The Marrow Saint

There was a noise to the snow in Cold Harbor. It did not fall. It hissed. The wind scraped it across the old cannery lofts and ticked it against the stained-glass windows of Saint Bartholomew like a thousand tiny fingernails. When I stepped off the coach, the hiss went straight through my coat and collar and sank into bones that were already tired of fighting winter.

A child stared at me from the depot bench and kicked his heels in boots that were too big. He had a bell in his lap. Polished, heavy, no clapper. His mittened hand traced the mouth of it the way a person might trace a scar. The bell had a chip in its rim. It looked older than the station and older than the town.

"Where did you get that?" I asked. The child blinked. His cheeks had the raw, windburned shine. "They give them out tonight." He spoke as if it were a warning.

"Who does?"

He looked past me. The platform clock stuttered. 4:12 according to a jerk of the second hand. "The men from the lodge. The ones with pins. If you do not take one, they say you cannot hear him coming."

"Who?"

He shrugged, as if the answer was not worth saying aloud, and slid off the bench. He left the bell behind. By the time I realized he had no parent with him and he was walking into the whiteout without looking back, he was already part of it. Only the bell remained, heavy and cold as a chunk of sky on the bench. When I picked it up, the skin of my palm stuck to the metal for a breath. It tasted like iron in the air.

I tucked it into my bag and walked the three blocks to my aunt's house, a salt-stained square on a hill where the roofs of town rose like old tombstones. The wreath on her door was made of braided rope and dried cloves, not pine. She opened the door before I knocked.

"You look thinner," she said. It was not affection. It was an audit. "Hello to you, too."

She let me in, took my bag, and sniffed the air in a way that had once made me hide cigarettes. Her hair had gone white, but her eyes were unchanged. Sharp, kind only in the way a blade can be kind as long as you do not lean into it.

"So you came back after all," she said. "For the Eve."

"I came because you asked me to watch the shop when your back went out. You should have asked sooner."

"I didn't want to owe you anything," she said. "But debts come with their own legs."

There were candles everywhere. Not pretty ones, but squat altar candles that smelled of tallow. She lit a new match off an old wick, the room filled with the crackle of their little sounds.

"You still keep the bells?" I asked. "They keep themselves," she said. "They follow the families. You know that."

I did not want to know that. I did not want to remember the bell closet under the attic stairs, with its slats of cedar and neat rows of tongues wrapped in cloth. No clappers. That was the rule. No bell rang until it was time, and you did not choose when that was.

"I saw a boy at the depot," I said. "He left one on the bench." My aunt's mouth pinched. "You should not pick up strays."

"It is a bell."

"Strays all the same." I set my bag near the radiator. She brought me tea and watched me not drink it. "He is still dead," she said, without ceremony. "You will not find him at the bottom of a mug in my kitchen."

"I am not here for him," I said.

We both heard what I could not say, that I had the ashes. That I carried them back like contraband in a tin. That some nights my hand woke clenched around the tin the way I had once woken with my hand on his wrist. Luca had liked winter because it killed the smells: the rot, the river, the fish at the cannery. Winter cleaned the air, he said. Winter put stuff on the shelf for a while so you could think it over.

He had died in winter.

My aunt tapped the side of her cup, a low, dull note, the kind that sinks behind the ribs. "Do not go to him," she said, and then, when I did not answer, "I know how your mind works. It is a hungry thing. It would eat ghosts if they would hold still."

"I am here to work."

"You are here because tonight is the Eve," she said. "And because the dream came back."

I did not ask how she knew. Cold Harbor is a town where you do not need to carry your secrets far. The streets carry them for you. In the dream, I stood at the end of the pier, and the ice crackled like old paper under my boots. Bells hung from the ropes along the pilings. Red wool ribbons tied them in tidy knots. The air tasted like cloves. There was a shape at the horizon, tall and lean, with the long-armed gait of a stag on salt flats.

As it drew near, the shape broke into three distinct forms that walked in step. They were dressed like carolers in black coats, their faces hidden behind plain black masks sewn from something that resembled cat hide. One head had small, pointed ears. One had none. One wore a crown of bleached and brittle antlers. They were too tall for men and too exact in their quiet.