What he found was a mournful procession in the hamlet. It’s hard to put on a good funeral show when there’s no more than twenty families altogether, but this was the most ragged bunch of grievers Alvin had ever seen. It’s not that they weren’t sad enough—he couldn’t remember seeing a group more downcast. It’s that they also seemed so very tired, plodding along as if at the end of a long day’s work.
Well, of course they were. It was late in the afternoon, and Alvin doubted that anyone except the immediate family had taken the day off work.
Alvin doffed his cap, as he knew would show respect, and then fell in at the back of the procession. Up ahead, the plain box rested on the shoulders of six men, and Alvin wondered if they were the dead one’s family or if the hamlet was so small that the same six men carried everyone who died.
But before he could ask anyone that question, he had to establish himself. So he spoke quietly to the prentice-age boy nearly at the back. “You mind a stranger asking whose burial we’re headed for?”
The boy didn’t even glance up. “Why? You didn’t know her.”
“Well right there that’s something I didn’t know. A woman. Or a girl?”
“A woman as should have knowed better,” said the boy, and then he sped up his walk and left Alvin behind.
“Move on through this hamlet, mister,” said a middle-aged woman. “We got nothing for you here.”
“Not even a bite of supper? I can work for it or pay, if need be.”
“You don’t want to spend even a night here,” said the woman. “It’s the wickedest place in all the world.” Tears streamed down her face.
“This little place?” asked Alvin. “It’s too small to be wickedest. You don’t even have all the equipment.”
“We are burdened with our sins,” said the woman, “and we don’t have time to take you on.”
“Maybe I can help with your burden,” said Alvin. He was beginning to get an idea of the kind of Christianity that John Chapman loved.
“There’s no helping us,” said the woman. “Jesus only hung for a day on the cross. That wasn’t time enough to atone for me.” And then she burst into tears and, like the teenage boy, she sped up her pace and left Alvin behind.
Well, Alvin knew that a funeral wasn’t a place to discuss theology. And for all he knew they might be right. A town was bound to know itself better than any stranger could, especially one who just walked in and meant to walk right out again next day. What was he going to tell them, that they’d listen to?
And yet they did all seem burdened, and not just by bearing a box on their shoulders, or grieving for the dead. It became clearer when he got to the hilltop cemetery. For they took turns speaking over the grave before throwing a handful of dirt onto the coffin, and they all said just about the same thing.
“Nedra died convinced of her damnation, but I’m more damned than she could ever be. There was the day she had a new bonnet, and I said, ‘Would Jesus think that money was well spent? Remember the widow’s mite.’”
The other mourners groaned, sharing her apparent agony.
“I judged her and I know it broke her heart. I pray God to forgive me, for I helped put her down there.”
Others had different tales, some longer, few as short. How they’d done this or that to offend Nedra. But the pattern was soon clear. First, the offenses were all of a sort most people did without thinking. They could be bad, but they didn’t seem intentional.
Second, they mostly consisted of saying things that might cause Nedra to judge herself harshly. Which seemed oddly circular. There they stood, each in turn at the head of the grave, explaining how their terrible sin was to make Nedra feel more sinful. Seemed to Alvin she would have fit right in.
By the end, Alvin was beginning to think that the woman at the back of the procession had been half right. This town believed itself to be the sinfulest place, but the sins were all those of piety.
Usually when people were full of such condemnation, they spent it to condemn others; but in Piperbury everyone condemned himself—and what they condemned themselves for was harsh judgment of others. Yet Alvin wasn’t really sure he believed that people so sensitive about judgment would all have committed the same sin… of judging.
So he finally spoke up, when the woman from the procession’s end was done with her confession and self-condemnation.
“Forgive a stranger, ma’am, but the words you say you said to Nedra seem awfully condemning. You don’t seem to be the sort of woman who would say such a harsh thing.”
The group was silent, and the woman he was talking to seemed abashed. “Well of course I didn’t say it out loud,” she said.
“But if you didn’t say it aloud, then Nedra couldn’t have heard your words, and if she didn’t hear them, how could your offense have put her in the ground?”
The woman burst into tears. “I should have said them aloud! Maybe we could have talked. Maybe I could have been a true friend to her!”
Alvin turned to face the largest group of mourners. “She’s not the only one, is she? Did any of you say your sinful thing out loud, where she could hear?”
“Goodness no!” said the preacher.
“We try so hard not to hurt anyone,” said the weeping woman. “Yet she felt our rejection and our condemnation, and she could bear it no longer. She is on our conscience! We slew her in our hearts, every one of us!”
And there arose then such a wailing that Alvin fled from before it, walking halfway down the hill and trying to puzzle out just what was going on here, and what sort of Christianity this was. He’d never heard of an all-damnation, no hope of atonement version of the faith. Nor could he believe that the cheerful, witty fellow with the knack for apples that he met outside of town would find this place anything but disheartening. Yet he had loved it.
He sat unobtrusively a ways back from the lane when the mourners came down to return to their lives in the hamlet. No one met his gaze, until at last the woman he had spoken to brought up the rear. She stepped aside and went to him.
“I thought you’d still be here,” she said. “I think I’ve left you more confused than helped, and that’s a sin.”
“No, it’s not,” said Alvin.
“Let’s not argue,” she said. “You’re a stranger and it’s too late for you to go on to the next town, though that would have been a better plan. So you can come to my place. I’m a widow now, alone in the house, but you look to be an honorable young man.”
“I’ll do any jobs as need doing,” said Alvin. “I have a way with stuff needs fixing.”
“Lives?” she asked. “Souls? Do you have a knack with those?”
“Only one who ever had such a knack as that,” said Alvin, “and I’m not him.”
“Come with me. You’ll have food and a nice place to sleep. My son’s bed lies empty. It’ll be good to have someone in it again.”
“Has he been away for long?” asked Alvin.
She shook her head. “Near two year ago. Half cut his own leg off with a scythe and bled to death. The tourniquet was too late. Or maybe someone was deliberately slow, to help him on his way.”
“Are you saying someone helped to kill him?”
“It’s the only mercy we have left—to get to hell sooner, before we rack up any more sins.”
“What’s wrong with you people?” asked Alvin. And then, remembering himself, he said, “Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“It’s our knack, I think,” she said. “We have a knack for recognizing our own sins and confessing them. Other people in other places may commit worse or coarser sins, but what is within our reach, we do, mostly by hurting each other.”
They were already in the town square now—not much of a square, but not much of a town, either. There was a church there, and behind it a large and lovely garden of a graveyard.
“I wonder why you moved it,” said Alvin. “The cemetery. This one doesn’t look half full yet.”
“Plenty of
room there, in the churchyard, on hallowed ground, where a godly soul might go to rest until the resurrection day,” she said.
“So why did you move the cemetery out to that hill?”
“Because you can’t bury a suicide in hallowed ground,” she said.
“She killed herself?” asked Alvin. “No one mentioned that.”
“No one had to. We knew where we were burying her, and we knew why.”
“There are so many others up there,” said Alvin. “More graves than here. They can’t all be…”
But they could. She gave him a glance that said all.
“Every one of them by their own hand?” asked Alvin.
“Because we drive them to it,” said the woman.
“The things you all told about up there by the grave—none of you even said those things.”
“Some did.”
“Most didn’t,” said Alvin. “What she didn’t hear couldn’t drive her to commit such a terrible sin.”
“Sin it is,” said the woman. “The worst sin. But when you finally come to understand that your soul is so filthy that even Christ can’t save you, then what does it matter if you add one more sin to the burden, if by doing it, you can stop your miserable life of abomination?”
It was the ugliest sophistry Alvin ever heard. Peggy had taught him to recognize such false reasoning. But his own experience had taught him not to bother arguing. Most people’s logic was invented to explain why they could only do what they already meant to do. Her logic for suicide was meant to explain why so many had taken their own lives. But arguing wouldn’t save a one of them.
Oh, it got worse. Turns out the woman—Mrs. Turnbull—kept a table for seven different men of the hamlet—which was a high percentage of the total. Every one of them had lost his wife, and so she cooked for them, having lost her husband and her son and her two daughters.
“Did they all…?” Alvin knew it was prying and rude, but he had to know.
“No,” she said bitterly. “My husband killed himself, but my two wicked daughters fled the town like Jonah, thinking they could hide their sins from the Lord.”
Alvin couldn’t help but think they had the right idea. Especially when he found out one more piece of information.
At supper—an adequate meal, but Mrs. Turnbull was no great shakes as a cook, except the apple pie—Alvin could hardly believe it, but Mrs. Turnbull told them about Alvin’s curiosity. He started to apologize, but they seemed intent on begging his forgiveness—for what, he didn’t know—and then each man in turn told about his wife’s suicide, and they weren’t halfway around the table before Alvin realized the worst thing of all. Most of the suicides sounded like accidents to him.
He said so.
They all nodded knowingly. “Yes, that’s what Satan would like us to believe.”
“They seized the opportunity of the moment,” another one explained. “I don’t want to say they planned it. They were just ready to die, and took the first opportunity.”
“It’s still self-slaughter.”
That night Alvin lay down on Mrs. Turnbull’s dead son’s bed, covered with his clean white sheet and a blanket lovingly laid down. “You look right in that place, young man,” said Mrs. Turnbull, kissing his forehead like a mother. “How I wish I hadn’t driven him to his death.” Then she left the room weeping.
This was definitely not the most sinful place he’d ever been, but he’d never known people who felt guiltier. And it was also not the most perfectly Christian place he’d been, either, unless your idea of Christ was about condemnation.
Yet this obsessive guilt did not seem like anything that John Appleseed would love. He had spoken of the New Church, whose members should go about like Jesus, doing good, and that it was your collective good works that earned you a place in Christ’s forgiveness. Nobody here talked about good works, or expressed the slightest hope that the good they did could ever balance out, let alone overcome, their terrible, nonexistent bad deeds.
The most common sin was driving people to suicide by unspoken criticisms and unperformed acts of spite. Everyone in fact treated each other well, if a bit dolefully. And all the suicides Alvin heard of might well have been accidents or illnesses—and might have been recovered from, except that nobody bothered to take care of the sick or treat the injuries or even stop the bleeding from a seeping wound. Alvin wanted to scream, He might have lived, if you had only kept feeding him! Broken arms heal, it doesn’t mean she tried to kill herself and failed! The sin here is that you all want to die, and you keep allowing each other to do it, needlessly!
With these thoughts in mind Alvin tried to go to sleep, but his mind kept spinning around and around.
Who am I to judge these people? I saw none of these accidents, none of the illnesses. How can I say that any action of theirs might have made the slightest difference? It’s easy for me to talk of healing or curing or helping or saving, because I have the Maker’s knack, I can reach inside folks with my doodlebug and fix whatever’s wrong with them. Who else can do that? How dare I, with my great gifts, judge people who don’t have them?
And then worse thoughts, as the hours grew later. They’ll know that I judged them. I already let them see that I thought they should have tried to save their loved ones’ lives, and now my condemnation rests on them like a burden. Of course it will be unbearable; how could he put something like that upon them?
What if every man at that table kills himself tonight, what if Mrs. Turnbull herself is dead by morning? Whose fault will it be but mine, for having judged them so harshly, so unfairly?
And unlike them, I didn’t even have the decency to keep it to myself. I spoke right up, I said my say. I’m the worst of all of them.
By morning, Alvin was so full of despair, of the dark weight of his own sins, that he found himself thinking of ways to die.
Accidental ways. As if he could trick God into not recognizing his subterfuge and thinking that he died naturally. In his mind Alvin played out many stories of his unintentional death, and now he understood why everyone knew that the suicides were really suicides, however they might look: everyone had these thoughts, these nightmares.
But why do I? he asked himself. I don’t believe the way they believe. I don’t live here. If there’s some guilt disease they all caught, I don’t have it. I haven’t done anything wrong, at least not lately, and yet I’m so ashamed of myself, so guilty before God that I can hardly bear it and it makes no sense at all.
Does somebody have a knack for causing other folks to have bad dreams?
Is there something about the bed pillows or mattress ticking in Piperbury?
And he kept thinking about John Appleseed. Calling this the most righteous town—no, no, what were his words? “A keen awareness of the goodness of God and the low poor condition of the human soul,” that’s what he had said. “Every living soul of them,” he had said.
John Chapman has seen what I see, and he approves. There’s an unsanctified cemetery filling up with bodies of purported suicides, and everybody in this town thinks they’re worthy of nothing better than death and hell. And John Chapman said, “It’s a godly town.”
Alvin thought back to the only meal he had eaten in the place, and the only part of the meal worth eating: Mrs. Turnbull’s apple pie. It wasn’t made with windfall cider apples. These were delicious to the taste, even baked in what he had to admit was a very mediocre crust. What was good and memorable about the pie was the apples.
He didn’t take any of the offered breakfast. He especially didn’t take any of the apple scones. “Will you hold my place for me, Mrs. Turnbull?” he asked. “I hope to be back before the day’s out, but I have an errand to run.”
“What business could you possibly have around here?”
“The business isn’t around here,” said Alvin, “but your house, and your son’s fine bed, will be on my way back from it.”
“It’s not as if there’s anyone clamoring to stay here,” she said. “But if
you don’t mind paying me the bit that you promised afore you go.”
Alvin paid it, preferring money to chores when he had some traveling to do, and then he set out briskly along the path back to the main road, which skirted Piperbury about a mile and a half south.
He came to the place where he had chatted with John Appleseed, and then began to look for the way the man had gone. He had stayed with the road, it seemed, for Alvin saw no sign of disturbance on the left hand or the right, and invisible as Chapman might be when sitting still, he was a White man and he wasn’t going to turn off the road without leaving a mark.
Alvin would make better time getting off the road and running through the forest with the greensong in his heart. But then he’d see no signs of Appleseed. So he loped along on the road, getting a little benefit in speed and smoothness from trees leaning over him most of the way.
After only a half-hour’s run, Alvin found a turning, and the place where Chapman had spent the night. It would have been a two-hour walk for him, no doubt, being older than Alvin by twenty-five years or so. And however early Chapman might have risen that morning to resume his trek—he left no sign of having cooked anything for breakfast—he could not be all that far ahead.
Chapman gave a yelp of fright when Alvin touched his shoulder and said, “Beg pardon, Mr. Chapman.”
“How did you come up behind me without my hearing?”
“You must have been lost in thought, sir,” said Alvin. “I had a question to ask you, and I ran from Piperbury this morning to see if you had an answer.”
Chapman looked very skeptical. “From Piperbury? This morning?”
“Spent the night in Widow Turnbull’s house. In the bed her dead son left behind.”
“Her son gone? And her husband, too?” Chapman looked sincerely grieved.
“All part of the godliness of the town, it seems to me,” said Alvin. “Does it seem that way to you?”
Chapman stared hard at him, and then suddenly tears started dripping from his lower eyelids and running down his cheeks. “I deserve to go to hell for this.”
Dead Man’s Hand Page 21