sonreir | "It's hard to beat a person who never gives up"

Biding

He's trudging up the walkway again, one foot after the other. He's got a cane now, but he's too proud to use it.

Ma looks out the window, rises to her feet. "It's George. Get your Pa."

Pa's out in the barn, milking the goats.

"I'll get him," says David, standing up from the table.

I look out the window, watch him come up the walk. Step, drag, step, drag. He can hardly make the trek these days. Pa’s been saying lately, that when George isn’t able to come anymore, he's going to have to start going over there.

"Should I...?" I start.

Ma nods from the stove, where she’s just put the kettle on, and I slip out the back door.

It's around sunset, just before the evening meal.

George used to come earlier, David told me once, but after grandad died, Ma started asking him to supper, and he never said no.

The light slants across the ground lazily. Late summer, early fall. There's a chill in the air that suggests it'll freeze tonight. The first of the leaves are beginning to turn.

"Mr. Lewis," I call to him, from the front step. "Pa'll meet you in the kitchen."

You don't have to walk all the way to the dairy barn, I want to say, but a man has his pride.

"Margaret," says George. "Is he waiting, then?"

"Ma's just put tea on," I say, dodging the question. He’s not inside yet, but he will be, by the time we’re into the house. "Supper’s near ready. They're expecting you inside."

He grimaces. He's wearing the old coat today, the one with the patches on the elbows. It hangs loose on his frame, comfortable. He used to dress up for these visits. Not any longer.

"Is he in the kitchen?" George repeats, coming toward the front step. He can't climb it without help anymore.

"Yes, Mr. Lewis.” I offer him my arm, and he grunts.

“Damned knee gets worse every year,” he says. “Begging your pardon, of course.”

I dip my head in a nod and try not to frown as he clenches my arm with fingers like iron. He’s still got his strength, even if his knee hurts.

“Now,” he says, panting. “You said something about tea?”

“Ma’s just put the kettle on.”

“Huh,” he grunts. “Supper?”

“The last of the runner beans, with tomatoes and salted beef, and Ma’s made biscuits.”

“Good woman, your ma,” he says, absently.

“Thank you,” I say, helping him up the step. I lead him into the kitchen, where Ma is setting the table with the everyday dishes. This is old business, and we’re comfortable with each other now. George isn’t a guest anymore. I’m honestly not sure why I still call him Mr. Lewis.

David’s washing up at the sink. Pa is already at the table -- he must have finished up with the goats when he heard the front gate creak open.

“Evening, George,” Pa greets him, as I help him settle into his chair. “Tea?”

“Please.”

Ma pours a cup for him first, then one for Pa, and puts the bowl of maple sugar on the table.

“Did Margaret tell you what’s for supper?” she asks. Ma has an easy way of talking to everyone, that makes them think she likes them, even if she doesn’t. She does like George, though, and I can tell: her hands are steady as she pours his tea, puts the sugar between him and Pa. Her hands used to shake, with fury or fear, I never could tell, every time she served my grandad, Pa’s pa.

“Beans,” says George, after a moment. “And tomatoes. Last of the harvest?”

“Near enough. Almost everything’s in jars, now. These were the last ripe tomatoes on the vines.”

“Nice,” he says, absently. He stirs a lump of dark brown sugar into his teacup.

Ma and I finish setting the table while George and Pa talk and David finishes washing up. Ma pulls the biscuits from the oven and takes the beans off the stove.

“Supper,” she says, mildly.

“We’ll go out after the meal,” says George, and Pa sighs and settles into his seat as Ma fills their plates.

After supper, Pa excuses himself and George to go walk out to the edge of the farm, out where grandad is buried.

They’re going out to the grave. It’s the thing that we all know, and all of us is too tactful to say anything about. The spot where he’s buried -- or bound, really.

Grandad called himself a magician. Said he’d studied at the big magic school in the city, though they wouldn’t lay claim to him. The only magic anyone in town ever saw him work was curses.

The stories have mostly died down, now, but I’ve heard them all the same. They tend to resurface in winter, when it’s dark and cold and there’s nothing else to do.

Janet Cleary, who lost her daughter and her husband to cholera -- she’d spurned him to marry a man from the south.

The Wises, on their spit of land down by the river -- he’d drowned all of them, the whole clan, from the old great-granma to the unchristened baby Wise, barely a week old. Everyone knew what happened to them, even if we didn’t know what happened to the bodies.

The Emmits, too. Their house burned down in the middle of town, on a clear summer night. Everyone escaped but the youngest son. Mr. Emmit, he was the one that had written to the magician’s college in the city, asking for help.

The list stretched back years. Curses and misfortunes and tragedies, all linked back to him.

Grandad never denied any of it. If asked, or accused, he’d smile a slow sort of smile, and wouldn’t say anything at all.

He might have gone on living forever, mean as a snake, but he got too bold. He started summoning things, setting them upon travelers on the road that ran along our property.

The magician’s college had to listen, then. They’d ignored the letter Mr. Emmit sent (never mind its cost), stating that they could not discipline anyone but their own students, but this -- this was a matter of safety. The governor got wind of it, and they had to send someone. Someone brave, someone stronger than him.

They sent George Lewis.

He’d been a lifter, back in his day. The one that could save you, if a curse hadn’t caught up with you yet. He knew about magic, bright and dark. If grandad had dedicated his life to the dark, George Lewis had dedicated his to the bright.

He was stronger than grandad, if only just.

He came to our town and followed the rumors to our farm, where grandad and Pa lived, where no one came unless they had no choice.

He followed the rotten smell of dark magic to the shed where grandad had been doing his summoning. He found what he was looking for, there. He destroyed the unknowable thing grandad had raised to do his work with a single silver bullet through its head.

When grandad came out to see what the noise was, George shot him, too. Ordinary bullets couldn’t hurt him, but these were silver, and spelled with protection glyphs to boot. Not enough to kill him, but enough to slow him down and put a binding on him, tethering him to the land and keeping his magic quiet.

“You weren’t fast enough,” said grandad, as George finished the binding rituals. “I’ve already passed it on. Can’t you feel it?”

“You’re broken,” said George. “Your magic is gone, I feel that. There’s nothing to pass on.”

“Oh,” grandad gurgled, around a mouth full of magic and bile. “There is. It skips a generation, you know. Not the son, but the son’s progeny, and a willing vessel at that.”

Pa was there, watching from the edge of the woods. He’d come running, when he heard the first shot fired, thinking it was something grandad had done. He stopped, when he saw the glow around George, and listened.

“Your magic is bound,” George repeated, grimly, and the light around him flared up, golden hot. “Your work is undone. Whatever was riding you is bound to the earth and will pass when you pass.”

“Not a son, but a daughter,” hissed grandad, and fell silent.

The light died down, and Pa stepped out of the woods.

“I…”

“Later,” said George. “Until then…take him inside. Wouldn’t do, to have him die before his time, come back and haunt you.”

Pa shivered.

“When is his time?”

“That’s beyond knowing,” George snapped. “Now then.”

They heaved him into the house together. George patched his wound -- the curious little entryhole the bullet had made, bloodless and cold to the touch -- and gave Pa instructions on how to care for him.

“I’ll talk to the townsfolk,” he said. “Let them know, you’re not afflicted.”

Whatever George told the townsfolk, they listened. People in town treated Pa a bit distantly at first, inclined to be standoffish and cold. When he made it clear, not through words but through actions, that he was uninterested in magic, that he was his mother’s son, that she had successfully raised him before her death -- that was when everyone began to calm down some. That grandad was nearly bedridden and hadn’t cursed anyone or summoned anything in three years didn’t hurt any, either.

Pa married Ma a few years later, after she came out to prentice to a dressmaker and fell in love with him, instead.

He told her the whole story, in the name of honesty, and she said she didn’t mind; he was nothing like his father, being uninterested in magic.

Ma hated his father. That, she never hid from him. Pa did, too, I think, but he was his only son, and he knew what had to be done.

Grandad died of a fever, when I was six, or Ma said it was a fever. The first time I saw her laugh was when the doctor, sent for from three towns over, said there was nothing as could be done.

After grandad died, Pa burned the shack down, and buried him under an unmarked paver, with the words and spells George told him to use.

That would have been the end of it, if it weren’t for me.

Not a son, but a daughter.

George makes out at every supper like he’s only coming over to make sure the bindings are still working, that grandad is still lying quiet in his grave. That’s why he has a house in town now, he says, instead of in the city, but I know there’s more to it than that.

David and I eavesdropped once, when we were younger, and it was so uncomfortable we never did it again. I heard what he said, about me and the curse, what they had to watch out for.

It’s been near ten years since grandad died, and George still comes to the farm once a week. He doesn’t wear his armor anymore, or the mage’s robes that mark him as what he is, and his calls are more social than anything else, but he and Pa still go out and talk to each other, standing next to the grave, the burned-out skeleton of the shack.

I know why he comes.

It’s hard to beat someone that won’t quit, and it hasn’t stopped trying.

Whatever rode grandad was promised it could have me, too. That’s what let him work everything he did.

I can sense it sometimes, lurking at the edge of my vision. It whispers things, in the dark, and I know stories I shouldn’t, because of it.

No one ever told me the story of what happened, that final night in the woods. I know it because I’ve seen it -- not through Pa’s eyes, but through grandad’s.

When he comes out every week, George isn’t coming to check on the bindings. Those are solid, and will keep long after those bones have crumbled into dust. It’s not the bones that worries them -- it’s the spirit, and that is not lying quiet in the ground.

When they excuse themselves out to the gravesite each week, I know what they’re discussing. I know what they’re waiting for.

It’s waiting, too.