John Langan - The Fisherman

Lottie cannot believe what she’s hearing. It isn’t that she herself is especially rational. Of all the family, she’s the most religious, and she has no trouble with the miracles found in the Old and New Testaments. Nor does she have any problems accepting the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. Manna in the desert, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, the coming of this and that evil beast, those are fine with her. If you ask her, she’d say that she believes in God’s hand shaping events in the world, and in the Devil’s efforts to frustrate that design. She isn’t sure about guardian angels or personal demons. That may be veering too much towards popery; it depends on her mood, though. The Bible, however, is the past, except for Revelation, which is the future. As for the present, you have to look carefully for the supernatural in it. It’s a matter for study and interpretation. God and the Devil, good and evil, are active, but their actions are subtle. All this — broken woman returning from the grave and threatening their children, men vomiting monsters, sorcerers — it’s so blatant, so vulgar.

That isn’t the only thing. There are her parents. I guess you could say that, as regards Rainer and Clara, this night is one of surprises for Lottie. First there’s her insight into their humanity, which is disconcerting enough. Then it’s capped by talk of magic. While Rainer and Clara attend church services with Lottie and her sisters, neither of them has ever appeared all that devout. Rainer, of course, is the skeptic. Clara prides herself on her common sense. In fact, one of Clara’s favorite activities is teasing her husband about this or that example of his lack of common sense. Now, in a matter of minutes, both Lottie’s parents have abandoned their hard-headedness for mysticism, and not a particularly Christian-sounding one at that. It’s as if, up until this evening, Rainer and Clara have been acting, playing roles they’re only too happy to set aside. For a second, Lottie’s parents seem stranger to her than any woman with gold eyes and a weird voice.

Rainer notices this. He sees his daughter squeezing her eyes shut against the vertigo of the situation and crosses the room to her. Catching Lottie by the shoulders, he says, “I know. I know you’re thinking, ‘Who are these crazy people, and what have they done with my mama and papa?’ It is difficult to hear us talking like this, isn’t it? Here we are, your parents, who yell at you for too much day-dreaming, and we’re saying there could be ein Schwarzkunstler making dead people get up and walk around. What’s next? A witch in a gingerbread house? A handsome prince who’s been changed into a beast? A little mermaid who wants to be a real girl? It is like a storybook. It is like you’ve fallen into one of the stories we used to read you when you were a child. You don’t understand everything, but you understand enough, and that knowledge, it twists things, doesn’t it? Maybe you are afraid this is madness?” Lottie nods. He’s pretty much hit the nail on the head. Rainer goes on, “I thought the same thing, the first time I–I thought the same thing, once. I thought I could feel my sanity slipping away, the way water does when you try to hold it in your hands. I wasn’t insane, though. I wasn’t, and you aren’t. This doesn’t make a lie out of everything else. It complicates it, yes, but it’s not a lie. Do you understand?”

Lottie doesn’t, not as much as she thinks she wants to, but she nods anyway, because she isn’t sure she can keep listening to this man who looks so much like her beloved father, yet talks like someone else entirely. She wants to flee the scene, run away to her bed and hide herself in sleep, and after Rainer hugs her tightly and releases her, she makes a beeline for her bedroom. She hasn’t taken two steps before Clara catches her by the arm. “You wanted to know,” Clara says. There’s something in her mother’s voice, a kind of quaver like, that the instant Lottie hears it makes her realize that, once upon a time, her mother went through what’s happening to her now. She thinks back to those late night conversations — arguments, really — between her parents while the scandal was breaking around her father at the University. She remembers her mother walking around the house during the day in a daze. It was this, Lottie understands. Her father had been forced to tell her mother about it. Her mother had demanded and he had told her in such a way that she had no choice but to accept. “You wanted to know,” Clara says again, jerking Lottie out of her own thoughts. “So. You know. You will live with this. Do you understand? You will live with this.” Clara might be talking to herself. She says, “What is happening will be seen to. Your father will find out what needs to be done, and he will do it. He is right. This is bad business. It must be seen to. You heard about today?”

“Yes,” Lottie says.

“That is what we can expect,” Clara says, “that and worse. That foolish man started what will get worse.” Without further ado, no reassuring hug, Clara releases her, and Lottie retreats to the safety of her bedroom. As you might guess, sleep, when at last it comes, is not the cozy sanctuary she hoped for. She never said what her dreams were, but I imagine at least some of them have to do with the events of that afternoon, what Clara asked Lottie if she’d heard about and Lottie said she had. Seemed most of the camp knew about it five minutes after it happened. Helen reappeared, you see, though that was only part of the story, and not the one that set everyone’s tongue wagging.

I suppose we have to backtrack to Rainer and his fellows standing around George’s corpse. Once the men have determined that George has indeed shuffled off his mortal coil, most of them flee the scene. No doubt some were terrified by what they’d been part of, but likely the majority wanted out of there before anyone in authority, namely the police, shows up. The camp has its own police force, and while I don’t know that they’re much worse than any other police force at the time, I haven’t heard that they were any better. These fellows are all immigrants, besides, and the last thing they want is to be associated with a strange death. Their jobs are the best some of them have held since coming to this country, and they aren’t going to do anything to jeopardize that.

So it falls to Rainer to walk to the police station and inform them that his neighbor has passed on. As a stonemason, one of the skilled workers, he’s in a better position to convey such information, and the fact that his English is better than most doesn’t hurt. He decides to say that, as far as he can tell, George died of a fit, which is close enough to the truth for him to be able to stick to it. And stick to it he does, even though the cop he tells stares at him for an uncomfortably long time after he’s finished speaking, as if he thinks he can stare a confession out of Rainer. When the officer gets up from his chair and accompanies Rainer back to George’s, somewhat to Rainer’s surprise the officer agrees that Rainer’s assessment appears to be correct. He’ll have to send over to Woodstock for the undertaker, the cop says, Rainer’s free to go. He thanks the cop, and takes his leave.

No one person witnesses all of what happens next. Lottie pieces most of it together from the combined gossip of a dozen different people that day and the next. The substance of it is simple. The undertaker’s assistant, a young fellow by the name of Miller Jeffries, who’s sent by his boss to collect George’s body, upon his return to Woodstock shotguns his boss, then drives back to the camp to shoot his sweetheart and himself. The consensus among the camp’s population is that Jeffries lost his mind, which is what the residents of the camp tell the newspaper reporters who show up to cover the crime. I know: not the most earth-shattering of explanations. No one breathes a word about the reason for Jeffries’s insanity, although a good portion of the camp traces it to the trip he took to fetch that body. A smaller number of people know that he met Helen, the dead man’s dead wife, who was waiting in the house for him when he arrived. About an hour before Jeffries shows up, folks see her walking up the street to her house. One moment, the street is empty. The next, she’s in it, as if she turned a corner in the air and appeared. She makes her muddy way to the house, and takes a seat next to her husband’s corpse. Maybe she’s expecting the undertaker himself. He’s otherwise engaged, though, so it’s Jeffries who’s taken the black horse and wagon over from Woodstock. He’s a bit strange-looking, is Miller. The papers describe him as short, with bow-legs and long arms. Word is, he isn’t the brightest candle in the box, either. Lottie, who met him a couple of times in passing, said his face looked like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem that was beyond him. He climbs down from his wagon, enters the house, and meets what’s waiting for him.