You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  That night the sheriff can’t sleep. He lies in bed with his eyes wide open; how can she sleep, he wonders, with the light so bright? He finally gets up to look out the window, but there is not, as he’d supposed, a new streetlight there, and the old has not been repositioned to shine directly on him. The sheriff, when he thinks about all this later, decides that he must have been half asleep, which would explain his strange behavior. He’d padded on his bare feet, cold across the floor to the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, certain that it was the source of light, and there was, in fact, a light there, burning whitely, but how did it remain when the door was closed? He has no idea how many times he opened and closed the refrigerator door, trying to work it out before his wife found him there and brought him back to bed. He tried to tell her about the light but she told him there was no light anywhere, to close his eyes, go to sleep, which apparently he did.

  But the next night it happens again, and the night after that as well, until the sheriff is so tired he can’t think straight. He doesn’t even try to go to bed but lies in his lounge chair, and when the light arrives, follows it out the door to the end of the block in his pajamas, before he comes to his senses and goes back for the car.

  He follows the light through the quiet streets, until he thinks he knows where he’s going, and it turns out he is right. He parks his car at the cemetery. The light emanates from there, brighter than anywhere else. The sheriff shakes his head against the impossibility of what his mind has imagined; he is a rational man, this isn’t happening, but still he must follow, he must, he walks slowly over the hill, past the headstones decorated with pumpkins and turkeys to the grave he knew he’d arrive at, the headstone carved with a small lamb, a little pot of yellow flowers beneath it: his son.

  The sheriff begins pawing at the ground, scraping his cold fingers against the hard earth; he will get in there if he has to use his teeth. He isn’t even embarrassed when Sam, the graveyard’s neighbor and unofficial guard, finds him and tries to get him to stop. The sheriff refuses to answer and after a bit, Sam leaves. When he returns, the sheriff’s fingers are bloody. Sam, whose own son was born the same year as the sheriff’s, has a pickax, a hoe, a shovel, a large thermos of hot water, and chains. The morning sun is bleeding the sky pink by the time they hoist the tiny casket.

  Sam doesn’t ask why. Not then, or ever. He doesn’t want to know. He hopes never to understand this particular kind of madness.

  They carry the casket to the car. The sheriff turns back to repair the damage left in the cemetery but Sam tells him to go.

  “Get out of here with that,” he says.

  Which the sheriff does, driving carefully because of the bright light burning in his car, almost blinding him. It’s a good thing he knows these roads so well.

  The corpse painter tends to sleep in during the winter, catching up on his rest after all those nights of painting the dead; he sleeps a lot, sometimes he doesn’t change out of his pajamas for a week. Once the frost arrives, he prunes the roses back, his mail is delivered again, he spends his days catching up on bills, paging through thick catalogues of art supplies and magazines with photographs of perfect little teapots, expensively framed paintings, artists with tousled hair and knowing smiles, which he finds deeply disturbing. The corpse painter drinks coffee and watches Oprah. He falls asleep wherever sleep finds him—the couch, the lounge chair, the kitchen, sitting at the table—he dreams about the dead, working with the flesh coarsening beneath his fingers, waking with the terrible knowledge that when he dies, there will be no one to do the same for him, which seems a terrible waste.

  He is in the midst of such a terror, waking in the chair where he’d fallen asleep, when he sees the sheriff’s car turn into the driveway, disappearing around the side of the house, the way he does when he brings a body. The corpse painter wipes his hand across his chin, feeling the stubble of whiskers. He is confused. Why is the sheriff here at this time of year? Was winter’s approach only a dream? Is it still summer, the roses embracing the mailbox, the grass green, everything in the house, the stacks of mail, the catalogues, the mugs with moldy coffee a symptom of spring? Has the corpse painter slept all winter? He shuffles in his slippers to the back door, where the sheriff stands, knocking on the aluminum frame.

  The corpse painter opens the door for the sheriff, who shakes his head, turns, walks down the steps toward his car. The corpse painter, not sure what else to do, follows, though it is cold out here in pajamas, and his feet hurt in the soft-soled slippers, walking across stones.

  The sheriff inserts the key in the latch and raises it, ignoring the corpse painter’s protest. He is struck silent anyway by the small casket there, once white, now muddied. He knows who it is. He wipes his eyes while he tries to work out what to say.

  “I know, I know,” says the sheriff. “It’s really bright, but you get used to it after a while. Like the sun.”

  The corpse painter shakes his head.

  “Hey, I got a pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment. You can have them.” The sheriff walks to the front of the car. The corpse painter watches a clod of dirt slide down the casket. The sheriff returns and hands the sunglasses to the corpse painter, who can’t think what else to do with them, so he puts them on.

  “Hey,” the sheriff says, “you look good with those.” He scratches his chin. That’s when the corpse painter notices that the sheriff’s hands are scraped and bloody, that he, too, is wearing pajamas.

  “Come inside,” the corpse painter says. “I’ll make coffee.”

  The sheriff frowns. “I don’t know. Don’t you think he’ll—”

  “He’s fine,” the corpse painter says.

  The sheriff tilts his head, then, with a slight nod, closes the hatch and follows the corpse painter into the house, which is a real mess, but warm. The sheriff has never sat at the corpse painter’s kitchen table, not when he was a boy and came with his father and not in all the years since he’s been bringing bodies here. They sit together in the dim light, though the sheriff can still see the glow emanating from the car beyond the window. They drink coffee and talk. The corpse painter delicately addresses the limitations of bones but the sheriff says he’s not worried. “I’ve seen what you can do,” he says. “I know you’ll get it right.” The corpse painter is not beyond being flattered. He nods as though it’s no problem when the sheriff says he wants it in time for Christmas. “A gift for the wife,” he says. “Anyway, I should get back. I don’t want her to guess what I’m up to. I want it to be a surprise.” The corpse painter walks with the sheriff to the car. One of them could do it alone, but they carry the casket together, into the house, set it on the kitchen table, surrounded by all the mail. Suddenly self-conscious, not used to the newly established camaraderie, they say an awkward good-bye.

  Sometimes in the weeks that follow, when the sheriff wakes in the middle of the night, he wonders if he imagined everything: the boy’s death, the horror, the guilt, the long hours, the emptiness, the wife’s sorrow, the corpse painter, the darkness, and the light. In the dark, the sheriff thinks, chuckling softly to himself, it is so easy to think that the light was only a dream. He lies there, with his hands behind his head, watching the shadows on the ceiling, and considers how much of life is filled with the shock of all those certain things. Every year it happens like this. The frost is shocking, as is the snow, the first flakes drifting past the window and sticking to nothing at all, very shocking. Sometimes, when he looks at his wife, expecting to see the woman he married but finding instead this person whose face has morphed into something resembling a marshmallow, a not unpleasant face, but old, he is shocked, and he is shocked by the mirror as well. They were all shocked by the boy’s death, though that of course was the only thing certain once he was born. The sheriff’s wife snores softly. She’s been better lately. He thinks. And that is not shocking at all; it is almost ordinary, though not ordinary, of course, because if it were ordinary, he would not be lying in his bed thinking about the o
rdinariness of it. The sheriff has never been very philosophical, but what person doesn’t stop on occasion to take account?

  Lately, they’ve been sleeping with the curtains open. His wife objected at first, but told him after a few nights that she’d grown to like it. Sometimes, they lie together and look out the window at the moon, or watch the snow drift past the streetlamp. He thought, on just such an occasion, to tell her about the light that had woken him, shining from their son’s grave, but didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

  So, on Christmas Eve, when he drives to the corpse painter’s house, the sky gray with clouds, the sheriff is pleased with himself for keeping such a big secret. This is going to be good, he thinks.

  The corpse painter had never worked like this. He had not used these tools, and he had not worked with bone before. He had not worked in the winter, with its poor lighting and the cold that rendered his fingers stiff. For the first time since he has been running the place, he ordered a cord of wood for the wood-burning stove. The corpse painter worked by fire day into night, listening to boys’ choirs on the classical station, their voices filling the corpse painter with beauty as though beauty was something that could become a part of being human, not something seen, but something known, like breath. He carved, and etched, filed and sanded. A child has two hundred and eight bones, but of course many were broken, shards of sharp points, strange shapes he couldn’t identify. Some he set aside. He couldn’t possibly get them all done; he concentrated on the largest. He sent for wax in bricks he melted on the stove. He forgot to eat, only remembering when his hands were shaking; he ate nuts and cheese while he sang along with the boys, remembering the boy he had been, as he worked on the bones, and in this way he worked until Christmas Eve, and the corpse painter showed the sheriff, and the sheriff said it was good, and invited the corpse painter for Christmas dinner. The corpse painter surprised them both by saying maybe he would. The sheriff carried the box; it was a large box lined with paper so the bones wouldn’t rattle. The corpse painter told the sheriff about the rest, the tiny pieces, the broken shards, the bits he hadn’t used. The sheriff just shook his head. No, no he said, you keep them. Never mind.

  By the time the sheriff left, it was almost dark, the snow had stopped, there had been just enough to make the children happy, to create a winter wonderland like the one his wife had fashioned on the mantel with bits of cotton around the paper house. They hadn’t had a tree since the accident, but this year she’d hung a wreath on the front door, and she’d bought some new decorations in strange colors, a pink feathery thing, a silver ball, even a reindeer, though it was a strange shade of green, not like Christmas at all, more the color of a bruise. The sheriff understood. It was a way of starting over. Not from the beginning, which, shockingly (he chuckled) was gone forever, but from where they were now.

  They ate supper at the table. She’d made mashed potatoes, and boiled chicken, then panicked when she realized how white it looked on the plate. “What are you talking about,” he said. “It’s perfect,” and it did taste very good. There were the usual phone calls, then they watched TV—he sat in his chair, and she on the couch—flipping past the Christmas movies, settling finally for the weather station, until it broadcasted Santa’s passage across the sky; she turned it off, and said, “He would have been seven this year.” This too was shocking. He tried to imagine it, but could not. They went to bed. They lay side by side, watching the dark sky out their window, and the streetlights glow. The longer he lay there, the more certain the sheriff was that this was the time to give her the present, obviously, why hadn’t he thought of it before? It was a gift for the dark, after all.

  “Are you awake?” he asks.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “I forgot to tell you. I invited him for dinner tomorrow.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure he’ll even come. We have extra, right? There’s always so much food for Christmas.”

  “I haven’t cooked like that in years.”

  “We could have sandwiches.”

  The sheriff’s wife is almost amused. How could he do this? What was he thinking? By the streetlamp glow, she looks at her husband. She hasn’t looked at him in years, only recently realizing that something’s not right about him, which she finds reassuring. How could anything ever be right again? For a while, she’d thought he’d moved on somehow, back to normal. “We’re not having sandwiches. I bought a turkey breast and a box of stuffing.”

  “The corpse painter,” he says.

  “He’s coming here? To our house?”

  “Probably not. Hey,” the sheriff says, as though he only just thought of it. “I got you a present.” He jumps out of bed and trots out into the hallway while she lies there thinking about the strangeness of life. When he returns, carrying the large package, he is grinning broadly, like one of those crazy jack-o’-lanterns. She scoots back to sit up against the pillows. He places the large, surprisingly heavy package in her lap, kisses her on the forehead.

  After the sheriff left with the gift for his wife, the corpse painter considered the remaining bones. He thought of making jewelry, or delicate carvings, intricate knots, or infinitesimal vases, but in the end he dumped them in the fire pit. This is what they’d always done on Christmas Eve, only later learning that the bones his father brought home were never his to burn. He said they were from the butcher, roadkill, something dead in the forest. The corpse painter never imagined his father was a good man, he doesn’t know how his mother ever did, but neither of them had guessed at the cost of those bones.

  He waits until the dark is settled like something permanent, the sky everywhere deeply black, starless, and the clouds black too in the deep ink of night. He pulls on his socks, his boots, remembering in these simple gestures the small fingers shivering at the buckles, daring to believe in the magic of a night he did not know was haunted. He opens the door and almost turns back. It is so cold he can see his soul. He loves the sound he makes walking across the snow-dusted stones, then just the snow. No one shouts for him to hurry, there is no uncertainty of how the night will end, like a tumor, though he does have to remind himself that his father is dead, painted and buried. He throws sticks in with the bones, that’s the way to start a fire. He watches it burn until it is good and set, then feeds it until the flames shoot up to the sky, and he is warm, remembering the things he wants to forget, wishing he could cast them into the fire as well.

  The sheriff’s wife turns the strange things in her hand. “These are bones,” she says, not certain until she says it and he doesn’t disagree. “Turn on the light so I can see better,” she says.

  But the sheriff has a different idea. He takes one from the box and sets it on the dresser, amidst the junk of receipts, spare change, lint, and socks. He shoves all that away to set the thing there, and then, he lights it; she sees the carving like lace, light spills across the room in flakes, like snow, light flutters to the ceiling like angels.

  “Where did you—”

  He sets more on the small wooden chair, shoving the papers off to do so (what are those papers anyway, she wonders, I must be going crazy), several on his night table, and after moving her box of tissues, her crossword puzzle book, two mugs and several paperbacks off her nightstand, he sets three candles on hers. He sets candles on all available surfaces, until there is no space left, and even then many still remain in the box on her lap. When the candles are lit, the room is a kaleidoscope of light and shadow.

  The sheriff crawls back in bed beside her. They lie side by side, watching the light flicker, expand, and diminish, until they fall asleep, sleeping peacefully through one of the hardest mornings of the year, into the afternoon, when the corpse painter arrives. Drawn by the strange light emanating from the uncurtained window, he watches the sleeping sheriff and his wife, entwined as though they were two sides of a broken heart in a body composed of bones and light. The corpse painter turns, walking back the way he came, to his car parked at the curb. He puts
on the sunglasses the sheriff gave him, and then drives home through the quiet streets, in the dark.

  The Christmas Witch

  The children of Stone collect bones, following cats through twisted, narrow streets, chasing them away from tiny birds, dead gray mice (with sweet round ears, pink inside like seashells), and fish washed on the rocky shore. The children show each other their bone collections, tiny white femurs, infinitesimal wings, jawbones with small teeth intact. Occasionally, parents find these things; they scold the little hoarder, or encourage the practice by setting up a science table. It’s a stage children go through, they assume, this fascination with structure, this cold approach to death. The parents do not discuss it with each other, except in passing. (“Oh yes, the skeleton stage.”) The parents do not know, they do not guess that once the found bones are tossed out or put on display, the children begin to collect again. They collect in earnest.

  Rachel Boyle has begun collecting bones, though her father doesn’t know about it, of course. Her mother, being dead, might know. Rachel can’t figure that part out. Her mother is not a ghost, the Grandma told her, but a spirit. The Grandma lives far away, in Milwaukee. Rachel didn’t even remember her when she came for the funeral. “You remember me, honey, don’t you?” she asked and Rachel’s father said, “Of course she remembers you.” Rachel went in the backyard where she tore flowers while her father and the Grandma sat at the kitchen table and cried. After the Grandma left, Rachel and her father moved to Stone.