Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 3. Chapter 3 Ash

There is a particular quality to grief unwitnessed, I have come to learn in the long telling of this tale, that grief which is offered no eye to receive it, no ear to mark its passing; it does not spend itself as other griefs do, in the ordinary commerce of a house, a word of comfort given and a word of comfort received, but is left instead to circle upon itself, again and again, in a man's own breast, until he can no longer rightly say where the wound ends and where he himself begins. I bore such a grief in the days that followed Obadiah's leaving. I told my father the bruise upon my face was earned in a fall against the barn's low beam, and he asked no further question of it, being a man who did not think overmuch of matters that did not touch his own harvest directly, and so I carried the whole of it alone, as I had carried everything alone, the whole of my nineteen years.

The frost, in those days, gave over at last to true winter. The ground I had labored so long to wall grew hard as iron beneath it, and I labored on regardless, for what else was there in the whole of the world for such a man as I had become to do, save labor, and wait for a spring I did not, in truth, much believe I wished to see.

It was upon one such evening, the light already failed though the supper hour had not yet come, that I felt the cold change about me, the particular cold I had known but once before, at the crossroads, and turned from the wall to find him there again, leaning upon the very stone I had set that afternoon as though it had been placed there for his convenience alone.

"You wear it well," said he, and drew upon that same sweet, scorched cigar, "the look of a man who has learned precisely what his own asking is worth." He studied the bruise upon my cheek with an open and unhurried pleasure, the way another man might study a fine piece of workmanship he had commissioned and found, upon delivery, entirely to his satisfaction. "Obadiah," he said, tasting the name as though it were a delicacy, "struck you rather harder than I confess I had hoped for. I own myself pleasantly surprised. Boys of his sort so rarely have the courage of their own terror."

I did not ask him how he came to know the name. I had ceased, since the crossroads, to marvel at what such a creature might or might not know.

"You did this," said I, and my voice, to my own surprise, did not shake in the saying of it. "You sent the wheel that cracked. You lamed the horse."

"I sent nothing that was not already within my gift to send," said he, and here his smile widened, though it touched nothing of warmth in doing so. "I promised you a companion, Jack, and a companion I gave you, freely and entire, exactly as you asked it. What he did with the gift once given was his own affair, and none of mine. I am a scrupulous man in the matter of my own word. You will find no fault in the letter of it, search as long as you please."

"Then why," said I, "do you trouble yourself to come and gloat over the ruin of it?"

He considered this a long moment, as though the question pleased him more than any answer he might give in return. "Because," said he at last, "I find I am owed a small entertainment, here and there, for the trouble you have put me to. A debt, you might call it, of a hundred years' standing, that you have seen fit to add your own small portion to." He drew again upon the cigar, and let the smoke curl up into the darkening air between us. "But do not despair yet, Jack. I am not, whatever the Sullivans may tell their children of an evening, an ungenerous man. I find I have not yet done with you."

And with that he was gone, as swiftly and as wholly as he had come, leaving nothing behind him but the cold, already thinning, and the ordinary dark of an ordinary winter's evening settling once more upon the wall.

I did not sleep that night for turning his words over, and finding in them no comfort whatsoever, only a dread I could not have named and would not, had I been asked, have owned to feeling.

It was the very next evening that I found the boy waiting at the wall.

I did not see him arrive, nor hear him, which I marked even then as strange, though I was in no humor by that hour to marvel long at strangeness. He sat upon the stone as though he had always sat there, as though the wall itself had been raised half in expectation of his coming, and he looked up at my approach with an ease that struck me, after Obadiah's guarded watchfulness, as almost startling in its openness. He gave me no name that first evening, only a smile, warm and unhesitating, the sort of smile I had waited the whole of my life to be given and had, until that hour, believed myself incapable of receiving.

I did not ask him whence he came, nor why, nor how he came to be sitting upon my father's wall in the deepening cold of a winter's dusk with no coat sufficient to the weather and no apparent discomfort in the lack of it. I understand now, with the clarity that a hundred and fifty years affords a man, that I did not ask because some starved and desperate portion of myself had already resolved not to hear any answer that might take him from me. I called him, in my own private thought, by no name whatsoever, for he gave me none, and I did not ask it of him.

What passed between us in the day and the half day that followed, I find myself, even now, reluctant to set down in its entirety, not from any want of memory, for I remember the whole of it with a clarity that has not dimmed in all my long wandering, but from a certain tenderness toward it that resists, even yet, being handled roughly by plain telling. I will say only this: that where Obadiah had been careful, and watchful, and afraid, this boy was none of these things. He took my hand upon the very first evening, in full sight of the house, and did not flinch from the taking of it, nor look about him first to see who might be watching. He spoke of my loneliness as though it were a thing he already, entirely, understood, without my needing to explain the whole shape of it to him as I had been obliged to explain it to every other soul I had ever tried to make understand. He laughed easily, and touched easily, and loved, so far as I could tell and can tell yet, entirely without the fear that had undone Obadiah upon the ridge.

I ought, perhaps, to have marked the strangeness of it sooner than I did. He never once spoke of a father, nor a mother, nor any house he had come from nor any road he meant to travel on to. He ate nothing in my presence, though I offered him bread and such meat as I could carry out to him unseen by my own father's eye, and turned the offering aside each time with a small, private smile, as though the offer itself were gift enough. And when, upon the second evening, I took his hand in mine and found it warm, warmer than the winter air had any right to leave it, warmer, I thought even then, though I put the thought from me as quickly as it arose, than any hand I had ever held before, I did not ask myself why this should be so. I was, God forgive me, too glad of the warmth to question its source.

It was upon that second evening, in the last hour before the supper bell, that he leaned toward me as Obadiah had leaned toward me upon the ridge, and I did not think, in that instant, of Obadiah at all, nor of the crossroads, nor of the cold gentleman and his cigar and his promise. I thought only that I had been given, against every reason the world had ever furnished me for believing otherwise, a second chance at the very thing I had asked for at that crossroads, and that I meant, this time, to take the whole of it, without the fear that had cost me the first.

I kissed him.

I could not tell you, even now, which came first, the warmth of his mouth against mine or the first faint disintegration of it, for they arrived together, or so nearly together that memory has never since been able to part them one from the other. I felt him go to ash beneath my very hands, softly, without violence, as a log long consumed by fire will fall inward upon itself at the last touch that disturbs it, and I was left standing in the last light of that winter's dusk with nothing before me but a drift of fine gray ash, already scattering upon the wind, and my own hands, empty, and reaching still for a shape that had already ceased, in the space of a single held breath, to exist in the world at all.

I did not move for a long while. I could not have told you how long. I stood with my arms yet raised, as a man stands who has been struck and has not yet permitted himself to fall, and I felt, rising in me, a grief so total that it did not, for that first long stretch of time, resemble grief at all, but something nearer to the silence of the ridges that had answered no shout of mine the whole of my life, a silence with no bottom to it that I could find.

It was into that silence, some minutes after, that the laugh arrived.

I did not see whence it came, nor could I have told you, had my life depended upon the telling, whether it belonged to any throat at all, or merely to the wind moving through bare branches in a fashion that only grief could have mistaken for mirth. It was low, and brief, and entirely without heat, the laugh of a man well satisfied with an evening's modest entertainment, and it passed over the wall and was gone before I had fully understood that I had heard it at all. I have wondered, in all the years since, whether I ought to have taken it then for confirmation of what I already, in some wordless chamber of myself, understood to be true. I took it, that evening, for nothing more than the wind. I had not the strength left in me, by that hour, to take it for anything else.

I do not know how I came to be indoors again that night, nor what account I gave my father, if I gave him any account at all. I know only that I did not rise from my bed the following morning at the hour I had risen every morning of my life before it, and that when I did at last rise, some hours past what decency allowed, I found I had no strength in me for the wall, nor for any other labor, nor, in truth, for very much of anything beyond the drawing of one breath after another, which even this I found, as the days wore on, an increasingly burdensome labor in itself.

The winter that followed was, by every account but my own, an ordinary winter, hard, and long, and white, as that country's winters generally were. I do not remember it as ordinary. I remember it as a slow and patient unraveling, a loosening, day upon day, of whatever thread it is that binds a man's spirit to the labor of living, until I could no longer have told you, had I been asked, what precise reason remained to me for drawing breath at all. My father sent for the doctor from the village, some weeks into it, and the doctor examined me, and pronounced himself unable to find any fever, nor any wasting of the lungs, nor any ailment known to his own considerable learning that might account for a strong young man's slow and steady decline, and left, I believe, more troubled by the case than he cared to own in my father's hearing.

I did not tell the doctor of Obadiah, nor of the nameless boy who had come to me at the wall, nor of the crossroads, nor of the gentleman who had named me Stingy Jack and marked me, by his own account, for some further entertainment yet to come. What words did I have, that any physician of that or any age might have received them as anything but the ravings of a fevered mind? I kept my own counsel, as I had kept it the whole of my life, and let the winter do its slow work upon me, unwitnessed, uncomforted, exactly as I had borne every other grief that world had furnished me.

I do not recall the precise night that I died. I have wondered since whether this itself was mercy, that the last threshold should pass so quietly I did not mark the crossing of it, or whether it was merely one further cruelty in a life that had furnished me so generous a portion of them already. I know only that I closed my eyes upon a winter's dark much like any other, my father's lamp burning, as it had always burned, in the kitchen window below, and that when I opened them again, it was to a stillness unlike any I had known before, a silence beneath the silence, as though the whole of creation had, at long last, stopped even the pretense of listening for an answer that would never now be given.

And somewhere beyond that stillness, though I could not then have said where, nor by what hand it had been kindled, a small coal burned steady in the dark, banked and patient, waiting, as I would come to understand only very much later, for me.