A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  I sewed my squares together. You must make a choice, Lawrence. Widower’s choice: love or death, but choose before my heart breaks.

  Alice was dead, his children needed a mother, he needed someone in his bed, why did he hesitate? Was I so repugnant to him that he would rather choose death than love with me?

  Now, as a spirit, I walk to the windows, and the fog that is my breath congeals on the windowpanes. I watch the family that lives here now spill out of a new vehicle. Talking and laughing, they look at glowing screens more than each other. None of the children clean the floors or sew or even have a hope chest to leave them desolate and alone. They are nearly a different species from me.

  Back then, when I had finished my quilt at long last and spread it on my bed, Lawrence had come into my room with a lamp turned low. “That’s a new bedspread.”

  “No, it’s a new quilt,” I corrected.

  “It’s very nice,” he offered and kissed my neck.

  “What color do you like best?”

  “It’s too dark in here to see the colors properly,” he protested.

  “Then turn up the light,” I urged.

  “No, the children might see and wonder. They all look gray to me.”

  “So you choose gray?” I asked.

  “It seems to be the only choice I can make,” he said, laughing at me in the gray twilight of my room.

  “I suppose it does seem that way to you,” I said, sad and soft after he blew out the light so he could use me in the black dark of the moonless night.

  In that way, he let me know the purpose I served him, which was paltry. I was a mare in the stable, available, serviceable, and generally obedient. I would do for now, unless something better came along. That was why it was only gray to him. He thought he chose me, but what he actually chose was the color black.

  Black for death.

  He had chosen it the moment he blew out the lamp, instead of turning it up brighter to look at the Widower’s Choice. He chose blindly and so I made the final decision for him. Red was no longer love: Red was blood. His blood.

  It was easy to do. He gave me barely any trouble at all. I hid a butcher knife under my pillow, and after he had spent his seed in me and fallen asleep where he would lay until dawn before he snuck back to his own bed, I grabbed him by the hair. His eyes flew open. That night was a full moon, and he saw the glint of the blade and the murder in my eyes. I slashed his throat quicker than slitting the throat of a hog, and he turned the whole of my bed red. It dried to a red sienna, and when the light of his eyes had gone, I saw that they were red sienna the entire time, all the rest was only a trick of the light he held inside.

  I waited to light the lamp again until after his struggles stopped and then I kissed his forehead. I closed his eyes. He would never love me after having beautiful, sparkling Alice to love.

  I stripped off my bloody nightgown and left it on the bed. I dropped the knife into the basin of water on my bed stand and tried to wash the blood from my face and hands. Of course, it was impossible; my hair and my neck, my breasts, my ankles, my feet, all were awash with my lover’s blood.

  The lamp showed the smears I couldn’t remove in stark, shadowy detail. I wiped and wiped, but it wouldn’t come off, my basin of water simply wasn’t enough to wash it away.

  I went back to the narrow spinster’s bed where we had entwined ourselves in the darkness for so many nights. I was angry at him for his choice, and I was filled with a sensation of joy. It was a contradiction that is difficult to explain.

  He was so beautiful lying there. I pulled the new quilt up to his chin and kissed his pale forehead. I left the lamp by his head and sat at the foot of the bed, watching his features flicker in the warmth of the lamplight. First the ghost of a smile, then perhaps what could be mistaken for a tear, a frown, a laugh, a worry line … He should have been mine. I should have gone out to the dance. Alice had been right, I could be beautiful when I tried.

  I was the dark to her light, the moonlight to her sunshine.

  Dawn came slowly. It was cold that morning, and the light that came through the window muted the warm light of the lamp and turned everything gray, everything except for the blood. There was no mistaking it in the daylight for black. The edges of the quilt that were unsullied from his blood stood out in blue for the bachelor turned husband turned widower, and now finally, to betrayed.

  The children would be waking soon. Alice’s sweet darlings. I had pretended that they were my own children. I clutched my arms around my stomach and stifled a sob. What had I done? The quilt had shifted, and the slashed lips on Lawrence’s neck peeked out at me. Nothing I had done was beautiful. It was the work of a mad woman. Once all was clean, I unfolded the Roman Cross I had made and laid it down once more and sat with dry eyes on my spinster’s bed.

  Since that dawning, I’ve had many years to think about my actions that night. It took me many years to lose the anger that had driven me to impatience with Lawrence and still longer to try to forget what followed next.

  I couldn’t answer the children’s questions about their father. They had already lost their mother, and I knew that they laughed at me behind their hands. I wanted them to love me as they had loved Alice, but they called me Boring Aunt Beth and pulled away from my arms when I held them. Perhaps they always knew what I was capable of. They say children see further than adults while understanding nothing of what they see. They react on instinct. They haven’t yet tamed themselves to smile when they want to cry, or laugh when they want to scream.

  I went to little Laura’s room first. She was easy, still so small and so young. Her sleepy cries didn’t wake her brother. Jonathan was more difficult. He was growing into a young man already, and I was glad that I had brought the knife with me, or he might have gotten away.

  Such pretty children, they looked like their mother. Golden haired, pink cheeked, and ochre-stained eyes—dead and staring— were all that they had of their father. Open and watching me, I saw myself reflected there in their father’s eyes. I was a figure from a nightmare with my white face, thin, cold lips, and bloodstained butcher knife.

  I won’t tell you all the rest. You can imagine on your own how I hid the bodies in the woods, digging as deeply as I could three graves amongst the tree roots. How I wrapped Lawrence in the Widower’s Choice and covered him with earth. You can imagine, if you will, how I carried each child tightly against my bound breast, my gray dress whisking along the dead leaves and old moss of the forest floor, each one wrapped in a quilt that I stitched together with my hopes and my dreams and blood from my pricked fingers.

  I burned everything that had been bled on in the fireplace, tearing the sheets and adding them a strip at a time to the blaze, watching the evidence flee into smoke and ashes. I threw out the water I had used to mop up the blood out the back door, and I swept the house and sanded the floors. I sanded until I had to stop; my fingers had started to bleed, and it was no use trying to clean up blood with more blood.

  After a time, people came calling to find out where Lawrence had gone. I told them that he had taken the children away, that he was tired of the old house, the old life, and I hinted, perhaps, he was tired of living with an old maid.

  I was only just thirty years old when they died, and I died too, although I lived on in body. Every day I faded still further into the woodwork until one day, many years later, I died of old age.

  It took them a long time to find my body. Not many people came to visit me by then. How long was my body left where it fell in the kitchen while I peeled apples for a pie? I’m not certain. From the moment Lawrence made his choice, time never moved properly for me again. After I died in the more formal and less poetic sense, time jolted, jumping ahead and then freezing still.

  I walk through the house, looking at the flowers some young wife has put in a vase on the table or the lace someone worked hard to make.

  They never found the bodies I buried deep in the woods, and I pray that they never do. I want to
remember them with dimples and blonde hair and Lawrence with his eyes bright and full of grand ideas and summer umber. Those are the memories that sustain me; the way the house is treated is abhorrent. Nobody takes proper care of the wooden floors. Quite the opposite; they covered over many of them with carpet now, and I hide when they clean them with their loud, noxious machine that makes five minutes of a job that, done properly, would take most of the morning.

  It’s sacrilege. Beautiful trees had been cut down and chopped out of their life to make them and to cover them over and leave them to rot—

  I’ve said too much. I sit in the dead hearth and let my wails echo through the chimney. A woman rocks her own golden-haired, pink-hued daughter and tells her, Hush, it’s only the wind, little one.

  I like to remember when everything was beautiful and I was young. Even the gray ones deserve to have memories like that. Even the murderers deserve to remember what it was to be loved. I tell myself this, but all I can see are rags in an old hope chest and quilts buried deep in the trees. A Widower’s Choice quilt stained black with blood in the moonlight and the struggles of the children to resist me.

  I bite my ghostly knuckles and weep for a dance never gone to … and all the other choices I never made … and all the ones I did.

  The Turners called their home a farm, but to most folks in Buchanan County, they lived on an estate with one hundred acres of premium land close enough to town that electricity lit up their big farmhouse with its second story and inside toilet. No one held their good fortune against them. The Turners earned every bit of it, got their own hands dirty breeding quality horses in their round red barn. No one wished them a bad turn. No one figured one was coming.

  “This way, Benji. You’ve gotta see why we’re skipping the piano tonight.” Pearl Turner tugged at the watch chain draped across Benjamin’s vest. “It’s bonafide.”

  The Edison Amberola had arrived that morning, carried in a crate by the postal delivery wagon. Just in time for their Friday night shindig, Pa Turner gave the new phonograph a place of honor in the addition he was keen on calling the “ballroom.” He’d rubbed the dark cabinet down with wood soap, like liniment on a prized racehorse, tenderly wiping packing dust from its mahogany girth. He’d opened the storage door and organized the bright blue cylinders of music, each label printed with the face of Thomas Edison. He turned them all so Edison’s eyes faced forward, peeking over the shelf edge again and again.

  The Turners and friends huddled around the Amberola at the far end of the large room. Heels tapped on the hardwood floor, gazes drifted to the crystal chandelier.

  Albert, the Turner’s oldest, used all six-foot-four of his lanky frame to command attention and held up one of the wax cylinders. “You know, my buddy up in Wisconsin says these blue Amberols are getting rinky dink. He’s buying diamond discs. They’re flat and take up less space.”

  In the lull of new music, the younger Turners rolled their eyes, clasped their friends’ hands, and giggled their way into a rowdy spin of ring-around-the-rosy.

  “These are Edison.” Pa took the cylinder from Albert’s hand. “I don’t care about those other talking machine jobbers.”

  “Edison’s making discs too, Pa.”

  “Applesauce.” Pearl raised her voice over the children’s singing “ashes, ashes” and squeezed her way between her father and brother. “Don’t listen to him, Pa.” She knelt to read the cylinder labels. “He doesn’t know music like you and I do.”

  She handed her father a cylinder, and he lifted the top lid to slide it into place. Band music trickled from the cabinet and filled the room with the earnest pleas of a beau to his sweetheart, begging her to go a-walking. Pearl yanked Benji into the middle of the room and led him into a slow foxtrot. She had learned all the newest dances.

  Ma Turner raised her eyebrows and leaned into Pa. “It’s a good thing they’re engaged.”

  Pa chuckled, then elbowed Albert and pointed out the window to a cloud of dust. An automobile horn honked, and four goggled figures emerged from the billowing dirt.

  “See that machine?”

  Albert nodded.

  “Son, do we get rid of all our horses just because we bought a horseless buggy?”

  Albert shrugged.

  “Course we don’t. Course we don’t, son.”

  Pa Turner’s second son, Grover, entered the front door with another fellow and two young ladies. A chorus of laughter and the ruckus of goggle, glove, and motor coat removal broadcast their arrival. The young ladies used a small brush to tidy their dresses. Grover bounded through the parlor into the ballroom to his father.

  “You lost one of your music doohickeys.” In his outstretched hand lay a bright blue cylinder.

  “The Amberola only comes with a dozen.” Pa Turner took it and frowned at the label. “It’s not an Edison.”

  “Well, it was on our porch. This must be number thirteen.”

  The Fieldings moved into the old farmhouse with a gusto indicative of city dwellers getting to stretch their legs on a patch of green in suburbia. The house came with a round red barn on its three acres, situated close enough for a stroll to the quaint downtown coffee and gift shops. While Fiona appreciated the bargain and proximity to her job at the hospital, Max envisioned converting the round barn into a sound studio. That is, once he got the house renovations squared away.

  Max sat on the second to last step of the staircase and sighed. The more boxes he unpacked, the more worn the old house looked. With a little elbow grease, he knew vintage hardwood floors hid beneath the orange vinyl flooring. And he couldn’t decide whether he preferred the idea of a real wood-burning fireplace or if he should convert it to gas; set blazes with the flick of a switch. The screen door in the kitchen slammed and in skipped his son, Jack.

  “Dad? What’s this?” He tilted backward so his father could reach into the hood hanging down the back of his sweatshirt. The boy had been rummaging in the barn since that morning, insisting he got dibs on treasures.

  Max gripped the brown paper parcel and loosened the twine.

  Meg hopped down the stairs, pink headphones resting at her neck, and peered over her father’s shoulder. “Oh, how are we going to play it?”

  He stared at the blue cylinder, its wax surface speckled with white clouds, its label browned and torn. “This will only play on a very old record player.”

  As they marched into the backyard, Jack kicked at a length of concrete jutting from the ground. “Why’s there an old parking lot in the yard?”

  Max gave the concrete a kick too and explained it wasn’t a parking lot. “This house used to have an extra room.”

  Meg tiptoed along the crumbled foundation, balanced on one foot while holding the other aloft, and tilted forward into the shape of a capital letter T.

  Max pointed to the large picture window on the back of the house, and both of his children stared. “That used to be a doorway into a huge ballroom.”

  On the back of the house, a faint line revealed the mystery room, a dingy charcoal halo around the siding less dingy than the rest.

  Meg shoved her hands on her hips. “A ballroom? I could have had a ballroom to practice in?”

  In the dim light of the barn, the three Fieldings sorted through wooden crates and dusty cardboard boxes but found no Amberola.

  Jack grumbled and refused to open another box. “I’m telling ya, there isn’t one in here. I would’ve seen it, Dad. I know what those record players look like.”

  Max Fielding rattled the ladder to the loft. “Take a break, Jack.” He pointed his thumb at the loft. “If I don’t find anything up here, we’ll try the shops downtown and hit that ice cream place before Mom comes home.”

  Jack grinned and raced from the barn as his father climbed the ladder.

  Meg skulked to the door as well and yelled as she left. “I’m taking a break too.”

  Max rolled his eyes. Kids. Didn’t they want to witness the reveal, the great moment of discovery? He crawled ben
eath the cobwebs sagging from the ceiling and reached a small stack of boxes.

  Meg and Jack reappeared, their eyes wide as they crammed against the doorframe.

  “There’s music. Old music coming from the house.”

  Meg gripped her brother’s shoulders.

  He hummed and tried to sing. “Long way to … where’s Tippa Larrey?”

  Despite his efforts, cobwebs clung to Max’s black T-shirt. He cupped his hand around his ear. In the distance, the distinct strain of an old song wobbled, the male tenor belting out about it being a long way to go.

  He shifted his body, closed his eyes to focus on the faint music, and felt his knee sink into a soft plank of wood with such speed, he failed to grab anything to stop his long, long fall.

  Grover and Benji marched around the room, the younger Turners keeping step, and Albert sang out with an exaggerated Irish accent, “Tipper-ra-ry!”

  Ma Turner forced a smile. “Our Grover. Joining the army.” She clutched Pa’s arm. “Going to war.”

  “It’s not our war.” Pa retrieved the cylinder after the song ended. “It’s a Mexican revolution.” His words echoed in the large room. His eyes drifted to the window, the nightfall. “The army’s just protecting the border. Making sure they stay on their side of the Rio Grande.” He tucked the cylinder into the cabinet, spun Edison’s eyes forward. “We’ve got four men running for president this year and not a one are talking war.”

  Grover clambered into his mother. “No war for me, Ma. I’m gonna catch bandits.” With his fingers bent in the shape of a handgun, he aimed at the chandelier.

  One of his guests giggled.

  Pearl yanked at her fiancé Benji’s hand. “Don’t you forget you’re just tagging along. Don’t you sign a thing.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “Pa, was that the last one?”

  Albert sidled to the phonograph with the thirteenth cylinder. “We haven’t tried this one.”

  Pa grumbled at the label, running his fingers over the stark lines and two dots until Pearl leaned over his shoulder.