The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  “Have you seen many winters?” she said. “Real winters?”

  “I’ve seen a few.”

  “I’ll see one this year,” she said, a blood vow in her voice. “I’ll see one this year.”

  By nightfall the wind had returned, and Arlen was nearing completion of the dock. He figured to have the last board laid by noon the next day, and then he could start on the boathouse, though they’d need more lumber before he could make much headway there. It was a ludicrous endeavor, working so hard to rebuild a place that they’d soon abandon, but he didn’t know what else to do. It kept up the pretense that they’d remain, for one thing, but it also gave him a task to handle. He needed that.

  He loved work. Physical labor. It was a strange thing, maybe, but he loved the ache in his muscles at the end of a day, loved the sweat that coursed from his pores, loved the sound of a saw and the feel of a hammer, the clean crack of a well-struck nail.

  So many men wandered this country now, looking for so simple a thing as work. It was a bizarre notion when you stopped to think about it, and Arlen figured it was a birth pang of a new world. So much had happened to cause this Depression, so many things he understood and more that he did not, but in the end they all captured a simple idea: you couldn’t depend solely on yourself anymore. Not in the way men once had. You could have skill and strength and desire, but you had to find someone who needed to utilize those things. Was a time when, if you knew how to work metal, you’d set up a blacksmith shop and make enough to support your family. Now, if you knew how to work metal, you’d likely need a job in a factory where the needs of not a town but a state, a nation, a world, had to be met. It was all about size now: the big ran the world on the sweat of the small, and if the big faltered for any reason, the small were the first to go.

  The funny damn thing was, Arlen had no desire to be among those in charge. That was the goal, supposedly, the ordained American Dream, to rise from the ranks of the small and become a colossus.

  It wasn’t in him, though. The bigger your role, the more people you impacted with your decisions. He didn’t want to have to make those sorts of decisions. All he wanted to do was work. If his day ended when the last nail was driven, it had been a good day. It had been a damned good day.

  Or at least it usually was. For once, the standard satisfaction stayed away from him when he gathered his tools and walked back up the trail to the Cypress House. He’d worked, yes, done the pure labor of a man who was small in the eyes of the world but content in his own heart, and even that hadn’t been enough today. Today, he’d felt the weight of decision upon him.

  It was the right decision, he knew. It was right.

  But, oh, how he’d hated to make it.

  * * *

  The days passed with surprising speed and silence. Solomon Wade didn’t come by, nor did Tolliver, nor anyone else except Thomas Barrett, the delivery man. When he arrived at the end of the week, Arlen asked if they could make a run for some more lumber.

  “You’re not sending the boy this time? I enjoyed him.”

  “He’s gone.”

  Barrett’s freckled face split into a curious frown. “For good?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Strange. He told me he intended to stay. What put him back on the road?”

  “I can’t speak for him,” Arlen said shortly.

  “Well, it’s a shame. This is a tough place for a lad like that to be on the road alone. Did he have any money?”

  “Let’s go get that wood,” Arlen said.

  They went out to the paved road and then south toward High Town. It had been silent since they left, and though Arlen didn’t feel much like talking, he also didn’t want to seem ungracious, so he asked after the name of the town as a means of conversation.

  “Where I’m from, the place would be called Flat Town,” he said. “Nary a hill in sight from what I saw.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “West Virginia.”

  Barrett nodded. “Well, it’s plenty different terrain than that. High Town might not look much different to an outsider, but it’s one of the few places around here that’s always been clear of flooding. So, it’s High Town—and Dry Town.”

  They turned east at the center of town, and Arlen twisted his head to look back at the jail as they passed. Tolliver’s car was parked in front.

  “Didn’t you say you ran for sheriff?” Arlen asked.

  “That’s right. Al Tolliver beat me fair and square,” Barrett said dryly.

  “You had any policing experience? Or just wanted a piece of it?”

  Barrett flicked his eyes over and then back to the road. “No policing. Did my time in the Army and then came back home. I like my home. I didn’t like the people who were taking control of it. That ain’t changed.”

  “There anybody around here that could actually make those boys answer for something?”

  “If there is somebody,” Barrett said, “I ain’t found him yet.”

  Arlen nodded, and they were quiet again for a time, riding with the windows down and the hot air pushing into their faces. The forest had given way to swampy stump fields now, and Arlen looked out across the litter of slashed timber and felt a pang, remembering the way forests of his boyhood had fallen. He’d been at Arlington National Cemetery once after the war, and the first thought he’d had, staring over the columns of stone markers, was of the clear-cut woods that climbed the hills behind his home. They were both fields of death, filled with inadequate reminders of what had been.

  “They cut a lot of timber out here,” he said.

  “Yes, they did. Sawmill was not far from here. I worked there for three years. Used to hear the band saw in my sleep.”

  “When it went under, the town went with it, is what Rebecca told me.”

  “That’s right. There were two thousand people in this town not five years ago. Ain’t but a few hundred left, and a lot of stumps. You take a canoe out through the swamps not far from here, and you’ll find stumps nine, ten feet around. Some big boys, they were. The wood lasts, too. Cypress is damn strong.”

  “It makes the finest coffins,” Arlen said.

  “How in the hell do you know a thing like that?”

  “My father told me,” Arlen said. “He paid a lot of mind to such things.”

  The memory lingered. Long after he and Barrett had returned with the lumber and carried it down to the dock, Arlen was thinking of his father. He could see the dark eyes above the thick beard, hear the deep, easy voice. He could see the big hands wrapped around a plane or a piece of sandpaper, smoothing the grain of someone’s final home. He spent time on coffins that few would, treated each pauper’s grave as if it were a rich man’s tomb. Even in the summer of the fever, when twenty-nine died in eleven days, he’d taken care with his coffins. Arlen could remember him working through the night that summer, the summer his mother had died. Arlen had been twelve at the time, and she’d gone slow and suffering and with her hand in Isaac’s, who’d looked his son in the eye and told him to have no fear, the earthly being mattered not in the end.

  That was twenty-five years ago.

  He sorted and stacked the lumber and tried to push it all from his mind, but it would not stay at bay, and that evening when he sat on the porch with Rebecca, he said, “I reckon I’m ready to tell you the story.”

  She studied him for a moment and then said, “Why? What changed?”

  He thought on that while he slipped a cigarette out and lit it. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could pin down; the world had shifted on him in a way he didn’t fully understand. It had an awful lot to do with her, he knew that much.

  “It’s just time to tell the tale,” he said. The tale he had not told anyone, ever.

  She didn’t answer. Sat with her hands folded in her lap and waited. He smoked the cigarette down a little bit and watched the waves, and then he told her about the day his father died.

  32
/>   IT WAS FIVE YEARS after Arlen’s mother had passed. Isaac had taken to spending more time in his shop, particularly at night, when visitors were unlikely. The shop was located beneath the room where Arlen slept, and the sounds drifted up, barely muffled by the thin floor that separated them. He’d long known the sounds of the tools on the wood—his father’s paying job, other than a bit of small-time farming, was as a furniture maker—and sometimes Arlen could also hear Isaac humming to himself or occasionally speaking bits of German, his mother tongue. The conversations, however, were a new twist.

  At first Arlen had thought his father was talking to himself. The words were soft-spoken, and initially it was just background noise, mumbling of which he did not take much heed. It was only after it had persisted for a time that he began to pay attention, and the phrase he heard uttered again and again raised a prickle across his spine.

  Tell me, Isaac Wagner would say. Tell me.

  The more he listened, the more evident it became that his father was trying to speak to the dead. Not only that—he believed he was. The words that left his mouth were parts of an exchange.

  The conversations had gone on for many weeks before Arlen chanced a trip down to the shop to see for himself. What awaited him was chilling: Isaac spoke with his hands on the corpses. Stood above them and placed his palms flat on their chests or on either side of their heads. When he’d talked himself out, he removed his hands and returned to work and fell silent. Always he was silent unless he had his hands pressed against their dead flesh.

  He was a different man outside of the shop as well—both with Arlen and with the townspeople. Moody and unpredictable, given to perplexing statements and a constant tendency to dismiss the worries of the living.

  It was a few months before Arlen could admit that his father was truly losing his mind.

  Rumors swirled through the town but avoided a troublesome pitch until a teary-eyed man came to the shop with a child’s toy in his hand, prepared to ask that it be buried with his wife, and found Isaac in his now-customary pose, standing above the body with his hands on the dead woman’s head like a preacher offering a blessing. The sight had rankled the grieving husband, and while no more than a heated exchange of words took place—with Isaac taking no steps to pacify the man, simply saying that he’d talk aloud in his shop if he was so inclined, to whomever he liked—it added coal to the fires of suspicion already smoldering throughout the town.

  What did you do with a father who was insane? The question haunted Arlen through his days and kept him awake through his nights. It was just the two of them now; there was no other family in the town. Isaac had led the way to this place, and Arlen’s mother had been unable to conceive after giving birth to her first and only child. No confidant existed. He listened to his father speak to the dead and thought of what might happen if he sought help for him, if he told anyone in town the truth, and he decided that it would be better to keep silent. There was no harm being done. It was strange, certainly, unsettling and troubling, but it wasn’t harmful. He promised himself that if it ever became so, something would have to be done.

  It was a day on the fringe of winter when Joy Main died. Three nights of frost had been followed by a final gasp of Indian summer that burned out behind a cold wind, and no one in the town had passed in six weeks. Isaac was making furniture instead of coffins, and Arlen had been allowed to slip into something close to a peaceful state. At night his sleep was uninterrupted by voices from below, and the dark rings around his father’s eyes had lessened, his strange remarks becoming fewer. Then they brought Joy Main’s body to the shop.

  The Mains were the power family in town. Edwin’s father had been a surveyor—and a damn shrewd man. He asked for, and received, acreage instead of wages, and he had a fine eye for land, acquiring large parcels along the New River and through the gorges that bordered it. It was coal and timber country, beautiful land that was soon to become rich land, and by the time Edwin was grown, the mining boom was under way and the property he inherited made him a wealthy man. He stayed in Fayette County and filled his father’s void. He was large and pompous, and charming when he had cause to be. At other times he was harsh and cruel, but the townspeople seemed to believe you could expect that from your leaders.

  Joy Hargrove was the most beautiful girl in the county, bright and clever, a gifted piano player and blessed with a haunting, gorgeous voice that turned heads at Sunday services. The marriage was of the arranged sort—Joy’s father was vying for purchase of a promising mine. The courtship was strongly encouraged despite the fact that Edwin was past forty and their daughter just seventeen, and it was only a matter of weeks before Joy Hargrove became Joy Main.

  They were married for seven years before her death, and during that time she bore three children and grew increasingly quiet, seeming content to offer formalities and then retreat within herself. She was well known in Fayette County but yet not really known at all.

  On that early November evening, when they brought her to the Wagner house just as the burst of warmth from earlier in the day was disappearing with darkness, Joy Main was a week past her twenty-fifth birthday and dead of a fractured skull.

  Edwin came with her, tears in his eyes and the sheriff at his side. He explained that Joy came out to the stable to see him and a horse had bucked and thrown a sudden high kick and a rear hoof caught her square in the head.

  He’d shot the horse, Edwin explained in a choked voice, and then sent for the sheriff. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do, shooting that horse, but he couldn’t help it. There needed to be blood for blood.

  Arlen had heard it all from inside the house, the men standing on the porch with the body at their feet, wrapped in blankets. When Edwin told the story, Isaac Wagner said, “You had the mind to shoot the horse while your wife lay dying?”

  The sheriff stepped in then, told Isaac that Edwin was a grieving man, damn it, and there’d be no such questions, who cared a whit about the horse at a time such as this? Isaac had said nothing else, but Edwin Main had watched him with dark eyes, and Arlen, standing at the window, felt the coldness pass through the glass just like the wind that had returned out of the northern hills.

  Isaac gathered the body in his arms and prepared to carry Joy Main back to his shop. Edwin spoke up again and told him to make it the finest coffin he’d ever constructed; anything less would be a sin, and how much the box might cost mattered not, he’d pay any price.

  Isaac told him that every coffin he made was a fine one.

  It wasn’t long after they’d left that Arlen heard the dreaded phrase from his father’s shop: Tell me.

  This time he’d crept to the door. Usually he tried to clear himself away from the sound, but there’d been such tension in the air tonight, with his father asking that question about the horse and Edwin Main staring at him ominously.

  Not her, Arlen thought, of all the ones in town for you to speak with, not his wife. We’ll be run out of this place if anyone knows.

  The talking persisted, though, and it horrified. Isaac Wagner was pretending to hear an explanation of murder.

  “He laid hands on the servant? That girl’s no more than fifteen, is she? He intended to violate her? Did she see what happened after? What did he strike you with? Had he beaten you before? Did the children see? Did anyone see?”

  Arlen stood at the door and heard it all and felt a trembling deep in his chest that intensified when Isaac said, “I’ll see that it’s dealt with. I’ll see that he has a reckoning. I promise you that; I swear it to you.”

  Arlen opened the door and went into the room then and shouted at him to stop, and what he saw was more terrible than he’d imagined. Isaac had lifted the dead woman and placed her hands on his shoulders and was looking into her face. There was still blood in her hair, and her eyelids sagged halfway down, but the hint of blue irises remained and seemed to stare over Isaac’s shoulder and into Arlen’s own eyes.

  “She’s telling me what happened,” Isaac
said. “Don’t be afraid, son. She’s telling me the truth.”

  “She’s not,” Arlen screamed. “She can’t speak, can’t tell you a thing, she’s dead! She’s gone!”

  “No,” Isaac said, “the body is gone. She is not.”

  Arlen stood at the door and shook his head, tears brimming in his eyes. Isaac lowered the body slowly and very gently, then turned to face his son.

  “I have to touch them to hear,” he said. “There are those who don’t, those who can conjure without needing a touch, but I’m not one of them. Maybe in time. It took me many a year to reach them at all.”

  “Stop,” Arlen said. “Stop, stop, stop.”

  “You don’t believe,” Isaac said. “Those who don’t believe can’t hear. But you’ve got a touch of the gift yourself, boy. I’m sure of it. I see it in you.”

  “No more,” Arlen said, backing away through the door. “Don’t say any more.”

  “Look past your fear,” Isaac said. “It’s about doing what’s right. This woman was murdered, beaten with an ax handle and killed, Arlen! That demands justice. I’ll see that it’s delivered. I’ve promised her that. And if there’s anything I hold sacred, it’s a promise to the dead.”

  Arlen turned and ran.

  He spent close to two hours in the wooded hills, stumbling through the underbrush with hot tears in his eyes and terror in his heart. He wondered if his father was still down there with Joy Main or if he’d gone off in search of the promised reckoning. The longer Arlen walked, the more certain he became that he could not allow such a thing to take place.

  You’ve got a touch of the gift yourself, boy. I’m sure of it. I see it in you.

  It was that statement more than any of the others that drove him out of the woods and back into town. His father was insane—the dead could not speak to the living; they were gone and nothing lingered in their stead—but Arlen was not insane. He was not and he wouldn’t ever be.

  Let Isaac Wagner bear his own shame, then, and not put it on his son as well. If Isaac would show the world that he was mad, his son would show himself to be sane.