Fall Of Every Year: A Hallowe’en Tale

Fall of Every Year: A Hallowe’en Tale

Russell came into the kitchen with his shuffling stomp, his heavy boots spilling crumbs of red clay from their deep tread. The linoleum-covered floor sagged beneath his bulk as he crossed to the table, beneath the dust-draped avocado-green ceiling fixture. The cone of 60-watt light it spilled onto the table was as feeble as his mother-in-law’s voice.

Wont grits with yore aigs? she asked around a mouthful of blue smoke.

He grunted in response to her bobcat voice and the cigarette dangling from her lips. Russell neither drank nor smoked, but he did allow himself a can of worm-dirt tobacco every couple of days. He felt it was more fitting for a deacon to keep his vices less visible. Russell looked at Bobbi.

We got any of that grated cheese left?

She shook her head no, the pink tips of her gray hair wagging with the motion, drawing attention to her latest attempt to look younger. I kin make you some pan gravy to put on ‘em, Bobbi wheezed, nodding towards the canister of grits on the shelf.

Nope, he said, and dropped into a vinyl-covered chair, shaking the entire kitchen with the movement. He clenched his face in his customary scowl, thinking of how Bobbi ate her grits with butter and sugar and a little Pet milk, like some damn toddler. His mother-in-law shrugged and turned back to the skillet, blowing smoke into the grease-scented air.

Think you might brang in my flowers tonight? she asked, still facing the stove. Gonna turn off cold and I’d like to keep ‘em alive as long as I kin.

Russell didn’t respond. He sat watching her narrow back, the bulky gray sweatshirt and the shapeless purple sweatpants knotted against her waist with a band of sprung elastic, trying to remember how he had come to move in here with his dead wife’s mama.

Finally he grunted. I’ll try to remember, he said.

What you got on yore agendy? she asked.

That water hot? said Russell, ignoring her question and pointing at the tea kettle with its furry pelt of dust atop the sheen of grease on its green surface, the same green as the light fixture’s shade above him.

Hit’s hot.

He scowled again. Why don’t you fix me a cup of coffee, then, ‘stead of worryin’ about my plans?

Bobbi shrugged, her shoulders working in the timeless motion of the resigned. She took a cup from the dish drainer, spooned dark crystals into it from a jar, and poured in some water from the kettle. She stirred it, licked the spoon, and turned to Russell, handing him the cup across the oilcloth-covered table.

He stared at the spoon in her veined hand and thought a thought, then took a sip. Too hot. He sat the cup down, grunting.

Well, since you’re so interested, I was plannin’ to blow them leaves down into the trees.

She turned back to the stove and flipped the eggs with a spatula. Guess nobody rakes leaves no more, do they? Watch for them copperheads. They like to hide under leaves.

He picked up the coffee again and tested it. Reckon I know the habits of serpents, he said. Bobbi, in her silent mind, did not disagree.

The eggs were done and Bobbi slid them onto a plate and added two biscuits from the cookie sheet and placed the food on the table, sliding the plate over to Russell. She turned and stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer, mindful of how much her son-in-law hated when she put one out in a plate of food she’d finished.

While he ate his breakfast in great, untasting bites, Bobbi watched him. His presence with her in these withering years was as much a puzzle to her as it seemed to be to him, and Bobbi had long ago learned not to poke too deeply into mysteries.

Russell took a final bite, filled his mouth with the last of the coffee, and chewed everything into a slurry before gulping it down. He scratched at the stubble under his jaw and belched, then challenged Bobbi with a glare. She said nothing. Finally, he took the little round tin from his shirt pocket and pinched a bit of the tobacco from inside it and fingered it into the inflamed space between his lower lip and his bottom teeth.

Gonna get after them leaves, he announced, and stood with some effort. Breeze shoulda dried ‘em out some.

Bobbi watched him sidelong as he shambled from the kitchen, his belly like a wheelbarrow beneath the stained red flannel shirt. She lit another cigarette with a kitchen match; her arthritis made it difficult to flick the cheap plastic lighters she once used, and she blew the smoke towards the closed window, framed in the yellowed white curtains, thinking of Jamie, dead these thirteen years, and of the red flannel nightgown she’d worn to tatters, the gown Bobbi had given her for Christmas all those years back. She picked up Russell’s breakfast dishes and turned to the stove and sink, following her pattern for the day.

***

He kicked three gas cans before finding one at least half-full. Russell primed the leaf blower with the bulb, yanked it into roaring life, then shut it down, nodding. He filled the plastic reservoir with gasoline and capped it, then adjusted the shoulder straps on the rig. He grunted his way to his feet, swaying on the soles of the heavy boots, then finally finding his balance. He shouldered the shed door open and went outside.

One of Bobbi’s half-wild cats was picking its way with care through the leaves, headed towards the garage. When it saw Russell, it lifted its tail in recognition.

Git! he bellowed, and the cat got. For good measure, Russell stooped and scooped up a fragment of a brick and threw it after the animal, striking the side of the garage as the cat slipped under a broken board. He moved the dip around in his lip, grinning around its bulge. Felt good to scare one of her useless-ass cats. She’d nag at him about it later – she was almost certainly watching from the kitchen window – but it was worth it. Cats don’t earn their keep, he thought. Russell wondered briefly what cat meat tasted like. Might not be too bad.

His belly led him down the hill to the meadow where the leaves were so thick on the ground. Beyond lay the woods where he would blow them. He stood for a moment, peering into the gloom of the woods. Then he pulled the cord on the blower, shrugged into the rig, unlatched the nozzle, and walked to the near edge of the carpet of objects that not long ago had been waving high above where he walked, catching the sunbeams the way good center fielders shag flies, transforming the warm, golden light into rich, green food. But now they lay splayed before a man who had never spared them a thought except to curse their presence on the ground in the fall of every year.

Russell made steady progress and was halfway down the meadow before movement drew his attention. Down there, just inside the treeline, he saw something shift. Whatever it was seemed to be large. Bear? he wondered. Naw…too fast-moving for a bear. The brief moment of his oblique view of it had given him the impression of something that moved in an angular, almost asymmetrical fashion. Russell stared at the same place, nozzle aimed at the bare patch of ground where the engine-powered air had blasted away the dead and dying leaves. He stared. Nothing. He swept his eyes through the trees, back and forth, up and down. Nothing.

Prob’ly a damn coon, he muttered. And turned his attention back to the blower and the leaves.

When Russell reached the edge of the trees, he adjusted the angle of the forced air and made the leaves cascade up in a rolling swirl, like a surfer’s curling wave. The russet blizzard arced up and over, around and under, washing towards the interior of the woods, where he planned to stop.

And that was when he saw the large mound of leaves before him.

The pile was too perfect, too sculpted. It sat like an enormous, pristine scoop of brown and red and yellow ice cream, plopped down from the sky by some measureless hand.

It was moving.

Pulsing, actually. Almost as if breathing. There was no breeze and Russell was not aiming the blower nozzle anywhere near the pile. He reached back and switched off the machine strapped to his back.

He stood motionless for a full minute, watching hard. The pile moved constantly, expanding and contracting. Russell noticed that none of the leaves on the pile’s perfect surface shifted or stirred or fell with this movement.

Not right, he thought. He began walking towards the perfect pile of leaves.

As he neared it, Russell thought he saw movement to one side. When he looked to his left, he saw nothing. He looked back to the right. When he looked again at the pile of leaves, he noticed that a few dead pine branches had fallen on top. They looked like the bones of large fish, gray and curved and sharp.

The wild grapevine had been growing for some years. It had snaked its way under the ground, then across beneath the surface of the soil, then back up and along the ground until climbing onto a maple sapling. The part that was exposed above the earth was a nice little loop, like a stirrup, and Russell’s boot slid right into it and stopped his progress down the slope.

He pitched forward onto his face, hard. The shock of the impact made him gray out for just a moment, and then he regained his senses. He rolled his face to one side, brushing dirt and leaves from his nose and mouth, and tried to push himself up onto his elbows. Something was pressing him down into the dirt.

No. Something below the dirt was pulling Russell down into it. His torso was joined to the earth as if welded there.

No. Something else was wrong.

Heart attack, he thought. They been warnin’ me. But there was neither pain nor pressure in his chest, none of the signs he’d been cautioned about. He remained still for a moment, then tried again to rise, but could not. Russell was more correct than he knew. At the moment of his heavy body’s meeting the immovable earth, a tiny fleck of his body’s own manufacture dislodged from one of the innumerable subway systems buried inside him, a fleck smaller than a flake of pepper from a shaker, and it traveled faster than the time it takes to feel fear, and it lodged in a place and blocked off a spot, and Russell’s body switched off certain relays, and it all failed him in a glorious and terrible cascade.

A sound in front of him, soft and sibilant.  Russell managed to lift his head just a bit, and looked down the slope. The perfect pile of leaves was there, pulsing and moving, as if breathing. No — not like breathing. More like a series of muscles flexing, bunching, undulating beneath some tawny shield of skin. He tried to take a breath but his chest was crushed against the ground, and Russell could not call for help. He could only work his soundless mouth as his body, carried by its own ballast, slid quickly down the incline towards the pile of leaves. The movement caused his head to arch back and his eyes were on the leaves as he rushed to meet them, watching as his own inertia pulled on him with a relentless pressure, a pressure without pity or mercy, and in some small miracle, the toes of his boots beat against the ground in a thudding tattoo. The pulsing pile of leaves finally revealed knotted and bulging shapes with their pretty patterns on them, pretty and symmetrical as artwork, and as darkly beautiful as copper. He closed his eyes when he realized that the smaller snakes were going to rise to meet his face. Caked mud flaked from the soles of his boots as they dug trenches into the damp, leafy earth.

***

Bobbi watched out the kitchen window. The black cat with the white patch on its chest was sitting next to the garage, sniffing the air. A leaf drifted down in the cooling air and the cat batted at it with one paw, playful and predatory in the same instant. Bobbi reached for her cigarettes, thinking of how she would fuss at Russell when he came back to the house, reprimanding him for scaring one of her cats.

Might as well go bring in my own flowers, she thought. He’ll be mad as a snake with shingles if I say a word to him ’bout tormentin’ my cat. She went to the door and propped it open, looking at the pots full of flowers, and then over at the neat, leafless meadow.

 

~ copyright 2023 by S.K. Orr