Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  The view is excellent. You can see the wide horizon and all the faces of the sea from the windows, and so the members sit, with their backs to the town, watching the boats sail by, for every day is the Saturday of regatta week. The conversation that moves about the club is respectable, though sometimes it turns boastful, taking on the kind of swaggering tone a man employs when his wife is not there to contradict him in front of company.

  “No, no!” say some of the men, their feathers ruffling at the sight of Silas on their porch, the others echoing their sentiments with emphatic nods. “We’ll have none of your kind here! No, none of that rubbish you’re peddling, we’re staying right where we are!”

  “Okay,” says Silas, confused. “That’s okay with me, really! I’m not peddling anything—”

  “Oh, he says that now,” scoffs one, “but just wait, he’ll be just like the father with his ‘time for home,’ and ‘get ye gones’! Well, we’re not having any of it, young man! So you can turn yourself right around. This is private property.”

  “Wait! You know my father? Have you seen him?”

  “Your father is NOT a member of this club. I assure you!”

  Feeling a little offended, Silas says, “I’m not here to tell you what to do. I have no intention of telling you to go anywhere. Stay here as long as you like, if that’s what you want.”

  “Just so. Thank you. And, if you don’t mind,” says one of the men more quietly, in his captain’s cap with too much gold braid stitched to its brim, “no need to mention to the wives what’s become of us, righty-o?”

  “Um—right,” says Silas, “but may I ask, what are you hiding from?”

  “Hiding!” hollers the captain, his sotto voce gone, “we prefer ‘weathering over’! So much quieter here than home. Less chatter, too. More civilized. We spent so many excellent weekends here, some of us just thought we’d stay on, you know, man the helm. A man wants to be the captain of his own ship, and, well, no man can be that at home. So”—orders the captain, mustering his zeal—“you can just move along, Undertaker! We’re not leaving.”

  Silas makes an obligatory scan of the ranks of club members, but sees no familiar faces, nor do any of the ghosts speak up to claim him as kin. It is clear that while nearly everyone knows of his father, no one here knows anything of his whereabouts.

  Already resigned to going home, and caring little one way or the other what the men of the club do with their afterlives, Silas raises his hands in mock defeat and hangs his head as he turns to go. But as he begins to unwind the cord from the death watch, he looks once more on the men of the Yacht Club, who have all turned suddenly and very reverently to the east. The men have moved to stand on the rocks of the breakwater in front of the club, each on his own little island, and they now look out toward Lichport’s deep-bottomed harbor. There, Silas can just make out the misty outlines of a ship risen up from the water, its pale, hell-shredded sails billowing in a storm that blows for it alone.

  The men of the Yacht Club raise their drinks in somber reverence to the ship of mists, then drink down the contents of their glasses and throw them to shatter on the rocks, and without another word to the Undertaker, they march back into their club, closing and locking the doors behind them.

  As he turned the corner from Coral Street onto Coach, Silas felt, just for an instant, strangely comforted by not finding his father in the shadowlands he’d visited. For one thing, it might mean that his dad was still alive, though that raised many more questions than it answered. Most of those questions circled about his uncle’s name like black birds about a copse of trees. And Silas wondered how would it have felt to find his dad just sitting there on a stool in the tavern. Just sitting, glass in his hand, not looking for him, not trying to get home. Just lost like the rest of the ghosts, drunk on their own little miseries, waiting down the years, sharing their stories with strangers, their families so far away it was as though they never were.

  Alive or dead, his father was still somewhere, waiting to be found.

  The night was clear and fine, and the fixed stars burned with cold light across the sky above Silas as he made his way home to his father’s house. Above him, something flashed. He stopped in the middle of the street and saw a star fall, trailing behind it a thin ribbon of fire that faded almost as soon as it flared. Just another traveler, he thought. Just another soul fallen from its sphere. A thing nearly burned out.

  Still looking up, Silas felt drawn upward into the pitch of the sky, his stomach turning, because he was standing in the middle of nothing. With every passing moment, the configurations of the constellations were fading. There were no more connections he could see, or remember, or make. He felt his father’s face drawing away from him into the dark, his features becoming lost among the invisible lines between the now patternless stars. Where Amos once stood in Silas’s mind, now there was only space. Nausea rose up in him, and he felt sure now that there were only two places in town where his father might reside. First, his house, which was full, floor to ceiling, with associations—notes, letters, clothes, books. Objects and reminders that would every day bring him closer to knowing his dad, though not necessarily bring him any closer to finding him. Then there was the other place. His uncle’s house, where, Silas increasingly feared, something more of his dad than merely memories lay waiting for him. He started walking quickly up Coach Street, keeping his head down, his eyes only on the road.

  AS HE RETURNED HOME from his wanderings among the town’s shadowlands, Silas realized that while Lichport had become his home, without his father it was just another limbo to him. Dizzy and nervous from his journey, from the realization that there were, at every turning, worlds within worlds all about him, Silas didn’t feel like leaving the familiarity of his father’s house. Mrs. Bowe was down the hallway if he needed her, the front door was locked, and everything outside that haunted and confused him was on the other side of that door.

  He spent the day reading, wandering from shelf to shelf. First a few lines from one volume caught his attention, then an engraving in another book momentarily drew his eye. After hours of flitting from page to page, Silas needed to stretch his legs. He went upstairs and began opening doors to rooms he hadn’t yet gone through with any attention.

  He turned the knob to a small room toward the end of the hall and walked in. There were a few old toys in the corners and animals painted on the walls. Silas had opened this door on his first day in the house, but thinking it empty, he’d closed it again and hadn’t been back. Now he looked more closely at the room and could see that all the painted animals had faded and the toys were gray with dust and age. He knew this had been his room, long ago, before his family moved away.

  When he had first arrived in his father’s house, Silas had almost liked the idea of discovering his father’s secret life, but slowly he was realizing it was only a secret kept from him. He began to get angry, and quickly the anger turned in on itself and then began to hurt.

  He ran to his father’s bedroom and frantically began looking through drawers and the pockets of his father’s clothes, searching for anything that he might have missed, some clue about his father’s disappearance. Some evidence. A note. Anything that could bring his dad closer to his life again or hint at where he’d gone.

  Nothing but the pieces of a life left behind suddenly. A pants pocket holding a handkerchief and three quarters in change. A shirt hanging on a closet door with a pen still clipped to the breast pocket. Two dirty undershirts in a pile on the floor by the bed. An unfinished book on the bedside table with a bookmark showing there were seven chapters left to be read.

  Silas found keys, perhaps to houses, but there was nothing to tell him where they might fit. He found small notebooks that his father might have carried with him while he worked. The notes were hastily written and nearly illegible. They seemed to be about particular haunted places, small details, circumstances of lives that had come to bad ends; all now anonymous.

  Silas found the real estate a
dvertisement for their house in Saltsbridge. This must have been from the days when he was still a baby and his dad was resigned to moving his family out of Lichport. The page had a black-and-white picture of their old house and the layout of the interior rooms with their dimensions. There were numbers and figures scrawled up and down its margins, perhaps mortgage calculations, as well as numerous doodles that made Silas think his dad had had this on his desk for a long time before he told his mother about it and made an offer on the house. Along the bottom of the page was typed “Perfect First Home in Saltsbridge Township!!!” But his father had taken a black felt-tipped pen and struck through most of the letters:

  “Perfect First Home In Saltsbridge Township!!!”

  … leaving only the word “P r I S o n.”

  It felt like someone had hit him square in the chest, and his breath caught in his throat. So that was how his dad thought about the place where he lived with his family. That was why he stayed often here in Lichport. In Saltsbridge he felt tied down, trapped. For the first time Silas allowed himself to consider that maybe his dad wasn’t dead or held somewhere against his will, but that he’d just walked away from a life that no longer held any interest for him, away from his son who no longer …

  Silas dropped the paper back in the open drawer, put his face in his hands, and began to cry. It welled up in him, quietly at first, but then as scenes of the last year ran through his mind, dragging along all his fear and sorrow with them, the sobbing started, big, wracking sobs that he couldn’t stop.

  Every moment he could think of made it worse. A happy memory of his father, waiting on the porch for him, turned in his stomach like a knife because now he thought he might never see his dad again, and now he thought he finally understood how much his dad hated being in Saltsbridge with his family. Thoughts about his mother living in his uncle’s cold house. Seeing himself, alone, walking along the lanes of a town that was crumbling even as he looked on it. The knowledge that the only girl who’d ever liked him was dead and now lost; a figment, a shadow of a shadow.

  The sound of his crying had made its way right through the walls. Some moments later there was soft knock at the door that joined the two homes. It took Silas a minute to wipe his eyes and cross the house. When he opened the door, there was Mrs. Bowe. She raised her arms and was hugging him before he could step back. Then he really let go, crying hard into her soft shoulder.

  “I know, Silas, I know,” she sang. “And that’s the worst of it, the part no one ever tells you about.”

  “What part?” he said, his voice still clenched with grief.

  “How it never stops. How the pain of missing people never stops. When you burn your finger in a fire, it hurts, but it only hurts one way because you know what caused the pain and why the pain is there, and you know that it will settle, in a bit. But heart pain has facets, Silas. A thousand different sides, sharp and hard; most of them you don’t even know exist, even when you’re looking straight at them. When someone leaves, or dies, or doesn’t love you in return, well, you may think you know why your heart hurts. But wrapped in there are a hundred kinds of fear all tangled in a knot you can’t untie. Nobody wants to be alone. We all fear being left alone, being left behind.”

  “I don’t want to be alone like them. I have seen such things, Mrs. Bowe, things that would break a person’s heart in two,” Silas said.

  “I know such things exist. But you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence. You must learn to make mourning into memory. For once a person takes leave of his life, that life becomes so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping. The dead find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone. But people forget the power of memory. So we fear death in the deepest place of our very being, because we don’t know that memories make us immortal. We focus instead on being gone and the awful mystery behind absence.

  “Love and death—and those two are very closely bound together—scare us because we can’t control them. We fear what we can’t control. That fear is really part of what makes us human, but mostly, we’re just afraid of the ends of stories we can’t foresee. I wish our memories were better.”

  “I’m not afraid of death.” Silas said, the clutching tension in his throat letting go as his tears dried.

  “Well, you’re the only one who isn’t.”

  “Do you think my dad was scared of death? How could he do his work?”

  “Yes. Well, yes, but not like other people. He wasn’t afraid of the process of someone dying because, well, what’s the point in that? Everyone dies some way or another, eventually. He wasn’t afraid of the moment of death, not in most cases, which a lot of folks are, because he’d seen a lot of good deaths, and those lucky folks go easy as you please. Slide right out of the world without pain or grief. He also wasn’t afraid of dying himself, at least I don’t think so. He’d come close to death a number of times that I know of, and it didn’t shake him.”

  “So he was fearless, huh?”

  “No. There were things that scared him terribly. Some I know about, because I was with him when those things rose up close to him. But the thing that scared him most was the thought of something hurting you, the thought of losing you. I know that haunted him. I know that’s why he left Lichport. He knew the town was no place for you while you were very young. He knew it had a bad effect on your mother.”

  “Like everything,” Silas threw in, but his heart was no longer in speaking harshly of her. The more he thought about his mother, the more he could see that while they were on different roads, they were each just plain lost. In their life together as a family, maybe for the last ten years, maybe longer, they’d all been living in a kind of perpetual twilight. Not light. Not dark. Not anything. And then when his dad disappeared, the lights went out, and Silas and his mom had been wandering around in the dark looking for a switch. Could he blame her because she hadn’t found one either? Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.

  “As you please. You know your mother much better than I ever did. But she is your mother and she loves you, even if you don’t care for how she shows it, or care for what the weight of her troubles has made of her. Your dad had worries too, but I think he always hoped you could all live here again. The idea of dying somewhere other than Lichport, that scared him. A person likes to think of dying at home.”

  “Mrs. Bowe, do you think he ran off?”

  “No, Silas, I don’t. I know he never would leave you like that. He never would.”

  “Do you think he’s dead? Please tell me. You can tell me.”

  “Silas, I just don’t know. You are his son in so many ways—and I know by your eyes you’ve already seen plenty of this town’s strangeness, so I’ll tell you this because it’s all I am fairly sure of: If he were dead, he would send along word one way or another. Knowing what he knew about the dead and the living and what’s between them, and what it’s possible to do between one world and the other, well, I can’t believe he’d stay quiet unless something was keeping him quiet.”

  “Then you don’t think he’s here in Lichport?”

  “I didn’t say that. I think he may be here, somewhere. I have looked, in my way, and haven’t been able to find any trace of him. I know you’ve spoken with people in town—could no one tell you anything?”

  “Nothing that would help me find him, no.”

  “Not in the last few days?”

  Silas shook his head and guessed she had some idea of where he’d been. Maybe a person just looked different after following the dead into their prison houses.

  Sitting down, as if asking it wearied her, Mrs. Bowe drew her hands together in her lap and said, “Silas, did you see or hear anything strange at your uncle’s?”

  “Everything I saw and heard there was strange. Are you saying you think my uncle knows something about my dad?
I’m sure he does. I know it. Mrs. Bowe, I’m not asking for facts. I’ll settle for intuition. What do you think has happened? What do you think my uncle is capable of?”

  Mrs. Bowe got very quiet and drew back into herself, her shoulders slumping forward as if heavy with weight. “I don’t know. But there was little love lost between them, and your uncle doesn’t seem very distressed by Amos being gone. It’s his composure that bothers me. Often it’s the sea’s calm surface that bespeaks dangerous currents below. I’m not saying I know anything for certain, but your uncle is a man who keeps his secrets close, and it’s possible he knows something about your dad’s disappearance. Who knows what he may know?”

  “I’m not sure I’d describe my uncle as calm. He’s like a tight wire all the time.”

  “Okay, well, maybe I’m just fretful. You spent time in that house, so you know best.”

  “Mrs. Bowe, I can hear the fear in your voice. I think because you care for me, you don’t want to say anything that would make me go back to my uncle’s house. But I think my uncle knows everything about my dad; what happened to him, where he is. And what’s worse, I think my uncle inviting us here was not merely hospitality. He is doing something in that house, and he needs my family to be a part of it.”

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  Silas watched Mrs. Bowe, the sound of skin making a soft rasping sound as she worried and wrung her hands over and over.

  “Your mother is still in that house. And maybe you’re like me, fretful. You can’t just go accusing people of things. I don’t think your uncle should be challenged openly. I think, Silas—and I’m sorry to say it, because I don’t want to put any more weight on your shoulders—I think if anyone’s going to find your dad, it will be you. I’ll help, in what ways I can, you know that. This is your house now. You’re safe here and always will be, within these walls.”