Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (7 page)

Kelly, alone and dying. No, she wouldn't die alone. She would bring this child into the world. The child that was on its way, hospital or not. Dead or alive.

She writhed in the hay, wracked by waves of a new hurt, as if her pelvic bones were being ground to powder. The muscles in her stomach ached from pushing. The child inside her squirmed toward the world, toward the light, toward the land of pain and promise.

Kelly's eyes squeezed closed, tears leaking, the same saltwater that had filled the amniotic sac. The water of life. She pushed again and something tore free down below. She was going to pass out, die without ever seeing the flesh of her flesh, without ever connecting.

She forced her eyes open. The ghost hovered again, settling down upon her in the dark corner of the barn. She had no air to scream. Her final breath would be stolen by this thing of mist and dreams.

Except, as the ghost wafted over her, gentle as lamb's wool, a warmth flooded through her. This time, its touch was soothing. The pain lifted, vanished like a spirit in sunshine. The ghost pressed against her, embraced her, bathed her in whatever energy and life it was able to give back. She rose to meet it, like a lover or a penitent surrendering to a force of faith.

Kelly felt strong again, and she pushed, grunted and pushed again. The baby slid free, and she reached down between her legs. He was slick from her fluids, warm, but still. Too awfully still.

She sat up and clutched the child to her chest, wailing, all rain and thunder. The child's skin was blue. She rubbed him, shook him, pinched the tiny nose and blew into his mouth. Even though he was already dead, she admired the beautiful face. He was Stamey, all right.

“Don’t leave me,” she cried, the limp umbilical cord tangled across her thighs. She rubbed its chest and shared her heat. She half-crawled, half-wriggled toward the cemetery, the chill of the infant’s flesh reaching deep into her soul. Blood oozed from her birth channel and her scraped knees and palm as she tugged herself over twisted roots and jagged gray stones.

Her muscles were gone but she tapped faith for fuel, dowsing for some hidden wellspring. The pale outlines of the grave markers appeared through the foliage. She continued her crippled crawl, compelled herself forward to hallowed ground, pushing over the scrabbled turf until she collapsed before the slab of etched marble.

And the ghost was there, forming again, smaller this time, its effervescence less bright. The milky threads of the ghost settled over the baby, swaddled him, gave to him that same strange energy that had revived Kelly.

The baby coughed weakly, shuddered, and then the cord pulsed. The small heart pumped, unevenly at first, then more steadily. His lungs got their first taste of air, then he let loose with the first of many complaints to come. He breathed.

Kelly hugged him, wiped the stray fluids from his mouth, smoothed his slick wisps of hair. She clawed a scythe from the barn wall and severed the umbilical cord. Then she wrapped the baby in the folds of her shirt, pressing him against her warmth. When the cries died away, she gave him her breast, and he fed.

She lay in the hay until the placenta was delivered. She looked around for the ghost, but knew she would never see it again. Not as a ghost, anyway. The child blinked up at her. In his brown eyes, those strange Stamey eyes, were those silver and white threads. As she watched, the soft threads dissipated, but not completely.

The Stameys had always taken care of their own. From the cradle to the grave, and back again.

She named him Lewis Kelly Stamey.

And it named her Mother.

THE END

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SHE CLIMBS A WINDING STAIR

Outside the window, a flat sweep of sea. The ocean's tongue licks the shore as if probing an old scar. Clouds hang gray and heavy, crushed together by nature's looming anger. In the distance is a tiny white sail, or it might be a forlorn whitecap, breaking too far out to make land.

I hope it is a whitecap.

Because she may come that way, from the lavender east. She may rise from the stubborn sandy fields behind the house, or seep from the silver trees beyond. She could arrive a thousand times, in a thousand different colors, from all directions above or below.

I can almost her hear now, her soft footsteps on the stairs, the whisper of her ragged lace, the mouse-quick clatter of her fingerbones on the railing.

Almost.

It's not fear that binds my limbs to this chair, for I know she's not bent on mortal vengeance. If only I could so easily repay my sins.

Rather, I dread that moment when she appears before me, when her imploring eyes stare blankly into mine, when her lost lips part in question.

She will ask me why, and, God help me, I will have no answer.

I came to Portsmouth in my position as a travel writer on assignment for a national magazine. In my career, I had learned to love no place and like them all, for it's enthusiasm that any editor likes to see in a piece. So neither the vast stone and ice beauty of the Rockies, the wet redwood cliffs of Oregon, the fiery pastels of the Southwestern deserts, the worn and welcoming curves of the Appalachians, nor the great golden plains of the central states tugged at my heart any more or less than the rest of this fair country. Indeed, much of my impression of this land and its people came from brief conversations and framed glances on planes, trains, and the occasional cab or boat.

So the Outer Banks held no particular place in my heart as I ferried across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke. To the north was the historic Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest in the country, which was currently being moved from its eroding base at a cost of millions. I thought at the time that perhaps I could swing up to Hatteras and cover the work for a separate article. But assignments always came before freelance articles, because a bankable check feeds a person much better than a possibility does.

So on to bleak Portsmouth for me. At Ocracoke, I met the man who was chartered to take me to Portsmouth. As I boarded his tiny boat with my backpack and two bags, my laptop and camera wrapped against the salt air, he gave me several looks askance.

“How long you going to stay?” he asked, his wrinkled face as weathered as the hull of his boat.

“Three days, though I'm getting paid for seven,” I said. “Why?”

“You don't look like the type that roughs it much, you don't mind me saying.” His eyes were quick under the bill of his cap, darting from me to the open inlet to the sky and then to the cluttered dock.

“I'll manage,” I said, not at all pleased with this old salt's assessment of me. True, I was more at home in a three-star hotel than under a tent, but I did hike a little and tried to be only typically overweight for a middle-aged American.

The man nodded at the sea, in the distance toward where I imagined Portsmouth lay waiting. “She can be harsh, if she's of a mind,” he said. Then he pushed up the throttle and steered the boat from the dock in a gurgle and haze of oily smoke.

We went without speaking for some minutes, me hanging on the bow as the waves buffeted us and Ocracoke diminished to our rear. Then he shouted over the noise of the engine, “Hope you brought your bug repellent.”

“Why?” I said, the small droplets of ocean spray making a sticky film on my face.

“Bugs'll eat you alive,” he said.

“Maybe I can borrow some at the ranger station,” I said.

The man laughed, his head ducking like a sea turtle's. “Ain't no rangers there. Not this time of year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hurricane season. That, and federal cuts. Government got no business on that island no way. Places like that ought to be left alone.”

My information must have been wrong. Portsmouth was now administered by the National Parks Service, since the last residents had left thirty years before. An editorial assistant had assured me that at least two rangers would be on duty throughout the course of my stay. They had offices with battery-operated short-wave radio and emergency supplies. That was the only reason I had agreed to take an assignment to such a desolate place.

Not for the first time, I silently cursed the carelessness of editorial assistants. “The forecasts are for clear weather,” I said, not letting the boatman know that I cared one way or another.

“You should be all right,” he said. “Least as far as the weather's concerned. Still, they blow up quick sometimes.”

I looked around at the great blue sea. The horizon was empty on all sides, a far cry from the past glories of this area's navigational history. In my research, I had learned that this inlet was one of the first great shipping routes in the south. Decades before the Revolutionary War, ships would come to the shallow neck and offload their goods to smaller boats. Those boats then distributed the cargo to towns across the mainland shore. Spurred by this industry, Portsmouth had grown up from the bleak gray-white sands.

“A lot of shipwrecks below?” I asked, more to keep the old man talking than to fill any gaps in my background knowledge.

“Hells of them,” he said. “Got everything from old three-mast schooners to a few iron freighters. Some of them hippie divers from Wood's Hole said they saw a German U-boat down there, but they was probably just smoking something funny.”

“So the bottom's not too deep here?”

“Depends. The way the sand shifts here from one year to the next, could be fifteen feet, could be a hundred. That's why the big boys don't come through here no more.”

And that's why Portsmouth had died. As the inlet became shallower, ships no longer wanted to risk getting stranded or else breaking up on the barrier reefs. The town had tried to adapt to its misfortune, and was once an outpost for ship rescue teams near the end of the 19th century. More than a few of the town's oarsmen were lost in futile rescue or salvage attempts.

Then ships began avoiding the area entirely, and the town residents left, family by family. The population dwindled from its height of 700 to a few dozen in the 1950s. The stubborn Portsmouth natives continued to cling to their home soil despite the lack of electricity, no steady food supply, irregular mail service, and a dearth of doctors and teachers. But even the hardiest finally relented and moved across the sound to a safer and less harsh existence, leaving behind a ghost town, the buildings virtually intact.

“There she is,” the boatman said, and I squinted against the sparkling water. The thin strand came slowly into view. The beach was beautiful but bleak, a scattering of gulls the only movement besides the softly swaying seagrass. Low dunes rolled away from the flat white sands.

“Used to be a lot of wrecks right along this stretch,” the boatman said.

“I read that they'd go out in hurricanes to rescue shipwrecked crews,” I said.

“Brave folks, they was,” he said, nodding. “'Course, you'd have to be brave to set down roots in that soil, or else crazy. My people came from here, but they left around the First World War, when the getting was good. They's still lots of them on the island, though.”