Out of the Wild Night

by Blue Balliett

  Perhaps it’s a scary face, a patch of freezing air, or a suffocating pressure pinning a person to the bed at night.

  Anger and urgency don’t evaporate with death, you know. Some souls remain disturbed, and no doubt have good reason for making a fuss.

  Others are surprised. Working. Busy, like me.

  Most ghost stories do center on an old house. A place like Eliza Rebimbas’s and mine, at least if Eddy Nold doesn’t get to it.

  Ohhh, perish the thought! If my house is gone and I am, too, who will ring and hoot?

  “OHHHHHH! Does anyone hear me? HELP us!” My voice bleeds across a quiet sunset, a streak of darkness against the orange light. People watching shudder. Grandma Sue closes her kitchen window; Eliza Rebimbas rests her eyes and thinks of happier times.

  I work at being louder. “OHHHHH, who will rescue us?”

  As the sun drops below the waves, all is still.

  It’s said that the ghosts of those who were here before modern times are tougher than recent spirits, perhaps because death was always around the corner.

  Despite my moment of desperation, I feel hope. I’m surrounded by far greater strengths than my own, and I don’t mean the Eddy Nolds of the world. I’m thinking of those who went to sea in the days before engines and radar and satellites. Those who remained on this island for centuries, despite illness and hardship.

  Although not all may have reached out while alive, they are now freer.

  Most of us who come back are here for two reasons. One, our home is still intact, the wood and plaster saturated with our everyday doings. We drift in and out, the way I used to do. Two, we are needed.

  Maybe it’s an invitation that few souls can resist, an urge that becomes stronger after death, as if once we’ve stopped breathing, we’re better at helping others. Now we’re able to offer what was given to us when we were still flesh and blood, although we might not have been aware at the time of the gift.

  Perhaps we spirits are like folded towels on a kitchen shelf. Out we come—snap! flap!—at the right moment. To dry tears. To mop up spills. To soothe.

  To be present.

  I’m back with a willing hand.

  I have two. Here—hold tight.

  While Sal returns from his visit with Mrs. Rebimbas, the Gang fishes for ideas around the woodstove in Phee’s warm kitchen.

  Life at the Folger house wasn’t always this cozy. Sal and Phee were thrown together by a storm.

  Phoebe Folger Antoine—pronounced Fee-bee Fol-jer An-twon—appeared eleven years ago on an old sailboat in Nantucket Harbor. Born early and small, she refused to give up despite complications, rousing the entire harbor with her shrieks. She has always been headstrong. Her mom, Sal’s daughter, Flossie, is now away and her dad, Jules Antoine, has returned to Haiti, where he’s from. Things didn’t exactly work out between him and her mom; they made some “bad choices,” as a school counselor once put it. Phee remembers thunderous fights, the boat rocking wildly as her parents pushed each other and threw heavy things against the walls, once shattering a porthole.

  At age five, she awoke alone on the boat one windy night. Curled up in her bunk down below, stuffed animals held tight, she listened as the wood creaked and moaned. Water began to trickle through the cracks, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Soon her pillow was wet. She called to her parents, but both were ashore working. This wasn’t unusual; she knew they were often gone while she slept.

  Suddenly a deep voice boomed, “Permission to come abooooard!” and unfamiliar boots thumped across the deck. A head peered down through the hatch. A member of the Coast Guard draped a jacket over her pajamas and brought her to the police station in town, where her grandfather Sal picked her up.

  A ferocious nor’easter blew up overnight, swamping the boat, which needed repairs. Phee has lived with her grandfather from that moment on. His home is now hers, and vice versa.

  Her mother, Flossie Folger, left soon after for a California university where she’s worked for years on a degree in the preservation of historic buildings. Steering the past into the future, as Sal explains it. He says that, as a kid, she always loved listening to stories about their old family home, and believed that secrets were hidden in the cracks and knotholes. Good with a hammer and nails, she spoke to and patted the walls. Sal says she’s always had a soft spot for Nantucket’s weathered houses, and that learning how best to protect them is the perfect career for her.

  Sal is a can-do guy. Not everyone in the community knows that, as he keeps to himself. He and Phee talk lots, but he and the rest of the world talk little. As sometimes happens if you jump a generation, Sal and his young granddaughter understand each other without even trying.

  Phee does still miss things about her mom: Flossie’s cheerful humming and lemony scent; the sight of a crescent of stars always clipped in her hair; a jingly tangle of arm bracelets; and the made-up stories, ones starring friendly sharks, hurricanes that became cozy hammocks, a cool sun and a warm moon that loved each other. Phee and her mother played a simple game: If Flossie hadn’t seen Phee for a few hours, she would ask, “Where’s my big girl?” and try to look as if she didn’t recognize her daughter. Phee would then shout, “Here! I’m right here!” and Flossie would shriek and grab her for a hug.

  Of course, there were the bad times when her parents were angry at each other, but Phee remembers that less well.

  Her mom and Sal have been writing for all these years. Phee adds her news to the bottom of Sal’s letters. They haven’t heard from Flossie for months now, but Sal isn’t worried. He says the end of a degree is probably the hardest part, and that is why she’s been silent.

  Phee’s dad left no address, but Phee will try to find him when she’s older. A house painter, Jules always smelled delicious, like salt plus turpentine. She remembers he had broad, cozy shoulders and taught her a game played on the deck of their houseboat with chicken bones, dried beans, and scallop shells.

  Meanwhile, she’s happy in town with Sal. More than happy.

  They make an odd pair. Sal is tall and faded; Phee, short and vivid.

  She likes her grandfather’s pirate-y looks. He comes complete with a sock hat, no matter what the season, a broken front tooth, chin stubble, and one lazy eye. Difficult teeth run in the family; Phee has uneven chompers that boast a whistling gap in front, and pointy incisors give her a slightly dangerous grin.

  She likes to comb her long black hair until it bounces and shines. Her eyebrows can wander away from each other but rush together when she’s angry. If she wants to be fancy, she puts on invisible eye shadow with a smooth nubbin of shell, and powders her nose with a leaf.

  Phee’s taught her grandfather how to play the Jamaican chicken-bone-and-beans game. Sal teaches his granddaughter never to feel sorry for herself, no matter what, and never to stop thinking about how to repair and recycle the broken things in life. Being an islander, he tells her, means being a problem solver.

  The Folger house has been in the family since it was built in 1783. It doesn’t exactly fit in with its neighbors anymore—the place buckles and leans, and the yard is a maze of wooden barrels and sea chests bound with iron, a blacksmith anvil surrounded by tools, old carriage wheels, a tangle of anchors, weeds as tall as Phee, and neat stacks of fireplace mantels and brick.

  Things other people might need or want one day.

  Sal and Phee have noticed that some of their off-island neighbors have gotten unfriendly over the last year or so. Gathering on the sidewalk in front, they talk and gesture but without so much as a nod to Sal if he happens to walk by. Eddy Nold has parked his truck nearby several times, always with a passenger or two inside. Waving his short arms toward their house, he wraps smiles around people Sal says are his customers.

  “Bet he’s trying to scare them,” Sal mutters. “Warns that if they don’t chuck everything old, they’ll end up looking like us.”

  Just the other day Phee opened the front door, looked out in her pajamas, and had
a thought. Wriggling her toes in the cool air, she wondered suddenly if her mom had done the same thing at age eleven. When was her mom coming home, anyway? It’d be good to have her around again, to talk about girl stuff and to help with the everydays, as they called the chores. While Phee stood there thinking, a neighbor walking by stared, his mouth open, then simply sped up. Not a word or a wave, even when she nodded hello.

  “Stranger and stranger,” as Sal put it. “No manners. The people coming out here now, some don’t know where they are. They don’t realize this is a community. A place where we notice each other.”

  It’s not just the living that Sal notices. He can sometimes reason with unhappy ghosts in other people’s homes, and he used to dowse for water using a willow stick, a skill that allowed people to dig a well in just the right spot. He can untie any problem and pick his way into most locks. He enjoys figuring out how to use almost anything left over. That includes modern materials like plastics or fiberglass, metals, and, of course, wood. All that floats or shelters … plus people.

  Yes, people. He doesn’t believe in all-bad souls, even the greediest ones. “Give ’em time,” Sal likes to say.

  Phee considers herself lucky to have a true islander for a grandfather, someone who has seen much sadness as well as joy. She knows that his parents, uncles, and aunts all died young, as did his wife, leaving him to live on as the only adult in a big house that was once filled. Phee has heard there were many mishaps in the family: a long-ago fall off a horse; a nasty tumble downstairs; boating accidents; something bad with a blacksmith’s anvil; infections and diseases that had no cure. Before modern medicine, death was an everyday happening.

  Sal is surprised by little.

  When he steps back in the kitchen after visiting Mrs. Rebimbas that afternoon, he says nothing at first. He and the group of kids sit in a circle. The fire dances on their quiet, serious faces, dipping here a cheek, there a curl of hair, in gold and tarnished copper. Rose follows blue green as the flames leap and dart.

  After a log falls in the fire and Sal pokes it back into place, the group hears a floorboard creak overhead. The Gang and the older man all look at the ceiling. Sal sighs.

  “You’ll be getting some help,” he says slowly, “I do believe. But you kids will have to be careful. The tide that surrounds an old home can run high.”

  By the time all of the kids but Phee left the Folger house, the Gang had a plan. Sal gave it his blessing.

  Like a doughnut with a hole in the middle, their idea was built around what was missing.

  As we islanders know, empty space on Nantucket is rarely just that.

  November 10.

  Sal thought the Old North Gang had a plan to do just one thing: watch any ongoing damage, as Phee and Gabe had at Lydia Lyon’s house. Stand in a close group at the edge of one property “renovation” after another, absorbing the details of wreckage. Remember and then tell, speaking to all the neighbors and residents who might listen.

  They’d be out there after school and on weekends.

  “You’ll be peskier than a cloud of mosquitoes in August,” Sal said to the group, looking pleased. “Mosquitoes with scarves and mittens.”

  When Phee and Gabe talked the next day, though, the plot began to deepen.

  “Let’s not disturb Sal with this,” Phee said. “He’s had enough worries in his life. But—”

  One good thing about old friends is that ideas share themselves. “I know,” Gabe said quickly. “Just standing around isn’t enough.

  “Last night, when I was falling asleep, I was startled awake by that boy in Mrs. Lyon’s house, the one waving at me to hurry up. Like he could see me lying there in my warm bed. I felt awful when I realized he and the little girl and everyone else inside the front door will probably be gone for good in no time. The insides of that house are headed for the dump, right? Last night I pictured him standing in the dust of his home, his straw hat still on, broken bricks and splintered boards everywhere. He was waiting for me.”

  “Huh,” Phee said, feeling just the tiniest bit spooked. “But not like, you know—”

  “Not like I’m about to die or anything,” Gabe finished for her.

  “What did he want you to do?” Phee’s voice was barely audible.

  “I’m not sure,” Gabe said. “I just know he wanted me to do more than stand and watch and then tattletale to people who already know this island has ghosts.”

  “What if it has something to do with your family stuff, like your great-grandma Hepsa’s way of quieting spirits?”

  Gabe looked nervous for the first time in their chat. “I think the boy wants me to be the lure,” he said slowly. “Not to quiet things down, but to do the opposite.”

  “Yikes,” Phee said. A shiver of fear slipped around her heart.

  “Can’t see turning away,” Gabe said, sounding more like his dad than he knew. “I’ll dive in.”

  Mary here. When I was a girl, my grandmother made us doughnuts to be used as a spyglass. The modern spelling is donut, but I’ll stick to the old.

  If you were playing on the street—whick-whacking around, as some of us still say—you might smell something delicious coming from one of the houses. We kids always crept in closer, whispering, “So-and-so is making a plate of wonders.”

  The hope was that the door might open and the plate be passed around. No one ever cooks just one wonder.

  Sometimes the grown-up in the kitchen teased us all by pretending not to know we were there. She might say by an open window, “I wonder what I’m going to do with all these today. Got too many. Maybe one of the dogs—”

  That’s when we’d pop out of the bushes, mouths watering, shouting, “NO, we’re here!”

  We kids would hold the warm, sugary circle up to one eye and look through the middle. When you spied a surprise, you sang out—like a seaman who spotted a whale—and were then allowed to eat that fried ring of bliss. People like Grandma Sue and Grandma Rebimbas must remember this, too. For us lookouts, it made us trim the wicks and keep our lanterns bright—that’s kerosene-lamp talk.

  Wonders prepared us for life.

  We didn’t miss much. Sometimes it was a fat slug that needed to be captured in the garden; other times a clot of dirt under a chair or a rip in the hem of a skirt. Things that were important to notice, clean up, or fix. Once I even found a British coin in the dirt and traded it for a chicken, to my grandmother’s delight. No telling what a hungry soul can spot when looking through a wonder.

  I’m glad that Gabe has been a part of the Old North Gang and eaten Grandma Sue’s irresistible wonders.

  Here’s a bright bead of hope—hope that there is time for these kids to spot what they need to catch.

  Hope that a boy can be a lure and also live to tell the story.

  Sometimes kids need to take charge.

  I say this with trepidation.

  Our windless month is turning cold fast. On the evening of the eleventh, the island feels the first light dusting of snow.

  Cyrus Coffin looks up from his math book, glancing out at the burial ground. He leans forward, squinting.

  “Come here,” he says quietly to Paul. Maddie is playing with plastic ponies on the bottom bunk across the room. She hops down and points outside. “They’re walking,” she says solemnly. “I seen it before, through the bushes.”

  Paul clicks off the overhead light in their bedroom, and the three kids press their noses to the window.

  “This like what the twins saw that night?” Maddie asks.

  “Dunno,” Paul answers. “Doesn’t seem like the same.”

  Maddie draws a lopsided smiley face on the condensation gathering on a windowpane.

  Outside, a powdery snow is falling. Without a breath of wind, it should be drifting straight down, but instead it lands on several apparent but invisible objects in midair.

  Look! Over there at the edge of the graveyard, is that the brief outline of a shoulder and the back of a head? Oh my, it’s as round as
a Halloween pumpkin. Only, there are no people to be seen, nor is there anything solid that might explain this.

  “Are those shadows?” Cyrus whispers.

  “Can’t tell,” Paul says quietly. “I don’t think it’s anything bad. But it feels—well, like they know we’re here. See? That shape near the bushes just turned our way!”

  “Yeah.” Maddie nods. “And it likes us.” She gives a little wave to the outlines, fingers opening and closing, and then goes back to playing on her bunk. Grabbing a pony with a baby-blue mane, she says, “I’m naming this one Benjamin. Benjamin Coffin.”

  The boys peer out in silence for a moment longer. Both see the grass rising and falling on its own, squishing down and then springing back up as if something unseen is stepping closer. Cyrus twitches the curtain closed.

  “Better not be too obvious,” he mutters to Paul, who nods but continues to peek through a crack.

  The oldest of the boys sees an odd shape hovering at chest height in the curtain of snow, as if a man-sized hand were pointing at him, the side of it and one finger collecting flakes.

  As if the ghost could see the boy’s eye.

  Paul Coffin steps back from the window, his heart hammering.

  The temperature rises overnight and all snow is gone by dawn, leaving the ground wet.

  As the Coffin kids wait by the side of the graveyard for the school bus the next morning, Paul nudges his brother.

  “See that?” The three look down at what seem to be fresh footprints, many prints. Some are large and deep, as if made by a tall person. They weren’t there yesterday.

  “Maybe a school group.” Cyrus bends to look. Both boys know that a visiting class would be made to walk through the main entrance to the cemetery.

  “Someone with a stick,” Paul says, pointing to a round hole pressed down into the mud.