by Mel Bossa
Going back to the house, we walked up through another property to Atwood Avenue and strolled down that street, covered over surprisingly with huge old houses like Grandpa’s but dark now in the twilight, shut out by the enormous walnut and oak trees that lined the road. Janet said she was afraid each time, even though Mother always laughed at her. I laughed at her too, but it did feel eerie to me, walking along that road and not hearing the sound of traffic, but all the subdued noises of the country instead of the city—surf, crickets, the wind swooshing through the foliage.
Before going to bed, we would stay out on the veranda and in the failing light play Parcheesi or Chinese checkers or just listen to the radio from Providence, which still had talk shows like Hopalong Cassidy and the Mystery Theater, which we never heard in New York because we had television already. Then, each night before going to sleep, Mother would take us to the end of the second floor, up the five wooden steps to Grandpa’s cluttered little study where he sat up late reading the Bible and smoking his pipe, sitting up straight in the old Captain’s chair, looking thoughtful, immersed in the words of the text open in front of him—until he would hear us and turn to lift us up and let us kiss him good night. It was then that he smelled strongest of old wool cloth and pipe mixture. His hard long bristles of waxed mustachio would scrape my cheeks not unpleasantly. And I would try to count the wrinkles on his neck behind the starched high white collars he wore even in the hottest weather. His smell was always a sour-sweet mixture of the pipe mixture and the violet candies he constantly chewed now that his gums were going bad, a mixed odor that would always make me—already exhausted—dizzy with anticipation and fear of growing up.
It was Grandpa Lynch who first told me of Amity Pritchard—really told me, didn’t merely make a story out of her life to scare me away from the Pritchard property. And so, I suppose, he too figured importantly in the linking up, although exactly where I’m still not certain.
But that wouldn’t happen in the small step-up study, nor until much later, in August. And Grandpa wouldn’t be telling just me either but my cousin Chas too, who was to be involved in it as deeply as I, even if he never admitted it or even really recognized his involvement.
And before Amity’s story could make any sense to me, I still had to meet Chas.
Chapter 2
“Any fish that’s dumb enough to be caught with a line like this ain’t worth the work.”
I looked up from the fishing line I was disentangling for the third time that afternoon. Standing between me—out on the grass bank of the little river that ran behind Grandpa Lynch’s house and the water itself—was a boy who, from the way he looked and held himself and suddenly, quietly appeared, might have come up from the bottom of the riverbed itself or from some thicket or cave across the water, deep in the gloomy woods facing me, he so much fit into the place.
Without knowing for certain, I knew this was my cousin Chas.
“You’ll be there all afternoon, doing it that way,” he said in his mischievous but surprisingly grown-up voice.
He was right, of course. Following a storm the night before, the calm little rivulet had become a swollen, high-banked torrent, its current so strong, my line would double and even triple back on itself every time I cast it. Three or four knots were made instantly, except for the lure and hook, which I couldn’t seem to knot tight enough to hold, and which fell off and had to be replaced with every throw.
“Here,” he said, holding out his hand. “Give me!”
Without my offering the line, he bent down and drew the line out of the water. He barely inspected it. Holding it in his teeth, he expertly removed each knot in seconds. This gave me a chance to look at him more closely.
He couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than me—but he looked a whole lot more grown-up. His shoulders were high and wide, his legs long and muscled, his waist slim, his entire frame of flesh defined from either exercise or sport. Not an inch of baby fat, whereas I was covered with it. As he was wearing only a pair of dungarees, I could see he even had a hair or two bravely sticking out in the flat depression between his chest muscles. He was a deep tan—almost brown—tanner by far than I was, although I’d been out in the sun almost every day for the past two weeks. And this brownness contrasted with his curly sandy-colored hair, with flecks of yellow and streaks that were almost pure white. He wore his hair much longer than anyone else I’d ever seen—and it seemed to draw even more attention to his deeply tanned, surprisingly mannish face. Surprising because feature by feature, it was almost a girlishly pretty face. Even odder, despite his coloring and because of his hair color, you expected to see light eyes—blue or green or even gray—but his weren’t light at all. They were so brown as to seem black, and all the more prominent because they were so large, even with him squinting against the strong sunlight, and so deep-set. He was, of course, the same little boy I’d seen in the family photo on my mother’s dresser. But that boy was a baby, compared to the little man squatting in front of me.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he said, and I was struck all over again by the New England accent with its strange shifts of vowel emphasis, its drawn-out syllables, and flattened consonants that made even the smallest child sound like an old person. “What a mess you’ve made of this line,” he added with disgust. But all the knots were out of the line already. “Here, you can’t knot a hook the way you hook a rug,” he said. “Look here. This is the way you knot a hook. It’s a sailor’s knot. See! First you loop it, then you pull the line through halfway and tighten it with another loop in the other direction. That way you can unknot it just by giving it a tug. See! Just tug it off when the hook is caught in a fish’s mouth. Now you try it.”
He stood up and threw the line into my lap.
“Go on. Try it.”
“Like this?” I asked. I unknotted it easily enough, but I couldn’t remember the instructions to put it together again.
“No. First this way, then hold it, and do it in the other direction.”
I repeated his instructions out loud as I tried to follow them. “First from this way. Then hold it. Then from that…ow! That rotten hook!”
He grabbed my hand to look at the cut in my index finger.
“It’s nothing,” he said, with disgust.
“It hurts. It’s bleeding.”
He held on to it even harder, squeezing the little cut until a globule of blood welled to the surface, followed by another one, so red and liquid that my eyes hurt to look at them. Then he quickly bent down and swallowed my finger. When he looked up at me, I felt afraid and pulled my hand out.
“Mmm,” he said.
“Let go!”
“Mmm,” he said again and finally took my finger out of his mouth, inspecting the cut. “There. That will keep you from dying of tetanus.”
“I’ll go get a Band-Aid,” I said, trying to withdraw my hand from his grasp. But he continued to grip it and squeeze it, making more drops of blood rise to the surface and break and fall into my open palm, before he swooped down again with open mouth and licked the blood.
“You don’t need a Band-Aid now. It’s all right now.”
I took out a handkerchief, which while rolled up was pretty clean, and wrapped my finger in that.
He sat down in the grass next to me and stared at me until I began to feel even more frightened than when he had my finger in his mouth and wouldn’t let go.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Roger.”
“I thought that’s who you were. I’m Chas.”
“I thought that’s who you were.”
He laughed. “Oh, yeah! Well, then you’re not as dumb as you look.”
I didn’t like that remark and so turned back to my fishing line, trying to knot the hook on again as he had told me to.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you like being called dumb?” Without waiting for my reply, he went on. “I’ll bet you didn’t know that now that I’ve sucked your blood to
keep you from dying, you’re in bondage to me—forever.”
“I wasn’t going to die.”
“Yes, you would have. From tetanus.”
“That hook isn’t rusty. It’s brand-new.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Hooks don’t have to be rusty to have germs on them. You can’t see germs, stupid.”
That at least I knew to be true. But I didn’t like either his tone of voice or what else he was saying. “Well, I’m not in bondage to you. Or to anyone, just because you drank a little of my blood.”
“You are too! And anyway, you probably don’t even know what it means.”
“I do too! It means being a slave to someone. I read about it. The Hebrews were in bondage to the Pharaoh of Egypt, until Moses came along.”
“Well, so are you to me,” he said, enjoying my discomfort.
“Phooey! I never heard that before.”
“It’s true,” he said.
“No it isn’t. When you drink someone’s blood, it means that you swear friendship with them. Only both of you have to do it, or it doesn’t work. That’s the only thing about blood drinking I ever heard of.”
He listened, then stretching his lips tight over his teeth, with his hands raised, fingers crooked out, he leaned over me until he’d forced me onto my back, shrinking from him.
“What about vampires!” he shouted. “Haven’t you heard of vampires? How they come while you’re sleeping and suck your blood while you’re dreaming?”
I had heard of them, and I was clearly so terrified that he dropped his mask and laughed out loud.
“Don’t worry, kid. I’m not a vampire. Boy, what a stupid kid you are. You’d believe anything.”
I stood up. “I don’t believe in vampires.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked. He was watching me closely now.
“No. There’s no such things as ghosts.”
“Well, that’s how dumb you are,” he said noncommittally, lying back in the grass and looking up at the sky. “Because I saw one.”
I ignored him and, gathering up my line, went away from him a few feet. I sat down there and cast my line in the river. I couldn’t really concentrate on my fishing though. He was still too close to me, turned over on his stomach, leaning on his hands with his face turned toward me, looking at me with I don’t know what intentions.
We were quiet like that for a long time. Then I reeled in the line.
“This place stinks for fishing,” I said.
“I’ll show you a really good place to fish,” he said quietly. “Last week I caught a six-pound carp there.”
“Where?”
“You’re probably too scared to go.”
“Where?”
“On the Pritchard property. In the broken old well up on the terrace level. Same place where I saw the ghost.”
“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” I said.
“You sure are dumb. Everyone’s afraid of ghosts. Especially when it’s old Amity Pritchard’s ghost. She’s something! I’ll bet I’m the only person—grown folks and all—to even go near that property, they’re all so afraid of her ghost. Ask Grandpa Lynch. He’ll tell you.”
I said I would ask Grandpa Lynch and began gathering up my tackle to leave. He stayed on his stomach, looking at me.
“If you want,” he said suddenly, his voice seeming to drop until it almost sounded like someone else’s voice entirely, “I’ll cut myself too, and then you can suck my blood too.”
“No thanks.”
“Boy! What a jerk you are. I already told you you’re in bondage to me. This way you’ll get out of it.”
That seemed logical to me. But he scared and disturbed me. So I said, “No thanks. I don’t want any lifelong friends.”
“Suit yourself, it’s your loss,” he said nonchalantly, then, rolling over, added, “If you’re not going to use that line, leave it here. I’ll try my hand with it.”
“Make sure you get it back to the house,” I said, throwing it down on the grass next to him and walking off.
He came into the house later that afternoon with three good-sized fish, though nothing like the six-pounder he had talked about. I was sitting in the big hammock on the veranda, half falling asleep with a book in my lap.
“You get them at the Pritchard property?” I asked.
“Nope. In the river. Exactly where you were sitting all day like a fool. Did you ask Grandpa Lynch about the ghost?”
“I’m not interested in any ghosts,” I said, taking my book and opening it so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“Scaredy-cat!”
Chapter 3
Chas and his sister Cathy had arrived at Grandpa Lynch’s house two weeks in advance of their parents, who were still in Coventry preparing for their eventual larger move to a partially built house a half mile away from where we were staying for the summer. During those two weeks of transition, Chas stayed in the extra room on the second floor, although I was already told that when his parents came, they would be moved in there, and he would be sharing my room. Cathy and Janet were already sharing their bedroom with ease, and beginning the first tentative blush of their developing friendship.
In the meanwhile I saw Chas only at meals and whenever he deliberately chose my company. I never consciously sought his. Not only because of our first encounter but also because he had dropped the fact that he had not returned to Nansquett to play with “kids” but to play with his friends from previous summers—especially the two Muller boys, more his age anyway, who lived up at the restored mill house.
I had enough to keep me occupied for a while, even though as July wore on I had already become a little sated with the beach and the few amusements it offered. I did discover the Nansquett Public Library one day, however, and so I could put aside the few books I had hurriedly packed, which, read and reread, had already become tedious to me.
That discovery happened one of the afternoons I was assigned to accompany my sister and cousin to the ice-cream stand on Twill Road, just past the Atwood Avenue crossing. It was near the little wooden bridge thrown up over the river, where the half-dozen stores that composed the town proper were located. Much as I was annoyed at having to hold the two squealing girls’ hands at the one traffic light in the area, I looked forward to the lusciously creamy homemade ice cream we would get there, made daily with whatever fruit—peach, blueberry, strawberry—was in season. And also I looked forward to looking at the comic book rack above the small pile of local newspapers.
That afternoon the ice creams available were vanilla, chocolate, and raspberry. But the comic rack hadn’t been changed in weeks, a fact I complained about to Eileen, the twelve-year-old fair-skinned, raven-haired daughter of the ice-cream store owner, Bud Bianchi. Eileen had made a point of being extra polite and cordial to me from the day I’d come to her store, and this afternoon she not only told me about the public library, but she got her mother’s permission to show me the place, saying she had some books due to be returned there anyway. The younger girls were placed in an adjoining kitchen with a picture puzzle to solve, and Eileen and I walked the few blocks to the library.
I was used to our library back in the city—a modern, glossily efficient series of low rooms with blond wood Danish furniture, wood shelving that looked plastic, and fluorescent lighting. So I was surprised by—and later pleased with—the old two-story structure that housed Nansquett’s public books. Set in the back of the small building that served as the town hall and justice of the peace’s office, the library consisted of one huge room with heavy dark wood shelving eight feet high all around, except for two walls, which were twenty feet high and had a small balcony of books, approached by a rickety-looking cast iron stairway, leading to a perforated cast iron walkway which gave access to the upstairs shelves.
In the center of the room were four large old oak tables, surrounded by deeply curved distressed-oak chairs. Everything about the place—its great, sudden height; its narrow small-paned windows beveled in
yellow glass around each edge; its general gloom of aged wood and old bindings even on those days when the sun came in with great flat patterns across the old tables and readers; and especially the beautiful old sets of books—impressed me so much that later on, after a decade and a half, I would be drawn back to it with renewed interest and affection. Only then, fifteen years later, would I notice the beneficiary plaque set in the wall above the librarians’ desk, its unpolished bronze showing the prominently placed name of the library’s founder, Amity Pritchard; the year 1873, written in Roman numerals; and under that the dedication: IN MEMORY OF MY DEARLY DEPARTED SISTER, CONSTANCE, AND HER HUSBAND, CAPTAIN EUGENE V. CALDER OF THE UNION ARMY.
When I was twelve I didn’t see the plaque—or if I did, it didn’t register. At the time all I remarked upon was the deliciously indiscriminate placement of adult and children’s books on the same shelves—although there was one shelf of children’s picture books, including Anna May Seward, Alcott, and a “Great Lives for Boys” series, all of which I scorned. It took only an hour to find the books that would interest me, even obsess me the remainder of the summer: battered old copies of the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Le Fanu, Poe, Wilkie Collins, and, most profusely, the appallingly frightening works of the home state author H.P. Lovecraft.
Eileen turned her pretty nose up at these choices of reading matter but at nothing else about me. We soon found we could talk hours at a time about almost any other subject under the sun, in any place whatsoever—a situation that made Janet and Cathy whisper and giggle and squeal all the more. Naturally I ignored them, thinking only what a sensible girl Eileen was, how well-read, how much of a first friend for me that summer. Nor did it escape me that such a friendship brought with it large, free quantities of ice cream, and a consuming interest from her lovely melting eyes, eyes my mother once evaluated in conversation as a true and haunting amethyst color.
