The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  “Do you know what happened to you? After the complication set in?”

  Another pebble hurled into the street and clanked against the curb on the opposite side of the road, in front of Daniel’s store.

  “Did you ever read any of Emily Dickinson’s poems?” I asked.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Lucas, still not stepping forward and showing himself in the light. “Billy said you read those things all the time. He worried you admired her so much, you wanted to be her, hiding away inside your father’s house like that. You turned so strange and ghostly.” He sighed. “You really bothered him with your oddness.”

  Instead of responding, I quoted one of her poems.

  “Death is a dialogue between

  The spirit and the dust.

  ‘Dissolve,’ says Death. The spirit, ‘Sir,

  I have another trust.’

  “Death doubts it, argues from the ground.

  The Spirit turns away.

  Just laying off, for evidence,

  An overcoat of clay.”

  Neither of us spoke after my voice finished echoing across Daniel’s store and the limestone bank building beside it. I thought I heard the muffled pounding of a hammer beyond the boarded-up windows and the paint-spattered walls of Liberty Brothers, and I longed to be done with Lucas.

  “Don’t let Death and the APL keep you trapped in the shadows, Lucas.” I sucked a deep breath of air through my nose and felt it settle inside my lungs. “Remove your badge, and go up and join the party in the lodge.”

  A pair of hesitant footsteps shuffled toward me across the sidewalk. Lucas, still in his charcoal-gray businessman suit, wandered into view from beneath the lamplight with his arms wrapped around himself. Another wanderer, just like me.

  “Remove your badge,” I said with a nod. “And go have some fun. All right?”

  His dark coat quivered with the nervousness of his arms shaking against the fabric. He didn’t speak or move until the jazz band switched to an old childhood favorite that all of us kids who grew up in the early years of the century adored: “Bill Bailey.” Lucas lifted his face to the windows of the lodge with an expression of wonder in his bottle-cap eyes. Laughter and music and beautiful whiffs of booze streamed out with the glorious golden light of the chandeliers within.

  He removed his badge and shoved it down into his right trouser pocket.

  He passed me by on the sidewalk and hustled inside the humming and shimmying Masonic Lodge, which seemed ready to launch to the stars.

  I heard his feet gallop up the staircase beyond the closed door.

  Another soul had escaped the darkness.

  Chapter 27

  I blew inside Liberty Brothers Furniture as if carried on a breeze—which, perhaps, indeed I was. The little brass shop bell tinkled above my head with the flutter of an object unsettled by a shiver of wind, and all the ceiling lamps swayed.

  Daniel sat across the room, hammering away at a piece of furniture with his back toward me, and my presence seemed to ripple through him as well. He shuddered, lifted his head, and turned halfway around on his spindle-back work chair with the same troubled eyes and pursed lips I had viewed on the night I first drifted past his store with my bags in hand. The band across the street played a cornet-heavy rendition of “Bill Bailey” that threatened to set me crying for the past. I balled my hands into fists with my nails digging into my flesh, determined not to shed a tear until I said what needed to be spoken.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  Daniel sat up straight in his chair. “How much do you know?”

  “I know about the flu. What it did to me. I know”—I folded my arms across my chest and glanced at the faded pink patches on the scrubbed and bleached floorboards—“whose blood that is and why it was shed. I know that Frank and Peter Rowan burst into here . . .” I gritted my teeth and blinked back the sting of tears. “They burst into here, not just because of Billy. They came in here to kill”—I nodded to make the words shake free—“because of me.”

  Daniel lowered the hammer and wood, rose to his feet, and reached for the back of his chair, grabbing the empty air twice before taking hold of the furniture. “How did you—”

  “My mother is able to talk to me. For some peculiar reason, we Rowan women have always been able to see . . .” I filled in the unsaid word with another nod, and he squeezed his lips together.

  “I know about our poor town,” I continued, “and my friends who drive the ambulance with me. I know about you and why you looked so lost when I wandered by that first night . . . why you have that rope burn scarring your neck, and why you can’t ever . . .” My voice broke. “Why you can’t ever father a child.” I tucked my chin into the warm collar of my blouse and cried soundless tears with gentle shakes of my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tasted the sea on my wet lips—or at least what I’d always imagined as the flavor of the faraway oceans, miles and miles away from Buchanan, Illinois.

  Daniel cleared his throat and shifted his weight. “Your father and brother called out your name when they were here. That’s how I knew who you were that night you introduced yourself to me. The first thing they said when your brother pulled my arms behind me and your father socked me in the stomach was ‘This is for Ivy. Your people k—’”

  I opened my eyes when he didn’t continue, and I watched him rub his hands across the sides of his legs while his lips sputtered and his eyes moistened.

  “They said”—he wiped his cheeks with the back of a hand—“‘Your people killed her.’ And for a moment, I thought someone found out about Belgium. But then they beat me and kicked me and shouted about Germans dumping the flu into theaters, and I realized I was going to die because of ignorance and this damned anti-immigrant paranoia, not because of the real reasons someone should kill me.”

  I inched toward him, my hands tucked beneath my arms, my fingers trembling against my ribs. “No one should have killed you, Daniel.”

  “You heard what I did over there. I saw the look of horror in your eyes after I confessed my sins.”

  “No matter how shocked and appalled I might have been when you first told me”—I stopped three feet away from him, feeling the firm pull of him within my chest—“I know others ordered you to kill. That wasn’t you deciding to take lives.”

  “I took them just the same.” He leaned forward against the back of the chair. “I still see them sometimes. I’ll always see them.”

  “My father and brother made you pay dearly for the ills of your native country. Don’t keep punishing yourself. I’m sorry I only made things worse with the things I said.”

  He swallowed and gripped the chair with whitening fingers.

  My eyes strayed down to the pink marks on the floor below my black shoes, and my mind once again envisioned the brutality of the night of Friday, October 4, 1918, now envisioning Daniel as the victim bleeding and hurting down on the floorboards.

  “Did they make you suffer long . . . before they . . . ?” I closed my eyes to squeeze away the image of my father tugging a rope around Daniel’s neck. “Did they hang you in here like the mob that killed Robert Prager?”

  “No.” Daniel sniffed. “They held me down there on the ground—someone’s knee pushed against my spine—and they yanked the rope around my neck until I blacked out. They garroted me.”

  My balance wavered. I raised my arms out to my sides to steady myself and planted both feet solidly against the floor. “And . . . Albrecht was never here?”

  “No. Only me. I heard them break the glass from upstairs and immediately ran down, but they grabbed me before I could get to the drawer and fetch the gun.”

  I raised my eyes to his. “You’ve known what happened to us all along, haven’t you? Even that night I first came here and spoke to you, you knew.”

  He nodded.

  “How?” I asked. “How did you know when most of the rest of us didn’t?”

  “I’d seen enough of death. I recognized the scent of its arriva
l—the strange feel of it in the air—to understand precisely what was happening to me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Why did you let me believe you were a grieving brother and I was alive and healthy?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t—” He lowered himself to the chair with a clumsiness that made the wood slide with a squeak against the floor. “You just showed up in the dark of night . . . and you made me feel”—he rubbed his right hand across his chin—“as if the entire world hadn’t conspired against me. I didn’t want to frighten you away. You were always flitting off so quickly as it was.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the back of his chair, close enough to touch the side of his warm hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wanted this to become our Eden.”

  “You wanted to keep me free of knowledge, you mean.”

  “No.” He swallowed. “Just free.”

  I reached up to the rope burn beneath his collar and traced my thumb across the smooth red line. His unsteady breaths tickled the back of my wrist.

  “Why is this mark still here if your other wounds healed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it like the pain in my stomach, waiting to be freed?”

  He shook his head and again said, “I don’t know.”

  “What would free you?” I cupped my hand around his cheek and his chin and stroked his soft skin that, now that I thought about it, never seemed to grow much in the way of whiskers, beyond a thin and bristly layer of stubble that never, ever changed. “What would allow you to leave this place?”

  He turned his face in the direction of the front-counter drawer that hid the Sentinel article about the murder.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He drew my hand into his and peered up at me with glossy blue eyes. “I want to know that Albrecht and this store will be safe.”

  I sank my teeth into my bottom lip, and the wood-paneled walls of Liberty Brothers seemed to squeeze against my chest, pressing all traces of hope for his well-being out of me.

  “Oh, Daniel. You might be asking for the impossible.”

  “I know.” He shifted his position in the chair with another dull squeak. “But my brother, he’s lived in this country since 1912. He’s never hurt a soul or betrayed America. And yet he’ll have a struggle to reopen the store and marry Nora because of slanderous attacks like the ones—” He darted another sharp glance at the closed drawer.

  I pressed my hand over his, molding my palm around his knuckles, which somehow grew colder beneath me. “What can I do to help?” I asked. “What can I ask my mother to do?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. The war has to end first. People need to change their way of looking at other people to set things right for Albrecht.”

  “And you believe you’ll remain trapped inside this building until that happens?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “That doesn’t seem right at all. Try to come with me.”

  “I keep telling you”—he peeked back up at me with the same haunted look I remembered from the day I first walked in on him cleaning up the blood, his pupils wide and dark—“I can’t.”

  “Just . . . come to the music and the dancing across the street . . .”

  “Ivy . . .” Daniel brought me down to his lap with a soft pull of my elbow. “I’m not ready to go. If you need to keep moving and find whatever it is you’re searching for, I won’t stop you. But I’m not going. I’m staying right here until I’m certain it’s safe.”

  A tenor with a lush vibrato—perhaps the slick-haired piano player—burst out in song across the street and gave us both a start. His melancholy words and dreamlike melody caused my soul to tire inside me. The lights dimmed. The world withered. I lowered my head against Daniel’s shoulder and said, “I can’t stay here with you. This store reminds me of my father and my brother, and what they did.”

  “I know.” He leaned his head against mine, and we trembled and fought against allowing the music to chip away at our hearts until nothing of us remained. We stayed tethered to the earth, for better or worse, and absorbed the sorrow of the tenor’s voice.

  Daniel swallowed next to my ear. “Last night was the end of the world.”

  I collapsed farther against him. “I know. I feel the same way.”

  “No, I mean”—he brushed his cheek against mine—“that is the name of the song. ‘Last Night Was the End of the World,’ by Henry Burr.”

  I emitted a sound that wavered between a whimper and a laugh and locked my arms around his shoulders. My eyes turned to the copper lamp dangling above us, and I stared at the unsteady bulb that hummed and flickered inside, fearful it would soon blink out and abandon me in a darkness where nothing ended or began. Just darkness and cold. And me.

  The singer across the street reached his final crescendo; his voice shook throughout the store and volleyed across my legs and my head and my bones—or what I thought to be my bones.

  And then the world fell silent.

  I held my breath, clung to Daniel, and kept my face fixed on that teasing bulb above, willing it not to burn out just yet.

  Friday night a band of vagrants broke into Liberty Brothers Furniture Store and attacked and killed Wilhelm Daniel Schendel, aged 24, a German enemy of the U.S. who resided in downtown Buchanan. A neighbor down the street from the scene of the crime telephoned the police after hearing the intruders break the glass windows and door. Officers found Mr. Schendel lying facedown on the floor inside the establishment. The coroner pronounced him dead at the scene.

  Mr. Schendel’s injuries included multiple bruises and lacerations, missing teeth, a broken nose, a ruptured spleen, and fractured ribs. Officers discovered him with a rope wrapped around his neck and speculate that the intruders strangled him to death.

  Wilhelm Schendel entered the country directly from Germany in 1915 and has been on the American Protective League’s watch list ever since he registered as an enemy alien in February of this year. Records show that he does not posses a draft registration card and that he and his surviving bother, Albrecht Schendel, aged 29, did not purchase Liberty Bonds during any of the drives. Albrecht Schendel also failed to produce a draft registration card when questioned.

  Police assure the public that the incident was an isolated event committed by migratory ruffians passing swiftly through town. “Mr. Wilhelm Schendel likely perpetrated the violence by preaching his disloyal sentiments to the vagrants,” said Police Chief Clyde Madison. “The anonymous men attacked an individual who posed a tremendous threat to our country’s safety and then moved onward as quickly as they arrived.”

  Despite the victim’s heritage and disloyal tendencies, Madison emphasized that Mr. Schendel’s death does not represent another Robert Prager-style act of mob justice and should not be treated as such.

  —BUCHANAN SENTINEL, October 6, 1918

  Chapter 28

  The shop bell down below stirred me from my rest. I awoke next to Daniel in his bed, still clothed in my blouse, skirt, and stockings from the night before, out of fear that I would need to spring out of bed at some point and run.

  From what, I did not know.

  I heard footsteps down in the store and assumed at first that they might be Albrecht’s again. If he had seen our wreckage from our unhinged night of boozing—the broken lamps, the bullet holes, the shattered bottles—he surely must have assumed more “vagrants” had entered the store and inflicted additional anti-German damage.

  Poor Albrecht. I wondered if he knew we haunted him.

  The visitor down below sounded as if he were pacing in a pattern that struck me as familiar. I propped myself on my elbows and cocked my ear toward the bedroom door to better listen to the rhythm.

  Step-step-step-STEP, step-step-step-TURN,

  Step-step-step-STEP, step-step-step-TURN . . .

  Yes, I had most certainly heard that particular style of
pacing before—in my own house, on evenings when Father didn’t receive fair payments for our crops. And during the night after he injured Billy with the shovel, when the doctor had warned us that my brother could slip out of consciousness without a moment’s notice.

  I slid out of bed without a sound, careful not to disturb Daniel and his gentle breathing, and crept downstairs to the store that glowed with morning sunlight stealing between the boards of the windows.

  My father stood over the bloodstains with his hands on his hips—the same stance in which I had found Daniel on the night of the murder. Father’s back was turned to me, so I could only see the curve of his spine beneath his tan work shirt, the rigidness of his hunched shoulders, the thin, combed-over hair that shared my same golden-brown color—and Billy’s color. I doubted Father would see me, so I snuck farther inside the store from the workroom and leaned my shoulder blades against the nearest wall, in the comfort of shadows.

  Father sighed with a deep grumble that rumbled up from his belly, and he just stood there, looking at the faded blood he himself had pounded out of Daniel.

  “What do you want, Father?” I asked.

  He raised his head and glimpsed over his shoulder in my direction, and for a moment I feared that he had drunk himself to death or keeled over from the flu—and that he could hear me. That he had come to spoil my newfound independence.

  His eyes didn’t focus on me, however, even though he kept his face directed my way, as if he felt but didn’t see me.

  He still lived and breathed.

  A living man. A free man.

  “What do you want?” I asked again, and he turned away and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. Perhaps my presence resembled a fly creeping across his skin.

  I heard a creak in a workroom floorboard.

  Daniel appeared in the back doorway and immediately stiffened. He braced his hand against the doorframe and, with a sting to his voice, he asked, “Who is that?”

  Father left the stains and wandered over to the maple cabinet Daniel had been trying with all his might to fix the first night I spoke to him. He ran his calloused left hand over the cracked and splintered trim, and I saw the shine of his gold wedding band.