Out of the Wild Night

by Blue Balliett

  Wait! My heart—unseen, but still here!—is thudding. The three of us are far from alone.

  The air is filled with life but does not move. Clouds and ocean and land are rolling, like crumbs on God’s knee. Colors drift. Now a darkening cobalt sky frames the gleam of low tide, and sand glitters and flows beneath a rising moon.

  The late light is ours! They’re back. Many others. I can’t see them, but I can feel them.

  And like the worn cobblestones in our streets, the rumpled brick sidewalks and the sinewy arms of elms, we belong.

  I wonder how many of us are here and whether we will matter. I think of the tear rolling down Eliza’s cheek, and our poor, dear house, so close to that dreadful scene. My teapot, peering anxiously out the kitchen window.

  I ring! I blow! “I’m here!” I shout. “HERE! HERE! HERE!”

  But no one replies.

  The boy and girl walk on. Oh, why can’t they hear me?

  “Gabe?” Phee’s head pops up.

  The two are passing through narrow streets in the oldest part of town, where many houses stand empty in the off-season. She stops abruptly and sits down on some steps.

  Silence.

  “GABE. What happened back there?” The boy joins her. It is then that Phee sees her old friend’s eyes are swimming with tears. “Oh. Sorry. I know this stinks.”

  Gabe shakes his head. “I’m just so mad,” he says slowly. “And I know my parents won’t want me to talk about any of this.”

  “But talking to me doesn’t count,” Phee reminds him. Both have odd voices that stand out in a group, which first made them notice each other in school—Gabe’s sounds like bicycle brakes that need oil and Phee’s is a low croak.

  Another reason they’ve been friends for so long is that their families are opposites. Phee lives alone with her grandfather, Absalom Folger, on Main Street. Everyone calls him Sal and he calls his granddaughter Fee-fi-fo Phee because of her giant-sized determination. Their home is often messy and there are few rules, like when to go to bed or what and how to eat. No one bothers about homework or whether you’ve gotten the dirt off your shoes. Nor does anyone worry if you’re late or haven’t left a note.

  Gabe’s place, on the other hand, is strict and quiet. Not much is said and lots can’t be talked about, as if messy ideas aren’t polite. Everything happens on schedule. To Phee, this is exotic and puzzling. For Gabe, it’s frustrating and sometimes lonely.

  Visiting each other feels good to both. Phee has always enjoyed the orderly atmosphere at Gabe’s, and his dad’s way of watching over them as if they might vanish, like soap bubbles or water boiling in the bottom of a pan. She also loves his mom’s gooey chocolate cookies.

  Phee and Gabe study each other’s faces for a moment.

  “Well? What is it?” Phee says, unable to be patient for another second.

  “There’s stuff I haven’t told you, because my parents were so worried about it. You know, well, spirit stuff. I’ve been sitting on it for days.”

  First, Gabe fills her in on what he and his dad saw on the beach. Then he tells his friend about his great-grandma Hepsa Coffin. Phee’s eyes are wide but she only nods, biting her lip. She knows that interrupting a Pinkham is dangerous to any story—it could mean the end of it.

  “And just now, at the house site,” Gabe mutters, “I saw some kids. Through that hole at the back. A boy wearing a straw hat stood on the second floor, and when the board under him fell, he jumped. Landed down below, by the fireplace. And then nails flew through the air, plus a shower of broken things, and he didn’t seem to notice. Like they flew right through him, and the hat stayed on.”

  Phee’s mouth is now open.

  “On the first floor, he disappeared and then popped out again, pulling a girl who clutched a cloth doll, one of those old-fashioned ones with a china head and feet. The two kids held hands and rushed toward the front door. Then the boy stopped just inside, looked around, and gestured to me. Me! All frantic. Like it was an emergency.”

  Gabe pauses and Phee, desperate for him to continue, bobs her head up and down like one of those puppies stuck to the dashboard in a car. Her friend goes on. “The boy went like this with one hand, as if to say, Hurry up, you! Then the two of them stepped into a crowd of adults standing just inside the front door, people with old stuff on. Long skirts. Bonnets. Foul-weather gear like rain slickers. Some were solid, some just outlines. One of them had a flat basket, another an oar. It didn’t seem like anyone but the boy noticed me. Then bam! Another board fell from the second floor and thick dust puffed everywhere. When it cleared, all those people were gone.”

  “Wow. That’s it,” Phee says softly. “You’re one of them.”

  “I am NOT!” Gabe says indignantly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Like your great-grandma. You have a talent for seeing ghosts! My grandpa Sal says it runs in families. Some are born with it, some aren’t. And if you live on a place like this island, with lots of old buildings, well …” Phee sounds far too cheerful.

  “I don’t want to be able to do that!” Gabe moans. “I’d have to hide it from my parents. They’d say I couldn’t go anywhere on my own if the dead are trying to make friends. I hate all of this.”

  “Gabriel Pinkham,” Phee replies in her bossiest voice. “This is cool.”

  “I feel sick,” Gabe says, then reties both of his sneakers, his chin resting on first one knee and then the other. “Like I might barf. How can I help those kids? By stopping the house-wrecking? Me? A kid?”

  “We,” Phee corrects.

  “Okay, we.” Gabe looks down the street. “We. But what if those spirits are, well, depending on us? And we can’t help?”

  “Hmm.” His friend squints, kicking at a pebble by her foot. “Seemed more like they wanted you to stop asking questions and start doing.”

  “You sound like my dad. And since he saw the steps on the beach, too, but has decided he didn’t … nah. He’ll do his best not to believe. Everything in his world has to fit with what the police say is real.” Gabe’s mouth turns down.

  “I think your dad would do anything for you,” Phee says gently. “But he probably thinks the smartest thing to do is nothing.”

  “Yeah,” Gabe says, the word heavy. “Nothing.”

  “But we know it isn’t,” Phee says. “That boy wants your help. And you saw them all waiting. Mrs. Lyon’s place must have been their home first.”

  “ARGHHH,” Gabe mutters. “So the only thing to do is to stop this house-gutting—but if someone on Nantucket owns an old house, they can legally do whatever they want to the inside. But this is so cruel, with spirits involved, and it’s wrong. WRONG.”

  “Why do you say ‘spirits’?” Phee asks.

  “Sounds less scary than ‘ghosts.’”

  Phee looks around at the quiet street. “Do you think your dad could talk to Mr. Nold about what he’s up to? Like, persuade him that it’s awful to rip apart these old houses?”

  Gabe turns away, his expression oddly like one of Herbie’s. “Unlikely.”

  “Unlikely means possible,” Phee says brusquely. She hops to her feet, takes a few determined steps, then stops when she realizes Gabe isn’t next to her. “Come on, you slowpoke—there’s not a moment to waste. Spirits, ghosts—it doesn’t matter what you call ’em. Either way, this is an emergency. Let’s see what the Gang has to say, instead of heading home to my place.”

  As Gabe adjusts his backpack, his face brightens. “Hey! What if this is something meant for kids, and kids only—and maybe that’s why I saw them? That day my dad and I saw the footprints on the beach, he was pretty shaken up, but I had this strange bubbly feeling, like—well, like I was glad the spirits were there. I kind of felt like I could rescue my dad, if needed. Like I recognized something he didn’t. And I hung some cookies on a bush for whoever belonged to the footprints, in case anyone was hungry.”

  Phee grins at her friend. “Good move,” she says. “Onward.”

  A
s the Crier, I’m amazed how little adults know about how much kids think.

  I feel a bit dizzy with that idea. Being an adult most recently, that is.

  Kids live in a far more interesting world than their parents do, in part because they are always spying. Spying and living in the present.

  And here’s a secret: When you’re really in the present, I believe you’re most in the past, because it never actually went away. It’s what makes us all people and not horseshoe crabs or stones. Many who live think the past isn’t here, but those of us who’ve died know better.

  Half an hour later, the kids in the Old North Gang are sitting in a circle among the stones in the Old North Cemetery, halfway between Phee’s and Gabe’s homes. Friends for years now, the Gang consists of Gabe and Phee, Maria and Markus, and three other kids—Paul, Cyrus, and Maddie Coffin. The last three live in a one-story cottage owned by their grandmother, one bordering the burial ground.

  Ranging in age from six to eleven, each one of the kids in the Gang has seen things they can’t explain. They are open with one another. Gabe has just told the rest of the Gang what he shared with Phee on the steps, with a warning not to repeat his story; Maria and Markus have told the others about the invisible shapes wading out of the water and then the lights that chased them from the graveyard. The Coffin kids have the greatest backlog of stories, being the ones who live right next to hundreds of graves. They’ve seen a tiny girl who calls herself Mary Abby and sometimes appears in a white dress, wanting to play; they’ve seen a woman in a long skirt and hat who always sits quietly by a cluster of slate gravestones, painting a picture; they’ve seen a man with a beard and a woman with a long braid who like to stroll arm in arm, but then vanish into nothing if you try to get too close.

  When Gabe now fills them in on the boy signaling frantically for help and the little girl by his side, eyes are big.

  “Sounds desperate,” Cyrus says.

  “Poor kids.” Maria nods. “Losing their home.”

  “I’d bring my doll, too,” Maddie chirps.

  They decide that one adult in particular might be able to help in this crisis, and that’s because he’s lived through more ups and downs in his lifetime than most. That person is Sal Folger, Phee’s grandfather.

  Before the kids leave the graveyard, I need to share a bit more about this Coffin family and a certain game played by the Gang.

  It’s a game that lures ghosts.

  Paul, Cyrus, and Maddie Coffin have two living parents, but both work on an offshore fishing trawler and are sometimes gone for weeks. When they’re home, this mom and dad often do too much “celebratin’,” as their grandma Sue calls it. The kids are just as happy to be living with her.

  The three feel lucky that their grandma’s cottage is next to an unfenced graveyard; there are no cars, just an occasional rabbit or a curious deer. The house is cramped—“the size of a polite sneeze,” their grandma says fondly—and sometimes one kid or another takes a game, a book, or a snack and leans against a headstone to do homework outside or simply be alone. During the hot months, the kids have sometimes crept in among the stones at night to find a breeze under the stars and look for ghosts. The burial ground is never a sad place for them. Rather, it feels as if they’re in a friendly gathering spot, as their grandma is related to most of the people buried nearby. Of course, this means that they are, too.

  “You kids belong,” Grandma Sue reminds them comfortably. “Coffins, Husseys, Bartletts, Gardners, Folgers. Family. Nothing out there will ever hurt you. Just folks who went to sea, caught whales, cooked everything to the bone, and made do.”

  The Ramos and Coffin kids are neighbors and spend lots of time together. Gabe and Phee, both “only” kids, like to stop by after school, as they did today. The Old North Gang’s favorite game is one taught to them by Grandma Sue, who calls it Ghost Gam.

  The word gam comes from life at sea. When two whaling ships ran across each other in one of the oceans and the captains wanted to talk, one was rowed to the other ship and they got together for a gam.

  Nantucket language is packed with those nautical terms—you can’t get away from them. “Once at sea, never off it,” we islanders say.

  Here’s how Ghost Gam works: One kid—called the Captain—quietly picks a name from the children’s markers in the graveyard, of which there are many. He or she then writes down the chosen name, stuffs it in a pocket, and wanders around silently repeating the dead child’s name until a clear picture of something comes to mind, something that feels like a surprise. The Captain then adds this by the name. It might be a family of china animals or a jack-in-the-box, a live puppy, a painted toy boat, or a rocking horse.

  In the Captain’s pocket, a scrap of paper might say:

  Little Emmy & baby chick

  or

  James Hussey & spinning top

  The others then ask twenty questions about this thing that came to mind, such as: Does it move? Ever breathe? Is it a pet? Is it made of wood? Was it carved?

  The Gang is good at this game and almost always guess right. Next, they all gather around that headstone and leave the piece of paper next to the grave, tucked under a heavy stone or shell from Grandma Sue’s beachcombing pile. They chant, “Here you are, and so are we. Here’s your gift, so please be free.”

  When the Gam is over, one of the kids calls out, “Grandma Su-u-ue!” in a teasing singsongy voice. Sue Coffin opens her kitchen door and sings back, “WHO wins the WON-DER?” and all the kids feel happy and excited because although there’s really no winner or loser, she rolls wonder off her tongue as if it’s as sweet and rare as a winter goldfinch.

  And what a wonder it is—a heavenly circle of fried dough dipped in either chocolate, maple syrup, or a mix of sugar and cinnamon. Everyone gets one.

  Grandma Sue loves this game, as she feels the children buried nearby could always use a toy and some play rather than a sad glance. As the Gang piles into her kitchen and reaches for the wonders, she always says the same thing: “Here’s to all, so bite the lure!”

  A lure, of course, is nothing unusual to people living on a small island. Comparing a treat to a fishhook doesn’t trouble either this grandma or the group of kids.

  As in many families run by a grandparent, the three Coffin children fit like puzzle pieces. Paul, never shy, is eleven and pretends always to know which way the wind is blowing, which usually works. People think he does even when he doesn’t. Cyrus, nine, is the one who keeps an eye or ear out for trouble, especially during this silent month when thoughts are extra loud. Grandma Sue says he’s lucky to be “the Coffin with deep waters,” which makes him feel special. Maddie is six, the baby in the family, and happily notices and announces things the other two miss. She doesn’t yet write well enough to be a Captain in Ghost Gam, but she can partner with one of the older kids.

  After the brief Gang meeting in the cemetery that afternoon, Paul calls out, “Grandma Su-u-ue! Going to Phee’s place for a bit,” and his grandmother pops her head out the kitchen window.

  “Already?” She frowns. “Gam done, or aren’t you kids playing today?”

  Maddie waves back. “Gotta see—” she squeaks, then stops as the others nudge her.

  Grandma Sue scans their faces. “Well, okay. Hold on to your sister.” Grandma Sue nods to Paul and Cyrus.

  As she turns away from the window, she mutters, “I’ll keep those wonders warm …”

  Phee’s grandfather hears the shuffle-bump of many feet on the stairs before he sees the kids.

  As he listens to the news about Mrs. Rebimbas’s empty house and the deadly treatment of Lydia Lyon’s place next door, his eyes darken with anger. Gabe then describes the boy who signaled for help, the little girl clutching the doll, and the crowd by the front door.

  Sal nods grimly. “You’re right—those folks need us. Make yourselves at home till I get back,” he says. “Gotta check in with someone.”

  “But not my dad! He hates this stuff and doesn’t want me
talking about it,” Gabe blurts. “Please don’t!”

  “Not your dad,” Sal repeats. He pauses. “But don’t ever underestimate a parent,” he says slowly. “Or grandparent,” he adds with a wink as the door closes.

  Minutes later, after walking rapidly past Mrs. Rebimbas’s empty house and standing by the stripped-down wreckage that was once Lydia Lyon’s proud home, Sal sits by Eliza Rebimbas’s bed in the island nursing home.

  She raises one hand. “Must stop it,” she murmurs. Still as can be, she listens to all Sal has to say.

  A nurse marches in and interrupts. “Pills, Mrs. R.! Time for your nighty-night pain meds!”

  Mrs. Rebimbas takes the medicine, closing her eyes in resignation. When the nurse is gone, Eliza gazes directly at Sal, her blue eyes as sharp and kind as ever.

  “I’ll do my best,” Sal promises, looking at his hands. “As will the children.”

  “Yes, the children …” Mrs. Rebimbas looks out the window. “Children and ghosts. Like sugar with cinnamon.”

  Her eyes slide shut and Sal sits for a moment longer, remembering what had happened to him at her house when he was a boy.

  The dead had stepped in and straightened him out.

  Let’s talk about ghosts. Spirits. Souls. Poltergeists.

  This Crier doesn’t know exactly who’s out there.

  Thousands of people have lived over the centuries on this tiny island: If we were all present at the same time, it would be a nightmare.

  I mean it. We Nantucketers have always valued our privacy.

  Every island resident has heard stories of the dead crossing paths with the living. This has gone on for longer than I can remember, but some aren’t sure what to think or say about this stuff. I mean, whether or not to believe in a spirit that seems to interact. Well, here’s the truth: All folks change their tune once they’ve had an experience of their own.

  Sometimes it’s seeing a figure, or even a number of figures; other times, there are bumps, thumps, footsteps, latched doors that open. Objects are moved. Snatched. Dropped. Mostly the experience is comforting, as the sounds in my house were. Occasionally a visit is threatening.