by Josh Ritter
When she came, she stood at the cabin flap and looked at the Colonel for a long moment. She put her hands on Henry’s shoulders and pulled the boy closer to her. “What can we help you with today, sir?” she said. “Maybe you’ll want some tomatoes or some beans and then you’ll go on your way.” She did not ask the man inside.
“She is dying,” the Colonel said. “She has been calling for you.”
His mother’s tongue caught in her throat with a click until she forcibly cleared it. She let go of Henry’s shoulders and wiped her hands on her apron at the words. “All right.” She disappeared into the blackness of the cabin, and when she reappeared her hair was tied back and she was no longer wearing the apron. Her knuckles knotted and unknotted themselves around the stock of the rifle that she held between her breasts. “This is loaded,” she told the Colonel. Then, to Henry, “Henry, wash your face and fetch a clean shirt. Quick, now, we’re going to meet your aunt Rebecca.”
Henry did as he was told and came to stand by his mother and the Colonel.
“Good man.” The Colonel smiled faintly down at him. “Rum rations doubled.” He bowed and swept a courtly arm up the road.
“Don’t speak to my son,” his mother said. “And we’ll walk behind you, not the other way around.”
“Chivalry is—”
“Keep it,” she said.
As they came up the drive, Henry was happy to see Rachel standing on the porch, but when they got closer he could see that she had been crying. His mother saw the girl too, and she slung the rifle by its strap over her back. It rattled against her shoulder blades as she ran up the steps and pulled the girl close. Only when she saw the Colonel’s two boys standing silently in the open door did she become wary once more and release Rachel, pulling the gun back around into her hands so that the barrel pointed at the space of porch between her own feet and the boys’. Corwin, thick-lipped, his eyes cast downward and his fingers kneading themselves into fat fists, refused to acknowledge Henry or Henry’s mother. Duncan, yowl-eyed and willowy, regarded them both with the steadiness of an underfed barn cat. Henry’s mother turned to the Colonel. “Where is she?”
Henry followed her through the front door and into the gloom of the Colonel’s house. In front of them a staircase led to the second floor, but his mother did not ascend it, instead veering left and into a large sitting room festooned with portraits. Here the air was heavy and the light pierced through the gap-toothed slats of the shutters like hot knitting needles. A woman dressed in an old gown lay on her back upon a table in the middle of the room. Henry’s mother went to the head of the table and gazed down. That the women were sisters was unmistakable, and yet, while Henry’s mother was healthy and strong, her sister’s face was sunken, her arms at her sides like sticks, her tiny feet laced tightly within ankle-high black boots. She did not seem able to move save for her eyes, which blinked at a crack in the ceiling plaster above her.
“Colonel,” his mother said, as she turned and fixed the man with a look of hatred, “I’ll ask you for a few minutes alone with my sister please.” The Colonel backed out of the archway, through the front door and down to the yard. When he was gone, she turned and leaned over the woman. “Rebecca?” She said the name very quietly. “Rebecca? Can you hear me?” She laid her hand on the table and then rested it on her sister’s hand. “He came and told me you were asking for me.” She beckoned Henry to her side. “Henry, come here and say hello to your aunt Rebecca.”
Henry had been standing in the center of the room, afraid of the woman on the table in front of him, and afraid of Corwin and Duncan standing with Rachel in the archway behind. He approached slowly. The woman tore her eyes off the ceiling crack and looked at Henry blisteringly. Her pupils were very large in the dimness and they jittered back and forth like birds in shaken cages. He had to look away, and when he looked back her eyes were once more fastened on the ceiling above.
“Last time you saw him was when he was born,” his mother said. “He’s growing up into a big strong man like our own brother Henry was.” The woman’s hands were small and seemed covered over with the kind of thin, beautiful skin that frogs have. “It’s all right about everything,” his mother said to the woman. “I know it didn’t turn out like you thought it would. It didn’t turn out that way for me either. We both know where things went wrong, but it’s no good worrying about any of it now. The world got us all at once. First with our Henry dying in the Philippines, then Mother and Father”—here she turned and looked out the window at the Colonel on the lawn—“then my own husband buried in the coal mine before he could lay eyes on his son.” She raised Rebecca’s hands a little and then lowered them again as she leaned over her. “Too much,” she said quietly. “Too much all at once.” She let go of the woman’s hands in order to fasten a stray button at the top of the woman’s neckline. “We can’t blame each other for all the things we said to each other that we didn’t mean, but I know we can’t say we’re sorry either. So I’ll just say that I love you. I love you so much. Looks like you have some really fine children here, and I’m gonna pray for them. I’m gonna pray really hard for them and I’m gonna pray hard for you and that we meet again in a better world than this one we’ve been given.” She bent and kissed her sister on each of her cheeks and then, taking the ivory comb from the folds of her skirt, she began to comb the woman’s hair. “I’m not gonna leave you here like this,” she said, her voice turning as thin and jagged as the crack in the ceiling.
“Children,” she said. “If you stay, you need to bow your heads and close your eyes and don’t open them again, no matter what you do, until I tell you that you can. Henry, go on over there with Rachel and the boys and bow your head too.” They did as they were told and she began, her back to them and standing over her sister. “Heavenly Father, if it is true that you give us sorrow and joy in equal measure according to the strength of our backs to bear the load, have mercy on your daughter Rebecca and give her now the joy in her new life that you withheld from her in this one.” Henry opened his eyes to peek at his mother, but he couldn’t see her face. “We pray that as she enters your kingdom …”
Her voice left off suddenly and her body hunched with some strange effort, her head bowed from sight beneath the line of her shoulders. The rifle slung over his mother’s shoulder shifted this way and that as if it was aiming at some high-flying, far-off bird. Rebecca’s tiny boots kicked against the table three or four times, then lay still.
In the silence that followed, Henry looked over at Rachel and her brothers. Corwin and Rachel’s heads were bowed, but Duncan’s eyes were wide open and he was watching Henry’s mother as well. After a long while a sigh escaped her lips and she continued, “We pray, Heavenly Father, that as she enters your kingdom you will offer her some explanation for the sorrows that you, in your infinite wisdom, saw fit to visit upon her.” His mother’s hands dropped to her sides all at once. She turned, the rifle butt clanking hard against the parquet as she sank to the floor. She pulled the gun around and laid it across her lap, leaning back against one of the table legs for support. She closed her eyes. “Amen.”
She opened them again. Her hair was mussed, her face as waxen as her dead sister’s. Corwin and Rachel still had their eyes closed and their heads bowed. She glanced at Henry and then at Duncan. The boy looked back at her steadily. She looked more exhausted than Henry had ever seen her. She reached behind with one hand and used the lip of the table to pull herself to standing. “Corwin, Rachel, you can open your eyes now. Henry,” she said, “come along with me.”
She walked through the upper rooms, standing in doorways, trailing her hands absentmindedly behind her along the walls as if her fingertips were collecting old memories. Here and there a few strips of dirty wallpaper had once been printed with lilac bunches and roses. One room had been a nursery, and where there had been a water closet, part of the wall had fallen away, the room dropping off abruptly into open air and the dusty lawn below. The tub and washbasin were fille
d with old charcoal.
There was a sharp, mildewed odor to the rooms. Plaster pieces lay fallen and cracked everywhere. One room was bare save for a pair of boots lined up against a wall, a broomstick planted stick-down in the hole of one as if awaiting the firing squad. “It didn’t used to look like this, Henry,” she blurted all at once, standing framed in the crumbling hallway. “It was a beautiful house once. Do you believe me?”
He went to take her hand, but she brushed by him now and ran down the stairs. He went to a window and looked down to the yard where she had joined the Colonel. She was leaning forward and speaking to the man’s unmoving profile, strands of her hair escaping the knot she had tied it in and puffing into cirri around her face. Henry crept down the stairs to the porch and stood half hidden in the doorway, next to Rachel. The Colonel seemed oblivious to his mother’s ferocious presence. He stared off into nothing as she spat words so quietly at him that Henry couldn’t make them out.
Just when it seemed he had turned into some Civil War statue the Colonel collapsed from his reverie and walked to the squash patch and pulled a rusty shovel from where it was stuck into the ground. “Boys!” he yelled toward the house, and looked off into the far distance as he waited for an answer. When none came, he did not call again, instead holding the shovel handle toward the open doorway where Henry was standing.
Henry’s mother snatched it away from the Colonel and stepped back, the shovel in one tightly clenched hand, the rifle in the other. “What in God’s name are you?” she hissed. “Henry!”
He was down off the porch and at her side in a moment. She did not look away from the Colonel as she held the rifle down for him to hold. “You remember how to use this, don’t you?”
Henry nodded, taking the gun in his hands.
“Yes, you do. And you remember how I taught you to pull the hammer back so the gun is cocked and ready to fire?”
He nodded his head once more.
“Good,” she said. “Now, I want you to cock the gun carefully, all right? Pull it back with your thumb like I showed you.” There was a click as the hammer locked. “Good, Henry.” She seemed to exhale forever. “Now I want you to point it at him, and if you see him move from where he’s standing, I want you to shoot him dead.” Her eyes flitted quickly down to see if he’d comprehended. “Do you understand me? If he moves while I’m digging this hole, I want you to shoot him dead in the face. You don’t even ask me if you should; you just pull the trigger. I need you to protect me, Henry. Can you do that?”
He clenched the rifle so tightly in his hands that his fingers began to tingle and whiten. In answer, he pointed the gun up at the Colonel’s head. The Colonel stared hard at Henry, and those spoon-colored eyes frightened him, but he hid the man’s face behind the eclipse of the rifle barrel and kept it there as his mother dug the grave.
The early-spring ground was still frozen solid beneath the slush, and digging was nearly impossible. She chiseled away at it nevertheless, steam rising first from her mouth and then from her entire body before she broke down and sat in the middle of the shallow gash she had cut in the yard. When she caught her breath she got up and began again. Henry’s arms began to tire and his fingers to feel numb from holding the heavy rifle trained on the Colonel. By the time his mother had dug a trench two and a half feet deep he was nearly weeping from the weight of the thing. She stood back and let the shovel fall on the frozen pile of chipped dirt by the side of the hole. She came and knelt next to Henry. He tried to give the rifle to her but after an hour his fingers seemed locked around it. Her eyes shone as she eased the hammer back down and helped each of his fingers to uncurl from the gun. “That was just fine, Henry. Your father would be proud of you.” She kissed his cheek and then heaved herself up with the rifle and walked up the steps into the house. The Colonel followed close behind her.
Standing at the foot of the table, she took her sister’s ankles in her blistered hands and made ready to lift them. The Colonel went to the head and stood looking down into his wife’s face. He removed his broad-brimmed hat and ran his hand through the plastered strands of his hair. “Well, that is that,” he said. He reset his hat firmly on his head and strode from the room without a second glance, leaving her still holding the dead woman’s ankles at the foot of the table.
She set the legs down and came to kneel next to Henry. “I’m going to need your help one more time. This will be hard, but we’ll go slowly. Will that be all right?”
Henry looked out the doorway where the Colonel had gone and nodded yes.
“Now, I want you to go to where I was standing and I want you to try to hold those legs up while I pull her off the table. Can you do that?”
He nodded again and went to where she had been standing.
His mother took the body by the armpits and began to pull it slowly down the length of the table. Henry followed the dead woman’s feet as they slid down the long plane of wood, and he tried to catch them as his mother finally pulled the last length of the woman’s body off the table, but the legs were too heavy and the little black boots passed through his hands and thumped to the floor. His mother caught her breath and considered her sister’s body. She looked at the doorway warily before taking the rifle from around her back and nestling it in her sister’s arms. They half carried, half dragged the deadweight a few feet at a time until, as they passed into the hallway and neared the front door, his mother gave up trying to carry the body at all. Instead, she grabbed whole ripping handfuls of the woman’s gown and heaved her over the threshold and down the porch stairs each step punctuated by the dragging rat-tat thump of the boots. At last the body rested in the dirt at the Colonel’s feet. She bent and pulled the rifle from her sister’s embrace.
“You haven’t got a box, have you?”
The Colonel stood erect and did not reply, so she cocked the rifle and handed it back to Henry, who pointed it at the man while she climbed into the shallow grave and pulled the body in after her.
She took a long time arranging her sister in the narrow hole, brushing the dust as best she could off the gown, combing her hair once more with the ivory comb. The arms, which had twisted in their joints from being dragged, did not look right. She tucked them behind the body, so that the dead woman appeared to be clasping her hands behind her as she walked through a doorway from one world into the next.
Finally, she closed her sister’s eyes, climbed out of the grave, and, after taking the rifle back from Henry, allowed her gaze to rove the house and the overgrown craze of bramble and crab-grass that lived in its shadow. She put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “We’re going now,” she said to the Colonel. “She was my sister but she was your wife, and I’ll not be the one to bury her. That’s for you to do, and I know you know how to do that at least,” she said. “It didn’t take you long to get my father in the ground. If he’d known what kind of a man you really were, he’d have shot you down like a sick horse. He might not have been a colonel, like you claimed to be, but he fought in a war too, and when he came home he held his head high.” She spat on the ground. “Look at you,” she said to the uniformed figure, “Colonel Morse.” She said the name as if it were a bad taste. “They were all so proud of you. She was so proud of you. A colonel. The last man to know my brother.” She snorted once with derisive finality. “To think anyone was ever worried about the family name because I married a coal miner.”
The Colonel’s eyes raked across her face, but he said nothing.
“Rachel,” she said to the small girl in the doorway. “I want you to come live with Henry and me now. Just leave your things and come along. This isn’t the place for you to live anymore.”
“Leave her be,” the Colonel said quietly. “That is my daughter.”
The girl in the threshold curled her neck around the door frame like a little swan, her body still subsumed by the interior shadows behind her.
Henry’s mother raised the rifle with one hand until it was pointing at the Colonel. With the other hand she b
eckoned to the girl. “Rachel? Just come along now, all right? You’re going to come and live with us.”
The girl wavered, looking in confusion between the face of Henry’s mother and the Colonel. The man did not turn to his daughter but continued to regard Henry’s mother.
“It’s all right, girl,” his mother said. “He isn’t gonna hurt you. He knows this is no place for little girls. You know that too, don’t you? Come along now.”
The girl’s dirty face flickered. She unfolded herself from the door frame and came walking slowly down off the porch. The Colonel lunged and grabbed her as she was about to pass. He pulled her close to him, and the girl did not resist, appeared in fact to relax into the surety of her father’s grip.
“She is my daughter,” the Colonel said. “You dare insult a grieving man.”
“Rachel,” Henry’s mother said. “Little girl, if you ever need anything, if anything ever happens to you, I want you to come find me, do you hear? You know where we live.”
All the way back to the cabin, his mother walked facing backward, the rifle gripped so hard in her hands that her knuckles looked as if they might pop out from beneath her skin. Once they were home, she put it up in the rafters where she always kept it and sat down on the footstool by the empty fireplace a long, long time, rubbing her shins beneath her skirt and staring into the charred rocks at the bottom of the flue. Henry went outside and played with the rabbits and chickens through the fencing. As the sun was going down, he went and threw rocks on the road. Only when the sky was as black as the fireplace itself did his mother emerge from the cabin and fetch some wood for a cook fire.