She placed her feet on either side of the carcass and repositioned her hands on the sinewy cord. Leaning back, she grunted loud. She gasped as her hands slicked up the bloodied tube, sending her sprawling backward, landing on her bottom in the streaked and splattered snow.
“Owwwwwie,” she cried.
She pushed back to her feet and wiped her hands on her nightgown. She studied the firmly anchored treasure and knew she would need the scissors out of the what’s-it drawer in the kitchen to cut it loose.
When she was little it was against the rules to take the scissors because they were sharp, but that had been a long time ago. She’d outgrown Aunt Sal at seventeen, and was almost as tall as Cousin Benny; although she knew she was done growing now. Aunt Sal said that she was taller than Momma had been but Sunshine didn’t remember what Momma looked like. Cousin Benny said Momma was really pretty, just like Sunshine.
Sunshine walked as quiet as she could past the couch where Cousin Benny sprawled, mouth open in an alcohol-induced slumber. A sour smell hung in the chilly air inside the house, and Sunshine couldn’t help inhaling through her nose as she quietly tiptoed her way across the room. Her foot hit a can and it cracked its way across the small living room, ricocheting off a pile of discarded pizza boxes and two-liter Mountain Dew bottles, sending two of them toppling loudly onto the dilapidated, mud-streaked, hard wood floor. Oh no, no, no. Sunshine held her breath.
Benny snorted in his sleep, and caught a bit of escaping saliva with his tongue before it slid from the corner of his mouth and onto the stained couch cushion. His tattered blanket slid onto the floor, exposing an erection. Sunshine’s eyes darted away as memories invaded her mind. Her sticky hands clawed fistfuls of flannel.
“It’s okay, Sunny,” he’d breathed against her ear, “We’re grown-ups now…”
She didn’t like to look at Cousin Benny anymore. He had told her it would be fun, that she would like it. His hands made her feel good. He hadn’t told her that it would make her feel creepy and as if she was misbehaving every time she saw him. Or that it would hurt.
Movement brought her back to the present as he rolled onto his side, still asleep.
Sunshine continued on to the kitchen and got the scissors. Her nose was so cold that it itched with runny mucus. She scrubbed it with a numb hand then wiped it on a dishtowel. Aunt Sal would tell her again that women who thought like little girls, like Sunshine did, couldn’t go outside alone. Couldn’t use the scissors alone. Couldn’t go to school alone, or go for a walk alone. Aunt Sal would be angry when she saw Sunshine had gone outside by herself but the reward far outweighed the cost.
We’re gonna have a real Christmas tree this year. Maybe Santa will come to our house. Then Aunt Sal won’t be mad anymore.
She slipped quietly outside.
Soon, Sunshine had clipped free her prize and trotted back toward the front yard.
Quick like a bunny…quick like a bunny, she thought, matching time to the beat of her slippers in the snow. As she ran past the neighbors’ tree, she smiled when she saw the curtain close across their front window. An excited, screeching giggle escaped her. The neighbors must be jealous that she, too, had a beautiful Christmas tree.
She carefully adorned the tree, taking time to arrange the hardening ropes in precise scallops from the long branches at the small tree’s base clear to the top. She stood back, wiping her soiled hands on the front of her nightgown.
Snow fell again and large, fluffy wet flakes came to rest on the blue aluminum. All she needed to complete the tree was an angel for the top. A scan of the yard and roadside offered nothing. Even walking and toeing snow-covered heaps was fruitless.
Maybe there’s an angel inside.
Wandering from room to room, she searched diligently as her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, careful not to wake anyone else until the tree was done.
Oh boy! The Baby Alive she’d begged for last time Aunt Sal had taken her along to Goodwill peeked from under yellowed sheets on her bed. She’d found the perfect tree topper. Eager, she grabbed the doll.
Silent as a mouse. She slipped past Benny and back out the front door.
Baby Alive sat crooked atop the tree, slid past a scalloped, sticky tree branch and fell into the snow. Sunshine picked the doll up and wiped the dark red streaks from the doll’s rubbery skin. The tree’s spindly top bounced upright. Tree topper angels had a place for the tree to go on their bottoms. The toy didn’t have wings either but her dolly had a sweet face like real tree-topper angels. Upending Baby Alive revealed the place where the baby doll went potty.
The hole there was small but after working at it, Sunshine stripped the needles away and was able to jam the red-streaked doll down onto the tree top.
“Pretty,” she said.
Sunshine rocked back and forth in her slippers. Snow melted against her pink skin, causing rivulets of blood-streaked, icy water to trail down her face. She beamed. Her tree was beautiful. Her rocking was soon accompanied by soft humming, which quickly turned into a few disjointed and choppy Christmas carols, as best as she could remember them.
The neighbors’ curtains were open once more and someone stood inside with the telephone held tight to an ear.
Dense morning fog now joined the freely falling snow, encasing the scene of Sunshine’s Christmas as a dusky, echoless vignette. Through the thickening fog, spinning blue and red lights approached slowly, routinely, as they reflected off the shining snow.
Sunshine sang louder, dancing in swirling circles around the tree as the lights grew brighter. The sound of a car grew near and a police cruiser pulled into their driveway.
The neighbor in the window flung his free hand toward the road as he screamed silently into the receiver of his phone.
Sunshine’s front door flew open and Aunt Sal stepped outside to get a look at who was parked in the yard. Bloodshot eyes swept the footprints in the driveway, the bloodied path beside the road, the small tree in her front yard. Her bloody, smiling niece.
“See! See!” Sunshine squeaked. “Merry, Merry Christmas!”
“Oh, Sunny, what have you done?” Aunt Sal managed to say. She turned her head to release the vomit induced by last night’s cheap pinot and the aromas emitted from the scene in the yard.
Empowered, Sunshine sang louder.
Aunt Sal will tell me how beautiful our tree is after she’s done being sick and finds her some morning coffee. Maybe she will even sing Jingle Bells or Silent Night if I say pretty please…I will just have to wait.
Sunshine beamed.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
THE DEAD SEXTON
THE SUNSETS WERE red, the nights were long, and the weather pleasantly frosty; and Christmas, the glorious herald of the New Year, was at hand, when an event—still recounted by winter firesides, with a horror made delightful by the mellowing influence of years—occurred in the beautiful little town of Golden Friars, and signalized, as the scene of its catastrophe, the old inn known throughout a wide region of the Northumbrian counties as the George and Dragon.
Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coach-house in the inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before this story begins, under strange circumstances, and in a place where it might have lain the better part of a week undisturbed; and a dreadful suspicion astounded the village of Golden Friars.
A wintry sunset was glaring through a gorge of the western mountains, turning into fire the twigs of the leafless elms, and all the tiny blades of grass on the green by which the quaint little town is surrounded. It is built of light, grey stone, with steep gables and slender chimneys rising with airy lightness from the level sward by the margin of the beautiful lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre of the fells at the other side, whose snowy peaks show faintly against the sky, tinged with the vaporous red of the western light. As you descend towards the margin of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its taper chimneys and slender gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous sign, and over all t
he graceful tower and spire of the ancient church, at this hour or by moonlight, in the solemn grandeur and stillness of the natural scenery that surrounds it, it stands before you like a fairy town.
Toby Crooke, the lank sexton, now fifty or upwards, had passed an hour or two with some village cronies, over a solemn pot of purl, in the kitchen of that cosy hostelry, the night before. He generally turned in there at about seven o’clock, and heard the news. This contented him: for he talked little, and looked always surly.
Many things are now raked up and talked over about him.
In early youth, he had been a bit of a scamp. He broke his indentures, and ran away from his master, the tanner of Bryemere; he had got into fifty bad scrapes and out again; aid, just as the little world of Golden Friars had come to the conclusion that it would be well for all parties— except, perhaps, himself—and a happy riddance for his afflicted mother, if he were sunk, with a gross of quart pots about his neck, in the bottom of the lake in which the grey gables, the elms, and the towering fells of Golden Friars are mirrored, he suddenly returned, a reformed man at the ripe age of forty.
For twelve years he had disappeared, and no one knew what had become of him. Then, suddenly, as I say, he reappeared at Golden Friars—a very black and silent man, sedate and orderly. His mother was dead and buried; but the “prodigal son” was received good-naturedly. The good vicar, Doctor Jenner, reported to his wife:
“His hard heart has been softened, dear Dolly. I saw him dry his eyes, poor fellow, at the sermon yesterday.”
“I don’t wonder, Hugh darling. I know the part—‘There is joy in Heaven.’ I am sure it was— wasn’t it? It was quite beautiful. I almost cried myself.”
The Vicar laughed gently, and stooped over her chair and kissed her, and patted her cheek fondly.
“You think too well of your old man’s sermons,” he said. “I preach, you see, Dolly, very much to the poor. If they understand me, I am pretty sure everyone else must; and I think that my simple style goes more home to both feelings and conscience—”
“You ought to have told me of his crying before. You are so eloquent,” exclaimed Dolly Jenner. “No one preaches like my man. I have never heard such sermons.”
Not many, we may be sure; for the good lady had not heard more than six from any other divine for the last twenty years.
The personages of Golden Friars talked Toby Crooke over on his return. Doctor Lincote said:
“He must have led a hard life; he had dried in so, and got a good deal of hard muscle; and he rather fancied he had been soldiering—he stood like a soldier; and the mark over his right eye looked like a gunshot.”
People might wonder how he could have survived a gunshot over the eye; but was not Lincote a doctor—and an army doctor to boot—when he was young; and who, in Golden Friars, could dispute with him on points of surgery? And I believe the truth is, that this mark had been really made by a pistol bullet.
Mr. Jarlcot, the attorney, would “go bail” he had picked up some sense in his travels; and honest Turnbull, the host of the George and Dragon, said heartily:
“We must look out something for him to put his hand to. Now’s the time to make a man of him.”
The end of it was that he became, among other things, the sexton of Golden Friars.
He was a punctual sexton. He meddled with no other person’s business; but he was a silent man, and by no means popular. He was reserved in company; and he used to walk alone by the shore of the lake, while other fellows played at fives or skittles; and when he visited the kitchen of the George, he had his liquor to himself, and in the midst of the general talk was a saturnine listener. There was something sinister in this man’s face; and when things went wrong with him, he could look dangerous enough.
There were whispered stories in Golden Friars about Toby Crooke. Nobody could say how they got there. Nothing is more mysterious than the spread of rumour. It is like a vial poured on the air. It travels, like an epidemic, on the sightless currents of the atmosphere, or by the laws of a telluric influence equally intangible. These stories treated, though darkly, of the long period of his absence from his native village; but they took no well-defined shape, and no one could refer them to any authentic source.
The Vicar’s charity was of the kind that thinketh no evil; and in such cases he always insisted on proof. Crooke was, of course, undisturbed in his office.
On the evening before the tragedy came to light—trifles are always remembered after the catastrophe—a boy, returning along the margin of the mere, passed him by seated on a prostrate trunk of a tree, under the “bield” of a rock, counting silver money. His lean body and limbs were bent together, his knees were up to his chin, and his long fingers were telling the coins over hurriedly in the hollow of his other hand. He glanced at the boy, as the old English saying is, like the devil looking over Lincoln.” But a black and sour look from Mr. Crooke, who never had a smile for a child nor a greeting for a wayfarer, was nothing strange.
Toby Crooke lived in the grey stone house, cold and narrow, that stands near the church porch, with the window of its staircase looking out into the churchyard, where so much of his labour, for many a day, had been expended. The greater part of this house was untenanted.
The old woman who was in charge of it slept in a settle-bed, among broken stools, old sacks, rotten chests and other rattle-traps, in the small room at the rear of the house, floored with tiles.
At what time of the night she could not tell, she awoke, and saw a man, with his hat on, in her room. He had a candle in his hand, which he shaded with his coat from her eye; his back was towards her, and he was rummaging in the drawer in which she usually kept her money.
Having got her quarter’s pension of two pounds that day, however, she had placed it, folded in a rag, in the corner of her tea caddy, and locked it up in the “eat-malison” or cupboard.
She was frightened when she saw the figure in her room, and she could not tell whether her visitor might not have made his entrance from the contiguous churchyard. So, sitting bolt upright in her bed, her grey hair almost lifting her kerchief off her head, and all over in “a fit o’ t’ creepins,” as she expressed it, she demanded:
“In God’s name, what want ye thar?”
“Whar’s the peppermint ye used to hey by ye, woman? I’m bad wi’ an inward pain.”
“It’s all gane a month sin’,” she answered; and offered to make him a “het” drink if he’d get to his room.
But he said:
“Never mind, I’ll try a mouthful o’ gin.”
And, turning on his heel, he left her.
In the morning the sexton was gone. Not only in his lodging was there no account of him, but, when inquiry began to be extended, nowhere in the village of Golden Friars could he be found.
Still he might have gone off, on business of his own, to some distant village, before the town was stirring; and the sexton had no near kindred to trouble their heads about him. People, therefore, were willing to wait, and take his return ultimately for granted.
At three o’clock the good Vicar, standing at his hall door, looking across the lake towards the noble fells that rise, steep and furrowed, from that beautiful mere, saw two men approaching across the green, in a straight line, from a boat that was moored at the water’s edge. They were carrying between them something which, though not very large, seemed ponderous.
“Ye’ll ken this, sir,” said one of the boatmen as they set down, almost at his feet, a small church bell, such as in old-fashioned chimes yields the treble notes.
“This won’t be less nor five stean. I ween it’s fra’ the church steeple yon.”
“What I one of our church bells?” ejaculated the Vicar—for a moment lost in horrible amazment. “Oh, no!—no, that can’t possibly be! Where did you find it?”
He had found the boat, in the morning, moored about fifty yards from her moorings where he had left it the night before, and could not think how that came to pass; and
now, as he and his partner were about to take their oars, they discovered this bell in the bottom of the boat, under a bit of canvas, also the sexton’s pick and spade—“tom-spey’ad,” they termed that peculiar, broad- bladed implement.
“Very extraordinary! We must try whether there is a bell missing from the tower,” said the Vicar, getting into a fuss. “Has Crooke come back yet? Does anyone know where he is?”
The sexton had not yet turned up.
“That’s odd—that’s provoking,” said the Vicar. “However, my key will let us in. Place the bell in the hall while I get it; and then we can see what all this means.”
To the church, accordingly, they went, the Vicar leading the way, with his own key in his hand. He turned it in the lock, and stood in the shadow of the ground porch, and shut the door.
A sack, half full, lay on the ground, with open mouth, a piece of cord lying beside it. Something clanked within it as one of the men shoved it aside with his clumsy shoe.
The Vicar opened the church door and peeped in. The dusky glow from the western sky, entering through a narrow window, illuminated the shafts and arches, the old oak carvings, and the discoloured monuments, with the melancholy glare of a dying fire.
The Vicar withdrew his head and closed the door. The gloom of the porch was deeper than ever as, stooping, he entered the narrow door that opened at the foot of the winding stair that leads to the first loft; from which a rude ladder-stair of wood, some five and twenty feet in height, mounts through a trap to the ringers’ loft.
Up the narrow stairs the Vicar climbed, followed by his attendants, to the first loft. It was very dark: a narrow bow-slit in the thick wall admitted the only light they had to guide them. The ivy leaves, seen from the deep shadow, flashed and flickered redly, and the sparrows twittered among them.
“Will one of you be so good as to go up and count the bells, and see if they are all right?” said the Vicar. “There should be—”
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 41
