I went to high school with a boy from that family. They’d been going down a long time.
Of course she had, though. This was a tiny town. Everyone knew everyone, except me. I knew the house, but I didn’t know who the ghosts were, feeding me, bathing me, dressing me. It occurred to me that I might miss them if they were gone. Lischen’s presence had been strange, a real person joining me in my house, even as I’d gotten accustomed to the kindness of invisible people.
The iron scent was strong here, strong enough to cover over the carbonized dirt, to almost obscure the sour chemical tang that lingered in the air from the poison that had been made here. I cleared the soot, chunks of wood and leaves from the top of the chimney, pushed the earth away from metal that was warm to the touch. The wind picked up, moving the heat through the air, making the sweat dry sticky and salt on my skin.
Something shone in the dirt, and I knelt, scrabbling for the shine.
A hand grabbed mine.
I reeled back from the dirt, and it came with me, bones clutching at my fingers. It caught and ripped at my skin. I could not shake it loose.
Not a hand. A horseshoe. Like the one Olivia had left on the anvil’s horn, but unlike as well. Clumsy, half-formed. Fingers that were more like claws, with rough edges. This was someone’s hand, iron, left here to rust. I stood, staring at it, wanting to fall down. Here it was. She’d told me.
I thought of how Olivia Weyland had prayed for me. I’d go and pray for her. And Row. All my wrongs. All my rights, in one little body.
I picked up the awful horseshoe and wrapped it in my shirt. I went inside and put the other horseshoe—there it was, kicked beneath the table—into a cloth napkin. Shrouded, my brain told me.
I wasn’t a churchgoing man. I was someone who wished he could muster the hope it would take to believe in anything. But it was Sunday.
13.
I walked into town. The car wouldn’t run for me. My hands were full of scraps of metal, wrapped in cloth. I walked, and as I walked, I talked to myself. I wrote
myself a letter, as though someone loved me enough to send me comfort. My faults were my own, but people had loved me despite them.
Dear Malcolm,
You’ll never be forgiven, but you’ll forget the pain a little. Your son will not be returned to you, but you will keep living.
You will not forgive yourself, but it isn’t necessary to forgive yourself. Mistakes are made, and you live with them. No one ever died of sorrow, Malcolm.
I realized I was quoting Olivia Weyland, even in my head.
I passed the cemetery, this sad little stand of white stones like tree stumps. I hopped a fence, thinking to visit Olivia’s grave, and looked for the original Lischen March, and for Michael Miller, but they were nowhere to be seen. Someone still waiting for a prison letter that never came, a letter saying where to find the bodies. I found Weylands and Marchs all over, though, this town seemingly filled with them. A small section of Millers, off to the side, all in a row, grass dead atop them, just as the grass was dead beneath them on my land.
There was a grave set off to the side of the rest, a simple monument, with a small hand etched in lines of silver at the top of it. The only writing, “My son.”
I brushed at my prickling eyes, and nearly fell over a small metal marker, stabbed into the earth as though the person below it was a row of seeds planted for the harvest.
Olivia Jones Weyland, it said. I looked at the marker more closely. There was something written on the metal, after her last name, etched in with a sharp tool, not colored as the rest of the letters were.
Olivia Jones Weyland Chuchonnyhoof
And below it, the mark I’d seen on the brand. The C tangled with the W.
I stood up, panting. Graffiti, someone messing with the graves. More Chuchonnyhoof’s there, and there, on some of the other stones, scratched into stone, scribbled on in pencil.
On the road beside the cemetery, a beige truck idled, a horsetrailer attached to the back of it. Ralph leaned out the window. “You okay there, fella?” he asked. “You tied one on last night. Need a ride? You’re far from home, and far from town too.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the cemetery wasn’t in town at all. I was still miles from Ione proper. I tried to smile at him, aware that I must look as crazy as I felt.
“I guess I might,” I said. In the trailer I could see a sleek black horse pressing its face against the slats to look me over. It snorted. The live sound of it, and the rattling of it stamping its hooves against the straw on the floor made me come to attention. “I thought I was going to church. But I don’t even know where it is.”
I tugged at my thin plaid shirt, a gift from the house before the house had gone quiet, trying to make it look better than it was.
“There’s no church in Ione.” I was bewildered. Even the tiniest towns had churches. “Used to be a town of bears and mountain lions, wild
horses,” Ralph said. “Now we have people, but only just. This was a walk through the wilderness, not a hundred years ago. Still not too safe out here.”
I got into the truck. The horse in the trailer stamped and neighed.
“Hush, you,” said Ralph. “She doesn’t like newcomers. Gets funny around people from away.”
I looked out the sliding window. The mare looked back at me, very close, her eyes golden. I could feel her wet breath on my neck as we made our way down the dirt road, and into town.
Behind the hardware store, there was a fenced corral, with bushes tangled around the feet of the fenceposts, blackberries bending the vines back towards the earth. The horse tore at the fruit as Ralph walked it past.
As he slipped the halter from around the horse’s ears, something winked silver in the sun. I rubbed my eyes. The mare’s hooves seemed wrong. Then they were right again. She trotted into the corral, giving me one last look. Not a friendly horse.
“Maybe a bit hungover after all, fella?” Ralph asked, and slapped me on the back. “No shame in that, though. Every man’s got something he can’t resist, even when he might know better.”
No. It might have been easier if I could have blamed that particular demon for Row’s death, instead of my own unseeing carelessness. Carelessness is hard word to live with, when it comes to the thing you care for most. The police had ruled me not to blame, though I tried to surrender. To volunteer.
“You made a horrible mistake, Mr. Mays,” the district attorney told me, “but you didn’t break the law. You threw yourself on the mercy of the system, and the system rules the death accidental. Accidents can have tragic results, but that doesn’t make them crimes.”
I stood in that office, my wrists aching for handcuffs, my neck aching for a hangman’s noose, my wife stand- ing there too, her rage wrapping around me. I think she wanted to be punished as much as I did, but Row was dead because of me.
I was the one who’d turned the key in the ignition, not Amina. She’d stood on the porch screaming me on my way, and neither of us checked Row’s bedroom door, though we both knew he woke when we fought. Row had run out into the night once before, during one of our big blow-ups. In the morning, frantic, we’d found him sleep- ing in a treetop, draped in the spreading branches of the oak like a bright bird, his costume torn, his crown bent, his thumb in his mouth.
Amina blamed herself for his death as much as she blamed me. I blamed her too, and god, and fate, and stu- pidity, and my history, and my future, and the town we lived in, and the staircase, and the road, and electricity, and nightfall, and the sun, and the stars, but mostly I blamed myself.
I was the one who’d slam-braked the car at the bottom of the hill, thinking rabbit, deer, cat, dog. I was the one who’d found Row, blood from the corner of his mouth. I was the one who’d carried him home, screaming. No phone—I’d thrown it out the car window as I pulled out of the driveway, giving her no way to find me.
I was the one my wife had met on the porch in the middle of the night, and in my arms, our child, not sl
eep- ing. I hadn’t killed myself after the ruling, only because I’d heard my grandmother in my head.
“Nothing’s for nothing, Malcolm,” she’d said to me once when I was down and out, twenty years old, washed up on her porch, trying to recover from a girl I’d lost, telling her I wanted to die. “I have skill made of hard times. Nobody who hasn’t been hurt can work a miracle. You have to lose something to know what you have. You think you’ll die of love, but you won’t. Broken love’s not like broken glass. It’s like dull, heavy metal. Forge it into something useful, and stop moaning over how the world did you wrong.”
My gran cuffed me in the head like a mother cat bat- ting a stupid kitten, and handed me a glass of sweet tea. My granddad laughed from the porch swing. “She doesn’t have much in the way of sympathy, boy,” he called out. “You came to the wrong woman for that.”
But I’d seen her heal a broken-backed goat. I’d seen her fix a car engine by touching it. She wasn’t a witch, my gran, but she was known for fixing things.
The night Row died, she was all I could think of, but she was gone fifteen years by then, and my granddad too. I hadn’t inherited any of what she knew, and I hadn’t both- ered to learn it. All I had was the power to break. I knew she would have said that everyone born on earth started out liking the breaking of things more than the fixing of them. The point of growing up was to spend some years fixing before we started breaking again. My gran believed a person’s history mattered, that bad history could become something of use, if you paid attention, if you learned.
I’d thought I was on the way to church, but there was another place I hadn’t been. Salem was two hundred miles away, but I could do it in a few hours.
I stood there, in the hardware lot, thinking about it, scared and exhilarated at once.
“Are you a handy sort of fella, or will you be looking to hire out the work when you fix up the house?” Ralph startled me, unlocking the dented metal door at the back.
It was my house. “I want to do what I can myself.”
The door clanged shut behind us. “All right then. We can start you an account, so all you have to worry about is the reckoning, when it’s finished.”
I walked slowly through the hardware store. I’d need more paint, I knew. I shoved my hands into the loose pockets of my overalls. In each, cloth wrapped around metal. The horseshoes. They would need nails.
No. I would need nails. Not for horseshoes, but for car- pentry. There were boards to be replaced, and the shutters hung off-true, and trim that needed to be tacked back down.
The popcorn maker whirred and snapped into life, and the scent of hot butter and salt filled the store.
“You don’t need to take care of all your obligations to the homestead at once,” Ralph said. “Give yourself some time to settle in, really get to know the place. Better to know something’s true character, than to have to come back and redo mistakes.”
Paint, both the white for the walls, and dark blue, for the shutters I would rehang. Nails. Iron nails, not Naglfar’s, and not for shoes. Spackle, to fill in holes in the walls where keys had been. Some wood, of varying sizes.
“Is there something that will fix the ground?” I asked Ralph as he rang up my supplies. “Where it’s been burned?” “Seems like a cursed place. Don’t know that anything will ever grow there, no matter what you do.” He shook
his head.
“Do you believe in that sort of thing? Curses?”
Easier to think that too, that I was cursed to break things, rather than that I had broken them by being who I was.
“Someplace like that, with all of what’s happened there, if it hadn’t already burned to the ground, I’d say that’s what should be done. I knew Olivia Weyland. She didn’t deserve any of what happened to her. She tried to fix things.”
He hadn’t answered my question, but I didn’t ask it again.
“What’s the best way to get to Salem?” I asked instead. He looked me dead in the eye for a moment.
“Well. If you’re going to Salem,” he said, “you should borrow Lischen’s truck. It’s out there in the lot. She won’t mind. You’ve got an errand to do.”
“I do,” I said. “I—”
I almost asked him to go with me, but something in his look told me that was not welcome. He handed me a bag of popcorn and hauled the lumber and supplies out to Lischen’s truck.
“It’s a drive,” he said. “But you might as well get it over.” “Get what over?” I asked.
“Whatever needs doing,” Ralph said. “Plenty to do in Salem.” He smiled at me, and I got into the pickup. He pointed off into the distance.
“Just go that way about four hours,” he said, “until you start smelling the ocean. You see waves, you’ve gone too far. They’d never put the prisoners where they could see the way to the water. People used to hop the walls. Now they’ve got barbed wire, and nobody climbs out. Ask me, they should have put the Pen on the coast, or offshore. Like a lighthouse. No pirates on the Oregon coast these days to pick prisoners up. They’d be trapped there with rocks to their backs and sea to the front, and that’s a good prison.”
Ralph looked ruminatively off into the distance as though he was picturing the prison even as he spoke to me.
“Will they let me in?”
Ralph laughed. “You worried you’ll have to break in? No. It’s a place like any other, Malcolm. And your errand won’t take long.”
14.
I stopped by the library to make sure Ralph had been right when he handed me Lischen’s spare keys. The doors were locked there, though, and there was no movement inside, despite her saying she’d be working.
The interior of the truck smelled of her perfume. I nearly turned back. It was Sunday, after all. Chances were there’d be no visiting. I could go home, to my safe little house, where no one could find me.
For another two days, anyway. No. I had to go to the prison. Approved.
I did go home for a moment, and grabbed a stash of letters, but I took off from the front door without looking back, afraid I wouldn’t manage to leave if I considered it any more.
I hit the highway and headed north to I-84, cursing the strangeness of Oregon, the 55 mph speed limit that anywhere else would be 75. It was already mid-morning, and I worried I wouldn’t get into the prison before it closed. I should have called. My mind had gotten soft here, and now I expected the rest of the world to feed me lunch and tuck me into bed. It felt good to take the ramp out of town.
I worried my way west, driving a parched landscape, patches of trees as I moved toward Portland, and then, green and dark everywhere. A national forest, so lush it seemed impossible after all the desert. Beside the highway, the river gleamed silver as chains. I looked to the left and saw Mt. Hood, the volcano rising up, snow like a cape over its shoulders. Bridal Veil Falls, a flash of white, a sign announcing a landmark.
I was breathing again, feeling like a real person again. Other cars around me, towns, people. I was driving. I was okay. Nothing was wrong now, not really. I believed, for a moment, that I’d moved on, and then I remembered I was driving toward a prison.
They’d tell me he was dead, and that I was only getting letters as a formality. They’d tell me I needed to pay for his burial. I’d get a motel room, and watch cable TV. I saw signs advertising rooms for $29 a night, old neon with cowboys on them. A motel, a swimming pool, an orange soda. That was what I’d find once this was done. A reward for making sure. That’s all I was doing. Making sure.
The prison itself, when I finally got to it, was weirdly beautiful. I’d imagined concrete blocks, and instead it was Art Deco curves, a watchtower rising over the front entrance, and tall arched windows lined with dark tiles. The sun hit the complex in a way that tricked my eyes into thinking I was somewhere nice, a hotel not terribly far from the seaside, maybe, except for the loops of barbed wire around the tops of the walls. The gates were open, to my surprise. I’d expected to fail. The guard motioned a window roll-down, and
I struggled with it for a moment, unused to the manual operation in Lischen’s truck, but then got it down, and tried to look not guilty. Why? I wasn’t guilty.
The guard looked at me, sighed, and said, “Visiting hours are over, mister.”
“I need to see the warden,” I said, that notion falling out of my mouth unexpectedly.
“There’s procedures,” the guard said. I looked at the wad of gum he was nursing in his cheek. Bright pink. I could smell the strawberry on his breath. He looked barely old enough to be out of high school, and he’d shaved badly. His face was nicked.
“I need to see him,” I said, and pulled the sheaf of letters out of the glove compartment. The guard looked at them, grimacing.
“I don’t know what you got here,” he said. “But it looks like a mess.”
“Letters from a prisoner. From this prison. They’re threats,” I said, to make it stick.
The guard sighed and blew a bubble, giving up on me. “You can go and see what you get in there,” he said. “But nothing goes out without getting read. Can’t be much too bad in them. Most guys just write porn to girls. I don’t know why you got a guy writing to you, unless those are porn.”
He looked at me, curious now. “You getting porn from someone in here? That what’s wrong?”
“No. Do you recognize his name?”
The guard looked at the envelope again, at Dusha’s name and at my address. “I think I’d remember that one,” he said. “But I haven’t been here long. There are records in the office. Might be for nothing, and you drove a long way. I used to play basketball near Ione, in high school. That place doesn’t even got a team.”
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