Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part Four

Tulah wanted to scream. She wanted to bolt out of her bed and run as fast as she could, but in that moment she was in the strange paralysis that happens between waking and sleeping. She stared through wide, fear-stricken eyes at Tarn.

His skin seemed to bubble in the phantom flames as the slowly consumed him. His hair floated around him like a silver halo with a flame edge. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of horror. He reached out his hands to her and she saw that the flesh on the tips of his fingers had burned off leaving blackened bone. Yet, still they moved.

“Come with me, little girl.” He said, his voice croaking out through his destroyed lips. “You promised you’d follow me anywhere, didn’t you?”

Tulah stared in shock at his hideous form and realized she smelled the odor of cooking pork. It took her a moment to realize it was Tarn’s skin and flesh burning in the ghastly fire.

“No!” She screamed, finally finding her voice. “You’re wrong. I thought that but I never said that to you. I didn’t!”

The burning man grinned in a rictus of bubbling skin, his nose nearly gone.

“Oh, but that don’t matter none…you wished it in your heart of hearts. It was your soul’s desire, and now you are mine! Follow me into the flames of eternity, little girl. Follow me like you promised!”

Tulah bounded out of bed, finding that she now could finally move, and ran screaming, “No, no, no!”

She ran out of the house and into the darkness of the wood. She ran, blindly, and as fast as her feet could take her. She felt the hem of her long gown catching on briers and tearing. She barely noticed the branches whipping past her face as she ran or the mud of the wet spring she crossed squishing between her toes.

She ran for a long time, and when she stopped she realized she was in a part of the wood she did not recognize. There, tucked away in the woods was a small abandoned church. It was in a lonely spot and she didn’t remember seeing it before. It had a bell tower and dark swathes of vines grew up the walls in unruly tangles. Tulah looked and saw a glow coming from the door that was inset into a small hallway. A dim glow came from the windows that were barely visible beneath the matted vegetation. It seemed as if the church was occupied at this odd hour.

She drew closer and tentatively climbed the steps that went up to the small vestibule. She heard fiddle music that kept playing the same odd few bars over and over. It wasn’t a tune or hymn she’d ever heard before. Light streamed through the keyhole and the crack in the door. Tulah slowly pressed her eye to the narrow bar of light where the two doors met and peered inside.

A man with golden hair dressed in a white suit was inside. He rested a silver fiddle on his shoulder and played intently. Around him danced small figures that Tulah tried to see, but for some reason she couldn’t make out who or what they were. She thought he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen ever. Light seemed to glow out of him and she could make out the strong line of his jaw as he held it firmly on the fiddle with his eyes cast down on the strings. She wondered if he was the preacher here at this little church and she wondered why she had never seen him. Surely, she would remember such a beautiful man.

Suddenly, a ring of fire rose up around the golden haired man and his playing became more frenzied. The figures dancing around the edge of the circle began to take form and Tulah saw that they were strange combinations of animals. There was a sow with a possum’s head that gaped her sharp teeth and instead of a regular pig’s tail, she had the possum’s slick scaly rat’s tail. There was a weasel with a viper’s head. A bear with the body of a raccoon. Tulah recoiled at the unnatural beasts. She seemed to recognize that there was something evil about them.

Into the ring of fire appeared the ghostly form of Tarn Rickson. He stood with his head down, shaking.

The golden haired man put down his fiddle and said, “ Did you not bring me anyone? That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

Tulah heard his voice as a soft musical sound. It was sweet, but sweet like something you knew would make you sick if you ate it.

“I need more time!” Pleaded Tarn. “Just give me a day or too. I can bring you someone…I knows I can. Just please…more time!”

The beautiful man said coldly, “There is no more time for you, Tarn.”

He snapped his fingers and a chainsaw chain with rusty edges appeared around Tarn’s neck. Tarn screamed as the beast imps leapt upon him. One began sawing Tarn’s neck with the chainsaw chain and while blood ran freely from his neck and he screamed most pitifully, the saw chain never seemed to cut through his neck. The Sow/Possum cackled with laughter. The Viper/Weasel produced a length of barbed wire and began beating Tarn with it, shredding his flesh down to the bone. The screams were dreadful and even more horrible than the scrams he had made earlier that night while he was burning to death. These were the screams of eternal torment.

The beautiful man snapped his fingers again and the ring of flame closed in and flared up, consuming the imps and Tarn Rickson. They seemed to disappear into the floor.

The man with the golden hair dusted his hands off on each other then picked up his fiddle and bow. Then he turned to where Tulah stood watching behind the door. It was the first time she had seen his face full on. His eyes glowed red.

And he said in his beautiful, sweet voice, “You aren’t mine yet, little girl.”

He grinned a wolfish grin, flashing perfectly white teeth.

“But you could be. Oh, yes…you could be.”

And with that, he disappeared into nothing and Tulah knew she had seen the Devil himself.

She woke up soaked with sweat in her own bed, trembling, and breathed a long deep sigh of relief when she realized it had all been a dream. She sat up and put her face in her hands. Surely it was the tea she drank to sleep that had given her such disturbing dreams.

She pulled her legs from underneath the pile of quilts on her bed and put her feet on the floor. She knew she needed to get out of her sweat soaked nightgown. She stood up on the cold plank floor and looked down.

The hem of her nightgown was dirty and torn and her bare feet were caked with mud.

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part Three

Tulah’s mother arrived late to the scene of the fire. She saw her daughter rocking on her knees in shock and went to her. Cinnie sank down beside the child who thought she was a woman and wrapped her arms around her. They both rocked back and forth with Cinnie murmuring, “Shhhhh, shhhhh, baby, shhhhh….”

Tulah couldn’t seem to say anything. She tried but it came out in big gulping shudders like a distraught five-year old. “Uh…uh…uh…”

Then she would commence to rock again, her eyes wide and staring.

Cinnie took her own coat off and wrapped around the girl. Tulah leaned into the leftover body heat in the wool and buried her face in it. It was as if she thought drinking in the scent of her mother could stop the shock and shuddering.

“Come on, baby…” Her mother said softly. “We need to get you home.”

She pulled the girl up to a standing position. Tulah stood on her legs swaying like a calf stumbling to its feet for the first time. If not for the supporting arm of her mother, she would have surely fallen back onto the ground in a stupor.

Cinnie led the girl slowly back down the path to their home. Tulah was barely conscious of getting there. Her brightly lit home looked somehow different. She looked at it with new eyes and she realized it wasn’t the house that had changed, it was her. Everything looked somehow smaller and she felt bigger, as though she was taking up so much more space than before. She didn’t feel safe and she didn’t like the feeling. She allowed her mother to sit her at the kitchen table and wrap her in a quilt.

Her mother took some water off of the stove and brewed up a pot of tea made from the mountain apricot vine. Tulah’s eyes followed her movement’s vacantly. Cinnie counted out the five minutes then poured the tea in a cup.

“Here you go,” she said, setting the big mug of tea down. “This will help you sleep.”

Tulah looked down into the pale green liquid and took a sip. She remembered the other-worldly saucer shaped flower the vine grew on and it’s odd spikes of lavender and white.

“Some folks call this passionflower.” She said. “What an odd thing to call a flower that puts you to sleep.”

Cinnie sat down next to her. “You drink up. You’re in shock.”

“They tried real hard to kill him Mommy. They tried real hard. I didn’t want them to at first, but by the end I was prayin’ for a bullet to hit him.”

Cinnie reached over and covered her daughter’s shaking hand with her own.

“Shhhhh…you drink now.”

Tulah drank her tea and felt the waves of sleepiness and calm flow over her. She allowed her mother to lead her to her bed and help her undress. Cinnie tucked her daughter in and sat on the side of the bed stroking her hair until the girl fell asleep. Then she quietly left the room, closing the door behind her.

She slept in a deep mindless sleep where dreams made less sense than usual. But it was not the sleep of an innocent girl anymore. Indeed, had it not been for the soporific effects of the mountain apricot tea, Tulah would have not been able to sleep at all. The cries of the burning man, the man she thought she loved, still played over and over in her mind. The rain began to fall on the tin roof at some point in the wee hours of the morning. This sound, which so many times had lulled her to sleep, seemed to waken her from the odd narcotic dreams she was having.

At least that was what she thought, when she became aware of a glow in her room. She thought perhaps her mother had opened the door to look in and check on her.

She looked towards the glow through her eyelashes and then, in horror, opened her eyes widely.

The ghostly apparition of Tarn Rickson stood at the foot of her bed, engulfed in flames.

The Conclusion of "Sugar and Brimstone"

Sugar And Brimstone ~ Part Two

Tulah started shaking as she remembered all the blood Tarn was washing off of himself. No, surely not, she thought to herself. He just went coon hunting. That’s what he did!

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that Tarn had killed Ned Franks. It started like a worm churning in her belly and made her fingertips cold. She stood there in the yard and watched the lawman head off to visit more houses to see what he could find out. She thought about saying something about seeing Tarn by the creek and her mouth opened to say it. But she just stood there watching him leave, unable to speak.

Tulah spent the rest of the day sitting on the porch doing the mending with Cinnie. Her mother noticed several times that she wasn’t quite herself.

“Sweet thing, what’s the matter? You don’t seem quite yourself.” Cinnie reached a hand over and grasped Tulah’s hand. She squeezed it gently.

“You know you can tell me anything, don’t you? What’s laying so heavy on my girl’s mind?”

Tulah smiled weakly at her mother. She looked up at her mother and her eyes were tearing a bit.

“Mommy, Jesus forgives all sin, right?”

“Yes, Baby, Jesus forgives all. You just hand it over to Him.”

Her mother went back to her sewing and hummed “Beulah Land”. It eased Tulah a bit to hear the wavering tones of her mother singing softly.

The truth was that Tulah was beginning to question her heart. She wondered if what they said was true after all. That just looking at Tarn the wrong way would get you killed. And she couldn’t help but wonder if Jesus really did forgive all sins. Or were there some sins that were just too bad.

As night fell, there were extra lanterns put out on the porches. People seemed a bit nervous after the killing and knowing that the killer was still out there. Folks did tend to wonder if Tarn or any of the other wild boys on the mountain had anything to do with it. Tarn was thought to run a still somewhere up past Naillon Town. No one really knew where it was and as was the custom, no one ever showed any curiosity about it or really wanted to know where it was. Sometimes, the less you knew, the safer you were. And even if you knew, you pretended you didn’t. That was just the smart way to be.

They wondered if mayhap Ned had stumbled upon someplace he wasn’t supposed to know about. Someplace that might be worth killing to keep secret. Truth be told, if Tarn Rickson had anything to do with it, he may have just thought Ned looked at him funny. Tarn was like that and folks steered clear of him because of it.

Tulah and her family were about to go to bed when they saw it and heard the excited cries coming from down the way. The sky was orange just over the hill. Something had caught afire. The entire community ran down the road in the direction of the fire to help put it out.

Tulah followed the crowd of folk down the road, running down the gravel path. It was deeply dark but everyone knew this road in the same way that they knew the path to their outhouse in the dark of night. She stopped and looked toward the warm glow in the sky. Her heart skipped a bit when she realized it was coming from the direction of Tarn’s cabin. She ran faster.

As she approached Tarn’s cabin, she heard a dreadful sound. It was something like when you cut pigs, that horrible squealing that rises when the knife slits the skin over the testicles and only stops when you yank them out then release the pig. But this sound doesn’t stop, it rises and falls then rises and falls.

The fire looked like it had started in an outbuilding then spread to the cabin. The shed was full of quart jars of corn likker and it had gone up like a rocket. They had seen the glow from the shed going up before it spread to the house. It was now consuming the cabin. Tarn was evidently still inside and burning to death and he was the one making that dreadful sound.

A ring of men with rifles paced around the perimeter of the inferno. It was impossible to get in there to Tarn. Tulah saw one of them and then another sight and shoot into the house fire.

“What are they doing?!” Tulah grabbed a man by his coat sleeve and yanked to get his attention. “Why aren’t they helping him? Why are they shooting?”

The dreadful screaming seemed to go on and on and on, rising above the roaring of the fire.

The man squeezed Tulah’s shoulder. “Honey, we can’t get to him. They are just trying to put him out of his misery.”

So the men continued shooting blindly into the fire, hoping one of the bullets would connect with the man who was screaming and twisting somewhere behind the curtain of flame.

And Tulah sank to her knees on the ground in shock. Her hands were buried in the dirt and clenching the soil, her knuckles white. She opened and closed her mouth in silent horror like a trout on a fly. Her face was covered in sooty tear tracks and she rocked back and forth like an infant seeking comfort. And the screaming seemed to go on forever before it finally stopped and only the popping and cracking of the burning logs remained.

Tulah knew, as long as she lived, she'd never forget the horrible sound of the screaming and burning that was Tarn Rickson's last minutes on Earth.

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part Four

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part One

They said they named him “Tarnation” because his mother almost died carrying him. She had to lay-in at Granny Wilson’s for a month and a half before he was born. And when he did enter the world, kicking and screaming, she bled to death. And he seemed to live up to his naming. It was as if he carried a curse of violence around with him like a badge of honor.

He was a small man in most ways. But there was something very square about him as well. He was short of stature with a boxy frame, but everything else about him was small. He had delicate little feet and hands and small facial features. His voice was small and soft and you often had to strain to hear what he said. Often, you were sorry that you had. There was something decidedly incongruous about his small mouth, nose and eyes that seemed out of place on his square, boxy head. Perhaps it was this smallness of stature that made him so mean. Or perhaps it was his smallness of spirit.

His one great vanity was his flowing mane of silver hair. It fell in curling waves down his shoulders like Samson’s tresses. It was a crown of glory that any woman would be proud to have flowing down her back. His other great asset was his lovely singing voice. Perhaps it was his voice that Tulah loved, or perhaps it was his beautiful hair.

He was thirteen when he killed his first man. Some said it was an accident. Some said it wasn’t Tarn’s fault. Some said Tarn’s daddy shouldn’t have been cleaning his gun drunk. But Tarn was found standing over his father’s corpse and all he said was, “He sorta deserved it, didn’t he?”

But no one wanted to believe a kid would kill his daddy. Some now thought, maybe they should have.

Tulah, of course, knew all this. Hers was a very small mountain community where there were no real secrets. Everyone knew everyone’s business and sometimes more. But in the way of young girls, his dangerousness only seemed to fascinate her more.

She tried to put herself in places where she knew Tarn might pass by. She tried to find herself in situations that she thought he might likely find himself. Once she balanced in the middle of the Deep Hole footbridge waiting for him to pass by for three hours with the plan of throwing herself in the creek so he could rescue her.

He never came that day. Her pa whipped her when he found out.

But today she came across him at that same spot. Tarn was out in the creek washing blood out of a shirt. She briefly considered throwing herself from the footbridge as she had planned that day, but decided a subtler approach was in order.

“Hey, Tarn,” Tulah called down to him. “Whatcha’ doin’?”

Tarn looked up from his laundry. The water flowing away from the shirt was tinged with blood. His pretty hands looked skinned and wounded, or maybe it was just the blood coming off of the shirt.

He said something in his soft, snake-like voice and brushed a wet steel-colored curl from his shoulders.

“What did you say?” Tulah called down.

“Ah said, I killed a coon last night and it bled all over me.” He said, marginally louder but with a rasp.

“Oh. What did you do with it? I cook up a real good coon stew.” She coyly smiled at him.

Tarn looked up at her and cocked his head a bit. He looked at her like she was a new kind of bug he’d never seen before.

“I gave that coon to the dogs. They ripped it to pieces.” He hissed. “You should go on home, little girl. I’m sure your mommy has told you I’m not to be tarried with.”

“Pshaw! I don’t care about that! I just wanted to see how you was doin’.”

“Well, you’ve seen. Now git.”

Tarn came out of the creek with rusty water flowing off of his clothes. Tulah took a long heartsick look and danced off home. She played the meeting over and over in her head on the way and imagined deep searching looks Tarn surely threw her and how his voice might have sounded fond of her at one point.

Running into him there had made her day, that’s for sure. But her heart sank when she got home and saw her parents and brothers gathered in a worried knot on the porch with the local lawman.

She slowed her skip to a walk and saw everyone’s heads bowed in conversation. Her mother looked up and saw her.

“Tulah! Thank God!” Cinnie said. “You’re safe!”

“What’s going on?”

“Ned Frank’s been found murdered. It’s terrible.”

“What happened?”

Ned Franks had been found dead that morning floating in Staines Creek. He’d last been seen at Johnsay’s Market that evening where he bought a tin of Red Man and an RC Cola. As far as anyone knew, he was on his way home. He usually took a short-cut through Staines Creek to get to his house.

The law didn’t know exactly what to call it. Frank’s head was almost separated from his body and the murder weapon, a chainsaw chain, was just barely hanging around his neck. It looked like something between strangulation and decapitation. But one thing they did know. Ned Franks had been alive when it happened.

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part Three

Tulah sat looking out the small window into the morning light with dreams of love in her fourteen year-old noggin. Her eyes were dreamy and unfocused as she imagined her love all dapper and fancied waiting for her at the alter.. His hair was long and curly and salt and pepper. He had the purtiest hair. She saw herself being led up the aisle by her Daddy and the preacher man waiting for her with Tarn beaming and smiling. That gold front tooth of his glinting like a diamond. Her dress was long and new and covered in lace and ribbons and he just couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

She gave a long, loud sigh and hugged herself closing her eyes with a delicious shiver.

It was about that time that her ma gave her a good swat with the wet dish towel.

“Ow!” she cried. “That hurt... Mommy!” She drew out “Mommy” in the way that teenagers do and rolled her eyes.

“I’ve about had it with you mooning around here after that no-count.” Her mother, Cinnie, said. “He don’t even know you’re alive…and a good thing too. “

Cinnie scrubbed the stove top with more force than was strictly necessary. She scrubbed, then poured a measure of lye water on it to sit for a while. Then she pulled the butter churn from behind the wood stove and began churning it with more force than she needed. She drew her lips into a tight line and stayed tersely silent.

Tulah gave another heavy sigh.

“Oh, Mommy, he’s bound to notice me. He just must! I just love him so! I swear he looked right at me and winked at the homecoming. I know he did!” Tulah twirled around the cabin floor, hugging herself.

Cinnie stopped her churning and looked down into the opening of the churn. She cut her eyes at Tulah’s young face.

“Baby. You have to listen to me. Tarn Rickson is a bad, bad man. He’s done terrible things. If I thought he were after one of my babies, I’d kill him. I’d shoot him dead. I really would. I just don’t understand why you set your cap for him.”

Tulah frowned and gave a little pout.

“Oh, Mommy, you just don’t understand! I could change him. I know I could!”

And Tulah felt in her young girl’s soul that this was surely true. All Tarn needed was the love of a good woman. And she knew in her heart of hearts that she was that woman.

And Cinnie prayed to herself, Lord, don't make my baby learn this lesson the hard way.

Sugar and Brimstone ~ Part Two