Are you doing well? Have you traveled the world as you wanted to? Remember the map on your wall? The red pins in the map where all your pen pals lived? Have you seen them yet? So many places, Eddie. We hope you’ve seen some of them. So many things to see in life.
We know you cannot reply, but every day we wonder how you are, what you’re doing, what kind of adventures your life has brought you. Sometimes we stop what we’re doing and say, "I wonder how Eddie’s doing"? or "I wonder to whom he’s married?" or "Where do you think he is these days?" Sometimes it’s almost a game we have. We’ll say, "He’s in Chicago now," or "He’s in New Orleans listening to jazz now." Wherever you are, we hope you are happy.
We are doing well. Things, at first, seemed so odd, but we’ve gotten used to it. Isn’t that how things are, Eddie? Things seem really scary at first, but once you get used to them, they become interesting, even exciting. We’ve gotten used to the oddities, the strange way things are here. We’ve made friends and seen amazing things. After the darkness, we felt so alone until we found each other again, and then everything, a whole new everything, opened up to us.
We don’t have much time to finish this letter, so we will be wrapping it up for now. We just want you to know this: We’re thinking of you. We're always thinking of you. Every day we love you, and we look forward to seeing you again someday when you can tell us about your life, your loves, and your triumphs.
Goodbye for now. We’ll try to write again, but if we can’t just remember that we’ll see you again . . . someday.
Love Always,
Mom and Dad
Eddie dropped the letter onto the table as if it were hot coals and stared at it. The coffeemaker finished brewing, and the kitchen was filled only with the sound of electric heaters buzzing to life again.
***
When he pulled up to the cottage, Eddie parked his car and switched off the ignition. He pushed open the car door and slammed it shut, his coat open and flapping in the cold night breeze. The cottage curtains were closed, and behind them the soft glow of lantern light flickered.
He stomped up the porch stairs, pulled the letter out of his coat’s right pocket, and reached up with his left hand to bang on the door with a closed fist. He pulled his fist back, and the front door swung open.
A short, thin elderly woman with smooth skin, gray hair pulled back into a bun, and wearing a red cable knit sweater stood in the doorway. Black reading glasses were chained around her neck. She folded her arms and squinted at Eddie. "The postal service know you’re bothering customers late at night?" she asked.
Eddie held up the letter. "No, but the postal inspector might find out that you’re sending harassing letters to mail carriers." She looked at the letter in his hand, put on her reading glasses, and her eyes widened. "You know?" he said. "Postal inspectors? They’re federal officers, and I don’t think they’re going to be too happy with someone harassing one of their own."
"Harass?" she said.
"That’s the way I’m going to file the criminal complaint," he said.
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "If that’s not the damnedest," she said. The wind blew through the slumbering orchard, and the trees responded with creaks and groans. "Technically," she said, "it was, well . . . forwarded to you."
"Sending harassing mail and operating an unregistered mail forwarding service?"
"You’re really angry, aren’t you?"
"You’d be too if someone’s sending you letters saying it’s from your dead parents."
"Oh," she said, nodding. "Yes, I can see how that would be distressing."
"You think, lady?" Eddie said, stuffing the letter back into his pocket. "Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Next time, maybe don’t use your wax and personal stamp. You must really not think too much of us."
She looked up, her eyes dark and hard. "On the contrary. The service of messenger is one of the highest callings anyone can have."
"Well, my calling doesn’t involve dealing with nutcases who have access to my name and address and decided to play games with me. Just wanted to let you know before I file with the postal inspectors."
"Mister, uh—?" she said.
"Don’t play games, you know my name," he said, turning to walk off the porch.
"Actually, I don’t," she said. "I write out so many letters, it’s too difficult to keep track."
"You got sick kicks, lady."
"That letter? It was from your parents. If that’s who it says it’s from, that’s who wrote it."
"They’re dead, lady," Eddie shouted. "You know that."
"They wrote it," she said. "They wrote it through me."
He stopped and turned to her again. "What?"
She stepped onto the porch. "If it says it’s from your parents, it’s from your parents. I wouldn’t remember writing it, but I hardly ever do when I write my letters. You see"—she looked around—"they used me to write the letter. No, that sounds a bit negative, doesn’t it? They used my, faculties, to write it. I put the pen to the paper or put the paper into the typewriter, and they . . . created the words. They addressed the envelope. Once that’s done, I simply seal it, stamp it, put it in the mailbox, and . . . that’s it."
Eddie looked at her, a strained smile crossing his face. "Holy hell," he said, "you’re crazy."
The woman took in a deep breath. "I know it’s difficult to understand. I didn’t understand for the longest time, but now I do. And I accept it."
They stood on the small porch facing one another, cold December wind now whipping around them, lifting dried leaves and skittering them over the road.
"Please come in," she said. "I'd rather not freeze out here." Eddie looked at the door and the windows, looked for the dark white-eyed wraiths. She motioned him to follow her inside. "There’s nothing in here that can hurt you. Nothing."
He followed her to the doorway and stopped. "I saw things," he said. "In the windows. A couple years ago."
"Please don’t call them things," she said. "They have feelings just like you and I do." She reached out her hand to him. "My name is Simmons. Persephone Simmons."
He reached out and grasped her hand. It was warm and soft. "Edward Mercury."
"Mercury," she said. "A fitting name for a messenger."
She walked into the cottage, and Eddie followed her, closing the door behind him as the wind pushed through the orchard and over the rooftop, spinning the weather vane to all points of the earth.
IV. The Messengers
The interior of the cottage was even smaller than Eddie thought it would be. Directly to the left of the front door was the living room, a room ringed by bookshelves stocked with leather-bound books and crammed with three small desks, one piled high with paper and pens, one with two typewriters, and one with letter trays and an unlit white candle. Beside the candle, Eddie espied a small wax stamping set, a shimmering gold fountain pen, and a bottle of black ink. At the center of the living room sat two dark cherry wood chairs and a low coffee table upon which a white hurricane lamp glowed brightly. To the right of the front door was a darkened room that Eddie guessed was a kitchen. In the corners, dark things churned like smoke.
Persephone led him into the living room and motioned to one of the chairs. "You might want to take off your coat," she said. "It may be a small, old house, but they knew how to build them back in the day. Gets fairly warm in here when I want it to, and tonight I want it to."
Eddie slipped off his coat and hat then sat in one of the chairs, his buttocks sinking into the thick pink seat cushion. He draped his coat over his lap and looked around the room at the books and the desks and the lampshadow dancing over the walls.
"I’ll get coffee," she said. "I always have coffee ready. Helps me do my job." She slipped out of the room, leaving Eddie to listen to the winds swirling around the front window. Sometimes things seemed to move in the corner of his eyes, a brief movem
ent of shapes taking curious glances at him, then evaporating when he turned to look. Sometimes feathery, whispery sounds chattered behind his head, and he’d lean forward, scan the room with his ears, and hear nothing but the cold December winds again.
On the coffee table, a shadow stretched towards the hurricane lamp, a shadow shaped like a long, bony hand with fingers that flexed and bent. Eddie watched the shadow as it crawled to the base of the lamp, reaching for the wick raiser knob, slowly, slowly—
"They do that sometimes."
Eddie looked up. Persephone stood in the doorway holding a tray with two large white porcelain cups and a large silver coffee pot. She smiled at him and walked to the table, setting the tray beside the lamp. "Sometimes," she said, sitting on the other chair, "sometimes they think they can turn off the lights, thinking it’ll make it easier to be heard. Usually the new ones are like that, the ones who don’t understand how it all quite works. They expend a lot of energy, you know? Like a, how would one say, like a rookie? But then they figure it out and stop wasting their time."
She reached down and started pouring coffee into the cups. "I use real cream, I hope you don’t mind," she said. "And I don’t use sugar. I prefer the artificial sweeteners, too. Once again, I hope you don’t mind. Kind of interesting how my tastes can be so anachronistic one minute then so current the next. But we’ve all got our inconsistencies, don’t we?"
Eddie smelled the coffee from where he sat and reached down for a cup. He kept it black and unsweetened, as he usually did when he wanted to stay awake. "They," he said.
"Excuse me?" Persephone sat back and sipped from her cup.
"You said they."
She nodded. "I did," she said. "And I know you’ve seen them. Oh, not just the one on the coffee table, but the ones at the window that one night a couple years back. I usually keep the windows closed so no one can see them, and that gets tiresome sometimes. I miss being able to open the windows at night and let in fresh air."
Eddie remembered that night, the shadows at the window with the dim white eyes. The shadows that seemed to join and separate like storm clouds. "I remember them," he said.
"And you probably see them in the orchard from time to time. Little glimpses. Like glimpses from the corners of your eyes. The glimpses of hands moving over the coffee table." She smiled and looked down, as if remembering sweeter moments from her life.
"What are they?" he asked. "The mail, from this house, where—?"
"When I was a little girl, this little house was my world," Persephone said. "Well, the house and the orchard. We never knew why my grandfather wanted to set up a citrus orchard in Pennsylvania. Apples would have made more sense, but my grandfather did things his own way, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But, for whatever reason, it was my world. Blossoms in the spring, lemons in the summer, falling leaves in the autumn, cold snow and dark light in the winter. At least that was a good part of my world."
She lowered the cup to her lap, looked directly at Eddie, her eyes dark and narrow. She then looked over at a clock on the wall. "It’s about time." There was a low rumble, and Eddie felt the floor shake under his feet. "Won’t take long," she said. "Just a few seconds."
The rumble built to a deep roar, and a bright light shone through the curtains. Enmeshed with the roar was a rhythmic thumping like railcars over a railroad crossing. The roar built until a locomotive horn blared and dopplered through the living room, the sound filling every corner, the light burning out every shadow. Persephone sat in her chair, gripping the cup with two hands. Eddie stood up, ran to the window, and pulled aside the curtain.
Rolling behind the house, a black locomotive roared past, pulling a short line of black Pullman passenger cars and a blocky, dark caboose with the word Lackawanna on the side in white lettering. After a few seconds, the engine roar faded, the clacking on the rails silenced, and the horn dissipated into the winds rolling through the orchard.
And then the room was quiet again. The deep room shadows returned. The hurricane lamp flickered slightly before burning bright once again.
Eddie turned to Persephone. "I thought that rail line was out of commission."
"Did you?" she asked.
He walked back to his chair, then sat down. "There’s weeds covering the tracks," he said. "The crossing on the main road that leads to that line has been torn up for a few years now. It’s just pavement. I’ve been taking that road every day for fifteen years. Never seen a train on it."
She took a sip of her coffee, looked him up and down, and began to speak. . . .
***
We had a small family, Edward, a very small family. It wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of my parents, grandparents, and relatives. We just came from, I guess you could say, weak stock. A child would be born, then die a year or two later. We thought it was bad luck. Sometimes we thought it was a curse or that the Lord Himself had it in for us for some reason. That was before we knew about genetic abnormalities, before we knew that some family lines just had one amino acid in the wrong place, one step on the ladder slightly cracked. I was a lucky one, of course, and my parents and grandparents watched me every minute, made sure my coughs weren’t too severe or that the scrapes on my knees wouldn’t consume me with infection. They spoiled me, I admit it, but I never let it go to my head. I knew they spoiled me because I didn’t die like the others, and I knew that I could die any day, just like everyone else. Just like you, Eddie. Just like your mother and father.
But I saw from an early age how things were different here in the orchard than they were out there. We’d take our weekly trips to church or to the grocery store in Pittston, short vacations to small lakes in the Poconos or to New York or Philadelphia, and we could all see the differences. The differences in light and shadow. The differences in sound. We noticed how things seemed to move in between the lemon trees and how voices seemed to come out of nowhere, like echoes from far away. For years we’d attributed it to just the isolation from the main roads, silence playing tricks on the mind, creating voices to fill the empty air, things like that. Sometimes I’d invite friends for sleepovers, and they’d notice the change in light and sound as soon as they turned onto Lemontree Lane. They’d tell me the following day how they couldn’t sleep because it was either too quiet or too filled with strange sights and sounds.
For a while I started to hate the differences. I just wanted to walk away from it all, live on a street with normal houses with normal sounds and normal light. But we couldn’t, of course. This small house, this orchard . . . it was all the family had.
But I had a happy childhood, Edward, I truly did. I had a grandfather and grandmother who played games with me and told me stories of faraway cities, and a mother and father who looked after my every need and made every day in this strange orchard feel bright, even when the light was dark.
Then my grandparents died. Too quickly. Lung cancer for one. Heart attack for the other. And in a year, it was just Mother, and Father, and I. Father did what he could to maintain the orchard, but it was too much, even with Mother and I helping every day, day and night, weekday and weekend, it was just too much. Eventually he had to work in the mines over in Duryea, like so many others did. The orchard made little money, but coal mines always paid, so Father would be gone all day, and I would be at school, and Mother . . . Mother would be here, in this house and orchard all wrapped up in silence and strange light.
Father and I would come home in the afternoon, and Mother would have dinner ready. When we sat together and ate, she began to look off in the distance, even when Father and I would speak to her. Not ignoring us, mind you, just concentrating on two things at once. She spent more time walking through the orchard, sometimes with Father and me, often by herself. I’d look out this very window here and see her walking among the lemon trees. Sometimes when I’d watch her, her body seemed to darken, even in sunlight, but just as quickly, the darkness would go
away. I thought maybe it was my eyes, that maybe I was getting sick like others in my family had, and I told her, but she’d only shake her head and run a hand over my cheek and say, "You’re fine, Percy."
Then Father and I noticed the papers on her desk. Mother was an avid letter writer, you see, and seeing ink-stained papers on her desk was nothing new, but we started spotting something strange. At first, the letters seemed to be filled with scrawl, just illegible scrawl. Father worried the most since he admired her handwriting so much, but then the scrawl began to take shape. Each letter had a different style of handwriting, some in elegant cursive, some in primitive print, as if each letter was written by a separate person.
Then we started reading the letters. Father and I knew it was an invasion of her privacy, but we were worried, as you could imagine. Mother in a quiet house all to herself. Maybe her mind was beginning to turn inwards? Maybe she was losing touch with reality? Each letter seemed to be the same: I am fine, I am content, I hope you are well, that sort of thing. Reassurance to, well, to whom Father and I had no idea until one day he finally sat with her in the kitchen, his clothes black with coal dust, and asked her what she was doing.
And all she did was smile and say, "Listen," and point at the ceiling. And Father did. He looked up, said nothing, and listened. "Don’t hear a thing," he said to her, and Mother just said, "It takes longer than that. You need to let all the silence wash over you, like water in a bathtub." Father just looked at her, and from where I sat out here I could see the worry in his eyes. I knew he was thinking about hiring a doctor we couldn’t afford or taking her to the mental hospital in Blackbridge.
"When you take away the noise of this world," she said to Father, "you hear the noise of the other world."
Father was wary of her after that, unsure if he should leave me in her care when he wasn’t around, but he had no choice. The salary from the mines paid the monthly obligations and not much more. If we needed professional help, we’d be unable to buy any. So, in the summer months, I spent the entire day with Mother, helping cook and clean as always, clearing away what little we could in the orchard, collecting lemons, buying groceries. And Father would come home, take me aside, and ask me how Mother was doing. I’d tell him the truth: that she seemed fine; sometimes distant, but fine. When we finished with morning chores, Mother would sit at her writing desk quietly, sometimes for almost an hour, close her eyes, then begin writing, almost non-stop, for three, four hours. Then she’d stop, get up, and call me to help make dinner.
Christmas in Culm: Three Stories Page 7