Майкл Салливан - Deep Magic. Fourth Collection

Gustaf.

I know precisely when she finds his name, because that’s when I do too. It burns like a stoked fire through me, churning up sparks of guilt and self-loathing. Stirring up smoke that chokes me out, and a voice within it, crying:

“How could you, Eliza? You ruined me!”

And though the details are still lost, and I beg for them to remain so, I know—as surely as my name—that it is true.

Even though she’s miles away, I know Jael is reading old newspaper articles from the time before all the trouble began, for I can see Gustaf’s blacksmith forge as if it’s before me, can feel the whoosh of the bellows and sense the heat around me. I can hear the town’s accolades for his fine workmanship, their praise for the young man who shows so much promise. And I see something she doesn’t see, something I was never meant to find: in the corner, the metal box with a false bottom, and in that hidden compartment, the short-handled running irons favored by cattle rustlers.

Then I picture the family vault across town and know, when she does, that Gustaf is not buried there either. I know, with frightful certainty, that they never recovered enough remains to put to rest.

And Father’s words echo around me: “Today, I’ve lost both my children.”

This time when Jael visits, it’s drizzling, and the sky is as clouded and dark as my thoughts. She’s wearing an orange poncho and rainboots that come halfway up her calves. She carries a rake with bamboo tines and a garbage bag that’s already half-full of debris.

“I found your family,” she says as she approaches, and her memory of them stirs a whirlwind of emotions through me: love, pain, sorrow, regret. “Your parents and grandparents are across town in that vault, as I’d suspected, but you and your brother aren’t. You know why?”

She waits, listening, as if I might answer.

Even if I could, I don’t want to. I may not remember the details, but I remember enough. Enough to know that I ruined his reputation. I ruined our family’s good name. And what’s more, from the gnawing ache of guilt that won’t go away, I’m beginning to suspect I may have done something worse.

“I asked the librarian,” Jael said, putting the rake to the ground and carefully tugging at the snarls of dead leaves and tangled weeds. “She thought she remembered reading some old records in the archives about the family once. Some big scandal that turned the town upside down, back when there were more cattle out here than people. She said I ought to head to the main branch, that they’d have more reels of microfiche there with newspapers from that era. Maybe I can find out what happened.”

The heat of terror flows through me. A leaf catches in Jael’s hair—coincidence? Or a sign that her curiosity is catching, making me stronger? Besides Hugh and the librarian, whom else has she talked to about me?

I wish I could tell her that I don’t want to be remembered. I wish I could force her to give up this pursuit. I try to scream it as loud as I can, and maybe a bit of it gets through.

“It’s part of why I do what I do,” she says almost apologetically, gesturing to her tools. “It just doesn’t seem right, that just because you lived long ago . . . just because you didn’t have any children or grandchildren of your own, that you should be forgotten.”

But some of us want to be forgotten.

She sets about her work, humming a melancholy tune as she goes, and I follow at her heels like a calf trailing its mother, able to hold on more tightly this time because her mind is so full of my story. When the sun begins to creep down toward the golden treetops, she tucks the rake away in the groundskeeper’s shed, and this time when she reaches into her bag to grab her keys, she shivers, and my name is on the tip of her tongue. She says it aloud, though she doesn’t know why.

I leech off the power of her tablet until we reach her car—an enclosed, silver thing that only resembles the carriages of my day in that it has four wheels and seats. She turns the key, and the engine roars to life, along with a battery far stronger than that of her little tablet. Between her musings on my life and the electrical energy in this rumbling machine, I’m able to sit beside her and be carried away, farther each minute from the place where my body was laid to rest.

Jael listens to music as she drives, the same melancholy tunes that she’d hummed as she worked, only now I hear the lyrics too. They’re words of frustration and angst and loss, and I wonder what they mean to her, why she sings with such conviction.

Outside, the empty prairie of my day is gone, and I finally see the city that, thus far, I’d only vaguely sensed. It’s easy to see why so few from my corner of the cemetery are remembered; there’s no trace of my era on this city. The buildings our hands constructed have crumbled. The places that bore our names are gone. Highways bisect the farms that families passed from generation to generation.

It is as if we never existed.

And yet, beside me is a woman who wants to resurrect old things: old names, old stories, old pains, old wrongs. What right does she have? What good will it do?

“Whoa,” Jael says, frowning at the dashboard, which has started blinking in agitation. Yellow lights. Orange lights. Red lights. The car sputters, threatening to die, and another vehicle whizzes past, its horn blaring. That’s what it takes to make me realize what I’ve done, and I pull back, immediately regretful. The engine turns over, humming steadily again.

“What was that all about?” Jael mutters to herself. I can hear her heart beat faster and feel the adrenaline fluttering through her veins. It makes me feel stronger, more powerful, and yet at the same time, it frightens me. The world is full of stories of spirits who feed on fears, who revel in their notoriety and use that power to manifest themselves, keeping their memory alive long after those who would remember them are gone. Is that what Jael is turning me into? Is that what I’m destined to become?

I sink back into the seat, distancing myself from the dashboard and the engine.

When Jael’s phone rings, I fear I’ve caused that as well, but when she answers it with a sigh, it’s a real, living person she’s talking to.

“Hey, Tyson.” She loops a Bluetooth device over her ear, and though I could tuck myself away inside its tiny bits of metal to hear both sides of the conversation, I choose to listen only to her words, a tiny gesture of humanity that makes me feel less like a haunt.

“No, I didn’t send money yet. Why?” She sighs again. “Look, where did you say you were interviewing? Right. Uh-huh. No, I believe you. Yes, I know we’re family.”

“How could you, Eliza? We’re family.” The car speakers sputter, static filling the air where Jael’s music had just been, and within it, behind it, from somewhere deep beyond, comes my father’s voice. “I don’t care what he’d been making or for whom—even if it was for the devil himself. Family doesn’t betray family. Mark my word, that sheriff’s gone to get his deputy, and the two of them are going to cart your brother away before the night is through. All his hard work, gone. Our good family name, besmirched. And that’s on your shoulders. Nobody’s but your own.”

And then Mother’s. “Where’s Gustaf?”

The scent of fire overwhelms me.

“Look, I gotta go,” Jael says. “I’m in traffic, and my car’s acting up. Smells like something’s overheating. I’ll call you back later. Yeah. Bye.”

She tosses the phone onto the seat beside her and urges the car like I used to do with the horses pulling the wagon up the big hill at the edge of town. “C’mon, girl. We’re almost to the library. Just a few more blocks, and I’ll call the mechanic. Just hang in there a few more blocks.”