Beneath Ceaseless Skies #98

by E. Catherine Tobler

  The thread makes a whisper as it goes, a soft hiss that reminds her of an egg in a pan. She breaks the jars, letting time evaporate—ending all Mother Night said should be ended—and even that becomes not enough. Not enough, for there he is, stealing through pomegranates, and there, in her own caboose, leaving a token for the bell jar.

  In the end—

  No, this is the part she cannot yet see.

  * * *

  The young redheaded woman comes to Beth on a warm afternoon, finding her behind the caboose washing the bowls that have overflowed the small inside sink. The bowls make a kind of music as they clink together, water streaming from them as Beth lifts them from the washtub to the rinse water.

  “The little man said you were back here.”

  Beth is about to ask which little man but then realizes she means Eamonn. She straightens to peer through the back window, watching the dwarf and monkey dole out jars of marmalade to customers.

  “Here I am,” Beth says. She gently drops the bowl into the rinse water and dries her hands upon her apron. If the woman wanted marmalade, she would be up front, not back here.

  “I heard that you might— Might help me.” She sweeps her jacket back to reveal the small bundle nestled against her chest. “I want to keep her, but can’t.”

  The last two words are only a whisper. Tears spill over the girl’s cheeks then, brightening her brown eyes. Beth clucks her tongue.

  “Sometimes we can’t have the things we most want,” she says, looking at the pair of them long and hard. The baby makes a faint gurgle, seeming to nestle closer into its mother. Sometimes, Beth thought, even though we can’t claim a thing we are still haunted by it. “Wait here.”

  Beth gestures to the upended crate in the shadow of the caboose and when the girl sits, she steps into the train car. She takes down one jar of orange marmalade, then returns to the girl. The girl who frowns at her.

  “I didn’t come for your mar—”

  “You will hush,” Beth tells her and crouches before the pair of them. She sets the marmalade between her own knees, in the hard dirt, and looks up at the girl. “Stay quiet.”

  Beth slides a hand into the sling, finding warm darkness inside. Her fingers seek out the curve of the baby’s skull, smoothing over that downy hair before settling just above the nape. More warmth floods through Beth’s palm. An unnamed daughter, born seven days ago.

  She ties a small knot in the thread of life, before she divides the thread as neatly as she ever has. She splices this life from that, knowing that no matter what she does, there will always be this point for the mother to look back on. Beth cannot remove the memory of it entirely, so she changes it, infusing the marmalade which sits nearby. Even when given willingly, the loss of a child is no easy thing to bear, but when this young mother looks back onto the knot of the severed thread, she will remember only joy. She will remember the blue of the autumn sky that arced overhead when her child was conceived; she will recall the way the air cooled that night and how sharp the stars looked when they finally came out. With every bite, the young mother will be calmed.

  Even so, she will still have to face the bottom of the jar, when the sweetness is gone and only clear glass remains. Will she break the jar or keep it and the memories it tries to hold? Will she seek the circus out in an attempt to find more? Beth can see all ends coming to fruition—she sees the young mother on an endless search for the train, the train which she never finds again; she sees her making the small jar the center of her universe, as if it might replace the child she gave away. This is the true price to be paid.

  “What do I owe you?”

  The young mother gets to her feet, the crate rocking gently. Beth rises beside her and presses the marmalade into her hands.

  “Thirteen pears,” she says.

  The woman nods and walks away, sunlight gleaming on her auburn hair as she emerges from the caboose’s shadow.

  What of the child? Beth looks only far enough to see this woman walking to the edge of town and the steepled church there. A young widowed man will notice the infant on his way into town, will raise her as his own. Beth could look farther, but she doesn’t, leaving them all there for the time being. Sometimes, she doesn’t want to see where the threads lead.

  In the morning, Beth finds a bag of thirteen pears on the caboose’s back porch. They are bruised and fragrant, and perfect for turning into butter (no pomegranate seeds this time, for they perished when their jar shattered, shot through with glass). This work keeps her busy the morning through, distracting her from the idea of the young man returning, even though the pear butter is meant for him. She refuses to acknowledge the way his name spills from her spoon every time she whisks it around the edge of her pot. It is not about her troubles, no, but those of every person outside these caboose walls. She can think on their miseries, if not her own.

  She saved one pear for eating and slices another bit of it free, savoring the warm grit of it between her teeth and against her tongue. Ichabod, who perches where the bell jar once did, bends his head down and opens his mouth. Beth feeds him a slice and softly hums until the sunlight brightens the caboose and customers begin lining up at the window. She searches their eager faces yet finds no one she knows.

  The disappointment is still sharp, even after all these years. She glances to the jars and reaches for County Kerry’s morning mist. The jar always feels cold in her hand and weighs more than it should for mist. At this point, she doesn’t even have to open this lid, for she knows the mist too well. She simply vanishes into it and is gone, her bare feet sinking into long wet grass, the scent of heather replacing that of cooking pears. She closes her eyes and turns west, walking.

  She finds him where he always is, in the churchyard where they first met. He crouches at the base of a crumbling statue, scribbling in a book. She is surprised to see him—she always is, for this is how Memory wrote it. She was only searching for clovers when her path crossed his; she had never looked further down her own thread, for knowing too much about one’s future was a dreadful thing—didn’t everyone agree?

  In this moment, he is young—so young! His brow is not yet creased with lines of worry, for he has not met her. She hesitates. If he doesn’t meet her, how much better off might they both be? She brushes that thought aside as she does every time.

  “Fáilte.”

  He startles when she speaks, his laughter broken and loud in the gloom of morning. He tilts his book and she can see the image there, a church bell tower emerging from the morning’s fog. She glances past the statuary to see the church herself.

  “I didn’t think anyone came out here,” he says. He stands, setting his book on the statue’s base, watching her with reserve. She is intruding into his private space, the space he has shared with no other.

  “You came out here,” she says. She picks her way past him, leaving footprints in the mud. She crouches beside a statue to Saint Peter and rolls her jar on the ground. It makes a faint tinkling noise, as if something other than mist is caught inside.

  Later, he will think he dreamed her and Beth almost wishes she had kept it to that, but she can’t. She knows she will follow him. Nothing sparks her interest the way he does; nothing will haunt her the way he will.

  She sits with him all afternoon, silent while he draws. He doesn’t ask anything of her, shares the orange he has brought, and when she rises to leave, makes to follow. She doesn’t stop him, knowing that as she begins to pull caboose walls back around her, he will pause on the muddy track, studying the line of footprints that are once there and then gone, as though the strange girl became the mist itself.

  Mist falls from her shoulders as she comes back to the train. Deliberately, she lets the jar slip from her frozen fingers; it hits the floor with a solid thud and does not shatter. Beth watches it roll away from her and then back, resting against her muddy toes. It is the second jar she cannot break.

  * * *

  The first jar is the bell jar.

 
Her younger sister offers it to her in the depth of a night so dark Beth thinks that Mother Night has returned for good. The jar is strangely warm, like a living thing though it is made of glass. Beth cannot immediately see what it contains and for that she is grateful; when she can—when dawn’s first sun breaks through the glass and illuminates the wheel and tree inside—her breath sticks in her throat. She knows that this eternal autumn will be her undoing (salvation, that distant voice whispers), but not precisely how.

  She keeps the jar with her, throughout all the years she can count. It sits at her side, upon a shelf, or buried in a chest; it is never more than a dozen steps away. In one house, she can see it from anywhere she may be, like a bright pinprick of light that has its own heartbeat.

  She has tried to break the bell jar three times.

  The first time is an accident. While sweeping autumn leaves from her front room, the broom handle collides with the curved glass, sending it from the table to the floor. Beth’s heart seems to pause as she watches the jar drop; she expects it to shatter into a thousand pieces and mourns its loss even before it is gone. Though the glass makes a familiar sound against the floor, it stays intact. The wheel inside doesn’t even come loose from its moorings. A small blizzard of orange and flame leaves rise within the dome and from that moment, though unbroken, the tree continues to shed its bounty.

  She expects the leaves to build up and eventually fill the jar, though they do not. She watches the bell jar, once for an entire afternoon, and she can see what happens. She can see the leaves slowly rot and if that is a skeleton barely visible beneath the tree’s roots, she does not want to know. Let the leaves cover it. Better yet, let the thing break and become trash.

  The second time, she throws the bell jar to the ground in an effort to make it just that. She is living alone in a lonesome, stony place; the floors are stone yet worn smooth from the continued passage of her bare feet. Back and forth and back once more and she can no longer stand the tree with its damnable leaves. She hurls the jar into the stone and it simply rolls; rolls until it hits the wall. It remains whole.

  Years pass. She does not count how many, but when the third attempt rolls around, she is running for her life. When people suspect what she can do—that she knows too much about their lives, that she can seemingly control some part of them—they allow fear to guide their actions. Driven from her home by women too enraged at the idea of what Beth knows of their husbands, Beth flees toward the low murmuring sound that has approached all day. Across this field and that, putting more distance between herself and those women, Beth finds herself at the edge of a railroad track.

  She draws up before she stubs a toe against the ties, against the tracks, and only stands there, breathing, praying, listening. Don’t, don’t, don’t. The longer she stands, the more she realizes she can no longer hear the women. Perhaps they have gone.

  And then the train, blazing out of the night with its headlamp, rushing past her so fast that her skirts fly up. The rush of wind through her tight brown curls is like laughter or fingers or some combination of both. Beth finds herself laughing and as the train passes her, she flings the bell jar at the caboose. The glass lands on the back porch and is carried off, deep into the night. Beth falls to her knees and presses her hands to the hot rail.

  The little man finds her in the morning. She wakes, aware of a hand on her cheek and then her shoulder, and she opens her eyes to find a curious sight: the man can be no more than two feet tall, his face beautiful with gold dust and kohl, his lips turned into a bright red flower with green leaves that spread across his cheeks. On his shoulder perches a small monkey wearing an even smaller top-hat, and their eyes are the very same color, a color that Beth longs to drown in.

  “You will need to collect your things,” he tells her.

  She can’t go back there, can’t risk those women, and the little man seems to know this without her saying a word. He takes her by the hand and tugs her up from the ground, walking with her along the railroad tracks. By noon, they reach the train.

  The bell jar sits on the back porch of the caboose, looking none the worse for its adventure. The wheel is still upright and leaves continue to fall from the tree. Beth bursts into tears at the sight of it, watching the little man as he and an assortment of people from the train head off, toward town. Later, they return with her trunks.

  The first time she watches them raise the great wheel, Beth feels like she will be sick. It is a long process for the workers, to dig the holes for the supports, to set the foundation and precisely place each panel that will hold a car. This, Eamonn tells her, is why they don’t always raise the wheel. Only certain cities get the wheel and it’s because they’ve paid extra for the time and risk.

  Beth notes each little, worn red car that slots into place when the panels finally ring the axel like petals. She knows there will be twelve cars and that on windy days they will squeak, for so does the wheel within her jar. Eamonn sits beside her on the caboose’s back step and they watch the process in silence, until Beth can watch no more. Still, she has nothing else to occupy her. Within this traveling circus she has no talent that might be put to use, not until Eamonn presses an orange into her palm and gives her the idea.

  Her hands close around the orange, fingers seeking the rough skin as the wheel takes its first test spin. The wheel makes a horrific noise, all that metal and wood being forced to move, until it finds its rhythm and rolls easily within its frame.

  “Sweet,” Eamonn murmurs and leans into Beth’s side.

  She glances down at him and then to the orange. He may be talking about the wheel, but she’s focused on the purpose he has placed within her hands. Sweet was not without bits of sour to counter it; Mother Night said everything has its beginning and so too its end.

  Her first efforts are terrible, more tart than sweet, though the monkey Ichabod eats it without complaint. She sits on the back stoop to contemplate where she has gone wrong—with only the marmalade, for any truly complete list would run far into the future. She hears the wheel groan as it lifts another bunch of people into the night sky; she hears the fall of each leaf within the dome of the bell jar.

  The idea of the jar draws her to her trunks, which have stayed locked all this time. She opens one, to look upon the jars that line its interior. They gleam as the light from the carnival hits them. All these things she has preserved: time and cities and small words that people have otherwise forgotten. Salvation. Hope. Mercy.

  She is adding the laughter of a three-year-old child to a batch of orange marmalade when Jackson enters the caboose unannounced. Beth pauses mid-pour to stare at him, thinking he will tell her to get out, that he will smash every jar she’s strewn about the caboose. But he instead shambles forward and nudges the jar up, preventing her from adding too much. Beth caps the jar while Jackson dips a long wooden spoon into the pot upon the stove. He tastes and then is smiling and laughing much as that three-year old had a hundred years before.

  Beth closes her eyes and sees the thread of Jackson’s life stretching far into the distance. When she looks closer, she can see the knots and deviations, the other threads he is tied to. Looking even closer, she can tell that she and he have skipped forward and back, with and without the train, and she sees the thing he cherishes most, the hand holding the cross which rests within his beloved locomotive, and she knows then—believes that if she can infuse such a memory into her marmalades, that though all things must end, she can make the in between bearable.

  * * *

  Beth does not know how long she has been with the circus train, nor does she care. Her days are spent helping people as she can. Rather than severing lines, she fuses them together for a little longer. But every fuse has its consequences, she knows. Everyone cannot go on forever and sometimes she must open jars she would rather not.

  She kneels now before a jar wreathed in cobwebs, its label peeling and yellowed. The name that was once writ upon it is long gone, but it whispers in the back of Beth
’s mind. Her own name. The cork has been sealed with a thick coat of wax and she digs her nails into it, until she can pull the cork free. The air that filters out is stale but she breathes in it, accepting all she has denied herself.

  The great wheel is not far from the caboose; though it is night, crowds still revel amid the tents and booths. Children squeal and the scent of popcorn saturates the land. Beth’s course is steady, a jar cradled within her hands. Her bare feet make no sound until fallen leaves begin to crunch underfoot.

  There, near the base of the wheel, stands a tree. A few leaves yet cling to its thick branches and though they fly off under the cooling night air, they never seem to run out. At the base of the tree stands the young man, looking the way he did those many years ago when she startled him in a church graveyard. He’s dressed in the colors of the circus, though, for he works here, operating the great wheel. She knows he does not remember her, for she took that from him. (And yet, whispers that voice, he does, for look, he is here and you are here.)

  A sob escapes Beth when she realizes what she has done—what she hasn’t done—and she feels the weight of every second spent in this place pressing down upon her. She feels so heavy, she wonders how she will ever reach his side, but when she does, she’s laughing, because he’s looking at her as though he wants to say—

  “No one comes here,” he says, though the people around him contest those very words. The wheel slows behind him, and the people holler for him to fix it—make it go! His brow wrinkles.

  Beth’s laugh deepens and she offers the jar of pear butter she carries.

  “You came here,” she says, and when his hands close around the jar and he opens it, dipping two fingers in to taste the sweetness, the salvation, the wheel above them glides once more into smooth motion.

  Copyright © 2012 E. Catherine Tobler

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