The Beginners

by Rebecca Wolff

  ON THE THIRD DAY, still bruised but mending, I went back to work at the café. Halfway through my shift Raquel opened the door, making its little bell ring. She approached the counter, smiling, and asked me what time I got off. She suggested we go for a walk in the graveyard, the old one in the churchyard on the green. She asked me to meet her there at five-thirty. I had told my parents I would be home in time for supper, six-thirty-ish, but I supposed, opportunistically, that it was possible that I might still make it.

  19.

  Three towns live under that water. It is a morbidly fertile, eventually ghastly image if you give it time to settle in and materialize. Jack’s scale model at life-size: dark frame houses, barns and fences and even the odd stick of furniture, all standing down at the bottom of a remarkably deep, remarkably wide well of man-made origin. Now, this is what I call supernatural: times that float in recollection but are history till we reanimate them with powerful imagination. The past is frightening. But not for any reason I can put my finger on.

  Oddly enough, those had been the exact questions occupying the better part of me that day, while Raquel was coming to get me so unexpectedly at the café. “What is ghostly? What is otherworldly?”—meanwhile I was keeping my hands busy clearing plates, and filling coffee cups, and making change for customers to tip with or to plug the antiquated parking meters (nickels only) right outside our door on Main Street. I was thinking about drowned houses, their endless quiet; and graveyards, and about nightmares, musing on their respective potentials for actual fright, for real transports of terror. I was not thinking about Cherry, for I was after all a child, and a child knows how to create a new world for herself in the blink of an eye. The snap of a shutter.

  A whole world of fright that the whole world knows about, the kind you get walking alone in the woods—not necessarily at night, though that helps—when you begin to allow your mind to wander toward what you know, surefire, will scare you. A face so ugly and dead, or madly gaping, or slackly grinning in idiocy, or covered in blood and abjectly weeping, that it fits the bill exactly and causes you to short-circuit and panic, and quickly enclose yourself in your own arms and then, as swiftly as possible (but without running because the last thing you want to do is attract attention to yourself, to your small, unprotected head) in your own house, and shut the door jerkily behind you. Only then can you stand to look around at what is not there behind you, but instead is inside you. It is inside you. So in the end it is only our imagination that is haunted. Or: what haunts us is imagination.

  SHE WAS NOT AFRAID of the dead, she said; she was only afraid of other people. I wondered if she would talk this way if Cherry were there. I didn’t think so. I had noticed a very different tenor to Raquel’s conversation, or monologue, more accurately, when it was just me there, or me and Theo; anyway, when Cherry wasn’t around. A less worldly, more introspective tone, as though she was talking to herself, really, though she told me once that this was quite literally the last thing she would ever do. “I’ll talk to myself when I’m dead,” she said. But it was as though for Cherry she had developed a patter, one suitable to the ears of a typical teenaged girl. Now she would have no need for that kind of fake talk.

  “I’ll tell you what really scares me,” she said. Now I was listening to her with one ear, as with my other I was attentive to the possibility of unnatural rustling in the hedges, the noise of dead people’s bodies risen up and watching. “What scares me is when you come face-to-face with some person or other, in a room somewhere, and you look into the other person’s eyes and instead of the flash of recognition, of acknowledgment, you receive instead a transmission of void, of absence, of abyss. It’s just hell, looking into another person’s eyes; it’s dead in there, you know. I become afraid.”

  When you’re looking at a face, I corroborated silently, trying to talk to that face, and the harder you try not to, the more you see the impending mutation of the face, the way the eyes and the mouth threaten to slide, or gape, or hollow, to become unknown. And this is the face of a friend.

  “Where is Cherry, by the way?” Raquel plucked her out of my thoughts like the fruit my friend was named for. “It’s not like you to be without her.” This was true, but I felt that Raquel was being disingenuous. She knew as well as I did—more likely, far better than I did—that things had changed.

  “I AM THE DIRECT descendant of a woman who was hung for a witch.” She said this the way you might say “I am the ghost of Christmas past,” or “I am a fugitive from a chain gang,” as though somebody else had written the words and said them out loud long before you were born, and with much more conviction. I just looked at her and waited. I was frightened. Not so much by her declaration as by the fact that we were still sitting, face-to-face, our crossed legs almost touching at the knees, in the churchyard, by a gravestone, under a tree, in the dark. There was barely any light at all from the moon, or the stars, or the houses around the green. We had stayed and stayed in the graveyard that late afternoon, and on into the evening. I was stiff with chill, with holding myself very still in the dark, and with the residual ache of my impact with the road. Every time I thought that we might leave, that we had reached the natural end of the episode, Raquel would begin to spin another tale, another train of thought, another musing preoccupation. Now I had the sense that all along, all day, she had been waiting till darkness fell to tell me this story. She had been saving it.

  “This is called beginning at the beginning,” she said solemnly. Her face was close to mine. I could see its outlines, almost phosphorescent as my eyes adjusted to the nearness.

  “I do not entertain notions of guilt or innocence, in the telling of this story. Her name was Sarah Goode. She was the wife of Joseph Goode, and the mother of eleven children, all but seven of whom died in their infancy, and she was my great-grandmother eleven times over. Sarah was an upstanding member of her community, a small farming village up north of the city.”

  Everything was so quiet around us that her voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, from the night sky and from the headstones, the shapes of which I could just barely make out.

  “She was an old woman, living peacefully with her husband on their farm, when certain townsfolk got it into their heads that she was a witch.

  “You know, they did actually designate certain members of the community, usually those who had displayed an especial zeal for the task, as witch-finders, or as administrators of the tests they had devised, to identify witches more officially. My favorite of these was the infallible water test: If she floats, she’s a witch. If she drowns, she wasn’t.

  “These small villages were rough places to try to make a go of it. The people struggled throughout the brutal winter and worked like demons—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the hot, lush summer, just to put up enough food and wood to make it through another winter. It must have made some hard, hard people, this closed circle of resources. Sarah was hard. When they took this seventy-something-year-old woman to the jail, all she did was stand still with her head bowed, and pray. She said to herself, and then, later, to those who sat behind the bench and sentenced her to death, ‘The will of the Lord be done, and no other.’”

  At Raquel’s recitation of this solemn motto, a huge shiver ran up, and then back down, my spine, which I could not help but remember was exposed to an entire churchyard full of graves, which in turn were full of the moldered bones of centuries of my townspeople. I felt as though my back was bare, as though my sweatshirt and T-shirt and skin itself had been peeled away.

  “There are many theories—socioeconomic, psychoanalytic, biochemical, even—defining the factors that contributed to this sweep of spiritual executions. The Goode family, which was particularly called out on the witchcraft charge—two of Sarah’s sisters were accused, too, and one hung—was well off, relative to the rest of that scrabbling community. They lived on a hill, literally above the rest of the town. Their farm was prosperous. They owned a lot of acreage, and even collect
ed rent from some of the other families, a relationship always sure to incur rancor. The concept of “surplus” was unavailable to most, and this is just what the Goode family possessed. Their pantries were full, they had actual cash with which to purchase goods.

  “But can you imagine such calculation? I like to think that the process was more subliminal, that the accusers (who were, you know, virtually all teenaged girls) were simply overcome with the power of their own imaginations, and with what they had succeeded in creating. Think of it: grown men sitting all day with a group of girls, eating up their every last utterance! They were possessed, I believe. By themselves. By an experience of transcendent meaning. They suddenly meant something.

  “So they spun, and spun—and wouldn’t you?—the most fabulous truths they could come up with. ‘Goody Rich came to me in my bed and tweaked my nipple and told me I must sign the book or she would make my father’s cows go dry. Then a yellow bird hung upside-down on the beam and spoke in the voice of John Rector’s wife and said that she had walked beside the Black Man and drunk his spittle.’ Don’t you think, in a sense, that she had experienced just exactly that, the night before, lying in her bed, a fever of possibility upon her? In fact, I don’t see how anyone managed to escape the ecstasy of these girls, ‘the afflicted,’ as they were called. Once it was seen that they would invariably be believed, that their words had a universal, indisputable meaning, for once in their grim, untranslatable lives . . .” Suddenly, unaccountably, in the darkness that was all around us like light, she was at a loss for words.

  “I’m not cold. Are you? The ground is damp, though.” Her voice held all the hesitant panic that moments of silence produced in her. “Shall I go on? I said I would begin at the beginning, which implies ending at the end.” She scooted back on her bottom a little, uncrossed her legs and then crossed them in reverse order. “That’s better,” she said. “Gosh. It’s getting late. It doesn’t even get dark till nine o’clock . . .”

  I knew my parents would be worrying about me, and I chose not to care, and indicated this with the unwavering tenor of my silence. Raquel went on, and regained her footing as the story got steeper.

  “These were very religious people. Pious as all get-out. They would dig their way through four-foot-high snowdrifts to get to the frigid church where they could see their own breath, and sit and listen to the minister stamp his frozen feet and rail against the sins of fornicators and pleasure-seekers. ‘Where?’ they must have wondered, looking around the congregation for any telltale signs. To these folk, morality was not an issue of free will. At least they had that responsibility removed from their overburdened shoulders. If you did wrong, if you sinned, it was because you had the Devil in you, with a capital D. It was because you had actually been visited by the Black Man, and he had gained control of your soul.

  “Sarah had a short trial. She was hung two days later. One gets the sense that for her it was all a matter of bad timing. Two months later, or even six weeks, the townspeople had begun to look around at one another like puppies who have pissed the carpet.”

  WHILE I HAD NOT always been the most attentive student, I did remember quite clearly my eighth-grade class’s inquiry into this black spot of history. I remembered, for example, that one of several theories ran that the town’s winter stores of grain had grown moldy in the humid coastal winds, and that the afflicted girls were high on psychedelic oats and barley and corn. Thus I could not doubt Raquel—why should I doubt her?—when she went on to tell of a concurrent history: how the Goode family, or at least what remained of it, had left their village and come inland to make a new life in this very region, in the prosperous Shift River valley.

  But what I did wonder about was the seemingly universal desire to settle on every explanation for these accusations but the most obvious. What if the women and men had been burned not as a by-product of greed, or inequality, or sheer envy and mistrust, or mind-altering grain, for that matter, but because they were witches? Why overlook the trees that stood in the forest so sternly, so full of promise? I do not wish to take up arms against an army of skeptics, but rather to make an argument in favor of that which is, simply, more interesting. Raquel, for example, was obviously and inarguably a mind reader, for she laughed at this, laughed out loud at my silent thoughts, my thoughts which tended toward darkness, and put her arms around me, reaching across the cauldron of darkness between us. Her embrace was loose but warming, and when she let me go I felt the chill air, the damp earth, more exquisitely.

  20.

  What if I told you we had seen a ghost in the graveyard.” Raquel stood in the doorway of the kitchen, combing her fingers through her dripping hair. It had begun to rain as we walked back.

  “Would it be the truth?” Theo spoke without turning to look at her from where he stood at the countertop, slicing mushrooms. I regarded his back, and neck, and shoulders, the long rhomboid muscle that allowed his regular motion. I suddenly saw him on top of Cherry, like a photograph from the pages of The Beginner brought to life, his ass between her legs, his torso obscuring hers, an irregular rhythm governed by invisible motive, an ungovernable finish. And I then saw the ghost that might have followed us home, watching them, relieved for a moment of his infinite loneliness.

  “At least it’s a partial truth,” Raquel offered, blithely. “And you know every partial truth contains a germ of absolute truth. It’s like genetic cloning, whereby you only need one cell from any creature in order to replicate or re-create, flesh out, as it were, that creature’s whole essential being.”

  “Well, gee,” Theo said, after a silence during which he scooped a brown paste he called “miso” out of a plastic container into a small blue ceramic bowl. “I guess you really did go to graduate school, didn’t you.”

  She took both hands to the back of her head and collected her hair into a ponytail, then sat down at the table, watching us and waiting. I had nothing to add.

  “Ghost sightings, for example, are almost universally understood as some kind of energetic collision. You know, when we die, blah, blah, blah, matter is never destroyed, but only converts into other forms of energy. And some of the living are more receptive to the apprehension of this energy than others. And this is a kind of truth which may not be the final truth but is certainly a useful one.”

  I sometimes felt that Raquel herself was a kind of ghost. She could never bring herself to fully materialize—to trust us, to allow us to love her—and perpetually shifted in and out of the little realm we were now creating, there, the three of us newly divined, newly consecrated. Where the other realm she inhabited might be I could not decide: Was it the realm of her imagination, into which she vanished? Or was it some more final, more absolute void, one that might threaten to swallow her up completely, one from which Theo and I, her rescue squad, could never retrieve her? I worried, at times, that she was drifting farther and farther away, that we might not be able to hold her. I did everything in my limited powers. I laughed along with her nervous laughter, laughing especially hard when I did not understand the source of her amusement. I listened attentively to her versions of events, be it what Theo planned to cook for dinner that evening or a narrative of how the true pain of living manifested itself to her (“as a veil cast over my eyes, so that I can never trust that what I see is what anyone else sees. And the pain is both the veil and the vision”). I never said no to her. If she wanted me to walk in the graveyard, I walked in the graveyard; if she asked me to sit at her knee and tell her all about the mill, I did so happily, though I had never spoken freely of it to another human being besides Cherry.

  “But what’s really frightening,” Raquel insisted, as though she had been countermanded, rather than colluded with by Theo’s and my twinned silences, “is not the apprehension of the ghost itself. That’s just a comforting illusion. The very idea! What’s truly frightening, whether you know it or not, is the infinite variety of the mind’s creation. The mind creates it all, variety included. You see these things and then
you are left alone again, but you never were otherwise: the adrenaline rushes through you in the moment of acceptance of your own power, your own exhilarating and horrific power. I have faith in my mind, if in nothing else. My mind is at the bottom of it all.”

  I was about to say something about Sarah Goode—about how that was very real, historically provable, a real collection of people and facts that had truly happened—when a resonance sounded at the front of the house, in the hallway. I realized after a minute that it was the noise created by someone outside, on the front porch, pressing the very old doorbell—an echoey creaking and whining in place of the usual “dingdong.” I was surprised by the sound, but I was not surprised when neither Raquel nor Theo made a move to answer its call.

  We all sat very still and presently I heard footsteps, on the porch, down the step, moving away off through the night. The ghost of a visitor.

  STATIONED BEFORE JACK’S MODEL of the lost valley, peering in the minuscule windows of the tiny houses at microscopic figures engaged in passing plates around a table, or zooming out to regard the valley as a whole, its rich soils and plentiful waterways, I have often thought of a more distant past, of the people who left the civilized but brutal coastline of Massachusetts to stake a claim on the promise of the river. They found a fertile valley and made all the motions of settling: clearing land, raising structures, forging institutions, establishing trade, begetting sons and daughters. A few generations down the line, we were flourishing. We had sturdy businesses and charming society, an outlying scenery of pretty farms and their structures. This is when the most beautiful houses in Wick were built, all gathered together like a meeting of elders: when citizens were feeling secure, stable, even flush. These houses, lining our serene village green, a monument to certainty, are truly wonderful to behold. They speak volumes about what is inside, and what is out. Inside is for the privilege of privacy and inheritance. Outside is for those who peer, and pry, and try to get inside.