Life of Death

Life in Death

"Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.": - Jesus of Nazareth, John 7:24.

"What a long day, eh, Jake?" the old man asked as he pulled a muddy work boot off of his left foot with a sigh and sat slowly into his rocking chair on his front porch. He saw Jake, his faithful blood hound, perk his ears at the sound of his voice from where he just laid down nearby. He looked up from the dog and watched, with a certain satisfaction, as the sun began to dip below the horizon.

His satisfaction was not because the day's work was over; on the contrary, it was because he was always satisfied with a good, hard day of work done well.. Something a bout a full day of labor seemed to cleanse his body and mind. Besides, anymore it seemed to him that his dog and his work were the only real things in his life any more. It had been like that for longer than he could remember. He didn't mind too much, though. He could lose himself in his work, and anywhere he went there was his friend Jake, ready to travel down to Hades and back with him if need be.

After rubbing Jake behind the ears, with a feeling almost of ecstasy the man pulled off his hot, sweaty sock and dropped it to the wood floor of the porch where it settled steaming in the cool, dry autumn air. He set that foot down and raised the other to remove his other boot and sock.

Suddenly a large, hairy, brown spider ran quickly onto his bare foot, causing him to jump up out of his chair, flinging the spider across the porch where it landed, motionless, evidently stunned.

The old man felt goose bumps rise on his flesh. "Jesus H. Christ," he mumbled under his breath. Disquieted, he began to hobble, due to the still unremoved right boot, toward the spider, which had already begun to move, slowly coming out of its shock. As it finally raised itself up to run away the old man brought his boot clad foot down upon it, an action of his fury. The spider nearly disintegrated, its body gone, leaving only a wet spot on his porch and his boot.

"Goddamn spiders," he said, "getting bigger every year." He was glad to have something to release some tension. Although he was satisfied with what he had accomplished during the day, the day had been hectic. That morning he had been unable at first to find his flock of sheep. Even worse was the reason why -- a section of fence had been completely torn apart. His flock, he found, had exited his lands through that opening, and after several hours of searching he had finally discovered the flock roaming around on his neighbor's land. It was that old son of a bitch Thompson, and it was all the old man could do to get permission from him to go onto that land to herd the flock back to his own farm. Even then it ended up costing him two of his best sheep. You old blood sucker, the old man had thought as he watched the bastard take the two sheep to his pens, this just gives me one more reason to hate you.

He knew he probably could have called the police and be able to keep all his sheep, but he would have lost face with Thompson, would have shown himself as week. Better to lose gracefully on your own than win by someone else's hand, he believed.

With the help of Jake, then, he had guided his flock back through the torn place in the fence; however, as he did so he discovered that, even after taking into consideration the two sheep that he had lost to Thompson, one sheep was unaccounted for. He suspected that Thompson had stolen it before he had even discovered the missing sheep, but again his pride prevented his calling any authority to rectify the matter.

Instead, he had spent the remainder of that warm, early fall day mending the wooden fence that his granddaddy had built almost one hundred years earlier. Even though it was hard work, he felt a certain pride when he mended it. The work always reminded him of his childhood. He could still remember days nearly sixty years previous when he had walked along the top of that ancient fence and laughed at the vertigo that the height of the fence gave him as he looked down at the ground as his granddaddy held his hand, a hand that was strong and reassuring, a hand that let him know that it would never let him fall. He remembered the joy and security there was in being able to believe in that higher power.

But now, all the higher powers in the old man's life were gone. He was by himself, a man, old and, except for Jake, alone. His wife had die long ago. Even longer ago than that his boy had moved out to California, after which he had barely called or written, and the last time he had visited was to attend his mother's funeral. So now he lived each day as a means to an end, his end. He was not unhappy, nor sad about the life he had lived; however, even though he believed that maybe a God existed, the heightened pessimism that each new day brought him made it harder and harder for him to believe in such a hopeful thing.

He came out of his thoughts of the day, still staring at the wet spot the spider had left on the boards under his boot, and remembered he had planned to get inside, clean himself up, and have the food that his body was craving.

As he turned toward the door he wondered why he was so hungry. Then he remembered that he had not eaten all day: he had missed breakfast. Once he had discovered the missing flock and the broken fence during his customary check on the flock before breakfast, he had forgotten breakfast all together. He had thereafter worked nonstop throughout the rest of the day, stopping only for drinks of water when he became parched. That was the way he was, work first, comfort later.

"Goodnight, Jake my boy," he said as he bent down to pet the dog and scratch him behind the ears. When Jake seemed satisfied, the old man stood up, walked slowly toward the door, and opened it. He stepped into the house and closed the door tightly, insuring that no critters could get in -- especially those damn spiders.

The air inside was an air-conditioned cool and dry. "Damned air conditioner." He had lived the 72 years of his life without an air-conditioner, and had never planned to get one -- he enjoyed clean, fresh air of the outdoors -- but a year earlier his life insurance agent had forced him to have a physician check his health. The doctor told him he either needed to move to a dryer climate, like that found in Arizona, or get an air-conditioner with a dehumidifier feature. He hated insurance, too, but he didn't want to leave any surviving relatives having to pay funeral costs when he died. So, not wanting to move away from his home, he had installed the air-conditioner himself.

"Damned insurance men," he said, thinking of the whole mess as he opened the cupboard over the sink. He pulled out a can of soup, some bread, and a pan, and began creating his simple meal of vegetable soup and toast. While the soup simmered, the old man poured himself a tall glass of iced tea and took it with him down the hallway to his room, where he planned to change into his house clothes.

As he switched on the in the bedroom, a large, smooth textured, black spider was revealed where it rested on the night stand next to the old man's bed. It looked to the old man as if it must be as big as his hand, and he froze. As he stared at the spider, he could swear it was looking back at him, waiting for him to move, as if were waiting to pounce at him. A chill shivered his body, but he did not let his natural fear and hatred stop him from acting for long. Slowly he reached down for one of the slippers on the floor at his feet and took hold of it. Then, with a great deal of caution he began creeping over towards the night stand.

He raised the slipper up slowly, poising it to kill the thing before him. Just then, without any perceivable hesitation, the spider ran, leaping over to the bed. It was there that the old man, swift even in his old age, brought the slipper crashing down, intercepting the spider and crushing its body into the bedspread.

He lifted the slipper. There was little left of the spider that the old man could see.

"Nasty critter," he said with disgust. "The only truly evil things on this earth. Who in hell possessed God in heaven when He made such terrible critters?" he wondered aloud, maybe to himself, maybe not. Disgusted he pulled the bedspread off his bed and drug it towards the washing machine. His wife had wanted one and, although he did not like the idea of a machine doing the work of a human, he had had it delivered, and had installed it, on her birthday. He smiled as he remembered the smile on Erma's face as he installed it for her, running the electrical wires and exhaust himself.

That was nearly seven years earlier, he recalled, almost a year before she had died. He frowned. That had been his last outward act of love for her. He had had other things to do apart from romance, he tried to tell himself. He had had the farm to take care of, the sheep to raise . . .

He stopped in front of the washing machine, dropped to his knees, and, still clutching the bedspread, held the wadded mass of cloth to his face as if to hide his eyes from the world. The guilt of her death gripped his heart like a vice. If Erma were here, he thought with his face scrunched in the anguish of his loss, she would hold him tight, tell him to have faith: faith in life, faith in God, faith that everything would be all right -- and her prophecy always came true. When she told him that he knew the crisis would pass, he knew things would get better again. But that was while she was still alive, and he had taken her for granted. Now she was gone, and he found it difficult to forgive himself. He had taken her for granted.

He had found it easy to believe in that higher power when she had been alive. Each day since she had been gone, however, he found it increasingly difficult to believe in her God.

"Why did you take her from me?" he cried out, looking up, not knowing whether he believed in Who he was talking to, "Why?"

Though he would never admit it, even in a court of law, the old man cried himself to sleep that night.

The next morning was another early day for the old man. A rising crescendo of whippoorwills outside of his bedroom window awakened him, but it was what he heard above that eerie avian cries that startled him out of bed. It was Jake's familiar bark, but there was something unfamiliar to the old man in the hound's gruff sounds that the old man did not like. Anger? Fear?

The old man grabbed his shotgun from where it rested against the wall as he headed out of his room and toward the front door. The old man had never worried when Jake had barked at strangers before. It always ended up being a sheep buyer or a bible salesman, but the dog had always defended the home with courage. The fear he heard in the dog's snaps and growls, however, was not like Jake at all, and that worried the old man, recalling the time Jake had fended off an entire pack of coyotes from raiding the sheep herd and had not allowed even one strand of fleece to damaged.

Jake had nearly died, however, and the old man thought about the sadness that had filled him as he bound the dog's wounds, thinking the entire time with great distress that his companion might die.

Suddenly Jake's barks turned to yelps of fright and pain. The old man began to run as fast as his old legs would allow him, remembering in a flash of memory Jake's wounds from the fight with the coyotes, and prepared himself for the worst.

He flicked on the porch light, threw open the door, and moved out into the night -- and as he did so, he saw that the worst that he could prepare himself for had not been enough. Blood covered a small area of the porch, painting that portion in a dark, thin red layer, and in the center of that gruesome portrait was Jake, also brushed darkly with that color of death.

Ignoring any worry of danger that might lurk nearby the old man dropped to Jake's nearly lifeless body, only able to say a whispered, "good-bye," before the hound's body turned to corpse, as the last of life's breath rushed out, almost as if anxious to be out of its pain wracked, fleshy cell. As Jake's body went limp, the whippoorwills frenzied orchestrations died off along with him, as if in disappointment.

The old man felt a tear in his eye, but he shook his thought of sadness from his mind. it was not the time for him to grieve yet. He had to survey the scene, find out what had happened to his friend -- so that he could exact revenge.

He looked quickly around him to see if there was any present danger, to see if the foe were still around. Seeing nothing with his careful gaze he turned back to Jake's body. He examined the dog's body, and as he looked over the abused canvas it looked to him as if the dog had been jabbed twice with a long, wide, and very sharp instrument. What ever that instrument was, it seemed that the attacker had stabbed and left the weapon inside of Jake because the wounds were torn open as if Jake had struggled to pull himself free.

What disturbed the old man further was the amount of blood. Although at his first glance, as he came agitatedly out the door, he had seen a large amount of blood, there was in reality only a thin, spattered coat of it on the porch. With tears now flowing freely, the old man unable to control his emotion, he envisioned Jake crawling to the porch, bleeding heavily as he crawled, using every ounce of strength and life, only to die as the help he sought had come. But the old man looked around through his bleary eyes, unable to see any semblance of a blood trail leading to the spot where the old hound now lay.

As he looked down at the porch floor, contemplating what this might mean, he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye. He looked up and saw, in disgust, that a large spider was literally stuck in a congealing glob of blood down inside one of Jake's wounds.

"God damn you, you bastard," the old man screamed, his grief turning to rage. Anger overcoming his fear of touching the spider, he used his hand to flip the thing out of the wound and crush the life out of it.

"God damn you," he said flatly. Having spent his anger, grief again took over his mind as he wiped the gooey remains of the spider off his hand, turned to Jake and the duty at hand.

The old man buried Jake at the edge of the woods, using only a sprouting red fern tree as a grave marker. He prayed, as best as he could, that the fern would grow strong and old to honor Jake's long, faithful life. As he spoke silently, his tears fell to the earth, watering the sapling fern tree with the salty mixture of sorrow and love.

That day the old man immersed himself in his work, doing more in one day than he had done in a long time. He justified this by saying that, with Jake gone, he had to do the dog's work, too. He tried to deny to himself that he was trying to hide from the truth.

That afternoon his neighbor to the west, Mr. Jacobs, came by to warn him that the radio had announced a severe storm warning for the area. The old man thanked him for his concern, but he had known long before then that there was a storm coming. Having lived there all his life, having become intimate with his land and the area around it, he could sense upcoming weather, by the sounds of the birds and insects, the look of the sun in the sky, and the smell of moisture in the air. He knew, and he knew it was going to be a mother of a storm.

For just such occasions, nearly thirty years earlier the old man had constructed a shelter for his flock set halfway up the side of the largest hill on the his family ranch. He built the shelter so that most of it was inside the earth, not only to protect its inhabitant from storms but to keep them warm in the coldest days of winter and cool during the hottest days of summer. It was well tested against past storms, and the old man was not worried about this storm breaching the shelter.

So, trusting in the shelter to protect his sheep, he quickly rounded up and herded the sheep into the shelter, counting each one as they entered, as the wind began to pick up. Having thus accounted for all the members of his flock he proceeded to fasten the latched used to secure door. Then he went about the area, searching for the tools he had used to make sure that the thousands of screws and nails holding the shelter front together were sufficiently tightened. He had found most of them securely fastened, but he had wanted to be sure the shelter would hold up during the coming tempest. Now, as he collected the last of his tools and put them in his toolbox where he could find them the next time he needed them, he looked to the sky. There he saw a an early dusk settling over the land due to the storm clouds moving rapidly in from the east, and he decided that the had better be moving to shelter himself.

It was then that he saw it, silhouetted on the hill in the light of the dying sun. At first he thought it was a tree, or perhaps a clump of trees, but he knew that there were no trees where he was looking, and besides, what he saw did not move at all the way trees would in the wind that was already beginning to move towards storm proportions. Then the sky went black as the clouds completely filled the sky and what ever he had seen was lost to sight in the blackness of the early nightfall. A chill erupted through his body, but he was unable to understand what it was about the shape he had seen that frightened him so much. He felt that there was something familiar about the silhouette, but he could not place what it was. He felt almost as if his subconscious did not want to know, did not want to remember when or where he had seen that shape before.

However, despite his fear, he decided to investigate. He walked quickly over to where he had parked his pickup and grabbed his shotgun from the rack behind the seat. He loaded it and then got a flashlight out of his toolbox and proceeded up the hill in search of what he had seen.

He found nothing. Not a trace.

After a few more futile minutes of searching in the dark it began to sprinkle and the old man decided to give up the search for the phantom. During the bumpy, overland truck ride to his house he decided that it must have been a small herd of deer standing together, a trick of the poor light coming from the cloud covered sun as it silhouetted them.

Somehow he knew he was wrong.

Normally the old man slept well during storms. In fact, he preferred it, as it somehow lulled him into deep sleep -- but that night was different. He had never felt so utterly alone in his entire life. With the death of Jake that morning and the disturbing thing he had seen at dusk, he tossed and turned, trying to figure out his life. All of the death and anguish of his life flooded through his mind. Even when he caught snatches of sleep, he dreamed of Erma, of Jake, of his estranged son. He woke from these dreams even more depressed than before.

At some point in the small hours of the following morning, his mind drifted to the possibility of eating his shotgun. He even sat up in bed and looked at it, sitting innocently in the corner, inert. He looked at it long and hard, thought about the bitter taste that the metal would have, and the hot, sulfuric taste of the slug and the gun powder as it would pierce his throat, his spine. He leaped out of bed, disgusted with himself for thinking of doing such a cowardly thing, and left the room toward the bathroom and his morning shower.

"I'm a survivor," he repeated over and over again as the warm water slid down his back. "I'm a survivor," he said, and became determined to continue to resist the temptations of death.

The first order of the day, with the storm all but gone, was to let the sheep out of their shelter. So, after his shower he dressed, headed out of the house to his truck, and drove it out towards the shelter.

With a the new feeling of purpose that the task ahead of him gave, he began to feel better about his life -- until, as he neared the location of the shelter, he was shocked to see his sheep out and grazing around the area of the shelter's hill.

"Well I'll be a son of a bitch," he said, amazed. He stopped the truck and, calming himself, said, "well, mother nature, you finally did it, didn't you. You've gone and busted it." He laughed heartily, actually glad to have something to do to divert his attention from his previous day's loss of Jake, and as he laughed he felt the tension he had been feeling melt away. What he couldn't foresee, however, was that that tension was about to be replaced by a woe just as great.

As he rounded the hill and the shelter came into sight, the old man saw the extent of the damage and it was much worse than he had expected. The entire front face of the shelter had been torn off into two rough and asymmetric sized pieces, almost as if they were two huge, irregular barn doors. He noticed, though, with pride that the earth imbedded shelter had not collapsed with the destruction of the front facing.

He drove closer to determine whether or not any sheep had been injured by the shelter's destruction and to assess the damage to the shelter itself. After getting as close as he could without frightening or endangering any of his sheep he parked his truck, got out, and walked the rest of the way up the hill toward the wreckage. Still in a pretty good mood for having something to do, he approached the now gaping entrance and stepped inside.

Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the interior of the shelter he was horrified to find that his fear of an injury to his sheep was justified as he saw the blood-stained corpse of a sheep where it lay in the center of the enclosed space. The old man observed the area around the carcass, and to his surprise saw no debris that he felt could be responsible for the death of the beast. Blood covered only the animal -- and nothing else.

After a moment of silence, the old man moved slowly toward the fly covered, already stinking carcass, suddenly afraid of what he might see. What he saw was a familiar sight. Two large puncture wounds broke the fleecy surface of the animal's dead body, with only a small amount of blood, now dried, present anywhere in the immediate area.

He suddenly cried out in anguish, "Oh, God! If you do exist, why? Just let me know why." He was angry at Him, angry at the senseless death, angry at his feelings of loneliness and uselessness, at there being no sense or force of justice in the world, at all the pain and anguish that he had experienced in his life. He slowly lifted the body of the sheep, carried it out of the pen, and lifted it into the bed of his truck so that he could bury it later.

For now, however, he turned back to the shelter. Using the debris from the wreckage of the shelter front, he quickly went to work creating a makeshift fence to enclose the shelter.

"Well, not my best work, he said when he had finished and wiped the sweat off his brow with his handkerchief. Then he cleaned up and put his tools away neatly in their places in his toolbox. When he had finished, he herded the sheep into the rebuilt shelter, all the while missing Jake's company. As the sheep filed in he observed them. He and his dog had herded sheep together too many times to count, and it seemed to him that the sheep missed him, too. When all sheep were accounted for, he closed and latched the crude, but sturdy, improvised gate.

Hoping that the hooligans would not arrive while he was gone, the old man hopped into his truck and drove back to his home for his shotgun. After retrieving his shotgun, a flashlight, and a canteen of water, he left some lights on in his house and walked back to the shelter so as to make it seem to anyone stopping by that he was home. As he walked, he noticed that he had worked all day on the new enclosure for the shelter, for it was almost dusk. Whoever had killed Jake had always attacked at night, so he had to hurry. He knew that every moment he was not with his herd that it could be in danger.

The old man knew the route well. As he walked he could smell a mild storm brewing. His olfactory sense was confirmed when he looked up to see dark, swift moving clouds as they moved in as if determined cover the moon that was high in the sky. However, he was able to easily find the shelter without turning on his flashlight even in the near pitch blackness of that cloudy night. Upon arrival he climbed up and over the crude fence he had built and the flock made a small amount of commotion as he made his way through them to their center. Here he calmly sat down, and soon afterward they settled down, too, nestling their heads and bodies against each other for communal warmth and comfort. As the old man had planned, he found that he was surrounded by the bodies of the large sheep and, leaning back against one behind him, only his head broke the surface of the woolly sea.

He was glad for the warmth of the flock, since the tough denim jacket he had worn would not have been adequate without them. He took a sip of water from his canteen, and readied himself for what promised to be a long, maybe unproductive, night. The air began to get chillier, however, as the night wore on, and the old man, after his hard day of work, quickly began to get sleepier and sleepier as the darkened storm clouds swiftly consumed the light of the moon.

The next thing the old man knew, he was awakened by a crashing of thunder outside in the storm that had come while he slept. Once the old man had come out of his shock at being awakened, he looked around carefully in the dim light afforded to him by the lightning which occasionally flickered at the horizon. As far as he could tell, his sheep were fine and, albeit fitfully, asleep. During a lengthy flash he was also able to observe that the fence remained unbroken, putting to rest all of his fears of what might have happened while he had slept. The storm began to calm, and he saw that the cloud cover began to break up, revealing the light of the moon in the sky beyond them.

Suddenly the night became darkly black.

Instantly after this, the sound of timber being torn and shredded permeated the air. The old man could feel the sheep becoming suddenly restless around him. He could almost feel their panic along with his. In their jostling they several times nearly knocked him over.

Confused, the old man stood and fired two, rapidly pumped shots from his shotgun over the top of the sheep towards the entrance, hoping to at least scare off who ever -- or whatever -- it was at the entrance. As he did so the darkness suddenly lifted and he saw an extremely large, black shape reel away from the opening. The shotgun blasts set the sheep into a full panic and they began, to the old man's dismay, to quickly exit through the newly formed break in the shelter's temporary fence.

Although fearful, the old man pressed his way, along with the sheep, towards the opening. He emerged from his hand-made cavern and began in search for whatever had been tormenting him in the past few days, and he watched with dread as the clouds again became denser, blacker, attempting to recover their dominion over the light of the moon. The sound of the wind whistling through the valley increased in fury, becoming almost maddening. The old man ignored it as best as he could, mostly unworried about his own comfort. He was focused on the task at hand.

He quickly switched on his flashlight. It lit only a minuscule part of his unperceptively immense dark universe; however, when he did so he did not like what he saw. In the glow of his flashlight he saw a portion of a large creature which, from seeing only that portion, he could not identify. In the first split second of observation, however, he was able to access that it at least eight feet in height, smooth skinned, only slightly hairy, and of a black coloration and hue which seemed almost unnatural to the old man.

He quickly moved the light over the body of the thing. As he did, the realization of what this thing was came to him. As if to confirm this, a flash of lightning lit the night sky as if it were day, leaving no doubts in the old man's mind as to the creatures identity.

Before him was a huge, bloated looking spider.

Revenge fled into the recesses of the old man's mind as he looked on in horror as he saw, in the dim light of his flashlight, the spider turn to directly face him.

"God help me," he cried. If this thing exists, he thought, there must be a god of some kind to have made it.

In the soft, rain filled glow he saw two dripping wounds in the creatures side, and that one of its legs was missing, a fresh break near one of the other wounds. Elation at his good shots swelled in his heart until he saw, in the eight eyes of the spider a look of fear, of pain, and, most of all, of intelligence.

It was then that he noticed that its abdomen was utterly covered with its young. The creature backed away, as if afraid, but the old man decided it more likely was making a conscious move to keep them away from him. Then he saw it tense up, and he knew in that instant that he was about to die, that it would attack, with no fear, with no remorse, just as he had done in the anger and the pain of Jake's death. He winced his eyes closed, and prepared for death as if it were an old friend.

But death did not come.

He slowly opened his eyes, hesitant, and saw the spider pounce -- not on him, but upon a lamb that had innocently stumbled and frolicked too close. He heard the mother bleat in concern, as if to call the lamb back, but it was too late for even the old man to react. In merely a second the spider seized upon the small, spotless lamb, pierced its flesh with its mandibles, and was gone, fleeing into the night.

The old man let go of his shotgun, dropping it into the mud at his feet. He stood there as if rooted in place. He thanked God for his deliverance, not from death, but from ignorance. He sank to his knees and clasped his hands, and worshipped God and His wisdom. He relished the feeling of the cold rain as it lightly caressed his face.