The Boy Who Loved Her
When these lips shall never more Press a kiss upon thy brow But lie cold and still in death Will you love me then as now? _________ The Carter Family, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" One night a few weeks before the season began at Smith Mountain Lake, about a year before that terrible tragedy that befell their friend, Mike Fischer, the Lightfoots and the Lynches had a late night supper, on their back patio at Bernard's Landing. When it was done they opened two bottles of wine, and told stories. The hour grew late and the Spring constellations appeared in the sky, glimmering brightly with so little light pollution, in those days, to dim them. They were all enacting a part and a parcel of their ancestry which they could not understand but which manifested with the aid of fermented grapes from France - the ancient Appalachian institution of the raconteur, the telling of the strange and the uncanny and the marvelous. They were all, to a one, from West Virginia, and perhaps the way the evening was so pristine and hushed it brought out the instinctual urge in them to share, to speak, to let loose into the night sky some hidden, some esoteric parts of their own lives. Before they began, they decided to make it like a contest - whoever had the best story would get a bottle of wine from the rest of them. All had a turn. Gus Lynch, who everyone called Junior since he was, after all, a junior, told the story of his father, Gus Lynch, senior, who they all called Pappy. He had earned his Bronze Star and his Purple Heart on Triangle Hill in the Korean War - his best friend was that famous fella, Ralph Pomeroy, and don't you know that Pappy saw the poor man blown apart right in front of him? Had his religious conversion, then and there - fell to his knees and asked the Lord to save him. And ever since he's been the preaching man of God he is now. Archibald Lightfoot chilled them all recounting how he may, or then again may not, have had a run-in with some bogey-creature in the deep wilds of Boone County - he shuddered to tell it, the pieces that he could remember from his fright, about the accursed plot of sunflowers that, he swore, were alive and watching him as he drove late at night. The gathered group shared his shiver, but a shiver was all it earned, because there was too little to go on - too many ways Archie (they all called him Archie to his never-ending eyeroll) could have hallucinated the whole thing with highway hypnosis. Maggie, Lightfoot's wife, gave her favorite anecdote about the time she had dinner with Billy Collins, the poet. This was neither scary or heartrending, but a good example - subconscious, maybe, and luckily for her not thought of by those gathered - of her upsettingly long list of wasted talents. But it was sprightly and charming, and it gave some welcome relief to the heavy direction the conversation had taken. Now it was Lynch's wife, Susan Anne, to have her chance to tell a story. Before she began, she downed her half-glass - red, Merlot, from Williamsburg, her favorite - and poured herself another. Her husband frowned, and raised an eyebrow. "This what I think it be?" he hazarded. "Tis," she said sweetly, a little knowing in her voice. Maggie leaned in closer. "Well if she needs that much wine it must be a good one!" "Tis," Susan Anne repeated, this time with a coy wink - Maggie and Archibald both saw Junior roll his eyes. Archie regarded her skeptically, his seersucker-draped legs crossed in his chair and one of his expensive cigarettes between his fingers, burning with his anticipation. "No reason to keep us waiting then, Suzie - get on with it." Susan Anne laid down her glass, put her hands together - and smiled. "Alright. Here goes. This one happened many, many years ago - and maybe it was just a dream, I'll never know. But I'd like to think it was real." And she began: Before she was Susan Anne Lynch, she was Susan Anne Ashby, and she grew up in Colfax, just a little ways south of Fairmont - it's a tiny town nobody has ever heard of and very few people hear of afterward. Back then she was just another West Virginia girl - mousey-brown hair, light brown eyes, she tried her best to be a good girl. This was hard to do, because her father was a scoundrel whom to this day she still hated - he ran around on Susan Anne's mother Mary Anne, drank too much and just about humiliated their family every chance he got. But then one day, up in Fairmont, he said the wrong thing to the wrong stranger in the parking lot of a pool hall and got shot enough times in the chest to be dead on arrival at the hospital. Susan Anne's family was Catholic and her mother couldn't - so she said - divorce the man, so she was relieved when she was finally rid of him. But even his absence caused problems: Mary Anne struggled to keep their family together, Susan Anne and her three brothers who never talk to her anymore now that they were all grown - though their mother worked hard, so hard, they remained very, very poor. The kids at school made fun of Susan Anne unmerciful, calling her all sorts of names and making all kinds of insinuations about how much of a philandering asshole her father had been, bringing shame to their family years and years after that rat bastard finally got what was coming to him. They made fun of her shabby clothes and her withdrawn, shy demeanour, a direct result of being constantly ashamed and seeing her mother go through so much agony because of one man. The only one of her classmates that showed her any compassion was a slight, blondish boy whose family had come from Morgantown some years before. His name was Shane Evans. Shane, his parents, and his grandmama, who was blind and spent her days making crazy but beautiful quilts on a rocking chair on the front porch, lived in a much nicer house than she did, because his family made much more money than hers did, but he was modest and kind and recognized that nothing the kids made fun of Susan Anne for was ever her fault. He was always sticking up for her against the other kids at school, and Susan Anne never forgot it, never stopped being grateful. Shane was a sickly boy who never could keep on much weight and often coughed when the weather was too warm - Susan Anne never found out what was wrong with him, because he'd never tell her: she'd ask, he'd shake his head, make some excuse about weak blood, weak lungs. Nuthin ta concern yew, honey. And he'd smile his sad, sweet smile. She and Shane took to courting, once, but it was never a serious thing, so they just remained friends - best friends - throughout middle school and then high school. Eventually the kids she went to school with grew up and stopped mocking her, at least to her face, and Susan Anne always thought they would have never stopped were it not for Shane. When Susan Anne would be over at the Evans' for dinner, his grandmama would eat very cleanly and politely and excuse herself after sitting just a little while at the table to pace back out to the parlor and resume her knitting. Even though she was both ancient and blind - her eyes were milky-white, no pupils visible - she knew her way around the house and could go about unaided. She, like the rest of the Evans family, took a shine to Susan Anne, and told her that, just from her voice, she had a good heart, she was a good girl. Grandma Evans practiced a kind of peculiar folk-magic that had been handed down to her from generations of granny-women in Wetzel County, where her people were originally from. Though she seemed nice and sweet enough she would every so often make startling and upsetting pronouncements about things - a terrible storm was on its way, someone we know is in trouble, a stranger would bring good news. She would explain it as having knowledge of a plethora of obscure omens - things that others wouldn't notice, or not think anything of, but which held, for her, some dire, esoteric importance. And she would always conclude her observations with the same cryptic phrase: "The hills take care o'their own..." At any rate, the friendship between Susan Anne Ashby, Shane Evans, and his family lasted throughout the time they were growing up. Finally things started to look up for Susan Anne and her family: she got accepted to Marshall and Mary Anne had saved just enough money for her to go, the first person in their family to attend college. She was thrilled, but it meant saying goodbye to her best friend - Shane was going to Fairmont State instead. They had one last tearful farewell in front of Shane's house - his grandmamma on the porch in her rocking chair, seeming to watch them, with her blind, unblinking eyes. Some months went by, and the two friends wrote to each other whenever they could, and after awhile it crossed Susan Anne's mind to try and court Shane Evans again, though they now lived far apart. The day she was going to proposition him this way, however, she received a call from her mother, telling her that Shane, who had always been possessed of weak lungs and a fragile constitution, was in the hospital for some infection in his upper respiratory tract. It seemed serious, Mary Anne said, telling her to come up as soon as she could. When she got there, however, Susan Anne was given terrible news: the infection was unresponsive to antibiotics, and it was soon clear that Shane Evans was dying. They released him from the hospital to die, surrounded by his family, in the house he grew up in. By the time Susan Anne got to the house it was like a funeral already - her mother met her in the parlor and held her hand as she came upstairs to see Shane propped up on the bed, his grandmama beside him looking very grave and serious, and on his other side a Methodist minister from down the way, come to give him the final blessing. He couldn't speak, his breaths coming in horrible rattles like a dying engine in an old truck - but when he saw Susan Anne, he smiled again, that sad, sweet smile that Susan always knew. Now Susan Anne paused, a little falter coming to her voice, the red in her glass not enough to balm and salve the wounds of a little under a decade before. "That's so sad..." Maggie offered. "Oh, oh my - is this a sad story?" "A story y'ain't need ta be tellin..." Junior muttered. "Well I don't think that's rightly fair, Junior," Archie said with a smugness he could not hide. "Just because your women carried a torch for someone else all them years ago--" "That ain't why," came Junior's answer. Susan Anne nodded gravely at her friends, and her husband. "That's true, it ain't no sad story - here, now, it gets - well, it gets a little weird." Up came Archie's eyebrow. "Is that right, now?" "Oooh!" Maggie exclaimed. "This'll be good!" "Dammit..." said Junior with a concluding murmur. So Susan Anne continued: As the gathered family and the priest and the doctor stood in Shane's room, something strange - very strange - started to happen. In West Virginia - they all knew it - there's a kind of flying squirrel that's not found anywhere else, and in fact is its own species. They're usually in the western part of the state, but sometimes they come up north...and one of them appeared by the window in Shane's room. Even with the terrible tragedy before them, everyone saw it - the little gathered crowd of people there, no more than a dozen. It was a most unusual sight - they are peculiar, furry little creatures, more delicate-looking than their more robust tree-dwelling cousins, with big, timorous eyes, and a handsome webbed cape that they use to glide from branch to branch. But then there came another. And then another. Two more - three more. Soon the whole windowsill seemed full of those queer little flying squirrels - there had to have been a whole half-dozen! And they stared into the window. They seemed be staring right at Shane, each one of them, unwavering, motionless...and Shane looked at them, in turn, their glowing, preternatural eyes of orange starfire eyeshine. This would have been an upsetting occurrence, one that none of those gathered would have wanted to begin to explain, but Granny Evans made it infinitely worse. Though she was blind, she seemed to somehow detect, or sense, or see, that there were a gathering little passel of flying squirrels at Shane's windowsill - she seemed, Susan Anne, to look over and watch them, though she could not see them. And then - in the dreadful, still silence of the room, the kind of noiseless atmosphere that makes the approach of death all the more terrible - the old woman spoke: "Them squirrels is a-comin fer em," Grandma Evans pronounced. "Him ain't gonna die - no sir, he'll be right fine, but y'ain't gonna like what he gonna be, no sir." And then she shut her blind, milky eyes. "What I tell ya, now? The hills take care of their own, by God - always have, always will." Over the sounds of Shane's own rasping breaths came a stunned, horrified silence, overlapping the mournful quiet already there. Shane's parents stared at the old woman in abject horror - and Susan Anne, utterly overcome, burst into tears, and ran from the room, out of the house. Shane died later that night, not an hour later, Susan Anne was told, and the gathered passel of squirrels vanished into the evening as soon as the poor boy drew his last, labored breaths. He was not yet nineteen - gone far, far too soon. Now, again, Susan Anne paused in her narration of her tale, a strange, enigmatic smile crossing her face. She stopped long enough for the three others in their group to notice: "Well is that it?" Archie demanded. "So an old lady said a crazy thing when some squirrels showed up, that's--" "Shhh!" ordered Maggie. "She's not done." She looked askance at Junior as he shook his head, rolled his eyes. Susan Anne smiled. "Thank ya sweetie - I ain't." She continued: A week after she got back to Marshall, after Shane was buried, Susan Anne heard from her mother that some late Autumn rains had caused the creek near where the Evans family to overflow its banks, and the coffin that Shane had been freshly laid to rest in had washed away - they never found it. This was upsetting enough, but it was compounded by Susan Anne's own struggles as a college freshman - the experience was soon overwhelming her, and without her erstwhile friend to help her she felt lost, a failure, alone. As the weeks wore on she began to think that was she was seeing things - in the trees or in the bushes walking to and from her dorm, she thought she could see flashes of light...orange, fiery, but vanishing just as quickly as she looked. She thought at first she was seeing things, until one night when she was walking with a friend - it's been so long, she couldn't remember who - thought she saw them too. Susan Anne would stop and stare at the tree or a bush - it was either or, never both - where she thought she saw those odd light-flashes, and eventually, after only a few days, she began to think they were eyes. "Now why I thought that, I'll never know," Susan Anne confessed with a frown, throwing her hands out, wine glass still in one, as though to encompass her entire bewilderment. "But that's what I thought they was - big ol eyes, watchin me, in the nighttime." Rather than get scared, or thinking she was crazy, Susan Anne began to think of the eyes as something safe and comforting - some guardian angel that was helping her in Shane's absence, and in the new difficulties of being a college student. Months went on like this, and her first semester and her Christmas visit back to see her mama and brothers in Colfax behind her, Susan Anne still told nobody about what she thought was her own guardian angel that followed her everywhere. As her second semester began, Susan Anne met her future husband, a charming backwoods rascal named Junior Lynch, and - falling for each other quickly - soon went steady together. Susan Anne paused the story to wink at her husband, who was now distinctly nonplussed. Now right about the time she and Junior got together, Susan Anne began to notice the lights - the eyes - more and more frequently, and it began to concern her, because this had never happened before. What did it mean? Night after night the eyes of her guardian angel - or what she had fooled herself into believing was her guardian angel to kid herself that she hadn't gone bananas - appeared, brighter, longer, lingering, seeming to look at her, look after her, and then vanish. She began to get scared. And then one night... Once more Susan Anne paused her story to think. "I ain't ever been sure...if what I seen was real. I know the lights were, I seen em, others seen em - but one night it was just me, and I..." She shook her head. "I ain't ever been sure - if it was a dream or not..." One night - she began again - it was in March, and it was finally starting to get warm, so Susan Anne had taken a little walk alone. She was coming up on a little part that led into some forest, when she saw the eye-lights, brighter than they had ever been. She froze where she was, thinking that whatever her guardian angel had truly been was about to reveal its true form. And she was right. Out of the shortest branches of a tree, it appeared: a shaggy, furry thing, caught between being a man and being an animal. It had dexterous hands and feet that gripped the branches of the tree, its lower body a luxuriantly fluffy bunched-up mass of skin that, if it were unfurled, could undoubtedly help it glide through the air. Its eyes - what had haunted Susan Anne all this time - were a gorgeous, hypnotic, gemstone-like pyrotechnic of orange eyeshine, internally luminous, that threw out a light wherever they went, and in the night it would transfix, in the night it would terrify. But Susan Anne gasped aloud - at the face. Even with the high, pointed, furry elvish ears, and the bright orange eyes that glowed with an inner fire, and the rest of the hybrid squirrel-boy body - she could still recognize who it was. The old woman had been right, the squirrels had taken him for one of their own. It was Shane. All this time he had been still afraid she would be vulnerable, still afraid she would need his help, however long and however far away he had to be, he would watch her, from a distance, protecting her in his new, immortal life that the flying squirrels had somehow given him. All this time - it was Shane. She was completely, wordlessly overwhelmed with feeling - she stood, transfixed at the beautiful, elfin way Shane had achieved his synthesis of boy and animal. And then - through her fresh, happy tears - she spoke to him, the creature in the tree. "Oh - oh Shane!" she called, her voice choked with sudden emotion, an outpouring of grief that she had suppressed and held back for months and months. "It - it was you! But - I'm alright, Shane - I'm alright! You don't need to look out after me, anymore! You - you can go, be with your own kind, now!" And then the creature - Shane, it had to be, with his sad, human face, and his delicate, furry shape, and his tears that glistened in the streetlight - vanished, disappeared, melted, whatever you'd like to call it, into the trees, and with a rustle, into the forest behind it. Shane - the new Shane, what Shane had become - was gone. "After that I never seen no eyes in the dark, or felt like I was bein watched," Susan Anne said, a kind of conclusion, finality, bringing the action of the story to a close. "My guardian angel - Shane, it had to've been him, he - I dunno - I guess he come show hisself because I was with Junior now, n'he was jealous..." She shook her head, long and slow. "I never told em I loved em - I - I still think bout that sometimes. Chances ya never took, decisions ya coulda done different..." She sighed. "Course I think about what I seen that night, and yanno I wonder - were it a dream?"
She pointed with her free hand to her husband, willfully disregarding his trained, steely eyes on her. "This one's daddy seems ta think I weren't seein no haint - but I'll never be sure, long as I live." And then she lifted her glass, neither smiling nor frowning, and said: "But up ta that, afore that, I swear, every word of it were true!" A dreadful, time-killing pause fell over the group with the finish of the story. Who was not to believe her? Susan Anne loved telling stories but she was an honest woman, everyone knew that - what else to make of her story? So it was, that the little jet-set gathered there on the back patio, overlooking the broken glimmer of Smith Mountain Lake in the starlight of that early Spring, discovered that Susan Anne Lynch had, all her life until she was a freshman in college, someone watching over her - a sickly boy from Colfax who turned into a half-squirrel, a creature of the forest... ...or so she said. "Well my goodness!" Maggie's prim face crumpled into a look of horrified incredulity - it was clear Susan Anne had won the story contest that night. But Junior, and now inexplicably Archie too, looked at each other in disgust and horror - sourly one motioned with his head to the other to get up from the table, and they departed back to the downstairs kitchen to fetch some more cigarettes. The ladies watched them go in the kitchen in silence - watched Junior shake his head rapidly and then hiss some kind of invective at Archie. "What is his problem?" Maggie asked, a smaller guffaw escaping her. "Oh who knows," Susan Anne replied. "Probably just another of his moods. He really ain't like me tellin that story but - yanno, he don't ever say why!" Maggie studied the two of them with narrowed eyes - watching her husband as he folded his arms and raised his eyebrow to listen to whatever stream of stress was leaving Junior at an incredible rate. "Well," she said, "whatever it is, he really sure don't like it." Susan Anne finished her glass of red and relaxed in her chair, dismissing her husband and whatever he must have felt with a wave of her hand. "Who cares! It was just a story - I may have dreamt it all, yanno? If he so upset with me tellin that story why dun he tell me why? It's silly." "Well why you think he don't like it?" Susan Anne considered the thought. "He did - say sumthin once, sumthin bout - he don't like it when people turn into animals or all this. You know he really ain't like none o'them - whatcha call - werewolf movies." "You're right, that is silly! It's his own weird phobia, what's that got to do with you?" "Ya don't hafta tell me, Maggie! Look at em--" She gestured, vaguely, to their husbands. "So worked up! And whatever for?" She smiled, seeming pleased with herself. "You must have dreamed it, that old lady must have been crazy - ain't no such thing as people turnin into animals anyhow!" She paused for effect. "Right?" The women shared a good laugh.