Limbus Patrum

Limbus Patrum

A father swings from a tree in the churchyard whilst his children sleep inside. The wind blows eastward, and he twirls in it like some rotting ornament. The earth below his feet is impenetrable and his wife has no shovel. Only his eldest son has seen his hanging body. The boy comes and goes, not looking to his right when he leaves, and not looking to his left when he returns, always ignoring his ole’ Pop. Look at me, boy. Too grown up for your ole’ Pop, Eh? You ain’t even tall enough to cut me down. There is deadness all around, an ocean of nothing. There is only the church that shelters these flesh flies who buzz around the corpse of civilization. Just die, the land seems to say, Won’t you just die?

In the distance the boy named Earnest walks toward the church. He is holding a rabbit so meatless it could be a rag. He looks behind him at the impending horizon of storm clouds. They are imposters, pregnant only with dust. He turns and keeps walking. He divides up the parts of the rabbit in his head as he reaches the church. A filthy sheet is used as the front door, and he draws it open gently. Inside everything is quiet, peaceful even. A cry rises and a hum pushes it down. Earnest enters the big room where his siblings lay. His mother is rocking the smallest one in her arms. The rest of the children sleep and the sun through the stained-glass shimmers against their bodies like water. 

“There’s a storm coming,” he says. 

“I know,” she says. 

“We should cut him down.” 

“Let him rot out there.”

“I have a rabbit,” 

“Fresh?” 

“It was alive when I found it. There’s not much on it.” 

His mother turns to him. The starving child in her arms looks celestial. He sees tear tracks on his mother’s cheeks. “I won’t eat,” he says. Another boy rises from the sleeping bodies. He has dusty blonde hair and sand powdered skin. He looks to be apart of the desert, like a cherub pulled from its earth. 

“I don’t have to either,” he says. 

“Thank you, Elliot.” The mother stands up and lays their sister on the floor. “Can you help your brother start a fire?”

“Yes.” 

The two boys gather loose pages and splintered wood and begin piling it on the marble floor. They sit cross legged on either side of the debris. Earnest begins spinning a stick and flames erupt instantly. Elliot’s eyes widen. “In this dryness,” says Earnest to his younger brother, “the fire waits behind the air.” 

“Were there wolves this time?” 

“No, not this time.” 

“They stay out there, right?” 

Earnest thinks of the coming storm and how it will bring all living things with it. “Yes,” he lies, “they stay out there.” 

The fire begins to fill the dark spaces of the room. That symbol is illuminated, strange, their mother calls it a cross. Hands and feet are nailed to it, broken off from an absent body.

The rest of the little vagrants wake up, rubbing the crust form their eyes and blinking in the firelight. They join the older boys around the fire. There is a freckled one with thunderous red hair named Edie, another named Victoria, who shares a perfect resemblance to the corpse outside, and a trembling little raven named Miriam. Their mother comes into the circle with the glossy pink rabbit and suspends it over the fire. Earnest watches its skin blister and pop as it browns. His stomach begins to groan. He stands up and leaves the circle.

He walks out into the night. The sun has fallen and the church is surrounded by black singularity. He is relieved there is no yipping on the wind. He walks to The Tree and picks up a stick that rests on its trunk. He ducks under the swaying feet of his father and walks back toward the church. He pulls a sharp rock from his pocket and sits on the front steps of the chapel. He scrapes the rock against the branch with melodic precision. There is a rustling of the sheet behind him and someone sits down. 

“Go back inside, Elliot,” he says, thinking it’s his bother. 

“I can bring you a quilt if you’re cold,” says his mother. She holds out a glistening shred of meat and he takes it. She sits beside him and they look out on the black shoreline. 

“Dad told me this gray earth used to be green, that it was soaked with water. He said men were gods.” 

His mother nods. “That’s true.” 

“He said that we all are just flesh flies buzzing around the rotten corpse of civilization.” 

“Your father never should have learned how to read. It prevented him from being a proper defeatist.” 

“You read.” 

“For escape, not hope.” Earnest looks at his mother. Her hair is pulled back tightly. There are dead streaks of gray in it, tallies of her trauma. The latest one is owed to the death of her husband. Her only youth shows in the high corners of her mouth where the muscles to smile have not creased the skin. Earnest returns to whittling the branch. He makes its arthritic shape into something straight and sharp. His mother watches him work. 

 “Your father obsessed over the greatness of men at the height of civilization,” she says. She takes the spear from Earnest and runs her finger over its point. “But he was never interested in our beginnings.” The wind picks up and with it the faint and high notes of distant cries. Something is coming out of the darkness, a small gray blip that looks like the only star in an urban sky. It is growing larger. Earnest takes the spear from his mother and stands up. 

“Go inside,” he says. There is no argument. Earnest walks to the edge of the church yard and levels his spear like an aimed rifle. He knows these animals. This one is surely not alone. He has never seen one move like this, straight and steady as if in a sprint. It gets closer and Earnest sees that distance has betrayed its size. The gray star is now Jupiter in the blackness and he hears panting and then snorting, and he knows that wolves do not snort. 

The figure takes form under a distance flicker of heat lighting. It is a gray and naked mare galloping across the dead earth. As it passes, he can see other details: the horse’s left eye is a purple smear and flaring streaks of red are gouged across its flank and it gallops as if being prodded by phantom spurs. He draws his spear back and leads the hoofed feast. The spear sails but he cannot see its trajectory; instead he listens for the fleshy sound of contact. The sound doesn’t come. The horse leaves into the darkness and there is the wind again. 

Inside the fire still crackles. The mother sits amongst her children, thinking that to bring one into this world was sin enough, but five, the flame of lust burns in any condition. She did fight him, more than once, not for herself, but for them. Little Elliot sucks on a bone as he carves a drawing on the back of a pew. He wants to join his brother outside, wanted to see the horse, but his mother won’t let him. He starts carving a tree. He pauses and looks over at his mother. She is reading. He continues carving. He carves a rope from the tree and then he carves a hanging man. Edie appears behind him and asks what he is drawing. He says, “Go away.”

“I want to draw too,” she says. 

“Go away.”  

“Elliot.” His mother gives him a hard look over the top of her book. The little boy hands the rock to his sister and stands. She plops down and starts carving little flowers on the tree, and then puts a smile on the man’s face. Elliot walks over to his mother and leans his head against her shoulder. He looks into the open book. 

“Are there pictures in this one?” he asks.

“No,” she says, “there are not.” She points to a letter. “Do you see this one?” She feels him nod against her shoulder. “This an E. It makes an Eh noise, like in Elliot.” The boy places a finger under a different letter. 

“And this one?” 

“That letter is called—” She is interrupted by a sound outside.

“What is it mama?” She holds a finger to the boys lips. She listens outside. She walks toward the entrance of the church with Elliot at her heels. She pushes him backward. 

“Stay with your sisters.” She walks outside. The night is no longer quiet. It is awake with yips and snarls and the waning screams of little girls. She looks around frantically for Earnest, but he is gone. She hears the howling getting closer. It echoes in front of her and then behind. The wind has picked up into a drone and sand whips her face. She calls out for Earnest and the wolves cry back. There is a thudding, a maddening sound from the tree, the wind throwing him against the trunk again and again. She regrets not cutting him down. She turns away from him and looks out once more. Waves of dust roll forward from the black plane like the tide. She goes back into the church. 

The children are huddled in a circle. Even inside she can hear the howling. “Eliot,” she says, “help me with this bench.” The little boy stands and helps his mother push the pew against the front opening of the church. 

“Where’s Earnest?” the boy asks. She says nothing. She walks back and begins pulling another pew toward the entrance. A barricade is forming. Eliot asks his mother again. 

“He is outside,” she says. The little boy doesn’t say anything else. She sits amongst her children.  

Objects float in the wind around Earnest. He stands in the darkness of the sea floor. He feels only the sand under his hands, hears only the jeering howls, sees nothing, swears his father’s chiding is somewhere amongst all of it. There is a foulness in the air. The sweet, sweet foulness of a decaying thing. There is only one dead thing in the east. He raises himself and begins to run toward it. He tries to ignore the flaming crescent on his side. He can hear the wet lapping behind him, the squeaking whimpers of those hungry dogs. He can feel the hot slickness trickling from his rib to his leg, then into his shoe. 

There is a crack of lightning and that heinous silhouette hangs in front him. He pumps his body harder and more blood releases from the bloody smile on his side. He reaches the church yard and looks toward his father. The wolves shriek around him like ravished harlots, but louder still is his father, we can do it while they’re asleep, they won’t feel it. It will just be us who feel pain, but only for a moment. Earnest slaps his hands against his ears and falls to his knees. The corpse in the wind is doing a taunting dance. He stands back up and screams, the wolves cry back in response. He sees them now circling like sharks in this deep. They break inward toward him. He bounds toward his father, leaps, swings from the corpse as the jaws snap at his feet. There is a groan from the branch followed by a thunderous crack as father and son fall into hungry mouths. 

Earnest feels flaring nips across his body, then more confident bites, hot breath, and cold prodding noses. He covers himself where he can, but there are too many. In his blind gripping he feels cold flesh, the hand of his father. He pulls on the hand and turns his father’s body on top of him. In this painless moment he has time to think. He feels a hundred pulses throughout his body, see how your ole’ Pop protects you? There is a ripping sound and then the feeling of cool porridge running down his back, metallic stink. Through the clashing fur and teeth he can see the church. He can give up, that would be okay, but not here, not like his father did. 

He lifts himself up under the dead weight, the wolves try to pull off his cover, but he fights free. He carries his father piggy-back like a wounded soldier. The wolves follow behind hesitantly. They are just confused, and Earnest knows they will attack again. He leads them from the church yard, the storm all around him. He feels his father’s cool blood down his back, and it raises the hairs on his neck. He leads the wolves further and further from the church. He hears their claws break against the dust and knows that this is as far as they are going to let him go. He drops the body. The eyes fling open and in heat lighting they stare up at him, stricken by the boys audacity. Earnest backs away but his father’s eyes follow after him. He runs in a direction away from the church and hears the tearing, the slurping, a father doing what a father should. And he is next, but now he has time.