in her thermos. She grabbed her electric lantern as an afterthought.

She didn’t need to say anything or leave a note for her housemates. They were used to her silence and occasional absences. She knew they thought her standoffish and antisocial; she thought she was protecting them. For her, a burden shared was not a burden halved. It was the passing on of contagion. She’d seen the darkness grow in the eyes of people she’d confided in in the past, had seen the filter shutter their expressions when she reencountered them at school or a local cafe. She would spare them all that, including herself.

She set her route as she gassed up the Scirocco, just in case she’d forgotten some detail or blocked out the way in her mind. It had been years and years since she'd been “home.” She didn’t relish wandering the mountains on ever-narrowing roadways until they turned into paths that led to abandoned shacks or worse, occupied shacks.

But she wanted to travel the old two lane highway, not the bland windshield cinema of the four lane interstate. Concrete, concrete, concrete, rest stop. In this case, she preferred worry over boredom.

Two and a half hours to the first turnoff, then sharply south and east. Immediately, a dark corridor rose to either side: larch and oak, black walnut already shedding its yellow stiletto leaves to autumn while red maple blazed out through the midstory in strobing vermillion.

The shock of nature's beauty, something she hadn’t known she was so hungry for. Her long quarantine pained her. After her grandmother died, she kept minimal contact with the childhood places. No one called her or sent cards or asked after her and she had thought that was fine, another way of simplifying her life. She never heard from her parents anymore. They thought she was permanently ruined and they were culpable, so they just turned away. Or maybe trying to explain anything to their friends was too hard. She didn't even know where they lived anymore. She thought Florida, maybe.

She made a pact with herself, felt a slight internal shift. She would do this thing. And then she would lay it to rest. She would have friends. She would send and receive birthday cards.

The riverine way of the old road soothed her, impressing its own rhythm on her passage. She had wanted that. Time to craft calmness and order one’s thoughts.

The old VW took the canted curves, elevations and descents with a surprising antique vigor which pleased her. Old spells can’t reattach when you’re moving fast, ducking and dodging. Her rules, newly minted. The tools in the holdall chinked and chimed as they rolled against each other, timed to the vertices of the road, a practical comfort.

But finally, finally there came the towns.

She had to slow down because she didn't want a ticket but now she could sense the inhabitants: feelers of misery, boneless and wormlike, emanated from the gray houses leaning out over the road. Only two inhabitants on the crumbling sidewalks, an older woman and a child who probably should have been in school. They both frowned at her as she passed. There was an old anger there, a desperation that had been burgeoning even when she was very young: ingrown lives and futures, the death of an obsolete industry, the inability to escape, and fear of the larger fast-moving world. It felt wise not to stop.

Noon came and went. She started to feel a little lightheaded and realized she needed to eat. She pulled over on an empty byway and rummaged in the back seat for her lunch that apparently still sat on the kitchen counter at home.

She would have to brave some local hostility if she wanted to complete her mission, the way she wanted to complete it. Small changes in circumstance could derail a course so easily.

Not-quite-towns centered around crossroads or a stop sign, sometimes offering a convenience store with a gas station or two. She stopped at the next cluster and the stars aligned, the convenience store had a tiny drive through window. She ordered the least worst thing and offered no eye contact although it would be unlikely for anyone to recognize her. She'd changed a lot since she'd been away and she still had about twenty years of history and seventy-five miles yet to go.

Across the street an old church squatted in a muddy parking lot. The door was already off its hinges, so she judged it in safe dormancy. A peeling wooden cross of indeterminate color swung from a facade masquerading as a bell tower. She crossed the road to the lot and swung the Scirocco around to keep an eye on things. She hoped her generous tip would buy her a little clemency to finish her food before someone crossed the street to see what her business was. Where she was from. Who her people were. A bathroom would be next on the list, but not here. It was better not to linger in one place for many reasons.

As she ate, a long-severed memory arose:

She closed her eyes, could feel the sticky upholstery of her Sunday school teacher's old Buick, could see her five classmates crammed in beside each other, sweaty and cross.

They were going to a church, wa-a-a-y out in the country, as he said. She was eight, just a month before her world shifted on its axis. Her classmates ranged from six to ten, dressed nicely and coached into solemnity. The teacher was an earnest balding state representative; he'd conceived of an ambitious summer mission to show his charges how lucky they were and “to appreciate everything they had.” Her parents had given permission without another thought.

We tumbled out into the parking lot, grateful for the fresh air. He lined us up and lectured us on respect and gave the “children should not be heard” speech. He’d parked in the middle of the rutted lot when it was fairly empty but now his sedan was completely blocked in by old pickups, rusting vans, and coupes with taped-on plastic wrap windows. People spoke to our teacher and looked us over, incurious, a relief. The church doors opened and people began to disperse from their gossiping groups.

Our teacher crouched to our level and admonished us one more time: stay together, be quiet, and most of all: stay away from the long box outside the church entrance.

We coalesced into a communal animal and sidled along the path to the front door as a unit. One of us tripped over the first porch step and the boxes began buzzing. A strange sour odor released into the air. We felt the sense of something questing, but could see nothing behind the dark screens.

A gaunt elder in black dress pants and white dress shirt buttoned up to his chin showed us to our seats, a wooden pew in the middle of the church, off to the left of the main aisle. A central pillar made it hard for us to see from where he placed us. The man wasn’t kind or unkind, just distracted as if we were of no account.

An organ at the front of the church quietly warmed up, half-hidden by a nearby platform with a tall microphone stand on it. The music seemed a summons and the church began to fill. A few parishioners sat on either side of us, forcing us to scoot together. We were hemmed in on all sides. Our only way out would have been to crawl on the floor and none of us were going to put our feet down, even if the church burned. Not after passing the buzzing boxes. A rictus of Criss Cross applesauce for the duration.

The music shifted to a recognizable hymn and the organist was joined by an invisible drummer off to our right. The lights dimmed. The congregation stood up. They opened their songbooks and sang but the words were confusing, like a language we'd never heard before.

The hymn ended and the organ tempo became more vigorous. We heard a thump and then another. Old women were disappearing in the shadows, just vanishing. Through gaps in the crowd we saw that they had fallen on the floor and were rolling around, banging into pews and each other. They called out in shrill voices that sounded like they were suffering. Their plain floral print dresses rucked up over their girdles and their mist hairnets tore and their permanented curls escaped. Buttons came loose, showing their breastplate brassieres and wrinkled flesh. No one came to help them. We wanted to help them, cover them up, but no one else seemed concerned. Instead they were stepped over by the men approaching the central platform.

One of the men spoke into the microphone. It sounded like, “Behold the wonders of the spirit, all ye unbelievers.” We felt eyes turn on us. We looked for our teacher but he was indistinguishable in the murk.

The rolling ladies quieted; most lay where they were, resting with their eyes closed. They looked like our lunch ladies at our elementary school. I wondered if our ladies had secret lives like this too.

The men rolled up their sleeves and picked up articles we hadn't noticed before from the platform.

“Brother William! Show them your faith in the Lord!” We understood that we were the 'them.' Brother William lit a torch with a match and calmly ran the flame up and down his arms, his face underlit and glowing. There were male and female shouts of “Amen," and"Hallelujah."

“Brother Henry!” Another man raised a large mason jar over his head. “Strychnine,” invisible people around us whispered. Such a strange word. We had no idea what it was. He took several large gulps of the clear liquid, lowered the jar and then drank again until it was empty. We all recognized the action: ‘see, it's all gone.’ The crowd became more agitated and some fell to the ground where they stood, the men also, keening and wailing.

Unable to cry, we huddled in to each other and tried to switch off in any way we could. One of my classmates murmured ‘please let it be over.’ Please let it be over. Please God. Amen.

But the crowd stirred again and we couldn’t help but look. The buzzing box was dragged inside. The crowd parted as its lid was opened. Down the aisle came a procession of men who helped themselves to the straining bodies of snakes, large and small. The men returned to the platform, passing within a few feet of the us, the snakes’ angry cat eyes only inches away, rattles thrumming, patterns of satin mystery and camouflage seeking their way around the pillar to us.

The men mounted the platform, snakes writhing and brandished in nonchalant bundles. Everyone was speaking loudly in words unknown to us. A man on the right side of the platform shivered and let out a little cry, bending over and hunching his shoulders. People came from the sidelines and helped him off the platform and into the gloom.

This was the proof to us that these people didn't know what they were doing. People whispered that the bitten man hadn't enough faith, that he'd failed his trial but would do better next time.

From what we glimpsed through the crowd, the snake box’s lid was only partially closed. Arrow-shaped heads rose above the wooden sides, searching. We could see a few, slithering past people's feet, out towards the woods, towards the fresh air, escaping. Our cramped legs had gone to sleep, but we didn't move.

The men finally came down from the platform and returned their snakes to the box. The organ played a few more unrecognizable hymns and the congregants began to disperse. We remained frozen in our pew until our Sunday school teacher finally appeared. We didn't dare ask him where he was.

Young boys dressed like their elders watched our class troop out with speculative contempt as we loaded into our teachers’ car as fast as possible with no complaining. We could see figures clustered around one of the snake handlers, lying in the grass.

They knew something. They knew about death or something very near it.

What happened to her later seemed born from that secret world of alien violence, where anything could happen and be countenanced as good.

She put her hands on the wheel, palms sweaty, and left the parking lot well behind her self-imposed schedule.

She didn’t regret the memory, though it was harrowing. It was a link to the past to remind her: you were once expendable. The snake handling, fire, and poison were a similar species of dark enchantment she meant to put down, however she was moved to, with whatever she had to hand.

Driving the last few hours returned her to her body, but time and distance had changed the forests into foreign constructs.

She didn’t recognize the turnoff anymore when she came upon it. But there was the miniature route marker, full of bullet holes. Once she’d gone about a half mile down the narrow road she finally remembered. Remembered traveling it as a girl with her grandmother. Her grandfather’s wife. After the incident, the violence the screaming. ‘Please let it be over. Please let it be over.’ She was confused, unmoored then. So was her grandmother.

She rode with her grandmother to the cemetery because there was no one else to put the man in the ground where he belonged.

The waiting minister did the ceremony by the book, and everyone, including the gravediggers, seemed relieved when the casket was lowered into the grave. There were no visitants besides her and her grandmother. The minister and workmen left but Grandmother remained standing. It’s over, she said. But of course it wasn’t.

They helped each other back to the car, but the spell was already burning its way into her bones.

And there it was finally, the cemetery, dark and overgrown, the rusty scrolled gates standing open. No lock. No attendant. No visitors. The graves were shrouded with quivering vegetation as a light wind combed through the hemlock and little birds dropped down from branch to branch like pachinko balls. The birds calmed her with their dedicated antics.

She finally grabbed her holdall and began walking up and down the narrow aisles between the stones. Her memories were spotty, but the grave seemed to act like a lodestone. In five minutes, she found it. Knee-high marble crowded by thorned locust seedlings and stained black by acid rain.

Something took hold of her and gave her a muscular shake. She was a workman, at last a righter of wrongs. She knew how to wield the hammer and chisel. No more ‘beloved husband, father, and grandfather.’

She took out the carpenter pencil and circled the epitaph to make a clean job of it. By now the sun was failing. She chiseled the inscription flat by the light of her lantern, chips of stone letters falling into the rotting leaves.

She began a new set of letters.

“I,” she said as she worked, “belong . . .

to . . . me,” driving the chisel in straight and true.