Fear Mountain Page 4

  When we made it back to the clearing, the flashlight beam fell on the cabin door, partially ajar, further confirming my suspicion that Dad had limped his way back. No lights were on inside, no flame flickered from an oil lamp, no smoke curled from the stove pipe. The cabin was dark and quiet.

  Henry led the way, still holding the shotgun at shoulder level. He must have felt more than noticed that something was amiss. I followed close behind, guiding us with the beam. When we stepped past the threshold and entered the cabin I shined the light on Dad’s cot. It was empty, sheets and blanket thrown off and lying in a pile beside it. I moved the light to my cot, then Henry’s. Same thing. Stripped clean, linens piled hastily on the floor. Pop’s cot was no different.

  “Dad?” Henry’s voice sounded louder against the still quiet of the cabin and made me jump. No answer came from the darkness.

  “Dad.” I swept the light around the room in a frantic search for our father. “You in here? You okay?”

  The only answer was the steady thumping of my pulse in my ears.

  I looked at Henry, a sudden sense of dread replacing my anxiety.

  “Let’s look around,” he said, moving over to the table to light the oil lamp. He removed a match from the box, struck it, and put the flame to the wick. Within seconds asymmetric shadows with sharp angles gyrated against the walls and ceiling in time with the rhythm of the flame and the interior of the tiny cabin glowed in a warm orange. What the light revealed, though, was anything but warm. The cabin had been ransacked. Our duffel bags had been emptied, clothes tossed about like litter after a parade. Our food chest was open and empty, picked dry. Even the frying pan and pot were gone.

  Henry cursed then shot me a sheepish look and apologized.

  “It’s okay,” I said, then also cursed.

  Henry walked across the room, paused, then said, “The guns are gone too. The guns and shells.”

  We had five shotguns with us: Dad had brought three, Pop had one that probably hadn’t been fired in over ten years, and Henry was toting his. Four were missing—and shells.

  But what disturbed me most, what struck fear in me and conjured feelings of dread like I’d never felt before, was that Dad was missing too. Dad and Pop.

  Henry was steaming mad by now. He has a temper like Dad, controlled but as excitable and unpredictable as a wild bronco. One moment he can appear composed and merely annoyed by a stubborn nut rusted fast to its sidekick bolt, the next moment he’s in a red-faced, blood-pressure spiking, muscle-trembling feat that would make Antonio Valsalva, that famed 17th century Italian physicist and anatomist whose name depicts the artery-taxing maneuver in which Henry was involved, do a complete log roll in his grave. Kicking at a pile of clothes on the floor, sending them sailing through the air like maimed ducks, all wild wings and feathers, and landing in the corner, Henry cursed again and this time didn’t bother apologizing.

  “Who did this?” he said, pacing. He reminded me of the gorillas we’d seen at the zoo two summers ago. The dominant male, the silverback, paced back and forth on all fours, huffing and grimacing, baring his teeth, beating his chest whenever he felt threatened or endangered. Fortunately for both of us, Henry wasn’t walking on all fours and beating his chest. Yet. “And where’s Dad? What’s going on around here?” He stopped and looked at me like he actually believed I had an answer that would explain things.

  “I don’t know, Henry, but we need to calm down and think this through. The way I see it there’s only a couple of scenarios that fit. One, Dad made it back here and was delirious with pain.” I waved my arm around the disheveled cabin. “Maybe he was looking for something or thought he was looking for something, then went back into the woods after Pop. Two, Dad never made it back here and someone else did this.”

  Personally, I liked the first scenario better, it meant Dad was at least still alive and, given his current physical condition, couldn’t have gone far. But it was the option with the most holes. How could Dad have carried four shotguns, at least three boxes of shells, and three days’ worth of canned pork and beans and jars of applesauce and stewed tomatoes in his condition? I’d have been surprised if he could have walked at all.

  No, option two made more sense, though it was definitely the more frightening one. If Dad was still out in those woods it meant he either moved himself or was moved. And if someone looted our cabin it meant we weren’t alone in these woods. Recalling the other set of footfalls I’d heard in the woods, I slipped my hand into my pocket and felt the Nazi pillbox, remembered the sound of Pop’s groans. A cool sweat broke out on my forehead, and my mouth suddenly felt like it was lined with cotton.

  Henry must have noticed my sudden pallor for he lowered his gun and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

  I nodded and swallowed hard. “Yeah. I think Dad and Pop are in trouble.” I told him what I’d been thinking, about the third person in the woods with us, Pop’s moaning, the pillbox.

  For at least a full thirty seconds, Henry stood there, flexing his jaw muscles, pursing his lips, allowing the steam to build. When he spoke, his voice cracked from the effort to contain the mounting pressure in his chest. “We need to go after them. At first light. We need to find them.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. We only had one gun and whatever shells Henry had stuffed in his pockets. We had no food, a minimal amount of oil left in the oil lamp, and one flashlight that would soon be useless with a dead battery. If the search took longer than a day, which it very well could, we’d be in serious trouble. “Maybe we should take the truck into town and get help,” I suggested. “The more people we have on this, the better our chances of finding them.”

  Henry thought for a moment then said, “You go get help; I’ll stay and look.”

  I started to protest. I didn’t want to leave him here alone. We didn’t know how many of them, the ransackers, there were. If they were hostile, he’d be stuck up here in the middle of nowhere outmanned, outgunned, and easy prey. But Henry silenced me with a raised hand. He was so much like Dad, and I knew if he didn’t want to come with me I would never be able to make him.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be quick. Don’t do anything stupid, though, okay? If there’s . . . others, don’t be a hero. Just locate them and wait for help. Okay?”

  I waited for an answer but none came. I knew my older brother and knew he didn’t want to make a promise he had no intention of keeping. He may be stubborn and short-tempered at times with a country-bumpkin logic that educated people outwardly scoffed, but he was honest and decent and I loved him for it. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “I’ll be quick.”

  I gave Henry the flashlight, and he walked me out to the truck. Opening the driver’s side door, which creaked through its arc, I slid in behind the steering wheel. The shocks groaned under the added weight. I reached for the key in the ignition and felt nothing. “Did Dad leave the key in the ignition?”

  Standing beside the open car door, Henry looked at me, a bewildered blankness in his eyes as if he couldn’t believe I would ask such a ridiculous question. “He always does.”

  I felt again. “They’re not here. Let me see the light.”

  Henry handed me the light and I ran it over the floorboard, seat, dash. No key. “It’s gone.” The words sounded so final, like a door on a mausoleum slamming shut, sealing the dead inside. After climbing out of the car, my stomach growing more knotted and convoluted by the second, I pointed the light at the front tires. A worm of dread burrowed through my mind. But both were fully inflated. If we could angle the truck toward the lane, I could shift it into neutral and coast down most, if not all, of the mountain, riding the brakes to control our descent. If only all four tires . . . But at the site of both rear wheels sitting on their rims, the rubber of the deflated tires bunched and sagging like semi-liquefied wax, my stomach twisted so tight I thought I’d be sick.

  We were stranded, stuck on this mountain with no way of getting help. There was no way I was hikin
g out. By the time I trekked the eighteen miles to Woodsmall and got help it would be much too late for Dad and Pop. If I even made it the eighteen miles to Woodsmall. Unarmed and unskilled in the ways of the outdoors, I’d have about as much chance of surviving as a housecat in the middle of the ocean. Henry and I would have to stick together. We’d have to find Dad and Pop and . . . well, we’d have to find them first, then figure out the rest.

  “Looks like I’m staying with you,” I said to Henry.

  “C’mon,” he said, “let’s see what’s left inside. The sun will be up soon.”

  7

  By the time Henry and I finished combing the cabin for anything the looters had left behind the first hint of dawn was lighting the eastern horizon with a muted shade of pink. Our cabin sits on the east face of Bear Mountain so sunrise comes much earlier than it would if we were on the west face. It was a welcome sight too. The darkness was beginning to feel like an enemy, a curse, a plague. But our God is a God of order and the sun always rises, pushing back the darkness and giving way to hope and a new beginning, a new day.

  Inside the cabin, Henry found a few loose shotgun shells scattered amongst the clothes and bed linens, and I found a can of beans that had rolled under Dad’s cot and a bag of beef jerky I had stashed in the bottom of my duffel bag. Our visitors must have been in a hurry. Around the side of the cabin I found four clay jugs of well water. Dad had put them there the previous night to keep the water cool for drinking. It was enough to sustain four adults for four or five days.

  At half past five, Henry and I stood in the clearing, each donning a knapsack containing a change of clothes, a blanket, and a canteen full of water. Henry’s also contained the can of beans, mine the beef jerky, and both of us had an extra canteen draped over our shoulder. As before, Henry manned the gun, I the flashlight. I had no idea how much life the battery had in it but if our search took us through another night whatever was left would surely come in handy.

  Gripping the gun with both hands, Henry looked back at the cabin, then at me. “We’re not coming back until we find them.”

  His words were final, I knew that, and though I agreed, to hear him say it was like an admission of guilt and sentence of death. We’d lost Dad and Pop and now we’d have to find them or die trying. I nodded and forced a swallow past the lump in my swollen throat. Tears burned the back of my eyes. This may very well be the end of life as I know it. I was facing the very real possibility that I would die on this mountain, either of starvation, dehydration, exposure, or at the paws and fangs of some wild thing. “I should pray then,” I said.

  Henry looked at me then squinted into the woods. His usually crystal blue eyes were darkened by the shame of failure. I knew he blamed the whole thing on himself. Since Aaron went off to Europe, Henry was Dad’s right hand on the farm, picking up the slack and filling the void that Aaron had left and I’d failed to satisfy. To his credit, he never complained, never criticized, never shot a why-don’t-you-pull-your-own-weight look my way. He not only accepted his new responsibility with grace and maturity well beyond his years, I believe he embraced it. So as the oldest son not lost in some forest in France he saw it as his responsibility to care for Dad when he got injured and his responsibility to find Pop last night. In his mind, he’d failed at both. Pop was still lost and Dad’s whereabouts were a mystery. Not to mention the fact that the cabin was ransacked, our belongings stolen, the truck useless, and our situation looking bleaker by the hour.

  But the sun was on the rise, bringing with it better visibility, warmer air, and an inkling of hope. And right then, just the two of us dotting the vast and tangled woods that swathed the mountainside, hope was all we had.

  Apparently, though, Henry hadn’t caught the hint of hope in the air. I could almost see the burden he carried in the set of his shoulders, the slumping posture, the somber eyes, drawn lips. He didn’t see the dawn the same way I did. To Henry, dawn was a reminder that we’d just spent three hours looking and wound up worse off than when we’d started. To him, dawn was a sinister reminder of his failure, nature’s way of laughing at him, mocking him, taunting him.

  I said it again, “I should pray before we leave.”

  Henry kept his gaze on the woods and gave a half shrug of his shoulders. “So do it.”

  Henry and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye on religion. He (and Dad) saw it as something done on Sundays. To them, religion was church-going—black suit for fall and winter, gray suit for spring and summer, wetted and combed hair, Bible-reading, hymn-singing, praying, and sitting quietly until the preacher had preached himself out. The other six days of the week were for work.

  Henry and Dad are both good men, moral, honest, hardworking, and many would say godly, but the only time I ever saw either of them reading the Bible was on Sunday morning when Reverend Hudson said to open the Good Book to such-and-such a passage. And the only time I saw them bow their heads in prayer was when Reverend Hudson prayed at the beginning and end of each service and before supper when Dad would say grace in as quiet and reverent a voice as I’d ever heard him speak.

  Outside of Sunday, neither of them saw a need to crack open God’s Word. “Work cleanses the soul, brings a man closer to God,” Dad once told me, “not reading about stories that happened thousands of years ago to people you have nothing in common with. You want to see the stuffing of a man’s soul, you watch how he lives his life, how he provides for his family, how he treats others . . . you watch how he walks.”

  I don’t agree with him, though, not totally. I’ve known folk who appeared to be living lives of sanctified purity—saying the right things, wearing the right things, doing the right things—but inside were just as dirty and rotten as week-old garbage. Whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones. For me, living a life of holiness starts with knowledge. The more I study the Bible and read about men like Abraham and Jacob and Moses and Joshua, the more I examine the life of Jesus and the apostles, the closer I feel to God. I’ve followed the example of my mother. She starts every day with her nose in the Bible, says it’s breakfast for her soul.

  And that is why there’s a wall between Dad and me. That is why I’m such a disappointment. I’m nothing like him and everything like Mom. I’m not a laborer, my hands aren’t thickened with calluses, my back isn’t strong, my muscles aren’t corded. I’m “soft,” I once overheard him say to Mom, a “momma’s boy.” He followed that with, “I have two sons to help me around the farm, you can have Billy to help in the house. Just don’t make a sissy of him.” At the time it hurt like a punch in the gut, but I know he didn’t really mean anything by it. Dad was raised on a farm where work ethic was everything. A man was measured by the number of bales he chucked or the time it took him to shoe a horse. Reading and writing and studying was busy work, housework was women’s work. It was the way he was raised, he’d been brainwashed, so I didn’t hold it against him.

  I bowed my head to pray and stared at the grass. From the corner of my eye, I could see Henry still watching the woods, as if he expected Dad to come limping out with Pop on his arm. “Father, we’re in a hard way here. Pop and Dad are lost and Henry and I have to find them. You know where they are, Lord, so please lead us to them. And in the meantime, keep them safe. And us. Amen.”

  When I raised my head, Henry snorted and shook his head. “You ready now?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and adjusted the knapsack on my shoulders. “Now I’m ready.”

  It didn’t take us long to find the spot where we’d left Dad. Daylight was filtering through the trees enough now that we didn’t need the flashlight. The trees cast long, thin shadows across the forest floor and that, broken by the orange glow of the morning light, gave the appearance of a tiger’s stripes.

  At the base of the tree where we’d left Dad I found the depression where he’d sat. To the left of the depression the leaves were scattered and the ground marked with a tangle of scuffmarks. I looked at Henry and saw that he’d noticed it too.

  “Loo
ks like signs of a struggle,” I said, hating what the words implied even as they slipped past my lips. They suggested Dad didn’t just wander off in search of Pop. He was taken.

  Henry didn’t say anything but circled the tree, studying the ground. When he came back around from the other side his jaw was set and eyes narrowed. “There’s more on the other side. Looks like a trail leading that way.” He pointed in the direction away from the cabin, deeper into the woods.

  I felt two hands grip my stomach and squeeze, forcing bile into my throat. Deeper into the woods, the unknown, was not where I wanted to go. That feeling of being lost that I’d experienced all those years prior crept into my chest and surrounded my lungs like concrete, making it hard to draw in a full breath.

  Henry started around the tree, stopped and looked back at me. “You coming?”

  I nodded, afraid that if I opened my mouth I’d also open the gates holding back the tears. I didn’t want to cry in front of Henry, not now, not here.

  “Good,” Henry said, forcing a half-smile for my sake. He knew my fear of the woods. “Let’s go then. It’ll be okay.”

  8

  As we hiked through the woods, Henry in the lead, me sticking closer than his shadow, following the trail of disturbed leaves, the Nazi pill box burned a hole in my pocket. I had the strong inclination that whoever lost it was the same person who looted our cabin and possibly abducted Dad and Pop. What kind of person were we dealing with? A war veteran gone manic, dealing with the rage and fear and nightmares that would not give him a moment’s peace? I’d read of veterans returning from the war acting as though they’d been possessed by an evil spirit. Family and friends were potential enemies, home was foreign soil, and sleep was a tormenter that teased then tortured. The sights and sounds and smells they carried home from Europe or North Africa or the South Pacific haunted them both in wakefulness and sleep. Their minds had short-fused and disconnected them from society as they knew it.