The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  Yes. A flower can carry a message in every petal. As mine did to Pratt.

  “You speak beautifully yourself, Agnes.”

  “Young man, thank you. I’ve had plenty of practice, as you can tell. And I don’t mind talking. It’s all I do, now.”

  “Then I’ll ask you about this.” Pratt pulls the plastic bag from his pocket, and holds my message up in front her. “I’m hoping you can tell me what this might be saying.”

  “Good lord.” Mrs. Fanoli blinks. “What is it?”

  Pratt brings it closer to her cloudy eyes. “It’s a rose, actually.”

  “Is it? Oh, such a sad little thing. Why have you put it in a baggie?”

  “Because you won’t want to touch it, or have to. It comes from the dead.” He seems excited to be sharing my gift with her, and confident. “I hope you can see for yourself, the rose isn’t the color of the water it’s been soaked in. It’s a kind of yellow, isn’t it? It came from the Lambry House, I believe, from a certain bush in the garden, from the arbor near the front gate. Do you think you can make out the variety?”

  The old woman balances on her cane and squints, making a pouting face at my pretty wet bud until the water wells over in her eyes. She pulls away, nodding.

  “Absolutely I can tell you this variety. This is the rose we call Lambry’s Ache. You’ve got the yellow petals, and the tiny border of orange, and the distinctive curl. That orange isn’t from any water stain, Mr. Pratt. That’s the natural color derived from a Sutter’s Gold variety, but fiddled with to create a stronger contrast. Used to be, the tips of yellow roses had to be dipped in red dye to get that effect. Not anymore. Not many people remember those days, of course, or remember this rose anymore, but there used to be quite a few of them around the village. And of course they were first bred at the Lambry House. Near the front gate. In the arbor? Yes. That would be right. There used to be many more of them, all around the house. It’s a climber. Alice wasn’t quite the gardener some of her forebears were.

  “Oh, my dear,” she says, turning to Ellen, “can you tell me if there is any news about her old handyman, Manoel? I heard about the accident, the water tower. He used to ask me questions about what to do with that challenge of a garden. I heard he was in an awful way?”

  “We’re sorry to tell you he died, Mrs. Fanoli.”

  “No! Oh no.” She feels for the bench inside the gazebo and sits. “His poor family. And Alice! What would Alice say.”

  “What do you think she would have said?” Pratt watches her closely.

  “Well, I don’t know, exactly. But she clung to him. It isn’t many old women who are lucky enough to find such a companion, such a helpmeet, late in life. Trust me. If you want my opinion, it wasn’t that old water tower that did him in. It was probably poor Alice who pulled the man down. Just to keep her company. The Lambrys always were a bit on the selfish side, you know.”

  If I could, I would fly down from the top of the gazebo and kiss the top of Agnes’s head, so nicely is she filling in the story I want Pratt to hear.

  Pratt looks at Ellen.

  “Now, young man, tell me, why have you brought me a Lambry’s Ache in such terrible condition? Does it have anything to do with Manoel?”

  “It’s part of the overall … cleaning.”

  “Terrible! Well, I hope that at least knowing the variety can help in some way. Manoel! That’s unforgivable. I take back everything I said about not squashing ghosts. It was stupid of me to say. The past haunts. But we shouldn’t let it. I can only hope that Alice feels she’s done enough now, taken enough with her, and will go off to her sleep with the rest of her played-out family. Although nothing a Lambry would do would surprise me. They were always the kind of people you wanted to shake and ask: what on earth were you thinking?”

  Ellen turns to look at the hydrangeas.

  “Agnes, would you mind walking a little further and sharing with me more of what you know about the family?” Pratt asks. “Or would you prefer to sit and rest here?”

  “Let’s stay here in the shade of the gazebo. It’s one of our nicest spots. And anyway, if you’re going to ask me about that family, the answer may take a while. You sit down and make yourself comfortable, too,” she says to Ellen, patting the small bench beside her. “Let the gentleman stand up before the female of the species.”

  She looks at Pratt, but her cloudy eyes don’t seem to see him. “If you want to know about the Lambrys in this village, you have to go back to the first of them to do really well here, Eugenia and Augustus Lambry. He was one of our leading lights, a lumber baron who got his money, let’s be honest, from his father grabbing the best land when they chased the Indians out. And then he made his fortune out of trees he never grew, cut by men he didn’t raise. Augustus and Eugenia had four children. Three of them did quite well for themselves, as I recall. One didn’t. He was drowned and never seen again. Your Lambry’s Ache, now, it was bred in memory of that lost son. Many plants in this region, Mr. Pratt, have rather sad associations to them. Take that one standing so tall right there beside you, next to the hydrangea. That’s called the ghost flower. Relative of the snapdragon. A foreign plant that’s hybridized and reinvented itself so it can survive our damp and cold. It’s said to wilt when the hot breath of misery comes too near it. But unless my poor eyes deceive me, it’s in fine fettle today. Upright and sturdy. Beautiful specimen. I’ve seen it wilt only once or twice. We’ve seen bad things happen around these cliffs. I’ve seen them myself. Sometimes the past seems so close …”

  “Lambry’s Ache?” Pratt prods her.

  “So single-minded you are,” she says, shaking her knotted head, “with all this profusion and complexity around you.

  “Lambry’s Ache,” she explains as she digs her cane between her feet, “was bred to commemorate the loss of the boy who died at sea. It happened one year, early in the last century, when a doghole schooner foundered, and the poor young man was drowned along with several sailors. There had once been rumors that the son’s death was a curse the mother had brought down on her own head, and the father brought down on his own ship, for a sin, a cruelty they’d committed. A bit of scandal attached to the drowning. Some vague guilt that the family wouldn’t claim or name.”

  And why would they? It was only their own name they ever grieved, I think and keep still on the gazebo’s sunlit side.

  “In any case, those bodies were never found, though empty graves were prepared at Evergreen and left unmarked, as is our custom. It’s said that if you mark the grave of a lost soul, it will return angry to you, because it’s been named and tied to a place where it didn’t rest. So that’s why, at our cemetery, you’ll see a few graves with no names on them.

  “Well, since Eugenia Lambry could leave no flowers by a stone with her son’s name on it, she did other things to ease her grief. She built the Lambry steeple and the widow’s walk, so she could look far out to sea where her son died. She cultivated a rose in memory of him. They say she had a very skilled Chinese gardener who helped her. There’s no record of his name—so many people came and went through this town whose names were never recorded anywhere, isn’t that shameful—but he bred her something special. That took the place of the boy’s grave. But if you’d like, you can still see the boy’s marker, Mr. Pratt, over at the cemetery, in the section for the lost and unknown. It says only, ‘Dedicated to God.’”

  “Yes, I’ve been there, and seen it and felt something directly over that very stone.”

  I remember and see Pratt again, standing in Evergreen—how he’d clutched at his chest and hurried off. But it didn’t mean he understood anything at all, guessed at anything real.

  “How else can I help you now? Is that sufficient?”

  “Do you remember, yourself, any of the Lambrys you just described?”

  “A few. Some more than others.” She tilts her head above her turtleneck and closes her eyes. “Old Mrs. Lambry, she was pretty far gone by the time I was old enough to care about anythin
g around me other than myself. She wasn’t very interesting to me as a little girl. Tall and gray, worn-out looking. My family ran the mercantile in those days. We had dealings with the Lambrys, just like anyone else. We had dealings with everyone in town, but we weren’t close to that family. Not many people were. Over the years, we watched one set of Lambrys after another grow up in that house. Some haughty, some nice. Eventually they would all drift away—especially after the mills started to close, and the Lambry businesses started to shut down, mostly after the Second World War. A few of them eventually came back … Like Alice’s parents, who were Beatniks. I remember them quite well. Dressing like Indians, high as kites on drugs and prancing around in the garden. Poor Alice. She was an only child, and I’m afraid she wasn’t much wanted or attended to. A strange, lonely person she was, even then. She was a good twenty years younger than me, so we were never friends. Not that she had any friends of her own. She preferred her shells and flotsam and brushes and paints. She never let anyone in, so to speak, not until her parents were dead and then Manoel came along. And that’s why I think it’s Alice who brought Manoel low; it’s her not wanting to be alone, not after knowing what it’s like to have had someone.” She nods at Ellen beside her and Pratt standing over her, as if to be sure they’re still with her.

  “I know that feeling, to be honest with you. You get to a certain point, the only company you have are pictures in your head. I sit here, and I picture, for instance, a man I saw thirty years ago, drowning right in front of me, down below the cliffs, here. He was an abalone hunter but a dumb tourist, we found out later, not from our coast, and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He let himself get caught in a riptide and no one could reach him. I watched him get pounded to pieces on the rocks. Right below me. Right here. I wonder if he saw me … Well. I never talk about it. I hear talk can raise the dead.

  “Maybe Manoel raised Alice, without meaning to. There were always rumors about the two of them, you know. Being more than employer and employee, as it were. And I’m not going to say she wasn’t entitled to some company while she was still alive. I don’t know about after, what any of us are entitled to … The closer you get to dying the more … the more you see how lonely it’s going to be. Lonelier, I mean.”

  “Are you all right, Agnes?” Pratt asks.

  She’s sagging a little on the bench next to Ellen, one shoulder slumping, her thin lips pressing between the clamp of her teeth.

  “Agnes? Mrs. Fanoli?” Ellen touches her.

  She lets out a small breath. “Oh! So sorry. It was just a little spell. I get them sometimes. I get them at night, usually. When I see the pictures in my head of that dead tourist floating all torn up and can’t talk with anyone about them. I forget to breathe, and I wake up. Apnea, the doctor calls it. I guess being around a ghost hunter has raised a ghost in me, Mr. Pratt. Do you smell something … decaying? It’s black spot, sometimes. The roses. They’re my responsibility. To guard this garden …” She tries to stand and wobbles on her cane, vaguely.

  “Ellen, will you take Agnes back to the Welcome Cottage? Agnes, do you think you can walk?”

  “Do you smell it, too?” the old woman asks feebly. “It’s coming from over there.”

  “The ghost flower,” Ellen whispers.

  “Ellen. I’d like you to walk Agnes back.”

  I’ve moved away from them all. I rise and balance in the air, so high I can see where the poor abalone hunter was ripped to shreds, thirty years ago. I fear what’s coming next. I’ve seen it before. The ghost flower, a white spear standing tall above the other snapdragons in the garden, has gone gray and black. The puckered mouths of its blooms are shriveling and falling to the ground at the feet of Ellen, Pratt, and the old woman. It’s telling them a crawler is near. About to surface and find us.

  A dream-crawler isn’t a ghost. It’s a pitiful creature trapped between body and spirit. It’s a thing that can’t find air or light or hope. It has nothing to do with me. It’s a soul that was buried in a place where it didn’t want to be buried, and so it tunnels through the dark, with the worms, until something speaks, beckons to it. Then it rises. Wailing.

  Pratt stands in front of the women, protecting them. The carcass of the crawler has begun prying its rotting fingers out of the roots. Its neck and spine hump, showing. It strains to break its hips free from the tide of dark soil under the flowers. Deep gashes, the marks of the rocks, scar the dead man’s bones.

  Ellen is trying to move Mrs. Fanoli, who can neither speak nor move.

  “Get her out of the way. Now! ” Pratt says.

  Ellen lifts her—I don’t see how—as if she’s suddenly much stronger than she’s always looked.

  Pratt takes a single step away from them, forward, and then another and another, coming closer to the crawler. It breaches and falls to the path, pleading.

  I had hoped to be elsewhere, it groans.

  And why is it hope, I want to cry back, that causes more pain in all this world than such a sweet thing should?

  The corpse rubs its thick, clotted skull against the gravel, writhing. Ellen and Mrs. Fanoli are scrambling away. They don’t see, as I do, from high above, that Pratt has bared his arm. The silver band with its black marks now gleams. Is that weapon, I wonder, a thing that came out of all the wars? Some button that can be touched, some gas launched, some sickening taint?

  I remember Pratt’s words: Not a human being, but the mold of something that once held a human being … Yet the mold of a thing can only hold so much … Is that what it does, then? Fills a spirit with so much, it can hold no more?

  I will not lose heart.

  It takes heart to stand and stay with a spirit when a hunter comes to turn it to ash. It takes will not to turn away, to look and see what a hunter does. And so: I stay. I stay as long as it takes to watch Pratt raise his arm and ball his fist and then extend his fingers in a reach that looks like it might be kind, answering the cry of the pleading spirit. But it isn’t. I hear screaming through the red beam of light, and I smell the burning in the air and I back away, away and high, far up, as far as the Welcome Cottage—though I know there is no welcome, anywhere, for those of us who challenge such horrors. But I won’t look away, and I won’t lose heart. I watch as Pratt steps forward to make sure the crumbs of the man are cooling under his feet, crouching down to touch the pathway, patting it gently, and I know this much: we must never make peace with the thing that is trying to kill us.

  The cottage is filled with bright postcards and packets of seeds and bulbs waiting to be planted. It seems a terrible, thoughtless, heedless place to me now. Mrs. Fanoli puts her hand to her throat, looking through the window.

  “Come away,” Ellen says, strangely calm.

  “I can’t help myself. I need to remember this. If only I could see better. I need to see, so I can remind myself, when my time comes, to lie myself down flat in my grave and not give any hunters a chance.”

  “Come sit down.”

  “I know what that was. I recognized it. It was the picture in my head, the man from my dream, my memory. He’s killed the man from my dream. What is Mr. Pratt doing now?” The old woman squints, anxiously.

  “He’s coming back toward us. He’s finished.”

  “What a shocking thing. We all choose our lines of work, don’t we? But I don’t know. Why choose that one?”

  “He says he didn’t choose it. Are you feeling better now, Mrs. Fanoli?”

  “I’m not sure I should be. Mr. Pratt,” she says as he comes through the door. “What on earth would you call that?”

  “A shadow. A creeper. A crawler, we call it. It won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Is it gone?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “For good?”

  “Yes. For good. Are you feeling all right?”

  “No. I’m not. But lighter, somehow … I suppose I have you to thank for that.”

  I stare at them all, amazed. This is what the thoughtless living do: they th
ank men like Pratt for making their hearts emptier.

  “I’m sorry the matter wasn’t tended to sooner,” he says, wiping his hands.

  “How could it have been? I never spoke of it. I thought the garden had been thoroughly cleaned.”

  “Yes, I’ve been hearing that a great deal around here. May I wash my hands at your tap?”

  “Please go ahead. And sit here”—she points—“in my chair, please. You look a bit—”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

  The hunter finishes rinsing his hands of someone’s life. All in a day’s work, for him. He wipes his forehead with one palm. “I just have one more question for you. And then we can put some of this day to rest. It’s a simple matter. Do the words on Alice’s gravestone, ‘The last to see me be the first to rejoice,’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.” Mrs. Fanoli sets her cane aside, not needing it indoors. “Except it sounds like some lofty nonsense a Lambry would have on their tombstone. Have you seen their memorial in the cemetery?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you know how full of themselves they were. Are you all right, young man?” she says bracingly. “You look like you could use a hot toddy.”

  “It’s been a long few days, Agnes.”

  “I can imagine. But why does one spirit give you so much trouble and another one you crush, I see, like an aphid? What’s the difference?”

  “Some are weak. Some are strong.”

  “What would I be, in the end, I wonder?”

  “You’d be yourself. Ghosts were once people, so they have the traits of people. Some weak, some strong.”

  He stands, leaning against the chair he wouldn’t take, and seems tired. I hope he’s tired. As tired as death. I hope he carries inside him all the ash he’s made and left in all the gardens of this world.

  “Some ghosts have a great deal of self-knowledge,” he goes on, murderer that he is, “and others don’t. Some are honest, some liars”—he looks at Ellen—“and liars tell lies in death just as much as they did in life. Some are confident and can walk as plainly in the open as you or I would and almost seem to inhabit living form. They’re the sharpest, the trickiest to deal with. But even they go down, too, in the end.”