by Tom McNeal
Jeremy’s father did not speak Zyla’s name, nor did he try to find her and bring her back. He made his oil deliveries, but he no longer sang his songs. His supervision of Jeremy was absent-minded.
Then, about five years ago, Jeremy heard his mother’s voice, faint and sorrowful, but, still, he was certain that it could be no one other than his mother. I’m sorry, the voice said. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.
The voice fell silent then.
Perhaps ten days thereafter, Jeremy’s father received in the mail an envelope with no return address. It contained a Todesanzeige—an obituary—scissored from a paper in Saskatchewan, Canada. I have seen the document myself—Jeremy brought it out one day to show me. It announced the death of Zyla Johnson Newgate, who had suffered death by drowning after her canoe capsized among rocks and boulders in fast-moving water. She was survived by her husband, Theodore Newgate, and two stepchildren, aged seven and nine. A photograph of the woman was positioned above the text. It was of Jeremy’s mother.
When Jeremy arrived home from school that afternoon, he saw the obituary lying on the table. Even after reading it again and again, he was hardly able to believe its meaning. He put his head on the table and closed his eyes. Some moments went by, and then all at once he became aware of the deep and strange stillness of the house. He went to look for his father. He found him in his bed completely covered with blankets.
“I’m awful cold,” he told Jeremy.
“She married and became somebody else’s stepmother,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t even know you were divorced.”
“Neither did I,” his father said. His eyes were red.
That his father had been crying scared Jeremy. He had never seen his father cry before.
Jeremy looked again at the picture of his mother in the newspaper. “Guess she didn’t find her happy ending.”
The only sound in the room was the tick, tick, tick of the clock. Finally, his father said, “You can’t tell anyone what’s happened to your mother.”
“Why?”
A second passed, then another. “Because I’m asking you not to.”
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “What do I tell people?”
“Nothing.” His voice, to Jeremy, sounded not quite alive. “No one needs to know anything.”
Jeremy thought it was strange that his father wanted to turn his mother’s death into Their Secret.
“Okay?” his father asked.
“Okay,” Jeremy said.
“I need to stay here,” his father said. He stared up at the ceiling. “Here in this room. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Jeremy counted the ticks of the clock. He had reached one hundred ten when his father said, “Here’s what you tell people. Tell them that I have a rare sickness that not even the doctors can understand and I just want to be left alone. Okay?”
Jeremy nodded, and his father closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” he said in a whispery voice. “I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for me and I’m sorry for Zyla.”
This was the first time in five years he had spoken her name, and he would never speak it again.
Jeremy sat in a chair beside the bed until his father fell to sleep, and then he slipped back into the kitchen, for an idea had occurred to him, one that, when he again read the obituary and inspected the calendar on the wall, proved to be true: the afternoon that his mother died was the very date that he had heard his mother’s voice whispering that she was sorry, sorry, sorry.
Jeremy climbed into the attic to be with his mother’s books, and that night he dragged his bedding up the ladder. Ever since that darkening day, the attic above the bookstore had been Jeremy’s private room and the apartment behind the bookstore had been his father’s sanctuary, and also his prison.
After saying au revoir to Ginger Boultinghouse, Jeremy pulled out the key attached to the long leather cord around his neck, unlocked the bookstore door, and found a letter from the bank lying on the floor below the mail slot. “Final Notice of Trustee Sale” was written at the top of the letter, followed by a dense text containing terms like default, unpaid balance, collection fees, late fees, and lender’s legal department.
“God,” Jeremy said under his breath, and still carrying the letter, he pushed through the door that led from the bookstore to the apartment, where his father lay in bed watching television.
“There you are,” his father said in the tone of a person both relieved to see someone and annoyed by his late arrival.
“I went by the bakery,” Jeremy said, and his father’s face turned rigid, for he, too, had heard the story of his wife asking the man from Canada for a ride.
“I had to go sometime,” Jeremy said.
Well, it is true. Sometimes avoiding something can give it more and more meaning rather than less and less.
His father tipped his chin and poked his fingers into his gnarled beard, which seemed to irritate Jeremy and make him go even further. “I had a piece of Prince Cake, too,” he said, and this was too much for his father—he clamped shut his eyes, as if not seeing his son might put him beyond hearing him as well.
“I had a piece and it tasted really good and nothing happened.” He softened his voice. “Nothing happened, Dad.” He waited another moment and made his voice softer still. “It wasn’t the bakery’s fault that Mom left.”
Mr. Johnson pulled at his beard, kept his eyes clamped shut, and said, “I know what I know.”
“Well, here’s something else for you to know,” Jeremy said a bit tensely. He held out the letter from the bank. “Open your eyes and take a gander at this.”
Harold Johnson gave the letter a squinting look. “What is it?”
“It’s from the bank. They’re going to schedule the sale of the store.”
His father said nothing and turned his eyes to the television screen, where several men in cowboy hats shot at one another from behind barrels, feedbags, and horses. One dying man splashed into a watering trough. A bleeding man dragged himself across the street while bullets sprayed up dirt all around him. Yes, yes, it was quite a spectacle.
“See that guy who just got shot and is writhing in the dust?” Jeremy said. “That’s us, Dad. We’re going to be put out on the street. We’re going to lose the store and our home, and we’re not even shooting back.” His father kept gazing at the television. Jeremy raised his voice. “Are you even listening?”
His father pried his eyes from the television. “We aren’t shooting back,” he said, “because we don’t have any bullets.” He let his gaze drift back to the television.
Jeremy seemed about to say something more but thought better of it and instead pushed open the door to the kitchen. There he grilled three cheese sandwiches, one of which he ate quickly with a glass of milk made from powder. That, I knew, would be his supper. Then he served the other two sandwiches on a tray just as his father liked them—double-tiered and spread with a generous layer of a maple-flavored syrup, moderately heated.
Jeremy’s father sat up in bed and ate his sandwiches almost without taking his eyes from the television screen.
Jeremy said, “I’ll be studying.”
His father turned his head slightly while keeping his gaze fixed on the screen. “But you’ll come back for our quiz show, right?”
“I’ll try.”
Uncommon Knowledge was the only show that Jeremy and his father enjoyed watching together, and I confess that I, too, found it diverting. “The quiz show that celebrates the uncommon knowledge of the common man!” a rich voice always proclaimed at the beginning. Then the host would describe how the show’s talent scouts had scoured the far corners of the countryside looking for ordinary men and women who possessed extraordinary knowledge about some particular thing—the history of the carrier pigeon, for example, or the terra-cotta soldiers of Emperor Qin, or the life cycle of skinks. These self-taught experts were then questioned by renowned authorities in the field. The audience rooted for the commoners, as they always have.
&n
bsp; “You should watch it with me tonight,” Jeremy’s father said. “They’ve got a woman who knows everything about chasing tornadoes.”
“What we need is somebody who knows everything about dodging foreclosures.”
His father seemed not to have heard. “Tornado chasing could be real interesting.” He smiled hopefully at Jeremy. “You’ll watch it, won’t you?”
“I’ll try,” Jeremy said again. “But it’s finals week.”
His father’s eyes faded slightly, and he slowly raked his fingers through his unkempt beard. “Okay,” he said. I believed I knew what troubled him. He was afraid that Jeremy would go away to a university and leave him alone. But that is the way of the world, is it not? Every day a child steps away from the parent by the littlest distance, perhaps just the width of a mouse-whisker, but every day it happens, and the days go by, one after another after another.
So Jeremy sat at the long table in the other room, removed his shoes and stockings so that he could feel the age-worn Persian carpet underfoot, and opened his books. After studying geometry, there was world history, but then he folded his book over a finger and whispered, “Jacob?”
Yes?
“What do you think of Ginger Boultinghouse?”
What I thought was that she was a saucy girl whose saucy ways could become a distraction from Jeremy’s studies. But over my long life as a mortal I had learned that it is best to answer such questions as positively as the truth will allow.
She does not allow herself to be bullied by Conk Crinklaw and his friends, I said, and she is kind to Frank Bailey. I think well of her for those things.
Jeremy nodded. “That it?”
Well, she is very comely. I watched his face. Would you not agree?
He tried to manufacture a casual response. “I guess so, yeah.”
And she is clever, I said, and then—I could not keep myself from it—I added, Perhaps a bit too clever.
Surprise registered in Jeremy’s face and he seemed about to ask something more, but at this moment his father shouted loudly from the other room, “Two minutes till Uncommon Knowledge!”
“Okay,” Jeremy called back, but he did not stand up. Nor did he question me further about Ginger Boultinghouse. He silently resumed his studies, though more than once his eyes drifted toward the window, his expression softening, as if he were thinking of something pleasant, and I would have to whisper a reminder, just as I did long ago with my younger brother, Wilhelm.
The studies now. The studies.
As the sun’s last rays soften the room’s light and Jeremy turns his pages and makes his notations, I will tell you a short tale about Jeremy and his beloved grandfather, who opened the Two-Book Bookstore in his old age.
Lucian Johnson had spent his entire life working as a steam-fitter, dynamiter, water witcher, cardsharp, and coffin maker, and when his working days were at last behind him, he thought a written account of his life might be of interest to the public. He spent several years on the project, and it grew to two volumes in length. But when he was finally done, no one wanted to publish it, so he had the book printed at his own expense, and he converted Johnson’s Custom Coffin Shop to the Two-Book Bookstore, the store’s two books being My Life & Times by Myself, Lucian A. Johnson, volumes I and II. He lined the walls with bookshelves, rolled out a soft Persian carpet, set an old oak library table in the middle of it, and brought in a red velvet sofa and two stuffed armchairs purchased at an estate sale. Then he hung out a sign that said OPEN.
For a time, his doddering friends came to the bookstore to play dominoes at the library table, and while playing, they would pretend to be on the constant lookout for potential retail trade.
“That a customer?” one of them would say when somebody approached on the sidewalk, and then when the pedestrian had passed by, another would say, “Guess not.”
This droll ritual finally drove Jeremy’s grandfather into such a state that one afternoon he threw the domino players out, and the dominoes, too. During the months that followed, Jeremy was the only person whose company his grandfather could tolerate. He took seriously the voices Jeremy heard, even going so far as to have Jeremy repeat the words whenever he received them. “Ghosts,” his grandfather finally surmised. “You’re hearing ghosts.” He squinted at Jeremy. “Do you see ’em, too?”
Jeremy said he never saw any ghosts, and a few days later his grandfather, having done his research, announced that Jeremy was not a clairvoyant but a clairaudient. “That’s a person who hears voices from the spirit world.” His grandfather had also come to another conclusion. “When these books sell out,” he said, waving a hand vaguely toward the shelves stuffed with his autobiographies, “I’m going to add a chapter about you for the next edition.” He smiled at Jeremy. “You’re quite a curiosity.”
Jeremy and his grandfather became friends of the best type. Each saw in the other the subtle but estimable qualities no one else saw. One day, Jeremy came into the store with his cheeks red from crying. Somehow he had lost his house key—again—and it seemed to him to signify something larger. “I’m nothing but a loser,” he said, and flopped down on the old red sofa.
Jeremy’s grandfather sat right down beside Jeremy and said, “You may be a loser of keys, Jeremy, but that doesn’t make you any other kind of loser.” The next day, he presented Jeremy with the long leather cord that he still wore, beautifully knotted, on which hung a brand-new house key. He slid it over Jeremy’s head, tucked it into his shirt, and said, “There. That should do it.”
It did. Thereafter Jeremy never lost a house key again.
Days, weeks, and months traveled not unpleasantly by.
Then, three years ago, on a chill wintry day while Jeremy was at school, the old man’s heart failed and he fell dead. He evidently passed quickly through the Zwischenraum, but before departing, he found Jeremy in his school classroom.
You’re a dear, good boy, he said, and I love you more than the sun and the moon.
Jeremy, who had been at his desk doing math sums, sat stockstill and wondered how the voice he was hearing could sound like his grandfather’s.
He rubbed at his temple more and more frantically, but his grandfather’s voice did not come again.
“No!” Jeremy said in a strange, strangled whisper, and then, dropping his pencil to the floor, he rose from his desk and, in spite of the teacher reproachfully calling his name, ran straight to the Two-Book Bookstore, where he found his grandfather lying dead on the old Persian rug.
For several days, the final examinations proceeded well. The first few tests came and went without difficulties.
On Thursday night, however, something happened.
The evening began in quiet study. Only two exams remained—one in geometry and one in classical vocabulary. Our contemplation of geometry had taken most of the evening, with Jeremy, at my promptings, reciting his axioms and postulates. This had aggravated his father as he lay in the next room watching television. “Not so loud!” he yelled from time to time.
And so, when geometry was finally finished, Jeremy took his vocabulary book up to the attic, where I could quiz him without annoyance to his father. I would pronounce a word and Jeremy would give its definition, followed by the Latin or Greek derivation. Unlike other subjects, vocabulary came quite easily to Jeremy. It was just a matter of taking the time to rehearse the words. He remembered that digital comes from the Latin digitus, meaning finger, but had forgotten the Greek root for podiatry. “Don’t tell me,” he would say, but finally I would have to tell him.
“Pous, podos,” he repeated, “pous, podos,” and, really, he was so earnest that something in my ancient soul went out to him.
Accord, I said, and he said, “Agreement, from the Latin ac or ad, meaning to or toward, and cor, cordis meaning heart.”
Exzellent, I said, and had begun to pronounce the next word when suddenly I heard a strange tapping sound.
Jeremy cocked his head.
And then it came again: tap, t
ap, tap.
It seemed to come from the small door between the attic and the tiny gabled balcony.
By the clock, it was 9:40 p.m., a time when few in the village ventured out.
Louder now: tap, tap, tap, tap.
“See what it is,” Jeremy whispered to me, but he knew I could not, not unless he opened the door. (As a rule of thumb, I tell Jeremy that if a cricket can get in, so can a ghost.)
The tapping grew even sharper and more insistent: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap!
Jeremy crept slowly toward the half door, but as he approached, the tapping stopped as abruptly as it had started. Now silence itself seemed eerie. Jeremy leaned toward the window and was staring out when a masked face suddenly appeared in the glass!
“Eh!” Jeremy said, or perhaps, “Ek!” and lurched backward. Who could blame him?—a masked face in the window will give any mortal a turn—but now the terror in Jeremy’s expression was caught by a beam of light directed in from the window.
How was this? How did a lantern get up to this high balcony?
But look! The light slowly turned on itself and a hand appeared, gripped the knitted mask, and slowly pulled it free to reveal the face of … a grinning Ginger Boultinghouse!
And perched precariously on the balcony behind her were her two girlfriends, also in high mirth.
Ginger motioned for Jeremy to open the small door, and the girls came spilling and laughing into the attic, each carrying a rucksack and each dressed from head to toe in black clothes.
“Very funny,” Jeremy said in a peevish tone.
But Ginger was unrepentant. “You’re right,” she said, grinning. “It was, very.” She looked around. “Zounds,” she said. “Kind of stuffy up here in Johnson-Johnsonville.”
Maddy walked over to the window that gave onto the back of the alleyway and began to unlatch it.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jeremy said, but she already had, and a foul smell streamed in.
The girl slammed the window closed and held a hand over her nose. “Wow,” she gasped. “Are you storing, like, a thousand rotten eggs out there?”
