I looked up at him. For the doctor, the sequence of events was obvious. The Chinaman had given his life for ours and had we been more valued citizens of Galen, what he did might have seemed heroic. Galen would think he perished in the fire. For Galen, there was no mystery in what had happened. For me, there was nothing but mystery, one that would endure into my old age. He’d had no reason to go back into the inn. We three were the only occupants. But his arrival in a town that offered him nothing had been similarly improbable. What had brought him?
Toward dawn, the inn finally burned itself out, leaving a charred staircase as the only evidence a home had once stood, a house wherein some people, who had never amounted to much, had lived and died, loved and cursed each other. My bedroom door, like most everything else, was burned to cinder, but its locks had not been destroyed. Even melted into a twist of metal, I could see where they had been pulverized, smashed to bits by some powerful force.
Another discovery awaited in the barn, where the fire had not reached. The body of Seth Hamilton. There was no blood or soot. He’d not been stabbed nor shot nor burned. His neck was simply broken, as neat as a chicken’s meant for Sunday dinner.
In the days that followed, no one ever thought to pursue Seth’s killer. Reverend’s son or not, he’d long been more trouble than he was worth to Galen and with his mother and father and brother gone before him, there was no one to miss him in their lives or insist his death be avenged. Seth had outlived the few people who might have cared that he no longer walked the earth.
Nor did anyone think to find out for certain what had become of Chun Sung or Sung Chun; I never did find out which name went where. He was a foreigner, after all, and folks were satisfied that he’d perished with the inn, though no trace of him was ever found, not even the telltale teeth the doctor had predicted. But I knew. I felt certain that someday, in some dark corner of the world, I’d spy him disappearing down a twisting path, or glimpse him through the window of a passing train, his slanted eyes catching mine and holding for a moment, but only for a moment, before disappearing again. People always said Orientals were slippery, and now I had first-hand knowledge.
Rennie had her own theory about Mr. Sung. She thought the little man had not so much wandered to the inn as been invoked. By whom, I asked—for surely I’d not invited him. But she would only smile her dreamy smile that hinted at some secret communion and was not unlike the expression I had sometimes seen cross the features of our boarder. And I remembered their hushed conversations.
Not until some weeks later did I begin to understand, but only faintly, because whatever had transpired between them had not been for other eyes to see, and was not now for other minds to grasp. Rennie had summoned him and it was to Rennie alone that he had perhaps unveiled the mystery of himself.
We had been living in the barn because there was nowhere else to go, and mysteriously each day, a basket of food would appear, or a freshly baked loaf of bread, even once a mattress, as if Galen was afraid of its own timid compassion, a feeling that if allowed to grow might have led to further involvement and the further risk of sharing too closely in another’s misfortune. And no one wanted that, least of all me. Sympathy would have only embarrassed me. So, they dropped food and snuck away as kindly and as stealthily as they had come.
I wondered if I could sell the blackened land where the inn had stood, and who in their right mind would buy it, and who, even if they were crazy enough to want to buy it, would have any money to buy it with. Conscience might make me confess that it was an unlucky place, cursed with old events, memories, personalities, convictions that do not burn but linger to haunt a house and the land it sat on for always, undimmed by time or the elements. In short, too much had happened there.
Then one day, not long after, while Rennie was at school, and I was sweeping the floor of the barn where Seth had got his neck broken, I sensed I wasn’t alone, and looking up, I saw the silhouette of a man, illuminated from behind with the light of the morning sun. He seemed to have been standing there watching me for some time. Wordlessly, he came toward me, and with each step, his arms opened wider. And I went into those arms that had known me in hell, only to find me now in purgatory, and for the first time in years, I really looked at the sky, and I saw over his shoulder that there truly was something above the earth, a horizon that could not be sullied by it, that even tears could not obscure. And as I closed my eyes, my thoughts echoed the words he whispered into my hair. “I’ve come home,” he said quietly. We held on to each other for a long time, then held each other far enough away to look at each other, only to clasp each other close again. And we probably would have gone on a long time like that—holding and looking and holding again, our eyes and arms so starved for the sight and feel of each other—had Rennie not come home from school.
She didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him and when questioned, said she had always known he would come back for us. That that was simply the way it was to
