*Content Warning: Physical Violence or Abuse*
 

Goosey goosey gander where shall I wander,
Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber.
There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.

It annoyed Al, the ancient imperative that compelled everyone in a barroom to look up at the door of the place when it opened, but what annoyed him even more was when they didn’t look down again. Like today, when he walked into The Pub Bar this lovely May afternoon, a day of warm, delicious air and crisp contrails decorating a high blue sky, a day he sensed he didn’t deserve. His fly was not open, he was not bleeding, but still they stared. It didn’t make sense. But since when did anything make sense? The idiotic redundancy of the name, The Pub Bar, didn’t make sense. So far, Bogie Zimmerman, the owner, had resisted the urgings of Al and his drinking buddy Charlie Grace to rename it The Pub Bar Tavern, but he was weakening. In the lop-sided trajectory of his life—the quick climb up, the long slide down—Al Black had always savored nonsense, and he wondered if it were that, the pure nonsense of the staring faces, the idiotic name, that had summoned the old nursery rhyme into his head. He’d never heard it as a child, of course—his own mother and father were not the nursery-rhyme-reading sort. The first time he’d heard it was a few years ago, his daughter Deb reading it to her daughter, Janey, reading it to her from a book of nonsense verse—nonsense verse!—an entire book of the stuff! Who’d have guessed? But of all the verses, it was goosey goosey gander that struck closest to home, for he could never think of this particular nonsense poem without the other bit of nonsense coming to mind, the nonsense his Granddaddy Black had told him about when Al was a child at his knee, Granddaddy Black’s own version of a bedtime story: the story of a gander who’d had his head yanked off, and lived to tell about it. It had been his Granddaddy Black himself, in fact, who’d done the yanking, back in the days when men were men, and blood sport was commonplace, but that was another story. That was another ancient imperative.

“What the hell you looking at?” Al said, making his way to the bar. He scowled. Having pulled a good number of his teeth with pliers over the past few years, his face was ready-made for scowling. Reluctantly, eyes turned away. Begrudgingly, elbows bent, whispers resumed.

Sitting next to Charlie, Al put his five dollar bill on the bar, but Bogie didn’t budge. Bogie was wearing the same limp white shirt and clip-on bowtie he always wore presiding over one of the seedier joints in Hartsgrove, a town with more than its share of seedy joints. He and Charlie still stared, regarding Al with an odd aura of expectation.

“What the hell’s the matter, you run out of beer? Gimme a shot too.”

Bogie, a sour look on his hang-dog face, drew and poured. “Wasn’t that Janey Geer kid some relation to you?”

Shot poised before him, Al licked his lip. “Janey Geer’s my granddaughter. Why?”

Bogie and Charlie looked at each other, then looked away. Bogie washed a glass. A game of eight-ball broke out behind him, balls clacking loudly. Al licked his lip again, glancing in the overcast mirror behind the bar to see all the eyes scrambling away. “Why?”

“The question of the hour,” Charlie said. Charlie Grace was aging oddly, his long hair half jet-black, half pure white, though it wasn’t always easy to tell. He usually wore a high cloth cap, the type favored by welders, his on-again, off-again profession. Today’s was a purple floral pattern.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Al said.

Charlie shrugged. “I guess you been away.”

“Why?” Al said, with considerably more emphasis. He looked at all the somber faces in the barroom, then back again to Bogie. “Why did you say wasn’t?”

“Al, something happened,” Bogie said.

“I guess you didn’t hear nothing yet,” said Charlie.

“What happened?”

“Janey up and got herself killed,” Charlie said, and everyone leaned another inch away from Al.
 
 
He treats his old pickup rudely, clattering and slipping up the hummocky bricks of White Street toward his daughter Deb’s house on Rose Hill. If he can get there fast enough, it won’t be true. Clamminess breaks out on his forehead, spreading down his neck, under his arms. She’s there. Janey. Rounding third base—the only time she ever rounded that base in her life—like an awkward angel after her accidental hit, pudgy in her powder blue softball uniform, the light of the miracle on her pure, wide face. He feels heat. The fury is banked in the furnace, growing molten, ready to erupt. She was his granddaughter, his blood. Whatever had happened to her had happened to him as well. Someone, something—he tries to wring blood from the steering wheel—would have to pay.

Deb’s place was filled with long faces, most of them unfamiliar. Everyone looked up when he came in, which annoyed the hell out of him.

“Where’s Deb?” His lack of teeth made the spittle fly, especially when he was emphatic, which also annoyed him.

“She’s up in her room,” a skinny, gray-haired woman said.

A fat-cheeked woman with a fat-cheeked baby said, “She wants to be left alone.”

Al scowled. “Then what the hell are you doing here? Get out! All of you! Out!” There was hesitancy, questioning glances. “Go!” he yelled, punching the air, and the hesitancy vanished in the scramble for the door.

He headed for the stairs. Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber. One of his rules held that no one he’d brought into this world was entitled to keep secrets from him. He didn’t knock. Tow-headed Deb, thin and gaunt, was curled on the bed; they were both a mess, her and the bed.

“Big Al,” she whispered.

“What the hell happened?”

“You’re frothing.”

“Deb, what happened?” he said more slowly.

“They killed her, Daddy.” Her eyes were dry hollows of black and white, peering over the pillow she squeezed. “They killed my baby.”

“Who?”

The police were still investigating. A bunch of kids had gone to celebrate spring at the clearing in the woods up from the dam on Potters Creek yesterday. There’d been drinking and drugs, a long day full, and somehow, some way, Janey had ended up dead. They were still trying to get to the bottom of it, though the police had told her one thing: It hadn’t been accidental.

“What did they do to her?”

Deb’s eyes squeezed shut. She shook her head.

“What was she doing out there? What’d you let her go for?”

“She just wanted to fit in. That’s all she ever wanted.”

He dropped to the chair by the side of the bed, sitting on a heap of laundry; Deb was the same housekeeper her mother had been. “Why didn’t you call me up?”

“You know why. You’d just get drunk and cause trouble.”

“Cause trouble? Me? Don’t you think the goddam trouble’s already been caused?”

She sat up, wearily. “Easy, Big Al.”

“I want some answers!”

“You want some blood.”

“God damn right!”

She handed him a picture. “Remember when you used to paint pigs on their bellies?”

He remembered. Ten years ago maybe, but a lifetime really. Just before he’d lost the house, just before he and Louise, Deb’s mother, had split up. The family gatherings had been a lot bigger then, before Al’s son and his wife had become estranged from the family, before his other two daughters had moved away with theirs. He remembered, distantly, rooms full of people, floors full of giggling kids, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, neighbors, friends, laughing and drinking, reading nonsense poems, singing nonsense songs, rough-housing, wrestling—and painting pigs.

Al had invented the game. He’d pick a victim and announce, I’m gonna paint a pig on your belly, and the chase was on. The victim was held down by the other kids, Gramp’s accomplices, and, amidst much giggling, screaming and squirming, the belly was bared, the painting commenced. Magic markers were the favored medium, difficult to wash off, and they always tried to wash it off, wash away their shame, immediately. And within the hour, one of the accomplices had become the next victim, the last victim the newest accomplice. “I always used the belly button for the pig’s nose,” Al said. “Outies worked the best.”

“Janey would never let me wash hers off.”

“Do tell. I never knew that.”

Deb lifted her knees, resting her head there, yellow hair falling limply. He looked at the picture again. Janey was maybe six in it, about the time of the pig-painting parties, a smile with two new teeth too big for her mouth, her forehead high, her eyes wide, set apart: learning-disabled—an expression new to him at the time. He would never use the word retard again.

“Where’s she at?” he said.

“Down at Guth’s.” Guth’s Funeral Home on Jefferson Street.

“Where’s Dave? Did you call Beth and Barb?”

Deb’s husband Dave was down in his cellar workshop, her sisters and their families were en route. Her mother, Al’s ex, Louise, was flying up from Florida, where she’d moved after the split nearly ten years ago.

“I threw everybody out,” Al said.

“I know. I heard you.”

“I’m going too. What do you need? What can I do?”

“Just don’t do anything stupid, Big Al. Please?”
 
 
“Al,” Officer Shick said, “don’t do anything stupid. Or you’ll end up right down there behind bars with the rest of ’em.”

Al paused in the doorway of the police station as he was leaving. “That supposed to be a deterrent?”

“Al, you heard me. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Six kids were in custody. Shick hadn’t told him much more than that. The State Police were handling the interrogations, and they should have it pieced together within a few hours. What had apparently begun as horseplay had escalated, veered out of control. No specifics, no why, no who. In these days of high school murder and mayhem, what did anyone know? Just troubled kids, mean kids, bored, restless, drunk, drugged-up kids who’d probably been victims of abuse themselves.

Al longed to show them the meaning of real abuse.

He stood five-foot-eight. He’d earned the nickname Big Al in high school, on the offensive and defensive lines of the first Hartsgrove High School football team to have a winning record in twenty years, and the last for another twenty. There were still chinks missing from his right forearm, bits of flesh left on the teeth of opposing linemen foolish enough to challenge his “forearm shiver.” He married the Homecoming Queen, Louise Hulse, when they were both sixteen. Each lent a confidence to the other that neither had. He took correspondence courses, teaching himself surveying, then civil engineering, caught on with the coal companies, prospered, bought a big old house, remodeled, had four kids, leap-frogged up the social ladder till he was rubbing his leisure-suited elbows with lawyers and doctors at the country club. Then the coal business went down the toilet, and the drinking—which had given him his brashness, his edge—caught up to him, overtook him; Big Al all the while, as the nickname spiraled slowly downward, away from respectful.

At sixty, he had the same broad, sloping shoulders, much of the same muscle, but his stomach had morphed from washboard to watermelon.

Driving past the Court House, he peered toward the basement jail, seeing no signs of life. He drove down to Memorial Park by the confluence of Hartsgrove’s three creeks, where the broad green baseball fields unfolded in the late May sun. There was a skateboard facility, a curving plywood structure, by the fields near the tennis courts, intended to keep the kids off the streets.

He figured more than six kids had been at the clearing yesterday.

The facility sat idle, but the parking lot of the adjacent Sylvania plant, long since closed, was crawling with them: a dozen kids, maybe more, fresh from school, skateboarding, biking, roller-blading, all strut and swagger and noise. Goosey goosey gander where shall I wander — Pulling up in their midst, Al climbed out.

His scowl made room for a snarl. Kids—baggy jeans around their asses, underwear showing, ear rings, nose rings, nipple rings, ball caps backwards, all badges of their ignorance. A couple looked familiar. One was a dead ringer for a man whose name Al couldn’t remember, but he remembered sitting next to him—must have been the kid’s father—years ago at a businessmen’s banquet, the exchange of words, the embarrassing mashed potatoes incident. Anger flushed through him. “Hey! Any of you little bastards out at the clearing yesterday?” A spray of spittle sparkled in the sun.

“Who wants to know?”

“Why, it’s Big Al!”

“Big Al! Big Al wants to know!” A roller-blader swooped toward him, the sun at his back. A kid on a bike sling-shotted a trailing skateboarder at him. “Hey, Big Al! How they hanging?” They began buzzing him, laughing. There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers— Sunlight burned at his brain, a poker raking across the smoldering heap of coal, flames leaping out. Muscle memory took over. Al was on the gridiron again, protecting his turf. A kid with greasy hair escaping his backwards cap zeroed in on a skateboard—I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs! Bracing himself, Big Al flipped a forearm shiver into the kid’s face with perfect grace and timing, the skateboard flying, the kid tumbling. Al noticed a bloody tooth in his forearm just before his bad knee gave way to the wheel of a bike behind him. His cheek warm on the blacktop, his knee hot with pain, he saw a skateboard heading toward his face, front wheels rearing like an angry horse.

Al sees the ghost of his Granddaddy Black. By the red boards of the barn, the horse rears and stomps at his shadow. Above them, hanging from a pole by its feet is a large bird in full panic, feathers flailing, punishing the air. The horse retreats in a dancing canter some distance before turning and commencing its gallop, and the rider—the young man who is Al’s grandfather— strains high in the stirrups, extended, reaching like a child for forbidden fruit as he passes beneath the bird. The gander hanging from the plank, head and neck greased with lard, evades the clutch of the rider, and the horse circles, stomping and snorting, galloping again toward the bird, hooves pounding the dirt in time to the lunatic beat of the shouts and laughs and claps of the men looking on. Al is not clapping or laughing, he is small and scared, and he knows he is not really there. The gander begins to tire, drooping toward the passing, groping fist, and on the third pass, the fist finds the head, the grip is sure, the twist violent, and the head departs the body with a dull snap, red blood flying in the sunlight. A deep-throated cheer from the watchers, at the same instant the gander’s feet come free, and he falls awkwardly to the ground in a flutter of wings, landing on his feet.

The gander lives! His death flurry ebbs and dwindles, and soon he swaggers about the barnyard like a rooster, headless, feathers glistening at the top of his serpentine neck. The horses in a semi-circle prance fitfully in place, their riders slack-jawed with wonder. The gander struts to the pounding of their hearts. He nears a horse who whinnies and rears in fear. He beats at the air with his wings, lifts off the ground a few tentative times, then races unerringly through the circle of men and animals, past Al, past the barn, toward the pasture, taking off, lifting into the sky, flying straight toward the woods, over the trees, away

Goosey goosey gander where shall you wander?

Al’s granddaddy opens his clutched fist, staring at the glassy-eyed head of the bird. He holds it toward his wide-eyed grandson. A drop of blood falls blackly through the air.
 
 
An antiseptic odor. A nurse shakes his shoulder, insisting he awaken. He refuses. He remains Little Al, sitting at the feet of his Granddaddy Black, who is not a ghost at all. He is a memory, an old man with tobacco-stained lips and a misshapen face, where the cheekbone shattered years before by the kick of a mule never properly mended. It is 1943. He is telling his grandson, not for the first time, the true story of the Headless Gander, a legend more than sixty years in the making—the last time the sport of gander-pulling was ever practiced on the Black farm, or anywhere else, to the best of his grandfather’s recollection, in all of Paine County.

“Let’s hear your story,” Officer Shick said, standing beside Al’s hospital bed. Al came around. Groggy, he told him, listening to his own voice: how he was set upon by a pack of unprovoked young hooligans. How could Shick not believe him, with Al’s granddaddy there to vouch for the truth of it?

“That’s not the way they told it,” Shick said. “The one kid’s down the hall.”

“The one that bit my arm?”

“Listen, Al. I know you got problems with your head, and I don’t just mean the concussion. I can call it your word against theirs. But don’t go pushing your luck.”

Al lifted himself on his elbows, the load shifting painfully in his head. It was dark outside. Below, the lights of the town lay sprinkled across black hillsides; Hartsgrove Hospital was on the highest hill in town. Louise was standing beside his bed where Officer Shick had been. Had he slept?

“You look like hell,” she said. So did she: Shock, grief and travel had compounded the wrinkles, fat and gray of age. And on the wide, deep shelf of her bosom, on the yellow, Floridian blouse, the likes of which Hartsgrove had seldom seen, lay the remnants of her latest meal. The Homecoming Queen was dead.

“Nice to see you too, Weezle.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The surge of anger hurt his head. “Trying to find out what the hell happened.”

“Why?”

“Why? If you gotta ask that….”

“Al, this isn’t about me—or Janey. It’s about you.”

“Me?”

“You were never there for her. This is just some misguided attempt on your part to compensate for your neglect when she was alive.” Her years of therapy were showing, in her amateur diagnosis, in her calm, unnatural voice that irked the hell out of him.

“I’m not the one who moved a thousand miles away.”

Her nostrils flared in disgust. “You might as well have moved a million miles away.”

“Bullshit.”

“Al, the last thing Deb needs right now is to have to take care of another kid. Do you think you can behave yourself?”

“I went to all Janey’s softball games.”

“I doubt it. And when you were there, you were so drunk you embarrassed her.”

“She knew I was there. Where were you?”

“I couldn’t be there, and you know it. You might have tried to kill me again.”

His face melted to a scowl. “I still don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t.” Her hand remembered at her throat.

He stared at his own hands for some time. Rough, callused hands, like his Granddaddy Black’s, powerful. If he’d tried to choke his wife, if he’d meant indeed to kill her, wouldn’t he have succeeded? But then maybe he did. Maybe he did, and then, afterwards, maybe she flew off to Florida. Where was the truth of it, where was the myth?
 
 
The sun crested Longview Hill, streaming in the window. Al looked out; the first light hadn’t yet touched the town below, still cupped in darkness. He dressed. Throwing his bloody bandage in the wastebasket, he covered the gash with his cap, bill pointing forward, and walked down the hushed hallway. There was no cartilage left in his bad knee which throbbed nearly as painfully as his head. Looking in every room, he found only one patient under eighty, a kid sleeping with his mouth open, a gap where his front tooth should have been. Asleep, he looked closer to five than fifteen. Unclenching his fist, Al hobbled out.

“Where do you think you’re going?” The night nurse was frumpy, fat and familiar.

“See a man about a horse.”

“Al, you get right back here—that’s a bad concussion.”

“I’m immune to ’em by now.” He’d lost track after his first ten or so.

“Al! We won’t be responsible.”

From the pay phone by the Emergency Room, he called Charlie Grace for a lift. He couldn’t tell if Charlie was still up, or already up, though since he was between jobs, it was probably the former. “You look like hell,” Charlie said when he got there.

“So folks keep telling me.”

“What happened?”

“Kid tried to decapitate me with his skateboard.”

Charlie laughed. “Punks.”

Al eased into the wide front seat of the old Buick. On the floor at his feet was a scattering of Gourmet magazines. He didn’t ask. “Let’s take a ride out to the dam.”

When Charlie hesitated, Al looked over. “Ain’t you going to fasten your seat belt?” Charlie said. Al scowled, and Charlie laughed again.

He parked at the dam, and they walked across the footbridge, over the steaming water. Fresh daylight filtered into the woods as they made their way up the trail toward the clearing. A light mist rose from the melting dew that soaked their boots and the bottoms of their jeans. Al ignored the pain in his knee, Charlie ignored Al’s hobble.

A plump young rabbit dashed across the path, and Charlie mimed firing at it. “Shoulda brought my shotgun.”

“Me too,” Al said.

“Yeah. But you’d be after more than rabbits.”

Al grew away from the pain. He felt as though he were watching them from a tree. He was at a loss as to whether to attribute the out-of-body sensation to the concussion or to the circumstance—a dawn visit with a man wearing a pink plaid welder’s cap to the woods where his granddaughter was killed.

The clearing was littered with natural debris, rocks, logs and stumps, as well as with the waste of campers and partiers: broken glass, beer cans, butts, wrappers, assorted trash. A sour smell arose from the soggy campfire ashes. Al stood, hands on his hips, breathing in the smell. Charlie kicked through a pile of rubble behind a log. It was hushed and wet and violent, red sunlight slashing down through trees.

“Aha!” Charlie said. “I thought so.” Bending, he plucked up a plastic six-pack binding, three heavy blue cans drooping down. “Kids are stupid. Want a beer?”

Two cans cracked open like snakes hissing. Charlie stood staring at the solid limb of a maple spreading over the clearing. Al joined him. They each took a long drink of beer, eyes never leaving the limb. “Did you know this place used to be a resort of sorts?” Charlie said.

“Do tell,” said Al.

“There was a dance pavilion, a road, about a dozen private cottages. Rich folks.”

“When was that?”

“Cloudburst washed it away in 1911. I read about it in the paper.”

They stared at the raw spot on top of the limb, where the bark was broken away. Where a rope might have been tied to hang something heavy.

Al said, “Did you ever hear that story my granddaddy used to tell, about the Headless Gander?”

“Who hasn’t? A rural urban legend.”

“Do you believe it?”

Taking off his cap, Charlie ran a hand through his black and white hair. “Hell yes,” he said. “I’ve bore witness to miracles myself, with my own two eyes.”
 
 
After a bracer at The Pub Bar—they met Bogie unlocking the door—Charlie dropped him off at his truck. It still sat where he’d stepped out of it on the Sylvania parking lot, door still open. Driving past his dumpy room in the Union Apartments on Main Street, Al headed south. Two miles out of town, the road curved down a hill under a railway bridge, the abutment scarred and indented like his Granddaddy Black’s cheek. It was the site of at least three fatalities he could remember without trying. Approaching it at sixty, his grip tensed; he resisted the magnetism again, the lure to take it on, to see how tough it really was, to spit in its face.

Three miles out of town he turned onto Black Road. Past Mrs. Ishman’s, past the Conifer’s and Shugers’—all cousins of some distance or other—Black Road curled down through a hollow where a cluster of trees stood beside the old farmhouse. An outbuilding near the road had caved in on one side, overcome by creeping ivy, vines and bushes, so it looked like a building of boards and leaves. The barn beyond was abandoned, decaying. Other farmers, relatives mostly, worked the fields now. The house was still solid, though the paint was faded to patches, and the clenched shingles of the roof had taken on the green hue of mildew.

He smelled the frying bacon from outside, where the old dogs lay on the porch drooling. In the kitchen, his mother bent like a question mark over the skillet; seeing Al, her face filled with wary delight. Behind her, his father sat before his plate, fork in hand.

It took him a moment to recognize his son. When he did, his invisible eyebrows arose, opening his face to an emphatic blankness. “You got any alcohol on you or in you, you can turn around right now.” The old man, hard of hearing, always barked.

“None to speak of.” Al’s breath mint was lost in his toothlessness.

“Good. You look like hell.”

“So do you.”

The old man laughed, and slapped the table.

“You want me to fix you a plate?” his mother said. Hard of hearing too, she compensated contrary to her husband, by talking too softly.

“He don’t want a plate,” the old man said, “look it how fat he is.”

“Why he ain’t fat at all.”

“Nothing for me, Ma. Just some coffee.”

“He don’t want a plate, but I could sure use one. In this lifetime.”

“Hold your horses, Mister.” This the old man didn’t hear.

Crossing the black floorboards, Al took a mug of coffee to the table, where the red flowers on the oilcloth had long since faded to pink smears. He told them about Janey.

The old man took it personally. “I don’t know no Janey Geer.”

“She’s your great-granddaughter,” Al said.

“Never heard of her.” The old man fairly shouted.

“You remember her, don’t you, Ma?”

His mother stood by the stove, where she always stood while her husband ate. She cocked her head. “Janey Geer, Janey Geer. Wasn’t she the sweet little retard?”

“She ain’t the one used to teach Sunday School out at Rassleton?” the old man said.

Al shook his head. “She was only fifteen.”

“She ain’t the one married Wilbur Shugers?”

Al shook his head. His mother’s voice came in low beneath the volume of his father’s, like a spy plane under radar. “He don’t remember anything, Al—that’s why he never calls you by your name. Why, he can’t even remember to die.”
 
 
His folks weren’t dead on the kitchen floor, being feasted upon by the dogs. That was one reason he’d come out. The shotgun he kept upstairs since he’d lost his house was another. And there was a third reason: Al hobbled out to the barn.

The old man limped along, using his cane, though it seemed to Al that his own knees were worse. His father had never subjected his to football or brawling. They didn’t discuss their walk to the barnyard, they didn’t speak at all. The old man made no plans; he had nowhere to go, and all day to get there.

Al tried to remember painting the pigs on Janey’s belly that she didn’t want her mother to wash off, but he couldn’t. All the pigs he’d painted on all the squirming, giggling little bellies were the same in the distant fog. No single pig stood out. He remembered watching Janey round third base with the winning run once—the only time it had ever happened, as she was an indifferent, infrequent softball player, who handled a bat like a two-by-four. The glow on her face ignited that one time by her teammates’ hugs and cheers had lasted all evening long. He remembered holding kids—grandchildren, nieces, nephews—on his knee when they were infants and toddlers, tickling, talking, playing, singing, but he couldn’t pick out Janey in his memory. The kids were as indistinguishable as all the pigs he’d painted.

A barn cat skulked across their path; the old man swung his cane, grazing it, the cat scampering off with a slinky hiss.

Al had lived with cruelty all his life, and had thought he understood it to be a natural, human thing, simply the flip side of kindness. But he was wrong. He was baffled. There could be nothing on the other side of this coin. He didn’t know what to do now that the fire had gone to a slow smoldering. The three options that had settled upon him were unsatisfactory: Take his twelve-gauge and throw some fear—or some buckshot—into the hearts of some deserving young punks; take on the railway bridge abutment and see who was really the better man; or go to Janey’s funeral tomorrow, and weep like a child.

Or, all of the above. Or, none of the above.

“So this is where they used to pull ganders,” Al said. He and the old man had walked around back of the barn, where he hadn’t been in forty years. It didn’t seem to be a setting fit for a legend. It was overgrown, nearly impenetrable. The rusted corpse of a John Deere and the bare skeleton of an old Hudson sat ensnarled in creepers and vines, while bald tires, ancient appliances and assorted debris lay mostly hidden by the undergrowth. In the musty smell from the barn, there was no distinction between what was dead and what was waiting to die. The barn boards were warped and weathered gray, many missing altogether. Al cleaned it up in his mind. He cut away the undergrowth, plowed the adjacent field over to the tree line; the barn boards were new and fitted and whole again, a deep red hue. He pictured where the pole must have protruded, where the unfortunate bird had been tied. He imagined the horses and riders, the bearded farmers in denim and wool.

He could see it as clearly as the dream last night. Where had it come from after so many years? Why? Had Janey brought it to him? How much had been the true memory of his grandfather’s story, how much invention? Who had invented it? He saw the snorting horse, the desperate flurry of the gander. Standing there in the hot May sun, a baggy tee shirt over his watermelon gut, Al became his muscular young granddaddy on the galloping horse, stretching, reaching for the evasive head of the bird. The old man stared with him, at the same spot on the side of the barn. Was he seeing it too? Al felt the muscles in his back go taut. He bounced and swayed on the prancing horse. It was all he could do to keep from reaching up with his right arm, grasping for the head of the fowl, trying to get a grip, trying to take hold of the elusive nature of whatever this thing had become.

The old man said nothing. “So this is where they used to pull ganders,” Al said, louder.

“They done what?” the old man said. “Who?”
 
 
Early next morning, two contrails crisscrossed the blue sky high over Hartsgrove. Emily Ungar, eight, on her way to buy a quart of milk for her mother, was taking a short cut down by the softball field below the Golden Days Supermarket, where the Sandy Lick met Potters Creek to form the Red Bank. Studying the white X high in the sky, she didn’t notice the man sitting in the bleachers till she was very close to him. “Hey, kid,” he said.

“Hey, Mister,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Just sitting here not watching the game.”

“What game?”

“That game right there. The game that nobody’s playing.”

Emily Ungar stared at the empty infield.

“It’s a perfect day for not watching a softball game, don’t you think?” the man said.

“If you say so.”

“I might just sit here and not watch ’em play all day long, unless they don’t go into extra innings. The toughest part is not knowing which team not to root for.”

“You’re weird, Mister.”

The man had an odd, hollow smile. He rubbed at his knee. “You think so? Well, you’d probably be weird too if somebody grabbed you by the left leg and threw you down the stairs.”

Emily Ungar hurried away.
 
 
Later that day they buried Janey Geer. Hundreds of folks showed up, most of her classmates, many weeping, including the boy with the missing tooth. Charlie Grace was there, wearing a jacket that covered his thumbs, a tie and a welder’s cap with yellow daisies; Janey had liked daisies. Bogie Zimmerman, his hang-dog face sad and flaccid, was there in his limp white shirt and clip-on bowtie.

Big Al, however, was not.

Louise was hardly surprised. Her arm around Deb was a rigid embrace, no comfort, as all she could think of was Al. “You didn’t really think he’d be here, did you?” she said to Deb and her other daughters in her calm, unnatural voice. “He couldn’t grieve like a normal human being, he’s too macho for that. I’m sure he’s out getting drunk for her, for Janey of course, not for him. That would be the manly thing to do.”

Deb squeezed her thumbs in her fists. “Mother, you’ve got something on your shirt,” she said, watching Louise brush at a breakfast crumb encrusted on her bosom. Deb loved her parents, both of them, but she didn’t have time right now. She had to grieve, to think of Janey, her little girl, not to think of how much she wanted her mother to hurry back to Florida, her father to hurry up and kill himself, to get it over with.

Officer Shick was there. He wanted to be on hand in case Al did show up. It was a volatile situation. Big Al was a loose cannon, and besides all the kids, Strauss was there too, Strauss the butcher, along with his wife and his mother; Strauss’s kid brother was one of the suspects, one of only two kids still in custody.

Snuffy Guth, the funeral director, took Officer Shick aside, and told him his place had been broken into last night. At least he assumed so. There were glass shards inside the cellar door, the small pane nearest the lock broken. But nothing seemed to be missing; there was nothing, really, there to steal. He didn’t even know whether or not to report it.

“Anything disturbed?” Shick said.

“I’m not sure. Kind of hard to tell. Mrs. McManigle might have been a little tilted, and there was a floral basket crooked in by Janey Geer. But nothing to speak of.”

Because he was on his mind, Shick immediately thought of Al, but dismissed it again just as quickly. One small pane of glass wasn’t up to Big Al; he would wreak considerably more havoc than that. “Let me know if anything turns up missing,” Shick said with a shrug.

Janey Geer looked perfectly at rest. Everyone thought Snuffy had done a wonderful job on her, all things considered. She was laid out in the black skirt and white blouse she’d worn to her cousin Brenda’s wedding, where she’d wondered if she’d ever be a bridesmaid. She’d doubted it, since her flower girl dream had never come true, so she’d decided that the bridesmaids weren’t all that pretty anyway, especially Marla Ewing, who was too bony.

Janey’s wide eyes were peacefully closed, her expression placid, though her lips seemed a bit apprehensive. Her broken skull was cushioned in the soft, satin pillow, and the rope burns on her neck were invisible beneath the powder.

Snuffy of course didn’t inspect every square inch of his premises, let alone every square inch of everything there. How could he? Why would he want to? So he—or anyone else—never noticed the third button on Janey’s blouse, the edge of which was not quite completely clear of the button hole, a condition Snuffy would never have tolerated. And so it followed that no one ever thought to open her blouse. It never occurred to anyone to look at her belly, and thus to behold—lo and behold!—the wonderful pig painted there.
 
 
About the Author 
Dennis McFadden, a retired project manager, lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His collection “Jimtown Road,” won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection, “Hart’s Grove,” was published by Colgate University Press in 2010; another collection, “Lafferty, Looking for Love,” is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. His novel, “Old Grimes Is Dead,” earned a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, and was selected by their editors as one of the Best Indie Books of 2022. Over a hundred of his stories have appeared in publications such as The Missouri Review (including the winner of the 2023 Perkoff Prize), New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Arts & Letters, The Antioch Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Best American Mystery Stories and in the inaugural volume of the series, The Best Mystery Stories the Year 2021.