by Scott Thomas
Dear Marcy. Her heart was too large and soft a target for the world and a boy with a tongue like mine. It was a trick, I said—birds could not live in a box for as long as she claimed. Well that had her crying for sure. Open it, I said.
No, no, not here, she said; it had to be opened at the Indians’ graves. She ran with her prize. I followed, over the hill with the river below and sunlight bright on her dress and her hair an envy of every autumn. I heard her call out when she dropped the box and it went tumbling down the hill and I heard the birds in the box screeching and the hiss of the fast dark water.
Marcy Waters kissed me because the moon was pale and wandering and the years had forgotten so much. Her lips were bitter from wild strawberries—like half-formed hearts—that we found coiling and trembling along the ruined boards of old Whitney’s fallen barn. We were fifteen summers out of the womb, gangly and white in the darkness, our bodies shivering and brittle-seeming without clothes. I felt the bones through her back and the press of her budding chest against my own hard ribs.
She laughed and lied and I believed her and told her that we were over dead Indians’ graves, and that they had killed old Whitney with his own axe and she pretended to believe. Then we lay down like birch branches on the grass.
They all knew the baby was mine—but didn’t it look like an owl, feathery-haired, and round-eyed and with strange arms that should have been wings. Marcy never spoke to me after that and they say her father sent her off to live with an aunt in Connecticut, but I saw her sometimes when rain made the river high and the dark waters shaped her face briefly and broke it up again. Maybe her father drowned her there where she used to dream and where she lost the box to the eastward current and cried as the crying birds gurgled. They were the souls of Indians, she said, and they cried for their land and their graves where we raised our corn.
I blame myself now and picture Marcy Waters with her freckles and the quick green of her eyes. In spring I imagine her laughter, and in autumn her grief. I found the box three miles down the river, the wood dark and soft and the latch a blur of rust. I could tell by its weight that it still contained the bones that old Whitney had dug up out of his field and stashed behind his woodpile.
I broke it open and waited for the sound of birds, but there was only the sound of a river squirming past the muddy banks and the half-remembered screams of old John Whitney that day that I smeared my face with owl blood, like war-paint, and killed him with his axe.
Whispers
Massachusetts, 1880
Over in Eastborough there stands a handsome brick Georgian house, festooned with ivy and sporting great twin chimneys and long small-paned windows that catch the amber light of a setting February sun. Inside, three wealthy gentlemen sit by a wide flickering fire, their brandy glasses glazed with flame, their voices lowering as if following the sun on its daily course into darkness.
Oliver Welcher is the owner of the house, a retired merchant, previously of Salem. The other two men, one young and curly-haired, with dense red lamb chops hugging his jaw, and the other a weary and stooped older fellow of darker cast, are surgeons. The younger man, Bellows, has just finished telling his ghost story.
“It’s your turn, Edmund,” the portly host intones, smiling and gesturing with his glass.
Edmund Houghton seems to hunch deeper into his chair, his eyes on the window where the sun has now fallen below a line of pines.
“My life is a ghost story,” he mutters, more to himself than anyone else—it is almost an involuntary utterance.
Young Bellows perks. “I’m intrigued!”
Houghton, realizing what has just come from his lips, shifts, grimacing, for his body is capable of few motions that do not elicit some notable degree of pain.
“Well, “ Welcher says. “Let’s have it.”
“I’m sorry,” Houghton moves to repair, hiding behind his glass. “Haven’t we had enough of wraiths and demons for one sitting?”
Bellows smirks. “Never enough demons. Come now, Edmund, don’t tease us.”
“My dear friends, I enjoy a good yarn as much as the next fellow, but I really fail to see where my story would amount to a pleasing entertainment. We have had a pleasurable visit this afternoon, and I suggest we leave it at that.”
Welcher, being a man of keener sensitivity than the youthful doctor, recognizes the earnest discomfort in his friend’s eyes. “Yes, perhaps Edmund is right, another spook tale might be a bit much at this juncture. Perhaps a game of billiards would be the thing...”
Bellows frowns. “Edmund can scarcely heft a cigar without agony and you expect him to wield a stick?”
“Better I suffer some aches than you my dreadful little biography.”
Bellows creaks forward in his seat and stares. “So you have, in actual fact, seen a ghost, Edmund?”
The older surgeon has his eyes to the window, where the neat square panes are losing their fire and as surely as a sun must set, his words begin to come out.
“Seen, and so much more.”
The men settle back and you should too, safe and comfortable, wherever you are.
It’s been twenty years now... I was returning from Reverend Atwell’s house one evening in March, having been called away from my meal to treat one of his sickly children. Lois, I believe.
She had a terrible fever. I had done what I could and was riding home with the darkness coming on and the cold closing in. The road was all mud and the crows were making an awful noise in the woods.
I came around a bend on the road that twists toward Grafton, by the rolling Nourse farmland, and there saw a figure shuffling ahead of me. It was a woman with a frayed black shawl about her shoulders and pulled up over her head, and it was my impression that managing the muddy road was a great effort for her. My mare snorted and this figure looked back over her shoulder. It was Esta Henstick. She was passingly known to me; something of a solitary figure, struggling with the upkeep of her little pig farm following the death of her husband some months earlier. I felt pity for the dishevelled creature and offered her a ride.
“My dog has run off,” she explained, taking her wrap down, showing her dark hair. “I been searchin’ half the day.”
“Come now, I’ll get you home. It’s dark and a dog’s likely to make its own way back, don’t you think?”
Esta had come close to my horse and looked up at me with her sad little eyes. She was not a pretty thing really and while, I learned later, she was twenty five-years of age, she appeared older, such was the mark of hardship upon her.
Well, to speed the story on, I’ll just say that it required some further prompting on my part to convince her to accept my generosity. When she shyly conceded, I dismounted to help her onto my beast, grasping her undernourished waist. Then I climbed up behind her, and we rode on, her dark hair inches from my lips and her shawl against my chest. She was shivering and the moon was moving up out of the trees.
Her house was a sorry little thing set into a low, hill-ringed bit of land, dense with trees and heavy with the smell of her pigs. I helped her down and she seemed ashamed, I want to say, being poor and having a man of my social position and wealth as witness to her squalor. She held her face down and seemed thankful for the dark hair that fell to obscure it.
“Can I repay you in some way?” she said to the earth.
“No, good woman, thank you. It is payment enough to see you safely home.”
She turned toward her house then and I saw the heavy sadness in her face take flight and her worrisome small eyes light briefly with girlish glee.
“Bonnie!” she exclaimed, rushing to embrace a rather mournful-looking mutt of mottled colours, which did little to conjure or justify its title.
“You see,” said I, “just as I said. Dogs are loyal creatures—they always return home. Goodnight, Mrs. Henstick.”
“My name is Esta,” she said. “Thank you, sir, and good night.”
Well that was that and I was swift on the road toward my comfor
table home and my lovely golden-haired wife and my three delightful daughters, each as fetching as my bride.
George Snow had taken quite a blow. A horse’s kick had broken a rib on his right side and sent him hard against a fence with the impact. I patched him up and stopped in at Parmenter’s Tavern.
Some drinks later, I went out into the brisk dusk and found, close by my horse, a tattered dog of bleak colours.
“Bonnie?”
The dog lifted its bored head and blinked at me.
“She likes you,” a voice came from a shadow and I turned to regard Widow Henstick.
I looked back at the dog, which could not have illustrated further disinterest in this storyteller.
“I can see that,” I said.
“I recognized your horse,” Esta said. “A lovely horse, she is.”
I petted my mount on her wide neck. “Earns her keep, I’ll give her that.”
We stood for an awkward moment and Esta, in her shyness, seemed to be visibly shrinking the whole time, though it was actually the light leaving us and night settling.
“I must be off,” I said, swinging up onto my horse.
Esta floated closer, looking up, just then, with a smile that was like those of my daughters when they have drawn something and offer it to me, bristling with timidity and frail emotions, as girls are so thoroughly imbued.
“Good evening,” I said, almost curtly.
“Sir?”
I sighed and turned, my patience waning.
“I, I have little, it’s true, but I would like for you to have this,” she said, and she removed from under her shawl and extended, in offering, a bottle.
“It’s some wine. I make it myself... each evening I have come here, hoping to make your acquaintance, that I might present it...”
“You owe me nothing,” I said. “Thank you, but I must be off.”
It appeared as if Esta Henstick’s face would crumble and I felt a cruel lout. Her chin fell against her shallow chest and she turned in silence and started away.
Memories are whispers and that night in my bed, there were small quiet voices in my secret mind, like ghostly songs recalling the feel of the lonely widow on the horse, against me, for I again carried her to her sullen abode, the wind putting her dark hair in my face and her weight leaning against my ribs and the quickening heart behind them.
I felt obliged, as a man concerned with the healing of wounds, to make some polite gesture to make amends for my harsh treatment of the waif outside the tavern. When we arrived at her shelter, I told her that I would indeed be more than pleased to taste the wine she had been so generous as to offer and further suggested that we share a glass. Well, at that, her face lit as it had before, when she had discovered her dog safe and sound. But just as quickly it went dark and she turned, as if in turning she could entirely hide, or even disappear.
“What is the matter, Esta?” I asked.
“My house is not much to see, sir, and I should be ashamed for a gentleman as you are to set eyes upon it.”
“Do not be ashamed. Here, it looks rather cosy from the outside. It can’t be less friendly than this chilly evening, at any rate. We’ll have a good drink by a good fire and then I’ll be off.”
I can scarcely account for what followed, but somehow, I found myself in my hostess’ arms. She was frail and timid at first, the candlelight warm against her pale flesh, the empty wine bottle wobbling on the close table as the rattling bed bumped against it. Then she was filled with a passion and kissed me with such desperation that the release of her lonely tears was on both of our cheeks. Afterwards she clung to me like a child, her breath whispering. I heard it later, deep in my brain as I lay by my faithful Susanna.
How vile I felt, how terribly wretched. I had gone to that woman’s house with no intention of placing a hand upon her and yet, somehow, it had happened. The shame was immense and I resolved to spend the rest of my days with the singular purpose of being a worthy husband. Never would I speak to that widow again. Damn her memory, her breathing in my head, playing over and over like some small warm wind, trying to pry open my heart.
Each night I would come home and stand in the darkness above my daughters’ beds and pray for their safety, and for their unknowing forgiveness. I would stare at my wife, so much prettier than that dark-eyed woman in the woods.
Slowly, however, my wife became a portrait, a walking portrait. She coiled comfortably in my wealth, so smug and busy making social impressions, so hollow. She was a thing to be envied for the gold on her head, the gold on her finger, my gold in her purse. How had I ever believed that I loved such a woman, when there was Esta, so simple and sweet, like a natural emanation of the shady glen where she spent her modest days?
It was August and the trees were heavy with their leaves and close about Esta’s small shadow of a house. We lay upon her bed while thunder pounded the dark above Eastborough, her small face on my chest, breathing.
“Edmund?” She said. “What if there had never been a Susanna... would you have married me?”
I think that I sighed. “Of course,” I’d said.
She cried each time I left, like a spoiled child, cried violently. Initially, such displays grabbed and shook my heart, but in time I grew annoyed and her face, all red and squeezed by her grimacing, made me want to slap her. My beloved Esta was becoming pathetic. More and more she asked about Susanna until I began to feel something almost territorially defensive and refused to speak of her. But Esta was insistent, and I came to miss the times when she had seemed softer, more brittle, but she was empowered you see, as women tend to be upon stealing another woman’s place by the side of a man, especially a man of wealth.
“Edmund?” she’d ask. “What would Susanna do if she knew? Would she go away?”
I stared at the flame in the oil lamp by the bed. “I don’t know,” I replied stiffly.
“Perhaps she would take your children and go far, far away...”
I sat up then, moved away from her, and dressed.
The situation became intolerable by the time autumn came. The days went away, wheeling the sun to some cold undisclosed distance and the trees were thinning. Wherever I went I was not free of the dark little widow’s voice, hissing in my ear, in my brain, and into my blood. I would close my eyes and see hers, small and sad, staring at me like her foolish dog.
I would walk out of her shabby excuse of a home, tripping on the rocks in her dooryard, hearing her mournful wailing at my departure. It sickened me.
Esta pleaded with me to stay. “Why must you leave me each night to sleep with her?” she cried. “You don’t need them any longer!”
While I did not wish to look upon her, I whirled about just then and glared. She stood in the doorway of her wretched shack, in her shabby dress, the oil lamp in her hand, her face twisting and contorting—an animated beet!
“I am going home to my family,” I snarled. “My wife and my children.”
Fury flew into her features then. She waved the lamp about and shouted at me. “You will have no family! I am going to pay a visit to this glorious wife of yours and tell her all! I will tell her, Edmund, and she will hate you and she will go off, far, far away and you will see your precious daughters no more!”
“Damn you!” I cursed and my rage was so great, so sudden and primal, that I reached for the first weapon at hand, that being a good-sized stone at my feet. I hurled the thing with all my force and it struck her squarely in her wide twisting mouth. She dropped with such swiftness that I scarcely witnessed the sudden blood. I went straight to my horse, mounted swiftly and was off, with the sound of her insipid dog howling behind. I did not think of the lamp she had been holding until, a mile or so away, up on the dark twisted road, I turned and saw the flames denoting where her house had been, horrible flames waving through the trees.
How does a man live with such a crime, you may wonder. He simply does. Guilt, pity, remorse, they were all mine in great numbing quantities, but the days move on, the s
un comes and goes, the weeks roll forward. My life continued, for I still had my dear children and my wife, a fine home and my practice. In time I may have felt a sense of relief, my tragic indiscretions tucked away behind my consciousness, away from the continuing world.
My name was never spoken in association with Esta Henstick and her unfortunate passing did little to ripple the local waters. Her charred remnants were tucked in the cold ground, the whole of her dingy life tucked out of mind.
Winter fell upon my days, its dreary light turning the world into a grey place. I took comfort in repetition and the familiar distraction of favoured beverages and books. I began to harbour softer feelings toward Susanna, perhaps as a function of necessity. Indeed, it was the reassuring sameness that upheld me.
There was a succession of storms in December. Eastborough was stark in snow, the forests that wrapped about the town were like legions of upside-down birds, their terrible claws raking the bleak and windy sky. My girls were delighted and exploited every occasion to play in the abundant white stuff. It gave me some cheer to sit in my study and hear their laughter beyond the frosted window.
One overcast afternoon I sat in my favourite chair half-reading with the sound of their light voices close by. Something near to contentment settled over me and I closed my eyes. I was mere heartbeats from sleep when something thumped at the window. I started and saw a snowball flattened against the glass, sliding down, and I heard a chorus of giggles.
I smiled and set my book aside and went to the window.
Voices came through the glass. “Father, look, see what we have made!” they called.
A snowman stood facing me as I peered out, or a snow woman, as the case may be, for the snow had been bunched midway to indicate breasts. The thing stared back with sad little bits of coal and the mouth was one large black chunk. These features might have passed undistressingly were it not for the fact that the girls had balanced one of our oil lamps in the crook of a wide snowy arm.
