by M Dressler
“I don’t really, Martha.”
“I’m the same way. I don’t like to start the day all stuffed and heavy. Now let’s hoof it up to the gallery. You’ll have the whole second floor to yourself. Well, the whole place, aside from me.”
We climb the carpeted stair, each step with its fine brass rod holding the deep-napped rug in place. It makes a runner difficult to sweep, I know.
“Do you have anyone here to help you, Martha?”
“How sweet of you to ask. Not really. Mostly I take care of everything myself, now that I’m on my own. My ex left and moved to Sacramento, so . . .” She gives herself a little shake, as though some lint needs brushing away. “Doing all the work myself saves on costs, at least. We tend to think bottom-line around here, because we don’t have a year-round season. And when the snow hits, the passes can close; then we’re really on our own. So it’s best to know how to be self-sufficient.”
“And when does the snow come?” I ask, my mood turning eager. The cold that burns like hellfire, Miss Camber said, that can be so deep it buries a man.
“We’ve got a little system coming in tonight, matter of fact. Might get us our first flurries of the year. I have to say again”—she turns to look back at me at the top of the stairs—“what I said earlier about your clothes: not up to the weather. You don’t have anything else with you?”
“I didn’t plan to stop here.”
“So you said, but you have to be careful this high, okay? People die from cold at this altitude. A front can sweep in out of nowhere and get really serious really fast. And then where will you be?”
As dead as I am now. “Thank you for your concern, Martha.”
“It’s just so you know. So, here we are on the guest floor. You like it? We preserved everything we could from the era.” She beams, admiring her own landing. “All these sconces are rose glass, which is what the madams and the miners thought of as pure elegance back in the 1850s.” We pass through a hallway of closed doors illuminated by crystal shades. “It’s a little bawdy, I know. Of course we’re a family-friendly establishment now. With a bit of spunk. The Corner Room is at the end of the hall. It has the nicest view of the square, or will in the morning.” She takes a key from her quilted vest.
Inside, I see first bright satin curtains in sapphire blue drawn tightly together. A bright blue canopy hangs over the bed, dressed with fine blue pillows and a lace coverlet. A darker blue carpet covers the floor.
What a royal room to touch and stroke, I think. And all mine. For the night.
“All right.” The mayor looks around. “See if you have everything you need. I want you to be comfortable. Bathroom there. Coffee and tea maker here. Extra blankets. If you happen to want to get up in the night, I’ll leave the lights on in the hallway, and a few downstairs. And I’ll put an extra shawl out for you, too, by the fire. If you need me, for any reason, I’m up on the third floor. It was the door we passed right at the top of the landing. Don’t hesitate to knock or even come on up if you want or need anything. I’m here to attend to your needs. Think you’ll be all right, alone here?”
“I will be. It’s perfect.” It is.
“Glad to hear it. Here’s your key, then. Have a good evening, Rose. See you in the morning.”
She gives me an innkeeper’s nod, then closes the door behind her.
I turn. Delighted. Here’s such a fine crystal water pitcher—and for the night, it belongs to me. And these sharp-cut glasses. Mine. And the dainty white linens folded beside them. Mine. The carved white dresser. The framed picture on the wall above it. A ghost, if she’s left her haunt, has no possessions. I didn’t think I would miss having things, linens and furniture to hover over and claim. But at the moment, oh, I do. The heavy-framed photo above the dresser is darkened in the way of old tintypes, like the pictures that used to hang in my last home. The photographer has pointed his camera at a local celebration, the town turned out in their finery on the square, bundled in furs and shawls on a snowy day, with flags hanging frozen from the balconies all around. Men stand shoulder to shoulder in deep coats and slouch hats, their boots crusted, while a few women lift their chins under heavy black bonnets. Every eye stares in one direction, as if at something just over my shoulder. In a low corner, a date is written in pale ink: 1852.
A number to put with the faces of the dead. But no names. Looking at them, I wonder: what would we say to each other if you weren’t lost and gone, but were granted a wild stubbornness, as I was?
A faint tinkling comes from outside the curtained windows. I go and peer out. It’s only the chimes I heard earlier, lilting across the square.
I let the draperies fall. All around this little village, I suppose, the living are putting themselves to bed, to sleep. Something I can’t do. I can’t sleep. I don’t dream. I imagine others, settling onto their plump pillows, pulling their blankets up to their chins, closing their eyes inside the darkness.
It’s then, when the living think themselves safe in sleep, that a door might creak, like this one, and a light break open, and a ghost walk out into the night.
Those who can’t sleep, haunt.
We use the night to learn what only the night can teach: how to face loneliness.
I walk down the crystal-lit hall, between the row of closed rooms. Near the landing, outside the innkeeper’s door, I stop, and listen. Through the keyhole I hear Martha softly snoring. In. Out. In. Out. Her living breath, I haven’t forgotten, is one that praised the murder of ghosts. She said we ghosts are poor, lost things that need to be blasted. I reach my hand toward her door. I’m wide awake. I could take vengeance if I cared to.
Still, this woman gave me a home for the night. It’s more than I’ve had in a while.
I move away, leaving her to the drift of dreams. I make my way down the stairs, with no sound. There’s a talent to being a spirit, with or without a borrowed body, that the living will never know unless they die and linger long enough to make their own soul’s acquaintance.
In the dark parlors below, the spindle-backed chairs sit empty, and the wood in the fireplace lies split and unlit. The mayor, as promised, has left a shawl for me, and a light on in the kitchen. In the shimmering porcelain and blue room a tea cup and spoon wait for me, beside small sweets I can lift and smell but not swallow.
It turns out there’s a price for moving through the world as something new.
It means old longings must find some fresh way to be fed.
Still, I’ll never say, as the hunter Philip Pratt does, that a ghost should give up her longings because longing is all she ever feels. Isn’t it—I think as I put the sweets down—longing, hope, desire, that the living most feel, too? And even though it’s feeling—wanting and pain and anger, rage—that most risks giving a ghost away in this world, still I’ll never say that what the soul must do is stop feeling altogether; or that a soul who might have to control her feelings just to survive is any less than a man, like Philip Pratt, who’s free to howl his pain far and wide.
“The ghost of a feeling is still a feeling,” I say out loud, simply to hear my own voice come from inside this body I’ve claimed. “I’ll never say a haunt shouldn’t feel what she feels.”
A whispering, agreeing sound comes from the wall beside me.
Coming from a hidden place.
An answering hiss.
Low.
4
“Who’s there?” I call, my soul racing.
From where—there?—behind the oven glass—the gentle scratching comes.
It’s a phantom’s tap. A knocking.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Our greetings aren’t like those of the living. Our sounds must come across space and time. We’re echoes careful not to say where we started.
My soul waits. Breathless.
We dead know the dead. We feel, we hear the same echoes. We’ve passed the same way. I was told there were no ghosts in White Bar. Yet someone, plainly, is here. Someone who knows how to last, and so knows it
’s best not to show ourselves to any but kin and kind.
Still . . .
Be careful, I urge myself. For I’ve learned there is no certain friendship in the meeting of spirits. Passed souls are no different than living ones. Some good. Some cruel. As easily as the living, some betray the others. I’ve seen it done. Perhaps I’ve even done it myself.
All the saints are dead, so the Irish saying goes, but not all who die are saints.
Again I call, “Who’s there?”
Two hands, smooth, young, appear at the greasy window. Palms facing me, pressed against the glass.
I come nearer, excited, and see sleeves ruched tight at the wrists, printed with tiny, faded flowers.
Careful, I think. Still, be careful.
“I can see you. Who are you? Can you tell me? Can you come out?”
The hands don’t move. Or can’t.
They quiver.
With a faint click-click, the oven is lit. It begins to glow.
Now the hands slap, pound.
“I burn!” the hissing cry comes, frantic.
Pain. Such terrible pain.
“I hear you! I can see you! Can you get out? You must try!”
The young hands writhe against the glass. They scorch and twist.
Terror. At every moment we carry in us what killed us. “It was something terrible that happened to you, I know, I know! But I’m here. I’m Emma. Can you come out? Can you see me?”
No answer. Only those hands, writhing, beckoning in the heat. Fingers outstretched. Are they asking to be freed? Or luring me in to follow them?
Careful. Careful.
“Can you come out to me? Come out, if you can, so I can see you.”
“I burn.” The hiss begins to fade. “I burn. I burn.”
“I know, but you must come out and—”
With a click, the hands disappear. The oven is cold again.
“Wait!”
No, she’s gone.
Back into death’s silence.
My soul beats, wildly. What’s just happened? Did I speak the wrong words? Did I ask too much?
A soul, living or dead, doesn’t always know the right thing to say to a stranger.
But I’m not alone, I think. I’m not alone . . .
I feel it. Not only the certainty. But what it is I want. I race through the hotel with this new hunger, haunting, hunting, searching with it, down every hall, hoping she might be able to see me, from wherever it is she hides.
I show her my desire. I want to know you. It’s a beginning, at least. And a beginning is all you can ever ask, after you’ve ended . . .
I haunt with a leaping hope, all night long.
5
“Well, look who’s up early!” Mayor Martha says cheerfully, coming down the stairs in the morning and seeing me standing alone in the dining room. “You’re a quiet riser. And way ahead of me!”
She notices I haven’t touched the shawl she left for me. She’s wearing a fresh quilted vest. Her steely hair is combed and smells newly soaped and dried. She’s so alive. She bends to light the kindling under the logs in the hearth, pokes at the fire, then rubs the ash and soot from her hands and smiles, unknowing, at me.
“Did you have a peaceful night’s rest, Rose? Did you find the goodies I left for you in the kitchen?”
I did find something, I remind myself. The spirit, she never showed herself to me again—but then, I think, she might have been confused and not understood that my ghost, like hers, is hidden inside something else.
Or perhaps she knows her way too well around death and around this place, and knows she has cause to be careful in this town where other ghosts have been blasted to dust. No ghost will let herself be seen unless she wants to be seen—or unless she’s goaded by a hunter to anger or pain. But by what means might I, or should I, provoke a ghost?
The mayor is still smiling at me. “I remember you don’t want any breakfast. Do you want coffee, though? Or are you heading”—she glances at my straight shoulders—“straight out the door already?”
“No,” I answer, coming toward her and the smoking fire. “I was just doing a bit of thinking, here in your pretty parlor. I’ve been feeling, all night—I hope this doesn’t sound strange—that White Bar might be the perfect place for me to stop, for a little while. I’m wondering”—I smile back at her—“how it might be if I stayed on for a few days? If you can spare the room?”
I don’t say: I will be staying here, one way or the other.
She turns slowly, considering, toward the hotel desk. “A few more days, Rose?”
“If you can manage it. I wouldn’t want to be any trouble.”
She tilts her head, surprised, watchful. “Even though you don’t have what you need, luggage-wise, for these mountains?”
“I could get some things.”
“Sure, but you should know we’re pretty much a one-night town, in November. Not much left open now except the café and the museum and the general store, maybe one art gallery. Not much to do except look at the falls, and that takes maybe half an hour. If you stay, I’m just worried I’d be taking advantage of you, you know. And I don’t like to do that, not if—not when you feel like you’ve been running and searching for something, as you put it,” she says cautiously.
“But that’s just it, Martha.” For the soul can be nimble when it needs to be. “I really have been running and searching. There’s something I haven’t told you that . . . that I’ve suffered through, not so long ago . . . and there’s something, now, here, that feels so good and right for me, after what I’ve been through. I think, for some reason, White Bar might be a magical place. I think I knew it as soon as I came. It makes me never want to leave at all. It feels”—I put a little plea into my voice—“so different. A place a body can trust.”
She gives me a long look—and then some steel seems to soften inside her.
I see it. Plain as day. I can’t claim to be able to read every soul I meet. Yet I’ve lasted so long, now, in life and in death, I’ve come across nearly every card a living face can show.
Mayor Martha Hayley is flush with happiness.
“Rose, gal, you see more than most people usually do.” She stares at me. “White Bar really is a special place. It’s not just old-timey trinkets and postcards and relics, like most people think.” She blushes, proudly, excited. “It is a place of trust, like you say. We’re entrusted with so much here. With each other . . . and making our little town work . . . caring for our little corner of history . . . But most people don’t ever see that. They just use us for a rest stop, and go on. But Rose, hon . . . are you really sure it’s the right thing for you to stay here right now? A place you don’t even know, with so few . . . resources?”
“Martha, would it help if I told you I’m starting my life over after someone told me I don’t deserve a life at all?”
As if a bolt from heaven has struck her, Martha’s shoulders stiffen. She seems to grow taller in front of me.
“I knew it!” She pounds her fist on her desk, from her fresh height. “I just knew it! I called Mary Berringer last night, and I told her, I think there’s some story here with this young Rose coming out of nowhere with almost nothing in her hands. You’ve escaped someone. I knew it! Well, whoever they are”—she raises her voice—“God damn them to hell! Did they—no, no, you don’t want to go into the details, I can see that and I understand and respect it. But this changes everything. You poor girl!” She reaches out—too shy, I see, to take my hand, so she strokes my sleeve instead. “Now, you listen to me. You don’t need to go anywhere, right now. Just lie low with us for a while, and get strong again. The Bar is such a good place for that. A fine place. You know, White Bar took me and Dale in after we lost everything? In the mortgage crash when nobody got punished but us little fish. We were literally on our way to the casinos to try to turn the almost nothing we had left into something, and we felt so worthless, just worthless, and we happened to stop here just to take a breath and a
sk ourselves what on earth we were doing . . . and we sat down in the café, just like you did, and the next thing we knew we met people, and found out the hotel was sitting empty and run down, and the next thing we knew John and Mary were loaning us money to buy it . . . and now look at where I am. Mayor! And then, even when Dale left me flat”—her voice breaks and goes flat, too, but not weak—“the Bar lifted me up again. That’s just how it is here. We stick together. Now, you come back into the dining room with me.” She takes my elbow and tugs on it. “I know you don’t do breakfast, but how about some tea to warm you, while we talk a few things through, and see what we can come up with in terms of clothes and things for you. You sit down right here,” she says, pointing to a table, “and we’ll get something hot into you and onto you.”
She disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a pot and cups and saucers and sugar and milk, and bends and serves me, as I used to serve others. Oh, such a lovely feeling it is, to be waited on hand and foot! It makes you feel like you’re someone important just by sitting down, and makes someone else seem less so, bending their back toward you.
And that’s the trick and trouble of it.
“Martha,” I say, “you sit down now, too.”
“I will, I will. I do want to know more about you.” She drops into the creaking chair across from me. “Like, what you do for a living? So we can see what there might be for you to do around here. How to fit you in.”
“I was a housekeeper.”
“Now that could work out! But”—she chews her lip and nods—“what you mostly want is independence. That’s what we work for here. A sense of control. I know, and a lot of us do, what it feels like to lose that sense of being in charge. I know what it means to have found out you were mistaken in someone . . . ” Her brash voice falters again. “But the thing is, with the help of others, you pick yourself up, you find your center again, and you go on. And it’s in the going on that you see how any misfortune, no matter how big it is, can be made into something small. It’s the wonderful thing about time, right? It’s like doing the laundry. It shrinks the past.”
