Alma Katsu - The Taker

Jonathan fell quiet in response to my attempt at cheerfulness. We turned the car around and headed back toward town.

We went to a small restaurant in the center of town that night for dinner. You could call it a restaurant in that it was a place where meals could be purchased, but it didn’t resemble the sort of restaurant that I was used to patronizing. It was more like a diner with a dozen laminate-topped tables, each surrounded by four metal-tube chairs. The tablecloths were oilcloth, the napkins paper. The menus were covered in yellowing plastic, and it was a safe bet that the menu had not changed in twenty years. There were five customers, including Jonathan and me. The other three were all men in jeans and flannel shirts and some kind of cap, each sitting at a separate table. The waitress was probably also the cook. She looked at us critically as she passed us menus, as if there was some question of whether she would serve us or not. Country music played sweetly from a radio.

We ordered food that neither of us had seen in a long time, if ever, living abroad: fried catfish fillets, chicken and dumplings, food that was almost exotic in its strangeness. We lingered over bottled beer and spoke little, under the joint impression that the other patrons were watching us. The waitress-hair like coiled wire and determined sags cut into her face-looked pointedly at the half-eaten meals before asking us if we wanted any dessert. “Pie is good,” she deadpanned, as if making a general observation.

“Was it disappointing, to visit your home?” I asked, after the waitress had brought over two more beers. Jonathan shook his head.

“I should have expected it. Still, I wasn’t prepared.”

“It’s so different, but in some ways, so much the same. I feel disjointed. If you weren’t with me, I’d leave.”

We left the diner and walked down the street. Everything was closed, except a tiny bar, the Blue Moon to judge by its neon sign predictably shaped like a crescent moon. It sounded romantic, but through the plate-glass front I saw it was completely full of men, truckers and loggers watching a sporting event on the television. After the commercial part of town had petered out, we came upon the churchyard. There was just enough moonlight to wander among the headstones.

It had become wild and overgrown. Wild berry bushes and nettles had reclaimed the stone wall, shrouded the twin columns that had once flanked the entry, and swallowed up some of the markers. Years of frost heaves had thrown some of the gravestones out of their places; other headstones were eroded by time or had been broken by vandals. I picked my way through the graves quickly, not anxious to visit my former neighbors in this way, while Jonathan made his way from graveside to graveside, trying to read the names and dates, pulling at weeds that had sprung up around the stones. He seemed so sad and wounded that I had to quash the urge to make him leave.

“Look, it’s Isaiah Gilbert’s marker,” Jonathan called out. “He died in… 1842.”

“A respectable amount of time. A good long life,” I called back from the spot where I stood, smoking and weaving from remembrance and vertigo.

By then Jonathan had turned to another tombstone. He was crouching, on the balls of his feet, looking around the churchyard. “I wonder if everyone we knew is here, somewhere.”

“It’s inevitable that some of them left. Have you found any of my family?”

“Wouldn’t they be in the Catholic cemetery on the other side of town?” he asked, walking down an aisle, looking from headstone to headstone. “We can go over there next, if you like.”

“No, thanks. I’ve no curiosity left.”

I knew Jonathan had found someone significant when he knelt next to a large double marker. It was rough stone and pitted with age, its broad, flat back to me, so I could not read the inscription. “Whose is it?” I asked as I walked over.

“It’s my brother.” His hands were running over the engraved words. “Benjamin.”

“And Evangeline.” I touched the other side of the tombstone. Evangeline St. Andrew, beloved wife. Mother of Ruth.

“So they married.”

“Family honor?” I asked, brushing off the letters with my fingertips. “It doesn’t look as though she lived long.”

“And Benjamin was buried beside her-he never remarried.”

In the next hour we found most of Jonathan’s family-his mother and eventually the daughter Ruth, too, the last St. Andrew to live in the town. Jonathan’s sisters were missing, though, which led Jonathan to hope they’d married and left town, to raise happy and successful families somewhere else and be buried beside their husbands in more cheerful surroundings. He wanted to believe they’d escaped all the melancholy of St. Andrew.

I took Jonathan back to the cabin. I’d smuggled two bottles of an extraordinary cabernet all the way from France in my suitcase. We pulled the cork on one and let it breathe on the counter while we lay in bed together. I held Jonathan against me until the chill had left his body and then I undressed him. We lay in bed between the aged and softened white cotton sheets, sipping the cabernet in tumblers and talking about our childhood, the brothers and sisters, friends, and fools; the closely held long dead, decomposed and inert matter in the ground while we were still inexplicably alive. I could not bear to tell him the truth about Sophia. Instead, we spoke of each cherished one until Jonathan lapsed into sleep-and then I cried for the first of many times.

There were no more excursions to relive the past: no more visits to graveyards, no retracing of paths in the woods at once familiar but now barely evident and ghostly. We walked along the Allagash, sighting moose and deer and admiring the light from the full Maine sun sparkling on the current, rather than reminiscing about events that had transpired on this spot or that. The rest of the time was spent quietly in each other’s company.

Time spent together became like a drug I couldn’t get enough of, and I began to think maybe we could get lost here, where we had started together. We wouldn’t have to live in St. Andrew proper; since the town had changed so much, it might be disconcerting to stay. We could find land in the woods and build a cabin, where we’d live apart from everybody and everything. No newspaper, no clock, no insistent ticking of time tapping us on the shoulder, reverberating in our ears. No running from the past every fifty or sixty years or so, to emerge as another person in another land, or rather pretending to be a new person, as new as a chick just come from the egg, but inwardly feeling like the person I was and could never get away from.

We were out one night on the deck behind the dilapidated cabin, wrapped in our coats, sitting on two folding chairs, drinking wine from glass tumblers and looking up at the flat moon. Jonathan steered our talk to the past and it made me uneasy. He wondered whether Evangeline had had a hard, unhappy life after he disappeared and whether he had been the cause of his mother’s early death. I said I was sorry over and over, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear any of it, shaking his head and saying no, it had been his fault, he had been terrible to me, taking advantage of my obvious love for him. I shook my head, placing a hand on Jonathan’s forearm. “But I had wanted you so much, you see,” I told him. “You weren’t entirely to blame.”

“Let’s go out there, again,” Jonathan said, “to that place in the woods, where we used to meet, the place with the vault of birch saplings. I’ve thought of them often, the prettiest spot on earth. Do you think they are still there? I’d hate it if someone has cut them down.” Tipsy and warm from drink, we climbed into the SUV, though I had to go back inside the cabin for a blanket and a flashlight. I held the open wine bottle to my chest as Jonathan maneuvered the vehicle through the woods. We had to leave the sport utility on the side of the logging road and travel the last half mile on foot.