The End of the Sentence (3 page)

There were more letters on the floor when I got there. I stacked them up, and set them on the end table inside the door, weighing them down with the envelope from Ralph’s.

Behind me, the mail flap clicked. Smiling up at me, again, from the floor, the picture of not-Row.

“God damn it!” I yelled, and kicked the end table over.
Approved.
Who approved this? It was harassment, stalking, something. Letters fluttered through the air, and the envelope slid to the ground with a heavy thunk. I shoved a hand through my hair and stared at the mess, feeling stupid. “God damn it.”

I took the can of paint upstairs. Painting over the graffiti might not be his plan for the day, but it was mine. As I painted, I made my mind as white as the wall. I covered over the red door, and along with it, I covered thoughts of other doors, with bodies behind them, thoughts of doors through which letters came unceasingly, doors through which my son would never walk, no matter what some impossible monster promised.

I painted, pushing the roller over the walls until they were clean, white and blank. When I was finished, I felt like I was the only one wearing my skin for the first time that day.

I washed, and went downstairs, looking for food. There was a cold supper in the refrigerator—a roast chicken, potatoes, green beans. An apple pie. Another bottle of wine. Even if the rest was wrong, the ghosts were kind. I ate and drank until I was full and drowsy.

There was a letter on my pillow upstairs.

Ten days time. I felt alone, and not just alone. Afraid. What was being asked of me? I had to find out, ask someone,
tell
someone. I had to call the prison. 

In the kitchen, I heard water running, dishes clattering against each other. Someone was humming, the faintest hum. A song, but I couldn’t catch it. The sound made me want to cry, remembering my life in the world I’d left behind. Row being bathed in the kitchen sink. Then him in my arms in his towel, his little head against my chest. I was breathing too fast. Every time he was offered back to me, I believed it, and then I had to remember he was gone. 

Fake. But what if it wasn’t? Those stamps.
Approved.
Someone would know. I’d find someone who knew what he was. I felt drunk. I pictured my house, standing out here in the dead center of nowhere, no neighbors, no fence. I didn’t have a gun. Nothing to protect myself, protect my house. What was being asked of me? Make shoes? Keys and bindings. Iron and doors? I didn’t understand.

I had to call the prison. I was resolved, but as far as I could see, there weren’t even any phone lines out here. Maybe they’d been taken away by whatever rural phone company there was, after the house next door caught fire. I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. I’d dropped it in a trashcan somewhere in the Midwest, when the Greyhound pulled over to let lost souls stretch. Now I regretted it. 

I drove into Ione again, late at night. Moon up, yellow and thin as a toenail clipping. My granddad had been a captain working in the Gulf of Mexico, but early in his career, he’d been second mate on a Norwegian freighter. I thought about a story he’d told me once, about a ship made of the nail clippings of the dead. I heard him again like I was six years old, sitting with him on his porch in New Orleans. 

“Naglfar, they call it,” said my granddad. “The nailship. At the end of the world, Naglfar comes loose from its mooring. You have to trim the fingernails of the dead, boy, or they go to build that ship. You don’t want to leave a dead man with his fingernails long.”

I saw my granddad’s white beard, his dark skin, and his glittering eyes. He stretched his fingernails out to show me. Trimmed to the rind. He looked at my face, and then laughed. 

“Your gran told me not to tell you those stories anymore, or you’ll wet the bed, won’t you?”

“Will not,” I said. But I did, later that night, imagining the nail ship making its way through some terrible ocean, an anchor chain made of toenails, and a hull made of fingernails torn from their beds. I had nightmares about Naglfar for years. Now I was having waking nightmares about iron growing out of bones and I couldn’t make sense of them. I imagined nails, iron nails. I’d read a story years before about a woman who grew fingernails instead of hair, and I imagined that for a drunken moment, a miserable creature covered in hard, sharp scales.

On the steering wheel, I looked at my own fingernails. For the first time in years I’d let them grow beyond their edges. What kind of fool thought he wasn’t five minutes from dying? I shook my head. I was losing it. 

Some old story, all of this. I was here, in Oregon, in October, working in heat hot enough to bake my brain. I didn’t think I needed to go to a hospital, but then I wondered if maybe I did. I hadn’t gone after what had happened at home. I couldn’t imagine going to a hospital when it wasn’t me who was injured, but my mother had tried to get me to go. “If you don’t sleep, you die,” she’d insisted, not realizing that dying was what I wanted. 

Above me, there were shooting stars, and below me there were rabbits on the highway, white shapes moving across the black, discs of brightness that looked like floating Christmas lights, and then resolved into eyes. I swerved to keep from hitting them. 

I drove past the grain elevators and the little cemetery, its stones yellow under the moon. None of my thoughts were good. Who was buried there? Was there a plot of earth waiting for a madman and a murderer?

Whatever he was, whoever he was, Dusha had given me ten days. I felt the unwilling tug of a kid forced onto a team for dodge-ball, standing on a gymnasium floor, the red rubber ball in my hands, a fast dodger, but a bad thrower. I’d always been a coward. Running from someone throwing me what I deserved. Eventually, I’d turn my back and it would hit, whatever was coming. 

I needed to call the prison. I wanted to be punished, but it wouldn’t fix what I’d done. They’d judged me not guilty, and in that moment I knew the gap between law and truth. 

I felt guilty. 

There were days I wanted to volunteer for execution myself. That picture of Row. In the picture, I saw my wife’s face. He had her eyes. He had my mouth. Who knew what else he’d have had, had he lived? My bad judgment? Her anger? 

I felt the jig of rocks under my wheels, and turned the car back into the road. Not sober. I drove to the diner. 

Night, and lights glowing out over the dark high desert. It was full, and I wasn’t expecting that, the windows showing me the population of Ione. There was Ralph from the hardware store, and the girl from the library, sitting at the counter on red vinyl stools that had seen better days. I stumbled out of my car and into the dark lot. 

I had a sudden vision of the face of Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, looking up at me from under thick black eyebrows, but I didn’t have any idea what Dusha looked like. I could only see his smile. It was a smile of certainty, that I would do what he wanted, that I was weak. 

What was I doing? Trying to report someone already imprisoned? The letters were
Approved
, ruled safe. 

I hadn’t slept in too many months, was all. Paint fumes and heatstroke too. I looked into the diner. It looked safe in there. Black coffee. A pot to myself, at the counter. Maybe I hadn’t really been eating, either, but just imagining the meals served by ghosts. Maybe I was starving. I’d walk into the diner and start over. It was the American way. I could be allowed to erase my history. People did it all the time. Through the windows, I watched a woman pushing her plate away, a waitress silent movie-ing her hands in the air. I stood in the dark, longing for everything inside. I wanted them to see me, to make sure that I could be seen. 

I realized suddenly that I didn’t know what had happened to the people next door, my neighbors, the burnt-out rectangle. I didn’t know if they’d lived or died or run off into the dark. I didn’t know if they were in prison with Dusha.

I made it almost to the door, but there was a sound I couldn’t place. I realized it was the hissing of the lights. I looked up at the diner sign. 

LISCHEN’S DINER it said, blinking on and off. Then it didn’t say that anymore, but something else entirely. 

The letters blinked out completely one by one, until they read only HER. As they did, the girl from the library walked beneath them, unbraiding her hair. She turned her head, looked out the window, and saw me. She smiled. She waved her hand. She called me in. 

HER.

The lights were red and blazing and I stared at them as she beckoned. The remaining letters of Lischen’s Diner blinked back on, as though they hadn’t been off. I walked to the diner door, and opened it, slowly. I hadn’t been this drunk in a long time, and I hadn’t even realized it was happening. 

The guy from the hardware store turned around. 

“Hey, there, fella,” he said, and the way he said it was so friendly, I almost cried out in pain. “Have you tried the keys yet? They’ve been there years. Might be for locks you got, might not. The people who lived there were strange ones. You’re not from that family, are you, boy?”

My knees buckled. 

“I need to use the phone,” I said. “I don’t have one where I live.”

The girl from the library was already on her feet. 

“Are you okay? You don’t look okay,” she said. “How about some coffee?”

“He’s the new guy,” said Ralph. I swayed, catching myself on the back of a booth. The girl had a mug in her hand, and she was coming to me, concerned. 

HER, the lights had said. Her. 

“I’m Lischen,” she said, and my guts slid sideways like a glass door. 

“How is that?” I managed. 

“How’s what?” she said. “Lischen March. I know, it’s a funny name, but it’s in my family.” 

“You know you’re—”

She smiled at me. 

“Drink that coffee. This is my place,” she said. “Well, it’s my mom’s place, anyway, and before that my grandma’s. I know you. I work at the library. You went running out like dogs were after you. You’re Malcolm, who bought the Weyland place. You’re the talk of the town. Drink the coffee. We know what drunk looks like.” 

That perfume was still on her, a sweet, familiar forest smell, and her face was sweet too, and tender, sunburnt cheeks and hair bent from the braid she’d taken out. She was still wearing the same dress, flowers twining up from the hem to wrap around her. Maybe in her late twenties, not the teenager I’d first taken her for. I felt the ghost of the ring I’d had on my finger, and I pushed past her. 

“I need to use the phone,” I said. “It’s urgent.”

The guy behind the counter pushed an old phone at me. Rotary. I listened to the dial tone. I was real. There were people outside this town. 

I caught myself dialing my old number. No. I put the receiver down again, with effort. 

“I need a phone book.”

He had one. Once I had it in my hands, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. This phone book wasn’t for Salem. Salem was 200 miles away. I decided to try to trust them.

“I need to call the prison. The Oregon State Penitentiary, I think?”

They looked at me, all these innocent people in this innocent town. None of them knew anything about what was happening to me. I got off the stool, exhausted. This had been a mistake. Ten days allotted to me by a madman. It wasn’t real. 

Ralph sighed, and put his cup down on the counter. 

“So you’re looking for Ironhide,” he said.

I collapsed to the ground in a clattering heap of red-glitter vinyl and silver chrome diner stools. Shock, exhaustion, drunkenness, and there I was, crumbled on the floor, no legs left to stand on.

“Come on, now, fella. Up you come.” Ralph picked up the stools, then tucked his hands under my arms and pulled me up as well. “Malcolm. Have a seat now, Malcolm.”

He heaved me onto one of the stools, and Lischen set a slice of grasshopper pie in front of me. “It’s on the house—a welcome to town,” she said.

My brain was a page full of crossed-out writing.

“Ironhide,” Ralph said. “No need to call the prison to find out anything about him. Eat up now. Everyone around here knows the story. Not the kind of thing we’d forget, even if Lischen weren’t named for her great-aunt, God rest her soul.”

“Why do you call him Ironhide?” I asked.

“Well, you can hardly expect a person to spit out his mouthful of a name every time, now can you? And besides, he had that condition. Give me a slice of that pie, too, Lischen.”

She smiled as she slid the plate over to him, and the bracelet she wore glinted in the light from the fluorescents overhead. Normal things. I could barely hold myself still in my seat. Better to be back on the floor, where the world might stop tilting. They were acting as if Dusha Chuchonnyhoof was nothing.

“Exactly,” Ralph said.

“What?”

“That name you just said. Dusha whatever it was.” Ralph took a bite of his pie.

I hadn’t realized I had spoken.

“Condition?” I asked.

“Something to do with too much iron in his blood. Made him rust from the inside. And he smelled like iron, stank of it, if you got too close to him. Some said that’s what turned him into the monster he was, but I believe he was a monster already, to do what he did.” Ralph shook his head, his great mane of hair haloing out with the motion.

“Did it make him immortal, too?” I took a small bite of the pie, and then another, larger one.

“Good, isn’t it?” Ralph asked. “Lischen bakes them. And no. He wasn’t immortal. Ironhide is good and dead. Has been for years. They executed him, way back when.”

He looked at me, his eyebrow up. 

“But”
I’ve been receiving
“there are letters”
from him
“from the prison”
saying he’s returning
“to tell me his sentence is almost over.” In my head, the words I could not spit out echoed.

“That was the condition of the commutation of the sentence,” Lischen said, her voice so quiet I could hear the sign outside crackle and spark. “When he wouldn’t tell the location of the bodies. My family never gave up hope he would, that confronting his own illness and death might cause compassion in him, and so we asked that he not be put to death. But we also wanted justice. So unless he confessed, and told where to find them, his body would remain in the prison, in its cell, for two lifetimes and a day.”

I looked up at her. “Why the extra day?”

She startled, then relaxed. “A day to punish him for any other sin, I guess. Maybe they thought he’d done more than they knew.”

“The letters are just to tell you it’s almost time to come and get the remains. Condition of buying the Weyland house, I expect,” said Ralph, his fork screeing across his empty plate.

But the letters are from him.
“But why would the prison expect the Weyland family to take responsibility for his body?”

“The family worked for him, way back. Blacksmiths. Ironhide was the one who bought the place for them, that and all the land around it. Olivia, the lady who owned the house before you, sold off some of the land when things went hard for her,” said Ralph. “But check your papers. Some of it at least should still be yours.

“I’m sure the Board of Corrections just wants some money to bury the bastard with. No one actually expects you to sling a body in your trunk and drive off.”

Lischen cleared my empty plate. “Can I get you anything more?”

“No, thank you. You’ve been very kind.”

“Better to take care of someone.” She began wiping down the counter. The diner had emptied itself of all but the three of us.

“It’s late. I should be going.”

“Are you going to be able to get yourself back safe, now? It’s no bother for me to run you out there,” Ralph said.

“I’m better, thanks.”

He looked at me, then nodded. “You’ll feel better still once you get that place cleared out. I can come out to help, you need it.”

“Ralph, it’s late to be drumming up business. Let the poor man get home.” Lischen smiled at me. “Drive safe, now.”

I sat in the car for a minute, head tipped back against the cracked leather of the seat, waiting for the spinning that had nothing to do with drink to stop. The sign blinked, and across my windshield, again, in letters of bleeding red,
HER
.

I rolled down all the windows to let the night into the car as I drove home.

I wanted to believe those good, logical explanations. It was easier to think there was some hidden clause in the papers I’d signed, something that said I needed to pay for a murderer’s burial, than to think that the pages and pages of letters littering my hallway were written by that same iron-skinned murderer. Better to think that, even if it meant realizing that my grip on sanity was less than I’d thought after Row’s death.

The car thumped and skidded, wheels off the shoulder and into the dirt. I wrenched the steering wheel back to true. A dead rabbit, twisted and broken, on the side of the road.

(My child, my boy, twisted and broken.)

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, dead man’s nails biting in, and pushed those wishes and wants out of my head until I turned into my driveway.

I wanted to believe Lischen and Ralph, but want and truth didn’t sleep well in the same bed together.