Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  “So you think it was a coincidence, him showing up like that around the same time?”

  “It might have been. Only children saw him, which also might mean it isn’t true at all. But people were different back then. Tormenting a child was looked upon differently. It wasn’t the adult’s fault for frightening them, but the child’s fault for being foolish enough to be frightened. Everything could be called a lesson back then, even if it wasn’t. Even if it was just plain malice, you could excuse it in that fashion.”

  She explained, after a pause, that when she was a girl—or at least where she had grown up—children were more or less considered to be on par with animals. Then she recalled, after folding both her hands flat on the table—as if the substance of the memory was something she could draw out from the wood itself—the time a man caught her playing in a puddle on the way to school.

  “I was trying to catch a frog,” she said, “which the man objected to. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me, but he thought I had no business, as a young woman, to be doing something as crude as catching a bullfrog with my bare hands.”

  She rubbed her hands on the table again before continuing.

  “I remember he pulled up my dress, took me over his knee, and spanked me right there in the road. And he did it hard, and for a long time. Now, mind you, teachers could do that sort of thing, and my parents had plenty of times, but nothing like that had happened to me, not outside of those places. I was humiliated, and terribly angry. But when I told my father, he punished me both for telling on the man, and for having embarrassed our family in the first place.”

  After a moment, she told me he made her stand on her toes, facing the wall, for two hours straight, until it was dark out, while everyone went about their business. I was quick to move her away from these kinds of memories and back to Missy.

  “So, you think the man might have been some kind of—I don’t know—prankster? Somebody torturing the kids for the fun of it?”

  “It seems like it could be the case,” she said. “But I can’t know for sure.”

  “Do you think it could have been someone specific?”

  “It could have been any man for miles,” she said.

  And then, because I felt my own thoughts about Missy wouldn’t be well received until then, I decided to interject them there, in that moment of uncertainty. I spoke quickly, but softly, like I was sharing some bad news with someone who had already heard too much.

  “What if—and this is just a guess—what if it were someone who knew who Missy was?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t quite know about that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while and thought someone must have. When I heard you mention the man just now, I remembered him and…I don’t know, it just fits.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” she said.

  I could see that the idea was distasteful to her, but I continued.

  “If one of the children could positively identify that man, if the authorities had been contacted or a sketch produced—I’ll bet that man would be able to tell you where Missy came from.”

  “Yes, well. No one was too concerned about that. After no one came forward to identify her, the family was quick to petition the government for support in her care. They started receiving a stipend from the Crown.”

  Then she interrupted herself and I watched her face darken.

  “You’re making things into a drama,” she said. “You’re looking for a villain, but there isn’t one.”

  I felt myself grow defensive, so I waited a moment before I spoke. I asked if she honestly believed it was just a coincidence that after this girl appears, a man begins searching their windows.

  “No.” She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And you’re disregarding what I said about how things were back then. I was there, more or less, closer than you were. You don’t know.”

  Then she did what my mother had done, and presented me with another anecdote in a way that made it seem like it was meant to hurt me. Something she had kept from me because it was indelicate, something she now wielded like a weapon.

  She explained that the children were cruel then, too. That when they found Missy, she was crammed in between two cords of wood piled in the shed and that at first, they didn’t even know what it was they were looking at. A slab of meat, pink and red from the cold. Before, or after, they realized it was a person, they collected their mother’s sewing needles and pushed them into her thighs and buttocks, her sides and breasts.

  “She didn’t move or scream,” she said. “Couldn’t feel it. And they left her there as much because they were afraid of their parents as they had made a game of tormenting her.”

  My grandmother made a wet sound with her mouth in the face of my silence. She looked pleased to have said it and disgusted to have had the words in her mouth to begin with.

  “Whatever that man was or wherever those sounds came from, those children deserved to be frightened. They might have been seeing the face of their own guilt looking back at themselves. Have you thought of that?”

  She looked at me with whatever ferocity she could muster and I saw, for the first time, what my mother must have grown up fearing. I wondered, while looking into her bulging eyes, and at the small veins traced through them, where all this passion came from and how it got passed down.

  But then the old woman’s energy waned and she couldn’t sustain her indignity. She yawned, and I was able to speak even more clearly than before. I put forth what I believed, that Missy might have been someone they knew, or came from somewhere familiar. That she might have even been part of the family. A half-sister. In a town so small, how could no one identify her? Was it more reasonable to suppose that this girl was a princess or a wolf-child, or that her identity was simply the kind of secret people keep in order to maintain respectability?

  “Fainting at the sight of a stranger is almost incomprehensible,” I told her. “But the sight of a black sheep, or a family secret standing right in front of you? I can believe that.”

  And then I sat, waiting for an answer, looking out the same window at our reflections cast over tall grass and trees, waving in the fall wind. Minutes passed. Then she leaned back in her chair, exhausted. She spoke. I understood later that she was offering me a compromise.

  “You may be right,” she said. “But you also forget that nearly no one lived there at the time. It was a few logging paths that crossed over each other. No roads, and forest for miles. People knew each other, yes. But could someone stay away and keep something from everyone? Very easily. In the deep woods, before the roads? Anything could have been going on out here.”

  She looked at me for a long time, as if trying to emphasize that hers was a heinous enough explanation. Mine was too much, it seemed, and this was as far as she was willing to come with me. We looked at the trees together.

  That was the last we spoke about it, and one of the last times I saw her before her death. My interest in Missy waned not long after that, once I was busy substitute teaching and working at a roadhouse bar three nights a week. Our conversation would come back to me when I allowed myself to think about it, on long drives or in the midst of menial chores, staring at a tumbling bundle of clothes in a basement laundromat. But when I was busy, when I was balancing trays and counting money, when I was taking attendance or trying to understand an absent teacher’s lesson plan, Missy was gone from the forefront of my mind. The mystery itself was folded up, from a winding, fractal shape, back into something more portable. Most days it was blunt and simple, a Fisher-Price version of Missy. It was a fairy tale again.

  Six months after our conversation about Missy, I received a letter from my grandmother. It was handwritten and to the point, with not one pleasantry included. A single sentence from a pad of stationary I’d seen magnetized to her fridge. It was written in an unusual script
that I later realized was my aunt Karen’s handwriting. My grandmother was arthritic and couldn’t hold a pen by that point. The letter had been dictated.

  Shannon,

  You are right that the girl might very well have suffered terribly at the hands of our community and our family, but you must also accept that whatever our role was, in the end, we provided her a home when she was in need and accepted her as one of our own, no matter what she was.

  Mary Allan Barrett

  I never wrote her back, but I kept the letter and read it often, especially in the first weeks after I’d received it. By then I’d all but accepted Missy’s story as an enigma, something that wasn’t meant to be solved, or that was at least unsolvable by me. But the letter itself was another kind of puzzle. At first I assumed the same things I had when I visited with her, that my interpretation was troubling to her. I imagined she had spent time considering what I’d said, and that this letter represented the results of an unpleasant search.

  Once time had passed, when I found the letter nestled in with other keepsakes and photographs, it struck me as something else entirely. It had included something for me to accept, as a kind of trade. Her admission of the family’s possible wrongdoing in exchange for absolution from it. I thought at first the mention of suffering at the hands of our family referred to the children’s torture of Missy. The line that I had glossed over as a kind of general, catch-all admission of the possibility of anything and everything I had said—whatever our role was—now stuck out to me. I couldn’t help but pair it with the line about suffering, and wondered if, when combined, it wasn’t a clear acknowledgement of what I had theorized about the girl.

  The note was bordered with illustrations of kittens playing with yarn and stretching, meowing, lapping at milk, and I spent enough time handling it that I wore off one of their faces where my thumb and forefinger rested. Eventually, I knew the note by heart and instead of reading it, spent time looking at an orange tabby with an eroded face, a pair of faded eyes and ears floating over an unmoving body.

  Years later—maybe twenty or so—after the note was gone, I was thinking about my grandmother. When I thought about why I had never bothered to write her back, a truth was apparent to me then that I couldn’t have admitted as a younger person.

  It was unpleasant. All of it.

  The story was unpleasant, and so was talking about it, and so was my grandmother, and so were my thoughts on the subject. By dropping the matter entirely, I had closed myself off from all of it. From Missy and the cabin and the woodpile, the man in the window, the children and their needles. And most importantly I closed myself off from my mother and how she was treated by hers. How it felt to know about it. I was trying to keep all of it from taking root in me. But it already had.

  When I thought about it this way I had an answer, which was that the note was an apology of sorts. If you didn’t know about Missy, the letter looked like it could have been about my mother, and how my grandmother had reduced her—maybe inadvertently—to the slow-talking, soft-faced woman I knew. That she had hurt her, and hurt her because she had no other choice.

  III

  When I visited my hometown with my new husband, the story came back.

  I was pregnant, and we were both filled up with the idea of having a family together. We’d both rushed into things and were in a hurry to get to know everything about one another. The Missy story came out of me like it had never before, whole and with direction, a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It was a performance—about who I was and wasn’t, and about the things I did and did not want to say otherwise. It took the place of longer talk about my mother and father and childhood, maybe because it could be a tantalizing story, if you told it the right way.

  Part of the reason it came up was because we were in what had once been my grandmother’s house, which was the same plot of land where Missy had lived (and died). It had been inherited by my mother and father, who were using it as a summer home. It was January, so everything was cold and dark, shut off and unplugged for the season, but we were happy with it as a getaway. Our marriage at a courthouse and celebration at my bar weren’t dissimilar events.

  Lewis, whom I had chosen from a dozen interested patrons at the bar, was a sort of woodsman, and I was happy to have a honeymoon in a place that was familiar but without luxury, and which would let him show me everything he knew. He was older than me by about fifteen years and was always interested in demonstrating any skills he had—or at least he had been back then.

  I told him the story of Missy during a walk through the woods behind the house, through the farmers’ fields behind them, turning back before we got to the highway and industrial park that had taken hold at their edge. The rest of it I recounted in the basement of the house, which he’d sealed us off in. He had set us up around the wood stove, where we kept warm and ate meals cooked right off the top of it, and slept, and fucked, in two sleeping bags zipped together.

  I think I probably also turned the story into a kind of test for him. I told it to him while trying to be upbeat, without putting emphasis on any particular part of it, without interjecting my thoughts about it, or what I thought was sad or strange or interesting. I presented it as if it were something merely curious, or silly. I wanted to see how he would regard it and, I guess, me.

  When I got to the part about the time they took her to neighbouring Annapolis Royal, set her up in the town hall, and invited the townspeople to come see her, his face didn’t change one bit. This, for me, was one of the most upsetting parts of the story. They had charged admission to see her, I was told, and they also had the second-eldest daughter (my great aunt) act as a kind of interpreter, answering for her or explaining her own observations about her, an act that always bothered me as show-offy. As a girl, this part of the story had been related to me by my mother as if it were fun. Like Missy were a kind of performer in the play of her own life, or maybe like it was her job to help solve the mystery of her own existence.

  I found proof of this event, years later, when I was widowed and alone and on Missy’s trail in my spare time. The Nova Scotia Archives had recovered a number of volumes of newspapers from the area, including The Speculator, where the first article had appeared. This second article was published ten years after the first, and despite the obvious interest that people displayed by being in attendance, its tone seemed almost bored by her presence:

  Nearly the entirety of Annapolis County gathered at Annapolis Royal Town Hall on Thursday evening to witness a most unusual sight: the unknown girl who was found wandering the woods in the tiny village of Dale, NS, sitting in a large, comfortable chair alongside a small dog.

  The girl, who has been kept by a local family, and who has come to be known affectionately by her guardians as "Missy," was given the opportunity to answer questions put forth by interested townspeople.

  Though mute, Missy was able to respond through her caretaker and foster sister, Marie-Ann Daigle. Though no substantial answers to the riddle of her existence were given, the people were given an opportunity to regard the young woman up close, and learn more about her character.

  Marie-Ann Daigle disclosed much about Missy's daily routine, which includes playing with small toys, and much window-gazing in the company of their dog, a terrier named "Bully." She also gave witnesses a chance to look at a few of the girl's strange drawings, which looked like no more than scratches on paper, though the young Miss Daigle claimed to be able to understand them, and identified them as illustrations of a horse, their house, and a small circle which she said their feeble-minded charge would draw when hungry.

  The mysterious girl was restless throughout the inquisition, and eventually broke out into a fit, caterwauling and flailing about until her keepers were forced to call an end to her appearance.

  A small entrance fee was collected which is being put towards Missy's care.

  I searched the archives in the weeks aft
er her appearance for some letter to the editor about it, and found nothing. I thought I would see some outcry about the inhumane treatment of the girl, or the way she was paraded around for the amusement of gawkers and for money, but there was none of that. Letters abounded about a lack of temperance and piety among the men and townspeople, but none of it applied to Missy or her keepers. I could accept their fascination with her—after all, I had been just as fascinated, all my life—but could not believe they truly thought this was a noble endeavour. There was no interrogation, no investigating going on. It was a freak show.

  If my husband, Lewis, thought any of these things, he didn’t say them. He nodded and accepted all of it, not once expressing sympathy for Missy or the family. It disturbed me, a little bit, that he took these outcomes as normal. Which he was probably right about. In nearly every documented case like this, the same thing happens. A mysterious person is found, they are cared for by a person or persons—usually with funding from some kind of government—who then try to further capitalize on their ward’s misfortune. Every feral child or strange person found up until the turn of this century was put on display. Kaspar Hauser of Nuremberg was. The Elephant Man. The Wild Boy of Champagne. It goes on and on. It’s simply what humans do.

  There was only one thing my new husband—who was quiet and thoughtful, and who never spoke without much contemplation—thought to say about Missy. He had been a hunter and a guide in his youth, and recognized something in the story. Days after hearing it, when we were driving back into the city to resume our regular lives, he spoke:

  “More than likely she was out there for a long time before she came in,” he said. “Sounds like she had hypothermia.”

  “Of course she must have,” I said. “She was frostbitten. And she was naked.”