The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

The Holy Bright Number by Andy Duncan

Once a high-yellow business girl named Clarissa lived in a dead cropper’s place at the head of a trail in a hollow up Tobaccoville way. The trail was made by deer and widened by men and narrowed again by the mountain itself in the years after the last cropper died and burley leaf dropped cheaper than souse meat and the bank let the fields go to laurel and huckleberries, so as she picked her way up the hollow the first time, she must have been walking on faith that the way led anywhere at all. Or maybe instead she had no faith, and walked into the woods for that reason instead, which is another kind of faith and one often borne out in the hills. But walk she did, and was surprised or not by the one room cabin she found at the head, and that very evening the folks on the other side of the ridge saw smoke pluming up from the dead cropper’s chimney and resolved to coon hunt elsewhere for a spell, for the dead have been known to kindle a fire. Soon the trail started widening up again, as fear of the dead lessened or grew, either way leading men all over the country to tramp the trail to pay their respects to Clarissa. On a chestnut stump at the edge of the clearing she set an unopened box of Red Devil Lye: on its side meant please abide; standing straight, no need to wait. Those who waited stood several trees apart, smoking, not speaking, each imagining himself alone between the great black woods and the lighted window.

One new moon night when only a granddaddy coon could have found his way from the turnpike to the head of the hollow, a stranger named Charlie Poole sauntered up the trail whistling, banjo in one hand and bottle in the other. As he passed the Red Devil he kicked it over. When he reached the front door he kicked it open. “Whoa, now,” said Clarissa as he plucked her up dripping and kicked the washtub a-slosh across the floor. Her wet cat shot onto the stove, snarling.

Later Clarissa said, “I got a good notion to gate that trail. How’d you find me in the pitch black dark?”

He fought free of the friendship quilt, grabbed the back of her head and said, “This dowsing rod here.”

Later she said, “I purely hate a banjo.”

“For the rest of your life on this round Earth,” he said, “whenever you hear a banjo, that’ll be me, talking.”

Still later Clarissa padded naked as a jaybird through the dewy gray grass, snatched up the Red Devil box and carried it back to the porch. A groundhog watched her from the garden patch.

“Look, then,” she told it, and went inside, slamming the door.

Months passed. Visitors got no farther than the stump, where, confused, they turned back. No one entered, no one left the hollow.

(Many years later, a young woman writing notes by hand amid a stack of books and records at a little desk in the college library in Chapel Hill asked herself what Charlie Poole could possibly have been doing for four and a half months in the spring and summer of 1924. The answer occurred to her even before she set pen to paper to record the question, and she snorted with laughter at herself, a sound that so emboldened the young stranger at the adjoining little desk that he peered over the partition and spoke to her. Whatever he said wasn’t much, but it was enough.)

One afternoon in the cabin in the hollow, Charlie Poole was laughing fit to bust. Clarissa’s tabby had decided his bouncing pecker was a play-pretty and was trying to jump up and bat it as Charlie galloped from one end of the cabin to the other, daylight breaking through the floorboards each time he landed, Clarissa’s arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and her lips against his ear murmuring giddyup. But Charlie’s laughter faltered and died as he slowed to a canter and then to a walk. Clarissa had to lick him to get his attention.

“Charlie! I said, let’s fetch that tick and straw from the yard and get this bed back together. It’s aired enough, and there’s thunder coming.”

“You hear it, too?” Charlie said, standing still.

When his pecker quit bobbing, the cat lost interest and went to wash itself under the stove. Clarissa slipped off Charlie’s back and knelt beside the water bucket, drank deep from the dipper. “God damn, it’s hot in here,” she said. “Wish that storm would come on. Might break the weather a little.”

“Ain’t no storm,” Charlie said. The way he said it made her look at him.

Another boom boom boom sounded, closer now, as if just the other side of the ridge. The canning jars rattled.

The cat yowled as Charlie trod on its tail in getting to his clothes. The rocker righted itself a little at a time as Charlie relieved it of britches, brogans, shirt.

“Charlie,” Clarissa said. “Charlie?”

The booms were in the hollow now, continuous and evenly spaced, like a heartbeat or a funeral march.

Charlie’s gaze met hers for a second as he slipped on his braces. “You ain’t dressed yet?” he asked.

One more deafening boom, then a silence painful to the ears.

A voice rumbled from the front yard.

“Charlie Poole, come out and be known to the Lord.”

Clarissa stood, mouth open, arms at her side, staring at the door, heedless of her nakedness, of the dress Charlie was trying to thrust into her hands. He finally draped it over her shoulders like a shawl.

“Charlie Poole, come out.”

A heavy thump like a body flung down made the porch boards groan and jumbled the knick-knack shelf. A souvenir dish from the Natural Bridge fell to the hearth and smashed. Another thump, then another, coming closer. With each one a bit more daylight appeared beneath the door.

Clarissa was trying to put on the dress, really she was, but in her terror and her focus on the door her arms were leaden, and her fingers wouldn’t work. It was like trying to button when she was a girl, while watching the contrary Clarissa in the head-to-toe mirror at the Federated store in Winston.

Behind her, someone pounded on the sash, but she didn’t look around. The whole floor of the house now sloped toward the door. Off balance, fearing she would pitch into the arms of whoever was now turning the handle, she instead fell backward onto the sagging ropes of the bed frame, where she clawed for purchase like a spider as the dress slithered to the floor.

The sudden breeze as the door swung open smelled of summer mud and honeysuckle. Filling the doorway, stooping to peer inside with deep-set ice-blue eyes, was the largest man Clarissa had ever seen.

He wore a bluish-white seersucker suit, jacket buttoned, pants creased as sharp as the ridge line, shirt collar hooked tight but no tie. His neck was as thick as Clarissa’s waist, his jaw ponderous, his mouth wide and crooked like the glancing blow of an axe, his rectangular head made more so by his terrible haircut, razored so close that he was patchily bald. His nose and brow were lumpy, too much in them. Meeting his steady, shadowed gaze, Clarissa thought of two miners’ headlamps deep down in the seam.

The well-dressed giant bared his teeth and said, “Evening,” so loudly she flinched and so low in pitch that her bones vibrated.

The giant stepped inside, massive shoulders hunched, buzz-cut head sweeping dust from the ceiling. The little cabin rocked like a cradle as he moved about, gazed at the dime store gifts that cluttered the shelves, the few dresses huddled in the chiffarobe, the stove battered as if clenched in a fist and unfolded again. Clarissa suddenly hated her whore’s nest, and all it contained, and herself.

“No, you don’t,” the giant rumbled, his back to her. She gasped, the answer to her unspoken thought more invasive than this uninvited hulking presence among the scraps of her life.

The giant knelt and began picking up the shards of the Natural Bridge, piling them in a calloused palm. They clicked together like a cricket’s legs. “You don’t hate nothing, Clarissa,” the giant said. “You’re just ashamed of a right smart of it.” He drew one last shard from between two floorboards, topped off the pile, then cupped his palms together and rocked them. “Afraid this plate here has been to breakfast,” he said, looking mournful, but in his hands the bits looked less like fragments of something broken, a ripped jumper, the insides of a jack-o’-lantern, and more like fragments of something yet to be made, the squares of a quilt, kindling. The cat twined around the giant’s ankle, purring, and rolled onto her back to present her belly.

“He lay down as a lion, and as a great lion,” the giant recited. “Who shall stir him up?”

He closed his eyes, brought his cupped hands to his mouth and blew into them, his cheeks inflated like a child puffing out a candle. “Restore unto Clarissa this geegaw, O Lord,” the giant said, and blew again, then opened his eyes and his hands. The smashed bits of plate were unchanged. The giant’s whole face wrinkled as he beamed at Clarissa. “Indeed, the Lord’s work is ever marvellous to behold,” he said. “You got any glue?”

Sitting on the edge of the bed frame now, a rope burn streaking across her thigh, she shook her head.

The giant grunted and stood, shoved double handfuls of plate into his jacket pockets like a bashful suitor. “My name’s Ralph Poole,” he said. His smile faltered on “Poole.”

Since the giant entered, Clarissa had not been studying about Charlie. But now, with a pang of guilt, she looked for him. She, the cat and the giant were alone in the room. The tatty curtains in the open window billowed in the rising breeze.

“Gone, of course,” said the giant Poole, shaking his head just as she realized, with something like nausea, that Charlie Poole was never coming back. “No matter,” the giant continued. “He ain’t no harder to find than cigarettes and beer.” He reached for the dipper, one huge hand enfolding the battered tin handle all the way to the bowl. He peered into the bucket as he stirred, the dipper clanking against the sides. “I reckon you know, Clarissa, that my little brother stinks like blinky milk. He is a varmint and a rake-hell and a hard, hard man.”

“I know him,” Clarissa said, enraged – I could have gone with him but you stopped me, somehow you stopped me - and blinking back tears. “But I don’t know you.”

The giant Poole lifted the streaming dipper, swung it toward her. “Drink,” he said.

The dipper rasped across her cheek once, twice, leaving a damp trail.

Still furious and sick at heart, she also was suddenly thirsty. She parted her lips. She drank the hot, metallic well water that had come to taste like home, looking into the giant’s eyes as he gauged her throat movements and tipped the dipper steadily, unerringly, as if his arm were hers.

When she was done he dipped more water and poured it onto her upturned face, onto her shoulders, her chest, and somehow she felt calmer and less naked, not more. The water was colder now and she shivered, her body awakening despite herself, as the rivulets coursed down her arms and back and backside and legs. Empty dipper still in hand, the giant Poole regarded her nipples without expression, a look Clarissa knew well.

She weaved a bit as she stood. Wanting to hurt him, she spread her feet a bit farther apart for balance, put her hands on her hips and said, “It’ll cost you.”

The giant Poole’s high-pitched chortle made Clarissa flinch and sent the cat streaking beneath the bed. “You think I don’t know that?” the giant asked.

He scooped her dress off the floor one-handed and tossed it at her. She tried to snatch it from the air but her body caught most of it, the fabric plastering to her damp skin. She had no trouble putting it on. Then the giant handed her the cat. It lay draped across his hand, purring.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To get some glue.”

Outside, the sun was past the ridge line, and a cloud was rolling through the hollow, spattering rain as it brushed the tops of the chestnuts and poplars. On the porch, leaning against the woodpile, were a gnarled walking stick and a double-headed, leather-handled drum. The giant reclaimed these as he passed. Clarissa held the cat close for warmth as she stepped from the porch onto the flat, mossy, rain-hollowed rock that served as a step, a puddle already collecting at its green centre, and then onto the clover that long since had taken the grass. Splintered locust wood, then water and stone, a damp cushion of green – she stood for a moment on each, her bare feet digging imaginary toeholds to mark the place as hers forever, and then walked forward, following the mist enshrouded figure of the giant along the path.

Entering the woods, the giant began to beat the drum one-handed with the stick, the steady boom boom boom flushing quail and squirrels and larger creatures, too, that crashed and slid and plopped out of sight as he advanced. Clarissa quickly saw that however she hurried, inviting stumbles over roots and thrashes among clinging, clammy leaves, the gap of twenty feet between her and the giant never closed, so instead she took her time, content with the drumbeat and the purring mass against her chest and the familiar underfoot treacheries of the trail. She tasted the rain and filled herself with the bullfrog-scented air.

In the thickest woods, just as Clarissa could only hear, not see, the giant before her, she heard another, more distant music: a banjo.

The drumbeats stopped, and Clarissa knew the march had stopped, too. She stood, swaying amid a copse of honeysuckle. She had not been lying when she told Charlie she purely hated the banjo and all the tunes he and Satan could commit with it, but he would play them, so she couldn’t help but recognize this one – “Budded Rose,” Charlie had called it.

“Too damn many notes flying out of this thing,” he once said, sitting drunk on her porch wearing only his bowtie and picking the evening away. “Better catch ’em, now. Hear that? Here they come. That’s one for your pocket, and one for your stove, and one for when you wake up hungry at night.”

At first she thought this “Budded Rose” was coming from that very porch, but then it was ahead of her, and then off to the side toward the rock fall, and then downslope and sharing a laugh with the water in the branch. It was everywhere; it was nowhere. Nowhere. Hungry at night, indeed. She wept into the cat’s fur, feeling as if she had awakened from the saddest of dreams.

Up ahead, the drumbeat resumed, and Clarissa walked forward again, though she was no longer following the giant but coincidentally walking along behind him. Clarissa was done following Pooles. The second had broken the spell of the first; now the first had broken the spell of the second. One day Clarissa would cast a third spell herself, and not on any damn Poole. Now if only Charlie’s banjo would hush.

To her relief, the giant, with more volume than skill, at this point began to sing.

I want to join that holy bright number

I want to join that holy bright number

I want to join that holy bright number

And turn some ransomed one home.

They number one hundred and forty-four thousand

They number one hundred and forty-four thousand

They number one hundred and forty-four thousand

Oh, turn some ransomed one home.

The song was easily learned, and Clarissa sang along as she trudged down the hollow. Her voice grew louder, the giant’s, fainter. By the time she reached the turnpike, a rutted silver scar leading into a gloom only deepened by the distant lights of Tobaccoville, the giant and his drum and his voice had melted away as if they had never been, and any trace of “Budded Rose” was temporarily lost in the rattle and snarl of a pulpwood truck labouring up the grade. Clarissa held the squirming cat tighter as she stepped forward and stood, proud and ready, in the middle of the road. Standing straight, no need to wait. She listened to nothing, squinted into the glow of the headlamps cresting the hill.