Ashes (29 page)

Jerp felt as if his arms had been ripped from
his shoulder sockets, the way they had felt when he grabbed the
electric fence to see how strong the shock was. He looked down at
the barn floor fifteen feet below. The scarecrow boy was standing
there, grinning like a turtle eating saw-briars even though its
eyes were cold and dead.

"Lordamighty, it's a wonder you ain't broke
your neck," Grandpa yelled. Boots drummed down the loft stairs,
then the crib door banged shut. Then Grandpa was underneath him,
telling him to let go. The scarecrow boy was gone.

Jerp relaxed his hands, and the balls of his
feet drove into the dirt floor. Pain shot through his ankles.
Grandpa caught him before he fell over.

"You sure you're okay?" Grandpa asked,
holding Jerp's shoulders.

Jerp nodded numbly. Accidents happened on a
farm. Timber fell on legs, snapping them like dry twigs. Horses
kicked out blindly, causing concussions or worse. Plows and harrows
sometimes turned more than red clay, sometimes making furrows in
flesh and blood.

And accidents happened in the city. Gunmen
drove by and filled the street with random hot lead. Drug dealers
knifed rib cages because someone looked like someone else through
angel-dusted eyes. Airliners sheared off rooftops and spread
carnage like confetti. Misunderstood boys were labeled maladjusted
and sent to juvenile hall where they learned nothing except how to
be real criminals instead of amateurs.

"I'm sorry, Grandpa, I just lost my step,"
Jerp said as his wind returned. "I'm all right now. Let's get back
to work."

Work was the answer. Work would keep evil
away. Work would keep thoughts and daydreams and made-up monsters
away. Work would make Grandpa happy.

"You sure?" Grandpa asked, and this time
there was no threat in the words, only real concern and tenderness.
Jerp nodded again and walked to the corncrib door, trying to hide
his limp. They went back up to the loft and Grandpa lifted the pole
that spanned the haychute.

He let out a liquid whistle and said, "Boy,
lucky you fell just right. This thing mighta speared you like a
frog on a gig."

The scarecrow boy could have made it happen
that way, if it had wanted. But Jerp would work harder now.

They bundled tobacco the rest of the day,
until the pile of sheaves was taller than Jerp. Grandpa complained
about having a headache, and by the time they had cooked and eaten
supper, the headache had turned into a fever. As night rose like a
cliff made of coal, Jerp built a fire and Grandpa sat by the
hearth, a shawl across his knees.

He looked miserable in his helplessness.
"Jerp, I ain't up to doing chores tonight. You think you can handle
them?" he said, his voice as chalky as his face.

"Sure, Grandpa." Jerp was anxious to make up
for dropping that egg basket, forgetting to slop the hogs that day
two weeks ago, and burning the cabbage bed by broadcasting too much
fertilizer. "I know what to do."

"Don't forget to put up the cows."

Put up the cows. In the barn. With scarecrow
boy riding herd.

"Something wrong, boy? You ain't afeared of
the dark, are you?"

Dark wasn't bad. Dark was
only black, suffocating stillness. Dark didn't walk. Dark
didn't
smile
.

"No, of course you ain't. And remember to
latch the gate when you're done," Grandpa said, his attention
wandering back to the fire which reflected off his rheumy eyes.

Jerp put on his coat, his fingers shaking as
he fumbled with the zipper. He took a flashlight from the ledge by
the front door and went out into the night, under the black sky
where stars were strewn like white jackstones. Crickets chirped
across the low hills. Jerp's flashlight cut a weak circle in the
darkness, and he followed the circle to the gate.

The cows had come in on their own, following
the twitching tail of the mare who was smart enough to know where
food and shelter could be found. They were milling outside the pen,
rubbing against the split locust rails. Jerp walked through the
herd, grateful for the warmth the animals radiated. He lifted the
latch and they spilled into the barnyard, annoying the sow into a
round of grunting. Jerp slid back the barn door and the animals
tottered inside. So far, so good.

But now he had to go to the hayloft. Now he
had to go through the corncrib and up the stairs and across the
loft that was littered with square black holes. Now he had to meet
the scarecrow boy on its home turf.

He almost turned and ran back up the hill to
the light and safety of the farmhouse, almost let his legs betray
him by becoming a whirling windmill of fear. But then he pictured
Grandpa asking if all the animals were put up and fed and the
chores done proper. And Jerp heard the words that Grandpa had been
waiting to say.

I was hoping to leave this farm to you, to
let you carry on the tradition that your father abandoned. I was
hoping someday the soil would lay claim to you, because busy hands
touch no evil. But if the dirt's not in you, you can't plant
there.

Jerp squinted in the moonlight that spilled
into the barn. He kicked a horse chip across the ground. He took a
pitchfork from the wall and walked to the corncrib. He would be
part of the farm, not a big-city sissy.

Jerp banged the wooden handle on the door to
warn the rats and the scarecrow boy that he was coming and had work
to do. Taking a deep taste of air, he slammed the door open so hard
that the sweet potatoes rolled around in their bins. He ran up the
steps with one hand clenched around the pitchfork.

The haybales were stacked like bricks on the
far end of the loft. He tiptoed through the tobacco that hung like
long sleeping bats, around the hole he had fallen through earlier,
and past the workbench. He was among the hay now, walking down an
aisle between the silent stacks. Jerp turned the corner and there
was scarecrow boy, sitting on a bale and grinning at him, a straw
jabbed between its teeth.

Jerp held the pitchfork in front of him. If
the scarecrow boy was stuffed with straw, Jerp was ready to pierce
its flesh and shred its muscles and rake its insides out. If the
boy had a ragball heart, Jerp would make the heart stop beating.
Jerp's own heart was racing like that of a crow that had eaten
poisoned corn.

The scarecrow boy looked at Jerp with eyes
that were beyond life, eyes that neither flinched nor twinkled in
the flashlight's glare. Eyes that were as black as good bottom
soil, black as manure. Eyes that had seen drought and flood, lush
and fallow fields, harvests both meager and bountiful. Eyes that
were seeds, begging to be planted and given a chance to take root,
to grow and bloom and go to seed, to spread on the winds and in the
bellies of birds, to propagate among the loess and loam and
alluvial soils of the world.

"You've been waiting for me," Jerp said.
"Always."

The scarecrow boy nodded, its head wobbling
on its shoulders like an apple tied to a kite.

Suddenly Jerp knew whose farm this was. It
had never been recorded on a deed down at the county seat, but some
laws were unwritten and universal. Rights of ownership went to the
possessor.

And Jerp belonged here, belonged to the farm
and to the scarecrow boy.

The scarecrow boy spread its musty arms as if
to hug Jerp. Jerp let the flashlight drop to the floor as the
scarecrow boy rose like smoke and drifted through the tines of the
pitchfork. Jerp tried to draw back, but he felt as if he had a
splintery stake up his spine. His arms went limp and he itched, he
itched, his hands were dusty and his mouth was dry. The pitchfork
fell onto the planks, but the clatter was muffled, as if he were
hearing it through layers of cloth. Jerp tried to stretch the
threads of his neck, but he could only stare straight ahead at the
boy in front of him.

At the boy with the smile
that curved like a blackberry thorn. At the boy who had stolen his
face and meat and white bones. At the boy who was wearing his
scuffed lace-up boots. At the boy who was looking down at his
hands—
no, MY hands
,
his cobwebbed mind screamed—as if the hands were a new pair of work
gloves that needed to be broken in.

Then Jerp knew. He had forgotten to latch the
gate behind him. Even though Grandpa had told him a thousand times.
But Jerp had been so afraid. It wasn't his fault, was it?

Jerp tried to open his
mouth, to scream, to tell the boy to get out of his skin, but
Jerp's tongue was an old sock. He strained to flap the rags of his
arms, but he felt himself falling into the loose hay. He choked on
the cotton and chaff and sweetly sick odor of his own dry-rot. And
still he
saw
, with
eyes that were tickled by tobacco dust and stung by tears that
would never fall.

Jerp watched as the boy now wearing Jerp's
clothes bent to lift the pitchfork. The boy tried out its stolen
skin, stretched its face into new smiles. Then the boy who had
borrowed Jerp's body stepped between the haybales and was gone.
Minutes or years later, the barn door slid open.

Jerp tried his limbs and found they worked,
but they were much too light and boneless. He dragged himself to
the window and pressed his sawdust head against the chickenwire.
Jerp looked out over the moist fields that would now and always
beckon him, he listened to the breezes that would laugh till the
cows came home, he sniffed the meadows that would haunt his endless
days. He wondered how long it would be before the next season of
change. Already he ached from waiting.

Jerp looked down into the barnyard and saw
the boy who wore his flesh walking toward the farmhouse, the
pitchfork glinting under the moon, perhaps on his way to punish
someone who had shirked the evening chores.

The boy remembered to latch the gate.

###

LAST WRITES

Ah, the vanity of the living.

Just look at him.

He sits on the upper floor and surveys the
flat sweep of ocean. The sea is weak, exhausted from a night of
stretching, yet he watches as if some catastrophe will occur at any
moment. True, ships have sunk here in sight of shore on the calmest
of summer days, but not on this man’s watch. All he knows is what
the logbook has told him and what he has gleaned from the tales of
those who sent him here.

He will not learn, and he has time ahead of
him. His eyes may become bleary and strained, he will grow lonely,
he will think things that no normal man should. Yet, when his term
is over, he will rejoin the sweeping tide of the living and give
this place little thought. He will leave this place, and that is
why I hate him. That is why I must become a part of him, invade his
thoughts and dreams. We each seek to become immortal, and I must
live on through him.

He imagines himself a lighthouse keeper, yet
he keeps nothing. He comes and he goes, like the others. And still
I shall remain. I am the real keeper here.

He fancies he knows of solitude. Sitting
there in his bamboo chair, with his lantern and bottle of spirits.
The labels have changed over the years, grown more colorful, but
the bottom of the bottle still speaks the same words. The speakers
of several languages have sat in that chair: Portuguese, Italian,
Dutch, but mostly English and Spanish. Yet the language is the same
to me. Theirs is the language of the living.

This one is handsomer than some of the
others. He has sideburns clipped close to the lobe, beard trimmed
in a fashion I haven’t seen before. He is young. They get younger
every year. Or perhaps I am older. Please, merciful God, let me be
older.

The object on the table beside him emits a
purring sound, like that of a cat stuck in a sewage drain. The man
puts the object to his ear as if it were a conch and speaks.

“
Hello, Norfolk
Lighthouse.”

He pauses, listening. If it were a conch
instead of the strange object, he would be hearing the roar of the
ocean. Or the blood rushing through his head. Sometimes those two
things are the same.

“
Hi, Maleah,” he says, his
face changing instantly, lifting into a bright and open
expression.

Maleah. A pretty name. It sounds of Hawaii,
that Pacific island region of which sailors sometimes speak. She
must be as beautiful as her name.

I hate her, for she occupies him.

I go to the window, stick my head in a sea
breeze ripe with the scream of gulls, but I can’t drown out his
words.

“
I miss you, too,” he says.
“But it’s only for a year. And I’ll get a lot of writing done while
I’m here.”

His other hand, the one not holding the
non-conch, goes to the bottle. He nods, sips, glances at the
window. At me.

I rattle the shutters. Perhaps I am getting
older. I don’t bang them with the same enthusiasm of a couple of
centuries ago. Still, paint sloughs off and bits of stucco dust
fall to the beach far below.

“
Maleah,” he says into the
conch-thing. A telephone, they have called it. “Something weird is
happening.”

Now I am “something weird.” I would sigh if I
had breath. But I must do this the hard way. Just like always.

I knock on the door to the upper chamber. I
stand on the winding staircase, the yawning gap of darkness that
leads to a pale, gleaming light far below.

The door swings open, the strong stench of
spirits marking his breath, and I see his stricken face—as stricken
as mine, surely, and then I fall again, far, far, far. As I fall, I
smile. He has forgotten Maleah and thinks of me.

Sooner or later, they all dream only of me.
To the last.

I wasn’t always like this. When I was alive,
I walked the beach in search of shark’s teeth and pretty shells. In
bare feet, dawn fast and pink on the horizon, the water licking at
my ankles with a gentle, foaming tongue. The lighthouse was a
marker, a means to measure the distance I had walked from the
cottage I shared with my doting, deaf parents.