More from Cheryl Sawyer

On these pages I'd like to offer readers a speech, essay, article, interview, workshop note or perhaps a short story, updated on a regular basis. Please follow the links on the left to other stories.

This is the first appearance of this short story. If you should wish to reproduce it in a magazine, anthology, in print or any other medium, please apply to me for the rights.

He’s back. The old house stands before him. There’s a moan in his ears like windsong, but here in the glade not a leaf shivers and the autumn air touches his skin without a breath of motion. He walks through the gateway, seeing in memory the line of the fence flying straight as a bullet to the tupelo and cypress stands on either side of the yard. The fence has been blown away; the rest is unchanged. As he advances, the porch roof frowns at him and the stone columns retrace all the barriers this family used to put up in his path. When he steps up onto the top level, the slate paving under his boots admits of no sound. He shouldn’t have come.
The door is wide open and he stops, listening. Someone is advancing from within, but it cannot be Sarah, for in all the vast misty space that he has wandered through, he has never encountered the face and figure that haunt him. He knows that whoever emerges from this house will be a stranger, but yearning still courses through him and he fixes his gaze on the dark doorway.
There are footsteps, a shape in the gloom, then a woman appears on the threshold. She jumps in violent surprise, then stands still, sharply moulded by the cold light.
‘Yes?’ She has frigid blue eyes and her pale, lean cheeks hold two red spots of fright and annoyance. Outlandishly dressed in dungarees and white shirt, her tow hair short and spiky, she looks like a farm boy detailed to see off intruders.
His legs weaken as though he is about to fall, but he can use his voice, and because he has been alone for so long it sounds as strange to him as it must to her—deep and slow, like the sad music in his head. ‘Is the family home?’
‘No,’ she snaps, ‘this place is mine!’ Then she shrinks a little, realising too late that she has admitted to being alone in the mansion in the woods.
He turns on his heel and goes down the steps, not caring where he puts his feet. He looks over his shoulder and the cavernous porch wavers and tilts behind him.
The young woman places one hand against a pillar to stay upright. She hisses, ‘What are you doing here?’
Her hard radiance fills the space around her, thrusting him away. She is so vividly alive that he knows without question he can never find Sarah, and his last hope bursts and drives inward like shrapnel. He moves blindly to the sycamore tree in the center of the yard and turns his head to take a final cruel look at the house.
The young woman is at the top of the steps, one hand still against the marble column, the other pressed to her throat. ‘Oh Lord,’ she says. ‘Oh no. No.’ Then fury surges up through her terror and flashes in her eyes, ‘This is all I need.’
He’s retreated too fast—flickered from the porch into the yard without moving a limb. He can’t shift again or he would terrify her farther. He can’t leave either, not yet, for the tug of the place is too strong. He tries a neutral pose, leaning against the tree trunk, which feels soft against his shoulder, as though with more pressure it might melt and absorb him. He crosses one ankle over the other, adjusts his body to achieve balance without impinging on the tree. It’s the exact same sycamore under which he and Sarah used to stand, and it towers above him, still monstrously alive, arms stretched against the sky, roots gripping the earth under a coverlet of its own dead leaves.
Tears rush from his eyes but they don’t blur his sight and the woman on the porch can’t see them. He manages to say, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t figure to alarm you.’
‘Who are you? No one said a goddamned thing when they were selling this place to me. Bastards.’
He flinches and stands straight again, fists clenched. This skinny, enraged creature, with her bristling hair and tongue like a whip end, is so altogether unlike Sarah it cuts to the quick just to look at her. He turns his head. There’s a dirt track stretching through the trees towards the village, from which a far-off humming can be heard. If he disappears that way it may quiet her somewhat. He owes her that at least.
‘No, you can’t just go.’ There’s a quiver in her voice that sounds like a different kind of anger. ‘You have to tell me who you are.’
She lowers herself to sit on the porch with her bare feet on the step below, and grips her hands around her knees. It costs her a mighty effort to do this, to hold herself in despite her fear.
She is nothing to him except a dreadful reminder of the emptiness of the house, but he must respect her right to it. Nothing he’s ever done gives him a claim to this ground. He’s drifted in like a falling leaf, and when the next wind comes lashing through the trees he’ll lift away and be gone.
‘My name’s Jacob, ma’am. Don’t fret. This is my first visit back. And I trust it’s my last.’
‘How do I know? What if I wake up tonight and find you lurking outside my window? What if you slide through the door in the dark? I came here to be alone.’ He sees a sparkle in the outside corner of each eye, a trace of silver along the lower lids.
He’s shocked, by her fear and her weird desire for solitude. ‘Put that out of your head, ma’am. I’d never come inside the house. I never was permitted to before, anyways. Never got past the point where you’re seated now.’
‘So it wasn’t your place?’ Her irises glitter like melting ice. ‘Why’d you come back, then?’
‘I was looking for …’ He can’t say Sarah’s name, but the woman on the step is waiting so tensely he has to go on. ‘My betrothed. I went off to war and didn’t set foot here again. Time out of mind I thought I’d see her somewhere, but it never fell to my lot.’
‘See her somewhere?’ Scorn rakes through her voice, then she hesitates. She puts one hand on the flagstones beside her, and after a breath she says, ‘That’s your uniform?’
‘I guess so, ma’am.’ His rigout is a grey flannel shirt crossed by suspenders, with grey breeches, and down-at-heel boots. ‘They may be rags, but they’s regimental issue.’
She takes that in, struggling with it, her fingers pressed onto the charcoal slate. ‘Where do you come from?’
‘I don’t know.’ How to tell her about the fog and smoke, the last bleak field, the smell that burned his nostrils and invaded his chest? ‘I was lost in the war.’
‘But you knew where she was. Your betrothed. Couldn’t you have come back before now?’
‘She wasn’t my betrothed. That’s merely the way we talked, alone. Her parents wouldn’t countenance me. I was never good enough for them.’
‘What about her?’ He hates the way she asks these questions; with contempt, as though she already knows the answers. He turns his head away again, shrinking from her candid gaze. He should go. But she forestalls him. ‘She was waiting for you, wasn’t she? Tell me, she was waiting?’
He nods, and the slow movement of his head seems to strike a chill through her body. Both hands are frozen beside her, palms flat, as though she longs to thrust herself up and leap inside out of reach.
He says, ‘We made no promises. I had no right. I couldn’t leave her a widow.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘Other men took the risk. When my grandfather came back from his war he had a wife and child here in Kentucky. A child he’d never seen.’
‘It was different for us. If Sarah had married me and gone from this house, they’d never have took her back. If I’d left her a widow, she’d have had no roof to call her own.’
She catches something in his eyes. ‘But she wanted to, just the same? She wanted to marry you!’
‘What of it?’ He slams his fist into the tree. Once it would have skinned his knuckles, but this time it shudders and sighs, and the tremor races through him and snatches his voice away.
She’s on her feet. ‘If she loved you, she could have borne anything. My grandmother had just a week with my grandfather, but she told me that carried her through. But you couldn’t accept that kind of love. It’s so typical.’ She begins to step down towards him.
He looks up at the sky, speaking within himself the one name he wants to hear, summoning up the face he needs to see. To talk of Sarah in the past is blasphemy; she walks still, someplace he has never come across, under another heaven that will never smile on him. He can sense his whole being silently blowing apart, scattering into minute particles like the acrid blast from a gun.
‘Jacob,’ the girl says very distinctly, ‘I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. My name is Melanie Rice. I come from Kentucky but up until last month I lived in New York with my husband. I bought this place so I could be on my own.’
He says, ‘You’re a widow?’
‘Separated.’
He examines her, the word ringing like a knell in his ears. ‘How can you choose separation?’ When she doesn’t reply, he gestures with his thumb along the woodland path. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off in town? There’s a place by the schoolhouse that might suit.’
‘There’s no town any more,’ she says slowly. ‘It’s all suburb. There’s a mall … but not what you’d call a main street. I chose this place because it’s right on the outskirts. I leave my car up there at the end of the avenue and walk down. It’s the most private place I could find with my kind of finances.’ She smiles, trying to penetrate his confusion, but so many of the words are strange to him. There’s a shyness in her, and a glimmer of concern. He feels guilty, and forlorn—familiar feelings in this handsome, forbidding place.
She’s standing on the grass, near enough to have to look up into his face as she says, ‘There hasn’t been a whisper of anyone else around. There’s no woman haunting this place. If I’d sensed another spirit here, I’d tell you. You believe me, don’t you?’
‘I believe you,’ he says, bitterness corroding his throat. She’s making sure he’ll go, plucking the last expectation from his heart to guarantee he doesn’t return. She’s so scared of him that a pulse beats under the fine skin at the base of her neck, like a moth under silk, fighting to get free.
She says almost in a whisper, ‘What happened to you?’
‘I don’t rightly recall.’ A sick weariness descends on him. ‘It’s all shut away from me.’ He sweeps his hand, indicating the house and yard, and she jumps a little. ‘I couldn’t even find this place, however hard I tried thinking on it. Until now. I reckon it just called to me. But there don’t seem no rhyme nor reason to that.’
Her eyes travel downward from his face. ‘Where were you wounded?’
He looks down too, with sarcasm. ‘Ain’t I all in one piece?’ Then, into her silence, ‘Tell me what you see.’
While she assesses him, her mouth crimps in a quick inward smile that says Don’t fancy yourself. Sarah looked at him like that when they were alone together for the first time in the woods, and she told him Handsome is as handsome does. So he kissed her.
Melanie says, ‘One foot taller than me and a year or two older. Rangy. Weatherbeaten. Need a comb and a shave. But in the right clothes you might cut some kind of a figure.’
He gives her a mocking salute and she doesn’t start this time. ‘Do I have leave to go now, ma’am?’
She frowns. ‘But … where?’
‘I can’t say. True as I stand here, I don’t know.’
‘So I’ll never be sure whether you might come back. What if the house calls you again?’
He shakes his head. ‘This is it. My one chance, and she isn’t here.’
She catches the agony in his voice. ‘You can’t blame her!’
‘Can’t I?’
‘You told me, she said she’d wait forever. She was willing to defy her parents to marry you.’
‘She cried so hard over it she made herself ill. But they wouldn’t back down. So she was going to run away with me.’
‘And you said no?’
‘If I couldn’t give her more than my name, I wouldn’t marry any woman.’
‘Typical.’
‘I envy you,’ he says harshly, ‘if everything in your life goes true to type. It must be darned easy to make up your mind.’
‘I’ll bet I take longer over it than you!’
Of course she’s riled, and in equal measure he can see the hurt, for her chin lifts but the points of her fine shoulders draw inward as though she’s looking for protection that no one here is about to offer her.
‘I doubt that.’ He waits a bit, then says, ‘So you’re cast-iron, certain sure about living here on your own?’
‘Yeah. Until you turned up.’ She spins around and walks away.

The second time it happens, once again he has no warning, he just finds himself standing under the sycamore tree. The sadness hits him as he examines the house. The door is open, and on the porch are a puny table and two chairs that weren’t there before. Then he hears footsteps behind him and turns to see Melanie close by, pacing out the ground. She’s so tiny she has to do it with exaggerated strides, and she looks comical and touching, like a child caught up a rigorous, solitary game.
She doesn’t see him until she turns around at the far corner of the yard. She freezes, just ceases to move, darting a kingfisher glance at him that’s piercing in its indignation.
He says, ‘I didn’t mean to trespass, it just happened. The way I figure it, you’ve only to turn your back on me in a deliberate fashion, and I’ll disappear. Why not try it now?’
She begins slowly to advance. She has on a red pullover and blue breeches that show bright against the soft colours of the woods. ‘It’s not that simple. You’d only come back sometime later. This place isn’t ready to let you go.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘Working out how long the fence will be. I’m getting quotes.’
‘Who are you planning to keep out?’
‘Not you, obviously.’ Her voice today is as light and dry as the dead leaves.
‘Your husband?’
‘Oh, catch him coming!’ She squints along the line of the fence. ‘What was it made of in your day? Stone, like the gateway?’
‘No, it was a high picket fence.’
‘Good. That’s what I want. There’s a few things that need fixing inside the house as well. I might need to rent it out, so there’s quite a bit to do.’
‘Why?’
She shrugs. ‘My husband keeps telling me I should go back to him.’
‘And will you?’
She gives a little smile. ‘That’s interesting: you credit me with a choice.’
‘Instead of preaching at you? Woman, every one of God’s children has choices to make. It’s just some choices are worse than others.’
She smiles again, then squares her thin shoulders. ‘There’s something I might have brought up with you last time, but I was too craven. Inside the house I’ve a very fine biography of Robert E. Lee. And a picture book of the battles in North Carolina, where some of my family come from.’ She stares at the ground. ‘This is stupid—I mean, even without having read a book in my life, I can tell you what happened to the Rebs.’
‘No. Thank you. I knew in my bones Dixie would go. And more often than not I speculated I’d go with it. I don’t care to know how.’
She raises her head. ‘Is that why you wouldn’t marry your betrothed?’
He returns her clear gaze. ‘No. You were right: I didn’t trust hard enough to her love.’
‘Do you now?’
‘A little late, isn’t it?’
A pause. ‘Where did you used to meet?’
‘Here. We’d go walking; they permitted her that much. Down to the lake sometimes.’ He nods to his right, where a scarcely worn track still leads away through the tupelos.
She says, ‘I’ve only been there once. You want to come down now?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, but it’s one more reference point; it might help.’
He grunts, and she takes it in the affirmative. They are side by side when they reach the path but it’s too narrow so he moves off it and goes through the trees.
After a while, though, she stops and laughs in a breathy way that makes her face glow with a kind of tenderness. ‘I can’t stand it! You’re not allowed to do that, it gives me the absolute creeps. Come back onto the path—walk ahead of me.’
He shrugs and complies, then after a while her voice, lightly mocking, stops him again. ‘Promise me, if we meet someone, you won’t walk through them.’
He says, ‘I doubt they’ll see me.’
‘I can!’
‘I figure it might be because you belong to the house.’ He catches the flash in her glance and says quickly, ‘Leastways, I mean, the house is yours. You’re a woman, bringing it to life again. Maybe that’s how it summoned me.’
‘Well, well, so it’s all my fault,’ she says to herself as they walk on.
The ground becomes soggy and sometimes they have to step over shallow pools. The trees grow shorter and thinner and finally he comes upon the lake. Serene, ample and sleek in his memory, it’s now clogged with reeds and dead wood, and the long stretches where water birds used to flock have shrunk to puddles criss-crossed by sluggish little eddies.
She’s beside him. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you.’
He stares out over the water. Swamp cypresses still encroach on each side, but on the opposite shore where the land rises he can see, behind a veil of spreading trees, the walls of buildings. They are of diverse shades: pink, yellow, rust-coloured, grey-brown. Barns?
‘Houses!’ he exclaims.
‘It’s an estate.’
‘Land used to belong to a fellow named Hyram Medlow.’
‘That’s what it’s called: Medlow Lake.’
‘None too sober in their choice of limewash.’ Then the pain becomes too much and he says, ‘Why does this have to be? What’s the use of me coming back, when everything’s an abomination?’
The woman beside him is shrinking away but he can’t help it, he calls out over the water, ‘Sarah!’ A bittern flies up like a shot out of a gun, straight into the sky from an invisible perch not five yards away. ‘Sarah!’ His voice slaps back at him across the lake, stinging his face, and he puts his hands up and groans.
‘Jacob.’ Melanie tries to touch him, but he feels nothing but a coldness around his wrists, like shackles.
He flings down his arms and shouts at her, ‘Go! Get away from me!’
She screams, a mist off the water licks around her and she turns to run. The last he sees of her are her pullover pulsing like a distant beacon, and her blue legs flickering dimly in the spectral fog, then she’s gone.

There shouldn’t be a third time, but it happens. It’s sundown, and long shadows lap around the house. The sky is low and angry, flying a red war banner that stretches across the tops of the trees and snags itself on the bare, bristling twigs. Downstairs there are lights on, blazing like a hundred lanterns against the curtains she’s pulled across all the windows. It still hurts, to be shut outside. Separation, she calls it.
On the little table near the door are a china mug, a plate and some other utensils, alongside a pile of books. While he’s watching, Melanie opens the door, takes a step out onto the porch towards the table, then sees him.
She doesn’t pause—she goes over and picks up the three books, then stands with her back against the wall, clutching them against her chest like a shield. Silence falls.
‘I ask your pardon,’ he says at last.
‘You can’t help it.’ After another long pause she says, ‘I keep looking for you. I keep wondering whether maybe you’re around all the time, but I just can’t see you.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s not the way it is. You’ve no call to be afeared of me.’
She gives a little laugh.
It’s hard to see her face, as the startling lamplight from within illumines only one cheek. She is not smiling.
‘The fence looks grand,’ he says. ‘May I step in?’
She hesitates a second, then nods.
There’s a gate, too, set neatly between the old stone posts. He contemplates trying to lift the latch, but out of the gloom he hears her ironical voice. ‘Don’t trouble yourself; just walk through, why don’t you?’
She’s wearing something bizarre as usual—a white woollen garment as long as a fisherman’s pullover, with the collar rolled up under her ears, and breeches made of some creamy stuff that looks like velvet. With her pale face and hair she’s a piece cut out of the darkness of the stone wall. A hole in the picture. An empty space where Sarah used to stand, one hand lightly on her waist. He remembers the deep glossy swathes of hair drawn back across her temples, and her dark eyes, the colour of grey river stones under clear water. And her voice. She used to say his name, that he always thought of as plain and workaday, as slowly as if she were reading it from some solemn book. She used to relish it, and the two sounds of it spread and lengthened in the air between them as though she were reaching out to touch him. ‘Jacob.’ Like a caress. A promise. A physical claim. She was a seemly, churchgoing woman, but the inborn power of the way she said his name always took his breath away.
He steps into the yard.
Melanie moves so that she’s framed by the bright doorway, and every feature disappears except for the nimbus of golden hair. ‘I think you should come in.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘You mean you couldn’t, then. But you should now.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not? What have you got to lose?’
‘Nothing ma’am, you’re right about that.’ Then, regretful, he softens his tone. ‘But you might have a deal to lose. What about your peace of mind?’
‘I don’t have any.’
He goes to the foot of the steps and tries to read her face. ‘Has your husband been to see you?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. He says I shut myself up in this place to get away from him. So he won’t come, even to talk. On principle.’
‘That’s no principle, that’s straight out natural resentment. What else did you expect?’
‘I had a right to expect he might listen to my side of the story for a change.’
‘How can he do that, with you way in tarnation down here?’
‘Well I’m not about to go running back to New York on his say-so!’
‘Ah. He wants you back.’ She twitches a little but doesn’t deny it. So he asks, ‘Do you love him?’
‘Yes,’ she says. Then goes on hurriedly, ‘But that doesn’t solve anything.’
‘Really? Your notions have changed some!’
‘You don’t understand.’ She turns sideways and leans against the lintel, still holding the books to her chest. ‘Love isn’t enough for him. He cares more about money.’
‘Come now.’ He’s seen too much of her to believe that. She’s well capable of tempting a man if she cared to, making him want her a sight more than anything he might have in the bank. The fact that she can look so like a lost little girl only increases her attraction. So different from Sarah, whose power lay in the strong, steady passion that burned in her grey eyes, like embers under ashes. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘I was made redundant, three months ago.’ She glances at him. ‘I mean, I lost my job. I went home to tell Brent. I was devastated, but I tried to hide it. I wanted him to … I don’t know …’
She hesitates so long he says for her, ‘Comfort you? Protect you?’
She wriggles a bit, then she says real quiet, ‘Yes. You know what he said? Straight off, he said, “Well, you’d better get looking, damned quick. We can’t afford more than a month without income, payout or no payout.”’
‘So he was afraid?’
‘How do you think I felt?’
‘So you were both afraid.’
She gives him a long look. ‘You’re saying we let each other down?’
‘I think you could have stuck around and talked more. You want a man to protect you, you’d better let him know. You could have fooled me, for a start.’
‘It’s too late now.’
‘Why? You could go up there and talk it out.’
‘There’s too much at stake. I bought this house in my own name. He’s furious about that.’
‘So sell it. What would you rather have, the house or him?’ She’s silent so long that he goes on, ‘You know what I came back here for? It sure as purgatory wasn’t this pile of stone. I even think … maybe there’s something bad about it. It separates folks.’
She looks up and says, ‘Come inside. They never let you in, so you should do it now. Maybe that’s the answer.’
‘To what? I won’t find Sarah.’
‘You might find yourself.’
He snorts, but when she turns and steps into the hallway, he follows her in.
He expects to be ambushed by grief, but everything is so unfamiliar there’s no room to feel anything. Walls the colour of wine, with gold frames everywhere around paintings that say nothing, they’re just splashes of colour. Lamps directed at odd angles, shedding a fearful white light like the flares he saw once at a theatre. Furniture so piled with cushions it looks as though you’d just sink in and downright smother. The floors are without covering of any kind, indecent in their shining nakedness.
Melanie puts the books down on a table that’s set absurdly low in the middle of the parlour floor, and beckons him on. ‘Come and see what I’ve done with the family room.’
Further on is the kitchen (she has to tell him what it is), and a large space created by losing a couple of walls and fitting huge windows giving onto the dark garden behind, where Sarah used to cultivate herbs.
‘What happened? A shell go through it?’
She laughs. ‘Along here are the bedrooms.’ He follows her down a corridor, which is panelled in the old way.
He’s starting to suffocate. He hasn’t been indoors since the morning when he took shelter in a cabin, just before the Yankees came charging out of the fog and he charged out and the earth exploded around him and tipped him onto his back so all he could see was the sky.
Sarah used to read the Book of Ruth to him: Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. But he left her behind, in this prison, this labyrinth.
Melanie turns and gestures and he walks into the room.
An enormous bed like a great white nest. Rugs on the floor, warming the space around it. Bright things on the dresser, shiny containers and bottles of different colours and shapes, filled with silk flowers.
And a mirror.
As he advances to the dresser, he hears Melanie make a nervous sound, and she comes to stand at his elbow, not trying to touch or prevent him, but alive with trepidation. He ignores her and stares into the mirror.
He sees a girl with spiky hair and an oval face that stands out in stark relief against the wood lining behind her. Nothing else. No one else. No other creature, alive or dead, is visible by her side.
A groan bursts from him and he blunders away, out the doorway, along the stifling corridor, through the brilliant, deserted rooms, out to where the black night awaits him. But the darkness is inside, filling his chest, catching in his throat, and when he reaches the porch he can go no further. Sick and blind, he holds onto the column at the top of the steps, his forehead against the cold marble.
‘Jacob.’ The voice sounds almost like Sarah’s.
Sobs rip through him. ‘It’s all empty. It’s no use. No one’s here.’
‘Jacob.’ The voice is so gentle, so full of pity, that he opens his eyes.
Melanie is standing in the doorway, where the light gleams on her wet cheeks. Her eyes, in shadow, have darkened to grey. And as he looks into them he sees it at last, in all its passionate strength: the love, unchanged—unchangeable—that a woman once offered him, and that he used to consider beyond belief.
‘Jacob, don’t go.’
Melanie’s face is so pale it looks like paper. The lintel around her crumples and fades, taking the wall with it. The old mansion, defeated, begins to shrink away, loosening its hold, setting him free. Free to join Sarah.
For as long as he hasn’t trusted to her love, he’s been forever looking in the wrong places.
Love is the journey. He has only to take the first step, and she will be with him.
He leans away from the ancient porch. The column slips smoothly from his hands, the paving glides from beneath his feet and he turns and moves into the beckoning dark where his love waits, smiling, for his return.