Paul hunches on the rail station bench under the Welch, W. Va. sign, mining his cold nostrils and feeling sorry for himself. After a long three hours, a woman with a face soft as a bruised peach yanks him to his feet.
“Paul Barnaby?” she asks, swatting the yellow dust off his black jacket with her wide palm like he is a rug hung up for beating.
“Regrettably, ma’am.”
“Never seen such a dour-faced child in all my days. Look ready for a coffin in that suit.”
“My daddy’s new wife said to always prepare for the worst in life.”
He tugs a heavy carpetbag from under the bench, weighted down with his mama’s prettiest things. He hid them when that new woman and her three girls barged in, all squealing like their tight ringlets were screwed to their scalps, all dolled up like piglets in lace.
“Smart lady. She wrote in her letter that you was buggy.” Alma stoops and peers into his wide brown eyes like a brazen peeping tom. “You buggy, boy?”
Paul shrugs, shifting from one foot to the other. His best shoes clamp down on his toes like vices. He kept them on for three jostled days and nights on the train, afraid someone would snatch them when he dozed off between meals of sandwiches dry as the paper they were wrapped in. All his bones feel like they were splintered and rearranged inside of him, all but his toes, which he fears are nothing but a mass of bloody stumps by now.
The woman pulls a crinkled letter out of her pocket and flaps it in his face.
“Miss Alma, she said, my husband’s son is buggy. Sees the spirit of his departed mama in the window glass. Said she couldn’t have you scaring her God-fearing girls. Said you’d take to palmistry if you was trained up right.”
Alma peels his fingers back from his clammy palm, turning his hand in the failing light. Sucks her teeth and wags her head, like she’s scanning an obituary for cause of death.
“Can’t make heads or tails of your potential, but the Professor will read you soon enough.”
He tugs his hand away and shoves it into his suit pocket. Breadcrumbs harden in the lining. His stomach rumbles, but he’s used to it by now.
“Thought I was sent up here to learn barbering.”
“Oh, you’ll learn that, too. Languages, athletics, barbering, and palmistry. All our boys at Blue Nose enter society well-rounded and professionally trained.”
Alma lurches the mud-splattered Model 30 down a two-track road splitting through dense woods. Boulder-clad mountains jolt up on either side. Paul gapes at the red and gold bower of fluttering leaves arching overhead, clapping their dry hands for his arrival. They look like the ladies with painted lips that waggled full bottoms under bright skirts when his daddy took him to town.
“Farmer’s Almanack called for a good turnout of color this season. I always tell the Professor that they must have direct communion with angels, telling them the Almighty’s plans. Right on the money, every year.”
“We don’t have trees on our mountains back in El Paso.”
“Stark hills. Naked as sin.” Alma’s cheeks blotch the color of old blood. “It’s a fallen world we live in. Abominations everywhere. Don’t you forget it. Even nature rebels against the Lord’s commandments.”
She runs her fingers up the row of brass buttons tourniqueting the stiff collar under her dimpled chin.
“You best keep your clothes wound on tight around here, or Ol’ Smokefoot will take a hankering for you. Snatch you clean out of your cot.”
As the motor car grinds up a wooded hillside, the setting sun casts black shadows over Paul’s face. The trees twist and rattle, sending a shiver up his spine. He pulls his jacket tighter around his scrawny chest.
“How many boys you got at your school?”
“It’s an academy and you’ll be the sixth.”
As they pull off the road up a steep stretch of rutted drive, a wooden sign creaks from rusting hinges in the chilling wind.
BLUE NOSE ACADEMY
Shave, Haircut, Fortune
25¢
Additional Elegancies for Additional Cost
“Folks come from miles around to see the Professor and get gussied up by our pupils.”
A two-story house looms on top of the hill, stark whitewash against the purple dusk. Paul heaves his carpetbag from the back seat and hobbles towards the front steps.
“This way.” Alma steers his shoulders toward a small building nestled under gnarled black walnut trees.
A trickle of smoke rises from a metal stove pipe jutting out of the low roof, and from a single window, a yellow candle flame wavers. The wooden door is bolted with a heavy chain and padlock. Alma tugs a key out of her pocket and unlocks it.
“You got bedclothes in that satchel?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Make sure you get changed away from the window.”
Soft murmuring leaks out of the narrow slit under the door.
Alma cranes her neck this way and that before she pulls the groaning door open wide enough for his carpetbag, then pushes him inside and slams it. Chain rattles and the padlock clinks shut behind him.
Five pairs of owlish eyes blink at him in the gloomy light. Six cots line both sides of the cramped room. A paltry fire crackles in a tiny wood stove. Paul plops his heavy bag down on the only unoccupied cot. He scans the expectant faces, takes a deep breath, and recites the speech he practiced over hundreds of miles of train tracks.
“Hello, fellas. My name is Paul Barnaby, and I hail from Lone Star country, near the fine metropolis of El Paso, to be exact, where the mountains brush heaven’s hem and the sky is big as judgment day. Do not let my small stature deceive you that I am younger than eleven, for it is the result of many aromatic cups of coffee imbibed from too early an age that I was stunted to this diminutive height.”
The boys all glance at one another, mouths open. Paul looks down at his tight shoes and wriggles what’s left of his poor toes and tries again.
“I’m from Texas, and ever since I was ten years old, folks been calling me Buggy.”
A pot pie-faced boy in tiny round spectacles grins, “Hey, Buggy. Pleased to be acquainted. I’m Frankie outta Franklin County, and those are The Generals, Lee, and Jeb, from down Georgia way. They saw a lady with two heads and three breasts at the circus one time.”
Gangly twins huddle under woolen blankets, freckles speckling everything but the whites of their eyes. They give a stiff salute, and Paul returns it.
“That’s Cyrus, he’s from Ohio. He can shave a grown man’s face down to the bone without raising a drop of blood.”
A sallow-cheeked, tow-headed boy with long, elegant fingers limply waves from his cot.
“And I’m Little Burl!” squeaks a boy in the corner with a cowlick sprouting out the top of his flaming red dome.
“He wets the bed every night,” says Cyrus.
“I do not.”
Burl glares, but from the twinge of urine stinging the air, Paul can tell it’s true. The woodstove eats up all the oxygen, and a wide yawn stretches his mouth. He opens the straps of the carpetbag, pulling out his pin-striped pajamas and a framed portrait of his mama. Her eyes gaze just beyond the frame like she can see death shambling closer.
Cyrus points one of his long fingers to a corner where a stained sheet is pinned up. “Go behind there to change, or Ol’ Smokefoot’ll see you.”
Paul shrugs. “My daddy says the only things to fear in life are the sheriff’s knock and your own damn thoughts.”
He sinks onto his lumpy cot and gingerly pulls off his rigid shoes and peels off his crunchy socks. His toes are still there, but water blisters bubble over the raw flesh. He presses on the largest one, feeling the bulge of clear juice shift under the thin skin.
Frankie tiptoes to the frosted window, where the candle flame flickers against the pitch darkness outside. He peers out, his breath fogging his glasses. He settles back on his cot and wipes them with the corner of his faded nightshirt.
“You can sneer at our backwoods superstitions all you want, but that chain on the door ain’t for keeping us in, it’s for keeping Ol’ Smokefoot out. You can hear him pacing around these four walls at night, scratching on the window, breathing under the door. He got in once, when Miss Alma got into the elderberry cordial last New Year’s Eve and forgot to lock up. He stalked up and down and up and down at the feet of our beds, sniffing and moaning, til he saw Bobby Binkle’s bare foot sticking out of his blanket, the very blanket on your cot.”
“Bobby Binkle,” The Generals say, raising a salute.
“Bobby was my friend,” Little Burl whimpers.
“A good man, taken too soon, lost too young,” Cyrus says.
Paul runs his hand over the bristly gray wool. Static sparks, raising the hair on his arms.
“What happened to him?”
Frankie leans in as he whispers, “Hunters found him in March, or what was left of him, after the vultures had their fill. Stark naked, dangling from the tippy top of a pine bough two miles from here. His pie-jamas folded at the base of the tree, neat as can be.”
Paul doesn’t go behind the curtain to change. He pulls the scratchy blanket up to his nose and lies awake for a long time, fully dressed in his wrinkled black suit, his mother’s photograph clasped to his heart. He doesn’t believe in all that Ol’ Smokefoot nonsense, but just in case, he wedges the woolen blanket around his blistered feet. Before his eyelids flutter shut, a soft sniffling drifts from Little Burl’s pungent corner.
♤
“Buggy, wake up,” Frankie shakes his shoulder.
The other boys are already dressed, cots made, and Little Burl’s wet bedding hung up over the rafters to air out.
Paul winces as he pushes his feet back into his shoes. They’ve shrunk even smaller in the night.
The lock clinks, and Miss Alma throws open the door, the early morning light streaming in behind her broad frame.
She hands each boy a metal bucket as they exit, marching, knees high, towards the house and around the side. The handle cuts into Paul’s fingers as she passes him the last bucket. The weight drags his arms. Full to the brim, smooth river rocks painted a humming shade of blue.
“What do I do with these?” he asks.
“You march with them.” Alma straightens her high collar and strides toward the chicken coops.
“Athletics,” the Generals call back to him as they wind around the house, dropping a stone every so often.
“What sport do you have to carry rocks for, anyway?” Paul asks, trudging behind Frankie, the blisters on his toes popping in warm squelches with every step.
“I dunno. But we gotta carry them around the house every morning, drop one on the ground every twenty steps or so, til there’s a line circling round, then we pick ‘em all up come evening.”
“Seems pointless.” Paul drops a rock.
“Keeps the haints from slipping past while the Professor communicates with the mysteries.”
Paul snorts, but Frankie is dead serious.
“They’s bad spirits and good spirits, but they all sound alike. The rock circle is like a strainer. Sorts ‘em out.”
“Why can’t they be left there all the time then?”
“Cause haints don’t keep calendars. You gotta remind them it’s a new day.”
As they round the back of the house, blue rocks thunking onto the frosted ground, Paul catches a glimpse of his mother’s pale face wavering in an upstairs window. He drops the bucket with a clang, and the stones roll every which way.
“You seen a haint, Buggy?” Frankie cranes his neck up at the empty window, squinting through his spectacles.
“Nah, these gee-damn shoes are rubbing my feet into minced pork.”
“Wanna trade? Mine are too big, pulled ‘em out of the charity barrel.”
Frankie’s boots are clodhoppers but feel like heaven on Paul’s tender feet. He gathers the fallen stones and catches up to the other boys, who have emptied their buckets in a perfect circle of blue river rocks around the house. He drops his remaining rocks to fill in the gaps before he lines up at the pump. The Generals take turns working the handle, til each of their buckets slosh full of knuckle-aching water.
After they scrub their fingernails and wet-comb their hair into slick, cold parts, Alma allows them in the door. The front rooms yawn sterile and bright, barber's chairs set up in neat rows. Jars of hair oils, scalp liniments, whisker dyes, and mustache wax line long, gleaming shelves. Paul sniffs. The air is heavy with Brilliantine pomade, heady, floral, like the Confederate jasmine that crept past his mama’s quarantine window where he watched through the wavy glass as she shrank deeper into the pillows until one morning was gone.
Alma hands each of them a hard-boiled egg, still warm from the pot, and shoos them up the staircase. Paul raps his egg on his forehead to crack it, sending Little Burl into a fit of giggles. The fiery cowlick sprouts out of the center of his hair. No amount of water can douse it flat. The boys tromp up the stairs and down a long hallway to a door painted the same haint blue as the stones circling the building. Paul traces the gold lettering with his fingertips.
Professor Zeke P. Zebulon
Purveyor of Mysteries, Patented Formulas, Palmistry
The Professor hunches over a dusty volume at his desk. Spectacles thick as soda-lime glass perched on the bridge of his crooked nose. His coat, threadbare velvet the color of rust, hangs from his bony shoulders. His hair, tarnished silver, curls at the ends like burnt paper.
“Ah, Miss Alma informed me that we were receiving a neophyte.”
The Professor slams the book shut, sending a puff of dust into the beacon of morning light streaming from the window.
“Who are you, boy?”
Paul’s lungs shrivel too small to answer. Leather-bound books press in from every wall. Yellowed posters hang askew. Heads with bulging lumps, palms etched in fate lines, diagrams of the human aura, figures burnt up in colorful flames. A glass ball sits in a velvet nest on the table beside him. The crystal reflects the room, strange and rippling, like it’s underwater. A flicker in the reflection. His mama drifts behind him, skirts brushing his ankles. He whips around, heart knocking on his ribs, throat too tight for air.
It’s only Frankie, gnawing on his hard-boiled egg.
The room tilts. He grasps the edge of the table before his knees give out.
Frankie nudges Paul. “Tell him like you told us.”
Paul takes a deep breath and straightens to his full height.
“My name is Paul Barnaby, and I hail from Lone Star country, near the fine metropolis of El Paso, to be exact, where the mountains brush heaven’s hem and the sky is big as judgment day. Do not let my small stature deceive you that I am younger than eleven, for it is the result of many cups of aromatic coffee imbibed from too early an age that I was stunted to this diminutive height.”
The Professor clasps his hands above his head and shakes them like he is about to cast a pair of winning dice.
“Oration is a dying art, my boy, and you are blessed with the gift of gab. It is a wise thing, learning to tell the story of yourself, because it is in the telling that we begin to understand who we truly are.”
The Professor grasps Paul’s face in his gnarled hands and tilts his head back and forth, running his long, tobacco-stained nails over the ridges of his skull.
“A fine head. Gather and observe the cranial architecture of our nascent initiate.”
The boys lean in. Warm egg breath blows on Paul’s neck. The Professor pats the back of his head.
“See here? Language, most prominent! The parietal eminence bulges with faculties for the vernacular. A natural skill for bending ears to his fancy. Fit for a politician.”
He rotates Paul’s head gently, like a precious specimen, and taps his forehead.
“Now here, in the anterior region, Ideality, positively throbbing! Where second sight takes root. Dreams, visions. Spirits, perhaps? Our Paul from El Paso has the cranium of a conjurer. Some might call it cursed. I call it gifted. This is not a mind with the pure criminality of a politician, but one who will change himself and thereby change the world.”
The Professor releases Paul’s head.
“Now, to the palm.” He catches hold of Paul’s clenched fist. “Here we learn the length and breadth of our little lives.”
Paul can’t help but flash a sheepish smile and open his hand. No one has ever spoken such flattery about him before. He’s grown an inch since he entered the Professor’s study, and it’s not just Frankie’s hand-me-down clodhoppers making him taller.
♤
Paul sweeps hair clippings into soft piles as the afternoon sun tilts through the windows. The last grizzled customer plunks a quarter onto the register counter as he heads out, his polished hair parted clean as a whistle. Frankie counts the coins in stacks of four and tallies the earnings in a ledger while the Generals disinfect their scissors.
“That all for us?” Paul points with wide eyes at the stacks of coins.
“Nah, goes to our upkeep, Alma says.”
“Rash of head crawlers going round,” one of the twins calls through the doorway to the kitchen. Pots clang over Alma’s loud sighs.
“Lord tests me like Job, I swear, and on a full moon to boot.”
Little Burl scratches his head. Paul squats and inspects the mound of hair at his feet. Gray, bathwater blond, brown, the pile crawls with pale yellow cooties.
Paul’s palms itch, but it’s not from the sight of the lice or the splintered broom handle. The Professor’s words echo between his ears. He had traced his thick, yellowed nail over Paul’s hand, slow, as if reading invisible words etched into the lines of his palm.
“Trouble meeting trouble. See how the life-line forks? Danger at the turn. And here–” the Professor pauses, thumb pressing a short, broken groove, “death walks near, my boy, close enough to smell your breath.”
The twins shovel coal into a metal burn barrel out front and stoke flames til they burn cherry red. Paul sweeps the hair clippings into a wide dustpan and carries it, arm extended, down the front steps. A gust of chilly wind blows the clippings and creepers back on his face. He sputters, skin crawling, and runs the rest of the way to the burn barrel. As he dumps the remaining hair onto the smoldering coals, the stench of rotten eggs stings his nostrils. Must be what hell smells like.
They each get a biscuit with a thin slice of salted ham and applesauce for supper. Paul munches on the front steps, still feeling the phantom itch of hair bugs.
As the full moon rises over the treetops, the boys gather the blue stones back into the buckets. They are warm to the touch as Paul clunks them into his pail, although the night is cold.
Alma lumbers down the steps carrying a boiling pot of water, steam licking the air. A cast-iron tub sits under a black walnut tree, clawed feet so alive, Paul keeps an eye on them in case it scuttles away from the hot coals smoldering underneath its rounded belly.
The Generals take baths first, then Little Burl and Frankie. They each undress under white sheets, one at a time, and like ghosts, clamber into the hot water steaming from the tub. They stay under the sheet as they scrub themselves, Alma shouting reminders to wash every square inch or the itch critters will stick. After they are finished, they poke their faces out through a slit in the sheet and dash, dripping, to the cot house, one by one, until only Paul is left.
Alma works kerosene into Paul's scalp with rough hands. The stuff bites his skin like fire ants, and the stink of it crawls up his nose and burns the back of his throat.
She drops a threadbare sheet over his head.
“Strip down,” she says, her voice flat as a shovel blade.
Under the thin weave of fabric, Paul peels off his black suit and feels his way to the tub.
As he sinks into the warm gray water, a fresh bar of lye soap strikes his sheeted head and bounces into the water with a dull splash.
“Every inch. Don’t want to host a shindig for scalp-jiggers.”
Under his bottom, the coals hiss as he slathers his hands with lye suds. The soap smells peppery and stings his eyes.
“Behind your ears,” Alma’s voice calls from the distance.
“Betwixt your toes.”
“Back of your neck.”
“Betwixt your unmentionables.” He can barely hear her now.
“Miss Alma?”
The coals shift below him in soft moans. Out in the darkness, a nightjar calls, drawn out, like a door easing open on rusted hinges.
Paul lifts the sheet to look for her, but the woman is gone. He calls her name again, more urgently now. No answer, only the wind yowling through the holler, hurrying clouds across the heavy, yellow moon.
A rustle comes from the fallen leaves beyond the walnut tree’s black roots. He drops the sheet back down over his head. It clings to his wet hair, the water pressing cold against his shivering skin, the lye watering his eyes. At the foot of the tub, the sheet twitches and hot breath huffs against the sheer cotton.
The edge of the sheet rises.
A hand, black hair bristling up the wrist, nails long as slaughterhouse hooks.
He folds himself into the smallest ball his body can make. It reaches into the water for his curled toes, talons scraping the inside of the tub.
A scream rips out of his lungs. The wet sheet whips off his head.
Alma is there, looking down at him, dripping sheet in her hand.
“You get the heebies?”
He doesn’t answer, shivering, blue-lipped.
“Not yet,” she mutters up at the full moon, “We have a deal.”
Miss Alma brusquely wraps him in the sopping sheet, winding like a burial shroud until only his eyes show. She carries him toward the cot house, eyes fixed on the edge of the dark woods.
♤
Ol’ Smokefoot prowls the cot house all night. His claws drag along the tin roof, sending a chatter through Paul’s teeth as he huddles under his blanket. Little Burl whimpers from under his piss-soaked cot. Cyrus clenches the handle of his straight razor. The General’s quavering voices croon under their covers, I’ll be with you in apple blossom time, voices splintering in the high notes.
Frankie grasps Paul’s shoulder, round face pale, and points towards the rattling door. From the crack beneath it, wet breath, thick and rancid, slides under and rolls across the floor like mustard gas. The twins gag, and Frankie chokes, tears running down his cheeks. Paul springs for the kindling box, hand covering his nose and mouth, snatches a stack of old newsprint, wads, and rams them into the crack til it’s choked off.
He scrapes his metal cot over to the corner where Little Burl cries and tips it to barricade the boy underneath.
“You’ll be safe now,” he whispers, in a voice braver than he feels.
Frankie and the Generals follow him, and they huddle together under a thick tent of woolen blankets til dawn.
As the candle flame in the tiny window sputters out, Paul rubs the grit from his bloodshot eyes.
“We are circling the rocks around us tonight. If they work for the haints, maybe they work for the Devil.”
The others nod.
At nightfall, the moon rises, white as a blind eye, and Ol’ Smokefoot returns. The stones quiver and chatter but hold their ground. He paces the circle, a starving moan pouring from his drooling jaws, claws scraping through the dead leaves, testing, testing, but he can not cross.
♤
Ol’ Smokefoot doesn’t come again, and days stretch into weeks of lulling routine. Mysteries in the morning in the Professor’s study and barbering downstairs in the afternoons. Paul learns how to read the lines etched into the palms of the other boys and how to trim and slick a man’s hair ‘til it shines like patent leather.
One late afternoon, as the last yellow leaf dropped from the blackened bough of the walnut tree, a gleaming black automobile purrs up the driveway. A dark-haired gentleman in a pinstriped suit emerges, then a slip of a woman with pale blue eyes and hair the color of summer hay. Her face is pinched and blotchy, like she was born crying and never quit. Paul peers through the window as they come up the steps and calls over his shoulder to the Generals.
“Silk stockings, incoming!”
He turns back to the window. In the wavy glass, his mama’s reflection. Run away, she mouths and vanishes. Paul backs away from the window, his heart thumping in his ears.
“Looks like a real swell. Maybe he’ll sling us a nickel,” Frankie says.
The woman peels off her kid leather glove and moves like a haint up the stairs to the Professor’s study. Soft sobs leak down through the ceiling.
The man points at Paul to shave him. Cyrus hands Paul his straight razor.
“Just do it like I showed you. Quick and clean.”
Paul works a lather onto the man’s stubbled chin. His eyes are pale blue, nearly colorless, and he watches Paul like a cottonmouth that’s learned how to smile.
Paul draws the blade over his cheek in slow, careful motions, just like Cyrus taught him. Then he sees it. Black hair bristles from the man’s knuckles, thick and wiry like Ol’ Smokefoot’s. His hand slips. The blade kisses skin. Blue blood rises from the nick like curling flames.
The man is on his feet, teeth flashing, incisors too long, too sharp. One sweep of his arm and Paul flies back into a wall of bottles. Glass shatters, biting his cheek. Tonics splatter, burning his eyes.
Alma bursts in, apron flapping. “What’s all the hubbub?”
The Professor totters halfway down the stairs and stops dead at the sight of the man. The ends of his silver hair curl tighter. He hobbles back up to his study with a fit of wheezing.
The lady drifts down, wet eyes pleading, lips quivering but silent.
The man snatches a towel from Little Burl and swipes the lather off his face. He smooths his suit and smiles, reaching into his pocket. He presses a button-sized gold coin into each of the boy’s palms, but Paul refuses to open his clenched fists. The others bite the coins, grinning at the shallow imprints left in the soft gold.
“Take it, Buggy,” Frankie says. “It’s bona fide.”
Paul wags his head and keeps his gaze on the man’s bristled knuckles. Warm blood dribbles down his cheek. He doesn’t bother to wipe it.
“I know who you are,” he says, raising his bold eyes.
“Names are just jackets to slip out of when they don’t suit you anymore,” the man answers, tipping a wink, lips curling back from knife-bright teeth.
As the couple leaves, the man hands a heavy leather pouch to Alma and murmurs in her ear just loud enough for Paul to catch it.
“Additional elegancies.”
A hard frost settles in Alma’s eyes.
That night, as Paul undresses behind the sheet, a gold coin falls from his jacket pocket and rolls across the floorboards. He gingerly picks it up. It’s hot, as though the fire that forged it still smolders inside. Strange markings gouge the surface, like the slashes left by claws.
“We have to get rid of these,” he announces, holding up the coin.
“Not on your life!” The Generals say.
Little Burl shakes his head.
Frankie’s eyes are magnified through his spectacles. “Thought you didn’t take one.”
“I didn’t. It just appeared in my pocket.”
Frankie shrugs. “Do what you want with yours, but we are keeping ours.”
Paul scowls. “My daddy said never to take a payment if you can’t name what you’re selling.”
When Alma unlocks the door in the morning, the circle of blue stones around the cot house has vanished, and their buckets are gone.
“We don’t have a need today,” Alma tells them before they ask. “The Professor is going to be off traveling. Some godless place. Jersey City. I’m carrying him to the station in an hour.”
Paul slips away from the others and lopes across the frost-bitten ground to the tallest walnut tree. With a jag of broken branch, he stabs a small hole between two gnarled roots. Into the wound, he feeds the coin and presses dirt over the top.
As he opens the front door to the house, a haze of heat and syrup hangs in the air, as if Alma baked right through the night. The Professor hobbles down the stairs, a purple cravat tied around his throat, a stack of dusty books under his arm. He places a stale peppermint stick in each of their hands and jams a shabby top hat on his head and hurries out to the motor car.
“I’ve prepared a feast for you,” Alma says, “Don’t make yourselves sick.”
Paul throws his arms around her waist, and her mouth drops open.
“Say your prayers and you will be all right.” She doesn’t look like she means it.
As Alma bounces the sputtering motor car down the rutted drive, Frankie jostles Paul.
“What did you hug her for?”
Paul opens his hand, the one he slipped into Alma’s pocket when he hugged her. The key to the cot house padlock rests in his palm.
“It’s a full moon tonight, all our blue stones are gone, and I don’t think she means to come back.”
The morning and afternoon are swallowed by snow, flakes heavy as ash. In the pantry, an apple pie for each boy and a bottle of elderberry cordial they pass around, swigging the sweet rot of summer. They eat their way through honey rolls and heavy pies, a roast chicken, and pumpkin turnovers. Lips stain purple and small bellies swell.
As the sun tilts westward over the snow-covered hills, Little Burl slumps over with hiccups, Cyrus snores on the floor, and the Generals sway as they sing.
I’ll be with you in apple blossom time. I'll be with you to change your name to mine.
Paul stands at the window, watching the moon rise over the bare, black branches of the walnut trees. He hauls Frankie to his feet and shakes his shoulders.
“Perk up, will ya? There is no cellar in this house, and every room has big windows and no locks. Our cots are the safest place.”
As they stumble into the cot house, heads swimming in cordial, Frankie breaks a kindling twig into six pieces and holds them in his hand.
“Someone’s gotta stay outside to lock up.”
They each draw a splinter, and when Little Burl sees his short one, his face crinkles and lower lip quivers.
Paul snatches it from him. “Quit your blubbering, I’ll do it.”
Frankie hugs him tight. “You’re a brave man, Buggy.”
Paul glances up at the cold, round moon as he clicks the padlock shut. A faint rustle from the black seam of the woods. He sprints towards the house, frozen air scraping his lungs, bursts through the door, takes the stairs two at a time, skids down the hall, and into the study.
Panting, he peeks out the window. A dark figure stalks over the white snow toward the house, smoke rising from every step. He scans the room for a weapon, anything to beat away the beast. Under the Professor’s desk, the buckets of blue stones.
Downstairs, the front door creaks open. He dumps the smooth river rocks into a pile and, with trembling hands, arranges them in a circle around him. Hoisting the heavy crystal ball off the table, he cradles it in his lap, his mother’s face appearing, warped and weeping, as the stairs groan under Ol’ Smokefoot’s weight.
He closes his eyes and, in a whisper, he says, “My name is Paul Barnaby, and I hail from Lone Star country...”
The rotten egg of Ol’ Smokefoot’s hot breath curls up his nose and raises the hairs on the back of his neck. He squeezes his eyes tighter and keeps talking, keeps repeating the words until they no longer have meaning, just sounds drowned out by the stones ringing him, all bouncing and chattering like teeth. Ol’ Smokefoot rips and roars and stalks round and round, but Paul is safe in his circle.
It is a bright, brittle morning when he startles awake. He steps out of the unbroken stone circle and lets the crystal ball roll across the floor to the corner.
Relief washes over him as he sees the cot house door still shut tight, with deep grooves of claw marks in the solid door. He unlocks it and opens it.
Hollow. Silent.
A gold coin glints on each of the five sunken gray pillows. The little window gapes open, shattered from the inside, shards of glass glittering on the snow below.
Drops of blood, winterberry red, spot the tracks of bare footprints. He follows the trail to the great walnut tree. Looking up, he sees them.
Bodies hang on the dark branches against the pale sky, bare limbs swaying slowly in the wind. Their pajamas, folded in a neat row at the roots, dusted lightly with snow. Frankie’s glasses, speckled with blood and lenses cracked, dangle from a low limb. Paul tucks them in his pocket, tears freezing on his cheeks.
♤
Paul carries a bucket of blue stones and his carpetbag down the rutted drive and past the creaking Blue Nose Academy sign. As he tromps along the snow-covered road toward the rail station, he works words around his head for a while, then says them aloud, speaking to bare-limbed trees like they are an audience of hundreds.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Buggy P. Barnaby, and I have plied a straight razor to the bristled cheek of Ol’ Smokefoot himself, drawing blue blood right out of the brimstone of Hell. Death has followed me close enough to smell my breath, and I outwitted him with nothing but this here pail of haint stones. For a penny, you may feel the vibrations, and for a quarter, you may take one home.”
