A Job of Dying
Joyce Melton

Today, Death came in through the front door. There was no hurry; Death doesn’t keep a schedule, has no quotas to fill, and doesn’t file reports with her Superiors.

It was night, though darkness and light are all the same to the Specter of Death. It was very early in the morning, to be more precise: just after 2 a.m., local time. The Goblin Hour in which time such specters can sometimes be seen and spoken to.

In the living room of the house, a man sleeping under a light blanket stirred as Death passed him by. Death had made no noise, but the man’s spirit called out. “Where are you going? Who are you here for?”

Death paused to hear the man’s questions. “Go back to sleep,” said Death. “I’m not here for you.” Death’s voice was chill and distant, like the voice of a woman standing at the bottom of a well.

“Are you here for my father? You leave him alone!” the man’s spirit demanded.

“He’s been waiting for me a long time,” said Death. “Would you have me be unkind?”

“He’s a good man,” said the spirit of the man sleeping on the couch. Tears could be heard in the dream voice, for the man had been crying in his sleep. “Leave him alone.”

Death nodded. “You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep. Your father is alone, as you say. He’s alone, and he wants my company. Go back to sleep and dream of peaceful, happy times when you were a child, and your father kept you safe.”

With a sob, the spirit returned to its body, which groaned and shifted its position on the couch without waking.

Death waited a moment to be sure the man would continue sleeping and not be further disturbed by Death’s errand. Then she continued through the darkened room, easily avoiding the furniture. As always, light and darkness are the same to Death.

In the darkness, she found a short hallway and continued along it to a bedroom. She did not knock, no more than she had at the front door, but a voice called from beyond the entrance. “Come in,” said the voice.

Death entered. “Just to be certain, are you the man who was Corporal Todd Heartley of the U.S. Army?”

An old man sitting on the edge of a bed answered in a thin and cracked voice, “I am that Corporal Todd.”

“Are you the Corporal Todd Heartley who was a sniper during one of your nation’s wars and who killed a hundred men of the enemy army over a period of ten days in the year of 1952?”

The old man slumped where he sat, his old joints clicking and creaking. “I am that Todd Heartley,” he said again.

The Specter of Death clomped across the floor, her footsteps loud now where they had been silent before. She turned and sat on the edge of the bed beside the man who had been Corporal Heartley. “It wasn’t a hundred,” she said companionably. “It was only eighteen.”

“I lost count,” said Heartley.

Death nodded. She had also taken uncountable lives and knew how it could be. “Still, it was a job, and you did it in a professional manner. You should be proud.”

The old man covered his face with his scrawny arms. “I am not proud,” he said.

Death waited until the old man stopped weeping. She lay a spectral arm across his shoulders. Waiting was something Death did very well and in a professional manner.

“I wanted to speak with you tonight before you take me on my last journey,” said the man.

“Someone heard your prayers, and I have leave to tarry a while to hear you speak,” Death said simply. It was an amiable lie; Death never needs permission.

“Thank you,” said Todd Heartley. “It is a kindness you do to an old man.”

“We are old friends, Corporal Todd, and what are one’s friends for if not to listen to what troubles one?”

The old man nodded, smiling. “I knew you would be kind.” He took a deep, rattling breath and coughed into his elbow. “I haven’t much time.”

“No hurry,” Death assured him. “You have all the time in the world now.”

The old man thought that over and sighed. “I’m already dead?” he asked.

“For some while,” said Death, picking at the fabric of her robe. “I came in the fullness of the hour.”

“I have a question for you,” said the old man, but he looked away from the Specter’s visage.

“Ask me anything,” Death commanded.

“Do you know the men I killed?” the old man whispered.

“I do,” said Death. “I was there—there beside you, and you know that for you felt my presence.”

There was a break in the old man’s voice—as if from a catch in the breath he no longer owned. “Do you know their names? Where they are now?”

“I can,” said Death. She paused for a moment. “They are within me, and I know them like I would know my own children.”

“I want to speak with them,” said Corporal Todd after a glance at the body lying on the bed. “I want to apologize.”

“There’s no need for that,” said Death. “You were both doing your jobs; yours was killing for your country, and theirs was dying for theirs.”

“You don’t understand! I won’t be able to rest if I can’t talk to them, tell them I’m sorry.”

“You would become a revenant and haunt this place?” asked Death. “That would be unkind to your son and to his children. They would have to tell their school friends, ‘No, you can’t come in to have a sleepover because we keep Grampa’s ghost in the spare bedroom.’”

“Do not jest with me, specter!” the old man protested.

Death relented. “A sad and funny man once said there are only two subjects in this world worth laughing about or crying over: Love and Death, and Love is busy.”

She turned and looked at the shade of the old man. “But I have time for thee.”

*

They left by the front door with the old man’s son still sleeping on the couch, time enough for him to find out his father had passed away in the morning.

Death took Corporal Todd’s hand in a spectral grasp and led him along a path mortals cannot tread. They traveled for some time and came to a green meadow that the old man recognized. He had last seen it sixty years ago, but it had burned its contours into his memory, though now it was green, edged with trees and laced with wildflowers. A monument stone stood sentinel near where men of the Chinese and North Korean armies had died.

Heartley fell to his knees. “Oh, Lord, forgive me,” he said as a prayer.

Death watched. “Are we done then? Forgiveness is God’s profession. You had only to ask for it.”

“No,” said the ghost of the old man. “I must atone with the souls of the men whose lives I ended.” He started to struggle back to his feet but found that he could stand easily: his youth had been restored, and he was once again the young Corporal Todd he had been.

“I will summon them to this site, for they all know where it is,” said Death.

A young Asian man dressed as a soldier of a long-forgotten war appeared near the monument. Surprised, he looked around and spoke in Chinese to the Specter of Death. “Are we not done with each other? My ancestors are waiting for me.”

Death spoke in turn. “This is the spirit of the man who killed you, shooting from that hill over there.” She spoke in Chinese since the soldier understood no other language.

“What does he want?” the soldier asked.

“What’s he saying?” Heartley interrupted. “Can he hear me? Can he understand me?”

“Patience, leaf-chewer,” said Death. “I will explain and translate.”

“Tell him I’m sorry that I followed my orders and killed him,” the sniper’s ghost said.

Death spoke in Chinese, and the young Asian man replied, then vanished.

Heartley fell to his knees again. “What did he say?” he asked.

Death turned to him and spoke with compassion, putting the Chinese words and phrases into ones Heartley could understand. “He said he would not have the burden of wishing that you had been in disobedience to your orders. You gave him mercy, killing him so quickly he didn’t realize he was dead until they came and took his body away.”

“Oh,” said Heartley. “I tried for a killing shot with every round. Wounding someone would have been even more horrible.”

Death nodded.

Another shade materialized. A younger man, also Asian, but hardly more than a boy. He had only one arm still attached and carried the other, in its sleeve, in his remaining hand.

“Here then,” said Death, “is the man you wounded.”

“Oh, God! Oh, God,” Heartley moaned.

“It doesn’t hurt him anymore. Even though you did not kill him, he died soon after at the hands of his comrades who despaired of his screaming.”

“Why am I here?” the boy wanted to know. “If I am dead, then I am done with everything.”

“Can you ask him to forgive me?” Heartley pleaded with Death.

“I can and I will,” Death promised.

She did, and the boy replied. “Tell him to go to his own land and forgive himself and his leaders. Except, if he’s dead, then he, too, is done with everything in the world. War is nothing, and nothingness is peace.” Then he, too, vanished.

“Succinct,” said Death, after telling Heartley what had been said. “But the boy is correct, this is pretty pointless.”

Heartley prostrated himself, sobbing on the grass.

“The problem, in part, is that many of the men you killed didn’t really believe in an afterlife. Like the boy said, if you’re dead, you’re done with everything.”

Heartley made a noise, rolling over and sitting up with his arms around his knees. “But that’s not true. I’m here, and you said you could summon the men I killed.”

Death nodded. “But that’s you using me to impose your beliefs onto them.” She shrugged. “I didn’t think it would be this difficult, but it’s not easy to resurrect the living soul of someone who thinks they no longer exist.”

“I’ve carried this guilt for sixty years…. It was always with me. When I was most happy, when I got married, when my children were born, when they became adults and brought me grandchildren…. The guilt was there to eat up my happiness.”

He sighed. Or appeared to sigh. Being without breath, he could only imagine making the sound.

“And now it seems that inflicting my need for forgiveness on the men I murdered is another atrocity, another unfairness.” He pulled up a tuft of grass and savagely tore it apart. “O Death, what am I to do to find peace?”

“You answer your own question,” said Death. “But I may be able to help you. Do you remember the first man you killed?”

“Indelibly,” said Heartley. “He was an officer. He wore no insignia, but his uniform was cleaner, crisper, unpatched, and the hat he wore was different.”

“He was also a Christian and spoke English. He had a teaching degree from the Illinois Normal School in Champagne-Urbana.”

“A Christian!” Heartley was newly horrified.

“Is it any worse to kill someone who believes in the survival of the soul than to end the life of someone who is certain that death is a final ending?”

“-uh?”

Death reached for Heartley’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “I can’t call Captain Wong to us. We will have to go to him.”

“Why-uh-why not?”

“He’s not allowed,” said Death, leading the way along a new path through darker places, some of them lit fitfully with burning rocks, shining pennants and sparkling stones. At last, they came to a trench crossing the middle of an endless frozen plain.

“Where are we?” Heartley whispered a question.

“Cocytus, literally the ass end of creation,” said the spectral guide.

Heartley looked around. “It looks like Hell,” he said.

“None other,” agreed Death. “The man we seek, Captain Wong is in the River of Lamentations at the bottom of that trench.”

Heartley shivered and continued shivering as Death found a path from the frozen plain to the frozen river. “This way, mind the ice, it is slippery,” Death warned.

They stopped near a frozen eddy where heads in grotesque array sprouted from the ice like horrible cabbages.

“Captain Wong,” Death called out, and one head struggled to answer. The face of a youthful Asian man appeared in the ice, submerged in Hell’s Permafrost up to the ears. “Who dares intrude upon my punishment?” the man demanded.

“Captain Wong!” Heartley exclaimed.

“Who, if you don’t mind the aptness, who the Hell are you?” asked Wong.

“This is the young American who put a bullet in your ear, Captain.”

Heartley remembered. His target had turned his head slightly. Corporal Todd had been aiming for the bridge of the officer’s nose.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Heartley resisted the urge to babble. “You were the first person I ever aimed at, and I killed you!”

Wong scoffed. “And didn’t I deserve it? I led my men into an ambush. I think they must have all died or many of them. I betrayed them, and here I lie frozen in the ice of Lamentation, the punishment for all traitors who regret what they have done!” He swore vehemently in four languages since he spoke English, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Italian.

“I… I….” Heartley couldn’t think of anything to say in response to such vitriol. Finally, he managed to stammer out, “I n-need you to forgive me for what I’ve done!”

“What you’ve done?” Wong scorned him. “I think you are guilty of a foolish pride. Have you spent sixty years unforgiven? Sounds like Purgatory to me! Go! You have no business here; you are the opposite of a traitor: a patriot! One who can be trusted to make painful decisions in support of an ideal! Scoffer! Do you envy me my fate? Are you jealous of my ice?”

“Captain Wong!” Heartley protested.

“You’ve paid your penance with your life!” screamed the face buried in the ice. “What would you have me do? Forgive you for ridding the world of a villain? For surely, I am the villain here, not you!” Frozen spittle spewed from the mouth of the submerged soul. “Who knows what sins and crimes I might have committed if I lived? You did the world a favor by shooting me in the head!”

Suddenly, the face half-buried in ice changed from screaming and cursing to weeping, and as the tears froze, new ice formed, beginning to close the voice in a prison of Lamentation. Heartley knelt, trying to brush away the ice as it froze around the eyes, cheeks, lips and tongue of the Chinese officer.

Defeated, Heartley sat back on his heels and looked up at Death. “Don’t you have something sharp, like a scythe or a sickle? Maybe we could cut him out of the ice!”

Death shook her head. “He has chosen his doom himself, and not even in another sixty years will he have begun to forgive himself for his betrayal of his men.”

“But I’m the one who killed them!” Heartley bowed his head. “I’m confused,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

The stillness of the End of Creation lay around them without even a wind to mask a whisper.

Death spoke without lessening the silence. “And you’ve had sixty years to forgive yourself. Do you need sixty more?”