was the Lord’s will, and he was adjusting well. He had patted the top of Marty’s
whole-head mask again and said that some he knew had heavier crosses to bear.
So now Marty lies in his bed, listening to the October wind sing outside, rattling
the season’s last leaves, hooting dimly through the eyeholes of the carven pumpkins
which flank the Coslaw driveway, watching the half-moon ride the starstudded sky.
The question is this: What is he to do now?
He doesn’t know, but he feels sure that in time the answer will come.
He sleeps the deep, dreamless sleep of the very young, while outside the river of
wind blows over Tarker’s Mills, washing out October and bringing in cold, star-shot
November, autumn’s iron month.
NOVEMBER
The smoking butt end of the year, November’s dark iron, has come to Tarker’s Mills.
A strange exodus seems to be taking place on Main Street. The Rev. Lester Lowe
watches it from the door of the Baptist Parsonage; he has just come out to get his
mail and he holds six circulars and one single letter in his hand, watching the
conga-line
of
dusty
pick-up
trucks-Fords
and
Chevys
and
International
Harvesterssnake its way out of town.
Snow is coming, the weatherman says, but these are no riders before the storm,
bound for warmer climes; you don’t head out for Florida or California’s golden
shore with your hunting jacket on and your gun behind you in the cab rack and your
dogs in the flatbed. This is the fourth day that the men, led by Elmer Zinneman and
his brother Pete, have headed out with dogs and guns and a great many six-packs of
beer. It is a fad that has caught on as the full moon approaches. Bird season’s
over, deer season, too. But it’s still open season on werewolves, and most of these
men, behind the mask of their grim get-the-wagons-in-a-circle faces, are having a
great time. As Coach Coslaw might has said, Doodly-damn right!
Some of the men, Rev. Lowe knows, are doing no more than skylarking; here is a
chance to get out in the woods, pull beers, piss in ravines, tell jokes about
polacks and frogs and niggers, shoot at squirrels and crows. They’re the real
animals, Lowe thinks, his hand unconsciously going to the eyepatch he has worn
since July. Somebody will shoot somebody, most likely. They’re lucky it hasn’t
happened already.
The last of the trucks drives out of sight over Tarker’s Hill, horn honking, dogs
yarking and barking in the back. Yes, some of the men are just skylarking, but
some-Elmer and Pete Zinneman, for example-are dead serious.
If that creature, man or beast or whatever it is, goes hunting this month, the dogs
will pick up its scent, the Rev. Lowe has heard Elmer say in the barber shop not
two weeks ago. And if it-or he-don’t go out, then maybe we’ll have saved a life.
Someone’s livestock at the very least.
Yes, there are some of them-maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen-who mean business. But
it is not them that has brought this strange new feeling into the back of Lowe’s
brain-that sense of being brought to bay.
It’s the notes that have done that. The notes, the longest of them only two
sentences long, written in a childish, laborious hand, sometimes misspelled. He
looks down at the letter that has come in today’s mail, addressed in that same
childish script, addressed as the others have been addressed: The Reverend Lowe,
Baptist Parsonage, Tarker’s Mills, Maine 04491.
Now, this strange, trapped feeling … the way he imagines a fox must feel when it
realizes that the dogs have somehow chased it into a cul-de-sac. That panicked
moment that the fox turns, its teeth bared, to do battle with the dogs that will
surely pull it to pieces.
He closes the door firmly, goes inside to the parlor where the grandfather clock
ticks solemn ticks and tocks solemn tocks; he sits down, puts the religious
circulars carefully aside on the table Mrs. Miller polishes twice a week, and opens
his new letter. Like the others, there is no salutation. Like the others, it is
unsigned. Written in the center of a sheet torn from a grade-schooler’s lined