The Ferryman's Fee

— Prelude —

Violet had seen something. She had been standing at her sink watching the gray morning fog grow bright when she thought she saw a dark snake of smoke slither along the window frame of Mr. Fox’s doublewide. And there was a sharp snap too, a sound common to the twilight at Cliff-Top Estates. A door slamming, perhaps, or a small pistol shot.

A fire truck turned left on Fremont and climbed Hill Road to the mobile home park. Violet Krutzmier was sitting at her kitchen table now, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. The flashing lights ricocheted from wall to wall; she heard the sirens shriek. Violet shook another cigarette from a hard pack and wiped the tobacco crumbs from the table with a sweep of her arm. She lit the Marlboro with a purple Bic, and then, with some effort, she stood to watch the emergency lights flicker in the trees beyond her kitchen window. She draped a blue, quilted housecoat over her prodigious shoulders and stepped outside into the morning mist.

The shrill siren expired with a moan as the fire truck crept through the foggy streets, silently now, lights flashing, wheels rolling slowly, trolling past the dew-dripping trailers that lay in line on a hill above the town like tins of tuna on a grocer’s shelf. Residents emerged cautiously, leaning from their driveways into the street where they could observe the approach of the polished red fire truck and feel the drumming pulse of its powerful engine as it passed.

Violet slogged to the street in feet-slapping slippers, holding the Marlboro at arm’s length as if for balance, ejecting smoke into a mouse-gray cloud that followed her on a mantle of mist. Tom Herman stood on the street smoking a Camel stub. He stared at Violet with a wide, toothless gape, then shrugged and grinned and hitched his baggy britches. Violet paid no heed.

Ma! screamed Violet’s daughter. She jumped down from the trailer’s wooden steps and ran to her mother, her breasts bouncing beneath her cotton tee, her fresh painted toes surfing through the long wiry grass. Ma! she screamed again. Ma! louder still in order to be heard above a warbling police car that had edged into the park.

Put some clothes on, girl! Violet shrieked at the cavorting pubescent. Tom grinned at the girl and then turned away ashamed, already intoxicated by the intensity of the morning’s sights and sounds at Cliff-Top Estates.

A bright white ambulance emerged from the mist and rolled to a crawl, its siren stopping abruptly, mid-whoop, leaving residents awash in ear-numbing silence. Blue-suited EMTs carrying black bags and a folded gurney stepped lively across the lawn and followed one another into a cream-colored mobile home. Yellow-striped firemen wearing red helmets glistened in the damp morning light as they paraded in and out of the house carrying bags and hose.

The Cliff-Top residents pressed ever closer for a better view. The fire chief eyed the mob, all quick-dressed in breakfast sweats and housecoats, and now gathered silently like wildebeest that had paused to watch the lions pull their old bull into the deep grass.

They pulled old John Fox out of his smoldering trailer, and lashed him to a gurney and wheeled him down the sidewalk, his jelly belly jiggling under a pale blue sheet. The crowd watched as the attendants inserted Fox into the white van, and slammed and slapped the doors shut. The emergency lights hummed and then popped and flashed while the Dodge threaded the crowded roadway out of the park. Violet and her daughter leaned into the street to watch but stepped back quickly and turned away just as the breeze of the passing ambulance tossed their hair and teased their balance. Violet raised her chin and watched the flashing lights disappear into the mist. She hugged her daughter close, pulling her deep into the many folds of her housecoat with her large, fleshy arms. Let’s pray for John, she said, and she commenced moving to the rhythm of an unheard hymn. Violet looked fondly at the girl’s purple painted toes as they danced. That’s a real nice color, hon, she whispered.

1

John Fox was dead as stone. The fire chief reckoned that Fox had suffered a heart attack before his teapot boiled dry and the curtains caught fire. A neighbor, Violet Krutzmier, recalled hearing a distant whistle for a spell before she spotted the smoke coming out of the Fox trailer. She dialed 911.

Flames had engulfed the stove and quickly blackened the cupboards. The trailer stank of smoke and water; sooty rivulets dribbled down the kitchen walls and gathered at the floor where black ponds formed on the napless carpet. Bug-eyed goldfish pleaded in a bowl on the counter, frantically swimming against the glass as the soot rained down in their water world, accumulating on the ramparts of the painted porcelain castle and the brown Bakelite bridge. A deep shadow crossed the fishbowl; a large-framed fireman eclipsed the glare of a naked ceiling bulb and scanned the soggy contents of the mobile with a sheriff’s deputy.

Look at all the goddamn books, the deputy said.

The guy was a college professor, a hatless fireman said.

No shit?

Back in the sixties, I guess.

Does he have any family?

Had a missus when he lived in Chicago. He came up here on account of her dying, I heard.

Another sad old man—no friends around here that I know of, said a third fireman carrying a portable generator.

Will you look at this shit.

What? More books? God, look at ’em all, will you?

Hey, these are stamp albums. Says right on ’em. Must be fifty or more—

Look at ’em over here.

What the hell? There’s more in here, for Christ’s sake, a fireman yelled from the bedroom.

A deputy was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, his gloves pinned between his knees, turning the pages of a thick Scott International album. Wait’ll Chief sees this shit.

The water in the fishbowl was turning black with soot. The two fantails pushed themselves against the glass now, bug-eyed and wild, gills fanning frantically.

Hey, Freddie! Get these fish some fresh water, will you? Fire Chief Rudy Sampson clumped through the mobile home with thick boots. He’d stripped down to his black wool sweater peppered with holes beneath wide red suspenders. Let’s get going here! Art, get this gear out and stow that generator. Where are these books, Bobby?

You’re looking at ’em, Chief.

These here? What the hell is all this? Better get ’em covered up with plastic for the night. Chief Sampson looked out of the bedroom window. A couple of Cliff-Top residents had ducked under the police tape and were milling around outside the mobile home. One man was looking in an open window and grinned at the chief and another was trying to open the door of John Fox’s F-150.

Freddie, forget the fish, you’ve got looters out here—they’ll have this trailer stripped down to formaldehyde before lunch. Clear ’em out, deputy.

The chief pulled a stamp album off a shelf and opened it. The thick ivory paper felt unusually soft between his fingers. There was printing at the top of the page:

Egypt 1866

Lithographed

Printed by Pellas Bros., Genoa

Six stamps, all pale colors, muted by time, were aligned perfectly below the title, each with a handwritten caption. The chief whistled. We got some serious old shit here, he said. We gotta find someone who knows about stamps—who’s that woman who saves stamps? She was on the council a few years ago. What’s her name?

Margaret Carlson?

Yeah, that’s her, lives on Shuster Road. Freddie, after you’ve chased the lowlife off the premises, drive down and see if you can get Mrs. Carlson to come up here. If this shit’s valuable, we gotta get it secured.

Margaret Carlson stood at her sink and washed a breakfast bowl and saucer. She turned the bowl under the faucet slowly, relishing the warm cascade of water across her stiff fingers. She was a handsome woman with bright gray eyes and salt-and-pepper hair pulled back from an imposing, intelligent face. She looked out of the kitchen window upon a woodland that emerged from the mist like flowers in an unfinished watercolor, standing half-resolved in a golden bed of fallen leaves. Margaret was pleased by the view, by the coming of autumn, by the cool nights and the sharp, fragrant days. She carefully arranged the bowl in the basket and wiped her fingers gently on a towel. For a moment, she stood at the sink and watched the morning light ignite deeper features of the woodland, expecting to see, as she had from this window for many years, her husband, Walter, walking along the fence line with their golden retriever, Hilda. It gave Margaret pleasure to imagine, even for a moment, that Walt was still alive and that he would walk through the door presently and announce that he had seen a red-eyed vireo’s nest. She could still hear Hilda’s impatient panting and her clattering paws clicking across the wooden floors. Margaret turned away from the window and looked at the kitchen table where a single place setting had matured at the table’s head, where her coffee steamed, and the dried flowers lay. She had just pushed herself away from the counter when there came a tap on the storm door.

Officer Baker, isn’t it? Margaret held the door open so the sheriff’s deputy could step in.

Yes, ma’am. Freddie, the deputy said, turning his cap in his hands.

Freddie! Of course. What can I do for the men in blue today?

Chief wonders if you might help us. John Fox died this morning.

Oh, no. I’m sorry. Would you like to come in?

No, ma’am. Chief wondered if you would come up to the trailer court and have a look at Mr. Fox’s stamp collection.

Margaret looked surprised. His stamps? I didn’t know Mr. Fox collected. Of course my husband may have known him—he was the stamp expert in this house. Margaret paused. The deputy waited. Sure, what the heck, I’ll have a look. Let me get my coat—and for goodness sake, come in.

Deputy Freddie Baker stepped into the house and fidgeted with his cap while Margaret pulled a gray canvas coat from the closet. The aroma of toast and coffee lingered in the Carlson house, and Freddie momentarily recalled the St. Luke’s church basement on a wintery Sunday morning.

I am by no means an expert philatelist, but I’ll give it a go, Margaret said, smiling at the officer. She picked up her briefcase and closed the door to the kitchen.

Ma’am? Freddie said. You said you’re not an expert—something?

Oh, philatelist? A stamp collector, Freddie. Someone who studies postage stamps. Margaret held Freddie’s arm as they stepped across a frosty patch on the asphalt driveway. Was Mr. Fox ill?

I don’t know, ma’am. They’re saying he had a heart attack. He opened the passenger door of the Crown Victoria. He was pretty old, you know. Heavy too. Neighbor saw smoke and called it in. Burned up the stove. We found him deceased on the kitchen floor.

Margaret pulled the seat belt across her chest and looked back at her house. She remembered the morning that they had come for Walter after he had passed in his sleep. She had awakened on her side of the bed that morning, facing the windows, watching the snow falling, swirling in the eaves. The stillness of the morning and a sudden emptiness in the room frightened her. She had listened. The first tears crossed her cheek while she waited for Walter to breathe. Then she lay on her side for some time imagining that her husband was dozing. It was Hilda’s low moan that reminded her, finally, that Walter had passed and that it was time to turn over and say goodbye.

The EMTs had come quickly with the siren blaring and left the house quietly, lights flashing out of respect. Margaret had been surprised how easily they lifted Walter to the gurney and how expertly they navigated the hallways and the steps. When the ambulance departed, Margaret opened the Camry door for Hilda and followed. The retriever sat rigid in the passenger seat, watching the ambulance intently; her ears laid back, her face tense with fear. Margaret reached out to calm the dog several times, but Hilda pulled away.

By the time Margaret had finished the paperwork at the hospital, the retriever was fast asleep in the seat of the car. Margaret had just fastened her seat belt when a wave of grief came, and she cried bitterly into the dog’s soft hair. The two of them sat for nearly an hour in the parking lot, silhouettes behind snow-stained windows, alone on a cold winter’s morning in a misery that fortune had kept from their door for thirty years.

For two weeks, the woman and the dog ate together and slept together. One morning Margaret awoke to find that Hilda was dead and that the dog had taken with her a chunk of memories that forever closed a doorway to the past. Margaret rose from her bed and pulled the dog on a sheet out of the house and across the yard to the edge of the wood, where she dug a grave. When she returned to the house, the kitchen was cold and quiet. She sat at the table in her winter coat for an hour, her hands in her lap. Then she rose and cleaned the room. She played every nocturne in Walter’s Chopin collection while she put away things that had accumulated during her thirty years of marriage. At first Margaret moved cautiously, with uncertainty, as if she were tossing away the embers of a memorable bonfire. She put away Hilda’s bed and Walter’s clothes; she boxed his records and tapes and removed his books from the shelves.

Margaret claimed the house for her own, one room at a time, rearranging spaces to accommodate the movements of her widowhood. It was Walter’s study that she entered at last. The door was closed, the curtains pulled, the familiar fragrance of Walter and Hilda deeply invested. There, she boxed the photographs and the paintings and the Lionel train set. She put away Walter’s office sweater and his slippers and pipes. She boxed his reading glasses and his jars of pens and pencils. She collected Hilda’s collars and leashes. She scrubbed the windows and the walls until the house smelled of them no more.

She reframed an oil painting of Walter and Hilda and herself and mounted it over the living room fireplace. She carefully wrapped the letters she and Walter had written to each other and put them on a shelf of their own in the bookcase. She sewed new curtains and pulled down the wallpaper and ordered new carpet for the floor. She moved Walter’s desk, finally, into a shaft of morning light, and one day while she pondered how best to dispose of Walter’s stamp collection she opened an album of his notes on the Overland Mails of Romania.

At first she read his paragraphs impatiently, as if she were angry with the writer for his enthusiasm, then, quite unexpectedly, she recognized Walter’s voice. Reading his philately, she discovered, was like listening to him speak. Margaret was stunned. Walter’s passion for philatelic scholarship was great, it had consumed him, and when he had written about his researches, he had penned his fervor, fluidly and floridly, with an unscholarly, conversational inflection that she could hear as clearly as if he were sitting with her by the fire.

For a month Margaret read Walter’s writing for the simple pleasure of his company. It was during one such rendezvous in Walter’s old study that her anger and her loneliness dissolved and she began to feel herself emerge as the woman she had been before she married. She discovered that she had disliked herself for many years and that her disgust had simply fallen away like the skin of a snake. She found fresh pleasure in her memory of Walter as a friend.

She tasted the philatelist’s curiosity during her evening readings. She began to experience the thrill that a collector feels when the examination of a postage stamp leads to the discovery of a moment in the past—the sweet shiver of scholarly revelation, as Walter had so often said. It was a journey of a kind that had brought with it a most unusual pleasure for her, often for hours on end.

She remembered the evenings when they sat together in the study, Walter working with his stamps and she reading a book. He was inclined to work in silence when he engaged his stamps. He often became so engrossed while interpreting postal notations on century-old envelopes that he ceased to move at all. One night Margaret feared that he had had a stroke, for he was slumped to one side, trancelike in his chair. Walter admitted that he often became so absorbed in his study that he felt deeply tired afterward, as if he had returned from a long journey. He often claimed that he could imagine himself in places that no longer exist. The pages of a stamp album are doorways to an incredible journey, Peg, he used to say.

Walter was easily engrossed for hours in the story of a single stamp or ‘cover,’ as philatelists call envelopes. Margaret often looked up to see Walter move pages and view stamps and make notations as if he were being directed by a force from another place—or another time. Though he seldom spoke, his lips constantly moved, and he appeared confused if spoken to. Margaret came to accept the shell of Walter’s physical presence and the absence of his spirit.

Now, Walter was dead. He left pages of notation, sketches, footnotes—as well as an occasional aspen leaf or slender feather of the red-eyed vireo. Walter had left much of the man that Margaret knew, and she often visited his notebooks just to hear his voice.

Margaret remembered the nights when he had finished researching a cover, when he would offer her the story behind the stamp. I’ve got a stamp tale for you, Peg! he would say suddenly with a twinkle in his eye. She would put her book in her lap and pull the afghan over her shoulders. She smiled at his youthful exuberance.

Imagine a mail coach crossing the icy Carpathian Mountains in Romania in November of 1858, Peg, sliding on snow-covered trails rough-cut into jagged mountain outcrops of rock that tear at the carriage as it passes. Walter always gestured wildly. The horses thrash, they slip in the snow; the driver is bundled in filthy blankets, huddled against the cold winter winds. The night coach rattles down a rutted road into the village of Borzoi, where this letter was to be delivered to A. Hulot.

Walter handed Margaret a surprisingly delicate envelope, light as a spider web, darkly stained.

"The postillion lifts the post horn to his lips and sounds the arrival of the mails: Ta-da, dit-da, dit-da!" Walter enthused.

There was a police inspector aboard the mail coach on that cold night, Peg. Margaret held the cover carefully and using a large magnifying glass she examined the thin paper and observed the elegant cursive, laid down in iron gall ink with a steel pen.

A woman’s hand, Margaret said.

Walter smiled. Yes, it is. A young lady who lived in a nearby town posted this letter, appealing to her brother to help the police with an investigation. There had been trouble in her village. A cemetery had been disturbed—stones broken, coffins opened, and an old man murdered. The writer was among those who found the body; it had been dragged about and mutilated, probably by wolves. The villagers were frightened to the quick; they believed that something evil had come from the underworld. Here, look, Peg. Walter rose and pointed to a florid cursive line in the middle of the letter. "She writes, ‘… they believe that the dark ones have come from the River of Unbreakable Oath and now live among the villagers, to feast upon them. My brother, you studied mythology at Vienna; you must convince the villagers that this singular event is a real danger wrought by a living being who walks among us. Tell them this is not the work of spirits.’

"She goes on, informing her brother that the villagers found bones nearby, a skeleton with bronze coins in its mouth. By this discovery the village authorities determined that an evil force was loose, that a soul was refused passage from Tartarus to the Elysian Fields. They reasoned that the obol was not sufficient payment, that the ferryman refused the journey, and that the soul had returned and destroyed the burial grounds and devoured the old man.

"‘You must assist the inspector in his investigation of this heinous crime,’ she says. ‘The people of Drobeta must know that they face a danger greater than the superstition that paralyzes their minds. Please return with the inspector. Do not delay.’

"Many days later the police inspector is murdered while collecting evidence. A. Hulot learns that a witch who lived in a beech woods and traveled by day through the orchid meadows of the white Carpathian Mountains had been murdered by the villagers; her body impaled on a tree at the fork of the Morava and Dyle rivers.

The gypsy’s death stills the villagers’ fears—though the murderer lives, Walter said.

How horrible, Margaret said.

"And here is the last letter written by the young lady to her brother. Listen:

‘It has come upon us again, this fearsome thing. Come to me. Please hurry!’

Walter grimaced at Margaret. "Isn’t that something? I’ve been researching the Hulot story for three months and just yesterday I received these newspaper clips that confirm the police inspector’s mysterious death. The Journal of Philately has asked me to include the tale in my Carpathian Mountain Mails article."

Walter’s stamp stories always captivated Margaret’s attention. She enthusiastically examined the postal history that he offered in support of his tales. She remembered how she had been particularly disturbed by the manic cursive penned on the A. Hulot letter and how she had been impressed by the elucidative nature of postal history; the history of a moment compressed on an envelope—frozen in a context that would be fully discernible to the future. The stamps themselves were heavily canceled with a greasy mixture of lampblack and oil that obscured much of their delicate design. The rude postal markings added a frightening aspect to the cover, tainting it with ominous accouterments that foretold the tragic end of three young lives.

Many of Walter’s philatelic adventures had their origins in the Carpathian Mountains, where a veritable library of furtive voices had been harvested from the mail stream, correspondence produced by mountain villagers who expressed their day-to-day lives in a lucid Cyrillic hand upon folded sheets of paper and parchment, routed by the curious urgency of postal markings, and not infrequently stamped with the imperforate Moldavian Bull, a primitive postage stamp, crudely simple in its rendering, unpretentious as the villages from which it emerged bearing the post. Walter had become an expert translator of the historical Slavic alphabet. By deciphering the postal history, he had revealed nearly forgotten mountain cultures where, only a hundred years before, exigent scrawls had enabled postmen to connect remote and isolated villages, one to another, weaving intricate communal webs that eventually spawned nascent trade economies.

The post had not only reshaped a much older Balkan culture, but more immediately brought light to the loneliness of the long, gray Romanian winter.

A. Hulot’s story had given Margaret a taste of her husband’s travels night after night in his study, and she was entranced by his journeys and began to find herself attracted to collecting. Though the hobby had embezzled many years of their precious time together, Margaret found comfort in Walter’s albums, and now, in his notes, in his careful analysis of postal history, she had found the man that she had known for most of her life, and by this association she had become a collector and philatelist.

The squad car cruised slowly up Hilltop Road to the Fox doublewide home, surrounded by police tape that had twisted itself against the cold morning wind. Freddie jumped out of the squad car and came around to open the door for Margaret. Faces appeared in trailer windows while the deputy and the gray-haired woman ducked under the yellow tape and stepped into the creamed-colored mobile home.

Ma’am, thank you for coming. Rudy Sampson met them at the door. The chief extended his hand to guide Margaret into the living room. She glanced at the kitchen counter and quickly veered toward the sink. In a split second she had emptied the fishbowl of soot and refilled it from the tap, holding her hand under the faucet, adjusting the temperature. She removed a bronze disk from the bowl and looked up at Sampson. Looks like an ancient coin, Chief, she said.

The fireman took the coin from her. We found another one of those here this morning. You don’t collect coins, do you?

No. Why? Margaret asked, wiping her hands.

The fire chief leaned over the counter. The EMT found one of these on the floor next to the body. Maybe it’s a medal or something—have a look. The chief removed an envelope from his coat pocket, and a small circular piece of metal slid onto the counter. Don’t touch it—fingerprints, you know, the chief said.

Margaret leaned on the counter and looked at the object through her bifocal lenses. That is a silver coin. I think it’s probably Greek.

Greek to me for sure, the chief said.

Margaret laughed. Mr. Fox might have collected coins; some stamp collectors do.

Wonder why they’re scattered around here.

I don’t have an answer for that one, Chief.

Margaret lifted the bowl and watched the two fish circle their freshly redeemed world. Freddie tells me you found a large stamp collection, she said, putting the bowl on a shelf above the counter. I wasn’t even aware that Mr. Fox was a stamp collector. Nor was my husband, as far as I know.

The whole trailer’s full of stamp books, Mrs. Carlson.

Call me Margaret.

Yes, ma’am—Margaret. I remember that you talked about starting a stamp club when you were on the council, so I thought maybe you could tell us whether we’ve got some valuable property in here.

"I’m not an expert by any means, Chief, but I’ll be