"Old Man Howl" by Taylor Brown
Taylor Brown is the author of In the Season of Blood and Gold (Press 53, 2014), Fallen Land (St. Martin's Press, 2016), The River of Kings (2017), Gods of Howl Mountain (2018), Pride of Eden (2020), Wingwalkers (2022), Rednecks (2024), and Wolvers (2026). You can find his work in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and many other publications. He is a recipient of the Southern Book Prize, Montana Prize in Fiction, Georgia Author of the Year, and serves as the founder and editor-in-chief of BikeBound.com. He lives in Savannah, Georgia. His story "Old Man Howl" was a finalist for the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and is a prequel to his novel Gods of Howl Mountain.
Old Man Howl
Innocent objects behaved strangely that night. Old Man Howl found his keys in the breadbox, for instance. Then his boots, mud-crusted, he caught them cozied up under the bed, as if the pair of them had walked in from the porch to escape the cold. Two buttons from his coat went missing, the threads sprung like cornstalks, the empty slits gaped like dullards’ mouths. And then there was his pocket watch: the face of it cracked at exactly eight.
It was as if somewhere out in the world, or in some other one, a hammer had come down on a timepiece, and by some misplacement of consequence it was his granddaddy’s own watch that cracked. A misdirected trauma, the wires of the world crossed up a single moment, betraying the flickering nature of what was. Yes, there were strange forces at work out there, in the nights especially, but Old Man Howl already knew that. He always had.
He sipped from his jar and watched the hills below, blue-lit under the moon like the swells of a great dark sea. Here or there a flicker of light, barely seen, like a ghost in the trees. Still-fires, tended by men and boys made demon-faced in the shivering glow. Light-bringers, as he thought of them, men of his blood and employ. They made the best there was, the hottest, and they always harked.
But tonight it was he who awaited word.
It would come by horse, he knew, just the way it was sent. He saw his son’s big gelding stepping from the trees into the blued-out meadow, in its haughty trot, high-stepping like the old warhorse it was, the steam throbbing from its nostrils like the exhaust of some great machine. He saw his son atop it, straight-backed in the saddle, his cigar pulsing like a firefly in the night. He saw his son whole again on that horse, alive and unmaimed, his straight smile split whitely in his square face.
The old man jerked awake. He’d been dreaming again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
His son had turned up already, earlier that day, and not on his horse. A part of him had, at least, delivered by a messenger on a bloodred motorbike. It was in a leather satchel the rider brought, innocent as any, but even before the old man opened it, he felt a cold hollow yawn open inside him, a big lonesome place that howled. He lifted a flap, only to find his first-born’s hand sunk in a jar of his enemy’s whiskey, the fingers clawed like a great white spider in a curiosity shop.
The heaviest thing he had ever held.
His answer.
The jar burst on the porch between his boots, the shriveled flesh landing palm down, knuckles up, a thing that might just run off.
It didn’t.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He’d made his living on ultimata, a man seldom defied. In his youth, he’d done a thing no one else would. He’d killed a man with a nine-inch bowie knife in a gravelbar fight, the two of them, it was said, clenching opposite ends of a red handkerchief in their teeth as their blades flashed and danced in the sun. He who clenched longest was winner, a code devised by troopers from the Civil War, and it was Howl who had.
It was said he was stabbed nineteen times in the process by his antagonist, a Mr. Corcoran Muldoon of Seven Devils, North Carolina, who’d insulted Howl’s prized coonhound when it failed to tree a single stripe-tail in two days of hunting along the Gumtree River. It was said that white worms of scar surfaced all over Howl’s body, lustrous and fat, like a stilled plague. Though a few men were known to dissent, in whisper, saying that he had, as a boy, been tangled for two days in a stretch of his daddy’s barbwire.
Howl did not take kindly to such whispering, and he shot down two of the dissenters in duels, using a Colt’s Dragoon from his cavalry days when each declined the knife. Many witnessed this. Both men shot dead in the heart, on the same gravelbar of the Gumtree River, at fifteen paces. After that everyone believed, and his word carried the weight of blood or steel, and it was on the lips of the many sons he bore, and their sons after that.
Now a new enemy had risen. Eustace Uptree. A machine-gunner from the Great War, it was whispered, who’d decimated whole hordes of the Hun. He was cooking popskull in the hills—busthead whiskey—a challenge clear as the gauntlet. Already there had been skirmishes. Stills raided, trucks overturned and set alight. Nightriders newly mounted, with torch and pistol, who moved like a dark flood across the hills.
Enough. Old Man Howl had sent word, by his eldest son, that there would be remittance, or war would follow. Outright. And when his answer came in the form of a five-digit hunk of his very own flesh, he felt his very truth shaken, felt it go out of him like the ghost it was, into the thin air above him, and he was sick.
There was a force at work here, counter to his own, and the world lay now at a slant, such that keys could slide down counters into breadboxes, muddy boots could tumble indoors. Such that his favored son, his eldest, could be undone as easily as the faceless hulks that hung in the smokehouse. As easily as something for supper.
For the first time in years, Old Man Howl’s word had not been harked. He knew, old as he was, he would have to bleed weight into it again. He knew a rider would come, not his son but some other man bearing a challenge, and it would be a gravelbar at first light.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Once again, he was called to the river—the great dark Gumtree, bedded with the bones of ages, which the government now planned to dam, flooding the valley for power. So many stories would be buried, his own antecedent selves lost beneath the dark fathoms of history. His memories, dueling in darkness. Howl had his men fighting the plan tooth and nail—blood would be paid for every drop of river the government dammed.
His younger sons conveyed him down by wagon, the buckboard lurching and jumping as it descended the mountain, making its way through the night with an escort of armed riders. Despite this the old man dreamed, flat on his back, and he saw all the days of his life, gold-lit as any storybook tale, as he’d sat high upon his bentwood rocker and watched the world below him shape itself to his will. Watched the fires that were his, the wagons and trucks running the roads his blood had built. Watched the little town rise up out of the valley like something he’d planted, the big mill whose thirsts he quenched, whose smokestacks shot straight as fortress towers into the sky. All this risen at his behest, as if at the tips of his fingers, as he sat high upon his mountain to watch.
And he saw too the men who’d died for defying him, for daring his truth. Muldoon, on that spit of gravel, whose blood he could still hear crackling into the tiny pebbles of the beach, the both of them crumpled and puddling. And the boys after that, O-mouthed when the balls struck home, when they were wronged for all time, and he a man made big on story and rumor.
In his dreams of them he was not afraid. His hand never shook, his aim was true. And yet seeing them again, in his dreams this night, he saw that it was not them that he drew down upon but his own son, boy-faced beneath his beard, reaching handless for his own gun.
“I can’t,” his son was saying. “Papa, I can’t.”
And still Old Howl’s hand never shook.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howl jerked awake in the bed of the wagon. His eyes stung as he opened them, from tears or sweat he wasn’t sure. He blinked them clear and saw it was yet night, the stars cast above him like polished stones. He reached up his hand, toward them, as if he might pluck one from its setting, but they would not be moved.
Before long the river shone through the trees, silver-lit under the moon like a stumbled-upon treasure, a vein of quicksilver in a newly faulted earth. But as first light seeped upward into the sky, the river began to darken, as if in spite, the gravelbars burning pale as blisters upon its skin.
Old Man Howl’s sons halted well within the trees. He climbed down from the wagon, his body an assemblage of rusted hinges, his spine a worm-eaten kingpost that smarted its discontent, and mounted the horse they offered him. They rode down out of the trees and onto the bank, then down into the river, the fetlocks of the horses whipping through the shallows.
The gravelbars, in neither this county nor the next, were difficult to law, and Uptree’s men were gathered already upon one, sitting their horses with long guns across their knees. Beyond them, upriver, an old wooden bridge spanned the banks, no traffic at this hour.
The old man, as the challenged party, had the choice of weapons, and he’d chosen pistols without dishonor. No one knew how old he was—old enough, it was said, to ride with the James Gang some sixty years back—and he could not be expected to fight a man a fraction his age with knives. He pulled his great horse pistol from his saddle-wallet, stowed in the woolen sock that kept it warm and oiled. A Colt’s Dragoon, sized to kill not just men but the animals they rode. His now-eldest son, who would serve as his duelist’s second, wanted to load it, but the old man waved him off. He already had, the night before, driven home a wadded ball of lead upon a full charge of powder, and now he unsocked the great pistol as he had twice before on such mornings, on this river as the dawn-light shot jagged through the trees.
On the near bank people were assembling, onlookers who’d got up early to walk the many miles to watch. To say they’d been there, to tell it this way or that, telling of pistol flashes burned into their eyes, of blood so hot it steamed upon the pebbles.
Eustace Uptree strode into the middle of the bar to meet him, smiling as he came, the straps of his overalls clinging to the heavy mountains of his shoulders, his felt slouch hat worn high on the back of his head. He had the bandy swagger of a new god, a chest swollen with blood and might, and Old Howl knew himself a fool to believe that truth was ever a set thing, that it need not be proven again and again and again, blood-reared each time until it wasn’t.
Uptree was talking now, hissing through his bared teeth, enumerating injustices Old Howl and his ancestors had done him and his kin. Saying how Old Howl stood stony in the way of fortune, how the dam would bring thousands of newcomers—a boon of thirsty throats. How the old man wasn’t but a ghost of what he’d been, how he’d drive through him like a fogbank.
Old Man Howl hardly heard him, the words breaking all around him like the river upon the ground they stood, white-churned and without meaning. He’d learned long ago that no one could be both a god and saint.
Uptree snapped his fingers before the old man’s face. “You even listening to me, Howl?”
The old man wasn’t. He was looking at a Carolina parakeet on the limb of a leafless bootheel oak. How green it was, how startlingly green, a burst of brightest color in the colorless dawn. A bird rare as hen’s teeth, hunted to the edge of extinction. Beneath him, far beneath him, the seconds paced them apart. Somewhere, in that world below, a handkerchief dropped.
The old man raised the big pistol to the parakeet chittering on its limb, if only to point it out, to tell the world watching how pretty it was, how right and how true. But it was too pretty a thing for even him to bear, so he dropped the pistol toward the man before him, laying the iron upon the man’s heart. He would right himself.
But innocent objects behaved strangely that day, and the weapon only clicked, and a fire bloomed before him that wasn’t his.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Old Howl lay upon the bar, and he could hear his blood whispering through the pebbles. A thousand tiny voices, lost. Then, more loudly, the voices of men upon the bank. Onlookers, their words falling on the river like stones, like the first heavy drops of a great flood.
One of them spat. “I heard it was a tangle of bobwire give him them scars.”
“Me too,” said another. “Heard he never did own a coonhound neither.”