When Things Get Dark Page 8

  And incense.

  Always those joss sticks to be lit with her morbid repast.

  The people of Cedarville knew to anticipate Mr. Wong by the smoky attar of camphor, which clung to him like a malaise of the spirit. Not that anyone saw him with any regularity anymore. Loss had converted Mr. Wong into a hermit, and regressed his life to native pleasures: ethnic cooking, calligraphy, foreign movies, Allegra the postwoman said, which cost a fortune to import. He avoided his neighbors, lived frugally on the profits from the sale of his store, reserved his chatter for the altar over which a monochrome portrait of a teenaged Ms. Wong— nineteen, with a stratospheric bouffant, and makeup too old for her gravely cherubic face—presided.

  I think they were lovers, came an anonymous note, printed on periwinkle cardboard and neatly sleeved in a long cream envelope. Were it not for the daub of rose perfume, a wet storm-tossed summer scent, Mrs. Gagnon might have kept her identity secret. But like so many others in Cedarville, she was an animal of habit. It’s why they never married anyone else. Fifty years of living here and neither of them could find a spouse? They must have been fornicating.

  The use of the word “fornicating” was a very Mrs. Gagnon thing, Mr. Carpenter noted, as were her lavender fascinators with their taxidermized nightingales, as was her insistence the Old Testament provided better instruction than its successor, and the way she took sacrament like a harlot traversing her wedding night: with gusto, without hesitation, with the pleasure of years of practice. Mr. Carpenter and Mrs. Gagnon were not friends but Mr. Carpenter trusted in her instincts and carefully inventoried her indictment of Mr. Wong. If nothing else, it was proof that Cedarville had at last acclimatized to Mrs. Gagnon.

  For years, it was Mrs. Gagnon who was hounded by the gossips. Over fifty years ago, she had come to Cedarville like a portent: thrice divorced, a pageant alumni, richer than was courteous, a woman to be envied and thus, one to resent. Now? Now, she was part of the body of Cedarville, holied by their church, distrustful as any native of foreign intrusion.

  Mr. Carpenter made a note to relay his congratulations. It was nice to see Mrs. Gagnon finally accepted among her peers; he liked it when good things happened to deserving people, “deserving” being the operative word here. Mr. Carpenter, though he understood such ideology was unpopular, even untenable in the current epoch, believed virtue was a currency. Kindness should not be extended to those who did not provide commensurate payment. Love, divine or otherwise, was a privilege to be earned. And that was the problem with the world these days. People expected too much for too little and that avarice, Mr. Carpenter believed, was the reason they’d all be found one day nailed to a tree, throat and temples and trunk woven with a stigmata of thorns.

  The days yielded to weeks. Summer fallowed to autumn and Mistress Smith’s dogs grew restive in their kennels, eager to be done with the soporific heat and set loose on their annual hunt. Traders came and went. The township fattened with imports. Cedarville was beginning to forget what had occurred in that little village to the west when a man from Asbestos arrived. He was not a tall man, not a handsome one save when he smiled, stocky in that way farm boys often got, with a genial face and clever green eyes, a flurry of soft black curls for hair, the kind in which hearts and fingers so often become entangled.

  Mr. Carpenter met the man—Mr. Jacobson—at Cedarville’s only gas station.

  “Harvest ain’t for weeks,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone from Asbestos to be here so early.”

  “The harvest?” said the man, clearing his throat. “No, no. I’m not here for that. I came by to offer some news from Asbestos.”

  Mr. Carpenter cocked his head. “News?”

  “News,” said Mr. Jacobson.

  The two shared a quiet like a last cigarette, night ashing the dusk sky, that glorious wine-gold leaching into a dead man’s grey. The gas station squatted beside the bridge which led into Cedarville, scabrous with rust, a spindly thing still waiting for permission to die.

  “What kind of news?” said Mr. Carpenter, when it became clear the man would not speak unless prompted.

  “Well, Asbestos had a meeting several weeks ago and we discussed what’d happened, you know?”

  Mr. Carpenter nodded. “Yes. We all know.”

  “We figured,” said the man. “It had to be an outsider. One of those truck drivers who pass through sometimes. The guy who comes by twice a year to buy ceramics from Mary Sue. The rich couple with that big cabin in the woods. Someone like them.”

  “But not,” said Mr. Carpenter with the care of a man fording barbed wire, “someone like Mr. Wong.”

  “Probably not.”

  A non-answer but not unexpected.

  “Could be the teenagers who come for their yearly retreats. They’re feral at that age.”

  Mr. Jacobson nodded and scratched under his chin, his nails raking florid rows down the white road of his throat. They were filthy with what could have been grease or gore, a deep jammy dark that seeped softly along the cuticles. Exactly like blood, Mr. Carpenter thought. But Asbestos, though starved of good farmers, had slaughtermen and butchers and ranchmen. The blood, if it was blood, likely had justifiable cause to be there. And if it did not, there were ways to deal with a murderer so striking.

  “Maybe.”

  “So how does Asbestos plan to deal with this revelation, then?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Jacobson, and Mr. Carpenter wondered if the man sang when he was not in the abattoir, entrails gnarled along his forearms, a slop of red scudding along the floor beneath his feet, greasing the drains so the chum from his work escaped with ease. No reason for him to not sing in the knacker’s yard; entertainment wasn’t sacred, not like the grain or good earth. “We decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to close off Asbestos for a few months. Make certain whoever it was who did it knows we won’t stand for such behavior. That they’re not welcome here.”

  Mr. Carpenter waited. He could tell a request was coming.

  “Anyway,” said the man. “We were wondering if you’d do the same. Show of solidarity and all that. We’ll give you discounts on meat and wool.”

  “Could even try setting up some kind of barter system,” said Mr. Carpenter. “Meat and wool for cider, pies, preserves, whatever else you want from our orchards.”

  “And your fields.”

  Mr. Carpenter bobbed his head. “Depends on if you can talk Mrs. Taylor into coming around to check our generator every now and then. The turbines are starting to fall apart.”

  “What happened to Mr. Smith?”

  “The repairman?”

  “Mm.”

  Mr. Carpenter said nothing further until the man took the hint.

  “I’m sure we can figure out something. Between you, us, the other communities in the county, we should be able to keep ourselves going for a while,” said the man.

  Mr. Carpenter thought on this, aware that when he spoke, he spoke for two thousand and fifty-six other individuals, and that he held this responsibility because none of them desired any culpability in municipal affairs; that he was, in some respect, an effigial figure, something to burn should the winter linger past its welcome. It was a knowledge that had left him anchored to cowardice for too many decades.

  But today felt different.

  Today felt like an occasion for change.

  Months from that pivotal instant, Mr. Carpenter would replay the encounter in his head, wondering how he’d come upon the epiphany, if his subconscious had received instruction from the dying summer, some sign necessitating rebellion. If he had read those augurs in his morning oatmeal, in the calamities listed in the morning news, in the flight of the crows of Cedarville, who had always been uncommonly large and eerily astute. Regardless, whatever possessed him did so with a vigor that’d become alien to him, and Mr. Carpenter, there in the ruin-sodden dark, said to the man, vehement for the first time since his youth:

  “I think so too.”

  * * *

  It was ea
sier than anyone thought it would be.

  A few calls made in an apologetic tone, citing half-true excuses and old sins, altercations between Cedarville and this truck driver or that. A number of emails dictated to the Elliots’ oldest daughter, a brittle melancholic girl precociously married to the manners of mid-age, then sent through the only computer in the township’s solitary school. A single somewhat obsequious letter, mailed to those in charge of the county; more formality than anything else. Both Cedarville and Mr. Carpenter could not recall the last time the administration even took note of their existence.

  The matriarchs of the church ran bake sales like wars, organizing them with autocratic pomp, all manners of kitchens conscripted into the effort and not one allowed the freedom to refuse. This was about community. There was no opting out. So for weeks, Cedarville smelled warmly of butter and baking pies, gingerbread and blackberries cooked down to syrup, mulled wine steeping in vast stock pots, their surfaces pitted from long use.

  Men and women and giggling children came from adjoining communities, bringing with them money and other oblations, the latter far, far more precious to Cedarville than currency. After all, there would be amnesty from the outside world. No point to money if it can’t be spent to acquire things you couldn’t trade for, luxuries like Parisian coffee grounds or fresh books.

  Slowly, a frenetic joy developed through Cedarville, spreading as gossip might, and all at once, before anyone knew how, there were wreaths on every door, windows garlanded with red, fairy lights threaded along the roofs, and a nightly choir who sang hymns in lieu of carols, most of them in languages Cedarville still spoke. It felt like Christmas although Christmas was still a few months away, and also something older, something old enough that it could not be named, only observed as an absence. Some of the younger people joked about agrestic paganism and how memory could be held in the marrow, how bucolic practices were often scaffolded on grisly traditions, and wasn’t it true that everything Christian has its beginnings in blood? Perhaps it was that.

  But no one looked too deeply into their postulations, not even them. No point in doing so when there were dances to attend, visitors to entrance, meals to share, drinks to sip and guzzle and splash onto one another, whether in ecstasy or rage or some amalgamation of the two. By the time winter arrived, cauling the branches with frost, everyone was convinced they could do this forever.

  Except Mr. Wong.

  Where the rest of Cedarville was nourished by the recent changes, Mr. Wong withered. The fat slicked from his small frame. He no longer brought food to his sister’s altar, migrating the paraphernalia into the cottage he’d shared with her. He avoided his neighbors; he shrunk. As much a wraith now as the memory of his sibling, Mr. Wong, for a while, seemed like he would grow smaller and smaller, until at last he was nothing but a faint unhappy noise.

  Then, Mr. Carpenter made the error of calling a town hall, six weeks after he brokered a deal with Mr. Jacobson, the man from Asbestos. It was not the first of such meetings, but it was the largest, the most officious of the lot. Everyone came, dressed in their festive best, and they stayed even if they could not find room to fit into the church, haunting the windows. The children, Mr. Carpenter thought, were especially darling. Though Cedarville was enjoying a surfeit of largesse, it remained a pragmatic township, taught at the crib to ration and take care of how it made use of its bounties; the winters here could be cruel. As such, most of the finery was reserved for the youngest, and how radiant they were under a patina of such doting! The girls wore embroidered bonnets, the boys damasked waistcoats, and there was satin for accents and goose-down in the lining of their velvet coats, and mother-of-pearl shining from their buttons. Mr. Carpenter, who’d never wanted his own offspring, ached nonetheless at the cherubic vision, full of pride, filled with saudade for the life that ended with his wife’s own. Had the Devil provided him the option of being preserved here, in the thick resin of this moment, Mr. Carpenter would have begged for him to take his soul.

  It was perfect up until Mr. Wong spoke.

  “This is wrong.”

  His voice, rarely discerned save as a mumble, was atonal and clamorous. It skidded along the higher registers, becoming shrill, but was otherwise arthritic in the way typical of the aged. But for all its thinness, Mr. Wong’s voice was not lacking in volume. His declaration boomed through the chatter, and Cedarville collapsed into a watchful quiet.

  “Sorry,” said Mr. Carpenter from his vantage at the podium. “But how so?”

  Mr. Wong strode down the corridor, a finger jabbed at Mr. Carpenter, or perhaps the wizened Christ looming behind the latter. The town halls were, by and large, held in the settlement’s only church. Whoever had commissioned the building had worshipped authenticity, and so the Messiah, starved to his pith, possessed not a beatific expression but one of pained ecstasy, the Holy Spear still jutting from beneath his ribs, viscera unspooling from the wound while stained-glass angels gaped longingly.

  “This is wrong,” said Mr. Wong again. “Closing the borders like this. It’s wrong.”

  “It sends a message,” said Mr. Carpenter calmly.

  A hoarse bark of laughter. “What message? That we are stupid? If there is a wolf here trying to eat us sheep, what do you think it is going to do? It is going to laugh. It is going to be so happy to know that the sheep won’t make contact with their shepherds.”

  Mr. Carpenter decided then that what grated at him was neither Mr. Wong’s diatribe nor the content of his soliloquy, but the architecture of his grammar, his sentence construction, the lack of flow in his speech. His delivery was stilted for all its passion, his enunciation lamentable. It troubled Mr. Carpenter as Mr. Carpenter believed elocution was a vital practice, and if one wanted to speak in public, one owed it to their audience to speak well and with great charm.

  “The authorities believe the murderer has moved on,” said Mr. Carpenter. “Unless you have reason to believe differently.”

  The furnaces kicked in. A low hum suffused the church and to Mr. Carpenter, made briefly superstitious by his vexation, it seemed like the building despaired of Mr. Wong’s presence too. Why, Mr. Carpenter could not be sure, although the more he interrogated the notion, the more ill-ease he experienced. To a great degree, he understood this to be subconscious projection, a trick of the mind, much like the movement of the seraphs in the corner of his eye. Nonetheless, it is impossible to witness a holy place passing such sour judgment on an individual and not feel a frisson of caution.

  Mr. Carpenter said none of this, of course.

  “I think the killer could be a local,” spat Mr. Wong. “You people don’t need to look at me like I’m crazy. You know it’s true.”

  “Our county is small,” said Mr. Carpenter, so very carefully. “And we are blessed for that reason. We know each other and we know one another to be good.”

  The crowd murmured agreement.

  Mr. Wong swore loudly, in a tongue none but him and his dead sister spoke. Then, in English again: “Fuck off. Fuck off with your stupid ideas. You think you’re all saints? I know who you all have been fucking. I know what you do. I know which of you beat your children and which of you cheat the tourists. Don’t think I haven’t been paying attention.”

  Had that bitter statement been spoken under different circumstances, Cedarville might have done nothing but scrunch down, abashed to have its fabrications and its pretenses at genteel behavior so bluntly shucked. But there, in the church, amid those festive days, with so many of them garbed like country kings, a very different emotion took root. It was not horror that burgeoned in the breasts of Cedarville’s finest, not self-loathing, not guilt, not introspection or mawkish repentance; no, nothing constructive at all.

  It was rage instead, subtle yet consuming, even righteous in its timbre. Rage at the insult of being laid bare without consent. Rage at being coerced into examining old sins when the wise knew better than to exhume the past; at being named for what they were. Spouses glanced warily at t
heir partners while adulterers looked meekly to old lovers. Parents glowered at their brood, daring them to author complaint, to suggest that the punitive measures they’d doled out were disproportionate to the error. Liars smoothed the creases of their fine suits. Cedarville’s wealthy, what few there were, consoled themselves with a familiar paean: that there were occasions when they had been kind, that they were, at least, more pious than their neighbors. And all of them, they kept a sliver of their fury for Mr. Wong, for without him they would not be made so uncomfortable.

  This was his fault. This unwanted accounting of misdeeds, their sudden uncertainty, the crumbling of their faith in not just each other but themselves. This was Mr. Wong’s doing and some manner of reparations would need to be made.

  “These are serious allegations you’re levelling against the community. Your community,” said Mr. Carpenter, mouth pinching. “Unless you think yourself better than us somehow.”

  Mr. Wong drank in the unhappy crowd. He had lived in Cedarville for so long, the memories of his birthplace felt like an abstract, a story told to him and misremembered as his own. He understood this thought as false but fact had little to do with reality. Truth was merely raw material. It was the story, the consensus belief, that mattered.

  “I think,” said Mr. Wong, aware things would be very different by the end of the sentence. “That I am more honest than the rest of you.”

  * * *

  The first month of isolation bore a celebratory air despite the blizzard which came as escort. Cedarville kept its houses bedecked with decorations, though by the second week there was no one to admire their colors, not with how the ice grew in sheets, laminae of glass pressed thickly to the walls and the pavement. The municipal committee tried at first to salt the walkways, only to have their work undone in minutes, and after that consigned themselves to reserving their supplies for emergencies. There were many more days of this algor weather to survive. Likely, there would be tragedies too: people to unearth, the ailing to migrate from home to hospital. They would need the salt then to ward against slippage.