“She says those are the words she saw on the stone. I don’t think she’s lying. She’s very confused, and not just because you shouted at her. She wants to know why Patrick’s going to die so young.”
“He isn’t! Stop it!”
“I’m not saying it’s true; I’m only saying what she believes.”
“I don’t care! It’s gone beyond a joke. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Bring him here. I want to see him.”
Zoe fetched Patrick from the house. Bryce could see Omie watching from the kitchen window. He ignored her and made a great fuss over the boy, a handsome fellow with a fine thatch of curls. Until now Bryce’s only concern for his son was the possibility he would one day lose that curling crown, as Bryce had.
Patrick picked up a chisel and lunged inexpertly at some scraps of stone. “Like father, like son,” Zoe said, and made herself laugh. She’d never seen Bryce so distraught.
Zoe left the boy with his father and spoke again with Omie, telling her never again to mention what she imagined she saw on the stone. Omie said she wouldn’t, then cried some more, because they really had been there, those words and numbers, and it upset her awfully that Papa would carve them, then get angry when Omie saw what he had done. None of it made any sense. She wouldn’t go near his horrible tombstones ever again, to punish him for being so mean to her.
Nine days later, Bryce was backing his delivery wagon out of the yard. He had a good team that responded well to his commands, even the difficult backward maneuvering required to get the wagon into the alley. He suspected nothing until the broken body of Patrick appeared below the wagon tongue. Bryce let out a cry that brought neighbors into their yards. Zoe came running. Bryce was on the ground beside the nervously stamping horses, cradling Patrick. Both wheels on the wagon’s left side had passed over him. Patrick had died without a sound. Bryce hadn’t even been aware he was playing in the yard.
Zoe couldn’t make him talk, not in the days preceding the funeral or in the days that followed, when Bryce did nothing but work on the blank slab of stone, chipping out the words Omie had seen. He would not eat, would not look at his wife or stepdaughter. The stone was everything. Zoe’s own grief at their loss seemingly meant nothing to Bryce; he acknowledged no pain but his own. Zoe and Omie began finding subtle ways to avoid him, rather than suffer the rebuff of silence and averted eyes.
“Why won’t he look at us, Mama?”
“He thinks what happened to Patrick was his fault.”
“But it was an accident.”
“I know, but he’s such a gentle man, he can’t bear to think he was responsible. He can’t cope with talk now, so we’ll just wait till he can. We won’t bother him, all right?”
“Yes, but he’s been working on the other stone.”
“It’s Patrick’s stone. When it’s finished we’ll all go and help place it in the cemetery.”
“No, the other stone, the one with Papa’s name on it.”
“There is no such stone!”
“I saw it, Mama. It says Papa’s name, and the year he was born, and this year. I saw it.”
“Like you saw the stone with Patrick’s name?”
“Just exactly like it, only with Papa’s name.”
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone about it.”
“Why not?”
“Just promise me.”
Omie promised. While Bryce slept that night, Zoe took a lamp and inspected every stone in the yard. Patrick’s headstone was almost completed. There was no sign of anything bearing Bryce’s name, yet Zoe believed Omie’s statement to the contrary. On top of her misery over Patrick, Zoe had to deal with a mystery, and the anguish of anticipating its repetition. She knew she mustn’t blame Omie, who clearly had no inkling of the strange thing that had transpired.
Zoe was not unfamiliar with such phenomena. When she was small her mother had several times experienced moments of foreknowledge. Nettie Dugan had been semiliterate, not given to extended conversations, even with her children, but there had been times when she would describe for them events happening at that very moment, she insisted, far from Schenectady. For the most part these were mundane enough, usually involving members of her family in New England. She was especially sensitive to their deaths, one by one, over the years. She even described their funerals. None of what she related could be verified, since her family had disowned her following her marriage to James Dugan.
All three children had accepted their mother’s visions as a kind of storytelling, taking her seriously on only one occasion, when she suddenly fell down in the street and began depicting with her limited vocabulary a terrible train wreck, paying particular attention to the fact that the respective engineers of the two colliding trains were, by remarkable coincidence, brothers. It was too fantastic a story for belief, but they read the newspapers for several days, waiting for reports of the event Nettie had described. It had not taken place for another two weeks, and the engineers were indeed brothers. The children were impressed, and Nettie herself began to wonder if the various deathbed scenes and funerals she had seen inside her head had in fact taken place long after she pictured them. The notion disturbed her greatly, suggesting as it did the predestination of events, a concept alien to Nettie’s mind. Thereafter she never spoke of such things or shared whatever visions might have visited her still.
Zoe had not given that aspect of her past a thought in years. Might Omie somehow have inherited her grandmother’s gift of foresight? It was an alarming prospect. The gift, if that was what it was, had never benefited Nettie in any way, had even driven a wedge between herself and her husband on those occasions when he learned of the things she had seen. Dugan had been a superstitious man, and he called his wife “a sister of Satan, been touched with his fork.”
Zoe promised herself that if the gift had truly been passed on, she would not allow it to come between herself and Omie. But in having tacitly accepted the reemergence of the gift, she granted Omie’s vision of a gravestone for Bryce a kind of legitimacy, and having done that, Zoe had also to accept that it was only a matter of time before the stone would actually be carved, and that was too much for her to embrace without a fight.
Bryce installed Patrick’s headstone himself. When the family returned home, Zoe sent Omie on an errand to the store, then confronted her husband.
“Listen to me. You mustn’t do this thing I know you’re thinking of. Do Omie and myself mean nothing at all to you?”
His eyes, for five days now focused on some spot in the distance, narrowed a little, and Zoe saw her suspicions were close to the mark.
“You mustn’t,” she said. “If you love us, stay and be with us. What happened was not your fault. No one can say it was. Why do you tell yourself it was? And this other … matter. That will never bring him back. You may not even meet him … over there. They say there’s a different place for those who … who take their own life. Don’t you leave us, don’t you dare, just because you’re feeling too sad to live. It wouldn’t be right. Don’t you dare!”
She hadn’t meant to shout, but the eyes that looked briefly into her own quickly clouded over, and shifted from her face to a corner of the room. She took hold of his shoulders and shook him, a thing Zoe had never imagined herself doing to any man. Bryce resisted not at all, simply ignored her, even when Zoe delivered a stinging slap to the side of his face. “Damn you!” she screeched. “Wake up and be with us again!” But he would not.
The following day he began work on the second stone, and when she saw the name forming beneath his chisel, Zoe felt her hopes slide into a trough of despair. Now the unthinkable had become the seemingly inevitable, and she was obliged to ask herself if she loved him enough to do everything in her power, practice every conceivable stratagem to persuade him toward life, or else accept that her affection and respect for Bryce (never really love, she admitted with less reluctance than usual) had weakened considerably in the face of his unmanly surrender to absolute misery and self-
pity. She did not blame him for the tragedy of Patrick’s death, but saw no way to avoid holding him responsible for what he planned to do next.
Zoe’s family was on the verge of being reduced to herself and Omie again. The more letters that were added to the stone, the less Zoe believed she could alter the path Bryce seemed bent on following. She begged the preacher who had buried Patrick to talk with Bryce, but the man’s earnest efforts came to nothing. Neighbors, getting wind of events, advised roping Bryce to his bed and spoon-feeding him like a child until his malady passed. “Melancholy, seen it before plenty of times,” was the general diagnosis of what ailed him. “Keep him inside and away from guns and knives. He’ll get over it soon enough.”
But Bryce was unchanged. Zoe was aware that interest in the manner Bryce would employ to do away with himself had become a topic of open speculation in the area. A reporter from the Pueblo Chieftain arrived for an interview, and was quickly shown the door. He penned an entertaining article anyway, under the headline:
GRIEVING PARENT PLANS OWN END
WILL JOIN BABY BOY ON NETHER SHORE
WIFE FAILS TO INFLUENCE COMING TRAGEDY
Someone slipped the paper under Zoe’s door. This was the most humiliating moment so far. She was tempted to confront Bryce with it in the yard, but the fence was lined with curious onlookers, most of whom were prepared to wait all day, watching the grieving parent perform the final duty to himself by carving his own headstone. Some shouted advice, encouraging Bryce to add all manner of scrollwork and curlicues to the piece, in order to delay its completion, but Zoe knew the finished stone would be bare of ornamentation, as Patrick’s had been. Omie had described its exact appearance, and Bryce was nearly to that stage already with his delicate tap-tap-tapping.
Finally it was done. Bryce wiped the stone clean of chips and dust, then went indoors. A low moan escaped the crowd gathered along three sides of the yard, then they debated among themselves the likelihood of having had their last glimpse of the sorrowful stonecutter, as Bryce was now universally known. There was some argument over the possibility of drawing straws to see who among them might win a chance to stand vigil inside the house, along with the unfortunate wife and daughter. A bystander offered to make this suggestion to Zoe. He knocked on the door and haltingly outlined the proposal. Hearing it, Zoe knew beyond all doubt that the tragedy had turned to farce.
“No,” she said, and closed the door firmly.
All potential instruments of death had been removed from the house and deposited with a sympathetic neighbor. There remained not a knife or fork. Shortly after Bryce came in from the yard, Zoe went out, to collect and count his stonemason’s tools. Every chisel was there, from the heaviest to the finest. She bundled up the lot, including all sizes of mallet, and passed them across the fence to her female cohort next door. This lady rented gawking space along her side fence for fifty cents per person, but Zoe forgave her.
Now the waiting began. Bryce had selected a comfortable armchair for himself, and appeared content simply to sit. Staring at nothing, he did not speak. Zoe sat nearby and took up some knitting. For two hours they sat together, in different worlds, then Zoe heard voices somewhere in the house. Investigating, she found Omie chatting with the reporter from the Chieftain through her opened bedroom window. She turned guiltily as Zoe entered the room.
“Explain yourself,” Zoe demanded.
The reporter tipped his hat and was gone. Omie chewed her bottom lip and looked at the floor.
“What did you tell him?” Zoe asked.
“Nothing.”
“I heard you talking.”
“I didn’t tell him anything. He just wanted to know if Papa ever said anything to us, and I told him no, that’s all.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes.”
Zoe didn’t believe her.
“Shut the window. You can come in the sitting room with me.” It would not have sounded right to have said, “in the sitting room with your father and me.” Bryce wasn’t really there, not in spirit anyway. And was he still there in the flesh, or had he run madly from the house the minute Zoe turned her back. She hurried to the sitting room and found Bryce exactly as before, his expression vacant as a statue’s.
Zoe hadn’t the least doubt now that her husband fully intended dying. The stone with his name stood waiting, as Omie had predicted. Of course, her seeing the stone was not the same as seeing her father dead. Maybe Omie wasn’t able to see that far ahead. It was an encouraging thought, but Zoe dismissed it; Omie’s vision aside, she felt that Bryce was already gone, his courage nowhere in evidence, his spirit dwindling by the hour. There was a special kind of darkness in the house, an atmosphere of inexorable doom. She could do no more than wait, Omie beside her, Bryce across the room. They were all in a prison cell bounded by lush wallpaper and the ticking of a mantel clock.
Bryce neither ate nor drank, so it was not to be wondered at that he did not budge from his armchair to visit the outhouse. Zoe and Omie had to, and each time ran a gauntlet of townspeople now openly tramping around the backyard. An illustrator from the Chieftain was rendering the fateful stone in India ink for posterity on page one. It was some consolation when evening came and the crowd departed.
It was an insult, the way Bryce had chosen to ignore the needs of Zoe and Omie, and brought down on all their heads the humiliation of public fascination. She still could not understand why he was as he was. The pain of Patrick’s death, harsh though it assuredly had been, did not require such extravagant sacrifice to ease its passing. Bryce’s life in exchange for Patrick’s was a bargain no god could sanction, and Zoe certainly didn’t. She recognized a growing resentment inside herself, a bitterness at having married this man and borne him a child, in expectation of a life filled with the usual joys and hardships. Nothing had prepared her for this. It was more than a disappointment; it was a betrayal. The cause of Bryce’s grief did not justify his extreme reaction to it. He had seized upon their misfortune in order to exorcise himself of some other, darker secret, or so it seemed to Zoe. There was no means of knowing what thoughts swam in his mind.
Zoe remained in the sitting room with Bryce throughout the night, sending Omie to her room when the clock struck nine-thirty. She slept fitfully, kept the lamp burning low in order to see at a glance if her husband was still there whenever she woke up. He always was. If she could have been sure of his immobility, Zoe might have spent the night comfortably in bed. It was one more unnecessary annoyance.
Next day her neighbor delivered to Zoe a copy of the Chieftain’s morning edition.
GIRL FORESEES TALE OF WOE
UNCANNY PREDICTIONS BY YOUNGSTER
TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS REVEALED
DAYS IN ADVANCE
Zoe took it directly to Omie. “Did you tell that man about what you saw? Did you?”
Omie hung her head. “Yes.”
“Why! Why did you! Now they’ll never leave us alone!”
“I didn’t mean to. He said Mrs. Grimes next door told him her little girl told her I told Lucy I saw the words on the stone before Papa put them there. He asked me was it true. I didn’t want to tell a lie.”
Zoe sat beside her and put an arm across Omie’s trembling shoulders. “So you know you saw a thing that hadn’t happened yet.”
Omie nodded. “I thought at first he really was making the words but saying he wasn’t. Then I believed him, but the words were there anyway, like they were waiting to come out of the stones.… I didn’t mean to do it.”
“I know you didn’t. It’s something you have inside you, a kind of gift.”
“Gift?”
“An ability, so to say. You can … see things happen before they really happen, because you have … a special eye, I suppose you’d call it. It’s a very unusual thing, but you don’t need to be frightened by it.”
“I’m sorry I told the man.”
“It doesn’t matter now. Have you seen anything apart from the words on
the stones? Have you seen us … burying Papa in the ground?”
“No. Why did I get the thing inside me, the special eye?”
“I don’t know why, but I know where it comes from.”
She told Omie of her mother’s faculty for seeing events of the future. Omie was particularly impressed by the story of the brother railroad engineers who ran into each other and died along with so many of their passengers.
“Will I see something like that too?” she asked, excited at such a dramatic prospect.
“I hope you never do. I hope you see only good things, happy things that will happen later on. It isn’t fair for a little girl to have to see bad things.”
“Is it because of my blue mark?”
“No, no, it has nothing to do with that. It isn’t a punishment, either thing, the special eye or the blue mark. They’re both just things that you happen to have. They’re part of what makes you … you.”
Omie considered this, then said, “Is Papa still in the chair?”
“Why don’t we find out.”
He was, but Bryce’s immobility was the only calm aspect of that day. The newspaper article on Omie’s clairvoyance caused a sensation, and the crowds around the Aspinall house doubled. Soon people were at the door requesting that Omie give them an estimate of their own mortality, or that of a sick family member. She was asked also to diagnose various maladies the town doctors were unsure of, and to prescribe a cure for these. Several young women wished to know if their young men were fated to marry them, and some begged Omie to describe in detail young men as yet unmet. Zoe allowed Omie to talk with none of them, fearing that a single interview, however disappointing it would assuredly prove for the one who came wishing for knowledge of things to come, would open the floodgates to even more comers than had already knocked upon the door. It was an impossible state of affairs.
To put a stop to it, Zoe allowed a reporter, the one Omie had talked with through her window, into the house. She had schooled Omie in her statement and the responses she would be obliged to make to his questioning. Omie shuffled her little boots and told the man she had lied about seeing the names on the stones. It was a big fib, she said, and she was sorry now for having said it. When the reporter began badgering Omie, hoping he could get her to admit she was lying about having lied, Zoe showed him the door.
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