The Death and Resurrection of Pentecost Waite
The Afterlife of an Unrepentant Sinner, a somewhat fictional Account.
-----------------------
It is night, and Pentecost Waite waits. It’s something he’s grown accustomed to in the 300-odd years since his death.
Living men have no idea how haunted they are, how myriad the phantoms that swirl about them. This surprised Pentecost when he became a phantom himself. Looking back, it would have been most useful if Reverend Fiske had but once mentioned this from his creaking pulpit, instead of droning ever on about witches. In near three centuries, Pentecost has not encountered a single witch, but he has seen ghosts galore. The truth is, the dead are everywhere.
When he considers it, he cannot help but think bitterly of his own death as the farcical end of a life barely begun. Twenty-five years of unspeakable longing. A single passionate but deeply unwise encounter in the Wenham Common Wood. And in the end, his handsome dalliance, Flee-Fornication Waldron, belatedly lived up to his name and, guilt-ridden, whispered of their sin to another. How swiftly a whisper travels in a community of the godly! Three days later, as his sister answered the door to the dark visages of the Deacon and Constable, Pentecost slipped out the back ell and began to run.
He didn’t stop until he reached York, on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There, he wagered, his sins could not follow. But in the greatest irony of all, just as he tasted freedom from the stifling press of his former community, a chance to live out his days undisturbed, if not entirely fulfilled, Death came for him--as it so often does when man is least prepared.
The tavern where Pentecost had planned to spend his first night in York was full to bursting at an hour past sundown, as was his bladder on account of the plentiful cheap ale. He’d packed his clay pipe with borrowed tobacco, drew a rushlight from the fire and headed outside to heed nature’s insistence. In the gloaming, as Pentecost lit his pipe, the traitorous ale weakened his knees and he lost his footing. He hadn’t noticed the embankment there, and fell backwards down the slope, striking his head on a large stone. Blinding pain, and then nothing.
After death, lucky souls are immediately ascendant, or so Pentecost assumes. The unlucky linger on the earth. And the unluckiest, by force or circumstance become trapped, attached to some meaningless object: a kid-skin glove, an oak aumbry, a cocked beaver hat, or in Pentecost’s case, the stem of his clay smoking pipe. The best he can discern, he must have bitten it into pieces when his head struck the rock, and his soul rushed in. He is tethered to this clay piece like a ship to an anchor. He is not alone. More tethered souls dot the landscape around him, just out of reach. A garden of ghosts.
In death, the monotony is pervasive. Through the decades, Pentecost has watched the tavern become a home, watched children grow and die. Clothing and speech change, but people remain the same. He expected to go on like this, a silent shipwrecked observer, as the pipe stem crumbled to dust.
That is, until HE came.
People tour the former tavern now in eager groups. They cluster in the back on the spot where the drunken taverners once pissed and speak loftily of The History Of The Place. Sometimes, one of the group hangs back when the rest have moved on. They gaze at the building, peruse the ground, pocket a sherd of broken pottery. And that is how Pentecost came to be found.
How the young man spotted the artifact in the shadow of the embankment, Pentecost will never know. In a moment, the pipe stem was plucked from the ground by nimble, curious fingers, and Pentecost with it. Gently pushed into a darkened pocket, he was free.
How to describe the whirlwind journey to the young man’s home later that day? Impossibly fast, a hurricane of color and speed in one of the horseless carriages Pentecost had observed for years with curiosity and trepidation. The young man’s rooms were small, simple, bright with windows. He emptied his pockets on a table by his bedstead, and examined the pipe stem again. Pentecost stood awkwardly in the corner, a guest without an invitation.
The young man, brown of hair and eye, was disarmingly handsome in a boyish way, polite and soft-spoken as he greeted his neighbors earlier on the doorstep. And he smelled divine. Something stirred within Pentecost.
That night, when the young man retired to bed, and with nothing preventing him, Pentecost slid beneath the covers. He lay awake all night, intoxicated by their proximity, memorizing every crease and curve of the young man’s face, the sound of his breath, the slow beat of his heart. That such exquisite intimacy unavailable in life could be so easily come by in death was both an amazement and a grief in turns.
In the morning, the young man arose and left the house. By night he returned. And so Pentecost slipped into a new and wondrous routine: nights spent pressed close beside the young man, and days spent exploring his rooms.
The young man was an avid reader, Pentecost quickly discovered, and half-opened books lay on nearly every surface. Through experimentation Pentecost learned to turn the pages, and once he did, he read everything in sight. At last, he felt like he could face eternity.
It is night, and Pentecost Waite waits.
The young man is late this evening. When he arrives home, he looks weary from work. He has a quiet supper. He washes the dishes and spends a long while looking out the kitchen window towards the rising moon. When he makes his way to the bedroom, Pentecost follows.
The young man empties his pockets on the bedside table, as he does every night. Tonight he picks up the pipe stem there and turns it over and over between his fingers. Time seems to slow.
“I know you’re here,” he says at last. He raises his head to look around the room.
Pentecost freezes.
“You’re the one who’s been reading all my books, aren’t you? I see the shape of your head on the pillow every morning.”
The young man holds up the pipe stem, eyes still searching the room.
“You came in on this, and now you’re here with me.” It’s more of a statement than a question.
Silence hangs thick as a curtain. After a moment, the young man opens a drawer in the bedside table and slides the pipe stem in gently, reverently, as if it were Pentecost’s immortal soul itself.
“So you don’t get lost ever again,” the young man murmurs.
Pentecost realizes he is quivering.
Slowly, slowly, the young man raises his arms, pulls his shirt off over his head. He’s beautiful in the half-light, achingly so. They face each other in the deep stillness that follows. Then the young man holds out his hand.
“Come to bed,” he says, and smiles.
Pentecost doesn’t wait, not one single minute more.
(Apocrypha)
