The Corpse Candle

The Corpse Candle

Thomas woke before the fever released him, and for several moments he could not tell whether he had opened his eyes or dreamed the room around him. The walls seemed further away than when Margaret had settled him, and the window held only darkness.

Something moved across the clapboard outside.

He saw only its shadow first, thrown vast and upright against the wall beside the glass. It did not waver. It did not walk. It moved slowly. Thomas watched it cross the wall and felt the hairs rise on his arms. Then the flame came into view, no higher than a man's knee, burning without smoke and bending to no wind.

He knew it instantly. Every Welsh child did. The knowledge arrived in his stomach, cold and absolute, and for a moment he could not draw breath.

"Mam," he called. "Mam. Come here now."

Margaret appeared in the doorway with her shawl half fastened, and something in his face stopped her where she stood. She crossed to Thomas and gripped his arm above the elbow, hard enough that he felt it pinch. Her face did not settle for a long time. The cold came off the glass and Margaret's stillness beside him was of a kind he had not felt from her before, a stillness that was not calm.

"You have seen one," he said.

"In Tregaron," she said. "Before your Granda went."

She released his arm and went to wake William.

Thomas lay still and listened. Through the thin wall he heard Margaret's voice, then his father's, shorter each time. William's voice rose once, in the tone he used to close a discussion, and silence followed. The old country had spoken. The new country had answered.

Morning brought coal smoke and porridge and the four of them at the table. William junior sat nearest the stove, Lewis beside him, Methuselah at the end with one boot unlaced, turning his lamp over in his hands the way he always did before a shift. Margaret worked at the hearth with her back to the room and spoke to William in Welsh. The boys kept their eyes on their bowls. Thomas could see that the mood of the house had reached them, that particular morning silence that boys learn not to question. Methuselah set his lamp down and did not pick it up again. He looked once toward Thomas's doorway, quickly, and then away.

"We are expected," William answered in English.

Margaret said something more. Thomas, watching from his sickbed doorway, caught only the Welsh word for light. William set down his cup and reached for his coat. His hands worked the buckles of his lamp strap with unnecessary care, one after the other. Thomas watched his father's face and saw the thought that crossed it and was refused. It lasted no longer than a second. Then it was gone, and William was a chapel man in America with a shift to make, three sons to lead and a sick boy who had dreamed something in a fever. That was all.

"God keeps us," William said, to no one in particular.

The boys rose. William kissed Margaret but she did not lift her hands from the stove. She could not. Methuselah lifted his lamp and followed his brothers out, and Thomas watched him cross the yard until the dark took him, which was quickly, because he was the smallest.

He returned to his bed and lay with the fever moving through him in waves. From outside came the ordinary sounds of the settlement. Carts, voices, and the distant knock of the Avondale shaft. Then fewer voices. Then a woman calling out, her words carried away before Thomas could make them out. Then another voice, and running feet, and Margaret becoming still in the kitchen.

The sudden ringing of the bells did not tell Thomas anything he had not known since the flame passed his window, but his body did not know that. He pressed himself back against the headboard and listened to the sound clang across the settlement. Through his fever, he felt a cold force its way up through the mattress.

That night he stood at the window. The yard was dark. The clapboard wall held only the dim light from the room behind him, and the place where the shadow had fallen was empty, as he had known it would be. The candle had gone because its work was finished.

Margaret sat at the kitchen table. She had stopped weeping but she had not moved for a long time and Thomas did not go to her. There was nothing in him adequate to it.

He pressed his hand flat against the glass, looked at the wall and considered the fever, and whether some part of him had understood before he woke. He would never know. The candle had not come for him. He did not know yet what it had come to make him.

He would learn. In the years that followed he would see it again, once in a Pennsylvania winter and once on a crossing he should not have made. Each time it would speak truly and each time his hands would be empty. The light chose who it chose. It did not ask whether they could bear it.