by Daniel Mills
Whateley’s face turned crimson. He sprang up from the chair and grabbed hold of his wife’s arm. Without a word, he dragged her to her feet and spirited her toward the doorway.
In the entryway, he retrieved his cane and spun on his heel to address Lowell.
“You have wasted my afternoon, sir,” he declared coldly. “And you will not see me again. Nor will you see my friends again, either. I will certainly warn them to stay far away from a fraud and a charlatan such as yourself.”
He stepped through the doorway, pulling his wife after him. She tripped on the stoop and looked back at Lowell, her expression at once pleading and resigned, as though craving a deliverance she no longer expected. Her despair bit deep, instilling in Lowell a terrible, inescapable guilt.
He ran after them into the alleyway.
Dusk was descending. A heavy snow filled the air.
“You swine!” he shouted after Whateley. “I will tell the world what you are!”
Whateley halted and turned around. He released his grip on his wife’s arm and advanced on Lowell with a menacing sneer, brandishing his cane like a common thug.
“Run!” Lowell shouted to Mrs. Whateley. “He will kill you. Don’t you see that?”
She did not move but looked on without expression, watching as her husband approached her would-be rescuer. Whateley lifted the cane high above his head and brought it down across his chest, a pendulum descending.
Lowell dodged to his right and managed to evade the blow. The cane impacted the frozen ground with a hollow report. Whateley cursed but did not drop the cane. Seeing an opening, Lowell took the offensive and dashed toward Whateley with fists raised.
The other man was ready for him. He stepped to one side and caught Lowell with his outstretched boot, scooping the legs out from under him. Lowell struck the ground, hard, his weight landing on his elbow. His arm went numb.
Lowell attempted to regain his feet, but the younger man was too quick for him. Whateley kicked him in the side then stomped down on his exposed gut. Lowell screamed. He attempted to crawl away, dragging himself through the snow, but Whateley followed him.
He wielded the cane like a riding crop, delivering a series of blows across Lowell’s back and dropping the photographer onto his stomach. Lowell tried to speak—to apologize, perhaps, to plead for mercy—but found he had not the breath for it.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Whateley raise the cane and take aim at his left temple. The blow connected with a startling crack. The world flashed white before him and the vision in his left eye flickered and dimmed. A warm trickle poured from the torn scalp, staining his shirt and collar. He closed his eyes.
Snow settled above his brow and melted. Cold fluid streamed down his forehead and into his damaged eye. Patrick’s face returned to him in that moment, surfacing from the crimson cloud that obscured his vision.
“Forgive me,” he murmured. “Please.”
Whateley wiped his stick on Lowell’s shirt and spit on him as he would a beggar or criminal. Then he turned away. His footsteps retreated, muffled by fresh snow.
“Come,” Lowell heard him say. “We mustn’t be late for dinner.”
*
Lowell opened his eyes. Night had fallen. Hours might have passed or mere minutes—he could not be sure—but the agony he experienced on waking was indescribable. His chest ached. His temples pounded, and he had lost the sight in his left eye. Nauseous, he rotated his head and threw up into the fresh snow. His vomit was yellow and dark, the color of old bruises.
He crawled to the nearest wall and propped himself against it. Slowly he counted down from five, whispering the words to himself as he did before a picture. When he reached the end, he vaulted himself into a standing position. He wobbled dangerously, nearly fell, but caught himself against the wall. He cast his gaze back in the direction of his studio. The door was open, but he could not bring himself to return there.
Breathing heavily, he hauled himself down the alleyway, emerging into the gas-lit sheen of the street. Only this morning he had walked this same block, but tonight, everything had changed. Providence itself swam in the lens of Patrick’s camera. Even the newest buildings bore signs of decay, marked by smoke stains and fallen roofs, brown curls of dying ivy on every wall.
It was late, but the city hummed with activity. An endless stream of carriages banged and clattered past. Lowell stumbled into the path of a police officer, but the man ignored him, turning up his collar to hurry past.
No one took notice of him. He passed among the midnight crowds—anonymous, unseen—cursed by solitude as in the year that Patrick left him. A dogcart flew past him, missing him by less than a yard. He took two steps backward, lost his footing, and tumbled into the gutter.
He lay there for a time, quite collapsed, while men and women passed him by. At one point he spotted the two sisters from the morning and observed that their faces had grown heavy with the accumulation of years, all vestiges of their former beauty spoiled. On a chain between them, they carried a purse that bulged with miserly excess.
Behind them, shackled to the purse by a pair of manacles, walked a young woman of waxy countenance who wore nothing but a cotton shift. Lowell could see that she alone understood his plight, but she only lifted her shackled wrists, as though to indicate her own helplessness, and then shuffled past, dragged on like a dog by the women she served.
Nobody would help him—that much was clear—and he called on reserves of strength he did not know he possessed in order to regain his feet. Once he had steadied himself, he began to walk, continuing down the pavement toward Saint Andrew’s. He shivered in his shirt sleeves, occasionally spitting blood into the slush at his feet.
He thought he must be dying.
On the corner, he passed the paper boy. The lad grinned wickedly through his front teeth and shoved the evening circular into his face.
“No,” Lowell said. “I don’t need it.”
“Yessir,” the boy drawled. “But ye do want it, don’t ye?”
Lowell tore the paper from the boy’s grasp and threw it into the street. He pressed past him to the church of Saint Andrew’s, where he mounted the stone stairs. He took them slowly, his legs weakening with each step. At last he reached the high doors. He rattled the handles but to no effect. Locked fast. Even the Church had closed its doors to him.
In despair he cast his gaze heavenward, seeking out that point in space where the cross-topped spire disappeared into endless snowfall. Then he saw it: the cross had become a crucifix. A living figure writhed in agony on that bronze tree, naked and abandoned with only the dark for comfort. Lowell recognized him at once, even at that great distance.
He fell to his knees, trembling as before the altar. He heard a cry—a boy’s voice, he fancied, though he could not make out the words. The world was falling from him, a garment shed. His head tipped back and he tumbled into nothingness.
*
He woke up swathed in snow. His clothes had frozen to his body, and the blood had thickened in his beard. He wiped the snowmelt from his face, relieved to find that he could see through his left eye, and levered himself into a crouch. The pain was excruciating, but perhaps not as intolerable as before.
He was in the alleyway behind his studio. His nightmare, then, had been a nightmare in truth, a vision brought on by the blow to his skull. It made no difference. He was a man haunted, damned beyond atonement. Years might pass, but nothing could erase from his mind the image of that crucified figure.
He limped back into the studio.
A fire smoldered in the grate and the room was still warm. From this he concluded that his unconsciousness could not have lasted more than an hour. He went to the side cabinet and extracted the brandy bottle. He took three quick slugs before replacing it.
He crossed the room to the corner where the shipping crate lay discarded, left behind in his excitement over Patrick’s camera. He turned it upside down. A brown envelope slipped free and drifted to the floor.
No name was indicated, but he knew it was meant for him.
Inside was a photograph. Lowell recognized it as one that he himself had taken many years before. In the picture, a young child regarded the camera without smiling. Patrick. The child’s features were fair, his nose turned slightly to the right where it had once been broken. His eyes were blue: wide with terror, blank with suffering.
Lowell blinked. His vision blurred. The room swam before him and the blood rushed to his ears. He thrust the photograph into the fire. He watched it light—the child’s face blackening, falling through—and then lunged for Patrick’s camera.
He toppled the tripod, dashing the instrument onto the floor. He ripped free the hood and shattered the slide loader, punching through the mahogany frame, his knuckles splitting where they connected with brass. He plucked out the lens from the viewfinder and carried it into the darkroom, the glass slipping between his injured fingers. In the darkroom, he held up the lens to the mirror and glimpsed himself in its depths.
What did he hope to see there?
He could not say. Some hidden truth, perhaps—some veiled hope of which he was only half-aware. But his appearance had not altered. In the lens, he saw only the same broken man as in the mirror, a bloodied beast stalked by the same demons, the same ghosts. With a roar of agony, more animal than human, he hurled the lens against the far wall and heard it shatter.
He returned to the studio and shot the deadbolt, the better to escape down the neck of a brandy bottle. And so the night passed. He drank—he did not pray—and the darkness drew near as with the rustle of fabric, a starless hood that stretched to cover the city, to gather all creation in its sweep. At dawn, the wind turned southerly. The snow became a bitter rain that drummed like pebbles on the walls of the studio.
*
He was awakened by the doorbell. It was midday, the sun’s glare doubled by slush and snowmelt. He went to the door and cracked it open, withdrawing the chain when he recognized the clerk from the Post Office.
“Yes?” he croaked. “What do you want?”
The clerk started, shocked by the change in Lowell’s appearance.
“You didn’t stop by, sir. Yesterday. Before we locked up.”
“No,” he said. “I was—delayed.”
“I have this for you,” said the clerk. “I am sorry, sir.”
The tersely-worded missive contained the news of Patrick’s death.
On November 29th, the young photographer had sold off his apartment and settled his debts before returning to the studio. After he failed to emerge, his friends had summoned the officers, who found him in the darkroom, a suicide.
It was later reported that Patrick had boxed up all of his possessions prior to his death: his books, his papers, his prints. Only his camera was found to be missing.
*
Lowell’s story ended there. For a time neither of us spoke. Crickets sang in the nearby underbrush. The moon emerged from a bank of clouds, recasting the landscape from shades of silver. Lowell stubbed out his cigar and disappeared inside.
Five years have passed since our brief meeting, and yet I find his story has not left me. Lowell spoke eloquently of light and darkness—and of the dark that cannot be illumined—and within his tale itself there is another kind of darkness, a history hidden from the light of narrative: shadowed, secret, and thus ineradicable.
I woke the next morning to find that he had gone. He had departed the resort at first light and returned to Providence. I do not know what has become of him. Sometimes I like to think that he has found some measure of peace, whatever the nature of his past sins. In any event, I doubt that I will see him again.
WHISTLER’S GORE
The old churchyard
Two miles north of Plymouth, VT
ANNA BURDEN
Beloved Sister in Christ
Consort to the Revd Abijah Burden
Returned to the Lord
19th Jun 1798
Æ 24 years
Born in Ireland, County Sligo
She came late to the Faith
Being married to the Revd Burden
In her 22nd year of age
And received into the Fellowship of the Saints
Deporting herself with an abundance
Of kindness & womanly virtue
Before falling from the Post Bridge
Into the rapid waters beneath
Wherein she lies drowned
Untimely born and stolen away
Who is this that cometh from Idumea?
(Is 63:1)
*
PHINEAS OLMSTEAD
First son of the Col. Silas Olmstead
Felled by the Hand of God
Æ 16 years
Mon 30th Jun 1798
Heard to pass an unquiet night
Following upon the Revd’s sermon
He journeyed to the far fields
West of the Gore
And did not take warning
When first the thunder
Rolled and clapped on high
And thus caught unawares
Did not return with the other ploughboys
And was not found until daybreak
By J Cuthbert, Smith
Am I born to die?
To lay this body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?
*
IN MEMORY OF
EDWARD CARTWRIGHT
Taverner
Died
Jul 2nd 1798
Æ 31 years
And though I waken to the dream
And dwell no more upon the Vale
I leave behind the burning skies
The One who yearns to die but fails
PATIENCE CARTWRIGHT
Amiable Consort
Died
Jul 2nd 1798
Æ 23 years
Pray do not mourn the end that comes
But count it gladly, as a grace
For in this death the Spider stirs
To mask with silk the Savior’s Face
*
ALL MUST SUBMIT TO THE KING OF TERRORS
JOHN CUTHBERT
Blacksmith, Deacon
Honest & upright in all matters
Devoted himself with saintly zeal
To the memory of his wife
And to the welfare of his countrymen
Perished in the flames
Jul 2nd 1798
Æ 27 years
Every knee will bow to me
And all the tongues confess
(Is 45:23)
*
ASHBEL ALLEN OLMSTEAD
Second son of the Col. Olmstead
Brother to the departed Phineas
An Innocent & Child of God
He apprenticed to John Cuthbert
And died in the fires of July the 2nd
That destroyed the tavern and the smithy
Returning to the ground
Æ 14 years
Reposing there in darkness
Where the silent waters flow
A land of deeper shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary regions of the dead
Where all things are forgot
*
ZERAH CARTWRIGHT
Brother to Edward & Jerusha
Departed this Dark Valley
Upon the 5th of July 1798
Æ 34 years
Having left the church
In the final days of his life
Upon hearing the words of the Revd Burden
And being granted a vision of realms beyond
He submitted himself to the Angel’s yoke
And was washed clean in the waters
Wherein he fished by morning
And in which his empty boat was found
For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets
And they shall show great signs and wonders
(Matt 24:24)
*
&
nbsp; BLACKBRIDGE
GIDEON JOSEPH
Capt, Massachusetts 1st Militia
B. Apr 12th 1753
D. __________
JERUSHA MARGARET
Wife & Mother
B. Oct 27th 1770
D. Jul 8th 1798
PATIENCE
B. Jan 1st 1793
D. Jul 7th 1798
Æ 5 years
FAITH
B. Sep 5th 1794
D. Jul 7th 1798
Æ 3 years
Born unto death
These babes await
The homecoming of their father
Capt. Gideon Blackbridge
A Hero of Bunker Hill
Who vanished into the wood
On the 5th of July
And could not save them
From their mother Jerusha
A midwife
Who christened them with pine pitch
And set the house alight
Before fleeing from the Gore
Found hanged at Adams’ Point
8th Jul 1798
Now rest these babes in slumbers deep
The sleep that hath no dreaming
The sea o’er which their father waits
To join them in their weeping
*
SARAH OLMSTEAD LITTLE
Widow of Asher Little
Sister to Col. Silas Olmstead
Mother of Ephraim
Died the 10th of July 1798
Æ 52 years
Survived by her son
E Little, Stonecutter
These words he chooses
In anticipation of the coming day
When the holy fires dim
And all things cease to be
That day is a day of wrath
A day of trouble and heaviness
A day of destruction and desolation
A day of obscurity and darkness
