Death Watch (6 page)

T
HE TIDE WAS FLOODING FAST
, leaping up over the rocks, churning itself into spirals of foam and bladderwrack, pushing higher among the piles of driftwood abandoned above the high-tide mark left long ago by a storm.

Mother Peale stood watching the quickening flood from the wharf-side, wondering how high it might get.

“Company’s comin’, and that’s sure,” she whispered into the still evening air, and then began to sing softly, just breathing the words out into the twilight. “Who will it be? Who will it be? Shall we dig ’em a grave, or set table for tea?”

If the strange high tide was any hint, someone was coming home. In the old days, Lichport folks could always tell when a ship carrying kin was sailing into port because the tide would flood in high without a storm, without so much as a breeze. But kin ships were not all that came in on a flood tide. The portents hailed worse, things that ought to have stayed out at sea, things best not to set eyes on.

A black dog was sitting at the edge of the pier, barking.

No good
, she thought.
That is no good sign
.

Someone was coming in by land, she could feel that, but this omen—the dog—told her trouble was coming on the flood, too. Looking farther out over the water, she could hear a sound, soft but sure, something like the creaking of timber and a distant cry, like someone might make from the bottom of a well if they survived the fall.

By land and by sea … it made her think whatever was coming from either way was no accident. Maybe connected. Maybe not. Whatever was out there on the water was a fair bit off yet. So she turned back toward the land and closed her eyes. She could see farther that way. She drew the dark night close about her like a shawl.

Yes. Yes
, she thought, opening her eyes as she began her short walk home.
Let the child come home again
.

She could hear Mr. Peale hollering within the house even before she’d crossed the threshold. He was having one of his fits. Mother Peale walked in quickly and saw her husband sitting in his chair by the fire. He was covered in sweat, his wet hair plastered down onto his skull in strips and his night clothes clinging to him, yellowed and translucent.

As she entered the room, he threw back his head and yelled, “There is a shadow on the sea, my girl! Wandering it goes, yet sure it comes to harbor! The ship of air … the ship of mist … Hold fast!” And before Mother Peale could cross the room and soothe him, he jumped from his seat, his eyes still closed, and began leaping on the stones near the fire in a sort of dance, singing out,

Hear the wailing of the crew,

Hark! There’s the tolling bell!

Away! And weigh the anchor,

A ship sails forth from hell!

Had it been a hundred years? Fever or no, she knew her husband could see the truth in the turning tide. The mist ship was coming into harbor, and before sailing forth again, it would take a soul with it out of Lichport and into perdition.

I
T WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE END
of their time in Saltsbridge. The day before departure. It had been quiet in the house all morning. Silas and his mother were each doing their own last-minute packing, but there was a heaviness in the air. Too many boxes unfilled and unsealed. Too many things still to sort out and no time left. Silas was trying hard to ask his mother only easy questions, the kinds of things you could answer with a plain fact.

“What time are we driving to Lichport tomorrow?”

“We aren’t driving,” Dolores said a little smugly. “We are
being driven
. Your uncle is sending a car for us.”

“Okay, then. I’ll drive over myself in the car while you’re chauffeured.”

“That might be difficult, Silas. That car’s gone.”

“What? What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean it’s gone. I sold it. Go look in the garage if you don’t believe me. How do you think we paid for the movers?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Silas yelled, his calm shattered. “That was my car!”

“Si, it was your father’s car—”

“It
still is
his car!”

“It
was
your father’s car. And when he … didn’t come back … it became
my
car, and I sold
my car
so I could get some of
our
things to
our
new home and pay to put the furniture in storage because we
can’t just go redecorating the house of our host. You understand that, right?”

Silas couldn’t speak. He was beyond angry. No car? What would he do if things in Lichport went bad, or he hated living with his uncle? He’d always assumed he’d have a way out, but, with no car, now what? Not to mention, his mother had just pretty much admitted that she thought his dad was never coming back. He ran to the garage and opened the side door. Even as his eyes adjusted, he could feel the unfilled space in the way his quick breaths echoed loudly off the floor and walls.

It was all falling away, everything he knew he could count on. All vanishing. And tomorrow he was leaving for Lichport. He’d be just another item on a growing list of things that weren’t where he needed them to be.

Dolores sat on the porch, watching the movers carry all her marked boxes across the yard. Only the boxes with her handwriting on them were being stacked in the truck, while Silas’s boxes of books sat idle in the driveway.

“Well?” she said as though someone was secretly questioning her. “What if there’s not enough room for important things, for the valuables? I don’t know why you’re taking all your father’s old books along. They’re rubbish anyway.”

“These are my books,” Silas said calmly, not wanting to argue with her again today.

“They are not your books!” she insisted, and then sneered, “Your
dear
father bought most of those books or slipped you the money for them. Money that might have been better used, I might add.”

“Do you see him around?” Silas asked, rising to the offer of a fight after her remark. He hadn’t forgotten she’d sold the car.

She glared at him from her chair on the porch, her eyebrows and lips pulling thin as if someone were standing behind her and making a knot of the flesh on the back of her skull.

“No. You don’t,” Silas said flatly, answering for her. “So that makes them mine. But,” he added out of spite, “when he comes back, I’ll return all the books if he asks me for them.”

“Besides,” she called back over her shoulder at Silas, unable to let him have the last word, “haven’t you washed your hands of school? Didn’t you call it quits at high school? No college, right? At least, not in the foreseeable future. You’ll
see
, right? So all that reading, it’s just a waste of time, isn’t it?”

“I
did
graduate, or don’t you remember? You bought a cake,” Silas said coldly. “And I’m not wasting time. Time is what my father left me, and I’m keeping a good hold on every second, even if you have made other plans for yourself and forgotten your obligations.” Then he walked up to her chair and leaned over to whisper, “But it looks like you need another drink. Can I bring you something from one of the crates? Perhaps you’d like to join me in the kitchen to see if we can find a bottle that you haven’t already emptied?”

Dolores didn’t reply with words, but her hands, dry and chapped from days of wrapping everything she loved in layer after layer of paper, were clutching the arms of her chair like claws. Forget her obligations? Her? Run from them, maybe, but she’d never forget them. She had sunk down into herself, into a seated, crouching posture that said,
Try and get me out of this chair, and go to hell while you’re at it
. Besides, she knew there wasn’t a single bottle in the kitchen that had even a drop in it. The well was dry.

So she just sat there while Silas stormed back into the house, just sat, watching the men make a river of her belongings across the lawn. Down the steps and across the stone pavers set into the
lawn like little islands on a wide green sea. One, two, three. The movers were timing their steps so their feet came down in the middle of each stone. One, two, and just there, under the third stone, she remembered, there was a little corpse, another thing being left behind.

In her mind she could see Silas as a boy sitting on the lawn in that very spot, carefully digging a hole. She remembered his slow, deliberate movements as he gently placed the mouse wrapped in one of her good linen napkins into the ground. She was about to start yelling about the napkin when she saw Silas take a handful of small seeds, the mouse’s favorite food, and cast them into the little grave. She asked him, more annoyed at the action than the theft of the napkin, “What the hell is the food for?” And she’d never forgotten his answer, which he said so slowly and carefully, as if he thought she didn’t know English—

“So he knows I love him.”

She knew then, all those years ago, that Silas would be headed back to Lichport, that he was his father’s son. She never would have guessed that she’d be returning with him. She could have done with forgetting a lot of things from the days when Silas was little. But gin never seemed to work quite as advertised on her. She remembered a lot. Too much, she thought, getting up to go in to get a drink, maybe from a bottle she’d hidden in the bathroom.

“You okay?” Silas asked, trying to make peace.

“Damn dead mouse,” was all she said. But she thought:
A dead mouse gets to stay put, but I have to move. Christ
.

Although she had actually admitted to wanting to move into a bigger house, and knew that Charles Umber was a man of some remaining means, she didn’t like to do anything because someone else’s actions made it necessary. Her husband had failed to come back. Failed to support his family. Failed to raise
his son properly. Failed to save them from bankruptcy and the awful but necessary charity of family. Failed to keep them out of Lichport like he’d promised when their son was born. She could blame him for these things until the day she died, and in that, she took some comfort and eased her grasp on the chair just a bit. Was it so much to just want a normal life? For things to be unremarkable, simple?

Maybe in Charles Umber’s house, with all that good furniture and art on the walls, things might get easier for once instead of harder. If only he didn’t live in Lichport. Maybe she could convince him to move someplace nicer. What did he have to tie him there? Unlike Silas, Uncle’s son was in college, and his wife had abandoned them long ago. There. They already had something in common. She knew he was sweet on her. Always had been. She could see that in the way he’d looked at her years ago. Maybe this could turn out okay. Big house meant some money, savings. But back in Lichport. Maybe she’d get some brochures of condos in Florida, leave them around the house.

But Lichport.

Right back where you started
, she told herself.
Right back in the middle of that town. You were out
, she told her heartburn.
You. Were. Out
. Her father once told her that when you leave a place, you should never go back, because no matter what the actual circumstances, it will always look like a retreat, a failure. That was sure how it felt. As the men with the boxes flowed past her chair, her mind began to make a list of things in her life for which she was now being punished. But this time there would be a fine house and someone with money looking after her.

But Lichport! Every time she so much as thought the name of that town, she felt nauseated and nervous.

Silas looked at his mother in her chair. He could feel her doing that
list
thing, where she didn’t speak or look at you because she was tallying something in her head. Figuring out how bad you’d messed up.

Yet, seeing her like that, he started to feel bad for having taken such a nasty tone with her. Didn’t she have enough to worry about without him being such a pain and trying to pick a fight?

He looked around the living room, empty except for a few small boxes and the luggage that would go with them in the car. Where the furniture had been, Silas could see marks sunk into the carpets, footprints of the arrangement of their life here in this house. In that moment, he felt like the illusion that his family had become was held together only by the constellation of patterns left by the furniture feet set on a rug, by the runes formed in the shadows that the chair backs threw on the walls, and that once those things were moved or faded, he wouldn’t know who he was anymore. All the pictures had been taken down, and the walls were scarred with the holes of rusted nails. When he passed his hands over the holes, he could feel little jets of cold air blowing into the room from the space beyond. He leaned his head close to the wall and felt a pencil-thin stream of air on his face, and the sound of it escaping from behind the walls was like one soft, continuous exhalation of breath, like the whole house was dying.