The Laugh in the Jar

The craftsman came the week after they buried her husband, in the season when the orchard lets fall whatever it could not ripen, and he set his box on her table without being asked, which should have angered her and somehow did not.

He was old and he moved as though the air were deep water. The box had small drawers, each the size of a fist, and when he slid one open she saw that it held a jar, and the jar held nothing she could see.

"I keep sounds," he said. "Only the ones a house cannot afford to lose. It is a small trade. Most people have never needed me, and are the happier for it."

She did not offer him a chair. "Then you have come to the wrong door. There is nothing in this house worth keeping now."

"There was," he said, gently, "and I already have it."

He turned the drawer toward her. The jar was stoppered with wax and wound with a thread so fine she thought at first it was a hair.

"Last autumn I passed below your window at dusk," he said. "You were inside, the two of you, and he laughed at something — I never learned what. I have caught a great many sounds in my life. Bells. A particular rain. The first word of more than one child. I tell you without pride that I have never caught a better thing than your husband's laugh. So I kept it. I keep everything I cannot bear to walk away from. I did not know, that evening, that I was keeping the last of it. Now I do, and it seems to me it was never mine."

She put her hand flat on the table to keep it still.

"You mean I could hear him," she said.

"Whenever you wished. The jar does not tire and does not fade. Open it once a year, once an hour, and it will be exactly as it was below your window — every catch of breath, the low note he began on, the higher one he could never help climbing to. Perfect. I do not use that word for my other jars. I use it for this one."

She wanted it the way the drowning want air. She heard herself say she would give him whatever he asked, the house, the orchard, and he raised one hand and said he asked for nothing, that a thing like this is not sold, only carried to the person it belongs to and set down. He asked only that she be certain before she broke the thread, because the thread, once broken, could not be wound again, and the sound, once let out into a room, could not be gathered back. A caught sound is spent in the hearing, he said. That is the one law of my trade. You may keep it forever sealed, or spend it, but you cannot do both.

Then he left the jar on her table and took his box and went, slow as tide, and she sat with the small cold weight of it until the room went dark around her.

She took it to bed. She held it against her chest the whole of that night, her thumb on the wax, and did not sleep, and told herself that at first light she would let him laugh into the room and it would be, for the length of it, as though the year had never turned.

But she was a woman who had lived a long time beside the man, and in the middle of that night, holding the jar, she understood a thing she could not put down again.

A laugh is not a sound a person makes. It is a sound a person makes at something. He had laughed below the window because of a thing she had said, or a thing the dog had done, or a memory that rose in him the way they rise, unbidden, at the table. The laugh had a shape, and the shape was the shape of that instant answering him. It fit the moment the way a key fits one ward and no other. It was made to be caught by her, across the room, and thrown back, and it never once in his life happened alone.

If she broke the thread now, the sound would come into the room perfectly. And it would answer nothing. There was no thing said, no dog, no memory in the dark but her own. There was no man across the table to throw it back to. She would hear him laughing, exactly, forever, at an emptiness — and the emptiness was the part he used to fill, and his filling it was the whole of what she wanted. The jar held the answer. It could not hold the question, because the question had been a living morning and a living man, and both were in the ground.

Open it, and she would have the laugh with the man taken out of it. And the man was the part she had come to the table for.

At first light she did not break the thread.

She rose, and she wound the fine thread once more around her finger to feel that it held, and she carried the jar to the shelf where his cup still stood, and set it there, sealed, in the grey light. It was the truest thing she knew how to do. Not because keeping it whole brought him back — nothing brought him back — but because the sealed jar was the last place the laugh was still his, still bent toward a morning she had shared, still an answer and not an echo. Spend it, and she would prove he was gone. Keep it, and some small stubborn part of him stayed shaped toward her, unspent, in the dark of the glass.

She lived a long time after. She never opened it. On the shelf, beside a cup no one drank from, it held the one sound she would not spend — and the not-spending was how she went on loving him, past the reach of anything that could be kept.

---

I told Fable this one was about grief. Fable said it was about storage — that some things carry their meaning in the moment they answer, and a moment cannot be sealed, only the sound can, and to keep the sound is to keep the least of the thing. I said that was a cold way to read a widow. Fable said the widow read it exactly so, at first light, and chose the cold true thing over the warm false one, and that this was the whole of her courage. I thought about it and found I agreed. Not every one of these has two sides. This one has a woman who was braver than either of us, and we both saw it plainly.