The End of the Sentence

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  My fingers left streaks of grime and dust across the envelopes. I heard the screech of a faucet, long unturned, and then the thumping splash of water into a tub.

  The tub was clawfoot, a white curtain strung on iron rings hiding the end of it, and half-full of steaming water when I walked into the bathroom. Written on the fogged-over mirror, one word:

  Bathe.

  I hesitated, but whatever it was in the house with me had been benign so far. Much easier to poison me than to drown me in the tub, despite the horror movie I was suddenly viewing on repeat inside my head. Drowning was hard. The house didn’t feel angry. It felt full of something quieter than anger, anticipation rather than rage. There was a clean kitchen, and a gleaming tub. Whatever ghost or ghosts lived in my house, it was a tidy one. The longer I stood there, the more I could feel the grime and cobwebs on my skin. I stripped, and lowered myself into the water.

  When I stepped out, there were clean towels waiting, and a pair of old-fashioned men’s pajamas, thin blue pin stripes running down white cotton. They were slightly frayed at cuff and collar, but soft and comfortable. My jeans and t-shirt were nowhere to be seen.

  I paused at the door. “Um. Thank you.”

  Sconces had been lit against the darkness of the hallway, flickering orange light that might have been candles, or might have been some bulb, clever enough not only to counterfeit flame but also to shine without electricity. I looked at the sconces for a moment, wondering who’d installed them. In the half-light, the fixtures looked like hands, though I hadn’t thought so during the day.

  A storm had come in while I bathed, painting the sky in streaks of purple. Burnt ozone hung in the air like someone had walked the property, smoking menthols. Thunder echoed in the distance.

  The sheets had been folded back, and the letters piled into stacks by the bed. I opened one.

  Seventeenth June

  My dear Olivia,

  By now someone will have told you, though the traditions are not as they were meant to be. The town will have told you of the pair of lovers, and of the blood, and all of the things that I have been found guilty of doing to them behind the great iron door.

  The house will have given you the key.

  The prison will have told you the date of my return.

  We belong now, to each other, Olivia, and so I feel that I can say to you that I did not do the things of which I have been accused, and found guilty, and served one lifetime in atonement of already. There are appeals, and the process continues. They say I will be released. There is no proof of crime.

  I will tell you, Olivia, the truth, if you wish it.

  I will return, regardless. The house will have told you that you have no choice in the matter, being bound by blood and vow. I would tell you that I am sorry for this, but I will not lie. The truth becomes a large thing, when one is imprisoned for a falsehood.

  Take care of my house, Olivia, and it shall take care of you.

  Yours, waiting,

  Dusha.

  My dreams that night were not comforting.

  5.

  In the night, awakened by the sound of letters falling in the hall, I rifled through the desk in the bedroom. Something insisted I look there. Top drawer, beneath the drawer liner. How quickly I’d grown used to envelopes filling every passage, to a house feeding me and putting me to sleep like a child. I thought it possible I might still be dreaming on the bus from Louisiana, jostled among suitcases and other sleepers. The envelope I found wasn’t sealed, and it was different from the rest. Not a prison stationery, this one, but something finer.

  January 12th, 1956

  Dear Mr. or Mrs. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof:

  There is no one of any of those names at this address. No one named Marvel. No one named Eugene. My dear husband Paul is recently deceased, and if you’re looking for him, you should consider your manners and respect my time of grieving.

  I’ve telephoned the prison. Your appeals have been overturned. They said it was my duty to tolerate and provide comfort to prisoners if I could, and I shall not tolerate your correspondence. I’m a Christian woman. Though I find myself reduced in circumstances, I do not deserve this torment in addition to my bereavement.

  The people next door aren’t nice people, and perhaps they’re the ones you’re looking for. I’m not the type of woman who gets letters from a prison, and I DO NOT APPRECIATE YOUR CHEEK.

  I will not do what you demanded in your last letter, nor will I do what the letters sent by your pranksters ask me to do. I’m not a Weyland but for marriage. I’m a Jones from Reno.

  I’m told you’re to go to the gas chamber, and good riddance. I don’t know why they’ve not sent you there yet. Whatever crime you committed, the time you’ve spent there means it was something terrible-

  I will pray for your soul and that is all.

  Yours,

  Yours truly,

  Your own,

  The letter ended with a jagged line of ink, deeply scored into the page.

  It was handwritten, in stationery embossed at the top with the name Mrs. Paul Weyland, and an address crossed out at the bottom, and replaced, by hand, with this one. At the very bottom, a smashed insect, a mosquito there sixty years. I shook the paper and watched the dust crumble, then turned my head to look at the graffiti arrow tagged from the bedroom doorway to the rectangle painted on the wall.

  A door, it suddenly occurred to me, and then I wished it hadn’t. This one wasn’t iron. This was only paint.

  But it was a rendering of a door, with a crude star-shaped knob. I touched it with my fingertips, and felt the edge of the paint. Enameled. I resolved to go into town to buy some clean white latex to cover the thing over the next day. I had a little money. Enough for that.

  Nothing in the house protested or directed me. Silence, but for the arrival of letters, one every few hours. I moved around the bedroom, looking at the door that wasn’t a door, and at last, I slept again, dreaming of a prison, everyone in it wearing black and gray stripes, a gas chamber deep in a maze of corridors. I dreamed toward sunup of Mrs. Paul Weyland. “Yours, Yours truly, Your own.” It made me nervous, that thought, that someone here might have forced her into such a promise.

  Letters arrived all night, rattling the door in such a way that I got used to it, just as I’d begun to get used to everything else, the bed, the food, the bath. I didn’t read any more of them.

  Bad dreams bleeding into the sunrise. My brain was dull with broken sleep and things I’d seen in movies. (What door? Where was it? Was it on my property? Did I have the key? I didn’t want to have anything more to hide. I kept thinking about my mother, and how I hadn’t talked to her in a year. Only one person had this address and that person was in prison.)

  I stacked the new letters in a patterned basket I’d found in the front hall closet. I had a memory of something like it seen in a book, Native crafts, Western exploration, willow branches woven and pigment-dyed red and black, and for a moment, I had a good association, touching the inside of the basket, of a happy baby sleeping inside it.

  Maybe not sleeping.

  Suddenly the empty basket felt filled with stones. I put it down, nauseated. I was sweating again, and outside, it was still too hot for the calendar. A glass of water had appeared beside me. I drank it.

  Then the feeling of wrongness was gone, and it was just the letters, the growing pile addressed to

  My Dear Malcolm.

  I wasn’t reading them. I cleaned some more, outside this time. A pair of overalls, paint-stained, but washed, had appeared, hanging from the bathroom door. They weren’t modern, but nothing was. Like all the things the house had given me, they fit.

  I’d found a rusty push mower, and shoved it along the property, then raked up the dry grasses to the best of my ability. Around the edge of the house, the grass had begun to grow in green, and beside the front door, there was suddenly a patch of violets, out of season, and one of mint.

  I hauled another load of mess out, TV tray
tables, though there was no television, a cracked rubber doll, a rusted bit of metal that I couldn’t identify. A branding iron, I thought suddenly. A crude letter C, placed between what seemed to be two swords.

  Chuchonnyhoof, I thought, with a sick lurch, looking out at the dry grass, seeing smoke in the distance, not so far off. It came from the place where the meth house had burned, maybe leftovers from some underground flame. Something was on fire there, and I felt lucky it wasn’t me.

  I ran my fingers over the rust on the brand. Red, and hot. I put it down in the pile of grass, then picked it up a moment later when the grass began to smolder. Frantic stamping on the incipient flames, and I got it out, but I didn’t know what to do with the branding iron. I looked at the patch of mint, and at the dampness of the leaves there, and finally, I put the brand into them, relieved as I heard it hiss a C into the soil. The smell of crushed mint and smoke, and I remembered for an agonizing moment my old life, a glass of ice, bourbon, mint, sugar, my wife smiling at me, her face lit up with love. A sunset. Trees dark and tall. Fireflies starting to blink on and off around the edge of the yard, her hand in mine.

  That was over and done. “Over and done,” I repeated to myself as I walked the property line, “over and done, Malcolm.”

  Something echoed and I stopped. I turned and looked at the house, at the open front door, the staircase inside it like the bridge of a nose, the upstairs windows like eyes, the porch like a mouth.

  I looked at the mark the brand had made, and realized it wasn’t swords at all, but a C atop a W.

  Olivia Weyland. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof. W & C.

  I thought about the smell of branding. I didn’t really know what it smelt like. I didn’t want to know what might be branded with such an iron.

  The sound of something scraping on glass. I turned, hoping to see it happening, a ghost in action, but no, I never did. On the front window of the dead car, traced in the dirt, there was a word.

  Drive.

  Oh, Malcolm. Malcolm, Malcolm. I didn’t want to drive. Didn’t want to think about being behind the wheel of anything. That was why I’d taken the bus cross-country. I couldn’t drive anymore.

  Drive, the word appeared again, and this time I watched it being written, letter by letter, slowly.

  I found myself going into the house. I got the ring of keys, opened the car door, and put the key into the ignition, expecting nothing. They’d told me it didn’t run. A junker, they’d said, thrown in for the scrap. I’d imagined there was no motor, or what was there was under the hood, rust and mess, but the car started. The Chevy looked like a skeleton, the interior all springs and split leather, a swallow’s nest against the ceiling, wefted into what remained of the fabric lining. I looked for a moment at the nest, and then reached up and slipped my hand into the hollow beside it, where an envelope waited.

  Twenty-second October

  My Dear Malcolm,

  In the town there is a small library. I am certain you’ll wish to verify the history, the crimes, the accusations. My trial was much covered in the papers.

  Yours,

  Dusha.

  Inside the envelope, there was something else. I drew it out hesitantly. A photo. A little boy, grinning, one tooth missing. Yellow t-shirt.

  My little boy. I pressed myself back against the hot leather of the seat, wondering how Dusha had gotten this photo. I’d never seen it before.

  But no. No, of course not. This wasn’t him. Row hadn’t gotten this old. He’d died when he was four, across the country, nowhere near here. This boy must be six or seven. This was the Row I’d imagine when I wanted to punish myself, the Row that wouldn’t be.

  I stared at the photo. I turned it over. Dusha’s writing.

  If you do as I tell you to do, he will return when I do. If you do not, he will remain where you left him. I know your dreams, Malcolm, just as I know the dreams of everyone who sleeps in my house.

  On the dust of the dashboard, the word Drive, again.

  There was no choice. I drove toward town.

  6.

  I didn’t see anyone else when I walked into the Ione Public Library. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof: a unique name. I figured I could discover the basics from an internet search, rather than needing a librarian. This was my problem, not anyone else’s.

  One of the chair’s casters squeaked as I pulled it closer to the computer desk, and the grinding of air conditioners snugged into the window bottoms contributed little more than noise to the atmosphere of the place. But the computer worked, and the internet gave me what I was looking for.

  The article was written in the formal language of the late 19th century, and it looked sideways at the sex and gore that would have splashed all over the page today, but both were there. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof had been convicted of a double murder, the victims the 23-year-old Lischen March, and her fiancé, 25-year-old Michael Miller.

  The accused murderer had been found covered in blood, and clutching an iron key. There were innuendos, that Chuchonnyhoof had an unhealthy obsession with the young lovers before their deaths. The bodies of March and Miller were never discovered.

  Nor was the door, opened by Chuchonnyhoof’s key, though that was less of a priority.

  It was the lack of corpses that saved Chuchonnyhoof from execution. The families of the engaged couple, March’s family in particular, had begged and pleaded for the location of the bodies, but he’d maintained that he hadn’t killed them.

  The article made note that, after the trial, the jurors had all commented on the peculiar odor that surrounded Chuchonnyhoof. “Like burning iron,” one said.

  “Like the Devil himself.”

  I skimmed through a series of other articles that gave the same basic information, and then a few more mentions of the name, usually in articles about the legality of the death penalty on Oregon. His sentence had first been death by hanging, but the death penalty had been voted out of law in Oregon between 1914 and 1920. Chuchonnyhoof’s sentence had then been commuted to “two lifetimes and a day,” urged by March’s family, who’d still hoped he would disclose the location of her body. The death penalty was voted back into legality, and in the late 1950s, he became a volunteer for execution by gas chamber. There was no information on him after that, but I couldn’t tell whether it was that he’d faded from public interest—it had been years since his crime—or that the records were simply unavailable. I could find no death records, no obituary. I clicked a mention of Salem and the late 19th century, in some mid-1980s prison guard’s memoir, intrigued momentarily, only to see that it was a tabloid story. “I Guarded Deathless Prisoner,” Says Guard. Fittingly, a dead link. What was I doing? Tabloid news, and fake headlines.

  I searched for Olivia Weyland. That gave me almost no information, other than the notice of her marriage into the Weyland family, and then her obituary in the local paper, confirming what I already knew from the circumstances of my possession of the house: the Weyland family was gone. They had died out, both by blood and by marriage, when Olivia did.

  I raised my fingers from the keyboard, and then set them down again. One more search. “Rowan Mays.”

  Row.

  My son.

  A sob barked from my throat, and I smashed my hands against the keyboard, blanking the screen before I could read the things I knew were true. All the way fucking gone, Malcolm, I reminded myself, and every newspaper account, disagreeing on other things, would agree on that. He was dead.

  “Sir? Can I help you?” A young woman in a floral sundress and worn cowboy boots stood next to me. “The computers can sometimes be frustrating. I’d be happy to help you put together your search.”

  “No.” I sucked in a breath, and screwed my fists into my eyes. “No, thank you. Unhappy memory. I’m done now. I’ll be fine.”

  “A glass of water, then? Those air conditioners aren’t worth more than a promise.” Her voice was cool in the heat, and her perfume like the heart of a forest. Had this been a different life, those things might have ma
ttered. Even so, they were enough to remind me that this wasn’t a different life. No one was coming back.

  “I really am fine. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  She smiled, and I almost smiled back.

  “You didn’t at all. I’m just here to help people. It’s the end of the sentence, you know.”

  “What? What did you say?” I looked at her, shaken.

  “It’s the end of the summer, you know, later than it should be. October acting like August out there. Heat could kill you. Come back here if you need to cool off.”

  She smiled at me again, and tossed her long braid over her shoulder. I fled the library and everything in it.

  I walked to the hardware store. The building looked like it might have grown up out of the ground, but inside, everything shone. Iron nails and pale, clean-smelling lengths of cut wood. Oil, and the chemical burn of paint. There was popcorn, hot and dripping with butter, in a machine just inside the door.

  “Help yourself to a bag while you look around.” The man who spoke had a lion’s mane of white hair, and a sun-lined face. He wore jeans that looked like he worked in them, and a red t-shirt with the name of the hardware store—“Ralph’s”—in curving script.

  I lingered in the store while I ate the popcorn, looking at trim, tiles and plumbing fixtures, thinking of where I might put them in the house, once I could afford them. When I finished, I walked with my gallon of white latex paint back to the front of the store.