by Joe Hill
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The deathoscope,” Alinger said. “Very sensitive. Put it on if you like, and you can hear the last breath of William R. Sied.”
“Is he someone famous?” the boy said.
Alinger nodded. “For a while he was a celebrity…in the way criminals sometimes become celebrities. A source of public outrage and fascination. Forty-two years ago he took a seat in the electric chair. I issued his death certificate myself. He has a place of honor in my museum. His was the first last breath I ever captured.”
By now the woman had recovered herself, although she held a wadded-up handkerchief to her lips and looked as if she were only containing a fresh outburst of mirth with great effort.
“What did he do?” the boy asked.
“Strangled children,” Alinger said. “He preserved them in a freezer, and took them out now and then to look at them. People will collect anything, I always say.” He crouched to the boy’s level, and looked into the jar with him. “Go ahead and listen if you want.”
The boy lifted the earpieces and put them on, his gaze fixed and unblinking on the vessel brimming with light. He listened intently for a while, and then his brow knotted and he frowned.
“I can’t hear anything.” He started to reach up to remove the earpieces.
Alinger stopped his hand. “Wait. There are all different kinds of silence. The silence in a seashell. The silence after a gunshot. His last breath is still in there. Your ears need time to acclimate. In a while you’ll be able to make it out. His own particular final silence.”
The boy bent his head and shut his eyes. The adults watched him together.
Then his eyes sprang open and he looked up, his plump face shining a little with eagerness.
“Did you hear?” Alinger asked him.
The boy pulled off the earphones. “Like a hiccup, only inside-out! You know? Like—” He stopped and sucked in a short, soundless little gasp.
Alinger tousled his hair and stood.
The mother dabbed at her eyes with her kerchief. “And you’re a doctor?”
“Retired.”
“Don’t you think this is a little unscientific? Even if you really did manage to capture the last tiny bit of carbon monoxide someone exhaled—”
“Dioxide,” he said.
“It wouldn’t make a sound. You can’t bottle the sound of someone’s last breath.”
“No,” he agreed. “But it isn’t a sound being bottled. Only a certain silence. We all have our different silences. Does your husband have one silence when he’s happy and another when he’s angry with you, missus? Your ears can discern even between specific kinds of nothing.”
She didn’t like being called missus, narrowed her eyes at him, and opened her mouth to say something disagreeable, but her husband spoke first, giving Alinger a reason to turn away from her. Her husband had drifted to a jar on a table against the wall, next to a dark, padded loveseat.
“How do you collect these breaths?”
“With an aspirator. A small pump that draws a person’s exhalations into a vacuum container. I keep it in my doctor’s bag at all times, just in case. It’s a device of my own design, although similar equipment has been around since the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
“This says Poe,” the father said, fingering an ivory card set on the table before the jar.
“Yes,” Alinger said. He coughed shyly. “People have been collecting last breaths for as long as the machinery has existed to make my hobby possible. I admit I paid twelve-thousand dollars for that. It was offered to me by the great-grandson of the doctor who watched him die.”
The woman began to laugh again.
Alinger continued patiently, “That may sound like a lot of money, but believe me, it was a bargain. Scrimm, in Paris, recently paid three times that for the last breath of Enrico Caruso.”
The father fingered the deathoscope attached to the jar marked for Poe.
“Some silences seem to resonate with feeling,” Alinger said. “You can almost sense them trying to articulate an idea. Many who listen to Poe’s last breath begin in a while to sense a single word not being said, the expression of a very specific want. Listen and see if you sense it too.”
The father hunched and put on the earpieces.
“This is ridiculous,” the woman said.
The father listened intently. His son crowded him, squeezing himself tight to his leg.
“Can I listen, Dad?” the boy said. “Can I have a turn?”
“Sh,” his father said.
They were all silent, except for the woman, who was whispering to herself in a tone of agitated bemusement.
“Whiskey,” the father mouthed, just moving his lips.
“Turn over the card with his name on it,” said Alinger.
The father turned over the ivory card that said POE on one side. On the other side, it read “WHISKEY.”
He removed the earpieces, his face solemn, eyes lowered respectfully to the jar.
“Of course. The alcoholism. Poor man. You know—I memorized ‘The Raven,’ when I was in sixth grade,” the father said. “And recited it before my entire class without a mistake.”
“Oh, come on,” said the woman. “It’s a trick. There’s probably a speaker hidden under the jar, and when you listen you can hear a recording, someone whispering whiskey.”
“I didn’t hear a whisper,” the father said. “I just had a thought—like someone’s voice in my head—such disappointment—”
“The volume turned low,” she said. “So it’s all subliminal. Like what they do to you at drive-in movies.”
The boy put on the earpieces to not-hear the same thing his father had not-heard.
“Are they all famous people?” the father asked. His features were pale, although there were little spots of red high on his cheeks, as if he had a fever.
“Not at all,” Alinger said. “I’ve bottled the dying sighs of graduate students, bureaucrats, literary critics—any number of assorted nobodies. One of the most exquisite silences in my collection is the last breath of a janitor.”
“Carrie Mayfield,” said the woman, reading from a card in front of a tall, dusty jar. “Is that one of your nobodies? I’m guessing housewife.”
“No,” Alinger said. “No housewives in my collection yet. Carrie Mayfield was a young Miss Florida, beautiful in the extreme, on her way to New York City with her parents and fiancé, to pose for the cover of a woman’s magazine. Her big break. Only her jet crashed in the Everglades. Lots of people died, it was a famous air disaster. Carrie, though, survived. For a time. She splashed through burning jet fuel while escaping the wreck, and over eighty percent of her body was burned. She lost her voice screaming for help. She lasted, in intensive care, just over a week. I was teaching then, and brought my medical students in to see her. As a curiosity. At the time, it was rare to view someone, still alive, who had been burned that way. So comprehensively. Parts of her body fused to other parts and so on. Fortunately I had my aspirator with me, since she died while we were examining her.”
“That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard,” said the woman. “What about her parents? Her fiancé?”
“They died in the crash. Burned to death in front of her. I’m not sure their bodies were ever recovered. The gators—”
“I don’t believe you. Not a word. I don’t believe a thing about this place. And I don’t mind saying I think this is a pretty silly way to scam people out of their money.”
“Now, dear—” said her husband.
“You will remember I charged you no admission,” Alinger said. “This is a free exhibit.”
“Oh, Dad, look!” the boy said, from across the room, reading a name on a card. “It’s the man who wrote James and the Giant Peach!”
Alinger turned to him, ready to introduce the display in question, then saw the woman moving from the corner of his eye, and swiveled back to her.
“I would listen to on
e of the others first,” Alinger said. She was lifting the earpieces to her head. “Some people don’t care much for what they can’t hear in the Carrie Mayfield jar.”
She ignored him, put the earpieces on, and listened, her mouth pursed. Alinger clasped his hands together and leaned toward her, watching her expression.
Then, without warning, she took a quick step back. She still had the earpieces on, and the abrupt movement scraped the jar a short distance across the table, which gave Alinger a bad moment. He reached out quickly to keep it from sliding off onto the floor. She twisted the earpieces off her head, suddenly clumsy.
“Roald Dahl,” the father said, putting his hand on his son’s shoulder and admiring the jar the boy had discovered. “No kidding. Say, you went in big for the literary guys, huh?”
“I don’t like it here,” the woman said.
Her eyes were unfocused. She stared at the jar that contained Carrie Mayfield’s last breath, but without seeing it. She swallowed noisily, a hand at her throat.
“Honey?” her husband said. He crossed the room to her, frowning, concerned. “You want to go? We just got here.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to leave.”
“Oh, Mom,” the boy complained.
“I hope you’ll sign my guest book,” Alinger said.
He trailed them to the coatroom.
The father was solicitous, touching his wife’s elbow, regarding her with dewy, worried eyes. “Couldn’t you wait in the car by yourself? Tom and I wanted to look around a while longer.”
“I want to go right now,” she said, her voice toneless, distant. “All of us.”
The father helped her into her coat. The boy shoved his fists in his pockets and sullenly kicked at an old, worn doctor’s bag, sitting beside the umbrella stand. Then he realized what he was kicking. He crouched, and without the slightest show of shame, unbuckled it to look at the aspirator.
The woman drew on her kidskin gloves, very carefully, pulling them tight against her fingers. She seemed a long way off in her own thoughts, so it was a surprise when all at once she roused herself, to turn on her heel and fix her gaze on Alinger.
“You’re awful,” she said. “Like some kind of grave-robber.”
Alinger folded his hands before him, and regarded her sympathetically. He had been showing his collection for years. He was used to every kind of reaction.
“Oh, honey,” her husband said. “Have some perspective.”
“I’m going to the car now,” she said, lowering her head, drawing back into herself. “Catch up.”
“Wait,” the father said. “Wait for us.”
He didn’t have his coat on. Neither did the boy, who was on his knees, with the bag open, his fingertips moving slowly over the aspirator, a device that resembled a chrome thermos, with rubber tubes and a plastic face mask attached to one end.
She didn’t hear her husband’s voice, but turned away and went out, left the door open behind her. She went down the steep granite steps to the sidewalk, her eyes pointed at the ground the whole way. She was swaying when she did her sleepwalker’s stroll into the street. She didn’t look up, but started straight across for their car on the other side of the road.
Alinger was turning to get the guest book—he thought perhaps the man would still sign—when he heard the shriek of brakes, and a metallic crunch, as if a car had rushed headlong into a tree, only even before he looked he knew it wasn’t a tree.
The father screamed and then screamed again. Alinger pivoted back in time to see him falling down the steps. A black Cadillac was turned at an unlikely angle in the street, steam coming up around the edges of the crumpled hood. The driver’s side door was open, and the driver stood in the road, a porkpie hat tipped back on his head.
Even over the ringing in his ears, Alinger heard the driver saying, “She didn’t even look. Right into traffic. Jesus Christ. What was I supposed to do?”
The father wasn’t listening. He was in the street, on his knees, holding her. The boy stood in the coatroom, his jacket half on, staring out. A swollen vein beat in the child’s forehead.
“Doctor!” the father screamed. “Please! Doctor!” He was looking back at Alinger.
Alinger paused to pick his overcoat off a hook. It was March, and windy, and he didn’t want to get a chill. He hadn’t reached the age of eighty by being careless or doing things in haste. He patted the boy on the head as he went by. He had not gone halfway down the steps, though, when the child called out to him.
“Doctor,” the boy stammered, and Alinger looked back.
The boy held his bag out to him, still unbuckled.
“Your bag,” the boy said. “You might need something in it.”
Alinger smiled fondly, went back up the steps, took it from the boy’s cold fingers.
“Thank you,” he said. “I just might.”
DEAD-WOOD
It has been argued even trees may appear as ghosts. Reports of such manifestations are common in the literature of parapsychology. There is the famous white pine of West Belfry, Maine. It was chopped down in 1842, a towering fir with a white smooth bark like none anyone had ever seen, and with pine needles the color of brushed steel. A tea house and inn was built on the hill where it had stood. A cold spot existed in a corner of the yellow dining room, a zone of penetrating chill, the exact diameter of the white pine’s trunk. Directly above the dining room was a small bedroom, but no guest would stay the night there. Those who tried said their sleep was disturbed by the keening rush of a phantom wind, the low soft roar of air in high branches; the gusts blew papers around the room and pulled curtains down. In March, the walls bled sap.
An entire phantom wood appeared in Canaanville, Pennsylvania, for a period of twenty minutes one day, in 1959. There are photographs. It was in a new development, a neighborhood of winding roads and small, modern bungalows. Residents woke on a Sunday morning and found themselves sleeping in stands of birch that seemed to grow right from the floor of their bedrooms. Underwater hemlocks swayed and drifted in backyard swimming pools. The phenomenon extended to a nearby shopping mall. The ground floor of Sears was filled with brambles, half-price skirts hanging from the branches of Norway maples, a flock of sparrows settled on the jewelry counter, picking at pearls and gold chains.
Somehow it’s easier to imagine the ghost of a tree than it is the ghost of a man. Just think how a tree will stand for a hundred years, gorging itself on sunlight and pulling moisture from the earth, tirelessly hauling its life up out of the soil, like someone hauling a bucket up from a bottomless well. The roots of a shattered tree still drink for months after death, so used to the habit of life they can’t give it up. Something that doesn’t know it’s alive obviously can’t be expected to know when it’s dead.
After you left—not right away, but after a summer had passed—I took down the alder we used to read under, sitting together on your mother’s picnic blanket; the alder we fell asleep under that time, listening to the hum of the bees. It was old, and rotten, it had bugs in it, although new shoots still appeared on its boughs in the spring. I told myself I didn’t want it to blow down and fall into the house, even though it wasn’t leaning toward the house. But now, sometimes when I’m out there, in the wide-open of the yard, the wind will rise and shriek, tearing at my clothes. What else shrieks with it, I wonder?
THE WIDOW’S BREAKFAST
Killian left the blanket on Gage—didn’t want it—and left Gage where he lay on a rise above a little creekbed somewhere in eastern Ohio. He didn’t stop moving for the better part of a month after that, spent most of the summer of 1935 riding the freights north and east, as if he was still headed to see Gage’s best cousin in New Hampshire. He wasn’t, though. Killian would never meet her now. He didn’t know where he was headed.
He was in New Haven for a while but didn’t stay. One morning, in the early dark, he went to a place he had heard about, where the tracks swept out in a wide arc, and the trains had to slow down alm
ost to nothing going around it. There he waited. A boy in an ill-fitting and dirty suit jacket crouched beside him, at the base of the embankment. When the northeastern came, Killian jumped up and ran alongside the train, and hauled himself up into a loaded freight car. The boy pulled himself into the car right behind him.
They rode together for a while, in the dark, the cars jolting from side to side and the wheels banging and clattering on the tracks. Killian dozed, came awake with the boy tugging on his belt buckle. The kid said for a quarter, but Killian didn’t have a quarter and if he did, he wouldn’t have spent it that way.
He grabbed the boy by the arms, and yanked his hands away with some effort, digging his fingernails into the soft undersides of the boy’s wrists, and hurting him on purpose. Killian told him to leave be, and shoved him away. He told the boy that he looked like a nice kid and why did he want to be that way. Killian said to the boy to just wake him when the train stopped in Westfield. The kid sat on the other side of the car, one knee drawn up against his chest, and his arms wrapped around the knee, and didn’t speak. Sometimes a thin line of gray morning light fell through one of the slats in the boxcar wall, and glided slowly up the boy’s face, and across his hating and feverish eyes. Killian fell asleep again with the kid still glaring at him.
When he woke, the boy was gone. It was full light by then, but still early enough and cold enough so when Killian stood in the half-open boxcar door his breath was ripped away from him in clouds of frozen vapor. He held the edge of the door with one hand, and the fingers that were outside were soon burned raw by the sharp and icy current of the air. There was a tear in the armpit of his shirt, and the cold wind blew through that, too. He didn’t know if Westfield was still ahead of him or not, but he felt he had slept for a long time—it was probably behind. Probably that was where the boy had jumped out. After Westfield there wouldn’t be any other stops until the train dead-ended in Northampton, and Killian didn’t want to go there. He stood in the door with the cold wind blasting at him. Sometimes he imagined he had died with Gage, and had wandered since as a ghost. It wasn’t true, though. Things kept reminding him it wasn’t true, like his neck stiff and achy from how he slept, or the cold air coming through the holes in his shirt.
