The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(40)

“I congratulate you,” I said. “She has caught herself for you, and you have no need of my help.”

“She was a vision,” he said, as if I had not spoken at all. “The most beautiful creature anyone has ever seen—you will agree on this, if nothing else, when you see her—and she loves me. She was so beautiful I thought she might be an angel.”

“Did you pray, when you thought you had seen one?”

“I tried to,” he said. “I tried to offer up a prayer of thanks, but I found that I could not. I had forgotten every prayer I had ever learned.”

As the one who had taught him every prayer he ever knew, I did not especially like that. “Can you remember one now?”

“I will,” he said. “I will pray every morning and evening, once I have her.”

“One prayer now would be better than a hundred tomorrow,” I said.

“You are likely right,” he said, “but you are also interrupting my story. She came back to ask me to return her comb, which I had under my pillow, and which I could not give her. For if she does not marry me, I will die, and I wish to be buried with it. Then she asked, if I would not return the comb, if I would not change my mind and live with her under the sea, and I told her I could not, but begged her to visit my grave when I perished from the wanting of her.”

“You two are never at a loss for conversation, at least,” I said.

“Then,” he continued, “she made me a new offer.”

I put down my pen. “Did she,” I said.

“She did,” he said. “A fair one, too. She said she loved me, and that she would be my wife and live here with me for seven years, if I would swear to come to her palace under the sea with all that was mine at the end of them.”

“Naturally, you agreed.”

Johnnie smiled. He was terribly beautiful when he smiled, and I loved to see him do it. “I threw myself down on my knees, and I promised all that and more.”

*

So that was settled, then. That same week they were married. She let the priest do it, which surprised me. I would not have thought she would be able to stand in the church and hear a bible spoken over her. But she was made of strong stuff, and smiled at everyone, and only shivered a little when the priest made the sign of the cross over her. The two of them together were as lovely as the sun over the sea. Pearls as big as fists studded her hair.

And so for seven years she lived with my Johnnie as his wife—lived with us as Johnnie’s wife. I said nothing, as it was a lawful marriage, but cataloged their sins and watched my son’s beautiful face for signs of repentance, and watched his wife’s beautiful face for signs of pity. And things went well, as long as she was with us. The fish ran as they hadn’t in years, the sheep got fat, a man from the government came out and installed a wind turbine at the end of the grazing field, the grocer got her checks on time. Gem-de-Lovely did not work, and neither did Johnnie, and so the additional labor fell on me. I found their chores came as easily to me as my own; I have never minded work. Some in the neighborhood might fault me for the sin of omission—might say I had the opportunity to tear up wickedness by the root and did not act—but I say I gave them both seven years’ opportunity to choose grace. That they did not seek it was a great grief to me.

They had six children, all healthy, all carrying their parents’ promise of beauty. Johnnie kept the gray-green comb on the mantelpiece over the fireplace in the kitchen, and often I would catch him staring at it. I suppose sometimes I stared at it, too.

So the seven years came to an end, and Johnnie had not repented of his ill-gotten wife, nor of his heretical promise, and she was still determined to drown him. A faraway look came to her beautiful eyes, and she was ever smiling and looking out the window toward the sea. Johnnie took to varnishing the fishing boat down by the slip, the first honest work I’d seen from him in years. Some afternoons he took the children with him, and sailed out and around the bay. He always had at least the decency to look sheepish after those trips.

Seven years on God’s soil, and after that a brief, drowned life with a flooded, faithless people, with no hope of salvation or eternity thereafter; this was the bargain Johnnie thought fair, and meant to give his children as inheritance besides. He was ever careless with his own soul, but now he grew careless with theirs. I had baptized the children each myself in secret after they had been born, although I suspect I always knew that would not do much good when the time came. I had baptized Johnnie too, for all the good it had done him.

On the last night of their marriage, I arose from my bed and fashioned a little cross out of old radio coils. I buried it in the embers of the kitchen fire until it glowed red, and I went into the children’s room and pulled back the covers from their beds. I pressed the cross between each of their shoulder blades in turn, oldest to youngest. Had they been awake, they likely would have screeched like anything, but I had put enough Veronal in their milk at supper that they would not have stirred if the world were ending. There would be enough time for screaming in the morning, if they thought it would help ease the pain. If Johnnie was determined to be drowned, that was his affair, but he would not drag six little souls with him, to grow up in dark and dripping sea caves with a thief for a father and a murderer for a mother.

I’d given Johnnie the Veronal too, and he lolled back and forth as I tied his hands and feet. Our family has always raised sheep; branding and binding were not new to me. It was a heavy thing, to carry my son out to the boat and put him in it. He was the only son I ever had, and he was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, even now. I had not bothered to drug Gem-de-Lovely. I grabbed the fire iron from the hearth and thrust the point into the hollow of her collarbone. She woke up choking on her throat’s blood and glaring furiously at me.