He waved me through the gate, and pointed at the lot.
There was a sign in blue paint on the wall outside the front prison office, a layer of bullet glass, and a receptionist behind that, who had no interest in looking up at me.
I stood for several minutes, reading the sign over and over again, like a mantra. “You can’t talk your way out of problems that you behaved your way into.” I wondered why those instructions were facing prison guests, rather than prisoners.
The receptionist looked up, at long last. I could see from the lines of her face that she spent her time behind that glass biting the insides of her cheeks out of boredom, or disgust.
“You don’t think you’re here for a prisoner visit, do you? You’re not on any of my lists.”
“I didn’t tell you my name.”
“Well, you missed basic visiting hours, and there aren’t any specials scheduled, so you can assume I know how to do my job.”
I pushed the letters through the slot in the glass. She looked at them, with a complicated expression on her face. One part excitement, one part revulsion. She was thinking I had a pile of porn again, I suspected. When she looked up, that expression was gone.
“No one by that name here,” she said.
“I’ve been getting them, sometimes a five or six a day,” I said. “Somebody’s sending them.”
“We control mail in and out,” she said. “These are stamped, but this isn’t our prisoner. Not ours. He’s not on record.”
I looked at her.
“That’s true,” I said. “He’s not. He died in 1957.” Her face changed. “He was executed. I’m here to pick up his bones.”
She sighed. “Some people are fools. Leave well enough alone, but no. You think you’ll sell a dead man’s bones on eBay? There’s a prison cemetery here, and if he’s dead and nobody claimed him, he’s in it. What you’re doing here sixty years late, I don’t know.”
“I’m not leaving until I see someone. I want to pick up his bones. And I want these letters explained.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“The penitentiary,” I said.
“Then don’t fuck with me,” she replied, startling me. “Don’t threaten, don’t pretend I can’t throw you out if I want to. Prisons aren’t for tourists. The only reason you’re getting this far is that it’s the end of the day and nobody has procedure for this.”
She slammed the door behind her as she went deeper into the prison. I waited to be thrown out. Guards with guns? This didn’t seem like a prison to me. It seemed like a post office, and the receptionist an irritable postal worker.
A door opened across the room.
“Malcolm Mays?” The man beckoned to me. Khaki uniform, badge. Maybe in his sixties, with teeth that looked older. His skin was as though he’d pulled the plug partway on an air mattress, before realizing he didn’t want to go flat. “You’re wanted.”
“I was cleared,” I said, without even thinking of what I was saying.
He looked at me.
“Wanted back here,” he said, and beckoned again. “It’s the end of the day, and I’m due home for Sunday supper. Just come with me.”
My spine felt like a spring. I couldn’t decide whether to go back beyond that door with him, or to leave, claiming confusion. He decided for me. He grabbed the letters from my hand, and looked at them.
“You’re coming with me,” he said. “I’m Warden Kern, and you’ve got some explaining to do. Thank you, Lois.”
The receptionist shot me a triumphant look as I went into the prison itself. On the warden’s belt, I could see a holster. The door clanged shut behind us, and a red light came on above it. He saw me looking.
“Security,” he said. “This is a prison. What do you have there, Malcolm Mays?”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s right here on these letters, isn’t it? It is.”
He led me into an office, and slammed the door, dropping into a soft desk chair while I sat awkwardly in aluminum. He looked hard at me.
“And I know these letters. I wondered if you were real.”
“Who did you think they were going to?”
“What are you trying to do here, Mays? You’re in my house now. I’m two years out from the end of my sentence.”
“What did you say?”
“Retirement,” he said. “This place is a sentence like anything else. I have a man ready to come up and sit where I sit. I have grandkids. Tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what you can’t have, and you can be on your way.”
“I want to see Dusha Chuchonnyhoof,” I said.
“Deceased,” he said. “In 1957. Executed by gas chamber. You know that already. You said it out there.”
“He’s not dead,” I said. “He’s haunting my house. Or, not my house. Haunting my mail.”
The warden’s lip curled. “He’s dead.”
I brought out Olivia’s letter about the executions, and pushed it across the desk. He looked at it, at first cursorily, and then less so. At last, having brought out a cigarette lighter, and set the letter on fire, the warden spoke again.
“Leave this alone. Get up from that seat, walk out to the lot, and leave this the hell alone.”
“He’s asking me to help him.”
“Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is legally dead,” the warden repeated, looking me in the eyes. “He was executed. By the power of the state, at the end of his sentence. There were witnesses. His death certificate was signed. And he’s buried in the cemetery here.”
“What if he didn’t die?”
The warden’s hand moved toward his holster.
“This is my prison, Mays. I’d know. And if I knew we had a prisoner here, a prisoner who wouldn’t die? It would be my business what I did with that prisoner. If that prisoner wrote letters, if that was part of the condition of his imprisonment, if that prisoner were passed to me by the warden before me, and by the warden before him, if all of us had been waiting a HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN FUCKING YEARS for that goddamned prisoner to be released? Do you think I’d fuck it up, Mays? Do you think I’d let him out into the world before his sentence was over? Do you think I’d surrender my prisoner to you?”
The warden’s hand was on his gun.
“Where is he?” I tried. “Can I see him? I don’t have to talk to—”
“Dead, Mays. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is dead. No one sees him. You can’t go gape at a dead man.”
The extra flesh on the warden’s face now seemed filled with something that might make him levitate, a mascot from a balloon parade gone small in this office.
“There will be no scandal here, Mays, hear me? If we had a prisoner here, if we did, a prisoner who wouldn’t die? We wouldn’t want the world to know, would we? There’ll be a moment when this all comes right and we’re waiting for that moment. A couple days left in that sentence. This is a job. I don’t truck with the devil in here. I don’t owe the devil my soul.”
Suddenly he was over the desk at me, his gun in his hand.
“If I find you got leaky lips, I can help you with that. A warden is authorized.”
The click of the safety.
“You ready to leave my prison now?”
I was.
“Lois will let you out.”
Lois took me to the parking lot, and watched while I got into the truck. She watched while I drove out the gates, and away in the dark.
Dusha Chuchonnyhoof was alive, real, and in that prison. He wasn’t invented. There seemed to be nothing I could do about it.
He was coming home to me.
15.
As I turned into the dirt lane at dawn, the truck caught on something. There was a bang, and the wheel jerked sideways in my hand. It fishtailed to a stop. I sat, shaking. There hadn’t been a bump. I hadn’t hit anything. Anyone. Not this time.
The front tire on the passenger side had blown.
I looked everywhere to see what it had caught on, but found no rock, no litter from the yard,
no tossed-aside piece of lumber with nails still sticking out. I couldn’t find the spare, either, so I heaved some of the paint, nails, and two-by-fours out of the truck bed, and hauled them back to the house.
A letter cartwheeled from the ceiling to land at my feet. I picked it up, intending to just pile it up with the others and burn the whole heap later, but it was the stationery and handwriting I had come to think of as Olivia’s. Whatever it said, I felt I owed it to her to read it.
October 31
Dear Malcolm,
Forgive my brevity, but it is difficult to write. The walls are thin, but not yet open, and your stubbornness, Malcolm, does not help.
So that you may know it is me, I will say that you were brought a gift yesterday morning. Popovers. You might reconsider eating them.
Dusha Chuchonnyhoof is neither a demon, nor your enemy. I do not know if there is a Heaven or a Hell, nor do I know if I am to go anywhere beyond where I am now, in the house, but I am still a Christian woman soul, and I would not advise anyone to take a path that might lead them into Hell torment.
Help Dusha. Do what is necessary, no matter how strange it seems. Tell him you will help, agree to the terms, and those of us remaining in the house will be able to help you again. We want to. I want to and I wish to be free of this life which is not a life no matter where it is I might go after.
We will protect you. Trust that it will be well.
I still hold out hope of Heaven.
Soon, Malcolm.
Please.
Olivia Jones Weyland
I did not want to be in debt to a murderer, (though again, the thought pinched at me. I was guilty and free. What if he was innocent and caged?) and God knew I didn’t want to commit murders of my own. I already knew what it was to carry the burden of a death.
But I wanted to help Olivia. If I could free her, I had a duty to do so. Maybe I’d misunderstood what was being asked of me. I’d misunderstood things in my life before, and maybe more than I’d known. I heard my grandmother again, and I thought about fixing things other than the ones I’d broken. She hadn’t been the one who broke that goat’s back. She hadn’t broken the car engine, but she’d fixed them, all the same.
I turned the letter over.
Same day
Chuchonnyhoof,
I’m not doing this for you. And this is my house, not yours, but if you must come here, then you must. I will give what help I can.
I read over the words. I hadn’t promised to kill anyone, to cut off hands. I would help, if I could. That wasn’t a lie. I wouldn’t promise further.
Malcolm Mays
I set it outside on the porch where I’d put the previous letter. I didn’t know what answer I wanted.
The smell of coffee crept out from the kitchen and down the hall. I heard the sizzle of grease on a hot skillet, and the clank of glass bottles rattling in the shelves of a refrigerator door. The house, at least, had forgiven me.
The plate was heaped with bacon, eggs and hashbrowns. It smelled good, and I wasn’t in the habit of turning down food. Leaning against a glass of orange juice was a letter from the prison. Approved.
Thirty-first October
My dear Malcolm,
Forgive me my temper and my silence. Under-stand that your first letter came to me at a time where I could very nearly taste my freedom, could smell the rain-soaked earth and sky, and feel the breeze upon my skin. To have the one person I was counting on suddenly and cruelly refuse to offer me any aid when I had been nothing but kind and generous, hurt more than I can say, Malcolm.
But no matter. I understand what it is to fear, what it is to fall under the sway of evil counsel, how even the kindest word can sound wrong to an ear filled with suspicion. Stop your ears against those who would seek to turn you from me, Malcolm.
I am grateful. You have returned to me, and of your own free will. Our bond is strengthened by this, and so the binding will be an easier thing to perform.
I return to you soon, as I must. Complete the binding, Malcolm. I have no wish to become a monster. It is your actions that will ensure that I do not.
Dusha.
I couldn’t make the two sides match up in my head. Olivia wanted me to help. She would help me, protect me, if I did. But the thing she wanted me to help was a monster who, as far as I could tell, had not changed his demand that I murder two people and forge their hands into shoes for him. He might not want to be a monster, but he seemed bent on making me one. And no matter what anyone said, the dead didn’t come back to life. Dead wasn’t the kind of thing that could be fixed.
Behind me, water splashed into the sink. A woman’s voice, humming. “My Baby Cares Just for Me.”
I carried the paint and spackle upstairs. There was work I could do, clean work, that didn’t mean walking down dark stairs and lighting a fire in a forge.
The outline of the red door had bled further through the paint, and the key was once again sticking out of the wall. The pencil on the nightstand lifted up into the air and floated across the room. O-P-E-N scrawled in loose letters above the key.
“It’s not a door,” I said.
OPEN. The pencil underlined the letters, pressing so hard the lead snapped. It was the first time I’d seen things actually moving in the air. The ghosts didn’t care any longer whether I saw them moving about.
I turned the key, and felt it catch tumblers. Click.
The door opened into a space behind my bedroom wall. There were shelves, like a pantry, but not for holding food. On the shelves were six pair of horseshoes. No six and a half. Thirteen total.
I felt like I was standing before a crypt. The horseshoes rested together in their pairs, the hands of each lover. The bottoms of them were worn, rubbed smooth in places, scratched and nicked in others. Some of the hands wore wedding bands. In one instance, both hands were small, delicate-fingered, with long nails, as if both belonged to women.
Only the solitary shoe showed no sign of being worn. I had two horseshoes—the beautiful one, that had been left on the anvil’s horn, and the ragged one that had risen out of the dirt to grip my hand. Perhaps one of them was the mate, but I didn’t know how to tell, and it seemed wrong, to match up a pair that wasn’t true.
There was one more thing, heaped in a corner of a shelf. It was so tarnished that at first I thought it was iron, too. But no. Too light, and the metal near white when I scraped at it. Silver. A bridle made of silver. Even the reins, dangling from the bit.
I sat down in the doorway that wasn’t, and thought about what I could do, what I couldn’t do, what I didn’t know. I thought about who that bridle might be meant to fit. Maybe there was a horse waiting for me, like that mare. I wasn’t from horse country. I didn’t know anything about riding. I didn’t know anything about horseshoes, even now, and as I thought it, I nearly laughed with misery. I was only a month into a new life. How was it that I was supposed to know everything? How was it that these were the stakes? Tell him you will help.
Hands holding hooves. Whose hooves? What was Dusha Chuchonnyhoof? No one had told me that, for all that there were threats and vows and promises. No one had said what sort of creature he was. No one sees him, Warden Kern had said. No one had described the goblin I was meant to keep bound. No one had told me why he needed binding.
The bedroom window was open and I could smell fall coming in, leaves beginning to crumble into dust. There was a cool breeze hitting the back of my neck, but in the closet it was hot as a forge.
Beneath each of the sets of shoes, there was a letter.
No, not a letter. A contract.
The first one was written out in fading brown ink, the handwriting unfamiliar to me. It had a location too, Gretna Green, Scotland.
I picked the paper up from the shelf, and shuddered. Beneath it, there was a long braid of hair, two different sorts. One red, one black, twisted into a coil and tied with a faded string.
Samira Eld is wedded to Theodore Miller this first of November, in the year of o
ur lord seventeen hundred and fifty-four. Witnessed by the blacksmith priest, the former trapper and New World traveler Joseph Weyland, in the blacksmith’s shop at Gretna Green, upon the wedding anvil belonging to this shop. The anvil is rung by the blacksmith priest, and these two are handfasted, promised by their fingers and by their blood to one another, and to their witness, a man of this town, brother-in-marriage (now bereaved) to this blacksmith, who shall watch over them, and in deeds, repay them their gifts.
Beneath that, the signatures of the couple, the signature of Joseph Weyland, and a mark. The C and W brand. Followed by the signature of the wedding’s witness. The flowing looping lines, the dark ink, the handwriting I knew all too well.
With this hammer and this anvil, with this promise, I take your hands to mine,
the last line of the contract read, and then, it was signed.
Dusha Chuchonnyhoof.
16.
I went through the rest of the contracts quickly. Name after name, each one witnessed (witnessed or much more?) by Chuchonnyhoof. Centuries of marriages.
The weddings moved from Scotland to the deck of Glashtyn, a ship somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean. I quivered, imagining a monster aboard a ship, though what monster I still didn’t know. Hooves on a deck. Two hooves, not four. There were never four shoes, and it was only now that I considered that. A picture of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof assembled itself in my mind, hooves on animal legs, a man’s muscled torso.
The next wedding was in Massachusetts, the two women, and I thought about that for a moment, the time that this had occurred, and the place. Inez Weyland and Isabella Fuller. At last, the anvil seemed to have shifted to the Oregon Territory, where, for a hundred eighty years and more, the anvil weddings had been, it seemed, taking place here, at the blacksmith’s shop in Ione.
The End of the Sentence Page 7