Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  Silas paused, with the fossil still in his hand, as he tried to puzzle out the implications of what Uncle was saying and why he might be saying it.

  “But Uncle, don’t you think there’s a simple elegance in death? In just letting the end come and then joining hands with your ancestors who have gone before? In letting go? I think people who worry too much about the kinds of things you’re talking about end up trapping themselves in some way. I mean, I haven’t really thought about it like this before, but what you’re saying just sounds, well, wrong somehow.” Silas was thinking especially about his uncle’s later photographs, about how it seemed now that they might be fledgling attempts at the bizarre process Uncle was trying to explain to him. Although that was many years ago, Uncle had had a long time to think about it, to refine his philosophy and his technique. What was he experimenting on now? Silas wondered.

  “Ah!” Uncle exclaimed as he forced a smile. “His father’s boy, indeed! How wonderful! But perhaps you will allow me, sometime soon, to explicate the matter a little further for you, to actually show you what I mean?” There was a cold light in Uncle’s eyes, and Silas didn’t like it, but he stayed polite, deferential, because he knew it would keep things on an even keel and there was still dinner to get through.

  “Of course! I’d be honored. I know there is so much I can learn from you.” Silas hoped he didn’t sound as insincere as he felt.

  “Wonderful. Just wonderful. By the way, how tall are you, Silas?”

  “About five-eleven,” he answered without thinking. “Why?”

  “I was just wondering if some of my old clothes might fit you, some jackets, or perhaps something more appropriate for a young man of letters such as yourself?”

  “Um, sure,” said Silas, who did not intend to part with his father’s jacket, which he had taken to wearing all the time now.

  His mother sailed into the room, stroked her son’s cheek as she passed by him, then perched next to Uncle. She took his waxy hand in hers and held it affectionately.

  “Isn’t your uncle wonderful, Si?” Dolores said, running her hands over a new dress of purple velvet accessorized with a small hat and veil. Presumably a gift from Uncle.

  Silas said, “It’s a little much for dinner at home, isn’t it? You look like a silent movie star.”

  Dolores seemed not to notice her son was being anything but complimentary, and she smiled as she fussed with an imaginary wrinkle on the fabric. “Doesn’t your uncle just think of everything?”

  “Indeed I do,” answered Uncle before Silas could proffer an opinion. “Dinner?” he asked, ringing a small silver bell.

  The dinner ritual was the only part of Silas’s days that had any structure. He spent his time investigating the house, or reading, or wandering portions of the town, but he knew that every night at six, he had to be in the parlor ready for dinner. While he found it overly formal and didn’t particularly look forward to it, having one thing to do every day kept him aware of the passage of time. Only an hour until dinner, better get home. Three hours since dinner, must be nearly nine. This was something his life in Saltsbridge had lacked completely, and so each depressing day there had blurred into another until, by the time they had left for Lichport, Silas wasn’t even sure what month it was or how long his father had been gone. But in Lichport, he had an easier time staying focused. He knew it was dinnertime and it was Wednesday and that it was September, and that his father had been missing for one year, two months, and twelve days.

  Everyone was expected to contribute to the dinner conversation, and Silas found asking questions easier and usually less annoying than answering the questions put to him. So he asked his mother where her side of the family lived in Lichport.

  “All gone,” she said, not even looking up.

  “But houses must still be there. The house where you lived? Your grandparents? Cousins?”

  That seemed to get her attention, and she snapped her head up suddenly and barked at Silas, “Keep the hell out of those old houses! You’ll fall through a floor or some damn thing and we’ll never find you!” She caught herself and suppressed her annoyance. “This is a new start for us, Si. No need to go digging around in the past.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Silas. “If I fall somewhere and die, I’ll make a point of floating back to say good-bye.”

  “Jesus Christ, Silas!” Dolores rose abruptly and stormed into the parlor to compose herself.

  “He only wishes to know something about his new home and family, Dolores. It’s only natural,” said Uncle over his shoulder, in a soothing voice.

  “Indeed I do,” said Silas, imitating Uncle’s calming tone. “And there is something I’d like to ask you about, if you don’t mind?”

  Uncle nodded, as he chewed a piece of dried meat.

  “I saw the building belonging to the mortuary. And I saw a sign saying a Mr. Bowe was the mortician?”

  “That is correct. Mr. Bowe was the town’s mortician, and once my employer, my partner, really, until we parted company. He has been dead for some time.”

  “So my dad has been the town’s mortician since Mr. Bowe died?” Silas asked.

  Dolores came back into the room and sat down at the table, apparently more or less recovered. She looked hard at Uncle, then shrugged and nodded as if to say, Go ahead. Do it. As if they had already discussed the possibility that this topic would arise.

  “Not at all. Your father may have worked from Mr. Bowe’s house, but he was not a mortician, not by training or inclination.”

  Silas couldn’t let the question go.

  “But my dad was a mortician. He told me about it all the time. Do you mean he worked for Mr. Bowe? That Mr. Bowe was the mortician and my dad helped him? Was my dad just his assistant?” Silas began to feel as though he was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

  “Silas, your father was, how shall I say it? Self-employed. I assure you, my boy, if your father had become the mortician, I would have known about it. Indeed, I might have taken up the reins from Mr. Bowe … why, I once even thought of asking for his daughter’s hand. But in the end, I found her somewhat plain, and thought better of it. Silas, I am very sorry to be cast in this role as the exposer of lies, but I can only be honest with you. Your father was a tremendous disappointment to this family, and to your mother. He was a person of some promise, but he chose to squander the gifts God and family bestowed on him and spent much of his life in a world, in a fantasy, to which he alone had the key.”

  Silas didn’t want to hear any more and stood up from the table.

  “You know what, Uncle,” he said, the sarcasm unmistakable, “I don’t think you knew my father very well at all. He hardly spoke of you, and now I see why. You think because you’ve helped us out, because you’ve got money and a nice house, that you’re what, the head of the family? My new dad or something?”

  Far above stairs, a loud, sickening banging had begun, as if someone was hitting the floor over and over with a sack full of rotten fruit.

  Uncle looked up suddenly, his eyes wild, then looked back at Silas with an unfocused gaze. After a few labored breaths, he seemed to be himself again.

  “Silas, I am sorry that I have offended you. Here, you finish your meal. I will yield.” Uncle smiled thinly as he waved his white napkin and said, “Truce.”

  He threw the napkin down on the table as he stood up. Without explanation, he walked quickly to the staircase and took the steps two at a time, in a hurry to reach the second floor. Silas could hear doors being unlocked in the north wing, opened and closed, and after a few moments, his uncle shouted something and the walls of the house shook once, and the banging stopped.

  Dolores put her face in her hands.

  “Oh, Red …” She sighed, invoking Silas’s least favorite childhood nickname.

  Silas sat back down at the table, picked up his uncle’s untouched glass of wine, and said to his mother with a forced smile, “Love you, too.”

  Dolores left her son at the d
inner table and retreated to her room.

  Though she liked lingering downstairs with a drink as the candles burned down, tonight all she wanted was to go to bed. She stood before her dressing mirror in a long robe and looked at herself and the room about her in reflection. Behind her, the wood-paneled walls glowed in the low lamplight. The large bed held aloft a velvet canopy, and the furniture was gilt and grand. That all felt right. Even so, she was weary. If only Silas would trust her a little more. Or at least be more willing to see things through, wait them out, see what might come next. It wasn’t in her son’s nature to be trusting. She knew that. She brought a small cotton square up to her mouth. As she wiped and wiped the soft cloth across her lips, the rouge came away a little at a time.

  Silas used to trust her. Christ, how they’d play when he was younger and Amos was hardly ever home, hadn’t yet taken a hold on Silas. She’d called Silas “Red” sometimes, not because of his hair, but because of their fairy-tale game. She had this game she’d made from Little Red Riding Hood. She would get in her bed with her clothes on and draw the bedding up around her, covering most of her face. Silas would knock on her bedroom door, and she’d say in a high voice, “Come in, come in, my dear.” And Silas, oh, he was maybe six or seven at the time, would come in very slowly, dressed in his red-hooded jacket. He knew all his lines because they’d read the story together many times. Dolores liked that story. Men were wolves and practical women took the knife to them, and those wolves, those sharp-toothed men, they didn’t come back after that.

  “Grandmother, what big eyes you have.”

  “All the better to see you with, Red.”

  “What big ears you have….”

  “All the better to hear you with, my dear.”

  And with each line, she’d call him closer and closer to the bed with her eyes. She’d laugh in her throat at how nervous Silas would get, and by the time he got right next to the bed, he’d look like he was about to piss himself, thrilled and nervous both. She’d pull that sheet up over her mouth, and as she spoke, he couldn’t see her say the words, though the sheet moved a little with the in and out of her breathing. Sometimes Silas would start to shake toward the game’s end, like maybe somewhere in his mind he thought that under the blankets his mother had changed into something else, something that wasn’t his mother anymore. So she’d drop the sheet a little toward the end, down to her chin.

  “What big teeth you have.”

  And at this she’d laugh and leap from the bed, hollering, “All the better to eat you with!” She’d grab him and he’d laugh too, but his eyes were wild, like an animal in a corner, looking rapidly this way and that for a way, any way, out.

  She liked this game, liked the weird tension of it. Sometimes she’d call him “Red” for the rest of the day. She did that until it became a habit, a regular nickname for him. Silas didn’t like it, maybe because the main character was, in the story, a girl. Maybe because when he heard it, it reminded him of a part of him that scared more easily. Maybe because his father called him “Bird,” which he liked much better. Either way, one day when she called him from the bed, he said he didn’t want to play that game anymore if she was going to call him Red. She didn’t hesitate. Just jumped up out of the bed, straightened her clothes, and said loudly so he could hear her through the door, “Your way or no way, huh? Okay. Your way.”

  And that was the last time they played together. Though every now and again, when Silas failed to finish something, or she wanted to chide him, she’d call him Red, even though she knew he wouldn’t respond and would ignore her for it, sometimes for days after.

  Thinking about it now as she stepped away from the mirror and sat on the edge of her bed, Dolores thought maybe this hadn’t been such a great game to play with a little kid.

  Later that evening, after everyone had retreated to their rooms, Uncle came downstairs, unable to sleep, and sat in the quiet dark as he pondered his options. If he was lucky, he would fall asleep in his chair for an hour or so. The house was at peace for the moment, and dawn was not far off.

  Dolores had gone upstairs to her room after dinner and had not come back down. Silas might have gone to bed as well, although for all Uncle knew, his nephew could be wandering the town. Brave, that one. Intrepid. How like himself, he thought. It was becoming clear that Dolores had little if any discernible maternal instinct. That would not serve the purpose for which he’d brought her here. Not at all. Two failures—the father and now the mother—both unsuitable. Uncle tried to comfort himself by remembering that this was, after all, an experiment, and setbacks were to be expected. And really, two errors could be considered two steps closer to eventual success. Dolores wouldn’t be any trouble, though. No need to take any action yet. She might prove useful in unexpected ways. When she drank, she was in her own little world, usually quiet and detached from the daily noise and doings of the house and blissfully uninterested in the long hours he spent above stairs dealing with the other occupant in the north wing.

  From the side table, he picked up the fossil of a small, domed, star-marked urchin that Silas had left there earlier. As he held it in his hand, Uncle wrapped his palm and fingers about it like a protective nest.

  “Did you have a mother, I wonder?” he said to the fossil’s stony, rippled surface. How permanent and individual it seemed, how it appeared to have been made exactly as it was, a little immortal thing waiting down the ages. He admired those qualities.

  “Never mind,” he said to the fossil, putting it gently back on the shelf. “Hardly matters now what’s become of her, does it?”

  EVENING AT UNCLE’S HOUSE became a ritual set in stone. Reliable. Unchanging.

  Dinner at six. Candles lit as usual and melting onto the tablecloth. Uncle and Dolores, at opposite ends of the table, gazed at each other while they chewed and dabbed the edges of their mouths with linen napkins. Occasionally, Dolores would drop a hint about a trip to Florida or going shopping in Kingsport. Then Uncle would say how lovely that would be if only his work would allow him such indulgences. Dolores never asked Uncle to elaborate on how he filled his days.

  While they talked, Silas looked out the window at the amber light. It was about an hour before dusk, and he loved how the town changed at twilight. He wanted to be outside, rambling among the long shadows on the streets, watching the little candles being lit in the windows of houses he had thought were abandoned the night before.

  Also, Silas wasn’t sure how much more he could stand of watching his uncle watch his mother. Uncle’s eyes moved over his mother’s arm as it lifted food to her mouth. Uncle’s eyes eagerly watched her empty her glass, and looked hopeful each time she tipped in a little more scotch.

  Tonight Silas excused himself from the table before dinner was quite finished. Said he felt a headache coming on—a trick he’d learned from his mom—and that a little fresh air would do him good. He left the dining room without waiting for a response from either Uncle or his mother. He went directly to the front door and out into the street. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but the air of the approaching evening was coming in off the sea with the promise of a cool breeze.

  He walked slowly up Fairwell Street, feeling that the entire town was his. There was a particular gravity in Lichport, a sort of pull he could feel, as if the town’s streets and stones were continually calling him. Or maybe it was just the comfortable weight of his father’s watch in the front pocket of his jacket.

  He passed by a gate on his left that led to another of the town’s many family cemeteries. Atop the gate, iron was twisted into calligraphic letters spelling: UMBER.

  The Umber family plot.

  Just over the name “Umber,” also in iron, was a head of Janus, much like the one on his pendant. He opened the gate, and it whined in protest. Silas entered the overgrown little graveyard and looked around. He noted with interest that a number of stones had the same image either carved into them, or as an ornament on the gravestone.

  Here are my people, he tho
ught proudly.

  In the very middle of the cemetery, there was a large granite mausoleum in the classical style, surrounded by briars at its back and sides. At first the bronze doors seemed locked, the handles unwilling to budge. But Silas kept turning them this way and that, and eventually, the door creaked open.

  The light from the low sun, though fading fast, hit the stained-glass windows on the west wall so the inside of the tomb glowed in jeweled light: ruby, emerald, amber, and sapphire. There were numerous engraved plaques that marked the hollows in the walls that held some of his more ancient ancestors, and he could easily follow the names back well beyond the few he knew. Near the still-open chambers nearest the door were the coffins of his grandfather and grandmother, his father’s father and mother. And there, just beyond them, were the coffins of his paternal great-grandparents. Tradition seemed to be that the most recent dead were left out for the continuance of mourning, but after a time, their coffins would be set into the walls and covered over so as the coffin dissolved, it was done out of sight of the curious. It also appeared the custom had been abandoned or forgotten, since clearly no one had been in the mausoleum since his grandfather died.

  So, Silas thought, for all Uncle’s formality, he clearly didn’t cling closely to tradition. The light was fading, and as much as Silas liked being around any family other than his uncle, he didn’t much care for the idea of being in the mausoleum after it got dark.