by Daniel Mills
The carcass is gone.
Salterton returns to shore, splashes onto the beach. His pants are bloody and sopping.
“Oh, dear,” he says. “And now I fear I have disquieted you.”
My voice is dry, choking. “What are they?”
He doesn’t answer, changes the subject.
“You must believe me,” he says, “when I tell you I have nothing but compassion in my heart for poor Fiona. A kind of love, even. She was so brilliant, so talented. And so very, very lovely. I admit it freely: I succumbed. She was the first of my young ladies, but Julian’s techniques were as yet—imprecise. There were consequences.”
“Complications.”
“If you will. You were right that she came to see me last week. I am sorry to have been dishonest with you on this point, but one never knows to whom one is speaking, yes? Fiona told me she had been to the new clinic, that she had met another of my young ladies.”
“She threatened you.”
“Yes, but you mustn’t think she was after anything so common as money. She was not that kind of person, the poor dear.”
“What, then?”
“She wanted an apology. Which I was only too happy to give her. I have always regretted the way things ended between us. More than that, though, she expected a promise of future—well, ‘good behavior,’ shall we say? Fortunately for both of us I was able to offer her something in exchange which proved far more agreeable.”
He looks at me. “Would you mind terribly turning off the light? Much obliged. Even old men have their vanity.”
In the dark he strips off his parka, sweater, shirt. His pants, too, his underwear. Stands naked on the sand, a thin silhouette with the chill wind tearing at him.
He continues. “You see, I was able to offer Fiona the one thing she wanted most in the world. A son. Our son. The child she thought she’d lost.”
“There was no child,” I say. “Abernathy took care of that.”
Salterton looks offended, even hurt. “He did no such thing, I assure you. The man is an outstanding surgeon, a neonatologist of international reputation, and you would persist in likening him to a mere abortionist? For shame, shame.”
“What did you tell Fiona?”
“The truth, of course. How she might find him, our little one. How they might be together again. I can only imagine she came here.”
“And then?”
Salterton doesn’t reply. He removes his wristwatch, folds his clothes and coat together. Places his watch on top, his keys.
I press him. “What happened to her?”
Click on the flashlight. The light glances off his face, eyes like flints as he turns away.
He speaks in a voice that’s barely audible. “Dear child,” he says. Gently, almost sadly.
“I really wouldn’t presume to say.”
He walks down to the water. The clouds lighten but the lake stays dark, starred with ice-flecks when the flashlight sweeps across it. Salterton’s outline, just visible. His wiry spine and shoulders, arms spread as the water surges round him.
Pale limbs, hands. Black eyes like his.
He rolls onto his back, swims beyond the flashlight’s beam.
The city shakes off sleep, snow, sets cars skidding.
I reach my apartment, let myself in. The tomcat pushes past me, followed by the kitten. They leave fine hairs on my trouser-legs, gray and white mingled.
Dream Children. I search YouTube, press play. Picture Fiona at the piano, her hands on the keys. Andante in G Minor: music to conjure loneliness, longing. Her yearning for a child in the days since she saw Salterton, the child she never had.
I can’t wait any longer.
North Beach. December 8, early. Fiona sits in the sand, knees at her chest. Light in the sky when the children surface, treading water, and her son among them with eyes like black glass. She wades in, swims out, doesn’t slow though the water boils and churns: a mouth with teeth and closing, closed.
The lake settles, mirroring light. The silence she leaves, left.
I grab for her phone.
Press down home but there’s nothing there: screen dark, battery dead.
I return the phone to Mark.
“I couldn’t find her,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
The snow is gone by noon. Home again, I spy the black cat in the yard. Dead. She sprawls on her side with her belly torn open.
I bury her in the yard and go back inside. Evening, and the floodlights turn on. I hear them like moths at the glass: the gray tom, the kitten. They're hungry.
“Come in,” I say, and open the door.
To the memory of Joseph S. Pulver, Sr
Lincoln Hill
SPRING
A man came limping down the track between the ribs of Lincoln Hill. He passed beyond the lumber mill, a woman on his broken back—with child, yes, but thin with lack, where he was seventy and ill, but still he carried her until they vanished in the tamaracks.
The snow looked ashy in that light, then crimson in the place they died. We found them frozen hard and white but heard a wailing out of sight, as if a lamb were caught outside... its faint cry faded with the night.
SUMMER
The season passed and lilies grew to fill the empty clearing where we buried them with muttered prayers, and where Elise and Abbie flew to pull the bramble and the blooms they wore like gemstones in their hair.
Elise, eighteen, stripped herself bare to meet a boy nobody knew. Her sister came home terrified to find me kneeling at the stove and begged for me to come outside. Elise made no attempt to hide but waited, waking, in the grove—but with such dreams behind her eyes.
FALL
The wind was in the naked trees the night he knocked upon our door and shouted to the upper floor that he had come back for Elise.
He brought with him the winter’s freeze. We huddled in our coats and furs and wept to hear the holy words they whispered as the chimney breathed.
My daughter wore the cotton plain her mother made to jump the broom, and even now, it bore the stains of blood and love and loving’s pain, as when she cried out in her room, and silence answered, and the rain.
WINTER
The days like decades dimmed the glow.
He guttered like a dying coal then winter stripped away the soul and left him changed, a balding crow. My daughter had to watch him go to pieces as the year turned cold. The roof-beams creaked and could not hold the weight of years, the drag of snow.
That night, the gusts came high and shrill into our house and howling round, and Abbie, dreaming, watched until her sister danced him past the mill and whirled the old man from the ground to join the wind on Lincoln Hill.
A Sleeping Life
ZERO
The sack surrounds me, a room of no light. I float, weightless. Breathe without breath where my lungs are empty. The scalpel slices, saws. The room opens to spill me into the blankets and the air bursts to my lips as the cord is stretched and severed.
Her flesh on mine, the heat of it. Her milk in my mouth.
ONE
Her hair falls over me, black and thick like veils against the brightness of the house. Windows open, the curtains half-drawn. A smell of oil and smoke, drone of old words spoken over me in my fever. Her chest rises, falls, and so do I, til a voice breaks on our darkness and the breast is withdrawn, the veil parted. A hand traces shapes upon my forehead. Her breathing hums in the walls of her chest, a soothing sound but falling away as I am lifted, lowered. The cold—
TWO
The light. A man’s face haloed by it. He wears gold-rimmed spectacles, sports a gray-black moustache. I close my eyes. He taps at my knees, draws the needle-tip down my feet. He inclines his ear to my chest and listens.
“Good,” he says, and his finger is in my eye. He hooks the lid with his nail and lifts to expose the white. His other hand holds a reflecting glass, which he angles to the window, directing the sun into my brain. The light pierces, searing. The nerves spark and
fire and the doctor chuckles.
“You see?” he says. “You hear how the little lad screams? All will soon be well.”
THREE
“And all manner of things be well.”
These words they sing and with their faces to the pulpit while Mother holds me on her knee, dressed in her frock and white ribbon and my uncle beside her in his Sunday best.
The song is finished. The priest cries to the echoes that linger and speaks with thunder of Christ’s humility. He says: “All Jerusalem came to greet Him. The people wished to make of Him a king but Christ rode upon an ass and washed the feet of his disciples. Is there any among us who would refuse the crown? No. For his humility was a thing of heaven rather than of earth and greater still was his obedience. We mustn’t forget how he allowed himself to be led without protest to the hill of his crucifixion. He went willingly, lovingly, meekly as a lamb.”
My uncle is a killer of horses. He prays, his head in his hands. Beside him Mother watches the sun swing behind the west windows, sweeping color through the glass.
FOUR
To turn the country into light.
The town is below us, the square with its shops and houses and the medieval wall encircling. The railway station with its tracks running to north and west through farm-fields gold with wheat at harvest and all glimpsed through the face of the city clock.
We are in the clock-tower, the great bells hanging over us: one to mark the hour, another to summon the fire brigade. The latter is rung with a rope and counterweight. The bell-pull forms coils all around us where Mother kneels beside me, breathless.
“You cannot know,” she says, gasping. “How I have prayed for this.”
She holds me, presses me to her chest. “Doctor Leibenhauer said it was hopeless. Even Father Johannes despaired, but I know you, Child. You are like me. The world is before you in its glory. Of course you would wish to see.”
Her eyes are open: I see myself in them, but briefly. Then the clock advances and the counterweight descends—
FIVE
The blow shakes the darks of sleep, sets points of light behind my eyes like stars exploding. My uncle looms over me with bloodied hands and there’s fluid in my mouth as at my birthing—and teeth. I swallow them, choking, and cough with the pain that rakes my throat.
“Well, well,” my uncle says, snarling. “You’re awake now, aren’t you?”
He pulls me up by my shirt-collar, strikes me again with a closed fist. I tumble backward, bruising my head so the stars brighten and nova.
My uncle leans over me. He says my name. There is red spittle on his cheeks and brow and I can see that he is frightened.
He holds her portrait in his hands. It is edged in black, the glass smeared with finger-marks: mine, his. Her hair spreads blackly on the coffin-pillow, and her eyes are closed, hands folded together, a white ribbon cinched about her wrists.
SIX
It twitches in my hands: a length of rope and the old mare beside me limping. We cross the yard together, stepping over wheel-tracks frozen into ridges and hoof-prints dusted white with frost. The horse’s head bobs, eyes downcast. Her shoes strike stone, resound.
My uncle stands with the mare’s owner, a rich man in silks and fur with a top hat and jeweled watch-chain. He is a landowner and nobleman, an officer in the army. He speaks of war and horses but my uncle is only half-listening, the pipe in his mouth, gun broken over his elbow.
My uncle finishes the pipe as we approach. He inverts the bowl, strikes it with his hand’s heel. The ashes blow to dust to catch the blowing wind, and the nobleman is quiet, thoughtful.
He asks: “This boy is your nephew?”
My uncle grunts. The pipe disappears into his pocket.
The other man dons an eyeglass. He studies me with interest. “You will know, of course, his condition is a subject of much speculation in town. My dear friend Doctor Leibenhauer has examined your nephew on many occasions. Could it be the boy is sleepwalking even now?”
My uncle does not answer. He touches his hand to the mare’s head, strokes her ears and mane. “Poor old girl,” he whispers. “One thing to be done for you.”
SEVEN
“All she did for you. For me. She was a saint if such things can be and like a saint she suffered. Her heart was weak and she was always strange, always talking to herself or to God. She was twenty when she went to Ulm. We had a cousin there she stayed with, and she worked in a milliner’s shop. That’s how she met him. He was a writer of some kind. He took—liberties. She yielded herself, knowing no better, and was pregnant before I learned what had happened. I went to Ulm. I chased him off, her fiancé. I brought her back here, but it was no use. She wouldn’t eat. She was so frail I thought she was sure to die in her laboring through all the long hours that passed before she spit you out sleeping in the sack. She didn’t, though, and you wouldn’t wake for all she tried, til that morning she sneaked you up the clock-tower. She should never have done it: her heart couldn’t stand the strain and she was breathless and wheezing when I found her up there. ‘He looked at me,’ she said. ‘He smiled.’ It was all she longed for in this world and maybe there was more than that too but Lord forgive me I wasn’t listening. I was too scared. I could see she was dying. She couldn’t move for the pain in her chest and her breath wouldn’t come right. I tried to carry her down the steps, but she wouldn’t let you go, and you howled and kicked against her in your sleep while the bells went on and on—”
EIGHT
The rain sheets down, relentless. It pools beneath my uncle’s body where he lies face-down, unmoving. It mingles with his blood, rippling with the wind.
The stallion circles the courtyard, screaming for his shattered leg. His eyes bulge. The reins trail behind him and his prints are dark and red.
A man is shouting at me. The horse’s owner, a tenant farmer. He shelters behind the courtyard gate while the lamed horse stamps and shrieks.
“The gun!” he says, gesticulating wildly.
The shotgun is trapped beneath my uncle’s body, but I do not move to pick it up. Already the horse is tiring. His strength wanes, his pace. He falls. The breath heaves and is gone.
The farmer unlatches the gate. He sprints toward me and kneels before my uncle. Takes hold of the coat, rolls over the body.
The eyes open, staring. Rain strikes them, sets them quivering in their sockets. Lightning silvers the courtyard, but the thunder is far-off yet, too distant to be heard.
NINE
In the silence we are made to stand, sixty boys at two long troths and Father Johannes at the lectern. He clears his throat. He reads to us from Proverbs though we are starved and sickening and the food-troths are before us, steaming. One boy collapses, weak with fever. He is pulled to his feet and the reading is finished, the Grace spoken.
“And now I must entreat you to remain standing,” Johannes says. “Tonight Freiherr Von Steinfeld has deigned to join us at our table. He is among the most generous of your benefactors, my boys. Let us make him welcome.”
The doors swing open to admit a man in jewels and fur: the nobleman who once brought a mare to my uncle. He smiles broadly, beneficently. He circles the room unspeaking, inspects our clothes and teeth. He pauses before the troth. He inclines his head over it, sniffing.
Charred potatoes. Stewed cabbage in shreds. He samples both, grinning wide to suck the grease from his gloves. The taste is in our mouths, the smell.
TEN
Sweetness of rot and mud: a grave opened by lantern-light, Old Heinz’s teeth green and shining. My limbs are weak for hours spent shoveling and my hands are clamped about the dead boy’s ankles. Heinz secures the armpits. Sackcloth conceals the corpse's face, but the feet protrude, colorless, and we descend into the pit.
Father Johannes is here. He stands over us, Doctor Leibenhauer beside him. Their shadows join together, stretching to cover the open grave with its dozens of sacks under our feet like a world laid to rest in its afterbirth. We squelch, sink.
Leibenhauer says: “He is a strange one, isn’t he? His mother too. You’re a better man than I am, Father, to have taken him.”
“His condition has proved useful to us. That is all.”
“And he will remember nothing of this?”
“He is asleep. He has no life but dreaming.”
“Remarkable. And is the Freiherr aware of the boy’s involvement?”
“My dear man,” the priest says, “the idea was Steinfeld’s own.”
We lay the body down. Heinz grunts, and we climb to the lantern’s light.
ELEVEN
Then falling, not falling. The pavement strikes my knees, hard. My head snaps back, and a blond-haired boy stands over me grinning. Two others hold my arms while a third boy, younger than the others, opens my coat and fishes the parcel from inside. He hands it to the blond boy, who steps back toward the gate of a fine house. Summer’s stillness. Moonlight streams through gaps in the iron pailing and only the shadows move.
