GRINNER

About a decade ago when I had an agent in New York, doors appeared to be opening to me, and one person who read this particular story and passed back a comment on it through my agent was none other than John Updike, a gentleman whose graciousness to new writers was legendary, and whose absence is still sorely felt from the literary world. Receiving encouragement from Mr. Updike, solicited though it was, felt like seeing the dawn after a long night of self-doubt. "Really? You mean to say I actually do write some things that might be worth reading?"

I hope you guys like it too.

Grinner

Quiet and deadly, it came first for Saul, then the day after we buried him, we lost Grace, too. It was little Amy and I who found her face-down on the barn floor, wicker egg basket smashed under her contorted body. Amy ran screaming, but I stayed. I was crying, a boy of eleven, too old for crying, but crying all the same because I loved my sister Grace, and I mumbled how sorry I was, knowing she wasn’t hearing a thing I said, sure that her soul was gone.

It was Father who turned Grace over, and there---we all saw it, those who dared to look---was the same hideous expression we’d seen on Saul’s face down in the hay meadow after the big rattler stung his heel. You see, on Grace’s pretty face, now dark and dead, was a terrible grin affixed to her mouth only, not her eyes, which told that she had died in fear. And then Father himself let out a terrible cry of anguish.

It was the Grinner that felled my siblings, and the Grinner would not stop till it had us all. Oh, a funny name you say. Yes, a merry name, I agree, so comical. But so deadly. The Grinner was a black curse known back in Scotland, from the high country near Loch Ness, where so many of us in the Valley came from. Crossing large water was said to escape it, so we felt safe across the ocean, but there it was undeniably before us, and it had killed two of our own.

Father was now a man with four children, where days before he’d had six: and all six fine and fair and sound as ever children could be. Father took my oldest brother, Alexander, and went riding into town to fetch the Reverend Morris Macclay, who knew about hermetical matters like the hideous Grin. For when Saul died, though the expression he wore was telling, we all held out hope that the thing was not as it appeared. Maybe the rictus was simply rigor mortis or a reaction to pain that made poor Saul die with his mouth stretched like a vast, wicked grin. We all prayed this curse of the old country, about which we’d been told so many horrific tales, had not found us on the other side of the ocean.

I was eleven, as I’ve said, and the year was 1790. We all lived happily in our verdant valley in the west of Virginia, near the New River. Our town was called Ness, after the great loch our fathers left behind, and there were sixty families who called the valley home, virtually all of us first or second generation Scots. We were simple people, hard-working, happy. We labored dawn to dusk, paid our taxes to the county seat and to distant Richmond, went to church every Sunday for three-hours of the Reverend Mcclay’s fire-spewing Presbyterian sermons, and on those Wednesday evenings we could make it in we went again as well. We were peaceable. We were content to live and harm no man, and we bore no ill will toward anyone. There had been no redskin savages to trouble our region since ’83 when the militia cleaned out the last of them and sent them north of the big River, so there was little to concern us.

Till once again the Grinner came. Till once again the Grinner found us.

In the past this curse had fallen more heavily on my extended family than on most. In Scotland, when my father was a lad, a grandmother and several aunts and uncles were taken, all of them killed suddenly by perfectly explicable things---falls, chokings, drowning in the loch while clubbing at spawning salmon, a freakish burning death after a single spark set a skirt alight. One of my cousins was gored by a vast black boar who came down out of the hills and savaged him on the road between the village and Inverness, only to vanish never again to be witnessed. This cousin, too, was discovered with the horrid grin locked on his face. None was quite sure when or how the curse began, and theories ranged wildly, we only knew, down to the youngest of us, that it was a spirit, and that spirit sought us, and its presence among us meant death. And now, half the world’s width apart from where our bloodline started, this demon had again discovered us.

Oh, not that we were the only ones in the valley to die. Alas, two days after we buried Grace beside Saul under the elm tree by the fence, Father heard tell of Samuel Robinson’s daughter, Anna, falling down to the bottom of the farm’s well. They’d searched the surrounding woodlands far and near till well past midnight calling her name against the echoing hills until by chance she was found, her sodden skirts dimly apparent in the dark waters below. How she came to be inside the well, a small child not tall enough to heft herself to the lip of the limestone wall, none could say. But when her cold little form, stiff and pale, was brought upward once again, her hair and dress dripping, on her face was the expression we knew all too intimately. And then all the people of Ness felt the terror fall on them, as first my family felt it fall upon us alone.

On the Thursday that followed the drowning in the well, two brothers, Ronald and George Mackearn, out squirrel hunting in the hills, died within six feet of one another and minutes apart, when first George’s rifle misfired and the ball went through his heart, and second, Ronald, while he was hauling back his brother’s corpse, lost his footing and cracked his skull on a jagged stone. The next day the schoolmarm, Miss Beade, was kicked across the brow by her own mare, normally a docile creature, fond of children and never known to spook. All their faces, the brothers’ and the old woman, told the true cause for their endings. Their faces told of the Grinning curse.

Our little cemetery in the churchyard filled rapidly and over the course of the fortnight since Saul’s death we grew used to seeing piles of brown earth turned atop a new grave.

William Walters, tall, broad-shouldered, red-faced, hot-tempered but good-spirited, a leading man of the community and soldier under General Washington in the late war, fell after he chopped his foot in two while cutting cordwood on his farm, and dropped stone dead before his sons could reach him, so ferocious was the unnatural red stream that gushed from his wound.

His face bore the telltale mark.

After that the mindset of Ness became one of dread, for if so hardy a soul as William Walters was vulnerable to the wiles of this black evil, none of us was safe. We knew ours was a community under siege, and that unseen, but real as the night itself, the Grinner was out there, waiting in the shadowy forest, watching past sunset thru our candlelit windows, looking for its chance to find us alone and strike us with demonic malignity.

The instinct within the human beast is ever to turn from danger, and some sought to flee. As normal does this seem as the urge to drink water when thirsty, or sleep when tired. The members of the Patterson family, headed by Gilbert Patterson, rawboned old man with a white beard down to this belt, fled leaving nearly everything they owned. They climbed into their wagon and went east toward more settled lands along the James, away from the rural isolation toward which the Grinner was most drawn. We waited, expecting with grim fear to learn the Patterson clan, either all together or one by one, had met doom on the county road, that bare set of mere wagon-wheel tracks worn into the soil through hill-forest so dense a cloudy day beneath it was nearly the same as twilight in the open.

But when five days after they’d set out word came back that they’d reached as far as Belloeville, a county over, we collectively breathed a sigh of relief and thought maybe it was possible to flee after all. Maybe the spirit did have limitations and was not all-powerful. But then Gordon Macmains pointed out the cruel arithmetic of our lives, that the fewer souls in Ness, the greater the chance the Grinner would focus on your own house instead of an empty one. After that we were less comforted. Some were of a mind that we should all of us, every last family, leave behind the town we’d made together on the frontier, and journey back toward the center of the state. But that was of no use, for we each knew that what troubled us would simply follow.

As long as we stayed together, my family, all of us within sight of one another, we felt safer, since folklore going back two centuries told us it was when one was alone that the foe struck. Mother and the girls, Amy and Margaret, stayed together at all times, and Father and Alexander and I were never out of sight of one another for a moment. We walked out to do the chores three as one, climbed the ladder into the hay loft as one, and descended carefully, oh, so carefully, always keeping our eyes on one another. We were but weak beings beside the evil and at times I swear I could feel it there, watching, waiting patiently as a spider. No charm, no prayer, no incantation lingering in our lore from times when blue-painted druids ruled the hills of Scotland was proof against the Grinner, and none could dispel it. Some say it was the familiar-spirit of a witch burned on a heath in the time of Queen Mary. Others had it that the foe was not a thinking force but reacted like a fog or a plague. But some hope we held to our hearts, because if the foe was said to be unswayed by mercy or cowed by countercurse, it was also stated by our grandsires that like any foul pestilence it had its season and then waned for a time, sometimes for decades, so that a man might spend nearly a lifetime and never meet it twice. Having struck down seven in our town, surely the height of its power had passed, had it not?

On a day some weeks after the deaths had begun, Father and Alexander and me, three more protected than two, loaded the wagon and drove over to the farm of our neighbors, the Weavers, who lived three and a half miles down the way. We often did this, we going there, them coming to us to informally trade or pay a call, as peoples of rural lands had done since time out of human memory. Once or twice on that trip, looking back over our wagon’s rear, I believed I spied a faint shadowy flicker, there for but an instant, bobbing in space perhaps a score of yards behind us, dull, the opposite of fairy fire, having a coldness about it that made my heart tap that much faster.

I liked the Weavers. Mrs. Weaver was a fat woman but solid, with large sun-burned arms, a worker, not lazy despite her girth, and she had five daughters, so when I was there she always doted on me, being a boy. I looked forward to seeing them that day, this normal social custom after weeks of siege. But we found the Weavers closed in their house, a family stalked, terrified. In fact Father had a time persuading Mr. Weaver, a burly man with a reputation for “a way with horses” to open his door and come out.

“There’s naught to fear, Weaver, what with so many of us under the sunlight,” Father calmly explained.

I noticed things that afternoon. I noticed that there was a crow’s feather nailed above the doorway, and that a small circle of pebbles was fixed to the ground near the front of the house. Later I learned such a creation was called a “spirit stomp” and that an old Scots’ belief had it that any malign force that unwittingly crossed the circle would be trapped within, vulnerable to exorcism via a sprinkle of salt and a splash of water from a clean, fast-flowing stream, both administered while an elder repeatedly read a passage (“And Death and Hell were cast into the lake of fire.”) from the Book of Revelation.

When finally Father’s cajoling drew Mr. Weaver out, and then the rest of his family, all of them disheveled, frightened, animal-like around the eyes, the five girls with tangled hair and dresses wrinkled as though long slept in, Mr. Weaver asked Father for news, and then asked if he’d seen signs the foe was weakening.

Father said he had seen nothing but in any case he did not ken what such signs might be, save for an absence altogether of tragic deaths where the Grin lay on the pale, frightened faces.

Mr. Weaver said nay, nay, a sure sign was that the force would strike out yet fail in its malice, whereas early-on when its power was greatest, it would always succeed when it chose its victim, like some silent panther in the treetops. He asked had any in town survived strange accidents?

Father said he’d heard of nothing of the sort, no, so Mr. Weaver shook his head and sighed and said then things were not yet growing better and all had best tremble and prepare to meet the perfect anger of their celestial maker. Then he confided something to us that made me break out in cold-flesh right there in the sunlight. Leaning close and making his husky voice low, Mr. Weaver confided, “We hear it sometimes, breathing in the night, moving against the logs of the outside walls, scraping as it circles our house and looks for us. We hear it...”

We stayed at the Weaver’s place till afternoon. Father and Alexander and I helped with chores that had been neglected while the family had locked itself into its cabin. Father was sternly careful that we stay together, we four, but at one time I did step around the side of a woodshed, not quite out of sight but nearly so, and as I reached low to fetch a small twig I spied several feet ahead of me, just beyond my easy reach, I felt a strange sensation grip me as if inside my head. I know not whether it was my instincts speaking more loudly than ever to this day, many years from the time of my boyhood, or whether it was the reaching touch of the thing we feared, urging me cruelly closer, but truly I discerned the stirring of a coldness and felt a breeze of such iciness as one might know in the center of winter. Then I felt a calloused hand encircle my arm and another take my shoulder in a strong grip, and I was yanked backward. A slight cry left me as my passive spell was replaced with a terror that peaked within my heart.

It had me!

But, no, it was Father! Only Father! Strong Father who had saved me! He tugged me backward, a look of fear in his eyes, a look I normally never saw there. He demanded to know what was I thinking? Then he gave my body a stout shake and pulled me to him for a scant instant in an embrace, and muttered my name. Looking me in the eye he bade me be more cautious and get the wood there in the yard, where we all might see one another.
From behind the woodshed we heard a faint rustling, though the wind was still.

Mrs. Weaver and the girls prepared supper for us, and a fine one it was. It was as if out under the sunlight on such a fine, chilly autumn morning all was so well that the Weavers felt restored. There was happy talk as we ate the roasted chicken and newly-baked salt bread, the mashed potatoes, boiled carrots and leeks. Mrs. Weaver teased that wouldn’t I soon come a-courting one of her fair daughters, fine little gentleman that I was? This made me blush and the girls across the table giggled together and whispered while they looked furtively in my direction. I drank gulp after gulp of warm milk from the little wooden mug I was given, and swung my feet under the oaken table on which we ate outside. Not old enough for my feet to touch the earth when I sat, I was still a boy at heart, not yet the man circumstance would all too soon force me to be. It was a happy time, a good moment…and one of the last we would have for a long while.

Finally, our visit completed, our neighbors’ farm replenished after days with them spent in hiding, Father, Alexander and I bade our farewell and set off the three miles to our home. It was perhaps a tad later than we’d meant to stay and the trip seemed to take unnaturally long, as if where one step of the horses had brought us out, now three were needed to get us back. The county road was, as I’ve said, but twin furrows worn in the soil by wagon wheels, and the old mountain forest pressed in close on either side, barely permitting a large vehicle like ours to pass. From where I sat on the right side I could easily let my hand stretch outward and touch the pliant branches that hung low. They bent forward and snapped back again as my hand passed. Some of the best ones for this lay nearly at arm’s reach, away in the shadows off the trail. I soon found myself, bored now, leaning to the wagon’s very edge, out into the path of the wheels, urgently seeking to grasp the twigs and send them shooting backward like the string of a bow.

“Nay, cease that,” Father said.

I did not question his command, for children in those times obeyed their elders, but I recognized an urgency in his voice and knew he had never before given such a command to me. At times he had even allowed me to trot some distance behind the wagon, picking up rocks and throwing them down the hillside, so long as I stayed within eyeshot. But not today. I began to envision the entity that stalked us shooting outward and catching my hand and yanking me under the wagon wheels, and there Father and Alexander would see me bloody and dead, my lips perhaps even then drawing away from my teeth, pulling themselves to that hated parody of glee. I was only too glad to keep my hands in my lap after that, and scooted closer to my brother on the wagon’s bench. The entire forest now seemed threatening.

We went forward in this fashion, saying little to one another, where in normal times Father would as often as not sing to us in his fine baritone the ballads of our ancestral home amid the mountains of Scotland. As I speak of these things from far into the future, I believe it is not the fanciful whims of old age when I add that on that fateful day even the horses seemed apprehensive, tossing their heads and flattening their ears. Father had told us before, Alexander and I, how beasts are perceptive and the moods of men are transferred onto them. It may be that was all it was, our own nervousness bouncing back to us, yet to this day I think otherwise.

And then from a distance ahead on the trail came a great crash. The horses shied and Father’s strong arm flexed as he held them steady. “Whoa boys, whoa now,” he called, a Highland brogue slipping into his words.

“What was that sound, Father?” Alexander dared ask.

“Ach, probably a tree spilling to the ground. No concern of ours today.”

“But, Father,” Alexander persisted, “it sounded so near…”

Father said, though with gentleness: “I know a lad who’d do better to be more mindful of the chores waiting for him when he gets home than of an old tree tumbling down in a forest.”

Yet Alexander had spoken true, and as we drew a furlong closer to home, we saw that a good-sized maple, twice thicker than a man’s hands could easily encircle, had fallen across the road in such a spot that it was impossible to go around. The wagon stopped and Father sat a moment, slight worry about his face.

“Will we have to go back to the Weavers’, Father?” I spoke up.

“Nay, nay,” Father grumbled, “that will not do.”

This heartened me, for I did not fancy spending the night at the Weavers, which was what a detour would have amounted to in the time of the Grinner, when no one wished to be out in the night.

“Lads,” Father said, pursing his lips, “take pains to listen most carefully to me now.”
Alexander and I leaned closer.

“Sons, I want ye both to be still in this wagon. Do not step out. Do not be enticed out. And hold hands. Yes, you heard me a-right. Alexander, take hold of your brother’s hand. There, that’s it. And now most of all, do not take your eyes off me, sons. Do not let your eyes leave your father for one moment. Not till I am back in the seat beside you. As long as you see me, as long as you do not look off…I think no harm can come to me. Do you ken?”

“Yes, Father,” we both said together.

“Look at me, lads.”

We did so and he smiled at us. “Such good sons,” he said. He ruffled our hair and said, “Such fine boys, I have.”

Only much later did I understand the dark fear that was barely hidden in his eyes, or know how a man is but a boy grown up and set into the fury of the wide world, and how much Father dreaded what he knew he had to do to get us safely home.

Then the strong man who was our sire stepped out of the wagon onto the ground and a little involuntary whimper left my lips, for I felt it keenly that Father was leaving a safe place and setting off where our foe held strong.

Father was a brave man, big-shouldered, fierce when facing a task. He had been a soldier, as all men of the town were, in the fight against the British, and he walked with pride in his step, even then, even there. Under the watch of the Grinner he strode boldly the dozen yards to the fallen maple, stooped low at the knees, and with a groan hefted the trunk from the clutches of the brown earth. Staggering slightly, rocking on his feet, Father finally found his gravity and bested the load, walking a few teetering steps around in a semicircle, his face purple, neck bulging, eyes squinted, and throat making a grunting noise. As he did this impossible task and cleared the road for us, I heard it plainly that in the old tongue of the Highlands Father was muttering the Lord’s Prayer …

“…Ar n-Athair a tha air nèamh, gu naomhaichear d'ainm. Thigeadh do rìochachd. Dèanar do thoil air an talamh, mar a nìthear air nèamh. Tabhair dhuinn an-diugh ar n-aran làitheil. Agus maith dhuinn ar fiachan, amhail a mhaitheas sinne dar luchd-fiach. Agus na leig ann am buaireadh sinn; ach saor sinn o olc; oir is leatsa an rìoghachd, agus an cumhachd, agus a' ghlòir, gu sìorraidh….”

Those words were beautiful and yet frightening to hear, for Father reserved them for only the most dire of moments in life. He’d once told us: God is ancient, and likes best the oldest of spoken tongues.

Against my sweating hand I felt Alexander’s gripping hard at mine, his nails denting my flesh. Obedient boys, we kept our father in our sight, not wavering, not thinking, only at that moment simultaneously awed at the show of proud strength we were seeing. Yet we were deeply fearful, for we were stopped in the woods while night gathered in the east, and the Grinner lingered near.

At last, though, we saw Father fling the tree sideways and give a great cry. The tree hit the ground with a mighty noise and Father laughed, a good sound to hear in that still, close-pressing woodland. And such gladness my heart felt at what he had done! My father, this great Samson of a man! Where I’d sworn not three together could have bested the fallen maple, there Father had done it alone. It was love that gave him the strength, that I know, love of his boys, his kin and home, and for that I honor him all the more.

Yet how hateful it is to remember what came next.

We had held Father in our sight, my brother and I, and steady had we focused, somehow protecting him, for the Grinner was a coward who hated crowds and liked best to fashion onto those who were alone or unseen. Just then, though, as Father started back toward the wagon, the sweetest sound caught our ears. It was there only an instant and was as nothing we had ever heard. A songbird...a woman trained in the high arts of music…even now I know not. It was a noise glorious as Heaven, and soft….so soft... My eyes for that one instant flickered away from Father’s approach, as did those of my brother. We flashed our gaze sideways toward the hillside, searching the trees, the honeysuckle and mossy stones seeking the source of the cruelly sweet serenade of this siren, and saw… nothing.

And then a second sound, far more horrible, flashed our gaze back to Father, sent our heads reeling to him. For in that one instant, that bare, terrible instant we faithless boys had been lured to glance away, the Grinner fashioned upon our beloved sire. We saw him catch at his throat, saw him spill to his knees beside the road, not falling, but as if shoved with brutal force from behind so that his mid-section bent first before his shoulders or feet. We saw his face darken to a black-scarlet hue, and his eyes, just before they glazed and rolled inward, lighted on us.

“Flee home…” he wheezed, even as the death-coldness of the Grinner took him.

I screamed and my scream mingled with that of my brother and of our horses, whose hooves kicked upward in their own terror, knowing that foulness was in our midst. And around us we heard it now, a sound as of low rushing wind, as of evil and hate spilling toward us, as if we were an island in a flood with waters swirling upward in a surge.

Father’s dead face changed. His mouth stretched, his lips peeled outward, his teeth barred themselves, a grimace…a Grin. How it was I found my hands taking the reins, urging the team onward down the path toward home I have never known. The sound continued, though, a gleeful caterwauling, a cacophony of many voices but no words, a keening exhalation of power and savage inhuman wickedness. It flew at us and the air darkened to blackness.

I remember little except that the horses ran the remaining space to our home, and that we made it there as the last rim of orange sky stood like a candle flame on the western hills. Mother and the girls were waiting in the doorway, faces testifying to their terror, for we were late and the presence was far more terrible at night.

I leaped from my seat and ran headlong against my mother, tears flooding from me, gasps for breath cutting my words to bits as I tried to tell her we had lost Father now as well as Saul and Grace. Brave, strong Father, gone, and how it was our fault, for against his commands we had been tempted by a beautiful sound to look away….look away.

The next day three men traveling toward the county seat found Father still lying on the road, face black from his stroke, teeth naked with a grin. With sadness they brought him home, for he was known to many and it was no mystery which house was his. When the tale circulated of him charitably visiting the Weaver family and hefting the maple and falling a moment later, the opinion was he died a hero’s death overexerting himself clearing the road, a task that would have weakened any man. None of us liked the idea that after his courage Father was cowardly attacked from behind and laid low by that malign force. It was a fact, but we shunned it. Everyone knew it was the Grinner, but it seemed a way to spite the foe and rob it of his prize if we maintained the tale of natural death to be true. And something else made it easier to pretend: Father was its last victim.
The Grinner was already weak when it came for him, that we knew. Had it been at full strength Alexander and I, too, would have been discovered dead on that trail. Perhaps I would have stumbled and cracked my head against a log, or Alexander drowned in the creek at the crossing but it would have gotten to us all the same. So when in due time a month passed…then two…three…and Father’s death was not duplicated anywhere in the valley, we came to know that for now the evil had glutted itself, or passed, the curse had run through, and we were to be spared. And so we were.

For a time.

I grew to manhood, and I and the others ran the farm for Mother, who never re-married. When Alexander found a bride among the Weaver girls and took to managing the homeplace, I sought my own fortunes west in Tennessee. It was the first decade of the new century, the nineteenth, a bright time, despite the threat of a second war with our red-coated adversary across the ocean. I settled near Nashville, bought my own land, married, brought in crops of tobacco each autumn, raised horses---the finest in the county!---and was a happy man. I have lived to see my grandchildren born, and even their children. I have somehow found the title “Oldpaw” and this makes me chuckle through my toothless mouth.

When I was eighty-two, war erupted between the northern states and those of the south. I favored secession and was in the majority among my family and fellows. Most of my grandsons and the two youngest among my sons ventured forth to take up arms. By 1862 most men were in the army, fighting for our cause, asserting, as we had in Scotland long ago, that no outside power had a right to force a man to live in a way foreign to his heart. I was proud of the cause and confident of victory, though the quest to achieve it brought many hardships to our lives. On the battlefields and in encampments, one after another, deaths came. I lost a son in Mississippi, and a grandson in the east. Still another grandson, James his name, fell ill at winter camp and died on Christmas Day. Our women wore black, our hearts were heavy. Age may deliver one from youth, but never from grief.

Perhaps it was the blackness of our moods in this time that brought the Grinner back, I know not. Maybe, since the Grinner was a coward, it was the weakness of the land that called to it, a land where only the old and the young and women were about, and the strongest gone to arms. But when the first death happened…my littlest great-granddaughter, but a toddling babe, so precious and beautiful, she who fell under the hooves of oxen, her face broken but her bloodied mouth split with a Grin….I was cold with fear, but somehow I hoped it was not as it seemed…

And then my grandson fell against the pitchfork in the hay field and was found stuck fast against it so that he stood upright in death…hideous to behold….and when I saw the expression on his face, that dark, unhappy Grin….I knew.

I knew.

The Grinner has risen once again, and it has found us, we of the bloodline of the Scottish hills. The Grinner is among us once more, and as an old man I am as helpless as I was as a child, and I know that many I love will be swept down by it.

And I know that this time, I shall be as well.

---October-November 2006