Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  The barn door was open, letting in flying insects. I closed it behind me and set her plate on the workbench. The sunlight outside was so bright that the barn seemed dark and shadowy. I thought I saw her at the back of the room, sitting on the steps to the sleeping loft. “Lunch!” I called out. “It’s getting cold!” Then my eyes adjusted to the dimness. Emily was sitting there, holding an envelope and a piece of paper, staring straight ahead, giving no sign of having heard me. “Ma mère,” I said, reverting to our childhood usage. “Mère, what is it?”

  I made my way back to her, skirting cardboard boxes and piles of shavings. When I reached her, she let the paper slide to the floor. I read it on my knees in the light from a grimy window. The script was jagged and slanted, written in a hurry. Hannah was on her way to Rochester, over 400 miles from Dry Falls in the state of New York. Two weeks later she wrote again, giving no return address or telephone number. She was working in a furniture factory applying the finish to a high-priced line of Early American reproductions. She was making ends meet and saving a little besides. We must not try to find her because she didn’t want to see us. It was two and a half years later before she broke the silence again. This time she sent a Christmas card with her name scrawled at the bottom and no message, postmarked Albany.

  I got my mother to myself when I was almost eighteen. Once I had found her, I did my best to keep close to her. According to all the schedules of normal adolescent development, it was time to leave home and break the maternal tie. My pattern of development had been just the reverse of average. I learned to be self-sufficient throughout my childhood. To cut the tie now would go against my heart’s inclination. Instead of accepting a partial scholarship to a woman’s college in western Massachusetts, I enrolled at Portland University so that I was free to come home every weekend. When I finished college, where I dabbled in botany, business studies, and English, I found jobs that allowed me to make my home with Emily. My friendships with men and women were conducted during the week, Monday to Friday. I led a kind of harmless double life, as an individual and as a daughter.

  I worked briefly as a guide for a travel agency in North Windham, escorting groups of pregnant Catholic women to the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupré, the Lourdes of Quebec. After that there were stints of employment at the Shaker Village on Sabbathday Pond; as an assistant editor for Maine Heritage magazine, where I graduated from the SWOP page to a feature called “Maine Kitchens”; and, last of all, as the parish secretary at St. Anthony’s, working for the newly appointed minister, Henry Lieber.

  When Hannah ran away the temper of our household changed immediately, as if the dark red wallpaper with the raised fleur-de-lis design had been stripped and replaced with a coat of glossy white paint. We removed the Spanish armchairs to the attic, but left everything else just as it had been. Emily’s French blood made her as close-handed as any native Yankee. If their religion allowed it, the French would take their belongings to the grave, like the Egyptian pharaohs.

  We cleaned Hannah’s room and aired it, washed and ironed the curtains, and made up the bed with fresh sheets. If Emily was mourning I saw only one outward sign of it. She placed a vase on my sister’s bureau, and kept it filled with cut flowers in the summer, dried statice and silver pennies in the winter, forced branches of apple or forsythia in the springtime. She put flowers in my bedroom, too, and scented bags of lavender in my bureau drawers. She gave me my grandmother’s locket with a picture of herself inside it as a smiling child. I do not believe she had intended it for Hannah, or she would have presented it to her at the time of her engagement.

  You could say I regained a happy childhood long after the event. My mother and I read aloud to each other in the evenings on the screened-in porch, until the midges, which New Englanders call no-see-’ems, hung so heavily from the overhead light shade that we could hardly decipher the words on the page. Making up for lost years, we read childish books that had a moral—A Girl of the Limberlost, Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, stories about young girls growing up in isolated places. She taught me to drive the car. She made a lotion from rosemary and lemon balm for my teenage blemishes. Her garden grew like a jungle, overstocked and, in places, undisciplined. Emily was indulgent to weeds and allowed them their fair share of house room. Side by side we dug up the lawn with its sterile crop of grass and planted every foot of it. From the beams in the barn we hung herbs and everlastings to dry. Junior Freckleton, who owned the general store, was willing to pay cash for them. In early spring Francis’s workbench was covered with pie plates and egg cartons, where seeds sprouted and leafed until they were ready to be hardened off for transplanting.

  My mother was a garden witch. She knew without listening to the weatherman when all danger of frost was over for the season. Nothing ever died on her except plants that had been gifts from someone else’s garden. Mildew and slugs steered clear of her, although they visited Marion Smalley down the lane. I was much older and married before I recognized bud-wilt, black spot, cabbage worms, and leaf-miners; or realized that cantaloupes will not set fruit after an unexpected cold spell in the spring. I thought Emily was successful because she worked steadily from breakfast until suppertime, shoveling compost, repairing cold frames, staking vines, hanging netting over the raspberries—although now I remember her standing at high noon at the center of the garden for so long at a stretch that a chickadee came to rest on her shoulder. At those times I never went near her, any more than I would have interrupted a conductor directing an orchestra. Only once, twenty-two years after Hannah left, did my mother’s powers appear to fail her, in the summer of 1974, when drought browned the lawns and pastures. Even then Emily’s garden was the last in our community to wither; and at the peak of the heat wave it brought forth a crop of corn, a potful of puckered, stunted ears, somewhat flavorless but perfectly edible.

  PART II

  Christ Behind Us

  Chapter Four

  The first alarm was sounded on March 21, 1974. We made very little of it. In the event of a nuclear attack, chances are the emergency warning will be mistaken for a fire siren. March 21 was the opening day of spring. There was a layer of snow on the ground, melting when the sun shone and hardening to a crust after dark when the temperature plunged downward.

  The next morning I made the rounds in my fleece-lined boots, checking for signs of growth in protected areas—the south side of the rectory, the entrance to the church, and the graveyard that lay behind the church at the edge of an apple wood. Along my back porch in the herb bed the chive plants were greening and would soon be thick enough to cut. The lavender and rue looked dead; but they were always the last to revive. Tucked into corners by the lug door to the cellar, crocus and waterlily tulips were sprouting on schedule. I walked down the shoveled brick path flanked by beds of peonies, bending down at several points to brush aside the snow and a light blanket of chopped leaves and pine needles. I saw the red knobs pushing up and covered them over again. A thicket of tall, woody lilacs and overgrown forsythia screened the rectory from the church next door, thirty yards or so away. I crossed the lawn, leaving squelching wet footprints behind me, and ducked through a gap in the shrubbery, getting swatted by branches.

  Our church is a gaudy little building made of blue-gray granite, neo-Gothic in style like most Episcopal churches. The door on the western side is painted red. Red it stays, although once every decade there is a movement to change it. The stained-glass windows tell a one-sided version of the legend of St. Anthony, concentrating in broad detail on his temptations: naked women approaching the holy man as he slept; the Devil assuming the shape of pigs and goats; a big black bird with a human face snatching bread from St. Anthony’s hand. The triple window in the apse above the altar shows Jesus stepping out of his rock-bound tomb, an angel on his left and St. Anthony kneeling prayerfully on his right. Our patron saint is dressed only in his own uncut hair and beard. At the ends of his fingers grow long nails curving like sickles. No one knew why a church in the
northernmost state of the union should be named after a saint who lived in the Egyptian desert. A summer resident from Portland gave the money to build the church in the 1890s, so that he could worship the year round in the denomination to which he was accustomed, instead of having to make do with the Congregational service, where people prayed sitting down and sipped grape juice instead of wine at Communion. Since Herman Widerick owned a fleet of cargo vessels, it would have been more fitting if his church had been dedicated to St. Brendan, the patron saint of sailors and seagoing voyagers.

  I sloshed around back to the churchyard and through the gates of the wrought-iron fence, which creaked as I opened them, in need of oil and a new coat of rust-resistant black paint. The snow was already receding from the markers and the monuments, as if grave dirt were richer and hotter than other soil.

  There was a burial ground here before there was a church, even before Dry Falls was incorporated in 1811. The oldest stone in the churchyard was nearly illegible except for part of a date, 176—, and a last name, Huckins. The first name ended in the letter a so most likely it was a woman’s, although Asa was a name given to men in colonial times, and so was Hosea. There are no Huckinses in these parts now and no one can remember any. Whoever the dead person was, he or she had no local descendants. The oldest grave stands at the far end of the churchyard near a spreading apple tree. Later on a mass of blue scilla surrounds the foot of the tree and the headstone and it looks as if the unknown Huckins was buried underwater.

  Someone had paid a tribute to the stranger in our cemetery. As I came closer I saw a hodgepodge of offerings scattered on the ground. A frostbitten red florist’s rose, sprigs of dried lavender, sage leaves, and some greenery I couldn’t identify. An unusual assortment, chosen by a person with kind intentions and little money to spend, who wanted to convey a meaning or a message. People always give flowers to the dead, roses in particular, because Pluto lured Persephone into the underworld by holding out a rose. If I remembered my herb books correctly, lavender put a damper on the sensual passions and sage was a cleanser, the spiritual equivalent of Ajax. Herbs and flowers had their place on a grave, but why would anyone leave a cracked white cup and a small square mirror, the kind that might have fallen out of a dime-store compact? The cup contained a dark red liquid. I did not taste it, but it smelled like sour jug burgundy. Litter angered me, and I began to change my mind about my pious donor, who was probably a half-wit or a teenager.

  Mary Fran Rawls was coming out of the church, carrying a trash bag. Mary Fran was our cleaner, Ernie Silver’s waitress, and a ticket seller at the movie house over in Raymond. She lived with her mother, who took care of her fatherless little boy and gave her a bad time about working on Protestant territory. Mary Fran had on a pale blue sweater, too light for the weather, buttoned tightly across her thin chest, the sleeves too short for her long arms. Nola Rawls had no grounds for concern. Mary Fran was God’s chosen waif, and her faith was unshakable. She always wore some light blue article, if only a ribbon in her hair, because that shade was the Virgin Mary’s color. When Mary Fran was in labor with Patrick, sick and weak from childbed poisoning, the Virgin crowned with stars appeared to her and promised her a safe delivery. She had a rampant high fever at the time, and the doctors and nurses saw nothing out of the ordinary, except that the patient’s temperature went down as suddenly as it had risen; but it was a lovely story, and it kept Mary Fran buoyed up through the course of her fourteen-hour workday.

  “Put the bag down, Mary Fran. I’ll help you carry it.”

  “There’s something funny,” she said. “Come inside and I’ll show you.”

  Mary Fran led the way down the aisle to the chancel, bobbing a curtsy when we reached the steps to the padded altar rail. I wondered if she genuflected when she swept the stone floors, maneuvering her broom so her back was never turned to the cross. Our altar table is a plain slab of granite on a granite block. During the Lenten season it was bare of any cloth. At either end of the altar stood two branching silver candelabras embossed with birds and cupids’ faces, Herman Widerick’s gift.

  “Look for yourself,” said Mary Fran. “They were all here yesterday.”

  Each candelabra had five branches. Six of the candles were missing, all five from the sockets on the left and one from the right. Our candles were made of pure beeswax unadulterated by paraffin. They were costly to us on a tight church budget, but no burglar would have lifted them in preference to the candelabras or the chalice.

  “How about these?” said Mary Fran, reaching into the mended pocket of her brown trousers. She pulled out a handful of dyed feathers, yellow, fuchsia, and black, and a clump of fine white down used for stuffing pillows. “They were all in a mess on the floor underneath the altar.”

  “Under the altar?”

  “Well, the yellow one was on the top step and the other ones … It was awful.” She looked at me with stricken eyes. “They were sticking up out of the chalice, like, you know, an arrangement. It’s something bad. It scares me.” She took my hand in her own rough hands as if she thought I needed comforting more than she did. “Don’t worry, Cora. I wouldn’t let you down. I’ll be here next Tuesday the way I always do.”

  Henry believed that a church should always be open. Night and day, the door was unlocked and one light in the apse was kept burning. A house of worship was not a business with fixed working hours. It was an emergency room for the soul with around-the-clock access.

  During his sixteen years at St. Anthony’s, he had encountered many night visitors. Some belonged to his flock, some to other denominations, and some to none. A few of them took to their heels when they caught sight of Henry—I am thinking of fourteen-year-old Tommy Webb, whose father was a drunkard, albeit a peaceable one. Others required Henry’s ears or his blessing, like the little widow from a suburb of Boston, passing through on her way to her daughter’s, who needed to tell someone she was happy for the first time since her wedding day. Henry thought about keeping a supply of blankets and pillows in the vestry, since there were occasions when St. A’s was used as an impromptu hostel. One night Frank Morse bedded down on a pew when he and Jane had a husband-and-wife and Jane locked him out. A tramp and his bird dog took shelter to wait out a rainstorm, leaving before sunup to catch a boxcar at the whistle stop in Milliken. If your car broke down late at night, you lost your house keys and didn’t want to smash a window, the local inn was full or you couldn’t rouse the innkeeper, there was a saying in town: “You can always go to Henry’s.”

  For all that, no one took advantage of Henry’s open-door policy. Both locals and wayfarers found some way to repay the favor. The Boston widow left a hefty contribution in the poor box, enough to pay old Anson Nye’s oil bill for the winter. Frank Morse took it on himself to repaint the parish meeting hall. Some tourists from Wisconsin, the Strombergs, sent Henry an Easter card every year, since Maundy Thursday was the night they were stranded in Dry Falls. For a couple of months two summers ago we found a basket of fresh eggs on the church porch every week. We’ve also had anonymous donations of garden flowers (I particularly remember some spires of giant white delphiniums, their stems carefully wrapped in damp newspaper), but no one had ever left anything so cranky as those feathers and nothing had ever been stolen, broken, or violated.

  When Henry was drafting a sermon he was as close to bad-tempered as he ever got. It was one of his few vanities that he spent hours preparing and then gave the appearance of speaking offhand, as if the words and ideas had come to him on the spot. Preachers who read their sermons lost their audience, lost the chance to scan the congregation, meeting eyes in the back pews as well as the front, in case anyone was settling down for a spell of daydreaming. This week Henry’s text was from Luke, chapter four, verses one through thirteen, in which Christ goes three rounds with the Devil and comes up the champion. Two slices of toast lay uneaten on a plate beside his typewriter. When I entered his study he was tapping a pencil against his coffee mug. He greeted me as if I ha
d disturbed him several times that morning already, with a flash of annoyance in his eyes, a quick frown, and a stiffening of his shoulders. He had five more days in which to finish his sermon, so I stood my ground. I held out the evidence, which I was carrying in a shallow cardboard box: the frostbitten rose, the dried herbs, the mirror, the cup of wine, and the feathers.

  Henry got up and came around to my side of the desk. I told him my story and Mary Fran’s and offered to show him the empty sockets in the candelabras. He picked up the items one by one, handling them cautiously. He lifted the cup to his nose, dipped a finger in the liquid and tasted it. “What is it?” I asked. “A practical joke? Teenage mischief?” Henry walked to the window and stood there looking out with his back turned. There was nothing to see from that viewpoint but a row of gray birches. I began to wish I had spared him this added burden. His head was bowed, either in prayer or discouragement. His posture disturbed me. There was something he knew or surmised that was outside my comprehension. Many laypeople thought that a clergyman could see behind veils—even clergymen’s wives, who ought to know better. “Tell me what it is, Henry, please.” I don’t know if he heard me. He was opening the window, although his office was already underheated. A stinging cold breeze blew some filing cards down on the carpet. I treated his gesture as symbolic, an act of defiance, fresh air bracing his spirits, clearing away webs of suspicion.

  I disliked being cold indoors. It was the subject of a thermostat battle between me and Henry. When I raised the setting, Henry would sneak it back down. I used to leave him threatening notes tucked behind the dial: “This thermostat is wired to a silent alarm at the police barracks!” I was still wearing my parka but my hands and feet were numb. I wanted to change my socks and make some cocoa. In some ways I was the wrong kind of wife for a man of God. I had a very low threshold of tolerance for anything mysterious. Henry scanned the heavens; I kept my eyes on the ground. Perhaps I was not even a Christian, although I liked old churches and organ music reverberating in high-ceilinged spaces. Most Christians lived seventy-odd years in suspense: Would God embrace them at the last? Or cast them out of His temples into a lake of fire? I hoped to become good compost when I died. It was only the prospect of an afterlife that made Death fearsome.