The Tuckahoe

by Nancy Etchemendy

"The Tuckahoe" first appeared in Shadows 8, an anthology edited by Charles Grant and published by Doubleday in 1985.

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It's getting on towards dark, and I keep hoping maybe I've caught a fever and I'm out of my head. Maybe there isn't anything waiting under the house to get me as soon as I step outside. Maybe Pa and Lemmy are just playing a trick on me, and they'll come strutting through the front door any minute now, smug as a couple of tom turkeys. Oh, how I'd like that. Pa, he'd laugh at me, because that's his way, to make a joke out of Ruben, who'll never be a man. And Lemmy would probably hook his thumbs in his belt and call me his sissy little brother, seeing me wrapped up in Momma's quilt like this, shaking, and nothing sticking out except my nose and the barrel of Grampa's Colt pistol. But I wouldn't mind. It would be all right, just this once. If they came in here alive and whole, if they could prove tuckahoe is just tuckahoe, and that empty thing on the porch isn't really what's left of Momma. Then they could laugh all they want, and it would be all right. Just this once.

The rain started in again a couple hours ago, just like last night. Makes my heart crawl up into my throat and lie there twitching like a half-dead frog. I lit all the lamps and tried to make a fire in the fireplace. But the fire, it won't seem to burn right. It looks just the way I feel, puny and wavery, like it might not be here in the morning. I tried to give myself a good talking-to, just like Momma would if she saw me now. "Ruben," she would say, "the Lord helps them that helps themselves." But I don't think the Lord had much to do with this rain, nor with the thing that ate Momma.

Last night, when the storm first started, I had a feeling this wasn't any regular rain. Didn't seem natural the way it poured out of the sky. It came down in long, wavy curtains, like somebody'd emptied a bunch of big tin washtubs all at one time. There weren't any drops at all except from the splashes when it hit the ground. And the lightning felt wrong, too. I've never seen such lightning before. Why, it lit up the sky blue and white all night long, one bolt right after another. Early on in the evening, I saw it hit the two big old poplars down by the road, both at the same time. Before the rain put the fire out, they were burnt to pure cinders, and there was nothing left this morning except black poles.

The thing that made my skin creep worst of all, though, was the smell. I mostly like the smell of rain, especially this time of year, when the tree sap is running and the ground is already a little damp. But this smelled funny, kind of like that oily stuff Pa sprays on the crops sometimes to kill the bugs. I told Pa that. I said the rain smelled real bad, like oil or something. I even went out on the porch and got a little on my fingers so he could smell it for himself.

But Pa, he has a stubborn streak, and most times he doesn't pay any attention till something turns around and bites him right on the toe. He looked at me kind of sideways, scratching his beard, and he said, "Ruben, I don't smell a blame thing. Quit acting like an old woman." And Lemmy made it worse by laughing outright.

I saw right then I might as well not waste any more breath on those two, so I just shut my mouth and went over to the table to watch Momma kneading bread. I like to watch her when she has her sleeves rolled up and her hands all covered with flour. Sometimes a lock of fine, brown hair falls down in her eyes, and she asks me if I'll tuck it back for her. Last night, when I tucked her hair back in, she whispered, "The rain don't smell right to me, neither, if you want to know the truth." Remembering that now makes me feel like crying.

After a while, I lay down by the fire and tried to read in one of my school books about this fellow who discovered the South Pole, but it was no use. I kept getting this stickery feeling all up and down my back. Made me think Lemmy or somebody had sneaked up behind me and was trying to scare me. But every time I twisted around to look, there was nobody there at all, just the front window lit up all cold and blue, and the curtains of rain outside, and the roar of thunder. The more I stared at that book, the more I thought about the window, and the queerer I felt about what I might see through it if I turned around again. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up, and pretty soon a cold sweat broke out on my lip, right where I'm starting to get a few little mustache hairs. I made up my mind the only way to get myself over being afraid was to go take a good long look through the window to prove there was nothing peering in, fearsome or otherwise.

I put my book down on the rug where I'd been lying, and I got up and walked to the window, which was misted over a little on account of its being warmer inside than out. I spit on my sleeve and rubbed a little place in the glass. I couldn't see too good, because the rain and lightning made everything look so different. The straw grass on the front acre might have been a stranger's pond, and Momma's chicken coop loomed up in the night like one of those dinosaurs I've seen in books. I squinted for a long time, and finally after I had things figured out a little, I saw the chickens were all riled up, flapping around in the rain. That struck me as just plain unnatural, for chickens are pretty much like people when it comes to staying indoors on a wet night.

Then I saw the other thing, and it gave me a chill so deep I felt like I'd been dropped down a well. Through that little place in the glass, I made out something creeping towards the root cellar. I stood still as a lump of salt to get a better look, though my blood was hammering inside my veins, and my knees felt like cheese. The next bolt of lightning lit up everything almost as clear as day, and just for a second, even with the rain, I got a perfect sight of the thing.

There's a funny kind of toadstool that grows down in the dimmest part of the woods. Tuckahoe, Pa calls them, but Momma says they aren't like any tuckahoe she ever saw, and we aren't to eat them under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to anyway, for the sight of them puts me off my feed. You never find just one or two, coming up separate around dead wood like regular mushrooms. These tuckahoe like to grow from the heart of a living tree, a hundred or more together in a slippery, gray clump, like overgrown frogs' eggs. No single one of them is bigger than a man's thumb, but I have often seen nests two feet around stuck onto unlucky maples and dogwoods. Lemmy, he gets bored sometimes and knocks the clumps down and hacks them up with a stick for fun. But me, I'd rather stay as far away from them as I can.

Tuckahoe. That's what I thought of as I watched that thing crawl across our front acre in the stinking rain. I felt the sweat gathering into little streams on my forehead while I told myself to stop and think. It couldn't be tuckahoe because it was too big, big as a man. Besides that, it was moving, and fast, too. Tuckahoe couldn't move by itself, not that I ever heard of anyway.

I could feel a howl building up in my throat, getting ready to come out whether I wanted it to or not, when all of a sudden there was a big crash from the back of the house and the whole place shook. I think I did let out a yell then, but nobody paid any attention because they were all running to see what had caused the commotion. By the time I got my wits together enough to follow them, Pa and Lemmy were standing by the back door looking out into the storm. A good-sized limb from the old oak tree by the kitchen had torn loose in the wind and come down on the roof. Pa was growling and cursing, and Momma was out in the rain with a Farm Journal over her head, trying to see if the roof was all right.

All I could think of was that thing crawling around out there, and I says, "Get her back inside! Get her out of the rain!" My voice cracked, just like it always does when I most wish it wouldn't.

And Lemmy gave me one of those cockeyed half smiles of his and said, "For Pete's sake. You'd think she's made of sugar or something. The rain ain't gonna melt her, you know."

Then I hit Lemmy in the stomach, and he hit me in the nose. And the next thing I knew, Momma was standing over me with an ice pack, yelling a blue streak, and dripping rainwater all over the kitchen floor. I didn't care. I just closed my eyes and let her yell. As long as she was back inside, that's all that mattered to me.

+ + +

This morning, I remember lying in bed thinking the tuckahoe thing must have been nothing but a bad dream. I heard birds chirping outside the window, and I watched a little finger of sunlight move across a spider web in the corner. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were no more than a few raggedy strings way up high. I felt so good that I whistled while I put my pants on, and said good morning to Lemmy even though my nose was still pretty sore.

Momma was getting ready to go out and fetch the eggs from the chickens, like she does every morning. She had to pull on a pair of high rubber boots, because the front acre was ankle-deep in mud from the storm. I stood in the sunshine on the porch and watched her wade out towards the chicken coop. She had a basket hanging from one arm for the eggs. She got about ten or fifteen steps away, then stopped dead still with the basket swinging from her elbow. She turned around, and the look on her face made me swallow without meaning to.

"There's something kind of funny out here, Ruben," she said. "Better ask Pa to come and take a look."

I hollered for Pa, and he grumbled, for he hates to get up from his chair. But he lumbered out into the mud, and me and Lemmy rolled up our pants and followed him.

Momma had come across a patch of slimy stuff. It could have been egg whites maybe, except it was sort of milky, and where would egg whites come from anyway, there being no yolks or shells lying around? Pa frowned at it, and Lemmy and him stuck their fingers in it. Then Pa said it wasn't anything to worry about, probably some new kind of bug left it, or it might be some kind of mildew, he didn't know.

All that time, I was standing on one foot and then the other, and my heart was ticking as fast as a two-dollar watch. I had a pretty fair idea what had left that slime, and it didn't have anything to do with bugs. "Pa," I said, "I think you should know I saw some kind of strange critter crawling around out here last night, looked like one of those tuckahoe clumps, only almost as big as you are."

Lemmy rolled his eyes and spit in the mud right by my foot. Pa just looked mad and said, "Ruben, everybody knows you can't tell the difference between a tall tale and the truth. If you think I'm gonna swallow a story like that, you got a brain about the size of a pea." Then him and Lemmy sloshed back to the house, talking and laughing. I stayed outside with Momma, because I felt like I was either going to throw things or cry, and I didn't want to give Pa the satisfaction of seeing it.

By and by, me and Momma went and took a look at the chicken coop. It turned out there were hardly any eggs in the boxes. That was spooky enough. But what we found just inside the chicken wire scared me a lot worse. I thought I saw two rags lying there on the ground, but when I looked closer, I saw it wasn't rags at all. It was two dead hens, just their feathers and skin, with nothing inside. I squinted and poked, but I couldn't find any rips or bites. It was like all the blood and meat and bones had been sucked right out of them, leaving them empty, without a single mark.

Momma turned all white when she saw those hens, and she told Pa about them as soon we got back inside. But he treats her the same way as he treats me, like she hasn't got the sense she was born with. He said to her, "What do you expect after a storm like that? If you was a chicken would you lay good with all that racket goin' on?" Then he said a 'coon must have gotten in and killed them.

I came pretty close to telling him right then and there that if he expected me to swallow a story like that, he must have a brain about the size of a pea. I know what a 'coon does to a chicken, and it doesn't look anything like that. But I never really said it. I just thought it. And now I'm glad, because all I want is just to see Pa alive, even if he's wrong sometimes.

Momma took her boots off and went into the kitchen and lit the fire in the gas range. She had only got four eggs, and that was just two apiece for Pa and Lemmy, even if me and Momma went without. Pa was yelling about how he was half starved to death, and she couldn't very well expect him to haul an oak limb down off the roof with a half-empty stomach. He told her she'd better fry a whole lot of spuds to make up the difference, and he snapped his suspenders, which Momma hates because it makes them wear out quicker.

Momma was busy with the griddle and slicing some bacon and all, and she said to me without looking, "Ruben, honey, will you go down to the root cellar and bring up some spuds?"

I just stood there. All of a sudden, it didn't matter how bright the sun was shining or how loud the birds were twittering. It might as well have been pitch dark and rain pouring down in buckets again as far as I was concerned. I was thinking about that slime on the front acre and those two empty chicken skins. And I could see the tuckahoe in my head, all smeary through that window in the glare of the lightning, headed straight for the root cellar.

Momma turned and frowned at me when I made no move for the door. Then the frown melted off into worry lines, and she said, "What's wrong, honey?"

"Momma, please don't make me go. There's something down there," I said. My throat was so dry I could hardly get the words out.

Then Pa jumped up out of his chair and grabbed me by the shirt and shook me. I saw the veins popping up on his big, thick neck, and his face was the color of a ripe tomato. I'd have shut my eyes, but I knew that would just make him madder, and I was scared that he'd backhand me or kick me as he sometimes does. Instead, he opened up his mouth so those ragged, yellow teeth of his showed like an animal's against the furry dark of his beard. I could feel his breath tickling my cheeks, hot and sharp from the hard cider he had already drunk that morning. I wished he liked me better. Oh, how I wished it.

"You're a good-for-nothin' little momma's boy," he said, soft, almost a whisper. "There ain't nothin' down in that cellar but a few daddy longlegs and your own damn boogey men. Now go get them spuds."

He let go of my shirt and shoved me backwards with his fist, and I stumbled like I always do, my feet being so big and my legs so stringy. I landed flat on the floor, and I hurt all over, inside and out. I was crying by then, which added even more to my shame. And I started thinking he was probably right. If I was any kind of a real man, I'd get up on my own two feet and go down there after those spuds, whether I was scared or not.

Lemmy stood up and started laughing and prancing around like a girl. "If it's gonna make you cry and all, honey," he said in a high, fake little voice, "I'll go get the dadblamed spuds."

Then I really got mad, because there aren't very many worse things in the world than to have somebody like Lemmy poking fun at you. I don't think I would have done it if I wasn't so mad, and if I hadn't wanted so much to prove that I was no sissy. Anyway, I got up and grabbed the basket and started wading through the mud to the root cellar.

There I was, out in the sun again, blue sky above, and trees aglitter with dew, just like any other spring morning. Made me feel like I could face most anything. For a minute or two the world seemed so familiar that I started whistling and enjoying the feel of the cool mud between my toes. Then, about a stone's throw from the cellar door, I came across another patch of slime, the same as we had found by the chicken coop.

I squatted down beside it, nearly deaf from the noise of my heart. This slime seemed fresher than the other, and a smell came up from it like from the mouth of a cave that's too dark to see inside of. I stood up slowly, trying not to breathe too fast. My spine felt like ants were marching up it in a long, thick line. Still, I had it in my mind that a man wouldn't run. A man would stay and face whatever came his way.

That's when I heard the sound. It made me think of bees when they swarm in a tree, a thousand little voices raised together to make a single huge and angry one. I looked at the cellar door, and I saw it sort of moving, like there was something big leaning on it, trying to get out all at once. There's a crack between the door and the ground, a couple of inches maybe. And through that crack came a mess of gray, wet-looking tuckahoe, moving fast.

Part of me was still trying to act brave, and it said to me, "Ruben, my boy, you must have eaten something that didn't agree with you, for you are seeing things."

But the rest of me, which was the bigger part, said, "If a fellow can't trust his own eyes, just what can he trust?" That bigger part of me didn't give a hoot about whether I was brave or a man or not. It just believed what I was seeing and hearing. That's when I dropped the basket and hightailed it for the house.

By the time I came through the front door, I couldn't even talk. I just stood there shaking and sweating, with my mouth going open and shut. I was peeing my pants. I could feel it washing the mud off my feet onto Momma's clean floor, and I didn't even care. She let out a little cry. Pa got up and stared at me. I don't know what he saw in my face but it must have convinced him of something, because I have never seen him look like that before. He was scared, and I know it isn't right, but for just one second I was glad.

Pa grabbed his shotgun from the corner, and he said, "All right, Lemmy. We're gonna go find out what the hell is down there."

Then him and Lemmy took off for the root cellar.

Momma got her quilt and she wrapped me up in it and made me sit down on the bench by the fire. She sat beside me, and rocked me and sang to me like she used to do before I got so big. That's all I wanted, just to bury my face in the good clean smells of Momma, and forget there was ever anything else.

We sat like that for a long time, waiting for Pa and Lemmy to come back, watching the sun creep past noon into afternoon and the clouds begin to sweep across the sky again. But Pa and Lemmy never came. And we never heard anything for sure, no roar of the shotgun going off, no terrible screams nor cries for help. Once I fancied I heard a kind of long moan, way off across the straw grass. It could have been the wind, or an owl. But somehow, it made me wonder what we'd do if we had to get away. The only gun in the house besides Pa's ten-gauge was Grampa's Colt pistol, which Pa always kept locked in his trunk. I was pretty sure I could break that lock with a hammer. I was pretty sure I could do a lot of things if it came to saving Momma.

After a time, Momma fell asleep, and I did, too, still thinking about that lock. I was just too bone weary to hold my eyes open anymore. I had a dream, a fine warm dream about fishing down by the river on a summer's day, and when I woke up it took me a minute to remember where I was.

The first thing I noticed was that Momma had left the bench. She was standing beside the front door with a butcher knife in her hands, whispering over and over again, "The Lord helps them who help themselves. The Lord helps them who help themselves." All at once, it came to me that there was a funny noise outside, like bees swarming in a tree.

I jumped up, tipping over the bench, and yelled, "Momma! Don't, Momma!"

She turned around and there was a crazy look in her eyes, like I saw once in the eyes of a neighbor woman who stood in the road and watched her house burn down. Momma's face was all shiny with sweat, and that lock of hair had come loose. Oh, how I wanted to tuck it back, and make everything all right. "I won't let it in here, Ruben," she said. "I swear I won't." Before I could get to her, she held up the knife and opened the door.

I stood at the window and screamed. I screamed for a long, long time, even after there was nothing left of Momma but skin and clothes and the butcher knife. No matter how she struck and slashed, the tuckahoe got her anyway. And when it was done, it disappeared under the porch, leaving patches of slime on the wood.

Twilight fell before I came to myself enough to get up and light the lamps. I went in and broke Pa's trunk to pieces with Momma's kitchen hatchet, and got out the Colt and figured out how to load it.

I have been waiting for Pa and Lemmy to come and tell me it was just a mean trick. But now the rain has started in again.