Ashes (31 page)

“
That’s lovely,” I say. I
know nothing of poetry.

“‘
January three,’” he
continued. “ A dead calm all day. Towards evening the sea looked
very much like glass. A few seaweeds came in sight; but besides
them absolutely nothing all day, not even the slightest speck of
cloud.’”

“
Much like this morning,
only now the wind is picking up and there’s a swell
rising.”

He closed the book and stared out at the sea
for a moment. “What do you know of murder?” he asked, appraising
me, his eyes gleaming.

“
Very little,” I said. “I
can’t imagine such a horrid thing.”

“
I can,” he said. “Far too
easily. The mind of man is a foul, corrupt thing. And when a man is
alone with his thoughts . . .”

He drained his glass again, refilled it,
spilling a few drops on the table. “But forgive me,” he said,
louder. “I forget my manners. You are a guest and I have made you
stand.”

He rose unsteadily from the chair and sat on
the bunk, indicating with his glass that I was to take the chair. I
hesitated, afraid to linger but also wary of his wrath. I sensed he
could be set off with but the slightest provocation, and I began to
regret my bold adventure. The sky outside had grown even darker,
and though it was scarcely noon, the ocean and sky merged on the
horizon into a single bruised color, clouds whipping like rags on a
line. The wind screamed at the gaps around the windows, and from
below came the dull roar that the man imagined were the voices of
the dead.

I shivered, though the room was warm. “I must
be getting home,” I said. “My parents are waiting, and I dare not
get caught out in this storm.”

“
Why don’t you stay until it
blows over?” he said, leaning back on the bunk a little. Men who
worked with shipping had a certain reputation, and I suspected this
man was no different. Though part of me had longed for some romance
resulting from my encounter with a lighthouse keeper, I didn’t want
to suffer the rough attentions of an animal. The desire for
solitude in itself did not make a man sensitive.

“
They’ll be expecting me,” I
said. I took a tentative step toward the trap door, loathe to
negotiate those many steps again without a lantern.

Poe grabbed my arm, and his eyes were dead as
coal. “I can’t be alone anymore,” he said. “Don’t you hear
them?”

I tried to pull away, but his was the grip of
a lunatic. “Please,” I implored, silently cursing my recklessness
in coming here. A barren life on a lonely strip of shore was better
than no life at all, and the excitement I had craved was now full
upon me, but I wanted it no more.

“
The voices,” he said with a
hiss, his face clenched, sweat clinging to that high, broad
forehead. “With every storm they come, the souls of the shipwrecked
and lost at sea.”

As the wind picked up, I thought I could hear
them, but perhaps it was only the roaring heartbeat in my ears. I
wrenched free, desperate and afraid. He grabbed at me again, and I
dodged away. He howled, the mad sound blending with the wind until
it filled the watch chamber.

“
Don’t leave me,” he
shouted, diving toward me. I stepped backward, into the space of
the open trap door, falling to the top step and then into the
yawning black abyss, toward those tormented voices at the base of
the lighthouse.

I stayed with Poe for the remainder of his
term. He disposed of my body, of course, weighed me down by
slipping scrap iron into my dress, and set me out to sea in the
early morning dark of high tide. I came back with the tide the next
night, watched as he brooded with his bottles and occasionally
scrawled barely legible words on his papers. I read his logbook
over his shoulder, what I could of it.

I waited until he fell into a restless sleep
before I began whispering. Poe was right, those voices in the well
of the lighthouse were of the dead, and I both imitated and joined
them. Poe tossed in his sleep, sweated like driftwood, and finally
woke. “Who’s there?” he asked.

I told him my name, as I told all of them my
name in the years and centuries to come. He finished his story,
wrote poetry, and drank to forget me, though he could not forget
the one who was his constant companion. He had come to the
lighthouse to be alone, but in the end, that was the last thing I
allowed him. He read to me from his journal: “It is strange that I
never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word
has: ‘Alone.’”

And though Poe left at the end of the year, I
imagine I haunted him for the remainder of his days. I longed to be
the last thing of which he ever wrote.

The sun has risen on a new year. The watch
chamber has changed little, though now the lights are electric. I
learned from the living as my days ran together, as the lighthouse
keepers became park rangers and oceanographic researchers and
meteorologists. They brought computers, radars, radios, and
televisions, sounds and pictures that compete with the eternal
beauty beyond the windows. The ships have changed, no longer using
sails, some hovering over the water as if on cushions of air.
However, the sea has changed little, and I have changed even
less.

In recent years, the occasional paranormal
investigator appears, laden with equipment, but they are not as
interesting because they too willingly believe. This year, a woman
occupies the watch chamber. Over the last century, women have
become more common, though usually the chamber is still operated by
sole sentinels. I prefer it that way. They end up lonely while I
always have company.

I go to her now, my dress like a sheet of
torn vapor, my hair trailing, my fingers scarcely visible and cold.
I tap on the window, whisper like the wind, aching to know my new
companion.

She looks up from the computer and frowns at
the sunset on the horizon. She doesn’t yet understand that I am the
horizon, the point between the dead and the living. Where, as Poe
said on one of those long nights we spent together, the moon never
beams without bringing him dreams. All of them dream of me sooner
or later. I grow more solid with the sinking of the sun, and I
smile as I drift into the chamber.

She pushes back in her chair, the wheels
squeaking like frightened rats. She doesn’t believe her eyes. They
never do.

“
Who are you?” she
says.

I almost call myself “Mary,” but that
deception rang hollow centuries ago. As I told Poe, I want to be
remembered as my true self, not as another.

“
My name is Annabel Lee,” I
say.

I’ll be with her until the end of both of our
days. As with Poe, my first and always, she will make me
immortal.

###

SEWING CIRCLE

“
The only Jew in town,”
Morris said as Laney pulled into the church parking lot.

He pointed to the stained-glass window cut
into the middle of the belfry. It looked expensive, more than a
little country church could afford. Jesus smiled down from the
window, arms spread in welcome and acceptance.

“
The story’s about the
sewing circle, not the church,” Laney said.

“
Jesus as a ragpicker. Was
that in the Bible?”

“
You’re too
cynical.”

“
No, I’m just a frustrated
idealist.”

Morris rubbed his stomach. He’d gone soft
from years at a desk, his only exercise the occasional outdoor
feature story, usually involving a free meal. He’d given up the
crime beat, preferring to do the “little old lady in the holler”
stuff, the cute little profile features that offended no one.
Still, the fucking quilt beat was the bottom rung on the ladder
he’d started climbing back down a decade ago.

“
Come on, it’ll be fun,”
Laney said. She was the staff photographer, and true to her trade,
she managed to keep a perspective on things. Cautious yet upbeat,
biding time, knowing her escape hatch was waiting down the road.
For Morris, there was no escape hatch. The booby hatch,
maybe.

“‘
Fun’ is the Little League
All-Stars, a Lion’s Club banquet where they give out a check the
size of Texas, a quadriplegic doing a power wheelchair charity run
from the mountains to the coast. But this”—he flipped his notebook
toward the little Primitive Baptist church, its walls as white as
pride in the morning sun—“Even my Grandma would yawn over a sewing
circle story.”

“
You can juice it up,” Laney
said as she parked. She always drove because she had two kids and
needed the mileage reimbursement. All Morris had was a cat who
liked to shit in the bathtub.

“
That’s what I do,” he said.
“A snappy lead and some filler, then cash my checks.”

Though the checks were nothing to write home
about. He’d written home about the first one, way back when he was
fresh out of journalism school. Mom had responded that it was very
nice and all but when was he getting a real job? Dad had no doubt
muttered into his gin and turned up the sound to “Gunsmoke.” They
didn’t understand that reporting was just a stepping stone to his
real career, that of bestselling novelist and screenwriter for the
stars.

They headed into the church alcove, Laney
fidgeting with her lenses. Morris had called ahead to set up the
appointment. He’d talked briefly to Faith Gordon, who apparently
organized the group though she wasn’t a seamstress herself. The
sewing circle met every Thursday morning, rain, shine, flood, or
funeral. Threads of Hope, the group called itself. Apparently it
was a chapter of a national organization, and Morris figured he’d
browse the Web later to snip a few easy column inches of back
story.

The alcove held a couple of collection boxes
for rags. Scrawled in black marker on cardboard were the words:
“Give your stuff.” Morris wondered if that same message was etched
into the bottoms of the collection plates that were passed around
on Sundays. Give your stuff to God, for hope, for salvation, for
the needles of the little old ladies in the meeting room.

“
Hello here,” came a voice
from the darkened hallway. A wizened man emerged into the alcove,
hunched over a push broom, his jaw crooked. He leaned against the
broom handle and twisted his mouth as if chewing rocks.

“
We’re from the
Journal-Times,” Morris said. “We came about the sewing
circle.”

One of the man’s eyes narrowed as he looked
over Laney’s figure. He chewed faster. “‘M’on back,” he said,
waving the broom handle to the rear of the church. He let the two
of them go first, no doubt to sweep up their tracks as he watched
Laney’s ever-popular rear.

The voices spilled from the small room, three
or four conversations going at once. Morris let Laney make the
entrance. She had a way of setting people at ease, while Morris
usually set them on edge. His style was fine on the local
government beat, when you wanted to keep the politicians a little
paranoid, but it didn’t play well among the common folk in the
Appalachian mountain community of Cross Valley.

“
Hi, we’re with the paper,”
Laney said. “We talked to Faith Gordon about the circle, and she
invited us to come out and do a story.”

Five women were gathered around a table, in
the midst of various stitches, with yarn, cloth scraps, spools of
different-colored threads, and darning needles spread out in front
of them.

“
You ain’t gonna take my
picture, are you?” one of them asked, clearly begging to be in the
paper. That would probably make her day, Morris thought. The only
other way she’d ever make the paper was when her obituary ran. She
was probably sixty, but had the look of one who would live to be a
hundred. One who knew all about life’s troubles, because she’d
heard about them from neighbors.

“
Only if you want,” Laney
said. “But a picture makes the story better.”

“
We just thought the
community would be interested in the fine work you ladies are
doing,” Morris said. That wasn’t so bad, even if the false cheer
burned his throat like acid reflux.

“
If Faith said it was okay,
that’s good enough for us,” said a second woman. She was in her
seventies, wrinkled around the eyes, the veins on her hands thick
and purple, though her fingers were as strong as a crow’s claws.
“I’m Alma.”

“
Hi, Alma,” Morris said. He
went from one to another, collecting their names for the record,
making sure the spelling was correct. You could miss a county
budget by a zero, apply the wrong charge in a police brief, and
even fail to call the mayor on Arbor Day, and all these mistakes
were wiped out with a Page 2 correction. But woe unto the reporter
who misspelled a name in a fuzzy family feature.

Alma Potter. Reba Absher. Lillian Moretz.
Daisy Eggers. The “other Alma,” Alma Moretz, no immediate relation
to Lillian, though they may have been cousins five or six times
removed.

“
Just keep on working while
I take some shots,” Laney said. She contorted with catlike grace,
stooping to table level, composing award-quality photographs. The
janitor stood at the door, appreciating her professional ardor. He
was chewing so fast that his teeth were probably throwing off
sparks behind his eager lips.

“
So, how did you ladies
meet?” Morris smiled, just to see what it felt like.

“
Me and Reba was friends,
and we’d get together for a little knitting on Saturdays while our
husbands went fishing together,” Alma Potter said. “They would go
after rock bass, but they always came home with an empty
cooler.”