Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  The old gramophone had only half a dozen original records, all big band music, but Morgan had jury-rigged it to accept the smaller 45 records that he now brought from his secret room, most of them nearly a hundred years old. The mainspring was weak, so someone had to sit beside the machine to wind it every three or four minutes. What poured forth from it was real music, music of a kind Jori had never heard. Morgan began to snap his fingers in time and Jori laughed as Helen raised her arms like wings and fluttered around the room.

  Hadrian took over when they changed the record and gestured Morgan to the open floor. He gracefully took Helen’s arm and they began a slow dance to a tune from the 1920s.

  An enchantment settled over the room. The fire crackled, the aging blind woman and her mate floated across the floor without a care, the notes reaching not just across time but across worlds. Once, in the silence between records, they heard the deep hibernating exhalation of Aphrodite, sounding as if the mountain itself were breathing.

  Morgan and Helen at last retreated to the chairs. But not before Morgan pushed Hadrian to his feet. Uncertainly, he approached Jori. With a shy smile she accepted his hand and stiffly began to move in time to the melody. They danced through half a dozen songs before she began to relax, dropping her head on his shoulder. Then Morgan inserted another record, gave the handle an extra wind, and pulled Helen back onto the floor.

  As the new music filled the chamber, something within Hadrian cracked open. The notes were cutting through long-hardened calluses inside. It was a song not of his youth but of his mother’s youth, a tune she’d played again and again, sometimes dancing alone in the kitchen, sometimes dreamingly grabbing her young son for a partner.

  Somewhere beyond the sea, the mellow voice sang.

  The voice was not just mellow, it had a confident, unshakable joy, of a sort that had been lost to tongues all these years.

  Jori seemed to sense the change in him, and the tightness left her as well. It felt as if they had been dancing like this all their lives. When the record was over she asked Morgan to play it again. Hadrian’s hand trembled as he put a finger under her chin and lifted her face. With his handkerchief he began wiping away the Angel Polish.

  “I know it’s silly. For some reason I didn’t want to be me tonight . . .” she murmured, not bothering with the tear that rolled down her mottled cheek. He quieted her with a finger on her lips and gently removed the rest of the cream. Then she pressed closer and they danced.

  Somewhere beyond the sea, the lost singer crooned, my lover stands on golden sand and watches the ships that go sailing.

  Outside, another ending of the world was coming. But here, now, in the fairy-tale lair with the blind woman floating serenely over the floor, the dead singer transporting their spirits, the ancient bear snoring in the next room, for the first time in years something real flickered in Hadrian’s heart.

  CHAPTER Eleven

  HADRIAN WATCHED THE farm for half an hour, waiting as a wagon approached the lanky figure with the ax and dropped its load of logs for splitting into rails. He studied the crudely built tower of logs at the edge of the fields as he waited for the wagon to disappear, then took a step forward and paused. He glanced at the trail behind him, half expecting to see Jori.

  He had nearly reached Carthage when she had caught up with him, out of breath.

  “You aren’t ready for this,” he had warned her.

  “I’m only panting,” Jori replied as she lowered a heavy pack to the ground, “because Helen packed half her larder in here for us.”

  “I thought I left without waking anyone.”

  “I don’t think she slept at all last night. She can see more than most people with eyes.”

  He looked at the bulging satchel with a pang of guilt. Morgan and Helen needed all their supplies to get through the winter. “You mean she knew I was going.”

  “She knew we were both going. I told her I thought she would try to persuade me to stay.”

  “What did she say?”

  Jori looked away, color rising in her cheeks. “She said if I didn’t go, something inside would always wonder if you’d left just to run away from me.”

  “Jori . . .” he began. “It could never . . .” His words choked away.

  “Never what?” she asked.

  He looked toward his own feet, toward a patch of snow, anywhere but toward her. “I am never going to be the man you think I can be.”

  The silence seemed interminable.

  “Promise me to be careful,” he said finally. Reaching into his pocket, he extracted the round disc of agate. “This was Jonah’s,” he told her, pressing it into her hand. “When he had problems to solve, he would rub it. For me, it’s become something of a good-luck token.”

  She offered a stiff nod and buried the stone deep in her own pocket. He lifted the pack to his own shoulder. “You will have to tell them you jumped off the boat, that you were hurt in the explosion and found a cave where you were recovering. You don’t know where I am, don’t know if I am alive.”

  He had led her to Jonah’s cottage and promised he would return there that night before beginning his slow circuit of the town. He paused only at Dax’s mill, but found it empty, with no sign of having been inhabited for weeks.

  The young man laboring with the ax stared as if paralyzed when he saw Hadrian. He raised the ax as if defend himself.

  “You’re dead!” Nash yelled. “Drowned in the lake. They said so in the prison.”

  “In the prison they believe whatever Kenton tells them,” Hadrian said, advancing with his hands raised. “I’ve always been slow to die.”

  Nash grabbed the head of his ax and extended it handle first, prodding Hadrian’s belly. He limped badly as he walked. “It’s really you, Mr. Boone?”

  “In the flesh. I had to go away. Now I am back.”

  A grin overtook the young burglar’s countenance.

  “What’s happening to the farms? What are these towers in the fields?”

  “Guard towers. There’s been raids. Five, six men at a time, always at night, trying to steal corn, cows, pigs.”

  “Food?” Hadrian asked. “Is it only food they take?”

  “So far. Not much really. They usually get scared away, even though they carry shotguns. But the governor says we must be prepared for anything.” As he spoke Nash tugged Hadrian into the shadow of the large beech they stood beside. A group of horseman appeared, moving at a fast trot down the road.

  “Armed patrols,” he explained. “They’ve been ordered, day and night, through the farms to the south and west of town.”

  “You mean Buchanan assumes exiles are doing the raiding.”

  “It has to be, don’t it? There is no one else.”

  “Did the raiders do that to your foot?”

  Nash frowned, then looked uneasily back toward the farmhouse. “Men from the fishery. Wade’s men.” He limped into the open again, retrieving two wedges for splitting the next rail, then glanced at Hadrian with an apologetic expression. “I promised my mother I’d stay away from townsfolk and their troubles.”

  “Why would Wade’s men break your foot?”

  “It was nothing. I can walk.”

  Hadrian picked up a log and brought it to him. “Maybe I’ll stay and help. Maybe I’ll go to the house and introduce myself.”

  Nash winced. “Captain Fletcher wanted something I couldn’t give him. He thought I was lying, so he had to be sure.”

  “Wade is dead, Nash. I killed him. What did Fletcher want?”

  The youth’s jaw dropped. He stared at Hadrian in disbelief. A woman stepped out of the farmhouse. A wolflike dog darted from her side, loping toward Nash. “A painting,” he answered, his tone urgent now. “There was a job last spring. He thought I took a painting when I was there. I told them I never laid a hand on it. I only took little things. Jewelry and silver and such.” He looked at the dog, nearly on them now. “Jesus. Go!”

  “What kind of painting?”


  “Birds. Ducks on a lake.”

  “So you saw it?”

  “Never laid a finger on it. They just kept asking about it. They held me down, used a hammer on my foot. After they broke the bone they decided to believe me.”

  “Who did lay a finger on it? Who was with you?”

  “Please, Mr. Boone. My ma will tell the corps if she sees you.”

  Hadrian backed away.

  “It was ducks,” Nash yelled as he disappeared into the shadows. “Big ducks taking off at sunrise.”

  Hadrian turned northward, the threat of patrols keeping him on game paths, watching so intently in the direction of the road that he failed to notice the ruins until he was upon them. Work crews had built the road spur, continuing for perhaps a week before stopping. They’d made good progress on the footer for the bridge, even sunk two heavy posts and laid the ramp that would channel traffic onto the one-lane structure. But now all was ashes.

  Jonah’s bridge between worlds had been burnt.

  He pulled himself away and climbed the next hill, then up a high ridge along a stretch of cliffs. His melancholy grew as he moved through the gnarled oaks and maples that lined the base of the cliffs, studying the overhanging limbs. With a stab of pain he found what he was looking for, the unmistakable collar of scar left where the weight of a hanging rope once chewed the limb down to raw wood. He had been haunted by Dax’s secret map since the day he’d seen it. This would have been the first suicide, a girl of eleven, three years before. One.

  He walked quickly and found another, then another. Two and three. In the next quarter mile he found the fourth and fifth, futilely trying to fight his memories, to keep the images from his mind’s eye. He’d been at many of the trees before, had cut down the limp bodies of children who had been so sure they could find something better than this world. He had faced so many shrieking, sobbing mothers and brooding, broken fathers that there were entire families who shunned him now.

  Hadrian had just found the seventh of the death-scarred trees when he heard an odd metallic rattling. He crouched behind a rock for a moment, remembering the police patrols, then realized the sound came from directly in front of him, in the line of trees. In the direction of the eighth tree, the next circle, an empty circle, on Dax’s map. He leapt up and ran, ready once again to act as cheater of death.

  So wildly, so irrationally hopeful of saving a life was he that when he finally reached the little clearing a wracking sob escaped his throat and he collapsed to his knees. The rope scar was so fresh sap still dripped from it. A length of rope lay on the ground before him, hacked and tattered in several places where someone seemed to have attacked it. On the end closest to Hadrian was a blood-stained noose.

  The metallic noise had stopped. On the other side of the clearing Hadrian now saw a square-built figure in a brown homespun robe, holding an old censer by its chain. When William pushed his cowl back, Hadrian recognized the friar, but it did not seem the monk recognized him.

  The sturdy friar stared at Hadrian, disbelieving, then quickly crossed himself.

  “They say ghosts congregate here,” he said in a tentative voice, “that they float over the ridge and watch the town.”

  “Maybe when the time comes, I will, old friend,” Hadrian offered, “but for now I just stumble along like other mortals.”

  The monk gave a visible sigh of relief and quickly stepped toward Hadrian, arms open to embrace him. “Just yesterday Emily came to me and asked if I might preside over a memorial service for you at sundown one day this week.”

  Hadrian offered a sorrowful grin, then pointed to the noose. “Was it a child?”

  But his companion seemed not to hear. “Captain Fletcher reported three bodies pulled from the lake, said you were on the same boat, and that your body must have sunk. He has offered to speak at your memorial.”

  Hadrian looked over the long frozen expanse that was now the lake. Near the harbor a course had been laid out for the iceboats that raced in the winter. “I’m like the fish that keeps getting thrown back in the water. Too tough to eat.”

  “I should say Carthage is better for it,” William offered.

  “That, Father, remains to be seen.” Hadrian gestured to the noose once more. “A child?”

  “Two days ago. The only daughter of a carpenter.”

  Hadrian looked at the censer, from which fragrant smoke still drifted. “I haven’t seen this before.”

  “We have a new member of our congregation. He comes in once or twice a month. He says he was taught that the soul lingers for a year at the site of the death before passing on to paradise. I found him up here, burning chips of cedar. He said the fragrant smoke would summon in the spirits of the forest to keep the girl company. He said he’d lost a younger sister, and that his uncle had done that for her.”

  Father William’s faith may have been shaken but at least he kept trying. He looked at Hadrian with question in his eye, as if asking for approval. Hadrian slowly nodded. “If we can’t help them before they cross over, we should do what we can for them afterward.”

  William sighed. “The girl was up here last week, skipping rehearsal from some play to help me. She asked for you again, asked if it was true you were dead.”

  “The governor’s daughter? Sarah?”

  William nodded. “Tears were in her eyes when I said I thought we had lost you. ‘How will we remember who we are?’ she said to me. Then she started shaking as if she was sick. I asked if I could help her but she suddenly laughed and ran away.”

  The monk began his circuit around the clearing again, waving the censer. Hadrian placed his hand on the tree. Once, on a similar visit, Jonah had wondered out loud whether the hanging tree felt the pain of the dead.

  “Have you seen anything unusual when you come up here?” Hadrian asked after a long silence.

  “More unusual than eight suicide trees?”

  The question seemed to weaken Hadrian. He wearily sank onto a boulder. “I told you there would be another. I told you about the map. You saw the secret vault,” he said.

  “And haven’t I come up here every day since, trying to stop the next one.” William’s voice cracked as he spoke. “But I couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

  Hadrian found himself looking at the wisps of smoke floating in the air. “The one who told you about the smoke. Is he always alone?”

  “Sometimes he brings one or two others. Not always the same ones. All tall and dark, long hair.”

  “Where are they from?”

  William hesitated. “They must be hunters. They look at everything with great curiosity, as if they are new to Carthage.” He shrugged. “Some of my flock just come for the food we provide after the service. Some like our music. Some like my Latin. Some of them, older ones, say they remember priests when they were young. There’s an elderly Jewish man from New York. He’s teaching us prayers in Hebrew. We are going to take a group to the gallows.”

  “The gallows is still up?”

  “Still up? Buchanan has improved it, made it permanent. Put a little shelter at the top for the hangman, enclosed the stairway. From a distance it looks like a shrine.”

  “They burn the bridge and turn the gallows into a temple,” Hadrian muttered. “Why would he need it?”

  “Why the woman, of course. Jonah’s murderer.”

  “But she’s gone, father.”

  William fixed Hadrian with a troubled gaze. “I’m sorry. I know she was a friend. Though it’s never been done before, the governor and the judge said it was perfectly legal.”

  “Never done what?” Hadrian asked with foreboding.

  “Hold a trial without the defendant. She’s already been convicted, Hadrian. Condemned to hang. Buchanan announced a bounty on her head. A thousand dollars. More than most in the colony make in a year. He gave a speech on the square and vowed that within twenty-four hours of being brought in she will have the noose around her neck.”

  THE DECREPIT TWO-STORY building had been built as a
stable and hay barn many years before, but the town had overtaken it, leaving it lost in a backwater of warehouses that served the shops on the streets beyond. The wagon-repair business that operated in the former stable offered no indication of the trade plied within, and its gate could be closed for weeks at a time. When it didn’t yield to his push, Hadrian climbed a familiar tree and dropped over the wall that enclosed the compound. A tall, shaggy dog with the look of an elkhound trotted over to him, wagging its tail.

  He saw that the white-haired man at the workbench seemed to be having difficulty raising the hammer he was using to flatten a strip of metal. Hadrian dropped one of his colorful maps on the workbench, beside a half-eaten bowl of noodles with chopsticks perched on the rim. The man lowered the mallet, then pushed away the bowl and examined the map with obvious excitement.

  “You’ve been away,” he said.

  “I always come back,” Hadrian replied.

  As Takeo Hamada slowly turned his face toward his visitor, his eyes softened, the equivalent of a smile for the stoic Japanese man. The cold cigarette he chewed on took on a jaunty angle.

  “I have some questions,” Hadrian said.

  “Of course you do.” Hamada’s voice was raspy from years of tobacco. He led Hadrian toward the steep stairs to the hayloft, where all the answers lay, past the stall with a cot where Hadrian had often slept the past summer. At the landing at the top of the stairs he paused to light a lantern, which Hadrian held as he unlocked the padlock on the door.

  The loft still held traces of hay but its stacks and bales were all of books. Shelves so high ladders were needed to scale them lined the walls. In the light of a high solitary window, dusty, yellowed stacks towered impossibly tall. Hadrian and Jonah had often sent volumes here for safekeeping. Buchanan tolerated the illegal hoard because it was kept so secret and because he himself sometimes had questions only Hamada’s books could answer.