Excerpt from a new novel...

The Abercrombie Kids

Dear readers,

I have been writing a new novel for the past year and a half. It is an unwieldy thing by design, which means it may be a long time before I’m done with it. Because of it’s diverging, episodic nature, it contains many back-stories that read almost as short stories. I share one with you here, now. Thank you for your support monetary and otherwise while I find my way to the end of this thing. WARNING: TYPOS ABOUND!

—Carson Mell

PS: Tarantula episode B-5 “Fruit Laws” will arrive early November for paid subscribers.

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THE ABERCROMBIE KIDS

While not the oldest of wards at the Ellis Home For Little Wanderers, the Abercrombie kids—twin eleven-year-old boys and their younger sister—were its leaders in all but name, answering only to Housemaster Gentry and often defying him outright without consequence. Such hardscrabble lads would not have resigned themselves to living at an orphanage were it not for their frail, younger sister who was their keep. Edgar and Abe had not always felt this way towards their sister, Pamela. In fact, for many years, they had felt quite the opposite.

            Their father, Mack Abercrombie, had fought on the side of the Union. He’d acquired a half dozen medals and one piece of shrapnel behind his left knee. While the medals were nearly forgotten in a drawer of loose screws and bare bobbins, the shrapnel painfully asserted its presence every waking moment, thereby rooting Mack to a town where there was work he could do solely with his hands and obliterating Mack’s beloved, pre-war drifter’s life of odd farm labor and farmers’ daughters. Though he made a fragile peace with this staid and predictable way of life, eventually becoming a trusty shop keep’s assistant in the town of China Flat, California, he nurtured resentments towards both the job and the place and dreampt often of the shrapnel melting from his knee in a glowing mercurial rivulet, thereby unbinding him, freeing him to once again take up his life of threadbare gallivance. Likewise, he resented the young bride whose wiles he could not resist and the two boys she bore him. Though he cared for his family with a primal, steadfast affection, they further fettered him to the unremarkable town and his unremarkable life there so that even in his dreams, after the shrapnel oozed all silvery from his leg, he could no longer go bounding away due to his entanglement in a net woven of their impossibly long and rubbery arms which only increased in number and strength as he struggled against them. 

            Luckily for Mack, his boys Ed and Abe required almost no parenting. From the moment they could walk they tottered towards the door; from the moment they could speak they demanded to be set loose in the thicket behind the home. Their Mother, Abby, was host to a vibrant, exhausting colony of pin worms so after a bit of perfunctory, motherly protest, she acquiesced to her boy’s wishes and set them free in the wilds at an age when most mothers were still squeezing their boys into bonnets and booties. From morning to the late afternoon, she sat doing chores and watching them from the back porch of their home as they romped through the trees and brush, anointing their bug bites, poison oak rashes, and scrapes only when they came in for supper as they foraged their scant lunches from the woods and took a childish pride in their ability to do so. With each passing month, the children receded further into the wood so that by the age of five they played so deep within it and Abigail could no long longer see them from the porch. Nor could she have found them if she had tried, so she resigned herself to going about her day without worrying after them, trusting they would return for supper, which they always did.  After supper, the boys would go back into the woods to sleep in makeshift forts and holes dug into hillsides. Snacking on dry patties of mashed caterpillars and acorns, they told each other harrowing ghost stories late into the night.

            This strange diet and way of life imbued Ed and Abe with an unusual, prehistoric integrity which intimidated nearly all modern townsfolk. The brothers rarely visited China Flat proper, but when they were coaxed there by a desire for candy or some other trifle, they strode down Main Street shoulder to shoulder brown with dirt and identical of size so that together they appeared as a kind of gigantic dusty arachnid, a thing worth crossing a busy street to avoid. Though they found the exchange of money for goods awkward and confusing, they otherwise found the planed and tidied world of the town entirely yielding as they were used to nature’s ever-shifting complexities. In short, they thought the place beneath-them and considered those who chose to live there as fools.  However, while the boys ate their taffies and ice-creams on park benches and watched clean, giggling flocks of children play their organized games, they envied their numbers and their camaraderie. Their hermetic, feral lifestyle was, after all, a lonely one.

            When Mother Abigail became pregnant a second time, the boys laid their soil-blackened hands upon her rising belly and imagined the rapscallion who would soon come bursting into their verdant forest world. Guessing at the size of his small hands and feet, they fashioned him weapons from sticks and sandals from bark. They filched a pillowcase from the house and filled it with peat and leaves, arranging it beside their own makeshift cots in their coziest burrow and planning to steal the babe from the nursery as soon as he was brought home so that he could sleep in the woods with his brothers, where he belonged.

            Their sister’s arrival would have been a disappointment to the boys even if they hadn’t burdened it with wild expectation. Besides her sex, there was her condition. The infant girl who came into the world by means of a prolonged and injurious labor, was so small and frail that Abby could scarcely imagine how such a small thing could take such a toll. The toll was so severe, in fact, that just a few days after Pamela’s birth, Mack Abercrombie came home from work to find his newborn daughter howling with hunger and reaching towards her mother, his wife. Though she was mere inches from the bassinet she may as well have been on the surface of the moon, as she sat stone dead there in her rocking chair, head slumped to her chest and mouth agape.

            With the help of a neighboring family, who theretofore disliked Mack but now found his circumstances so pathetic as to incite a feeling nearly akin to love, he was able to feed the hungry infant and haul away the body before his sons returned from the woods.

            When Abe and Ed did return for supper they asked, where’s mother, where’s supper, why’re the neighbors here? Their father took them into his room and sat them down on the foot of his bed and explained to them that their mother was dead.

            The boys did not speak nor cry, nor react in any way really, so that their father repeated the news, to which Abe replied, “Is there food?”

            After they ate, they did not return to the woods, but slept in the beds their father had bought for them and which he quietly resented them for never using, as he quietly resented many things. That night, however, feeding his fledgling daughter breast milk donated by a nearby new mother, he felt no resentment. The fear he felt at having to be the sole parent to three, and one a newborn, was so deep and all-consuming as to barricade any other feelings.

            Many restless years passed. Ed and Abe aged to ten, Pamela to four. While the boys grew only more industrious, she remained a thing frail in both body and mind, the one arm injured in her birth staying the same size it had been on that fateful day, curled and disproportionate to the rest of her body, though the body’s growth too was less than desired. Mack, despite taking great pains to provide his daughter milk throughout her infancy and nutritional foods thereafter, still blamed himself for her small size, mostly because he had wished she’d never been conceived in the first place. Guilt, fear, and worry left him in such mental torment that he had barely slept since Pamela’s birth and had aged fifteen years in that short time. Despite being but thirty-three years old he wore a gray beard, and his face was cut deep with wrinkles that informed even strangers of his constant worry.

            The brothers, who took supper in the woods now along with the rest of their meals and only went into their home to fetch the occasional sundry item, were never outwardly cruel to their sister. In fact, with desired item in-hand, they always took a moment to kiss her head or sing her a ditty before returning to the woods. Still, Pamela had committed the great sin of not fulfilling their wishes for a brother in arms, and the twins resented her for this. Raised by a grand resenter, they saw not their error in feeling this way.

Perhaps this is how things would have remained, in this fraught and horrible stasis, were it not for the raisin cake. It wasn’t even a whole cake, just a half, and Mack’s employer brought it into work and gave it to him saying, “I think your boys would like this.” Mack agreed, and when he returned home, after picking Pamela up from the nursery and feeding her at home, he ventured into the woods to find them.

            Mack was so consumed with work and care for his daughter that he hadn’t visited the boys in the woods since their mother passed. When he found Abe now, sitting creek-side and catching frogs (his dinner) in a net wove of sturdy grasses, it was as though he’d come upon a vision of himself before the war, before the shrapnel, before his job and his family. This sight aroused so severe an envy that he was struck dumb. He didn’t call out to his son, but instead receded into the brush and stumbled back to his house as though in a trance. Though none too fond of sweets he ate the raisin cake in whole, saving just a pinch of crumbs and dried fruits for his daughter, who butted her head into him lovingly as he fed her, as was her affectionate custom.

            The next day, he walked to the edge of the woods and called to the boys until they came crawling out to the edge of the yard exchanging puzzled glances, as their father had never done anything like this, and in fact had paid them almost no mind whatsoever for years.

            Reaching into his pocket now, Mack procured a fistful of coins. “There’s a man over in Weaverville. He’s got a monkey. A baboon.” He gave half the coins to Abe, the other half to Ed. “You give him a nickel, he’ll let you see it, squeeze its ear, pat its nose.”

            “Weaverville’s far.”

            “It’ll take you a couple days to get there, sure. That should cover it. Good luck.” Mack put out his hand and both boys shook it. As anxious as they were to get started on their journey, both boys watched their father as he walked, slumped shouldered and exhausted, back to the house. In fact, they stood there watching for a long moment after he shut the door behind himself so gently that it didn’t make a sound. Later, Abe, the more thoughtful of the twins, would wonder if they somehow knew the significance of this moment.

            The trip to Weaverville was fun if uneventful. When they arrived there, they asked several perplexed townspeople where they could see the baboon until an older, pot-bellied boy told them the monkey was his and to give him their dimes and follow him. He led the excited boys to a back alley where he punched first Abe then Ed as hard as he could in their guts before leaping over their crumpled bodies and running away.

            Despite the lack of a baboon, the boys still had fifty cents each, and with these funds managed to have a gay time in the town. They watched a puppet show, pelted a pack of stray dogs with stones, and filled themselves taut with kettle corn and lemonade. Breaking through a rotten piece of lattice, they slept under a gazebo with apple cores and cigar butts, and headed back towards China Flats in the morning.

            When they arrived home days later, they found the house empty. No dad, no sister. Many of the better home furnishings were gone as well, and when they finally ventured to their neighbor’s they saw these items now in their home. “You seen our Pop?” Ed asked.

            “Well, I did. Yes. He left Pam with us and said he’d be back in a couple hours. That was going on four days ago.”

            “Pam’s here?”

            “Yes, she is,” the neighbor woman said. “She’s out back playing with my own boys this very moment if you want to see her.”

            Neither Abe nor Ed did especially want to see Pamela, they just wanted to get back into the woods, but because the neighbor suggested it, it seemed like they’d be bad brothers if they didn’t at least go check on her.

            They stepped out of the cool, dark house into the hot noon sun and walked towards the shapes of the three children stark against the patch of bald, sunbaked Earth just behind the neighbor’s house. The two boys were standing, leaning over with their hands on their knees, and Pamela knelt just before them. As they got closer, they could hear the boy’s laughter and see little black dots all over their sister, like somebody’d dashed her with a giant pepper shaker. But the dots were moving, they were ants, not pepper, and a wide, blunt anthill sat between her knees. The twins dashed forward now, and one of the neighbor boys turned back, his whole face a big damn smile, and said, “She’s eating ants.”

            Pamela laughed dumbly, licking the ants off her fingers, letting them crawl all over her. This seemed to please the boys, or at least incur their attention, and in a world without playmates, just one cold and weary fathering delivering food at regular intervals, playmates were worth a few ant-bites.

            There are three minds between twins, the two individual minds and the one they share. And as Abe and Ed saw their sister sitting there all covered in bugs, getting bit, a source of amusement to these older boys and nothing more, all three minds were in harmony. That is not to say that they were at peace, for the opposite was true. They roiled with guilt and wrath, and the twins acted first upon that latter feeling, pummeling the neighbor boys until they were heaped and howling bloody murder, bleeding too, and their maw bursting through the screen door screaming for them to stop and to hell with her too, raising rotten sons like these. Ed seized his little sister, no heavier than a doll, and the three Abercrombie kids ran straight into the woods and holed up in one of their most secretive shelters, way back in a cave, where Ed dabbed Pam’s ant-bites with pine pitch while she stroked the side of his face and kissed his nose. The aching she felt for this kind of closeness which they’d denied her was so palpable and clear that the brothers, again in all three minds, made the at first unspoken decision that night to never leave her side again. For the first four years of her life they’d failed her, utterly and profoundly failed her, and they’d spend the rest of their lives striving to correct this cruel folly.

            Early the next morning, still dark, the neighbors came looking for the Abercrombie kids, calling out their names as they pressed through the thicket. Fearing retribution from this party that sought only to offer alms, Ed and Abe gathered up their sister and many of the tools they’d collected over their time in the woods and fled. They planned to build another fort in the woods somewhere near and to continue living wildly, but soon found that this lifestyle did not suit their sister’s unique needs. It was then, with much chagrin, that the brother’s admitted she needed a more traditional domicile. They hiked to the nearest town then and asked about orphanages. A boy eighteen, an orphan himself who’d just set out on his own, told them of the Ellis Home, and there they ventured.