The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Realms of Fantasy, one of my favorite magazines and one to which I’d eternally hoped to one day sell my work, is shutting down. There are fewer and fewer markets out there for short fiction. I’m frankly starting to think, the hell with it, and just put all of my own stuff up right here and let whoever finds it, find it.
Oh well. I always enjoyed reading Realms, and I’ll always have my stash of back issues.
UPDATE: Check out Warren Ellis’s headline for this news.
“He is dead,” Willem said, looking up from the corpse.
“Then let us begin.” Doktor Muething injected the vampire blood into the second dead Jew. This one was an older man than the first, with a face that had been careworn even before the Nazis had come. Willem studied the man’s features as they waited for the vampire blood to take effect.
“Do you ever wonder about the lives they led before we took them?”
“Always.” Doktor Muething nodded. “Many insist that we shouldn’t think of such things, that concerns such as those have no place in the advancement of science. But yes, I do think of them.”
Willem stared at the dead Jew, and then it began.
With the shock of the first experiment behind him, Willem was now able to concentrate on the details. They were much the same as the last time. The second dead Jew’s eyes formed the same commanding stare as the first one, but now Willem was already wearing the Crucifix and thus felt none of the compulsion he had experienced before. He was able to watch without fear as the second dead Jew opened his mouth, revealing canine teeth that had certainly not been there before. He didn’t even notice the Doktor standing close behind him.
“Yes,” Doktor Muething whispered. “Yes…see the world through new eyes, my friend.” Willem was startled at the words, and he was not sure if they were meant for him or for the second dead Jew.
Now that Willem was protected from the vampire Jew’s horrible gaze by the power of God, it seemed to him that there was something else in that gaze, something beside malevolence and bloodthirst. What was it, though? Longing? Sadness? A passionate yearning for freedom? Willem pondered that gaze, and it was then that the reaction began to sour.
This, too, was much like the first experiment: the vampire Jew convulsed violently, hurling his body against the double set of bonds; his shrieks pierced the air which filled with the stench of rot.
“Damnation!!” Doktor Muething slammed his palm against the wall. “This cannot be!”
The vampire Jew’s convulsions became so ragingly brutal that the surgical table itself began to rock against its moorings. The shrieks were so loud and so piercing that Willem’s ears hurt even with his hands clasped over them. He looked at the Doktor, who was already moving for the window. A flood of golden sunlight, several moments of horrible decay, and it was over. The vampire Jew was dead, just as before.
“I don’t understand,” Doktor Muething said. “I don’t understand. It has to work. I can’t think of anything else to try!” He clenched his fist, and his body trembled. His calmness, his icy detachment was gone. Was it the voice of a man who keeps falling short of a goal years in the making? or was it something more than that? Why this goal, and not some other?
Willem stared at the dusty remains of the dead Jew as sirens began to blare outside.
“We are confident that our local forces will be able to turn the Americans and the British troops aside,” Commandant Reger said. “Until then, we will step up the pace of our operations here.” Thus he ordered the round-the-clock operation of the ovens. They would burn twenty-four hours a day until they were shut down by the Allies themselves. The Allied armies were sixty or seventy miles away; soon they would be at Hamerstadt – unless the tattered remnants of Der Fuhrer’s army were able to turn them aside. Noting the mournful expression on Commandant Reger’s face, Willem concluded that any such outcome was so unlikely as to be impossible. Doktor Muething had been right: the thousand-year Reich would die in mere weeks.
Willem paid almost no attention at all to the meeting. His thoughts kept returning to the pleading desperation that had formed in the Doktor’s eyes after their failure that morning. Why was this so important to him? And most importantly, what were they doing wrong?
After the meeting adjourned Willem went to the laboratory, where he learned that the Doktor had gone to town again on urgent family business. There he found all of Doktor Muething’s notes and journals from all his years of research. Unable to resist, Willem began to read. He found one book particularly interesting: it was Doktor Muething’s personal journal of all the experiments he had conducted, in all the camps, in the course of the war. He had performed a hundred such experiments on Jews from all over Germany. At the end of the notes on each experiment Doktor Muething had written, “God forgive me.” Was he seeking absolution even as he plumbed the depths of death?
And why did it always fail?
Willem studied for hours, reading all of the old accounts of how vampires had created their….”offspring”. Perhaps there was something in these papers, something even the Doktor’s brilliant mind could not remember; perhaps there was a missing connection somewhere. Perhaps a pair of young, fresh eyes coupled with a young mind could find whatever it was that had been overlooked. But as the hours went by, Willem despaired of finding any such master stroke. There was nothing here that he could see – but there had to be! Why couldn’t he see it?
“Young Schliemann?”
Willem awoke with a start to find Doktor Muething standing over him. It was dark outside the laboratory, and the only light came from the streetlights. Sirens blared, and Willem hadn’t even heard them until now. Willem rubbed his eyes.
“It is not there,” the Doktor said. “Do not trouble to look for it. The experiments will not succeed, and our time is up. We have failed.”
“It must be here somewhere, Herr Doktor!” Willem straightened up and rubbed his stiff neck.
“The answer—”
“There is no answer, Willem.” Doktor Muething shook his head. “The only conclusion possible is that Gunther’s hypothesis is wrong. The vampire blood is not sufficient to complete the transition. I’ve tested all the variables. It is over.”
“No!”
“It must end now. I have failed, and there are things to be answered for. That monument to pomposity Commandant Reger won’t tell you, but I know that this camp will be liberated within two days. I spent today making my travel arrangements.”
Willem blinked. “Travel? Where are you going?”
“South.”
“Switzerland?”
Doktor Muething nodded. “I do not wish to explain this to the Allies. It will be difficult enough explaining it to God.” He looked at the notes on the table and sighed. “This wasn’t meant to be. There truly are areas where we are not meant to dabble. I see that now.”
“You don’t truly believe that!”
“The luxury of choosing what I believe is no longer mine.”
Willem groped for a reply, something to say that would convince the Doktor to reconsider. He was still thinking when a loud commotion arose from outside. A truck had pulled up, and there were shouting voices.
“Now what could that be?” the Doktor said, and the two went outside. In the middle of the street was a truck which was full to overflowing with prisoners. Guards no older than Willem stood about brandishing guns, and one officer – Willem recognized him as one of the Commandant’s key assistants – was barking orders at the others. This officer saw the Doktor, and marched right up to him.
“Stand aside, Herr Doktor,” the man said. “I am on the orders of Commandant Reger.”
“Of course you are, Lieutenant Spengler. We are all on someone’s orders.” The Doktor stood aside, allowing ten guards to go past and into the tiny barracks behind the laboratory that contained the remaining four of the six prisoners that had been originally assigned to Doktor Muething’s scientific program.
“What is happening?” Willem asked.
“They are taking our research subjects,” the Doktor said. As if on cue the guards began reemerging, pushing the prisoners ahead of them. “They will all be killed here, probably by mass firing squad. They won’t have time to gas them all. And the bodies will be left where they fall. No more neat, orderly stacks of the dead.”
They watched as the four prisoners were pushed, one by one, onto the truck. The last one was the young woman, the one Willem had thought would be lovely if she was not….No. She was lovely, even now with her hair roughly shorn and her body emaciated, even as she walked with the starved listlessness that afflicted every one of the other thousands of prisoners in the camp. A sick feeling formed in Willem’s stomach.
“Move!” Lieutenant Spengler shouted, and the truck began to move – before the young woman, being the last of the prisoners, had climbed all the way inside. Whether from the cold air or from he weakened state Willem could not be sure, but all the same she lost her grip. As the truck rolled away she tumbled off the back end, landing on the ground in a heap. In seconds three guards were around her screaming for her to get up, the remaining guards having jogged off after the truck. She tried to push herself back up but the ground was muddy and she slipped again. Willem took an involuntarily step forward, but Doktor Muething restrained him.
“Don’t,” the Doktor said.
Lieutenant Spengler came back now to see what was going on, and when he did he shook his head in frustration. He gestured for the guards to step back, and then he drew his pistol and shot the young woman in the back. She flattened to the ground. Willem felt his gorge rising. Doktor Muething shook his head at the bitter tragedy playing out just twenty feet away. Willem swallowed several times in succession, forcing the bile in his throat back down. The guards laughed and congratulated Spengler on a good shot as they walked away after the truck. Willem stared at the young woman’s body, her blood spreading across the ground. Her blood, spreading across the ground….
Her blood….
And there it was.
If Death is the absence of Life, Gunther Schliemann wrote, and if Life is the absence of Death, then Vampirism is the absence of both.
Willem was so absorbed in the book that he missed the noontime meal completely. It was as if Uncle Gunther was speaking from beyond the grave – the turns of phrase and attitudes were unmistakable. But it was also as if there were another Uncle Gunther, some sort of doppelganger who moved in a world of graves and blood. He had spent years studying vampires, traveling from Amsterdam to Istanbul to Athens to Lisbon and back again following the trails of vampire folklore wherever they led. Gunther had not been content to merely study the legends themselves; he had been looking for the truths behind the tales. He had been seeking a real vampire. Uncle Gunther had been convinced that they existed. And how had he come to such a belief? At the University of Hamburg he had met Wolf Muething.
After completing their degrees the two friends had worked together, searching for vampires. Gunther wrote of many places where they had found that mysterious creatures had once existed, creatures which might have been vampires – but the trails were always cold, and a real vampire was never found. There was something terribly elusive about them, as if like the dimmest stars they vanished when looked upon directly. They searched towns in Poland and villages in the Carpathians. They journeyed to Transylvania and found no more evidence of real vampires than they had in any other place. Everything they learned, every lead they followed, every tale they traced was written in Gunther’s book: stories of the begetting of vampires, speculations on the nature of the secret vampiric society they believed to exist, hypotheses on the nature of vampirism itself – but no accounts of actual encounters. Those eluded them, and continued to elude them for years even as they lived off the money that Wolf Muething borrowed, cajoled and outright stole from his rich family.
It ended in part when Wolf Muething’s father died, and Wolf returned home to help his brother run the family. Gunther, though, continued the search on his own, earning money for his travels in exchange for medical treatments. He collected vast amounts of folklore relating to vampires, and as he studied them he began to discover parallels in all the accounts that led him to his own theories as to how they came to be. In one chilling passage he devised a simple experiment. It seems, he wrote, that the folklore leads to one conclusion: that vampirism begins by mixing the blood of a vampire with that of a person freshly dead. Would that I had the means to test this hypothesis.
Two years after Wolf Muething left the chase, Gunther found his most promising lead in a village near Salzburg. Here his prose became excited, even urgent: It must be nearing the end. How thrilling to at last approach the terminus of this great and awful road! And with those words, the book ended.
Willem turned the page and found only two blank flyleaves. He sat back, astounded, letting the book fall to his lap. There was nothing at all of the trip to Salzburg; had Gunther found what he had been looking for? Had he found the vampire? There were no answers. The questions filled Willem’s head as he headed out to dinner.
“You’re a faster reader than I,” Doktor Muething said as Willem entered the laboratory. “It took me two days to read that book. I often wonder who Gunther had print it. What must that person have thought?”
“He probably thought it was a novel,” Willem said as he came over to the table.
The Doktor raised his eyebrows. “Good Heavens, was that a joke?”
Willem only shrugged. “Another attempt?” he asked, pointing at the corpse.
“No,” the Doktor said as he used a scalpel to cut through chest tissue. “This man was fairly healthy when he was gassed. There are no shortages of opportunities to refresh my knowledge of anatomy here. Or yours, for that matter. Come closer, he’s dead and won’t bite. Rub some of that cream under your nose. It will help the smell.”
Willem took a dab of cream from a jar and rubbed it under his nose. The stuff smelled horrible and was very strong, but it did mask the scent of the corpse. He stepped closer and watched as the Doktor opened the man’s chest cavity.
“’Prick us, do we not bleed? Poison us, do we not die?’ What’s the last part – oh yes, ‘Wrong us, shall we not avenge?’” He chuckled. “If the Bard had only known what was to come. You look like you have a question for me, young Schliemann.”
He is always ahead of me, Willem thought. He asked his question. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“How do you reconcile the oath that a Doktor takes with the fact that here we mete out death in huge quantities, and that we profit by it?”
“Science is not an adequate answer to that, is it?” The Doktor shook his head slowly. “The heart has reasons that are unknown to the mind,” he said as he turned back to the autopsy subject. “In this man’s case, we probably did the right thing for the wrong reasons. His lungs are a cesspool of cancer.”
Willem couldn’t help but notice that Doktor Muething had not answered the question and he could see that it would be useless to bring it up again, so he decided to ask something else that was bothering him. “Doktor, do you really believe the things in that book?”
“My, you do like to change the subject! That’s good. It shows an inquisitive mind.” Doktor Muething picked up the scalpel and began cutting more tissue. “Science is about considering the possibilities. Gunther was a scientist, purely and truly. Before he became a physician, that is. He had no choice in that, you know. The reason the book ends in Salzburg is that Gunther was there when he received a letter from home. That was March of 1931. Do you understand?”
Willem nodded. That was when his father had died, and he had gone to live with Uncle Gunther.
The Doktor began cutting the blood vessels around the dead man’s heart. “Gunther received an urgent letter the day after he arrived at Salzburg, and he knew that he had to return home at once. He wrote to me explaining what had happened, and that he could no longer carry out our work. It broke his heart, at first, to have been so close to unraveling the mystery, but the heart can be strong in ways no one can expect. In time he came to accept his new life. And, I might add, his new family – such as it was.”
Willem stepped forward and looked down into the man’s chest cavity as the Doktor extracted the heart.
“So,” the Doktor went on, “we forgot all about vampires – or rather, your uncle did. He put that part of his life behind him. Whenever I asked him about it after that, he would only recite that passage from the Bible – the one about giving up childish things.”
Willem nodded. That had been one of Uncle Gunther’s favorite passages.
“I, on the other hand, saw nothing childish about our former quest, so I continued on as best I could. I taught at the University and studied the human body. I was able to conduct certain experiments, plumbing the limits and nature of death. Physicians study every way in their power to stave off death, but none ever actually study death itself. It is a fascinating subject. I have learned much since these camps were built. Of course, I doubt that the Allies will take a very kindly view when they arrive.”
“Do you really think they will?”
“I am counting the days,” Doktor Muething said in a voice that made Willem shudder. And then the Doktor continued. “Gunther and I corresponded through the years. He wrote a great deal about his wonderfully gifted nephew who was bound to be a fine physician in his own right. He wrote about things he learned from the old and the weak, and he wrote about all the wonderful little villages where he went to heal the sick. Those letters were far less dark than the ones he had written to me before. All of them, that is, except one he sent to me about two years ago about a village called Ganenpunkt. Do you know this village?”
Willem remembered it all too well, and he paled at its mention. It had happened two years before, when Gunther had heard of a disease that was ravishing the tiny village of Ganenpunkt. Gunther had taken Willem up there to help. Upon their arrival they had found six other physicians from around the region grappling with the disease. Every living thing in the village, it seemed, was wasting away and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Willem remembered the gaunt and lethargic livestock in the fields, and the sick people in the homes. He had never seen a town so afflicted, and just remembering all those pale and sunken faces brought the feelings of dread back as if two years had never passed.
But then Willem remembered something else. One of the other physicians there had voiced dismay at Uncle Gunther for bringing a child – Willem – into the midst of such disease, but upon looking at the very first patient he examined Gunther had whispered to Willem: “This is no contagion.” It had not struck Willem at the time, but now….
“God in Heaven,” Willem said.
Doktor Muething nodded. “Gunther wrote me a letter all about that mysterious affliction.”
“He sent me home at once,” Willem said, “but he stayed behind to try and give treatment. He told me that he feared for my safety if I stayed. When he came back he told me that the illness had been dealt with, but he wouldn’t say anything more than that.” Willem shuddered when he recalled the expression that had been on Uncle Gunther’s face for days after that.
“There were vampires there – two of them, actually. While the other physicians worked with ineffectual medicines, Gunther went to the graveyards. It did not take him long to find them. They had been townsfolk who had died just a few weeks before, both having wasted away quickly and died, the same disease that was now afflicting the town. Gunther did what had to be done.”
“A stake through the heart?”
The Doktor shook his head as he examined the man’s liver. “There are a number of ways to do it; staking is merely one of them. It is also not entirely reliable, as some less-than-successful vampire hunters throughout history have discovered.” He chuckled. “You see, staking the heart – the theory goes – destroys the balance between life and death that exists in a vampire. And when that balance is tipped, death always wins.”
Willem pulled up a stool and sat down. “Why is staking dangerous?”
“Because it takes time for that battle – between life and death – to end. During that time, the vampire can still strike. That’s assuming, of course, that the intrepid hunter hits the heart on his first try. Woe to the hunter who misses the mark. Did you know that some vampires sleep with their eyes open?”
“Then how did Gunther do it?”
“The best way: he doused them in kerosene and set them on fire. Fire cleanses and consumes; and it is much faster than staking. Fire completely destroys the life-death balance.” Doktor Muething set the liver aside and probed at the man’s kidneys. “Incidentally, the life-death balance is also why vampires are warded by Crucifixes. Christ is, after all, the ultimate symbol of Life and Death. He transcends both, and nothing so earthly as ‘balance’ applies to Him.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “The vampires had been a minister and his maid. So many vampires were priests or clerics in life, which seems strange: how odd that holy people so often succumb to the unholiest of fates. After Gunther destroyed them he looked through the papers the minister had left behind. Approximately a month before there had been two visitors to the parish, a man and a woman from Spain. They arrived before sunrise, claiming to be refugees of some sort – hardly uncommon in those days, but still I wonder if that poor minister ever regretted not asking just what they were refugees from.” He smiled wryly, and then continued. “The visitors left three nights later, heading for Seville. It was then that the minister and his maid fell ill. They became vampires, and they proceeded to do as vampires do: they fed from their surroundings. Gunther was able to surmise all this from the minister’s journal. It was the breakthrough he had always sought, but circumstances being what they were”—he looked at Willem—“he wrote to me. Thus, two years ago at Gunther’s behest I went to Spain.” Doktor Muething slit the dead man’s stomach and looked inside. “We never feed these people before we gas them. Doesn’t that seem overly cruel?”
Willem leaned forward, completely ignoring the presence of the vivisected body. Only the Doktor’s narrative mattered. “You found them, didn’t you?”
“I did indeed, although it took a long time and a great deal of work, the telling of which I will spare you. The problem with vampire hunting is the drudgery of looking through cemeteries. I searched every damnable burial yard in Seville and found nothing. I despaired of finding these two until, purely by chance, I learned of a wealthy family whose scions were all buried on the family grounds. This was my answer, it had to be – and sure enough, I found them there. I broke into the tomb in broad daylight – a necessity with them, you realize – and after a moment to admire them as they slept with their eyes open, I destroyed them by staking.” He shrugged. “I didn’t miss, fortunately. But before I killed them I was able to collect some of their blood, one pint each.”
Willem’s eyes went wide. “Uncle Gunther wrote that vampires are made by mixing living blood with vampire blood.”
“Go on.”
“And you’re testing it by….by injecting these people with vampire blood. That’s what’s in those vials!”
Doktor Muething nodded as he pushed himself away from the surgical table. “I think I am done here for tonight,” he said. “I am tired.”
“When will our next attempt be?”
“Our next attempt?” The Doktor smiled. “Tomorrow morning. Five o’clock.” He turned on the water to the sink and began scrubbing his hands.
Willem headed for the door.
“Young Schliemann?”
Willem stopped and looked again at the Doktor.
“What is right is many times concealed behind a veil of tears and blood,” Doktor Muething said. “Perhaps one day you will understand.”
Willem said good night to Doktor Muething and then left. As he walked across the street he heard the distant rumble of far-off thunder. It was the strangest thunder he had ever heard: the booms perfectly timed and identical. Only when he was almost asleep did he realize that the thunder was actually the rolling sound of exploding bombs.
A little while ago, I was tagged by SamuraiFrog with the “Story Meme”, which goes like this: a story is given to you in part, you continue it a bit, and then you pass it on to some other folks. Here’s where we stand so far:
Part the First:
The bus was more crowded than usual. It was bitterly cold outside, and I hadn’t prepared for it. I noticed that a fair number of the riders were dressed curiously. As I glanced around, I stretched my feet and kicked up against a large, heavy cardboard box laying under the seat in front of me.
SamuraiFrog then continues the tale:
I looked around for the box’s owner. Across the aisle from me, a pretty girl flashed me a smile and cocked her head. She was motioning toward the box. Encouraging me. Sliding the box back towards me, I opened it and was immediately confused. Inside was a plastic rain poncho, a police baton, and a Donald Duck mask. I looked around and saw that several people were wearing plastic rain ponchos. I looked back over at the pretty girl. “You’re ready for this, right?” she asked me. “They wouldn’t have sent you if you weren’t ready.”
And now I step up:
I shook my head as I folded the box closed again, and when I looked up at the girl, I chuckled. “They didn’t send me,” I said. “You’re really out of your depth if you think that they send me anywhere. I send them places.” I pushed the box over to her with my foot. “And Donald Duck? Really? I’m a Daffy man. If you knew anything about me, you’d know that.”
The girl’s eyes flashed momentarily, and then she smiled. It was the kind of smile that nice people see when it’s the last thing they see in this world, just before the person smiling that smile pulls the trigger on the gun that’s aimed at their forehead. “You’re not a Daffy man,” she said. “Not even close. You can think you are all you want, but we’re not about what you think you are. We’re about what you really are. And you were so close, really; a one-in-three chance of picking the false prop. No, the mask is real, and you’ll be putting it on soon enough, Boy-O.”
“And the poncho?” I asked.
“If you’re lucky.”
I nodded then, understanding. “So the police baton is the fake, huh.”
“No, that’s real too. That’s why your ‘They don’t send me, I send them’ bit just then was so lame that I almost got off the bus right then and there, which I’d have prefaced by kicking you in your smallish groin. If you knew anything about them, you’d know that they don’t mess with fakes.”
Now I smiled. “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever. Just shut up and put on the mask. You’re gonna be our getaway driver.”
“OK,” I said as I grabbed the box back, opened it, and took out the Donald Duck mask. Sure, I’ll wear this. She’s right that I’m not a Daffy man after all, but what she doesn’t know is that I hate ducks, all of ’em, every last one. Donald my ass. That’s what I thought. What I said was, “How’s this?”
The girl sighed. “They sure can pick ’em. Here. Do not lose this.” She handed me something from the pocket of her jacket, wrapped in paper. She was acting like it was the Holy Grail or something, and I suppose it was, because when I unwrapped it, what was in my hands was ____.
So, what did she give him> Tell us, Steph, Nettl, Jayme, Tosy and Cosh, Paul, and Simon! You’re all it!
UPDATE: I wrote this and scheduled it to appear today…and then discovered that Roger has tagged me with this same thing, although his version of the tale has gone in a different direction, obviously. Hmmmm!!!
Continuing a serialization of a horror novelette. Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, published previously.
Willem took a lukewarm shower, put on clean clothes, and then went back to the laboratory where he found Doktor Muething standing beside the staff car, the black satchel in his hand.
“You look better than you did an hour ago,” the Doktor said. “Come.” He climbed into the back of the staff car, and Willem followed. Inside there was a plate of pastries and a pot of coffee. The Doktor picked up the plate and offered it to Willem. “Are you hungry?”
Willem was indeed hungry, and he immediately grabbed one of the pastries and devoured it before the car even began moving. The Doktor lifted an eyebrow.
“Seeing you eat like that, I might take you for a prisoner.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and tapped the dividing window with his truncheon. “We will go now, driver!” he shouted. To Willem he added, “You may go to sleep, young Schliemann. We will drive a while.” The Doktor finished his coffee in one gulp and then pulled a book from his black satchel.
Willem tried to stay awake, but he dozed off anyway before they reached the main gates. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been this tired. Sleep was welcome….but the dreams he had were not. He dreamed of the dead Jew, reaching for him with long, bony fingers….
“Wake up!” Doktor Muething prodded Willem awake.
Willem groaned as he rubbed residue from his eyes. Looking out the window he saw that they were at the Hamerstadt Kirche, a great stone church with moss-covered walls that was at least five hundred years old. Willem followed Doktor Muething out of the car and down a wooded path, around the hulking building of dark stone to the church graveyard.
“Something doesn’t smell right,” Willem said.
“We’re away from the camp,” the Doktor replied. “You are smelling the normal air, absent of death.”
Strange words, given that they were entering a graveyard, but they were true nonetheless. The air smelled of wet earth, not ash; bodies here were interred and not stacked like cordwood, so there was no stench of rot. The two men traced a weaving path through the very old graves.
“I’ve been here before,” Willem said. “Some of Uncle Gunther’s patients were buried here. Not many, though.” Uncle Gunther had not treated many people who were rich enough to have been buried here. “Why have you brought me here, Herr Doktor?”
“A history lesson that you may find illuminating,” the Doktor said. They walked into an area dominated hy huge mausoleums. “Ah, here we are.” He led Willem to a very old mausoleum whose gray marble was worn very smooth by two centuries of wind and rain. There was a phrase in Latin carved above the door.
“What does that say?” Willem asked.
The Doktor shrugged. “Something about God, I suppose,” he replied as he produced a tarnished brass key, opened the lock, and pushed the heavy metal door open. “Latin was far from my best subject. Your Uncle couldn’t even tutor me to proficiency.”
Willem almost laughed at that, remembering many mornings when he had found Uncle Gunther still in his chair, asleep with a copy of Virgil or Ovid on his lap. Then Willem remembered where he was just then, and he shuddered. “Is this….legal?”
“This is my family tomb,” the Doktor said, “and therefore my property. Someday I may be laid here as well, though somehow I doubt it if the war goes as I expect it will.”
The only light in the mausoleum came from the sun shining through a dingy stained-glass window which depicted Christ on the Cross. The walls were lined with graves. “More than two hundred years’ worth of my ancestors are entombed here,” Doktor Muething said. “Here and in four other tombs in this very yard. I suppose that this is the final benefit of wealth: burial above the ground.”
Willem thought of Uncle Gunther’s grave in a tiny church graveyard fifty miles away. Uncle Gunther had died poor.
They arrived at the back of the tomb where an immense urn, made of stone with brass trim, sat on the floor. The side of the urn was engraved with a list of ten names followed by dates: 1694-1748, 1699-1740, 1742-1748, and so on. Beside the urn was a single wooden coffin that showed no sign at all of decay.
“Here we are,” the Doktor said. “In this urn are the ashes of ten of my ancestors. Of course, putting all their ashes in a single urn is unorthodox; such measures were necessary, though. And here, in this coffin, is my great-great-great-great grandfather, Waldemar. His body was burned as well, but his bones remained as did a peculiar artefact of his final death.”
“Final” death? Willem thought as the Doktor lifted the lid and gestured for Willem to look. Inside was a complete skeleton, the bones mostly smooth and white although tinged with charring. There was no hair at all, no remaining flesh of any kind – just the bones. There was also the “peculiar artifact”: a single wooden stake impaled through the skeleton’s chest cavity. The stake was also barely singed, and the wood was shiny as if purified by the flames. Willem let out a long breath.
“A vampire,” the Doktor said. “Yes, they exist, and there used to be many – although they now number very few.” He lowered the lid on the coffin. “Waldemar von Muething, by all accounts, was a horrid man and never moreso than in death. His passing was cause for actual celebration by the rest of the family and the entire town. Some, however, doubted that death itself could stop a man who had practiced certain forbidden arts.” He noted the expression on Willem’s face and shrugged. “Yes, the man was a dabbler of sorts. Some of his journals escaped being burned by the townsfolk, and those I have in my collection.”
Willem remembered the book in the Doktor’s satchel.
“He died eventually of a mysterious wasting disease, and the town was only too happy that he was gone. But then others began to suffer the same disease – first Waldemar’s family members, and others later on. All reported dreams of being visited in the night by a ghostly figure that stank of earth and drank their blood. Seven townspeople died, including Waldemar’s brother, sister, and two nephews. His niece, though, recognized him when he came for her and the next day she told the town Priest, who opened this very tomb and found Waldemar not dead and not alive. A stake – that stake – was put through his heart. The same was done to all the others who had died of the wasting, though it is not clear that any of those would have become what Waldemar became. All were burned in a great pyre and the ashes placed in that urn – except for Waldemar’s bones, which somehow the flames would not consume. So it ended – only to be remembered as a curious episode in the town’s history.” His voice became soft and finally trailed away. Willem resisted a sneeze from the dust in the crypt. “I see you don’t believe me,” the Doktor said suddenly.
“Vampires don’t exist,” Willem said. “They’re made up, for nighttime stories to scare children.”
“You’re not much more than a child yourself, young Schliemann. And you seem a bit unnerved. Are you realizing just what we are doing in the laboratory?”
Willem blinked. No, Doktor Muething couldn’t be trying to…. “The experiment?” Willem stammered. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes you do,” the Doktor said, sounding slightly exasperated. “You are smarter than this. Say it.”
Willem still said nothing.
“Say it,” the Doktor commanded.
Willem swallowed deeply. “You’re trying to create on of them,” he finally said. “You’re trying to create a vampire.” Willem nearly choked on the sheer absurdity of those words. Vampires didn’t exist. They didn’t exist, damn it!
“Perhaps we should go now,” the Doktor said.
Willem didn’t say a word as they walked back to the staff car, and Doktor Muething repsected that silence at least until they were in the car and driving back to the camp.
“You are disturbed,” Doktor Muething said. “Is it so difficult to believe?”
Willem glared at the Doktor. “I thought I was working for the good of Germany. Instead you give me ghosts.”
“Oh, they aren’t ghosts. They are very far from ghosts. As a scientist, you should use proper nomenclature. And as for the good of Germany, I suggest you put aside such notions. Again, you are too smart to believe in such nonsense.”
“You are a traitor, to speak this way.”
“Nonsense. Germany will survive. The Reich will not, and for that I am thankful. It has been a frightful business, perverting the minds of the people – the children, worst of all. I hear it in your words as you say things that I know you do not believe. But I know something of you, now. And I knew Gunther, perhaps even better than you ever did. Everything we’ve been told for the last twenty years is false, and you know it.”
Willem looked down at his hands. The Doktor laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t be upset, young Schliemann. All I have done here is to unfetter you from a belief you never truly held. You’ve known it all along. Those poor devils we’re experimenting on? Innocents. They are no one’s enemy.”
“Then how can you kill them?”
“Kill them?” Doktor Muething shook his head, and a look of great sadness came over him. “I am trying to save them.”
Willem looked up, met the Doktor’s gaze. “How?”
The Doktor sighed heavily. “Ah, there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than your philsophy dreams of. Something like that, anyway. Tell me, young Schliemann: what is medicine?”
The answer came automatically. “Medicine is treating the malfunctions of the human body by learning about the body’s limitations,” Willem said.
“Gunther’s words, and mine. Well, not ours, exactly; they were told to us by our teachers just as they have been told to you. ‘We study the limits of the human body and the effects of the world upon it.’ And the ultimate limits are the boundaries of life and death. We constantly probe those boundaries, and seek to move them. But the vampires? Ah, the vampires – they straddle the boundary, existing between it. So often we describe life and death as the faces of a coin. But does a coin not also have an edge, between the two faces? And does that edge not define the faces of the coin?” His voice trailed off as they arrived back at the camp. The car moved through the gates, stopping once to allow an arriving train to cross the road. Minutes later they were back at the laboratory, and Willem stifled a yawn. The Doktor checked his pocket watch. “Nearly noon,” he said. “A long time to be awake, and a short time to see the things that you have seen today. Take the remainder to rest, and we will begin tomorrow at the same time.”
Willem looked up at the Doktor. “I don’t believe in vampires, Herr Doktor.”
“Gunther did.”
Willem felt as though his blood had gone to ice. Doktor Muething nodded.
“Gunther and I worked together in school. He was as interested in vampires as I, perhaps even moreso – although I am unaware of anything in your family history that is similar to mine. But Gunther was the genius. He made the first breakthroughs; I have merely been carrying on his work, and noble work it is. He set the work aside, though, after the first War.”
Willem’s head spun. Uncle Gunther? Working on vampires? How could kindly old Uncle Gunther have done anything remotely like what Willem and Doktor Muething had done that morning?
“I don’t believe you,” Willem said weakly.
“Believe Gunther, then.” And with that the Doktor reached into his satchel and pulled out the black book, the book Willem had seen the night before whose title he hadn’t been able to make out, and handed it to Willem. “He wrote this book, you see. It is the collection of the work he did – that he and I did.”
Willem glanced down at the book cover. A single letter ‘S’ was enscribed there, and the lettering on the spine read Der Vampyr. He opened the book to the title page. There was no indication of publisher or date; only the title Der Vampyr and the name: Gunther Schliemann.
“Are you getting out?”
Willem looked up at the Doktor, and only then did he notice that the driver had climbed out of the car and opened the rear door. He moved for the door.
“Tomorrow, five o’clock,” said the Doktor.
As Willem climbed out of the car a fresh breeze stirred, chilling him. He scrambled to button his coat, but it did no good. He was suddenly very, very cold.
Continuing a serialization of a horror novelette. Part One and Part Two, published previously.
Willem jumped back with a gasp. He tried to tear his eyes away from the dead Jew’s cold, bloodless stare but he could not. “Doktor?” His voice came out strangled. “Doktor?”
“Magnificent,” the Doktor said. He was now standing beside Willem and looking with wonder at the Jew. “Has the stilled heart starting beating again?” he stepped forward and probed the Jew’s chest with his stethoscope, shielding his eyes with his free hand from the icy gaze of the Jew. “No breath and no heartbeat,” the Doktor said. “No signs at all that this Jew is anything but dead.”
“That’s impossible!” Willem protested. “Look at him!” The dead Jew turned his gaze back to Willem, and Willem took a step backward. He had never before seen a gaze so….commanding, that held him and wouldn’t let go. The dead Jew opened his mouth and a sound came out, a breathless snarl of rage and malevolence. Willem felt himself being beckoned closer, pulled forward by some force. He took a step toward the dead Jew, and another, and another. The dead Jew bared his teeth. Had his canines been that long before? Had they been that sharp, tapering to needle-like points? The dead Jew opened his mouth wide as Willem leaned over him. A vein throbbed in Willem’s neck as he bent down toward the dead Jew’s waiting lips—
“STOP!”
Willem was suddenly grabbed from behind and torn away from the dead Jew. He sprawled across the floor and the room seemed to spin around him. He blinked his eyes clear and looked up at Doktor Muething, who now knelt beside him. Willem’s stomach heaved and he rapidly swallowed to keep from vomiting.
“Here,” the Doktor said as he pressed something into Willem’s hand. “Wear it around your neck. It will protect you.” Willem looked down at the object. It was a silver crucifix. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to give it to you before,” the Doktor went on. “I must be getting old, if such important details are escaping me.” Willem put the chain around his neck, and his stomach quieted almost immediately as he did so. Then he stood up and joined Doktor Muething beside the dead Jew. The Doktor wore a matching crucifix.
“Lord have mercy,” Willem said. The Doktor only nodded.
The dead Jew stared at them with wide eyes burning white. Its skin had gone the color of alabaster and those horrible canine teeth gleamed in the harsh light of the surgical lamps. The dead Jew slowly tested the restraints on each of his extremities and growled when it discovered its immobility.
“It worked,” the Doktor whispered. “More things on heaven and earth….”
“What have we done, Herr Doktor?”
“We have created.”
Willem tried to fathom just what they had created….and then the dead Jew let loose a smoldering cry of agony. Its body convulsed against the restraints, and its strength was such that they nearly broke. The dead Jew convulsed again and again, shrieking wildly each time. That scream reminded Willem of that of children receiving their first injections – but of course it was far, far worse. He winced and stepped back, but Doktor Muething stepped forward.
“What is happening?” the Doktor said. The dead Jew kept screaming, its convulsions becoming more and more violent. Willem stepped back up to the Doktor’s side and watched, his eyes wide in fascination and horror. Somehow this starved, weak, dead body was pushing the restraining straps to their absolute limits. It was inconceivable that it could be that strong.
“What if it breaks free?” Willem asked.
Doktor Muething glanced at the clock. “I have a way of dealing with that.”
Willem heard trucks rolling by outside and the distant whistle of an arriving train; the camp would now be coming to life for the day – but his attention was riveted to the dead Jew who thrashed violently against its bonds. A musty and pungent odor of rot and decay filled the laboratory. Willem remembered that smell from when he had accompanied Uncle Gunther to a village that had been stricken by influenza. It had been the smell of unburied dead bodies.
Then the dead Jew’s skin sank as though its body was aging forty years in minutes, and still it threw its weight against the bonds and glared at Willem and the Doktor with blazing eyes. His shrieks became even more horrible, and Willem covered his ears; and then the restraints finally buckled and gave way. The dead Jew’s arm was free. A giant lump formed in Willem’s throat as the dead Jew reached up with his free hand and tore the head restraint aside; after freeing its other hand the dead Jew rose to a sitting position and glared at Willem. It ripped its ankles free and leaned forward, as though preparing to spring.
Willem froze, utterly unable to move. The veins in his neck pulsated and a warm wetness trickled down his leg as he realized that Doktor Muething was no longer beside him. The dead Jew approached, baring those awful teeth. All the while its skin sank farther, taking on the mottled appearance of a person three days dead. The dead Jew circled Willem, shrieking again and again, coming no closer than a few feet as the crucifix became hot around Willem’s neck. Willem wanted to run, but the creature’s eyes kept him rooted to that spot as if his legs were no longer his own. The crucifix grew hotter and hotter, and Willem wanted nothing more than to tear it from his neck. The vein in his neck throbbed, his hand moved toward the crucifix that seared his flesh – and then the dead Jew was suddenly bathed in brilliant yellow light. It threw up its hands in front of its eyes and screamed anew, but this time in horror and agony. Willem looked to his left and saw that Doktor Muething had opened the shutters, allowing the light of the rising sun to stream into the laboratory. The dead Jew wailed and writhed upon the floor, and as Willem watched its skin turned gray, its eyes sank into its skull, its lips shriveled and its teeth turned black. Less than a minute later the dead Jew truly was dead; the corpse was a dried, desiccated thing that looked human only in its roughest shape. Quiet settled over the laboratory again, and Doktor Muething’s cuckoo clock signaled seven. Just like that it was all over. From outside could be heard loudspeakers blaring announcements, truck horns and engines, and the regular commotion of morning at Hamerstadt Concentration Camp. Willem looked at Doktor Muething, who was wiping his hands on a towel. He suddenly felt quite weak.
“You knew that would happen?” he asked. His voice felt very small.
“Not entirely.” The Doktor shook his head. “Something went wrong, that much is certain. He clearly suffered an adverse reaction to the drug.”
“An adverse reaction,” Willem echoed, not quite believing the Doktor’s choice of words.
“Quite adverse, wouldn’t you say?” The Doktor smiled. “I am so close, so very close….” His voice trailed off, and he rubbed his forehead before speaking again. “You should go clean yourself, Young Schliemann. Then I will take you to a place where you may find explanation. Be ready in one hour.”
Suddenly aware again of his damp undergarments, Willem nodded and headed outside. He had to stop before crossing the street. A column of prisoners was being marched by, single-file. All were Jews. Willem remembered the defiance, the grim determination that he had seen on Jewish faces when it had all begun, years before. Now there was no determination; there was only waiting, waiting for the end. The last of the prisoners, an emaciated old man, glanced at Willem, and for some reason Willem looked away. They weren’t human, so why should any of this matter? Finally they had all gone by, and Willem crossed the street and returned to his dormitory. He felt a strange sense of calm, so it was completely to his surprise that he vomited when he got to the washroom.
Continuing a serialization of a horror novelette. Part One here.
Willem arrived at precisely 4:53. He found Doktor Muething sleeping on a folding cot in the corner with a book in his hand. There were more open books and papers piled atop the Doktor’s desk, and the only light came from the desk lamp. In that dim light the surgical table cast an eerie shadow over half the room and the far wall. The place was quiet except for the Doktor’s light snoring.
Willem drew toward the glass cabinet with the formaldehyde-preserved specimens inside. There was a fetal pig, a cow’s eyeball, a partially vivisected frog. He had seen all of these things before, so he turned his attention to the desk and the books that lay there. Instead of medical journals and texts, he found books of European folklore. Some of the titles were familiar; Uncle Gunther had owned copies for his pleasure reading. Why were they here?
He glanced down then at the floor beside the desk. Sitting open there was a black medicine bag, also just like Uncle Gunthers although Willem supposed that all medicine bags looked alike. He peered into the bag without touching it. There were various medical instruments – scalpels, forceps, a stethoscope – neatly secured in leather pouches. There was a small book in the bag. In the shadows he could not quite make out the lettering on the spine, but he could see that the title started with ‘V’. And there were two vials, each stoppered and labeled. Willem wondered what was in those vials, and he extended a hand down to draw one of them out….
CUCKOO!!!
Willem jumped back with a startled gasp. He hadn’t noticed the tiny cuckoo clock that hung on the wall above the door. The clock sounded five, and Doktor Muething awoke.
“Is that you, Young Schliemann? Ah, good!” The Doktor stood up. “And you are on time. Wonderful.” He strode past Willem and stuck his head out the door. “Bring the subject in, please,” he said to whomever was out there. Willem heard a muffled “Yes, sir” as Doktor Muething closed the door and turned back inside. “So, what new rumors about me today? I’m sure you’ve heard some whisperings by now. At dinner, perhaps?”
Willem considered being politic and denying it, but he chose otherwise. “You’re trying to cross a Jew with a monkey.”
“At the expense of the monkey, I assume,” the Doktor said with a scowl. “I’ve heard that one before. Not one of my favorites.” At that moment there was some commotion from outside. The door swung open, admitting two soldiers who dragged an unconscious prisoner between them. It was one of the six Jews from earlier. The Jew had been recently beaten; his face was heavily bruised and he was bleeding from several cuts.
“I’m sure the beating was justified,” the Doktor said.
“Inflicting punishment on the enemies of the Fatherland is always justified.” This came from Commandant Reger, who had just stepped in behind the two soldiers. His jacket was unbuttoned, his shirt collar loose – he had just risen himself.
“Put him on the table,” Doktor Muething said to the two soldiers. “Restrain him, also. Young Schliemann, in the bottom drawer of that bureau you will find a selection of appropriate clothing. Now, Commandant” – he turned to glare at Reger – “I seem to recall making clear that their blood was not to be spilled and their teeth were to be intact. Will you be ignoring all of my directives?”
Willem opened the drawer and selected a smock and gloves, trying not to appear as if he was listening.
“I believe you will find that my men left his canines undamaged.”
“And that,” the Doktor snapped, “is the most of my worries.”
Willem put on the smock as the two soldiers finished restraining the unconscious Jew. Then they returned to the door, behind the Commandant.
“Shall I stay and watch the proceedings,” Reger said.
“I doubt very much that you want to stay and watch the proceedings,” the Doktor said as he pulled on his own smock.
“Touche,” Reger said. “Good luck then, Herr Doktor.” He escorted the two soldiers outside, closing the door behind him.
“Contemptible man,” the Doktor muttered. “Jew or otherwise, death is not a plaything.” He pulled on a pair of gloves and turned to the unconscious Jew, who had been carefully restrained with wire-and-leather straps at the wrists, ankles, waist, and forehead. “Take a closer look. Tell me what you see.”
Willem stepped closer to the Jew and looked the man over. “What I see?” he asked.
“What you see,” Doktor Muething repeated. He was filling a syringe from a large glass bottle of clear fluid. “Describe him, as you would any patient.”
Willem nodded. He had done this for his uncle many times, after all. “This is an adult male, middle aged. There are beginning symptoms of malnutrition. His skin appears to be infected in places – there are lesions which have not received proper attention. A number of bruises and wounds around his upper head and torso indicate that he was recently beaten. He has suffered direct injury to his jaws; examination of his teeth—”
“That won’t be necessary,” Doktor Muething said as he came over, the syringe in his hand. “Will you please administer this? In the arm will do.” He held the syringe out to Willem.
“What is it?” Willem asked as he took it.
“A soporific. I want to see your technique.”
Willem had administered injections before, under Uncle Gunther’s watchful eye. He bent over the Jew and saw that the man’s gaunt condition made his veins easily visible. He pinched a fold of skin on the inside of the Jew’s elbow, and just like that a blue vein appeared. He slid the needle into the vein and depressed the plunger.
“Well done,” Doktor Muething said as Willem withdrew the needle. “Now, monitor him,” the Doktor said. “It won’t take long.” He handed Willem the stethoscope from around his neck.
Willem felt again the pinch of realization. “That drug will kill him, won’t it?”
Doktor Muething nodded. “I found that drug in Africa – frightful place, I’m glad it only took a few months – and I spent a great deal of time and effort at Trilenska refining it.” Trilenska was another concentration camp. “It will slowly halt his respiration. When that happens death will follow within seconds, and at that moment you must alert me. There is a moment, you see, between life and death when he will be both and neither.” He turned away then, back to the desk and the black satchel. Reaching in, he pulled out one of the flasks of dark liquid. Willem monitored the Jew’s slowing heartbeat as the Doktor filled another syringe from the flask. The heartbeat became slower, slower, slower….
“I think he will be gone soon.” The words caught in Willem’s throat. Uncle Gunther had said so many times: “Our work is preserving life if it is possible, or making it bearable if it is not.” And yet he had just ended a life – a Jewish life, but a life nonetheless. He felt sick.
Doktor Muething came over and listened to the Jew’s chest. “Yes, he is almost gone,” the Doktor said in a very low voice. He stood back up and came around the table, to stand next to Willem. There they stood looking on the dead Jew.
Willem had seen old people dead of age, adults dead of accidents, children dead of things in the water. Again he heard his uncle’s voice: “You must always accept death, but if you ever become accustomed to it, you must put aside your instruments for your useful days as a doktor are over.” Willem blinked. How could he ever become accustomed to this?
“Death is the last phase of life, young Schliemann,” Doktor Muething said. “Always think of it thus, and it will never defeat you.” With that, he took the dead Jew’s arm, found a vein, and injected the body with the dark fluid in the syringe. Then he handed the spent syringe to Willem and began administering compressions to the dead Jew’s chest.
Willem stared, confused. “Are you bringing him back?”
The Doktor paused compressions as he considered the question. “No,” he said. “Diverting him on his journey.” Satisfied at his own answer he resumed the compressions. “Move around the other side, young Schliemann. You won’t be able to see from where you are now.”
Willem came around to the opposite side of the table. He was struck just then by the Jew’s pallid coloration. This man had been dying for years, as had thousands of his brothers.
“That should be enough,” the Doktor said suddenly as he stopped compressions and stepped away from the body. “Now time will tell.” He walked around the laboratory and closed the shutters on all the windows, completely obscuring any light from outside.
Precautions for what? And why the secrecy of shuttering the windows? Willem wondered as he leaned over the dead Jew and studied the man’s features. He had learned long ago that every person died with a different expression. Some looked serene when they died, others looked frightened. How could he describe the expression on the Jew’s face? It certainly wasn’t serenity that he saw there. Anger? Fear? Resignation? Defiance? Willem couldn’t tell at all.
And then the dead Jew opened his eyes and met Willem’s gaze.
This is a horror story I wrote more than five years ago. The concept behind the tale is most definitely the most horrific I’ve done thus far, and I’m still unsure of the moral point behind the story; I write here about people who commit acts of great evil for reasons that turn out to possibly be not quite so evil after all. It’s a long story, so I’m going to serialize it, one installment each week, over eight weeks. While the story never sold, each of its rejection slips bore the consolation-prize of a hand-scrawled note from an editor saying “Wow, almost good enough.” That surprised me greatly, since I could never make up my own mind about this tale. But here it is.
Willem Schliemann extends a shaking hand toward one of his six remaining African violets. This plant hasn’t blossomed in months, and he wonders why. The truth is that he isn’t very good at this. He whispers an expletive as he hears the truck engine outside. He grabs his cane and heads for the door.
“Good morning, Senor,” Miguel says as Willem walks out onto the porch. Miguel goes around back of the pickup truck and begins unloading Willem’s weekly supplies. He puts two crates on the porch and stops to wipe his brow. “Senor, how can you wear long sleeves today?”
“The warmth appeals to me,” Willem Schliemann says with a shrug. “Though I admit that I will never truly be used to sun and heat in December.”
“You’ve been here fifty years.”
“Fifty-four,” Willem says. Fifty-four years since he last saw the Fatherland, though no one calls it that now.
“Perhaps that is why your flowers do not bloom.” Miguel grins and wipes his brow again. “I’ll see you next week, Senor Schliemann. Oh, your mail.” He hands Willem a pack of mail tied with a string, and then he gets back in the dusty old pickup and drives away down the narrow dirt road. Willem breathes in the warm breeze from the Atlantic. He thumbs through his correspondence. A few bills, letters he exchanges with people around the world – none bearing his real name, of course. Argentines don’t question such things. He finds a letter from a particularly engaging correspondent, and he smiles. Then he sees the postcard on the bottom of the stack.
The card shows a place Willem remembers with perfect clarity through fifty-four years, a lifetime, of memories. The front gates of the concentration camp at Hamerstadt. There on the left is the spot where he stood at attention that morning. The grass is green, the paint on the buildings is flaking – but it is the same place. He waits for the chill to run through him, but nothing comes. Has it been too long? He turns the card over and reads where a feminine hand has written in German, “I have finally found you.” There is no signature. One is not needed.
Old Willem Schliemann looks up at the bright morning sky. He knows that she will be here tonight. Willem sighs, puts the mail aside, and goes about putting his supplies away. As he does so he glances at his stubborn violets.
Some blossoms are more delicate than others….
Willem Schliemann stood at attention near the front gate. His new uniform, stiff and scratchy and at least a size too big, hung loosely on his slight frame. His head still itched from being shaved three days before. Thirty other new conscripts stood with him, waiting in the cold April air for….something. Flecks of ash fluttered down from the sky like snowflakes, ash from the great smokestack that towered above the giant foundry building that was not really a foundry. Somewhere behind them Willem could hear a train arriving.
“Attention!”
Commandant Gerhard Reger looked over his conscripts with a disgusted expression as a staff car pulled up in front of the phalanx. A man climbed out of the car’s back seat, and the Commandant turned to face him. “Herr Doktor,” Reger said. “A pleasure.”
“I’m sure,” the man said. Willem leaned slightly to one side to get a better look at this man. He was short, shorter than Willem. His black hair was slicked straight back and his thin lips were set in a tight frown. He wore a thick black overcoat with a sable collar, and a swastika-shaped lapel pin. He placed a pince-nez on his nose and looked over the conscripts. “Such a fine crop, Commandant. Our thousand-year Empire is now in the hands of sixteen-year-old boys.” He ignored the look of disgust on Reger’s face as he returned the pince-nez to his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, which he handed to the Commandant. “This is the one I require,” he said. “I trust I have not picked a boy to whom you have formed….an attachment?”
Willem watched as Commandant Reger met the man’s gaze. He was close to the front and could hear what was being said, but even the soldiers in the very back row could not have missed the look of utter loathing in the Commandant’s eye. Reger faced the conscripts again and yelled out the name on the paper.
“WILLEM SCHLIEMANN! STEP FORWARD!”
Swallowing, Willem stepped forward and walked to the front of the line, where he returned to attention as the man, this Doktor, came down and looked him over. He smelled faintly of lavender.
“An honor,” the man said. “Please, come along.” He gestured for Willem to come with him. “You are assigned to me now.”
Willem glanced at the Commandant, who gave a single, curt nod. Willem joined the Doktor and climbed into the warmth of the staff car as a young soldier who was not much older than himself held the door open. When the driver was back behind the wheel the Doktor rapped twice on the forward window with his truncheon. The driver nodded, put the car in gear, and drove. Willem looked out the windows as they passed through the camp. There were many guards presiding over the comings and goings of hundreds of emaciated, prisoners. More than once he saw two soldiers dragging a dead body between them. The Doktor sipped from a flask and shook his head.
“Somehow I suspect our solution is not so final after all,” he said. “In the end, there are still more Jews than Nazis.”
“In the end?” Willem asked, surprising himself by speaking.
The Doktor nodded. “Italy is no longer with us. The Russians failed to oblige us by simply giving up. We have already lost France, and Hirohito hasn’t been able to command the total attention of the Americans. And, of course, the British….well, there it is.”
“There is still hope,” Willem said.
The Doktor eyed Willem suspiciously. “Fill an empty bag with hope, and you have an empty bag.” He capped the flask and returned it to his pocket. “My name is Wolf Muething. I am a physician by trade, although in recent years my work has gone in other directions.” He sighed. “I chose you because of your experience working with your uncle.”
Willem glanced sharply at the Doktor. “How do you know that?”
“He was my friend,” Doktor Muething said. “We were in school together, many years ago. I was very sad to hear of his passing.”
Willem nodded and looked away, mostly to hide the fresh tears welling up. He had been five years old when his father died and he’d gone to live and work with Uncle Gunther. Since then he had spent his days traveling with his uncle to the villages and farms all around the region. Willem had helped deliver babies, set broken bones, and tend to the dying. He had done everything that a country doktor would, and he had always supposed that he would become a physician himself.
Then, just six weeks before today, he had been at Uncle Gunther’s side, treating an elderly woman with rickets. Gunther complained of chest pains, and hours later he was dead. Uncle Gunther had been old, but he had never been sick for more than a day or two. The shock of his passing was compounded two weeks later by his conscription into the Army….and now he was apparently assigned to another physician. Looking at Doktor Muething, with his black hair and severe look that was the complete opposite of Uncle Gunther’s, Willem suspected somehow that he would not be delivering babies or setting broken bones.
Minutes later they arrived at their destination. Willem looked out the window at the small, low building. “Here we are,” Doktor Muething said. “Your new quarters will be over there.” He pointed to the dormitories across the street. These looked somewhat better than the mass quarters he had shared with the several hundred other new conscripts – if any housing in such a setting could ever be described as nice. “Come,” the Doktor said. “I would have a look at what they have built for us.” He waited for the driver to come open the door and then he climbed out, followed by Willem. He led the way up five stairs and inside.
It was a small medical laboratory. Clean, Willem noticed, definitely clean. The place still smelled like fresh paint, plywood and plaster; the stainless steel examination table in the center of the room gleamed in the sunlight that streamed in through the large windows. But as Willem looked closer he could see spots where the paint was too thick or too thin, where the wall panels didn’t fit together quite correctly, where electrical wiring was exposed. Another disposable building.
“Not bad for construction performed at gunpoint,” Doktor Muething said. “It won’t take me long to put things in order.”
Willem looked around at the rest of the laboratory, which wasn’t much bigger than the room where Uncle Gunther had based his practice. He now saw that the examination table was outfitted for surgical procedures as well. A cabinet on the right was stocked with chemicals and specimens preserved in formaldehyde. There was a packed bookcase, and between the bookcase and the cabinet there was a roll-top desk. Willem approached the surgical table. It was not as pristine as it had first appeared. Its surface was dull and scratched, and although it had been meticulously cleaned since its last use no amount of scrubbing could remove all the traces of blood from the collection grooves.
“You probably didn’t use a table like this, working for Gunther,” Doktor Muething observed.
“No,” Willem said.
“It should make you proud, having such an opportunity to help the Fatherland.” He took off his overcoat and hung it on the back of the chair in front of the roll-top desk. He was wearing a double-breasted charcoal-gray suit, and now he wore no swastika pin.
“I am honored to work for the glory of Germany,” Willem said.
The Doktor laughed, and Willem’s cheeks turned a bright crimson. What had he said that was funny?
“Forgive me,” the Doktor said. “I am an old man, and I have seen the Might of Germany plowed under twice in one lifetime.” He settled into the chair, the legs of which squeaked. “What we do here is not for Germany. What we do here, is for the betterment of Man. Out there”—he made a sweeping gesture—“the masses will not approve of what we do. They will hate it, condemn it, and some will try even to deny it. But they will benefit. We must learn what we can. Do you understand?”
Willem drew himself up straight. “You speak treason, Herr Doktor.”
“Hardly. Germany will survive; I merely question the form in which it shall be. Perhaps on that day we will be a wiser people.” He pushed himself up from the chair, walked over to the surgical table, and ran a finger down one of the blood-grooves. “Tell me, young Schliemann – are you a man of science?”
Willem shifted on his feet as he considered the question. Doktor Muething smiled.
“You are thinking,” he said. “Good. We haven’t driven you totally to automatic sentiments and easy platitudes.”
“I don’t understand the question, Herr Doktor.”
“And that, young Schliemann, is the beginning of wisdom.” Doktor Muething smiled. “There was a time, once, when the standard treatment for disease was prayer. It was thought that all maladies were caused by evil spirits, and that only God could restore health to an afflicted body. But centuries of science have taught us otherwise. What God would afflict, we can now put right.” He leaned against the table. “So much of what we have learned has come at the expense of the dead. What does this tell you, young Schliemann? What question should arise now, if you are truly of science?”
Willem thought for a moment. “Is there a limit to what the dead can teach us.”
Doktor Muething nodded. “And if the answer to that question is ‘yes’?”
The answer came as quickly as before, but Willem hesitated before saying it. “Then I would ask what we may learn from the living.”
“Precisely,” the Doktor said, and then he addressed someone behind Willem. “Are they here, Commandant?”
“Yes, Herr Doktor.”
Willem hadn’t heard Commandant Reger enter, but there he stood, waiting patiently in the doorway.
“Good,” Doktor Muething said. “Let us see them.”
Willem and the Doktor followed Commandant Reger outside, where six prisoners stood at attention under the watchful eye of eight rifle-wielding guards. Two guards would be enough, Willem thought, judging by the look of the prisoners. Doktor Muething stepped up and looked over each prisoner. There were four men and two women. Each had that sunken look of hunger, and each wore the yellow Star of David stitched to their ratty prison clothes.
“All Jews?” the Doktor asked. “No Gypsies or other undesirables?”
“All Jews,” the Commandant replied icily. “You were quite specific.”
Doktor Muething bid one of the male prisoners to open his mouth, and then he examined the man’s teeth. “Healthy enough, I suppose.”
He has a strange idea of health, Willem thought as the Doktor moved on to the two women. He very briefly looked over the older of the two, but he lingered on the younger. “Might I see your eyes, child?” the Doktor said as he lifted her chin with a single finger. As her head rose, her gaze flicked ever so briefly to Willem’s. There was no fear in her eyes, only quiet resignation. In health she would have been lovely, Willem thought. Even for a Jew.
The Doktor stepped away from the prisoners. “These will do.”
“You are truly a charitable man, Herr Doktor,” the Commandant said, making no effort to look at Doktor Muething as he addressed him.
Doktor Muething waved a hand. “Charity is hostility with an open hand,” he said. “Young Schliemann, we will begin tomorrow morning at precisely five o’clock. I assume that Gunther taught you punctuality?”
Willem nodded. Uncle Gunther had always carried three watches to ensure that he would never be late for anything. One of those watches was now Willem’s; he had inherited it along with Uncle Gunther’s stethoscope, the last proud artifacts from the life of a poor country doktor.
Well, the winners were announced today in the Buffalo News‘s short story contest, and my winning streak has ended at one. Oh well…I can’t even get angry at the winner, since it turns out that he and I both work for the same company, but mark my words: next year I shall crush all comers like half-rotted pistachio nuts! Even more sadly, my submission wasn’t even chosen to be one of the five entries that are still alive for the “Reader’s Choice” thing, but that’s OK, since I’ve got a blog and I can therefore award my own tale the “Best Flash Fiction meeting the Requirements of the 2008 Contest Award EVER So Put That In Your Pipe and Smoke It You Goobers” Award. Huzzah!
Ahem…
Anyway, here’s my entry. The requirements were these: no longer than 600 words, the story must be set in Western NY, and must include a man, a woman, and “a job offer”. My tale is based on the Native American legend of the Maid of the Mist. Enjoy. I rather like the way this one turned out; I gravitate toward ambiguous tales of magic.
Handing her a cup of tea, he asked: “You said you have a job for me?”
The old woman nodded. “A woodcarving project that my husband started just before he died.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t do much carving anymore,” he said. “It’s getting hard to hold a chisel.” He rubbed his arthritic fingers.
“You carved that,” she said, gesturing to the item on the mantelpiece behind her. “I saw it at the Fair last month. I knew when I saw it that you were the one for this job.”
He lowered his head. “I didn’t want to enter it at all. My son made me do it.”
“I’m glad he did,” she replied, approaching the figurine on the mantel. Eight inches long: a Native American woman in a white birch canoe. Intricate carvings of animals along the sides; her gaze turned upward into the sky…or beyond. “I doubt Lelawala had red hair,” she said.
The man sighed. “Artistic license. She’s only a legend.”
She smiled. “Maybe not. My grandmother always claimed her as an ancestor.” She glanced at the framed photograph next to the carving, a photograph of a red-haired girl. “But it is a likeness, isn’t it?”
The old woman’s eyes compelled an answer, and he nodded. “Yes.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“She died?”
“Last February,” he said. “It’s been hard.” He didn’t mention that her middle name had been Lelawala, or that he and his wife had met on the Maid of the Mist.
The woman brushed away a tear. “I had a son, once.” She ran a finger along the wooden boat’s painted gunwales. “I want you to carve this. Just the canoe. I need it finished by the next first day of Spring.”
“Why then?”
“Because it has to be then. Will you do it?”
“By Spring? That’s six months–“
“I didn’t mention that the canoe is life-size,” she cut in.
He gaped. “Life size?”
“Can you do it?”
He swallowed. Again her eyes compelled him, and he nodded. She smiled and drained her teacup. “I will call you with the arrangements. Thank you.”
After she was gone, he wondered why he agreed. He would wonder that often, all the rest of his years.
The six months he had were just enough. Finally on the first day of Spring he met her on Grand Island, at sunrise, amidst the swirling mists, at the edge of the water, as she had instructed. She was so much more frail now: the result of age and leukemia. He knew what was to happen now, of course. He’d long since figured that out.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I can’t watch.”
Her only reply was to kiss him on the cheek, and then she climbed into the boat and began paddling away from shore. The current was slow at first, but it would become soon become inexorable. He stood there watching as the mists closed about her. At the very last, a beam of young sunlight shot through and made her hair appear as though fiery red.
“Lelawala!” he shouted, but no response came. The mists closed and she was gone.
There were few tourists on Goat Island that early. It was cold and foggy, and the water was still choked with winter ice. Some thought they saw a boat, but in the fog no one could be sure, save one German tourist whose camera caught a glimpse of a red-haired maiden in the mist, riding a canoe into the embrace of mighty Niagara, the thundering waters bringing her home.
I was looking through some older files on the old hard drive, and I found this story that I’d forgotten, despite the fact that I excerpted it on this blog…exactly three years ago today, believe it or not. Anyway, here’s the tale in its entirety. It’s long, as many of my stories used to be, but I like the way it turned out.
Rose Barnstone laid awake for a while, and when the bells of Old Presbyterian rang one o’clock, she shook the man beside her.
“Time to go, Enoch,” she said.
Enoch Spencer grumbled and rolled over. “Maybe I should just tell Edna the truth,” he said. “Save us all some trouble.” Then he laughed.
“Yeah, you do that,” Rose said. “And miss my company? I don’t think so.”
“Now, Rose,” Enoch said as he got up and pulled on his shirt and pants. “Edna and I don’t have what you and I have.”
“Is that a fact?” Rose raised an eyebrow as she pulled on her faded men’s shirt and overalls. “Well, it’s a good thing we’re doing things this way, because I would never marry a cheating miner like you.”
He laughed at that as he finished pulling on his shoes. “See you tomorrow night,” he said before leaving her room. Rose waited a few minutes and then went downstairs herself.
“Evenin’, Miss Rose,” Isaac said when she came into the bar. Isaac – “Big” Isaac to everyone else in town – was Rose’s helper around the Lambert. “I figured you’d go to bed and finish all this tomorrow. I can close up.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Rose lied. “Feel like taking him home?” She gestured to the stool at the corner of the bar, where as usual for this time of night Old Mordecai Franks was asleep.
“Don’ I always?” Isaac said as he walked over and gave Mordecai a shove. “Night’s over, Mord. Time to go.”
As always, it took about five minutes of prodding before Old Mordecai got up. “Fine, fine. Stop touchin’ me. Jesus.” Mordecai squinted at Isaac, as if seeing him for the first time. “Jesus, with you?”
“It’s me every night, Mord. Come on.”
“One more for the road, Rose? Least you can do before I go off with Blackie, here…” He didn’t even wait for Rose to say no; he just grumbled all the way outside as Isaac followed. Same routine, every night.
Alone in the bar, Rose glanced at her reflection in the mirror behind the rows of whiskey bottles. Shaking her head at the woman in the mirror, a woman whose face had too many lines and whose nose was a bit too slightly crooked and whose shoulder-length hair had a bit too much gray mixed in with the brown for a woman of thirty years, she picked up a cloth and began the last cleanup of this night. Right about now Enoch would be sliding into bed with his wife while she was cleaning glasses.
Rose stifled a yawn as she finished dicing the potatoes and divided them between the two stew-pots. Then she rinsed off the knife and started cutting the leeks, yawned again, and slid the knife across her left index finger. She had said five words that no respectable woman would say before she noticed Isaac standing there.
“You okay, Miss Rose?”
“Hell, I’m fine,” she said. “Just a little blood in the stew today.”
Isaac grinned. “A cook shouldn’t fear no blood in the pot. Gives the cookin’ some character.”
“Your momma had enough character for five counties,” Rose said as she pumped some water and ran it over her bleeding finger. “Need something, Isaac?”
“Well, I was fixin’ those eaves out front and a man came up. Drivin’ a truck. He asked to talk to the owner, and I told him that’s you, and he’s waitin’ at the bar.”
“All right,” she said. Isaac nodded and left. Rose tore a piece of cloth off a sheet she kept around in the kitchen for just this purpose and wrapped her finger in it, and then she went out front to see the salesman. There were more of them these days, passing through Corley’s Crossing on their way to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or Baltimore. Nobody came to Corley’s Crossing except to go through it to someplace else.
This salesman was sitting on Mordecai’s stool, with whatever he was selling in a wooden crate on the stool next to him. Rose pursed her lips as she looked at him. He didn’t look like the other salesmen. For one thing he wore no tie – just a collarless shirt that he wore open at the top, like the one Rose wore except it was a damn sight cleaner, plain dark pants and worn shoes that looked like he’d never given a single thought to shining them. He wore no hat and he was reading a book. Rose cleared her throat and approached him from behind the bar. He looked up from his book and smiled.
“Hello! Are you the owner of this establishment?”
Establishment? That’s quite the word, Rose thought. He was handsome, in a way, with a prominent chin and sand-colored hair that was casually combed and – the most piercingly green eyes Rose had ever seen.
“Yes, I am,” Rose said. “Welcome to the Lambert.” She reminded herself to smile, and she blushed with embarrassment over her appearance – not that it was any different from usual, not that she hadn’t talked to salesmen before dressed the same way, and not that he hadn’t talked himself to barkeeps in old shirts and overalls before.
“I’ll bet you don’t get too many salesmen,” he said, offering his hand. Rose took it, and his grip was strong. “This town is sure off the beaten track.”
“We like it that way,” Rose said.
“I’m sure. My name is Daniel. May I have yours?”
Daniel. Somehow it fit him, although Rose had no idea why or how.
“Rose. Rose Barnstone.”
“Barnstone…that’s a pretty name.”
“I guess so,” Rose said. “Can I help you?”
“I’ve been in a lot of towns like this,” the man named Daniel said. “Places no one knows except the people who live there, people who never leave or if they do they come back before long. Places that the rest of the world doesn’t know about, and you don’t want them to know about it so you don’t tell them.”
Rose looked at him for a moment. What he said was true; nobody ever left Corley’s Crossing except by dying, and nobody ever came there except by being born. She chuckled. “Daniel, you have the strangest sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”
“That wasn’t my sales pitch,” Daniel said, holding Rose’s gaze. She felt a bit strange, suddenly, and reached up with her hand to finger the top of her overalls bib in a gesture of sudden, reflexive modesty. His gaze was strangely intense, and it made her feel…naked.
“What are you selling?” she finally asked.
He smiled, less intensely. “Beer,” he said. “A brew that I think you and your customers will enjoy and appreciate – and it will bring in even more customers, I guarantee it.” He pulled a brown-glass beer bottle from the crate on the stool beside him and handed it to Rose. There was no label on it, just a glass relief image on it of a cross topped by a triangle.
“I have plenty of beer,” Rose said. “And the miners who come in here to drink tend to like whiskey more.”
“That’s because they haven’t tried Old Prospero’s,” Daniel said. “Go on. Taste it.”
“It’s not even cold.”
“With Old Prospero’s, it won’t matter. This is special stuff.”
Rose gazed at Daniel for a minute, wondering if this was some kind of joke. Then she leaned over and pried the top off the bottle. It was surprisingly cold, which she chalked up to it being a fairly cool autumn day, and she poured some of the beer into a glass.
The first thing that struck her was the beer’s color. The stuff she always served came two ways: so dark as to be almost black, or the yellow color of pale straw. This beer, though, was a deep gold or almost copper color, like an old coin or Father’s old pocket watch, as it had looked when she’d polished it and buried it with him. In the light of the bar, fairly dim even though it was late morning, the beer almost seemed to glow. Of course, anything could look pretty. She lifted the glass to her nose and sniffed. It had that grain smell that all beer had, but this was different; the aroma was so fresh that it made Rose think of a wheat field on a warm summer day.
And then she sipped it.
Her mouth was filled at once with what felt like a hundred different flavors, every one of them in perfect balance with all the others. There was wheat, pure and clean. There was the cleansing taste of the freshest water, like snowmelt on a day in late winter. She tasted strawberries and cherries, apples and cinnamon, maple and honey. She closed her eyes as she swallowed, and as it went down a feeling of glowing warmth spread through her body, all the way down to her toes and all the way up to her scalp. The she opened her eyes again, and when she did it was as if all the furnishings in the bar had been restored to their original luster and all the windows thrown open to let in the spring’s first sunlight. Rose took another sip, and as she did so she wondered if this was how the Lambert had looked on the day her father had first opened the doors. Even the air smelled better: the years of dust from the miners’ bodies and smoke from their cigarettes and pipes were gone, replaced by the tangy aroma of the stew simmering in the kitchen and the pine of the bar.
She took another swallow, and then another. She wanted the feeling from the Old Prospero’s to continue…and then the bottle was empty, before she even knew it.
“Oh my,” she finally said.
Daniel grinned. “Do you like it?”
Rose looked at him. “It’s amazing,” she said.
“That it is,” Daniel said. “I’ve seen longshoremen at the docks get drunk on Old Prospero’s faster than the strongest whiskey. But it’s a good drunk. You’ll never have a fight in here while you’re serving this.”
Rose nodded. Fights didn’t happen often in the Lambert, but they did happen.
“So,” Daniel said, “is there a market for Old Prospero’s in Corley’s Crossing?”
Rose looked into Daniel’s green eyes. He was smiling again.
“I think so,” she said.
“Good!” He reached into his back pocket and took out a small pad and pencil. “Will six cases be enough? or should we make it eight?”
Rose was considering that very question when the front door swung open, and three women walked in. Rose went rigid at the sight of them. It was strange enough that women would come into the Lambert at all, let alone these three – but then, maybe it wasn’t that strange. The woman in front, and the leader of this trio, was Edna Spencer. Enoch’s wife.
They were dressed in the Sunday best, of course. Edna’s floral-print dress was in perfect proportion, with its ankle-length skirt and lace collar and cuffs. Her tasteful, white hat bore a single yellow carnation. Her two friends – Alice Stewart and Mabel York, without whom Edna never went anywhere unless she was with Enoch – were dressed equally nicely, and each woman held a handbag with a strong, two-handed grip. Yes, they were the picture of “proper”, or as close as could be found in Corley’s Crossing.
“Hello, Edna,” Rose said. She glanced at Daniel, who had reopened his book and was trying to look like he was reading.
“I don’t recall that we are on a first-name basis, Miss Barnstone,” Edna said in that accent that she had perfected over the years, ridding herself of that Appalachian twang for no apparent reason, since Edna never left Corley’s Crossing. “I understand that you have been enjoying my husband’s company for some time. I’m here to ask you to stop.”
Rose shifted on her feet.
“He doesn’t love you, Miss Barnstone. If he has been…enjoying you for hedonistic reasons, you should know that love has nothing to do with it.”
Rose wondered if Edna had found out from Enoch or from someone else. Probably from someone else. Enoch did not have the guts to tell anyone on his own.
“You see, Miss Barnstone,” Edna went on, “Enoch could never love a person like you.”
Daniel gave a sigh that was barely audible. For some reason, Rose glanced down at the empty glass that had contained the Old Prospero’s, before she’d consumed it. The feeling of light-headed warmth came rushing back all at once. She put her shoulders back and crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s funny, Edna,” Rose said. “You’ve never been any farther from Corley’s Crossing than New Sedgwick, and your brother’s accent is the same as it’s always been.”
Edna opened her mouth, but said nothing. She hadn’t expected anything like this.
Rose went on. “If Enoch suddenly decided last night that you can actually satisfy him, then good for you. I guess you’ve been practicing more than your accent.”
Now Edna’s cheeks went red, while her two partners acted appropriately shocked at the very idea.
Rose smiled sweetly, feeling lighter than air. “You should worry more about Enoch than about me, Edna. After all, there’s a reason he came to me. Now, ladies, unless you want to buy a drink—”
Now Edna’s eyes flashed in what for a proper lady passed for rage, and she spun on her heels and walked out without waiting for her friends. Edna was a teetotaler, and she had tried many times to make Enoch into one as well, but it had never taken. “Good day to you, Mrs. Spencer,” Rose called after her, though she was well out of earshot by now. Then she laughed out loud.
Daniel smiled. “You were the picture of strength just now,” he said.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Normally I’d have just kept nodding until she left.” She put the empty glass under the bar. “I guess Enoch won’t be coming around tonight.”
“Do you love this man?” Daniel asked.
Rose stopped and stared at him. It was a strange question to receive from a beer salesman, and Daniel had a strange look in his eye.
“No,” Rose said. “He’s just a cheating miner.”
“I know the kind,” Daniel said. His voice sounded slightly angry now. “A rose is not a dandelion, and should not be treated as such.” He shook his head then, and just like that the dark look was gone from his eye. “Eight cases of Old Prospero’s, eh? I’ll deliver it in three days. It has been a pleasure, Rose.” He smiled again, but this smile was businesslike, perfunctory. It had none of the warmth from before.
“Thank you,” Rose said as Daniel left the bar. She watched him stand on the step outside, gazing strangely into the distance. Then he made a single motion with his hand, as if brushing away a fly, before he descended the step and left entirely. For several minutes after that she stood there, absently running her cloth over the same section of the bar. She wondered if she had said something wrong, something that had offended him. She also waited for the last bit of the buzz from the Old Prospero’s to fade.
“You OK, Miss Rose?”
“What? Oh, Isaac – I’m fine.” Just a little tired….
“Good,” Isaac said as he moved past her to get to the basement door and head down there to do…something or other. Rose suddenly remembered the stew she’d left cooking on the stove, and she ran to the kitchen. It was as she was adding herbs to the mixture that she heard the siren.
It was the gigantic siren from the coal mine, and it could be heard almost ten miles away, although it was only a mile and a half from Corley’s Crossing, up on the side of Grant Mountain. The siren sounded twice a day, to mark the arrival of the miners in the morning and their quitting time at night. Rose glanced at the clock on her wall. The siren never sounded at two-thirty in the afternoon, except for one reason. Rose shivered. She knew well why the siren would sound during the day. It hadn’t happened in almost a year, which was almost a record. She stopped stirring the stew and listened instead to the siren. Then Isaac came into the kitchen, and he too heard it.
“Lord have mercy,” he said.
“Too late for that,” Rose said with a sigh. “Help me get things ready, Isaac. Looks like we’re having a wake here tonight.”
“I wonder who it was,” Isaac said.
Rose said nothing. She wasn’t sure how, but she knew that it was Enoch Spencer at the bottom of the cave-in.
Enoch had been working in one of the older shafts, one they were getting ready to close down. He’d been on his way out when he’d gone back. Nobody knew why. Maybe he’d left something behind…but he’d gone back alone, despite the rule against it. And that had been that: no sooner had he walked beyond the first bend than the tunnel ceiling had given way. It was what the miners called a “quick-and-hopeless”.
When a miner died, that very night was always the wake, held at the Lambert where two generations of miners had come to drink after emerging from the earth. As Rose served the drinks at Enoch’s wake, she kept thinking about him and if he might still be alive somewhere down there, lying in the darkness with his lungs filling with dust and his body sweltering from the heat. They all told her it was a quick-and-hopeless, but still she wondered. She also wondered if this was the way Edna had wanted to get her wish about Rose no longer sleeping with him.
They dug him out the next day. It had apparently been a very strange cave-in: very small and confined to the one spot where Enoch had been. The structure shoring up the tunnel, though very old, was still sound leading up to that place, and it was still apparently standing beyond that spot. It turned out that while it was definitely hopeless, it was anything but quick. The cave-in had allowed some seepage of water, though no one knew from where, and the water had slowly filled the cavity in which Enoch was trapped, head-down. The space around his head had slowly filled with water and drowned him. If he had been able to move, or even lift his head a few inches, he might have lived long enough to be dug out. Everyone in Corley’s Crossing knew that death in the mines could be a matter of inches, but this was the closest anyone could remember.
The funeral was two days later, on a Saturday. It was held at Old Presbyterian, where Rose had not set foot since her father’s passing eight years before. Rose didn’t care for how her dress fit these days, but it was all she had and no one would really see her in it anyway since she’d only stand at the very back of the church.
While Reverend Holton went through his motions, not one of which had ever made any sense to her, she looked over the people filling the pews, most of whom only knew Enoch by name, if even that, but you always came out for a miner. Rose knew that Edna was up there somewhere, flanked by Alice and Mabel. Of course Edna would dab at her eyes with her handkerchief every moment or two, perhaps even shed a tear for appearances’ sake, but mostly she would either stare at the coffin or at the crucifix upon the front wall. After about the third hymn, Rose decided she’d paid enough respects and left, keeping the number of church services she had ever attended in their entirety to exactly two. She slipped out the front door, and headed back up Clover Street toward the center of town.
Even though it was almost noon, it was still fairly dark in Corley’s Crossing. Tucked at the bottom of a deep valley, Corley’s Crossing didn’t get much sun this time of year. Rose looked up at the old, worn mountains that had been there every day her entire life, and she wondered – not for the first time – what it would be like to live in a place where there were no hills, no mountains, where there was lots of sun and where she could see for miles.
When she got back to the Lambert, she found Isaac carrying cases of beer downstairs. It was the Old Prospero’s.
“He delivered on a Saturday?”
“Yes, ma’am, he surely did,” Isaac said. “He said he was sorry to miss you, and he gave his sorrows for the funeral.”
Rose nodded. She was, to her surprise, a bit disappointed that she’d missed him. “Did you get the soup for tonight on?”
“Yup. Turned out pretty good, too. I hope you don’t mind, but I added some things to it.”
Rose laughed. Isaac was always adding more garlic or more pepper or more something to her dishes when she wasn’t looking. “I’ll go change and then I’ll be down to give you a hand.” She went upstairs, to her room, and changed out of the dress and into her usual man’s shirt and overalls.
Old Mordecai Franks was the first one in the bar, as always. “Evening, Mordecai,” Rose said as he pulled himself onto his normal stool. She drew him a beer and put it in front of him. “Were you at the funeral?”
“Yeah, I was there.” He took a sip. “Son-of-a-bitch always cheated at cards, though.” Mordecai had a very long memory for things like that card game, which had been years ago. He hadn’t played Enoch since.
She went through all of her usual motions that night, pouring drinks and serving bowls of thick chicken soup for these miners who had nothing better to do than go to a tavern for beer and whiskey and food cooked by someone other than the missus who didn’t know shit about cooking since she’d learned it all from her mother who was just as bad. Rose turned the radio on at seven o’clock so they could hear some program about detectives or something if they wanted, or maybe even a ballgame if the air was clear and if any of those night games were on. In a lot of ways it was a typical night at the Lambert. Until the kegs all went dry, in the same five minutes.
Around ten o’clock or so, Mordecai – who was pretty drunk by now – asked for his ninth beer. Rose tried to draw it for him, but the tap just gurgled and dispensed a few chunks of foam that in a few hours might dissolve into half a sip of beer. “Dammit,” Rose said under her breath. “Bender’s is out, Mordecai. How about the Winling?”
“Whatever,” Mordecai said. “It all tastes the same anyway.”
She put the glass under the other tap, pulled it forward, and – same thing, same damn thing. Gurgling, foam, and no beer.
“Dammit, Isaac!” she yelled. “We need to change both kegs!”
“Both?” Isaac was sitting at a corner table reading some book he’d been working on for months. “Right now?”
“Right now. They both dried up on me.”
“Both,” Isaac echoed. “That’s a damn weird thing. Be right back.” He disappeared down the narrow stairs to the basement, while Rose waited. Other miners were starting to line up at the bar, waiting for their own refills. Rose took care of the ones who were having whiskey while she waited for the sound of Isaac whacking the basement pipes with a crowbar, his signal to tell her he’d tapped the new kegs. But the ringing never came; instead, Isaac came back upstairs.
“Miss Rose, we got a problem,” he said. “There ain’t any other kegs to hook up.”
“What?” Rose said. That was totally impossible. Last week there’d been one of each, she knew there had. She’d gone downstairs to check herself before she’d placed her weekly order at the Co-op. “Look again, Isaac. They’re down there.”
“No, they’re not,” Isaac said. “I looked everywhere. Twice. That basement ain’t that big. There ain’t any other beer down there. We’re stone out. And there’s no more whiskey, either.”
Now Rose’s jaw dropped. She didn’t keep much on hand, sure enough – “A good barkeep doesn’t keep more than a week’s whiskey on hand, ever”, as her father had said – but there was no way she was out of everything. “How can we have nothing at all down there? I thought for sure—”
“Where the hell is my beer!” Mordecai shouted. This was the time of night when he started getting pissy.
Rose rubbed her forehead. It had been a bad week, what with Enoch and Edna and the funeral and all, but how could she have forgotten to order enough beer and whiskey? But the she remembered that new stuff. For some reason she hadn’t told anyone about it, but now she had to. “I’ve got something new for you to try, Mordecai,” she said as she opened the cooler at her knee and pulled out a bottle of the Old Prospero’s.
“A bottle?” Mordecai said, recoiling. “Damn, what’s next?”
“It’s what I have, you old sot,” Rose snapped. “Do you want it or not?”
Mordecai sighed and made a gesture like he didn’t care. Rose popped the cap off the bottle and set it on the bar in front of him. She watched as he picked it up, looked at the bottle, shook his head, and finally took a sip. Then he put the bottle down. “It’ll do,” he said.
“I’m so glad you approve,” Rose said as she went about serving the Old Prospero’s to everyone else who needed a drink. With each bottle that she opened she got a whiff of that wonderful smell of wheat and honey that she remembered from when she’d tasted it, and after just a short while it was as if that smell was filling the bar itself. She wondered if these crusty old miners were enjoying the same feeling of warmth she had felt when she’d first sipped it. Probably not, she decided. These were experienced drinkers; Rose generally avoided the stuff. “Drunk barkeep ain’t worth a damn,” her father had said.
“Rose?”
She whirled around, not believing her ears, because it was Mordecai. He sounded…different, somehow.
“Another one already?” she asked, noting the empty bottle in his hand.
“Please,” he said. Rose blinked. He never said “please”. “And do you think we could get something better than this game on the radio? Maybe some music.”
Rose blinked at him, again. It just didn’t look like the same old Mordecai. For one thing, his eyes were all the way open and they weren’t bloodshot.
“Sure, Mordecai,” Rose said.
He smiled – my God, the old bastard actually smiled – and then he leaned over and began turning the knobs on the radio, spinning the dial past static-filled frequencies before finally hitting on one to his liking. Then he turned up the volume, and the voice of Billie Holiday rose above the din of the bar. The radio made her sound tinny and scratchy, but that didn’t matter at all. Rose washed some glasses in the bar sink while Billie Holiday’s singing filled the Lambert. And then all of the miners stopped what they were doing – all of them, the ones playing cards, the ones eating soup, the ones not doing much of anything at all. The bar fell silent except for the singer whose voice had never been heard there before, at least not at night. Rose found that even though she knew the song, it sounded like she’d never heard it before, like it was totally new. When the song ended, Mordecai let out a long sigh.
“She sure can sing,” he said.
“That she can,” Rose replied.
They listened to more music after that: Count Basie and Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. It was the quietest, nicest night Rose could ever remember, and it happened in the Lambert when it was full of drinking miners. When she’d closed and they’d all gone home, she decided that as soon as that salesman came around again she would order more of the Old Prospero’s. She drank a bottle of it herself, after she’d locked the doors and Isaac had left for the night. She felt more good than tired, and when she finally went to bed not only did she fall asleep faster than she had in months, but she also didn’t dream about Enoch.
Rose made a pot of peppercorn soup the next day, from her father’s recipe. She was putting the last ingredients – potatoes and leeks – into the pot when a voice called her from outside.
“Hello?” It was the salesman, Daniel. Rose recognized the voice immediately, and her heart quickened.
“Just a minute,” she called as she put in a dash of tarragon before going outside to meet him. The day was crisp and cool. Autumn had come to Corley’s Crossing. Daniel stood there, smiling and leaning on the fender of his truck.
“Afternoon,” he said, tipping his hat. “You’re a vision, I must say.”
“A vision?” She laughed. A vision indeed, a vision wearing a man’s shirt and faded overalls.
“Any woman can be beautiful in a chiffon gown bedecked with diamonds,” he said.
Rose blushed. No one had ever spoken like this to her before.
“I wanted to see how the Old Prospero’s was going,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t start selling it until last night, but once I did, no one bought anything else.”
“I told you!” he said with a wide grin. “That beer will change things around here, you mark my words. I can bring you six more cases tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Well, I can’t deliver beer to you on a Sunday, can I?”
“No, I guess not,” she said, feeling ridiculous again. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair. “Well, I guess that’s that, then – unless you’d care to show me around your town? I’ve been driving all weekend, and I’d really go for a walk with a lovely lady right now.”
Rose laughed. “I’ll bet you could,” she said. It was a very smooth line, after all. But she also felt a little hesitant. Funny how you could want something and be scared of it at the same time.
“I have a pot of soup on,” she said.
“Miss Barnstone,” Daniel said with mock severity, “are you turning me down for a pot of soup?”
“No!” she said. “I mean – I’ll just turn the stove all the way down. It’ll be fine. Needs to simmer a while, anyway.”
She went back in to do just that, and then she rejoined him. He had taken off his jacket and unbuttoned the top button on his shirt.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“This way,” Rose said, leading him around the front of the Lambert into the center of town. They walked along the town square first.
“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.
“All my life,” she said. “Sometimes I’ve thought about moving on, or just seeing someplace else, but I never do. I can’t leave the Lambert behind. My father built it. I couldn’t let it go.”
“There isn’t a town in this country where you can’t live well by serving drinks,” Daniel said. Rose glanced at him. He had sounded a little bitter just then, but it didn’t show in his face.
They reached the spot where the trees in the square parted and the sidewalk branched, the righthand branch leading straight to the bronze statue at the square’s center. Daniel pointed to it.
“Is that Corley?” he asked.
“That’s him.”
“Interesting likeness,” Daniel said. “A lot of towns have statues like this for their local heroes. Most times they look proud, like they could burst out of the bronze and retake Cemetery Ridge all by themselves. But your Corley looks – tired.”
“He looks beaten,” Rose said. “Because that’s what he was.” Folks around here didn’t like to think of their town’s hero and namesake being a beaten man, but that was it. Corley had led the Fifty-First Infantry Lancers against some Confederates, and when they’d been beaten he’d led his men here, where he’d crossed the Tassanaqua with all of his remaining men when the river was at flood-stage. He’d got half of his men killed in a stupid battle, but for not getting the other half killed doing something just as stupid he’d got a town named after him.
“I’d love to see the river,” Daniel said after he’d studied the statue of Captain Edward Aloysius Corley for a minute or two.
“You didn’t see it when you drove in?”
“From the cab of my truck, through a line of trees,” Daniel said. “Not the same as walking along the riverbank with a lovely woman to guide me.”
Rose gave a humorous scowl. “This way,” she said and led him past the town square onto Route 23, which wound down and out of the village toward the deep Tassanaqua River Valley. On the way she told him a little about the town history – how it had been founded by Nehemiah Lambert and named for him until they’d changed it to Corley’s Crossing. She shortly fell silent; the town was pretty old but that didn’t mean it had a lot of history to it.
When they were a half-mile away from the river they could already hear the rush of its water, which was impressive given that it was autumn and the river was at its low point for the year. In spring, when the river was bloated by fresh snowmelt, its roar could be deafening.
“This way,” Rose said, suddenly veering from the road and headed instead onto a steep path that dipped sharply down through the trees. She knew this path well. Her father had brought her this way many times, either for fishing or to wade out into the shallows and grab crawdads for the soup pot. Daniel kept up surprisingly well; he was definitely not one of those salesman who only saw the world as it rolled by the windows of his truck. Fifteen minutes later they stood on one of the huge boulders that jutted out into the green and black waters of the Tassanaqua. This spot was the middle of a tight S-bend, so tight in fact that the big bridge was just a half-mile upstream but it couldn’t be seen at all. Daniel looked back and forth, upstream and down, with his hands in his back pockets.
“Nobody fishing today,” he said.
“The better pools are down around the next bend,” Rose said.
Daniel stepped to the very end of the boulder and knelt down; Rose did likewise, kneeling beside him. “Fast water,” he said. “Are there a lot of drownings here?” he asked.
“Some,” Rose said. Percy Stewart had been the last one. Sheriff Fanton had pulled him out of the water just past the next bend.
They didn’t talk for a while after that. Somehow it just felt right, sitting beside the river with this man.
“The sunlight is a lot more flattering to you than the light in that bar,” Daniel said after a while.
He was smiling, but not as broadly as before – it was a softer, more intimate smile, and Rose looked away quickly even as he drew closer. She’d never been down here with a man before, except to help her father fishing, of course. The thought had certainly never occurred to Enoch Spencer. Daniel drew in closer.
“You know,” she said, “the most amazing thing happened when I started serving the Old Prospero’s…”
“Why aren’t you married, Rose? May I call you Rose?”
Yes please call me Rose… She could only stare at him, into those deep, green eyes, and nod. Her heart pounded in her chest, faster and faster.
“You deserve more than drunkards and adulterers,” he said. “You deserve so much more than what you’ve been given.”
Rose held her breath as Daniel took her in his arms with an embrace that was strong and gentle. He held her the way he would hold something fragile. When his lips met hers, his kiss tasted a tiny bit like the Old Prospero’s. Oh my God, Rose thought. What she said was, “Oh, Daniel…”
On the walk back through town, Daniel told Rose about Paris and some of the other places he’d been. As they walked past the co-op, Rose glanced inside, and then she glanced away just as quickly. Edna was in there, with her two friends. Luckily they didn’t see her.
“Did you feel that?” Daniel asked once they were past the co-op. “There was a chill just now.”
Rose hadn’t felt any chill, but then, Edna was there and Edna could chill anybody. They walked in silence back to the Lambert. When they got back, Rose offered him a bowl of the soup before he left, but he said he’d really better be going or he’d be behind on his run tomorrow. But before he left, he leaned forward and whispered in Rose’s ear:
“Under floods that are deepest, Which Neptune obey, Over rocks that are steepest, Love will find out the way.”
He smiled again, the same small smile from before, and then he took his leave. Rose watched after him for a time, and then she went inside to finish getting the bar ready for opening. As she entered the kitchen, she realized by the smell that she’d gotten the soup exactly right.
When she got up the next morning, Daniel had already been there and left eight cases of Old Prospero’s on the back step, with a piece of paper folded and stuck between the slats of one of the cases. She unfolded it and read:
“Fairest Rose, Business calls me elsewhere. I hope to be back in Corley’s Crossing before the week is out. Keep well. Love, Daniel.”
He has lovely handwriting, Rose thought, and when she sniffed the note she found that it smelled of lavender.
Mordecai Franks wasn’t the first one in the door that night, strangely enough; fifteen men were waiting on the doorstep when Rose unlocked. They were from Junctiontown, a small settlement – it wasn’t an official town – right on the railroad tracks where these men lived with their families. Most of them worked some of the local farm fields or at the logging company in Hoptonville, and few of them ever came into Corley’s Crossing except to go into the Co-op and come out again a few minutes later with provisions but without saying hello or much of anything else to anybody. The boys from Junctiontown weren’t exactly welcome in Corley’s Crossing, but they weren’t chased away, either. Rose approached the only one of them she knew by name. Micah Kingsley, it was.
“Evenin’, Ma’am,” he said in a voice that was deeper and softer than Isaac’s. “We heard somethin’, and – well, we’re wonderin’ if it’s true.”
“And what’s that?” Rose asked.
“We’ve heard you’re servin’ somethin’ new. A beer that – well, we’d be obliged if we could try some.”
The other men nodded in agreement. Free country, Rose thought – and Father had always said that a barkeep’s got no business turning away a thirsty man with money, unless he’s too damn drunk already to know the difference between a quarter and a carp. These men were mostly quiet folk, but sometimes quiet people could create problems just by being quiet, if they were quiet around the right noisy people. “Look,” she said, “I’m not turning you away, because I never have and I’m not starting now. But if any trouble starts, I need you boys to be the bigger men here. Understand?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Micah Kingsley.
Rose stepped aside and let Micah and his friends in. Every one of them stood at the bar, in a nice row like the pictures of men in the army, while she put a cold bottle of Old Prospero’s in front of each man. Micah lifted his bottle to his nose, sniffed the beer inside, and smiled. He nodded to his friends, and one by one they took their first sips. Rose nearly laughed – they were taking this so damned seriously – but she didn’t. When they’d all swallowed they lifted their faces skyward as if each man was saying a silent benediction for the golden beer.
The front door clattered. “What the hell is this?” It was Mordecai Franks. Rose braced herself. Nothing good had ever come from Mordecai being in the same room as the Junctiontown boys, unless Rose put her foot down first which was the way it had to be with Mordecai on just about everything.
“Paying customers, Mordecai,” she said. “They got money, and that mean’s they’re welcome.”
Mordecai stared at Micah the whole time he pulled himself onto his usual stool. “You like that beer?” he asked, louder than he really needed to since Micah was standing right next to him.
Micah took another slow sip, closed his eyes, opened them again, and nodded. “Yes, sir. I do.”
Mordecai nodded. “Me, too,” he said. “How about it, Rose?”
Rose sighed as she handed Mordecai his first beer of the night. As the Lambert began to fill with customers, Rose began to think that things might be all right.
The next day was one of her two weekly trips to the Co-op to stock the kitchen. As she walked through town, enjoying the brisk chill of a fall morning in Corley’s Crossing, she looked up at the high hills all around the town, and suddenly she wanted very much to go over them and beyond, to see the world that they kept away from this town. It was a familiar feeling, but stronger now than it had ever been before.
When she got to the Co-op, she could hear the voices inside before she went in.
“Damnedest thing I’ve heard of,” said Ethan Gentry. Rose would recognize that smoker’s rasp of his anywhere. He’d been a good customer until he’d stopped drinking; now the Reverend Holton considered Ethan his greatest convert. Strange thing to Rose’s mind, though, was that he still smoked and the Reverend never said a thing about it. “Place was always so quiet,” Ethan went on. “Never even much of a good fight to be had there.”
“That’s cause all the tough ones go to the Valley Inn.” That would be Georgie Brickman. He did his drinking at the Valley, a disgusting dive down by the train depot. “You wouldn’t last five minutes in the Valley, Ethan, and that’s a fact.”
“So I was sayin’,” Ethan continued, “last night I’m out walkin’ cause I can’t sleep, war wound, you know”—his ‘war wound’ consisted, Rose knew, of a half-inch scar that Ethan insisted had come from a Spaniard rifle but had really been a rose bush thorn or something –“and I walk by that place, and everybody in there’s singin’ and laughin’ like it’s New Year!”
“So they do weird stuff there when they’re drinkin’,” Georgie said. “Nothin’ unusual about that.”
“There is when it’s miners doin’ the weird stuff with boys from Junctiontown,” Ethan said.
“Junctiontown? Damn,” said Georgie. “She’s lettin’ them in the Lambert, eh?”
“And what if I am, Georgie?” Rose said, loudly, letting the door slam shut behind her just as loudly. The four men clustered around the counter – Ethan, Georgie, Virgil Cotter, and Mr. Ludlow who owned the Co-op – looked up at her.
“Oh, Rose!” Mr. Ludlow said. “It’s Tuesday, isn’t it!”
She listed the items she needed, and Mr. Ludlow went off to check the stock.
“Say, Rose,” Ethan said, “would your father hold with the things that are goin’ on in his bar?”
Rose shrugged. “It’s not his bar anymore, Ethan.”
“Well, it’s a different place now,” said Ethan.
“Yeah it is,” Rose replied. “Since Dad died we’ve given it a couple coats of paint.”
“That’s not all of it,” Ethan said. “You’re servin’ those boys from Junctiontown.”
“And so did my father, when they came in and they had money and they were thirsty,” Rose said, her voice rising a bit. “I used to serve you when you were thirsty, Ethan.”
She glared at him, and he backed down a bit. Georgie, however, spoke up.
“I hear you’re servin’ somethin’ new over there,” he said.
“Just a new beer,” Rose said. “Come on by and try it.”
“Maybe when I have money. Your drinks are too expensive.”
“I charge the same for a beer that Sam Evans does at the Valley,” Rose said. “It’s just that I charge for a glass of beer. Sam charges for two-thirds beer, one-third water.”
Ethan laughed at that, but Rose had no idea why. It wasn’t funny, and she hadn’t meant it to be.
“Well, Rose, I’ve got most of it.” Mr. Ludlow’s voice preceded him as he came back to the front of the store. “I’m expecting the rest of it tomorrow, as long as the train’s on time.”
“I’ll have Isaac come and pick it all up,” Rose replied. Then she thanked him and left the store. It was probably her annoyance at having to talk to those two clods at all in there that made her completely miss the fact that Edna and her two friends were coming up the step.
“Excuse me, Edna,” Rose said as she tried to duck by the woman.
“By all means, Miss Barnstone,” she heard Edna say. “After all, you must get back to your dirty place of business and keep the town’s drunkards happy.”
Rose might have ignored that, if not for her delightful conversation inside. Instead, she stopped. “Drunkards like your husband, Edna?”
Edna only smiled, that tight-lipped smile that she smiled when she found something unamusing. It was, as far as Rose knew, the only smile she ever used. “My husband had some weaknesses for depravity, but he always made amends by coming home to me. Who comes home to you, Miss Barnstone?”
Edna and her friends did not wait for a reply, which was just as well because Rose didn’t have one. Rose turned and walked up the street, fighting the tears welling in her eyes all the way back to the Lambert. Why was it that the most hurtful truths were always spoken by the most hurtful people?
The crowd at the Lambert was even bigger that night, so big that there was barely room to walk inside once the night was going full-speed. All those people in the bar, all those men, drinking away – and the only sounds were laughter, singing, and cheerful talk. Miners and farmworkers, town men and boys from Junctiontown, old drunks and young men without mustaches tasting their first beers – all were there, drinking the Old Prospero’s.
At about ten o’clock Rose glanced outside the front door and saw Sheriff Fanton standing there. He had nothing to do, except to keep an eye on what was going on when there were so many people in one place. She thought of when her father had died, and Fanton had come to her the first day she’d opened the Lambert after becoming her bar. “Woman’s gonna have a tough time in this business,” he’d said. “What will you do when a fight breaks out?”
“Same thing my father would have done,” she’d replied. “Break it up and either kick them out or buy them a beer.”
The Sheriff had nodded and left it at that, and that’s just what she had done on those rare occasions. A good barkeep, after all, didn’t let things get to the point where a fight happened.
So there he was tonight, watching, with nothing else to do at all. Rose thought about inviting him in, but decided against it.
When the night was over, Isaac walked Mordecai home as usual, leaving Rose alone. She was always so tired at the end of a night, but those last few days it had been a welcome tired, the exhaustion that comes after a night of hard work but still felt good. She poured herself a glass of water – she didn’t like to drink this late at night – and sat at the bar, sipping it. Then she heard the front door rattle behind her, and when she turned she saw Daniel standing outside on the front step. She laughed and rose to let him in.
“I’ve driven a long way,” he said after he entered. “Is there a bed in this town for a traveler?”
“For a traveler, maybe,” Rose said. “For you, definitely.”
She swallowed the rest of her water.
“I was hoping you’d come,” she said.
“Really?”
“I’m almost out of beer again.” She giggled lightly as she said it, and he laughed to hear it.
“I brought fifteen cases with me,” he said. “We can bring them in tomorrow.”
“There’s something special about the Old Prospero’s, isn’t there?” she asked. He opened his mouth to reply, but she put her hand over his mouth and shook her head. “Later,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him upstairs to her bed.
Afterwards, when the night had at last gone quiet except for the sound of their own satisfied breathing, Daniel rolled toward her.
“What’s in the beer?” she asked.
Daniel shook his head. “I only sell it,” he said. “But I can tell you more about Paris.”
She smiled, and he told her more about Paris until they both fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Daniel spent the entire next day with Rose. When she jokingly asked him if he could afford to neglect his other customers, he laughed and said that there would be plenty of time for other customers later. “Besides, this is such a pretty town,” he said. Rose laughed that off, but he’d actually sounded like he’d meant it.
That night was just as wonderful as the one before had been, both for the atmosphere in the Lambert and for what happened in Rose’s bed afterward. So was the next night, and the night after that. The fourth night – Friday night, as it happened – started out normally. Mordecai came in, followed by a steady stream of miners and boys from Junctiontown. All were drinking Old Prospero’s – the whiskey bottles behind the bar were starting to get dusty – and it all seemed so normal that Rose could barely remember the way things had been before.
“Hey, what’s going on out there?” Rose heard someone say.
“I don’t know,” someone else answered.
“It’s all the women,” said another.
“Nah, there’s men too. Look, there’s Ethan Gentry, Georgie Brickman, Ralph Hunt – and isn’t that Reverend Holton?”
The men in the bar were all starting to cluster around the Lambert’s bay windows. Rose put down the tray of empties she was holding. Glancing at Daniel, she said, “I wonder what’s going on.”
Daniel shook his head. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
Rose looked at him for a moment, wondering what he meant by that. He said nothing more, and she walked over to the windows, pushing her way through the cluster of men to look outside. There, across the street, was a large crowd of mostly women and some men – the men who didn’t frequent the Lambert. And in front of them all was the Reverend Malachi Holton, of Old Presbyterian. He was leading them in singing. No one in the bar could hear what it was, but Rose knew a bunch of churchfolk singing a hymn when she saw them. She further recognized the prim and proper trio of ladies standing immediately behind the Reverend, and she wondered if the little gathering – not so little, actually – was Edna Spencer’s idea in the first place.
“Damn,” said Mordecai. “Who the hell are they prayin’ for?”
“Us,” Isaac said.
“What?” someone asked.
“They don’t hold with drinkin’,” Micah Kingsley said.
“Why?” Mordecai said. “We ain’t hurtin’ anything.”
“It doesn’t matter,” came another voice. It was Daniel’s. He still sat at the bar, facing away from the windows. “Not one of those people out there cares if you’re hurting a single soul with what you’re doing.” He made no effort to raise his voice, so everyone had to fall silent to hear him. Now Rose could hear the singing of the churchfolk outside: “Onward Christian Soldiers”, one of the three or four hymns she knew. “Who gets hurt, who doesn’t get hurt – none of it matters to them. You see, a person will do some pretty strange things when he thinks that it’s what God wants him to do. And you sure can’t talk to them, because to them, God’s already done all the talking. I mean, why listen to a guy like you or me when you’ve already talked to God? The Almighty’s a pretty hard act to follow.”
“But what if it isn’t God talkin’ at all?” Mordecai asked.
“I hope you don’t think they ever consider that possibility,” Daniel said, his voice even softer now. There was silence for a minute or two, silence that was filled by the people out there who had now moved on to “Rock of Ages”.
“Ain’t there somethin’ on the radio we could be listenin’ to?” Mordecai said. He returned to his stool and clicked on the radio, finding the tinny sound of The Inkspots singing “If I Didn’t Care” and turning up loud enough to drown out the Christians, both real and pretend, who were singing their hymns across the street. Gradually everyone left the windows and returned to their drinks. Rose went back to serving, although she kept glancing outside until the gathering broke up, about half an hour later.
“Sidewalk’s a pretty strange place for a revival,” she said once as she passed by Daniel. He said nothing, and the look in his eye was halfway between sadness and anger.
“You want this in there?” Rose asked when she had finished dicing the onions, peppers and celery and stood with the cutting board next to Daniel, who had stirred his roux until it was darker than Rose had ever seen one.
He nodded. “Then we’ll need the cut-up sausage.”
She slid the vegetables into the pot, where they immediately began sizzling. Daniel stirred them about quickly, and Rose cast a suspicious eye on the pot. “You’re sure the men are going to like this?”
“They eat this by the gallon in Louisiana,” Daniel said. “They’ll love it.”
Rose shrugged and began cutting up the five pounds of smoked sausage, glancing at him quite often as she did so. There had been a certain urgency in their lovemaking the night before, as if he had suddenly discovered a reason to fear that she might no longer be there for him. When they’d risen in the morning, he had announced that he was leaving for Hoptonville, but he’d be back by noon. Sure enough, he’d come back at eleven thirty with a bunch of special ingredients he’d bought at the store there, for something called “gumbo”.
Rose was finishing the sausage when Isaac came into the kitchen. “Someone to see you, Miss Rose,” he said.
“Anybody important?” she asked.
“Reverend Holton,” said Isaac. Then, with a look of displeasure, he added: “And Mrs. Spencer.”
“Oh, God,” Rose said. “I don’t have enough – ah, hell.” She glanced at Daniel as she wiped her hands on a towel. If he’d been offended by her swearing just then, he didn’t show it. Instead, she kissed him on the cheek and then drew a deep breath before heading out into the bar where she found Reverend Holton sitting a table, with Edna Spencer standing behind him. He made an exaggerated show of standing up when Rose entered.
“Good afternoon, Rose,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“So this is a social call, Reverend?”
“In a way,” he said with a smile that was not remotely as warm as Daniel’s despite his best efforts to fill his smile with the warmth of the Lord.
“In what way?” Rose asked. “I never expected a social call from you – and certainly not from you, Edna. Where are Alice and Mabel? I’m surprised to see you without them.”
Edna returned Rose’s gaze. “Good afternoon, Miss Barnstone.” She made no effort at all to speak with warmth, false or otherwise. The Reverend cleared his throat.
“Now, Rose, won’t you sit and talk with me for a bit?” He gestured to the empty chair across the table from him. Rose shrugged and sat down, not facing him directly. She had no intention of giving him her undivided attention, or even of allowing him to think that he had it.
“What’s on your mind, Reverend?”
“I am a man of respect and authority in Corley’s Crossing,” Holton said. “So, when certain things come to my attention – things that are happening in this town – it behooves me to learn what I can about them.”
“And?” Rose said, trying to sound bored. Reverend Holton smiled again, and Rose actually shivered. Every churchman has a smile, her father had told her. Not all those smiles are real. Learn to tell the difference. This, she was certain, was one of the false ones.
“And, my dear, I am now hearing some interesting things about recent nights in the Lambert Hotel.”
Rose leaned back in her chair. “I’m not sure how interesting anything happening in my bar could be,” she said.
“Indeed, but they are; and I was hoping you could tell me about them.”
Rose made a show of thinking it over, and then she shook her head. “I can’t think of what might be interesting you about my bar. We haven’t even had a fight in two months. It’s just the usual: honest working men coming in for a drink after the mines close.”
“Is that all they come in for?” the Reverend asked. Behind him, Edna snorted.
“Well,” Rose said, “some of them might be looking for something more than a drink – especially if they’re not getting what they need at home.”
Edna, turning red, glared at Rose. “How dare you,” she said.
“How dare I what?” Rose said, innocently. “I’m talking about the food. Can’t you smell it?” She took a deep, exaggerated breath. The aroma of Daniel’s gumbo had begun wafting in a few minutes before.
Reverend Holton shifted a bit. “Part of what I’m hearing is that you’re not just serving miners. In fact, I’m not just hearing it. I saw it with my own eyes. You had some of those Junctiontown boys in here.”
“What of it?” Rose snapped. “That’s no crime, and the Lambert is my bar.”
“So you have no concern for the community?”
Rose gritted her teeth. “They pay, they start no trouble, and when I close they go home.”
“Trouble always follows, Rose.” Reverend Holton leaned back in his chair and began fanning himself with his hat, even though it wasn’t hot. Funny how men of God always seemed to sweat a lot. “Trouble follows these people, Rose. It’s why we prefer it if they keep to Junctiontown. And why now, anyway? You’ve always run an honest business, for the most part”—he glanced now at Edna—“but now you are catering to men who have their own places to go for this sort of thing. Why now, Rose?”
It’s the beer, you fat hypocrite, Rose thought. She wanted to scream it at him and then throw him out of the bar, but of course she couldn’t do that….
But why not?
She thought of Mordecai Franks and Micah Kingsley and how they’d taught each other about Billie Holiday and old Irish ballads over bottles of Old Prospero’s – an old miner who loved a torch singer and a black farmhand who danced one hell of a jig. She thought of all the old miners, and the young ones – some who could quote Shakespeare and another who had the best singing voice she’d ever heard, and yet another who could speak French. All those things no one had known about each other, because nobody had ever cared enough to get to know anyone else beyond how well he held his pickaxe. She thought of Daniel and of his warmth beside her. Enoch had never been warm.
“Maybe if you come down for a drink sometime, you’ll understand,” Rose said.
The Reverend’s eyes flashed, and he stopped fanning himself – for just a moment. “I’m afraid that would be impossible for a man in my position,” he said.
“Your loss,” Rose said. “A man in your position could use a drink. You too, Edna.” She took some satisfaction in Edna’s little, proper gasp of horror. The Reverend simply put on his hat and stood up.
“Good day, Rose,” he said, filling his voice with as much authority as he could muster. “I hope you’ll take what I’ve said into your heart. It’s never too late to come back to the Lord. His House is large, and I will pray for you.”
Rose said nothing at all as he and Edna left. She only held Edna’s gaze, returning the other woman’s glare measure-for-measure. When they had gone, she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She could use a drink right now, although it was really too early in the day for that. Maybe if Daniel was almost done with the gumbo, they could go upstairs for a while. The warmth of his body beside her would be very comforting right now…she rose from the chair, turned to face the kitchen. She saw Daniel’s back, disappearing into the kitchen. He had been listening, and she wondered how much he had heard.
And then she heard the whistle from the mine, echoing through the valley. At one o’clock in the afternoon.
Rose shivered. It was time for another wake at the Lambert.
No one would drink the Old Prospero’s tonight; this was a night for the strong stuff that burned on the way down because the burning was how the miners reminded themselves that they hadn’t been the one. They’d just come for a night of quiet drinking in memory of whatever sad bastard’s name was being said in nothing louder than a hushed whisper. The name tonight was Abraham York, Mabel’s husband. Edna’s little trio had lost two of its three husbands.
But not quite yet. Abe’s cave-in hadn’t killed him outright, even though his head had been bashed about like a baseball and his legs had been crushed to nothing and his lungs had filled with dust. Somehow when they’d dug him out he hadn’t died yet, and when they got him home the poor bastard still wasn’t dead. Not that there was any hope for him; Doc Bly had been pretty damned clear about that. Abe was going, and heaven only knew why he hadn’t gone yet. So Mabel was there at her husband’s bedside, holding his hand and waiting for him to die. He should have died instantly, and only some mockery of mercy had kept him alive this long. Even though he hadn’t died yet, the miners in the Lambert toasted Abe’s memory, because he was as good as dead anyway.
John Reeves came in around eight. “Reverend Holton’s over there now,” he reported. “Won’t be long.”
Daniel, who had been helping Rose, cleared his throat. “Was anybody with him when it happened?”
“Yeah,” said Oscar Newcastle. “Jeb Shepard was with him. They’ve been a lot more serious about the buddy-thing since Enoch Spencer died.”
“Did anything happen to Jeb?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing. He came out coughin’ a lot, but he didn’t even get a limp.”
Rose glanced at Daniel, but he had already turned away, nodding.
It was a quiet night, damned quiet. The quietest Rose could remember. There wasn’t any music or singing, and there weren’t any cheerful stories about Abe York because he wasn’t the kind of man people told stories about. It was just quiet, the sort that scared the hell out of any barkeep worth a damn.
At their normal time of night, Micah Kingsley and the other Junctiontown boys arrived. Micah got two steps into the Lambert before Luther Marks stopped him. “Sorry, boys,” luther said. “We’re waitin’ on word of one of our own dyin’.”
“It’s all one town,” Micah said.
“You boys ain’t miners,” Luther replied.
“It’s all the ground,” Micah said.
Rose had been listening, and then she spoke up. “It’s all right, Luther. Micah’s right – they got as much right to mourn as anybody.”
Luther looked at Rose, then at Micah, and then back at Rose. Finally he nodded. “Your bar,” he said.
So Micah and the other Junctiontown boys came in, and they ordered their usual too – which was Old Prospero’s. At the sight of those bottles, and at the sound of the caps being popped off the tops, Mordecai Franks downed what was left of his whiskey. “Give me one of those too,” he said. “This hard stuff just ain’t my style anymore.”
And just like that, all the miners put aside the dull drinks they’d all been nursing out of respect for a man who hadn’t even been a drinker to start with. And, just as gradually, they began to talk – about how long the mine could go on, and how Abe’s kids would make out, and how Corley’s Crossing was going to survive since the trains weren’t coming by three times a day anymore and the mine wasn’t producing as much coal anymore – some laughter, a little joking, but mostly talk. Rose kept the Old Prospero’s moving, glancing now and again Daniel’s way and wondering at the unwavering, intent expression on his face.
Reverend Holton came in a little after eleven. He glanced around at the crowd and then at Rose; finally he took off his hat and spoke. “Abraham York died half-an-hour ago. The funeral will be Saturday.” One more glance at Rose, and he left. Silence settled over the Lambert.
“To Abe York,” Daniel said suddenly, holding up his own bottle of Old Prospero’s. Rose hadn’t even noticed that he was drinking, but at least he looked relaxed now after looking so serious all night.
“To Abe,” a scattershot chorus of miners and Junctiontown boys replied. Earlier they had toasted a dying miner; now they toasted a dead one.
Daniel went with Rose to Abe’s funeral, even though he had never met Abe and didn’t know him from Adam. This time Rose stayed for the entire service. She hadn’t been sleeping with Abe, so she had no reason to avoid Abe’s wife – other than avoiding Edna, which didn’t seem that important. Daniel stood beside her, wearing a nice shirt and tie she didn’t know he owned. He looked strange, all gussied-up like that.
Daniel wasn’t the only stranger at Abe York’s funeral. Just before the service began, three older-looking men entered the church. These men wore very nice suits, a lot nicer than you’d find in any closet in Corley’s Crossing. These three men in the tailored suits walked up to Mabel York, and they each kissed her on the cheek. Then they found a place to sit and wait for the service to begin.
“Who are those fellows, I wonder,” Rose said.
“Businessmen,” Daniel said with a surprising tone of contempt in his voice. “I’ll bet they own the mine.”
“You don’t like businessmen?” she asked.
“I don’t like what businessmen worship,” Daniel replied.
That’s an odd thing to say, Rose thought. And Daniel was beginning to sweat, even though it wasn’t all that hot inside the church yet. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I just don’t like churches much,” Daniel said.
Reverend Holton came out a few minutes later and started the service. It was the typical, dull stuff that went on at all church services, and as usual Rose found herself wondering how anyone could do this each and every Sunday. She didn’t sing the hymns, because she didn’t know any of the words, although she did hold an open hymnal so as not to appear completely lost. She held the hymnal up so that Daniel could see the words, but he didn’t sing either; in fact, he stood glassy-eyed, sweating even worse than before. When the service finally ended and they filed out of Old Presbyterian, Rose looked at Daniel as he mopped his brow with his handkerchief.
“It was too hot in there,” he said.
Rose nodded, but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t thought it too hot inside. At that moment the three mine owners walked by, and Daniel grimaced.
“It’s funny,” Rose said. “They weren’t here for Enoch’s funeral.”
“They’re not here for this one, either,” Daniel said.
Rose wondered what he meant by that, but she chose not to ask. Instead she pointed to Mabel, who had just come out of the church. “Here she comes,” Rose said. “We’ll pay our respects, and then why don’t we go down to the river and look at the autumn leaves?”
Daniel smiled. “That sounds lovely.” His cheeks were returning to their normal color, and Rose took his hand and squeezed it.
Just then Mabel passed in front of Rose, where she stopped. Edna and Alice stood to either side of her, and all three stared at Rose.
“I’m truly sorry, Mabel,” Rose said. “Abe was a fine man.”
Mabel’s expression did not soften; if anything, it became harder. “He was a fine enough man to inspire a night of debauchery for you and that crowd of drunkards of yours,” she said.
Rose recoiled, as if Mabel had slapped her. Edna put her arm around Mabel and showed her past Rose, who said nothing at all. There was, in fact, nothing that she could say.
On Tuesday morning Rose walked, as usual, to the co-op with her usual list of things she needed. As usual, the same bunch of old man were standing around gossiping like a sewing circle. It was unusual, though, in that there were twice as many men in there than on most Tuesdays. That was when she learned the bad news. The mine was closing.
“Two months from today,” said Mr. Ludlow. “They say they can’t get enough coal out of the mountain anymore to make it worth maintaining. Some of the men will still have work over at the Central City mine, but the rest, well….” He trailed off and went to check on Rose’s list, leaving her alone to contemplate that her patrons would soon no longer be miners.
The mood at the Lambert that night started out fairly subdued – even moreso than during any normal wake – but as usual the Old Prospero’s made everyone happier, and things were back to normal by nine o’clock. After that, there was too much singing and laughing going on for these men to really reflect on the impending loss of livelihood.
At ten o’clock, the town’s churchfolk gathered across the street again, but the drinkers in the Lambert ignored them. The only ones who did notice it were Rose, who watched with anger in her eyes, and Daniel, who watched with a mix of anger and fear in his.
The revivals across the street took place nightly now, and every night they got bigger. Soon there were people coming from their farms or houses in the hills – folk who only came to town once a week, if that, although now they were coming every night. The Reverend’s prayers got louder and louder, and once or twice Rose actually went out onto the front porch to listen. The first time, nobody noticed, but the second time Edna Spencer and Mabel York both saw her and pointed her out to Reverend Holton. He turned and, facing Rose, did not miss a beat in his sermon.
“There you are!” he bellowed in that voice of false import that all good churchmen practice until perfect. “You have brought this sin into this town! It is this sin that will destroy this town! You, who have corrupted the men of Corley’s Crossing with foul drink, have brought on us the closing of our mine! You rejected my appeals for your salvation, but it is not too late to do what is right! Rose Barnstone, turn away from Satan and turn back towards the Lord!”
The crowd was right with him all the way, some shouting Amen’s and Hosannah’s and Praise God’s as he segued smoothly into some Bible verse about the fires of Hell and the wrath of the Almighty. Rose shivered and went back inside. She tried to take comfort in the gaiety of her patrons, but she couldn’t. Something was coming, she knew it. She could also see that Daniel was afraid; she could see it in his eyes.
Their lovemaking that night was hard, almost desperate, for both of them. They were both afraid, and when they were done they held each other for a long, long time. The night was not particularly cold, but both shivered.
“Sorry, Miss Rose,” Isaac said. The rock in his hand was about the size of an orange, and it was worn smooth. Someone had chosen it from the Tassanaqua riverbed, just to put it through the front window of the Lambert. The broken glass crunched under Rose’s feet as she surveyed the damage.
“There’s never been anything like this before,” she said. “This bar’s been here since before Corley crossed a damn thing.”
“Well, someone’s sure mad,” Isaac said. “I got some plate glass in the shed from last winter. I’ll get to work on it.” He headed out back, leaving Rose and Daniel alone. She stared at the broken glass for a moment, and then she suddenly recited a list of words that made Daniel wince.
“You should be careful, Rose.” His eyes were full of fear, and she hesitated for a moment.
“What is it?” she finally asked.
“I have seen this before,” he replied. “It always starts this way – a rock through a window or something like that, and then it moves on to other things. It always starts with one rock, in one hand, and a mind full of the notion that it’s doing God’s will.” He picked up a shard of glass and stared at it. “I think I should leave now,” Daniel said after a moment. “I think this town isn’t so safe anymore.”
“Daniel—”
“Come with me,” he said.
Rose gasped. The look in his eyes was even more fearful now – almost desperate.
“What?”
“Come with me,” he said again, stepping forward to take her hands in his. “You’ve always wanted to see more than just this valley, more than just this town. You deserve more than this, Rose. Let me give it to you—”
“I can’t,” she said, pulling away, suddenly afraid. Daniel made no effort to stop her. He only held her gaze, looking into her eyes, before she turned away and left the room.
The next thing to happen was the death of Micah Kingsley.
No one would really say what exactly happened, but Micah Kingsley was dead and three of his friends had been beaten up real bad. “Damned shame”, old Mordecai said when he came in and took his seat of honor. Those same sentiments were expressed by all of the Old Prospero’s regulars, and so they gave something of a wake – the best one he’d receive, really – for Micah. When Rose looked out the front window to watch the gathering of the sidewalk revival, she wondered how many of these smiling Christians would take time to offer a prayer, silent or not, for the soul of Micah Kingsley. After that, the boys from Junctiontown stopped coming into the Lambert.
Over the next week there was another rock through the window, and someone painted crosses on all of the Lambert’s doors. The conversations around the counter at the Co-op ended abruptly whenever Rose entered, even moreso than before. Worst of all were the women of the town. Rose had never been one for their company, but now it went from quiet disapproval of the women who owned the bar to open hostility, and it wasn’t just Edna and Mabel and Alice. It was all of them, some of whom Rose didn’t even know by name. Women she couldn’t remember even seeing before would stop her and give her a tongue lashing for tempting fine men away from their families, as if she slept with a different man each night. Time was when Rose would have told them all to go to hell, that their men made their own choices, but now she was just too tired of it all to say anything like that. That, and the more she thought about the Old Prospero’s, she wondered if they really did make their own choices.
With the slackening of business at the Lambert, Rose’s stock of Old Prospero’s moved a lot slower. Where before Rose might have needed to order more in two or three days, she now had a week; and as that day approached, Daniel became more and more nervous. Several times more he asked Rose to come away with him, and each time she refused, saying that despite the strange and ugly things going on, Corley’s Crossing was still her home. The problem was that she didn’t particularly feel that way – the Lambert was home, but the town could go to hell. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to leave with him. And still, the stock of Old Prospero’s in her basement got smaller and smaller.
The day finally came when Rose went downstairs and found that there were only three cases of Old Prospero’s left and it was time to reorder. She had been dreading the coming conversation, but it had to happen, and now was as good a time as any. She turned around to go upstairs and find Daniel…and saw that he was already there, downstairs with her. She hadn’t heard him come down. She started to smile, and stopped. He was shaking his head.
“You can’t ask me to get more,” he said in almost a whisper.
“What?”
“You can’t keep serving the Old Prospero’s. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing good ever does.”
“Nothing good?” Rose couldn’t believe that he was saying these things. She couldn’t believe that she was hearing them. “How can you say that? Look at what it’s done for this place!”
“Rocks through your window, those men from Junctiontown beaten for coming into town in what’s supposed to be a free country, people who normally don’t have the time on a Sunday morning to even think about the church suddenly showing up at those damn revivals across the street. All that.”
“It’s not all like that,” Rose protested.
“That’s all it will be,” Daniel said. “Every time I come into a town, the Old Prospero’s helps for a time. For a while it makes things better…but then something else always happens. Darkness comes, and I have to leave.”
Rose folded her arms over her chest. “You’re refusing, aren’t you? There’s no way I’ll ever see another bottle of that beer.”
“You don’t want to see it again,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Sometimes I don’t want to. But I have to keep trying. I keep hoping the next town will be different, and it never is.”
Rose tried to understand what he was saying. It was all so absurd. “It’s beer, Daniel!”
Daniel turned away, slightly. “It is for some,” he said. “For others…it’s something else.”
“You’re leaving too, aren’t you?” Rose said.
Daniel stared at the floor for a long minute before nodding.
“Time for you to go sell beer to the next lonely woman who owns a bar that you meet?”
“Rose—”
“You were never going to stay at all, were you? You were always leaving. You couldn’t stay for me.”
Daniel stared miserably at his shoes, and for a time Rose thought he might actually disappear before her eyes.
“That is the way it is,” Daniel said. “I can never stay, no matter how much I might want to. Every town I come to, I hope it’s the one where I can stay. But it never is. I wanted Corley’s Crossing to be the town where I could finally stop moving on, but it isn’t. I get so close…but then I make things happen, and the darkness comes. And now I have to leave.”
Feeling a chill that wasn’t really there, Rose hugged her arms to her chest. “You want to stay?”
He stepped forward and took her in his arms. “Yes,” he said.
“Am I the first you’ve wanted to stay for?”
She felt him sigh. “Does that really matter?”
“Not really,” she said, letting him hold her. “Tomorrow?”
He nodded. “I’ve learned to tell.”
She looked up at him. “Where will you go?”
He returned her gaze with those green, green eyes. Then he shook his head, and she looked down so he wouldn’t see her tears. “May I come upstairs with you one last time?”
Rose didn’t say anything, nor did she even nod. She took his hand and led him upstairs. There was no passion in it, only sadness.
Rose had been through enough last nights to know how this one would be. She would awaken in the morning, earlier than usual, disturbed by the absence of the warmth beside her that she had grown used to. She would rise, and he would be gone, and she would be alone. That was the way it always went, and it went that way on this night too. Rose awoke to hear the sound of Daniel’s truck starting and driving away. She sat up, and despite the cold she moved to the window to see the truck turning around the corner and heading off toward the Tassanaqua. She was about to turn away from the window when she heard another sound, all wrong for the early morning. It took a few seconds before she realized what the sound was – a shot from a rifle – and by that time Daniel’s truck had veered sharply, rolled up onto the curb, and crashed into one of the trees that ringed the park. It was only then that Rose realized how cold the morning was.
She didn’t remember getting dressed, or leaving the bedroom, or leaving the Lambert. She didn’t remember running down the street, or anything else, except standing over the door of the truck as she looked down on Daniel as the blood ran out of the wound just below his ear. She stood there for just a moment before the strength left her legs and she fainted.
“Miss Rose?”
It was Isaac, and his was the face she saw when she opened her eyes. “He’s dead,” she said.
He nodded.
She was back in her bed, and she still had her clothes on. The right leg of her overalls was dirty from where she’d slumped onto the ground. Doc Pullman’s satchel was on the bureau, and a new copy of the Bible on the bed beside her pillow.
“Reverend Holton was here,” Isaac said. “He wanted me to tell you that he’ll pray for you at the services. It’s Sunday, you know.”
“Is he going to pray for Daniel?”
Isaac didn’t need to answer that. Rose already knew the answer.
“Does anyone know what happened and why?” she asked.
Isaac frowned as he nodded. “Ethan Gentry,” he said.
“Ethan?” Rose sat up and sipped from the glass of water Isaac handed her. Cold and clear, it reminded her of Old Prospero’s. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Ethan. He’d been in the Co-op, and she’d seen him in the crowd at the sidewalk revivals. But Ethan had never done anything rash in his life. Hell, he’d never done anything, period. Ethan?
“Seems he was taken by the spirit at the last few revivals,” Isaac said. “He’s been gettin’ holy, or whatever you call it. Anyway, last night he was babblin’ somethin’ fierce about sin and the den of iniquity and God’s will and Christian soldiers and all that. Nobody paid him any mind. I guess they shoulda’.”
“Ethan Gentry’s not a man anyone pays any mind,” Rose said.
“Yeah, well, Sheriff’s got him locked up.” He paused, and then said, softer: “I can get Daniel in Marlett Hill Cemetery, if you want.”
“That would be nice.” Marlett Hill was where the folks at Junctiontown buried their dead. The Corley’s Crossing Town Cemetery was for proper folk, not a traveling beer salesman. And Rose certainly wouldn’t want him buried beside Enoch Spencer and Abraham York.
Aside from Rose, old Mordecai Franks was the only one from the town to show up at Daniel’s funeral. Then, four days later, old Mordecai himself died. Heart attack, fastest damn thing.
Later, Rose poured out what was left of the Old Prospero’s. It wouldn’t be right to sell it. And as expected, the Lambert went back to the way it had been before. No singing, no laughter, no warmth and pleasure of company. Just drinking miners, nursing their crappy local beer and warm whiskey. Rose took the corner stool away, so nobody could ever sit in Mordecai’s spot. The sidewalk revivals came to a stop, even though men still drank and cheated on their wives – but not with Rose, who was done with all of those dirty bastards – and did so even more now that the mine was shutting down. So men still got drunk and now they fought again, and things were worse than before, really. Rose wondered just what victory Reverend Holton supposed he’d won.
The mine closed the first week of November. Some of the miners – half of them, maybe – were brought on at the mine in Central City, but the rest were not. Some of those found work doing other things, and the rest either moved or stayed in Corley’s Crossing and became even poorer. That’s how it went for the first year, and the second, and the third, as well. Some businesses closed, houses became empty and started looking run-down and shabby. The Lambert catered to fewer and fewer men, but those who came did so religiously, because they had nothing other to do than drink. As for Ethan Gentry, he was sent away to prison where rumor had it he died after just a day or two when he angered some of the fellow inmates with his mouth.
One summer day, five or six years later, Rose walked down to the Tassanaqua. It was the first time she’d been down there since the day with Daniel. She sat on one of the rocks for an hour or two, dipping her feet in the water and remembering a brief time when things had been lovely and better than they were now. She gazed down into the eddying pool in which she dangled her toes, and something there caught her eye. At the bottom of this particular pool was a bottle, and Rose knew that bottle at first glance even five years after she’d last seen one. She reached into the pool and pulled the bottle out. It was a bottle of Old Prospero’s. Someone had thrown it here, way back then…
…but it was still capped, and it was still full.
Rose’s heart quickened. Had this bottle really been here, in this pool, for five years? How could it survive the winter freezes? How could the Tassanaqua’s currents, swift all year but especially powerful in spring, not have pushed it away? And shouldn’t it have been floating?
All the memories returned as she gazed at the bottle in her hand. She remembered Daniel’s green eyes, and the nights in the Lambert filled with music and laughter. She remembered Mordecai smiling for the only time in all the year’s she’d known him. She remembered Daniel’s hands, caressing her and moving through her hair and under the bib of her overalls. She remembered his green, green eyes. And as she remembered all that, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the bottle opener on her key-ring. The cap came off with that wonderful sighing sound, and she sipped the beer without hesitation. It was still fresh and sweet and warm and spicy and full and cold, as she knew it would be. The warmth, that beautiful old warmth long since smothered, spread through her as if it had never left. Rose sat there, beside the Tassanaqua, drinking the single bottle of Old Prospero’s and watching the waters flow by, on their way around this bend and toward the next and on to wherever they went.
She drank the last drops and tossed the bottle into the river, watching it bob along with the current until it was out of sight. Then she went back to the Lambert, where she packed a couple changes of clothes into a bag along with all of her money from the cigar box. She didn’t need anything else, really. She went out back, to where Isaac was sleeping in his hammock. The big, kind man was older, fatter, and grayer at the temples, but he’d do all right by her father’s bar. She put the keys in the hammock next to him, where he’d find them, and then she walked out front and out onto the street. It was three o’clock, so she could walk to the depot and hop on the five o’clock train. They’d let her sleep in a boxcar, or if they didn’t she’d walk. It was a good time of year.
She was walking past the Co-op when Edna and Mabel came out. Alice had moved the year before.
“Going somewhere, Miss Barnstone?” Edna asked, her voice still dripping with all the contempt she could muster even after these years.
“Yes,” Rose said, smiling. “Edna, let your children leave Corley’s Crossing, or they’ll become you when they grow up.” And then she walked on, smiling as she went even though tears rolled down her cheeks. Smiling even though, in her gladness, she wept.
In a diner in New Mexico, a man orders pancakes, and when they are served he pours syrup over them from the bottle he’s brought in himself.
“What’s that?” asks the diner’s owner, a careworn woman in her fifties. The windows rattle as one of those new Air Force jets zips overhead.
“Syrup,” says the man. “A special blend that I sell.”
The diner’s front door bangs on its hinges; four men enter. More are pulling up outside. The breakfast rush.
“Syrup?” the woman asks as she looks at the brown glass bottle. “What’s it called?”
The man smiles at her over his short stack, and his green eyes twinkle.
“Old Prospero’s,” he says.