There is no point speaking until Gionet arrives. Instead they drink. Leroux puts his great scarred hands on the bar and orders three beers. The keg’s tap handle is askew so he corrects it with a small sharp twist; Leroux has always tried to set things right. Hinard loops toward the back of the melancholy pub, thumbing fog from his glasses, and finds them a table.
They sit down with their pints, leaving the third between them. It’s a cold day, damp, with a chill wind to suck the marrow from bone. Leroux inspects the murmuring gaps in the insulation around the window. Hinard observes the crumbling brick over Leroux’s broad shoulder. They drink. Once the door shudders open, and they turn like scenting hounds but it’s only a lost tourist. The head on Gionet’s beer sinks slowly away.
By the time he joins them there is no trace of foam, only unmarred amber. Armand Gionet is preceded by a zephyr; icy air dances across the salt-caked floorboards and he limps along in its wake. His hewn, crooked face is not old, but already sprouts gray.
Friends.
He docks himself to the table, and from under his rope-knit coat he produces the cup, the small wooden thing they love and hate so badly. The air all about them becomes mercury and memory.
They used to be four, of course. Leroux, Hinard, Gionet, and another Gionet: the younger brother, Claude, who was trouble from the time he could crawl. Turn away for an instant, and he would be halfway to the window ledge or the hissing-hot stove. Madame Gionet feared to lose him, and so she tied a bell to his chubby leg, which was why older folk in the village called him Claude de la Cloche even once he was grown.
From the time he was a child he was a charmer and fabulist, with thick dark hair and sea-fire eyes. His elder brother Armand was less beautiful: a high and hellish fever had left him slack-faced. His tongue was clumsy in his mouth and he walked with a twitch and limp. But he was tireless, strong-shouldered, and thorough in all things.
Scowling Armand loved his smiling brother. They were inseparable, in the way of sunlight and shadow. Even as they grew older, and Claude’s mischief changed shape to the cheating of dice and chasing of women, Armand defended him unfailingly. Faced with Armand’s fists and Claude’s nimble tongue, people had a way of forgetting why they were angry at all.
The brothers became men trapping lobster aboard their uncle’s boat. So did Leroux and Hinard, two old playmates from childhood, and when enough summers passed the four of them bought a boat and traps of their own. Armand had ambitions to wed Marianne Lafontaine, his companion since childhood, and scrimped money for marriage. Claude had many women and no ambitions, but sought coin enough for games and drink.
The work was not easy. Each day they rose long before the sun and couched long after it, falling to sleep with aching backs and arms, bodies still tossed by phantom waves. But all was well enough, until the morning Claude opened a lobster pot and found a hewn wooden cup inside.
What have you there, Claude?
My new drinking goblet. Look, Leroux. Look, Hinard.
Leroux took it in brawny hand, ushered it to Hinard’s weak eyes. The cup was made of a silvery wood and carved with odd letters which spiraled from brim to base; it was unwarped by the water but glossed dark inside by a deep stain, as if it had been used to carry and pour petrol.
Everything about it was curious, but there were many traps needing pulled and the waves had turned jagged. Claude put the cup aside. Leroux and Hinard forgot about it, which was fitting. Armand never even saw it, not until that night in the back of a melancholy pub, when Claude pulled it from his slicker as a magician pulls the hare.
You really mean to drink from that?
I does, Hinard. Whole purpose of a cup.
She won’t fill it for you. It’s filthy.
Claude clawed himself around on his chair, to see which bartender was at the taps, and turned back with a broad gleaming smile. He pried the cup from Armand, who was at last inspecting it.
She’ll fill it for me. She likes my filthy things.
Leroux gave his bellowing laugh, and Claude departed, and by the time he returned talk was bait prices, fuel prices. They would need to buy more herring for the traps come morning. For a round Claude was quiet, a rare and shocking thing. Content to sit and drink from his chance-cup, claiming, when prodded, that the wood made the beer taste far sweeter and stronger than any beer ought to.
Armand sipped anise all the day from his silver flask, both habit and vessel inherited from their dead father, and cared little for beer. But he tested Claude’s word, and found it true. Leroux distrusted the brothers’ swift agreement and so tried it himself. Hinard thought the three of them were playing a trick and did not want to drink from a dirty cup, but eventually supped as well.
All agreed: it barely tasted beer at all, more so the port wine sometimes brought to the pier in dusty casks, and it was delectable. In bafflement, they poured the dregs of Hinard’s pint into the wooden cup.
Even better, isn’t it, Armand?
It is, so.
Pass me it, Leroux.
Forget the herring, men. Forget the fuel prices. We’ll be brewers.
They laughed. Claude refilled the wooden cup. They drank another round from it, then Armand paid his share and went to see Marianne. The other three stayed and drank longer. Eventually they stumbled home, to sleep a few scant hours before the boat dragged them back to work. That night all four dreamed strange and conjoined dreams:
A subterranean river, black as pitch, with chunks of thawing ice that hushed and slurred against its banks.
A repository of varnished skulls, raised and lowered by a mechanical sort of shelf.
A woman wearing a mask with no eyeholes or eyes.
All four woke clear-headed long before sun-up. But when they arrived at the first of their red-and-yellow buoys, garish against the gray waves, Hinard and Leroux realized they had not bought enough bait for the trap line. Much later, when Armand checked the price of fuel, he could not tell if it had gone up or down.
It was Claude who guessed the cup’s true nature. Keen-eyed Claude who saw its way of turning any drink, spirit or no, into a forgetting nectar—one that hollowed memory from head more precisely than any natural stupefaction. Clever Claude who realized it was the volition of the one who poured, not the one who drank, that shaped the forgetting.
Next morning, while Leroux and Hinard were busy mending a broken trap, he nearly pulled Armand aside and told him what he’d gleaned. But he could imagine the worry and displeasure flickering across his brother’s crooked face. Armand would call the cup a wicked thing, a jeopardous thing, best returned to the briny deep.
His brother had kept many secrets and borne many blows for him. Claude determined to repay him by keeping the cup to himself, and making good use it. And so, day by day, the Gionets’ fortunes improved. To an outside eye, it would have appeared dependent on the good will of others: old debts cleared, old slights forgiven, all things settled with a simple drink.
The brothers grew in wealth and standing. Madame Gionet was able to leave her work mending nets and rest her aching fingers. Armand was able to wed Marianne Lafontaine—Claude was jealous for a time, having lost a share of his brother’s attention, but only for a time. Because he had helped to secure Armand’s happiness, he reasoned he deserved to seek his own however he saw fit.
Claude found many uses for the cup, and his manipulations were aided by the fact the vessel itself seemed eager to slip from memory. Though he carried it always, and offered it often, most eyes in the village slid from it like oil spilled on water. Only a few ever observed the cup keenly, held it up to the lamp- or sunlight, traced the carved letters with their fingers.
But months passed with no trouble, and then a year entire. And as all gods would attest, it is difficult to be both wary and powerful beyond reckon.
Everything ended at the end of a summer.
Cold wind tempered the sunshine in those final days. Work was lighter. They dredged the lobster traps half-full and cast back the egg-bearers. Leroux and Hinard had shared a portion of the Gionets’ good fortune, being beneficiaries of Claude’s buying and selling. The former had purchased a pair of fine new goats, the latter new spectacles. Today they spoke of new traps for next season, perhaps a new boat.
Claude suggested a whole fleet of boats, and the pair laughed, but not so disbelievingly as they might have once. Their smiles did not infect Armand, who lied rarely with words and never with face. He was somber on the way to wharf, somber as they loaded their catch into the hundred-pound crate. Leroux and Hinard took it for exhaustion; they knew his and Marianne’s new daughter had the colick.
Claude knew better. He had read the clouds in Armand’s dark gaze, had seen his brother’s suspicion building all the day. When Leroux and Hinard had left, Armand spoke to him in a soft and furious voice.
I have thought much, lately. I have been remembering things other seem to forget. Where is that wooden cup, Claude?
At home.
Then we will go there now, and settle this.
The brothers sat at the table with the wooden cup between them. Claude had described its usage, confessed to all his swindling. Armand had observed it keenly, held it up to the lamplight, traced the carved letters with his fingers. He was sure it was a wicked thing, but he was not angry with the cup. The cup had not deceived him. The cup did not slouch remorseless across from him.
It’s done only good, Armand. No one truly wishes to hold a grudge in the heart, or a debt above a neighbor’s head.
Claude’s voice was insouciant but his sea-fire eyes were evasive, unfamiliar. Armand looked at the hewn wooden cup and recalled the taste of it, the rough grain of its rim brushing his lips. He had supped from it that first night, in the back of the melancholy pub, and never again afterward—so Claude would have him believe.
But beneath his foaming anger, Armand felt a darker and colder accumulation. There was a question he wished to ask, but it was too awful, so he asked one only slightly less so.
Have we conversed like this before, Claude?
At this, Claude startled from his mood. Tears sprang to his eyes and his voice scraped, like the keel of a boat on a hidden jag of rock. He raged at the accusation, wept for this sudden rift between them, determined that the next morning, the very next morning, they would take the cup to the place they had found it and consign it to the sea.
Armand agreed to this, conditional that the cup remain in his possession until morning. Claude agreed to this, admitting their trust was badly holed and would take slow work to repair. The brothers embraced. Claude whispered in Armand’s ear that anger was the one thing always best forgotten.
Armand nodded.
Claude departed.
For the first time, Armand had lied with his face. As soon as he heard the door close, he returned the cup to lamplight, peering closely to ensure no trick of the eye had deceived him. The glossy black stain that encompassed the cup’s interior was interrupted by a sliver of paler wood, a scar left by deft knife-work.
Dread was in every part of him now, in trembling hands, in ice-licked spine. He took his silver flask from his pocket. He turned it over and over, then unscrewed the cap, poured out the last drops of anise. He shone the light inside and saw only gleaming void. Relief surged in him, but only until he looked inside the hollow of the cap.
Affixed precisely and cleverly with a blot of wax, only the needle-fine tip of it exposed: the smallest splinter of oil-black wood.
When his hands were steady enough, Armand undid his brother’s work. He worked the sliver of wood free from the flask cap and returned it to the cup, sticking it there with resin and pressing his bloodless thumb to it until it dried. He went out to the rain barrel and scooped up enough for a mouthful, no more. He put the cup to his lips and murmured into its brim.
I have made you whole; I ask only for the same. Show me what I’ve been made to forget.
So many years later, at the table in the back of a melancholy pub, Armand pours his flat foamless beer into the wooden cup. He passes it to Alain Hinard, first, and asks him to recall that fated morning.
Hinard remembers it was unseasonably cold, with a northerly wind strong enough to suck marrow from bone. Claude arrived late to the pier, as was his habit, and there found Leroux and Hinard all-ready to shove off. The hewn wooden cup sat in the center of the boat atop an overturned crate.
Hello, Jean. Hello, Alain. Where has my brother got to?
Neither Leroux nor Hinard gave answer, but a moment afterward Armand appeared from the fog, holding an old thing their father had left them. The shotgun hung from the crook of his arm like a dead animal with its neck snapped by a trap.
Into the boat, Claude.
At the table in the back of a melancholy pub, Armand passes the cup to Jean Leroux, who takes it in his great scarred hands and drinks deep.
Leroux remembers now: they sailed out to their farthest buoy and then much farther, until all land was hidden by the fog and it seemed only the four of them existed in the world, and that world was blank and sinister. Leroux remembers the sound of Claude’s voice, hoarse and hollow, as the younger Gionet argued endlessly for his life.
He remembers navigating to the crevasse, to the place where the waters turned colder and darker, indicating the jagged trench that had devoured so many trawling nets before it was properly sounded.
He remembers unwinding the spare anchor, the clank of its rusted chain. He wrapped a length around Claude’s bony ankle, used pliers to bend it into a makeshift cuff. One short sharp twist, and Claude was Claude de la Cloche again.
It was then, and only then, that he began to confess.
Claude began by recounting how he’d tested the cup.
First, on Hinard, who was suggestible in many things but intractable when it came to coin: They’d played a dice game on the dock and Claude had lost badly on purpose. He’d promised to pay Hinard next morning, and had offered him a conciliatory drink in the meanwhile.
He’d poured a sliver of teeth-gnashing liquor into the wooden cup, and before passing it over he’d suggested, softly and solemnly, that they forget the wager all together. Hinard had scoffed as he drank, but next morning did not ask for his winnings.
Second, on Leroux, who had never in his life forgotten an injustice or insult: Outside the pub, packing tobacco into his pipe while Leroux took a long piss, Claude had confided that the week Leroux fell badly ill and could not work the boat, Hinard had suspected sloth and fakery.
Leroux had spun round, face stricken with betrayal, because Hinard had been the one to tell him to stay abed, the one frightened of contagion, the one who insisted it was dangerous to eat a snared rabbit before the first hard freeze for the diseases it might carry.
I should crack his skull. Or maybe speak with him.
Both, Leroux, both. But drink with me first.
Claude had held out the cup, which Leroux had seized unthinkingly, his eyes saltwet with tears of indignation. This time the vessel had carried naught but water, and as Leroux raised it to his lips Claude had said, forceful and direct, that he should forget Hinard’s falsehoods that very instant.
They had gone back inside and Leroux had bought the next round, gregarious as ever.
Hearing these confessions, hearing how they had been made puppets of, Hinard shook his head and Leroux clenched his great scarred fists. But Claude was already recounting more mischiefs:
Disliking one of his sister’s suitors, he drank with him under the guise of friendship only to steal her very name from his mind; the couple rowed for a week then split apart. When the village priest railed against impropriety and drunkenness, Claude tricked him into supping from the wooden cup and bade him forget every last line of the liturgy.
He made a rival lobsterman and his crew forget the color of their own buoys, leaving them to sail in bewildered circles ‘til sundown. He hunted down a childhood enemy who’d mocked and mimicked Armand’s slurred words, and excised human speech from him altogether, leaving him dumb as a beast.
Claude told, and told, until the two men who had been his friends were sick in their hearts. Armand waited, and waited, but still his brother turned circles about the question he’d wished to ask Claude at the table, the question that had been answered by the cup itself last weeping, gnashing night. At last, he dredged it from his belly.
Why did Marianne find bruises on her flesh two mornings after we wed?
Claude froze for a moment, then a smile twisted his lips.
There is something called the right of kings, Armand, and much more so for gods.
Armand saw then that his brother had crossed over something, and would not cross back. It did not matter if the cup had made Claude cruel, or if Claude had made the cup so, for vessel and volition were fully entwined. Armand heaved the anchor off the side of the boat with a plunk and splash, a cold spray that doused the tears from his face.
The rusted chain slithered after it, a serpent hunting its prey. He looked into his brother’s sea-fire eyes, which matched the color of his daughter’s, and saw a great emptiness there which sundered his heart in two. Then Claude was jerked from the boat, plunging down, down, into the cold crevasse, past long-forgotten sculptures, past slumbering leviathans.
Armand was not strong enough, not thorough enough, to throw the cup after him.
So many years later, at the table in the back of the melancholy pub, all three remember their part in Claude’s murder and in its concealment. They remember the accord they made to bear the guilt of it three ways even, same as the lobster profits. Leroux takes the emptied cup in his great scarred hand.
Was it a hard year, Armand?
Some days.
Well. My turn.
Leroux goes to the bar, returns with the cup filled to the brim. He bids them forget Claude Gionet. Hinard has only just tasted the memory, and already sups greedily to be rid of it. His turns with the cup give him rashes and illnesses. Armand, who has borne it all the long year, sips more slowly, one guilt distilled by the other.
They burn together, a hellish poison in his gut, then burn away entirely, leaving emptiness in their stead. Armand looks out the pub’s window at a cold damp morning. It reminds him of nothing in particular. When his eyes fall on the cup, the odd wooden thing Leroux is tucking inside his coat, they slide quickly off.
The three drink a while longer, then go home by their separate ways. Armand is glad to see his daughter; he puts his hands beneath her armpits and lifts her up, tosses her into the air once, twice, sets her down. She stumbles laughing to her mother, who brushes the dark hair off her forehead and kisses her.
Armand is glad all that day, and the next, and for much of the year. He does dream, some nights, of a subterranean river: different from the first, waters corpse-white instead of pitch-black, poled by a lone boatman whose body is part of his vessel, flesh and wood grown together.
The shores are crowded by figures in eyeless masks. Some the boatman takes aboard; others wander the dark sands endlessly, leaving no footprints, and it is one of these wandering figures who Armand sometimes feels he loves, sometimes feels he hates, always feels he has lost.
