by Alex George
“How come you don’t get mad at all the things people say?” I asked him after a man had complained for several minutes while his wife and children had scowled in aggrieved silence next to him.
“Can’t get mad if you don’t hear it,” said Lewis.
“What do you mean?”
“I tune ’em out,” he explained. “These people have a lot of things they need to say, but I don’t have to listen.”
“How can you not? They’re standing right in front of you.”
Lewis’s eyes twinkled. “I listen to Charlie Parker solos in my head. He can blow awful loud sometimes.” He looked at me. “Don’t get angry at those folks, Robert.”
“But they’re so rude!”
“Can’t blame ’em for that. They’re all miserable.”
“But they’re on vacation!” I said.
He looked at me. “You’ve never had a summer vacation, have you?”
It was true. My father had never taken a day off while the park was open. I’d spent every summer of my life in Maine.
“Here’s how it works,” said Lewis. “You spend all year working your ass off, doing overtime and staying late in the office, dreaming about spending time away, just you and your wife and your kids. So you save up. You plan. You count the days. It’s only when you’re actually on vacation that you remember that you don’t actually like spending time with your family. There’s a reason you work late. Your kids drive you crazy with their whining. Your wife nags you all day long. And of course this vacation is costing an arm and a leg. By the third day you’re checking the calendar, figuring how long until you can crawl back to that job you hate so much.” He beamed at me. “That’s the most valuable thing about full-time employment, Robert. It keeps you away from the people you love.”
Full-time employment! The words made me giddy. Each morning I proudly climbed into the station wagon with my father, ready for another day of adult responsibility. People depended on me to do my job and to do it well. Every Friday afternoon my father handed me a small brown envelope filled with folded banknotes. The money felt good in my back pocket. An honest wage for honest work.
Lewis was a good teacher. Each week I learned a little more. He began to let me have a first try at fixing things. Sometimes I could do it, sometimes I couldn’t. Lewis never got impatient, even when there was a long list of problems that needed our attention. He would show me what to do and then would wait until I had fixed it myself. There was pride, I discovered, in mending things. Occasionally Lewis sent me out into the park to perform minor repairs on my own, while he sat back in his chair and listened to his beloved bebop.
As the season progressed I also stopped worrying about my costume. I had come to realize that my ridiculous hat and tunic made me invisible. I began to watch the guests more closely, safe in the knowledge that they would never notice me. I’d thought a lot about Lewis’s compassion for the tourists who flocked through the gates every day, so desperate not to be disappointed. Since then I’d been looking at the park through new eyes. Now the families I saw seemed fractured by small disappointments. Children were not sweetly grateful for their special day out; they were tyrannical cyclones of self-entitlement, always wanting more. Parents did not look on in amused indulgence; they were simply too tired to resist all those shrill demands and too bored to fight with each other.
My childhood memories were quietly unspooling, slipping through my hands.
—
NATHAN, MEANWHILE, had decided to make the best of a bad job—quite literally. He resolved to become the best fryer of onions that had ever worked in the Fun-A-Lot kitchen. Every morning he put on a scuba mask and snorkel before peeling and slicing the hill of vegetables that awaited him. He made a peculiar sight as he wielded his knife, the rubber snorkel waving above his head like a naked flagpole in the wind, but he was able to chop quickly, uninterrupted by the sting of onion fumes. He worked the hot plate with care, piling up mountains of perfectly glistening, sweetly caramelized onions, garnishes for a thousand hot dogs and burgers. Through an act of sheer willpower, he actually began to enjoy his job. It helped that there was nowhere Nathan wanted to be more than in that awful, sweltering kitchen, because from where he worked he was able to look across the room and watch Faye smile at the waiting customers.
I think Nathan was hoping that Faye would notice the excellence of the fried condiments and turn around to see who had wrought such gastronomic wonders—My goodness, she would breathe, that boy can certainly fry—but she never did. Still, Nathan’s ardor for her did not diminish. I had hoped that after a while some kind of instinct for self-preservation would kick in, but his infatuation still burned as hotly as ever.
There were other girls to look at, too, of course. None of them were as beautiful as Faye, but I still enjoyed watching them bustle through the park in their hokey medieval outfits. My gaze would linger surreptitiously over their satin-sheathed behinds as they sashayed along the gravel paths, but I knew better than to try to talk to any of them. Back then I was deeply conflicted about the opposite sex in general. I could still remember the night when I sat on Liam’s bed and listened to him explain how babies were made in gruesome (if anatomically vague) terms. I knew my brother had to be telling the truth, because not even his warped imagination could have come up with something so disgusting. I finally buried my head under his pillow and begged him to stop. For days I couldn’t look at my parents, I was so ashamed of them.
I was eight years old.
It seemed that I was the only one who had reservations about such things, however. That summer the park was a typhoon of teenage lust. Wherever I looked there were people necking and pawing at each other. In every corner I could detect the whiff of adolescent debauchery. After closing time, many of the older kids congregated outside the gates, smoking cigarettes and surreptitiously sharing cans of beer. This was when the riot of hormonal activity was at its most febrile. Boys showed off and smirked; girls preened and simpered. It was there that Nathan suffered most. He watched the older boys swarm hungrily around Faye while she played with her beautiful hair. To make things worse, Hollis Calhoun was one of the crowd vying for her attention. He was always cavorting about in front of her with a stupid grin on his face.
“I never thought we’d see him again,” muttered Nathan.
I wasn’t sure that you ever saw the last of people like Hollis Calhoun.
Nathan watched it all from a distance. Every fluttered eyelash was calibrated, each tinkling laugh measured and noted.
After a while the crowd would slowly drift away in twos and threes toward the beach. We could only imagine what went on down there. Nathan and I were never invited. Nathan would stare wordlessly after Faye as she sauntered off, her arm draped casually over someone’s shoulder.
He was waiting to see if a favorite would emerge from the pack.
FOURTEEN
Once the older kids had left for the beach, Nathan and I needed something to do. Neither of us wanted to go home. I had no wish to return to my dying brother and my parents’ baffled misery, and Nathan was always looking for reasons to postpone the long bike ride back to Sebbanquik Point. His mother spent every evening at her desk, hidden in a cloud of cigarette smoke. There was nothing for him there.
One June evening after the parking lot had emptied, the two of us cycled into Haverford. The center of town was heaving with people eating ice cream and wandering in and out of shops. The parking spaces were all occupied by cars with out-of-state license plates. We couldn’t walk more than five yards down the sidewalk without having to circumnavigate another blackboard promising cut-price souvenirs.
By unspoken agreement we got back on our bikes. Half a mile up the town’s main street, we turned onto Bridge Lane. It was a pretty street, its houses set well back from the road. At one point the road dipped in a steep incline; we freewheeled to the bottom of the hill, where a bridge crossed
the river as it snaked inland from the sea. On the opposite bank stood the Haverford Paper Company. At one end of the vast brick building a tall chimney rose into the sky, solitary and bleak, and cold for years now.
We stopped on the bridge and listened to the steady pulse of the water beneath us. It was a beautiful evening.
“Have you ever been inside the mill?” asked Nathan.
I shook my head. “It’s been locked up for years. There’s no getting in.”
“There’s always a way in,” said Nathan.
“Not here. People have tried.”
“They haven’t tried hard enough, then. Come on.”
We rode across the bridge and left our bicycles in the deserted parking lot. Around the back of the building there was a pair of wide double doors, bound shut by a heavy, rusted padlock. We tugged at them but they did not budge an inch.
“You see?” I said.
Nathan stepped back and gazed up at the three stories of tall windows. “Look,” he said, pointing. “See that top window, on the far right? The panes have been smashed.”
I saw. The rest of the windows glowed orange in the warm reflection of the setting sun, but the one he was pointing at was a dark hole, swallowing the light.
“What good is that going to do?” I said. “We can’t get up there.”
Nathan walked toward the mill until he was standing beneath the broken window. “Look,” he said with a grin.
A series of iron rungs had been hammered into the brickwork. They went in a vertical line up the wall, past the broken window, and then continued to the top of the chimney. It was some kind of maintenance ladder.
“I’m not climbing that,” I said.
Nathan looked surprised. “Why not?”
“Who knows how long it’s been since anyone’s climbed it?” I replied. “Any one of these could come loose.” I grabbed the lowest rung and shook it. It did not move.
“These things were built to last,” said Nathan. He put one foot on the lowest rung.
“What if you fall?” I said. “You might slip.”
“I might.” Nathan climbed up another rung.
“There’s nothing to catch you.”
He peered down at me. “When is there ever anything to catch you, Robert?”
I had no answer to that. “Look,” I said, “let’s go and find somewhere else to explore.”
“I want to see what’s inside,” said Nathan.
“Nathan, wait,” I said. “There’s a—”
He stopped. “There’s a what?”
I took a deep breath. “There’s a ghost.”
To my relief Nathan came back down to the ground. When he was standing in front of me, his eyes were wide. “A ghost?” he said. “For real?”
I nodded. The story had been whispered across the town for generations. A delicious shiver of apprehension passed through me every time my father told it—which he had done often, at my eager request, throughout my childhood.
“For real,” I said.
—
WILLA CAVICH BEGAN WORKING at the Haverford mill in 1927. She was a tall, thin girl—pretty enough, the story goes, but rather shy. She lived with her parents and her younger sister, Alice. Her job was to manage the inventory of chemicals that were used in the pulping process. She worked in a small office on the top floor of the mill. Willa liked to look out of the window and watch as the workers came and went at the end of their shifts. One man in particular caught her eye. His name was Jacques Durousillier, a recent immigrant from New Brunswick. While most of the men trudged in and out of the mill gates with their shoulders slumped in exhaustion, the Canadian carried himself with a swaggering brio. Twice a day he would step outside and smoke a cigarette, and Willa made sure to position herself near the window, just in case he might look up and see her there. One evening he was leaning against the mill doors as she left for the day, waiting for her.
Jacques Durousillier wooed Willa Cavich with an intensity that left her breathless and unstuck. He was ardent but also impatient. Willa did her best to resist. You’ll have to marry me first, she told him night after night. He begged and pleaded, but, good Catholic girl that she was, she remained firm. There was nothing Willa wanted more than to hear a proposal of marriage from the man she adored, but it never came. Still, she decided that she was prepared to wait, if he was.
One Sunday after church Willa decided to surprise Jacques at the house he shared with four other millworkers. She walked across town, lunch packed in a small basket on her arm, her thoughts full of a romantic picnic by the ocean. When she pushed open the door to his room, at first Willa did not recognize the woman in the bed. Then she sat up, and Willa began to scream. Jacques Durousillier begged her to be quiet, but she did not, could not, stop. And then there was her sister, Alice, coming at her, sheets abandoned, her face a sour rictus of contempt. The slap caught Willa by surprise and sent her staggering sideways. She slipped, and as she fell her head hit the corner of the chest of drawers. Then there was no more screaming.
Jacques Durousillier and Alice Cavich stared in horror at the dead girl on the bedroom floor. They knew they had to get rid of the body. That night they wrapped Willa in a tarpaulin and dragged her to the empty mill. The first floor of the building was dominated by a giant pulping machine that chomped uncut timber by the yard, reducing hearty tree trunks to fibrous slurry in seconds. They hauled Willa Cavich onto the metal rollers in front of the machine’s waiting steel teeth. When Jacques Durousillier switched on the machine, her body vanished instantly in a red mist of blood and splintered bone. No trace was left.
The next day the Canadian fled back across the border to New Brunswick. Alice Cavich, though, had nowhere to go and nothing but her guilt for company. Her confession, when it came, made headlines for a week or two. After her conviction she was remanded in custody to a mental institution in Bangor, where she lived for the rest of her life. Jacques Durousillier was never heard of again.
It was not long afterward that the sightings began.
From time to time workers would catch half a glimpse of a young, sad-looking woman standing next to the mouth of the pulping machine. When they looked again, she had vanished.
We all knew the real reason the mill had shut down. It wasn’t economics; the place had been cursed. The ghost of Willa Cavich still haunted its vast, deserted spaces, alone in her sorrow and victorious in her revenge.
—
I LAID IT ON pretty thick, I admit. By the time I got to the part about the pulping machine, I was pleased to see that the color had drained from Nathan’s face. We would be back on our bikes again soon enough. He shivered when I had finished. “That’s a great story,” he said. Then he turned back to the ladder and began climbing again.
“What are you doing?” I said.
Nathan turned and looked at me. “Don’t you want to see the ghost?”
I stared up at him in disbelief. “No,” I said.
“Are you scared?” asked Nathan.
“Of course I’m scared,” I said.
He looked down at me and grinned. “Me, too.”
And with that he began to climb again. I watched helplessly as he pulled himself higher and higher. Soon he was level with the broken window. There was a gap of about three feet between the ladder and the ledge. I watched anxiously as Nathan reached out a hand across the empty space. He stayed there without moving for a moment. Just as I’d begun to hope that he had realized he would never be able to make it safely across, he climbed two more rungs, so that he was higher than the window—and stretched out a foot. With one swift movement he let go of the iron rung and shifted his weight to the ledge. As he did so, he grabbed the window frame and hauled himself inside. The last thing I saw was the soles of his sneakers as he vanished through the hole.
For a moment there was complete silence. The awful thought occurred
to me that the floors of the old mill had rotted away and that Nathan had crashed to the ground through an ancient forest of splintering timber. But then his face appeared, grinning down at me in triumph.
“Are you coming up?” he called.
I wasn’t sure which scared me more—the thought of seeing Willa Cavich’s ghost or jumping from the ladder to the window ledge. “Can’t you come down and open a door?”
Nathan considered this. “Hang on,” he said, and disappeared. Several minutes later a small door close to where I was standing opened. Nathan appeared and doffed an imaginary hat. “No ghosts so far,” he reported.
We crept into a huge, high-ceilinged room that took up the entire ground floor of the mill. Pieces of disassembled machinery caked in orange rust filled the space like abandoned statues. The floor was mottled with faded shapes where the huge pieces of equipment had blocked out the sunlight for years. I tried to guess which discolored patch had been the pulping machine and squinted anxiously through the creeping twilight for Willa Cavich’s ghost. There were pyramids of discarded turbines and cogs scattered around the room. We scavenged through these in an effort to distract ourselves from the fact that we were both terrified. Every few moments I thought I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye and would freeze, a scream already half bubbling up in my throat. But there was no ghost. After a while we summoned the courage to explore a little further. The second story of the building was divided by faded lines of white paint into hundreds of numbered bays. I guessed that this was where the paper was stored until it was ready to be shipped. There was a large hole in the floor so that palettes of paper could be lowered directly onto delivery trucks waiting below. A collection of hoists, pulleys, and hooks dangled over the double-height space, nooses with invisible bodies.