Alma stood among the giant oaks and rows of tombstones in the Ashton County graveyard, staring at letters written upon a plain gray stone. To her, an uneducated child of twelve, the epitaph held no meaning save the date, but to others, it recalled the tragedy of a life cut short. Here lies Emma Jenkins, b.1662 d.1698, Ease now her troubled life and commend her soul to Heaven, May she ever slumber soundly in the arms of the Lord.
Her mother’s funeral was the first she’d attended and after months spent absorbing the pain, witnessing her mother wither and fade with each passing day, Alma found herself unable to feel the grief displayed so easily on the faces of others. Her tears had dried up. And a coldness had settled into her heart, numbing her emotions as efficiently as the New England autumn stole the warmth from her bones.
Alma had spent the ceremony alone as her father and uncle shook hands and accepted condolences with polite nods and ‘thank you’s.’ She noted the plain clothing worn by the attendees; how it was made to seem nice just for the occasion, like her mother’s funeral was Christmas. Seldom seen white stockings and shined shoes were worn with old knickers and cotton bonnets trimmed in lace instead of simple crosscloths to accompany threadbare dresses. She listened to their conversations as well, always taking note when her name was used in conjunction with unfamiliar words, like bereaved or sympathetic. If everyone was talking about her, why couldn’t they talk to her? Why did they act as if she didn’t exist?
Thankfully, the funeral was brief and the majority of guests had filed out of the cemetery before her mother’s pine casket was lowered into the ground. They were lucky. For them, the grief was over and they could go on about their day. Perhaps they’d finish working on a quilt or harvesting their crops. Maybe they’d muck-out the stalls or pull the weeds from their gardens. There was any number of things they could do, and why not? The funeral was over. They didn’t have to see the dirt being shoveled into the grave or hear it spattering against her mother’s coffin. They could go home and have a meal and be thankful their families were still together.
Overhead, the sun sank pale and heavy in a pasty-blue sky and a stiff breeze carried an aromatic mixture of witch hazel and wild blueberries, contrasting sharply with the earthy fragrance of moist, dead leaves. A lengthy coil of coarse twine sat atop the mound of loose soil that filled her mother’s grave; one of its ends hidden in the dirt, the other brushing the tips of Alma’s rounded black shoes. She had bent down to examine its frayed edge, but found her mind paying closer attention to the tired, edgy voices of her uncle and father as they walked up behind her.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” her father said. “I lost most of my business to Jack Murphy and his boys while trying to look after Emma.”
“Well, you can’t blame them folks,” Uncle Eldred said. “Not really. The rest of the world don’t just stop ’cause a sickness hits. People’s wagons need fixing whether you’re the one doing the fixing or not.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
Her uncle didn’t answer and her father’s words died on the wind, but Alma still heard them reverberating in her mind. She rolled the rough twine between her thumb and forefinger, trying to concern herself with its twisted segments rather than the worry evident in her father’s voice.
Alma glanced over her shoulder at her father. He’d always been a large man with broad shoulders and big, strong hands that could probably squeeze the life out of a bear, but over the last few months she’d witnessed his health decline along with her mother’s. His clothes hung limp over his belly, where they used to stretch taut and dark shadows, the shape of new moons, gathered under his green eyes. She’d never seen him look so old before. How was he going to take care of her when he hadn’t been able to take care of himself? Not to mention her mother. What if Alma got sick? Would she die, too?
The muffled tinkling of a silver bell interrupted her thoughts and drew her eyes toward a young man dressed in the slate gray of a cemetery employee. The man’s fingers enshrouded the bell’s exterior and-from what Alma could tell-pinched off its clapper as well, preventing it from truly ringing. How odd, she thought, that the man should carry such an item in a place like this.
“Come on, girl,” her father said. He issued a wary look to the man and his bell. “It’s time to be going. It’s getting late and I don’t want you to catch cold.”
Alma dropped the twine and grabbed her father’s outstretched hand. The two turned toward the path leading out of the cemetery.
“Daniel, I’m sorry,” Uncle Eldred said behind them. “Don’t go home yet. Alright? You don’t need to be there right now-either of you. Let me buy you a drink.”
Alma felt her father’s shoulders sag as if her Uncle’s words sapped what little strength remained in him. Until now, she hadn’t thought of what it would be like to be at home without her mother, without her presence filling the house. Even when she was sick, their home still felt like home because she was there. How would it feel without her? Empty? Or strange? Or maybe both? Her father exhaled an incredible amount of air, which usually meant he was about to say no.
“It’s okay, papa, you should.”
The young man with the bell passed them as they left, but Alma looked back in time to see him reach her mother’s grave. Then he did a curious thing: the young man tied the bell to the twine, then stretched it and fastened it to an overhanging branch of a nearby tree.
Alma kept her head down as they walked, watching the withered grass and crumpled orange and red leaves pass under their feet. She wanted to ask her father about the bell, but her father took one step to nearly three of hers and she had to work to keep up.
After a few minutes, their feet brought them to the hard-packed dirt road that would lead them to the town green and The Rusty Hinge. Uncle Eldred kept repeating how great it would be to get something to eat and a nice stiff drink, but neither Alma nor her father said anything. Even though her stomach felt hollow, she didn’t want to think about food. She didn’t want to remember the images it evoked, like those of her mother peeling potatoes at the table or stirring deep iron pots of stew. Sometimes, her mother would hum when she performed these tasks, but not anymore. She wouldn’t say anything anymore. Instead, Alma’s consolation had to come from her father’s heavy breathing as he trudged along beside her, the occasional rustling of animal life from within the goldenrods and sassafras that lined the road, and the songs of the scarlet tanagers as they foraged for food in the treetops overhead.
The Rusty Hinge was a shabby place with rough tables and uncomfortable chairs and-according to her father-watered down ale and whiskey. But a cozy fire crackled in the corner and the soft hum of voices that filled the main room offered them much needed solace after the mournful silence of the funeral. After a few drinks, her father seemed to forget about his earlier conversation with Uncle Eldred. The lines in his face had smoothed, but a sadness remained in his eyes; one that had been there since they first discovered her mother’s illness. But if he would have only taken better care of her, Alma told herself, he wouldn’t have to be sad. Nothing would have to change and they wouldn’t be here, trying to forget their troubles, as Uncle Eldred had said.
Alma swirled her fork through a pile of mashed potatoes while her father ordered two more ales from a skinny woman with a greasy apron. She said her name was Perdita and she smiled and seemed friendly enough, but Alma didn’t like her. Perhaps it was the way her fingers warped near the tips, or the way she tottered around the tavern as if her legs didn’t want to bend. Or, even, the way she flinched every time the door slammed against its frame. There was no simple reason for Alma’s discomfort, but she couldn’t suppress a shiver when the woman’s deformed fingers brushed against her father’s hand as she took his money.
Her mother never moved liked that-jerky and unsure of herself-she used to glide across a room like a sled over fresh snow or a squirrel darting out on a limb. She was beautiful. Nothing about her ever made Alma feel odd inside.
The image of Perdita, oddly enough, brought to mind the question that had been haunting Alma since they left the graveyard.
“Papa?”
Both, her father and uncle turned her way, abruptly stopping their conversation.
“Yes, love?”
“When we were leaving mama’s grave, there was a man with a bell. He-well, he tied it to that string and-“
“Oh, Lord.” Her father closed his eyes and drained his mug, throwing his head back in the process.
“-then he tied it to a tree,” Alma finished.
Uncle Eldred looked to her father, who stared at the Hinge’s beamed ceiling as if searching for the answer. Any answer. When it was apparent none would come, her uncle shook his head and found one of his own.
“That’s something best left alone, Alma.”
“But-“
“Trust me on this one. There’s just some things children ought not know about.”
They always did this to her. Every adult tried to isolate her in ignorance, even when she was the subject of their conversations. Alma decided to push on, but with a different tactic.
“Well, why did she have to die? Can you tell me that?”
“Hey,” her father said, narrowing his eyes at her. “You know there was nothing we could do. Your mother tried to fight it, but-“
“What? She was too weak?”
“No. Don’t you say that-I didn’t say that!” Her father slammed his fist against the table causing Alma’s plate to jump and her fork to rattle to the floor. A few of the Hinge’s other patrons looked their way, but quickly shifted their eyes when Alma met them head on. Her father sank back in his chair and the floorboards groaned under his weight.
“You should have done something,” Alma said. “Didn’t you love her enough?” Alma opened her mouth to speak again, but her father’s hand jerked back and she shrank against the chair, waiting for the blow.
“Here you are, you two.” Perdita clanked two foaming mugs onto the table and slid them toward the men, leaving a wet trail on the oak surface.
Alma’s cheeks flushed hot with anger, resentment, and-the thing that irritated the most-embarrassment. She was grateful that Perdita had interrupted when she did, even if the timing had only been coincidental, but she didn’t want to feel anything positive toward the woman. Alma huffed and shoved her half-eaten plate towards the center of the table.
Perdita started at the unexpected movement and shot a glance in Alma’s direction.
“You’re done with that then?”
Alma nodded, but kept her eyes fixed on the table. She refused to look at the woman again. Instead, she noticed the moisture streaked over the wood and the way the remnants of foam fizzled until the tiny bubbles dissipated.
“Can I get you gentlemen anything else at the moment?” When no one said anything Perdita picked up the fork and swiped the plate then left the three sitting in an even more uncomfortable silence than when she’d arrived.
A short while later, Uncle Eldred insisted Alma and her father should stay at his place for the night, and, while it was smaller and more cramped than their house, it didn’t hold any memories of her mother.
She was to sleep in her cousin Thomas’ room, which hadn’t been used in the nearly five years since he’d been apprenticed to a smith in Boston. Her father told Alma to change out of her dress and sleep in her cotton shift and that he’d be in to put her to bed in a few minutes, but he never came. Instead, Alma lay quiet in the dark, adjusting herself to the musty smell of unused sheets, the unfamiliar way the moonlight glanced across the room, and the subtle creaks of a different house. Her mind had difficulty processing the day’s events and a steady stream of images flowed through her consciousness until everything swirled together. Warm tears rolled down her cheeks, blurring the darkened objects of the room and stretching the reflected moonlight into thin, brilliant streaks. Her mother used to tuck her into bed every night. She would pull the quilt up to her chin then kiss her three times, on the forehead, the nose, and the lips. But she was gone now and her father had to do it. Alma knew he’d never be able to do it like her mother, and the thought forced more tears to fall.
A soft rap sounded on the door. She lifted her head off the pillow enough to see Uncle Eldred peek his head through, his face bathed in the yellow light of an oil lamp.
She wiped her eyes and sniffled as he slipped into her room.
“I hope you don’t mind me tucking you in,” he said. “Your father-God bless him-plopped onto that old chair of mine and passed out cold.”
Alma frowned and felt her chest constrict. “Is he alright? He’s not sick is he?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. Your dad’s just worn out, that’s all.” He set the lamp on the nightstand beside her bed then perched himself on the edge. “Your mother’s passing has taken a heavy toll on him.”
Alma watched the shadows leap across her uncle’s face and she could tell he was biting his bottom lip-a trait he shared with her father. They always did that when they were thinking about something.
Uncle Eldred leaned onto his knees and studied some aspect of the room’s interior that Alma could only guess at. She thought it might be the way the light and shadow wavered along the walls with the moment of the oil lamp’s flame, but there was no way to tell for sure. In the middle of her thought, he nodded and closed his eyes.
“Are you okay, Uncle Eldred?”
“Uh-huh. I just haven’t been in here in a very long time. It’s strange that Thomas isn’t the one in bed.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. But that’s not what I came in here to talk about.” He paused a moment with his mouth still open, as if waiting for the words to find their way out. “Do you still want to know about that bell?”
Alma didn’t say anything right away because the question caught her by surprise.
“Daniel would hand my head to me on a platter if he knew what I was about to tell you, but it just doesn’t seem right keeping it from you. I never kept any secrets from Thomas-nothing important anyway. I mean…if you’re old enough to attend the funeral and feel the pain of your mother’s loss, then you’ve got a right to know as well as anybody, don’t you?”
Alma sat up and pulled her knees to her chest.
“What’s it tied to? The rope.”
Uncle Eldred took a breath and held it. When he did speak, the words came out in a rush.
“Your mother’s hand,” he said.
“What?” Certainly, she’d heard him wrong. “Why? Why would they do that?”
“It’s a long story really, but I guess it all boils down to a young mortuary assistant named Dunstan, who used to work in the graveyard at night over in Kent County-that’s around 300 miles from Ashton. Some of the townspeople thought it was an odd habit to practice, working around the dead during the witching hour, but Dunstan didn’t care. It was quiet and no one bothered him as he performed his duties. It was just him and the dead and they weren’t going to bother anybody….
A few months passed and Dunstan’s routine had become as regular as the cycle of the moon. He’d come to work at ten o’clock and pick up any bodies that needed to be prepared for their special days or finish those started by the graveyard’s proprietor during the day, then set about arranging the burial equipment according to when it would be needed. After that he’d tour the grounds, to make sure none of the local misfits had desecrated any of the burial sites. And it was on one of those walks, out in the darkness after midnight, that something disturbing came to him on the wind.”
Scratch-scratch-scratch…
Scratch-scratch-scratch…
“Dunstan searched the grounds for the source of that noise for two days, but he never did find what caused it.
Well, not until it was too late, anyway.”
Alma huddled close to her uncle and gripped the sheets. “What was it? How did he find it?”
“Are you sure you want me to finish? You look upset. Maybe your dad was right and I shouldn’t have told you this.”
“No,” she said, clutching his arm. “If it has anything to do with mama, I’d like to know-anything at all.”
“Alright then…well, he didn’t find it, actually, but someone brought it to his attention a few days later. The brother of one of the deceased Dunstan had prepared-a doctor apparently-made some outrageous claim that his kin, whom all had thought dead of pneumatic plague the week prior, was actually still alive.
The old proprietor didn’t believe it, of course. Just figured it to be the insane ramblings of a grieving man, I suppose. But the doctor persisted with his claim, relaying the details of dozens of cases where patients, who’d had this same disease, at first, appeared dead, but in fact, they were alive-their bodies had just slowed down. He said, he tried to stop the burial himself, but his brother’s wife refused to hear any of it.
The proprietor thought it was a bunch of nonsense, but he exhumed the body-you know, dug it up-and-“
“The man’s brother was alive?” Alma asked. Her jaw gaped open as she waited for the response.
Uncle Eldred shook his head. “No, my dear, he wasn’t…but he had been. And after they’d put him in the ground, that much is for sure.”
“How could they tell?”
“The dead man had splinters under his fingernails and the inside of the casket had been damn near scraped thin.”
Tears streaked down Alma’s cheeks as she listened to the details. Her stomach turned when she tried to imagine some poor man’s fingers scraping themselves to the bone while trying to escape a small, black box.
“I know,” Uncle Eldred said. “I’ve thought about it myself and when it comes down to it, that poor bastard had to die twice.”
“That’s awful,” Alma said. She sniffled and wiped her tears against the sleeve of her shift. “But, I still don’t understand what that man has to do with mama?”
“Alma, he wasn’t the only one it’s happened to. Since then, they’ve found many others that were in the same predicament.”
“So if mama’s alive-“
“She’d ring her bell…and someone would be there waiting to get her out.”
A brief moment of hope caused Alma’s heart to leap against her chest. A dozen questions raced through her mind.
“Do you think-“
Uncle Eldred must have expected the question, because he provided her with an answer before she’d finished asking it.
“No. No. I don’t think your mother is a dead-ringer, girl…and, honestly, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“Why would you say that? Don’t you want her to be alive?”
Though Uncle Eldred faced away from her, she heard him sniffle and caught the waver in his voice that told her he, too, was crying. “More than anything…but try to imagine what an experience like that would do to a person, Alma.”
“I can’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to.”
“Sure you can. You’ve met someone who’s lived through it.”
“Who?” Alma heard the shock in her own voice. “I don’t know anyone like that….”
“Sure you do. You met her at the Hinge,” he said.
Perdita. The word echoed through Alma’s head as if her uncle had screamed it.
“She’s originally from Buxtom County, near Boston. I traveled through there on business, the day after it happened. The whole town was in a frenzy like you wouldn’t believe. You know the worst part?”
Alma shook her head, unable to find the word ‘no’ in her vocabulary.
“After those on the graveyard shift dug her out and contacted her husband…they thought he’d be happy, you know, to have his wife back-the mother of his children and all-but the bastard refused to see her.” Uncle Eldred’s brow wrinkled as he shook his head. “Said it would be ‘too hard on the kids’ after what they’d been through. Can you believe that?”
Uncle Eldred looked right into Alma’s eyes and she returned the stare without blinking. She watched the lamp’s fire reflect in his pupils; how it seemed to engulf the shadows completely in one moment then diminish to darkness the next. After what seemed an eternity, he said, “You try and get some sleep. It’s late.”
Two days later, Alma found herself sitting upon a blanket in the cemetery next to her mother’s grave. Her father hadn’t thought it to be a good idea, but she insisted that she wanted to come alone. She had some things she wanted to say to her mother and she didn’t feel she could do it with him around.
She’d spent a couple hours having lunch and talking to her mother as if the two of them were old women gabbing at a church-run quilting bee. But, eventually, she ran out of things to say and a twinge of sadness and guilt rippled through her emotions. She knew that after today, she’d never come back to this place, but she promised her mother she’d always remember the good things about her and none of the bad. She promised she’d remember her the way she was before her sickness, with a light spirit and graceful stride and an infectious smile and laugh.
She folded her blanket and stowed it in the basket she’d borrowed from Uncle Eldred then brushed the dirt and leaves from her dress. It was a beautiful October day and she couldn’t escape the feeling that her life was about to begin anew. The months of suffering and worrying over her mother’s illness were over and she could rest knowing that her mother would never have to experience that pain again.
“Don’t worry about us” Alma said. “Uncle Eldred asked papa and me to stay with him for a while. He told papa that things would work out…and I believe him. He doesn’t lie to me.”
A chill wind swept through the air, stirring the leaves and shaking the boughs of the great oaks that surrounded the graveyard. Nearby, on a low-hanging branch, the clear ringing of a small silver bell cried out, its voice floating upon the wind. An image of Perdita, staggering across The Rusty Hinge on stiff, corpselike legs flashed into Alma’s mind and a queer tickle raced down her spine, as if an ice cube had been dropped down her dress. She snatched a small carving knife from the basket and placed its blade against the length of twine disappearing beneath the dirt.
“You rest now.”