Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 8. Chapter 8. What Was Freely Given

I did not know, in that first instant after he had said it, what shape a choosing so entire might properly take, nor by what mechanism a dead man and a living boy were meant to close the whole vast distance a pane of ordinary glass had held between them the better part of two months. I had spent a great many years learning the theory of such things, in the half-remembered fashion the old tales kept it, a night of thin veils, a door left unbarred, but theory is a poor guide to a threshold a man has never in his death been permitted to cross, and I confess I stood before that glass, in the last hour of that October, as ignorant of the plain mechanics of my own deliverance as I had stood, a boy of nineteen, ignorant of the plain mechanics of a bargain I signed away with a handshake I did not understand.

"Okay," said Julian, and I heard him draw breath the way a man draws breath before a labor he has decided to perform whether or not his body has entirely agreed to it. "Okay, nobody's given me an instruction manual for this, so I'm just going to, I don't know, try things. Is that allowed? Can I just try things?"

"I do not know what is allowed," said I, honest, for there was no longer any refuge left to me in pretending otherwise. "I know only that the glass feels thinner tonight than I have ever known it feel, and that I would have you try whatever you find yourself moved to try, for I have no better counsel to give you than my own long ignorance."

He laughed, short and unsteady, and pressed his palm flat against the pane, in the place he had learned, across those borrowed nights, was nearest to wherever I stood, and I felt, beneath that ordinary and well-worn gesture, something give.

I cannot tell you, even now, in whatever fashion a soul past all further dying still tells anything at all, precisely how the glass ceased, in that moment, to be glass. I have turned it over a great many times since, and found no account of it that satisfies the whole of what I felt, save that it was less a breaking than a forgetting, as though the pane had simply, for one suspended breath, forgotten the office it had held between us since the first evening I found that window, forgotten that it was ordinance and barrier both, and let itself become, for that one breath only, nothing more than air.

His hand did not meet cold glass. It met mine.

I had not been touched, not truly, not by a living hand meaning the touch entire and without fear, since a ridge above my father's north field a hundred and fifty years gone, and Obadiah's hand, hesitant, testing ice before he trusted his weight upon it, withdrawn before the day was properly out. I had forgotten, in all my long exile, what such a thing could undo in a man, if man I still in any fashion was. I felt his fingers close about mine, warm, entirely and combustibly warm, warmer I think than any hand I had held even in my own living years, for a body spends its whole warmth carelessly while it is being lived in, and does not know, until it is offered to the cold, what a treasure it has all along been squandering.

"Oh," he said, and his voice broke clean in two around the single small word. "Oh, you're. You're actually. Jack, I can feel you. You're actually real, you're actually here, I can feel your hand, oh my God."

I could not answer him at once. I had spent so long constructing, stone upon careful stone, a composure fit to carry a dead man's grief without breaking beneath its own weight, and I felt that whole long labor of construction come apart in the single instant of his hand closing about mine, not as a wall falls when it is struck, but as a wall falls when the man who built it simply, finally, sets down the trowel and permits it to fall.

"I am here," said I, when I had found enough of my own voice to say it. "I am here, and I have you, and I do not mean, Julian, whatever this night asks of either of us, to let go of this hand again."

It was then, in the very fullness of that gladness, that I felt him falter.

I had watched him decline before, across the whole autumn of my acquaintance with him, by slow degrees and by sudden ones, and had learned, God forgive me for the learning, to read the particular grammar of his body's failing the way a farmer reads weather. What came over him now was neither slow nor, I think, entirely like anything I had watched before. His hand tightened in mine, sudden, and his breath went short, and I saw the color that had only just now risen faint and living in his cheek drain from it again, swift, as water drains from a cracked vessel, and I understood, with a horror that ran through whatever now stood in place of my own blood, that whatever the Devil had meant by the exact hour of his own dying, that hour had arrived, and had arrived, cruelest of all mercies, in the very moment I had been given a hand to hold.

"Hey." His voice had gone thin, and he was trying, even now, even in this, to make it sound like nothing, like the small ordinary failing his body visited on him most evenings of his life. "Hey, it's fine, this happens, this is just, this is just a bad one, I've had bad ones before, I just need to."

He did not finish it. His knees went, and I caught him, I who had not caught anything in a hundred and fifty years, I whose hands had held nothing living since a ridge and a wall, and felt the whole of his weight settle against me, real, and slight, and terribly, terribly warm.

I do not know whether it was the crossing itself that drew that hour toward him, or whether his own body, worn past what any body ought to have been asked to bear, would have failed him that same night regardless, veil or no veil, Devil or no Devil, and I have made my peace, in the long telling of this since, with never knowing the answer entire. I know only that I held him, there upon the floor of the room I had watched so long and never once entered, and felt no impulse whatsoever, in that hour, toward the thing every particle of my long grief urged me toward, which was to beg, to bargain, to offer up whatever remained of a soul already twice refused, if only some power greater than my own poor coal might grant him one further hour.

I did not beg. I want that set down plainly, here, at the very last of my own telling of this tale, for I have come to believe it is the truest thing I ever did in the whole of my long death, truer than the wall I built, truer than the crossroads I knelt at, truer than any love I bore before this one. I had watched Obadiah taken from me by another man's terror, and had raged against it, uselessly, in the frozen mud of my father's yard. I had watched the ash-boy dissolve beneath my own hands, and had stood in the wreckage of it wanting, more than anything, some power to call him back. I had asked, at my own crossroads, for love to be given me, handed over, arranged, procured by whatever cunning or bargain the world's dark machinery could manage, and had learned, across a hundred and fifty years of watching windows, precisely what such love was worth once it arrived by force of asking rather than by the plain, unmanaged grace of being chosen.

I did not ask, that night, for Julian to be spared. I asked only to be permitted to stay.

"Jack." His voice had gone very small, and very clear, in the way a voice goes clear just before it goes silent, a last clean note before the instrument is set down. "Jack, I'm not scared. Is that weird? I thought I'd be so scared. I'm not scared."

"You are not alone," said I, for it was the only true thing left in the whole of the world worth giving him, and I had learned, at the cost of everything I owned, precisely how much such a small true thing was worth. "Whatever else this night is or is not, you are not alone in it, and you will not be alone in whatever comes after it. I am here. I mean to stay here. However long, however short, whatever shape it takes, I am not going to leave this room, and I am not going to let go of your hand."

He smiled, then, the whole of his old dry armor gone from it entire, nothing left in his face but a boy's own plain, unguarded gladness, the very thing I had first glimpsed through that glass and loved past all good sense before I had ever properly known his name.

"Good," he said. "That's. Yeah. That's the whole thing I wanted, actually. That's the whole entire thing."

I felt, behind me, though I did not turn to mark it, the lantern I had carried the whole of my long exile flare once, bright beyond any brightness I had ever known it hold, and felt, in that same instant, some part of the terrible cold that had gathered about me the whole of that Halloween night begin, at last, to loosen its grip upon whatever remained of me, as a fist loosens that has held itself closed so long it has half forgotten the shape of an open hand.

His eyes found mine, and held there, and did not look away.

I had asked, at nineteen, at a crossroads I ought never to have stopped at, for one soul, given freely, who might stand where a peddler's boy had stood and not simply pass on down the road and leave me to the silence.

He did not pass on down the road.

Epilogue

They found the boy in the morning.

His mother found him, in the grey hour before the day had properly decided what kind of day it meant to be, and there was nothing about the room to trouble a coroner's eye beyond what his long illness had already, many times over, prepared that household to expect. He lay upon the floor rather than the bed, which the mother could not afterward account for, and there was, upon his face, an easiness that she did not know how to describe to the doctor who came, nor to the neighbors who came after him, nor even to herself, in the long years she carried the memory of it, save to say that he did not look like a boy who had been frightened at the end. She said this to more than one person, in the weeks that followed. She said it, in fact, for the rest of her life.

The mother did not see what she thought she saw, standing in that doorway before the doctor came, before there was a room full of people to tell her she had imagined it, and she never spoke of it to anyone, not the doctor, not her own husband, not even, in the end, to herself, in any words she trusted enough to keep. But she would say, many years after, to no one in particular, on an October evening much like that one, that for just a moment, in the grey hour before the day had decided what kind of day it meant to be, she had thought she saw two shapes at the window rather than one, her son, and beside him, a boy she did not know, dressed for a century that was not his own, and that the two of them had not been standing at the glass looking in, as she might have expected of a ghost, but at the glass looking out, together, toward some light beyond the ordinary window that the ordinary yard did not account for. And that they had gone, the both of them, hand in hand, into that light, unhurried, the way two people walk who have nowhere left to be but where they already are.

She never saw it again. She did not look for it.

On the sill of the window nearest his desk, though no one in that house owned such an object, nor could afterward account for how it came to be there, sat a hollowed turnip, small, roughly cut, the sort of crude and homely thing a boy might fashion who owned no proper knife for the labor. Within it, no coal burned. It held only ash, gone cold and grey and perfectly ordinary, the way any dead fire's ash is ordinary, and the mother, not knowing what else to do with so strange a small thing, set it upon a shelf, and kept it there, and never once threw it away.

The county had known Jack a long while by then, though few who spoke of him had ever rightly agreed on what manner of thing he was. Some said a light seen along the old roads of an evening, low and steady, the deep banked orange of a coal held fast in something hollow. Some said only a story the Sullivans told their children, and their children's children after them, of a boy who had traded away his soul at a crossroads for want of a single hand that would not let go of his own, and had walked the county a hundred and fifty years for the trading, refused alike by Heaven's gate and Hell's own patience, carrying nothing to light his way but that one mean and mocking coal.

No one saw the light again, after that October.

It is a strange thing, how a story changes its tense without any person present deciding to change it. The old folk who had once said there is a man who walks these roads of an evening, and you had best not stop to speak with him began, in that following winter and every winter after, to say instead there was once a man who walked these roads, and did not remark upon the shifting of it, nor seem to notice they had made it, any more than a river notices the turning of its own course around a stone that has finally, after long labor, worn itself entirely away.

For it was always understood, in the oldest telling of it, the one the Sullivans carried down from whatever hills had first carried it to them, that such a soul walked only until one thing was granted him: one heart, given freely, that would stand where he stood and not simply pass him by. Every telling since had assumed this to be the one mercy the world would never trouble itself to grant, the impossible clause, the wish no clever bargain could ever quite secure, for love got by cunning or got by force is never, in the end, the thing itself. It must be given, or it is worth nothing at all, and worth nothing at all was precisely what the old stories had always expected of it.

This once, it was given.

And so the wandering ended, not by any trick played upon the one who had first set it in motion, but by the plainest and least clever thing in the whole of creation, freely offered, and freely received, and kept.

If you walk that county still, in the low golden hour before an October dusk, you will find, on any number of ordinary porches, children's pumpkins carved and lit against the coming dark, small orange lights set out in rows along the road, and none of the children who lit them could tell you why it is done, only that it has always been done, on this one night of the year, to keep something from being altogether lost in the dark.

They are not wrong to do it.

The End

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