by Doug Burgess
“You started grieving for your grandma as soon as you found out she was ill,” she answered.
She’s right, of course. There are times when the house itself seems to be degrading along with her and other times when it seems crueler that this should not be so.
But there is more than grief. I haven’t been sleeping. It started the night after I found out about Emma and Teddy Johnson. As soon as I got into bed, my legs felt warm and sticky, and the bedclothes chafed. I kicked them off and lay naked in the frigid air. I flopped onto my side, back, stomach. I closed my eyes and felt them rolling behind my eyelids. I tried to imagine cool grass and a riverbank, but all I could think of was Wally with his throat shot away and the Laughing Sarahs carrying a shrouded figure out into the night. That’s when my breath started coming in short gasps. The darkness of the room closed in, and I had to turn on the lights before I drowned.
It’s been like that for nearly a week now. Insomnia tears ragged edges off of everything. Clothes scratch, food sours on the tongue, stair treads are not where you expect them to be. Nothing feels right, or normal. By the end of it, you would trade your immortal soul just to be able to lie down on the couch, pull the afghan up over your shoulders, and sleep, sleep, sleep.
By the day of the storm, I’ve been awake nearly seventy hours. My hands tremble against the ladder’s cold aluminum. As the last cover reluctantly wedges into place, I look over and see the empty windows of Emma’s house staring back at me. Her bushes have become frowzy, and the yard is choked with leaves that chase one another and fling themselves against the porch. Emma’s old Buick is still there, but one of the tires has gone flat. No one is left to close the green wooden shutters, tie down the lawn furniture, protect the house from what is coming. I feel a queer pang of pity for it, which is really for myself.
Aunt Irene arrives just as the first flakes begin to fall, bringing a picnic hamper full of tuna sandwiches and a spare flashlight, because she figured Grandma’s might be dead. It was. “Big one coming this time!” she announces predictably.
“Is your place okay?” I ask. Irene lives in a tiny saltbox colonial at the edge of Briggs Marsh.
“Oh, yeah. Melvin looks pretty shaky tonight. I’m crossing my fingers.” Melvin is a vast, ancient, leaf-blighted oak whose branches loom over her house. Irene’s been waiting for Melvin to crash through her roof for thirty years and won’t replace so much as a shingle until he does. “There’s no point,” she insists. “Insurance’ll just end up paying for a new one.” But since Melvin’s planned trajectory includes her living room, Irene always comes over to Grandma’s during a storm.
“You’ll be dead and buried before that tree comes down,” Grandma insists, chuckling.
“In that case I’ll have Bill Phillips chop it up and make my casket. If I go down, I’m taking Melvin with me.”
We sit around the kitchen table, watching the sky grow steadily darker. The wind comes in gusts and spurts, rattling the storm covers and hammering on the back door like an unwanted relative. Channel 12 is already calling it the Storm of the Century, which is what it called every blizzard since the year 2000, and we still have almost eighty years of century left. But then they switch over to the radar, and Irene gasps. Everything from New London to Buzzards Bay has disappeared under a churning white mass with a small, black, wicked eye. Its fingers brush against the coast. “Record snowfall already reported in Foster-Glocester… All schools evacuating immediately… Police warning all nonessential vehicles to remain off the road… Reports coming in of downed power lines and dangerous conditions throughout southeast Rhode Island…fires…whiteouts…buildings collapsing under the weight of the snow…”
“Jesus,” I whisper.
“I’ve never seen one that big,” Irene admits, to which Grandma inevitably ripostes, “That’s what she said!”
The house begins to groan in protest, each board and shingle braced against the onslaught. But it hasn’t really started yet. There’s still a patch of sky over the bay, and I can see the waves tossing up great frothy sculptures of foam. “God help sailors,” Irene intones, “on a day like this.”
Even as she speaks, I spy the mast lights of trawlers homeward bound, heeled over against the wind. “What the hell are they doing out there in the first place?”
“Can’t miss a day’s catch,” she answers. “It’s hard times for the fleet. But they’ll be all right. There’s still time yet.”
Outside, the world is disappearing. A wall of white moves across the bay, consuming the waves, the rocks, the last few boats still straggling toward shore. Beavertail Light gives one last faint flicker and surrenders. In a moment the entire coast is gone. It is as if the animator ran out of ink, leaving only a blank page.
The storm flings itself on us like a lunatic escaped from an asylum: crying, screaming, laughing, scrabbling at the windows and doors, begging to be let inside. The noise is immense, intolerable. I strike a match, and a moment later, the red glow of the hurricane lamp throws weird shadows on the walls. From the darkened kitchen, we stumble through the dining room, the hall, and finally into the den, but the sound follows us everywhere. The house has become possessed. Storm covers chatter and complain, nails squeal as the wind claws them loose. “This can’t go on,” Irene moans.
But Grandma seems curiously unmoved. The vagueness in her eyes is gone, replaced by a kind of knowing shrewdness that I have not seen there for a long time. “It’s a good blow,” she says. “It’ll clear the air. Need to wash things out once in a while. Good for us all.”
“Not so good for the house,” I suggest.
She shrugs. “Queen Anne was on the throne when they nailed those beams together. I don’t really think they waited this long just to come apart, do you?”
But even as she speaks, I can hear a strange clicking and rattling. A chink of darkness tears through a storm cover; a moment later it’s gone. The wind cries triumphantly and flings itself on the panes, which buckle and shiver. From the other room comes a heavy crash. It sounds like one of the doors just blew off its hinges.
“Should we go to the cellar?” Irene asks. Her face is huge and round in the weak light.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Irene,” Grandma snaps at her. To prove her point, she sits behind the partner’s desk and nonchalantly lights another Marlboro. “I think there’s a bottle in the cupboard there. Why don’t you look, David?”
I give a start. This is the first time she’s called me by my name in weeks. “Sure, Grandma.” And there is. Johnnie Walker Black Label with about a third missing. Grandma pulls out some glasses from the desk, and the party is on, in a manner of speaking.
The Waterbury eight-day clock ticks unperturbed. Irene huddles close to the lamp and leafs through old issues of Architectural Digest. Grandma pulls out a pack of playing cards and deals herself a hand of solitaire. “Shame we don’t have a Ouija board,” she muses. “This would be a heck of a night for it.”
Instantly, I imagine all the ghosts circling round the house: Emma, Teddy, Grandpa, the Robies, old Captain Barrow. Yeah, right, I think to myself.
“What would you ask the spirits, Maggie?” Irene wonders. I’d kick her if she were close enough.
Grandma looks surprised at the question. “Why, who killed Emma, of course.”
Irene’s eyebrows go up. “What makes you think she was killed?”
“Don’t be daft, Irene. I saw that fella hanging round her house that day.”
Now we are both staring at her. “You saw someone at Emma’s house?” I ask.
“Sure. He was skulking around the driveway.”
“Did you see his face?”
She looks at me as if I’m a born fool. “Well, of course I did, do you think I’m blind or something? Dark hair, gray at the temples, kinda handsome. Looked very posh. Big, fancy black car, too.”
“A Mercedes,” I say, almost to myself.
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“I guess so. Why, do you know it?”
Oh, yes. I know it. “Did you see him go into the house?”
Just at that moment, the window shatters, and the wind slashes through the room like a scythe. The storm is all around us. “Get the bookcase!” Irene screams. It’s on the same wall as the window and about the same height. “Help me,” I say, and together, heaving and grunting, we push it over the aperture. The room quiets to a low howl. I relight the lamp.
Grandma’s cards have scattered to the floor. She mutters, gathers them up, begins laying them out again. “Grandma!” I call to her. “Did you see the man go into the house?”
She looks up at me blankly. “What man?”
Irene gives a derisive hoot.
“What man?” Grandma repeats. “What house?”
The storm answers the question for her, attacking the house with a fresh burst of vigor and renewed cries. “That’s the dead,” Grandma says matter-of-factly.
We both look at her. “What are you talking about, Maggie?” Irene demands.
“My momma always said that a storm happens when the world of the dead gets too close to that of the living. The air pulls things down from the sky and up from the sea. Everything is upside down. Just at the spot where the wind touches, if you look hard enough into it, you can see the other side. And they can see you.”
“Your momma had a morbid imagination, Mags.”
Grandma shrugs. “Maybe so. But that don’t make it any less true. You hear it? That’s the sound they make when they’re trying to cross back again.”
“Who?” I ask.
“The ones that didn’t quite make it. Sometimes you get halfway over and then just…stop. Nobody knows why. You’re not in one place or the other. Like poor old Captain Barrow. Others have made it through but wish they hadn’t. It’s not what they expected. So they’re trying to get back also. And then there’s the ones that left too much behind…”
Anywhere else such a speech would sound mawkish but not here. Little Compton has always been not quite where it should be, a place suspended between sea and sky and land, never entirely one element or another. Should it be so surprising if it creases the envelope of the netherworld?
But Irene is a strict Presbyterian. “You shouldn’t say such things,” she chides. “The dead are dead and very happy in paradise.” She purses her lips.
Grandma’s snort is eloquent, but she says nothing more. Her point has been made. She lays out her cards, turning them over one at a time. Softly she begins to hum to herself, then sing. The song is an old one; I remember her singing it to me as a lullaby:
A girl upon the shore did ask a favor of the Sea,
Return my blue-eyed sailor boy safely back to me!
Forgive me if I ask too much, I will not ask for more,
But I shall weep until he sleeps safe upon the shore.
Irene looks up from her magazines. Her face is suffused with pity. She takes a breath to join in her own quavering alto, but just then a chink of light above the cabinet turns pale blue, then gold. Suddenly, impossibly, a ray shoots in with the intensity of a laser beam. It strikes Aunt Irene right between the eyes. “Gracious, me!”
“It’s over!” I cry, delighted.
Grandma remains oblivious, eyes closed, her face rapt with the story. Irene and I are both giddy with relief. “Well,” Irene says, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Don’t count your chickens yet,” Grandma grumbles. She has not moved from the desk. Slowly, methodically, she lays down another card.
“Oh, Mags, don’t be such a grouch!”
Grandma shrugs again. “Go see for yourself.”
We take her at her word. The kitchen door hangs off its hinges, and the room is filled with golden light. Outside, a foot of snow blankets the yard. It gleams with unnatural brightness. “My God,” Irene whispers, “it’s beautiful.”
It is, but an odd kind of beauty to be sure. Colors are inverted and strange: yellow sky, brown sea, and above our heads a perfectly round aperture in the black clouds through which an arc of brilliant sunshine streams down to Earth, benign and forgiving. It reminds me of those old medieval paintings of the Last Judgment. “It’s the eye!” Grandma tells us. “It’ll pass over for just a moment.”
“Then what?” I ask, fearing the answer.
She shrugs. “More of the same.” Then she takes a breath and sings softly to herself:
As though the Sea did hear her plea, a vision did appear,
The drifting tip of some wrecked ship came floating ever near.
A figure there did cling to it approaching more and more,
As if to ride on some strange tide safe upon the shore.
The shingles on the house glimmer with iridescent frost like fish scales. “Well, I’m going to enjoy it while I can,” Aunt Irene declares. She galumphs into the snow and throws up a handful into the air. Each crystal catches the light and twinkles, like tiny fireworks. Irene is enchanted. “Wonderful! Wonderful!”
“You look like a fool,” Grandma calls from the porch. She crosses her arms.
“I feel like a girl! Come on, Mags, have a snowball fight with me!”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“David?” Before I can answer, I get a face full. Even Grandma laughs.
“Oh, you’re gonna pay…”
“Come get me!”
All mad together, we dance around each other like duelists. Irene’s girth should make her an easy target, but she moves with surprising grace. Another ball swipes my cheek. I dodge behind one of the bushes and fire back with three well-placed rounds, but the voice that cries out is surprisingly deep.
I look up. Irene is standing in the driveway with her arms akimbo, laughing. Grandma tosses down a dishtowel to Billy Dyer, who wipes the snow from his reddened face. “I came to see how you all were doing.”
“As you can see,” Irene tells him, “we are bewitched. Want some coffee?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice if there’s time. Gotta get back to the station before it hits again. I thought maybe you’d want to come with me?”
The police station was once the colonial armory, made of fieldstone and designed to withstand everything from a hurricane to a French invasion, so his offer is not idle. Yet I can’t help but notice he keeps his eyes turned everywhere except at me. Right now his gaze is fixed on a spot just above Irene’s left ear. She looks back quizzically. “That’s sweet of you. Do all the old ladies in Little Compton get this kinda service?”
He grins. “Only my favorites.” Still he won’t look at me.
“Guess we can’t say no then. Can we, David?”
“How’s Debbie?” I ask him roughly.
His answer is a quintessential New England shrug, eyes downcast. “Gone to her folks up in Central Falls.”
“She’ll be safer there,” Irene says approvingly.
“Yeah. I guess.” Finally, he looks up at me. “What’s it to you?”
There’s really no answer to that question, but mercifully Grandma interrupts. “Who’s that?” she demands, pointing towards the sea.
Irene doesn’t bother to turn around. “There’s nothing out there, Mags.”
“Don’t give me that. I can see well enough for myself. Someone’s missing a crewmate.”
Irene sighs. “All the boats are in harbor now. Right, Billy?”
“Absolutely.”
But Grandma’s vantage is better than ours, still on the porch with her hand outstretched, pointing. “It’s there, I tell you. Look for yourselves.”
Sighing, Irene turns around. We all see it at the same time: a white something bobbing like a buoy between the rollers, only a few hundred yards from shore. “Could be a piece broke off a trawler,” Billy says dismissively, “or a lawn chair even.”
“Do lawn chairs wave?”
Grandma demands.
I see it too. A hand outstretched, disappearing for a moment under a fresh burst of foam, rising again.
“Oh, my God,” Irene breathes. “It’s a man.”
“Son of a bitch!” cries Billy.
“Come on!” It’s my own voice that answers him, and my legs that are hurtling down the rocky path towards the beach. Grandma calls out something, but whether in protest or exhortation, I couldn’t say. Billy struggles behind me; I can hear him panting, cursing as he trips over the stones. But I’ve been down this path a thousand times before. In no time at all, I’m on the beach, still carpeted with fresh snow. From here, the waves look enormous, great rollers forming whitecaps at their heads and crashing onto the surf with the sound of a thousand drums all beating together. Billy is shouting something, but the roar is too great. I shrug off my coat, kick off my shoes, and throw myself into the breaking sea, just like it was a hot Sunday in July.
At some point hot and cold come together, and the sensation is neither one nor the other. The body sends signals of pain, but the brain cannot understand what it is experiencing. I feel as though I am running headlong into a solid wall, which instead of shattering, enters me instead, until I become part of it, a frozen piece of cinderblock in a stone monolith. I am not cold, no, because there is nothing left of me to feel anything. Yet my arms and legs still move of their own accord. I’m swimming, one hand over another, an automaton winding down its spring. The drowning man is closer now. His head breaks the surface, arm outstretched. He is turned away from me, so all I can see of him is a dense mat of black hair and a white shirt plastered against his back. “Swim towards me!” I call out. But if he hears he makes no sign.
The sea has set itself against my struggles, slapping me back again and again. Now suddenly it changes its mind, and the surge lifts me up until I am staring right down at the figure in the white shirt. We are side by side, struggling together. “Come on,” I urge him, “Take my hand!”
But there is no acknowledgment. He still has not turned around. “Hey! You! A little help here?”
