Lamb

Glacial winds blasted the mountains all night and in the morning it was bright and bitter cold. Lamb filled the woodstove and set a pan of water to boil on top while outside he built the breakfast fire for Linnie. She was bundled up in Lamb’s extra clothes and wrapped in a rug, two rag-wooled hands around a tin cup of champagne. Lamb was back and forth in his sheepskin coat between the fire and the girl, the stove and the woman. He walked slowly through the wind in the space between the cabin door and the shop door and he no longer wanted to enter either room. He wanted again to lie down, this time in the snow, and see who came for him or where else they might put him.

“Why do you look so beaten up. Is it me?”

“I’m just tired, Lin. So tired.”

“This is because you’re feeding a dozen women breakfast, isn’t it?” She winked.

Lamb raised his eyes at her, his head lowered to his cup of hot tea and whiskey. “You have no idea.”

“Who’s your favorite?”

He sipped from the cup. “Emily.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“I took her from a swing set in her mother’s backyard.”

“Yuck, David.”

“She’s a sweet kid. That’s all. Maybe I wish I’d had a kid.”

“What’s so sweet about her?”

“She has freckles.” He poured more whiskey into his own cup, raised to her, and she drained the champagne and held out her own cup.

“I have freckles.”

“Those? Those are not freckles. Those are beauty marks.”

“I thought that was supposed to be a good thing.”

“Beauty marks don’t need my love. Freckles need my love. Enough beans?”

“Enough for two of me.”

“Enough bacon?”

“Let’s go inside.”

“You go ahead. I’ll get these plates rinsed off so they’re clean for lunch. I have a Scrabble board in the cabin somewhere. Get it out for us?”

“Can’t I see the shop?”

He nodded and stood slowly. “Come on. Let’s be quick and get it over with. I want to get back in bed.”

The shop was warm and they carried the cold in on their coats and in their hair. Linnie had the champagne under her arm. She hopped up on the workbench and looked out the window to the road and the line of trees, blackened by the brightness of the morning sky behind them. “But it’s so warm in here.” She turned back to Lamb. “Why didn’t we eat in here? It’s cleaner than the cabin.”

“A workspace has to be clean.”

“Do you work out here?”

“I will. I haven’t but I will.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to fix up the cabin, for one. Gutter in the back is hanging off the roof. Some of the window frame needs mending.” He opened the stove door to turn the wood. “The whole thing needs a good cleaning.”

“That little window in the bathroom is cracked.”

“I know it.”

“It could clean up pretty well. You could rent it out. Like a summer cabin.”

“Or I could just live in it.”

“You’d get restless.”

He looked out the window behind her head. “You begin to feel a lot differently about a word like restless when you’re my age.”

“You talk like you’re infirm.” She lifted the bottle. “Want to make a nest by the woodstove?”

“Out here?”

“It’s great.”

He nodded. “Okay, Lin. I’ll get some more wood and build the fire. You go get the blankets off the couch. Let’s get that rug too. Get the Scrabble board.”

In the bunk room Tommie was wide awake, hands folded behind her head and just peeking out of a pile of sleeping bags.

“You’re eavesdropping,” he said as he closed the door behind him and approached the bed. She scrunched up her face. “We’re going to sit in here for a while, okay? Are you good for it?”

“Okay.”

“It’s just two days she’s here. Counting today.”

“Okay.”

“If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to be really really quiet, right?”

“I know.”

“I don’t have any books or anything for you. You’re not going to sneak out and go back to Foster’s, are you? Call Fox News and USA Today?”

“I’m scared.”

“You’ll hibernate, right? You’ll be my little mountain critter hibernating in her nest all day, won’t you? And when she leaves you’ll be full of energy.”

Hearing Linnie’s footsteps, Lamb moved toward the door. Linnie turned the knob and peeked in.

“What a cool little room!”

“It’s the bunk room.”

“Why don’t we sleep in here?”

“It gets really cold in winter.”

“Can we use those blankets?”

“I was just checking them out. Smells like mice got into them.”

“Too bad. We could’ve used them for a mattress. Or even stayed in here. Do those beds come apart?”

“Too far from the fire. Besides”—he raised an eyebrow—“it’s haunted.”

She took his arm. “By who?”

“There’s an old man who lives up the road?”

She nodded.

“He’s seventy-something, eighty. His wife had a stroke some years ago and she’s there in a bed—like in-home care, right? Like a breathing corpse. It’s the awfullest heartbreakingest thing you ever saw.”

“Oh, God.”

“Well, years ago they had a daughter.” He took Linnie by the arm and led her out of the bunk room, toward the stove where she’d spread the blankets on top of the rug. He set her down on it like a picnic blanket in a grease-stained concrete meadow. “And Foster—it was his brother-in-law who owned this place. Name was Calhoun.”

“Spooky name.”

“I know it. His first name was Smiley and they… you want a pillow?”

“A pillow?”

“I think those pillows in there were okay.” Linnie watched him. Inside the bunk room he took a pillow out from beside Tommie and put his hand over where her head was. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. We’re okay. I’ll come back in to you as soon as I can.”

He came out with the pillow. “They were as close as close can be. It was Smiley who introduced Foster to his sister.

“He was best man at their wedding. He never married because he was… a little off. Not dumb—he was just one foot in his own world. Always half a smile, a wandering eye.”

“Hence the name.”

“Exactly. Foster, he was as sound a man as there is. And stern where Smiley was off-kilter. But the two of them, they cowboyed all over this place together in the fifties and sixties. They’d go out before daybreak, just the two of them, razors and combs in their pockets, jerk and crackers and baling wire in their bags and off they went for five, eight, ten days at a stretch. Sometimes working, sometimes just crisscrossing the tableland and nosing through the trees on horseback. Calhoun never married, so Foster’s wife—the sick lady—she was mom for everyone. She was something of a drinker. But nice. They were a kind of a weird family up here, helped each other out over the years. Anyway, two, three years into the marriage Foster and Calhoun’s sister finally have a baby girl.”

“What’s her name?”

“Emily.”

“You and your Emilys.”

“Linnie, it’s the same girl.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t get it.”

“You stay out here two nights with me and see for yourself.”

“She’s a ghost?”

“Listen to the story.”

“I thought you snatched her from some swing set.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m figuring this out as I go. Do you want to know the rest?”

“Go, go.”

“She’s a nice enough kid. Emily Rose. Soft swoop of pale hair and little stony blue eyes. Not particularly pretty, or smart, just a girl, right?”

Linnie shook her head. “You are such a sexist.”

“Oh, spare me, Linnie. She was just a dumb girl, okay? There are dumb boys too.”

“Go on.”

“Anyway, this kid turns ten or eleven, and around this time Calhoun decides he wants a shop. This shop. So of course he calls on Foster to help. They put the place up themselves—they’re hard workers and decent guys, good builders, they pay attention to the craft, right? First thing they do is they dig the foundation. They rent a backhoe and they make it a big project. An early summer project. They pour the footers, they tie the rebar, they pour the cement pad and place the bolts to secure the steel poles. They bolt the wall frames and use this truss-type design”—he looks at Linnie and points up again—“to erect the roof. All of this takes well over a month—much longer than it needed to. For the first ten days, everything goes fine. Every day the wife comes down to the cabin with the kid and they make big suppers. Fried chicken and early salad and potatoes and lemonade. Pork chops and macaroni salad. Then Foster helps his wife clean up and Calhoun piddles around outside while the kid scrambles over the rock and up into the old cottonwoods. This is how it goes, right? They’re digging the foundation and pouring the concrete and piling dirt here and the backhoe’s scooping earth from this side of the fence and dumping it on that side of the fence and they bring in a roll of corrugated steel, right?”

Linnie adjusted the pillow and looked up at him.

“All the while this kid is running dumb all over the place—up this pile of dirt and pounding on the sheet metal like a wild goat and up in the tree and hands in the concrete and then all of a sudden at lunch one day—she’s supposed to be bringing in the sun tea—they can’t find her. Just disappeared. They don’t know where or how, but of course the wife tells the sheriff and the sheriff’s posse comes out on horseback and for two weeks they run a comb of men and horses over this whole pasture and up into the skirt of the mountain looking for any sign of this kid. Dark birds of prey swinging against the hyperblue sky, men in their sweat-stained hats disappearing into the shimmering heat, into the tall columns of white trees. Week three they bring out the cadaver dogs and of course they don’t find anything. In their grief and in their frenzy Calhoun and Foster finish the shop. Very carefully, very deliberately, to keep them sane, right? They keep it empty and cold as a tomb all that first winter, but eventually—because the thing is so useful—Calhoun starts using it. Practically moves in. Lets the cabin go.”

“That’s why it’s such a wreck?”

“Exactly. And I’ll tell you something, Linnie. You feel watched in this place.”

“Really?”

“So many people have attested to seeing this girl that the first guy who was going to buy it—he’d put in a bid and everything—he found out after the offer was approved that the place is haunted and—get this—he legally got out of the bind.”

“No shit.”

“So.”

“And this kid is still haunting the place?”

“Not only. Foster comes down here every goddamned night with a flashlight.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m serious, Linnie. We can wait for him tonight.”

“Just looking for her?”

“Whatever happened to her, I say either Calhoun or Foster knew. Kept it under his hat all the rest of his days.”

“Can you imagine keeping that kind of thing from your own wife? Or sister?”

“Foster’s a miserable old man, Linnie.”

“And he’s just tortured by it.”

“My thought is whatever happened, happened fast. And that old Smiley—let’s say it was Calhoun who did it. Or maybe he didn’t even kill her. He was just there when she fell—something like that, right? But he was implicated by his own guilt—who knows why, who knows what the guy’s story was. He was quicker or crazier than people gave him credit for.”

“And you’ve seen this kid?” She grins. “This ghost?”

“Linnie.” He bent over her in the dark, put his mouth to her ear. “I’ve talked to her.”

“Uh-huh. Come here. My hands are like ice. What does she say?”

“She’s in love with me.”

“Of course she is.”

“No, seriously. She wants to live with me forever. She wants me to marry her. She wants to bear me ghost babies. Here. Lift.”

“I don’t know if I like the way this is going.”

“This or the story?”

“The story.”

“The floor’s not too hard.”

“No.”

“Turn around. Here, take the pillow.”

“Will you tell me another story?”

“I’ll just tell you the next chapter. I’ll tell you what happened when I went into that bunk room and found her little dead self tucked in with the mice running all over her face.”

“God! David that’s awful. I’m trying to kiss you here. Can it wait?”

“It’s a better story in the dark, anyway.”

Linnie looked up at our guy and grinned. “Oh, shut up.”