Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

Pickle came in after dark, hours later. I had last seen him standing on the dock, cheering the Superior. Now his boots were caked with mud, his clothes damp with sweat and pricked with burrs. When he saw me in my corner, from which I hadn’t shifted since noon, he took a little step back. “I thought you were with the others.”

I shook my head.

“We chased those dogs across the island, but they got to their canoe. They’re with their fellows. Can’t you hear them?”

I’d not noticed the sound before, but now I could make out the whiskey traders’ hoots and curses echoing over the water. Pickle sat on his bed, head bowed. Then he convulsed, and I realized he was weeping. I glanced away, at his calendar covered with x ’s, at my violin hanging in the window, at the lamp glasses black with soot. He had been good to me, and I had cut him from the kingdom.

THE FEDERAL GUNBOAT DEPARTED, the captain having claimed this was none of his affair. The other ships left soon after, and the elders shut themselves in the Temple. Some of the brethren had already abandoned their cabins and made camp on the dock to await the next steamer. By morning the news had reached across the island: God’s judgment.

Overnight the sky had turned gray. Thick clouds pressed low against the lake, and cold seeped through the cracks in the cabin’s walls. I ignored the breakfast Pickle made, put on my black coat, and walked to the Bainbridge farm, where I found Dorothea’s father lifting their trunks onto a borrowed wagon. He saw me, but refused to meet my eye. Dorothea’s mother was in the yard, boiling their clothes. She pointed to the clothesline. Dorothea was there, hanging sheets.

I waited for her to turn, but she ignored me. When the last sheet was hung she began adjusting the first, careful not to come near where I stood. Her manner made me anxious, but at the same time I became angry. Something promised me was being withheld.

“You’re free,” I said. “We can marry.”

“After what you saw? After everything?” she said. She showed me her face and it was twisted in anguish. “It’s too late.”

“It’s not,” I said. “I promise, I’ll forget everything.” I took her, held her in my arms. “Meet me tonight at the Judge’s House,” I said. “Will you?” Only when she nodded did I let her go.

All through the first hours of night I paced the timber skeleton of the Judge’s House. I imagined Dorothea waiting for her father to fall asleep, or writing a long letter to her mother. But as the night grew longer, I began to fear the worst. Finally I went back to the farm. It was empty, and at the sight a dizziness rippled up from my feet. I raced to Port Hebron and arrived an hour after dawn, in time to see a steamer leaving the bay. I searched among the dock camp that now spread along the shore, but Dorothea wasn’t there. After questioning a few acquaintances, I ran into Spofford, who told me he’d seen the Bainbridges board the boat. I looked out over the water and felt the bruises of my heart turn black.

I returned to Pickle’s cabin. When Pickle came in he told me that two of the elders had fled the island, taking the sacred books and the treasury with them, and that Celia had shut herself in the cottage; Josiah’s body lay spread on the dining table, and she refused to let him be buried. I stayed at the window. At night the whiskey traders returned to the bay in their canoes. Their shouting stirred me like a summons.

A day later another steamer put in. Pickle gathered his belongings into two carpetbags. He offered to pay my passage, but I told him I wasn’t leaving.

He stood in the doorway. “It’s all gone,” he said.

I told him my decision had been made, and when he asked what I meant, I got up, took my violin from the window, offered it to him, and bid him go.

FOR A WEEK LONGER, as the island cleared, I stayed in the cabin. I did not shave, nor did I visit the bathhouse, which was shut up now, anyway. I ate our last stores of food — hungrily, greedily, as if both nursing the wound within and feeding the fever that spread through my veins. At the end of the week I opened the door and stepped outside. By now the streets were empty. The whiskey traders had remained in their camps, and silence had descended, encasing every building in Port Hebron in a thin glass shell. The few noises were the sharper for it: a rodent scurrying from the sight of me, the crackle of a fire burning unchecked. Even the scent of the air was changed, carrying nothing but a tinge of smoke. In this strange, vacant quiet I felt my new beard. I searched abandoned cabins and wrapped myself in the furs and hides left behind. I bent to the ground and darkened my cheeks with mud. Then, at last, I went down to the water and yelled for my new brothers to come.

I lift up the lid of the livewell and look inside. A couple fish — bass, largemouth — sit in place, not really swimming.

“What’s up, fish?” I say.

The fish open their mouths and close them, which is about all they do. You can’t tell by looking at them, but they’re poisoned. Like, if you eat too many, you go blind, or crazy, or you become sterile or some shit. They’ve got signs at the pier and boat ramp, no more than two fish a week. It’s the fishes’ revenge, I guess, even though it’s really the big power plant that sits on the side of the lake that does it.

“Fish don’t need hassling,” my stepfather says to no one, meaning me.

I close the lid.

Usually, whenever my stepfather wants to tell me something, he’ll make some general comment or filter what he’s got to say through my mom instead of just talk to me. Not that I’m complaining.

I go sit behind the steering wheel and look at the screen mounted there. It shows how deep the lake is below the boat, and the size of any fish passing below. I wonder if it would show a dead body, if there’s a picture programmed in it for that. See, son, a dad’ll say, tapping on the screen, that’s a child. We only need the small net.

“Monster off the port bow!” I shout when a large fish swims on-screen, to be helpful.

My stepfather ignores me.

My mom reads her book.

The fish swims away.

I don’t like to fish. I just don’t. Maybe it’s genetic. My dad never fished, and we were never big on any of the typical father-son stuff. Like the one time I dragged him outside to play catch, the ball missed my glove on the first throw and bounced off my skull and over the fence.

Instead, my dad used to take me to Civil War battlefields, reenactments, history talks where Minié balls and pottery shards were passed around the audience of old people and us. He left three years ago, when I was nine. He got a new job in Shreveport and told my mom he needed to start over in the city. Which is pretty funny. I mean, have you been to Shreveport?

Once, before I discovered I don’t like to fish, I was baiting my hook with a cricket. A live cricket. I, who was never one of those boys that likes torturing insects or cats or anything, could not get around the central fact of this action: the sticking of the hook through the cricket’s (live!) abdomen. The cricket jumped in my fingers, twitching its legs. I brought the hook to its side, pushed a little, then my fingers loosened and the cricket got away. Chasing it, I knocked over the carton of crickets, a dozen more got out, and the one I was chasing jumped into the lake. So there you go. Drowning versus impaling.

If given the choice, I think I’d do the same.

A while back my stepfather was cooking dinner when he told me to drop a piece of chicken into the Fry Daddy.