December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  Without appearing to think at all about it, Issie and David moved to their seats. I felt likewise compelled to find a chair and join them. Within seconds all four of us were seated around a crate that served as a table. The oil lamp in the center of it gave our faces a ruddy glow, and a warmth, and we were all so close to one another that our knees touched, and hands could have.

  “Mark is ready to forgive everything,” Ceri said after a moment of silence.

  It seemed an odd start to me, and jarred me out of my peaceful stupor just a bit. I could see a flash in Issie’s eyes, too, as if she were waking up and feeling an advantage, a realization of having the upper hand. David only seemed confused.

  “Tell her, Mark,” Ceri encouraged, looking my way.

  That she was calling me Mark and encouraging me to indulge in the play of Issie’s creation was obvious. With no time to understand why or to think things through, I fell back on my old theatrics from the university: storytelling as teaching. What’s the end of any story? That which was lost, or most desired, is finally found at last.

  “I—I realize now that you’ve come a long distance,” I began, “over rock and stream and stormy sea. That’s how this story goes. You’ve come to me for just one thing. Every quest has an end when the grail is found, and here’s your prize: you’re forgiven—with a full heart and an open mind. That’s your chalice, and I genuinely hope, Issie, that it brings you peace.”

  They were mostly lines from a later medieval grail ballad whose anonymous author had imagined Tristan finding, in a land between this and the next, the absolution he required to enter into heaven. The words seemed appropriate.

  “There,” said Ceri quickly, apparently a little concerned that I’d go on longer. “Now we can begin the healing.”

  Which was another odd phrase, to me.

  “Yes,” Issie answered, clearly a little confused.

  It came to me then, seeing Issie’s momentary consternation, that Ceri’s gambit was brilliant. She was playing the part of the fringe psychiatrist, a new-age metaphysician—though I was not entirely convinced it was much different from the person she really was.

  Now, I thought, if only I knew what we were really talking about.

  “So,” Ceri continued, leaning forward almost conspiratorially, “let’s return to the moment of crisis. The sea crossing, as Mark just mentioned. What happened?”

  There we were, the four of us, in another one of the surreal vignettes that had so frequently plagued me of late. A witch, a ghost, a dwarf, and I, all in a cave underneath my ancestral home, gathered around a battered wooden crate in the eerie glow of an oil lamp. What manner of Christmastide, I was forced to ask myself, was this?

  I was shaken from my somewhat self-pitying musing by Issie’s strangely honest reply to Ceri’s question.

  “I was sick,” she said very genuinely, all acting gone, it seemed.

  “Yes,” Ceri encouraged. “The sea crossing to England, going to Cornwall to be with Mark, because you were afraid to fly.”

  “I was afraid to fly,” she repeated. “It was awful, that storm. It was awful. I thought we would die.”

  “You and the chaperone,” Ceri said softly.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “And who was the chaperone?” Ceri asked.

  “It was Tristan, I told you,” Issie said, sighing, a little irritated, more like a real person interviewed by a psychiatrist and less like an actress playing the part of Iseult. More, in fact, the way I sometimes responded to Ceri’s questions to me.

  “Yes, Tristan,” Ceri said, nodding. “And you took the wrong potion.”

  “I did that,” Issie said ruefully. “It all went wrong then, I can tell you.”

  “Issie,” David ventured, as if he were not certain what was happening.

  “Hush,” Issie told him imperiously. “Can’t you see that me and the doctor’s having words?”

  David licked his lips. I thought he might be worried that Issie was giving herself away a little, but it was impossible to tell anything except that he was frightened.

  “You took the wrong medicine,” Ceri went on, relentless, staring right at Issie.

  “I did,” Issie confirmed.

  “You took the love-philtre,” Ceri said firmly. “And you fell in love with Tristan.”

  Issie grinned and blew out a mean, nonverbal curse. “Not exactly.”

  “Issie,” David ventured again.

  “I said you to hush,” she snarled.

  All pretense that Issie was afraid of David had gone, which may have been some of Ceri’s intention, but to what end was still a mystery to me.

  “You fell in love with Tristan, you said,” Ceri pressed, “and it ruined your marriage to Mark.”

  “It was ruint all right,” Issie said. But there was a rude, raw pornography behind her words.

  “What happened?” Ceri asked softly.

  Issie started to respond, but David pounded his fist on the table. The oil lamp bounced and threatened to topple. Ceri reached out to steady it, and quickly surveyed everyone’s face. Alas, the spell had been broken, as had been David’s intention. Everyone leaned slightly back, and Ceri seemed shaken.

  “I was lost,” Issie said, back to the winsome ghostly girl who had first knocked on my door. “And the sea was wild.”

  “The love-philtre was taken by mistake,” I said, hoping to allow Ceri a moment to gather her wits. “And you and Tristan were locked together—locked for the rest of your lives.”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes.

  David folded his arms and couldn’t hide a tiny grin. His work had been done.

  “And then you came to me in Cornwall,” I went on, attempting to blend what I remembered of reality into the conversation. “I was there, at the Crick Stone.”

  “And I was there to help you,” Issie said, “as best I could. But the damage had been done. I could never be a wife to you, not a real one.”

  I noticed something then in Issie’s eyes, and realized that while I was doing my best to combine reality and her fantasies, she was also trying to do something very similar. She was weaving strange facts and believable fiction into a fabric that she hoped would— hoped would what, exactly? What was she trying to do? Now that I knew it was a trick, that she was up to something more cold and calculated than it had ever appeared, I was at a complete loss as to what to do.

  But what I had seen in Issie’s eyes, I thought, might begin to offer a clue. When she’d said that something had happened on the sea voyage with Tristan—that was true. Something had happened. And that was where the damage had, indeed, been done.

  There was the key. I was absolutely paralyzed with dread at the prospect of what was behind any door that key might open.

  23

  Ceri began her questioning anew. I had no idea at that moment if she’d seen the secret layers, truth upon lie, that I’d seen in Issie’s eyes. That was impossible to tell from the odd questions she began to ask.

  “Do you have any hot chocolate?” Ceri wondered, looking around the cave as if she were surveying someone’s living room.

  David could not prevent his face from registering disbelief. “Hot chocolate?”

  Ceri nodded and said, directly to Issie, “You’ve made this place cozy, considering the circumstances, and I just wondered if you had any hot chocolate. I’m still cold from being in the snow. I don’t know how you did it—running through the cold like that in your all-together.”

  “I don’t feel the cold like others do,” Issie said, turning up the winsome quotient to its highest setting.

  “I know,” Ceri said, a little less warmly than she had spoken before. “Sometimes the fugue state helps you to ignore the nerve endings. That’s dangerous, though. You could get frostbite really easily, and lose a foot, or worse.”

  Ceri had made her medical pronouncement staring hard into Issie’s eyes, penetrating through some invisible barrier, I imagined.

  Issie was momentarily at a loss for
what to say, but I did notice that she glanced, involuntarily, toward her feet. She was wearing boots of some sort, but they were battered and thin, and I wondered if she might, in fact, have a touch of frostbite. She had a strange sort of limping walk, which I had first attributed to her great madness, then to her actor’s skill.

  Ceri was trying to undermine Issie’s resolve, to break through the layers of fabrication and get to the truth—the way, as I understood it, an analyst might do.

  So I thought I’d help. “I got frostbite when Lucinda buried me in the snow. I lost one of my little toes, a patch of my backside, and the tips of both elbows last year. Last year about this time. The backside’s healed over, I don’t notice the elbows so much anymore, but I miss my little toe.”

  Issie glared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay.” That was all I said.

  Ceri picked up the thread. “Frostbite is nothing to ignore, Issie. It can turn gangrenous and fester something awful. I mean, at the worst end of it, you could die. And another example? When David pounded the table just now and nearly knocked over the lamp, I noticed that a bit of hot oil splashed onto your hand, but you didn’t even know it. Your nerve endings are beginning to atrophy, I’m afraid. The worst end of that is that you could catch on fire.”

  “What are you two going on about,” Issie snapped. “I’m talking about Tristan and the love potion.”

  “Oh,” Ceri said quickly. “Right. So go on. What happened?”

  Ceri leaned forward, so I did too. We were both suddenly filled with rapt attention. It seemed an attempt to further dislodge Issie from her concentration.

  And it worked a little. Issie spent precious seconds collecting herself. In those seconds I could see the further marriage of madness and reason.

  “The water was wide,” she began, as if she’d momentarily forgotten her lines, and had been prompted from off stage. “The sea was wild. We were both sick. Sick to death. And I went to take the seasick medicine that my mother had give me for the long crossing. But I made a mistake. I picked out the wrong powder. I give it to Tristan and I took more than my share. In seconds my blood was pounding. My skin was hot. I thought I could see clear for the first time in my life. And what I saw was Tristan, sitting on the bed. I wisht you could see him the way I did then. He was a handsome man, no matter his size.”

  Ceri seemed to choose that precise moment to interrupt. “Yes, Fever— oh, I mean, Mark met Tristan. Am I correct?” She turned to me. The look in her eyes somehow told me to be honest.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was little, but I saw him fairly often, though at a distance, when my parents were first working for the Ten Show. After only a short while of being with him, you forgot his size entirely. You were more impressed with his ability to engage in conversation with anyone: a mayor, a street cleaner, a magician—the magician’s assistant. He was, from afar at least, one of the most charming people I’d ever seen.”

  “That’s him, Lord,” Issie agreed, some of the actor gone from her voice.

  So that was part of Ceri’s plan, not unlike my own resolve: to begin to blend fact into Issie’s fiction and see what her reaction might be. In this particular case she didn’t think to object to the honest facts about Tristan Newcomb, though it was nearly impossible for me to imagine how she might have known him at all.

  “When I left Blue Mountain,” I mused, possibly against better judgment, “I tried to put my entire childhood out of my mind. I don’t really know much of what happened to my mother, and I have no idea when Tristan died. I kept in touch with my father only sporadically. My friend June Cotage—she and her husband were my parents’ friends really—June wrote to me that my father had died only after she realized that I might not know. He’d been dead for nearly a year at that point. A year. As I say, I tried to put most of Blue Mountain out of my head when I went to the city.”

  “But you came back,” Ceri said very softly.

  I nodded. “I came back. Joseph Campbell says—and, I mean, it’s not that I can blame everything I do on Joseph Campbell—but he did say that you explore the world, dabble in religions and philosophies all you want, but at the end of the dance, you have to go home with the one you came with. He went back to Catholicism. I came home to Blue Mountain.”

  I glanced at Issie. She was completely thrown off balance. What had been her storytelling time had become something of a bizarre group therapy session. Ceri thought that too, apparently.

  “What about you, David?” she asked. “Tristan Newcomb must have been something of a force in your life. From what Fever’s told me, he was quite famous in certain circles.”

  “What?” David looked around as if someone had shaken his chair. “Me?”

  Issie gave him a powerful look, which did nothing for his composure.

  “Oh, my God.” I gasped, very genuinely. “I just realized something—speaking of someone quite famous in certain circles.”

  Everyone turned my way as if I’d interrupted a church service.

  “Maybe it would be best,” Ceri began cautiously.

  But I wouldn’t let her finish. “Do you remember the loaf of bread we ate?” I asked Ceri.

  “What?” She was just as off balance as everyone else at the table.

  “The loaf of bread from Paris? You loved it?”

  “Yes,” she answered with extreme hesitation. “What about it?”

  “Would you like to know who sent it to me?” I asked, grinning.

  “Would I like to know who sent it to you?” She squinted. “Are you all right?”

  I turned to David. “Who do you think sent me a loaf of bread from Paris. He does it every other month or so. Because we’re friends.”

  “What?” David actually looked a little afraid of me, afraid I might be as mad as Issie Raynerd. “Paris?”

  I looked around the table, making certain that everyone saw a slight look of madness in my eyes. I was hoping my revelation would have some significant effect, though I was uncertain what that effect might be.

  “Orvid,” I said softly. “Orvid Newcomb sent me that bread.”

  Ceri tilted her head, Issie squinted my way, but David actually jumped out of his chair and took several steps away from me.

  “Orvid Newcomb,” I repeated.

  “Um,” Ceri said, a little impatiently. “Who’s that?”

  “David knows,” I said, using my most conspiratorial tones.

  “Okay, so tell me,” Ceri went on.

  I settled back into my chair. “Several years back, a crazed preacher named Hiram Frazier came to Blue Mountain, or, really, wandered aimlessly into our town. He killed two lovely young girls who were favorites of one of our citizens, a woman named Judy Dare. Orvid was Judy’s boyfriend, and he helped her get revenge. He killed poor Hiram Frazier, although it was always my impression that Hiram was already dead: his spirit had gone and only his body was left. Orvid killed that body, and then he and Judy vanished. Orvid was a cousin or a nephew or something to Tristan Newcomb, and admired Tristan greatly. He was among those who were convinced, in fact, that Tristan was my father. As I’ve said, that was incorrect but rumors persist to this day. At any rate, I thought David, here, might like to know that Orvid Newcomb is a good friend of mine who sends me expensive fresh bread from Paris on a regular basis.”

  David continued to back up.

  “What is it, David?” Issie asked, irritated.

  “Orvid is what is sometimes called, in the movies, a hit man,” I said ominously, “isn’t he David? And he’s very, very good at it.”

  David’s face was a mask of confusion, and he began shouting at Issie. “You never told me he knew Orvid! Goddamn it, Issie. He knows Orvid!”

  “So what?” Issie barked.

  “I’m not afraid to die,” David said, beginning to quiver slightly, “except if I die at the hands of Orvid Newcomb when he’s angry. And he’d be right spit-mad at me if Fever Devilin is a friend of his.”

  “Orvid
is very protective of his friends,” I assured all present. “Tell Issie, here, why you’d be afraid of Orvid’s brand of outrage.”

  That was a gamble. I’d only seen Orvid kill one person, Hiram Frazier, and that had actually been, in its own way, very gentle.

  “Who do you think taught me that trick with the baling wire?” David whispered. “I saw him kill a man that way, and it took three days. The longest three days of my life, God in heaven.”

  “David,” Ceri asked, “you studied with this person, Orvid? He taught you?”

  David’s eyes were vacant. “He made good money. I didn’t care about the blood—I thought. Seemed like a good idea. I had an advantage. He said so. You know Orvid, how he looks? He stands out—that long white hair and them bow legs. But me? If you don’t look too close, you’d think I was a child. Who thinks a child is coming to kill you? That was my advantage. You understand? Tristan always told us, all of us little ’uns, that our size could be a benefit or a burden, but it was up to us.”

  I was still stuck on David’s earlier pronouncement. “Orvid killed a man with baling wire?” I asked. “The way you were about to kill Skidmore?”

  “I thought I could do it.” David swallowed and closed his eyes.

  “I’m confused,” Issie began in an obviously desperate attempt to bring the group back to her topic. “You say David tried to kill a man? But—David’s here to help me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Issie,” David moaned, “please stop it. He knows Orvid!”

  “And Orvid would come here if I asked him to,” I said plainly. “He’d do that.”

  David rolled his head and staggered a little.

  Ceri patted Issie’s hand. “It’s all right,” she said sweetly, “I still want to hear the rest of the story. I still want you to tell me what happened. We were on a boat, on the ocean.”

  Issie was about to crack, it was obvious. Her eyes shot to David, then back to Ceri. She licked her lips and appeared to be at a loss for words.

  “By the time you made it to Cornwall,” I intervened, “you and Tristan were locked together, and there was no hope for a marriage with me. But you did your best. You tried.”