The Bargain

THE BARGAIN

The old mahogany grandfather clock chimed exactly 4:30 pm on a slow creeping spring afternoon in the soul of the southland.

“Well,” Betilda Swanson, known to her book club and church group as Tilly, said as she gazed into the eyes of the figure perched on the old pink Victorian sofa in her drawing room. “Will you do it?”

The visitor looked back at her over the coffee table, his large form reclining awkwardly, as if the smooth fabric grated against his skin. On the yellow oak table, their cup of tea sat untouched on its saucer, the crème curdling only slightly from the sultry southern heat, and from sitting for hours. Beside the teacups was an assortment of tea sandwiches, cookies, and her famous peach pie, all untouched. Although tiny beads of seat pinpricked her skin, Tilly noticed not a drop of sheen appear on the stranger’s face.

Honestly, she thought quietly, he isn’t what I expected at all.

She had always imagined him as something uglier, as if he belonged with an eye patch and stubble or with a long haggard face and sunken eyes, empty of everything but frigidity. She envisioned ribbon thin skin clinging piteously to his high cheekbones. His frightening countenance would be paired with a grating hollow laugh that shook the bones beneath it. She expected a work of fiction, of dark gothic novels and mysterious murderers, of the underworld of…she paused.

He wasn’t fiction.

In fact, the pair of eyes that looked back at her was strong and clear, a blue-grey skyscape speckled with marshmallow clouds drifting lazily across their amused and twinkling depths. His smile was oddly kind, even if the rest of his face was nondescript. She wondered silently, if when the job was done, if he did this most gruesome occupation with that smile, or if he simply walked away, unfeeling, unmoved, and unchanged.

She shuddered softly, and the stranger smirked. “Why should I?” he asked, his voice a little taunting as if he hadn’t spent the whole afternoon listening to her rambling explanations for why, exactly, she needed him to do this.

“A thousand reasons,” she replied flippantly, flicking her hand casually as if they were discussing politics, soap operas, or other such things.

After all, if he could be nonchalant, so could she.

He did not move, and Tilly recognized that she had given him the easy answer. She sighed. Over the last few hours, she learned that for this particular visitor, the easy answer was never really enough. She crossed her legs, covered in tan pantyhose and a smart peach frock covered in baby mauve rosebuds that dangled precariously over her kneecaps. Her feet were held tight in silky white slippers she would later doff in exchange for outdated pumps she never had the heart to throw away. She wore the same string of pearls around her neck she’d worn the last fifty-two years since the day her husband bought them for her on their wedding day.

The stranger cocked his head slightly, his voice bringing her back to the present and away from her feet. “Tilly?”

She jumped slightly, not liking the notion very much that he knew her name.

“It’s kinder this way,” she whispered, brushing a short silver lock away from her deep hazel eyes.

“Nothing is every really kind about this business, Betilda.” His voice was faintly chiding, as if she didn’t understand what exactly she was asking for with this.

She tole a glance from lowered lids. Although it was the closest he had ever come to rebuking her, his voice rippled over the syllables of her name, leaping up to a lyrical baritone and ripping downwards like liquid molasses. He shifted slightly, a small groan erupting from the old sofa beneath his weight. His presence was so…large.

A flush crept along her cheeks. She peered at him, suddenly lightly amused, “Have I discomfited you?”

He snorted loudly. “Hardly. Your sofa does more to my butt-end than your feelings do to my heart.” He sneered slightly, reminding her that he could be as dark as pitch in that world of his, untouchable and unbearably cold. “Tell me, when all is said and done, why should I make this deal with you?”

She sighed, irritated suddenly. “Jim…” she paused. “Jim isn’t quite what I thought he was going to be.” She laughed softly. “It’s been years since I had my Jim.”

She looked down into her tea and back around the room, her eyes meeting everything but the eyes across from her. She saw the old ceramic cats, chipped, painted and repainted, perched carefully on the windowsills where Jim would lovingly put them every evening so they could watch the sunrise. She saw the clutter of old musty books, of beloved novels of Sherlock Holmes and musketeers, of Mills, Millville, Thoreau, and Hemingway. She saw his literary masterpiece, a 500-page tome of literary genius he had been the only one to understand. There were teacups and teapots, China and good silver. There were pipes of chocolate peppermint tobacco and fuzzy blue slippers, making the house a solemn and silent shrine to all that had passed behind these walls. And there had been much, so many years ago.

“How so?” The stranger asked.

“He never brings me flowers anymore,” she said lamely, realizing that sentiment sounded unbearably selfish of her. “He used to always bring me flowers.”

In the summer of ’42, all the girls wished for flowers. Roses and daffodils, tulips and lilies, anything but the poppies. Jim was a private first class with the United States Navy, so damn proud of those Navy whites, it damn well broke his heart and his mind when another soldier accidentally shot a canon off too close to his ear. He was discharged immediately and lost almost all his hearing in his left ear. He heard alright from the right, which made for an interesting courtship. A classic southern gentleman, he always walked closest to the street. That meant, in no uncertain terms, they always walked up the right and down the left sides of the street, just so he could hear her speak. Lord have pity on her, she had loved those flowers. Even after the war, after all the pain of losing her three brothers, two to war and one to drink, each more eager to die than the last, she would plant the roses and the tulips, the gardenias and the irises, and of course, the daffodils. Jim would sit on the old porch swing rocker, laughing his great belly laugh at her antics in the garden and leering at the mud spot sitting on her britches. There were many flowers that year, the summer of ’42, ’43…and ’44.

And then came Margaret.

“Margaret?” The visitor asked., his voice amused slightly, a dark eyebrow perking upwards towards the ceiling. She winced at his barely disguised disdain.

Several times in the course of the interview she had felt as if he could read her mind, as if those deep penetrating eyes looked from behind her eyes to peer at her inside and crack open all those closets where she kept her dirty laundry, every embarrassing scrap of underwear and lacey contraption she hadn’t looked at since 1952. She closed her eyes, wondered if he enjoyed the pain, if he even understood what that name did to her very soul, how it left her aching and torn open, her viscera exposed to her eternal shame. The stranger, unaffected, simply sat there, impassive and silent, unmoved and unmoving, his large form dominating the small drawing room.

She sighed again and rubbed her forehead tiredly. He would want to know exactly what his clients were thinking.

“Margaret,” Tilly sneered, the old tigress buried deep inside snarling from within.

Margaret came in ’64. Twenty-one years of marriage broken the moment she entered his office. She was a new secretary, but an old cliché for all she pretended to be a new breed of independent woman that wasn’t afraid of her sexuality or bra burning and all the naughty things Betilda had secretly wanted to do. Over the years, Tilly wondered if the fire and ice was what did it for Jim, but deep inside she knew the truth of what made Jim stray.

“He wanted children so badly,” she admitted to herself, tearing open the secret guilt and grief inside herself. Like so many women then, she couldn’t have children, and back then, there were no hopes for women like her. They were faulty and incomplete, the stigma of shame punishment for an unavoidable crime.

She remembered the endless nights in their marriage when she would perch on the edge of the great king size canopy bed and watch as Jim bent over the crooked strands of an old red floor rug, straightening each piece until she would hold him round the middle and coax him, mumbling and fighting, back to sleep. She remembered how it was his father that made him so, made him “obsessive compulsive.” His poor body never really rested, which was nothing to say about his ruminating mind. Jim wanted, needed, to be a better father than his own. The night Samuel Swanson died, Jim sobbed like a child in her arms until nothing but her body could ease the ache inside.

“He cried for weeks after Margaret,” the stranger said. “A one-night mistake.”

Betilda looked up, startled, from her reverie.

“What…?”

The visitor smiled, a cheeky rather cocky smile that puckered in his cheeks and made those clear mystic eyes glisten with real genuine humor. “You didn’t honestly think I wouldn’t do my research, did you, Tilly?”

“He cried?”

The stranger smirked. “He was weak.”

Tilly paused and thought twice for the first time since the interview began. Despite all the years of resentment, she couldn’t help but love the man. He had cried? Her Jim? Tall, blonde, and stoic, the stone-face rock she had relied on, cried on, and even, sometimes, hated.

“Betilda?”

“It’s better this way.”

“Two for the price of one?”

She laughed slowly. It did seem cruel now, after all this, not to finish the negotiations, but part of her remained uneasy about moving forward. Hope was rare, she knew. It glowed bright and shiny in on one moment and faded into dust the next. Hope was rare, yes, but also cruel.

“Second thoughts, Betilda?” he asked, his sing-song tone back and full of mischief.

Tilly raised her head, squaring her chin and feeling an old shred of fire gleam in her eyes. “No,” she replied firmly.

He nodded, “Good.” He rose from the pink petal sofa, his dark shadow blocking out the sun. “Then we have a deal, Betilda?”

She swallowed and nodded. “We have a deal.”

“Seven o’clock, Betilda. At the hospital. I’m always on time.”

As the stranger left the room, a cold breeze followed his heavy lithe frame. Tilly felt his presence brush her cheek as he practically glided past her, the immensity of his presence belying the liquid grace with which he moved.

She never heard the door as he left.

At 6:30, still sitting on the couch, Betilda glanced at her watch and decided it was time to go. Taking up a tattered black coat from the rack by the front door, and tying a soft fleecy ivory scarf around her neck, she fastened her gloves and her hat and walked out the door. She stopped briefly on the porch, remembered those early summers of the flowers, and walked slowly and deliberately down the three cedar steps to the red brick path and, finally, to the old blue Ford station wagon parked in the driveway. She followed the familiar route to the place where Jim dwelt. She parked the car, put her keys in her pocket and walked through the thick automatic double doors of the entrance to the stale sterile hallway where she knew she’d find her Jim.

A series of blank doorways with clipped up charts and pens dangling like fishing worms from magnets guided her steps until she arrived at the fifth door to the right. She opened the door, smiled at the nurse who was leaving, and gazed at the labyrinthine web of tubes and wires, their discordant beeps clashing in cacophony around her husband’s sleeping head. She locked the door behind her and strode to his side, caressing his cheek. A tear fell unchecked to slip on the wrinkled face that could do no more than stare unseeing back at her. Taking off her coat, her hat, her gloves, and putting them on the chair by the bed, she lied down, pressing her old woman’s body against her husband’s.

She thought quietly, gazing with tenderness at the face that slept peacefully beside her. It was this man, she knew. Despite Margaret and no children, despite cat fats and marriage, it had always been this man. There had been so many moments of love, so many kisses, and so many slow summer nights. It was kinder this way, despite what he said. It had to be kinder this way, for both their sakes. To make it so, she would fulfill the vow she made so many years ago. And she would do it without fear.

It was 6:58 pm.

She closed her eyes, felt the stranger enter as surely as he said he would. No locks or doors hindered him as his dark frame moved silently about the room, his tread so soft that not even the nurses acknowledged that he had entered there.

6:59 pm

“Hello, Tilly,” the stranger said softly. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We’re both ready now.”

“He was only waiting for you,” he whispered gently.

She gazed back at him, steady and wise, and nodded. “It’s time.”

“I know.”

“Fulfill your bargain,” she whispered.

The familiar stranger gazed calmly at them both, smiling that wicked gentle smile. Then, at 7:00 pm, Death took them up and let them go.