Night Freight

He was all set up, his eyes sparkly with drink and excitement. "That new woman, that Grace Selkirk—she's dead!"

The Hot Stove League and I all came to attention. I said, "Dead? You sure, Charley?"

"I'm sure. I seen her through the window at the undertaker's. All laid out in one of them coffins, deader than a doornail."

Frank McGee crossed himself. He was new in town and a freshman member of the League, a young clerk in the Argonaut Drugstore who drove his wagon all the way to the county seat of a Sunday so he and his wife could attend what he called Mass in the Catholic Church over there. Old Mead said, "What killed her? Frostbite?" and commenced to cackling like a hen with a half-stuck egg. Nobody paid him any mind.

"I don't know what killed her," Charley Bluegrass said. "I didn't see no marks, no blood or nothing, but I didn't stop to look close."

"Some of you gents better go on over to the undertaking parlor and have a look," I said. "And then tell Abe."

Toby Harper and Evan Millhauser volunteered and hurried out. Charley Bluegrass stayed behind to warm himself at the stove and sneak another drink from the flask he carried in his hip pocket. I don't usually allow the imbibing of spirits on the premises—I don't drink nor smoke myself; chewing sassafras root is my only vice—but under the circumstances I figured Charley was entitled.

We all thought Toby and Evan would be gone awhile, but they were back in ten minutes. And laughing when they walked in. "False alarm," Toby said. "That Selkirk woman ain't dead. She's walking around over there livelier than any gent in this room."

Charley Bluegrass jumped to his feet. "That can't be. She's dead, I saw her laid out in that coffin."

"Well, she just got resurrected," Evan said. "You better change the brand of panther piss you're drinking, Charley. It's making you see things that aren't there."

Charley shook his head. "I tell you, she was dead. The lamplight was real bright. Her face . . . it was all white and waxy. Something strange, too, like it wasn't—" He bit the last word off and swallowed the ones that would have come next. A shiver went through him; he reached for his flask.

"Like it wasn't what?" I asked him.

"No" he said, "no, I ain't going to say."

Toby said, "I'll bet she was lining the coffin and laid down in it to try it for a fit. You know how she is with her trimming. Everything's got to be just so."

"Tired too, probably, hard as she works," one of the others said. "Felt so good, stretched out on all that silk and satin, she fell asleep. That's what you saw, Charley. Her sleeping in that box."

"She wasn't sleeping," Charley Bluegrass said, "she was dead." And nobody could convince him otherwise.

The next morning he was the one who was dead.

Heart failure, Doc Miller said. Charley Bluegrass was thirty-seven years old and never sick a day in his life.

Citizens of Little River kept right on dying. Old folks, middle-aged, young; even kids and infants. More all the time, though not so many more that it was alarming. Wasn't like a plague or an epidemic. No, what they died of was the same ailments and frailties and carelessness as always. Pneumonia, whooping cough, diphtheria, coronary thrombosis, consumption, cancer, colic, heart failure, old age; accident and misadventure too. Only odd fact was that more deaths than usual seemed to be sudden, of people like Charley Bluegrass that hadn't been sick or frail. Old Mead was one who just up and died. The young Catholic clerk, Frank McGee, was another.

When I heard about Frank I took over to the undertaking parlor to pay my respects. Mrs. McGee was there, grieving next to the casket. I told her how sorry I was, and she said, 'Thank you, Mr. Cranmer. It was so sudden . . . I just don't understand it. Last night my Frank was fine. Why, he even laughed about dying before his time."

"Laughed?"

"Well, you recollect what happened to that half-breed Indian, Charley Bluegrass? The night before he died?"

"I surely do."

"Same curious thing happened to my Frank. He went out for a walk after supper and chanced over here to Oak Street. When he looked in through Mr. Bedford's show window he saw the very same as Charley Bluegrass."

"You mean Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins?"

"I do," Mrs. McGee said. "Frank thought she was dead. There was something peculiar about her face, he said."

"Peculiar how?"

"He wouldn't tell me. Whatever it was, it bothered him some."

Charley Bluegrass, I recalled, had also remarked about Grace Selkirk's face. And he hadn't wanted to talk about what it was, either.

"Frank was solemn and quiet for a time. But not long; you know how cheerful he always was, Mr. Cranmer. He rallied and said he must've been wrong and she was asleep. Either that, or he'd had a delusion—and him not even a drinking man. Then he laughed and said he hoped he wouldn't end up dead before his time like poor Charley Bluegrass . . ." She broke off weeping.

Right then, I began to get a glimmer of the truth.

Almost everyone in Little River visited my store of a week. Whenever a spouse or relative or close acquaintance of the recently deceased came in, I took the lady or gent aside and asked questions. Three told me the same as Frank McGee's widow: Their dead had also chanced by the undertaking parlor not long before they drew their last breaths, and through the show window saw Grace Selkirk lying in one of the coffins, dead or asleep. Two of the deceased had mentioned her face, too—something not quite right about it that had disturbed them but that they wouldn't discuss.

Five was too many for coincidence. If there was that many admitted what they'd seen, it was likely an equal number—and perhaps quite a few more than that—had kept it to themselves, taken it with them to their graves.

That was when I knew for certain.

My first impulse was to rush over and confront Grace Selkirk straight out. But it would have been pure folly and I came to my senses before I gave in to it. I went to see Abe Bedford instead. He was my best friend and I thought if anybody in town would listen to me, it was Abe.

I was wrong. He backed off from me same as if I'd just told him I was a leper. Why, it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, he said. I must be deranged to put stock in such an evil notion. Drive her out of town? Take a rope or a gun to her? "You go around urging such violence against a poor spinster, George Cranmer," he said, "and you'll be the one driven out of town."

He was nearly right, too. The ministers of our three churches wouldn't listen, nor would the mayor or the town council or anyone else in Little River. The truth was too dreadful for them to credit; they shut their minds to it. Folks stopped trading at my store, commenced to shu

Finally I quit trying and put pen to paper and wrote it all out here. I pray someone will read it later on, someone outside Little River, and believe it for the pure gospel truth it is. I have no other hope left than that.

She calls herself Grace Selkirk but that isn't her name. She has no name, Christian or otherwise. She isn't a mortal woman. And coffin-trimming isn't just work she's good at—it's her true work, it's what she is. The Coffin Trimmer.

The Angel of Death.

I don't know if she's after the whole town, every last soul in Little River, but I suspect she is. Might get them too. One other fact I do know: This isn't the first town she's come to and it won't be the last. Makes a body tremble to think how many must have come before, all over the country, all over the world, and how many will come after.