Ashes (16 page)

She reached her hand to me. "Come, I can't
work the oars alone. Benjamin is out there."

I lifted my hand to take hers, then dropped
it suddenly. I shook my head, more to myself than to her. This was
madness. All madness.

A great wave crashed and rolled back into the
sea, the current pulling her away in the boat. The last I saw was
her open mouth and startled eyes, stark against the whiteness of
her exquisite features. Then she disappeared into the howling
storm. I backed away from the rising waters, my arms thrown over my
face to block the blinding rain. I came to the dunes and scrambled
onto and over them, and found myself among the houses of
Portsmouth. I collapsed in exhaustion.

The storm abated as suddenly as it had
arisen. When I finally opened my eyes again, the moon was out and
the wind softly blew the tickling seagrass against me. I stood,
disoriented, and looked over the bay. The water was as smooth as
dark glass.

I walked between those silent houses, back to
my room. Surely I was dreaming, I would wake up and find my article
half-written, a litter of empty cans and dirty clothes around me,
my face stubbled and in need of a shave. Surely I was dreaming.

Yet I awoke in clothes soaked with
saltwater.

I spent the next day wandering around the
town. I forgot all about my assignment, and left my camera sealed
in its bag. I told myself over and over that I only had to get
through one more night, and then a boat would arrive to ferry me
back to the sane, ordinary world. I wouldn't let myself go mad
there in that isolated and grim ghost town of Portsmouth.

I came upon the cemetery and impulsively
passed through its fallen corroded gates. I went to that place
where I had first seen the young woman. In that brilliant light of
day, the sun reflecting off sea and sand, I saw the details on the
markers I had not observed on my first night on the island. The two
tombstones were identical in both shape and the amount of
erosion.

The first read "Benjamin Elijah Johnson,
1826-1846." Under that, in smaller script: "Taken By The Sea." The
one beside it, etched in alabaster, read "Mary Claire Dixon,
1828-1846." Hers bore a subscript identical to the neighboring
marker's.

What was most striking about the stones were
the engraved hands. The hand on Benjamin Johnson's marker, though
well-worn by a century-and-a-half of exposure, was clearly reaching
to the left, toward Mary Dixon's marker. Mary's hand, slimmer and
more graceful in bas-relief, reached to the right, as if yearning
for a final touch. The poignancy was plainly writ in that eternal
arrangement.

Mary's hand. I bent forward and placed my
fingers on it, lightly explored it. I knew those curves and
hollows, those slender fingers, the sculptor's skill too finely
honed. I had held that hand before.

I don't know how long I stood in the
graveyard. The shadows eventually grew long, the breeze changed
direction, and I knew that if I didn't move soon I might be forever
rooted in that spot. I tore myself away from the twin graves and
raced back to my room. I would not leave it, I decided. I would
remain there, in the sleeping bag or rocking chair, until my boat
arrived.

That night the clouds massed from the
southeast and the wind rattled the few remaining shutters of the
ancient house. I hoped with all my might that the weather would
hold clear, lest my boatman lose his nerve. But as I watched from
my high window, the storm raged toward the island, the wind
screaming as the rain began. Suddenly a bolt of lightning ripped
across the charred sky, and I saw her in the yard below the
house.

My Mary.

She looked up at me with those familiar,
ravishing eyes, that long hair darkened by rain, her comely form
encased in that grand dress. My heart beat faster and my pulse
throbbed with equal parts dread and desire. On a second lightning
strike that followed closely on the heels of the first, I saw that
she was motioning for me. I tried to pull my eyes away, but I could
not.

Though I commanded my flesh to remain by the
window, my legs found a will of their own and carried me to the
stairs. I went down, a step at a time, my heart racing with
dreadful anticipation. When I reached the first floor, the rain had
increased, and the whole house shook on its flimsy pilings. She was
waiting on the porch for me.

"Will you come?" she asked.

"Mary," I said.

She nodded, then, without a word, she turned
and ran into the brunt of the storm.

I jumped after her, dashing madly through the
dead town of Portsmouth, shouting at the sky, my curses lost
against the fury. The wind among the hollow houses sounded like the
laughter of a great crowd. I ran on, toward the beach where I knew
the longboat would be.

She had already worked the boat into the
water, and beckoned me with an oar. I fought through the turbulent
sea, finally gaining the stern and climbing aboard. She had locked
two of the oars and arched her back, dipping the oars into the
churning sea. I found two more oars in the bottom and locked them
into place, clumsily trying to match my strokes with hers.

It was useless, I knew. We were two against
the ocean's might, two against nature, two alone. But I didn't
care. All that mattered was Mary, pleasing Mary, being with
Mary.

Lightning lashed again, and I saw the
now-familiar tableau of sinking clipper and endangered rowboats. It
may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw a man standing in
the fore of one of the rowboats, waving his arms in our direction.
Certainly I imagined it.

"Benjamin!" she shouted, looking over her
straining shoulders. A wave crested nearby and the salt stung my
eyes and nose and throat.

"Row faster," Mary yelled to me. "We have to
save Benjamin."

And if we did? If somehow we managed to beat
the brutal sea and pull alongside his boat, if we then were blessed
with the miracle of returning to shore, what then?

Mary would have her Benjamin, and I would
have nothing. I would lose Mary.

I stopped rowing, and the longboat careened
against the waves. Mary saw that I had stopped.

"Help me," she said, those beautiful eyes
confused, her precious mouth moving in silent question.

I shook my head. "No," I said. "Benjamin's
dead. You're mine, now."

I reversed direction with the oars, working
one side until I turned the boat around. I expected her to fight,
to thrash her own oars opposite mine. But she released them, and
they slid into the waves.

She stood in the rocking boat, all grace and
glory and the deepest beauty ever crafted. Without a word, she dove
into the sea.

I shouted, "I love you," but I don't know if
she heard me.

I waited several minutes that seemed hours,
fighting the currents, watching for her to surface. The lightning
struck again, and in its luminance, I saw that the clipper and
rescue boats were gone, victims of the callous ocean. I imagined
that each flash of foam, each breaking wave, was the lace of Mary's
dress.

But she didn't appear. I battled the oars and
clawed my way toward shore, though I lost my sense of direction.
All that remained was to row and row, to drag the foundering boat
through the sea that desperately wanted to swallow it.

The storm soon dwindled and died, and I found
myself on the sand. As I coughed the salt water from my lungs, the
east glowed with the pink of dawn. I struggled to my hands and
knees and looked across the bay. No boat, no wreck, no Mary.

I hauled myself back to the house where I was
staying. It took me many minutes to navigate the stairs, then I
finally made it to my room and my chair and my high window. I took
up my post, a watcher, a lighthouse keeper for the dead.

Three days, and still I keep my post.

I hope the boatman has given up on me. As
much fear as filled his eyes when he hinted at the island's
secrets, I don't think he even came ashore. I wonder if he will
report my absence, or if he has his own orders, his own obsessions.
It may take a week or more before anyone finds me.

Plenty of time for her to find me first, if
she so desires.

Desire is an odd thing, a destructive thing,
a strangely beautiful thing. Perhaps that is the lesson of this
tale, the one that has replaced the travel article on my laptop.
Whoever finds this account can make of it what they will. For the
story was written many decades before, the ending the only thing
left in the balance.

The ending.

I hear her now, below me, her footsteps as
graceful as the rhythm of the sea. She climbs a winding stair,
closer now.

Or perhaps it's only the wind creaking
ancient wood.

I don't know which I dread the most.

Her arrival in lace and deceived rage?

Or her never arriving, never again granting
me a glimpse of her everlasting and non-existent beauty?

I can almost hear her now.

Almost.

###

WATERMELON

Ricky bought the watermelon on a warm
Saturday afternoon in September.

The early crop had arrived at the local
grocer’s in late June, fresh from California, but the available
specimens were hard and heartless. Ricky had decided to wait for a
Deep South watermelon, and those traditionally arrived many weeks
after the annual Fourth of July slaughter. Besides, that was early
summer. He had yet to read about the murder and his home life with
Maybelle was in a state of uneasy truce.

But now it was the last day of summer, a
definite end of something and the beginning of something else. The
watermelon was beautiful. It was perfectly symmetrical, robust, its
green stripes running in tigerlike rhythms along the curving sides.
A little bit of vine curled from one end like the cute tail of a
pig. He tapped it and elicited a meaty, liquid thump.

It was heavy, maybe ten pounds, and Ricky
brought it from the bin as carefully as if it were an infant. His
wife had given him a neatly penned list of thirteen items, most of
them for her personal use. But his arms were full, and he didn’t
care to trudge through the health-and-beauty section, and he had no
appetite for Hostess cupcakes and frozen waffles. Sheryl Crowe was
singing a bright ditty of sun and optimism over the loudspeakers,
music designed to lobotomize potential consumers. Ricky made a
straight path to the checkout counter and placed the watermelon
gently on the conveyor belt.

Now that his hands were free, he could pick
up one of the regional dailies. The front page confined the woman’s
picture to a small square on the left. Her killer, the man who had
sworn to love and honor until death did them part, merited a
feature photograph three columns wide, obviously the star of the
show and the most interesting part of the story.

“
That’s sickening, isn’t
it?” came a voice behind him.

Ricky laid the newspaper on the belt so the
cashier could ring it up. He turned to the person who had spoken, a
short man with sad eyes and a sparse mustache, a man who had never
considered violence of any kind toward his own wife.

“
They say he was perfectly
normal,” Ricky said. He wasn’t the kind for small talk with
strangers, but the topic interested him. “The kind of man who
coached Little League and attended church regularly. The kind the
neighbors said they never would have suspected.”

“
A creep is what he is. I
hope they fry him and send him to hell to fry some
more.”

“
North Carolina uses lethal
injection.”

“
Fry him anyway.”

“
I wonder what she was
like.” Since the murder last week, Ricky had been studying the
woman’s photograph, trying to divine the character traits that had
driven a man to murder. Had she been unfailingly kind and
considerate, and had thus driven her husband into a blinding red
madness?

“
A saint,” the short man
said. “She volunteered at the animal shelter.”

“
That’s what I heard,” Ricky
said. The cashier told him the total and he thumbed a credit card
from his wallet. People always took kindness toward animals as a
sign of divine benevolence. Let children starve in Africa but don’t
kick a dog in the ribs. For all this man knew, she volunteered
because she liked to help with the euthanizing.

“
At least they caught the
bastard,” the man said.

“
He turned himself in.”
Obviously the man had been settling for the six-o’clock-news sound
bites instead of digging into the real story. Murder was rare here,
and a sordid case drew a lot of attention. But most of the people
Ricky talked with about the murder had only a passing knowledge of
the facts and seemed quite content in their ignorance and casual
condemnation.

Ricky took the watermelon to the car, rolled
it into the passenger seat, and sat behind the wheel reading the
paper. The first days of coverage had focused on quotes from
neighbors and relatives and terse statements by the detectives, but
now the shock had worn off. In true small-town fashion, the police
had not allowed any crime scene photos, and the early art had
consisted of somber police officers standing around strips of
yellow tape. A mug shot of the husband had been taken from public
record files, showing mussed hair, stubble, and the eyes of a
trapped animal. The District Attorney had no doubt kept him up all
night for a long round of questioning, to ensure that the arrest
photo would show the perpetrator in the worst possible light. No
matter how carefully the jurors were selected, that first
impression often lingered in the minds of those who would pass
judgment.

A week later, the coverage had made the easy
shift into back story, digging into the couple’s history, finding
cracks in the marriage. The only way to keep the story on the front
page was for reporters to turn up personal tidbits, make
suggestions about affairs and insurance, and build a psychological
profile for a man who was so perfectly average that only hindsight
revealed the slightest flaw.