by Daniel Mills
(Zeph 1:15)
*
SILAS JAMES OLMSTEAD
Col., Massachusetts 5th
Born November the 12th in the year 1751
He acquitted himself with laudable valor
At the battles of Trenton and Princeton
Attaining for himself the rank of Colonel
Before the age of thirty
His was the first family to settle in Whistler’s Gore
Where he oversaw the erection of a meetinghouse
And made provision for his fellow Christian
Through the winter of 88-89
A widower of long years
He raised two children from infancy
Only to lose them to lightning and to fire
Within a fortnight of one another
During these latter days
Died of grief
Jul 12th
May darkness show him mercy
Where the Lord has shown him none
Waked by the trumpet’s sound
I from my grave shall rise
And see the Judge with Glory Crowned
And greet the Flaming Skies
*
Revd ABIJAH BURDEN
A man of humility and moderation
Of benevolent aspect and amiable temperament
A teacher of the true faith, unsurpassed in learning
Unerring in his efforts on behalf of the lost
Husband to the late Anna Burden
Who drowned beneath the Post Bridge
And whose body was not recovered
In her death he glimpsed the coming of the Kingdom
And was moved to preach the Final Gospel
In this his church on the 29th of June
Speaking to no man afterward
And taking neither food nor drink
He succumbed to these privations on
On the 14th of July
Æ 26 years
And thenceforth joined our brothers
In the dark that knows no suffering
Whereunto I soon shall follow
And fall into the grave prepared me
E. Little, Stonecutter
Behold, I come quickly
(Rev 22:12)
*
From the sermons of the Revd. Abijah Burden. Dated June 29th 1798.
Upon that day of wrath they flayed the Son with savage blows and drove the spikes through his hands and feet. So, too, was he made to wear a crown of thorns, and in his despair, he cried out to the Father, beseeching the Godhead that dwells outside of time, of Whom Christ was begotten and Who shared His sufferings; aye, Who bears them still.
For though Christ died and rose, the Father remains, trapped by His eternal nature in the moment of His Son’s uttermost agony. Therein He knows only anguish and doubt and the terrible isolation of the dying. So falls to us this awful choice: the elect He preserves to join Him in the fire, while the damned He snuffs like candle flames failing.
Where you will be, my brothers, when the Final Trumpet sounds?
Where will you go, my sisters, when Death descends on spider’s silk?
Who is this who comes from Idumea?
THE WAYSIDE VOICES
I. The Traveler
The tavern came out of the mist. Hearth-light streamed through the shuttered windows, slicing lines in the dusk. The signboard creaked. The Wayside, it read. Inn & Spirits.
I cannot say what possessed me to take the Falmouth toll road. With the death of my boy, I fell into the dream and could do naught but walk the path my grief had blazed for me. That morning, I left his graveside and allowed my feet to carry me past the station and the church. In time, I reached the old toll route, disused since the arrival of the steam engine, and so passed from one kind of emptiness to another: the loneliness of fallen roofs, failing villages.
In such country I came upon the Wayside. To either side stretched orchards and barren farm-fields, the ground left to seed in this year of war and rainfall. Even the locusts, leafless in rows along the roadside, seemed half-feral, imbued with kind of wildness. Their barbed limbs dipped like hooks toward the roadway.
I went inside. Smoke filled the barroom, spreading outward from the fireplace around which huddled a group of men in battered caps. Two young soldiers stood at the counter and jested with the innkeeper, a heavy man attired in a leather apron. The boys roared with laughter, but the innkeeper’s countenance was somber, and he did not join in their mirth.
A small girl lingered near the corner of the room. She was a sly and skulking scrap of a thing, no older than eleven or twelve, her fair hair in braids—the innkeeper’s daughter, I presumed, though she looked nothing like him, being thin where he was portly and pallid where he was ruddy-cheeked, his whiskers sodden with crumbs and spittle.
The girl was the first to notice me. She darted a furtive glance behind her and scurried over to meet me in the doorway. She opened her mouth, as though she meant to speak, but the innkeeper caught sight of me then and waved me inside. He pointed to a table by a window. The damp steamed from me, forming puddles underfoot, but he did not seem to mind.
The men by the fireplace paid me no attention. At the bar, the soldiers heard the door and turned round. One of them smiled. In his uniform, he looked very much like my boy, though he could not have known what awaited him in the south, nor did he realize—as I did—that he would never again return to this desolate backwater which even the railroads had chosen to pass by.
I sat down at the table the innkeeper had indicated. Let me pour you a drink, he said, coming near, even as his daughter appeared at his shoulder bearing a mug of ale. For some reason this enraged him, though he strove to hide it, his hands twisted like claws in the apron. His daughter placed the drink before me and did not remain long enough for me to catch her eye or to ask what she had intended to tell me.
The wind moaned in the chimney.
Tree-limbs scraped and rattled at the shutters.
The innkeeper returned with a bowl of foul-smelling broth. Fish bones floated near the surface, and I caught the scent of something queer, a pungent aroma like barley gone to wild. The soup looked scarcely edible, and I lowered my spoon without tasting it. At this the innkeeper merely smiled—a little sadly, I thought—and did not trouble me further.
The soldiers excused themselves and made for the door. By the hearth, the men coughed and cursed the damp. I looked to the counter, but the innkeeper had vanished—then came the sound of heavy footsteps overhead, the shriek of a door thrown wide.
A young girl’s scream. The sick slap of leather on flesh.
The others paid it no mind.
After some minutes, the innkeeper resumed his place behind the counter. As before, he looked grave and joyless, his eyes focused on nothing as he readjusted his belt.
The men greeted his arrival with a chorus of slapped thighs and rattled cups. They whistled and stomped the floor and did not let up until the innkeeper brought out another tray of drinks. These new cups frothed and sloshed as he handed them out, retaining a single mug, which he placed upon the table in front of me.
For you, he said. It will help.
Help?
For the journey. We are late into autumn yet. Soon there will be a snow. His nostrils flared, ingrown with coarse hairs. By God I swear it won’t be long.
There was no clock in the tavern, but an hour or more must have elapsed before the remaining patrons pulled down their caps and staggered to the door. They said nothing to me as they passed, ignoring me as they had done all evening, so that I half thought myself invisible, a living man among ghosts.
Once they were gone, the innkeeper circled the counter and banked high the fire, flooding the room with wood-smoke. My vision blurred, and I mopped at my face with the back of my hand. The innkeeper said, You haven’t touched a drop.
His tone was gentle.
No.
You must be thirsty, he said, half-pleading.
No.
His face f
olded in upon itself. His lower lip thrust forward to suckle his moustache, and his expression softened noticeably, allowing me a glimpse of something inward, a queer and startling stillness. He shrugged and disappeared into the smoke.
I glanced down at the tabletop. The wood-grain was marred by scratches and scorch-marks, stains that could have been blood. From upstairs came a stifled sob, a wail of anguish.
Briefly, I was aware of movement behind me. The scrape of a boot on the floorboards. The whistle of air about my ears. And then the cold came over me, extinguishing all light, all memory, so that I found myself outside.
Again it was nightfall. The locusts rattled like surgeons’ tools, like the bone-saw that had taken my boy’s legs and stolen him away, binding us to the same dream, the same nothingness. I turned and found waiting the dark and the damp and the faint lights of the Wayside.
II. The Butchering Yard
There were so many. Men and women. Children with hair like lamb’s fleece and skin like new-fallen snow. It was never easy. My every instinct rebelled against it, but it was necessary: a kindness, a mercy. For the God of Abraham breathes the life into His children and thenceforth casts them to the wilds, wherein they find no refuge, none save that which I offered them—a Love given freely to all who came, unloved, to the Wayside.
The end found them like a creeping mist, enveloping them where they sat or stood or lay. Many fought against it. Others begged for mercy, for time. Some prayed, it is true, but their despair was evident, even then, and I saw the marks His goad had left upon them, their flesh wrinkled and cracked like harrowed earth or the scars upon Old Abel’s hands.
He was the first. I was a young man then and newly arrived in Falmouth. The town thrived in those days, the railroads some years away. With my inheritance I built up this tavern on the edge of Abel’s Wood, as it was called, for it was the exclusive domain of an elderly recluse known only by his Christian name.
“Old Abel,” the townsfolk called him, or “Queer Abel,” as he was notoriously taciturn and liable to shun all company. Strangest to me was the manner in which he kept his hands and forearms hidden, whether by gloves in the cold season or bandages in summer.
Oftentimes he wandered in to the Wayside and stayed until I turned him out. Always he sat at the counter and drank in silence, unspeaking save to murmur his thanks after every drink. At midnight, I showed him to the door and there lingered a spell to watch him stumble home, singing to himself as he walked, songs without words or melody.
Around this time the Bennington coach was stranded here on account of the weather. It was a miserable night. The snows lay deep upon on the ground and hid the moon and the stars.
By rights, the tavern should have been empty, and Abel came in as he often did. He was wind-burned and wild-eyed, the snowmelt dribbling from his beard. He meant to stay a while, or so I thought, but he left without explanation upon seeing the Bennington coachman.
Later this same coachman approached the counter and inquired after the old recluse. As it transpired, he recognized Abel from long ago. He had grown up in a village some miles to the south, where Abel had kept a flock of two dozen ewes, who grazed and slept on the common within view of Abel’s cottage: a square, thatch-roofed affair, wherein he resided with his wife.
His wife? I said, surprised.
Aye, said the coachman. And he made of himself a devoted husband, loving the poor girl for ten year or more, though she bore him no children.
What happened?
She died. There was a fire at the cottage, and the roof kindled and fell, catching his wife’s clothes alight. Abel could not save her, though he nearly burned off his hands trying. The girl was pale and smallish and always in ill health. The smoke killed her.
After the fire, Abel dwelt a fortnight amidst the ashes of his cottage. He made no effort to rebuild, nor to feed his flock, and it was only upon the fifteenth day that he roused himself from torpor. Thereupon he gathered his flock and led them across town to the butchering yard.
It was a kindness on his part, the coachman said. For the life had gone out of him. Winter was nigh, and they would only have starved.
Yes, I said. I suppose so.
The coach left late upon the following afternoon, departing for Bennington as soon as the road had been broken out. The horses were uneasy, frightened of the drifts, but the men were in high spirits. Seated within the coach, they smoked and laughed and played at cards, while the two women present—sisters—sat off to the side.
The younger sister eyed the men flirtatiously. She giggled behind her woolen gloves while the elder pressed her face to the window, as though to watch the countryside recede, a world stained and soiled by the snow. In that moment, I thought of Abel’s flock—and of the butchering yard—and realized with the certainty of revelation what was required of me.
The deed was swiftly done. Abel was drunk, half-decrepit, and my hand was sure.
His absence went unremarked upon, as did the fate of various foreigners and deserters during the years of war. The other townsfolk must have known, or suspected, but said nothing. Even the minister made no move to intervene, crippled by doubt as he was, so that the work of rescue fell to me alone. This burden was heavy, yes, but it did not find me wanting, save on the lone occasion on which my resolve failed me.
The girl came in the night. I was nearly asleep when I heard her knock upon the door, her piteous cries for admittance. I opened the door to her. She was fat with child and woefully underdressed, wearing nothing but a threadbare shift.
Please, she said. It is my husband. He will kill me.
What choice did I have? I showed her inside and poured her a drink. Her husband, she said, had married her for money, having scant interest in the joys of the flesh and no desire for children. When she fell pregnant, he flew into a rage and sought to kill the babe inside her, beating her with a strap when the household was asleep. Somehow she had carried the child to term but now the labor was close upon her and she knew not where to turn.
He will send the child away, she said. As soon as it is born.
That night the pains came upon her, a punishing flood. I lit the oil lamps in the upper room and built up the fire in the hearth but could not drive out the cold.
A midwife, she mumbled. A woman. The babe—
There is no time.
No time, she said.
Drink, I said, proffering the bottle. You must drink.
She resisted at first. But when the pains worsened—and her voice grew hoarse from screaming—she grabbed for the bottle and took it about the lips and sucked from it greedily until she could drink no more. Then her eyes rolled back inside her skull and she slumped against the bedding, insensible with pain and exhaustion and the beginnings of drunkenness.
No time, she repeated, and the shadows moved over her face.
The child was born in the hour before dawn, a girl. Afterward the mother lay sprawled amidst the bedding, prostrate, with eyes like shuttered windows.
Gray light streamed into the room, and I clutched the babe to my chest, cradling her with my left hand, for my right still held the dripping maul. The blood made a sound like rain upon the boards as the little thing screamed and screamed.
I could not silence her. I could not offer her even this small mercy. By my weakness, I consigned her to the tortures of life, this dreamlike existence in the teeth of a raging God—and though she would twice betray me, she proved her Love in the end.
Sometimes I think I sense her presence—close to me now, though time and more divides us. I speak her name, the name I gave her. She does not answer me, of course—and cannot—though it will not be long before the Last Day breaks upon me, and upon us all, a creeping mist.
III. Alive, Alive, Oh!
Go to the Wayside, the men said, when they learned I was a virgin. Out past Falmouth. You’ll find a woman there, one you can buy. If you’re lucky. The weeks passed. I worked myself into exhaustion, manning the lathes until midnight or later, bu
t it scarcely mattered: I was sixteen and the lust rode hard upon me, haunting my dreams, keeping me from sleep.
When payday came, I collected my wages and sneaked from the sawmill, taking the road where it plunged toward Falmouth. The village was empty, shutters drawn against the dusk. A freight train whistled in the distance, answered in turn by the call of a nightingale. Her song rose up from the brush, but I did not stop to listen.
I walked for the better part of an hour, traveling three miles or more along that narrow road. Brambles grew up from the roadside, flowering where they burst from hedgerows and weed-beds, stonewalls that had marked the boundaries of fields and orchards.
And then I was upon it. Twenty yards away, the Wayside sprouted from a row of swaying locust trees, discernible where it reared above the snarl of limb and leaf. Drawing near, I heard the rattle of cups, the roar of drunken men. A woman singing. Alive, alive, oh!
The door was ajar. Inside, the woman stood near the center of the barroom and sang, surrounded by low tables at which were seated a dozen men. She wore a dress the color of old wine with a scarf cut from yellow silk, which covered her hair like a gypsy’s. Her age might have been forty, or older, and her painted lips cracked where the hearth-light fell upon them.
She finished her song. The men slapped the tables and shouted for another. I looked around me, but there were no other women present—none save the barmaid, a sullen girl of much my own age with hair like dry straw. She scuttled past me, saying nothing, and the gypsy woman launched into another ballad.
This new song was familiar to me. I recognized the story, though I had heard it sung with a different melody. In the ballad, a woman murders her two babies. Later in life, while walking in the woods, she is confronted by their spirits, who drag her down to hell. It was a long story, and tragic, and I knew it would be some time before I could approach her.
I went up to the counter and motioned to the innkeeper. A drink, I said.
He regarded me curiously. His long tongue, pointed like a cat’s, swept back and forth across his thin moustache. His cheeks were sunken—his teeth gleamed, faintly luminous—and he bore an atmosphere of sorrow about him unrelated to the gypsy-woman’s song.
