The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  recipe for the piecrust called for ice water. Ice? In June? In South Carolina? On an island? In 1921? Clearly this was a Northerner’s cookbook.

  Where the hell was she going to get ice water? Forget it. The crust would get tepid water from the tap, and it would just have to like it. Faye preheated the oven and started hauling bags of flour and sugar out of the pantry and setting them next to the cans of peaches on the kitchen counter.

  She sighed.

  “It’s just a pie, Faye,” she reminded herself. She had a degree from an Ivy League university, she’d taken photographs that had appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Atlantic, Newsweek, TIME and even Garden & Gun. Surely she could make a pie without falling apart.

  Faye dug through the drawers and under the stove to find measuring cups, mixing bowls and the pie plate. When she stood up, Faye saw Dolly staring down thoughtfully at the assembled ingredients.

  Faye sprinkled some flour on the counter, and in the white powder wrote, “Something wrong?”

  “Crust?” Dolly wrote back in the flour pile.

  Faye showed Dolly the recipe in the book. Dolly shook her head, then walked into the pantry. She returned with a box of saltine crackers.

  Dolly wiped her hand through the flour, erasing the words. She wrote, “Watch me.”

  Faye watched her.

  First Dolly took out several fistfuls of crackers and laid them on the counter. With a whack of the rolling pin loud enough to make Faye jump, Dolly smashed them. Faye saw a smile around Dolly’s eyes as if she’d enjoyed making Faye jump. If Faye had to work a job this demanding at Dolly’s age, she’d probably pull pranks on her employers, too.

  Dolly rolled the pin over the crackers, breaking them into smaller and smaller bits. Instead of the measuring cups Faye had found, Dolly used a coffee mug and measured out two cups into the mixing bowl. The butter had already softened from sitting out, but Dolly melted it further in a small pan on the stove. From the junk drawer, Faye took the pad and with a little red stub of a pencil wrote down everything Dolly did. Dolly’s nimble fingers would do any Cordon Bleu chef proud.

  Wanting to help, Faye grabbed the jar of peaches and started to twist it open. Dolly waved her hand again, motioning Faye to follow her out to the garden. They walked past it and toward a small brick shed painted the same bright white as the lighthouse. A sign above the door read Oil House, and Faye could smell the faint scent of kerosene. But inside the shed she found nothing but a few empty old canisters and some old stained rags. Dolly lifted the cord to open a wooden trapdoor on the floor, lit a candle from a box on the inner wall and started down the steps.

  Faye had no choice but to follow even though she was absolutely certain she was walking into the lair of the king of spiders and all his spider children. Was Dolly trying to scare her to death? Or kill her? It sounded as if Faith Morgan had never done chores in her life, so maybe this was some kind of baptism by fire. But no...it wasn’t a spider’s secret kingdom, although Faye did see a few of the creatures. Five of them. She counted. Five too many. Dolly didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by their presence. And Faye had to admit it was kind of nice down there. It was a root cellar. Cool, damp air filled the room. Faye guessed its temperature at fifty degrees. If it weren’t for the spiders, Faye might have been tempted to bring a chair and a lantern down here and do some reading.

  Dolly pointed at the shelves. They were bleached planks, weathered, worn and full of nail holes. One had writing on it—SS something she couldn’t read. These planks had been part of a ship once. A wrecked ship? Possibly. On the shelves were bags and bags of food. Faye found onions—red, yellow and white. And at least six buckets of potatoes. In the darkest corner of the cellar, Faye spied a black box the size of a piano bench or large ottoman. She lifted the lid and saw several blocks of ice inside.

  “Oh, so that’s why it’s called an icebox,” Faye said. “It’s a box of ice.” Now she knew where to get ice for ice water. Not that she’d want to ingest this ice. Who knew where it had come from? She wondered if the previous lighthouse keepers had saved and stored the ice from last winter. That ice could be six months old for all she knew. At least it was something she could use as a refrigerator or a freezer. She saw a large jug of milk in the box and some sides of meat wrapped in white paper.

  Dolly pointed to a bag on the top shelf, and Faye pulled it down and found it full of peaches. They weren’t as fresh as they could be, but they hadn’t gone bad, either. Overripe bananas made for the best banana bread, and overripe peaches likely worked just fine when cooked in a pie.

  Back in the kitchen, Dolly whipped up a bit of puff pastry to make the crosshatch shell. Faye stood behind Dolly and watched her roll out the pastry, cut it into strips and lay the pieces on top of the pie with an elegant precision even Martha Stewart would have applauded.

  “You know more about running a house at sixteen than I do at thirty,” Faye said, glad Dolly couldn’t hear her. “I don’t know if you want to get married, but if you do, your husband will be a lucky man. You might not be lucky, but he will be.”

  Faye heard the sadness in her own voice, the bitterness. Married. This little girl married? But what other choice did a black deaf teenage girl in 1920s South Carolina have? Sure, there were black colleges, but did they cater to the deaf? Faye didn’t know but she doubted it. This girl, so smart and talented and hardworking—did she have a snowball’s chance in a South Carolina summer of doing anything with her life other than getting married, having babies or working as a housekeeper? Did Faye?

  Since waking up in 1921, Faye had felt almost everything—fear and terror, confusion, anger, lust and loneliness. But for the first time she felt real regret. She almost wished she could send Dolly to 2015, and Faye would stay here in her place. No, it wasn’t perfect in her time, but it had to be better than this?

  Still...there was hope, wasn’t there? Women had worked during World War I in unprecedented numbers. They’d had to. After that, many of them had fought to keep those jobs. And right now, out there somewhere, Dorothea Lange was learning her trade, a trade that would eventually lead to a job with the government taking pictures of the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl. If Dorothea Lange, a woman with a husband and children, could have a career as a photographer in this time, Faye could, too. Couldn’t she? But before she could take on the world, she had to finish baking this damn pie.

  Dolly gave Faye the pie, and Faye placed it in the moderately hot oven. When she instinctively went to set the oven timer, she found it had none. No egg timer, either. Had they not been invented yet? She’d have to check the clock on the mantel and peek at the pie every few minutes to make sure it didn’t burn. The engineers of the world had figured out how to build lighthouses and steamboats and tanks and machine guns, but they hadn’t invented a basic kitchen timer yet. As if Faye needed any further proof she lived in a world run by men.

  The mantel clock said it was 11:40. With the pie taking forty-five minutes, she’d need to take it out at 12:25, if not sooner. Faye tested her prowess with the oven by making a pot of tea and then set out to weed the garden while it steeped. She’d had a flower garden at Hagen’s house. The gardening itself had never been all that much fun for her, but Faye had loved taking pictures of the flowers as they’d budded, bloomed and died. Although she’d never had a vegetable garden, a weed was a weed, and she set to pulling them. Even with the ocean breeze wafting up from the beach, Faye still had to stop every few minutes, drink tea and towel herself off. She would have preferred a tall glass of ice water, but she didn’t want to drink anything that wasn’t boiled. The water for the house apparently came from a cistern and a rain barrel. Faye had no desire to acquire the Lowcountry version of Montezuma’s revenge. Especially since the pie looked so good when she took it out of the oven. She wanted to survive to eat this damn thing.

  After two hours of weeding, Faye was pretty sure she was going to die. Whoever had decreed that women had to wear full-length skirts and
long sleeves while working outside was both insane and sadistic. Even wearing the large hat she’d found hanging on the back of the kitchen door, Faye felt the sun’s heat like an ant under a magnifying glass. But if it killed her, so be it. If she died again, she’d either end up back in 2015 or in a morgue. She didn’t care which—both had refrigeration.

  When she went back into the house, she nearly knocked over Dolly, who was perched on a ladder in the center of the living room floor. She was cleaning the glass mantels on the light fixtures. The stuff on her cleaning rag wasn’t just dirt. It looked like soot. Was that a side effect of gas lighting? Soot everywhere? No wonder Dolly put “clean house lamps” at the top of her chore list. Soot plus gas plus heat could equal a house fire. Was there anything in 1921 that wasn’t specially designed to kill her? She should go outside in the next thunderstorm and throw metal lawn darts while eating some lead-based paint and huffing asbestos dust. How did anyone survive to adulthood? Many didn’t, Faye knew, including Faith Morgan. Faith had drowned last night, hadn’t she? And now Faye was here taking her place, living the life Faith would have lived. For what purpose, Faye couldn’t begin to guess, but she would give anything to know.

  Faye puzzled it over as she helped Dolly clean the downstairs lamps. Soon she was too tired to think of anything. Her arms ached. Her back ached. Her neck ached. Living in the past was literally a pain in the neck. Did naps exist in 1921? Even if they didn’t, Faye would invent them.

  When they finished the lamps, Faye called it a day before she fainted from the heat and the exertion. She stripped down to her slip and lay on top of the covers in her room. It was hot and stuffy in the house but she was too exhausted to care. The moment her head hit the pillow, she was out, and she dreamed of nothing, not even Will.

  Eventually hunger pains woke Faye from the deepest, hardest, most dreamless sleep of her life. Hunger and the pressure in her bladder. She pulled her sore and tired body off the bed, groaning like an old man forced to rise from his rocking chair. When she fumbled for the light switch on the wall, she remembered the house had no light switches. Reaching up she pulled the cord for the gas lamp on the ceiling. A dim light no brighter than the tail of a single firefly sputtered into existence. Earlier today while cleaning the lamps with Dolly, she’d learned the secret of operating the lights—the right cord turned the lamp on, and the left cord turned it off. Simple enough. But as the lamps took several minutes to reach their full brightness, a candle or a kerosene lantern was the better option when light was needed immediately.

  By the flickering light of the gas lamp, Faye found a match, a candle and a small silver candleholder. She slipped out of her room and into the hall, not bothering to put anything on over her white slip. Apart from her single small fire, the house was cloaked in inky darkness and eerie quiet. Would she ever grow accustomed to living in a house devoid of the usual sounds of modern life? The buzz of a refrigerator. The soft roar of air-conditioning. The whir of a ceiling fan. The hum of fluorescent lighting. Nothing made noise in this house but her feet, her breathing and the hardwood floors as she crept across their boards to the bathroom.

  “Dolly?” Faye called out before realizing how incredibly pointless that was. Surely she’d gone home by now anyway. How long had Faye slept? It was dark out, but that could mean the sun had just set or the sun was close to rising again.

  After leaving the bathroom, Faye took her candle and crept down the stairs.

  “Carrick?” she called out and received no answer. She raised her candle to the mantel clock and read the time—ten thirty. She’d slept for six straight hours, and Carrick was up at the lighthouse already. She made a mental note that if she ever got back to 2015, she’d write a book on the cure for insomnia she’d discovered in 1921—backbreaking manual labor.

  Faye took advantage of the empty house to snoop some more. Luckily Faith had been living at the lighthouse for hardly more than a week, according to Carrick, so it made sense she’d still be settling in and learning the ropes. Faye had to wonder how Faith had gotten here and why she’d chosen to flee to Carrick after receiving what must have been a brutal beating by her husband, Marshall something. Faye admired the girl for running away. That was probably a rare feat in 1921, when even the law took the side of abusive husbands. The law, the Church and society, as Carrick had said. If Faith had trusted Carrick with her life, perhaps Faye could, too.

  Unfortunately, Faye found no useful clues about Faith as she poked her nose in drawers and cabinets. The single item she found of interest was a telegram addressed to Carrick.

  Chief Morgan

  Received news that your daughter will join you at Seaport Station

  Pleased to have additional personnel at light

  Records updated

  Our thanks for your service

  It was signed by Beck, Sixth District Superintendent, and dated three days ago. Carrick had taken quite a risk lying to his supervisors about her. He was a good man, which made it even harder to be there. Surely a good man deserved to know the truth, but Faye couldn’t bring herself to tell him. What would she tell him even if she could?

  Carrick, I know I look like Faith and sound like Faith, but I’m not her...

  Carrick, do you believe in reincarnation?

  Carrick, have you ever seen the TV show Quantum Leap?

  No, none of those would work. She had no choice but to go on playing this role until God or fate or whoever was pulling the strings sent her back where she belonged. If that ever happened. She’d tried. She’d gone out to the water last night, waded in and waited for a wave to strike her and drag her under again. It seemed as if Faith had been doing the same thing last night. But not quite. She hadn’t been wading in the water; she’d been standing on the end of the pier. It was worth a try anyway.

  Faye went out the front door and down the path to the pier. The moon shone so brightly that she didn’t need her candle. She blew it out and left it sitting on the seawall. Careful in her bare feet, Faye made her way down to the dock and stepped onto the wooden walkway, which extended fifty feet over the water. Overhead the lighthouse flashed its beam. At her feet the ocean swished and swirled around the pier. Faye’s heart beat painfully hard as she walked to the end and stood with her toes overhanging the edge. As soon as she was there, she shivered as if someone were standing next to her.

  “Faith,” she said. “You were here, weren’t you?”

  Faye looked down at the water glinting in the moonlight. Above, the stars were so numerous, the sky looked like navy blue fabric covered in thousands of polka dots.

  “Why were you here?” she asked. “What were you doing? Were you committing suicide? No, I don’t believe that. Why would you run away from your piece-of-shit husband but then kill yourself once you were finally somewhere safe?”

  Last night Faye had waded into the shallows and accidentally dropped Will’s ring into the water, but what had Faith been doing out here? It seemed to matter, although Faye didn’t know why. One more mystery she had to solve.

  Faye turned her back on the ocean and returned to the house. In the kitchen she found that someone, Dolly no doubt, had left dinner waiting for her under a red-and-white-checkered dishcloth. Dinner tonight had been some kind of ham casserole and creamed something. Faye picked up the fork and took a bite. Creamed squash. Not bad. Better than she’d expected, certainly. She sat down and ate every bite of her dinner, and then hunted down the last quarter of the peach pie they’d made today.

  Faye took one bite of the pie and decided that maybe, just maybe, she could get used to living in 1921. Even cool from hours of sitting under a dish towel, the first bite tasted warm in her mouth. The salty crust dissolved on her tongue, and the sweetness from the sugar and the peaches set her cheeks to aching. There were no artificial ingredients. No Splenda to replace the sugar, no low-fat margarine to replace the butter. Real sugar. Real peaches. Real butter. Real everything. It didn’t taste like heaven, and it wasn’t an orgasm in her mouth. It tast
ed like pie, pure, unadulterated perfect pie.

  When she’d eaten her fill, Faye washed her dishes and put them away by candlelight. She found it almost...pleasant? Maybe that was the word. Something almost pleasant to Faye about the quiet, about the candlelight, about the solitude. Faye knew she should be scared out of her mind, and part of her still was. Yet another part of her drank up the beauty and the silence like a desert succulent in a rainstorm. Was this what the first astronauts who’d visited the moon felt? Equal parts terror and tranquillity?

  Faye went back upstairs to dress. Her skirt and blouse were sweat-stained and dirty from the weeding she’d done that day. She was tempted to put on clean clothes but with Dolly doing the laundry—probably by hand—Faye didn’t want to add to the wash pile more than necessary. And since Faye was helping with the chores now, she didn’t want to add to her own work.

  “Oh, God, the chores.” Faye put her hand on her forehead and groaned.

  She’d forgotten to milk the stupid goat.

  Well, the goat surely wouldn’t mind seeing her in her underwear.

  Faye stepped out the back door and into the pitch-black night with nothing but her candle to light her path to the goat pen. When was the last time she’d experienced a world without electricity? Had she ever? A couple camping trips as a child? Then it had been a novelty, something to be enjoyed for a weekend before returning to civilization. Now it was her new reality.

  She hardly needed the candle to find the goats. All she had to do was follow her nose. It smelled like a petting zoo, like warm animal bodies, sweat and oats and dung. The three goats drowsed lazily in their shed, seemingly content with their lot in life. They looked up at her with their weird eyes, their horizontal pupils dilating by the light of her candle.

  “Hey there, goats,” Faye said. “Don’t mind me. I’m just here to grope one of you against your will. I’ll be gentle, I promise.”

  The billy goat had terrifying curved horns on his head though otherwise he seemed fairly sleepy and innocuous. The littlest one appeared to be a female, but Faye didn’t plan on looking close enough to find out. Nanny eyed her curiously before bleating so loud Faye was certain Carrick could hear it all the way up in the lighthouse. Nanny had a rope around her neck, a sort of collar, and Faye winced as she reached for it. Thankfully Nanny seemed used to being handled and didn’t put up any sort of fight as Faye led her through the wooden gate to a smaller holding pen. Faye assumed that was where the milking took place as a tin bucket hung off a hook there. She found a three-legged stool, secured Nanny to a post and put the bucket on the hay-strewn floor.

  Faye sighed. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Nanny bleated again. It didn’t sound like a vote of confidence.

  “Maybe I should get you drunk first,” Faye said. “Maybe I should get myself drunk first.”

  “I might have some bourbon around here somewhere.”

  Faye started and turned around. Carrick stood in the doorway of the pen. It appeared he was trying very hard not to laugh at her.

  “Where’d you come from?” she asked.