Death Watch (31 page)

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.

S
ILAS 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 early, 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.