These Several Hundred Years

THESE SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS

A Short Story

Colin sends the scan on a Tuesday, at 1200 dpi, with a note that says hope this helps! sorry for the delay, cat was on the scanner.

Margot has it on the table within four hours, printed at A3, along with a second sheet that is her own tracing of it, because she has spent two nights with a lightbox establishing which marks are the mark and which are the damage.

"There," she says. "That's it. That's what's actually cut into the stone, minus the clergyman's flourishes, because he added flourishes, Cora, he could not help himself--"

"It's a name," Ash says.

"Yes. But it's a name plus something, and the something is what I want you to look at, because it's not decorative and it's not damage, and Colin's scan is good enough to show it and the 1878 plate isn't."

She slides the tracing across.

Beneath the mark, faint, there is a second line of cutting. Shorter. Made by the same hand.

"There's another one," I say.

"There's another one," says Margot. "It's badly worn and I can't read it and neither can the book, because the clergyman drew it as a smudge and captioned the whole thing a device of the lesser spirits, which -- I'd like it noted -- is the single laziest thing anyone in this story has done, and I include the man with the laser engraver."

Ash hasn't touched the tracing.

"I want to see it," he says.

"The scan's right--"

"The stone, Margot."

✦ ✦ ✦

Here's the problem, and it takes Priya about ninety seconds to lay it out, which is ninety seconds longer than it takes me to see it coming.

"He can't go."

"Priya--"

"Cora." She's gentle about it, which is how I know she's certain. "He cannot board an aircraft. He cannot pass a border. He has no passport, and there is no version of a passport in his future, because a passport requires a birth certificate and a birth certificate requires having been born." She spreads her hands. "He can't get to England. There is no lawful route and there is no unlawful route either, because the unlawful routes all require documents too, they just require worse ones."

The apartment is quiet.

"So we photograph it," Margot says. "We go, we photograph it properly, we come back--"

"That's fine," says Ash.

"It's not fine--"

"Margot, it's fine." He says it kindly. "I've wanted things I couldn't have before. I'm nine hundred years old. It's most of what I do."

And I sit there at my own dining table and look at a man being gracious about the one thing he has ever asked for, and I hear myself say:

"There's a way."

Everyone looks at me.

"No," says Ash.

"You don't know what I'm going to--"

"I know exactly what you're going to say," he says, "and the answer is no."

✦ ✦ ✦

We have the fight that night, after everyone's gone, and it's the worst one we've had, and it's conducted almost entirely in low voices, which is somehow so much worse than shouting.

"You'd have to light it," he says.

"Yes."

"You'd have to aim it." He's got both hands on the back of a chair. "Do you understand what that is? Every human being who has ever got me into a room lit that thing at me on purpose. Every single one. You're the one person in nine hundred years who did it by accident and wanted nothing off me, and that is the single fact I hold on to at four in the morning in a stranger's kitchen in Tualatin." He shakes his head. "If you light it meaning to, you're one of them."

"I know."

"I said it to you in a food court. You've said it back to me twice since. By accident. Never on purpose."

"I know what I said."

"Then why--"

"Because you want to stand on it," I say.

He stops.

"You've wanted exactly one thing since I met you," I tell him. "You didn't want a job, not really, you wanted somewhere to be expected. You didn't want a card, you wanted an address. You've never once asked me for anything, Ash, not one thing in eleven weeks, and last Thursday you stood at that window and said I'd like to go and stand on it, and I have been unable to think about anything else since."

"It isn't worth what it costs you."

"That's not your call."

"It is entirely my--"

"No, it isn't." My voice does something. "You don't get to decide what I'm allowed to spend. That's the whole argument, that's every argument we've ever had, that's Hazel Dell and Peter's kitchen and your four visits you didn't mention. You keep trying to protect me by subtraction and I keep telling you it isn't yours to subtract."

He looks at me for a long time.

"Eleven seconds," he says finally.

"What?"

"That's how long it took at your mother's. From the flame to me." He rubs his face. "For eleven seconds you'd be a person who calls me on purpose. That's what you'd be buying."

"I've done the arithmetic," I say. "I'd like to make the purchase."

✦ ✦ ✦

We fly on the twelfth. Me, Margot, my mother.

Priya does not come, because somebody in this family has a job, and because she said, at the airport, in a voice I have not heard her use before, "Bring my fiancée back in one piece, she has a dress fitting."

Ellen Delaney has not been on an airplane since 2011 and has opinions about all of it. Margot has made an itinerary. The itinerary is laminated. Nobody says anything about the lamination, which I think we can all agree is growth.

In Margot's carry-on, in a hard case, wrapped in a tea towel, is candle two hundred and forty.

She kept one. Of course she kept one. Tab seven, last line, in silver Sharpie: MINE.

✦ ✦ ✦

Two things about the trip that I want in, because they're true and because if I only put in the stone this will read like something it wasn't.

The first is that he still gets called.

Twice while we're in the air, which I only learn about later, and twice more while we're in a rented Vauxhall on the A1, and once at four in the morning in a bed and breakfast outside Alnwick, where I wake at four-oh-six local time because my phone lights up with a text that says gone, back soon, it's a woman in Salem and then, nine minutes later, back.

Eight time zones and it makes no difference at all. Of course it doesn't. He isn't traveling to them. He's just where the wanting is.

The second is Colin.

Because Doncaster is, as Margot puts it, "basically on the way," which it is not, and because my sister has been emailing a man with a cat for two weeks and has developed what I can only describe as a professional relationship.

He meets us in a parking lot. He is about sixty, in a fleece, and he brings the original brass master and a carrier bag with four other stamps in it.

"You're the candle lady," he says.

"I'm the candle lady."

"You said on the email it caused a bit of bother."

"A bit," says Margot.

Colin nods slowly, in the manner of a man who has been on the internet long enough to stop asking follow-up questions.

"Well," he says. "It's delisted. And I've took the file off the machine, so there's no more coming." He hands her the bag. "You can have them, if you like. Only I'd not want to sell them now, would I."

And Margot -- who cried on my couch about organza bags, who has been carrying two hundred and forty candles on her back since June -- takes a carrier bag of brass stamps from a redundant printer in a parking lot in South Yorkshire and says, "Thank you, Colin," and shakes his hand with both of hers.

"Aye," says Colin. "Right."

Then he says, "It's a name, in't it."

Everyone stops.

"I've looked at that mark eleven year," he says. "You can tell. Decorative ones are all balanced, they're drawn to be looked at. That one's written." He shrugs. "Whose is it, then?"

"A friend of ours," says my mother.

Colin considers this.

"Well," he says. "Tell him I'm sorry. I'd not have put a fella's name on soap if I'd known."

✦ ✦ ✦

The chapel is not a chapel. It's the remains of one, in the corner of a field, forty minutes north of Alnwick down a road that Margot's laminated itinerary calls a road and the Vauxhall calls a mistake.

Four walls to about shoulder height. No roof since -- the woman with the key thinks the eighteenth century, but the woman with the key is ninety and cheerfully unreliable, and the key is for a gate two fields away.

Her name is Doreen. She farms with her son. She has never in her life met an American and is thrilled about all three of us.

"There's stones," she says, when Margot describes what we're looking for. "In the floor, at the end. You'll want to shift the grass off, it's grown over shocking."

"Doreen," I say, "does anyone ever come and look at them?"

"Not since the university lot," says Doreen. "That were 1994."

✦ ✦ ✦

It takes us fifty minutes.

There are eleven floor stones, most of them illegible, and we work along on our knees in the wet grass at the east end, my mother with a hand brush she brought from Portland because she is a woman who brings a hand brush to a foreign country, Margot with the tracing in a plastic sleeve.

I find it.

I want that written down, because I've thought about it since, and because I don't think it means anything and I keep behaving as though it does.

It's the ninth one I clear. It's about two feet by three, worn nearly smooth in the middle where a doorway used to be, and it takes me a minute with the brush and then longer with my hands, and then I sit back on my heels in a field in Northumberland and cannot speak.

The mark is at the top. His name. Cut deep, and deeper than anything else on the stone, and gone soft at the edges from eight hundred years of feet.

And underneath it, in the same hand, smaller, is the second line.

It isn't a device. It isn't a smudge.

It's another name.

ALICE

And under that, almost gone, four words that Doreen's ninety-year-old eyes read before any of ours do, because she has been reading these stones since she was a girl and knows what shape the words come in.

"That's who called him," she says.

✦ ✦ ✦

I light it at four in the afternoon on the fourteenth of July, in the corner of a roofless building in a field, with my sister and my mother standing behind me and a ninety-year-old farmer sitting on the wall because her hip won't do wet grass.

I have done this precisely once, on a Tuesday in June, with two glasses of Malbec in me and no notion of what I was holding. That one doesn't count and it counts enormously, because it is the entire reason there is anything here to write down.

But I have never done it knowing. I have never once lit that thing at him on purpose, and I have said so out loud so many times in this account that it has started to feel like a load-bearing element.

Not any more.

Margot hands me the candle. My mother hands me the lighter, and then puts her hand flat between my shoulder blades and leaves it there.

"Cora," she says. "You're allowed."

The wick catches.

The flame stands straight up and gold, in wind that should not permit it, and then it bends -- over, and down, toward the stone at my feet, like it's found something it recognizes.

Eleven seconds.

The air goes thick and sweet like the moment before a storm, and he comes out of the corner where the shadows fold, in a field, in Northumberland, in the middle of the afternoon.

And I blow it out immediately.

I don't wait. I don't let it burn a second longer than the arriving takes, because I have thought about this on a plane and in a car and in a bed and breakfast at four in the morning, and I know exactly what I want the rest of it to be.

"There," I say, and my voice is not doing well. "That's the whole of it. That's the only eleven seconds there's ever going to be. Everything after this you're doing on your own."

He isn't looking at me.

He's looking at the floor.

✦ ✦ ✦

He goes down on his knees on the stone the way a man does when his legs have made the decision without him.

For a long moment he doesn't touch it. Then he puts his hand flat over the second name, and stays like that, with his head down, and none of us says anything at all -- not Margot, not my mother, not Doreen on her wall -- for what turns out to be four minutes.

"Alice," he says.

"You knew her."

"No." He hasn't lifted his head. "Yes. I--"

He stops. Starts again.

"It was a bad winter," he says. "Somebody wanted something and I went, because that's what happens, and there was a girl of about nineteen in a room with a rushlight and she was terrified of me, they were all terrified of me, and she asked me what I was and I told her, and then she asked--"

His voice does something.

"She asked what I was called. And I told her that, too, because nobody had ever asked, and I sat on the floor of a cottage and said it out loud for the first time in a hundred years and she made me say it twice because she couldn't hold it." He shakes his head slowly. "And then it got light and I went. And that was -- Cora, that was one night. That was one night eight hundred years ago and I have been in perhaps forty thousand rooms since and I did not think about her again. Not once. Not for nine hundred years."

He looks up, finally.

"She cut it into a floor," he says.

"Yes."

"She had them put her under it."

"Yes."

"Why would she--"

And my sister, standing behind me in a wet field with a laminated itinerary in her pocket, says, "Because nobody carves a name into stone unless they don't want to lose it. I told you that in your kitchen and you didn't argue then either."

✦ ✦ ✦

The four words under Alice are these, and Doreen read them first, and it took the rest of us another minute with wet fingers to be sure:

HE CAME WHEN CALLED

That's all. That's the whole of it. No date, no dedication, no pray for the soul of -- she spent whatever she had on a mason and she bought four words and a name, and what she chose to put on a floor that people would walk on for eight centuries is a fact about somebody else.

"It's not a binding," Ash says. "Is it."

"No," says Margot.

"It's not a -- nobody was trying to hold me. Nobody was--" He stops. "It's a headstone."

"It's a headstone."

"Then why does it work?"

"Because a name works," I say. "You told us that at my table. Put it on a thing and want hard enough while you're holding it and the thing it names has to answer." I crouch down next to him. "She wrote your name on the one object she was certain would still be here in a thousand years. She wasn't building a doorbell, Ash. She just -- she had one thing of yours, and she was nineteen, and she didn't want it to be gone when she was."

He puts his hand over his mouth.

"Nine hundred years," he says, through it, "I have been arriving in rooms believing that somebody put my name on a floor so that people would walk on it."

"I know."

"That's what I've -- that's the sentence I've had. That's the whole sentence I've had about myself." He's not really talking to me. "And it was a girl in a bad winter who couldn't hold the sound."

✦ ✦ ✦

We stay until the light goes.

Doreen's son brings a flask down from the farm at seven, because Doreen has told him there are Americans in the chapel and one of them is crying, and he is a man of about sixty who says almost nothing and pours tea for five people in a roofless building without once asking what we are doing there.

My mother talks to Doreen about hips.

Margot photographs the stone from every angle that exists, and then does a rubbing, with paper and a wax crayon out of her bag, because of course she brought paper and a wax crayon, and when she peels it off she looks at it for a while and then hands it to Ash without a word.

And at some point I look over and my sister is sitting on a wall with a ninety-year-old farmer, showing her photographs of the ficus on her phone.

✦ ✦ ✦

The bed and breakfast outside Alnwick has a room with a sloped ceiling that he cannot stand up straight in, and a bathroom down the hall, and a woman named Sandra who does breakfast at eight and has views about people coming in late.

I am not going to write down very much of what happens in that room.

Some of it because Sandra's floors are not what anyone would call structural, and some of it because after eleven weeks I have finally found a thing I want to keep, but mostly because it isn't anything I could set down properly. He'd been on his knees on a stone all afternoon. He came into that room like a man carrying something he'd been handed and hadn't put down yet, and what happened after was slow and mostly silent and had a great deal of crying in it that was not, in fairness, all his.

At one point, in the dark, under a sloped ceiling in Northumberland, he says my name -- just my name, the ordinary one, the one anyone can say -- like it is the more remarkable of the two.

"Cora."

"Mm."

"You called me."

"Once," I say. "For eleven seconds. Don't get used to it."

And he laughs, wrecked, into my shoulder, and says, "No. I mean -- thank you. For calling me."

And I lie there and think that in nine hundred years nobody has ever said that to him either.

✦ ✦ ✦

We fly home on the seventeenth.

Margot gets the rubbing framed at a place on Hawthorne, and there is an argument about where it goes, and it is currently on the wall in my hallway above the hook, next to the vest, which I think is correct and which he has not commented on once.

In the jar on the windowsill, the hedge cutting has done nothing. It is not going to do anything. The light is wrong and Peter knew it was wrong when he gave it to us.

We water it anyway.

And on the following Saturday at ten past one in the afternoon, a nine-hundred-year-old creature of appetite puts on a torn red vest in a warehouse on Halsey, because a woman with a bad knee is expecting him at one-thirty, and because he came when called is now, as of a field in Northumberland, a thing somebody wrote about him on purpose, in stone, meaning it kindly.