End of the Road (27 page)

“
There isn’t anyone here,”
said Bert.

“
Where was it that William
hung himself, do you know?”

“
Chuck said it was right by
the steps. He climbed the stairs and tied the rope then he jumped
off the steps.”

Bert was looking up at the ceiling near the
steps still holding the bag of weed. They heard more sounds. It
seemed to be a voice and some banging coming from behind the
bookcase.

“
We should leave,” said
Jerald.

They turned to return to the room with the
window to escape. They didn’t make it. They heard a screeching
noise behind them as the bookcase slid open. They turned and in the
dim beam of the flashlight saw the figure of a young man standing
in front of the open darkness.

“
Ahhhhh! It’s William’s
ghost,” Bert screamed and tried to run.

The ghost ran past Jerald knocking him to
the ground and sending the flashlight spinning across the floor.
Jerald was flat out on the floor but he heard the sound of
something crushing Bert’s skull then he saw William’s ghost
dragging his friend Bert back to the darkness. Jerald was
terrified. His legs were weak and it was so dark. He got up and
felt his way back to the room where he left the cross. Holding it
by the crossed part and intending to use the heavy base as a weapon
he returned and approached the dark hole behind the open bookcase
where the ghost had taken his friend.

“
Bert?” Jerald said in a
quavering voice. “Are you in there?”

The ghost popped out from the darkness and
grabbed Jerald by his shirt and threw him further into the room.
Jerald dropped the cross and hit a cold damp stone wall and slid to
the floor. He heard the bookcase close. An overhead light came on
and there stood William.

“
Please William don’t kill
us,” said Jerald.

“
I’m Jack. William was my
brother.”

“
What kind of place is
this?” asked Jerald.

Bert lay crumpled on the floor.

“
It was an old coal bin,”
said Jack.

Jerald glanced around. There was a small
table with three dolls in really old clothes seated in chairs
around the table.

“
What are those?” Jerald
pointed to the old dolls.

“
My sisters play with
those,” said Jack.

“
Why doesn’t the pastor get
them some new dolls?” Jerald was nervous and confused so he just
kept talking.

“
Our Dad doesn’t know about
this place,” said Jack. “No one does.”

“
How did you get the dolls
and the table in here?” continued Jerald.

“
I got the toy table and
chairs at one of the church’s yard sales. They must have crawled in
here by themselves. You’ve heard the stories about the three little
girls that disappeared sixty years ago? When I found out how to
open the bookcase they were already here. They must have crawled
through the coal chute and died when no one found them.”

Jack walked over to where he had dragged
Bert. He stepped over his lifeless body and pressed on the stone
wall. Part of the wall slowly slid open.

“
Over here is the root
cellar,” said Jack.

He turned around and dragged Bert by the
ankles into the new darkness. Jerald watched Bert’s body slowly
disappear through the passageway. As Jack dragged Bert’s lifeless
body Bert’s arms extended above his head as if he was giving Jerald
one last chance to save him. Jerald shook his head back and forth
saying softly, “No. no. no.” The cross still lay on the floor
beside him. He got up from the floor and grabbed the cross by the
top part again. He entered the root cellar that was dimly lit from
the light in the coal bin and swung the cross high up and crashed
it down on Jack’s head. He stepped back and tripped over a fourth
mummified body. Jimmy’s skeletal arms reached for Jerald as he
screamed and backed away. He heard the bookcase open. He looked up
just in time to see Jack’s two sisters standing there. One of them
pressed the stone that closed the root cellar passageway trapping
Jerald alive inside with the two fresh corpses.

As the pastor was jogging around the
community the next morning, he saw a car pulled over near the
parsonage. He tapped on Reeta’s car window. Reeta woke up blinking
from the sunlight. She put in the key and turned it far enough to
hit the button lowering the car window.

“
Are you alright young
lady?”

“
Uh, yeah. I’m sorry I must
have fallen asleep.”

Reeta had no idea where the boys were but
she was already late for work. She started the car and drove
home.

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The End

Chapter 25

Once We Were Children

By Chris Ward

Makayoshi died in the
spring, just as the cherry blossoms began to fall. The
eighty-fourth time his eyes had looked upon the pink
sakura
trees of
Nakajima Park was his last. Takahiro didn’t mourn his younger
brother’s death. He walked to Nakajima Park, sat on a bench among
the dying cherry blossoms and toasted Makayoshi with a glass
of
sake
made
from their own home-grown rice. His brother would have
approved.

He didn’t want to cry. He didn’t like
crying, it made him feel weak, and for as long as he could remember
he had been the cornerstone of his family, the dependable one.

He wrote a letter to Ayana in Okayama,
asking if she would come back for her great uncle’s funeral, and
perhaps bring the children?

She didn’t reply in time.

Makayoshi was cremated on
May 14
^th
. On the 15
^th
, Takahiro, together with
his brother’s neighbor, Kobayashi, interred the remains into the
family shrine on the little hill outside Matsumoto.

Ayana’s reply arrived on
the 17
^th
:

Sorry, Grandad, I was away on business.
Sorry to hear about Uncle and sorry I couldn’t make it. I’ll try to
visit during Obon. Love, Ayana.

It was a postcard, not even a sealed
letter. He knew she resented his failure to convert to the
electronic generation, but he would be following Makayoshi sooner
rather than later and didn’t see the point of stressing himself out
on something he would never understand.

He hadn’t wanted to cry. But he had.

#

‘
Dad, look. Oh, look.
It’s a girl. A beautiful girl.’

His eyes filled with tears as Kentaro held
out the tiny bundle of life, pink and clammy in a hospital blanket.
They had thought Hiroko couldn’t conceive, had tried everything.
When she fell pregnant after some experimental IVF treatment, the
family still hadn’t dared to believe. But here was the wonderful
result, a beautiful little girl.

‘
She has her
grandfather’s eyes, I think.’

Takahiro smiled. Maybe she did.

#

It was always planting time that Takahiro
liked best. Knee deep in mud, a bright sun shining overhead, the
hum of conversation all around him. Things always worked in order
of seniority, so Takahiro and Makayoshi would plant the seedlings,
while Kentaro, together with Makayoshi’s boy, Seima, would wade
along in front of them carrying the trays. Takahiro’s wife, Yumiko,
and Makayoshi’s wife, Tomoko, would prepare the picnic of rice
balls, sushi, boiled eggs and fried chicken. Hiroko and Makayoshi’s
daughter, Hiromi, got the bum job, cleaning out the old trays in
the small canal that ran between their rice field and that of Mr.
Tanaka next door.

As a baby, Ayana was as well behaved as a
child could be, sitting in her pushchair while the others worked,
only crying when she was hungry or needed changing. While they
chatted over their picnic she would be passed from lap to lap, and
Takahiro would always want to hold on to her the longest, look down
at her tiny puckered face as it broke into a grin aimed only at
him.

‘
I’ll bring my sister
next year, promise,’ Hiroko teased Seima, who was thirty-one that
first year after Ayana was born. ‘She’s looking for a
husband.’

‘
Who says I want a wife?’
Seima replied with a wide grin designed to mask the insecurities
they all knew he felt inside. ‘Maybe I’m happy as I am.’

Kentaro punched his shoulder. ‘Come on,
cousin. She’ll love you. You’ve got a great car!’

Even Ayana seemed to giggle in Takahiro’s
arms.

‘
Stop teasing him and eat
your boiled egg,’ Tomoko scolded.

Above them a warm June sun beat down from a
cloudless sky. A sparrow chirped from a tree back near the road.
Takahiro wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow and smiled. Good
times, good times.

#

Takahiro was seventy-nine and Makayoshi
seventy-five the last year they planted the rice field. Of course
it was all done with a machine by then, but even so, riding what
looked like a tractor crossed with a spider under the hot sun was
too much for either of them. This would be the last year, they both
decided when it was finally done.

And another book was closed.

#

Ayana had been gainfully scrubbing seed
trays for five years when the phone rang one evening in May.

‘
Hiroko has cancer,’
Kentaro said. ‘We’re going to stay in Osaka for a while so she can
have treatment.’

Takahiro didn’t cry after he put down the
phone, but he frowned for a long, long time.

#

‘
Another boiled egg?’
Tomoko said.

Takahiro took it, as was expected of him.
The women had made eight, the usual number, but there were three
spare. No one wanted to say anything, so Takahiro, Makayoshi and
Seima had an extra one each.

Hiroko had died. Her
family was from Osaka so Kentaro had stayed down there for the
funeral. He had transferred his job too, because he couldn’t bear
to take Ayana away from Hiroko’s grieving parents.
We’ll visit often
, he
said.

#

Kentaro was true to his
word, at least in part. Ayana was sent up for a visit every spring.
In the little canals around the rice fields they caught tiny fish
and eels and kept them in a tank in the house. Once they found a
rhinoceros beetle hanging from a tree branch and put it into a
plastic case because Ayana said she wanted to give it to a boy she
liked at school. Takahiro had wondered about taking it on
the
shinkansen
,
but they forgot to close the case properly and in the night it got
out and flew off somewhere. For years afterwards Takahiro expected
to find the shell of its armoured body down behind a bookcase or
under a pile of old magazines, but he never did.

The fish, little
dojo
, which became
harder to find as the years passed, lived. They bred. Every few
months Takahiro or Yumiko would scoop out a handful of babies that
were little more than swimming eyes and let them back into the
little canals where they would drift away towards the river beyond
the rice fields. Even though there were always too many for the
tank, Takahiro hated to see them go.

#

Often, sitting on the bench in Nakajima
Park, with a hot sun beating down, Takahiro would let his head loll
back, allow his eyes to close, and he would dream of those
days.

Ayana had found a frog once, a really huge
one, more like a toad, and popped it under Seima’s sweater as they
sat eating their lunch one year. Seima and Kentaro were sharing a
couple of beers and a joke. Seima leaned back, reaching for a rice
ball, not looking. The toad bounced under his hand. Seima shrieked
and rolled backwards. One leg slipped into the muddy water of the
rice paddy, and only Kentaro’s quick hand stopped the rest of Seima
from following it in. For a moment he looked shocked, then Ayana
laughed, quickly followed by the others. The toad bounced across
Seima’s chest, into the water and away.

#

Seima, always the butt of jokes but a good
sport with it, died in a car crash at the age of forty-one. He was
still unmarried, but Makayoshi had heard talk of a girlfriend,
albeit in passing. No girl came to his funeral, so they never knew
for sure.

#

Of course he missed them, it went without
saying. He missed them all, but more than anything he missed how
they had been. The most tiring days of toil in the fields were
painted with a sheen of romance when folded back into the arms of
nostalgia. He remembered bright sunny days and laughter, jokes and
picnics, companionship, family. He remembered them all, and he
missed them. He missed them so much.

#

After Makayoshi’s death, Takahiro made his
decision. He enlisted the help of Ryosuke, Mr. Tanaka’s son-in-law,
to plough the field. It had grown dry and wild, a haven for weeds
and other brush, but once the earth was broken the water would do
its work. Five years had passed since the sluice gates from the
little canal had been opened, and it took Takahiro a morning of
toil to clear away the accumulated soil and weeds to get the water
flowing again. Old Tanaka and Ryosuke tried to help, but Takahiro
wanted to do this alone. His back screamed at him to give up, to
quit, but he was made of solid stuff. Finally the water began to
flow, and from then on things were easy.

Within two weeks, a couple of lengthy
sessions to clear the old roots of the weeds had left the rice
paddy looking as clear and fresh as it always had.

Takahiro wiped away a tear.