(This short story was originally published in 2015 in Clapboard House, a literary journal.)

The wall, when you approach it from the east, in the early morning, looks blank. Looks just like a regular stone wall. The morning sun hits it at such an angle that you can’t see the inscriptions at first. And in the summer, ivy and other creeping plants do their best to stake their rightful claim. One of the widows will usually come by, though and tear any encroaching plant life away, so that the writing is not obscured.

Marianne Carlson, twice widowed (and thus with two stones in the wall) owns the property on which the wall sits. Her modest clapboard farmhouse, built in 1913, belonged to her first husband’s family, the Whidbeys. Edward had been the only son of Ernest and Grace Whidbey; a daughter had run off to the South and hadn’t been heard from in decades. Edward Whidbey had been a drinker. One starless night he had staggered onto the pond when it was not quite frozen through, not being able, in his inebriated state, to distinguish between the snow-covered meadow and the snow-covered and not-quite-thick-enough ice that covered the pond. He had sometimes liked to wander about at night, to look at the stars and howl at the moon. Ernest and Grace moved into town shortly after that, not being able to bear living on the property where their only son had died. They had felt obligated to give Marianne the house and land as recompense for her trouble, and also so that she could raise their grandson away from their own deep sorrow.

For a long while, Marianne stewed in her bitterness over Edward’s failing her. When she married him she had been a naïve girl, had not known much about drinking or what it did to people. Sometimes when he drank, he sang to her and was lovely in ways he normally wasn’t, but that scared her as much as the other times. She wondered who the real Edward Whidbey was – the good-natured crooner of folk songs who reached under her skirts and nuzzled her with the rough stubble of his beard, or the howling wreck with bloodshot eyes who yelled at her for overcooking the vegetables and leaving the radio on and using too much electricity. Continue reading →