Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  Bells even adorned the wire basket on the front of the bicycle that Ruthie pedaled up to the bike rack outside of the Corner Diner. Mark waved at her as he pulled his Jeep into the space just beyond the restaurant’s worn welcome mat. In true Finley tradition, Ruthie instantly smiled and waved back. Still smiling, she swiveled off the seat, then reached into her basket to remove the diner apron and cap she wore during her waitressing shifts.

  Mark killed the Jeep’s engine—and the strains of Christmas carols coming through the radio. He swung his feet through the open space that made up the driver-side door. Deep into December, he still hadn’t attached the soft doors for the winter. The smell of pine might have arrived, but the cold hadn’t—not yet.

  He paused on the sidewalk and frowned, tugging on his earlobe. Now that the music was gone, he couldn’t avoid the sound of the distant chant. It had followed him everywhere. He’d benefited from only brief moments of escape for more than a month; the past few days, it had even roused him from sleep.

  On occasion, he wondered if the chant didn’t have something to do with Patricia Steele. The first time he’d heard it was on that mind-boggling day when Patricia’s potentially life-ending lump had disappeared, leaving her doctor to scratch the thinning hair on the crown of his head, muttering, “Never seen anything like it.” A subsequent mammogram had confirmed the tumor was gone.

  “I once had a dentist find a cavity during a checkup—but when I went back to get it filled, the dentist couldn’t find it,” Tim Steele had often said in the days since, as way of some sort of explanation. “Dentist said I must’ve brushed it out. Or maybe he said it remineralized. Anyway, maybe Patricia’s body absorbed it, you know? Or her immune system attacked it. The body’s a mysterious place.”

  Mark had frowned anytime Patricia’s husband had launched into another round of maybes. He knew better. Patricia’s body hadn’t taken care of anything on its own. A couple of times, he’d tried to ask Tim if he heard the chant. It had trailed Mark from the hospital, followed him straight up the spiral staircase to his tree house. That relentless, pulsing, throbbing noise could drive a man to madness! It had been there when Mark had closed his eyes and when he’d opened them again. It had been there as he’d lectured university botany students via Skype. It had even chased him down the highway as he’d taken Jo out for a fancy dinner at the new Greek restaurant the next town over.

  Sure, when he’d first heard it, back in the hospital parking lot, the chant had sounded triumphant. But after a few days, it had become irritating—after a few more, it had begun to frighten Mark, because its rhythm still reminded him of feet, of stomping. And that made him feel he was being chased. His heart even began beating in time to it if he listened too long.

  “What chant?” was all Tim had ever said.

  Was he deaf? If the chant had something to do with Patricia, why would Mark hear it and not her husband?

  Today, it sounded louder than ever. Did that mean it was closer than ever? He wondered if Tim could hear it now.

  Mark lurched for the glass door. Swung it open. Hopped inside like maybe the diner was safe. Like somehow putting a barrier between himself and whatever that noise was could help.

  But the constant chatter and forks clanking against plates and chair legs scraping the tile did nothing to drown it out.

  The chant.

  The incessant chant.

  It beat, and beat, and beat, and beat.

  “You hear something?” he asked one of the men at the counter. One of the old-timers, as some of the more dismissive teenagers would have described him. One of the widowers who regularly took advantage of the large three-egg, hotcakes, and sausage breakfasts the diner served all day.

  Mr. McKinney frowned at Mark, emphasizing every line in his face. He hadn’t.

  But Natalie—who was sitting on the opposite side of Mr. McKinney, and was halfway through a made-fresh-daily cinnamon roll and black coffee—leaned forward to catch Mark’s eyes. “Hear what?” she asked tentatively.

  “A chant.”

  Natalie’s eyes swelled. “Whispering? Trying to warn you about some kind of danger?”

  “Yes!” Mark shouted, even as Mr. McKinney grunted and rolled his eyes. “Well—no. I’m not sure. I can’t make out what it’s saying.”

  “Does it come to you in a specific place?”

  “It’s everywhere! Always!”

  Mr. McKinney picked up his plate and moved to the end of the counter.

  Mark dove to lay claim to his old stool. “And it’s rhythmic, right?” he asked her. “There’s a drum always beating to accompany it.”

  Natalie’s eyes darkened. “No—no, it’s just a whisper.”

  “Sounds like a train to me,” Miriam Holcomb declared from a nearby table, just before raising her coffee cup to her lip.

  That was closer to what Mark heard. He swiveled to look at her. “A train!” he bellowed. “Tell me more.”

  “It’s the atmospheric pressure,” Justin offered. He tapped his pen against the table he shared with Annie. “It’s amplifying sounds.”

  “I don’t think atmospheric pressure would have any impact on a sound’s volume…” Mark began to lecture. But he gave up quickly. The look on Justin’s face was one of pure concern. Justin O’Dell was the lead reporter for The Finley Times, after all. While that didn’t exactly involve any kind of Woodward and Bernstein investigative skills, he also covered far more in-depth stories than the weather. If he was doing even the most surface-level Google-style research, trying to come up with reasons that could link weather and the volume of strange noises, then he had been hearing something, too.

  “Everything looks different,” Annie insisted. “I mean—the heat’s kept the fall colors muted. I know that. But there’s something else. Like there’s a layer of fog over everything. I haven’t been able to see any farther ahead than the length of a driveway for—I don’t know—almost a month, maybe.”

  “It’s words,” Norma said as she handed Ruthie the money for her to-go turkey club lunch. “Words repeating over and over—like you do sometimes when you want something to come true. Some dreams never die—”

  “It’s a chug. Like a train coming,” Miriam insisted.

  “Signs,” Kelly blurted from the large booth by the window. The entirety of the diner glanced her way. She put down her sketchbook, revealing she was hard at work on a new wedding dress design for a client. “They’re all omens of what’s to come.”

  “The flowers dried up from the front of my store,” Jo said, stealing the attention from Kelly. Mark hadn’t noticed her walk in. It couldn’t have been more than a few moments ago—she was still standing on the tiny black and white octagonal tile beside the swinging glass door. “Even though it’s still warm enough for them to be blooming. All at once, they just…”

  “That’s a sign, too,” Kelly contended.

  “What kind of sign?” Ruthie wanted to know. “Sign about what?”

  No one had an answer. Including Kelly. But something or someone in the town of Finley was trying to talk to them all; Mark was sure of it.

  “Sounds like a tornado,” Miriam murmured. “For weeks now, I’ve been hearing it. A tornado on the horizon, getting closer and closer. Taking the longest time to get here.”

  “Can’t be,” Mr. McKinney barked. “A tornado doesn’t travel for weeks. It’s not a hurricane. It forms, it strikes, it’s done. Chugging train-like sound only lasts long enough for you to get huddled into the basement or the outside fruit cellar.”

  Mark glanced through the diner’s plate glass window. Somehow, Miriam’s wacky tornado theory made sense to him, even though he also knew Mr. McKinney was right.

  Outside, the town square wore a festive holiday face. But something powerful and frightening was headed their way.

  Of that he was certain.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  On the opposite side of town, the caretaker of the National Cemetery walked through the rows of identical white stones, h
is feet crunching against the dried brown grass. But the grass wasn’t dying from a hard freeze—not as it should have been. Instead, the persistent hot weather had cooked anything green, turned it as brown as pie crust in an oven set to three hundred and fifty degrees. The hottest December first on record. Which was saying something. The records in Finley, as the caretaker was well aware, went back to the Civil War.

  The caretaker leaned his rake against the stone pavilion where the town had gathered last Memorial Day to listen in a respectful quiet to formal speeches delivered by men in uniforms. The caretaker had himself worn the uniform of military service. Funny, he thought, how today’s lightweight coveralls should bother him so much. He knew the feel of sweaty wool clinging to his body as he trudged through a Louisiana swamp. He had only barely escaped the alligators and the greybacks that day.

  Maybe that was why the heat bothered him. Maybe the days spent in the swamps had ruined him, made him more sensitive to the heat.

  He began to roll his coveralls to the elbows and knees, trying to get a little breeze. Behind him, the crunch of feet in the dried grass grew ever slower. He knew, without having to look, who had just walked up behind him.

  “You two have been scaring everyone,” the caretaker scolded. At first, it seemed something he could say to tell the two men he was aware they were there. But once the words hit the air, it was something else—it was what he’d wanted to say to both of them for weeks. Months, even. He finished rolling the second pant leg and stood, swiveling to face the two men standing just behind him—one in a green woolen coat far too thick for the weather, and one in construction clothes.

  “You didn’t scare me,” George justified, sliding his coat from his shoulders, folding it and draping it over one arm. “During the war. You always whispered to me, kept me safe. You were the eyes in the back of my head, telling me when danger was near. It might have made me afraid the moment I heard you, but that was because I knew I needed to get out of harm’s way. I was afraid of getting hurt, not you. Even though I didn’t understand yet what or who you were. I just knew someone—something—was with me, protecting me. That’s what we’ve been doing. It shouldn’t be scary.”

  The caretaker frowned. “That was different. I needed you to come home. Everything I’ve worked for here in Finley depends on having someone in the living world. Someone who believes. It always has. You know that.”

  George offered a slight nod.

  “You got careless. You let your feelings get out of control. You even kissed Natalie,” the caretaker scolded. “How foolish! It crossed the line.”

  “Last winter,” George protested. “One time! It was a brief lapse. She was so terribly lonely. Our meetings became so real—so emotional. I wanted to help her. You can’t still be angry about that, Great-Uncle Amos.”

  The name hit the air like the blast of cannon fire.

  “Don’t call me that out loud,” the caretaker snapped. “It could ruin everything.”

  “Why? We were only following your lead. You showed yourself to Norma last July. You showed her the way you drive around, searching for Finley. On a TV screen, no less! A device foreign to you—to make sure you could get her attention! You even told Natalie a story about me. About the war. Last winter, you decorated my own headstone with a fresh evergreen branch in order to give her a clue that all was not as it seemed. That I was the same G.A. Hargrove whose name was inscribed on the marble. Then you encouraged me to warn her about her balcony last May.”

  “I told you,” Amos reiterated. “I have to have someone in the living world who acts on my behalf. I can’t scare them all away. I have to cultivate their belief—draw them in gradually. Without a living person to perpetuate the story, the legend will die.”

  “No one knows that better than we do, Amos,” Thomas said quietly. Thomas had once answered to another name. But the sound of it had created unfounded fear in the hearts of white men. So the early settlers had given him another. The kind of name that had allowed him to maneuver through their world. Thomas. It had always sounded silly to him, a little like gibberish. But so many English words did.

  They’d called him something else, too, in the white world—a medicine man. Which had been a gross oversimplification of his place in his tribe.

  A woman’s singing voice began to float toward them. The three men turned in time to see her white hair, the arthritic slump in her shoulders.

  “Well,” Thomas admitted. “No one knows better than the three of us—and Mary.”

  She continued to sing. Louder and with more assurance. A hymn. Definitely a hymn. “Shall we gather at the river…” floated between the rows. She was holding a small pot of mums. And heading toward her husband’s grave.

  “It’s always a shock to see her as she looks now. I still picture her as a little girl,” George confessed. “The way she looked when I started telling her stories. Remember?” he asked Thomas.

  “You had already been home from the Great War for years by then,” Thomas said, as a way to show George he did.

  George had returned from the war a changed man, though the exact reasons were not readily apparent. He was also a locked box, as men of that time often were—he never said a word about his experiences in battle, often changing the subject when asked. At times, he could still make the air around Thomas feel heavy with sadness as he imagined the horrors.

  George became a solitary man—and stayed that way through the remainder of his life. (Which was surely why George had felt such a connection to the always-by-herself Natalie.) He took up farming, enjoying the outdoors and Thomas’s company. Especially the tales Thomas told about Amos and Finley, whom he had known personally—so well, in fact, Thomas had been invited by their families to stand at both their sides when they had passed on. Slowly, Thomas began to filter in another story—about how he had taught each of them some of the old ways, about putting one’s heart and soul in your work, about granting small miracles in exchange for those you wished for yourself. He filtered in the idea that Amos had chosen George. Kept him safe throughout the war.

  George had listened intently. He had told no one of the whisper. And so he accepted the tale Thomas had told him as undeniable fact.

  By then, of course, when Thomas had finished this story, he’d grown every bit as old as Mary was now. A full century of life—it was nearly unheard of back then. But it was undeniable that Thomas would be passing on himself soon. George would then be the only living man who could keep the legend alive. If the legend died, so would the possibility of Amos and Finley reuniting in the physical world, as Amos had dreamed.

  That meant George would need to find someone, too, wouldn’t it? Someone who would protect the legend once George was gone, just as Amos had protected George from injury overseas.

  With Thomas’s guidance, George had searched well into the period referred to now as the Roaring Twenties for the right person.

  He had never imagined that the right person would wind up being a child.

  “It all started with silly play,” George murmured. “With me telling her nothing more than a lie, really.”

  Thomas nodded, remembering. He had been with George that day. Fishing along the riverbank when Mary had come skipping toward them, loaded with little girl questions. Mostly in order to send her on her way, George had told her the sky was blue because God was holding his breath. “That’s the color your cheeks turn when you don’t get enough air.”

  Instead of heading for home and leaving them in peace, Mary had come closer to the two men. “Let’s help Him, then.”

  George and Thomas had exchanged looks. “You close your eyes and hold your breath,” George had said. “That’ll let Him take a great big inhale.”

  Mary’d done just that—held her breath as long as her lungs could bear. She exhaled all in a gust, popped her eyes, and whispered, “Did it work?”

  “Did it!” George had exclaimed. “He got such a deep breath, for a moment, the whole sky turned bright pink.”

/>   “That’s the kind of person it takes to believe in the legend. Someone who sees the world in a different way. Who believes in the wildest of possibilities,” Thomas said now, staring at the little girl who had become an old woman. Who walked the fringes of the cemetery regularly, coming to decorate her husband’s stone, coming for exercise, and coming to escape the constant attempts by her family to take care of her. Nitpicking—that was how the constant care surely felt to Mary.

  As the men had hoped, she had been the person who had perpetuated the legend. Kept it alive even when some dared to mock. Pushed it to the point that the names Amos and Finley had become synonymous, in town, with love itself.

  “Mary understands how to give just enough away. Little hints,” Amos said. “She understands being subtle. Neither one of you do.”

  “And that’s subtle?” George asked, pointing to the car in the parking lot. Amos’s car. “It’s in full view of anyone who happens by.”

  The car was the same Model T Amos had driven through town as he’d gotten older and walking had grown increasingly more difficult. He’d camouflaged it in more recent years, given it a sheen to match the feathers on the crows that nested in Finley trees. Just as the iridescent shine on their black feathers took on different shades—sometimes purple, sometimes green—depending on how the light hit, the appearance of the car changed depending on who was doing the looking. In truth, visitors to the National Cemetery saw only what they expected. What they had grown accustomed to seeing on the streets. The car was black. It had four wheels. Only two had ever recognized it as a Model T. Miriam Holcomb had. Kelly thought she had last October.