A Prayer for the Dying

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Black pearl inlay. Best I carry.” He stares at the others as if they might vanish.

  “What did the woman look like?”

  “What they all look like. You know.”

  “Young, old?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It was probably one of those Ramsays, they were in yesterday making trouble.”

  You’ll keep an eye out, you say, though you know you’ll never find it. Fenton’s not really upset; it’s a risk of the business, spillage. And he’s done well for himself, built the store back up after his father nearly drank it away. He just needs someone to complain to, and that’s you. You linger, make sure he gets his money’s worth, then back at the jail let out a sigh. These days it seems like you’re not getting anything done.

  Doc says the woman probably won’t make it till Sunday. You may have to come in and say something. You say that’s fine. Irma’s still in Chicago; Doc’s told her to stay put until this blows over. He peers deep into the green lake of his blotter as he admits this.

  “Blows over,” you challenge him.

  “It only makes sense.”

  And it does, that’s the thing. It does.

  Home is better. Clouds boil up after supper, and you and Marta walk out back to watch them. You kiss her, smell the flowery powder on her neck. She’s missed you, staying inside all day. She apologizes for being testy, but it’s hard. She wants to hear everything you’ve done, as if you’ve returned from some lavish expedition. You hold each other close and look to the sky, hopeful. You need to tell her about Irma, but you don’t. Hold her closer. Clouds pile up and collide, their dark centers menacing. Leaves flutter, blow over your withered garden. All month you’ve been waiting for rain. If it came down now, you’d dance in it, roll in the wet grass, sacrifice your clothes. Amelia’s asleep and the evening’s yours. Marta kisses you hard, like she used to, and the wind kicks up.

  “Jacob,” she says, “come to me now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not here. Inside.”

  “Here,” you say.

  “Jacob,” she scolds, teasing. “Here?” Then she slips your jacket off one shoulder and laughs as if it’s her idea.

  The grass is cool on your arms, the warmth of her stomach shocking, and there’s nothing you need, just this, now, her, always. She challenges you, laughing, then holds you after, concerned, teary, glad.

  It’s cooler, the evening deepening. You want to feel the first drops on your back, this relief a direct consequence of your love. This drought has to end, things have to get better for Friendship. They’re not idle wishes, not desperate yet. Isn’t love a kind of prayer, an act of faith? God’s love on top of yours, or your love a part of God’s. Goodness. Hope. Surely—at the very least—there is mercy. Marta kisses your eyelids, and it’s true, you really do believe this. You’re in love with this world again. The wind rushes over you, roars in the trees, but in the morning the sky’s blinding, the leaves calm, and once again you begin the long chain of days.

  *

  Friday just before lunch Cyril Lemke comes running in, saying there’s a fire out the Shawano road. “Bout a mile past Ender’s bridge. I seen the smoke from the bell tower.” He stands there panting, winded from his run across town. His hands are white with birdlime, and he’s wringing a filthy rag. Cyril’s simple, older than Doc but a nine-year-old inside; he licks his lips, blinks like a pigeon.

  “Old Meyer’s place,” you say.

  “Far’s I could tell.” He’s shaking, excited by the fire. “What are you gonna do?”

  “Spose I’ll go see what it is.” You want to be calm for him, even if the woods are burning. There have been rumors of incendiaries on the loose, of a great fire to the north sweeping through a Winnebago village, leaving nothing but the axles of wagons, the hoops of tubs. Thirty dead, and rumor is the children’s throats were cut, their bodies untouched by the fire.

  “Need any help?” Cyril asks. “I can pump the water for you.” He starts to tell a story to prove he can do it.

  “That’s all right, Cy, you go ahead. It’s almost noon.”

  It’s Cyril’s job to ring the hours, to call the town in for lunch, supper, church. The children tease him, call him Dumbbell, Ding Dong. Once you saw little Martin Ramsay walk straight up to him and punch him in the jewels; you ran over and seized the boy by the throat and later were ashamed of hurting him. Cyril just held himself, puzzled, then upchucked.

  Now he stands there blankly regarding the clock, the fire forgotten. You thank him and walk past him to the door, hoping he’ll take the cue, and he does. He watches you away on your bike, waves the rag athletically.

  You don’t know what you’re going to do if it’s the woods. Get the water engine from the mill, have the hands dig a line around the fire, keep it out of town. Riding, you don’t remember which way the wind’s blowing, or even if it is. The trees don’t say much, which is good.

  By Ender’s bridge you can smell it, and then you crest the last hill before Meyer’s and there it is—not the woods but a shed, Old Meyer’s smokehouse. The smoke goes straight up, then above the treetops bends to the south, a few sparks twisting in the wind. The roof of the shed is gone, one wall solid flame.

  Old Meyer and one of the twins—Thaddeus—are sloshing buckets on it, lugging them from the pump across the yard. You find another bucket and man the handle, make sure they always have a full one. The pump creaks, the water strong and heavy in the piston. The engine your regiment used to cool the gun barrels felt the same, and there’s that same smell of metal and wet ashes and hot air, the same ache in your shoulders.

  Usually, something like this, you’d just let it burn, but not this summer. And Meyer’s angry; he’s fighting it like an enemy, swearing blue blazes, his face red as a drunkard’s. Thaddeus flits across the grass effortlessly, without a word. Father and son, you marvel, how odd. Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you’ve only just opened your eyes.

  It takes a while but the three of you get it done. You stand looking at the destruction while Meyer kicks through the wet wreckage. He’s still swearing, Thaddeus beside you, absolutely passive, patient as a dray horse, and you turn to him, in that same instant realizing he’s not Thaddeus—he’s too calm, too aloof.

  “You’re Marcus,” you say.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “In bed. He’s taken poorly.”

  “Ain’t it the way,” Meyer says, kicking a blackened side of meat. “Never around when you need ’im.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Fever a some kind, I don’t know. Says his throat hurts him. He won’t eat anything, won’t take a drink, nothing. Goin’ on three days now.”

  You remember the soldier’s cup sliding off the wagon into the grass. In the cellar, before you fit the lid on, you blessed the dead man, nodded solemnly over his gray face. His toes were purple, his insteps green. He could have been a friend, an enemy, a civilian caught in the odd fusillade. The woods were full of them. They bobbed in the swamps. Women sometimes, children. You learned to love them, to consider them your own flesh, while around you your friends went numb, turned callous and bitter. Times like these you wonder if they were right to take the easy way—as if there’s a choice.

  “And Bitsi,” you ask, because you have to, “how’s she?”

  “One gets sick, they all do,” Meyer says. “You know how that goes. They’re young though. They bounce back quick. It’s nature’s way of toughening them up.”

  He goes on with his theory, tossing charred boards in a heap, Marcus pitching in. It’s like the fire, he says. It’s a test to see how much we can put up with. He’s philosophical, no longer angry, and you wonder if it’s because you’re there. He knows you disapprove of rough talk, that you prize thoughtfulness, the search for answers.

  One gets sick, they all do. The simplicity of it is stunning, a rock cracking a skull.

  “It’s like Abraham,” h
e says, citing your last sermon, “or Job.” The way he says it, it’s almost a question. He looks to you, the preacher, wanting confirmation. And there’s nothing you can do but agree with him.

  *

  You tell Doc and he gets mad at you.

  “You didn’t tell Meyer to stay away from them?”

  “I told him you’d come take a look at them. Maybe it is just a fever.”

  “You say he’s been sick three days.” He peers at the scab on his palm as if figuring a sum. “How about the girl?”

  You admit you don’t know, and he sighs.

  “I better get out there then.”

  You thank him, but he just sits there, he doesn’t get up. He lays his hands on the blotter and examines his fingers. “Jacob, while I’m gone, if you could take care of Miss Flynn.”

  It takes you a second.

  Doc helps you out. “I tried to find you but you weren’t around.”

  “Lydia.”

  “I’d be obliged.”

  “Of course,” you say, then repeat it as the news sinks in. It never fails to move you, to hurt you, no matter how many times you hear it, no matter how little you know the deceased. The deceased. It’s a word Mr. Simmons taught you as his apprentice. The soldier in you prefers “the dead”; it’s less formal, more physical, and that’s the fact of death—it’s the body that stops, nothing else.

  Doc’s still frowning over his hands, and you take advantage of the silence to say a prayer for her, then add one for him, against despair. Like you, he needs to save everyone, takes his losses hard. There’s no sense telling him he did his best; he knows that.

  “I should go tell Chase,” you say.

  “He was here. He went to get her something to wear.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me dressing people out.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “I tried to explain it to him.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Just throw the dress in with her. Don’t let him see her.”

  You don’t answer because you don’t like it. Any of it. The dead deserve respect, the living need to grieve.

  “I don’t want you bleeding her,” Doc orders. “Here, I’ll help you with her before I go.”

  “That’s all right,” you say. You’re used to moving them yourself; it’s like wrestling, testing your leverage against their dead weight, but Doc insists, and your knee’s still bothering you from Mrs. Goetz. Sometimes, getting up from praying in the empty cell, you hear your tendons creak across your kneecap, then snap back in place.

  The room smells of liniment, a blast of vinegar with a touch of horseradish. Doc starts to wrap her in the sheets. Her face is drained, and she seems thinner, the collar of her nightshirt specked with blood, a solid blotch on one shoulder. It seems longer than four days since you’ve seen her, but it’s not. Lydia Flynn, saved from the train stations. Automatically you bow your head to say a few words, and Doc stops and folds his hands.

  “Ay-men,” he says, then covers her face.

  You want to say you can do this, but it’s important to him, so you stand back, stay out of his way until he tells you to take her feet. The head’s heavier, and by the parlor Doc’s face is red. You check the street—nothing but the bright dust, the blank windows of Fenton’s General. How many times have you two done this before, and yet it always feels clandestine, as if this were midnight, the two of you murderers, ghouls.

  You toe the spittoon aside so the door closes and take her down to the cellar. Turn up the wick of the lamp so you can see what you’re doing. On the draining table she seems short, a little over five foot; you’ve already cut some that length. But not dressing her out seems wrong. It was too hard for you to do the soldier that way. You didn’t tell Doc that you bled him, that you rouged his cheeks and combed his hair just so, fit his cap back on before closing the lid. You didn’t tell Doc because even he wouldn’t understand. Every calling has its demands, its exigencies. In his work, a man makes promises to God.

  “I told Chase she’d be here,” Doc says from the stairs.

  “What about the sheets?”

  “Leave them the way they are,” he says. “And Jacob, I want you to wear a mask.”

  You assure him you will, and he leaves, but even after he’s closed the door you keep your eye on the knob, sure he’s not finished, that he’ll come back and tell you everything he’s thinking. When he doesn’t, you turn to the table and work, then remember the mask. Tying it behind your neck, you wonder what he could have told you that you don’t already know, or at least suspect. Still, you want to hear it from him. Why?

  You listen to his footsteps cross the floor above your head, then you climb the stairs and lock the door.

  Maybe you’d be less afraid if he said it, less alone. But no, this is wrong too. You’re not alone, and your fear isn’t for yourself but for others. You just want him to say there still may be a chance it’ll miss you, when you know there isn’t.

  You tend to Lydia Flynn. Unwrap the winding sheet, slide the nightshirt over her head. She’s tanned on the face and arms, the rest of her lard white. The girl in the station Chase described was stick-thin, a waif, but here she seems no different from the town women her age, gone broad with pies and white gravy, the comforts of the hearth. You expect some revelation from her flesh—shackle scars on her ankles, lash marks between her shoulders—but there’s nothing untoward save the gray tinge already settling around her mouth. She wears a small cross; it rests in a hollow of her throat.

  “Did he save you,” you ask, “or did you save yourself?”

  Neither, most likely. God doesn’t come and sweep you up like a lover, cure you like a doctor. You recognize something, a silence in the middle of noise, a stillness that no matter how fast you run won’t go away. Is that it, Lydia?

  “What is it like, to go from one world to another like that?”

  Strange, frightening. Blissful. Safe. You think of coming home from the war.

  “Did it seem real to you at first?”

  “I was grateful,” you say.

  “But no, not real at first. Like a dream. Like a dream I was having.”

  “And how does it feel now?”

  “It’s still a dream.”

  You know you’re not supposed to, but you find an empty cask and run a hose to it, make a slit behind her ankle and crank the table so it tilts. You’ll be careful; Doc won’t know. The blood fills the gutter, drums the bottom of the cask, then after a minute it runs silent, pours like oil. You never talk now; you check the level of the formaldehyde in the white barrel, make sure there’s enough. You’ve never done anyone from the Colony and you want to do a good job for Chase. For Lydia, really. For yourself?

  “We are all saved.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  How you want to say yes to this, I do, but there’s nothing. You work, and work is praise.

  Wait till the blood is just drips, then pump the handle to flush her with water. Now the fluid through its own stained hose, tartly stinking of paraffin thinned with kerosene. Stop the wound with a dollop of hot wax, apologizing as the faint hairs curl and wither around the plug.

  You’re working on her part, plucking the few gray strands, when someone thumps at the front door. You leave the comb jutting from her hair, on the stairs remember your mask and toss it at your workbench. Before you open the cellar door, you touch your key ring, then set the lock.

  It’s Chase, with a long white box tied with ribbon. His logger’s shoulders fill the window, behind him a team stamping in its traces. You open the door for him and stand aside, but he doesn’t come in, just hands you the box with a murmur. He seems tired, defeated, as if, the outcast, he’s been proved wrong in front of the whole town and has come for his punishment. Still, he expects you to say something, to comfort him; he’s like anyone else, and again you’re surprised. Why did you think he’d be different? All these years, you’ve scoffed at the stories about the Colony—the orgies and devil
worship, the midnight sacrifices—knowing how fearful people can be of religion, but maybe some thoughtless part of you believed them, separated Chase and his people from those you love, made them less, expendable.

  “I’ll make sure everything’s just so,” you promise him.

  “I know you will,” he says glumly, and shakes your hand. He asks when he should come around for her.

  “Tomorrow morning,” you say, though you’ll be done by sundown. Doc may have something to say in all this. You’ll probably end up accompanying her, making sure the box gets in the ground untouched.

  “I’m very sorry,” you tell him, and he nods his thanks, lips muttering but saying nothing. He turns to his team and climbs up on the seat.

  It doesn’t seem enough, and as he starts them off, you want to call after him, tell him how you too question the ways of faith, the injustice, the never-ending losses, that it stuns you too, that you still grieve for Mrs. Goetz and Arnie and Eric Soderholm just as their families do, though everyone else seems to have forgotten. Lydia Flynn, the tramp behind Meyer’s, the men in the swamps of Kentucky. If a sparrow fall, you want to say, it is not lost. I will remember. We are all saved. But Chase knows this, he must after so many years. It’s just a hard moment for him, a low point, not some soul-shaking crisis; you know those aren’t sudden or public, they take years, worming inside you like a disease. And anyway, he’s gone, lost in his own dust. You close the door and turn away, the box awkward in your arms.

  In the basement, you see it’s the uniform—the black shift and linen blouse the Colony women wear—and you remember her in the field, how she had on city clothes. You take the comb from her hair, scourging yourself for such disrespect. You remember her stockings and her high-buttoned shoes, just like Irma’s.

  “Maybe you were running away,” you say, and fit her arm through one sleeve. “Maybe you were going to run off with your lover.”

  “No,” you say, “I was coming back in the dark and got lost.”

  “That late in the day?”

  “I was trying to get to the railway station.”

  “The train doesn’t stop here anymore.”