Death Watch (43 page)

Such is the Devil’s way. Let the rope out easy and slow, easy and slow
.

Up and ever up that youth walked, and though he could no longer feel her hand in his, and though he could not hear her breath and though she said nothing, on and on he walked, feeling as sure of himself as any man in his predicament could. Walking still in the mist, when he could see the trees before him glow in the light of the sun, he spoke her name, just once. But she says nothing. Makes no answer. So he thinks he’s lost her, you see? Lost her somewhere along the way, so he turns to look, and well, that was it. He really did lose her then and for what? A little impatience
.

That sweet girl’s face hung before him on the air for the space of a breath, but then, oh then, it just fell away from him and back down into the earth and sank to that other place, where he would never see it again so long as he lived
.

“Is that always how the story ends?” Silas asked earnestly, almost desperately, twisting in his chair.

“Yes, if things run their right way. Yes. That is how it
must
end. Because, in case you failed to notice”—Mrs. Bowe’s voice dropped—“she was d-e-a-d.”

“But what if things ran another way?”

Mrs. Bowe didn’t like the direction this was taking. But she didn’t want to lie to him, not outright.
What would Amos want me to tell him?
she asked herself. She knew in her heart that eventually, Amos would have told the boy everything, but not yet. Not yet.

“Stories wander around, go from one land to another, sometimes parts change.”

Silas leaned forward in his chair.

“There is another version. It ends a little different. But it’s stranger, that story, and I don’t rightly understand all of it. It’s a song, and it came across the sea, and it’s in books. There’s no mystery about where it came from. The mystery is what it says. But it’s late, Silas, and I can’t go fetching up old songs at this hour.”

“But how does that one end? How is it different from the Orpheus story you told me?”

Of course he’d know
, she thought.

“Yes. Orpheus. But in this other version, this folk version, he is called Orfeo. And when Orfeo goes to the King of the Dead to get his girl back, he plays music for the dead, and they all think so highly of it, their king asks Orfeo what he wants to be paid for his marvelous song. Orfeo asks for his lady back, and the king tells him to take her and go home.”

“Doesn’t he look back? Doesn’t he lose her?”

“I don’t believe he does. The song ends with Orfeo going home and becoming king.”

“I like that ending better,” Silas said.

“I will have to disagree with you,” Mrs. Bowe said softly, now regretting bringing up the other version of the story.

“Why?” asked Silas, his voice rising. “It’s much better that way. Orfeo gets the girl he loves, and they go home and live together, and what’s wrong with that?”

“Because it is unnatural. Those who go to the halls of the dead do not return, and if they do, it is only because they may be of use to the King of the Dead. But it is getting late and you’ve had your story, young man. So enough. We can argue about ballads over breakfast. To bed, with us both.”

“I’m not tired,” Silas said. “I’ll stay up a bit longer. Good night, Mrs. Bowe.”

“Suit yourself.”

But as she turned to go, Silas spoke again.

“What if just part of the story is true? What if love can conquer death?”

“You mean like me and my man?”

“No, I was thinking of something more … I’m not sure … forgive me … something more
real
. Like when Orfeo brings back his girl.”

Mrs. Bowe went absolutely white and knew she had made a mistake. She should have left the matter well alone. She also knew she would now have to intervene. It had already gone far enough.

“Silas, really!” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Just how in the world do you intend to find that out exactly?”

“It’s just a question….”

“Well, some questions lead to trouble, and that’s no lie!” She tried to regain her composure, smoothed the front of her dress as if brushing off crumbs. “Silas, they don’t come back, dear. They may linger like a long shadow before twilight, but they do not return. At least, not in any way you’d want to get close to. Leave it be, now.”

Mrs. Bowe walked across the passage back into her own
house, her hands shaking. It was already becoming clear the boy was going the way of the father. That was expected, and she was proud of him, in a way and to a point. What she didn’t like was how quickly he seemed fascinated by that road on which there were few turns and no returning. She’d let it go too far.

Resolve rose up her, and if she didn’t stop to overthink things, she might be able to see it through and help him. Striding more confidently now, she went to the tomb in her garden and spoke to the hive. In an instant, the bees were swarming toward the millpond, then flying low over the murky surface, carrying water back through the window of Mrs. Bowe’s parlor and depositing it, droplet by droplet, on her mother’s crystal. She touched the water with her finger, spread it across the surface of the stone, and softly spoke words into the air as a veil within the crystal parted. “Drink. Drink. Drink, Lonesome Water. Sink down. Go low, child. Cold One, go low. Go back to the murk place and attend your bones. When you see him again, then you will sink down….”

The bees hummed in circles about her head.

“I know,” she said, “but it may hold her long enough.”

She intoned sharply, finally: “When they are together next, let the waters take hold of her again. He may look upon her once more. Then, let night descend. Then, let the waters take her and winter lock her in her bones.” Her voice blended in the air with the sound of the bees, and the water on the surface of the crystal turned to ice.

Between the hours is where they reside, just under the minutes by which we count out our days. They are always there, waiting, out of time, and when the sands are still at the bottom of the hourglass, we may take hands with them.

—
Marginalia of Richard Umber, recorded 18 September 1836

S
ILAS HADN’T SEEN BEA
for a couple of days. It seemed that when he was thinking about his father, or his work, she was less likely to appear, as though she knew that she wasn’t at the front of his thoughts, and was jealous about the time he spent thinking about anything other than her. She seemed to feel him thinking about her, and when he wasn’t, she stayed away until he did.

But Silas was thinking about her. He couldn’t help it.

Bea was distracting him in every way, more in her absence than her presence. Thoughts of Bea drew him away, even in sleep, from focusing on his work, further and further from finding his dad. It wasn’t only her strangeness. Silas needed someone who
wanted
to be with him, and she did.

Despite all the time they’d spent together over the past weeks, he still didn’t know much about her, but he had figured out a few things. He could almost admit to himself the kind of girl she was. Not merely different. Something more. When he was with her, it felt like there was nothing else in the world. When they were apart, he was filled with guilt for all the other things he had allowed himself to forget. But then all he wanted was more time with her, and so it went in his mind, around and around.

At the top of the stairs leading from the street to his front door, there was a spot where the paint was worn thin and the gray wood showed through. Silas liked to sit there and imagine
his dad sitting and thinking, watching the street or the sky. And that was what Silas was doing. Sitting on the front stairs, thinking about Beatrice. Clouds were passing quickly above him, high and fast, sailing shadows down the street and to the west. Every few seconds, a beam of sun darted through the clouds and probed the ground like a searchlight.

He’d been there since early morning. He’d had another Bea dream and wasn’t able to get back to sleep. He’d begun to fret, turning the problem of his distraction over in his mind. Silas knew, somewhere in his gut, that he should stay away from her. Even his dreams about her were beautiful but dark, always framed in coldness and shadow. He knew she had problems. It wasn’t that she was a bad person; he just knew she was probably going to be bad for him. But maybe she was the kind of bad he needed right now. Maybe it was a good bad. Or not. Like how the air seemed to condense when they were close, or the way her skin sometimes looked as if cold water was coursing beneath. No. None of it felt right. But it felt good, for the distraction as much as anything else. He liked the mystery of her. He liked feeling that he might one day be able to figure her out, that one day, he might learn what kind of light she actually was: lighthouse beacon, or mooncusser’s fire.

He liked feeling that it was the two of them. But when they were together, he noticed, the shadows drew in just a little. The world around them darkened. The light wasn’t so bright or revealing. All the rough edges of things were rounded down. He liked feeling as though he had a little secret he was keeping from the world, though he was beginning to sense there was something unnatural about their attraction for each other, something dangerous in their desire to be together, in the way she looked at him. Still, Bea was match to the field of dry weeds Silas’s heart had
become in the time since his dad had disappeared. Their little fire had started fast, and Silas didn’t want to worry about what else might catch or who else saw the smoke. When he thought about her, he was warm all over, and it was so nice to feel something, anything, other than scared and abandoned.

The clouds had slowed and gone ashen, swinging low toward the ground. It was going to rain.

He could just go along with it for a while. It was, after all, a learning experience. Like, if you wanted to learn a language, it was best to go and live in that country. And Bea
was
a Lichport girl. Born and raised here, Bea knew so much about the town’s dead and living both. He loved seeing the town through her eyes. She was part of Lichport, but also of some other land, an oddly distant place that happened to be right around the corner. Maybe love just felt that way, like a kind of fever dream, making things seem both frighteningly close and unbearably far away all at once.

From the story she’d told him about Orpheus, he assumed Mrs. Bowe knew something about him and Bea and did not approve of her. But why bother worrying her with details? Now that he had his own place to live, and was finished with school, he could do as he pleased. How long does a guy have to ask permission for everything he does? His great-grandfather had made a generous gift to him. He was buying his own food when he wasn’t eating with Mrs. Bowe or the Peales down in the Narrows. He could live on his own and on his own terms. Okay, he wasn’t washing his own clothes, but that was only because Mrs. Bowe insisted on doing it. She derived great pleasure from doing the laundry and found nothing demeaning in it. She said it was something traditional in her family, that her mother and grandmother and back and back were all “washerwomen.” He didn’t understand what she meant, but whatever. He could pay someone else to help him with
housework now if he needed to. The point was, he didn’t need anyone’s approval or permission for anything anymore.

Silas paused again very briefly, weighing possibilities. “Screw it,” was his conclusion. He always thought too much, worried too much. Besides, after the year he’d had, was spending time with someone like Bea really going to make things worse? For once, things weren’t quite so awkward. Like with the girl in his homeroom class. She had looked at him sometimes and once, had slipped him her phone number on the corner of a piece of paper. He’d never called her. Wanted to. A hundred times. But every time he thought about it, his mind boiled up with every reason not to do it, every doubt he’d ever had about himself. His mother’s comments hadn’t helped. She said it was because no decent girl would date a man with hair in his eyes and that he should get a haircut. But Silas had seen pictures of both his parents when they were dating, so he said, “But Dad’s hair was over his eyes when you dated him.”

“Yes!” his mother spat back. “And look where that’s gotten me!”

Silas was sure his hair had not been the problem. Homeroom-girl had given him her phone number despite his hair. She’d told him—when he awkwardly apologized for never calling—that he was “cute, but kinda weird,” and that her friends had made fun of her for giving him her number.

“Okay,” he’d said, embarrassed. “That’s okay.”

Most of the girls he had looked at in school wouldn’t talk to him at all.

Better to keep Bea a secret. It felt better as a secret. Only the two of them. Only him and Bea. And she was interested in him. Waited for him, sometimes. He even thought he could feel her thinking about him. It was easy spending time with her. They had walked through many of the town’s cemeteries together, one after another in no particular order, drifting among the stones,
Bea telling Silas stories of the folk who lay below them.