Ashes

by Scott Nicholson

  "Something wrong, boy? You ain't afeared of the dark, are you?"

  Dark wasn't bad. Dark was only black, suffocating stillness. Dark didn't walk. Dark didn't smile.

  "No, of course you ain't. And remember to latch the gate when you're done," Grandpa said, his attention wandering back to the fire which reflected off his rheumy eyes.

  Jerp put on his coat, his fingers shaking as he fumbled with the zipper. He took a flashlight from the ledge by the front door and went out into the night, under the black sky where stars were strewn like white jackstones. Crickets chirped across the low hills. Jerp's flashlight cut a weak circle in the darkness, and he followed the circle to the gate.

  The cows had come in on their own, following the twitching tail of the mare who was smart enough to know where food and shelter could be found. They were milling outside the pen, rubbing against the split locust rails. Jerp walked through the herd, grateful for the warmth the animals radiated. He lifted the latch and they spilled into the barnyard, annoying the sow into a round of grunting. Jerp slid back the barn door and the animals tottered inside. So far, so good.

  But now he had to go to the hayloft. Now he had to go through the corncrib and up the stairs and across the loft that was littered with square black holes. Now he had to meet the scarecrow boy on its home turf.

  He almost turned and ran back up the hill to the light and safety of the farmhouse, almost let his legs betray him by becoming a whirling windmill of fear. But then he pictured Grandpa asking if all the animals were put up and fed and the chores done proper. And Jerp heard the words that Grandpa had been waiting to say.

  I was hoping to leave this farm to you, to let you carry on the tradition that your father abandoned. I was hoping someday the soil would lay claim to you, because busy hands touch no evil. But if the dirt's not in you, you can't plant there.

  Jerp squinted in the moonlight that spilled into the barn. He kicked a horse chip across the ground. He took a pitchfork from the wall and walked to the corncrib. He would be part of the farm, not a big-city sissy.

  Jerp banged the wooden handle on the door to warn the rats and the scarecrow boy that he was coming and had work to do. Taking a deep taste of air, he slammed the door open so hard that the sweet potatoes rolled around in their bins. He ran up the steps with one hand clenched around the pitchfork.

  The haybales were stacked like bricks on the far end of the loft. He tiptoed through the tobacco that hung like long sleeping bats, around the hole he had fallen through earlier, and past the workbench. He was among the hay now, walking down an aisle between the silent stacks. Jerp turned the corner and there was scarecrow boy, sitting on a bale and grinning at him, a straw jabbed between its teeth.

  Jerp held the pitchfork in front of him. If the scarecrow boy was stuffed with straw, Jerp was ready to pierce its flesh and shred its muscles and rake its insides out. If the boy had a ragball heart, Jerp would make the heart stop beating. Jerp's own heart was racing like that of a crow that had eaten poisoned corn.

  The scarecrow boy looked at Jerp with eyes that were beyond life, eyes that neither flinched nor twinkled in the flashlight's glare. Eyes that were as black as good bottom soil, black as manure. Eyes that had seen drought and flood, lush and fallow fields, harvests both meager and bountiful. Eyes that were seeds, begging to be planted and given a chance to take root, to grow and bloom and go to seed, to spread on the winds and in the bellies of birds, to propagate among the loess and loam and alluvial soils of the world.

  "You've been waiting for me," Jerp said. "Always."

  The scarecrow boy nodded, its head wobbling on its shoulders like an apple tied to a kite.

  Suddenly Jerp knew whose farm this was. It had never been recorded on a deed down at the county seat, but some laws were unwritten and universal. Rights of ownership went to the possessor.

  And Jerp belonged here, belonged to the farm and to the scarecrow boy.

  The scarecrow boy spread its musty arms as if to hug Jerp. Jerp let the flashlight drop to the floor as the scarecrow boy rose like smoke and drifted through the tines of the pitchfork. Jerp tried to draw back, but he felt as if he had a splintery stake up his spine. His arms went limp and he itched, he itched, his hands were dusty and his mouth was dry. The pitchfork fell onto the planks, but the clatter was muffled, as if he were hearing it through layers of cloth. Jerp tried to stretch the threads of his neck, but he could only stare straight ahead at the boy in front of him.

  At the boy with the smile that curved like a blackberry thorn. At the boy who had stolen his face and meat and white bones. At the boy who was wearing his scuffed lace-up boots. At the boy who was looking down at his hands- no, MY hands, his cobwebbed mind screamed-as if the hands were a new pair of work gloves that needed to be broken in.

  Then Jerp knew. He had forgotten to latch the gate behind him. Even though Grandpa had told him a thousand times. But Jerp had been so afraid. It wasn't his fault, was it?

  Jerp tried to open his mouth, to scream, to tell the boy to get out of his skin, but Jerp's tongue was an old sock. He strained to flap the rags of his arms, but he felt himself falling into the loose hay. He choked on the cotton and chaff and sweetly sick odor of his own dry-rot. And still he saw, with eyes that were tickled by tobacco dust and stung by tears that would never fall.

  Jerp watched as the boy now wearing Jerp's clothes bent to lift the pitchfork. The boy tried out its stolen skin, stretched its face into new smiles. Then the boy who had borrowed Jerp's body stepped between the haybales and was gone. Minutes or years later, the barn door slid open.

  Jerp tried his limbs and found they worked, but they were much too light and boneless. He dragged himself to the window and pressed his sawdust head against the chickenwire. Jerp looked out over the moist fields that would now and always beckon him, he listened to the breezes that would laugh till the cows came home, he sniffed the meadows that would haunt his endless days. He wondered how long it would be before the next season of change. Already he ached from waiting.

  Jerp looked down into the barnyard and saw the boy who wore his flesh walking toward the farmhouse, the pitchfork glinting under the moon, perhaps on his way to punish someone who had shirked the evening chores.

  The boy remembered to latch the gate.

  LAST WRITES

  Ah, the vanity of the living.

  Just look at him.

  He sits on the upper floor and surveys the flat sweep of ocean. The sea is weak, exhausted from a night of stretching, yet he watches as if some catastrophe will occur at any moment. True, ships have sunk here in sight of shore on the calmest of summer days, but not on this man’s watch. All he knows is what the logbook has told him and what he has gleaned from the tales of those who sent him here.

  He will not learn, and he has time ahead of him. His eyes may become bleary and strained, he will grow lonely, he will think things that no normal man should. Yet, when his term is over, he will rejoin the sweeping tide of the living and give this place little thought. He will leave this place, and that is why I hate him. That is why I must become a part of him, invade his thoughts and dreams. We each seek to become immortal, and I must live on through him.

  He imagines himself a lighthouse keeper, yet he keeps nothing. He comes and he goes, like the others. And still I shall remain. I am the real keeper here.

  He fancies he knows of solitude. Sitting there in his bamboo chair, with his lantern and bottle of spirits. The labels have changed over the years, grown more colorful, but the bottom of the bottle still speaks the same words. The speakers of several languages have sat in that chair: Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, but mostly English and Spanish. Yet the language is the same to me. Theirs is the language of the living.

  This one is handsomer than some of the others. He has sideburns clipped close to the lobe, beard trimmed in a fashion I haven’t seen before. He is young. They get younger every year. Or perhaps I am older. Please, merciful God, let me be older.

  The object on
the table beside him emits a purring sound, like that of a cat stuck in a sewage drain. The man puts the object to his ear as if it were a conch and speaks.

  “ Hello, Norfolk Lighthouse.”

  He pauses, listening. If it were a conch instead of the strange object, he would be hearing the roar of the ocean. Or the blood rushing through his head. Sometimes those two things are the same.

  “ Hi, Maleah,” he says, his face changing instantly, lifting into a bright and open expression.

  Maleah. A pretty name. It sounds of Hawaii, that Pacific island region of which sailors sometimes speak. She must be as beautiful as her name.

  I hate her, for she occupies him.

  I go to the window, stick my head in a sea breeze ripe with the scream of gulls, but I can’t drown out his words.

  “ I miss you, too,” he says. “But it’s only for a year. And I’ll get a lot of writing done while I’m here.”

  His other hand, the one not holding the non-conch, goes to the bottle. He nods, sips, glances at the window. At me.

  I rattle the shutters. Perhaps I am getting older. I don’t bang them with the same enthusiasm of a couple of centuries ago. Still, paint sloughs off and bits of stucco dust fall to the beach far below.

  “ Maleah,” he says into the conch-thing. A telephone, they have called it. “Something weird is happening.”

  Now I am “something weird.” I would sigh if I had breath. But I must do this the hard way. Just like always.

  I knock on the door to the upper chamber. I stand on the winding staircase, the yawning gap of darkness that leads to a pale, gleaming light far below.

  The door swings open, the strong stench of spirits marking his breath, and I see his stricken face-as stricken as mine, surely, and then I fall again, far, far, far. As I fall, I smile. He has forgotten Maleah and thinks of me.

  Sooner or later, they all dream only of me. To the last.

  I wasn’t always like this. When I was alive, I walked the beach in search of shark’s teeth and pretty shells. In bare feet, dawn fast and pink on the horizon, the water licking at my ankles with a gentle, foaming tongue. The lighthouse was a marker, a means to measure the distance I had walked from the cottage I shared with my doting, deaf parents.

  Usually, I turned back when the lighthouse window was clearly visible, though on foggy mornings I might not see the towering structure until I was nearly upon it. On those days, a single bright lantern would burn in the uppermost window, serving as a guide for ships that might be daring the narrow passage. I was a ship myself, a vessel with an empty hull, as lost as any rudderless cutter.

  On the day I died, I decided to keep walking, though the tide had run out and my parents would be waiting for me to sweep sand from the floors, cook mackerel, and air the mildewed blankets. I loathed the smell of fish. It permeated the walls, and driftwood smoke would leak through the fireplace stones and sting my eyes. That morning, I couldn’t bear the claustrophobic cottage. The day was warm and pleasant, with only a few thin strips of clouds in the blue sky. My feet carried me farther along the shore than I had been in years, to the north, toward the lighthouse that had been built before my birth. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more gratified.

  My father told me strange tales surrounding the lighthouse-how men who kept the light burning through the dark hours somehow lost some of their own light, so that when their year of duty was over, their eyes were dry and hollow, their faces lacking in emotion, their tongues slow to speak. Through the years, several ships had run aground in the shallows, while others had cracked their spines on the rocky outcroppings to the west. Perhaps the memories of those failures haunted the lighthouse keepers, though not every man had witnessed a tragedy. Perhaps it was merely the lengthy solitude that turned them into dull, haggard beasts.

  The lighthouse towered before me that day, bright as sand as it stretched higher and higher into the sky with my every step. It was capped with copper that had long ago turned dull green. The masonry that from a distance had seemed solid revealed itself to be covered with spidery cracks, iron bands girding the base. As I grew nearer, I detected rust on the hardware of the single oaken door set in the rounded base of the structure.

  The door had a large metal knocker in the center. The keyhole in the door handle was like the black eye of a dead shark. Sand skirled in the breeze around the base of the door, and cool, fetid air oozed from the cracks between the oak planks. I touched the wood, wondering about the man behind. I tapped the door and a hollow echo sounded inside.

  In the little fishing village where my parents were born, two miles from the lighthouse, the people often spoke of lighthouse keepers who were only seen in daylight, on those rare occasions when they replenished supplies. The keepers were an odd lot, unkempt and wild-eyed, given to excess whiskey. The keeper position rotated by the calendar year, though sometimes stories emerged of those who had been unable to endure the loneliness and turned up raving in the streets, shouting about shipwrecks and sea monsters and Neptune with a forked trident riding in on the backs of deformed porpoises.

  I thought perhaps one of those madmen was inside that morning, high above me, far removed from the smell of mackerel. What strange tales he might share. And I, at eighteen, was as much at a loss for company as any man who had ever consigned himself to that upper chamber. I lifted the knocker and brought it down hard against the strike plate. The only sound in reply was the reverberation inside the base of the lighthouse, the whispering of the surf, and the distant cry of a gull.

  I knocked again, looking back toward the point where my parents’ house lay. Desperation fueled my hand as I worked the iron ring. I think I even started to weep, but I can’t be sure, because the sea air was salty and that was centuries ago. But at last there came a turning in the works of the door, and it creaked open.

  I found myself facing a man of dark countenance, with black, haunted eyes and a large, pale forehead. He was perhaps twenty, though his eyes looked far older than that, as if he had witnessed tragedies in abundance. His hair was swept away from his brow in a wild manner, like a tangled tuft of sea oats. He wore a vest and a white shirt, both stained and rumpled. The smell of drink hung about him like a mist.

  “ Do you know how many steps I had to climb?” he said.

  I gave him my sweetest smile, though I’d had little practice in that art. Despite his grave expression, he was handsome.

  “ I live around the point,” I said, “Since we’re neighbors-“

  “ I have no need of neighbors,” he said. “I wish to be alone.” But I caught him staring past my shoulder at the shoreline. The beach was empty, for the coral was sharp and discouraged bathers, and the currents here were too rough for putting out fishing boats.

  “ I was wondering if I could see the view from up there,” I said, leaning my head back to look at the windows far above. “I’ve lived here all my life but I scarcely know what the place looks like.”

  “ I have my duties,” he said. “I’ve no time for guided tours.”

  “ Please, sir, I will only be a moment. Just one look. And I came all this way.” I smoothed the lap of my dress, a gesture I had seen women use in church when speaking to men they wished to flatter.

  He seemed to reflect for an instant, and his eyes grew softer. “Hmm. You remind me of someone I once knew. Perhaps I can spare some time. But you must promise to be careful. These stairs are wretched.”

  “ I will take care, sir.” As I followed him inside, I couldn’t help smiling a little. Perhaps I had an untapped gift for getting my way. It is something I have perfected over the years. Something I grew better at after I died.

  The base of the lighthouse was hollow, with a well perhaps forty feet deep. The metal stairs wound up into the gloom, and I could see why he thought them treacherous. He had left an oil lantern by the foot of the stairs, and carried it while he returned to close the door. The lantern threw long, flickering shadows up the curved wall of the lighthouse.

>   “ Come along,” he said, offering his hand as he mounted the stairs.

  “ I think I shall hold the rail,” I said, believing myself coy.

  He held the lantern below his face, and in his position above me, the flame made the dark creases in his face even more somber. “Very well. Let me know if you tire.”

  We navigated upwards, his shoes thundering on the narrow metal steps. I followed close behind, watching my feet. He turned once to check on me, and seemed satisfied that I could keep my balance. We were perhaps halfway up when he paused, breathing hard. I was in better shape due to the great distances I had to walk to the village. He held the lantern high, and I glanced down at the great black space below. I gasped despite myself, and a smile came to his lips. It wasn’t a cruel smile, but a playful one.

  “ It’s difficult the first few times, but it gets easier,” he said.

  “ You haven’t told me your name,” I said.

  “ Poe,” he said. “From Baltimore. And yours?”

  I wasn’t prepared to tell him yet. I was still wary of what the villagers might think if he went around reporting that I had visited him alone. Word would also get back to my parents, and while I resented their control of me, I still loved them and wished them no additional worries on my behalf.

  “ Mary,” I said, the first name that came to mind. Only later, after my death, would he know my true name.

  “ Mary. One of my favorites.”

  We continued our climb and eventually reached a small trap door at the top. While I didn’t count them that morning, in subsequent years I have made note of each step. There are 136, all of them narrow and slow and worn by thousands of footsteps. Not mine, though. Since that morning, I don’t use them. Now, I float.

  He went first, then helped me up with a strong hand. Poe’s watch chamber was sparsely furnished. A table and a chair were on one end of the round room, a logbook of some type on the table, a quill pen and inkwell beside it. Papers were piled beneath the logbook, and a collapsed telescope lay across the open pages of the book. A bunk sat low to the floor at the other end of the room, a walnut trunk at its foot, presumably to contain his clothes. A cabinet stood near the trunk, filled with bread, dried meat and fish, apples, and several rows of corked bottles filled with amber liquid. A chamber pot, covered indiscreetly with a board, was off to the side. Empty bottles were scattered beneath the bunk, and the cramped room had the same spirited aroma that surrounded the man, combined with the cloying stench of the chamber pot.