Miss Beulah was not worried about a few dead feral cats, especially the ones that had lived for years in her woodpile before they met their sanguinary demise. She had discovered them gruesomely slaughtered with violent gashes to their necks just after a weak, late autumn hurricane had wreaked havoc on her yard and flooded her collard patch. Apart from believing that a bobcat had done the killing, her only real concern was removing the corpses from her yard. But a week later when the town mute found a dead baby, covered in bite wounds and with his fingers gnawed off, shoved in a brown duffel bag, Miss Beulah and the rest of the inhabitants of Whispering Pines knew that a malicious killer of unfathomable proportions was roaming freely through the dark, Carolina night. No one recognized the dead newborn or had any idea to whom it belonged. Sheriff Buddy, the only semblance of law in the area, had begun a thorough investigation into the crimes, aware that he was in charge of solving a horrendous murder in an area that had not seen such bloodshed in nearly twelve or so years since the last waning battles of the Begotten War. In Sheriff Buddy’s own taciturn way, sizing each individual up and down while the informant talked candidly about what they knew (which was next to nothing), he questioned everyone, even the children. But in a region where he was the only facet of the law, such inquiry returned little results.

On the first night after the unknown baby boy had been laid to rest and just as the sourwoods and buckeyes were ablaze in deep crimson and gold, the banging of thick slabs of lumber blocking the front door startled the wide-eyed and tremulous Arthur.  Dressed in a pair of used rocket ship pajamas Miss Beulah had given him a month ago for his eleventh birthday, Arthur watched his daddy scrutinize every entryway into their modest farmhouse. The man never spoke to Arthur, was only his daddy by birth and nothing more, and even as the man tempered with a window to make sure it was securely locked, he did so with a frantic precision that indicated perhaps he was only trying to save himself. When he finally got the window bolted shut, Arthur’s daddy moved to the kitchen table and rolled himself a cigarette, a luxury during a time when the family had been reduced to eating nothing but field greens and watered down potato soup.

The mantle clock in the living room chimed a dissonant twelve dongs, only voicing its opinion on the actual hour, because Arthur’s granddaddy had never gotten it to work properly, and it rang haphazardly without any real cognizance of time. Arthur’s mama escorted him into his bedroom as she did every evening and tucked him under a myriad of old cotton bags sewn together with some tattered denim scraps. Running her hand sweetly through his thick auburn hair, the tired woman kissed her son and obediently returned to her husband. With both of his parents visibly gone from his sight, Arthur lay stuffed in terror. He could still hear the solemn clock pronouncing its final, apocryphal call through the naked, drafty hallway leading to his bedroom, and the mollifying clangs reminded him of his brave granddaddy and how the old man had saved the clock from looters at the end of the war. Safely in his possession, the old man tinkered with the clock for weeks both day and night, adjusting the springs and oiling its gears, so it would finally work, and now satisfied that after years of experiencing war and devastation, which had interrupted the casual flow of time, the old man looked upon the face of the clock and saw a measurement of man’s greatness and ingenuity. Unfortunately, within a month after it had started to work, the clock faltered, and it continued to fail until a new war had erupted, one between the old man, who had become obsessed with harnessing time, and the mantle clock, which sometimes succumbed to the old man’s tightening and screwing and function properly only to then, weeks later, rebel against time and ring out whatever hour it wanted. The battle between clock and man became a weekly occurrence, the old man pining, sometimes even crying, in desperation to know that time was not lost. But then two months ago, on a scorching August afternoon, after a sleepless night wrestling with the clock, the old man, while winding the mechanism with frustrated twists, had a stroke, forever losing his mental clock to the debilitating pressure of time.

He was moved next door to Miss Beulah’s house, where she could nurse the old man through his convalescence. In a cruel ploy to get the young child out of his house, Arthur’s daddy, the old man’s son, had assigned Arthur the diurnal task of transporting the mantle clock over to Miss Beulah’s every morning, so the old man could work on the clock from his bed. Everyone knew it was a sick gesture with ulterior motives because the old man could barely lift his head, let alone his disjointed fingers. While Arthur’s granddaddy fought to remain in a world where life had treated him so badly, his son commanded a world where his life would be nothing more than inexplicable brooding, solitude, and sharp outbursts, directed toward Arthur and his mama. But for Arthur, the mantel clock had become a security blanket, its chimes easing him back to sleep during a severe thunderstorm or diverting his attention away from his parents’ shouts, which were usually some indication of a storm brewing in the adult world. And now, reminding him that however miscalculated its voice may be, the clock was a symbol that time always moved forward, that the sun would rise in the morning, and the poor child would be free temporarily from the nightmarish brutality that had befallen the tiny hamlet over the past few days.

While the sound of the mantle clock warbled down the hallway, Arthur noticed the placid sliver of moonlight that slipped its way through a two-inch fissure in the opposite wall and rested across his bedroom door. Tonight, the light seemed unusually bright and iridescent, casting a soft glow over the entire room. The patchwork curtains Arthur’s mama had sewn, with their abnormally broad stitching and lumpy body, always appeared to Arthur as amorphous beasts staring at him through the dark as they hung over the wide window. Tonight, however, with the glaze of moonlight across the mismatched fabrics, the curtains looked just as they were, curtains—almost warm, almost quaint.

Arthur closed his eyes and found a cool spot beneath the heavy blanket, allowing the sanctifying calls of the mantel clock and the natural light of the moon to calm him nimbly into sleep. His thoughts drifted casually, first on Jesus and the Apostles as he tried to whisper his nighttime prayers and then on to Miss Beulah, sitting in her yard and regaling him with stories about America before the Begotten War.  “This used to be one big country before the Second Great Depression,” she would say, as Arthur placed his head in her lap while the elderly woman stroked his hair. The young boy thought Miss Beulah knew everything, and he was fascinated with her tales of magical witches, woodland creatures that carried on conversations just like humans, and of course, her memories of the war. He especially loved to hear stories about his granddaddy and how the old man had been a brave loyalist, a soldier who tried to keep the country from ripping apart. The harsh aftermath of the war had borne Arthur, the mistake between a restless young man who could not find a destiny in a crippled country and a woman whose life up until that brief sexual encounter had been nothing more than back-breaking labor as the only able body in her family who could be put to work. Miss Beulah’s stories, although only vignettes when pieced together in his innocent mind, made no sense but filled a troublesome void in Arthur. He knew that his daddy did not love him, and his mama’s love was weak and would never be able to protect him. So, Miss Beulah was the only person whom the boy trusted, and looking out at the variegated landscape around him, slowly falling back into the impending darkness of winter, Arthur clung to the woman and her sagacious words, which delivered him from the complex past that had brought him forth into being.  “The natural is what we always forget,” she said in her soothing voice.  “Don’t forget that, my little pumpkin.  We all part of this natural world.”

Suddenly, the roll of film in Arthur’s mind, which played while he slept, was cut in half, and he woke abruptly, thrust back into the awareness of night and a room that had gone completely black. Not only had the moon glow disappeared, but the mantel clock had ceased its vocal patrol, and Arthur lay stunned by the deafening protrusion of silence that had severed his tranquil dreams. Frantically, he looked in the direction of the curtains over the window and saw their diffuse shape morphing into the nefarious face of the baby killer, smiling wickedly at its next victim with its long, jagged teeth. Arthur shut his eyes quickly and pulled the blanket over his head. Shaking beneath the oppressive weight of the quilt, he wondered how long he could bear the stifling heat of the blanket mounting in tandem with his flannel pajamas. Lying as still as an opossum playing dead, he wondered, “Where did the moon go?” His vivid imagination spiraled into even more flashes of the baby killer’s face until it was seized by one dreadful thought: His daddy had not bothered to secure his bedroom window. Then a gut-wrenching realization followed. Maybe his daddy had left his window unlocked on purpose. Before any rational thought could take the place of the unforgivable story Arthur had directed in his head, his tiny heart sank into a pool of rejection and unbridled fear. Tears broke the levees of his eyelids; he buried his face deep into the folds of the oppressive blanket.

Arthur pulled his knees to his chin. He knew the baby killer lurked just outside his bedroom, and it was blocking the mercy of the moonlight, which had given Arthur so much comfort only a few hours before. Reconciling his fate that he would be a midnight snack for the devilish brute, Arthur waited for the inevitable. The playful rustle of a squirrel, scurrying along a rafter in the attic, sounded like the elongated claws of the lunatic breaking through the fissure in his bedroom wall. Arthur held his eyes tight. But then, the coo of the mantel clock tip-toed down the hallway, filling the child’s ears with its mellifluous notes, and Arthur’s fear began to subside. Reigning in his sobs, Arthur thought about the story of his granddaddy, who had saved the mantel clock from a group of marauders with a defunct pistol. In her recounting of the story to Arthur, Miss Beulah had told the boy that a gun merely masked the true test of a  man’s courage, the ability to confront his adversary with a clear and sound mind. “A calm noggin! That’s how you confront evil.” Arthur was not quite sure what Miss Beulah had meant by a “calm noggin,” but he fought against the part of himself that acquiesced to the febrile fear now consuming his room. Conjuring what he thought was a calm noggin, Arthur bit his lip and slowly counted to ten. Then he lifted the blanket over his head and emerged into a room inundated with a pulsating, bright light.

The boy had never seen anything like it before. It was as if an electrical tempest galvanized the room with syncopated flashes of ethereal moonlight. Arthur grinned. He followed the epileptic streams of light to the crack in his bedroom wall and then  moved carefully to the foot of his bed, hoping not to disturb the wondrous splendor that encircled his room. The mantle clock continued its thunderous clangs, adding to the intensity of the illumination. With extreme caution, Arthur stretched his hand over to the wall and let the source of light fall into his palm. He looked at the singular vibrant ray as if it were some rare insect.  Maybe, he thought, the moon, like the mantle clock, was broken and spitting out its light in uncontrollable bursts.

Slinking off his bed, Arthur steadied himself up against the bedroom wall and peaked through the fissure into the blinding light. The entire countryside sparkled amongst the beautiful burn of the moon. Pine trees cast off their shadowy black bark for a more dazzling cloak of silvery sheen, and the harvested cornfield, normally brown and listless behind the house, coruscated beneath a layer of shimmering dew. Nearly losing his balance, Arthur pushed his brow harder against the wall, trying to get a better view of the grand luminosity embracing the earth. The tableau was breathtaking. Perhaps the malfunctioning moon had been nothing more than a calling card for the insignificant Arthur to come and witness the natural world in its truer beauty. The weight in his heart lifted, and Arthur let loose a tiny squeal of excitement. Then, from the corner of his eye, a tenebrous figure appeared, and before Arthur had time to react, it darted forward, robbing the moon of its light.

Arthur recoiled backward from the wall, grasping for sanity like a helmsman to the wheel of a capsizing ship. Once again, his wild imagination took control, and his bedroom curtains transformed into the grotesque face of the baby killer, who now watched his every move. Finding himself up against his bedroom door, Arthur felt around for the doorknob, anxious to break through to the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom.  But then he thought about his daddy, and how the man would surely command Arthur back to the gallows of his room. His heart raced with the celerity of a hunted animal, and Arthur clutched his chest, certain the baby killer could hear the heart’s pounding beats. Unassailable fear paralyzed his senses. Arthur opened his mouth, but he was frozen in the kind of terror, which not even a yelp could pry free. Holding onto his childhood for one last second, barely keeping a tight grip on the tenuous thread, which held together the veil of innocence covering the ugly savagery of the adult world, Arthur understood the decision he had to make: step forward with a calm noggin and be eaten like a man or cower backward and be devoured like a craven child.

Without reason and without cause, Arthur decided. He stepped out from the liminal darkness of his bedroom and readied himself to bear witness to something bigger than himself, regardless of how pernicious it might be. With the somber cries of the mantel clock pronouncing man’s mortality throughout his daddy’s house, Arthur journeyed step-by-step toward the perilous curtains and the answer of what existed just beyond the boundaries of a world occupied by an insignificant boy.  Bunching the two separate folds of curtain in his small hands, Arthur ripped asunder the chains of his fear and unveiled that quintessential moment when all young children see the perverse reality of adulthood  for the first time.  The shift in Arthur’s being was instantaneous.

There, twirling in a field of harvested cotton with the spotlight of the moon cast behind him, a boy, not much older than Arthur, frolicked across the nighttime earth in a ballet of aberrant rapture. The boy seemed to move in some cosmic trance, spinning in circles and jumping into the air as the weight of his body forced him back to the ground without any concern of getting hurt. Then, against the remaining detritus of cotton bolls, stems, and calyces, his torso convulsed in upward jolts, and he sprung back into the mystical night. The possessed creature pulled from the damp ground two dead cats, each with a piece of rope tied around its neck, and wielding them with ecstatic dexterity, the boy twirled them about and slammed their mangled bodies against the sandy field. The boy conducted the cats as if he were the maestro of some twisted puppet show. Arthur pressed his face against the window, the only spectator to this morbid concerto, and his breath, hindered by disbelief, lay caught in his throat. He desperately tried to swallow, but he could hardly digest the romantic, yet gruesome performance of child, dead cat, and moonlight.

As if the boy knew Arthur was watching him, he heightened his midnight display and propelled the cat bodies into the incandescent moonlight while manipulating their lifeless bodies, so they behaved like appendages to his versatile, limber thrusts. Quickly, Arthur turned his attention back to the seclusion of his room. The crazed light ran like veins across the wall and ceiling, and they zigzagged downward into the spine of the now exhilarated and hysterical Arthur. The moon, the ultimate superconductor, electrocuted both Arthur and the boy, crisscrossing their circuits so Arthur could tap into the boy’s tangled depravity. Responding to what his diminutive mind could not comprehend, Arthur grinded his teeth; the connection he shared with the boy in the decaying field grew more and more intense. Yet, while the show played on, the equilibrium between good and evil slowly unraveled, and by communing with the true night and not the night of never experiencing what he had initially feared, Arthur joined the sacred covenant of nature at its most perplexing, the first crack in childhood revealing what had been hidden for so long. The nightmare had come to life. Arthur freely enjoyed the tantalizing show of a crazed boy dancing with dead cats. And beneath the veil lay his own rebellious urges, which were beginning to see the light.

The next morning Arthur woke up prostrate in his bed. His pajamas were damp with sweat, and the dense quilt lay bunched in a corner on his bedroom floor. He rested in his thoughts for a while, uncertain if the phantasmagoric show he had seen the night before was a dream or part of a very tangible and vexing new reality. Sitting at the breakfast table and staring up into his daddy’s austere eyes, Arthur wanted to tell the man what he had experienced, but he knew his daddy would simply dismiss the encounter as some childish make-believe. If he told his mama, the shock of such a convoluted tale coming from her young, pure-hearted son would rupture the nervous beat of her fragile heart. The woman could barely quiet her palsied hand as she bit into a stale biscuit laced with watery scuppernong jam.

So, Arthur refrained from telling anyone, and he kept the secret in his heart as he toted the mantel clock in both his arms down the sandy path from his parents’ house to Miss Beulah’s front yard. The face of the clock leaned against his chest firmly, and he felt the beats bouncing around in their forgetfulness, out of sync with the rhythm of his heart.

Miss Beulah sat in her yard beneath a grove of cedars. She sorted through rotten sweet potatoes in a wooden bin, salvaging ones that had not spoiled from the flood waters the week before. The town mute, a lanky man of about thirty or so, who always wore the same brown bowler, stood on her porch, reattaching the screen door that had become unhinged during the hurricane. No one knew if the man could not speak or simply chose not to, but by all indications, he was an individual who had suffered some mental trauma early in his childhood, and in an attempt at giving him some sort of purpose, Sheriff Buddy permitted the mute to follow him around and help with odd jobs. Leaning up against one of the cedars, Sheriff Buddy concealed his eyes with a pair of scratched sunglasses, and he sliced and ate chunks of a bruised turnip he had yanked from Miss Beulah’s yard. “I don’t mind you eatin’ one of my turnips, Sheriff, but you better give me somethin’ for it,” she said directly, never breaking the attention from her work. Sheriff Buddy chuckled and tossed a dollar coin at her feet. The old woman kicked it with the toe of her boot. “Somethin’ of value,” she barked. Unaffected by the mat of sweaty hair against her weathered forehead and the early morning yellow jackets hovering around the dried juice of some spoiled muscadines, Miss Beulah looked out over the top of her small spectacles at the tall man. Her knees were bent inward under her sundress, and both legs were mangled and misshapen, dented with age and covered with dry skin and busted, scribbling veins. Reaching in his back pocket, Sheriff Buddy pulled out a folded piece of cloth and set it on the wooden table. Miss Beulah offered only a suspicious glance and kept working. “It’s some dried tobacco,” he said. “Good for a few puffs.” Miss Beulah simply shook her head.

Sheriff Buddy gritted his teeth while he perused the landscape. “You said you found two more this mornin’?” Arthur, just now entering the enclave of cedars with the clock, heard the Sheriff and stopped before the others could see him. Frustrated, Miss Beulah stuck out her lower lip and propped her arms on the wooden bin so her hands could rest. “I done told you!” she said peevishly.  “Two tied to a rope. Looked like they had damnation beat of ‘em.” Sheriff Buddy gave a perfunctory nod and narrowed his ken to the mute tempering with the screen door. He scratched his breast with his starchy fingers and flicked at a gnat, which had lighted on his thumb. Most people in town conceded to Sheriff Buddy’s military prowess as well as his desire to keep a tight and orderly community. Prior to the war, he had been an oilman and then a congressman from an area older people referred to as the Florida handle. Known for his bullish, conservative diatribes on the House floor, Sheriff Buddy naturally took up the revolutionary cause when the economy collapsed, and the nation erupted into lawlessness. He led a brigade of armed citizens, who overtook the Capitol, and immediately, he was appointed general of the American Legion of Patriots, who then mobilized and quelled the opposition. One of his fiercest adversaries had been Arthur’s granddaddy. After the war, Sheriff Buddy was assigned to Military District II, the region formerly known as both North and South Carolina, and he imposed strict martial law while the nation attempted to reconstruct itself. Up until the recent killings, Sheriff Buddy thought being the law was the ideal job before he could then retire; he had already built a two-story farmhouse he modeled after an Antebellum plantation on several hundreds of acres of land he had commandeered in and around Whispering Pines. Most days he spent riding his horse, Eisenhower, leisurely around the countryside. Now there was a problem, and it had nothing to do with some lunatic getting a sadistic thrill out of mutilating cats or chewing the fingers off a nameless dead baby or a few local bumpkins clamoring he find the culprit. Instead, Sheriff Buddy had a problem he wanted kept hidden behind those scratchy sunglasses.

“You say that Preacher, Walter Mayel got some too?” he asked politely, pulling off his cowboy hat and airing his coarse gray hair. Miss Beulah had already rolled the little patch of tobacco into a thin cigarette. She struck a match on the heel of her shoe and lit it. “Five plus what he thought was a baby’s toe,” she said, puffing between words. Sheriff Buddy cast Miss Beulah a startled glance.  But before he could respond, he saw the tremulous Arthur peeking from behind a pine tree. “Mornin’ Arthur,” he said, calmly placing his hat back on his head and recrowning his authority.  “Well, hey theah’ pumpkin,” Miss Beulah said sweetly, wiping her hands on her apron and moving over to the boy. She kissed him on the forehead. Arthur could feel the beads of sweat, cool and pocketed above her upper lip, smear across his skin. The old woman grabbed him by the shoulder to escort him into the yard, but Arthur balked. Something about Sheriff Buddy intimidated him. His mama had told him that a sheriff was the law and that no one should fear the law, but there was something sinister about the aged man with taut, leathery skin. Perhaps it was because Arther could never see Sheriff Buddy’s eyes and where the law was directing its focus. Or perhaps it was Sheriff Buddy’s elongated physique, which reminded Arthur of an emaciated scarecrow, bedraggled with dirty rainwater and bird droppings. Or maybe it was the tart aroma of Black Sambuca that drifted from the Sheriff’s mouth whenever he spoke. But somehow, deep down, Arthur knew if the law took off his sunglasses, he would see the same dark stare he saw from his daddy looking back at him.

“Your granddaddy’s sleepin’ sugar. Better set with me awhile,” cajoled Miss Beulah, edging Arthur to the porch. The mute extended Arthur a whimsy handshake, but Arthur, still beholden to the safety of the mantel clock, simply returned the gesture with a sheepish smile. “Well Beulah,” Sheriff Buddy said. “I’ll je’st have a look around. Still thinkin’ it’s a bobcat or coyote.” The man fiddled with Eisenhower’s holster and headed toward the backyard to Miss Beulah’s shed. “Only cat ‘round heah’ is him. Good for nothin’ polecat!” Her arms akimbo, Miss Beulah watched as Sheriff Buddy exited out from the grove of cedars into the backyard. “Probably goin’ back there to rob me of more turnips. Sit that old thang down, Arthur. Sure it ain’t light.” The old woman helped him with the mantle clock and pulled him up a straight back chair. “Your granddaddy got no business with that damn thang today,” she snapped. Then she caught herself. “Sorry, boy. Don’t pay me no mind. Had two more dead cats show up in the woodpile, strangled with rope and look like hell washed over ‘em. And they call him the law. He ain’t no law I ever knowed of!” Finally, Miss Beulah cooled her words and sat down on the step of the porch. The mute had fixed the screen door, and he misdirected his gaze in the direction of the sun. The autumn day was warm, and the earth was glazed in a bronze morning light. The gray dirges of the storm from the previous week had washed away much of the summer humidity, and now the air was rather crisp and light.

“That’s all I got for you today, Jesse,” Miss Beulah commanded. She handed the mute a burlap sack containing three Buckingham apples, and with his bounty he hurried off the porch and onto the dusty road away from town. “He don’t care for the law either,” said Miss Beulah as she parted a bit of Arthur’s hair from his eyes with the clip of her fingers. “You doin’ okay?” The boy nodded. Miss Beulah’s small white house with blue trim stood faded beneath the grove of cedars. The house, brushed with sand and dirt, was well over two hundred years old, and although marred with age, it still served a purpose unlike the unfinished suburb, which had fallen into mournful decadence across the road. Prior to the Begotten War, construction had begun on a large tract of homes just beyond Miss Beulah’s property. Some had been finished and inhabited before the war; others had not. A northern businessman had built them just down the hill from the original Beulah homestead, a long-forgotten farmhouse, which had belonged to one of Miss Beulah’s ancestors and mysteriously burnt down the year Miss Beulah was born. The newer homes, which occupied the same generic floor plan, lined the horizon like plastic game board pieces. The wide streets that separated each row of houses had been named after famous golf players, and they were trimmed with concrete sidewalks and lamp posts, designed to look much older than they were. Developed for residents escaping high property taxes in the North, the cookie-cutter houses were emblematic of the larger rapid changes affecting the nation. Masses of people had moved into the tiny community, and they demanded more public amenities, causing property taxes to rise. Many locals had been forced out of their homes, but not Miss Beulah. She remained steadfast, and when the Second Depression hit and the economy failed, she watched from her tiny house as people abandoned their new homes and headed toward the larger cities. After the locals scavenged the houses out of necessity, they were left to fall into themselves, the whole licensed mess nothing more than an ill-planned monument to a supposedly once glorious civilization.

From the porch chair, Arthur studied over one of the yellow jackets caught in the web of a field spider. The yellow jacket tried to thrust its stinger into the abdomen of the daring arachnid, which rapidly spun its prey into an ungodly entanglement. Each tiny creature dueled with its own evolutionary method of defense. Resting his elbow on the arm of the chair, Arthur held his chin in the palm of his hand. Then he reached down with his fingers, pinched some granules of sand up from the floor of the porch, and sprinkled them onto the spider. Surprised by the bombardment, the spider darted back into its underground tunnel, and Arthur left the yellow jacket alone as it bullied against the strong threads of the spider’s web.

Taking a break from her sweet potatoes, Miss Beulah climbed into her rocking chair and let out a deep, long sigh. She combed her chipped fingernails through the back of Arthur’s hair. “Arthur, you’re big enough to know what’s a happenin’ to your granddaddy.” The boy closed his eyes. “It’s nature. Just like the earth swallowin’ up them houses yonder, that’s what death is doin’ to your granddaddy.” She digressed into esoteric words about life and this magnificent meaning it was supposed to possess, but the young boy thought nothing of his granddaddy and the honorable design of the old man’s life. Instead, he opened his eyes and looked at the gutted houses in the distance. Scarred with vacant windows and pallid faces, their forlorn expressions were an integral part of Arthur’s upbringing. The pink tufts of insulation dangling from the eaves of attics and the rusted gutters, strangled with loops of kudzu, appeared organic as if they too had come up from the earth like the cottonwoods and pine saplings that now grew amongst them. Arthur looked at the welcome sign to the development. It read “Liberty Value Homes,” except some kid had marked through the word “homes” and scrawled “DOOM” in capital letters with black paint. When he was six, Arthur had traveled amongst the homes, helping Miss Beulah excavate the artifacts of a deceased culture, so she could sell them to curious buyers: busted cables and wires, cell phone shells and flat television screens, nicked china and mildewed fabrics. All of these things were permanent staples in Miss Beulah’s shed. “Technology had moved faster than humans,” she said, and what had once been the crucial demarcation between human and animal had fallen into what Miss Beulah referred to as “a miserable, forgotten muck.” Arthur, himself a product of the war, never found amongst the friable ruins an inkling as to what it had all meant. “It is a vicious, deplorable cycle,” Miss Beulah ranted. “And no matter how hard we search for somethin, we je’st keep wantin’ more ‘n more, and then we die. It all means nothin’. It’s all for naught. I’m just waitin’ to die. Well, if it ain’t Miss Maddie! Baby girl! How are you? I ain’t seen you since ‘round August time!”

Arthur had gotten so lost in his daydream that he did not see the long, blonde-haired girl meander out from the plastic homes and cross the street into Miss Beulah’s front yard. She appeared motionless like the figurine on a tombstone, holding a basket in one hand and a plastic gallon bucket in the other. Arthur imagined her to be one of those angels from the Bible, which dropped out of nowhere and revealed a cryptic prophecy to shepherds. “Cracklin’ bread,” she said, her voice soft and airy. With pale skin and a stray expression across her face, the young girl gave the illusion of not being, not present. Even the strands of her blonde hair and the sensuous slope of her body, which filled the faded lime dress she wore nicely, the girl presented herself more as an absent entity rather than an emblem of subtle femininity. Arthur looked at her barren feet covered in sand and dirt and wondered if she owned a pair of shoes, but it was her inexpressive countenance that impressed upon the boy a strong feeling of sadness. Most people in Whispering Pines ignored her, mainly because she had no discernible lineage with any of the inhabitants and for fear that the enigmatic girl might actually be a witch. Miss Beulah had repeatedly harped on Arthur for inquiring about such nonsense. The blonde girl was only one of many children orphaned by the terrible ravages of war, and although the blonde girl refused to live anywhere but deep within the cavernous remains of the housing development, Miss Beulah treated her like an injured bird, who needed to be healed with trust and charity. Others in town, including Preacher Mayel and his wife, had created fanciful stories about Maddie, the witch, but kept these stories locked within the confines of their church, superstitious that if the blonde girl caught wind of them, she would unleash another debilitating heat wave or devastating flood. With her plain, uncharacteristic face as if it had been chiseled from stone haphazardly, the blonde girl handed Miss Beulah the basket.

“Well, how ‘bout that? Cracklin’ bread. Should go good with the creamed corn I made this mornin’. Go on round back and fetch yourself some water. You want some beans?” The blonde girl shook her head no. “Heah, Arthur. Try a piece of this.” Miss Beulah held the basket out for Arthur, who remained fixated on the girl. She walked face down now, skirting her naked feet across the sandy path into the backyard. “Arthur!” snapped Miss Beulah. “It ain’t polite to stare.” Arthur turned toward the old woman and looked into the basket. The cracklin bread smelt savory and felt moist to the touch. Biting into the bread, Arthur’s mouth lavished the buttery taste. He wondered how the blonde girl, who moved so impassively throughout the world and lived amongst the forgotten ruins of a beleaguered past, had baked such delicious bread. Maybe, just maybe, she really was a witch. “Why don’t you go see your granddaddy now son, but if he’s sleepin’ je’st let him be.” Miss Beulah yawned as she arched her back and stepped down the steps toward her bin of sweet potatoes. Arthur shoved the rest of the cracklin bread into his mouth and readjusted his hold on the clock, hoisting it with the bend of his arms so that it looked more like a benefaction rather than an onerous task.

The fetid smell of creamed corn struck Arthur as he entered the house. The noxious scent wafted through the living room, and Arthur hurried to his granddaddy’s bedroom, desperately trying his best to hold the clock upright against the onslaught of the pungent odor. Slowly easing the door open with his elbow, Arthur tip-toed across the tawny carpet mottled with unidentifiable stains. A few flies buzzed around the room lethargically, finding no escape from the heaviness of the room and slowly losing the will to live. In a vain attempt at giving the room a more auspicious feel, Miss Beulah had hung a set of frilly, lace curtains in the only window, which looked into the backyard, but so much dander had collected on them, the entire enterprise had merely morphed into an extenuation of the poor man’s malady. The window’s venetian blinds, smothered in dust motes, were closed, casting an eerie haze over the moribund man, and a faded picture of Christ in a chintzy frame which hung over his head, did nothing to mitigate the voracious disease that now ate away at his brain. A single clean sheet lay draped over the resting man’s body, and he lay like the benumbed finale of an exhaustive museum exhibit about the ancient Egyptians. The only indication of life was the old man’s tongue, undulating from his mouth in a thick film of mucous-laden saliva, which withdrew into its cave when Atlas entered.

To the right of the bed was a wooden nightstand with two levels. On top sat a black bag like that of a country doctor’s, shrouded in a thin layer of dust. Arthur recognized the bag as where his granddaddy kept his surgical tools he used when operating on the mantel clock. Tucked in the small nook of the second tier rested the steel pistol Arthur’s granddaddy had carried during the war, and it was the same pistol he had fired so many times. On the night the thieves came for the mantel clock, it had refused to discharge, but the glint of its shiny frame when the old man brandished it was enough to frighten them back into the darkening countryside. Now it lay forgotten, its glory broken into tiny ringlets of oxidation across its frame like unattractive age spots. Stepping at the head of the bed, Arthur presented the mantel clock like a gift to a crumbling altar. He held the instrument close to the man’s ear, so his granddaddy could hear the clock’s ticking and know it had come home. Then he leaned it gingerly against the old man’s torso. The elderly man’s eyeballs bounced around beneath his turgid eyelids, and he rested peacefully in the coolness found only in that part of the house. Arthur looked at his granddaddy. He was not sure if he knew he had brought him the mantel clock, so he lifted the old man’s skeletal hand and set it gently on the clock’s curved head. Sensing the arrival of his nemesis, that which had filled his final years with agonizing consternation, the old man’s right forefinger strained to tap with the beat of the clock’s ticking.

For nearly an hour, Arthur sat relaxed on the bedroom floor while the old man tinkered with the clock in his mind. He tried not to look at his granddaddy’s sunken face, the crimps and wrinkles, which cut underneath his eyes and flowed down into the sallow cheeks that gathered into rivets around the crusty corners of his mouth. Instead, Arthur found a feather bug and let it crawl around his forefinger to occupy his time. But the intermittent gasps of the old man’s dying breath and the gyrations of his swollen tongue between two thin lips interrupted the boy’s play, and he forced himself to look upon the murky tears trailing down from the old man’s swollen eyes. At this moment, Arthur realized he was sharing the same air with the old man’s disease and how this air fueled its inexorable consumption. He thought about what he had seen the night before, and how the same corrupt splendor of nature was now overtaking his grandfather. Once again, unable to remove himself from the titillating gaze of seeing nature at work, Arthur had the strange, unimaginable urge to be a part of it. He wanted to touch the old man’s dying face and feel its greasy secretions, which had smeared into the polyurethane pillow. He wanted to rub the back of his hand against the stubble on his grandfather’s unshaven chin and jiggle the sack of blotchy skin dangling from his goose-like neck, which rested on the upper part of his boney chest. He wanted to caress death now living before him in its sickly hubris. Arthur studied this vestige of life rotting and gelling with the inevitability of time’s demise. Soon, the morbid ritual of the old man succumbing to nature’s cruelty bubbled deep in Arthur’s stomach, and it simmered with the surreal performance from the night before. He tried to clear the air in his nostrils with a deep breath inward but snagged more of the malodorous creamed corn instead. The cracklin bread left a pasty residue in his mouth, a taste now rancid and soiled. Then, for the first time, Arthur saw a glimpse of his own mortality in the dying countenance of his granddaddy. How could the same nature, which bestowed sentient creatures with such august vitality, be the same nature, which sucked it away with such raw agony? If all living things must die, then all living things must be tainted, and the vibrancy by which they harnessed themselves to life was nothing more than a ruse for the connate degradation given to them at birth.

Not much evacuated from his stomach after Arthur ran out the kitchen door into Miss Beulah’s backyard; a few specks of the grits he had eaten that morning and a kernel from the cracklin bread were all that he got up. Catching his breath, Arthur coughed and cleared his throat. He felt relieved, and taking in the warm autumn air, he leaned against the screen door, holding his hand over his stomach. Arthur had never seen a sky so blue, cloudless and limitless in its beauty. Parched, he imagined dipping his hand in the sky and quenching his thirst. But the sight of the blue began to hurt his eyes, so he stepped off the porch to get a drink from Miss Beulah’s well. Then seeing Sheriff Buddy still roaming the backyard, Arthur darted behind a black walnut tree. He watched the law furtively, following him as he sauntered over to Maddie, who sat with no expression on a stump, the gallon bucket empty by her side. “Don’t be so sad,” Arthur thought he heard Sheriff Buddy say. “I ain’t,” she replied. “I je’st.” The girl stopped mid-sentence and wiped something from her eye. “I only got to hold him once.” Sheriff Buddy grinned. “It was for the best,” he said, Arthur unable to understand what the law meant. Then something quite peculiar happened. The law came up behind her and touched her hair, similar to the way Arthur had wanted to touch his granddaddy’s skin. Unaffected, Maddie let the Sheriff twirl her hair with his thick, dirty fingers, stroking the blonde strands as if they were precious coins he coveted. Repulsed by the sight, Arthur turned back toward the house. Before he entered, he grabbed one of the black walnuts that had fallen from the tree and tucked it into his pocket.

The primordial clash between right and wrong festered again in Arthur’s stomach. Had he been older, Arthur would have grabbed the defunct pistol from his granddaddy’s nightstand and bludgeoned Sheriff Buddy repeatedly in the skull, marking his hands with the law’s blood, a testament to what he had just witnessed. Instead, he scooted the mantel clock out from underneath his granddaddy’s hand and replaced it with the black walnut in his pocket. For a brief second, the old man quit the tap-tap of his finger as he painfully searched for the unadulterated grooves of time. But as quickly as it had stopped, the finger resumed its rhythmic tapping against the sandpaper surface of the black walnut.

Cradling the mantel clock like the burden of an unwanted pregnancy, Arthur exited the farmhouse. The weight of the clock tugged at Arthur’s puny arms, and the noise of a sliding ding-dong warned Arthur to get a better grip. Miss Beulah prattled on about “dead cats. Damn. Not that I care. Glad to be rid of ‘em but a baby? A child? That don’t make no sense. Probably those trashy vagrants that live north of town. Always gettin’ into somethin’.” Eisenhower whinnied, and the old woman tossed him a sweet potato. The horse nudged it with its nose but eventually ignored the offering. “Damn horse. Look at you. Ain’t right for a horse to have pertty’ hair like that!” Hanging its head lazily, Eisenhower whipped its flaxen tail in the face of the old woman’s reprimand. Arthur waited a moment for Miss Beulah to see him, but the mantle clock grew heavier in his arms, so he hurried up the hill toward his parents’ house. Halfway up the hill, the mantel clock bellowed a doleful toll, and Arthur thought about resting it on the ground in order to placate its mournful cries. But when he turned the bend around Miss Beulah’s shed, a low solitary cloud moved before the sun, and Arthur saw Sheriff Buddy pushing his body against the body of the blonde girl. As the law lifted her chin and pressed his tobacco-stained lips against hers, Arthur’s arms gave, and the indefatigable ringing, which had never capitulated to the old man’s pursuit of imprisoning time, ceased forever.

That evening, Arthur’s daddy castigated him over the death of his granddaddy’s mantel clock. While Arthur listened to his daddy’s vicious harangue, he traced the many scratches the mantel clock had cut into his arm with his finger dipped in a bit of his own spittle. Annoyed that Arthur was not listening to him, the man knocked Arthur from his chair with a backhand across the face. An unfamiliar silence entered the room. Arthur’s daddy waited for the tears, but Arthur did not cry as he would have done only a day earlier. Instead, he laughed. It was a hearty, full laugh that brought tears to Arthur’s eyes. He climbed to his feet and turned his back toward the man, whose expression of incredulity was only seen by Arthur's mama, sobbing and wringing her hands in the corner. Then, Arthur walked quietly into the sanctity of his bedroom.

An hour passed while Arthur fidgeted in his bed, excited to see the last purple streak in the evening sky dissipate into total darkness. He could not wait for the first faint moonbeam to worm its way through the fissure in his bedroom wall and announce the start of the show he had seen the night before. Any second and the devilry would commence. But as the seconds drifted into minutes, the weight of Arthur’s eyelids was like the weight of the mantel clock, and Arthur could not hold onto consciousness; it slipped from his mind just as the boy from the previous night stepped out of the shadows and traipsed through the harvested cotton field toward Miss Beulah’s shed. As Arthur drifted into a dream in which he and the blonde girl danced, their bodies tight against each other beneath the majestic beauty of the moonlight, the boy from the night before snatched a calico kitten from the woodpile, stroked its newborn fur, and slit its neck with a paring knife. Blood trickled onto the kitten’s fur, and a new secretion unknown to Arthur poured onto the lining of his rocket ship pajamas. The dream was much more than any adult would ever admit, and the next morning poor, all-seeing Arthur shed the old skins of childhood, removed the rocket ship pajamas from his wet body, and happily welcomed the knowledge that he could now testify to the pleasure and the sin.

Arthur stepped into his granddaddy’s bedroom followed by his mama and daddy.  Miss Beulah stood by the doorway and clenched a rag tightly in her left hand. Occasionally, she used it to wipe away a tear while she greeted visitors as they entered the room. With a washtub filled with warm water by her side, Maddie sat on a metal stool at the foot of the bed and washed the old man’s decaying feet with a soothing ointment made of bloodroot, goldenrod, and witch hazel. Early that morning, Miss Beulah had gathered the herbs and mixed them with chicory root tea in a cast iron pot the moment she heard the death rattle bubbling up from the old man’s throat. Standing at the bedside of his ailing granddaddy, whose tongue flounced around the lips like a reflexive dismembered tentacle after it is severed from some aquatic creature, Arthur could hear the pronounced rattle, portending the old man’s final exhale. The breath surfaced with an excruciating whoosh and then unraveled like a piece of thread failing to catch the snag in a turning spool.

The presentation of meaning, however bastardized or contrived, soon trounced the morbid scene. Sheriff Buddy, taking the defunct pistol from the nightstand, handed it to Arthur. “Arthur,” was all the law could say as the boy took a hold of the gun and felt its futility when weighed against what he had achieved in his dream with Maddie the night before.  Precariously teetering the barrel at his granddaddy’s declining face, cloudy and opaque with disease, Arthur wished he could end the old man’s misery and rid himself of the moment of being there in that room. Finally, Arthur’s daddy grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him to the edge of the room where other individuals stood in their thick selves. Arthur could really see their faces for the first time. Each was standing and waiting for death, never admitting it, but needing to see death on the old man’s face the very second it arrived. But Arthur had already said goodbye to his granddaddy. He did not see the tongue perform its last sedulous undulation and collapse limply along the threshold of the hovel from whence it came.  He was more interested in the reaction of the audience: Miss Beulah reading the cobbled prose of the Bible; his mama wailing uncontrollably and his daddy with his dark penetrative gaze aimed downward; the mute flicking his fingers and rocking his head from side-to-side; Maddie, whose face had become no again, and Sheriff Buddy with his broad hand caressing the area just below her breast; Preacher Walter Mayel and his wife, and their young son a little older than him, who Arthur now recognized as the boy with the dead cats in the field, looking at him coldly, his hands folded in prayer.