When he opened the rickety screen door, he was acutely aware that everyone had suddenly stopped talking.
A general store full of old men and younger old men, even at an hour when most country people had gone to bed. They stared, turning slowly at his entrance, not quite simultaneously but close enough that Reed felt suddenly a little wetter in his rain-drenched army surplus jacket.
Their eyes didn’t fit the rest of their faces. Strained and blanked-out, every pair of eyes in the room. Reed could see the bottom halves of the faces talking, making jokes, occasionally suffering a grim smile, but the eyes, and the lines around the eyes, remained frozen. Bleached-white eyeballs, with pupils so pale and small they seemed to have disappeared entirely. White holes in dark faces. Like the faces of soldiers in shock.
Reed was suddenly convinced that there was nothing behind those sockets but the white sky of some hidden countryside. The old surface of the eyeball had been peeled away to let this other landscape shine through. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be looking at one old man’s face, and another set of eyes would suddenly peep out of the sockets to get a better look at him. Reed expected the masks to fall away from the old men’s shoulders at any moment, revealing perhaps a bright landscape of exotic trees and colorful birds tended by a dwarf with a twisted back, or some experimental animal with too much and too little brain, all there in miniature, sitting atop their shoulders where the heads used to be. Like the glass paperweights you used to see with the miniature scenes inside and the snow that would fall when you shook them.
Craziness. The train of thought amused him. What would they think, these people he had grown up with, if they knew what was running through his mind? He shivered as the warmth of the potbellied stove struck him. He could feel damp running out of his skin. Sometimes his imagination took on a life of its own.
Then one of the men stood and staggered in front of him, examining him with a dazed expression. Reed saw the blood on his face and hands, the torn jacket, the dirt and leaves in his greasy black hair. As if the man had been wandering out in the woods a hundred years.
Reed’s fantasy suddenly changed as he looked around the room. He could see, so real it made him shudder, skeletal heads on the shoulders, faces dumb and twisted from a heritage of incest, blackened tongues and mouths twisted with pain.
“Boy!” The man gripped Reed’s arms tightly, his red-veined eyes fixed on Reed’s black hair. The man reached up a trembling hand and pulled at it. “What you been doing!”
Reed tried to struggle out of the wild man’s grip, but he was too strong. “Jake? You’re Jake Parkey, aren’t you? I used to know you!”
Then suddenly Charlie Simpson was there, pulling Jake away. “Leave the boy be, Jake. He wasn’t out there; you’re just all tired and confused right now!” Then Charlie turned back to Reed. Reed was shocked; the storekeeper looked so old. “Reed? That you, son?”
“Yessir, Mr. Simpson. I’ve… I guess I’ve come home.”
“Well… welcome home, son.” He scratched his head and looked around. “I apologize for Jake there. See… we had a hunt tonight; a man was killed. Everybody’s on edge… half-crazy some of them. Here now… come sit down with me and your uncle.”
As Charlie led him unsteadily across the room, Reed glanced down at Jake Parkey bent over a beer. The man stared up at him with sullen suspicion. Reed grew cold, acutely aware of the water running down the back of his neck.
Ben Taylor was on his feet beside the table. “Reed?”
“Yessir…”
The man reached out and pulled his nephew into his arms. “Good to see you, son,” he mumbled into Reed’s jacket. “Wait’ll Martha and the kids see you. Another Taylor back in town.” Ben stepped back and looked at him, then said, “You weren’t out on the mountain, up the top of Big Andy, earlier tonight, were you?”
Reed caught Charlie Simpson giving Ben a worried look.
“No, no, I just got in off the train.”
Ben looked at him with a puzzled expression. But then, too quickly, his uncle grinned broadly. “Course not! You can see how old I’m gettin’, Reed. Imaginin’ all sorts of things lately.”
Reed smiled. “I don’t think my Uncle Ben will ever get old. I remember a time when you helped… helped my dad at harvest time, doing twice the work of any young man there. And still had energy left over to take me on a hike through the woods.”
Ben laughed. “Now those were fine hikes, weren’t they? Think I learned as much about the land around here as you did on our hikes. I miss ‘em, Reed.”
“Then we’ll do them again, Uncle. I’ve several things to do here, so I think there’ll be time.”
Ben and Charlie glanced at each other as they all sat down. Something was up, and it was making Reed very nervous. He’d always thought nothing happened here; nothing changed. But obviously something had these men frightened. Men like these didn’t frighten easily. “You said someone was killed tonight?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” Charlie looked at his hands. “You may remember him, Amos Nickles? Owned the lumberyard up near the Nole Mine?”
Reed nodded. He barely remembered the man, seemed like he stayed in his house or at the lumberyard all the time, except when he was bear hunting. “How did it happen?”
“Bear got’m,” his uncle said. “Got Charlie’s dog, too.”
Reed looked at him in surprise. He felt suddenly, unaccountably anxious. He thought of the eyes from a recurring dream: dark, bestial. “There… haven’t been bears in this part of the country twenty years or more,” he said to his uncle, but suddenly could not look at him.
“Seem to be now,” Charlie said. Reed was thinking how Charlie Simpson very much resembled some kind of bean pole in an apron, pushing salt grains across the tabletop with a long, brown finger. He made a circuit of them, his finger tracing loops, spirals, and figure eights. “So… what brings you back, Reed?”
The old storekeeper said it as if Reed had only been gone a few hours, instead of ten years. Nobody ever leaves these hills, he had heard his uncle say one time, and people tended to treat you that way, as if you’d never left. Reed glanced around the room; the old men around a nearby stove seemed to be paying no attention, their shoes bunched on the rusted metal like baking potatoes. But he caught Jake Parkey’s eye; the man had been staring at him. Reed wondered why all the obvious resentment. Actually, he hardly knew Jake Parkey; the Parkeys had moved into the town only eight months or so before Reed left.
“I want to dig up around Dad’s old place… see if I can find anything left there.”
His uncle smiled and touched Reed’s hand across the table. “That’s your right, son. I always wondered why you never sold that piece of land after it was passed down to you.”
Reed thought his uncle was fishing for some kind of answer, but he didn’t feel ready to talk about it.
Charlie flattened the salt out with his palm. “Lot of mud up that holler.” Then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “But you probably take after your uncle and granddad.” He smiled at Ben. “You Taylors’ve always been big about digging, haven’t ya? Arrieheads… ain’t it? That sort of thing. Things off dead folk…”
“Yeah… that was it.”
Ben laughed. “Why, Charlie! You sound just like a sour old disapprovin’ schoolteacher!”