Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 4. Chapter 4 Windows

I did not see the hand that set it in my grip.

I have turned the question over these many years and more, in every dark hour that a spirit without flesh to tire may yet call an hour, and can tell you only this: that when I rose from whatever bed a soul rises from who has been refused both gate and pit, unbodied now, unbreathing, cast out alike from the house that would not own me and the house that could not keep me, I found the thing already mine. A turnip, hollowed rough, as a boy might hollow it who owned no proper knife for the labor. Within it, banked low and steady, the very coal I had glimpsed beyond the stillness. Whether he set it there himself, laughing, ere ever I opened my eyes upon the dark that was now to be my only country, or whether such a thing is simply given, to such as refuse both houses, as a man is given at least a single stone to stand upon who has been turned out of every field, I cannot tell you. I have long since ceased to trouble myself greatly with the asking. It was mine. It has been mine every hour since, and though there have been nights I have hated it beyond any words I own to name the hating, I have found I could no more set it down than a man sets loose the one crooked stone that, though it sits ill in his wall and cuts his hand at the lifting, is nonetheless the stone that keeps the whole of the wall from falling.

So began my wandering. So, in a manner of speaking, it has not yet ended.

I will not weary you, nor myself, with the whole particular accounting of those years, for a man who has stood outside a thousand windows finds, in the end, that they are none of them so very different one from the other, only the shape of the glass changed, and the light behind it, and the manner of the grief he glimpsed through it before he passed on to the next. I watched the hemlock woods I had known as a boy give way, in time, to fields, and the fields give way in their turn to houses, and the houses multiply upon ground my own grandfather had once walked entire and empty, until Litchfield County wore a face I would scarce have known for its own had I not watched it change by such slow degrees. I watched roads that had been mere ruts heaved by frost grow smooth and black and swift beneath carriages that wanted no horse to draw them, screaming past me in the dark with a light that needed no flame to feed it, and did not so much as slow, for they could not see me, wherefore should they slow. I watched steeples rise and steeples fall to ruin and steeples rise again in some newer fashion on the very ground the old ones had occupied. I watched, I watched, I watched. It was the whole of my occupation, watching, for what other labor is left to a man who cannot lift a stone nor mend a wall nor do any single thing in this world save stand outside of it and mark how it goes on without him.

And still the coal did not gutter.

I loved, in that long watching, in the manner a starving man loves the bread glimpsed through another man's window, hopeless, and entire, and asking nothing in return save the leave to go on looking. I marked boys who wept alone in rooms no one thought to enter, and old men who sat the whole of an evening by a cold hearth with no living soul to share the warmth of it had it been lit, and girls who pressed their own foreheads to glass and looked out upon a night that offered them no more comfort than it had ever offered me. I could not touch them. I could not speak to them, save on such nights as the veil wore thin enough to permit a whisper, a cold breath upon a nape, a name half heard and dismissed for wind. I gave what small mercies were within my gift to give, a warmth that was not warmth exactly but the memory of it, a word traced in the condensation of a pane by a hand that left no mark upon the glass itself, and asked nothing, for I had learned, God knows I had learned, precisely what came of the asking.

And still the coal did not gutter.

I had ceased, by the turning of the second century's threshold, to expect that it ever would. I had made of my own grief a kind of habit, as a man makes a habit of a wound long carried, tending it without hope of its healing, only because the tending itself had become the one labor left to him that he still knew how to perform. I did not look, any longer, for the thing I had asked of the Devil at that crossroads so long ago. I had stopped believing, somewhere in all that watching, that the world held it in store for me still.

It was upon no night I can name as different from any other that I found myself drawn, as a man is drawn who does not know he is being drawn until he has already arrived, to a window I had not marked before, in a house set back from a quiet road in the same ground I had never left, for my wandering, whatever else it took from me, had never carried me beyond the county that had first claimed me. I do not know why that window, of the thousand thousand I had stood before. I have asked myself the question a great many times since, and I tell you plainly, for I would not have you suppose me other than honest in the telling of this tale even where the truth serves me poorly, that I do not know. No wheel cracked to bring me there. No horse went lame. No cold gentleman smiled from any vantage I could see, nor whispered any word into my ear to point the way. I came to that window as a man comes to water after a long thirst he had ceased, almost, to notice he was carrying, led by nothing I could afterward have named as reason.

There was a lamp lit within, low and yellow against the coming dark, and at a desk beneath it, a boy.

I did not cross to him. I could not have, had I wished it with the whole of what remained to me of a soul; the veil that October stood thick as a wall of granite, and there is no hand living or dead may pass through granite before its season. I only watched, as I had watched a thousand windows before his, and felt, for the first time since I had begun this long and unwilling accounting of the world's turning, something stir in me that I had believed the whole of my grief had finally, mercifully, burned away.

He sat in profile to me, the desk placed as it was against the far wall, and it was this, I think, before ever I marked the room about him or the light that fell upon it, that first arrested me entire: the clean, unstudied line of him against the lamp's low glow, the small, particular architecture of a nose, a brow, a mouth held in the unconscious repose of a boy who believes himself unwatched, which is, I have come since to understand, the only true repose there is, a beauty a man does not know he is arranging for any eye but his own. I had looked upon a great many faces in my long exile from the world of the living. I had not looked upon one, in all that watching, that so wholly refused to be looked away from.

I am not proud of what I felt in that hour, nor of what grew from it in the hours that followed, each no different from the one before, each spent in the same fixed, hungry attendance at that window. A man of sense, had a man of sense been left to me still, might have counselled that here was no fit object for such devotion, a stranger, unmet, unspeaking, unaware even that he was beheld; that whatever I supposed myself to feel was no more than an old grief seizing gratefully upon the first new shape offered it, as a starving man will call the barest crust a banquet. I knew this. I own that I knew it even then, in that very hour, and knew besides that the knowing changed nothing whatsoever in me, for there is a species of wanting that does not ask the sanction of a man's own reason before it takes up residence in him entire, and having taken up that residence, does not trouble itself to be evicted merely because reason, arriving late, objects to the lease.

The room behind the glass was lit by two lights rather than one: the lamp I had first marked, and beside it, larger, colder, some manner of screen such as the world had filled itself with over the long turning of my exile, though I had never before found cause to give one so patient or so covetous a study as I gave that one now, for it was turned, by the accident of the desk's placing, nearly toward the glass, and I, standing where I stood, could not keep myself from it.

I could not read the whole of what stood upon that screen. I was too far for that, and the glass besides gave back its own dim reflection of the yard and the one streetlamp and, fainter still, the shape of myself, unwelcome witness at a feast I had not been asked to. What words I caught, I caught only in pieces, and those pieces swimming, as a man makes out a shore through fog, more by faith than by sight.

‘Hartford Lab test results,’ I read, or thought I read, and beneath it, smaller, less certain, a line I could not have sworn to before any earthly court, though I have staked what remains to me of a soul upon the reading of it every day since: ‘tired today. more than usual. don't tell mom.’

I did not know, in that hour, what manner of grief that boy carried, only that he carried one, and carried it, as I had once carried mine, alone and in the dark, to no ear he trusted with the whole truth of it. I told myself this was compassion, that what I felt, watching him set down in secret what he would not say aloud, was the plain fellow-feeling of one lonely creature for another. I have had cause enough since to examine that telling, and I find I no longer believe it entire. There was pity in it, yes. But there was, beneath the pity, a hunger that had nothing whatsoever to do with mercy, a wanting to be nearer that profile, that small private grief, that particular light, than any dead man has right to want anything of the living, and I knew it for excess even as I stood within it, and did not step back.

He closed the lid upon the screen, some while after, and the room went down to the one low lamp, and then to no lamp at all, and I watched the dark take him from me with an ache so entirely disproportionate to the little I had been given, a profile, a fragment, two lines of a stranger's secret grief, that I might have laughed at myself, had laughter been left to me still. I did not laugh. I stood at that glass long after the window had gone black and given back nothing but my own long shape and the ordinary dark of an ordinary October night, and understood, with a clarity that frightened me more than the crossroads itself had ever done, that I had just now, freely, with my eyes open this time and no gentleman's bargain to plead in my defense, chosen my own undoing a second time.

I did not leave. I have never, since that night, entirely left.