by Tay LaRoi
When the kiss ended, she tugged Robbin to her feet. “Fine, but we’re doing it on a bed. The floor might be comfortable enough when you have fur, but it’s pretty damn cold to me right now.”
About J.C. Long
J.C. Long is an American expat living in Japan, though he’s also lived stints in Seoul, South Korea—no, he’s not an army brat; he’s an English teacher. He is also quite passionate about Welsh corgis and is convinced that anyone who does not like them is evil incarnate. His dramatic streak comes from his life-long involvement in theater. After living in several countries aside from the United States J.C. is convinced that love is love, no matter where you are, and is determined to write stories that demonstrate exactly that. J.C. Long’s favorite things in the world are pictures of corgis, writing and Korean food (not in that order…okay, in that order). J.C. spends his time not writing thinking about writing, coming up with new characters, attending Big Bang concerts and wishing he was writing. The best way to get him to write faster is to motivate him with corgi pictures. Yes, that is a veiled hint.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorjclong
Twitter: https://twitter.com/j_c_long_author
Other books by this author
Unzipped Shorts
New Year’s Eve Unzipped
Unzipping 7D
Hong Kong Nights
A Matter of Duty
Gabe Maxfield Mysteries
Mai Tais and Murder
Dove in the Window
Kara Race-Moore
“I can’t sleep,” Pearl whispered, crawling into bed with me.
In the morning, I woke up cold, clutching the wedding dress she’d been buried in.
I was sorely afraid, not because my dead lover had come calling, but because I knew Pearl’s parents would be fit to be tied if they found out their darling daughter had chosen to take her nightwalkings to sleep with me, Cissy McGurk, instead of that nice Howell boy they had picked out for her.
A haint in the family was one thing, but a fish-kissing girl was quite another. Plus, they wouldn’t be pleased if they knew Pearl lay in the cemetery in her underthings, right next to the church and all. I held the dress to my heart, torn between the want to never let it go and the need to hide it at once.
Old Henrik might howl at the moon once a month, and the O’Neil boys could blame all manner of things on run-ins with the Snallygaster beast, and nobody worried too much about the blue-faced Fugates over in the next county, but a girl was expected to know her place, especially these days. I was going to have to figure out what was going on with Pearl, though quiet like, but first, there were chores that had to be done.
Standing in my bedroom, still in my old too-short cotton nightgown, I allowed myself to hug the dress and take a deep breath. There was the expected smell of dirt and pine, but there was also the distinct scent of Pearl, like all the first little flowers that poke their heads up after winter mixed together, a perfume of kindly spring.
I had helped Pearl sew that dress, putting love and heartache into every stitch. If I couldn’t convince her to put it back on, for something told me this was no one-time nightwalk, I’d have to unstitch the entire thing, break it down into smaller pieces like bloomers, petticoats, undershirts, and all manner of smaller clothing that could all be tucked away in drawers and worn later with no one the wiser. I could do that, if I had to. Give me an old blanket, a needle, and scissors, and I’d be able to turn out near a brand new set of Sunday best for a whole family.
In truth, I had sewn more of the wedding dress than Pearl. She had often said she wished she had my patience for sewing. She was always ready to throw down her piecework and run off to pick apples or climb cliffs or look to see if them chickadees had new eggs, or just about anything that meant being outside and roaming.
I don’t know how it is for other folks, but me, when the stitches are setting right and I get a good pace going, I can have practically a whole quilt border in place by sunset while my mind still thinks it’s morning. I feel it, though, when I finally stand, all my muscles cramped up and complaining about my steady work, but still, there’s a peace I couldn’t even rightly describe to Pearl about doing something I was good at.
With Pearl gone, sewing lost most of the pleasure it had given me, but it was steadying to have something to do, to try to forget everything for a little while as I worked on this or that project. With spring in full bloom and summer making all sorts of noises about being about ready to drop by for a long spell, I had just been beginning to think maybe the world wasn’t over even if Pearl wasn’t in it anymore. But now she was back again. Sort of. Dead. But not dead. What was I going to do?
I folded up the wedding dress with gentle care and stored it in my hope chest guiltily, sliding it between two layers of linens. Cousin Martha had begun to make a few remarks that I hardly need worry about filling the chest at my age, but I knew no one would bother poking around in there.
In this area of Kentucky, where the green horse pastures gave way to the coal-veined mountains, most folks didn’t pry into others’ business because they didn’t want anyone prying into their own. President Roosevelt had been setting up CCC camps around the state for the past couple years, trying to make military-type work for all those unemployed men, but it didn’t seem to be helping the area much, and plenty were making ends meet any way they could, even if it wasn’t strictly legal.
Folks didn’t trust the government, and armies even less. The Great War had taken a fair number of young men from the area, and there were still women wearing black for husbands or sons who had died across the ocean in foreign lands. And there were still some grandparents who remembered the Civil War, back before they’d even been parents, and how the armies of both the North and South had trooped through and grabbed whatever supplies they wanted without so much as a by your leave, let alone payment.
Of course, war was nothing compared to the folks who died each year from consumption or whooping cough and the like. My parents both died in the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. Don’t feel too bad for me, since I was so little I don’t remember them, except maybe a faint memory of a lullaby. Or maybe that was just a dream. I don’t know.
Either way, I was raised by my second cousin once removed—or maybe he was a first cousin twice removed. I never could keep the details on that straight. But what mattered was that in an area where everyone seemed to have large families all around, he and I were all that was left of the McGurks, and so were stuck with each other. Oh, and he was a preacher, so Cousin Lucas was doubly stuck raising his orphan kin, having to abide by what was expected from church and community.
I didn’t see Cousin Lucas that often; church attendance had swelled since the ’29 Crash. People had more to pray for now, with so little available. And preachers like Cousin Lucas were happy to tell their larger congregations what they should be doing, and they all had a lot to say about not doing anything “different,” quoting the bloodiest parts of the Bible as justification for anyone even daring to think of putting a toe out of line.
So Cousin Lucas was either giving sermons, writing sermons, or seeing to different parishioners, leaving most of the raising of me to his wife, Cousin Martha.
I suspect Cousin Lucas found himself married more because no one would trust an unmarried preacher than out of any feelings of love. Cousin Martha married him, I think, to have someone to lift heavy things for her and open stubborn jars. “Sister Martha” and “Brother Lucas” they called each other, were more devoted to God than spouse, as they considered proper. Small wonder there were no children.
Cousin Martha tried too soon to instill a sense of devotion to God in me. A lot of theological concepts are fairly hard to grasp as a child, and by the time I was old enough to juggle some of the oddly contradictory concepts of the Bible in my head, I was rather disinclined to, already suspecting my personal inclinations wouldn’t be sanctioned by the Good Book.
However, Cousin Martha did teach me how to sew, and I quic
kly learned both the art of pulling thread and cloth together to make all sorts of pretty and functional designs, as well as the fact that if I was sewing quietly in a corner somewhere, people tended to leave me alone.
People left me alone even more after Pearl died.
Once morning chores were done, I spent most of the day working on a quilt. It had been Pearl’s project, but her mother had given it to me to finish shortly after the funeral, saying she knew Pearl would have wanted me to have it. Would have wanted me to do her work for her, I had huffed to myself, almost disgracing myself by laughing at my selfishness at such a time. I had been working on a “Honeycomb” quilt, but had put it aside, finding unexpected solace in working on Pearl’s “Dove in the Window.”
I took my time selecting the fabrics to use to form the triangles and stars of the middle section that represented “kissing doves.” There was no rush. Even just turned nineteen, I had already finished enough quilts to keep us warm in the winter and have extra to lay out to brighten up the worn-out furniture.
I cut up a faded pink shirt into triangles and thought about what Pearl’s midnight appearance meant. Everyone knew the dead might go nightwalking if they had important unfinished business in life—or if someone had laid a curse on them. There was only one person I could ask what this might mean, and the thought chilled me to the bone.
Nervous but determined, I walked over to the cemetery that evening, wedding dress slung over one arm, wondering what to say if I ran into anyone. Luckily, there was no one about, most folks having better places to be than a graveyard at night.
I would have looked quite quare if anyone saw me, a gangly girl in an old gingham dress wandering a graveyard at night while carrying a wedding dress as if she was delivering finery to some monster’s wedding.
Giggles spilled out of the corner of my mouth at the thought of a tentacled Snallygaster or hairy Dewayo decked out in lace and veils. Would they have a very high wedding cake? I wondered, the giggles threatening to become full-on laughter.
The local wedding tradition was that each guest would bring a thick wheat pancake to give to the bride and she’d stack them up, layering sun-dried apple slices between each gifted pancake. The higher the cake, the more friends the bride had. Pearl’s wedding cake would have been high as a pine tree; she was that liked. And the thought hadn’t made me jealous like it would most girls. What had hurt me was the thought of Danny Howell kissing her and not me.
And remembering that killed my laughter. Tendrils of anxiety spread through my veins as I recalled the solemn pact we had both sworn that we would be true to our husbands once we both married. I settled the dress firmly on my arm and kept walking.
The cemetery was spread over a little bit of rolling hills just a stone’s throw from the church and rectory. It was mostly an open area with a few dignified cypress trees planted here and there, professional mourners left to lament the loss of loved ones long after the funeral was over. Pearl’s grave was newest, in the more recent section where the graves were laid out in straighter rows. The oldest graves were closer to the church and in more of a hodge-podge without any particular order to them.
I lightly ran my fingers over the tops of the markers, the stone still warm from the afternoon sun even as dusk turned to full night, a handful of the same family names on the oldest. Lots of husbands and wives clustered together. I reached Pearl’s grave.
Gone to join the angels, her tombstone read.
But she hadn’t.
I sat down, my back against the tombstone, dress carefully folded in my lap, and idly tore up blades of grass and wove them into yellow-green rings to adorn my fingers. The light had shifted from reds and oranges to purples and blues. The first stars came out. And I waited.
As I waited, I wondered if this was my fault. The Dumb Supper, after all, had been my idea.
I’d heard other places had other traditions, but in the mountains it was known that if on May first you set the table for dinner—including a place for your future husband, just empty plates and glasses placed upside down—while walking backwards and then sat and waited in absolute silence, you might be given a glimpse of the future when the clock struck midnight.
We set it up in Pearl’s family’s kitchen, her parents nodding their assent to the request.
“You think you two little magpies can stop chattering for that long?” Pearl’s father asked us.
“I was able to stay quiet while I set a Dumb Supper when I was a girl,” Pearl’s mother chimed in, “and perhaps I saw a vision of a certain young man I’d been wanting to speak to me,” she added with a smirk at Pearl’s father.
“I waited until your mother invited me to supper,” Pearl’s father protested. “I knew I was safe, then, from your father objecting to me walking with you.”
She giggled like a woman half her age, and they soon retired, leaving Pearl and me alone.
Keeping to the rules, we walked backwards as we carried cups and plates to the table, arranging four places, cups, and plates upside down, with four chairs set backwards. Pearl placed a pitcher filled with daisies on the table and fussed with it several times until she was satisfied it was in the exact center of the table.
All in absolute silence.
The bits of noise, outside of a few folks on the road going about their evening, gradually quieted down to nothing. An owl hooted once, twice; then there was nothing but the crickets and the ticking clock. As the night got quieter, the ticking seemed to get louder until it seemed almost deafening.
We began fighting yawns around ten. Around eleven, Pearl stood up, gave me a silent bow, and stretched out her hand. Seeing at once what she meant, I stood up, fluttering an imaginary fan, cocking my head coyly, and batting my eyelashes at her.
In the silence, with just the ticking of the clock to accompany us, we waltzed about the kitchen, one, two, three, one, two, three. We’d practiced before, together and with other girls from school, to be ready to gracefully pair off with any boy who asked us at a formal dance, all of us sure that dancing was essential to that much sought after idea of true love.
As we danced to pass the time until midnight, Pearl took the boy’s part, as she often had in the past, but somehow, this time, her right hand pressed lightly on my back, it felt like more than just practice. Counterclockwise around the room, stepping through the pattern, there was a rhythm to our silent dance that filled me with an almost giddy sense of happiness.
Pearl tipped her head to the side and pressed closer. Our dance slowed as we shifted into a tighter embrace and then stopped completely as we leaned our faces closer, our movements almost identical, like a girl so near to a mirror her breath would fog the surface. Our lips parted—and the old clock on the mantel began to strike midnight. We sprang apart guiltily, as if we’d just been caught out by her parents or a neighbor at forgetting all about potential husbands.
As the clock kept chiming the midnight hour, I opened my mouth to break the hours-long silence with a joke about being old maids together, but there was a sudden gust of wind and the door banged open. A large person in a dark cloak glided in. There was no other word for it; it was truly a glide, not a sound of footsteps. It was impossible to tell if this was a man or a woman, as the cloak hid all distinguishing features except a height that almost made the head touch the low-timbered ceiling. The person held out a withered hand for Pearl.
Pearl looked horrified, her eyes as large as marbles. She took a step back, and I moved to be in front of her. “It’s rude to cut in,” I snarled. As scared as I was, I was more angry that this person was scaring Pearl.
The person withdrew the hand and glided backwards. The door shut just as the clock finished striking midnight.
Pearl looked at me, her eyes still wide with horror. “I’m going to die,” she whispered.
“No,” I said, quick to deny what we had both seen.
“That was Death. Death came a courtin’, and I should have gone with him.” She was breathing in shallow little ga
sps, her eyes wide and her face growing paler by the second. “It’ll be worse now that I refused him.”
“What’s worse than death?” I asked, trying to be flippant, but fear crept into my voice.
She didn’t answer, just started clearing the dishes away. I turned the chairs right ways round. When everything was cleared away, we huddled together on the floor in front of the dying fire in the fireplace, hugging each other for comfort. Later, we lied and told her parents that we’d slept through midnight and so didn’t know if visions of our future husbands had stopped by for supper.
Stammering, Danny Howell had asked for her hand not long later, and she’d agreed. Everyone in the families had been so pleased that no one but me noticed her despondency, as if she already knew it wouldn’t matter when they set a date. And less than a month later, Pearl was dead, gone from a fever between one day and the next.
And now she was nightwalking.
I was pulled back to the present by an odd rumbling noise nearby, and not far off someone popped out of their grave, an unnatural harvest from Death’s plantings. It was too dark to see who it was, but I guessed either old Margery Donaldson, who’d died last winter from pneumonia, or Jacob Bahr, who’d finally succumbed to the lung infection from working his whole life in the coal mines. The figure stumbled off, soon followed by another nightwalker.
Staying seated on the ground, I hugged my knees and closed my eyes, childishly acting as though if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. I knew something was wrong, but I hadn’t expected it to be this bad. My heart was pounding so loudly I could hear it thrumming in my ears, but not so loud I didn’t hear the rumbling coming from the earth right next to me, and when I opened my eyes, Pearl stood above me in, as I’d thought, her underthings.