‘Yes. It probably didn’t help that most of the TR was giving them the silent treatment. Then Finney died in the quarry — committed suicide in the quarry, I think — and Jared’s logger-boys got an idea. Came down with it like a cold. Only it was more like a compulsion. Their idea was that if they dug up the bodies and reburied them where it happened, things’d go back to normal for them.’
‘Did Jared go along with the idea?’
‘According to Jo’s notes, by then they never went near him. They reburied the bag of bones —
without Jared Devore’s help — where I eventually dug it up. In the late fall or early winter of 1902, I think.’
‘She wanted to be back, didn’t she? Sara. Back where she could really work on them.’
‘And on the whole township. Yes. Jo thought so, too. Enough so she didn’t want to go back to Sara Laughs once she found some of this stuff out. Especially when she guessed she was pregnant.
When we started trying to have a baby and I suggested the name Kia, how that must have scared her! And I never saw.’
‘Sara thought she could use you to kill Kyra if Devore played out before he could get the job done — he was old and in bad health, after all. Jo gambled that you’d save her instead. That’s what you think, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she was right.’
‘I couldn’t have done it alone. From the night I dreamed about Sara singing, Jo was with me every step of the way. Sara couldn’t make her quit.’
‘No, she wasn’t a quitter,’ Frank agreed, and wiped at one eye. ‘What do you know about your twice-great-aunt? The one that married Auster?’
‘Bridget Noonan Auster,’ I said. ‘Bridey, to her friends. I asked my mother and she swears up and down she knows nothing, that Jo never asked her about Bridey, but I think she might be lying. The young woman was definitely the black sheep of the family — I can tell just by the sound of Mom’s voice when the name comes up. I have no idea how she met Benton Auster. Let’s say he was down in the Prout’s Neck part of the world visiting friends and started flirting with her at a clambake.
That’s as likely as anything else. This was in 1884. She was eighteen, he was twenty-three. They got married, one of those hurry-up jobs. Harry, the one who actually drowned Kito Tidwell, came along six months later.’
‘So he was barely seventeen when it happened,’ Frank said. ‘Great God.’
‘And by then his mother had gotten religion. His terror over what she’d think if she ever found out was part of the reason he did what he did. Any other questions, Frank? Because I’m really starting to fade.’
For several moments he said nothing — I had begun to think he was done when he said, ‘Two others. Do you mind?’
‘I guess it’s too late to back out now. What are they?’
‘The Shape you spoke of. The Outsider. That troubles me.’
I said nothing. It troubled me, too.
‘Do you think there’s a chance it might come back?’
‘It always does,’ I said. ‘At the risk of sounding pompous, the Outsider eventually comes back for all of us, doesn’t it? Because we’re all bags of bones. And the Outsider . . . Frank, the Outsider wants what’s in the bag.’
He mulled this over, then swallowed the rest of his Scotch at a gulp.
‘You had one other question?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Have you started writing again?’
I went upstairs a few minutes later, checked Ki, brushed my teeth, checked Ki again, then climbed into bed. From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow.
Have you started writing again?
No. Other than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to Kyra in some later year, there’s been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to call him and tell him what he already guesses: the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isn’t broken — this memoir came out with nary a gasp or missed heartbeat — but the machine has stopped, just the same. There’s gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. I’ve put a tarp over it. It’s served me well, you see, and I don’t like to think of it getting dusty.
Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you don’t know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. ‘When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun.’ Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it — close enough for government work, kemo sabe.
Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that’s another idea I got last summer. Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.
Or maybe I just wish there’d been a little more time.
I remember telling Ki it’s best not to leave love letters around; what I thought but didn’t say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway . . . but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.
I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel — not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.
Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and while he was at the height of his narrative genius. He went on writing poetry for another twenty years, and when someone asked him why he’d quit fiction he said he couldn’t understand why he had trucked with it so long in the first place. In retrospect it seemed silly to him, he said. Pointless. I know exactly what he meant. In the time between now and whenever the Outsider remembers me and decides to
come back, there must be other things to do, things that mean more than those shadows. I think I could go back to clanking chains behind the Ghost House wall, but I have no interest in doing so.
I’ve lost my taste for spooks. I like to imagine Mattie would think of Bartleby in Melville’s story.
I’ve put down my scrivener’s pen. These days I prefer not to.
Center Lovell, Maine: May 25th, 1997 — February 6th, 1998