The Shadow Man: an old tale I wrote in part 13 years prior.

A tussle among the cheap cotton: it was like a whisper, and this, dominating the darkness, like God himself was sighing on them in a state of weariness, sighing on their repose and their attempts at a life.

"Have some and go back to sleep" said Telulah, her back to Terry.  

He could see in the gloom from the open window, her black hair, the marble white of her rounded female back, her shoulders, one upper arm trailing off towards her front.  He was used to her, for certain, and a kind of novelty of the unfamiliar had fallen away, but she still held a kind of charm to him, a charm through that gained and hard bought familiarity, but their friendship, too, how they huddled to together to make things work, like two people at one life, in marriage, in owning the property, in tending the children.

"Bad dream" Terry said, and that sigh again: he was moving to get off of the bed.  Then Telulah sighed a real sigh and broke the silence like a thunderclap, unlike the sigh of the bedclothes, the skin against the fabric.  Telulah's sigh brook something of the real and not the sting or enigma of the imagined sighs that elapsed sometimes; but Terry ignored it and went, grabbing at his pants, then grabbing at his boots, and carrying them out of the room with him.

The bedroom door gave a small shriek as he went out.

There was a muffled thump elsewhere in the house and Telulah moaned, dimly wondering if her husband had taken a fall, but dismissing that, doing a kind of half-hearted mental calculus, even while part of herself somewhere in her imagination was standing over him, as if he had fallen on the floor.

Without, in the drive and the dooryard and the pasture to the right of the front view, it was false dawn, and there was a ghostly glow on everything as that bit of starlight caressed everything, the tops of everything, at any rate, and made it seem something of a magic, something of the days before fire was stolen from the Gods and brought down to Earth to please man and obey his commands.

The muffled thump that Telulah had heard was the front door, Terry going out to front stop to finish dressing and look over the place, to get a good start on things before the day began, maybe even be finished in time to watch the sunrise.  He would bring the eggs and milking for breakfast after the fire was built-up in the stove, and anyway, there was no going back to sleep, and why Terry couldn't say exactly, because he could not remember the dream at all, nary a bit of it, not a scene, setting or character, but it left an emotional snail-slime across his mind that was real enough and remained still.  He knew when his eyes first opened his sleep was gone for the night; he could feel it, and the snail-slime residue of nightmare or fever dream left a kind of toxicity that warded-off sleep.

Terry was dressed and walking around the house when he perceived in the gloom a dark patch in the pasture.  It was novel enough that he stopped and looked again.  It seemed in the gloom that someone had dug a big deep hole in the pasture, but he knew that couldn't be so, so he went over to the fence, and came in the gate to get a closer look.

And the closer he got, there was a weird iron smell, not light striking a match, but something between dust and sick chicken blood, something familiar that he thought he should know, but could not quite make out.

He found out.

The big black patch went about 12 feet, cowhide from their steer, stretched insides-up along the ground, neatly pinned by a stick at each end.  This woke Terry proper, as he even felt it seemed like a dream, an insensible vision that he was already hoping he would soon forget like the other experience of that night.

He was too confused to recoil in horror, and it was a horror, that smell, cowblood, the iron of the steers life force spilled all over the ground, blood and skin and in the middle of the little tarpaulin of skin stood the good from the slaughtered cow.  He couldn't see it in the three-quarters dark, but none of the organs had been done much damage; the work was neat.

It was just weird enough to seem like a dream, and he coalesced by the gate post, staring not at the scene, but above it, into the brush beyond, his breath coming in great pulses of wind.

The neighbors came to see the sight, and one of them told him it was like a surgery, like a doctor would do, but the constable that finally showed-up mid-morning still wanting his coffee and breakfast from the vicitms, the constable would not acknowledge that.  He was sort of tight-lipped about the whole thing, as if willing to commit to nothing, and it put Terry in mind that the cop didn't trust Terry, as if Terry had tore-up his own cattle.  That was nature of silence and a lack of solace, it fills spaces where with internal doubts where there was none before; Terry knew enough to dismiss the thought, though.

Terry went fishing after, walking along the road to the mill pond he was thinking he was hearing the running water loudly, but it was another policeman, the wheels making the water sounds of the dirt and rocks in the county raod.  So they were out and about, looking around, making notations and talking to people.  Terry indulged a hope he would find out what happened, after all the steer was valuable property, and it represented much of Terry's meager financial holding, what of it there was.

They had said hello, he and the other constable in the car, and Terry wondered if that one was after a late breakfast, too, wanting the hospitality of anyone drawn into his orbit in the day, to freeload off of anybody whose luck had run sour.

And Terry fished, after walking through some small volunteer oaks to the creekbank, from the road.

The creek bank was steep and it made the dark water look deceptively deep from the side of it.  It had tendrils of what would have been a good root beer foam had there been great stones in the water, but herein there was only little tendrils, as if fresh cream had been poured in the black water by the saucer full.

Terry had at once toppled in the water while reeling in his only catch, and when he fell, his pole was gone along with the catch.  As he sat suddenly and abruptly laughing in the water, he imagined someone downstream getting themselves a gently used fishing rod at his expense, with the hapless fish still hooked on one end; the laughter was at first only a reflex, but it contained something of the magic and unexpectedness that the day had already shown him, and despite it all, he let the laughter come, and before it was finished, the laughter had become all real enough, such the he could enjoy it, even as he sat in the black water, the deceptively shallow mill creek that made people think it was twenty or thirty feet in depth, something majestic, but it wasn't, just a spit of water, and that coming from God, too, seemly, like the sighing of bedclothes and the copwheels on the dirt county road.