Ghosts: A Novelette

This is something I wrote many years ago; much too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel, let's call it a novelette. Here it is, as a year-end's offering. Get yourself a cup of tea and get comfortable, then enjoy!

  

 1993, Debra A. Marshall

I:1   Leaving

            We never belonged there. We came, following the sea northward along the shore, seeking prosperity like all the others gathered near the tides, hoping that fortune would wash in on the waves. Wealth and renown, wealth and renown: the sea whispered in our ears, and when we grew impatient, it hurled itself upon the rocks and howled, Soon! Soon! Soon!

            Before long we became too restless, too out of sorts in our secret longing and nervous energy: easily ‘roused companions that fed on the sight of the bright boat harbors and big seaside houses. We moved. Just beyond the reach of the uneasy morning sea mists, turned away from the wail of the grief-flung foghorns, just too far to feel the shifting of the sea. Our hearts stilled and our souls were set free again, back away from the sea, on the hills above the valley that reminded me of home – as much as anything in that strange place could conjure home.

            We fled to a ruined valley town surrounded by ridges, high sharp ridges that kept the glamour of the sea away from us. No seabird’s cry screamed anxiously in our ears; the lure and allure that rode above our brows, of the sea’s surging promises and the shore’s high-stepping towns, shrunk in the saltless air to a dense pebble we carried in our pockets. We would find it heavy in pants or shirt, or nesting in the bottom of a basket filled with old papers and photos. Fetching it out, we would admire its impatience, marvel at the way its colors had tarnished, and wonder why we ever bothered to cherish and nurture such a hard, heavy bit of jetsam. We wondered why, even now, in the midst of our greening complacency, we never brought ourselves to drop it by the roadside. Sighing, we polished it carefully and misplaced it again and again.

            Having spurned the coast and all it promised, we found comfort in the townfolk. They were proud and mindful of the strength with which they shunned the coast and its painwracked settlers. Poverty was honor; the townfolk never longed for more than what had been good enough for the old folks. Their integrity and the purity of the existence they celebrated balanced on the sharp point of doing without: they neither wanted nor admitted to being aware that there was anything to want. Had it been offered, they would never have stretched a hand towards it. Pride was certain only in not wanting, adamantly not wanting, and the townfolk possessed an untouchable superiority of character because they did not want.

            We moved to the ridge and the valley, to the snowmobile clubs, shotguns close-at-hand, unpainted houses, back-yard privies. We moved to untrimmed lawns, junk cars in yards, engines hoisted under oak limbs, haybales piled high against the flanks of the house to rout the sharpest winter drafts. We moved where winter winds whipped across the ridge, fields burned under sweet heavy clouds in spring. We left behind the glory of sea smoke and double rainbows hanging over the sea, the churning of waters cast up roil for roil in the churning of our souls. We chose instead the wind breathing through the pines, the river mumbling below, the sun glazing the fields, silent, untamed snow, and wild flowers and berries that grew unchecked through our passing days and dreaming minds.

            On the hills near the trees and the fields and the trailers, we would never belong. We had no ghosts nor bones in the cemetery, we lived in a stranger’s house. We had the wrong impulses, the wrong precepts, we had ties to different people. We had not forgotten how to hope and how to mourn lost hope, though we set grief aside for a time. We had come to watch the decline and death of old dreams; beyond that, our bags were empty.

            Time came when we found our bags were full again, and we took them and left; but we bore away with us only the shadows of the ghosts we had learned to live with. We never see them clearly except in times of unusual inner illumination. Otherwise, they remain but a haunting suspicion that all – all we long for, all we are, all – in fact – is not as it had been before we settled into that place on the ridge.

            We carried only one active haunting away with us: the kenning that the place – the houses, the land, the air, the way all these work on the people who live there – is as much an impulse of the inhabitants’ minds, as their minds are the impulse of the land, its ghosts, and all they require of place and self.

            We were haunted by mourning our parting almost as soon as we began to celebrate our arrival. With each scrape of wet plaster, each splash of paint, the setting of each flower or fruit tree – with each act of permanence we grieved silently, knowing we would leave too soon, drifting or drawn away. We would not have chosen to go.

            The time came. We divested ourselves of our trappings and lived for awhile in the nearly empty shell of the house that had never really been ours, slipping quietly and silently through the passage of legal rights, knowing that those who followed would possess the house no more than we had. We had lived companionably with the house, and it was not angry with us; we suited each other, though we never belonged to it. Even the land cared only that another tending hand would arrive in due time. We were memories in the place long before we left it.

            A basket of herbs and wildflowers and weeds from the ridge left with us. Some I had planted, some had been planted by those who preceded us, some rooted on no whim but their own. These I wove into a wreath. Hanging now above our bed, the scent of those flowers winds through my dreams at night, and I walk the ridge and drift through the cemetery again…

I:2   Hauntings

            Logging trucks. Nothing but logging trucks, going up and down this road, most hours of the day. Going down, they wheeze and miarmiawrl breathlessly, shudder and try not to lose their footing. Going up, slow as waiting, they complain about the climb, grumbling, choking, making a noise that should shake and wake the dead on the hill behind our house. Red, the trucks always are – red and heavy, a hot insult to the rising green fields sweeping away from the roadside.

            I can look down on the trucks, on the tops of their loads, the roofs of their dusty cabs, from my bedroom window. What I see – the house shakes and sways, as it does when the wind blows; and the ground shudders, and tree limbs fall, and grass bends low; and beside the road, flowers droop and gag and retch. Nothing changes; the wind continues to howl in the pine trees ringing the cemetery on the hill, the gravestones moan, the rainwater flows off the hill and onto my garden and into my well – but the dead don’t stir, even though I eat and drink them.

            None of this matters, didn’t matter, especially to old Perley Johnson next door, head down near his knees, sitting crosswise on his stoop on a kitchen chair tagged with ripped vinyl upholstery. Watching the straining trucks out of half-shut, wicked eyes, the fumes of his breath were nearly as violent as the fumes from the trucks. I brought Perley some wax beans and tomatoes from my garden, the garden he cunningly sat and watched most the summer – never asking. It didn’t matter that he did; neither thoughts nor fumes had enough strength to wither my corn. Perley was gone, moved to a miserable patch under the pines on the hill, before the corn ripened.

            This house from which I peer down onto the logging trucks has its own ghosts. They don’t float politely like rising clouds or pooling ground fog down from the hill; those bodies on the hill lay quiet, no matter how often I wait to catch sight of a stirring, or long for the tickle of a cold finger on my back. They sleep through my nervous calling. I tell my husband, I tell my neighbor, “Hey Charley, hey, Sophie, we have quiet neighbors on the hill. They don’t party but once a year, and I’m still waiting for an invitation.” The hill is no livelier after old Perley’s arrival, Perley who no longer sits staring at his knees, no longer turns on his lights in the cold morning hour of three, no longer forgets the blanket on the clothesline, no longer wishes he had strength or desire enough to hack at the weeds growing tall over the pile of empty bottles in his yard.

            Perley doesn’t stir. Even so, I’m careful not to look sideways at his porch and the empty chair, in case he regrets his place and drifts back to his chair, pulled by habit or old desires.

            No, the ghosts in my house have always been there, sharing the house with us in a most amiable way. They climb attic stairs that no longer exist, and pace across the guest room floor with the stiff tread of an old man leaning heavily on a cane for support, just risen from a rocking chair. The ghosts in my house watch me coming blindly up the steep stairs at four in the morning after following the whim of a hungry cat, after flitting by the windows – taking a quick look out to see old Perley’s light. I grip the banister tightly, and count the steps, just in case the ghosts are in a mood. I never look up.

            The ghosts scratch along the walls and sometimes slam invisible doors; they run underfoot and make me expect to see my cats where the cats can not be. They occasionally stir up the garbage and fill the house with its stink. They don’t talk; they don’t run their chill bones through my hair or whisper in my ears as I drift towards sleep. They riffle the air a bit in dark corners, and move quickly past the edges of my sight. They move through their own routines and leave me to mine; we share only the noises and the breathing air.

            I walk up the river road, part way up the hill, hopping into ditches to let the logging trucks pass, and eventually come to the Quaker cemetery. There the gray and solemn sleepers rarely move, except to shift more solidly into clay and gently sigh. The long field that lays painfully dry and stubbled between the stone fence at the road and the wood fence near the graves is yellow and hard and irritable. No living feet tread it now. It longs for the feet that carried bodies across tender greenery.

            This field has been cheated of its fodder, its time of growing lush and loamy and sleepy, digesting old dreams. This field is hot and tired of waiting. This field murmurs maledictions to its roots and the air.

            The Quakers deepen and sigh.

            I can look across the river and see the apple orchards choking out their twisted, splintered lives under rotting grasses and invasions of pine. When the lumber trucks grumble by, the apple trees with their gnarled arms lean out towards them, asking to be taken, as prostitutes reach towards the cars of men. The pines send their creeping roots quietly closer.

            I walk through town on a quiet night. The crumbling houses, the rusting trailers, drooping their scattered splendors inward, slump in the middle like hump-backed old men. All these torn windowpanes glittered when the apple trees were cherished and the Quakers walked. The houses and trailers haunt the town as they sift into dust, filtering by inches into the ground. I don’t dare to look in the windows; I do not care to see who or what might look out.

            On cold dark nights when the wind howls and chitters around our tight-closed doors, the old houses scream their rage into the wind, rage that drops down our chimneys to sit in impotent lumps on the hearth until someone kicks it into bits and it flavors the air we breathe. Then we sit hunched into ourselves, or prowl and scowl at one another. We breathe the dry old skin our houses shed, their rumbles fill our ears while we sleep, they disintegrate around us and powder our heads with the dust and ashes of age. We live in our ghosts. Our ghosts live in us. We quite companionably breathe the air ghosts tread.

            Sophie has a ghost who whispers in her ear: “The barn is getting dirty; why did you cut down my vine that I loved so well; don’t put the garden there; cleaner, this all must be cleaner…” This was the old lady’s home, and she trained it to utter cleanliness. Sophie bought it from the old lady, who took off her apron, moved to her daughter’s house, and died. I can hear the old lady’s broom at work in the rafters of the barn, and feel her wrath at the messes that explode behind Sophie’s child. The old lady impatiently waits for Sophie and Emory to learn her ways, but they’ve learned only the guilt. I wait for the day the old lady will reclaim her house.

             The old lady hadn’t time to worry the land with her madness, but it knew her hand and her anger from younger days, and a sharp glance from her was sufficient: the woods did not encroach on the field and the garden flowers did not spread from their places. Sophie and Emory have no such command. In spite of much cutting and burning and anxiety, the brush edges towards the house, perennials wither or run wild and lush through the fields, and dust films barn windows.

            Sophie and Emory bought the old building next door, and turned a standing wreck into a half-demolished wreck. Brush piles dot the fields and an old freezer rusts half-way across the lawn where it lost its way to the dump. The old lady groans among the attic rafters.

            Several times a year Sophie and Emory endure the visitations of the old lady’s disapproving, nervous daughters. The daughters and their husbands prowl through the house and over the land, noting everything, making lists in their minds, and in half-spoken rebukes murmur what has changed and deteriorated since dear mama, bless her soul, passed on. They, too, know mama is still there, hidden in the plaster and woodwork, whispering, whimpering, whispering…

            They tally the sins of Sophie and Emory’s caretaking against mama’s housekeeping. Mama catches the tally with her broom and keeps the list polished and drifting on the air for weeks. Passed on the way by three truckloads of dead trees as I trudge back up the hill to my house, I sneer. No relatives of my ghosts are welcome to come stir up the dead. My ghosts are all my own – except old Perley, who isn’t really there.

            Across the valley, on the peak of the other ridge, the mountain woman spends her days in the kitchen, sitting at her old wood table. There she cooks, and drinks tea, and reads, and writes her poems. In her kitchen the mountain woman sits across from the ghosts that live in her table. One of the ghosts has a body on this earth yet, which breathes, eats, sometimes speaks.

            The body belongs to the mountain woman’s mother, who is very old; her life exists in her memory and in that of her daughter, and in the table she haunts in her daughter’s kitchen. The mother was a poet: the mountain woman is a poet. The ghost shares the table with her dead husband, who wrote about nature – a poet writing prose. These ghosts lived and loved and wrote together, and this was their kitchen table.

            The mother is tiny and shriveled and light. The mountain woman is tall and large and blooming and heavy. Yet the insubstantial mother, living behind her eyelids, rests heavily on the kitchen table. The father always found it more difficult to maintain substantiality; he pulls lightly upwards on the table. The table groans and creaks when the mountain woman sits at it. The table shudders and sighs when she takes up her pen. The table mutters and cries when she writes.

            Her mother’s ghost follows her down the cold hall when the mountain woman trundles to bed. Her mother’s eyes look through windows and out of mirrors in the mountain woman’s poems. Her father’s hands rest across her shoulders as she writes.  The mountain woman dreams strange dreams as she works in her kitchen or drives her horse across the barrens.

            Julia lives in the sea captain’s house, on the edge of the river in the valley. The brother of the sea captain – another sea captain – built a twin house up the hill, across the river. No one has lived in the brother’s house for long and long; proud and solid on its face, its interior has rotten and fallen away. The townfolk see the house with old eyes that can see only what once was, and the sea captain is content. The shell of his house slumbers peacefully under the sky, and with his brother he haunts Julia.

            Julia’s house is not respectable. She has no time or money to keep the flowerbeds weeded, to paint the shutters, to furnish the house as the sea captain did. The captains hate modern plumbing and heating. They hate the house’s slightly tipsy demeanour. The house makes the townfolk feel uneasy – it’s not what it once was.

            When Julia moved to the valley her ghosts came with her. They quarrel with the local haunts. Julia’s ghosts are refined, educated ghosts, who resent being buried away in this godforsaken backwater. The sea captains, gleefully malicious, drive their unwilling guests deep into the shadows.

            Mice die in the springhouse; roof tiles fly off during storms. The old furnace chokes and fumes. Salt water rises and recedes in the basement with the spring floods. The wind finds large cracks in the walls in the dark of night in the dead of winter. The captains chortle in the attic and in closets, popping doors open at whim. Nothing – no floor, no counter, no bookshelf – lies flat, but all at sea-tossed, swell-formed angles.

            Julia perseveres. She bullies and cajoles the town men into fixing up, shoring up, fishing out, nailing tight, as she slips from poor gentility into dignified but abject poverty. The sea captains sneer at her through the townspeople’s eyes, and wait for both houses to be theirs again.

            The mad woman in the castle on the ridge is the mother of ghosts. High in the tower, peering into the darkness from behind windows hung with threadbare, mildewed blankets, she scowls at the lights in the town and a ghost is conceived in her head. It travels down, around her tongue and teeth, down her throat and stomach, marinating in bile and guile.

            Somewhere inside the mad woman the ghost sleeps and stretches, slumbers and grows. Days, weeks, years pass, and another trip to the tower causes the ghost to stir with anticipation. The mad woman dispels the ghost in wracking, rending birth spasms – from her ears, her nose, from her womb, from her bowels. The most potent of the ghosts the mad woman spews slip from her eyes, drenched in tears. The mad woman’s ghosts race through the castle, ripping the wall hangings, crouching in the cold hearths, gibbering at her mortal children. They wail at midnight on the blueberry barrens. They cry at night in the lupine fields. They howl from the tower, and the echo falls on roofs in the town and weighs them down.

            No one from the town but Julia walks near the barrens before dawn or after twilight. Julia lives so deep in unnamed grief that she doesn’t notice when one of the mad woman’s ghosts tries to capture her thoughts as she wanders in the barrens.

            The mad woman gives to each of her ghosts the care she abandoned for human measure.

II:1 People

            The people here aren’t much to look at. They’ve wrinkles and sun squints, caused by squinting into the glaring snow and from peering into the unlit rafters of house and barn late at night. And there’s a fine bit of bright nervousness: too often they’ve seen the shadows of the ghosts that sit in the dark corners with them.

            Old Perley, now… You couldn’t tell from looking at him where his wrinkles ended and his stubbly beard began. Grey and white he was, fading out… no spark in his eyes, already crumbling into dust. Unless you got real close – and you wouldn’t really want to get very close – you couldn’t rightly tell whether it was him on the chair on his porch, or just a pile of some old junk he’d set out there. Unless you got much closer, you couldn’t tell if he was seeing anything, or even looking, except deep inside.

            It didn’t matter much to old Perley whether his eyes were open or not. All he saw were things that were no longer there, and never had been, most likely. He specialized in the ghost of his dead wife – who had, when she lived, made his shack a sweet cottage. He had killed her, and he continued to kill her, again and again, day after day, hour by hour, in always more complicated ways.

            Folks who know tell that old Perley’s wife died, peacefully, in her sleep of a heart attack. Still old Perley killed her over and over again, her falling down stairs, falling down cellar, falling out a window, pushed down a well. Old Perley had cancer, and as it ate out his guts, his bones melted down, like candles that had set too long in the sun. Perley’s skin shriveled up into knots that hid in the crevices of his twisted frame. The skin had nothing to fill it out: the cancer consumed everything but his heart.

Perley’s heart never forgot that his wife fell into her grave before him, leaving him with a life and a house falling in around his ears. Old Perley followed his wife as fast as he could, crumpling in on himself until there was nothing left but the unsettled house.

            Ugly Man across the way is swollen up like a balloon. Watch – him bulging his huge self in and out of that tiny little car is rare entertainment – we watch him through the binoculars every chance we get. The house Ugly Man and his wife and kid live in is set into the hill, and the foundation wall on the outside was once a row of glass windows. Those windows are now nothing but broken bits and shards; we can see the insulation hanging from the walls in strips; the concrete is nicked and crumbling. Ugly Man and his bulk have done these things when his aim at his wife was off.

            Ugly Man leaves the lights on all night and all day. Ugly Man’s wife, Rosa, is also big, but she’s big like a blood blister that’s full of bad  ‘cess. Rosa has dark darting eyes that flash back and forth in her head like a nervous school of fish in a tank. She looks like she’s always trying to see over her shoulder – and so she should, because there’s no telling when Ugly Man’s fat will catch fire, and sorrow falls on the person who doesn’t notice in time to get out of the way. Rosa’s shoulders hunch up and forward like she’s trying to protect something painful perched in the center of her chest.

            Ugly Man and Rosa have a kid named Briiiyan. Briiiyan has no ears; they fell off when he was about two. Briiiyan is now four years old, and he talks to no one but the dog and the mailbox and the trees. Briiiyan never talks to Ugly Man. Briiiyan never talks to Rosa. Briiiyan leaves the house early in the morning, and crouches under the trees, or in the deep field grass, and talks and talks and talks the day away.

            Ugly Man never talks to Rosa, but he hollers. Rosa hollers at Briiiyan, and talks to the painful thing in her chest. Briiiyan sometimes hollers into the open air. Briiiyan is very thin and mostly insubstantial. Briiiyan gets little to grow on, because Ugly Man and Rosa first suck as much nourishment as they can suck, up into themselves. But Briiiyan wouldn’t take the fat over the lean if it were offered, because he knows it is a fine thing to be able to sink into the grass and remain unnoticed.

            Ugly Man works days and nights, and he always leaves his lights on. I can tell when Ugly Man gets home, or is home: there will be quiet, except for the grumble of the logging trucks, and Briiiyan’s whispering to the mailbox, and an occasional shriek from Rosa trying to get Briiiyan’s attention. Then, of a sudden, Ugly Man will sonic boom a stream of larded phrases, and across the street we jump up, running out into the yard or to a window, binoculars in hand. We watch Ugly Man bash shrapnel off his car door as he struggles to remove himself from the driver’s seat, we count and catalog the debris from the house that flies from Ugly Man’s huge hams. When Ugly Man is home, he never shuts up. We count, and we catalog, and we listen, and we dread the day that something light and tender will be torn out and flung to the earth by Ugly Man’s fury.

            The old man has a mean black dog that visits the neighbors before they wake up. Mangy and rough he is, nosing into gardens and compost piles and garbage cans and barns, collecting the fragments of the stories these tell. The old man’s dog wanders home, followed by an angry neighbor who shouts at the old man to keep his ugly dog tied up.

            The old man doesn’t hear what they say: they talk too fast, too much spittle flies, their mouths open too wide, and most the words get lost, blown away in the wind before they reach his ears. The old man smiles and nods and waves as his neighbor huffs off, then he goes back into his trailer and lies on the couch.

            The dog licks at his dish; sometimes the old man has thought to put food into it. He nuzzles the old man’s ear and breathes hot damp memories from his wanderings over the old man’s face and down his neck. The old man rubs the dog’s ear, his eyes close, and he wanders a bit with the dog through dream streets.

            The dog waits until the old man’s breathing is steady, then he goes to stand guard outside the trailer. The dog is a warrior, who dares the four winds to try to get by him to blow the old man away. The old man is light and transparent, and he lives at the gate to the cemetery. The black dog weighs him down and keeps him on this side of the gate, for now.

            Some days the old man walks down the hill to get groceries. If I’m in the garden, he’ll stop; I’ll feel the faint flutter of his gaze on my back, and I’ll rise and look for him. The old man will stand and talk and talk and talk, but I can’t hear him. His words are light, and the breezes catch them and scatter them back towards the cemetery gate. I smile and nod; I gather some tomatoes and bring them down the bank to put in his dry old hand. We smile and nod at each other, two strangers with no language between us but this. I quickly look at his pale eyes: he’s happy to have my tomatoes. The old man remembers he was going to the store, and drifts slowly off.

            Ira is the storekeeper. He is wrinkled and furred with a light gloss of mold and mildew, just like the fruits he sells. His hands are sharp claws, which flick and catch at whatever passes near. Ira sits on a stool next to the milk cooler, mingling his breath with the sour smell of the cooler. As you reach ‘round the counter, he reaches out and clutches your arm, then with a sigh releases it; he is there to sell, but he is not certain you are there to buy. Ira is rooted to this spot, as rooted and unmoving as the potatoes in their bin.

            Ira’s wife has empty eyes and a hollow voice. She doesn’t talk unless she has to, but she’ll point out where you’re lacking, like it or not. She guards the register and takes the cash, snatching it with a quick motion and drawing it closely to her before putting it away. For a moment her eyes fill with life, but when the drawer shuts again, the spark has all drained away.

            Sally and Horace live in a house his folks built six generations before. Sally is a shape changer: her face stretches and shrinks and swells or narrows to match the long-dead faces of the women who filled that house before she came. All the women who lived in that house are the important ones; they collected the detritus of the dying town, years filled with papers and cloths and scraps, piling it all carefully into boxes and baskets and corners and attics.

            Sally spends her life searching out the bits and pieces, dusting them off, lovingly breathing in the motes of the past. Sally reads every scrap and scrawl, fingers the old fabrics. She dreams and talks and dreams again, as the fragments crumble around her.

            When Sally is dreaming, Horace is living. He fills the stoves, boils the water, piles some of the collection near the door to use as kindling or take to the dump. He talks to the cats; Sally talks to whoever is in the house. When she comes to and starts talking, Horace snaps, “There she is again, and still talking! Will the woman never be silent?” He hops out of his rocking chair and heads for the barn, taking with him whatever cat he had brought inside for his lap.

            Sally natters at Horace and the cats, and Horace croons to the cats, “You’re a nice old fur. Ignore the old lady, she don’t like fur, no. You like to be petted, yes. The stove is warm, the barn is cold. You’re a handsome old fur.”

            One by one Horace lifts the cats and gives them a hug and kiss, then puts them out the door. Sally is talking non-stop with the women and what they saved; Horace is walking ‘round the house muttering to the furniture and the stoves and the windows, telling one about the doings of his day, giving another the news from town, asking yet another when supper will be ready. Horace and Sally eat and talk and mutter, never looking at one another, then subside into a heavy silence. Sally begins to dream, and Horace rises and goes out to the barn, to render a bedtime soliloquy to the cats and cows. When Horace is in the barn he stands straight and solid, his hands firm and sure as he cares for his animals, his voice full; in the house he is bent and his edges fuzz up, his eyes wander. Horace finds it easier to think in the barn, where generations of women-folk aren’t waiting to sweep away his thoughts.

            The madwoman lives in the castle high on the ridge. At night we see lights flitting from dark window hole to dark window hole as she lifts a blanket shrouding the windows in different rooms of the house. The madwoman has wild grey hair that changes color from poppy to camel and slate green as she moves about the castle.

            The castle is old, and although it belongs to the madwoman’s husband, it has stood through time waiting only for her. The madwoman is large and flowing; her face is lined deeply, and the lines shift in the lamplight to form eyes and mouth and nose when she needs them.

            There are many stairways in the madwoman’s castle, and the sound of children’s voices floats down them. Goat droppings litter the floors, and the floorboards are tracked with worm paths. The path to the castle is made of broken rock; the porch floor is riddled with rotten boards. No one sits on the musty, dusty furniture in the castle’s great halls. In the dining room the table is piled high with half-filled plates and mugs and bowls. In one bowl there is a frog. On this plate lives a spider. A goat nibbles apples from the tablecloth. A bird flies silently from behind the boxes that line the walls of the rooms.

            The madwoman sweeps up the cold ashes from the hearths of the many rooms that know no step but hers; she hoards the cold in the stones and bricks of the fireplace, she hoards the darkness in the corners of the rooms, in the chimneys, under the stairs. The madwoman descends and sprinkles treasured bits of cold dark ash upon the town from a pouch at her waist.

            The mountain woman is tall and broad, a magnificently handsome rock of a woman. She wears long billowing dresses and heavy dark shawls, and she drives to town behind a horse. The madwoman shrieks at her, her face twisted in jealousy: Mount Alma! Mount Alma! But the mountain woman only smiles and drives on.

            The mountain woman lives in an old farmhouse high on the ridge, just beneath the stars under the deep sky. The mountain woman has a kitchen, a cat, a barn and a horse. She comes alive in the evening; she is intimate with the ways of the granite ledges and blueberry barrens, the bears and the stars, under the dark shawl of midnight.

            The mountain woman turns socks and lives inside out so that she will know the inside as well as she knows the outside. She plays at dice with the gods on the barrens under the dropping sky, but she never holds the die long enough to singe her hands. The mountain woman is a poet; her poetry lights her path, and she casts her poetry as a spell to ward off the day and bring back the expansive night. The mountain woman eats the day at twilight.

            Lesley is old and his face is that of a very young child. His eyes are mild blue, his fair hair floats around his head, his clothes fit on his little round body the way clothes fit young children who still have undefined forms. But Lesley is strong and does a fine full day’s work. He loves his cats, his apple fields, his comfortable old car, and the deer and raccoons and critters that share his summer garden.

            Lesley lives in the house he was born in, the house he will die in. His house is white and clean, set in a clearing between the trees just down hill from the top of the ridge. Lesley’s house has no electricity, and he says his life is neater that way. Lesley drops his work often to walk to the pond or the barrens or the ledges, to turn his eyes and ears and thoughts to the growth of leaves, the songs of birds, the first flight, the last fall. Lesley says that this is part of his work, perhaps the most important part. All day the sun shines full and warm on his house and his land, and because he lives from sun up to sun down, eating only what his garden produces, repairing only what his house and sheds require, working only as his vegetables grow, Lesley shines warm and full in his bed at night.

            The old minister and his wife live in a trailer placed alongside their house. The house is tall and once was straight. The trailer is small and twisted and rusting. When the old minister’s children grew up and moved away, the old minister and his wife began to fill the house with treasures to keep for their children.

            The house is filled to the brim with the things the old minister and his wife have saved and treasured. None of the windows open, and the doors must be propped shut from outside with boards. The house is sagging from the weight of the stuff that fills it. The treasures the old minister and his wife have collected have long since turned to mold and dust, and the house is slowly sinking into its cellarhole.

            The old minister and his wife haven’t been in the house in many years. They don’t know that the treasures have turned to trash, and because they treasure it so highly, they don’t see that the house is mouldering, too. Their children have moved far away, and never come to visit, and never intend to return. The old minister and his wife have waited patiently for their children to come home.

            After many years the house and its treasure must be cherished and protected only because they have been cherished and protected for so long. After many more years, the old minister and his wife, failing in health, don’t remember why they cherish the house; they only remember that the tiny trailer they live in is less of a burden than the house. The house has become heavy, it weighs on their frail spirits, and they know they can no longer cherish it as it deserves. They sell the house full of treasures to a stranger who hopes to find antiques or rare books or jewelry mixed in with the trash.

            The stranger opens the door to the house, kicks the rubble away from the door, gingerly sorts through the boxes and bags and suitcases and crates that fill the sad old house, and finds only ashes and stains, the nests of field mice and chipmunks and droppings of bats. The stranger looks through the house, finds only trash, locks it up, and passes on.

            The old minister and his wife live in the small trailer and wait.

            Julia is tall like the mountain woman, but slender as the mountain woman is broad. Julia lives in a world that tumbles over itself: nothing is as it used to be, and nothing as it is now is as fine or as good as it was once before. Julia’s sweet babies have become great, hulking, difficult teenagers. Her children’s father has become a dreaded stranger. Julia’s flower  beds are full of weeds, the fine manners and delicate sensibility that order her sense of dignity are scorned by the townfolk as symptoms of a lack of character and common sense. Julia’s car won’t run, her stove won’t heat, parts of her body have become alien and diseased. The comfort and ease that Julia was raised to expect to occur naturally in a life well-lived have deserted her along with the money her ex-husband took away with him.

            Julia saves tatters and tag-ends of old lace and ribbons, velvet and roses, books and teacups, and painstakingly pieces them together into lovely shadows and memories of civility and comfort. As soon as she looses one delicately-wrought remembrance to enrich the air, and turns away to begin work on a second, a child or utility company or head-blind neighbor crashes into the lovely, fragile charm, knocking it apart and scattering fragments far and wide, throwing Julia to her knees.

            Julia sits silently and grieves, then gathers up the fallen bits into her grandmother’s long white apron, and glues them together again. Tears and hope form her glue, and some days a mended memory or a fragment will hold together in a warm, sunny spot for hours, proof against all the battering of children or bills or condescending outsiders. Once in a while, for just a moment, someone other than Julia recognizes the remembrance and cups it protectively, reverently, in her hands.

            Julia lives on a hill just above the river that slices the valley between the ridges. Her bedroom window looks out on the river, which runs swift and wild away from that place. Trees grow high on the banks of the river, and no one can see when Julia tosses her grief into the water. The river runs swift and wild, and is strong enough to have once carried men and barges far to the sea.

            The river sucks whatever falls into it deep into itself, breaks it apart, washes it clean, buoys it up and moves it along, tosses it high in the air in a spray that glows with sunshine and rainbow colors. There are many secrets in the river, and Julia knows most of them. Sometimes she thinks, wistfully, that she might join them.

            Emory’s brothers are all blowing, burly bulks of men: fishermen, loggers, builders. Emory and his brothers come from a rough town on the lying coast, and his brothers remain there, living in trailers, tenements, tract houses, fishing boats, and they are proud and happy to do so.

            But Emory is tiny and light and particular. Emory’s eyes shift uneasily, searching for signs, always for signs: signs that he is not being heard, or if listened to not being taken seriously; signs that his dignity is not appreciated; signs that his trek into respectability is somehow eroding; signs that he has not recognized or realized some important step that will make him wealthy; signs that Sophie is growing happy and content.

             Emory is taut and tense. He dares the world to make the mistake of thinking him to be anything than that which he imagines himself to be. Emory’s precise words and phrasing, his precious activity and emotions – all these will lay any chance fate that might make him grow big and brawny and common like his brothers.

            Emory reminds Sophie that she is different: different from her family, different from her neighbors, different from her friends, who must be no real friends because of he difference. Emory assumes that he is the only one not different from Sophie; Sophie has never said where in her continuum of values the shock that is Emory lies.

            Sophie is a mistress of illusions. Sophie plants a garden to create the illusion that she is a frugal country housewife. She stacks some wood to create the illusion that she lives roughly. Sophie drives long miles to a food coop to appear to need to save money. Sophie works hard to appear to be what Emory is, and Emory struggles mightily to become what Sophie has always been.

III:1  Atmospheres

            Entropy settles into the cup of this valley the way a cat nestles onto a stove-warmed pillow in the evening of a cold winter. It hovers, hunches down, turns ‘round and ‘round, then melts into every vacant wrinkle. You can tell it means to stay put for a good long while: there’s no good reason for it to move on.

            The summer complaints sometimes wander accidentally inland onto our ridges, when they’ve been tossed from the seacoast by too much sun, too much ice cream, too intimate a knowledge of the salt and the sea. They wander our way, looking for rocks that stand silent and unmoving in a green field that doesn’t undulate and rise with the moon. They wander inland searching for shade and fresh water and a respite from motion and sound. They look around them with eyes that are still bedazzled by sunglare on sea. They follow the road up past Lesley’s place to the top of the ridge, they gawk at the castle and the blueberry barrens and the fields of lupine. They squint down at the river, and through the sea of air towards the far ridge, where the cemetery lurks behind the pines. Rushing forward to gaze, falling back to move on, eventually they fade like the tide back towards the coast. As they climb back into their boats of cars, we hear them intone chantys about the bracing country air.

            I can agree the air gets damned invigorating about mid-January when the wind bowls out of the north and the only dry wood is buried under at least three feet of snow and ice, the woodstove is burning too hot, and the windows in the north room and bathroom decide they’re too tired and ice-heavy to stay up. A few inches of snow drifting across the bathtub, wafted in by the bracing country air, is mighty invigorating, indeed.

            But the atmosphere of the place mostly rests on our heads and muddles our feelings. We grow slow; moving deliberately, thought slows into musing, activity wanders like a dream of movement. There’s a leaden tinge to the sky here that might properly belong to the sea, but the sea is nowhere in sight. The ocean’s catarrh heaves itself over the ridge from time to time without warning, and fills up this high-sided bowl we live in with fog and salt and a roiling uneasiness that we have no room for, nor charms to ward it off. It weighs a body down to know the clear blue sky is so far above, and that so much land must be climbed before getting any closer to it.

            Our houses peel paint, and our lawns grow long, and we think about doing something about it – but we don’t. Our old cars pop off their wheels and settle into infirm eternity, rusted hinges drop doors, and windows chatter and shatter and fall. The roof and half of the second story walls of Emory’s shack become rubble, but no matter how hard or how often he works at it, the shack is never dismantled further. The junked freezer in his field never gets to the dump. Ugly Man’s smashed windows stay smashed. The community hall slides towards the river, shifts about to gain a footing, then settles comfortably into its new position.

            Every spring I say, “We have to get that west field mowed.” Every fall he replies, “We’ve forgotten to get that west field mowed.” It can be no other way; we measure movement by the number of things we remember we meant to do.

            In a house part way up the ridge, a child, long sick, joins the family ghosts, then trails his living family wherever they have gathered. He drifts on in the conversations that pass from mouth to mouth. Dead he is, they say he died, but they speak of him as though he still played underfoot. Whenever they speak of him so, they clasp him firmly to their sides as if he had never died. They hold him there beside them, they gather him in more tightly than ever when he still lived. In time he loses all desire to pass beyond the grasp of their hands.

            Energy is needed to keep from falling too deeply into the quicksand of the entropy that grips all the living on the ridge, and seduces the dead, through force of habit, to follow its decline. Thinking is action, action is motion, and with that deep, heavy sky above, motion on the ridge can only take place downward – irrevocably, depressingly, downwards.

            The fact is, sometimes it’s just easier to stay in bed. Jobs come and go, but mostly go. There isn’t much in the place that many folks find must be done. If the garden isn’t all it should be this year, that’s not to say whether it will be or won’t be next year. Paint peels from houses, but they provide shelter even so. Children run wild, but grow up in time. Grass grows long, but dies in the autumn. The river runs, high or low, but runs all the same.

             It is a terrible thing to lie in bed on a bright morning and know that outside your own family and the ghosts in your house, no one in the wider world needs you. To stare at the ceiling, heart flowing hot and heavy in your chest, and think about friends and neighbors; to know that were you no longer present, they would only alter their references to you to past tense. In their minds you would continue, suspended in the life you were living at that very moment - hunting, perhaps, driving the same 10-year-old car, living in the same house, tending the same vegetable garden, still looking halfheartedly for a job. Only when they came to speak of you would you slip from present, living self into death – throwing you back into the moments the remembering living chose to relate.

            If you were to die, you would be trapped where you are with no hope of mystery or miracle or sudden magic arriving to change your life. If you were to get out of bed, you would add one more day to those stretching endlessly behind and promising to stretch endlessly ahead. Another day of fighting the guilt of being without a job, of earning no money, of being no force, of stepping to the side of the expected path.

             To get out of bed would be to face the need to strive, while not appearing to be striving. To get out of bed would be to take responsibility for not failing, or appearing to fail, when the strife came to nothing in the end. In all of the need to do and to appear not to be doing, you would exhaust yourself, spend the hours of the working day shamed, and when it was over and done, you would be merely back in bed, having accomplished nothing but dressing and undressing.

            By staying in bed, you find yourself in exactly the same spot tomorrow, having effortlessly accomplished two things: you spent a day free of shame, because those who must stay in bed when others work need not strive for normalcy; and you spent a day entirely pleasantly and in great comfort.

III:2   Angels

            Maybe it’s because we don’t really put our minds and hands to work to tame the land, except for the few feet that directly encircles house or cabin or trailer. Maybe it’s because even the farmers, even the berry growers, expect just one thing from their land – berries, or hay, or corn, or cattle. Maybe because we don’t bother to trim its edges or root out its weeds, and because we put up meandering and untrustworthy boundary markers, or none at all. Maybe that is why the land we live on is beloved of spirits, imps, and angels.

            In the wildness that surrounds the mown or herd-driven field; in the wildness that springs up in fencerows or in patches of wet ground and forgotten ground and ground too long taken for granted; in the wildness that, in other towns or on the coast, would be trimmed, and tamed, and greened and perfected lawns; in the old apple trees that are no longer cherished for their fruit and are scorned as wood; in the berry patches no longer cut for their sweet jewels – here the angels have made their homes.

            In the tall grass under the locust trees on the ridge is a perfect circle formed by trunk and shrub and grass. The grass is deep and untrampled, the sunlight dappled as it filters through the locust leaves. In spring the circle is an orb, with heady walls constructed of the perfume of locust blossoms. In fall the sphere is deep with yellowed grass and crickets.

            I am careful to skirt the circle; cat babies may pass through, but my human feet would break the hallowed soil and draw the earth down upon my head, turning the circle into nothing but long-neglected grass in a ring of pucker-brush.

            Little bright eyes watch from the circle, and the wind never stirs there. Little bright eyes with powerful old gaze hold breath when human feet approach. Little bright eyes can only be seen in a quick glance, a sidewards look, a tentative touch of the senses. Little bright eyes gather the sun and shade about them and are blessed in silence and sight.

            All that is holy in the field and garden and fruit trees and crickets and dragonflys in our yard flows from the blessings those angels under the locust trees send out. All that is holy and mischievous passes through that ring of little bright eyes.

III:3   Growing Things

            It is impossible to live on the ridge without growing something. Vegetables and critters are the right things to grow, because growing them is essential to not needing, not wanting. The man who grows vegetables has what he needs unless he hasn’t the common sense of a woodchuck – which is exactly what the townsfolk have come to expect from those from away.

            Vegetables and cattle are the things to grow. You can grow fruit if you are a show-off, and you come under suspicion of deliberately causing trouble if you grow too much of it. A nice apple tree is all right, if your ghosts didn’t leave you a couple of old ones to scavenge, but there isn’t really any need for anything else.

            Vegetables are the choice of the honest folk, the strong folk, the proud folk. Fruit is for those with ideas above themselves. Flowers are the resort of those weak-minded creatures who can’t take care of themselves, and elderly ladies who have proved their inner strength through long hard years of getting by.

            Julia grows flowers, in massive beds in the front of her house. She cuts her flowers and brings them into her house, onto her table, puts them into a pitcher, lets them drip petals on the floor. If Julia plants a tomato plant, it withers: if she scatters carrot seed, it doesn’t sprout; if she hills potatoes, the beetles eat all, including the flowers.

            Emory and Sophie grow both flowers and vegetables; a vegetable plot is envisioned with great enthusiasm in the spring, slowly planted patchily, then allowed to go to weeds and seed by mid-July. The flowers Emory and Sophie plant stand in straight tight rows around the edges of things – lawn, garden, trees, house foundation, steps – becoming blowsy and dry in midsummer.

            I have a vegetable garden next to the house, and another on a flat spot going up the hill towards the cemetery: in that garden, behind the house, I have hidden a peach tree, and I grow sweet potatoes and a Christmas rose, and tomatoes from Siberia, and asparagus, and I don’t weed out the Johnny Jump-ups when they scatter into the carrots. In that garden behind the house I hide basil and cardamom, and flowers with startling colors, and a set of perfectly round rocks, and the bleached fragile bones of a bird’s beaked skull. In that secret garden behind the house, I tuck plants into beds with grass snippets up to their necks. I lie in the straw and listen to the crickets, I dream unspoken dreams, and I whisper words of mystery. In that garden behind the house, I secretly grow the dear things that haunt my mind and soul. I go into that garden behind the house at the tip of dawn, I in the clothes I wore rising from my bed, I with fingers sore and stroked to the bone with soil.

            A garden can’t be avoided on the ridge unless you are the great-grandmother of so many gardens that you have earned the right to rest in your old age, or unless, like Perley, you have lost all sense of self-respect. Perley once had a garden, before his wife died and died and died: and the plot that was garden shows up in the tangle of tall weeds that fill his yard as softer, filled with different weeds. Perley tosses his empty bottles into the empty garden now; it must have been a fertile plot, because the pile of bottles grows and grows and grows.

            The growing things that are rooted in the garden are to be taken up and bottled, lined up on cellar stairway shelves, planted in baskets and boxes and tubs, and carried into the root cellar. Nothing is to be wasted. The tops go to the chickens and pigs or compost, the flesh goes into jars, and the skins are cooked again and pressed and pounded and grated and sieved, forced into butters or jams or stews.

            The land throws forth fruit, and we turn our hands to it and fill our cellars with the produce. The apples drop, the cherries and Juneberries grow dark, raspberries tangle over the old cellar holes, the barrens cry out to be raked. Blackberries advance through the field behind the abandoned church, growing a path of thorns that will one day nestle against the god-forsaken building below and forsaken graves above.

            The blackberries have encircled two old apple trees, and boldly climb the hill around them. The blackberries are heavy and sweet and full in the wasp-droning sun, and they fall with thick thuds into my basin. I put them onto my stove and sweat the juice and flesh from them, I press them through a sieve, I flavor them with cloves and honey and whisky, and the bottles stand waiting in my dark kitchen cupboard, waiting to spring forth with heat and abandon on a cold winter day.

            Blackberries nestle in my dreams, haunt my waking thoughts, black and juicy and sweet and painful. I pick thorns from my hair, out of my arms, pluck thorns from my clothes. My fingers and lips and tongue are dark with berries and pain, my eyes glow in ebony light. The little old ladies down by the river see the stain of my passion and turn away: those berries should have gone into their light pails, should have become jam for the baked goods table at the historical society fair. Those berries will hide in my house without a thought for charity, and warm our bellies and lighten our souls.

            Sweetfern grows on the graves on the hill, and wild asparagus litters the paths. I eat the sins of the dead. I drink the incense of the tomb. Wintergreen freshens my mouth.

III:4    Voices

            The lingo of our ghosts passes through our consciousness in many voices: the grumble and rasp of the pulp trucks that groan under the death sighs of the trees they carry; the hushed whisper of the wind in the Quaker cemetery, which echoes the solemn prayers of its inhabitants; the mutterings that linger near door and window and hearth, lyric of the ghosts we harbor in our houses. The voices that come to us on the wind sing many songs: canons of daily life, arias of love and longing, dirges of fallen hope and lost time. The wind that puffs down our chimneys begins a lecture about duty and chores; the itchy skitterings of mice in our cellars lead us to make nervous remarks about the length of the winter and our fear that the canned goods and root vegetables will run out before the garden is blooming again.

            The voice of Sophie’s ghost is dry and scratching, scritching away monotonously in the sound of broomstraw on wood, scrub brush on wall, dry leaves caught in a breeze-swept corner of the barn. This old ghost’s complaints sound like the clang of soap bar against wash basin, dust rag against mantelpiece. Her complaint is always the same, and Sophie’s response is simple: the less often she cleans, the less often she has to endure the old woman’s whining, and it didn’t take long to learn to ignore the ever-present tick-tick-tsking of her tongue in the living room clock.

            The disapproving voices in Julia’s house are the sharp, cracking tones of men who are angered that a woman has been left to protect them: the house bellows angrily as it shifts its bones in the cold of winter, it grumbles moodily as water drips into its cellar during spring thaw, and as it works its way through the roof shingles in a summer storm. The startling report of nail popping from beam in the turn of the night, the sudden crash of nail splintering from plaster, echo the violent outbursts of indignant men. Sometimes at night Julia opens her bedroom window and leans far out towards the river, listening, listening: I wonder if it speaks to her of trials eased and comfort and forgetfulness, or does its voice tremble with agitation and chaos? Is it the delicate tongues of the waves that woo her, or the cautioning cries of those who were lured to it before her?

            Perley’s ghosts speak through the neck of a bottle. The gurgle of the fire running into his belly clashes noisily with the clamour of his regret: and each time he tosses a bottle onto the pile in the yard, his wife screams and crashes in her fall, driving him to lift yet another bottle to silence the echo of her bones breaking into a thousand precious pieces, shattering his life.

            Emory only hears voices rising from crowds of people, but he is haunted by what they say: poor man – pretender – son of a fisherman; married too high – over proud – family shame – such a waste… The people that form the crowds that haunt Emory might be talking about the weather, the crops, the latest lobster scandal; but Emory hears what he hears, and he knows what he knows. He glares about him, under darkening brows, turning his head to see who is talking, straining to recognize the voices, which all seem strangely to resemble his own. He is determined to identify those who murmur against him. He thinks he knows, he has his theories, but he is never – quite – certain. The voices are elusive, and when he studies the faces of the people he believes have spoken, he sees lips apparently forming different words.

            The trees on the hill tower high above the graves of the ghosts who claim the town. Even the slightest breeze brings their whispers drifting down the hill, through the locust trees, through the grass. I stand in my garden and hear the rustle and murmur all about me, high above me, down about my ankles. At times the ghosts draw gentle fingers over the skin of my arms, through my hair, as they whisper and pass by, breathing their light words on my neck. Down the hill at the school, the children pause in their play and listen intently for a moment, then play again: they have heard this whispering all their lives, from the moment they emerged from between their mothers’ legs in the bed at home. They hear, and don’t hear – the words are formed in their bones and their blood.

            At the deepest point of the river cut, the words slide into the river and dissolve, carried away to the sea with Julia’s tears.

            High on the ridge, the mountain woman and the mad woman listen to their ghosts speaking in like voices. The mountain woman’s mother itches nervously, sometimes smoothly and steadlily, other times in jerky, unconnected comments, as the mountain woman’s pen switches over her paper. Her father groans or offers a nearly silent comment as the mountain woman shifts in her chair. The madwoman’s ghosts itch and scritch their moon-bitten dreams into her ears as mice skitter up and down the chimneys, as dry leaves blow fitfully down the stairs and halls, dragging their stems like dry fingers along the walls. The madwoman hears her demons growling in the low rumbles of the castle walls as they deteriorate, in the distant crash of another window falling out of its frame and shattering, many floors above. The madwoman hears incantations and chants, rites and maledictions as her ghosts jibber and jabber; the mountain woman hears rhythm and rhyme, lost opportunities and regrets, combinings and unweavings, despair and hope and half-lost, intricate, absent-minded dreams as she rustles her papers and writes on.

IV:1   Self Destruction

            Houses die slowly. They begin to waste away when the living forget to cozen them: when hinges, squeaking, remain dry, and paint, peeling, shreds and tatters without notice. When the house has grown cold enough, the living drift away, and their ghosts follow. The air within grows dry and hollow. Nails fall from cracking wood; granite foundation stones lean away from the heart of the cellar. The roofline sags, vertical drops out of true, horizontal dips away from center. Weeds force spaces between shrinking boards and crumbling mortar. Water runs down dry passages, and dries up in wet ones.

            The house sighs, settles, cries. Rumination decays into echoes of memory; as the house grows stiller, awareness falls away and nothing is left through the measure of years but an uneasy, settled grief. Houses must forget themselves before they die, forgotten first by living and dead, growing colder and brittle with the sweep of time.

            On the rocks on the ridge a house became deranged. Its grief collected in the rafters and slid down its walls, pooled on the floor and dripped through into the cellar, disturbing the perfect silence of forgetfulness. The house stirred on its stones, stirred and settled and resettled again. Its grief built, and in a base and basic way, it remembered itself and felt its decay. It reached for an end.

            On a night without moon, with lowering sky, the house gathered itself and found a voice. It cried to the heavens; it resonated its grief. The house attracted what was there to respond to it, and lightning pierced its roof and bored runnels to its heart. The house threw itself into the flames, dry timbers shrieking, cold stone cracking apart. When the sun rose again, blackened stones lay separated, working their way once more into the ground. Timber had fallen to ashes, ashes paled by dew, scattered by wind. Sand drifted slowly into the cellar hole; weeds seeded between the detritus. The lilacs shifted next to the shattered granite doorstep, reached and stretched to cover the hearth stone. Leaves slowly filled the cellar hole; rotting, they became rich earth. Seeds landed, sprouted, were sheltered by the stone cellar walls, grew strong and vigorous and lush, flowered and climbed and creeped, woodbine and bittersweet and lupine and wild cucumber, milkweed and blueberry and fern and lichen. The wildings moved in, living under stone and bush, in limb and crevice.

            Memory was gone; only the lilacs and the rhubarb by the back path, and the moss rose daydreaming by the barn sills, were sometimes disturbed by the memory of a lilting voice and gentle hand.

IV:2  Blessings

            When I sit, in the summer, on the moss beside the path, below the pines ringing the cemetery, the grass and the wildflowers rise nearly above my head; below my feet, the roofs of the houses on this side of the ridge gleam grey and look like solid, sober wings. The sunlight drops over the ridge like a blanket; butterflies float in the air, bees hum at the far end of sound, a hummingbird flits from flower cup to flower cup. Birds wing and warble in the trees. Down on the river, dragonflies flash between patches of sunlight rolling through the leaf canopy of oak and maple that bless the river’s banks.

            The river trills and dances, cool and bright through the day, steady and soothing at night. Milkweed patches emit a perfume that is thrilling in its sweetness and elusiveness; lupine bespatter the fields. As the year lengthens, Queen Anne’s Lace and purple aster lead green grass into gold, green leaves into red and orange and yellow and bronze; high narrow shadows into long, low, deep ones.

            We walk in the cemetery, following the path over deep beds of pine needles and moss, enforcing the silence. Polished stones reflect blue sky and clouds, marble and granite tombs in the pine’s shade breathe cool hints of fortunes made and lost, conceits imagined and monuments raised. Our thoughts chase beckoning shadows down leafy lanes.

            Beside my kitchen door is a sheltered spot that captures sun and melts the snow in February. When the windows are still lacy with frost and the snow bulks thigh-deep everywhere else, next to my kitchen black earth thaws, and I plant lettuce seed, pea seed, fantasy and holy basil. Sometimes they sprout; sometimes they grow; sometimes the crocuses bloom in the midst of the hearts of lettuce.

            Rabbit’s foot clover and yarrow and daisies grow alongside the road. In the field are tansy and wild columbine and purple vetch. Under the trees are trillium and lady’s slipper and ferns and star flower and wintergreen. The state library sends books to my mailbox. Sophie bakes ginger pudding and fruitcake dripping with peach wine. Lesley drops by for tea and cookies; the simple, sharp lines and bright white clapboards of the old houses are heartbreakingly beautiful in the moonlight, in the fall light, at dusk.

            Sometime between Christmas and New Year Julia lights candles, weaves evergreen into wreathes, mixes and seasons and cooks the delicacies she has managed to squirrel away over the last twelve months. Firelight warms the blue tiles around her fireplace, gleams in the polished wineglasses. We bring her red flowers, yellow wine, green pottery. The mountain woman arrives in snowflakes and sleigh; she turns soft pages and slowly lifts the words to her mouth, our ears. Wool dries near stove, laughter rills musically from lace-tableclothed rooms, sofas, settles, kitchen.

            The river runs, the sun and moon take their places, the earth swings through its arcs. We feel it in the soles of our feet as we follow the path home; we feel it in the light bathing our heads. Our ghosts vibrate to its rhythm, and in the late hours, the house filled with friendly dark and moonlit glimmering, moving with the sighs and brushings of our ghosts astir in the sleeping hours, I walk through the quiet rooms, turning memories over in my hands, and feel blessed.

IV:3  Passages

            The town abounds with passages from here, or now, to there, and then. Each of our houses is a sure passage back into someone else’s life. Step through the door of Sophie’s kitchen, and suddenly you straddle your original intent to visit Sophie and a time 50 years before when the old woman mustered all her powers of body and will to shape the room as it is. Walk through Julia’s front door and you come face-to-face with the Captain and his intentions. Enter Sally’s ell and take tea, and you find yourself sitting on the furniture that supported the dead, getting the dust of an ended century on your fingers, your eyelids, your lips, your tongue.

            In the old orchards time exists only in the past. The steep road that runs by my house is a chute down which hurtle the fallen remains of centuries passed. When you take a basin into the field behind the old church to pick blackberries, it’s only moments before you lose your own consciousness and fall into those of all the women who stood there before, picking berries from the same spot, into similar basins or even into the same basin – for the same reasons, with the same intentions.

            A beaten path rises from the school house, next to the river, rises through the fields and circles the tonsure of pines that cap the hill and shelter the cemetery. The path goes nowhere, simply up and around. Generations of schoolchildren have risen from their work or play and walked and ran that circle, just below the eternal beds of their grandparents, just beyond that place of greatest passage. From that path one can see all the town, smoke rising in the fall and winter, gardens fresh-dug in spring, laundry hanging and flowers blooming in summer. If you follow that path three times ‘round the cemetery and then head back towards the school, it’s easy to forget whether you are a child returning to your studies, an adult repeating the rituals of childhood, or a child merely remembering the path your parents took years before. If you are a child who follows that path three times ‘round then heads back to school, you might forget whether you are you, dreaming of yourself as your parent, or whether you are your parent, or a child dreaming of yourself as the child you may someday have, who follows in your path as you follow the path of your parents and grandparents.

            The passages between generations are thin-skinned in the town, easily breached by emotion or thought or intention or motion. Even those of us who live in new trailers have parked them on the old sites; when we step out of them onto the land, we step onto the granite block our parents stepped on to, we follow the path worn by our parents, to the barn our grandparents built. What has passed is fully present in our now; what is now is easily confused with what has passed.

            In the older people, those standing on the passage between here and gone, this other-timeliness expands their thoughts and feelings so that they open up, open wide, stretch and expand to hold the past and the future and the present in their minds and hearts. In the younger adults, those who have passed from a childhood that hopped from things passed to things not yet happened, never losing grip of the all-transforming now, the pressure of the presence of the easy passages between now and then shrinks them up. They look inward, deeply inward, trying to avoid becoming their parents, to find the source of now, to build their own past and cobble out their own future. They fold in, they limit, they build defining walls. And yet – surrounded by things from the past, their bodies are molded to it without their awareness; seeing the sights that have changed but barely, hearing the same sounds, drinking from the same cups, treading the same floors, opening the same doors – this generation becomes a regeneration, and is surprised to hear itself open its mouth and say what its grandparents said, to look in the mirror and see its parents looking back at them; to find itself doing the same things, and thinking the same thoughts, that all of the ghosts piled up in the walls ever did, ever thought.

            We try to restructure ourselves, and we do send out new roots – a little gain here, a little movement there, a tiny change, a new attitude, a subtle shade of emotion. And yet – these changes pass immediately into the past that our children will someday struggle against, and our own struggle –

we find we are comfortable with what we know, and that our minds and bodies have adopted what is past and let it root its tendrils firmly in the present. We have become a passageway, willing and informed or unconscious, between the future and the past: we have become our own ghosts.

End