by Daniel Mills
“Yes,” the man said. “I see that I am not mistaken.”
John scuttled backward on his palms until he reached the fallen trunk. His pulse raced. He fumbled at his greatcoat and grasped hold of his knife, cutting himself as he did so. He gasped, felt the warm fluid spill from the wound.
“That ring,” said John. “It belonged to my mother.”
“So it did,” the man replied. “But first it belonged to me.”
John pulled the knife from his coat. The blade quivered in his hands and dripped to stain his shirt and breeches.
The other man spoke, softly. “You have done yourself some injury.”
The blade shook wildly. The handle was slick, slipping.
“Who are you?” John demanded. “Your face. Why do you hide it from me?”
“I hide nothing. This cloak I wear for your sake rather than for mine.”
And here he pushed back the hood, revealing the ashen remnants of a face. The lips were swollen, fat with weeping sores. The hair was thin, wispy, while the nose had caved in upon itself, exposing the sinuses where the flesh had flaked and rotted. He smiled. The lips curled up, causing the sores to burst at the corners of his mouth. Clear fluid dribbled down his chin, which he then licked away, the tongue long and red and snapping.
The knife dropped from John’s hands. It landed, soundlessly, in the grass.
The man said, “You see me now, as I am, and still you do not recognize me. Am I truly so transformed?”
“Who are you?” John repeated. “Tell me your name.”
“It is curious to me,” he said, “that you do not know it already. For I was once accounted a hero in these parts, known in Kingston and beyond as a champion of Liberty. The King’s Men spoke my name only with the utmost trembling, as did the redcoats themselves when in time we met upon the field of battle. Edward Blake. Some men took flight at the very sound.”
“Edward Blake is dead. He was killed at Long Island.”
“I was shot, it is true, but I was not killed of it, whatever I may have pretended. All my life, you see, I had meditated on freedom—my own and that of our new nation—but it was only there upon that smoky plain and with the fields of human wreckage strewn about me that I understood the true nature of Liberty—and the price that was commanded of me. When night fell, I stripped off my uniform and searching the field by moonlight stole the name and papers from a corpse. When New York fell to the King’s armies, I sneaked into the City and with my stolen papers enlisted to fight alongside the Royalists.”
“You were a traitor,” John said. “You betrayed your own cause.”
“I did no such thing. Always I served the cause of freedom, of Natural Liberty. I marched with Burgoyne from Quebec and served with St Leger at Fort Stanwix. Afterward, when the Indians deserted us, I chose to go with them. I lived a year among the Mohawk, and by God, it was good to run with such savages, hunting with them all through the heart of that wooded country. But for all their wildness, they weren’t free—not truly. The Indians could not understand it, my betrayal, and would have wept like girls, I reckon, to see their scalps laid out like that on General Sullivan’s table.”
“So you betrayed them too.”
“I changed only my name—that was all—and traded my red coat for blue. As a Patriot, I rode with Sullivan through the Indian Country in the summer of ‘79. I shot down braves and scalped them living and watched the crops and villages burn. I had my pick of the squaws, my choice of the boys for killing. I was free. And in this my Liberty, I slipped away once more and made my way to the southern colonies.”
John could listen no longer. He placed his head into his hands and covered his eyes. He breathed through the blood on his fingers with the wind in his hair and his father’s unnatural shadow in the trammeled grass, spanning the grayness that divided them.
“My mother,” he said, hissing the words through his cupped hands. “She was devoted to you. She grieved for you. Why couldn’t you write? Could you not tell her that you lived?”
“Your mother was devoted, yes,” the other man said, “but hers was the devotion of a slave to his master. Doubtless she thought herself free, but she was chained to her God sure as any negro to his plow. Each night, as I recall, she would pray that He might end her suffering and always her God did nothing. But there was one prayer, at least, that He saw fit to answer. He gave her a boy, a child to suckle at her breast—but even this was intended for a chain.”
“He gave her Salvation,” John said, fiercely. “Life Everlasting.”
John un-cupped his hands and forced himself to gaze upon that ruined face, the eyes like little lights enmeshed in folds of colorless skin.
“Life Everlasting,” repeated his father. “Yes. That will indeed be her punishment: an eternity shackled and bound and serving on her knees. The Creator means for us to win our Liberty, each man for himself, just as we birthed this country from the blood of its old nations. There was King Philip then the Iroquois, Parliament and the Crown. Liberty is ours, boy, or at least it can be. You must not forget that Lucifer, too, fought for his freedom—and that all of hell was his reward.”
“That is the vilest blasphemy.”
“It is the surest sense.”
“You are mad. Diseased in mind and body.”
“Diseased, yes. This affliction—it has rotted me, innards and loins alike, but I am ashamed of nothing. All goods carry a price, they say—and Liberty the priciest of all. I believe your mother sensed as much, though she was, of course, a simple woman. Lacking imagination, she yearned for death’s dominion where she could see no greater freedom.”
John stood, furious, and crushed his hands into fists. His nails settled in the long knife-wound, pain shooting through him. “Is this why you have come here?” he spat. “To scoff at her, your own wife? To jeer and mock her—and she not three days in the grave?”
“You think too little of me,” his father said. The tongue darted out and licked again at his sores, lapping the liquid from his mouth and chin. “I am not a monster.”
“Why have you returned to Eastbourne?”
“You cannot guess? Your mother is dead, and now you think to marry. I am Edward Blake, your father, and newly made a widower. Why should I not have the same fancy?”
John trembled. He shook with the rage that kindled in his nerves and spurred him to move. He walked forward, as does a man in a dream, approaching his father where he stood. He halted while yet within his shadow.
“That is why you have returned,” he said. “Because you wish to marry.”
His father’s expression did not alter. “Perhaps.”
“And who will have you? You are a traitor, a murderer. Worse.”
“I believe that you know her,” he replied, speaking with the utmost gentleness. Flecks of yellow spittle stood upon his lips. “Indeed I am certain of it. The maid is a cousin of yours—though you are but recently acquainted.”
“You are lying.”
“Not at all. I speak the baldest truth. She is promised to me, your beloved. Did you not think to wonder why she wept?”
“Her father, he would not—”
John’s father became angry. His smile pressed itself into a sneer, and the saliva flew from his lips as he spoke. “Have you understood nothing, boy? All men are born slaves—to their bodies, their beliefs. It is no small effort to break free of such strictures, but all must make the attempt. With his daughter’s marriage, Mr Carrier will be a wealthy man—fabulously wealthy, I have seen to it—and he will be at last unburdened, with no one left to love him. Surely there can be no greater freedom than that. Of what account to him then are her feelings? Of what possible profit to him, the ring with which you thought to woo her?”
John glanced down. His gaze strayed, unbidden, to the ring upon its cord, the stone reflecting nothing where the shadow lay upon it. In this light the ruby appeared lifeless, inert, betraying neither form nor depth. It was a trinket without value, a symbol of all that had boun
d him to his life. A hatred as red as the gemstone at its center. A love as cheap as the cord from which it hung. He tore the ring from his neck and threw it down at his father’s feet.
“You are a devil,” he whispered. “Corruption made flesh.”
His father stooped and retrieved the ring. He held it before him with the band resting in his open palm. When he spoke again, it was without anger or any discernible emotion.
“Yes,” he agreed, “I have been cruel. But you have learned this lesson, John—and you have learned it well. I trust you will not forget it.”
John said nothing.
“And remember this, too: it was your saint of a mother who birthed you. I never wanted it, never wished for children. A body makes for a heavy chain, outweighed only by the soul. Some may carry it, perhaps, though all but the Elect must fall beneath its weight. This was one lesson your mother never learned. Now you are here while she is in the dirt.”
His father stepped forward. He looped the ring around John’s neck.
“What am I to do?” asked John. His voice was thin and cracked, notes from a broken reed.
“Forget the maiden,” his father said. “Return to your mother’s house.”
“And then?”
His father held up his hands, the palms outward.
“Do what you will,” he said and raised his hood to hide his face once more. “As for me, I mean to marry. Mr Carrier is eager to celebrate his good fortune. There will be ale and rum and the finest of French wines. And dancing. Boy, I promise that you have never seen such dancing. Then the bridal chamber, the wedding bed—I will teach her something of her chains.”
He exhaled, heavily. The breath steamed from his hood.
“Farewell,” he said, and departed, his shadow following.
The wind rustled amidst the hemlocks, and John was alone.
Sunlight intruded through the branches. Once more the ruby sparked and glittered, swimming with faces. Therein John spied Margaret Carrier, her hair gray, her complexion blighted, the fever-marks showing about her mouth and nose. His own father: the ashen flesh rippled with the breath through his exposed sinuses. Last of all he saw his mother, as she had appeared in the autumn of ‘76, when she was great with child—and imagined the clamor of distant drums, the crackle of flames from the his father’s shop.
His fist closed round the ring. Holding it fast, he retraced his steps across the river and made his way toward Eastbourne while the sun rose to breach the cloud-line and the whole of the dew-wet world caught fire, blazing white then red like the glow inside a ruby.
Later that afternoon, around dusk, the residents of Eastbourne bore witness to a sad and curious spectacle. Young John Blake, the farrier’s boy, had built up a blaze in the street before his late mother’s house. Onto this he had laid her possessions: her gowns, shawls, and bonnets, those few books of sermons she had cherished above all. Now the boy struggled through the doorway with a mattress draped about his shoulders. It was clear what he intended, but he was a big lad, and strong, and the villagers did not interfere.
With a groan, John heaved the bed over his shoulder and onto the pyre. The stuffing inside was dry, tindery. It caught fire immediately, burning holes through the cover and whirling up, glowering, as the wind drove hard from the south—and all while John Blake stood before the fire, stone-faced, with his left hand balled and quivering, his right hand red with his own blood.
The blaze smoldered, went out. The villagers had seen enough: they retired to their houses to await the fall of evening. Only the farrier remained. He offered the lad a place to sleep, knowing he had no bed to call his own. John did not speak, but only nodded, and the farrier settled him on a pallet of straw and covered him with quilts against the chill. He waited ‘til he knew the boy slept, then took up his lantern and hastened to join the others on the common—for tonight there was a feast across the river, and he did not wish to be late.
THE FALLING DARK
Virgil Lodge: sleepless, pacing, thirty-one.
His eyes are dry and painful, but he will not rest. Prone to night terrors, he avoids his dreams as carefully as he avoids his neighbors, their faces—all but that of the factory girl Katherine, who lives in the tenement across the street, from whom he cannot look away.
He has never spoken to her. He knows her name only because he heard it shouted once at dawn as she let herself out of her building. The shout came from an older woman leaning, half-dressed, from a third floor window. Katherine turned around. She said something, to which the woman (probably her mother) nodded in response and disappeared inside. Then the girl continued on her way, vanishing beyond the window frame—the same library window at which he pauses now to watch the streetlamps flicker and dim.
With his adoptive father’s death six weeks ago, Virgil’s isolation is complete. Every night he continues the late Professor’s studies, working by candlelight because he can no longer afford oil for the lamps. When sleep threatens, he stands and forces himself to walk, pacing until daybreak when he watches Katherine leave for the factory and knows it is safe to sleep
Hours remain until dawn. He extends his hand and touches the tips of his fingers to the glass. The windowpane is cool, misted over by his breath, and the lamps beyond waver as a wind sweeps from the lake and shakes the flowering trees.
Elm, maple, basswood. Laden with blossom in this early season.
Sleep beckons, and with it, the promise of darkness: the emptiness of books unread, loss un-felt. His eyelids droop. He clenches them shut and rubs away his drowsiness. When he opens them again, the street is no longer deserted. There is someone standing outside of the tenement, a woman. Veiled in gray, she gazes up at his window and raises her hand in acknowledgment.
Katherine.
He fumbles with the window latch and pushes out the casement. Rain spatters his face. The streetlamp tilts with the wind, so strong it extinguishes the candles in the library, sinking the room into nothingness. The avenue is empty before him, all windows unlit. The woman is gone—if she was ever there at all.
He latches the casement and resumes his pacing, walking in the dark until the east begins to lighten. At half past six, Katherine leaves for work, attired in a plain brown dress. He watches her go then retreats to the bedroom, where he lies and waits for sleep to break across him.
*
The dreams, though bad, were worse in childhood. He cannot remember when they began any more than he can summon to mind an image of his mother’s face, or his father’s. Both perished in the infamous Canterbury Wreck. Virgil was present but remembers nothing of the event, being less than a year old at the time.
The collision occurred at dusk on a stretch of remote track miles from the nearest station. His parents’ train had come to an emergency stop after the engineer sighted a warning light ahead. Behind them, the express train from Exeter had departed Canterbury Station ahead of schedule and failed to maintain the proper stopping distance.
At five minutes after seven, the express plowed into the rear of their train, resulting in the near-complete telescoping of the final carriage as well as the partial destruction of the penultimate car, where Virgil sat with his parents. The impact of the collision wrenched him out of his mother’s arms. He flew across the carriage and landed unharmed near the front, thus avoiding the fate of his parents, seated in the fourth row, who were crushed to death when the rear carriage telescoped. His survival had been “miraculous”—or so the papers said.
Virgil was a teenager when he first learned of the accident. On his sixteenth birthday, the Professor presented him with a sealed parcel containing the details of his adoption along with a sheaf of press clippings from the time of the wreck. They never discussed the matter after that—neither his true parents, nor the manner in which they had died.
Thirty years later, he does not remember the screams or the breaking of timbers, the moans of the survivors. He can describe these things only so far as he has read about them. Nonetheless he has always h
ad nightmares.
*
As a boy, Virgil willingly endured days at a time of sleeplessness if it meant a respite from the dreams. The Professor himself was an insomniac and thus proved all too happy to wait up with the frightened child through the latest watches of the night.
Of the many evenings they spent together, Virgil remembers one in particular. He was ten or eleven and the two of them were seated alone in the library. The oil lamps burned brightly between them, and the Professor told him a story, as he often did, to pass the hours.
The tale that night was Vidofsky’s No. 27, “Of Silas and the Gray Woman,” though Virgil did not learn this until much later. The Professor presented the story to him as a simple folk legend—as indeed it was, Virgil supposes, after a fashion.
“Long ago,” the Professor began, “there lived a man named Silas. He was a good man, strong and upright, but his choice in friends was poor.
“It came to pass that he was accused of poaching deer from the Boyar’s wood. He was innocent of this crime. The true culprit, Silas knew, was his friend Peter. But the penalty for poaching was death, and Silas was a good man, as I have said, and so said nothing.
“The Boyar took this silence for proof of guilt and ordered his execution. The deed was quickly done. After his beheading, Silas was drawn and quartered, the mangled corpse displayed in five pieces at the crossroads outside of town.
“For a day he lay there, dead as the snow, but it was later, in the cool of the night, that the gray woman came for him. She knew of his innocence, you see, and gave unto him the justice his righteousness had denied him.
“She gathered up the pieces of his body into her skirts and sewed them back together, patching over the seams with moss and silver lichen. Then she cradled his head and breathed the life back into him, taking flight when the church bells tolled for five.
“Silas awoke and found himself at the crossroads. His wounds were gone. In their place he felt the fur of moss under his fingers. He remembered the axe blow, his last view of the world as his head rolled free. Am I dead? he wondered. Am I alive? Is there any difference?
