Jack, that Jack, the giant-killer of the bean tree, spent the better part of the evening squatting in the blackberry briars opposite the house of a farmer’s wife who would—for four dollars, but with no particular enthusiasm—lean over her husband’s plow and let a boy have a go. Once her husband went to sleep, she would step into her yard and fling a rock across the road; Jack was to meet her behind the barn, cash in hand. This farmer’s wife was widely known to possess both a strong arm and noteworthy accuracy, and, to the rabble who frequented the briar patch, her flung invitations often seemed more punitive than hospitable. As Jack waited in the briars, on a spot in the dirt worn bare by other waiting farm boys, the not quite ripe blackberries plain against the less black sky, and the summer air as close and fetid as the breath of a cat, he tried not to think about the whore-flung meteorite that might at any moment drop out of the sky and render him senseless. He waited and drank odd-tasting white liquor out of an indifferently washed Mason jar until he came into a cloudy, metallic, buzzy-headed drunk. The liquor had been a welcome surprise. He’d found it sitting upright in the middle of the road, the lid of the jar screwed on tight, as he set out on his carnal errand. Jack had often found along the road the things he needed most in his travels, so he’d assumed that he needed the moonshine as well. It had smelled all right, just a little off, overcooked maybe, so he’d taken a sip. When he did not die or get carted off by witches, he’d taken another. Now he squatted and waited and drank, sucking on the sour berries, flinching beneath his hat every time he remembered about the rock with his name on it, until both feet went to sleep and the mosquitoes found him in his unlikely lair, thinking, I’m Jack, that Jack, the giant-killer of the bean tree, and my life has come down to this.
And still the farmer’s wife did not sling her stone: her husband, the farmer, did not become sleepy. Jack watched the man smoking on the front porch, the red eye of his homemade cigarette staring out toward the briars where Jack stared back with increasing agitation. The farmer’s shape was distinct, the outline of his sad, farmer’s hat clear in the light of that one small flare, which—as Jack drank more—began to leave fire trails in the darkness whenever the farmer moved the hand that held his cigarette from his mouth to the arm of his chair. The farmer smoked, one cigarette after another, until the hour grew late, until the katydids grew tired of their chanting and the crickets tuned down, until all hope abandoned the world, until Jack’s hooch and patience dripped away, until that, finally, was that. Jack drained the last of the liquor out of the jar, grimaced, retched, swallowed bile, bad liquor, and a gut-full of green blackberries. He stood up, the briars ripping at his clothes, and, with a great shout that he meant to be a curse (but which came out instead as an animal blare that made no sense at all, not even to him), he threw the empty jar across the road toward the farmhouse, where it landed in the yard without even breaking.
Jack cocked an ear, listened, waited for the man on the porch to curse back, to yell “Who’s out there?,” to fire his shotgun into the darkness, to storm down off the porch spoiling to fight the man who had come sneaking onto his property looking to buy a four-dollar piece of his wife, but the farmer did not make a sound, did not move, just sat smoking on his porch, as placid as a steer, as shallow as a mud hole, as if strangers shouting from the briars and Mason jars falling from the sky were every-night occurrences. Jack fully expected to have to kill the man—for in the stories he had often killed men who’d kept him away from a woman (in his experience such men always needed killing), unless the woman turned out to be a witch, in which case he killed her instead—but the farmer didn’t stand up, didn’t speak, didn’t flick his cigarette out into the yard, nothing. Son of a bitch, Jack thought. He’s sitting there chewing his cud. It was more than Jack could bear.
“Cud chewer!” he yelled.
“Go on home, Jack,” the farmer said from the porch.
“How do you know it’s me?” Jack called. At the time he considered this a clever question.
No response came from the porch.
“How about I come over there with a silver axe and chop your head off!”
“You ain’t gonna do no such a thing, Jack. Go on home and get in the bed.”
“How about I send my magic beating stick over there to beat you about the ears until you run off down the road and nobody never hears from you again! Then you’ll be sorry!”
“Jack,” the farmer said patiently, “everybody knows you ain’t got no magic beating stick no more. You ain’t had one since I don’t know when. Now head on out.”
“I’ll,” Jack said, considering, as he spoke, an unexpectedly depleted list of options, “I’ll come over there and play a trick on you! I’m still smarter than you are!”
“Not tonight, you ain’t. I’m on to you and your sneaking Jack ways. There ain’t gonna be no Jack tale around here tonight.”
“Ha!” Jack hollered. “There already is! And you’re in it! It just ain’t a very good one!”
“I’ll grant you that,” the farmer said.
Jack stood quietly for a moment. “Oh, come on,” he pleaded. “Just one little slice. All you have to do is go to sleep. It’s late. Ain’t you got milking and plowing to do in the morning? Ain’t that rooster gonna crow before you know it?”
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Dogs Are People, Too
“Jack,” the farmer chided sadly.
“What?”
“Don’t beg. You used to be somebody.”
Disappointed in more ways than he could count, drunk but not pleasantly so, both legs asleep all the way up to his hipbones, Jack climbed through the briars and set out. He was not, so far as he knew, setting out to find a job of work, or a girl to marry, or new ground to clear. He was not even leading a cow. He did not expect that he would, as a result of this setting out, encounter an imbecilic king, inexplicably enraged at the sight of Jack whistling down the road; or a giant greedily clutching a gold-shitting goose in an improbably suspended castle; or a coven of witches yowling from a derelict mill in a fury of feline estrus. He did not, to be honest, even feel like fooling with kings or giants, the killing of whom—despite the inevitable mental and physical challenges—amounted to nothing more than a job of work, but he thought that he might be up for taunting and killing some witches, once he sobered up, especially if they were good-looking witches, though he could not remember the last time he had seen a witch, good-looking or not. The witches seemed to have gone off somewhere, along with the silver axes and his magic beating stick and the geese and the giants and the swaying bean trees, along with the kings and their bejewelled, creamy daughters and their glittering hoards of gold. Tonight, all he had was the setting out itself. So he set out.
He trudged down the road, trying to forget his lust for the doughy expanse of the farmer’s wife’s lunar bottom, his squatting in the briars like a stray dog waiting to steal a scrap and his rising hatred of farmers and all things agricultural, until he stepped unexpectedly into a compensatory truth: he could see in the dark. In a single miraculous moment, the road beneath his feet, until then virtually invisible, unspooled into the distance before him, silvery and faintly glowing, a still river lit by stars or the thinnest slice of moon. Yet the sky contained neither stars nor moon, just the low, black night pushing down.
“Huh,” Jack said.
He could see the tall corn on both sides of the road attentively pressing in; he could see not only the wooded ridges that bordered the fields but the thick summer foliage, blooming on the ridges’ steep slopes; he could see the ancient, giant-trod mountains in the distance, separated from the black of the sky by faint bands of light, which shimmered with colors that Jack could not name, colors that vanished if he tried to look at them directly—like angels or ghosts or shy, pale brides undressing in darkened rooms. The light wasn’t dawn, or even the idea preceding dawn, which still lay hours away, but something Jack had never seen before, something he was sure no one else had ever seen: the world itself was lit from within. The corn in the fields, the road, the mountains, everything he could see gave off a secret light. When he held his hand in front of his face, it, too, glimmered, and he studied it, his right hand, a fine thing, well shaped and strong, a hand as adept at caressing a virgin as at plunging a silver sword into the disbelieving eye of a giant. All around him, wherever he looked, the world revealed itself the way Creation must have revealed itself to God, everything part of the greater light, and it was good, and he stood there, dazzled and proud and happy, once again Jack the giant-killer, the best man in the world.
So he whistled along, twirling his Saturday hat on his finger until he reached a fair-sized creek spanned by a narrow bridge. As he stepped onto the planking, he savored a momentary twinge of vestigial excitement, the anticipation he had once felt every time he encountered a bridge. Perhaps this first step would set into motion not only a pedestrian travelling from here to there but a crossing over from this into that, a passage into a proper story. He hoped fleetingly for a troll to flummox, then remembered that trolls were now extinct, save for a non-breeding pair locked up in a zoo in Romania.
Jack was halfway across when a large black dog rose up out of the bridge, simply squeezed itself into being out of the bridge’s black wood. Jack stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t afraid—startled a little, maybe, at the dog’s sudden appearance, but not afraid. Over the years, he had learned that nothing really bad ever happened to him, that he was impervious to injury, if not to embarrassment, no matter how formidable the adversary or unexpected its arrival. Realizing that he had nothing to fear had, however, in an almost tragic irony, also robbed him of corollary excitement. Why, the last time he’d rousted out a giant—however long ago that was—it had been all he could do to make himself run.
“Grr,” said the dog.
“Howdy,” Jack said. (It was his experience that sometimes animals could talk, and sometimes they couldn’t, but that it always paid to find out.) He could see the dog’s white teeth as it snarled, its slobber-lapping, lengthy red tongue.
“Hello, Jack.” The dog had a low voice and it spoke wetly, deep in its throat.
“So tell me,” Jack said, noting that the dog knew his name, “why are you impeding my progress across this here bridge?”
“Because that is my solitary calling.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“I don’t know. A minute ago I wasn’t here, but now I am.”
Jack nodded. “Limited omniscient narrator,” he said. “My point of view.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
The two spent an expectant moment in silence, as if they were actors strutting and fretting, each thinking that the other had forgotten the next line. Finally, Jack clamped his hat on top of his head.
“Well, Skippy, or whatever your name is,” he said, “this has been interesting and all, but why don’t you step to one side and let me pass so that I can get along with my setting out?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Impatience flickered distantly behind Jack’s eyeballs. He remembered that he was still drunk, but not pleasantly so; that the farmer, simpleton though he was, had smoked him out of dipping his wick; that the summer night was chokingly close and humid. A liquorous headache began to mold itself into something that felt like a thumb jabbing repeatedly against the back side of his forehead bone.
“Look,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I don’t know what kind of story you think this is, but I can see in the dark, and I was enjoying it, even though I’m drunk but not pleasantly so, and I don’t wanna fool with no talking dog.”
“You don’t have any choice,” the dog said.
“What do you mean, I ain’t got a choice? By God, I’m Jack. I’ve always got a choice.”
“Not tonight you don’t. I’m going to bite you before you get off this bridge. That’s how this story goes.”
“Shit,” Jack said. “You ain’t going to bite me.”
The dog sank into a crouch. “Jack, I was put on this earth to bite you.”
“Whoa, now,” Jack said, spitting out a laugh as if it tasted bad. “You ain’t supposed to bite me. There ain’t never been nobody to bite me, not ever, in all these many years.”
“Grr,” said the dog.
“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “Just hold what you got and let me think.” His setting out had arrived at an arrival that he was unprepared to ponder. No old man had met him on the road to warn him that he would meet a dog on a bridge, then give him a silver sword or magic words with which to kill it. (Jack had always counted on the utilitarian, if narratively implausible, appearance of the old man bearing implements and instructions, but somewhere along the way the old man had also disappeared.) Now he was by himself in the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night, his mind lightly fogged by odd-tasting liquor, struggling to think of a way to outsmart a talking dog. He looked around. There wasn’t even a non-magical stick lying about, no tree to climb in the corn bottoms. Come on, Jack, he thought, you’re Jack. Think of something.
“This is the last Jack tale,” the dog said, inching closer. “The end of the story.”
Jack backed up a step. “Just hold on there, Spot. Before you bite me, I need to know something. Are you mad?”
The dog stopped. “Angry? Somewhat, I suppose.”
“No,” Jack said. “I mean rabid.”
“Hmm,” the dog said. “I think so, yeah. I feel a little hindered in the hindquarters.”
“So once you bite me I’ll die a slow and excruciatingly painful death.”
“That’s the idea.”
Jack frantically searched through his overalls but found only four dollars. He didn’t even have a pocket knife.
Without further warning, the dog scrambled forward and leaped at Jack. Jack managed to take a step backward and wrap his hands around its neck mid-leap and keep it at arm’s length; he fell down on top of the dog, pinning its head and chest to the bridge.
“Ow,” the dog said.
As the dog scrabbled around with its back legs, trying to find purchase, Jack squeezed its neck as hard as he could. Each of his fingers sought its correspondent on the other hand, interlocking as if playing the child’s game of building a church. (Here’s the people, Jack thought.) He felt the dog tucking its front legs underneath its body, testing Jack’s weight. Jack soon realized that he could neither strangle the dog to death nor hold it for very long. It was one big dog.
“Damn you, dog,” Jack panted. “You should not have done that.” He felt the dog calmly push up against his chest, preparatory to bucking him off.
“You’re done,” the dog said. “Once I stand up, it’s all over.”
“I am not done,” Jack said. “For the last time, I am Jack.”
“Which means nothing.”
“I’m important to people.”
“Not anymore. Not in any substantive way. The day is coming when your stories will be told only by faux mountaineers in new overalls to ill-informed tourists at storytelling festivals.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s ersatz, Jack.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means that you’re dead already and you don’t even know it.”
As Jack felt the dog’s muscles tense, he grabbed a fistful of fur in each hand. When the dog pushed itself to its feet, Jack stood and spun in a tight circle, lifting the dog off the ground by its head, and, with a great shout, swung it off the bridge.
Then he ran.
By the time he heard the dog hit the water he had already crossed the creek. Jack didn’t know where he was going, only that going seemed to be a good idea, that his setting out needed to be speeded up. Hiding also seemed advisable. He ran a few steps down the road, angling toward the creek bottom, gaining speed with each stride. Then he leaped from the road, over the gully, his legs running through the air, his arms waving in a vain attempt at flight; he landed on both feet in the sandy soil of the bottom, and, with another step, crashed into the thick corn. He knew that the dog would soon struggle up through the matted underbrush along the creek bank and set itself on his trail.
The corn was fully tasselled, seven or eight feet tall, its ears hardening, two hot weeks away from coming ripe. It reached out and grabbed Jack as he fought his way through it; it punched him with its thin, pointed fists; it slid its thick stalks and ropy roots beneath his feet to trip him; it became a congregation of angry Baptists—preachers and deacons and teetotallers, desiccated spinsters and disaffected, undipped Methodists, rattling with judgment and contempt as he fought through it.
Jack, the corn called in multitudinous chorus, you’re a fornicator and a murderer and a thief!
“Let me go, corn!” Jack spat. He lowered his head and struck back with his arms.
And you’re a ne’er-do-well and a swindler and a liar!
“I am not a swindler!”
The truth is not in you, Jack! For shame! Why, you swindled your own brothers!
“They had it coming.”
You disappointed your mother.
“Don’t you talk about Mama!”
Repent! the corn cried. Repent!
“Go shuck yourself,” Jack snarled.
Behind him he could hear—or thought he could hear—the dog huffing with deadly inevitability, bulling its way after him in a straight, unalterable line.
Jack fled and fought and cursed with the rage of the unredeemed and the panic of the pursued. He struggled wildly through miles and hours and years and lifetimes of corn and section breaks and the exposition implied therein, imagining with each step the rabid fangs of the black dog inches from his hamstrings. After an age and a day, he crashed suddenly and unexpectedly out of the corn and sprawled headlong into a thin dawn in a prairie of golden wheat. For a long moment he lay face down on the ground, his nose filled with the rich, anesthetic smells of earth and grain, and considered falling simply into sleep, dog or no dog. He had come a long way. But when he thought about the death that awaited him should the dog catch him—or any death at all, for that matter—he climbed wearily to his feet and stared toward the horizon, where he could at least make out a tree line, no more than a smudge between the field and the sky, who knew how many miles away, but a destination to aim for nonetheless, a place to flee to. As he took a first tired step toward the trees, a young girl, of maiden age, sprang with a yelp from the wheat in front of him and lit out across the field. Before Jack could even cry out, the wheat around him exploded with girls—hundreds, thousands, multitudes of girls—flushed like succulent quail, bounding toward the distant trees. They cried out, “Daddy!” and “Help me!” and “Save me!” as they leaped gracefully through the wheat.
Maidens! Jack thought, breaking unconsciously into a jog. Look at all the maidens!
Maidens with flushed and glowing complexions of peach and cream and alabaster and ivory, clad uniformly in simple country dresses of virginal white, each dress cut perhaps a size too small and a smidgen too short; maidens whose firm flanks fetchingly swayed and flounced, their downy bosoms heaving and swelling; maidens whose flaxen and wheat and chestnut and mahogany and ebony and sable and scarlet and crimson hair billowed and flowed and streamed; maidens whose panted exhalations were sweet and soft and breathy; maidens whose mysterious and dark and depthless and cerulean and emerald eyes were flashing and shining and burning with passion. In other words, lots and lots of maidens. Jack began to run. He loved nothing more than maidens. He wondered wildly if it would be possible to herd all the girls into one place, like a pasture or a feedlot. “Hey!” he called. “Come back!”
Jack soon gained ground and fell in behind a set of twins, who ran in step as their silken hair undulated in fragrant waves behind them. Jack watched their hair for some time—the girls seemed to have no idea that he was there—but the moment his eyes strayed below their narrow waists the girls stopped and whirled on him so quickly that he almost crashed into them. He managed to bring himself to a teetering, arm-waving halt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” asked one.
“Doing?” Jack panted. “I’m running away from a rabid, black, talking dog. What do you think I’m doing?”
“That’s not what she meant,” the other said. “What she meant was ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ ”
“Looking at?” Jack said, looking away. “I’m not looking at anything.”
“Liar,” the first said.
“You were looking at our fair nether parts,” the second said.
“Asses,” said her sister.
“I was not.”
“You were, too.”
“Then tell me this,” Jack said shrewdly. “If you were running away from me, how can you know I was looking at your asses?”
“Because we know, Jack. We know.”
“Girls always know.”
“Hmm,” Jack said. “I guess I knew that.”
“Next you’re going to look at our breasts,” the first twin said.
“I am not.”
“You are, too,” the second said.
The twins stared at Jack until he blinked. Then he looked at their chests. He tried not to, but he did. And there they were, maiden bosoms. Heaving. Swelling. Tumescent. The ripe pomegranates of the Old Testament. The top buttons of the girls’ dresses strained nobly to restrain them.
Jack thought, Day-um. He thought, God Almighty, italics his. He felt his manhood stirring. Or his loins. He could never tell them apart.
“See?” one said.
“Told you,” said the other.
Jack smiled what he hoped was an old-fashioned Jack smile. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Do you know us,” the first one said, shaking her head sadly. “Do you know us.”
“Oh, you know us,” the other said. “The first time we set eyes on you, you came whistling down the road, looking for a job of work, after your setting out.”
“You had the dinner your poor old mama had made for you slung over your shoulder on a pole. But the dust on the road had made you powerful thirsty and you had not a drop to drink.”
“Mama never remembered to send along a jug of water,” Jack said. “It was a shortcoming.”
“You came upon me first. I was sitting by the roadside, weaving a basket of golden straw for to carry eggs to the market. You asked me to draw you a dipper of water from the well.”
“And I was sitting in the doorway of our daddy’s sturdy house, churning a bait of butter for to bake a cake,” the other said. “Then you asked me to draw you a cup of water from the well.”
“You sure did drink a lot of water.”
“Was your daddy a farmer?”
“Miller,” both said.
“Ah,” said Jack. For one sweet moment he sensed more than remembered the rhythmic moan of a turning wheel, the gentle shush-shush-shush of water splashing, a slant of silver moonlight, an intake of breath as soft as the noise made by the wings of a moth, but he couldn’t conjure up the face of a girl. So many maidens, so many mills. Twins, though. He thought he would’ve remembered twins.
“That night at supper, while our daddy was eating his vittles and eyeballing his shooting-gun leaning by the doorstop, you tricked him into giving you his silver sword and ten bags of gold.”
“We still don’t know how you pulled that one off.”
“Then you slipped him a sleeping draught that made him snore so that the door joggled and the roof shook and nobody never heard the like, then or now.”
“You met me in the mill when the black cat mewled, and lay with me in the moonlight on the tow sacks of meal our daddy had ground by day.”
“Then you lay with me on the same tow sacks when the old owl hooted three times in the sweet-gum tree.”
Jack tasted a whiff of the bad liquor he had drunk. He felt another stirring, not of loin but of remorse. The feeling was unfamiliar, and he did not care for it. What was wrong with him? If the three of them managed to get away from this dog, why shouldn’t he lay with them again? He was Jack, after all, that Jack. But, instead, he swallowed. He said, “Forgive me, but I’m not . . . ”
“. . . sure you remember us?”
“I, I’m sorry, no, I . . . ” He leaned forward and looked intently into the eyes of one girl and then into the eyes of the other.
“They’re not limpid pools of amber, Jack,” the first said.
“They’re light brown.”
“And they’re not shining or flashing or burning with passion.”
“They’re just eyes.”
Jack looked back and forth between their lovely faces with increasing consternation. Why couldn’t he remember them?
“It’s just as well you don’t recollect us.”
“We were fifteen, Jack. Fifteen.”
“I know,” he said. “I mean, were you? I mean, I guess I know that now because you just told me.”
The girls stared at him, their brows slowly lowering.
“It was wrong, what happened, wasn’t it?”
“It was wrong, Jack.”
“It was wrong before you even set out on your setting out.”
The liquor roiled in Jack’s stomach. Inside his head he felt himself starting off down an unfamiliar road. No good lay at its end. The way was dark and cold and he was alone and growing older with each step. He couldn’t find his shoes. Jagged stones bruised and cut his feet.
“What happened after I left?” he asked, his voice dropping so that he could barely hear it. “Tell me what happened next.”
One girl shrugged. “Why, nothing happened, Jack. Daddy never woke up from the sleeping draught you gave him. He kept snoring so the door joggled and the roof shook and nobody never heard the like. Except us. We were the only people about the settlement once you left. Eventually, the mill rotted down and the dam gave way and the great wheel tipped and toppled into the ivy, where it lays ’til this day.”
“But what happened to you?” Jack whispered. “Tell me what happened to you.”
“Me? I just sat by the side of the road weaving a basket of golden straw for to take eggs to the market.”
“And I sat in the doorway churning a bait of butter for to bake a cake.”
“And nobody else came down the road.”
“Not ever.”
“Till the day I looked up and saw a big black dog a-standin’ on the hilltop. I did not like the looks of him, so I grabbed up my sister and off we ran down the road.”
“And after an age and a day of running down the road and fighting through the corn, here we are,” the other girl said, sweeping her arm around the wheat field. “Here we are.”
Jack looked nervously over his shoulder. A few more girls, stragglers, splashed out of the corn. They looked haggard, their simple country dresses soiled and torn. They ran tiredly by and stared at him as they passed. He saw in their eyes that they recognized him, but none of them smiled and none of them waved and none of them stopped. Nobody asked for his help. He forgot to look at their fair nether parts as they ran away. Jack turned to the twins.
He said, “All these girls, I . . . ”
“Yep.”
“Some of ’em twice.”
“Are you proud of yourself, Jack?”
“That’s what we want to know, Jack, that Jack. Tell us, are you proud?”
Jack was ashamed of what he had done—maybe fully ashamed for the first time in his life—but still, in his most secret heart, he wished that he had counted the girls as they ran away.
“Well,” he admitted. “Maybe a mite.”
“Then what are their names?” one twin demanded.
“Names?” Jack said.
“You heard her. Their names.”
Jack realized that he had never known any of their names. They had all been farmers’ daughters or millers’ daughters or kings’ daughters.
“Uh,” he said. “Susan?”
“No, Jack. None of us never got names.”
“The same way none of us never got more than the one white dress to wear, and it too tight, not even after you saw to it that we needed a different color.”
“You never saw fit to ask us our names.”
“Not even after you lay with us.”
Jack remembered then—as clearly as if he were there—the rhythmic screech of a turning wheel, the hush-hush-hush of water falling, a dagger of silver moonlight, a girl lying back on a stack of sacked cornmeal, her white dress pushed above her waist. She said, “I don’t know, Jack. I don’t know.” But what had it meant, the I-don’t-know? He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. What he wanted most right then was to forget that he had ever set foot in that mill, that he had ever set out down the road that led to that mill, but he could smell the corn dust, hear the wheel, the water, the intake of breath.
“Make it stop,” Jack begged. “Make it stop!”
“It ain’t gonna stop, Jack.”
“You drunk the seeing juice.”
“The what?”
“The seeing juice. You drunk it all up.”
“Out of the jar we put in the road.”
“That’s why you can see in the dark.”
“Oh, no,” Jack wailed. “I shoulda known. Y’all are witches. I thought all the witches was gone! Y’all done gave me a potion!”
“We’re not witches, Jack. And not maidens. We’re just girls.”
“We got the seeing juice from the old man beside the road. He said it was something you needed.”
“That son of a bitch,” Jack said.
“We put it in the middle of the road so you would find it on your setting out.”
“Then we run into the corn because we could hear the black dog coming.”
“But why?” Jack said. “Why would you do that to me?” Knowing even as he asked the question that its answer was obvious.
“Because we wanted you to see.”
“So you would know.”
“And now you see.”
“And now you know.”
“But I don’t want to see,” Jack said. “And I don’t want to know. I just want to set out. I want the sky to be new and the wind fresh on my cheek. I want to feel the red dust scrouging up between my toes. I want to whistle off down the road with the lunch my mama made me slung over a pole and meet an old man who’ll say, ‘Howdy, Jack. Today you’re going to meet a giant with two heads. Here’s two silver hatchets.’ ”
“That ain’t going to happen no more, Jack.”
“The black dog is going to get us all. He’s eating all the stories up from the inside.”
“So enjoy it while you can.”
“It’s almost like living, this knowing.”
Behind him, Jack heard a crashing through the corn, too loud to be a maiden. He grabbed the twins by their hands and tried to pull them with him through the wheat.
“It’s no use, Jack. Just let us go.”
The crashing in the corn grew louder.
“No,” Jack said, squeezing their hands so tightly he was afraid he might hurt them. “I ain’t gonna turn you loose.”
“It’s fine, Jack,” one said. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“We’re lucky, in a way,” the other said. “We got to be in another story. Even if it was with you.”
“We’re not weaving baskets and churning butter while nobody never comes. This is better.”
“But the way it ends,” Jack said.
“Is the way it ends. The black dog’s gonna catch us and say whatever it is he has to say and bite us and that’ll be that.”
“Come with me,” Jack pleaded. “Come with me and I won’t lay a finger on either one of you, I promise. I’ll get us a farm. How about that? I’ll get us a farm and clear some new ground and sow some seeds and grow some corn and a few tomatoes and I won’t set out no more. We can live happily ever after.”
“Oh, Jack,” one chided. “You don’t do happily ever after.”
“I do, too,” Jack protested. “I’ve done happily ever after lots of times.”
“But then the page turns.”
“The page turns and off you go again.”
Whatever was coming through the corn was almost upon them. “Shut up,” Jack said. “Just shut up and come on.”
He tried to jerk the girls after him. Their hands were sweaty, almost hot to the touch, callused from weaving and churning. When they resisted, he squeezed harder and felt the delicate bones rubbing together under their skin.
“Ow,” said the girl he clutched with his left hand. “You’re hurting me!”
“You let her go!” the girl on his right cried, clouting him on the ear. “Don’t you hurt her no more!”
Jack dropped both girls’ hands and rubbed his ringing ear. He said, “What the hell’d you do that for? I’m just trying to save you!”
But when he looked up the girls were gone, vanished as completely as if they had been imagined for a moment along the side of a road and just as quickly forgotten. ♦
