by William Bell
That was how I reasoned things through just before I fell asleep, and I didn’t really believe a word of it.
3
I heard her at the usual time. At first, all I could make out over the hiss of the rain was a low moan, then I heard crying, faint but unmistakable, then only the rain. I decided to run a test. I set the clock radio for three-fifteen and went to sleep again.
Music woke me. Piano music, Liszt, on “Late Night Classics.” In the background the roar of heavy ran. I dressed quickly, grabbed a flashlight and an umbrella and stepped out onto the deck. It was a warm rain, falling straight and hard through the still air, bouncing off the planks and splashing my calves. I walked to the edge of the trees and stopped. A curtain of water poured off the edge of the umbrella. I checked my watch: 3:25.
Logic dictated that I shouldn’t hear anything above the rain. But, to my left, someone was panting heavily, as if running in full flight, each sobbing breath like a saw rasping back and forth.
Joo-ball! The word was torn from a throat gasping for breath. Joo-ball, help me!
She passed me quickly this time. I heard only her panicked gasps, no footfalls thumping on sodden ground. But her fear set my blood thundering in my ears.
Forcing myself to move, I took several steps forward into the bush and heard something that froze my blood.
Deep in the trees, the voices of men, angry, afraid, as if arguing. They were moving fast, their words like nails pounded into my skull. I held my breath, knowing what would come.
Eighty wish!
Go back!
No!
The men passed me, voices in violent conflict. And then, from farther away in the bush, Help meeeee!
Her cry rose above the roar of the rain.
chapter
You look awful.”
“Thanks very much for the compliment.”
“Like death warmed over.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Like the ‘before’ segment of a sedative commercial.”
“I get the point.”
“When was the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?”
“Can’t remember. If I didn’t have you to talk to, I think I’d go insane.”
Raphaella smiled and tossed her hair over her shoulder. She was wearing a midnight blue T-shirt and a charcoal grey skirt that brushed the toes of her granny boots. The T-shirt read “Smoking Causes Profits.”
We were in the office of the store, where I had been making a catalogue of the books from the Maitland home when Raphaella dropped in after the Saturday-morning rehearsal of the WME, carrying take-out from the fish-and-chip restaurant down the street. Empty food cartons and juice bottles littered the desk.
“There’s something else,” I said, with hesitation.
Raphaella sat back in her chair, crossed her legs and gnawed at a fingernail. “Don’t tell me. The woman you love is too secretive.”
“Well, that’s for sure, but it’s not what I meant.” Haltingly, I told Raphaella about the woman in the forest, not sure how to relate the story without sounding like a hysterical airhead in a Hollywood horror flick.
“She’s been there every night?”
“Yup. At midnight and at 3 A.M. And now she has company.”
I related to her what I’d experienced for the past few days, how the men in my dream had become part of the … ritual, or whatever was going on. Raphaella heard me out without a word, her head tilted to one side, her deep, intelligent eyes fixed on mine.
“Wow,” she said when I finished.
“Exactly. I think I’ve gone over the edge.”
“No, you haven’t,” she said firmly. “I’ve been out there, remember?”
“So what do you think?”
“I think, Mr. Garnet Havelock, that what you have on your hands is a first-class haunting.”
2
A while later we were walking hand in hand in Tudhope Park, along the edge of the lake away from the main beach. Two toddlers stood in the shallows with their mother, tossing bits of bread to a family of ducks, while farther out the father hurled a stick for a golden retriever. The afternoon sun blazed down on us, and a cool breeze blew in off the lake.
We sat on top of a picnic table, looking past old willows with twisted, gnarled trunks out over the green rippled water where a few powerboats churned lines of white foam behind them.
“So, what do I do?” I asked finally.
“What we do,” Raphaella replied, “is go back into the past. Find out all we can about that maple forest.”
“And the clearing and ruined cabin. The one you haven’t seen yet.”
“Right. You said it was a weird place and that the woman seems to start and end her walk in that area.”
“It’s weird, all right. As if the little clearing has its own weather.”
“What is it that she calls out night after night?”
“The first word sounds like ‘joo-ball’ and then she says ‘Help me.’”
“Well, that’s easy. Jubal is a man’s name.”
The trouble with hanging around with sharp people is that every once in a while they make you feel stupid. Jubal. Help me, Jubal. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Right,” I agreed, pretending I had come to the same conclusion myself.
“Jubal means ‘he who makes music,’ or something like that,” Raphaella said.
“How do —?”
“I’ve studied names and their meanings. Also numerology. Sort of a hobby.”
“A hob —”
“Never mind. Your name means ‘red jewel,’ in case you didn’t know.”
“And yours?”
“Divine healer. Anyway, we have to go back into the past. Learn stuff. Find out who the woman is. It might be fun,” she said unconvincingly.
“Yeah. And you know what else I want to do? Wait for her. In the bush. See her. But it might be dangerous, especially if I bumped into those men …”
One of the little kids shrieked with joy when the dog bounded into the lake in a shower of water, scattering the ducks in a chorus of angry quacks. Suddenly I felt ridiculous. There we were, calmly discussing ghosts. Or presences, as Raphaella would insist.
“There shouldn’t be any danger, Garnet. Spirits from the past don’t hurt you. Physically, I mean. They’re, well, sort or re-enacting something, whatever it is that keeps them walking.”
“I think I’d like to try to see her.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“You’ll come?”
“Yes. In the meantime, Sherlock Havelock, we’ve got some research to do.”
3
“This is crazy,” I complained. “How could I let you talk me into this?”
We were stopped at a red light near the Stephen Leacock Museum, just down the road from Tudhope Park, and I was having second thoughts. A bad case.
“Into what?” Raphaella asked, kicking off her sandals. She plunked her feet onto the dashboard and tucked her skirt around her legs.
I shook my head, disgusted with myself. “I think the stress is getting to me — Mom being away, moving out of my house, the stupid dream. And you’ve got me believing in ghosts.”
“Spirits.” There was an edge to her voice.
“Whatever.”
“And people can’t make you believe in something.”
The light changed and I pulled away. “But it’s nuts,” I said. “It’s the twenty-first century, the third millennium, two thousand and —”
“I know how to count, Garnet.”
“What we’ve been talking about all morning only happens in books and movies.”
“You’re slipping into techno-mode.”
“Into what?”
“Techno-mode. The attitude that science can explain everything, that computers and machines can solve all our problems. You sound like that physics teacher, What’s-his-name, the one whose classes I never go to.”
“Canelli.”
“Right. ‘Seeing is
believing.’ ‘There must be a scientific explanation.’ That whole complex.”
“Yeah, well, I may be in techno-mode but I’m not too happy about the alternative view of the universe.”
“The alternative is there whether you like it or not.”
chapter
Raphaella had to work at her mother’s shop for a few hours, so I hit the grocery store before heading to the house. Once there, I chopped up some fresh veggies for a stir-fry and put them in the fridge. I put a block of tofu in some marinade, and settled down in the family room to wait for Dad to get home from the store.
There were times when I thought I would have made a good candidate for one of those corny stories about split personalities. Except in my case I didn’t have more than one person living in my head. I had only me, but I seemed to have two halves.
Raphaella was right. I was a digital junkie, a techno-mode person. I liked electronics with lots of lights and buttons on them, TV with loads of features, computer software — some of it — the whole modern thing. I didn’t believe in statues that cry, Saturday-morning evangelists who heal cancer patients by touching them and shouting towards the ceiling, angels who brought messages from the beyond. Superstitions made me laugh.
On the other hand, I could never — all my life — shake the notion that there was more. There were things in life that couldn’t be explained or measured. When I worked with wood, there was more to it than the mechanics of cutting and sanding and painting, something creative that I couldn’t explain to someone even if I wanted to. And the way I felt about Raphaella, or the love between my parents, how to measure that, or figure it out? Love wasn’t material. You couldn’t go down to the Farmers’ Market behind the library on Saturday morning and buy a pound of it. Love was spiritual.
There seemed to be no answer to this whole ghost business. It sounded crazy, but it wasn’t crazy. All I could do was go by my experience, and I knew with the certainty of a headache or a burned finger that the voices I had heard in the forest at night were real.
2
Raphaella turned up at my house in time for dinner.
“You might find my father a little eccentric,” I warned her.
Dad got home at the usual time, with the newspaper rolled up under his arm, humming away to himself as he came in the door. I introduced him to Raphaella and they shook hands formally. When he caught my eye, he waggled his eyebrows dramatically, as if to say, “Not bad!”
I stir-fried the vegetables while he sat at the table and read Mom’s latest report aloud to us. “I hope your mother isn’t getting in too deep,” he said, frowning. Then he smiled. “I think they have a few pounds of garlic left at the market if you want me to pick some up for you.”
Raphaella laughed. That was his way of saying maybe I had put too much into the stir-fry. But it was too late. I sprinkled some sugar on the veggies, added soy sauce, gave the mixture one last toss, and served it on a plate. I served the fried tofu in a shallow bowl.
Dad tested the veggie dish, pronounced it “groovy” and picked up a chicken wing. “Maybe you should be a chef instead of a furniture maker,” he commented. “What do you think, Raphaella?”
“Agreed.”
“I can’t boil water without burning it,” he said.
I looked at Raphaella. “See what I mean?”
She laughed.
“At least somebody around here likes my jokes,” Dad said.
“Dad, do you know anything about that little church out by the trailer park?”
“The African Methodist? A little.”
“How did it come to be called African?”
“Because the people who built it in, let’s see —”
“Eighteen forty-nine.”
His eyebrows shot up and he stopped chewing, then said, “Hmm. How did you come to be interested in the place?”
“I noticed it when I went out to Silverwood the first time. There’s a plaque that tells the date.”
“The people who built it were descendants of Africans, I suppose. You didn’t know about the black settlement in Oro Township?”
“Never heard of it.”
“What are they teaching in school nowadays? Never mind, I know the answer to that one. Lots of computers, no history.”
“You can say that again,” Raphaella put in.
“There was a substantial settlement there in the nineteenth century,” Dad went on. “Some say they were runaways from slavery who came through the underground railroad.”
“But I’ve never seen any blacks around Oro.”
“Oh, they all left the area long ago. Most returned to the U.S. You should read Elizabeth Maitland’s diary. She and her husband were the first to take up land near where the church came to be built. Maybe she mentions it.”
“Where can I get it? The library?”
“Don’t you remember? It’s part of my estate-sale purchase. In fact, you were holding it in your hands not long ago. It’s badly damaged, but a lot is still legible. It’s a genuine historical record.”
I remembered the box of books I had tucked away when the delivery was made, and the musty old volume Dad had showed me that day.
We ate in silence and Dad made a pot of his killer coffee. I brewed tea for Raphaella. While we sipped, a thought came into my mind.
“Dad, you said all the blacks left the area. Why? Too cold up here in the great white north?”
“I doubt it. Most came by way of Ohio and returned there. They have winter there, too. No, it’s a mystery. Nobody really knows why they left.”
3
After dinner the next day, I met Raphaella at the library. I found her on the second floor, sitting at a large oak table, a small stack of books before her, making notes from a volume that looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day for a century or so.
I stood and watched her. Her raven hair hung straight, hiding her face. Why is she so closed in? I wondered for the thousandth time. I knew she liked being with me. Things like that you couldn’t fake. And why would she? Nobody was forcing her to hang out with me. I knew she liked the physical side of things, too. Not that there was much. Kissing, hugging, holding hands. She wouldn’t go any further, not even when I felt her heart beating against my chest and her breath quick in my ear. She would stop and push me away.
She looked up and saw me. “By the pricking of my thumbs …” she said.
“Um, okay.”
“Something handsome this way comes.”
“I get the feeling you’re misquoting someone. Again.”
“Shakespeare. The Scottish play. One of the witches.”
“Ah,” I said knowingly. I didn’t have a clue. “Find anything useful?”
“Lots, but it’s all background. Let’s go to your store where we can talk. I’ll fill you in.”
At the store we made ourselves comfortable in the office. Raphaella opened up her notes and began.
“Okay, we go back a long way here. Two dates to keep in mind for the time being. After 1793, no one could be enslaved in Upper Canada — or any other British colony, for that matter. People who were already slaves remained so. After 1833, slavery was abolished altogether in Upper and Lower Canada.”
“Which really bugged the Americans, I’ll bet.”
“Keep your eye on the ball here, Garnet. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Speaking of the Americans, relations between them and Britain hadn’t improved after the Revolution, in seventeen whatever. You know where Penetanguishene is?”
I put on a stupid face. “Duh, a town up there on Georgian Bay?”
“The British were always afraid that the Americans would control the Great Lakes with their navy, and poor little Penetanguishene sat up there on the water, almost totally isolated, so the Brits got the idea to build a land route there from Barrie. That way, the port could be supplied and defended more easily. Remember, back then this whole area was nothing but wilderness criss-crossed by Indi
an trails.
“In 1811 a guy named Samuel Wilmot surveyed a road.”
“Old Sammy. What a guy.”
Raphaella sat straight and rolled her eyes. “No wonder you were in trouble at school all the time. Be quiet and pay attention.”
“Did I ever tell you that you’re beautiful when you take control?”
“While Wilmot was at it, he surveyed parcels of land on each side of the road for settlers. Why? you might ask.”
“I might, but I won’t.”
“Because settlers could grow food for the soldiers at the fort and, if necessary, they could defend the road.”
“All this is really fascinating, Raphaella, but I don’t really see —”
“During the War of 1812–14, the Americans did gain control of the lakes — for part of the war, anyway — so the government of Upper Canada knew it had made a wise decision. They decided to survey the whole area and bring in more settlers.
“The governor of Upper Canada, Sir Peregrine Maitland —”
“Who would name their kid after a falcon?”
“May I continue?”
“Sorry. Proceed.”
“Maitland decided to grant some of the land to blacks.”
“Hey! Just like Dad said! And Maitland, that’s the name of the pioneer who took up land near the church.”
“Couldn’t have been this Maitland. He lived at York — that’s Toronto. Your Maitland must have been a relative. Anyway, here’s the rest. Maitland was an abolitionist, and therefore sympathetic to blacks, almost all of them ex-slaves from the U.S. Between 1819 and 1826, twenty-one land grants were made to blacks. Nineteen located their grants, meaning they filed for them, but only eight families actually settled. You had to clear a certain amount of land and build a dwelling before you got ownership.
“Between 1828 and 1831, another forty black families bought land in Oro at a special price. After 1825 the area was opened up to Loyalists and military men, and in 1831 it was opened to what they called indigents — poor people — and a hundred or so white families settled.