I
Later she would come to believe that her eldest son’s long descent into lawlessness was due to nothing more or less than his own survival, his mind already accustomed — at the age of six or seven — to the reaper’s mighty blade so that, by the time he reached his fifteenth year and his second step-father was brought into the dooryard on the back of the sheriff’s donkey cart, his thoughts had hardened into the frozen earth of a perpetual graveyard. It had indeed been the eldest, Virgil, who had first come to tell her that the sheriff could be seen on the road and, slightly later, that there was a dead man on the boards of the cart.
“Who is it?” she asked him.
“Might could be Tom.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Who else?”
Of course the boy had been right. When the sheriff’s cart came to a stop she looked to Virgil again, hoping she might find a trace of sadness in his darkly handsome face, but his eyes were cold hollows and when he met her gaze it was to display no emotion whatsoever.
“Oh Tom,” she said quietly, her eyes on the cart once more.
“Sorry to say,” the sheriff said. He stood in the dirt just beside the donkey, hat in his hand.
“What happened?”
“Bullet from the saloon,” he said. “Just an accident. Pure and simple. Shot just flew out through the wall and into the street.”
For a long while she did not respond. She had been puzzling her son’s emotionlessness but now, standing there, she realized that the wrapped shape of her husband in the back of the cart brought her, too, no sense of grief at all. She looked again to Virgil and then to Caroline, her next oldest, her next survivor. The girl, at least, appeared distraught and pained, her little eyes darting from her mother to the sheriff and back again. So it was herself and Virgil only, not the daughter. Caroline had been spared.
“You’ve had a bad string, Anna,” the sheriff said quietly from beside the cart. “I can’t hardly understand it.”
“Life just hands you lemons sometimes,” she said.
“You’ve gotten more than any person I’ve ever known.”
It was true — three husbands and six children lost — but the widow only shook her head, looking out past the pasture where their two milk cows stood watching them, their expressions placid and vacant. Beyond that, the whole stretch of the Missouri territory flowed towards parts unknown and unremembered.
He asked her if she wanted him to leave the body and when the widow did not respond, the boy answered. But then he was not a boy anymore. Fifteen. And already the sheriff had locked him in their little jail cell. It had only been the one time but the sheriff knew from experience that one time was never enough. Now Virgil came into the dim light at the edge of the door. Anna did not move from the doorway, so her oldest could not get through the gap, but the sheriff saw his flinty eyes glaring out through the darkness, unblinking.
Caroline emerged when his eyes alit upon her, coming forward just enough to wrap her thin pale arms around her mother’s knees, like some baby raccoon peering into the sunlight at the cart, the sheriff, and the blanket covering the dead man. There was an infant somewhere within, another son, likely asleep.
He and TJ carried the body into the house. The table was but a small surface, hardly enough room to eat let alone clean and dress a dead man, and so they lay him upon the floor in one corner of the room. Virgil watched them silently, his eyes darkly staring.
“You want TJ back in an hour or two?” the sheriff asked.
“That would be fine.”
“You’ll want the preacher?”
“I’d appreciate that,” she said. She had already knelt at the body and had begun unbuttoning his blood-soaked shirt. “I’ll not get this stain out,” she said.
The sheriff watched her for a time in silence, glanced then at the little girl, Caroline, her eyes wide, and then at Virgil, who did not return his gaze.
The two men stepped through the doorway again and returned to the cart. TJ clambered into the driver’s seat and clicked his tongue and the two horses stepped forward.
“I don’t understand how a woman gets that kind of luck,” the sheriff said once they had gone a quarter mile from the widow’s cabin.
“Hard country,” TJ said. He had picked a bit of straw from the widow’s dooryard and chewed at it introspectively.
“I just don’t understand it,” the sheriff said again. He turned and looked in their tracks. The widow’s house was a small dark square against the rolling hills and, in the far distance, the blue shade of the mountains, the tops of which remained glazed with snow. In some strange and obscure way, he wanted to turn back, for in that moment he could imagine all manner of disaster careening across that landscape: the deprivations of the Crow and Blackfeet, hard snow and flood, murderous highwaymen. And no one to protect her. No one at all.
•
The sheriff had only ever known her as a widow, even though she had first come to the village on the Keene with her last husband by her side. Of course, everyone in that place had buried someone, the sheriff too, but even by the standards of that hardscrabble country, her young life seemed a measure closer to the scythe. Nine in all: two by sickness, one by drowning, one by winter, the others in accidents too tragic to recollect.
In the months and then years after he brought the widow’s third husband’s body to her dooryard, the sheriff grew to fear that her eldest son might well join that macabre assemblage, for Virgil Marsh soon began to drift in circles well outside the law and the sheriff wondered just how long it would be before their paths became more seriously entangled. When he pondered that inevitability — for in time it began to feel inevitable — it was the widow the sheriff thought of. How much loss could one human being endure? Her eyes were pale blue, like cornflowers, and he could not fathom what look they would carry when and if he was duty-bound to lay the corpse of her eldest at her feet. Some days, alone in the little room above the jail, he thought it would be better to hand in his star than to do such a thing.
It might have been that his visits to the widow — every Wednesday without fail — were as regular as clockwork for this reason: to allow Virgil the opportunity to get clear of him if he pleased. That he never saw the young man in those years felt like confirmation that he had made the right choice. Soon the new century came and with it the town began to feel less like a rough-and-tumble western settlement and more like a stable village. They had a post office now, with semi-regular mail service to the forty-five states and elsewhere. And as for Virgil Marsh: there were whispers and rumors about his comings and goings, but they were distant and beyond the sheriff’s official notice.
Not even the window herself had regular word from her eldest son. Sometimes a year or more would pass and in the intervening time she would think Virgil was surely dead, for this is what she had learned over the years of her life: that people died, that people died, that people died, and there was nothing she or them or anyone else could do about it.
That might well have been why she rebuffed the sheriff’s advances, even though she felt a pull toward him almost from the moment their eyes first met. She knew she could have had him if she so desired, and many a lonely night she did indeed desire him, and yet after three husbands and six children, she had come to believe that the rumors about her, whispered in town, were true, that she was cursed and that death would come quickly to any man she married.
She was friendly with the sheriff but nothing more. The one time he tried to kiss her, she stayed him with a palm to his chest.
“I just can’t,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t gotta be sorry,” he said quietly. “I understand.”
She waited for him to explain what he understood or, more probably, what he did not, but he remained quiet and she did not press him further.
The sheriff’s visits lessened to once or twice a month and then, for a long while, stopped altogether. Caroline was sixteen and boys had begun to come around, vying for her attentions. Caroline suffered them all with equal grace.
“You interested in any of them boys?” her mother asked her one evening after a particularly mumbling suitor had departed.
“Not much,” her daughter said.
“Well, that’s up to you, you know.”
“What is?”
“Whether or not to get married.”
“Married?” Caroline said, her voice a quiet shout in the little room. “I’m not gonna get married! Not ever!”
Her mother’s breath was a quick intake. The attitude had not occurred to her and she did not know what to say once it had been voiced and so she merely sat there, confused, working at the sewing upon her lap.
It was Caroline who broke the silence. “You gonna marry the sheriff?”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t you like him?”
“I like him just fine.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well why don’t you then?”
“I’m done marrying,” her mother told her. “I’m all married out.”
“Well,” Caroline said, “so am I.”
II
The day Virgil Marsh returned to visit his mother was a day that would change all their lives together. The sheriff learned of it via a cable from the federal marshal’s office, a brief missive that he held for a long while before crushing in his grip. “I’ll be gone for a bit,” he told his deputies, two of them now that the town had grown some in size. “Where you headed, sheriff?” one said in response, but the sheriff had already gone through the door and into the bright winter sunlight.
The ride to the widow’s cabin seemed longer than it ever had and the sheriff rode much of the way at a dead gallop, only slowing once he crested the little hill with its frosted copse of ponderosas, his mare’s hoofbeats squeaking in the snow. The cabin looked like some etched illustration from Harper’s: a snug, warm box, its roof dusted with snow, smoke rising from its chimney against that high wall of mountains, their lumbering shapes exhibiting a distant kaleidoscope of sky-blue and sun-yellow.
He made sure that his hands were visible as he rode, holding one in the air, the other clutching the reins, the horse now walking at its own pace, knowing the destination. When he came close enough to the cabin for it to make a difference, he raised both hands, the reins loose upon the pommel.
The horse stopped by the edge the porch. He waited, his stomach twisting, until at last the door cracked open. He still thought he might well die but then the widow appeared. She said nothing, only stood there watching him.
“They know he’s here, Anna,” he said.
To his relief, she did not try to deny it, instead only shaking her head, slowly.
“Got a telegram about an hour ago. Marshals are coming. He in there?”
She looked at him, and for a long time did not move. Then she nodded.
“Virgil?” the sheriff called. “I’m putting my gun here on the porch and I’m coming inside. I’m not armed.”
“You stay there, sheriff,” Virgil said, muffled through the log walls.
“I’m coming inside. We need to talk some.”
Virgil’s voice did not return and the sheriff unbuckled his holster and lay it upon the boards. Anna stood watching him, her eyes filled with fear. When he reached the door she put her hand on his chest in much the same place she had stilled his kiss, her warm fingers upon the denim and shirt buttons. He looked at her there, so close. Then he stepped past her and entered the cabin.
Virgil stood just behind the door and did not move as the sheriff came to the little table and sat. The sheriff’s hands were shaking but he clasped them together in hopes the man did not notice. “Put the rifle down a minute, son,” he said. “I’m only here to talk.”
“What about?”
“You heard what I said outside. The marshal’s on his way. Be here this afternoon.”
“So?”
“So what are we gonna do about it?”
The sheriff’s eyes went from one to the other, to the woman for whom he had carried a lit flame for all these years and to the man, once a boy, who had soured over the same period. That these two things could happen in unison was a fact that would not surprise anyone in the harsh and violent place that was the world.
“I’m only here cause of your momma,” the sheriff said.
Virgil’s head jerked up at this statement. “You leave her alone,” he hissed.
“I’m not your enemy, Virgil. Never have been.”
“So what’s that s’posed to mean?”
“Means that you’ve got a couple of hours to get shut of this place.”
Virgil looked temporarily confused, his face rippling with emotion. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
“I’m not lyin.”
“You aim to let me go?”
“No,” the sheriff said. “I aim to do a fair bit more than that. Got a map here in my pocket. I’m gonna bring it out.” He reached slowly into his waistcoat, the rifle barrel tracing him all the while. Then the map was upon the table: ridges and rivers and roads, roughly drawn.
“You’re gonna wanna ride down this draw here,” the sheriff said, his finger striking the table with a thud. “You can ride in the river. It’s shallow enough. That’ll cover your tracks. At this bend there’s a tangle of willows. You can ride up through them to the top of the ridge. Hunker down. Watch for us to pass. Then ride back and take whichever road you want and get away from this place.”
Virgil had come forward to stare down at the map. “Why should I trust you?” he whispered.
“Don’t seem like you got much choice,” the sheriff said.
“But why? What’s in it for you?”
“Your momma’s a friend,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
And indeed when he glanced over at her, he saw that bright tears had risen to her eyes.
“Don’t cry, momma,” her son said, stepping forward and kneeling before her on the slatted floorboards.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Virgil looked up at the sheriff, briefly, their eyes meeting in the cool shadow of the room. “I don’t either,” he said.
“Not him,” she hissed to her son. “You. I don’t understand how I did you so wrong.”
“You didn’t do nothin wrong,” Virgil said, one hand covering hers upon the worn table.
“They’re comin to kill you,” she said. “To kill you, Virgil. For somethin you done. I don’t wanna know what it is but I wanna know why you fell so far that this would happen.”
Virgil’s eyes were similarly glassy. The sheriff wondered for the briefest moment if he should step outside to give them their privacy, but something stayed him and he watched them there, mother and son, motionless in the charred darkness of that log-framed room.
“I’m sorry, momma,” Virgil said after a time. “It ain’t yer fault. I’m just bad by nature, I guess.”
“You don’t gotta be,” she said. “You choose what you get in this life.”
“Is that what you did?” Virgil said then.
“Hang on now,” the sheriff said. “This might be the last time you ever see her.” He knew he should be quiet, should let them have their moment, but he could not still his tongue. “You can’t blame her. Not for any of it.”
“Can’t I?” Virgil had set the rifle upon the table and it rested between them like a talisman of everything that had happened and everything yet to come.
“Sheriff?” Anna said quietly. “Could you wait outside?”
“Anna,” he said.
“Just wait outside,” she said. “I need to say goodbye to my son.”
Virgil spun his eyes back to his mother. The last thing the sheriff saw before he returned to the late afternoon sunlight was their twinned shape, mother and child, dark and magnificent.
•
In the morning he rode into the draw with the marshal and when they came abreast of the Keene’s sharp eastward bend, the sheriff could not help but glance upward toward the ridgeline.
“What do you see, Jim?” the marshal asked him.
“Nothing but blue sky.”
“There a way up to the top?”
“Not really,” the sheriff said.
The marshal’s horse continued forward along the bank, ice occasionally cracking beneath its hooves. “Anything I should know?” the marshal said after a time.
“Not a thing.”
If Virgil stood watching them from atop the ridge the sheriff did not know, and yet he could feel the younger man’s eyes upon him. What he felt were not the eyes of a man but rather the steely gaze of that death-shocked boy. Maybe if he had done his own job better the boy might have grown without the reaper’s shadow ever upon him. Maybe things could have been different. But then, of course, things were just as they were. Nothing could be different from itself. Nothing at all.
They rode for two days and then the sheriff left the marshal and his men to their devices and rode back to his own protectorate, a county that looked, upon the map, like the single wing of a butterfly laid over a topography as rough and rugged any ever dreamed. That night he camped alone in a draw beside the river and did not light a fire, instead chewing a few handfuls of salt pork and drinking from the wineskin he had purchased many years before from the Basque shepherds that sometimes crossed through town.
In the morning he rose early. He might not have come to the widow’s cabin had it not been directly in his way, and might still have ridden past it in honor of her solitude and what he assumed to be her sadness, but something of the stillness of the place bade him rein the horse around to follow the thin single track that led to the gate and then to her door. He knocked, lightly at first, and then harder and finally pounded the door and called her name. When there was still no answer he tried the latch, found it unlocked, and pushed the door forward.
The room inside was empty, not only of the widow but of various objects that he might have missed had he not been looking. A skillet. Several of her dresses. Her shoes. The bed clear of blankets.
He was leaving the room when he found her note, blown into the corner, perhaps when he had opened the door. It was written in her beautiful, sloping hand, with ink that was faintly brown. My dear Jim, it began.
Please do not blame me for leaving this place. It has ever been a theatre of sorrow and I am glad to be rid of it. I will miss your visits, tho. There was no frend for me here but you. As for this place — please give it all to some young family coming in from the east. It is hard enuf to make your way — maybe this will offer someone a start.
— Anna Barr
He folded the letter once and slipped it into his pocket. Then he stepped outside into the chill winter air and sat upon the edge of the porch. His horse looked at him impassively, its breath a thin cloud of steam.
He was thirty-five years old and had spent all of his adult life trying to hold the valley of the Keene to some semblance of order. And he had mostly failed in this attempt. But at least he had tried. It was more than most would have done. And yet he would have done more. He would have gone with her. That much he knew in his heart and part of him wanted to charge the horse on to the railway station, to find out which train, to follow her into the world. But instead he only sat there as the day lengthened and the sun began to drop and that world, once more, was plunged into frigid darkness.
III
The sheriff watched the West grow: genocide and greed and fights over water and the rise of a particular kind of civilization at the expense of another. His town established a foothold in the mountains but never much grew beyond that point. People drove automobiles, simple things that rattled and crashed and provided a new array of legal problems for the law to sort. There was a newspaper in the valley now too, and it was from its pages that the sheriff learned of the building of the Panama Canal, the rise of what would be known as the Great War in Europe, and the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge and Hoover. The newcomers to that country were German and Chinese and Blackfeet and some were third or fourth generation Americans from the East. They were not his problem anymore. Younger men would wrestle with various levels of discontent, violence that still sprang up from time to time, although not with the rapacity it once had.
He was an old man and despite all the changes around him, his own life had entered a long stretch of uniformity. When he retired from the position he had held since the age of twenty-two, the town celebrated with a parade in his honor. Forty years he had served. It was enough. It had to be enough. He sometimes rode east along the road that paralleled the river and thought of the young woman, the widow, who had lived in the solitary cabin there. When he crested the hill now, it was to look out upon a dozen or more cabins, their chimneys all smoking softly in the dim yellow light, children playing between them, young mothers hanging laundry upon the lines. The place was settled, or as settled as it would ever be, and yet in those young mothers he sometimes saw a movement that reminded him of the widow of his youth and the thought of her would send a physical tremor through his flesh. That she could still grasp him so after all the years that had passed was a wonder to him.
He had not seen or heard from her in decades and assumed he never would. But then the telegram came. One of the younger deputies delivered it and the sheriff — they still called him the sheriff — stood reading it in the doorway. The deputy apologized, although if he were apologizing for the contents of the telegram or for interrupting the sheriff’s solitude, the sheriff did not know.
He was on the train later that afternoon, a single bag packed and stowed in the luggage rack above his head. What passed by the window was a marvel but what he saw was only the long stretch of years he had wasted. He could have found her. He knew that much. She would have gone to Seattle to find her youngest, Bobby, or to Portland to find Caroline. She would have lived with them. And now it might well have been too late. Too late for anything.
He fell asleep wondering at the range of stars that spread out before him. As he slept, those stars ranged through his heart. They dipped into and out of some dark lake, some deep ocean, his fear welling up from the soil somewhere far far below.
•
He did not know how to find the house itself and the frenetic energy of the city did little to aid him. That she had lived out her days in this tumult of electric lights and motorcars and sparking trolleys — it seemed the opposite of everything he had ever thought about her. He still thought of her as that beautiful woman — still a young mother, but older than he had been — in the isolated cabin by the silver flow of the Keene, a woman whose youth had been burned out upon the rocks of those three dead men and six dead children, leaving her with a tragic beauty that even now, even in his memory, wrenched at his heart. Long ago, one of the town’s many drunkards had told him that she had become a legendary figure among the members of the local Southern Piegan band of Blackfeet, that they called her Nine Griefs. He had angrily denounced the appellation upon first hearing it but now, in the tumult of the city, he guiltily realized that he thought of her in precisely this way, a woman defined not by her life but by the deaths that floated ever around her. He recalled her empty face as he set the body of her dead husband on the floorboards and wondered if he ever really knew her at all. Such time he had wasted. Such time as would never be returned.
He asked a uniformed police officer where he could find the station and then asked if the young man would drive him there.
“Get a cab, old timer,” the officer told him.
“What’s that?” the sheriff said.
The officer looked at him. “Where’re you coming from?” he said.
The sheriff told him and added that he was sheriff there for forty years.
“The wild west,” the officer said, smiling.
“What’s that?”
“You were like a wild west sheriff,” the officer said. “I wish I could’ve been there with you. What was it like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Gunfights in the street and all that? Posses and outlaws and all the rest?”
“Hardly ever,” the sheriff said.
The officer laughed. “All right, sheriff,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The young man carried his bag despite the sheriff’s protests and together they drove the rain-slicked streets of Seattle, the great Pacific rising out beyond the docks to the west. Pines everywhere. The land so wet, so verdant, that it took away his breath.
“What’re you headed to the station for anyhow?” the officer said.
“Looking for someone.”
“For a case?”
“An old friend,” the sheriff said. “I ain’t the law no more.”
“Did you try the phone book?”
“There’s an idea.”
“Well shoot the moon,” the young man said then. “We can do one better than that.”
He parked them before a great stone block with tall windows all down its front and led him inside through the rain.
The building was the headquarters of the telephone company and the sheriff gave the woman there Anna’s name. He was concerned that she might be using some last name that he did not know, one of the names of her previous husbands or her maiden name or some other altogether, and so when the woman returned to tell him that there was no such listing he shook his head. “Maybe her son, Bobby,” he mumbled.
“Same last name?”
He looked up at her, confused. “No,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He tried to pull the boy’s father from his memory but the information was not there. “He sent me a telegram,” he mumbled.
“A telegram?” said the young policeman. “You keep a log. Don’t you, Mary?”
The woman nodded and asked him for the telegram and he handed it over, a damp thing, folded and refolded many times. She smoothed it upon the counter. “Let me look,” she said.
He read it again, upside-down. Beyond the border of codes and numbers and abbreviations, the word SEATTLE, and his own name, two lines:
MY MOTHER YOUR FRIEND ANNA IS UNWELL.
I WANTED YOU TO KNOW.
Nothing indicating from whom the telegram had come or where he might write back. He did not even know what “unwell” meant.
“I think this might be it,” the woman said, returning with a ledger book and setting it upon the counter next to his telegram and spinning it in his direction. Her finger alit on a line. “Tommy,” she said, motioning her head to the young officer so that he, too, sidled over to gaze down at the book.
“Well lookee there,” the young man said.
The sheriff’s eyes were not as good as they once were and he did not recognize the hand but the name itself was plain and he said it aloud: “Virgil Duffy.”
•
“He’s kind of a legend,” the young officer told him, the sheriff seated next to him in the front seat, rain pattering the windshield. “He’s your friend?”
“My friend’s son.”
“He’s in the paper all the time. Good money in shipping and he’s pretty much running the waterfront.”
“Really?” the sheriff said. He wondered now if they had the right name, the right address. Surely in all this seemingly infinite crowd, someone else could bear the name of Virgil Duffy. Perhaps they would reach the house and find a stranger in the doorway.
“Like I said, he’s kind of a legend around here. Broke up the strike and everything. It was quite a scene.”
The faint, spitting rain continued. The ocean was not visible from the streets where the police car moved but the sheriff could sense it out there, a dark sweep flowing out into the great distant forever like the golden grasses of the prairie he had seen as a child. And then something else, as if fading from that same sea: the face of an old man staring back at him from the window glass. My, he had grown so old. His hair gray and his skin furrowed with lines. And yet just a moment before he had thought of himself as not much older than the young policeman. But here he was: his face, his actual face, a collection of dry crags and valleys. Where had it all gone?
When the car came to its clattering stop the officer leapt up to help the sheriff onto the gravel walk that lined the street.
“Are you sure this is the address?” the sheriff said faintly.
“This is it,” the young officer said, his head bowed slightly against the rain. “He’s done well. That’s for sure.”
He had assumed all these years that the widow’s eldest son had met his demise somewhere. The sheriff had even watched for just such a report in the years after Anna’s disappearance, as if that might offer some sense of when and if she might eventually return, although in truth he knew she would never come back to that tiny town upon the Keene, that her days there had ever been numbered, a waystation along whatever road she walked, first with husbands and children and then simply alone.
But here stood the fact of the house: a structure not just clean and tidy but actually beautiful, a small, perfect Victorian with a curving porch and wet roofing shingles shaped like scales, the whole building painted in blues and pale creams that shone out into the early evening like a giant confection.
For a long while after the young officer drove away, he simply stood there in the rain. Then he stepped forward at last, forgetting his bag, returning for it, and lugging it up the porch stairs. The sound upon the boards was muted and soft, as if through a pillow.
His heart was racing. He wanted to flee back to the valley of the Keene. He wanted just the opposite. Oh that life would do this to him. To her. To all of them. Oh that life was just as it was. His life and hers. Everyone together waiting for whatever might come next. My God. For the first time in all those miles of travel he wondered if she might be dead. The thought of it, just the thought, nearly brought him to his knees.
When the door opened he jerked his head up in alarm. The man who stood there was middle-aged, his hair gray along the temples, his eyes dark but not unfriendly, mouth loose beneath a thick, downward-curving mustache.
“Virgil?” the sheriff said.
Recognition dawned slowly. “Sheriff?” the man said. “You came all this way?”
The sheriff shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by all he had done, the effort of traveling to Seattle, the effort of being here on the step. “You didn’t give me much to go on,” he said at last.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Then why’d you send the telegram?”
Virgil stood for a moment looking at him. Then he said, “Come in, come in. Let’s get you dried off.”
The drawing room was warmed by a crackling fire and Virgil took the sheriff’s coat and hat and hung them on a peg to dry. “I can’t hardly believe you’re here,” Virgil said.
“Neither can I,” the sheriff said. “I guess now I should’ve sent a cable back, although I didn’t really know it was you who sent it. I guess you left your name off for good reason.”
“A few good reasons,” Virgil said.
The sheriff felt those flinty eyes upon him, watching him there. He wondered if he should stand, if it would somehow display his health and youthful vigor to do so, but in truth he was exhausted from his time on the train and his various wanderings through town.
“She’ll be happy to see you,” Virgil said.
“She’s — ”
“Still with us. But it’s cancer. And it’s not long now, a few weeks.”
“I wish I’d known sooner.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to know at all.”
“Why not? Why wouldn’t I?” His voice was loud, too loud, but Virgil did not seem to notice, only continuing to lean against the arched doorframe.
“It’s just been a long while,” he said at last. “I didn’t know how you’d react to the news. For all I knew, you’d married and had a life for yourself.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I never took a wife.”
“We’re just a couple old bachelors then.”
“Where is she, Virgil?” the sheriff now said.
“Upstairs. She’ll be waking up any time now from her nap.”
And as if cued by these words, a faint noise rang from above. At the sound of it, the sheriff bolted to his feet with such force that the chair behind him clattered to the floor.
“Let me,” he said.
“She won’t like that,” Virgil said. “She’ll want to look her best. Trust me.”
“Please,” the sheriff said.
Perhaps it was the desperation in his voice, but the younger man nodded at last. “If she gets mad, it’s your own damn fault,” he said.
The bell rang again.
“Coming,” Virgil yelled in response.
For a moment the sheriff could not move. Then he began the slow walk up the stairs. “Left at the top,” Virgil told him. He had not really heard those words, such were the ebb and flow of his thoughts, the silver river of the Keene, the ocean just a few miles away. My God! He was made of water! Of sky! And he was rising. His boots thumping upon the stairs but also floating, cut loose of the earth.
When he reached the door he did not hesitate, but pushed it open gently, the wood swinging inward.
“Who were you talking to?” she said.
And then she looked up. And saw him. He knew she did not recognize him, not at first, her eyes blank and expressionless, some old man come into her bedroom like a thief, his hands clutched together before him. He could feel her eyes upon his face and he suddenly ran his fingers through his hair, once, twice, and then lowered his hands slowly, feeling foolish for moving, feeling foolish for just standing there.
At last she saw him. She made a sound — a sharp intake of air, gasping. And her mouth moved into the shape of a smile, teeth shining as she saw past the years that separated them.
“My God.” Her hand lowered and raised and lowered again. “You’re an old man, sheriff.”
“That’s true,” he said dumbly.
“Oh I’m just a mess. Did Virgil let you come up here?”
“You look … beautiful,” he said. It felt to him as if there was not enough air in the room.
She reached up a hand to touch her hair and now it was frozen in the dim slanting light of the receding day. She did not look well, but he had not lied when he spoke of her beauty. He had seen himself just moments before in the reflection of the automobile’s window, some ancient lump of granitic stone, furrowed and spotted with years, and when he had first seen her there he was shocked by how thin she had become, that great voracious crab stalking through her body, consuming everything with its terrible insectoid mouthparts. And yet she was there too, there in the gaze that stared back at him, the woman he had known twenty — no, thirty — years before, and if her oldest son had changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable, Anna had done just the opposite, her face so thin he could make out the shape of the skull beneath, skin tight upon that terrible frame, and from which stared the same sad luminous eyes he remembered from when he was eighteen and nineteen and did not even know he would fall in love with her, back when she was just a married woman who lived out east of town and he was the new deputy, fresh-faced and eager and nervous. He could smell the clean air of that day even now.
“It’s really you,” he said softly.
“I could say just the same,” she answered.
He sat next to the bed and when she lifted her hand he took it in his own, a thin papery bundle of twigs. She looked at him and then her mouth curled up in a smile. “It’s been a long time, Jimmy,” she said.
“You kinda run out on me,” he said.
She bobbed her head weakly. “You came a long way to make an old woman happy.”
“I hope so,” he said.
Her luminous eyes looked away from him, glancing first to her grown child in the doorway, a man of middle age, and then out toward the darkening window, the rain-spattered glass. “Did Virgil tell you how long I have?”
He nodded. Her face — a skull, hair pasted down upon her forehead — became liquid, wobbling, warping. He tried to still his emotions but they rode hard at the front of his heart and when the sobs began he could not stop them.
•
When Anna died three weeks later, only her fourth husband was by her side. He did not cry as the bright light of her eyes dimmed and went out. He only watched her go. That he was her final husband was a fact represented on her tombstone, his own last name affixed to hers for all time.
Her eldest boy proved a fine companion to him and the sheriff remained in Seattle as his lodger and, after a time, friend, taking up the room that his late wife had lived in. The two men were both set in their ways and yet those ways seemed to interlock as if they were brothers rather than unlikely in-laws.
He assumed that he would not live much longer than his bride, but the years kept coming and going and when he went to his own grave fifteen years later, it was in the same room that saw the last days of his wife, the heart that had carried nine griefs within its beating shape for forty years from the valley of the Keene to the great Pacific Ocean, finally giving out altogether. The last thing he saw was her eldest son, Virgil, leaning over him, not the middle-aged man with whom he lived but the flinty-eyed boy from his own younger days, the sun in his hair and the whole impossible future still spread out before him like a summer dream.
•••
Christian Kiefer is the author of the novels Phantoms, The Animals, and The Infinite Tides, and the novella One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide. He is the director of the low-residency MFA at Ashland University and serves as West Coast Editor of The Paris Review.