Free Ghostcountry's Wrath by Tom Deitz Page A

new-flaked spear point, say, or a handful of porcupine quills. And the next time he looked for them they’d be gone. It was always his stuff, too: things that were part of his Cherokee heritage. He’d always found them—so far. But every time—every time—they’d moved west, as if some odd magnet had drawn them that way. And Calvin knew what lay in that direction. Tsusginai, the Ghost Country, in Usunhiyi, the Darkening Land, realm of the Cherokee dead.
    And this week, the displacements had grown even more frequent, the spectral images clearer, so that he now found himself loathe to face the setting sun, because that was where the half-shapes always stood, the point from which the bodiless shadows spread.
    And Sunday, he realized with a shudder, was the first anniversary of his father’s death! Why hadn’t he remembered that? Perhaps because he’d been sort of unstuck in time all spring, and not, for a change, thrall to schedules? Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to recall.
    But something evidently, did, for the empty orbits of one of the masks on the wall across from him had suddenly acquired open eyes!
    Wolf clan, he noted with a start: his own clan, though it had taken him most of last summer to chase down anyone at Qualla Boundary who knew enough of such things—and of Calvin’s genealogy—to tell him so.
    But now something was taking shape below that mask. It could almost have been another shadow—except that it was slightly too dense, and the moonlight reflected off it a tad too unevenly. And it could easily have been Sandy’s Driza-Bone that hung on the brass coat stand next to the door directly above Calvin’s outdoor boots—except that was half a yard too far to the right.
    Whatever it was had now acquired arms, a suggestion of legs, and an odd sort of three-dimensionality, as it continued to stare at him from the mask that was now much less a mask and far more the likeness of his father: fortyish, square-jawed, and prematurely aged, but still handsome beneath longer hair than Calvin recalled.
    Chills stomped across him where he lay propped against the headboard, wishing on the one hand that Sandy would walk in right now and by some cogent observation about quarks or cosmic string banish it forever, and on the other hand hoping very hard indeed she would stay gone longer so as not to have her peace of mind disturbed by whatever post-trauma stress Calvin might succumb to.
    And so he lay and watched, his skin alive with goose-bumps, where it wasn’t drowned in the sweat breaking out like pustules across his forehead, chest, and shoulders.
    The image was almost complete now, though he couldn’t tell skin from clothing, nor what form either might have. A lump plugged his throat as a host of memories flooded back—most of them bad.
    He hadn’t loved his dad.
    A half-blood himself, Maurice McIntosh had tried to seal off his son from his Cherokee heritage, insisting that being different rarely made one happy, and wanting Calvin to be happy at all costs. That had prompted rebellion, which had led to words, and finally, when Calvin was sixteen, a schism. But there’d been moments of closeness, too; and as Calvin grew older, he regretted more and more that there were a whole host of topics he wanted to discuss with the old man and would never be able to.
    But the worst thing was that they’d parted in anger. Calvin’s last sight of his dad had been of him standing in the doorway of the ranch house down at Stone Mountain two Christmases back, staring at him accusingly, with an awful mixture of pain and anger branded across his face when Calvin had repeated yet again that no, he was not going to move back in, because he still hadn’t got his head straight about which world was his: white, or Cherokee.
    He’d missed the funeral, of course, first because no one had known where to find him, then because they thought he’d precipitated it—though how a guy barely twenty was supposed to scoop out a grown man’s