The day that child was born the Devil put his feet up to rest, breathed fire and said to himself “finally, help”. There’s mean, there’s cruel and there's just plain ugly, and as the child grew up it became apparent he excelled at all three. He became a ward of the town itself, no one least of all the mother wanting anything to do with what was so clearly an evil plan etched harshly in a babe’s clothes.
He came to be called Cooner, after what was at first wrongly thought to be a fear of raccoons that began to turn up twisted and broken all over town. The child would scream when he saw another mutilated ‘coon’s body, and only later did people realize the youngster yelled in excitement, not fear. In fact, Cooner had fear for nothing and hate for everything.
But most of all Cooner hated life itself and its cousin the living. So any chance he had, Cooner set out to show the Lord just how little he cared for the man's handiwork and soon enough death began to follow the boy like a bleak shadow.
At first, Cooner’s destruction was the usual fare of childish intolerance; birds delicate bodies smashed like paper playthings and countless bugs smudged into the dirt to mix back into the earth. But Cooner’s uncaring deviance soon gave way to a real and mature taste for death.
Like a baby able to reach blindly with the knowledge a mother's teat will be there, Cooner reached blindly and found death at the end of his grasp, growing stronger with each life he stung out. It came to him like a fire in his brain that he could only extinguish with old-fashioned hate.
Sometimes he felt like salt burned in his veins and blistered up to fight on the battlefield of his skin. Whatever breathed the lord’s air and came to life made the fire burn hotter and all wondered when the first real catastrophe would strike. It wasn’t long.
Luella Parkins went to her porch that cool wet morning and, banging her tin coffee mug on the railing waited for her dog Blue to come and breakfast. Theirs was an easy knowing of each other worn smooth like a stone over 20 years of friendship. Luella and her Jacob had saved the puny runt from being drowned by its owners.
Premature and too tiny to live, its mother simply stopped nursing the whimpering pup so the rest of her healthy litter could eat. Jacob had come across Miller Hatchings, who owned the bitch, on his way to the creek with the pup wrapped in newspaper, eyes still shut and barely breathing. When he got it home, it was blue with malnutrition weighing less then the paper coffin it came in.
Luella kept the pup in her dress top, fed it warm buttermilk and damned if that wisp of life didn’t continue to wake each morning to the surprise of them both. Named as much for its blue tick pedigree as for its signature color, Blue grew up robust and grateful, only too happy to follow after Jacob each morning into the fields for pheasant.
Around mid morning, which in an early-rising farming community like Lancaster County meant around eight-thirty a.m., Luella would bang her coffee tin on the porch railing and still a half mile out, only then would Blue leave Jacob’s side to race back home.
When Jacob’s rattling cough ended one chilling winter night with his last breath, Blue stayed next to him until the morning, until no warmth from the dog would bring his friend back. Every morning since then, going on five years now Blue dutifully went out on the same trails he and Jacob knew by heart, retracing alone the journey’s he and his friend had made their life.
At Dover’s point he’d stop short of the poplar strand and flush a handful of spring ptarmigan. He’d move slowly through the pines until he scared up some doves then onto the sugar mill where the grouse fed on fallen seed. This was Blue’s memorial, played out every morning, each season with not a one missed. Until today.
Luella knew he was gone when the last echo of her banging cup faded into far away and no Blue arrived. They found him froze solid by the far bend in McAlister River. Old and cold, his stiff legs broken in a bad jigsaw puzzle of twisted limbs. She buried him next to Jacob, a clutch of field daisies on the soft earth that covered him for the last time.
Folks brought canned peaches and cider to the house, sorry for Luella’s loss and she offered floury butter biscuits to each and every person. It was a shame they all agreed that ole’ blue fell and froze in the same map of a river which he and Jacob walked so often, but they all knew what really happened.
What really happened was the reason Cooner stared blankly when they asked how the hand was, how he’d lost the thumb. Bandaged crudely, the burlap straps bloomed red across his large hand, then finished into a crusty brown shell, dried and hard. And Luella knew.
Knew that Cooner had frozen that hand keeping Blue’s anxious head under the freezing water. Knew that Cooner had cried like a banshee, just as he did as a child, excited as her dog’s desperate legs kicked for life. Knew that his reward for killing the animal was a skinning knife, drawn along his froze hand, popping off the hard thumb like a walnut from its shell. People had now settled into an uneasy and wary silence around the hulking figure. He was a cold morning of mischief and bad timing whose sun rose when others set for the night.
Two-headed birds, children crib-dead and the wrong of the world were the minstrels that cried Cooner’s arrival. His was the darkest of foreshadows looming long and grim across the small town each day. The rumors from birth till now grew like moss on a wet stone, including those who said the baby had not cried but once in its entire life.
The day he was born, the nursemaid said the baby refused to breathe, most likely holding its breath in anger for its delivery into the living. The Doctor had to pin-stick the feet to tear breath from the baby and when it could no longer prevail, the child screamed with such fury they say the mother died right then and there. But Luella knew the old country fable was a patchwork of half-truths which only she could read the truth in.
Late autumn passed silently and with great quiet. The flowers were mostly gone now and the sun threw half-hearted slants of dull light over the fields at low, soft angles. Luella spent much of her time walking alone missing Jacob’s soft laughter like dandelions on wind as Blue padded along loyally behind them. She followed the steady curve of Macalister river down past the old school house with it’s spider veined windows all cracked and dry curved floorboards bending towards the ceiling.
A large raven, oil spot black circled lazily in the afternoon haze, the feathered tips of its wings waving in the thermals which kept it effortlessly airborne. Luella gathered up the last handful of some fiddlehead fern giving a good tug to bring it out of the earth, a clump of dirt firmly stuck to the root end. Holding the ferns in her apron she wiped the cool damp dirt from her hands and stood to leave when she saw him.
His silent vigil held her to the spot for longer then she would have wished and she could just see him where the field turned to Blue spruce. Just beyond the first spray of trees, his silhouette cut a black outline so dark all she could make out were his teeth.
Black as they were, she could see Cooner’s cut of smile sliced open to reveal those hard, dead teeth. Luella lost her footing without moving, and when she righted herself he was gone. But she knew it was him, felt it in her bones and wondered where he’d show up next.
Fall quickly retreated, took the last summer light with it and November hit hard and cold. The first storm blanketed every tree, flower and shrub in a frozen sheet starched solid and heavy. Luella spent the early winter nights in fitful sleep, waking at the wrong time and reaching to the empty place beside her. She’d sit suddenly upright sometimes, wake to the black room and look hard for shapes that were not there. She’d strain to hear, until the quiet itself was too loud then she’d put her head down, lay awake till sun up, then start what was left of her day.
By late January, the last light faded well into the forest, swallowed whole amongst the pines and even the moon fought to cast a pale glow. And when it did one quiet evening, it cast down on Cooner who stood at the far end of Luella’s property and walked on heavy feet towards her cabin. Soon he stood looking at the small house, its outline cut out against the black sky behind it and he felt his skin rise hot and dry.
Frozen stems crushed underfoot as Cooner’s boot settled on the porch. Luella’s kindling hatchet, its weathered oak handle shimmed into the heavy head, was stuck into the stump, took all the old woman’s might to sink it that far for a night’s keeping. Cooner easily plucked the hatchet out, felt the hard oak handle slide through his hand and the head come to rest by his side. The moon’s sorry light greased the nicked blade, blackened from time and cold from the night.
He opened the door, walked in and knew every step of the old place again, managing silently to miss each loose board meant to betray him. He knew these smells, the same after so many years. Flour and bacon grease worn well into the wood counter where every night for forty-five years Luella mixed her dinner biscuits. Heather and cockscomb hung in clusters above the cabinet, sweet and dry. And Cooner could feel the old scents cry into every pore, begin to strangle him and burn his memory.
At the bedroom doorway, Cooner played his finger over the jagged hatchet blade, pressing hard until he could feel his blood, warm and moist against the metal. He watched the old woman’s feet move under the covers, saw her face crease like old paper and took a step forward. Luella tossed mercilessly, her old hands fighting at her sides.
In her dreams, old Blue nipped at her skirt baying warnings long and low. Inside her head his cry echoed and that dog would just not let her sleep. Cooner knew the axe would cleave her head like winter kale, firm at first then giving over as the steel drew through her skull like a ship’s keel parted waves. Somewhere in dreamland’s narrow eternity, Blue yelped hard, dug his teeth into Luella’s skirt almost pulling her over, and finally she opened her eyes.
Dingy moonlight clung to her old linen curtain and did what it could to make its way across the black room. A torn ribbon of it fell at Cooner’s feet and this time the darkness had a shape Luella didn’t have to imagine. He saw her sit up slowly, silver hair against the old headboard, pale eyes wrestling with the night. He also saw the other eyes, cold black circles hollow by her side. They were eternity and then some, with no looking back to forever and already forgotten now. Only then did he understand the hard clack of a shotgun’s hammer drawn back, there is no forgetting that sound.
The cold eyes rose up to see him better, the rifle’s barrels dull and gray in the blackness. He needed only a nick of time, so he took it now wrapping his hand tightly around the axe handle. “Mama, I’m home”. Cruel teeth spitting the words, each one hanging on a sharp barb of hate. He brought the axe up fast from his side and almost out of his hand in one motion. And the cold eyes blazed fierce, spitting back at him as whole suns of light burned towards him in a rush of heat and the top of his head peeled back, and off.
Luella scrubbed the wall for three days with vinegar and salt. On the last day, her old brush worn to the nub she got up the last of it, the wood now scarred clean. On the fourth day, Miller Hatchings dragged the body out of the house and gone forever. When he came back, he lifted his satchel and from it eased out a small puppy, eyes pressed tight against the light, nose wet and cool to the touch.
A tiny perfect hound dog. Blue, come back like Lazarus but small. “I understand if...” Miller began but Luella reached over and took the pup, raised him up to the light to get a better look. Then put him in her dress, next to her bosom. Safflower honey eased the edge off the sassafras tea, and neither said much. Miller told her the old weed patch next to the Church had bloomed wild roses. No one even knew they were there. Just appeared a few mornings back, in mid-winter no less.
Some said it was a miracle. No one asked why Cooner hadn’t been seen around the last few days. Some said that was another miracle. Father Kestings just said it was a sign of good things to come. Luella nodded, the tea warm to her lips and looked out the window through brackish clouds, where columns of light poured down to soak new life into the frozen ground.
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