Death Watch

  The problem was, his father recorded information all through the book, as did its other contributors, taking every opportunity to add to, elaborate on, or refute what previous Undertakers had recorded. This made some pages read like overheard arguments. Even so, reading those words breathed life into their writers—his father and all the others who had written these lines and left them just for Silas to find and read. His people were speaking to him.

  The closer he looked, the more ages of the town, the more voices and hands rose up to greet and confound him. Not all the voices were kind. Some recorded terrible things, awful happenings with equally frightening resolutions. He could see that the book was more than a ledger. It was chronicle, journal, and spell tome, utterly occult even in its most common account. It was about the dead and what they can do and where they reside and how they may be dealt with, controlled, banished, and brought to peace. Many lifetimes of records spilled from the pages before him. There was no index. Some texts ended abruptly, as though pages had been removed. Some parts of the book wouldn’t lie flat because extra pages and portions of other manuscripts had been glued or stitched in. Some texts had been written over, or hastily added in the margin; others had been amended by the taping in of related works. He could see that someone, perhaps his father, had taped in some bookmarks with labels such as “Bindings,” “Banishing,” and “RE old district Restless,” but none seemed entirely consistent, or made a whole work of any topic. So Silas concluded that reading the ledger would be much like his relationship with his father: deep but hieroglyphic, rich but full of secrets, half-truths, mysteries, and fragments.

  He opened the ledger somewhere in the middle and began reading again. He decided this was how he would continue to read the book, since it was impossible to examine it in any kind of order. He would simply open it and look for any text he could read.

  He read day and night, pausing only to eat what Mrs. Bowe brought him. The fresh eyes of morning, Silas found, were best for the nearly illegible texts that had eluded him the night before. But he preferred night reading, because that was when the voices came. As he read, always by candlelight, he would begin to be able to make out voices that seemed to read along with him. He didn’t know what to make of this and was afraid to use the death watch in his house for fear of seeing something that would make him feel uncomfortable there. He simply imagined that these were the voices of his ancestors and the other folk who had added to the ledger over the years. Not so strange a thing, he thought, for when we read, don’t we summon the past into the present? Hold out our hand and invite an author to sit with us for a time? Although he sat by himself as he read, he never once felt alone while doing so, and because of that, he read from the ledger almost constantly, letting the book’s marvelous distraction dim, for a time, the candles of his other cares.

  SILAS HAD BEEN LIVING IN HIS FATHER’S HOUSE for almost two weeks. In that time, he’d scarcely left the place, spending almost all of his days and nights poring over the Undertaker’s ledger. He’d sleep briefly in his chair, or on the sofa in the study, but on waking, would continue reading.

  He was studying a translation of an obscure Egyptian text relating to the soul leaving its tomb to travel abroad, when he looked up to rest his eyes and saw through the window that Uncle stood on the sidewalk and was staring up at the porch. For an instant Silas panicked, but he quickly suppressed the fear that Uncle could bring him back to Temple Street by force. Silas was home. He was not a child to be fetched or taken anywhere he did not wish to go. Here, he was the man of the house.

  Silas opened his front door and called down to the street, “May I help you?”

  Uncle looked startled, as though he had been caught in the act of doing something, but gazed up at Silas from the pavement and said, “I believe you have borrowed my wheelbarrow.”

  “You came here for your wheelbarrow?”

  “Yes. They’ll have need of it in the garden.”

  Silas was sure he’d never seen a single gardener anywhere on Temple Street, and the back of Uncle’s property was a wilderness, so he knew Uncle’s visit was an excuse to confirm his location.

  “Of course,” said Silas. “I appreciate the loan.” He rolled the wheelbarrow awkwardly down the front steps and put it down roughly on the sidewalk by Uncle. “I’m sure you have a lot of heavy things to move around the house. I do hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.”

  Uncle refused to take the bait, saying instead, “Silas, your mother and I both wonder when you plan on returning home. A night or two out among friends is a fine thing, of course, but we are a family now and you should be with us.”

  Silas replied very calmly, “I’m not sure about that. I have work to do sorting through my father’s things, and I’m not sure how long that will take, so I think, for the time being, it’s best if I stay here.” Silas could see his uncle was clearly upset by this, but kept his composure as he shielded his eyes from the sun’s glare.

  “I understand your desire to pick over your father’s leavings, really I do. Very understandable, though there’s no reason we couldn’t have all his things brought back to the carriage house for you to peruse at leisure. I could even help you—”

  Silas put up his hand. The thought of it all sickened him: going back to Temple Street, moving his dad’s things, his uncle touching them.

  “No, no, Uncle. Everything is fine the way it is. Please give my mother my best wishes and tell her I will visit her soon.” Without waiting for a reply, Silas took the stairs two at a time, walked into his house, and closed the door behind him.

  When he entered Mrs. Bowe’s kitchen for lunch, he saw the table had already been set, spread with fresh fruit, cheese, and bread. Mrs. Bowe raised an eyebrow when she saw him come in and asked, “What was all that chatter on the sidewalk?”

  “My uncle came for the return of his wheelbarrow.”

  The color ran from Mrs. Bowe’s face, the blush of her cheek turning to chalk at the mention of Charles Umber.

  “He came here? Oh, Silas, he’s not in the house?”

  “No, no. I didn’t even let him on the porch.”

  She calmed a bit, the color returning to her face. “Good. Silas, I don’t ever want him in the house, not even in the garden, though I don’t suspect he’d ever step foot in there….”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I don’t want him here either.”

  Silas could see he had distressed her, so he changed the subject and asked Mrs. Bowe about her ghost-man. He’d been feeling guilty about not seeing Bea since he’d come here, and it was no coincidence that he was more than curious about Mrs. Bowe’s relationship with her dead boyfriend. And while he’d been too wrapped up in the ledger to think of much else, he had dreamed of Bea several times since seeing her last, and secret love was of interest to him, whatever the circumstances.

  “When you met, did you know right away you loved him? Was it love at first sight, I mean?”

  “Very much so.”

  “But you never got married? Didn’t your family want you to marry him?”

  “No, because everyone in my family understood that I would never marry because of my particular calling. Of course, that did not mean I couldn’t have a male friend. As you know, he was very special to me, and still is.”

  “Your father didn’t want you to marry? Didn’t fathers used to insist on stuff like that?”

  “It was not his decision. It was mine and my mother’s, and we decided that I should not wed, as is sometimes the custom among certain of the women in my family who are born with … particular gifts. In the Bowe family, it is the women who have the say over such matters; indeed, it’s our name the family bears. The men whom Bowe women marry either take the name Bowe, or keep their own, as it suits them, but Bowe women do not take other names. Not ever. Perhaps this was for reasons of maternal pride. More likely, people didn’t want Bowe women hiding behind the names of others. They wanted to know who we were and where we were. Sadly, my mother died e
arly, and perhaps in his grief, or because he began to change his mind about holding to custom, there was a brief time after my mother’s death when my father’s judgment became clouded by worries of what would become of his business. So he began to hint—just hint, mind you—that I might marry, for the family’s sake, despite his knowing that it would be a break with custom and the promise I’d made to my mother. There was someone he thought promising for a while, a young man, the photographer who worked with him. This was the photographer who would take pictures of the bodies, for the families to remember their beloved dead. It was quiet work, and he was a quiet man. He took beautiful, somber pictures, but there was something about him I didn’t like, even then. And in any event, I would never break with custom. So, I told my father, and this young photographer, to put the possibility of marriage from their minds.”

  Silas immediately knew who the photographer was, and he desperately wanted to ask her what she meant about her “particular gifts,” but he didn’t want to risk Mrs. Bowe getting offended, or reticent, or embarrassed, so he kept silent and listened as she continued.

  “My father and I argued about it for a long time, several months. He would go quiet about the proposal and then suddenly bring it up again. But always I told him there was no love there and besides, he knew my mind, and my mother’s, about my never marrying: A Bowe woman, such as myself, does not marry. I didn’t have to elaborate, although honestly, by that time, with all his simpering and long looks, I didn’t even want to be in the same room with the photographer.”

  “It worked out okay, though, right? I mean, no one forced you to take a husband, so it turned out okay. You just waited them out, and your father and the photographer eventually got tired of asking?”

  “It was even easier than that, though there was some unpleasantness.”

  “What happened?” Silas asked, moving forward in his chair.

  “The man who asked for my hand, the photographer—but of course by now you have figured out this is your uncle I am speaking about—he was … let go by my father.”

  “Fired?”

  “Let go. My father simply said he would no longer be in need of his services. He paid him a full two months’ wages, and that was dear money in those days because the town had long begun to go bad, folks moving away and fewer and fewer coming here to bury their dead. Nearly all the shipping had stopped and moved to the larger ports south and north of us. Even the overland import of Asian funereal vessels from the western coasts had begun to slow. I mean, we had money. Savings and investments left to us by relatives. This is a large house, but we built it and own it outright. I just mean to say, that was very kind of my father to give him so much after what he did.”

  “You don’t want to tell me what he did, do you?”

  “Well, Silas, he is, after all, your kin, and I—” She paused. “Perhaps, just for tonight, we should leave the past alone, just leave it. I won’t lie, your father did not think much of him either, but it’s not my place to dig up the awful past, particularly since he and your mother apparently have an understanding.”

  “I have already drawn my own conclusions about my uncle, and I don’t like or trust him,” Silas said firmly. “I think he probably had something to do with my father’s disappearance, though I can’t prove it yet. There is nothing you could tell me about him that would surprise me, and I doubt there is anything you could tell me that would make me enjoy his company any less.”

  Those words hung on the air for several moments before Mrs. Bowe began to speak again. Her brow was pressed into creases of concern, and she looked at Silas hard before she began.

  “Silas, I am so happy you’re here, happy to have the chance to know you. I loved your father so. Still love him, wherever he is. But I prayed you would never come here because of what I know about your uncle.”

  Silas could see she was becoming increasingly nervous and upset, and he put his hand on top of hers. She gasped slightly, breathing in deeply and slowly, trying to regain her composure.

  “All right then, all right,” she said, drawing in as much air as she could, calming herself. “Your uncle is a dark man, a man of dark thoughts and dark deeds. That’s what I know. Most of the folk in this town will not receive him. The people of the Narrows have threatened him with bodily harm should he come among them any farther than the Peales’s shop.”

  “What did he do to offend them?”

  “He married one of them.”

  “But his wife left him. At least that’s what he says.”

  “Yes. That is what he says. Whether you or anyone else believed him then or believe him now is another matter. She’s gone, and that’s all anyone knows for sure. And I know he had something to do with her very sudden absence.”

  “Do you believe that, or do you know it?”

  “I find it hard to accept that she would have left Lichport without so much as a good-bye to her kin. Leave your uncle? That I’d believe, for she was unhappy to have married him within the year. But go in the middle of the night to heaven knows where and never a word since to anyone in her own family? That I will never believe. When Narrows folk take their leave, they die in their beds, or at sea, and in no other way. And when they are “lost” at sea, they are never truly lost. Even then, word comes. Some news always arrives—the corpse will wash back up on our shore, or some sign will appear on the sea or be brought here by the tide bringing word that one of our own has gone below. Narrows folk don’t get lost. And they always send word … if they can.”

  Silas’s chair had become uncomfortable, and he couldn’t settle. He stood up and paced the floor. People lost. Lost. His father lost and his uncle right there, at the center again. And of all the ideas now set swimming in his mind, chief among them was the image of his mother sitting in that house, with him. He was glad to be gone from there, but he found little cheer in it because his mother was still there, and it was becoming clear that his search for his father would take him back to his uncle’s house.

  Why would the mortician fire Uncle? What kind of thing could a photographer do that was so wrong? Silas could see clearly in his mind some of the photographs from his uncle’s album. Faces that appeared to sleep, and yet were not asleep. He turned the pages in his memory. The dead boy leaning awkwardly against his young sisters. Living husbands holding their dead wives. Mourning mothers holding still infants in their arms.

  Suddenly one picture flashed into his mind, eclipsing all the others. The ivory-white hand. The picture that had brought on that awful, brooding quiet in his uncle. The hand. Silas knew the trouble must have something to do with the photograph of the hand.

  Mrs. Bowe looked at him questioningly, but then looked away as though she did not wish to hear what he might say. Silas reached out and put a hand on her arm, and spoke as softly and gently as he could.

  “The reason your father let my uncle go, was it over a picture of a lady’s hand?”

  “Oh, heavens!” she exclaimed, louder than she’d meant to. “Have you seen such a thing? Has he kept it after all this time? Then my father was right.”

  “He kept everything. He has albums of photos. He’s very proud of them. By the look of his house, I don’t think he’s ever thrown anything away.”

  Mrs. Bowe retrieved a handkerchief from her sleeve and gently drew it across her brow, which was glistening slightly in the low light.

  “Why would he keep such a thing, I ask you?” she said very suddenly. “Yes. It was the hand. I expect it seems such a little thing on the surface. I mean, it’s just a photograph. Seeing such a picture, you might even think it was taken by mistake as the corpse was being arranged.”

  “No,” Silas said gravely. “You can tell how careful he was when he took it. It’s a pretty special picture. I couldn’t stop looking at it.”

  “Awful, is what it is, when you think about it even for a moment! He just covered over the face of that kind, dear woman as if she didn’t exist. Covered her face all up and drew the hand away from he
r side and lay it on the dark cloth for contrast. Contrast! I’ll never forget that picture. I saw it on my father’s desk. Just a picture of a hand. But why do such a thing? You see, Silas, the folks who’d come to have a picture taken of the body of their dearly beloved, that is an act of love. Good photographs were expensive, and sometimes death came fast, so they might not have a recent picture of the dead to remember them by. Often, it was parents bringing children. The child died and the parents would want a picture with them. One last moment together before they put their own flesh and blood, and all those hopes, down into a bed of clay.

  “My father felt this was a holy thing, helping folks in those moments, helping them to remember their loved ones. He was proud to have the services of a good photographer who wasn’t troubled by taking pictures of the dead. It was always traditional here in Lichport, but in other towns, death portraits had gone out of fashion. That’s why so many folks would come here. Because we valued, still do value, the old ways.”

  “So he took a picture of her hand?” Silas said, trying to bring her back to the story she had started.

  “Yes, he did. And that picture had nothing to do with any kind of loving remembrance. He thought something was special about that woman’s hand, and he wanted a picture for himself. No one in the family asked him to take that picture. Who would? Knowing her, and the kind of woman she was and what she had done for her children … putting her other arm into the ground with them.”

  Silas only nodded, remembering the little things his uncle had told him about the woman, about the loss of her arm, but his mind was swimming now. His uncle was a man who took things that didn’t belong to him, a person who didn’t care about the wishes of others.

  “My uncle is a man, I think, who is proud of his trophies,” Silas suggested.