January Thaw - iii

He was an old man, and she was young, even though he’d been just a boy when she was in her agony. Back then, she barely knew him, not even in his teens. But still, when she saw him there in the neighborhood, she couldn’t miss the fact that he still had some youthfulness. She’d felt it the moment he’d looked at her that first time. She is a woman, and even though she died so very young, she had learned—as women do—to read men’s eyes. Nothing was said, but I wonder if after that first time in the short silence, she had considered not going back, afraid of him, as she had cause to be.

Or maybe I’m thinking them too human, these spirits. What need she fear of him, really?

So she waited, maybe, for a January thaw, a cold, crisp night with a silver moon that shines on the faces of the stones and casts shadows across the thin carpet of snow, a night when her going to him cast the whole place into silence because the others wondered what she thought of him, the man who had claimed to know so much more than he should—as if he’d seen her naked, as if he’d actually watched her make love with the man who would be her husband.

I like to think she goes to him late that night, when she thinks she’s alone, when it’s cold but not forbidding, that blue coat wrapped tightly around her, collar up. She thinks it’s a secret almost, but she knows better. The spirits are all around.

He is leaning up against his own stone, a leather coat with sheepskin collar pulled up against a light northwest wind. He is twice her size.

“You don’t know me?” she might have said.

He smiles. He always loved the attention of young and beautiful women. “Is that a question?” he answers.

She hadn’t expected another question, and it is intimidating this first time to be in his presence. “You scare me,” she tells him, which is something no one would expect a Brink to say.

Always genial, he tries to diffuse her fear. “We’re both long gone,” he says. “Besides, you’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she says.

“Vander Es—you have high cheekbones like a Vander Es.” He points that long finger. “Somewhere in your family line there’s Indian blood.”

She shakes her head.

“Brandsma?” he says. “Tall women, all of them. Good strong Frisian stock.”

That he could be that wrong makes her smile. “Memling,” she tells him.

His eyes narrow, his shoulders hunch just a bit, just a second or two before a long knowing smile, something she doesn’t like, spreads across his face in slow motion. He says nothing.

She nods because she knows at that moment that he knows. “And where is it—this secret place?” she says. Deliberately, she turns her back to him, walks just a few steps north, almost to the fence. “I could look forever—I have,” she says, insistently. “There is no secret place out here. This year, beans; next year, corn—that’s all. There is no ‘Garden of Eden,’ like you said. Long, flat land—very beautiful. But no secret place. You couldn’t have brought some girl here yourself because there isn’t such a place.”

She turns back to him when he offers her no answer. With his finger, he taps his temple three times.

“You can simply lie like that, and we have nothing to say?” she says. “I mean, those people you’ve lied about—we have no recourse?”

He stands, not to make her cower, but he’s thinking that there is disrespect in the way he’s slouching, and he wants her to know that what she’s said—about lying—does matter. “I wasn’t using you,” he tells her.

“Then who were you using?” she asks him.

“I mean, I wasn’t using you. I wasn’t using the real you.”

He approaches her as if to touch her with some comfort; he’s not unfeeling. But she turns away with enough clarity to let him know that she’ll have nothing of that. In life, I’m not sure he could have read that gesture, but he’s dead now, and smarter, less imprisoned. He laughs because he’s always thought he’d had a way with women—more than what he did at least. He holds his hands up as if to come clean. “No reason to be afraid. I’m not my characters,” he says.

“And neither are we,” she tells him, the collar from her coat falling back as she looks coldly over her shoulder. She waits. Waiting comes easily because she has no reason to hurry. She looks away again, towards town, towards the east.