The Ghost Road

by Charis Cotter

  “And she looks just like me, doesn’t she, Dad?” said Ruby. “I nearly fell down the hill when I first saw her.”

  Uncle George skittered his eyes in my direction and then looked back into his daughter’s glowing, upturned face. “Definitely a strong resemblance.”

  “Resemblance?” scoffed Ruby. “She looks just like me, Dad! If her hair was short and she had more of a tan, you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart.”

  Aunt Doll laughed. “I told you you were in for a surprise, Ruby. I nearly fell over backward myself when I saw her at the airport, looking out at me with your blue eyes!”

  “You never said anything to me,” I said, going over to the sink to get a glass of water.

  “No, I thought I’d let the two of you discover it for yourselves.”

  “But isn’t it just uncanny, Dad? Isn’t it weird?”

  He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. Cousins often look alike. Why everyone said my cousin Terry and I looked like brothers when we were twelve. Not so much now. You might grow out of it.”

  “Grow out of it?” squeaked Ruby, incredulous. “No way. We’re practically identical.”

  Aunt Doll was looking very closely at us.

  “Go on, stand together, here by the window,” she said. “Let’s have a look at you in the light.”

  Obediently, Ruby and I stood together.

  I was watching Uncle George. He looked from my face to Ruby’s, then back again. He bit his lip and then turned away. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I’d seen tears start in his eyes.

  Aunt Doll wasn’t so guarded. She started to shake her head and fumbled in an apron pocket for a handkerchief.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You’re as alike as two peas in a pod. But somehow when I see you together I can see something else. You’re the spitting image of your mothers at your age. Aren’t they, George?”

  “Stands to reason,” said Uncle George gruffly. “Look, Rubylove, I need to go and visit your Nan. Will you come along, just to say hello?”

  Ruby made a face. “Do I have to? She hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you,” said her father, looking pained. “She’s just—just—” He faltered, not able to find the right word.

  “She just hates me,” said Ruby. “She’s an old witch.”

  “Ruby!” said Aunt Doll sharply. “Don’t talk about your grandmother like that.”

  “You called her a witch yourself, last summer!”

  “I never did!”

  “I heard you, talking to Eldred. You said that old witch was pure poison and how she had a son like Dad you’d never know.”

  Aunt Doll blushed and Uncle George laughed.

  “You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” she said faintly to Ruby.

  “Never mind, Doll,” said Uncle George. “No offense. I know she’s difficult. But she’s still my mother, and I need to go and see her. And you might as well come with me now, Ruby, and get your first visit over with. You know she’ll want to see you once a week while you’re here.”

  “I don’t know why,” grumbled Ruby. “She only sits me down and tells me everything that’s wrong with me, and how I come from bad stock, and how Mom was a Finn, and nothing good ever came from Finns, and you broke her heart the day you married Mom.”

  “She’s never going to let it go, George,” said Aunt Doll. “She’s kept that feud alive in her bitter old heart all these years. You’d think that when Molly died she’d leave it in the past, but—”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that, Doll,” said Uncle George. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I’ve told her again and again to put it to rest, and not to burden Ruby with it. But she pays me no mind. She never did. But with Dad gone, she’s all that’s left of my family, and Ruby needs to see her. Come, Ruby.”

  He headed toward the door. Just before he left he remembered me and turned back. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ruth,” he said, and smiled. “Have a great summer. If you’re anything like Ruby, you’ll never want to go home.”

  Ruby followed him out, making a face at me as she went.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE FEUD

  “You’ll be ready for your lunch,” said Aunt Doll, opening the fridge. “I’ll make some egg-salad sandwiches. By the time they’re on the table, Ruby will be back. She won’t stay long with the old—” She glanced over at me and laughed. “With her grandmother,” she finished.

  “Why is she so mean?” I asked.

  “Where to begin?” said Aunt Doll, taking out a glass bowl full of eggs. She put a pan of water on the stove to boil. “There was never any love lost between our family, the Duggans, and the Barretts as long as I can remember. And Mildred was a Barrett before she was a Peddle.”

  “What’s a Peddle?”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake, what you don’t know about your own family! Ruby is a Peddle, and George is a Peddle. I’m a Duggan, and so was my sister Daphne, Meg and Molly’s mother. And Daphne married a Duggan, a distant cousin, so Meg and Molly were Duggans too, from both sides.”

  “Wait!” I said. All these names were whirling around in my head. It was just like when Dad got excited about plant classification of some obscure wildflower subspecies and started tracing its connections and I got lost after the first two names. “I need a piece of paper.”

  Aunt Doll laughed and shook her head. “You wouldn’t need to write it down if you grew up with it the way you should have. But look in the drawer in the kitchen table. There should be something you can write on there.”

  I pulled out a scratch pad and a pen from the drawer.

  “Okay, so Ruby is Ruby Peddle, and her dad is George Peddle. What came after that?”

  Aunt Doll laughed again. “I’m a Duggan, Dorothy Duggan, Doll for short. My sister Daphne was also a Duggan, of course, and she married a Duggan, so her daughters, Meg and Molly, were also Duggans.”

  I wrote that down. “She married her cousin, you said?”

  “A distant cousin, at least a fourth or a fifth, one of the Duggans from Bonavista, no near relation to my father, who was a Duggan from Fossil’s Cove, who was no near relation to the Duggans of Buckle—” She broke off, seeing my face, which was scrunched up in a frown. “Well, never mind about all those Duggans for now.”

  Phew. That was a relief. My head had started whirling again.

  “So, you said Ruby’s grandmother was a—what?”

  “A Barrett. Mildred Barrett.”

  I wrote that down. Aunt Doll kept talking.

  “And the Duggans and the Barretts never got along. We never had any trouble with the Peddles until the day Mildred Barrett married John Peddle—”

  I scribbled that down.

  “—who was a poor wisp of a man who never could stand up against Mildred—and she wouldn’t have a Duggan in their house and John was forbidden to associate with my uncle Patrick, my mother’s brother—”

  I wrote down “Uncle Patrick.”

  “—although they’d been quite good friends before.” She stopped to take a breath. “But the Barretts—why if a Barrett saw a Duggan coming down the road, they’d cross over and look the other way to avoid speaking to them. And Mildred did her best to keep her son George away from all of our lot, for all the good it did her. He went to school with Molly and Meg, and they all became fast friends, despite everything his mother did to try and stop it.”

  By this time Aunt Doll was deftly chopping celery and green onions into tiny bits and the eggs were boiling on the stove. I put down the pen. There was something very peaceful about watching her work. I’d never seen anyone so comfortable and quick in a kitchen.

  “But how did it start?” I asked. “What did the Barretts have against the Duggans?”

  Aunt Doll shrugged. “Who knows? The Barretts always thought they were better than the rest of us, that’s for sure. Not that they had any reason. They were fishermen, like everyone else in Buckle. No more education than any of us, no more money. But the
two families were always at odds. In a small place like this, it’s not easy to ignore your neighbors. From what my father told me, the feud went way back, maybe all the way to Ireland.”

  Now Aunt Doll was slicing and buttering a loaf of raisin bread. “I made this for you yesterday,” she said. “Never met a child who didn’t like raisin bread. Ruby gobbles it down.” She smiled at me and handed me a piece of raisin bread thick with butter. “It’s good to have someone to cook for again. It gets a little quiet here in the winter.”

  I took a big bite out of the bread. It was divine. “What do you mean, Ireland?” I asked once I could speak again.

  “Ireland! Where we all came from in the 1800s! Oh my. I can see you’re in need of some education, my dear. Don’t you know you’re Irish?”

  “Noooo…Dad only told me Mom was from Newfoundland. That’s as far as we ever got.”

  “Obviously!” said Aunt Doll with a snort, and began draining the eggs. “It’s a sin the way you’ve grown up, way off there in Ontario with nobody to tell you about your family. Well, we’ll see what we can do to fix that this summer, starting right now.”

  She was running cold water over the eggs, then peeling away the shells. I helped myself to another piece of raisin bread and butter.

  “Buckle was first settled by the Irish in the 1820s. People came on ships from Ireland. Our family, the Duggans, came out in 1832 from Waterford on a ship named Cathleen. Everyone who could muster up the fare got on that boat to Newfoundland, where they thought they could make a living with the fishery. But they nearly didn’t make it. They were heading toward St. John’s, farther along the coast, when a bad storm blew up and they were blown way off course, and the ship went aground and broke up just off the shore here. People had to swim for their lives.”

  “There was a shipwreck?” I asked, remembering my dream. I suddenly wished I hadn’t had that second piece of raisin bread. It was forming a hard lump in my stomach.

  “Yes, terrible thing,” said Aunt Doll, mashing the eggs and not noticing anything strange about me. “There were Barretts and Duggans aboard that ship, along with the Finns, Dunphys and Keegans—many of the families you still see here in Buckle. Luckily they were nearly all of them saved. The crew got most people into the boats and to shore. But a few poor souls didn’t make it.”

  I closed my eyes. I could see the slope of the deck, and the lifeboats swinging out over the water and my mother leaning over to grasp my hand. I could hear the screaming of the wind and the crashing waves and the breaking of wood against rock.

  A cold little shiver traveled up my spine. I’d been having the nightmare about the shipwreck as long as I could remember. Was this where it came from? An old family story? But no one had ever told me that story before now.

  “Ruth. Ruth!” said Aunt Doll, concerned. “Are you okay? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”

  I opened my eyes. “I’m fine,” I said faintly. “Just…just thinking about how awful it must have been. The shipwreck.”

  “You’re a sensitive creature,” said Aunt Doll. “Just like your mother. She never liked me talking about the shipwreck either. Molly didn’t mind, but Meg would go white, just the way you did, and make me stop. Too much imagination, that was her problem.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Never mind all that now.” She put an egg-salad sandwich on a pretty blue plate on the table in front of me.

  “Nothing like a bit of lunch to cure a bad attack of imagination,” she said with a laugh.

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed too and took a bite.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE FINNS

  “The witch wants you to come next time,” said Ruby, taking a pile of sweaters from her suitcase and stuffing them into one of the dresser drawers I’d left free for her.

  I was sitting on my bed watching her unpack. She didn’t seem to have any shorts. I shivered. It had clouded over again and started to rain a bit.

  “Why does she want to see me?” I asked. “She’s not my grandmother.”

  Ruby shrugged. “She’s nosy. She wants to see what kind of a child Meg had. And she probably wants to torture you the way she does me about how the Finns are no good and never will be.”

  “I don’t get it. Who are the Finns? Eldred told me they were people who lived in some little cove that disappeared long ago. What have we got to do with the Finns?”

  Ruby slammed down the top of her suitcase, fastened the buckles, then shoved it under her bed. She’d unpacked everything and put it away in five minutes flat. She glanced out the window.

  “Ooo, there’s Eldred going into the barn. Let’s go talk to him. He’s the one who should tell you the story of the Finns. No one can tell a story like Eldred.” And she was out the door and clattering down the stairs. I scrambled up off the bed to follow her, grabbing the rain jacket from the hook in the hall where I’d left it.

  The barn was dim and had a pungent, earthy smell: a mix of sweet hay and old cow manure. There were no animals in it now, but there was a loft piled high with hay. Off to one side I could just make out a figure standing in the shadows. There were tools hanging all over the wall and a long, high counter crowded with more tools, scraps of wood and bits of old iron.

  The figure turned as we came in.

  “Eldred!” said Ruby. “Ruth needs to hear about the Finns. Can you tell us?”

  “I’m supposed to be fixing your aunt’s toaster,” said Eldred, stepping into the light. He had a frayed piece of wire in his hand. He had that same air I’d noticed earlier, of being half here and half somewhere else. He looked at us with a slow, wondrous smile, as if he had never seen two girls before. Almost as if we were two unicorns that walked into his barn.

  “Oh come on,” said Ruby, darting behind him and pulling out a low, three-legged stool from under the counter. “Her toaster can wait. It’s my first day, Eldred. I haven’t had one of your stories since last fall.”

  Eldred laughed and sat down in a chair with a broken arm that was leaning against the wall. Ruby sat down on the stool and turned her face up to him, alight with anticipation. I had a sudden impression of her sitting listening to him tell stories back through the years, right on that stool, here in this barn. I looked around and saw an old wooden crate in the corner. I pulled it up and sat down on it.

  “Well now, the Finns,” began Eldred, smiling a little and glancing at me shyly from under his bushy eyebrows. “The Finns came over from Ireland, years ago. With the Duggans and the Barretts and the Keegans, and a lot of the other families that settled in Buckle.”

  “On board the ship Cathleen,” said Ruby in singsong voice. “And there was a shipwreck, and then the Finns went to live in Slippers Cove and the rest of them settled here in Buckle.”

  “Who’s telling the story, Ruby?” said Eldred, but he wasn’t mad.

  “You are, but it always starts the same,” said Ruby.

  “Yes, well, it starts with the shipwreck. Then the Finns and the Keegans went to live in Slippers Cove, and there they stayed. As the years went by, once in a while a boy or a girl from Buckle would marry a boy or a girl from Slippers Cove, and go there to live, and soon there was a small community there, just five or six houses.”

  “Then the storm came,” said Ruby.

  “The storm came. It was a hurricane, late September in the year 1879. There was heavy rain and strong winds. All the brooks overflowed their banks and the fields were awash. Full of water. There was a lot of damage in Buckle: the barn that used to stand here had its roof blown clean off.”

  “But Slippers Cove was hit worst of all,” said Ruby.

  “Yes. Slippers Cove was hit worst of all,” went on Eldred. “The day after the storm blew on out into the Atlantic, the people in Buckle were busy trying to repair the damage to their homes and outbuildings, so they didn’t give much thought to the Finns. But by the next day, when they would expect that someone would come by from Slippers Cove, either by boat or walking over the downs, and nobody came
, they started to worry.”

  “Vince Duggan had a brother married a Finn,” said Ruby.

  “Yes, Vince Duggan had a brother Boyd in Slippers Cover, who was married to a Finn,” said Eldred, “so Vince was concerned about his brother and his brother’s young family. Boyd had two little girls, twins they were, just two years old. So Vince took his friend Ernie Doyle, and they walked over the downs, along the road to Slippers Cove. It was a four-hour walk. There were parts of the road that were washed out, and they had to wade through water up to their knees in spots. But when they finally got to the top of the hill that looks over Slippers Cove, they beheld a dreadful sight.”

  “Slippers Cove was a tight little cove,” intoned Ruby.

  “You need to know that Slippers Cove was a tight little cove, well-protected by high cliffs, with a rattling little brook running down a steep hill from the downs. The houses stood on a bit of flat land by the water, with the brook running in between, down over the rocks to the sea.

  “When young Vince and Ernie stood at the top of the hill, two days after the storm, all the houses were gone. There was nothing there but a wide pool of water, and beyond that the cove: empty. There wasn’t any sign of the houses: no wreckage, no debris. But the little brook that used to clatter down the rocks was now a powerful waterfall, fifteen feet wide.”

  “They’d been washed out to sea in the storm,” said Ruby. “All the houses, all the people. Gone.”

  “Gone,” echoed Eldred. “All gone. Vince and Ernie could hardly believe their eyes. Vince fell to his knees with a cry as it came home to him that his brother and his brother’s wife and their sweet babies were gone. Ernie put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and wiped the tears from his own eyes.”

  “But then he heard a noise,” said Ruby.

  “A noise of someone crying,” went on Eldred. “But it wasn’t his friend Vince. Ernie turned toward the noise and saw the root cellar.”