Death Watch (39 page)

But the ghost only went on repeating itself, over and over, with almost no alteration to the stream of words flowing from it, and soon, its face was running again with dark mud, most of its features reburied in the slurry.

Silas felt his face reddening in increasing aggravation. He was partially angry at himself. There might be another way to ask, and he didn’t know what it was. Or maybe the ghost was afraid to admit what had happened to it. Maybe there needed to be more of an exchange. If Silas spoke to it about something else first, maybe it might speak more about itself. What to ask it? Maybe the ghost knew something about his dad. It had been in the alley a long time, maybe it would be easier for it to talk about something unrelated to its own misery. Silas thought this might be worth a try and said, “You know, I’ve lost a parent. My dad disappeared, and I haven’t seen him in over a year. Maybe you’ve seen him. His name was Amos Umber. My dad. Missing. Have. You. Seen. Him?”

The ghost’s form began to shake and the space on its face where its mouth might have been tore open. A shriek flew from it, piercing the air. “Where are the bones?” it howled pitifully. “Where are no one’s bones?”

Silas was stunned by the ghost’s sirenlike cry. His eardrums were close to bursting. The scream cut through his flesh, his blood became ice, and the bones of his body felt like they were cracking from the sound. He opened his mouth and, unable to stop himself, began to scream as well.

The ghost went silent.

Silas’s scream fell back into his throat, and he stood for a moment, unable to think or move. His ears pulsed with pain. He couldn’t see for the fear that now began boiling over into anger.
He blamed the ghost for not wanting to be helped, and he began to think of other people he knew who never listened to reason, like his mom, and so consigned themselves to needless suffering.

He began yelling, not stopping to think about what he was saying, just yelling and letting all the bile out of the bag.

“You’re dead, you know! Cold! Over! You are yesterday and never again, so give it up, will you? Hello? Can. You. Hear. Me?”

The moment those words left him, Silas could see the ghost cracking at the edges of its form, like mud drying and crumbling. He immediately regretted his selfishness.
Think!
Silas told himself.
Just shut up and ask it again. Don’t talk. Listen
.

“Sir, I am sorry. I spoke first and should have allowed you a turn to speak. Please tell me, why are you here? Why are you so troubled? Please say the words yourself.” And because he’d read an account in the ledger where such phrases were traditional, Silas added, “In God’s name, please speak.”

And so the ghost began.

The Lonesome Valley was growing lighter, as though true morning was coming to it for the first time. The long, solitary shadows seemed to shorten, the lightening world adding solidity to the ghost’s form.

“He went away, across the sea.”

The ghost stopped, as if remembering something, and then began again.

“
I
went away, across the sea, to seek my fortune. And fortune I found, though it was many years of hardship and toil before that happened, and so I sent no word home, for fear of shame. But years later, I found myself more fortunate, and with my rich earnings I sailed for home again. When I arrived in Lichport, it was too late to put my heavy bag of gold in the bank, for it was
almost night when my ship arrived. So I made for home, happy to be bringing such good fortune home to my ma and pa. When I arrived at the cottage, I hardly knew it, roof falling in, a broken window. And I knew then that my parents had fallen on very hard times indeed. All the better a homecoming it would be, for I would pour gold into both their hands. I knocked on the door and when my ma opened it, how careworn she looked. She stared at me as though it were the first time she’d ever laid eyes on me. My pa, too. I had grown a beard and looked only a poor, wretched traveler. Here’s good luck, I thought. The laugh’s on them! I asked for lodging for the night, and tomorrow, I thought, I will surprise them indeed: their own son returned home and they not able to even recognize him!

“They must have seen my bag, or heard the chink of gold within it, for so poor had they become, so destitute and miserable from holding in their hearts the thought of their son, lost over the sea, that they conspired and while I slept … while I slept …”

The ghost paused in his tale, and his whole frame seemed to run red, as though he was standing beneath a gutter spout and the sky was raining blood.

Silas looked at the ghost. He did not speak, did not look away. After a few moments, the ghost continued.

“They murdered their son while he slept. Their own son. They murdered
me
while I slept because they had become so poor. Because I had been gone so long and had been no help to them.”

The ghost could now be very clearly seen. Silas saw a young man standing before him, perhaps in his late twenties, his face and head covered over with the wild tangle of beard and hair long from sea travel.

“May I see them?” the ghost asked Silas.

“I don’t know.” Silas was unsure what the ghost meant. Was
the ghost asking to see his bones? His parents’ bones? “I don’t know what happens now. You are still here, so I think there is still something to do. May I ask you your name, please?”

“I was Roger Arliss in life.”

“Mr. Arliss, may I ask you one more thing?”

The ghost nodded.

“What became of your body? Where did your parents bury your body?”

The ghost’s form shivered in the air, but he pointed to a tree a little ways off from where he and Silas were standing. Silas drew his hands from his pockets and released the dial of the watch. The valley faded from view, and because good words had passed between them, Silas found he could still see the ghost, who continued to point at the small, thick tree that could be seen through the window of the cottage. A dim sun had risen. Night had passed.

“Mr. Arliss, I think you would like to be buried next to your parents. Is that so?”

The ghost wept at those words, and Silas continued.

“I know your name. I have seen the name Arliss among the graves on Beacon Hill. If I can restore you to them, I will. Mr. Arliss, may I have your permission to move your bones?”

Still crying, the ghost nodded his head slowly up and down.

Silas went into the little overgrown yard behind the house and found the rusted head of an old hoe. He began to dig in the soil at the base of the tree the ghost had pointed out to him. It was late morning when he found the bones a few feet down in a shallow grave. Silas brought the bones out into the air, unwinding some from the roots that had held them during the many years, they had been hidden in the earth. With a piece of yellowed moth-eaten lace curtain from the cottage, he wrapped the bones of Roger Arliss and carried them away.

Silas took Silk Street along the waterfront and then climbed the footpath up to Beacon Hill cemetery. He couldn’t quite remember where he had seen the Arliss graves, though he knew they were old and closer to the top of the hill than the bottom, so he walked in a tight spiral, slowly working his way up the hill. By the time Silas had found the graves of Roger’s parents, Elias and Judith Arliss, on the Beacon, it was late in the afternoon. He set the parcel of bones down on the earth between his parents’ graves.

“Master Umber,” said a familiar voice behind him, “how nice to see you again. What brings you back to our hill of peace, may I ask?” Without turning, Silas knew it was the voice of the sexton.

“Good afternoon, sir. I am here on business, I’m afraid.”

“Yes. I can see that you are. You have your father’s look about you.”

“I wonder if you can help me. I need—” Silas began, but the sexton gently interrupted him.

“If you return to the hollow oak at the bottom of the hill, you will find that your father kept a spade hidden within the trunk for, I believe, such a purpose as yours. Bless you and bless your ways, Master Umber. You are as fine a man as your father.”

Silas had knelt to unwrap the bones, and when they were set out on the lace with the late-day sun on them, he rose and turned to shake the sexton’s hand, but found him gone, already around the bend of the hill, and only his shadow trailing behind him. Silas walked down to the tree and there, inside the trunk, he found the spade waiting. He lifted it from the tree, feeling the polished handle, the blade indented from years of digging through rough earth and small stones. He wondered how many times, for how many graves, his father had used this spade.
No different
, Silas thought.
I am no different from him now, for we are in the same business. I am
about to dig a grave for a ghost with my father’s spade
. And as strange as the thought might have seemed, there, on the Beacon, it felt the most natural thing in the world.

With the spade in hand he climbed the hill again, and between the two Arliss graves, he dug a hole perhaps four feet down. He dug until he found the other bones. He wanted to put Roger Arliss truly among his kin. Though the earth was loamy and soft, it was much harder work than he’d imagined, and by the time the hole was deep enough, Silas’s back and arms were sorer than they’d ever been and the day was nearly spent. Into the hole he set each bone, one at a time. Then over the bones he laid the piece of lace and, taking up the spade once more, covered everything up with earth. The world was going quiet at the coming of twilight. The birds had stopped calling from the trees of the hill. Silas stood by the graves in that silence for many moments.

When he looked up, the sun was very low, and the edges of the sea were burning with the last embers of the dying day. In a moment that light would be extinguished by the falling night, and the surface of the water would be still and dark.

He wondered if his father had some formula or ritual words for moments such as this. In the ledger, many of the words he’d seen seemed stiff, formulaic and formal. His gaze hovered on the two names cut deep into their shared tombstone, and with his finger, he traced the letters of the son’s name on the stone next to those of his parents. Then he spoke their three names out loud into the evening air—the father, the mother, the son—and then said, simply and very tenderly, “Rest in peace.”

And they did.

Silas looked down, opening and closing his aching palms, and despite all the dirt pressed deep into his skin, he could just trace the lines of his father’s hands in his own.

A
S SILAS DESCENDED THE BEACON
, he found the town flooded with fog.

Instead of going home, he walked back into the Narrows, though he could hardly see ten feet in any direction. He wanted to walk and revel a bit in his success. With the fog came a sharpening of his other senses, and soon he heard sounds he’d hardly ever noticed before: the soft rasp of shoes on stones, the lap of the water against the pier posts—higher pitched than the low flop of wave on sand—the whip of a flag atop a mast, bells from buoys and bells from ships, a world of common music heard only when listening particularly, or when a heavy mist made the world blind.

Silas found Mother Peale waiting near the water. She had been standing and “having a listen” as she called it, waiting for something. Silas came up next to her and looked out in the direction of the water.

“There is peace now on the Dogge,” he said.

“Truly?” she said with real surprise in her voice.

“Yes,” said Silas. “I think Roger Arliss is at peace now. I feel that he is. Walk on the Dogge and see.”

“In time. Sometimes, after a bad stint, a place needs to be on its own for a while, to resettle, if you take my meaning. I am impressed that you could do what your father couldn’t. Your father tried many times, but that ghost would never speak to him. But not everyone can see the same thing, even when they are both
looking right at it.” She went quiet for a moment, but then added, “Or maybe you and that ghost have something in common.” Before she could explain, or Silas could question her, she said in a whisper, “Do you hear that? A quiet sea. Slack tide. Not coming in, not going out. Just a moment in between. Maybe that’s what it’s like for
them
. Not here. Not there. Nowhere. Tide’ll be coming in in a moment. But for the lost ones, the tide never changes. It just goes on and on, never an end to the pause, until, well, I guess until something changes. Like now. Things are changing here. You can feel that, I know.”

“What do you think it is that’s causing the change? What’s making people so nervous?”

“Some say it’s you being here. I agree.” And she smiled at him. “Others say things haven’t been right since your dad disappeared. Lots of folks think things have been wrong for a long time. Maybe that’s true too. Some say it’s because the mist ship is coming. Because even now it’s making its way into port. Nights like this herald hard days ahead. But there’s no mystery to it. Every hundred years it comes. ‘Everything to its hour,’ as my mother would say, ‘everything to its appointed hour.’ A hundred years. That’s the bargain. One hundred years between visits, but sure as anything, when the years run up to a clean century, there it will be. That ship has always run regular,” she insisted. “It’s predictable, like the holy days coming and going, each to its own quarter…. All Souls’, and Yuletide, and Midsummer, round and round and back again.”