Chapter Forty-Eight Frankie
FORTY-EIGHT FRANKIE
My uncle and I pushed our way through the crowd of townspeople gathered at the St. James barn.
It seemed the entire town, those left who hadn’t succumbed to the illness, stood holding lanterns, guns, axes and knives, pitchforks and scythes. The crowd was buzzing like a hive of agitated bees gathered in a swarm.
“They’ve formed a damn mob,” Uncle Thomas said to me in a low voice, his face and jaw tightening. “Readying themselves for a lynching.”
I could only shake my head in disbelief. These were good people—people I’d known my whole life. The Knapps, the Millers, the Talbotts. Reverend Davies and even some of the women Aunt Margaret sang in the choir with at church were in the crowd.
If Aunt Margaret were here, she would stop this, I told myself.
So you’ve got to find a way to stop it too.
I had to find a way to make them see reason.
To dispel the fear that clouded their thinking.
For Aunt Margaret. For the whole town. Uncle Thomas and I needed to stop them before they did something they’d all regret.
At the center of the barn was the knackerman, naked and shivering.
His face was bloodied, as if he’d been beaten.
He was seated in a wooden chair, bound in rope and heavy iron chains.
Around the chair and tucked underneath it were sticks, dry hay, scraps of timber, cut firewood, paper, rags.
He looked like a bird sitting in the center of a strange and terrible nest.
I could smell kerosene.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Luther?” Uncle Thomas demanded. His breathing sounded labored—whether from fear, effort, or the sickness, I couldn’t say.
“It all began with him,” Luther declared, addressing the crowd.
He was standing on the other side of the unlit funeral pyre, holding a rifle.
“He was the first to get sick and he spread his sickness. The sickness you yourself now have, Tom. The sickness that dooms you. Dooms each and every one of us.”
The others murmured in agreement.
“It’s unnatural, what he’s done!” It was Lawrence Owensworth, a fine carpenter who had built much of the cabinetry in the Endicott home, including in Uncle Thomas’s exam room. He was always so soft-spoken, to the point of shyness—I barely recognized this man shouting with rage.
“He rose from the dead to walk among the living, a demon in our midst,” Luther went on, like a preacher to his congregation, projecting his voice, turning to make eye contact with the crowd.
“And he’s creating an army of demons to do his bidding: possessing our women, our neighbors and children—making them do ungodly things! ”
“He bit and clawed Mrs. Stoddard and Emile,” added Michael Knapp. “Attacked them like a jackal. Who knows what he did to them once he called them into the woods to be with him.”
“A jackal! A hound of hell,” someone in the back of the barn shouted.
“Fought like a fiend when we caught him,” Lawrence said. “Scratching and gnashing his teeth, spitting and clawing like an animal. Like the devil he is.”
“Look at his eyes!” shouted someone. “Inhuman. The yellow eyes of a serpent.”
“Burn him!” came another voice, soon joined by a chorus. “Burn him!”
The knackerman interjected now, his voice guttural but clear.
“Are you not going to shoot me, Luther St. James? Just as you gunned down that poor woman in the woods?”
I was shocked by his lucidity—and by what he said.
“Is he talking about Clarice?” I demanded, turning to Luther.
Luther opened his mouth but said nothing.
The knackerman grinned, his mouth bloody, two front teeth broken and jagged. “I saw what you did. Put a bullet in her chest. And yet you say I’m the wicked one?” Bloody spittle flew from his mouth as he spoke.
“Shut your mouth, devil!” Luther ordered.
The knackerman continued, “How many have you kilt now? Half a dozen? More? Men and women?”
“Burn him!” came a call from the crowd. I couldn’t quite recognize the voice, but it belonged to a woman. “He’s a madman!”
The knackerman let out a braying laugh. “You think it’s I who’s mad? Take a good look at yourselves.”
“Don’t listen, he’s speaking with the devil’s tongue!” Bert Osbourne cried. I couldn’t help but recall that Bert was no more of a churchgoer than I was. “He’s been bewitching us, one by one!”
“Send him back to hell!” shouted Michael Knapp. He was wrapped in a blanket, looking sick and feverish, his eyes yellow. “Before he takes any more innocent souls with him!”
The knackerman thrashed and bucked in his chair, his face beet red, his right eye swollen shut, his ragged beard covered with mucus and blood. His one good eye was so yellow it seemed to be lit up and glowing, as if there were a fire burning deep within him.
“I’m the devil, all right. You called me forth, each and every one of you!”
“This is pure insanity,” Thomas said as he moved toward the knackerman, clearly intending to untie him.
I moved to help him. Despite the state he was in, it was evident that the knackerman knew where he was, who we were, what was happening.
Luther, still on the other side of the knackerman, aimed his rifle at Uncle Thomas. “Stop right there, Doc,” he warned.
My mouth went dry.
Uncle Thomas froze. I looked into Luther’s eyes and understood he was prepared to shoot. Although he did not have the cough, the fever or jaundice, he was quickly spreading a sickness of his own.
“Luther,” Thomas pleaded, “I know you’re frightened and angry, and you have every right to be, but you’re not seeing reason.
Look at the poor fellow, will you? He’s a sick man, not a criminal.
And he’s certainly not the devil. This nightmare has nothing to do with the devil, or with God himself, for that matter.
It’s a contagion. No more supernatural than the Spanish flu. ”
The knackerman smiled again. “Did your wife send you here to save me, Doctor?”
“My wife?” Uncle Thomas was taken aback.
“A good heart, she has,” the knackerman said, licking his lips. “Always seeing the best in people. Tell Maggie I’m sorry, won’t you?” he said.
No one but Uncle Thomas ever called Aunt Margaret “Maggie.” I myself would never dream of it.
“Sorry… for what?” Uncle Thomas croaked out.
I felt a weight pressing down on my chest; an invisible hand with strong fingers, taking hold of my heart and squeezing. Then the fingers worked their way up, picked at my skull, at my own thoughts and memories.
“I’m sorry I won’t be able to meet her again on the next full moon.”
Uncle Thomas swayed slightly. Opened his mouth, but no words came, just a wheezing rasp.
My mind spun. I thought of Charlotte’s visit to our home just yesterday.
Of my aunt’s little bag of bones, the moonlight walks she took—couldn’t sleep, Frankie, but don’t bother your uncle with it, he wouldn’t enjoy hearing that I was out wandering in the wee hours, but it calms me so, to look at the moon.
Then she was with child and moved into the spare room across the hall upstairs, insisted on sleeping in separate beds, worried, she’d told me, that Uncle Thomas’s affection would harm the child growing inside her.
“That’s enough, demon!” Luther shouted. He snatched a lantern off its hook on the wall of the barn and flung it into the hay and paper beside the knackerman’s chair, where it exploded in a shower of glass and flame.
“No!” I cried, jumping forward, trying to stomp out the fire with my boot, but it moved too fast. The flames sprang to life, dancing their way through the crumpled paper and straw, catching the bits of twigs and kindling.
Smoke curled up like dark phantoms rising to the apex of the barn’s roof, gathering there to watch what played out below.
I jerked my leg away before my trousers caught fire.
My uncle stood frozen beside me, staring at the man in the middle of the fire, in the middle of all the chaos in recent days.
“And tell her I’m sorry that I won’t be able to see the child born!” the knackerman roared over the crackle of the fire.
Uncle Thomas pulled the pistol out of his pocket. But instead of turning it on Luther and his band of townspeople, instead of setting the burning man free, Thomas trained the gun on the knackerman.
“It isn’t true!” he said. “She would never…”
“Uncle Thomas!” I cried. “Put the gun—” Before I could finish, he shoved me away without looking me in the face.
The knackerman gave him a hideous smile.
“Burn!” Michael Knapp shouted.
“Burn, devil!” the men and women of Boone’s Ferry chanted, again and again. “Burn. Burn, devil, burn!”
The flames crackled and popped, catching the pieces of wood beneath the chair, the legs of the chair.
Sparks shot out, and the heat grew so intense the tears on my cheeks were drying as soon as they fell. The smoke felt thick in my lungs and I began coughing. I covered my face and stepped back.
I looked to my uncle, to reason with him to leave immediately. As I squinted through the smoke, I could see his lips were moving, in unison with the chorus around us.
“Burn. Burn, devil, burn.”
“You’ll all pay for this,” the knackerman promised as he thrashed desperately against his bindings, rocking the heavy chair. “I’ll be back for each and every one of you! And the generations that come after you! You can burn me alive but you can’t kill the knackerman!”
The knackerman’s skin sizzled and burned and he kicked furiously, writhing, screaming; a high-pitched whinnying screech that didn’t sound human.
I let out a sob and covered my ears as I watched him twist and thrash as the flames took him.
The flames were a living thing, reaching out with orange and yellow fingers, catching the hay on the barn floor on fire, and within seconds, the back of the building was engulfed, flames racing to the hayloft, which went up like a tinderbox.
This is hell, I thought. We are all standing in hell. A hell of our own making.
“Everyone out!” Luther shouted. The townspeople ran, scattering, choking on smoke as the knackerman whinnied and screamed, as chunks of ash rained down like ruined snow.
Uncle Thomas stayed where he was, still clutching the gun, aiming it at the screaming man.
No one deserved this. No one. No matter what they had done.
“Shoot him, for God’s sake!” I begged, turning from my uncle to the figure in the flames.
Uncle Thomas fell down to his knees, toward the inferno. I got down with him, wrapped my arms around his chest, pulling him away.
I felt the scorching heat on my face—we were too close, the fire too hot. Sparks were landing on our clothing, in our hair.
“We need to go!” I screamed at him now. I dragged my uncle a few feet, but he was larger and heavier and I didn’t have the strength.
“The roof’s about to go!” a voice shouted in my ear, above the roar of the flames, the hideous squalls of laughter that had clearly turned back into screams.
It was Luther St. James. Together we pulled Uncle Thomas from the burning barn. We dragged him into the numb and quiet circle of men and women who stood in the melting snow, watching the fire take the old barn with a quickness I could never have imagined.
I reached up, felt my own singed hair and eyebrows. I looked at my uncle—his face was burned, blistered in places, his lips cracked and oozing.
No one spoke. All of us seemed to be holding our collective breath as the roof came down with a fiery crash, flames shooting up, sparks flying out like a thousand tiny demons, set free at last.