Her Red Velvet Cloak

First Published In Ink for the Dead, A Collection: 2003

A plain, friendly waitress brought me the pie, cookies, and coffee I’d ordered and put my credit card receipt face down on the table.

“Brewin’ up a big one,” she said and pointed out the window, where snow was already clogging the sidewalk and sticking to the glass. “It'll be a white Christmas.”

My head was someplace else, but I managed to smile up at her and nod in agreement. The weather was indeed getting worse. There were few moving cars; most were stranded in metered parking or local garages while their owners rode the subway home or took refuge somewhere downtown. A young woman in a dress and heels slipped just outside the bakery and slammed her hand into the window so hard I thought she would break the glass, but she regained her balance and offered me a sheepish grin before moving on. I gave her the thumbs-up and settled back into my reverie.

Maybe it was the smell of cinnamon rising from the pie, or the cookies I’d bought for the girls, or the snow that made me remember that night. Maybe the night itself was never too far from my thoughts. I hadn’t been able to tell anyone what happened, what I saw. I was sad about that; it grew me up a lot and made me a better person, I think. But it was weird and fantastic and just the kind of thing a boy would make up; it certainly wasn’t something a grown man would tell his wife and daughters. Besides, there was something about it that made me want to keep it a secret, like some sacred mystery. So I did. It was real though, and I was there.

I remember that I didn’t see the rock until my bicycle hit it and sent me flying over the handlebars into a snow bank. After lying there a moment to check for injuries, I rolled over and saw that my front wheel was bent. The bicycle would have to be left behind; it was already covered in a layer of snow, and I didn’t want to have to carry it through the storm. So I got up and trudged off in the direction I was already going, hoping to find some sign of civilization.

It wasn’t too long before I saw porch lights and an open barn door. There was someone moving around inside, so I walked up and knocked on the door frame. The place smelled of wet snow and hay, and an old woman was rummaging around in the back. There was a loft, not sturdy enough to bear the weight of a small child, which was, nonetheless, crammed full of winters-old sleds and snowshoes and summers-old wicker furniture. But the rows of tools along the wall were neatly hung, and a heavy canvas covered what appeared to be a carriage tucked into the darkness. Out of that darkness, she brought a package. It was a wallet of some kind. It looked hand-made; the worn leather was soft and supple, and a long cord was wrapped around it three or four times. She laid it down on the workbench and smoothed it at the corners.

“What are you doing out all alone on a night like this, young man?” she asked me.

“My name is Ben, and I’m lost. Can I use your phone?”

“The phone lines are down, Ben. They probably will be until the storm clears. And you still haven’t answered my question.” She peered down at me. I shuffled my feet, thought for a moment, and then looked her square in the eyes.

“My dad just moved us up here from Southern California to take some stupid job. I don’t have any friends here, I hate the stupid weather, all my mother ever does is complain about the stupid shopping, and my dad doesn’t listen to either one of us. I needed some time away, to clear my head and stuff. How was I supposed to know it was going to snow again?”

She patted me on the back and laughed out loud, a girlish sound made rough by her aging vocal cords. “Well, my name is Sarah, and you can stay with me until the stupid storm clears.” She handed the wallet to me and told me that it had belonged to her grandfather. He would have liked me, she said. I opened it up. It was full of manly things, a double-edged razor, a lathering brush, a pocketknife, and a silver pen. I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do with it, so I looked at it for a minute, just to be nice, and then gave it back to her.

It was then that the Magic Man walked into the garage. I don’t know what else to call him. He was tall and much older than I was and much younger than she was and maybe handsome; I don’t remember. In any case, he’d seen a bicycle up the road; was it mine?

“Yes, but I bent the wheel, and I couldn’t walk it any farther in the snow.”

“I believe I saw your parents a couple of miles back. They’re out looking for you, you know. Your mother is afraid you’ll get eaten by bears.”

“Bears don’t eat people.” I was petulant. “Are you here to take me back?”

“I don’t have a car,” he said, but he was looking at her. And who wouldn’t? There was something about her that even I was coming to like, though I didn’t understand why at the time. She was lovely, white hair plaited in a single braid down her slender back and blue eyes sparkling out of laugh lines that lived deep in her rosy skin. If I had been older, I would have chastised myself for finding her so beautiful. She was an old lady, for God’s sake.

“Then how did you get here?” I asked, but the Magic Man ignored me and continued to stare at Sarah. She was pulling the canvas back over the carriage, so she didn’t see him, and she didn’t appear to have heard my question. I cleared my throat. “Then how did you get here?” I asked again, pronouncing each word carefully. Still nothing. Were they deaf?

Sarah finished up and put her hand on my shoulder, steering me out of the garage. She motioned for the Magic Man to follow.

“Come on in, both of you. I’ll make us a snack and get the beds ready. You can both stay the night.”

The Magic Man’s name was Neil. He told us he came from West Virginia, but I didn’t believe anything he said. He was weird. His father was a coal miner and his mother was a cook, but that was a long time ago, and they were dead now. While I was trying to figure out how to pierce his obvious deception with my keen, pre-adolescent intellect, Sarah mixed up a batch of cookies from the recipe on the chocolate chip package and warmed the oven. When the cookies went in, she held up a single finger to silence Neil, who was rambling, and told us about her granddaughter, the one with the car.

“She’ll be by in the morning after they clear the roads,” she told me. I looked outside. It was still snowing, big, puffy flakes that stuck to each other and to everything else. “She’ll take you home.” She didn’t say anything about asking her granddaughter to take Neil anywhere. I thought that was weird, too. I didn’t think she knew him. She didn’t act like she knew him. He seemed as stranded as I was, and he didn’t even have a car. What had he been doing, wandering around in the woods all day in the snow?

Neil continued. He was talking about her house now. “It must be a hundred years old,” he said.

“It belonged to my grandfather. The only thing he loved more than his privacy was my grandmother, and she wanted a farm. So he bought two hundred acres and built a house in the middle. Told her if that wasn’t enough dirt to farm in, he didn’t know what was. They raised six children here, and when my mother’s heart failed in childbirth, they raised my older brother and me.”

“Where was your dad?” I asked.

“My grandfather told me that my father was a migrant worker who helped us with the orchard every year. When he got my mother pregnant the first time, my grandfather told him that no daughter of his would ever marry an apple-picker. But he allowed my father to visit his son, and that’s how I came into the world. My poor mother must have loved him very much; before she died, she made my grandfather swear not to kill him. And as far as I know, he kept his word to her. Nobody dared to speak ill of my mother or her children in his presence, though.” She grinned. “My grandfather’s family was holy ground; you walked on it at your own peril.”

I felt like I should say something then, but I didn’t know what, so I got up and stuck my nose in the oven. There was a moment of quiet while we tried to figure out how not to be strangers with one another, and then Neil broke the silence again.

“So your grandparents raised you. What was that like?”

“Like any other childhood, I imagine. My aunts and uncles were long since gone and had families of their own; my mother was the youngest child. My brother and I would play with our cousins when they came home for the holidays, and I never noticed any difference between their parents and mine. Honestly, I think we made out far better than most children did. My grandfather adored us, my grandmother disciplined us, and we got along just fine.”

The cookies were done, so she pulled them out of the oven, put them on a cooling rack and went to start a fire in the wood stove. Neil insisted on doing it for her, so she showed him where everything was and went upstairs to turn the beds down. I stared at the cookies long enough to decide that if she’d baked them for us, she’d want us to eat them, and I took one off of the rack. I was spooning it out of the bottom of my hot chocolate mug when she came back. She put the rest on a plate and motioned me into the living room, where Neil was surveying his handiwork.

“Now that’s a fire!” he said.

“Yes, indeed!” Sarah replied, laughing.

Neil rocked forward on his ankles to grab a cookie and then lifted himself into an armchair. “Tell me, what is your happiest memory from childhood?”

The air seemed to thin around us after he spoke, as if every sliver of sensation receded to make room for her voice. His gaze intensified, and her response to it made me wonder about him all over again. She stared into space for a moment, her eyes glistening and unfocused. When she answered, the air thickened with the fragrance of pine and cinnamon and cloves, a long-ago aroma that came from nowhere but her memory.

“There was a coat I wanted when I was sixteen. It was made of dyed blue wool, and it reached almost to my ankles. I was blonde back then, and when I tried it on at the department store, I felt absolutely gorgeous. I promised my girlfriends that I would wear it to the Christmas dance because I knew I could talk my grandfather into buying it for me. But he refused, and it broke my heart. I must have sulked for a week, but I eventually forgot about it and resigned myself to wearing what I had.”

She sipped her tea carefully and placed the cup back into the saucer. “It was my grandmother, the woman who held every household penny in her tight little grip, the woman who preached to us and punished us and raised us like straight stalks of corn, who surprised me that year. The night of the party, while my grandfather was outside hooking the horses to the carriage, my grandmother gave me a present. She said, ‘You’re only sixteen once,’ and sat down on the couch. When my grandfather came back into the house, I was crying like a little girl, and my grandmother was patting a cold cloth over my face to keep my eyes from swelling.” Sarah sighed then, and continued.

“It was the most beautiful cloak I had ever seen, hand-stitched red silk velvet, voluminous piles of it, with one of those hoods that drape over your hair without messing it up. It was as long as I was tall, and there was a red muffler to match.” She paused for a moment and put her tea down. “I think the muffler is still in the closet here; I used to wear it to church.”

“Go get it, Ben.” Neil spoke to me and pointed at the hall closet. My weird alarm went off again, a big, red, klaxon this time, but I did what I was told. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. It was there all right, wrapped in one of those bags that sheets come in. I unzipped it and took the muffler in to her. She laid it in her lap, smiled at me absently, and picked up her tea.

“Of course, I was the belle of the ball. My girlfriends were as envious as they were awestruck. We all took turns wearing it and spinning around the coatroom until my grandfather came and asked me to dance. I didn’t want to take it off, and he didn’t ask me to, so I spent the next several hours trying not to trip over it. But I danced. I danced with all of my grandfather’s friends, his friends’ sons, and their sons. When the mood struck, a girlfriend would come and dance with me, and we’d manage my cloak together. Occasionally Grandpa would bring me a glass of water or a plate of fruit and cheese and force me to rest. I didn’t notice when the party thinned; I didn’t see my grandfather get tired. But eventually there was no one left to dance with but him, and he took me outside and sang to me while we danced in the snow. I fell asleep in the carriage on the way home; the last thing I remember was the sound of carriage bells.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and put it on?” Neil had taken her hand in his. I stood up and glared at him; she hadn’t told us where the cloak was. He looked back at me with a gaze that was as full of love for her as it was full of warning for me. I wanted to be afraid, I knew that I should be afraid, but I wasn’t. She put her teacup on the end table and went upstairs, too full of her memory to have noticed Neil’s obvious strangeness. I sat back down and waited.

When she came down the stairs, she was sixteen. I don’t mean that she looked sixteen; she was sixteen. Her hair was blonde and fell in soft curls around her shoulders, and her face was smooth and full of youth. The red velvet cloak fell over her arms and draped down her back to settle in a pool of scarlet at her feet. She was looking at her hands, but I was staring at the soft, golden light that surrounded her and trailed from her cloak when she moved. When I was finally able to look away, I saw that Neil was wearing a suit and tie, and my sense of reality fled entirely. I wasn’t even surprised to hear the jingle of carriage bells a few seconds later, but her eyes filled with tears. She stared at Neil for a second with a joyful mix of wonder and recognition and then gasped as she ran from the house.

Neil glanced at me and grinned as he ran after her. “Stay here,” he told me, but he didn’t have to tell me. I bolted to the couch and pushed the curtains apart in the window behind it as the door slammed. The barn was open, and Sarah was getting into a carriage pulled by six horses and driven by a man whose face I couldn’t see, but whose voice was gruff and kind. Neil climbed in after her, and with a slap of the reins, the carriage rattled off into the night.

I stared after them for hours, my knees buried in the couch, my elbows holding the curtains apart. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I do remember the weak sunlight that woke me, and I remember that my forehead was pressed up against the cold window. That was when I saw the carriage, horseless now and open to the chilly wind. They were still sitting in it, Neil and Sarah, but I couldn’t see their faces. Neither of them seemed to be moving, and I thought it strange that they were so still.

So I ran out to them, and that was when I knew. Sarah was old again, but she was more beautiful than ever. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was turned up in a smile that I hope I someday have, even if I only have it once. Her cloak was wrapped around her, and her withered hands gripped its edges. Neil’s cheek was pressed to the crown of her head, and he held her in his arms the way I have often held my daughters, stroking her hair as it blew in wisps around them both. He was wearing his old clothes again; here and there brown leaves that had clung to the trees despite the snow were stuck to his coat and pants. And he was weeping, his tears falling onto her red velvet cloak and sinking into the fabric. I left him there to grieve.

“You didn’t drink your coffee.” The waitress was back. “Want me to get you a fresh cup?”

“No thanks,” I said. “But could I have a box for the pie?”

“Sure thing,” she told me, and walked away. The snow had stopped, and the daylight was waning. I pulled a silver pen from my front pocket to sign the receipt and held it in my hand for a moment. The rest of the wallet was at home, but I kept the pen with me. Sometimes I still felt bad for taking it, but I think she had been trying to give it to me anyway, had intuited something of significance about that night and the people she was about to share it with. I didn’t go to her funeral, and I never saw the Magic Man again, but I remember a gruff, kind voice and the jingle of carriage bells whenever my daughters ask me to dance.