The Penance of Leather (Book 1): Ain't No Grave

by S. A. Softley

I was not alive; had died a long time ago. I was a monster and the old man should have burned me; should have sent me to the natural death of which I’d been robbed. His wife’s faith in some higher power, some non-existent God was foolish and naïve. His own faith in his wife was equally misguided. The room spun faster and faster, the man’s face disappeared behind flashes of horrifying memory repeating over and over, each one hitting me with incredible force, slamming into my lifeless gut.

  What of Megan? What of the woman I’d killed in my passion? I’d assumed that she was dead, had become one of them. I’d assumed that there was no hope for her, no chance that her mind and soul would return from that dreadful un-death. What if I’d been wrong? What if she’d been like me? Perhaps if I’d waited; if I’d just given her a chance…

  Instead in my mindless rage, I’d set fire to her; had probably burned down half the town. I’d destroyed her utterly and left nothing at all, no evidence that she’d ever lived. No evidence that she’d loved and been loved. No image that would convey her beauty, no words that could let the world know what it had lost. Even her music now sat in the wreckage of a Jeep, buried beneath the snow, broken, ruined and lifeless. In the past, it might have been repaired so that at least her music could live on, but now it was beyond any man’s ability to repair.

  I was a murderer. I was a dead man. I was cursed. Damned beyond any of those other poor souls who walked though dead. I could remember. Knew the horrible things I’d done, experienced the pain I’d caused and could relive each of those sickening moments. I was still here, and that was a fate far worse than death.

  You did right by her, son, my father said. My imagination had difficulty with his voice. I’d never heard him with the approving tone the voice had adopted, just this once, in my mind. In the end, you did right by her. You killed her, ain’t no one can deny, but you did right in the end.

  No. She could have returned to me.

  Look at yerself. You want that for her? Ain’t no one comes back from the dead, not really. You put her at peace.

  We could have stayed together.

  Would have been the worst, most selfish thing you ever did.

  She could have…

  She wouldn’t’a wanted it. You did right. Just that once, you did right, son.

  Twenty-Seven

  “Son,”he said. “Son, did you hear me?” The room began to slow and stabilize once more around me. It was the old man. My father’s voice had faded where his began.

  “I heard you,” I rasped.

  “Do you know… what… what I meant by it?” some tenderness had made it’s way into his stony voice.

  “I’m dead.”

  “I mean to say… you… are not alive.” I guessed he was trying to make sure I knew that he was not threatening my life, not threatening to finish the job and burn me.

  “Yes.”

  “When I found you, you had no pulse. Your heart never beat while you were in my care. It’s not beating now.”

  “This whole time…”

  “Well, at least since I found you.”

  “No. The whole time.” I nodded vacantly, assenting to my own pronouncement.

  “Most likely,” he agreed.

  “I killed her.”

  “I know,” he nodded, his eyes regretful. The room started to spin again.

  “You knew?” I managed to choke out.

  “You spoke of her in your sleep. Kept saying you were sorry. Begged her to come back. Her name was Megan. You can imagine why I did not cremate you when I heard. I thought I heard you speak my wife’s name over and over again… begging her forgiveness. It took me a while of listening to understand that it was another.”

  “You should have burned me…”

  “I think not.”

  “I don’t belong with the living.”

  “They don’t, and yet here they are.”

  “I’ve killed.”

  “Once, as far as I can tell.” His voice remained hard, matter-of-fact, unchanging under the weight of the accusations I made against myself.

  “At least twice. I remember someone else now… a doctor I think… maybe others…”

  “You didn’t know you’d kill her,” he said, “just as I didn’t know it’d kill my wife keeping her here. It doesn’t lessen the guilt; our responsibility for it remains, but context is still important. Dying for your sins won’t make no difference.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “It’s exactly the same. In any case, I saved you for my wife. You can save others for your Megan. There is a reason you’re still here. Penance.” His words were slow and carefully chosen, as they had been before.

  He had been trying to hint at the truth. It became clear now. Never once had he said the word ‘alive.’ Never once had he spoken of saving me, of bringing me back from the brink of death. All those odd, pitying, scrutinizing looks as I’d spoken… it was only as I’d thanked him for my life, as I’d praised his treatment… it was only then that he discovered I’d known nothing of my true condition.

  “Penance,” I repeated the last word. “Penance.” The word sounded weighty and emblematic. Biblical. What better word could be used to describe the tasks of the last men… the labours of a dead man? What penance could I perform to absolve my guilt? Suddenly I felt the weight of judgement upon my shoulders. The judgement of a wrathful God.

  No. God was dead. The Bible that sat before me on the bookshelf was a relic of ages past, failed and irrelevant. The apocalypse had struck, but it was no act of judgement, unless it was nature herself who was trying humanity for its abuses. A tortured Earth desperate to be rid of a parasite. But that was wrong too. This was not cosmic karma; a debt in need of repayment. This was surreal chance handed out by an uncaring, inhuman universe. I was no Hercules. No Atlas. I could not support even what little was left of the world on my shoulders.

  And yet, if there were others like Megan… Other’s who needed help... Would Megan have died without me? Would she have given in and killed herself in the end? Would she have drunk herself to death? Would she have been careless and allowed one of those things to infect her? Would she, even now, be roaming the snow-covered streets restlessly hunting for fresh blood? It hardly mattered. She’d died regardless, in the most horrible way. She’d died in the arms of her lover, by the carelessness of the man she’d trusted. I’d bought her a few days. A few happy days. What were they worth?

  Still, now I knew. Now, perhaps I could help the living and then move on before I became a danger. I could save those left alive; struggling to survive. If nothing else, should I not try to release as many of those poor souls trapped in their rotting bodies as I could before my own body succumbed?

  “Penance,” I said again, tasting the bitter flavour of the word. Bitter yet cleansing. Bitter yet satisfying.

  Twenty-Eight

  “You saidsomething earlier; said you could help me last longer… you mean before I…”

  “Before you rot, yes,” he said plainly. The hint of emotion, of hesitation that had coloured his voice was once again replaced with rough hard rock. “I think I can help preserve you.”

  “Preserve me…” Everything about this was surreal.

  “There’re a lot of risks. I don’t know nothing about your condition. If anyone does they’re probably locked away in a government bunker somewhere.”

  “Does Canada have secret government bunkers?” I chuckled. His laugh was rough and scratchy. It sounded like something he’d had little practice at.

  “Point is, I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know if it’ll damage you. Never done it on a…” he searched for a word that could replace ‘living’. “…On a moving specimen before.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’ve done a bit of amateur taxidermy before,” he nodded to the deer heads.

  I did not look toward them. I felt my breath catch and then realized how absurd it was. Breathing… an automatic habit left over from life. How strange that I could
now go without.

  “Ok,” I said, nodding for him to continue.

  “If we, um, tan you, your skin I mean, like leather, it should preserve it. Should make it tougher against the elements.

  “Tan me…” I muttered.

  “I’ve got the chemicals we’d need. I make leather from the deer and cows I slaughter. Problem is, the material you’re tanning is usually removed from the body. I don’t know how the process would work if flesh and fat and muscle were still bound to the skin.”

  “You are not skinning me,” I said, shuddering.

  “No, no. But we could try the tanning process without the skinning… see if it works.”

  “Huh,” I muttered. It was all too much. It was all going over my head. I’d hit my limit for the day. Too much had happened too quickly.

  “That’s not all though,” he carried on, relentless. “Your organs will start to putrefy. Probably are already on their way. I’d guess that keeping cold for long periods has slowed the process so far. You’re lucky.”

  “Lucky…” I muttered ironically.

  “Yes,” he said unabashed, “you are. In any case, we have to stop that process too. Maybe… maybe remove them. Seems to me you can probably do without.”

  “Organs…”

  “There’s a funeral home an hour drive from here. We should be able to find embalming fluid there. They told me a bit about the process when my wife… well anyhow they replace your fluids. Keeps your body preserved for open casket funerals. Again, I don’t really know what it’d do to you, but it’s worth a shot. I figure, your blood doesn’t work like it did; your heart isn’t pumping so it must just be sitting there coagulating. It ain’t carrying oxygen. Maybe you could use any fluid to fill your veins.”

  “Embalming…” I pressed my knuckles into my eyes. “Look, I need some time.”

  “Mhmm,” he nodded. “I get it. You don’t have long though. Nature will not wait for your decision.”

  The next few days passed quietly. I couldn’t bring myself to do much thinking. I kept myself busy with chores around the man’s property. The log house was surrounded by a dense grove of pine trees. The snow had piled thickly upon their branches and the insulation made the grove silent and windless.

  We didn’t speak much, each preferring comfortable silence to conversation. I enjoyed working outside. Knowing what I knew about my body and the slow decay it faced, the cold gave me a sense of purity, of preservation. I wore insulating clothing to protect my skin from frost burn but without body heat, my limbs began to slow as warmth leaked away from me.

  The man, whose name I’d learned was Lawrence Ellison, had inherited Delfino Farms from his mother and had lived and worked there all his life. It was a good-sized bit of land and he grew barley, oats and some canola. He also kept a small herd of cattle, a coop full of chickens and four strong horses.

  Ellison had managed on his own for a long time, hiring farm hands only during busy seasons. He neither needed nor, I think, particularly wanted my help, but he knew that I needed to be kept busy and assigned me to odd jobs around the farm. I laid out hay for the horses and cattle and mucked their stables. We herded them in and out of the barns together, though I was more hindrance than help during this task. Instead, I preferred to fix things. I tuned up tractors, an old snow mobile and a rusty pick-up truck, having learned the skill from the frequent breakdowns out in the oil fields.

  Each day that passed, the light grew longer and brighter. Winter would be here for months yet, but the deep dark had passed. I hated to think what condition the roads would be in when spring arrived and the snow melted and the mud became thick. No one would repair the gaping potholes, no one would clear landslides and fallen trees, no one would rebuild washed out roads.

  I found, as the days passed, that I needed neither food nor sleep. The hunger, which had never left me no matter how much I ate, strangely seemed to become dull and less prominent when I did not eat. I preferred the hollow feeling to the heavy thickness that weighed me down when my belly was full. It was sickening to know that the food I ate was not digesting, but instead decayed and probably contributed to my own internal deterioration. After awakening one night on the old leather couch from a recurring nightmare in which I ripped the raw flesh from Megan’s slender neck, I rushed to the bathroom and vomited. Revolted by what had come out, I forced myself to vomit until nothing was left. After that night I never ate another bite and felt better for it.

  The nightmare had also caused my other discovery. Scared to return to sleep, I opted instead to sit out on the creaking old porch and gaze at the night sky, which was more full of shining light than I’d ever remembered. After that, I never slept. Night after night I’d stay out, keeping watch and listening to the howls of coyotes and the night noises of livestock. I didn’t feel the effects of the cold as I had when alive, it wasn’t painful or uncomfortable to be cold, but I returned inside regularly to warm my immobile, clumsy limbs.

  I found stars in those short days, vast fields of them, that few living had ever seen with the naked eye. They had been hidden from sight for centuries as humanity worked to dispel the night darkness. Only the most avid astronomers and most adventurous travellers, far from civilization, had looked into so pure a sky. In places, the stars were so tightly packed that they appeared as luminous clouds so bright that I marvelled that city lights had ever managed to block them out.

  When I wasn’t working or watching, I flipped through books in Ellison’s small library, desperate to keep my mind occupied, off the terrible truths of the past and future. I did not want to remember anything earlier than that day’s morning. I did not want to consider tomorrow, did not want to think about the repellent decisions that had to be made. All the while, though I avoided the thought, I knew that my body was slowly being worn down by the freezing and warming, by the fluids and bacteria that had previously cooperated with my cells and now had turned against them, consuming and destroying.

  They were doing what evolution and nature had designed them to do. It was a system that worked. My body was being recycled. It was supposed to return, now, to the earth where it would feed other organisms. I’d never worried myself over death. I’d always accepted the cycle, rarely giving it any thought. Only now the circle had broken and I was still here.

  Not once during those days, in the few words he spoke to me, did Ellison mention or repeat his offer to help me stave off my gradual decay. I think, perhaps, he knew that he had succeeded in planting the idea, knew that I required time to accept, to allow it to take root and grow. Like his trees. Like his crops.

  It did not take me long to learn that the man could say more in his silence than most men could say in a thousand words. With a few words, a nod, he was able to keep me busy and occupied with work that felt meaningful, though I knew he had no real need of my help. In a stony glance, I could tell he was monitoring my condition, silently reminding me that my time was limited. With a curt incline of his head, he could signal his approval of something I’d done, eliciting in me a strangely powerful sense of accomplishment and pride no matter how simple the task I’d performed. Though I was rarely consciously aware of it, I worked damn hard to receive even the smallest signal of approval from the man.

  One grey morning, before the sun rose, I was sitting out on the creaking steps of the porch, my mind numb and blank; meditative. It was as close as I ever came to sleep those days. I’d stayed with Ellison a little more than a week but something had changed that day. I could feel it in the light, which slowly grew behind the pines.

  Ellison’s heavy footfalls moved inside the cabin, strong, steady and certain as always. The door opened. I did not look up, but merely nodded my acknowledgement of his presence. Probably, although I did not see it, he nodded toward me as well. We said nothing. It was a routine we’d kept since the beginning of our days together. I’d come to see it as a ritual that symbolized how we’d wordlessly come to understand each other but also the value we mutually placed on space and
autonomy.

  I think I knew somehow that this would be the day. It was time… past time to face reality. The past and future demanded recognition and I’d hidden from it for long enough. I was glad for the time I’d been given to recover, to come to terms with my situation, but I knew that the time afforded me had come to an end. Penance, I thought, it was time for my penance to begin.

  I heard Ellison’s boots beat down the well-trodden pathway of compressed snow. I sighed and was momentarily struck by the irony that a sigh was now a vain action, a relic of my past life which no longer held any biological purpose. Still, it produced a residual calming effect despite the fact that I no longer required the oxygen.

  I stood and followed Ellison at a respectable distance, keen to preserve the privacy that we both valued. He stood silently just off the path, his back to me. I waited quietly for him to acknowledge me. As I stood I noticed for the first time that a single young tree stood apart from the rest of the pines, near where the man stood, looking himself like a weathered trunk, gnarled and obstinate.

  The sapling stood apart in distance and species. It was several yards away from the rest of the grove, unique, as it was no pine tree. A few wispy branches hung from the trunk. In the spring the tree would sigh in the wind, heavy with new leaves and in the autumn the leaves would fall like tears. I knew at once that Ellison stood on sacred ground and was embarrassed to have followed him there. All the same, I stood my ground, rooted like the man and his tree, feeling that it would be a greater disrespect to turn my back on the place.

  “My wife,” he said, his voice creaking like aged branches, “lies here.”

  “Maggie,” I said in a low voice. It sounded proper in the silence.

  “She loved trees, loved these pines, but what she always wanted was a weeping willow. Like her, they don’t love this place.” There was a long pause but we embraced the silence. “We never grew one. When she died, I planted it with her and made damn sure it grew.”

  “Better than a plot in some old cemetery,” I nodded, keeping my head respectfully bowed.