Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale - 1. Chapter 1 — The Peddler's Boy

Prologue

There once was a man called Stingy Jack.

He was a cunning man, the old folk say, and a stingy one besides, fonder of his coin than of his neighbors, and fonder still of his own cleverness than of either. One evening the Devil himself came looking for Jack's soul, thinking him an easy catch, and Jack, quick as ever, asked for one drink before the going. The Devil, being vain of his own powers, turned himself into a coin to pay for it, and Jack pocketed him quick beside a silver cross, and would not let him loose again until the Devil swore never to claim his soul.

The Devil swore it, and was freed, and thought himself well rid of the matter.
Years after, he came for Jack a second time, and Jack, no wiser but no less cunning, asked only for one apple from the tree above them before he'd go quietly. The Devil climbed up to fetch it, and Jack, quick as before, carved crosses all about the trunk, and would not let him down again until he swore a second time, this time to leave Jack be for good and all.

So it was that when Jack died, as every man must die, Heaven would not have him, for he had lived a stingy, cheating life and earned no place within her gates. And Hell would not have him either, bound as the Devil was by his own word, twice given. Jack stood, then, between the two, with nowhere in all creation left to go, and it is said, though fewer trouble to say it now than once did, that he was bound to walk so, forever, unless some one thing were ever granted him that no soul who told the tale expected to come to pass: a heart, offered freely, that would stand where he stood, and not simply pass him by. No one who heard the tale thought it likely. It was, after all, only a story told to keep children close to the hearth on a dark night.

The Devil, sore about the whole affair and unwilling to let Jack off without some parting spite, tossed him a single burning coal, to light his way through the dark he was now condemned to wander. Jack had, about him, a turnip he'd been eating, and he hollowed it out and set the coal inside, and went off into the night with his small, mean light, and has been walking ever since.

That is why, the old folk say, on this one night of the year, children carve faces into pumpkins and set a candle inside, to remember Stingy Jack, and to light his way, since no one else ever did.

— as the tale was recorded in The Dublin Penny Journal from earlier annals,16 January 1836

Chapter One: The Peddler's Boy

I had known, since first I was a boy old enough to know anything of this world at all, that no wall would raise itself from the bones of the earth, however long a man might stand and wish it so; that the stone must be hauled by his own two hands, and set by his own two hands, and cursed, if cursed it must be, in his own voice and no other's. What labor was not so? What inheritance did not demand its due in blood and ache before it would yield so much as a single yard of standing wall?

I did not then know that I asked the very same of love, that it too must be hauled up out of the cold earth, stone upon stone, by hands willing to bleed for it. I would come to know it. God help me, I would come to know it well.

It was October, and the frost had come early upon that hill country, so early that the ground gave up its stones more readily than it gave up its harvest, as though the earth herself preferred to arm a man against his neighbors rather than feed him. I labored the whole of that afternoon at the mending of the north wall, hauling granite from the field's edge and setting it against granite laid down by hands a generation gone, my grandfather's, and his father's before him, until my own hands ached with a cold that had, I swear it, nothing yet to do with the season. The woods pressed close upon that wall, hemlock and black birch grown thick and dark even at the height of noon, and beyond them the land climbed toward ridges that returned no answer to a man's shout; only silence, folded upon silence, folded upon silence again, as though the whole of creation had conspired to a single purpose, and that purpose my solitude.

Did I count myself unhappy in this? I had no cause, in that hour, to count myself anything at all. It was merely the shape my life had been given, as a stone is given its shape by the glacier that dragged it down from some higher place and set it, without ceremony and without appeal, precisely where it would remain until the trumpet sounded.

My father had raised me upon a certain understanding of the world, delivered not so much in words, for he was not a man of excessive speech, as in the silences he permitted and those he would not suffer. I had my letters chiefly from Scripture, and what verses I carried by heart were not the gentle ones. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. I could not have named the hour I first heard it spoken. I knew only that I had understood it, long before I understood why, as a verse fashioned with some particular and damning knowledge of a boy exactly like myself; that it had found me wanting before ever I had done a single thing to earn the judgment.

I told no living soul of this. There was, in truth, no soul to tell. I had grown to nineteen years upon that hillside believing myself the one creature God had fashioned so contrary to His own design that He had, in the fashioning, made an error He would not own to, believing it so entirely that I had ceased, some years past, even to pray against it, reasoning that a wrongness so singular could hardly be worth the Almighty's trouble to correct.

It was in this humor, and with my hands raw from the wall, that I heard the wagon upon the road below.
I straightened to see it come, a peddler's cart, canvas-topped and heavy-laden, drawn by a horse that had seen better decades than this one, driven by a man with the weathered, watchful look of one who has slept beneath a great many strange roofs and trusted precious few of them. Beside him on the box sat a boy near my own age, dark-haired, quick-eyed, minding the reins while the man dozed against the cart's swaying.

They drew up where my land met the road, the man rousing himself to inquire the distance yet to the village. I gave it as best I knew it, my own voice sounding strange in my ears for want of use, as a hinge sounds strange that has long gone unopened. It was the boy who spoke next, and not the man, asking with an ease I envied instantly and could not have named whether the well at the bend still ran sweet, for they had found it bitter the autumn previous.

I told him it did. He thanked me, and smiled in the doing of it, and for the space of a single held breath, no longer, his eyes remained upon mine a beat past what the errand required, so that I felt my whole chest seized as by a hand closing round it.

It was nothing. I understood even then that it was nothing, a peddler's boy, idle and bored upon a long road, offering a farm boy the ordinary courtesy of being looked upon as a person and not a fence post. And yet! I had lived nineteen years never once having been so regarded, and the nothing of it struck me with the force of revelation entire: that such a thing might pass between two men, plainly, in the open air, and the world not end for it. That I was not, perhaps, so singular a wrongness after all.

The man clicked his tongue to the horse. The boy lifted a hand in parting. And the wagon went on, canvas swaying, wheels finding every rut the frost had heaved into the road, until the trees took it wholly from my sight.
I stood a long while at the wall after it had gone.

I had thought, in my ignorance, that so small a mercy would content me, that having once glimpsed the thing I wanted, I might return to my labor consoled by the mere proof that it existed in the world at all. I discovered instead that I had erred in the gravest fashion a starving man can err, which is to suppose the sight of bread will satisfy where bread itself is wanted. The ache I bore home that evening was not the old, nameless ache I had carried the whole of my life. It was worse by a hundredfold, for now it wore a face, and answered to a voice that had called a well "sweet," and I knew with a dread certainty that I should carry that boy's parting glance the length of a life that promised, so far as I could then see, to afford me nothing further like it. Never. Not once more, though I should live to be an old man white-headed upon this same hillside.

I walked the road home in the last violet hour before true dark, the frost already silvering the stone walls to either hand, and it was somewhere in that walking, I could not afterward have said precisely where, that the old tale returned to me, unbidden, as such tales will.

It had come into our hills, I believe, by way of the Sullivans, who kept the mill two towns distant and told it, or some cousin of it, to any child fool enough to sit still for it, the old story of a man called Jack, cunning and stingy both, who had bested the Devil at his own game and paid for the besting with a wandering that had no end. I had heard it a dozen times before I was old enough to properly understand it, at hearths and on porches, the way a child hears any tale often enough that it ceases to frighten and becomes instead merely familiar, a piece of furniture in the house of his own mind.

I had always taken it for a tale meant to frighten children from a cleverness that trespassed too far past honesty, a warning against striking bargains too shrewd for a man's own good. I did not, upon that October road, take it for anything more than this. What was I, that I should fear such a fate? I was no clever man, nor a stingy one; I had nothing to trade, and nothing I meant to withhold. I thought of the tale, if I thought of it at all, only as any boy thinks of an old story walking home in the dark, glancing behind himself once, perhaps twice, at nothing whatsoever.

I could not have told you, that evening, why my feet carried me the long way home, by the crossroads rather than the direct path through the north field. I have wondered it a thousand times since, whether it was mere chance, or whether some current beneath the visible world had already begun to draw me toward that place, as a stream draws a fallen leaf toward water it cannot see and has no power to refuse. I know only that I came, in full dark now, to where the county road crossed the old cart track, marked by nothing more than a lightning-split oak and a scatter of loose stone, and that I stopped there, though I had no cause in the world to stop, and stood a long while in the cold with my breath showing white before me, and that boy's face burning still behind my eyes.

"You have the look," said a voice, quite near, "of a man who has lost something he never rightly had."

I did not cry out. I have thought since that I ought to have, that any man of sense would have cried out, or run, or fallen to his knees in prayer. But there is a species of terror so complete that it passes clean through fear and out the far side of it into a dreadful stillness, and it was this stillness alone that held me as I turned and found him there: a gentleman, or a passable imitation of one, dressed finer than any man I had seen in that whole country, his coat dark and well-cut, a thin cigar between two fingers trailing smoke sweeter than any tobacco I knew, and beneath the sweetness, fainter, the smell of something scorched that no sweetness could wholly disguise.

"I have lost nothing," said I, though my own voice betrayed the lie even as I gave it breath.

He smiled at that, a smile with a great deal of pleasure in it, and precious little kindness. "No," he agreed, and drew upon the cigar. "You have never had it to lose. That, I find, is rather the worse condition of the two, though men are slow to see it so." He studied me a long moment, unhurried, as a man studies livestock he has not yet resolved to purchase. "A peddler's boy, was it? With a mouth full of pleasantries about a well?"

I did not ask how he came to know it. I understood, in some wordless chamber of myself, precisely what stood before me, and that the asking of ordinary questions would avail me nothing whatsoever.

"I want only," said I, and here my voice broke entire, so that I was forced to steady it before I could go on, "I want only to be loved, sir, and to love in turn, without the world's ceaseless instruction that I have no right to either. I do not ask for wealth. I do not ask for years beyond my portion. I ask but one soul, given freely, who might stand where that boy stood this afternoon, and not simply pass on down the road and leave me to the silence."

"A modest request," said he, "as such requests go. I have granted worse for less." He drew nearer, until I felt the cold that seemed to come off him rather than any warmth a man's body ought properly to give, cold with that sweetish smoke laid over it like a shroud drawn across a wound not yet closed. "And what," he asked, almost gently, "will you give me for it?"

I had not thought so far ahead. What fool, at nineteen, thinks so far ahead? I had nothing: no gold, no land that was not already my father's, no learning, no cleverness worth the name. "Whatever I have," said I, "which I own is little enough."

"Your soul," said he, "will do."

I ought to have asked more of him than I did. I understand this now with a clarity that arrived a hundred and fifty years too late to serve the boy I was that night. But I was nineteen, and cold, and had that very day learned that the thing I wanted was possible in this world, only to watch it driven off down a dark road in a peddler's cart, and I was not, in that hour, a young man inclined toward caution.

"Then take it," said I, "when I have done with it. Only," and here some small, frightened remnant of sense rose in me, some last animal instinct toward my own preservation that survived even my despair, "only promise me this: that whatever should become of me, you will never carry my soul down into Hell itself. Wherever else I might be sent, spare me that one mercy."

I did not know, as I gave voice to the words, that I had spoken them almost precisely as the old tale had them spoken before me. I had given no thought to that tale in the moment at all; I thought only of the flames I had heard preached of the whole of my life, and wished, with the small cunning peculiar to the desperate, to keep myself from them by whatever narrow means the bargain allowed.

But I saw the change come over him at once, saw the easy, indulgent amusement drain wholly from his face, and something else rise in its place, something with an edge upon it, as a man's countenance hardens who believes himself mocked to his own face. He went very still. Stiller, I thought, than any living thing has right to go.

"Say that again," said he.

"I meant only..."

"I know precisely what you meant." His voice had dropped, and lost every trace of its former warmth. "You stand at my own crossroads, boy, and ask me the very thing that fool of a tinker asked a hundred years past, in the very words he used to ask it, and you tell me you meant nothing by it!" He circled me slowly, and the cold seemed to circle with him, closing. "Do you take me for a fool twice made? Do you suppose I have not heard my own name laughed over in every kitchen from here to the sea, on account of a stingy, thieving wretch who tricked me not once but twice, and left me holding my own word as a man holds a purse he cannot close?"

"I know no tinker," said I, and it was the truth entire, though I could see plainly it would not be believed. "I know only a tale the Sullivans tell their children of an evening. I meant no mockery, sir. I am not clever. I am only frightened."

He ceased his circling and studied me a long moment, and something in his bearing shifted then, subtly, but I marked it, from fury toward a colder and far more patient calculation, as a man's bearing shifts who has resolved that a wrong done him shall be answered at his own leisure, and not before. "Frightened," he repeated, as though tasting the word upon his tongue and finding it wanting. "Well. We shall see how well that serves you." He drew again upon the cigar, and let the smoke go slow. "I will grant your condition, boy, precisely as you have asked it. I would not have it said I feared to give a farm boy what once I gave a thief, for want of nerve. You shall never see the inside of my own house, whatever else befalls you." He smiled again, and there was nothing pleasant in it now, nothing at all. "But you shall not go by your own name after this night. You have earned yourself a better one. Stingy Jack, they named him, stingy with his soul, though he traded it twice over and more. I find the name suits you already, though you have done nothing yet to deserve it. Perhaps, in time, you shall grow into it."

I did not understand, then, that he had done more than merely insult me. I did not understand that he had marked me, that some private accounting had begun running behind that cold smile of his, a debt he reckoned owed him twice over now, once by a tinker a century dead, and once by me in that dead man's stead, to be collected in his own hour and by his own means, whatever the bare letter of his promise allowed him. I understood only that he extended his hand to me, and that I took it, for I could think of no reason in my desperation to refuse it.

He held my hand a moment longer than any handshake required, turning it, almost idly, palm upward toward the moon, and I felt, so faint a thing that I very nearly mistook it for nothing at all, a single sharp prick against the meat of my palm, gone again before I could cry out or draw my hand away. A thorn caught upon his sleeve, I told myself. A trick of the cold. I thought no more of it that night, nor for a long while after.

"Done, then," said he. "You shall have your companion, Jack. I am a great believer in giving a man precisely what he asks for." His grip tightened, once, and I felt something pass out of me in that instant I could not then name and have never, in all the years since, entirely recovered, not pain exactly, but a kind of loosening, as though a knot long tied at the very center of my being had been cut through and left to fray. "It is what he does with it after that generally proves the trouble."

He released my hand. The cold of him withdrew with it, all at once, so that the ordinary October chill of the evening felt almost gentle by comparison. When I looked again the crossroads stood empty, no gentleman, no cigar's sweet smoke, nothing but the split oak and the loose stone and my own breath, ragged now, showing white before me in the dark.

I walked the whole of the way home telling myself I had dreamed it entire, or else that some fever of loneliness had overtaken me that a night's honest sleep would cure. I did not yet understand what I had done. I understood only that the solitude I had borne the length of my life had been given, that night, both a name and, though I could not have said how I knew it, an ending, and I walked home almost lighter for the knowing of it. Fool that I was! Up the dark road I went, toward the house where my father's lamp still burned in the kitchen window, thinking myself, God forgive me, fortunate.

It was only as I came within sight of that window that I stopped, and felt the fine hairs rise along my arms beneath my coat.
For there burned a second light that night, low along the tree line where no house stood and no lantern had any earthly business being lit, small, and steady, and the deep, banked orange of a coal held fast within something hollow, and the woods about it, I would have sworn upon my mother's own Bible, had gone entirely, unnaturally still.

I did not look then at my own palm. I would not think to look until some days after, when, in the ordinary course of washing, I found upon it a small scab, no larger than a pin's own head, in a place I could not recall having cut it, and thought nothing more of so trifling a thing, and went on with my labor, and did not think of it again for a very long while.