Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 2. Chapter 2 Obadiah

I had told myself, in the weeks that followed, that I had dreamed the whole of it.

What sane accounting of the world admitted a gentleman risen out of a dark crossroads, cigar-smoke sweeter than any earthly tobacco, a promise given and a hand shaken cold as the grave? None. I had labored under a fever that October night, I told myself, some chill taken at the wall, some sickness of the blood that conjures phantoms where a tired mind cannot rightly distinguish waking from dream, and I had gone on with my life as a man goes on who has decided, for the sake of his own reason, not to examine too closely a thing he cannot bear to have been true. The small scab I had found upon my palm I ceased, in time, even to remember; it healed as any trifling hurt heals, and left no mark I could afterward have shown to any living soul, and so I let the whole of that night settle into the same drawer of memory where a man keeps his childhood terrors, visited rarely, believed in less.

I did not know, how could I have known, that I had not dreamed at all. That the promise had been made, and heard, and was even then, behind whatever veil separates a man's ordinary days from the machinery that governs them, being brought to its first and most patient fulfillment.

It was near three weeks after, the last of the maples gone bare and the first hard snow not yet come but threatening daily, when I heard again upon the road below the particular creak of that same wagon.

I straightened from my work, I was, I recall, mending a gate that had no business needing mending so soon after its last repair, though I did not think to wonder at that until long afterward, and watched it come, and felt something rise in my chest that I would not then name, for I had not permitted myself, in three weeks of telling myself I had dreamed, to also hope. But there it was: the same canvas top, patched now at one corner as it had not been patched before; the same weary horse, favoring, I saw as it drew nearer, its near foreleg; and upon the box, the same boy, though he sat straighter now, and looked less at his ease than he had looked before.

The wheel, the father explained, wringing his hat in both hands at my own father's door, the wheel had cracked upon a stone two miles back, and the horse gone lame trying to compensate for it, and might they trouble a Christian household for shelter enough to make repair, a night, perhaps two, no more than that, and they would pay what they were able for the imposition.

My father was not a man given to warmth, but neither was he a man who would turn away a traveler in true difficulty, and Scripture besides was plain enough on the entertaining of strangers, that a man might unknowing entertain an angel in the doing of it. He granted the barn, and such supper as we had to spare, and thought no more of the matter, being a man who did not think overmuch of matters that did not touch his own harvest directly.

I did not learn, until very much later, too late to matter, too late to have changed one single hour of what followed, that no stone had cracked that wheel. That the horse's lameness owed nothing to chance, and everything to a hand that need only wish a thing to make it so, and had wished it, smiling, from some vantage I could not have seen and would not have believed even had I seen it. I knew only, in that hour, that the wagon had returned, and that the boy who had called a well "sweet" was to sleep the night in my father's barn, and that some part of me, long starved, could not help but call this providence.

His name, I learned before the first evening was out, was Obadiah.

He gave it to me shyly, almost as an afterthought, while we worked together at the wheel by lantern-light in the barn's cold dark, for the father had gone in to sleep, being older and wearier than his son, and left the boy to see the mending properly done, and I had offered, as any neighbor might, to lend my own two hands to the labor. I gave him mine in turn, and he repeated it once, quietly, as though testing the shape of it in his mouth, and something in the plainness of that small exchange, two names, offered and received, nothing more, struck me as more intimate than any words I had exchanged with another living soul in the whole of my nineteen years.

We spoke, that first night, of small things only: the roads he had traveled, the towns that had used him kindly and those that had not, the particular loneliness, which he described with a rueful honesty I had not expected, of a life spent always arriving and always leaving before any friendship could properly take root. I understood that loneliness. God help me, I understood it entire, though mine wore a different coat than his, and I found myself speaking more in that single evening than I believe I had spoken in the whole of the preceding year, of the wall, and the ridges that gave back no answer, and the silence I had until that hour supposed was simply the shape a life took, without complaint, without appeal.

He did not flinch from any of it. He listened as though my words were worth the listening, which no one, in nineteen years, had troubled themselves to suppose.

The wheel, in truth, required but a day's honest labor to mend. It took us two.

I will not pretend, in the telling of this, that I did not know precisely what I was doing in permitting the repair to run its slow and unhurried course, finding some fault that wanted further attention, some spoke that sat not quite true, some excuse, however thin, to keep him yet another day beneath my father's roof and my own uncertain heaven. Nor will I pretend that he did not know it likewise, and permit it likewise, for there is a language spoken between two people who wish, above all things, not to part, and it wants no words at all to be understood entirely.

We walked, on the second afternoon, to the ridge above the north field, where the wind came hard and cold and the whole of the valley lay spread below us the color of a dying leaf. He said the country was beautiful, in a fashion that frightened him a little, being so wide and so silent after the crowded roads he generally traveled. I said I had never once thought to call it beautiful, having known no other, and he laughed at that, not unkindly, but as a man laughs who has been given a small unexpected gift, and said perhaps I ought to look at it as a stranger might, once in a while, to see what I had been standing in the whole of my life without ever properly regarding it.

I looked at him instead. I could not have helped it. And he, turning to see what held my gaze so long, did not look away, nor make some jest to cover the moment as a kinder mercy might have counseled him to do, but let it stand between us, unshielded, for longer than either of us, I think, had entirely intended.

It was there, upon that ridge, with the wind carrying off whatever words might have named the thing plainly, that his hand found mine, hesitant at first, as a man tests ice before he trusts his full weight upon it, and then less hesitant, and I felt in that single touch the whole of the ache I had carried since the peddler's cart first passed my land dissolve into something I had not till then believed myself permitted to feel: not merely wanted, but *chosen*, freely, by a soul who had looked upon the whole of me and found, in it, nothing to recoil from.

He leaned toward me. I did not draw back. Whatever might have passed fully between us in that hour, and I have spent a hundred and fifty years wondering what shape it might have taken, had the world permitted it even one moment longer, was broken instead by nothing more than the striking of the supper bell below, faint and ordinary, carried up to us on that same hard wind, and Obadiah startled from me as a man startles from a fire he has only just discovered is real.

I did not think, in that instant, that I had lost anything. I thought only that the bell had been poorly timed, and that the morrow would grant us what the evening had not, and I walked down from that ridge lighter than I had walked in the whole of my remembered life.

I did not see, until it was upon me, the change that had already begun its work in him.

He did not come to supper easy in himself, as he had come to it the evening before. He sat apart, and answered his father's questions shorter than the questions warranted, and would not once, in the whole of that meal, permit his eyes to find mine, though I sought them more than once, foolishly, as a man seeks warmth from an ember he does not yet understand has gone to ash. I told myself it was merely shame at having been so nearly discovered, or weariness from the day's labor, or some private trouble of his own that had nothing at all to do with me. I have since learned that a man in the grip of terror will seize upon any lesser explanation before he permits himself the true one, and I was, that evening, exactly such a man.

It was after supper, in the yard between the house and the barn, in a dark thick enough that I believed us unseen, that I sought him out, meaning only to ask what troubled him, meaning only to say, if he would permit me the saying of it, that whatever had passed between us upon the ridge need trouble neither of us, that I asked nothing of him he did not wish freely to give.

I did not finish the asking.

He struck me before I had said above three words, struck me with a fist closed hard and sudden, so that I went down into the frozen mud before I had properly understood that a blow had been landed at all, and lay there a moment in a stupidity of shock while he stood over me, breathing hard, his face twisted into something I would not have recognized as belonging to the same boy who had held my hand upon the ridge not six hours past.

"You would make of me the very thing they preach against," said he, low and shaking, "the very abomination..." and here his voice broke, not with sorrow but with a fury turned, I understood even through the ringing in my skull, more truly against himself than against me, "and I let you. God forgive me, I let you, and looked at you the whole of yesterday as though you were..." He did not finish it. He struck me again instead, as though the blow might silence the thought he could not complete in words, and I made no move to shield myself nor to strike in answer, for some part of me, even bleeding, understood that this violence was not truly meant for me at all, but for whatever he had glimpsed of himself, upon that ridge, that he could not afterward bear to have seen.

He left me there in the yard's frozen mud, and did not look back, and I heard the barn door close hard behind him, and did not hear it open again that night.

They were gone before first light. I woke to an empty barn and a wheel mended sound enough to bear them the whole remaining distance to the village, and no word left for me, not so much as a name scratched into a post, nothing at all to mark that two days had passed in which I had believed myself, for the first time in nineteen years, entirely and rightly loved.

I did not weep, that first morning. I have wondered since whether that itself was the truer wound, that I had gone beyond weeping into some colder country where grief no longer announced itself in any way the body could recognize as grief. I rose, and washed the blood from my face at the trough, and went out, because there was no other thing in the whole of the world I knew how to do, to the wall.

It stood precisely as I had left it three weeks before, granite upon granite, my grandfather's hands and my own laid one against the other, indifferent entirely to whatever had or had not passed upon the ridge above it. I set my hand against the cold stone, and found I could not, that morning, remember why I had ever thought the mending of it a fit labor for a man's whole life, found only that the silence I had once called simply the shape of things had returned to me changed, no longer merely empty, but haunted now by the exact size and shape of what had, for two days, filled it, and been taken away again.

I did not then know that this was but the first of the two griefs the world yet held in store for me. I knew only that the frost was hardening toward true winter, and that I was, once more, and would perhaps always now be, entirely alone.