That night there were meteors in the sky, little pins of yellow breaking through the dark and zipping about in lines. Sometimes they came in barrages, and other times only one or two an hour. The largest were a blazing white. Molly watched them through the dark, counting each flash until she could no longer stay awake. She swore she fell asleep to the sound of airplane engines.
Twelve
While I was gone, undertaking a ridiculous tour of labor with Reggie and contemplating why some deserters made it through the world almost charmed while others were chased like animals, news of my and Link’s actions had spread. Sales of the paper had slowed in response. Simon brought back grim stories of how slow business was at the boat barn too. Some fishermen went all the way to Sedgwick to have their boats winterized. Others stripped barnacle and sanded hulls and recaulked seams themselves. That they would give up days of work to stay in harbor and struggle to mend their own boats with limited resources, tools, and facilities made the community’s point. We were all being punished.
My mother was working the story of the fire harder than ever, and my father was spending more time alone down in his shop and staying later at the boatyard. He was distant when we spoke to him. Sometimes he would answer in a way that told us he hadn’t heard a thing we said.
A noise stirred me late one night, and I opened my eyes with a suddenness that brought me fully out of sleep. The wolfhounds were sitting side by side at the window. I had not heard them push the door open or come in. I called groggily to Sam first, and then to Daphne, and when neither moved, I understood there was something out there.
We were not alone. And the dogs would not turn away until they knew what stalked us. I was terrified as I pushed the covers back and swung my legs off the bed. The floor was warm against my toes, and I closed my eyes. It would be so easy to stay in bed and drift back to sleep. Sam came over and licked my foot until I opened my eyes again. When I left the bed and reached the small window, I saw, across the moonlit yard, near the edge of the tree line, a figure. I had made no effort to disguise myself. The figure raised a single finger to its lips and then sank back into the forest. As I dropped to the floor with my back against the wall, a low growl sounded in Daphne’s throat. Then the night silence returned. The dogs did not stop watching the window. They made no other sounds. And it was a long time before I rose and peered out at the empty yard and the wind blowing the shadows of the trees all about the night. I thought of Simon and Link, both asleep down the hall, and our parents asleep in their bed downstairs. I had always felt safe in this house my parents built. I had always felt that we had some power when together that would keep the darker things in the world away. For the first time I felt that sense of security vanish. With a single glance out a bedroom window, an era of innocence had ended. I got back into bed and pulled the covers tight about myself. I knew it must have been Lyman Creel out there watching us.
I told no one about what I saw.
We had frequented this river for four hundred years on my mother’s side, and while our family stories of the strange, the mad, and the tragic were seemingly endless, I sometimes thought I was the only remaining one who actually believed the tales. Legend said a banshee had walked alongside my mother’s family for generations, from the green hills of Donegal to the rugged shores of Penobscot Bay, ever since her lover, a young sheep rancher, had murdered her and loosed a curse on the family. While others in the family seemed unable to paint her as anything more than a child’s fright—a banal white-sheeted ghost incapable of materializing any more solidly in the imagination than fog did in the air—from Reggie’s lips she came in sheer terror.
“What makes her worth fearing is that she never leaves you alone,” Reggie told us, gleefully oblivious to the terror he might be passing down to children. “Think cancer. Think having a bad heart. Think knowing all your time is actually borrowed. You live your whole life with death walking at your side. That’s her particular form of torture. You flee across the Atlantic for a better life, and she stands right there beside you on the steamer deck, invisible and waiting.”
According to Reggie, her dress was ornately stitched and an almost comic canary yellow. All levity stopped there. Blood matted her long hair. Her lover had murdered her with a rock in a winter field after seeing her talking with another boy in town, which is not a crime, which is not even wrong, which of course didn’t matter. A faint layer of snow still dusted her face. Her eyes were not dead black things but a brilliant blue and achingly human. They were the eyes of the living, unjustly confined now to a departed body. Worst perhaps was the rusted wire. The young sheep rancher had wrapped her body in barbed wire, covered her with leaves, and left her in the woods. Though she no longer belonged to the forest floor, her barbed-wire bindings remained. Even in death the coils were twisted about her throat and torso, barbs tearing grotesque gashes into flesh, yet she never attempted to unwrap herself from her lover’s iron corset, and she never bled from those hellish wounds.
In the tale it was autumn each time the banshee emerged across the forest or stepped grim and unapologetic from the sea to wail before another of our brood was taken into the next world. The women were always the most irreverent and brave among our family, and my mother and my great-aunts had named the banshee Screech. While the name was not particularly clever, I had always liked that. How these women who raised me and came before me were above fear. How as their husbands became increasingly anxious, they raised the volume of the taunts and jokes they hurled at Screech until the men walked out of the room, shaking their heads in timid protest. How they understood the necessity of knocking down what you most fear in this world with a little humor.
My sleep grew light and troubled: two hours filled with a frightening awareness of every sound. The wood heat moving through the vents in the house. The groaning of trees outside as the world grew colder. The rattle of wind blowing over the dormers. Dreams, some fantastic, others believable, flashed briefly. Then I would sense Sam and Daphne in the room and come fully awake. Slowing my breathing, I focused on the house, sought out the sound of Simon snoring, the refrigerator whirring downstairs. I tried to make sense of the vague dark shapes in my room, the dresser, the beanbag chair, the pile of shirts and shoes and socks and underwear that had been collecting in the corner. Finally, being unable to put off the visitation any longer, I slid to the window. Lyman was there every time, smiling as he stood beside the same tall beech tree in the moonlight. I knew what he was doing was insane, yet by giving audience and saying nothing, Lyman and I began to share a sinister intimacy. He would stand watching me until he stepped backward into the dark woods, as if being swallowed. Sometimes he was carrying a thermos or a mug of something. Most times he was empty-handed. He never gestured, except with his face, which contorted into all manner of expressions, sometimes lewdly grinning, sometimes straight-lipped with stoicism, sometimes turned down with disappointment.
On the sixth night, the moon was full, and I could see Lyman Creel cupped in silver light. He was munching on an apple. I was certain it was from the ghost apple tree. I felt the wind drop from my lungs. I wanted to run from the window but could not. Lyman lifted his pinkie finger and wiggled it in a coquettish wave as he brought the fruit to his mouth. I ran through all the symbolic ways I could read this. A violation of our Eden, Lyman as the serpent, Lyman as Eve, the apple-eater, and so on. Thinking of his teeth working a ring around the ghost apple, I remembered the careful way Lyman had built a fortress of sorts about his family, and I recalled watching him care so delicately for his ravens, chortling to them and tearing meat up for their frantic beaks. What I had seen then was not a serpent or a defiler or a tyrant but a nurturer. Perhaps his mad intimidation in our yard a few Saturdays back and his nightly visits—I didn’t know what else to call them, for they didn’t feel like threats or warnings or trespasses—were carried out to protect his family as well. What if all conflict was just a matter of perspective? He was smiling. He was easy. I wanted to believe he was
just a man who was lonely and awake and a bit hungry. Yet there was something about Lyman eating an apple that seemed more sinister and symbolic.
The next day after school I went to the edge of the woods, where he had dropped the apple. The core was gone, picked up or eaten by animals, but a clear set of footprints led back through the woods.
I followed the tracks until they emerged from the forest. Lyman Creel was standing on the bluff by the ghost apple tree, as if he had known I was coming. I should have felt angry. I should have felt violated. But I could muster none of those feelings. The wind rode the bluff heavy. All about the clearing, whorls of color fell from the trees as they shook loose red, orange, and yellow leaves. After years of protecting this place from others, I was glad I wasn’t alone. I shivered, wrapped my arms around my chest, and watched as Lyman reached out to touch the tree, thought better of it, turned, and sat cross-legged on the ground like a child.
“Do you know the story?” he said, pointing to the tree, and I nodded. “Would you mind hearing it again?” I shook my head, somewhat amazed he knew the story at all, but even more surprised he had asked permission to tell it.
Lyman told a slightly different version of the story of Nigawes and Sanoba. In Lyman’s version, Sanoba did not die by his wife’s hand, chopped to pieces and cast into the sea. He was killed by loneliness. He left his family because he felt disconnected from those he loved, not because he missed a life free of obligation. When he realized his error and returned, there wasn’t a place for him anymore. His loneliness grew until he became his loneliness and nothing else. Finally, in his anguish, he cast himself off the bluff into the sea.
“You’re trying to make him the good guy,” I said.
“I’m just telling you the story the way it was told to me. There’s no good or bad.”
Then I found myself asking Lyman what I’d been too scared to ever ask my mother. “Whose story is it?” Sometimes you find the origin of a thing, and its wonder dies.
“You mean is it French, Irish, Penobscot, total bullshit, some mumbo from a book?”
“I guess.”
He shrugged. “It’s all of ours. It’s been around these woods for a long time. It was here twenty-five years ago, when your mother and I were on this bluff with Billy. And it’ll be here twenty-five years from now, when you or Wren or Galen or your brothers or your children or someone else’s children are up here.”
“Billy Jupiter?”
Lyman’s face tightened. He looked surprised, then nervous. “You didn’t know it happened here.” Lyman pointed past the tree to the edge of the bluff. “Billy fell right over there. Maybe Moses was right all these years.”
“You know Moses?”
“Everyone knows everyone here. Always have and always will. I was Moses’s sternman for a year when I first started lobstering,” Lyman explained. “He took me on even after my family’s connection to the mills and Billy’s death. I never fully understood it, and it made me uneasy, working with him. I spent my whole life thinking it would be better to be a warrior in the garden. But one time Moses told me the thing to really be was a gardener in the war.”
I thought about the paradox for a long time, until the rushing waves slapping against the rocks had grown deafening.
“I’ll probably die still wrestling with the right answer,” Lyman said. He gestured out to the sound of the waves. “I was surprised Falon came back to the bay at all. Even more surprised when she and your father decided to build near here.”
“Maybe it’s better to keep the bad things in front of you,” I said after some time.
Lyman grinned and rose. He reached out, and for a moment I thought he was going to tussle my hair. “Something like that, kid.” Then he slid his hands into his pockets, curled his shoulders inward, and turned and walked away from the bluff.
That night, the seventh evening of our strange game, something shifted. I woke in the dark gripped by an eerie anticipation. I wanted Lyman to be there. When I reached the window, Lyman was standing outside, but for the first time his back was turned to the house. It was as if we no longer mattered. I watched him stand that way for an hour before I fell asleep on the floor with Daphne and Sam beside me. The dead came to me that night in my dreams. Faces I did not know, but understood were my ancestors. From the dark they drifted toward the window in my room. Gentle, weightless things, really. It was as if they had simply stood in the driveway and raised their arms and let the wind lift them up to the second story. More of these figures kept lifting from the ground and gathering in a line. Hundreds of faceless men and women, stretching back to the woods, beyond the woods, filling the air above the river, filling the air above the ocean, filling the world. Then the first hand touched the glass. I watched it move through the pane. Then I felt it move through my T-shirt, through my chest, through my ribs. Finally I felt the hand close around my spine and begin to pull. I woke curled in a pool of in-slanting sunlight, sore and shaken and scared, scratching at my chest to make sure I was still whole. Daphne and Sam were gone. Lyman was gone. I wondered whether the dead were gone or with me still.
At the breakfast table I fixed my eyes directly on the plate of burned toast my mother tossed down on her way out the door. But my brothers knew.
“What happened?” Simon asked as we stepped outside. After eating we would walk the three hundred yards out to Arnoux’s shop, tell him it was time for school, and then drive into town. He liked that he could see us off in the mornings and head into the yard with the satisfaction of having already put some work into the day. What he did most often at the shop in those early mornings was sketch. He claimed he needed to be down here on the river to draw a proper boat, never in town, never anywhere else. Drawing a perfect centerline or marking out a cabin were his true joys. Building the things was the price he had to pay to draw them.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“Sam and Daphne,” Link said. “They’ve been leaving my room in the middle of the night. They never do that. I thought they were just going downstairs or into the hall.”
“But they’re not,” Simon said.
“They’re going to your room,” said Link. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” I felt trapped by my brothers.
“Your room looks at the woods,” Link said. “Mine doesn’t. Sy’s doesn’t.”
Simon stopped in the middle of the path. “It’s Creel, isn’t it?” he said. How could my brothers know such things? We were halfway to the shop. I imagined our father looking up from his drafting table at us in puzzlement.
Simon took my face between his palms. His fingers smelled of chalk and sawdust. He turned my head until our eyes met. “Being scared isn’t being weak,” he said. “You tell us. And we’ll tell Arnoux. Together.”
When we called around the shop for our father, there was no response. The tools were powered down, the piles of sawdust swept up, and the radio switched off, all sure signs he had not even been there yet that morning. “Strange,” Simon said. Outside we caught a faint, high metallic whining sound, and we followed it deep into the trees. Its volume rose with each step, until we came through the clearing in the deep woods beside the old stone foundation. Our father was just outside the barn with the Citabria. The engine was running, the propellers buzzing like saws. His face was only feet from the whirring blades. At first I thought he had been injured, that the blades had cut him open, or perhaps he had had a heart attack or a stroke. But he was just sitting beside the running machine. He looked up and noticed us then, but his face didn’t change at all.
“Almost ready,” he mouthed.
“For what?” I yelled, but my father didn’t seem to hear the question, as he turned back into the machine, his eyes a bit wild, another wrench gripped in his fist.
Simon stepped up beside the plane and reached into the cockpit and killed the engine. The propellers ticked and slowed, bringing our father up from his trance.
“He’s watching us,” Link said. Though the propellers ha
d stopped, the entire barn seemed to vibrate with stored energy. “Lyman Creel’s been coming up to the house and standing at the edge of the woods and staring at our house for some stupid reason. And Almy’s been up there, watching him right back.”
Our father didn’t react at first. It was as though he was trying to fully parse out a complex equation. Then he turned and walked out of the barn without saying anything. He didn’t slow as he walked back through the woods, and it was all we could do to keep up with him. He veered from the path, taking the straightest route possible, not flinching or slowing when branches snapped or sawed at his arms and face. “Get the keys, Simon,” he called without looking back at us. “Start the truck.” And then he went past the shop and up into the garden shed while we scrambled to do what he’d asked. He came out a few minutes later carrying a logging cant hook and a massive pair of channel lock pliers. “This is how he has always liked it,” he said as he tossed the tools into the back of the running truck, “how he’s always wanted it.”
Link said, “Make it hurt,” and then went silent when my father glared at him.
“You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” said Simon. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and my father made him slide over.
The Lowering Days Page 15