by Sheila Jecks
CHAPTER 6
With Christmas finally over, things quieted down. Jim went back to work, the kids went back to school and I didn’t see the little girl or the digging man again…until the spring.
A false calm had come over me, and I went back to work too. I couldn’t talk to the girls at work about what I was seeing; they already thought I was having a nervous breakdown. My life became a monotonous routine; I couldn’t seem to find an interest in anything.
Life just continued.
I saw the little ghost through the kitchen window of the church again that early spring. I was being called and I knew, soon I wouldn’t be able to resist.
Just thinking about it made my flesh crawl. I couldn’t talk about it to Jim, he didn’t understand. I began to have flash backs. But they weren’t my flash backs, they weren’t my relatives; I didn’t know the people I was seeing. I had anxiety attacks that sent me home from the office and I could hardly leave my bedroom.
I didn’t want to leave the house.
When I was forced to go out, to work or to the store, I would be soaked with perspiration and exhausted by the time I got back. The doctor said I was under too much stress and recommended being a stay-at-home mom for a while.
Dorothy the office manager, bless her heart, gave me a three month leave of absence.
The girls in the office quit doing the research on the early settlers; it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
The doctor just put it that way, I thought, so he didn’t have to tell Jim I was going loony toons and he would have to put me away in the funny farm soon.
I began to stress about Aunt Muriel, the old lady knew what was happening to me, she knew why I was being haunted. I had to see her and make her tell me what was going on.
Jim had to help me!
As we walked down the hallway that March afternoon in the Norwegian Old Folks Home, I began to have second thoughts. What were we doing here? Was I going to upset this old woman again? She told me she wouldn’t tell me anything else. So why was I doing this to her? I was getting a bad case of cold feet.
“Come on,” said Jim turning left at the end of the main hallway, “Her room is down here, room 204. Let me do all the talking, you sometimes get too intense.”
“O.K., O.K.,” I said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
We came to Aunt Muriel’s room and looked in, no old lady in the pink chair. No pictures on the wall. I turned to the young woman that was making up the bed and asked, “Where’s Aunt Muriel?”
“Not around here anymore,” she said with a smile, “Sorry, inside joke. You folk’s relatives or something?”
“No, we’re just friends of the family,” I lied, “Where is she?”
“Probably in heaven,”
“Are you telling me she died?”
“Yea, I guess so.”
“Oh no,” I said, leaning against the door jam. I felt thoroughly deflated as though all the air had suddenly been sucked from my lungs. I turned to Jim, “This is terrible; I wanted to talk to her. She was the only person that could help me understand.”
“You folks named, Fox? She said you’d be by, and made me promise I’d tell you to ask at the nurse’s station. She left something there for you.”
Jim and I left her room and retraced our steps back to the reception area. I stood by the desk, and when I told the clerk our name, she said, “Yes, I remember, Miss Henderson gave me a letter to give to you. She said you’d understand.”
We went down the quiet hall to the peaceful common room with the beautiful spring flowers and massive chandelier and sat down in the corner of the grey sofa.
I gave the envelope to Jim; I didn’t have enough courage to open it myself.
The expensive white paper inside was covered with an old woman’s small spidery handwriting. After glancing over it, Jim began to read out loud.
CHAPTER 7
It’s been three months now and summer is finally here. I still don’t know if I really believe any of this but the little girl ghost is gone now; no one has seen her since that crucial day in March.
What made her go away you ask? Helen’s Aunt Muriel finally explained it all.
Muriel’s Aunt Elsa and Uncle Olaf Gunderson built the little house in the cove. Everyone thought they only had one child. But Elsa gave birth to two little girls. One twin was bright and beautiful and normal in every way, the other twin was badly deformed and retarded.
People at that time didn’t understand about birth defects and felt it was something the mother or father did to deserve God’s punishment if a child was not perfect. Olaf wanted to leave the little girl outside and allow her to die of exposure, but Elsa wouldn’t let him. Instead she hid the forlorn youngster in the attic. Muriel was the only one that was allowed to come to the house and play with Jenna because she was an orphan and no one paid much attention to her. They tried hard to keep it from the youngster, but she eventually found out about the girl in the attic, anyway.
When the normal twin died of the fever she was about nine years old. Olav accidentally killed the retarded child the same day. They couldn’t admit to having two children after all that time.
If people found out he killed the retarded child he would be arrested and taken away. What would happen to his wife? How would she live? Finally they decided to bury both girls in the same grave, one on top of the other. That way they could have a funeral and no one would be the wiser.
Elsa and Olav took Muriel aside and made her promise on her mother’s grave that she would never tell about the other child.
Muriel’s Mother had died some years earlier, and her father was lost that same year when his fishing boat overturned leaving the little girl all alone and handed from relative to relative.
After the funeral Olav and Elsa asked Muriel if she wanted to come and live with them. They loved her and raised her as their own. She loved her Aunt and Uncle and was afraid of what people would say if they found out the truth. But she knew that after she died there would be no one left to criticise and it wouldn’t matter anymore who knew.
When the church’s graveyard was started in 1903 the parents disinterred the normal twin and moved her grave but because no one else knew about the other twin, she was left in the unmarked grave under the apple tree.
This March when the grave diggers dug up the spot under the tree that wouldn’t grow flowers, they found the little bones of that poor unwanted child.
It was odd that no one was ever able to find the grave of the little girl in the white dress, but when I looked for it in what used to be the church graveyard that heart wrenching day in March, I found it right away.
They now have one small marked grave in the graveyard again. There was some question as to whether they should bury them side by side or one on top of the other, but I knew they wanted to be together again.
Just like before.
No one knows if the Church Fathers or the Municipality will allow them to stay. But whatever they decide, I will move heaven and earth to make sure they stay together.
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