Death Watch (32 page)

“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 her 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.

“That is precisely what he wanted,” said Mrs. Bowe quickly,
as though they were of one mind on the matter. “A trophy. Something only for himself. Something to look at when he was alone. Well, she wasn’t his to take. She wasn’t an object. She was a person and deserved respect, alive or not. My father saw that picture and got quiet and then got terribly angry. He went to his desk, got the money, and sent your uncle from this house. Needless to say, marriage between your uncle and myself was never mentioned again. But every day for the rest of his life, whenever my father looked at me, there was an apology written on his face. How the thought of me marrying such a man haunted him.”

“What did the rest of my family make of this business?” Silas asked.

“Your grandfather came to call, of course, wondering why his son had been sent away. I’ve never been sure what my father told your grandfather, but whatever it was, he obviously wasn’t surprised by it, and he never asked my father about it again, though they remained friends. I think your grandfather pitied your uncle. Maybe that’s why he left him the house and the money like he did. Or maybe your uncle just worked on him until he signed everything over to him. Don’t know. I know this much, though: Your father was left right out of the will, and that was your uncle’s doing, one way or another.”

She was breathing hard again, worked up as if everything was happening in the very moment of the story being told. She turned her head toward the window, where the dark glass reflected them both now that the sun had set.

“I thought my father destroyed the picture, but it’s clear now your uncle kept copies of all the pictures he took. I am sorry to hear that, very sorry. I hate to think of him looking at those people. Running his fingers over their faces.” She looked back
from the window and closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled very weakly.

“Well, it was not long after that incident that I met my man. My father made no objection, although I know he wished we would have married and had children. And when my man died in the war over the sea, I wore black as any widow would, and no one said anything against it.”

Silas could see Mrs. Bowe was tired and feeling uneasy, as though she felt she had said too much. Maybe it was just the mention of his uncle’s name that brought some portion of him into her life again, into her home from which he had so long ago been banished. But there was so much she knew. So much more Silas wanted to know, but already he was feeling protective of her and didn’t want to do anything that would upset her further. It was clear she was always going to be of two minds about sharing troubled family histories with him. Maybe about everything. He knew Mrs. Bowe felt responsible for bringing him into Amos’s world, but the more they talked, Silas was also pretty sure she felt guilty about whatever she told him.

Her fighting days were over, he could see that. That was why she didn’t leave the house. She was safer inside with her memories to protect her. She had done a lot for him already. She’d made a home for him and had given him the key to his father’s world, and he loved her for it. So no more questions if he could help it; he would have to keep Mrs. Bowe out of it.

Silas knew then that he had to keep looking for his father, and he knew, from what Mrs. Bowe told him, that part of his search might take him back toward Uncle’s house on Temple Street. What he needed most was some perspective on his father’s work and a better understanding of the town, and the parts of the town where that work took place.

There are also hells beneath hells. Some hells communicate with others by passages, and more by exhalations …

—C
OPIED BY
J
ONAS
U
MBER FROM
H
EAVEN AND
H
ELL
,
BY
E
MANUEL
S
WEDENBORG
, 1757

T
HE ROOM WAS FAR COLDER
than the air outside, and steam rose off Uncle’s face as he entered his Camera Obscura, still sweating from his walk home with the wheelbarrow. As he set the complicated locks on the door behind him, he could see his breath in the broken reflection on the ornate metal lock plates. He locked this door to keep the room’s occupant in and also out of habit. But since Silas had left, there was no one else in the house who might disturb his private work in the Camera. Most days found Dolores numb before noon and lounging in the parlor or “retiring” in her room. Since Silas had left, the mood in the Camera had become angry and agitated, far more so than before. The room’s occupant knew Silas was gone, and the air bristled as Uncle entered by himself. When he walked in the room, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and he could feel the cold anger filling the chamber with an acrid, metallic smell. His brow furrowed in disappointment as he lit a candle.

His plans had begun to fray about the edges. He knew it, and his own aggravation wasn’t helping. Uncle had hoped Silas would come back to the house. He had hoped this wouldn’t be difficult to accomplish. Indeed, Dolores was doing most of the work for him. Uncle assumed her slipping health would inspire her son to come back to her side. Let her slip. Then Silas would come back to play the dutiful son.

From the middle of the chamber, Uncle could feel eyes watching him.

He spoke into the air of the room, trying to invoke a feeling of confidence and calm.

“I can see why you long to be near him. Despite his upbringing, there is something very remarkable about our Silas. Perhaps it is his sympathy. Or his independence. You admire that. And he knows you’re here, doesn’t he? He can feel your distress. He sees what a person has inside. That kind of perception is admirable. It can only come from pain. He has been hurt. You have been hurt. That is the kind of bond you can’t just conjure into existence. But we shall make a home for him, won’t we? Right here with you. In the bosom of his family. In the very house where his father was born. What symmetry.”

Uncle pulled a chair up to the glass, settling in for a chat.

“You would like to have your kin closer to you? Yes. I now see what is best. You want Silas close to you…. Yes, that will remedy all, but it will take a little time. He must come of his own accord. At least at first. Now he is in that
other house
, and it will be hard to get him out.

“Time. Always time. I know. I know you are lonely.

“Perhaps there is something I can do to fill the gap until Silas returns. Perhaps there is someone who can share your discomfort and bring you some ease, someone who might calm your shattered nerves. Someone to mother you a bit until our larger plan ripens.

“Will you abide? Just a little longer? For me? If I bring you something nice?”

The candle blew out, leaving him in the acrid darkness of the Camera, and Uncle said with a tired sigh, “How kind of you to indulge me.”

S
INCE SEEING THE GHOST
of Mrs. Bowe’s man, Silas almost never put down the death watch. If it wasn’t in his hand, it was close by, in his pocket, or on the table in front of him, where he could always see it, although he was careful not to stop its hands. He wanted to use it, but felt doing so for mere curiosity would be somehow … inappropriate. It was a tool, not a toy. And knowing now what it could do, he was also frightened by it even as it exerted a pull on his imagination. No matter where he was—in his house, walking through the town—he wondered what the death watch might show him should he choose to use it. Maybe there was a way to use it to help him find his dad. His great-grandfather had told Silas to see more of the town if he wanted to find out more about his father.

There was no straight path to the top of Beacon Hill, so Silas picked his way among the crowded gravestones that jutted up like crooked teeth from the mossy, flesh-fed earth. He tried not to walk on the graves, but it was hard to tell exactly where they were. Very few of the tombstones were aligned or faced the same way. Most leaned in various disjointed angles. Some had fallen forward, their names now pressed into the ground. Others reclined as if looking up at the sky, waiting for something to happen. Silas walked around the hill, his motion upward slow as spaces between
the gravestones appeared infrequently. Simply climbing over any of the monuments only to hasten his ascent was unthinkable, and besides, there were the names.

Everywhere he looked, the names of the dead were inscribed about him. Fisher. Barnaby. Kettle. Ransom. Hariot … He could almost make a song of the inscriptions—a song leading right back to the earliest days of the town’s founding. Silas noticed that as he went higher on the hill, the names seemed stranger, more old-world, harder to read, and he realized that the ancient townsfolk began by burying their dead at the hilltop, and slowly made their way down with the passing generations. It seemed only right the oldest townsfolk should have the best view. Mounting the top of the hill, Silas could see why the first Lichporters chose to bury their dead here: Out a bit, past the ragged edges of the Narrows’ slate-roofed tenements and low gabled houses, the sea ran wide and far, flowing over shoal and deep water, streaming back across the horizon to where the first settlers had started from. From the hilltop, the ancient dead could look over their town and remember their distant, ancestral homelands, all at once. Surely, with such a view, the dead rested well here.