A Bed Until Morning
The fourth person to come back from the dead asked Clara Mercer whether she had a room.
He stood beyond the stable door with his hat held against his stomach. A woman waited behind him, supporting a younger man whose left boot had split along the sole. All three were covered in the fine red dust that blew down from Blood Gorge.
Clara had opened the door expecting one person.
For a moment, she looked past them.
The road was empty as far as the last house.
“A room?” the man asked again.
“I heard you.”
“Didn’t mean to hurry you.”
Behind Clara, someone shifted on the straw. The freighter had been awake since supper, sitting with his back against the feed bins. The fever woman slept beneath a horse blanket. The old man lay facing the wall, one hand tucked beneath his cheek.
Three already.
Six, if she let these people in.
The arithmetic seemed an ugly thing to be doing.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Nathan Pell.”
“Have you been hurt?”
He considered that longer than she liked.
“I don’t believe so.”
The younger man behind him made a small sound. The woman tightened her arm around his waist.
Clara stepped aside.
“Bring him through.”
***
She had run the boardinghouse in Mercy for eleven years.
In that time she had taken payment in coin, flour, roofing nails, a milk cow she had not wanted, and six weeks of labor from a carpenter who drank away four of them. She had sheltered a woman leaving her husband and a husband afraid to tell his wife he had lost their claim. Once, during the spring floods, she had put seventeen strangers in a building with nine beds.
She knew how to find room.
What she did not know was how to explain to a marshal that the lock he had ordered placed on her stable was now lying open on the kitchen table.
The returned were being held for their protection.
That was what he had said.
Clara had asked protection from whom.
He had promised to speak with her in the morning.
That had been two mornings ago.
Now she brought a chair for the younger man and knelt to examine his boot. The leather had opened at the side, exposing a strip of stocking dark with blood.
He pulled his foot away.
“I can mend it,” he said.
“I expect you can. Hold still.”
He was perhaps twenty. Younger than he had looked in the doorway.
The woman who had helped him inside stood beside the chair with her hands clasped so tightly that her knuckles showed white through the dirt.
“Your husband?” Clara asked.
“My brother.”
“What’s his name?”
“Benjamin.”
“And yours?”
“Esther.”
Clara looked up.
There was something familiar about the woman’s face. A breadth through the cheeks. A small pale mark beside one eyebrow.
“Esther who?”
The woman swallowed.
“Bell.”
Clara sat back on her heels.
She had helped carry food to the Bell house after the roof fell in.
That had been three years ago.
Esther saw the recognition and lowered her eyes.
Clara reached for the basin.
“Well,” she said, “you’ll both want washing.”
***
Nathan Pell ate half a bowl of broth before setting down his spoon.
“Too much salt?” Clara asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Then what?”
He looked at the bowl.
“I remember being hungry.”
Across the stable, the freighter lifted his head.
“That goes strange,” he said. “Comes back some.”
Nathan nodded as though this were useful advice about an ordinary illness.
Clara had put the lantern on an overturned crate between them. Its light reached the six faces and little beyond. Above the rafters, the loft was dark.
Outside, Mercy had gone quiet.
The red moon remained over the eastern cut.
Clara had first noticed it through her bedroom window four nights earlier. She had thought it beautiful then, which embarrassed her now. By dawn it had not moved. By the following evening, people were standing in the street with their watches out.
A teamster coming from the west said the moon was white and perfectly ordinary until he crossed the dry wash.
He had refused to stay for supper.
Clara took her account book from beneath her arm and opened it across her knees.
Nathan watched her dip the pen.
“We haven’t money.”
“You can tell me that when I present the bill.”
She wrote his name.
Beneath it, Esther Bell.
Then Benjamin Bell.
At the top of the page she had written the date. Under that, after some consideration, she added:
*Arrived after midnight. Water. Broth. Bedding.*
“What do you remember?” she asked.
Nathan’s hands closed around the bowl.
“About coming here,” she added. “Nothing else unless you care to tell it.”
“The gorge.”
“Were you walking?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“At first.”
Esther sat on the floor beside her brother’s chair.
“We found him near the wash.”
Clara glanced at Benjamin.
He was staring at the stable door.
“Was anyone else out there?”
He shook his head.
Esther did not.
Clara set down the pen.
“What did you see?”
“A lamp,” Esther said.
The freighter moved his feet off the blanket.
“Where?”
“Up on the ridge. Somebody carrying it.”
“Which ridge?”
“The one with the split rock.”
The freighter looked at Clara.
He had described the same place the previous morning.
Clara picked up the pen again, though she did not write.
“Did the person speak to you?”
Esther rubbed her thumb along the seam of her skirt.
“He asked whether we belonged here.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That my brother lived in Mercy.”
Benjamin finally looked away from the door.
“I did,” he said.
Clara waited.
“I don’t know who has the house now.”
***
The knock came while she was rinsing the bowls.
It was quiet enough that she thought at first it had come from the boardinghouse, across the narrow yard.
Then it sounded again.
Three measured taps against the stable door.
Benjamin stood so quickly that his chair fell backward.
Esther caught his sleeve.
Clara dried her hands.
“Stay here.”
The freighter rose with her.
“I’ll come.”
“You’ll sit. That leg won’t improve with you proving things.”
He remained standing.
She did not argue further.
At the door, she raised the lantern and lifted the latch.
A man stood beneath the eaves.
He wore a plain brown coat, buttoned at the throat despite the warm night, and carried a hooded lamp in one hand. In the other was a narrow book bound in reddish leather.
His boots were clean.
Clara noticed that before his face.
The yard was dust deep enough to keep a chicken’s footprint.
“Mrs. Mercer?”
“Who’s asking?”
He inclined his head toward the stable.
“I believe you’ve taken in some people.”
“People do come to a boardinghouse.”
“Six of them.”
Clara kept the door where it was.
The man’s gaze passed over her shoulder, though the opening was too narrow for him to see much.
“I’m here to settle an error.”
“What sort?”
“Several names were called before their arrangements were complete.”
Inside, one of the bowls touched the floor with a small earthen click.
Clara tightened her grip on the lantern handle.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“Family?”
“No.”
“Then you can explain yourself from there.”
He looked at her for the first time with something like attention.
His face was ordinary. That troubled her afterward. She could remember his coat, his book, the narrow little shield around his lamp, but nothing about his features that she could have described to another person.
“I only require their acknowledgment,” he said.
“Of what?”
“That they’ve been received.”
Clara looked down at the book.
He had opened it without her seeing him move.
Six lines crossed the page.
From where she stood, she could make out Nathan Pell’s name.
Beside each line was a space for a signature.
“I’ve already written them in,” she said.
The man went still.
“In what?”
“My account book.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“It generally is.”
“They haven’t taken rooms.”
“They’ve taken shelter.”
He closed his book.
For the first time, Clara heard a sound from his lamp.
A faint, dry scraping.
She glanced at the hooded glass. The light inside did not flutter when the breeze crossed the yard.
“I would advise you,” he said, “not to enter debts you don’t understand.”
Clara thought of the flour she had accepted from a hungry farmer, of the carpenter sleeping drunk beneath her stairs, of the woman upstairs who had been paying a week late for nearly a year.
“You’d have put me out of business long ago.”
He did not smile.
“Please ask Nathan Pell to come to the door.”
Behind her, Nathan drew breath.
Clara turned her head.
“Let him finish his supper.”
When she looked back, the man’s eyes were fixed on her account book, lying open beside the lantern crate.
She moved the door another inch toward its frame.
“You can come back in daylight.”
His gaze rose to hers.
“Will that make a difference?”
“It will to me.”
She shut the door.
For several seconds, nobody inside moved.
Then footsteps crossed the yard.
Clara waited until she could no longer hear them before dropping the bar into place.
***
Nathan was trembling.
“I nearly answered.”
“He knew your name,” Clara said.
“He knew it before.”
Esther had sat down beside her brother again. Benjamin held both her hands.
The freighter leaned heavily against a post.
“Was that the man with the lamp?” Clara asked.
Esther nodded.
Outside, a board creaked.
Everyone looked toward the door.
Nothing followed.
Clara went to the crate and opened her account book.
The six names were still there.
So were the date, the broth, the bedding.
She had left a space at the bottom for what each person owed.
Slowly, she drew a line through it.
Then she turned to a clean page and began a second letter to Eddie Bone.
The first had asked whether he knew anything about people returning from their graves.
This one began:
*Mr. Bone,*
*Someone has come asking for them.*
She stopped, listening.
From the ridge beyond Mercy came a bell.
One clear note.
Benjamin covered his ears.
A second note followed.
Clara looked toward the narrow stable window. Red light lay against the glass, bright enough to show the dust caught in a spider’s web.
The bell rang four more times.
Six.
Then silence.
She finished the letter without sitting down.
***
By dawn, the stable had grown warm.
Esther slept with her head against her brother’s shoulder. Nathan had stretched out beside the feed bins. The old man still faced the wall, but his breathing had settled.
Clara lifted the bar and opened the door.
The yard was empty.
No tracks crossed the dust.
On the outside of the door, just below the latch, someone had written a number in white chalk.
**6**
Clara stood looking at it.
Then she fetched a damp cloth from the basin and scrubbed until the wood was bare.
When she turned back, Benjamin was awake.
“Will he come again?”
Clara wrung out the cloth.
“I expect so.”
“What will you tell him?”
Across the yard, the boardinghouse waited with its shuttered windows and three empty rooms. Clara had been saving those rooms for paying travelers.
She looked at the six people behind her.
“That you’ve moved into the house.”
She propped the stable door open.
Above the gorge, the moon had not shifted an inch.
Hello World!!! 3