The Dark (57 page)

Lamp in hand John navigates about the sawed-off boards and wood curls, newspapers and wallpaper sheaths. I’ll commence the clean-out tomorrow, he decides. David has been grumbling of late that his father’s projects will never end. But they have. Nearly.

He twists the peg-lamp firmly into its wall socket and by its steady burn reads his wife’s letter, pausing often to decipher her accordioned writing.

John digs through his desk for paper and writing implements. Jabs his pen in the inkwell.

John writes of the indoor privy. The new cookstove. The stone sink in the scullery. He does not apologize for the impossibility of gas lights. Such false lights are for the godless crowds of New York. Lamps and candles will suffice. And a crackling fire of pine. He plans to burn sage to rid the house of the odours of turpentine and milk-paint. He has no
intention of going to New York, not ever, but this he does not write. He has made that all clear enough to his women. His role is to care for them. How is he to do so if they are scattered hither and yon? They must come here, to the family house that he has toiled to provide.

He considers for some long moments, then takes out his letter to Leah. Each time he thinks it done, he writes further.

“Fuck Christ,” said John. Brother Able was a slumped-over thing with staring, open eyes. John looked to the field, then to the feeder canal in the middle distance. Not a soul. Only three feral dogs. He could leave Able right here under his giant oak, in this small wood. Leave him as crow-feed, rat fodder. But, no, a stinking corpse would bring questions and Able might have told any number of people of his mission to save John’s whisky-sotted soul.

He propped Able up so he looked to be relaxing in the scant warmth. Loped to the
Morning Star
, stooping to pick up Able’s little black hat from the rutted field, found a coal shovel and a crowbar—the very one he’d used to pry up towpaths and so sabotage the Sabbatarians, back when the world was fine. At the last instance he grabbed the grey horsehair blanket, then drank down the remainder of the first whisky jug. The second jug was still stoppered. It could wait for his return. The digging wouldn’t take long, he figured. But it did. The earth was rocky and half frozen and John-Before decided he wanted the requisite six feet down so the feral dogs wouldn’t dig up Able’s corpse for curious eyes.

He dug in a small clearing some ten feet from the roots of the oak. Every sound was intensified—the hammering of a woodpecker, the witnessing chatter of squirrels, the bells tolling in a town church. He searched Able’s pockets for money and valuables and found nothing save a cracked-paint miniature of a pretty young woman in an
old-timey high-waisted dress. John supposed the miniature was of Able’s dead mother and this filial affection of Able’s was a further annoyance. John couldn’t imagine carrying about a portrait of his mother, even if she had ever been young or pretty.

John was sweating and breathing noisily from the digging. Soon enough, I’ll be fuck-all sotted and asleep, he thought. He fixed Able’s hat on Able’s head, then rolled Able into the grey horsehair blanket. John could have made use of that blanket, but even he didn’t fancy shovelling dirt into the open eyes of the dead.

He tamped down the final patch of earth. Covered the grave with brambles and limp winter leaves. At the last moment he lugged over a grey-white rock and dropped it at the grave’s head. The rock could be considered a slab, a marker of a sort. He did not say a prayer. He did not even bow his head.

By the time John walked back to the boat the field was silvered by a full, high moon.
Moonshine!
John thought.
Hah. Give me a fuck-all sky full. Give me whisky, grog, corn liquor, black-strap
. For though exhausted and filthy and sorry for it all, John felt triumphant. None would ever attempt to convert him again. If nothing else, Able’s sad death was surely an inoculation against piety, bibles, preachers.

John climbed down into the chilled hold of the
Morning Star
, his fortress. First a drink and then he would attend to the fire. He balled his hands into fists. Could barely comprehend what he was seeing. The second jug had been stoppered. And he’d left it upright. He was not careless about such things.

“Son-of-whore-mongering bastard …” The jug lolled on its side. The whisky had soaked the patch of rag carpet and seeped through the floorboard cracks. Not a drop was left.

John fell to his knees. Licked the boards until his tongue was raw and bleeding. Squeezed the rag rug into a tumbler. The whisky, swirling with filth and hair, rose inch by inch. Was just enough to slake his thirst. He collapsed into his niche-bed. Hauled the blanket to his chin. The night turned cold. Why had he given that second blanket to Able? It wasn’t as if he’d need it.

“Damn your rotting eyes,” John said. Blood from his tongue splattered his beard. He calmed himself with assurances. Come first
light he’d go in search of liquor. Since he was penniless he supposed he’d have to turn to crime, but that hardly signified.

He woke up, with bile in his throat and a tongue so swollen it barely fit between his teeth. He tried to rise, only to collapse shivering on the floor. He hauled himself back to the bunk in a fevered agony. All that day he thrashed and groaned. He pushed his swollen tongue into the tumbler, then hurled the tumbler against the wall. The hold reeked from the spilled whisky. A reek, however, could not sustain a man.

The shakes came first and then the spasms. The horrors would be next. He’d seen men in the screaming grips of a rum fit, but never had he let himself go so far.

Let the fucking giant rats and spiders come, thought John-Before. How real can they seem?

But it was not giant rats and spiders who came in the end, it was Brother Able, and he was mighty real indeed.

The rank-sweet stench of rotting flesh was what told John-Before he was no longer alone. He half sat up in the bed and pressed himself against the wall. He hup-hupped in terror. Clutched the blanket as if it might be a shield.

Able sat cross-legged on a barrel. There was moist dirt clumped on his clothes and John-Before’s grey blanket at his feet. Able had only been buried a day, yet already he was the very picture of decay. His face was half skull, half raw flesh. One eye hung limply on a flayed cheekbone; the other looked calmly at John. A worm curled past his rotting gums. Death must have sobered him, because he was stuttering as he berated John for giving him the whisky, for the sorry burial. He did thank him, however, for the blanket. “I-I s-suppose that w-were the b-best you c-could do.”

John worked his mouth. No scream. Just a silent rush of air.

Able continued. Told John about his mother again. Her fine house and the loss of it to drink. “My f-father b-beat her. D-did I m-mention that?”

John twisted his head to one side. Did Able realize he was dead? The thought of telling him he was made John even more terrified, if that were possible.

“He d-did. D-Darn him. I c-could hear him y-yelling and her c-crying.” That was another reason Able had become a preacher, John learned; he wanted to have some purpose. He wanted to change the hearts of people, but through kindness and persuasion.

He stood and walked agitated about the cramped hold, dirt and skin dropping from him. “B-But now I w-won’t b-be able to ch-change anyone. I’m d-dead.” He sobbed. It was a dry, rattling sound. No tears. His eyes were too decomposed for that. At least he knows he’s dead, John thought.

Hours passed. Able-the-dead spoke on and on. Lamented the failure of his ambitions and hopes. Relayed the minutia of his ordinary upbringing, his quotidian sufferings. Told constant of his poor mother, how she longed to be with him in his endeavours. “B-But I told her, n-no, that I wanted to be a-alone.” And that was a lie. It was the burden of her love that Able didn’t want. And now? Now she was dead. Now he longed for such mortal love. For human company.

Able-the-dead pushed his rotting face close to John’s aghast one. John gagged from the stench. Twisted his head aside. Able squelched his hanging eye back into its socket; pus dripped onto John’s hands as he did so. Now Able could stare properly at John. Stuttered out that love between mortals was as necessary for salvation as a love for God. “It’s an ex-extension of D-Divine love, is all.” One cannot exist without the other. And this was where Able had failed. He had not loved his brother, Willing. Nor his mother, not in the way he should have. “W-We should have b-been together. S-She needed me. L-Love is hollow unless y-you show it.”

By this time the swelling in John’s tongue had abated enough for him to croak out, “Go away, please. I’m begging you.”

Able’s rotting lips curled up in a smile. He promised that he would leave. But John had to promise something in return. John had to cease drinking spirits. John had to become a man of God. And John had to return to his family and provide them with his love and unceasing protection. If not, Able would walk with him wherever he went. He would never cease talking, and he would never cease rotting, and the stench would follow John, and John would be a pariah among even the most wretched of the living.

“Fucking dandy, then. I’ll do it. Just leave me be, damn you.”

“Sh-Shake on it?” Able stretched out a rotting hand and John took it. Felt Able’s exposed knuckle bones, the veins looping out of his palm. John-Before squeezed shut his eyes.

When he opened them, Able was gone but for a lingering stench, but for some dank clots of earth from his grave. Some mouldy grey threads from his blanket shroud.

John sets aside the pen, stretches his stiffened legs. Takes his spectacles off and pinches the arched bridge of his nose. He cleans the lenses with a rag, breathing on them first, the round mist showing like a second eye. He folds up his narrative—for that, he supposes, is what it has become.

A clatter. Then a shattering.

He whirls. The peg lamp has fallen. He stuffs his narrative in his pocket. He yells. Flails his rag. Too late. Flames tear along the spilled burning liquid. Ignite the newspapers, the wood curls. In a blink the flames are shooting up to the ceiling and hurtling out sparks. The Currier and Ives prints vanish into a fiery maw. The wallpaper blackens and disintegrates. John stamps and swats. Curses as he has
not done in years. Coughs and gasps, his lungs hot as forge-irons.

David pounds at the smoke-whirled window. “Pa! Get out. Leave that.”

John staggers out, the flames grasping at his legs, David grasping at his arms. A small explosion tosses them both down the fresh-painted stairs. John hears glass breaking. A ferocious crackling. He lies stunned on the cool grass, his limbs flung wide as if he were afloat in a pond. Above him stars tunnel the sky, their multitude a humbling thing.

“Pa?” David’s broad face wanes into his view. John stands with David’s help. David’s sons and two farmhands rush by with buckets of water.

“That’s a waste of decent water,” John says. “Attend to the other buildings. Forget this one. There’s no saving it.”

A farmhand tosses his bucket of water at the porch. It might as well be a thimble-full. The porch collapses in flames.

David’s wife, Beth, runs up, skirts clenched in her hands. “Lord, how’d it happen?”

The flames tower up and up. The smoke thickens to a pall. John could say it was his carelessness with the peg-lamp, the burning liquid, but that is a falsity. He puts his hand in his pocket; his fingers rustle against the pages of his narrative, then touch something else—a thread that has the unmistakably coarse feel of horsehair.