The Obsidian Blade (5 page)

T
UCKER KEPT PRAYING FOR HIS MOTHER, BUT HER GOOD
moments came less and less often. Most days she never changed out of her white cotton nightgown.

“I look like one of them,” she said to Tucker one morning, staring at her blurry reflection in the polished steel side of the toaster.

“Them who?” Tucker asked.

“You don’t see them?” She looked at him.

“See who?”

“Them.” She pointed at the kitchen window. Tucker looked, half expecting to see someone staring in at them. “Ghosts,” she said as she lowered the shade.

“There’s no such thing,” Tucker said, the hairs on the back of his neck stirring.

In fact, Tucker had seen two ghosts in recent weeks.

The first time, he had awakened early one morning and looked out his bedroom window to see a man made of fog staring in at him. For a fraction of a second, Tucker could pick out every detail of the man’s features — a wide, down-turned mouth, a long nose, two close-set eyes, and a thick mop of colorless hair — then it was gone. It happened so quickly that Tucker didn’t have time to be scared, and after a few minutes of perplexity, he decided that he must have imagined it.

The second ghost had appeared on the roof of the house in the middle of the day. Tucker had looked up and seen a faint, gaseous, humanlike shape standing on — or floating just above — the peak of the roof. The bright sunlight made it difficult to see any details, but Tucker had the impression that this time it was a woman, and that she was watching him. The image lasted for five or six seconds, slowly becoming harder to see, then it disappeared entirely.

Water vapor steaming from the hot shingles? A cloud of insects? Tucker had forcibly ejected both events from his mind and did not think about it again until his mother brought up the subject of ghosts.

“If there were really ghosts,” Tucker said, “everybody would see them. Dad would see them too.”

“He is one of them, Kosh.”

“Kosh?” said Tucker.

His mother turned away as if he weren’t present, opened the silverware drawer, and began polishing the clean spoons with the corner of her nightgown.

Tucker couldn’t stop thinking about ghosts. His mom was getting more than weird; she was getting scary — calling him strange names and saying Dad was a ghost. He peeked through the half-open door of his dad’s study. His father was sitting with his elbows propped on his desk next to a half-carved troll, his chin resting on his fists, staring bleakly into space.

Tucker pushed the door all the way open. “Dad?”

The Reverend closed his eyes. “Tuck.”

“Mom says she sees ghosts.”

The Reverend shook his head. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

“I saw something on the roof.”

His father’s eyes snapped open.

“You stay off that roof,” he said.

“I didn’t say I was
on
the roof. I said I
saw
something there. Like a . . . like a ghost.”

“A trick of the light. Heat distortion.”

“It looked real.”

“It
wasn’t,
” his father said with startling intensity.

Tucker decided to change the subject. “Mom counted her cornflakes this morning. She lined them up on the table and counted. She told me she was only hungry for thirty-nine flakes.”

The Reverend did not reply.

“She’s polishing the spoons again.”

The Reverend’s shoulders slumped.

“Maybe we should take her to another doctor,” Tucker said.

“The doctors are useless.”

“She called me Kosh.”

Tucker’s father turned and stared at him.

“Kosh?”

“Yeah. Who’s Kosh?”

His father grimaced, as if the words caused him pain. “Nobody,” he said.

“Are you okay?” Tucker asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know,” said Tucker. “You look sad.”

“Happiness is overrated.” The Reverend’s expression softened. “I know this has been hard on you, Tuck. I’m sorry.”

“I just want everything to be like before.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not how life works.”

“How come you still preach, then?”

The Reverend’s forehead knotted, but his mouth curved into a smile. “Because it’s my job.”

“But you don’t believe in God.”

“I believe in preaching.” The Reverend swiveled his chair toward the window and did not say another word.

As his mother sank slowly into her private world of ghosts and clean light switches, as his father grew even more distant, as the crisp brown fields of autumn surrendered to a blanket of snow, Tucker distracted himself with school and snowmobiling with Tom and Will Krause. It had been five months since Lahlia had gone to live with the Beckers. He wondered whether she had learned to speak any English. He wanted to ask her how she had met his father. The Reverend Feye had steadfastly refused to talk about it.

Christmas came. The Reverend cut down a stunted spruce tree growing near the edge of the woods and dragged it home. His mother watched dully from her easy chair as Tucker and his father did their best to decorate the sorry little tree. It felt to Tucker as if they were faking it — just pretending to have Christmas. His dad bought him a snowboard, though, which gave Tucker another excuse to get out of the house as much as possible.

Emily Feye had become the subject of much gossip in Hopewell. Her increasingly odd appearance — white hair, staring eyes, quivering lips — was impossible to ignore. At home, she continued to cook and clean, but little more. One mid-January day, she left the house in her bathrobe and a long coat and walked into town. They got a call from Red Grauber, the owner of the Pigeon Drop Inn.

“Adrian, your wife is standing on the street in front of the old hotel talking to the air. You might want to come get her.”

Tucker and his dad jumped in the car and drove downtown, where they found her huddled on the front steps of Hopewell House. She was happy to get into the warm car but seemed puzzled as to why they had come for her.

“I was just having a little walk,” she said.

A few weeks later, on a cold Sunday in February, as the Reverend was preaching on the care of the soul, Emily Feye stood up from her front-row pew and cried out, “I see them!”

The church went dead silent. She turned, facing the congregation. Her eyes lifted and she pointed at a space several feet above the heads of the parishioners.

“They watch us,” she said. “Bugs in a bottle.”

The Reverend, after a moment of stunned silence, said, “It is true. The souls of our departed loved ones watch us as they pave the way for us to one day enter the kingdom of Heaven. . . .” As he spoke, the Reverend stepped down from his pulpit and took his wife by the hand.

“I was a
princess,
” she said querulously.

Gently, he sat her down. She did not resist; the angry light faded from her eyes.

As the days and weeks and months passed, Emily Feye became even stranger and more ethereal. The Reverend now spent nearly every free hour in his study, reading or carving. Tucker felt as if both his parents were fading slowly away, growing more ghostly and insubstantial with each passing week.

B
Y THE TIME SCHOOL LET OUT IN
J
UNE
, T
UCKER HAD
almost gotten used to having a crazy mother and a depressed father. He spent his days fishing, exploring the patches of woods around Hopewell, riding the new mountain bike his dad gave him for his fourteenth birthday, and hanging out with the Krause brothers.

Tom and Will were good at coming up with exciting new ways to pass the time. Over the past year they had talked Tucker into several exploits, including capturing a young raccoon to keep as a pet, blowing up a can of gasoline, and jumping Thorp Creek with their father’s snowmobile. The boys had survived all of these activities, sustaining only minor injuries: second-degree burns and a broken arm for Tom, rabies shots for Will, and a gash on Tucker’s elbow requiring twelve stitches.

Tom’s latest scheme was to build a rope swing. Not just any rope swing, but the mother of all rope swings. A few weeks earlier, while visiting their cousin Tony in Frontenac, Tom and Will had liberated a heavy-duty, hundred-foot-long rope from a barge that had run aground on the Mississippi. They hauled the rope back to Hopewell in their cousin’s pickup truck. All they needed was a tree tall enough to do the rope justice. For this, they recruited Tucker, who knew the lakes and woods surrounding Hopewell better than he knew his own face.

Tucker took one look at the rope and grinned. He knew the perfect tree.

The next morning the boys cut up an old shipping pallet for steps. They piled the boards into a wheelbarrow, coiled the rope on top, and took turns pushing it up West End Road and through the Beckers’ back soybean field to Hardy Lake.

A gigantic cottonwood rose from a steep bank at the south end of the lake. The trunk was six feet in diameter, and it was as tall as any tree in Hopewell County. They nailed the wooden steps to the trunk, making a crude ladder up to the lower crotch, where the tree forked into two heavy limbs. With one end of the rope tied to his belt, Tucker climbed up to the crotch, the rope growing heavier with each step. Wedging himself between the two limbs, he pulled up the rest of the rope hand over hand and draped it back and forth across the crotch.

He continued up the limb that arched out over the water. The rope played out slowly behind him.

Halfway up, several loops of rope slipped from the crotch. The sudden increase in weight nearly yanked him off the limb — but he managed to hang on. The Krause brothers watched from below, their mouths open.

Tucker continued shinning his way up the limb to a point where it forked into two smaller branches. He was over the lake now, the water sixty feet below him. The limb was only about six inches thick. Tucker was not usually afraid of heights, but he had never been
this
high before. His heart was banging so hard he could hear it in his ears. With his legs locked onto the branch, Tucker pulled the rope up to get more slack, then wrapped it several times around the fork and tied a triple knot. Just as he tightened the last loop, the remaining rope slipped from the crotch and flopped out over the lake, writhing and flailing. The branch jerked down as it took the full weight of the rope; Tucker clamped his body around the limb with all his strength as the branch bobbed and settled. The rope’s contortions quickly dampened as its bottom end settled into the water about twenty feet from shore.

Briefly, Tucker considered climbing down the rope. That would really impress the Krauses. But he could not seem to make his legs release their grip on the tree. He closed his eyes, took a few calming breaths, wriggled carefully back down the limb to the main crotch, then descended the wooden steps to the ground.

Tom and Will were knee deep in the water, tying the bottom of the rope into an enormous knot. Once knotted, the end of the rope hung about two feet above the water. Tom added a thin nylon cord to the bottom of the knot. Will looked up at Tucker, his face bright with excitement. He grabbed the end of the cord from his brother and scrambled up the bank, pulling the rope behind him. Tom followed.

“So, who goes first?” Will asked, looking down the steep bank to the water below.

Tom, looking up to where the rope was tied, said, “That branch looks pretty skinny.”

“It’s bigger than it looks,” Tucker said. “And it held me.”

“I weigh more than you.” Tom was the oldest, tallest, and heaviest of the three, and the most cautious. He had not enjoyed the burns he’d received from the exploding gas can adventure or the broken arm from the snowmobile incident.

“I climbed up and tied it,” said Tucker. “Somebody else should go first.”

“Will’s the smallest.”

“Am not,” said Will, even though it was clearly true.

“Maybe we should test it,” said Tom. “Tie something heavy to it.”

“If you think my knot’s no good, climb up and check it,” Tucker said.

“If you’re so sure,
you
should be the one to test it.”

“Maybe we should tie it around your neck and test it on
you
!” Tucker said.