by Gemma Files
“After what happened?”
Tierney pauses. “I’ll go get the file,” he says, at last.
Safie’s notes say we asked for copies of the stuff he showed us next, and Tierney obliged us, same way he did with almost everything else we requested; poor guy spent a good couple of hours xeroxing stuff from Mr. Whitcomb’s non-mine-related box alone, later that evening, while Safie and I checked into our little room in the Gooden Tymes Bed & Breakfast down the street. But the file on Giscelia Wròbl was considerably lighter, which you can see Tierney apologize for. “We had a fire back in 1957,” Safie’s notes have him saying. “And then a flood, then another fire . . . you’re sort of lucky we have anything from that time period at all, really. 1886 just wasn’t a good year, by most accounts.”
There were three newspaper clippings: one from Chaste, one from Overdeere, one from Upper New York. Story must’ve travelled, and I could see why. I remember doing research about the turn of the century, how there were a series of Millennialist scares as the 1800s drew to a close, though obviously nothing like what would happen in 1999, let alone what had happened in 999. Sometimes these were jump-started by actual cults—the Children of a Living Voice set their followers three or five separate deadlines for the apocalypse, for example, depending on your sources, before finally giving up on the idea. But then again, telling people the world’s about to end has always been big business of a sort, though it’s not as though Handrij Wròbl made any money off seeing his particular version of it through to conclusion.
According to all three articles, Handrij was such a recluse that locals first figured out he might be going a little wacky after he let all his animals go, then harvested his crops too early for them to be worth anything, stacked them together in his barn, and burnt the whole thing down. When the constabulary arrived to arrest him for endangering his neighbours, Handrij’s family convinced them he’d already run off; actually, he was lurking in their root cellar, where he passed the time praying and pounding nails into his own head “like Jael with Sisera,” as the paper from Chaste put it. When night fell, he collected his children and mother-in-law, leading them at gunpoint into the smoking ruin of his fields, where they spent the next two weeks waiting in vain for Jesus Christ to arrive on a chariot drawn by angels and whisk them off to heaven, hopefully without the minor inconvenience of having to die first.
On Tuesday morning of week three, Giscelia was discovered hiding underneath a pile of ashy dirt and discarded stalks, the sole survivor of the incident—her siblings and grandmother having either died of privation during their wait or had their brains beaten in. Handrij, meanwhile, was once more notably absent. A subsequent manhunt failed to turn up any leads, though a week later a man’s body was recovered from a nearby swamp with its head neatly severed at the neck, the wound cauterized, as if with a red-hot implement. And two years after that, the next person to plough Handrij’s “cursed” field broke his blade on a human skull buried a foot or so beneath the surface, with four iron nails driven halfway through its right-hand occipital ridge.
“She was blind, hysterically, when they found her,” Tierney tells the camera. “Spent the next few months at Miss Dunlopp’s, eventually regaining her sight, and started to paint sometime soon after. People thought it was a marvel—this uneducated farmer’s daughter, no culture but the Bible, making the kind of art she did. Used to have blackouts, go into these trances and paint all day and night without stopping, like she was sleepwalking. Got bad enough they had to tie her to her bed and feed her knockout drops just to make her rest. But Miss Dunlopp said her hardship was a gift from God, so they had to let it run its course, and as Giscelia—Iris, by then—got older, she stopped doing it quite as much. Miss Dunlopp also told anybody who asked it was a mercy she didn’t remember more about what’d happened.” He pauses. “That last part was a lie, but again, I can’t help but think she meant well.”
“How would you know she was lying?” Safie asks, from off-screen. To which he shrugs and answers, “Because we have her statement—Giscelia’s, Iris Dunlopp’s, Mrs. Whitcomb’s. From right after she was rescued.” One last nod, toward the file in my hand. “It’s in there, at the bottom.”
Statement of Giscelia Ezter Wròbl, aged nine years & eight months, collected 1886, at Miss Guinevere Dunlopp’s Formatory for Orphaned Girls and Boys (Schoolmaster Euan M’Latchey, acting as clerk):
My father said there was no point in sowing or reaping anymore, because the Lord was coming & these were End Times. So he took us all out to the field instead & there we stayed from the beginning of one week to the end of the next, fourteen whole days. We were waiting for Jesus & His angels to come get us, to take us away to Paradise on doves’ wings. We were waiting for the trump & the breaking of seals.
& some of us were sick when we first went out there, & some of us got better, which my father considered a blessing & a miracle, but some of us got worse. I was holding my littlest brother when he died & my grandmother died while she was holding me. & after a time I was glad that my eyes were glued together with sickness, because then I did not have to see how both of them changed. Besides which my father would not allow us to bury them because Jesus was coming & if we tried to move he would brandish his sword at us, which he had beaten out of a ploughshare. So we all just lay quiet & still as we could & pretended we were praying.
& then things were dark, but a light came, bright as though it was noonday. Yet perhaps it was noonday, since the doctor told me later I was eaten up with fever when they found me, so time may have passed me by. Even now, even here, I do not truly know.
& then, in the midst of it, with the flies & the heat & the burnt flowers nodding, the useless flowers & the ruts all overgrown with weeds. Then a smell came, such a bad smell, so hot & dreadful. Like when you make sausage & blood drips into the fire. & I heard a voice ask my father why he was not at work.
Who are you, woman? he asked, & she said: It does not matter who I am. Who do you think you are, that you neither till nor harvest & your field is gone to ash, not crop; where is your horse, your plough? Why is this land I gave you watered only with kin-blood?
I do not have to talk to you, he told her, & she laughed. Ah, but I think you will, she said.
You will.
If she comes to you at midday do not look up, my grandmother always told us, but my father said those were old wives’ tales, witches’ prattle. But my father told tales of Jesus & His angels in his turn, & those were not true, either. None of it is true, before or since.
She is the only true thing.
& I did not look up, I could not, my eyes were shut, I could not see. The doctor said I should have gone blind, that I should have been scarred for life, but I was not & this is a true miracle, not one of my father’s tales. A miracle that occurred when she touched me, cupped my chin in the palm of her white-hot hand & burned me to the bone, deeper, down where no one can ever see just for looking. She came & I saw, I saw. I am still seeing.
No, nothing ever came in the field but her, whether at noonday or midnight & so I know she is real, if nothing else. Everything else is lies or tales, the sort we tell ourselves when we are eaten up with fever, when our eyes stick together, when we are too hungry to move & too tired to pray.
When light reflects off the ploughshare-sword like a mirror & there is no water anywhere, no voice but his & then. & then.
& then, hers.
Safie’s notes say we made arrangements to join Val Moraine’s usual Saturday tour of Whitcomb Manor, aka the Vinegar House. Outside the museum, however, she mistakenly left the camera on, even while it was pointed downwards, allowing this snatch of conversation to be recorded—
HEWSEN: The fuck was that, man? That story—
CAIRNS: Yeah, I know.
HEWSEN: No, but seriously. Was all that real?
CAIRNS: Mrs. Whitcomb thought it was, I guess. Granted, she was young . . . just
been through an ass-load of trauma, too.
HEWSEN: She thought she saw Lady Midday, is what that was. Thought Lady Midday killed her dad.
CAIRNS: Wait, no. Didn’t she say her eyes were shut the whole time? I mean—Tierney said she was blind, right? So—
HEWSEN: Blind after. “I saw,” that’s what she said.
CAIRNS: Well, we can’t possibly take her at her word, ’cause that’s just . . . that’d be crazy, yes? Totally. No, she was just—she remembered the story, the one her grandma told her. The fairy tale. So she saw it, but in her mind. That’s what must’ve gone on.
HEWSEN: Right. [A beat.] So . . . what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb’s dad if it wasn’t . . . that? I mean, with his head?
CAIRNS: I don’t know. No way to know. It’s a great story, though. Isn’t it?
HEWSEN: Great, yeah. Uh huh.
CAIRNS: Oh, it’s just perfect. The perfect narrative strategy. Everybody in the world is gonna want to—what?
HEWSEN: Nothing.
CAIRNS: Safie, c’mon. These people’ve been dead a hundred years, long before either of us was born. Before my mom and dad were born. It’s sad, but it’s true . . . what bleeds, leads. So this leads.
HEWSEN: You’re happy about this. That we found this out. That this is why she was doing what she did.
CAIRNS: Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the only reason, but yes. This is the sort of stuff we came here to learn, and I’d rather it be interesting than boring. Wouldn’t you?
HEWSEN: Yeah. I guess, yeah.
CAIRNS: Don’t guess, be sure, or we might as well just go home—no money, no film, no book, nothing. You want that?
HEWSEN: No.
CAIRNS: ’Course not. So. Are you sure?
HEWSEN: . . . Yes. Miss.
CAIRNS: Good.
It’s definitely my voice—I hear myself say the words, and they sure as hell sound like the sort of bullshit I pull out when there’s something I want that I don’t want to be made to feel bad about wanting. I know it’s Safie, too. But . . . no, otherwise there’s just a hole, a blank. No sense of time or place. Just . . . empty.
Similarly, Simon tells me I phoned home that night—spoke to him at some length. Tried to speak to Clark, or get him to speak to me, but all he’d do was jig up and down on the bed yelling some rhyme Simon didn’t think he’d ever heard before. He couldn’t tell where Clark might’ve picked it up from, but thinks it went like this:
Inside out and outside in
This is how the world begins,
Outside in and inside out
Is how you blow a candle out.
“Dude, so loud,” I observed, and Simon laughed, or so he says. “He’s been like that since you left,” he told me. “Maybe he does miss you after all.”
I snorted. “Chance’d be a fine thing.”
“Aw, now, hon. Stay positive.”
“Well, I would, except for the fact that doesn’t sound a thing like me, really. Does it?”
“Nope, you’re right. Unfortunately.”
Inside out and inside out
Knock at the door then turn about.
Outside in and outside in
There she stands so let her in.
I hung up the phone, and then Safie and I had supper before going to bed. Her notes say I told her I thought the air pressure was shifting, that I could feel it in my temples. Something about how there were faces moving around in the paintings back at the museum, but I didn’t expect she’d noticed, ha ha. Sometime in the early morning she says she woke up to the sound of me yelling something she couldn’t make out, and when she snapped on the light it seemed to hurt my eyes; I jack-knifed into a foetal position, palms slapped to shield them, covered in sweat. Asked me: “Are you okay, miss?” and I just said yes, yes, it was nothing, I was fine.
“Should I call somebody?”
“No! No problem, go back to sleep!”
She didn’t, though, for which I can hardly blame her. Sat up instead, cataloguing what she’d done so far, till the sun came up and I woke for real, apparently unaware that anything at all had disturbed either of our rests.
The Vinegar House tour began that day—October 23, almost the last visit of the season—the way it always did, with an 11:00 A.M. sharp meet-up at Quarry Argent’s Town Square Pub, owned and operated by Val Moraine’s husband Stewie. Moraine does volunteer work for the Folklore Museum, and has been running the Vinegar House tour since she got her tour guide license from Ontario Parks and Rec in early 2000, shortly after the museum finally managed to have Whitcomb Manor declared an official Heritage Trust site, deciding to use the small annual easement this gave them to fund educational excursions around its grounds. As the house was already in an advanced state of decay, the museum’s board of trustees decided against attempting anything more than minimal upkeep on the site as a whole, especially since they probably weren’t going to get any more government funding to help defray the expense. Instead, they’d use it as an additional revenue source, hoping to attract just enough sightseers to keep the Manor from falling into irretrievable ruin.
We told Moraine what we’d been working on and, according to Safie’s notes, “her eyes lit up.” Like Balcarras had originally told me, it was no surprise to her that Mrs. Whitcomb had made films—indeed, one of her great aunts turned out to have been a staple player in the Japery movies and might even have appeared in Lady Midday (Version One), though the likelihood of being able to prove it was slim, since she’d died a mere month and half earlier. If we were right, this would make Mrs. Whitcomb not only Canada’s first recorded female filmmaker, but a technical and artistic savant as well. As her home and, almost certainly, her production studio, the Vinegar House would therefore be a candidate for classification as a site of “great historical significance” (my exact words) whose promotion might potentially bring Quarry Argent and surrounding townships a fair deal of welcome interest—and better yet, money. Carried away with enthusiasm (or so Safie describes me), I offered to show Val my Lady Midday clips on my laptop, since we were still waiting for the rest of the tour-goers for that day to show up.
You may or may not believe this, but Val Moraine was the first person to watch those clips who actually stopped the first one before it finished, and not more than twenty seconds in. “Thank you, that’s more than enough,” she said. According to Safie’s notes she looked either sick or scared. “I see what you mean; those do look a lot like the paintings in the museum. And the ones on the walls, too.”
“Walls?” I asked.
“Of the Vinegar House. They’re all over a bunch of the interior walls, painted right onto the wallpaper, sometimes into the wood.”
“Then that’s where we have to go,” I said, or Safie—the notes, annoyingly enough, don’t specify. But from the next sentence, I’m inclined to think it was me: “That’s what we have to see.”
If Moraine answered, it didn’t get written down. Presently, in ones and twos, the rest of the group trickled in—five people, all told—and we boarded Moraine’s minivan-cum-bus for the drive out to the Vinegar House.
“We call it that because of the smell,” Moraine told us during the drive up; in Safie’s recording, Moraine’s voice has the firm smoothness of a long-memorized but still-enjoyed spiel. “It doesn’t smell all that bad now, not that it smells like roses or anything. But all of us who grew up around here remember hearing the legends, those stories about what happened to Mrs. Whitcomb . . . what might’ve happened, anyways. My old gran told me there was this stink used to hang around the place—really bad, like rotting eggs; or something poisonous, like there’d been a fire, or a big spill down at the Chaste pickling plant.
“When Mr. Whitcomb got married and had the house all dolled up, he took that old field out back and turned it into a hedge maze with a garden in the centre of it, herbs growing wild around big beds of expensive flowers wi
th special names he and Mrs. Whitcomb brought back from their European tour. Everything was beautiful, and when things got real hot you could smell the garden all the way down the hill into Quarry Argent. But things changed after their little boy ran away. . . .”
The museum records for this period note an intermittent series of complaints to the town council about “unpleasant and pervasive” odours coming from the general direction of Whitcomb Manor, whenever the wind changed direction sharply. These complaints start in late 1908, the year that a judicial injunction allowed an empty coffin bearing Hyatt Whitcomb’s name to be buried in the Whitcomb crypt; the last complaint on record was filed in 1925, the year Mrs. Whitcomb was also officially declared dead. But even at the complaints’ peak, between 1916 and 1918, there’s no evidence in the records that any of them were ever acted on in any substantial way. By 1926, Mr. Whitcomb had already returned briefly from Europe to sign various documents and close Whitcomb Manor down permanently, and then promptly left Canada once more, never to return.
“People understood,” Moraine said. “They knew she had more than enough on her plate to deal with already. She was eccentric, sad—special, just like her boy. Never knowing what happened! And Mr. Whitcomb being always away, too, though of course he paid for anything she asked for, like a true gentleman; he begged her to come with him, but she refused. Said she was gonna wait right here until Hyatt came home, or he didn’t. It’s a sad story.”
Our group arrived at the Vinegar House shortly after 1:00 P.M.—an hour later than Moraine customarily began her showings, because I’d made it vehemently clear that Safie and I wanted to see the (usually-unexplored) inside of the house as well. This necessitated a detour to pick up steel-toed boots and hard-hats from Quarry Argent’s M’Cauley Family Hardware Store; Bob Tierney had already authorized the loan, using the museum’s emergency credit card. Once we disembarked, however, Moraine lost no time in leading her charges—now including German tourists Axel Beckenbauer and Holle Abend, and a local family on a day trip from Overdeere, Max LaFrey, his wife Kirstie and daughter Aileen, as well as Safie and me—up the driveway and through the remains of a mixed-fruit orchard that had once blocked the Manor’s view of Stow-apple road, providing shade and privacy, toward their destination.
