Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

“You’re making that up.”

“No, it was more common than you’d think.”

“Why didn’t they just bury them at sea?”

“Because for some people, the sea’s not home. Don’t you want to be buried somewhere near home?”

He recalled Anna’s funeral, in the graveyard of the church they’d both grown up attending, and where they planned to be married. “Never thought about it,” he lied.

The name and date on the next stone, FERLIN EDWARD SWETT, 1802–1855, were legible, but lichen covered part of the inscription beneath it. He was about to move on, when he noticed the word “feeble.” That seemed such an odd word for an epitaph that he knelt and picked enough of the green cover away to make out the phrase:

“What does that mean?” Rob asked.

“Who knows? Probably some old Victorian poem or something. I’m not a tombstone-ologist.” She knew she sounded tense, but Rob was too engrossed to notice. He looked back and forth between the two headstones.

Long forgotten, the man had said. Carved in stone.

“You know… these inscriptions could almost be two verses of the same song. Except the more recent one would be the first verse, since it talks about what happens at the point of dying, and the older one is what happens afterwards. What do you think?”

Nervous perspiration trickled between her shoulder blades, and it took real effort to sound casual. “Hm. Well, as fascinating as this is, you seem to be recovering nicely, and I need to take you back to town so I can get on to work.”

“Yeah.” He stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Thanks, by the way. For helping out back in town, and for the stitch job.”

She nodded. “Glad to do it.”

He took out his phone and began taking pictures of the inscriptions.

“What are you doing?” she almost shouted.

“Just taking pictures. That way I can play around with the words later.”

“You’d steal someone’s epitaph and turn it into a song?” She couldn’t keep the fear from her voice, but luckily it came out as outrage.

He looked at her oddly. She seemed offended all out of proportion. “Wow. I’m sorry, are these some of your people?”

“No,” Bliss said. “It just seems… rude.”

“What I really hope to do is find the poem these came from.”

“Oh.” She fought to appear calm. “That’s sensible, then. Come on, let’s get you back to the Catamount Corner.”

He started to protest, but suddenly his head swirled and he truly just wanted to lie down back in his room. He followed her back to the station, where she finally gave him some aspirin.

They were about to drive away when she abruptly stopped the truck at the end of the driveway. She searched his eyes for any gleam of the true, no matter how small, but found none. “You’re really not from around here, are you? I mean, no family from here, no history, nothing.”

“No. Sorry.”

She shook her head. “You sure look like you’ve got a good bit of Tufa in you. Hell, you and I could be brother and sister.”

“That’s a weird thing to say.”

“No, I’m serious. You don’t have any family ties to this area?”

“Not a one. It’s just a coincidence.”

They rode in silence back into town, and she dropped him off in front of the Catamount Corner. He carried his guitar through the empty lobby to his room, where he fell facedown on the bed. But he couldn’t sleep; the words from the two grave markers kept running through his mind, finding their own meter and melody.

He knew from experience that there was no fighting the muse when she struck. He pulled up the pictures on his phone, quickly transcribed the words to a piece of motel stationery, and began quietly noodling on his guitar, trying out the stanza in different ways, breaking it at different points. It worked best as a simple 4/4 rhythm, a basic chord progression, simplest thing in the world….

“Soul to earth” was a weird metaphor, he realized. Souls normally sprang to heaven, not earth. And yet it couldn’t be a euphemism for decay, because the next line explicitly covered that. He knew of no branch of Christianity that allowed the soul to return to the earth; so what religion had these people practiced?

And “through his wings”; what could that mean? Wings were reserved for angels, yet the subject of the verse was clearly not yet dead.

His cell phone rang and he jumped. He set the guitar aside and answered it. “Hello?”

“Hey, tough guy,” Doyle said, amused. “I hear you had a donnybrook on Main Street this morning.”

“Yeah, with some Neanderthal hill woman named Tiffany.”

“She’s a monster, all right. So did she beat you up too much to come over for that dinner tonight?”

“Not at all. I don’t know how much fun I’ll be, but I could sure use some home cooking.”

After Doyle gave him directions and hung up, Rob got online and tried a search for the poem or song that had inspired the epitaph. He got no results that fit. This thrilled him even more, for it meant he might be on the track of the secret, magical song that had brought him here. And they were right where the man had said they’d be: on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone.

The Collins’s trailer home looked isolated and vulnerable in the twilight. The trees around it were thick, old, and more densely packed than the rest of the forest. A creek ran along one edge of the lot, crossed by a small decorative bridge.

Rob parked next to Doyle’s truck beneath a solitary old oak that shaded most of the front yard. One branch had grown so long and heavy that halfway along its length, a makeshift metal brace supported its weight. The yard was neat and boasted no half-assembled cars or sleepy dogs, something Rob realized he’d expected to find.

Berklee greeted him at the door. She wore khaki shorts despite the chill and a criminally tight white T-shirt, and looked absolutely stunning. She held a beer, and the slight red flush to her cheeks said it wasn’t her first of the day. She stepped aside to let him enter and said, “Hi, glad you could make it. See you found us okay.”

Rob tapped the brim of his Royals cap. “Sorry for wearing a hat indoors. I know better, but I’ve got fresh stitches and Vaseline in my hair, and I just didn’t think I could stand shampoo on it just yet.”

“You’re not the first person Tiffany Gwinn’s made get stitches,” Berklee said sympathetically. “Seems like every town’s got someone like her, doesn’t it?”

Berklee took his jacket and hung it on the rack by the door. The trailer’s living room was furnished in matching couch and recliner, while the little dining area had new-looking table and chairs. Everything was neat and organized, in contrast to the cliché image of trailer people. Rob took a seat on one of the barstools in front of the counter that divided the kitchen and living room.

Doyle came down the hall in jeans and a dark sweater. “Well, look who took on the Queen Bitch of the Mountains and lived to tell about it. Quite a shiner you’ve got going there.”

Rob touched the skin around his left eye. It felt tender and hot. “Apparently, I don’t have to tell about it, everyone already knows.”

“Someone usually gets their head busted when the Gwinns come to town. You ever hear of Great Kate Gwinn?”

“No.”

“Back about seventy years ago, she was the biggest moonshiner around Needsville, in every sense. They say she weighed seven hundred pounds, but I figure there’s a thirty percent exaggeration factor in that. She lived up at the Gwinn house, but she was too big to get out the door, so nobody ever arrested her. The local cops told the feds, ‘She’s catchable, but not fetchable.’”