Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  That last idea was interesting, since it branched off into weird things called “atmospheric ghost lights.” There was apparently something called “will-o’-the-wisp,” which was fire that appears out of nowhere over water or marshes, and may have to do with some sort of natural electrical phenomenon meeting up with natural gases…though some folk tales actually said it might come from spirits of the dead!

  It was incredibly intriguing, but there was an undercurrent in it all that I found disturbing. No one was sure about this thing. Not that it existed; they all admitted to that. No one, however—Harvard Medical pooh-bah or ordinary citizen—was willing to say that there was an even remotely acceptable answer to what it really was. Not a single expert knew. Every one of them said at the end of their articles that it was…unexplainable. This thing that people were seeing, constantly and in groups, was moving around out there on the bay as some sort of unfathomable reality.

  Wow.

  When I left that room I was a little shaken. So was Antonine and that upset me just as much, maybe more. Though I could live with seeing my grandfather and Bomber after they died—could explain their appearances as a symptom of my anxiety—I didn’t want to believe that there was a ghost of this sort, this magnitude, in our midst. A ghost that crowds had seen. A ghost both Antonine and I had observed up close and personal. But there seemed to be no reason to believe we hadn’t.

  I wondered what Antonine was thinking now. Had her father, a relatively healthy and fairly young man, been haunted to death by the sight of this thing and a poor woman on fire on the bay near his chosen home? We hadn’t proven that Jackson Clay was of stable mind and that must have been hurting her deep inside.

  Then Florence Green showed up.

  We were walking back toward Eve’s desk, not saying anything, and I was trying to look at the positive side of things—I was about to have my first New Brunswick lobster dinner with two amazing people.

  “Hello, you two,” said Eve.

  There was another woman at her desk, a bit older, grey hair, dressed the way most folks around here dressed—in ordinary clothes, blue pants and a plain sweater, not putting on airs—and she had been deep in conversation with Antonine’s mom.

  “This is Florence Green,” explained Eve. “I gave her a call and asked her to come over. She works as a volunteer at the Bathurst Heritage Museum on Douglas Avenue. She has a story for you.”

  “Hello there,” said Florence.

  Just two words and if I had come from the moon I would have known she was the genuine article. There was just something about her. It made me smile. She was friendly, welcoming, and absolutely herself. If she had told you that she had just returned from a trip to Planet Vulcan where she’d had tea with Harry Potter and Han Solo you would have believed her.

  “Welcome to Bathurst!” she cried. She stood there and smiled at me, like the best aunt or grandma you could have. “I do indeed have a story for you. Well, not a story, actually, a true-to-life thing.”

  And This is what Florence the down-to-earth grandma told us.

  “I saw your ghost ship, I did, when I was a youngster. Not a child or anything like that, I was a young lady, in my twenty-second year. In those days, I used to live in the western part of Bathurst. I’d taken a college degree in Saint John and come back here, looking for a man likely—and I landed one eventually—but set up as a schoolteacher at first. That’s what I was in one of my earlier incarnations. Anyway, I used to walk into town here to the old theatre to see the pictures. I was a James Dean fan, gosh he was beautiful. I’d slip in here, sometimes with a fella or even with a girlfriend or two, and see a movie and then walk back out of town.”

  “Those were the days,” said Eve with a smile.

  “They were indeed, my dear, but this particular night, it was in the summer, there was a storm brewing, you could tell by the feel of the air, and I was hurrying along the street back toward home, and started heading out across the bridge from the main part of town out to the west. You may know that Chaleur Bay is then on your right, and you can see clear across it from there almost out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I was motoring along on the bridge when suddenly it seemed to me that some extra streetlights had come on. I looked up and then out over the water and I saw it. The burning ghost ship of Chaleur Bay!”

  I tried not to look at Antonine, but when I glanced over, she was glancing back at me.

  “I find it hard to believe that it was ever as vivid as it was that night,” continued Florence. “It was maybe a mile out but I could see it as clear as day. I stood there as if I was in some sort of trance and then realized that a car had stopped beside me, right on the bridge, and a man had gotten out. It was a taxi driver, Jean-Guy Knowles. ‘That’s it, ain’t it, Flo?’ he said to me, his voice sounding kind of weak for a big man like him. ‘It sure is,’ I think I said back. I don’t remember much more about our conversation because I was just staring at the phantom ship. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and by that I don’t mean that I was all aghast at simply observing it. It was more than that. Oh my, much more! I could see that it had three masts, I could see the rigging, I could see the men climbing up on it as if trying to get away, others writhing on the deck, and out front on the bow, a woman…my gosh, yes, a woman, on fire! I could tell you everything you want to know about that ship: its colour, its size, even the sound of the timber crackling and the woman screaming.”

  She stopped suddenly. I realized when she looked at me that my mouth was wide open. I didn’t dare turn to Antonine now.

  “That’s my story,” said Florence Green with a shrug.

  “A story, yes,” I said quickly. “What…what do you believe causes it?”

  “Causes it?”

  “What is it? St. Elmo’s fire? Atmospheric lights?”

  “None of those.”

  “Then, what?” asked Antonine.

  “It’s real,” Florence said.

  “What?” said Eve.

  “I have been a teacher and now I’m a pretty good amateur historian. I am a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. I do not believe in ghosts or anything airy-fairy in life. But I saw a burning ship that night, as sure as I’m standing here, and so did all the other folks who stopped their cars on the bridge and looked out at it.”

  “But surely you can’t believe it was a ghost,” I said. “You’d have to be able to explain it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I said I don’t believe in ghosts and I stand by that. But sometimes I wonder,” said Florence, “if there is something…in between.”

  Something in between.

  13

  A Memory

  Dinner at the Clays’ house was unbelievable, though I made a fairly serious mistake at the beginning. We ate in their little kitchen that had a big window that looked out over the backyard. Eve had cooked up a storm: amazing homemade bread cut really thick, potatoes fried in butter, corn on the cob, these weird little green vegetables she’d unfrozen especially for me to try called fiddleheads (apparently a New Brunswick thing) soaked in butter and salt too, and of course, the lobster. I wasn’t too crazy about the fact that Eve got out a big pot and essentially boiled them alive, but that’s what they do with lobster. And man, it was good. She and Antonine taught me how to eat it, how to crack open the bright-red shells to get the good meat and soak it in—you guessed it—butter, which Eve had melted and left in a little dipping bowl.

  Before all of that, though, we had to set the table, of course. That was when I made my big mistake. I volunteered to help and Antonine got the plates and cutlery out and handed me some. She set her two plates on either side of the table and I, naturally, set one between them, at the head. Antonine stopped suddenly, as if she were frozen, and stared at what I had done. Eve just happened to be placing some food on the table at the same time.

  “That’s for my—” began Antonine.

  “No,” sai
d Eve quickly, “no, that’s fine. Go ahead, Dylan, you can sit at the head of the table. It’s nice to have a man around the house again.”

  I felt like an idiot and wanted to clear the plate off the table with the back of my hand and smash it on the floor, but Eve was so nice about it that I didn’t say a word.

  A few minutes later, I lowered my butt into the chair as if Mr. Clay’s revered place was going to disintegrate beneath me. Everything seemed fragile for a moment, but it didn’t take long for us to get really chatting. They were just so incredibly nice and they weren’t putting it on, they were simply that way. I felt like I’d always been a member of their family. It was so cool—me, this kid from Toronto, Eve, this Acadian lady from the Maritimes, Antonine, and the presence of her dad, all of us just talking as if we’d known each other all our lives.

  I am a bit of a sap about this kind of thing—people of all different sorts getting along like a team. It was as if I was crying inside or something. Man, this really was something to keep inside. The whole scene was perfect, though. The way life should be.

  At one point, we started talking about the upcoming by-election.

  “I am not certain how I will vote,” said Eve, “though I know for sure that it won’t be for Jim Fiat. I knew him when he was a kid and he was a real little devil. His dad was the richest man around here and Jimmy inherited most of it, and now all he can talk about is being an ‘average guy’ against the powerful ‘elite.’ It is as if the people up in Ottawa are all evil. I’m guessing there are some nice folks there with honest intentions. It seems to me that he is just using whatever idea he can get his hands on to win the election. He is against more immigration, too, talks about it constantly, and I married an immigrant! I’m not crazy about the other parties, though. There just seems to be so much bickering. I wish we could all just respect each other, see each other as people and seek solutions. It is what is inside you that counts, not the outside. I may just sit this one out.”

  I could see where Antonine got her values. It was hard not to agree with Eve, though to be honest I didn’t know much about politics, nor did I care. Bill got me riled up about it, but that was as much about his attitude as the issues themselves. I didn’t like the next topic that came up either, though. It was about Antonine going away.

  “So, I guess my little one has told you about how incredibly smart she is, and that she’s going to France next year, abandoning me.”

  “Mom, not one word of what you just said is remotely true.”

  “When do you go?” I asked.

  Antonine paused. “In the spring. I told you that.”

  Mom says I don’t listen very well and sometimes she ties it to me being male. I argue with her about that, but she may be right.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. When she had first talked to me about going away, I guess I hadn’t found her quite as interesting as I did now. Is that a good way to put it? Anyway, I hadn’t paid the sort of attention to detail I was paying now. She was going away in six months? Right out of the country?

  “But you won’t be finished high school, will you?”

  “That’s the way it works. They want you to start early there. You do a year of what is essentially high school and then start in at their university. I’m really excited about it.”

  I wasn’t.

  We talked for such a long time that the sun went down and we were still sitting at the table. I had eaten a boatload of food too, just piling it in, both of my hosts smiling at what I was able to hoover into me. It wasn’t entirely my fault; the food was incredibly good. Eve didn’t stop at a smoking first course either, she brought on a dessert that just seemed to glow when she set it down on the table. It was some sort of butter-tart pie, full of maple syrup and pecans and a crust that appeared to have a pound of butter in it. I think I had four pieces. I apologized for each of the last three. It was partly Eve’s fault…she kept asking me if I wanted more.

  Finally, unfortunately, it was time to go. The three of us piled into Eve’s little car and they took me back to Bill and Bonnie’s place. The lights were all on in their house and Mom came to the front door when we knocked, looking anxious. I guess I had been away for quite a long time again. Eve and Antonine didn’t want to come in with me—I had the sense that all that money made them a little nervous—so they just waved from the car.

  Though it had been a great evening, I went to bed that night on edge. Two things were bothering me: firstly, I only had two days left here and Antonine wasn’t even going to be in the country shortly after that; and secondly, we had left the whole ghost ship thing hanging. We had seen something bizarre out there on the water, been close to it, and had found exactly zero confirmation that it was any sort of natural phenomenon. It had freaked out Antonine’s father enough that it maybe contributed to his death. It had made him seem like he was crazy not just back then, but in his daughter’s memories of him. Also, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had been hiding something, that this whole thing was deeper, maybe even troublesome, to his reputation. I felt like Antonine had sensed the same thing. Had he seen what I saw out there? Or more?

  “Man, you’ve got it bad for this chick,” said Bomber suddenly.

  He was sitting on the end of the bed, barely visible in the dim light. I hadn’t even seen him come in.

  “You keep thinking about her and this ghost ship in circles. Why don’t you just ask her to be your girlfriend, express your deepest and undying love, and actually do something about the phantom boat? What you need for all of this is a solution, man, an actual solution. What a concept, eh?”

  “If I try to do that, will you go away?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m your buddy. I’ll never go away.”

  He got up, walked through the wall and out onto the beach.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said in the distance.

  I stared up at the ceiling, listened to the waves crashing against the shores of Chaleur Bay, and focused. I started thinking about the way Antonine had described some of the things that happened the night she and her father chased the ship out onto the water. She had not only spoken of the two of them seeing a woman at the bow of the boat, on fire—and I had seen that too, which was worrisome enough—but Jackson Clay had also observed that flaming figure struggling in the water near a little island. And he had reached down to pull something out of the water.

  I sat bolt upright. He pulled something out of the water?

  We had to know what it was…and if he kept it.

  The next morning I woke to the sound of Mom and Dad and Bill and Bonnie putting together a big breakfast downstairs. They were also deep into another conversation.

  “The real-estate values have just been skyrocketing in this area recently,” said Bill in a voice so loud that I could hear every word from my bed. “That’s just tremendous. We were wise to set down roots here.”

  I glanced outside, saw how high in the sky the sun was, and realized I had slept in. It had taken me so long to fall asleep that once I was under, I had gone totally comatose. I had been dreaming, too, that I was out on Chaleur Bay with Antonine and her dad, watching him pull a young woman’s corpse from the water.

  I got up and padded downstairs, met by the dogs, of course—whom I now knew as Jordy, Joanie, Johnnie, and Georgie—in the hallway. Just as they had done every morning since I had been here, they jumped up on me, shoved their paws into my groin, and slobbered on my hands and all that sort of lovely stuff—behaviour Bonnie thought was hilarious. She let them lie on the couches, too, and woe to anyone who asked them to move over. I could smell meat on their breath from the “special” dog food Bonnie has for them, even though she also feeds them things off the table. The dogs are pretty picky about the table stuff; they want the right sort of meat. Not big vegetarians, these guys.

  “I often prefer animals to people,” I heard Bonnie saying to Mom, who didn’t reply.
/>   Do you mean people such as yourself…or “other” people? I felt like asking, though thankfully I didn’t.

  The breakfast that was being prepared would not have interested her dogs much. It was somehow heavy on the health food too: fried green tomatoes, more quinoa, bread bought from a local baker, local cheese, organic eggs, and freshly squeezed orange juice. Thank God for the bread and eggs. Bonnie knew more ways to rearrange veggies and quinoa into a meal than anyone on earth.

  Bill had started talking about the election again and I was not in the mood to hear it. I decided I had had enough. It was not my id coming out, it was Dylan Maples. It was me.

  “I’ll tell you about Jim Fiat,” announced Bill, “I had a problem with the garbage collection a couple of weeks ago and Jim has been on the local council for a little while—still is, actually, just taking a leave of absence to run for federal member. So, I thought, given all this stuff he says about answering his own phone—he actually has that in his ads, if you can believe it—I thought I would test him. You know, see if his ‘A Friend, A Neighbour, Not a Politician, Not an Elite,’ stuff had any validity. So, I call him up to straighten out my garbage problem, and Jim Fiat himself answers the phone, right in the middle of his campaign!”

  “Yeah,” I said, shuffling up to my high stool and surveying the veggies, “smart move on his part.”

  “Uh,” said Bill, “yes, I thought so too. He sounded very concerned.”

  “Another smart move on his part,” I added.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Did he solve your problem?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did.” Bill looked at Dad with a grin on his face. “Imagine that, everything solved within seconds.”

  “Not hard to do, when you’re an elite,” I said.