The Off Season

by The Off Season (epub)

  A story is a different kind of history. It gives a feel of time(s), place(s), and event(s). The skilled writer can take us into a world we would never, otherwise, know. While there are many places I cannot take you, I can take you to a small ship on the North Atlantic, to a mist-ridden hollow in Kentucky or North Carolina, and to the Washington rainforest. I can take you along empty roads, or to the top of tall trees, or to the bays and snows of southeast Alaska; and I can tell you how things look and feel. What is more, in the process of taking you there, I discover feelings and sights and whole landscapes that even I did not consciously know existed.

  Thus, when events in the story happen, they happen in the context of what I know and report, but also of what I discover. If I were indifferent, and reported a context I did not know (for example, flying a sailplane) the context would be no good. With a sour context, events in the story would have no meaning in the life of characters; and thus the story would have no meaning.

  But, if I stick with what I know and one of my characters is a ghost, I can give the reader the feeling of what is, and what used to be; and I can do it at the same time.

  I, and you, when you think about it, can tell whether the writer of a ghost story actually believes in ghosts. Most don’t, and that is one reason why there are so many lousy ghost stories. If a writer doesn’t believe in ghosts, then he or she will have a terrible time suspending disbelief. The story becomes an exercise in special effects, only.

  Knowledge of ghosts is not something one acquires through simple faith. Or, if one does acquire it that way, then one is intellectually stuck before a campfire warming his frontside, while getting chilled along his spine by spooky stories. Simple faith, without reason for owning it, seems pretty adolescent.

  Knowledge generally arrives through experience, reading, and observation. By observation, I mean more than simply looking at events or the world. Observation requires thought.

  Here is a simple example: I used to teach at a small university that boasts a magnificent campus. Old and new buildings are surrounded by huge fir trees that tower over rooftops. It is easy to walk across campus and say things like, “Wow!” The trees offer greater meaning, though, if one knows that the university was a hundred years old in 1990.

  The university is in Tacoma, Washington, and Tacoma was once a lumber town. During the 19th century forests were chopped like grass before a lawnmower. There was no clear-cutting, though, because there were no chainsaws. Unmarketable trees were left standing. These would have been trees younger than thirty years.

  When land was cleared to build a college, marketable trees went. The young trees remained. After one hundred years, it was a fair guess that the giant trees on campus were, give-or-take, a hundred thirty years old.

  I could look out my classroom windows and feel the presence of those old lumbermen. I could see their tools: the steam donkey (a yarder for moving logs), their two-man crosscut saws, their axes, their teams of horses or mules hauling logs to mills, or to a steam railway that ran to the harbor. I could imagine them working through summer heat or winter rain in this wet northwest.

  I could do all this because reading combined with experience. As a student of history, my reading about the northwest prepared me for a one-hundred-year-old scene. My work experience had once been in trees when I worked for a tree company in Arlington, Massachusetts. (There was time when I claimed a Harvard education on the grounds that I had climbed every tree on the Harvard campus. It was a bit of a stretch. There are a zillion trees on the Harvard campus.)

  With that background there was no problem understanding ghosts. In my mind those old lumbermen busied themselves around that campus every day, and students walked among them. Just because no one could see them didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “Lordy,” you say, “I’m reading the words of a maniac.”

  It’s a possibility. On the other hand, we may be onto something. Suppose that our usual ways of looking at time and history are flawed. We think that Monday comes ahead of Tuesday, and when Monday is over we won’t see another Monday until next week. That seems a real limit on consciousness.

  If we admit, though, that the past operates with great force in our Monday lives, as well as Tuesday, and the rest, maybe we can step beyond the limits. In some ways, at least, we may live a series of Mondays. At least we live according to ways that are laid down by the past, and not by a succession of days.

  Virtually everything we know and do steps toward us from the past. Let us look at only a very few examples:

  Family. We may, through thought and experience, eventually create original forms. No one starts that way. Almost everything we accept or reject about human relationships began as learning in some kind of family group, even if that group was an orphan’s home.

  We are raised by people (usually parents) who were raised by parents who were raised by parents, etc. If one’s grandfather was a farmer, then his son will know things about farming even if the son lives in a city. He’ll know them because his dad tells tales, and the family sometimes visits grandpa.

  Let’s say the city-son hates farms. The grandson will also have an attitude toward farms. He’s either going to embrace cows in order to offend his dad, or else he’ll think ill of milking-time because “that’s what pop told me.”

  Law: Our entire system of laws derive from English law and philosophy that reach far back beyond the Magna Carta. And, the Magna Carta has roots all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi. Six thousand years, give or take.

  Society: We boast a diverse society made up of many people with different customs. Virtually all of those customs step right out of the past. A few, such as watching too much television, are fairly recent.

  Religion: People who take it seriously, be they Christian or Jew or Muslim, have to take the historical Moses seriously. People who do not give a snip for religion still live in a world that does, so even an atheist has roots in the doings of Moses.

  Even superficial matters like dress have already been decided. Contemporary men and women generally own pants, not caftans. Styles come and go, but only a very small percentage of us own kilts. This has been so in the western world since the peasant frock, and the Roman toga, hit the rag pile some centuries back. In a very real way, the past is right here with us, hanging off of our suspenders.

  Briefly put, at least ninety percent of the way we live our lives comes directly from the past. To me it follows, then, that just because I can’t see things invisible, does not mean they aren’t there. The creative eye learns to see them because the creative eye trains itself to look.

  The challenge for the creative writer, and the creative reader, is the same as the challenge for painter and sculptor and musician. In order to dwell with ghosts, we need to learn how to feel the joy and pain of the past. Otherwise, no spirit rises from the pages, or canvas, or stone. Compassion is wanting.

  As this essay is being written, I’m reading The Tide At Sunrise, a history of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century. If I had not read a lot, and been around quite a bit, the history would seem fairly objective and cold. Not a single ghost would be present.

  But, I have read, and I have been around. I remember Pearl Harbor. I have read Shogun and Sayonara and Fires on the Plain. The overwhelming devotion of the Japanese to their emperor during the Russo-Japanese war does not surprise me, and I expect to find it where I do find it; in the joy of soldiers marching to certain death. I mourn those soldiers, but I also understand something of their joy.

  And, I have read Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto. I have read a history, The Fall of the Great Powers which, among other matters, tells of the arrogance and violence of Czars Nicholas I and Nicholas II. I have read the humorless Solzenitzen and the gentle Abram Tertz, both of whom did time in Soviet prison camps. I know the state of the Russian people as the 20th century opened. Thus, do I understand the dogged determination of Russian soldiers and sailors even though their situations were doomed. I
can feel their fear, and how they longed for a home they knew they would never see again.

  Spirits rise from the pages. I’m not dealing with dry fact, but with human hopes and fears and dreams. Does it seem strange to mourn Japanese soldiers now dead these hundred years? Or, does it seem strange to mourn the same for Russians who were so badly led, and so heartily defeated? If it did seem strange, I would have no right to be a writer, and no right at all to tell ghost stories.

  But, if the writer and reader do understand that men marched to their deaths en masse, but died individually, then writer and reader are ready to understand the presence of ghosts.

  Ghosts are, first of all, a metaphor for history. The metaphor becomes strong as the ghost becomes strong. When the ghost is an actual character, as in Tamsin, the past rises and mixes with the present. The reason so many good ghost stories cause uneasiness is not because they scare the reader (although some do), but because they take the reader into two dimensions at the same time.

  It is this dual quality that causes a ghost story to succeed. For that reason, one can write a ghostly tale and not scare anyone. If a ghost is a metaphor, in addition to being a character, then the ghost is in the happy position of being able to help the living. We have a friendly ghost, and I don’t mean Casper.

  Let’s look at it this way: The ghost is someone (or, as we’ll soon see, something) manifesting a spectral life after death. The ghost became dead for any number of reasons, including its own screw-ups. If, for example, it died while trying to drive a fifty-mile-an-hour curve at eighty, and if it appears five hundred yards before that curve on late Saturday nights, there’s not a message of threat, but one of salvation.

  Equally, ghosts bearing messages need not be people. They need not even be animals. They can be mountains and cars and ships and trees. Creatures or objects of the past gain fantastic reality when they become ghosts in a ghost story.

  I am absolutely sure, for example, that if one has lived in the American Southeast, and not seen ghostly soldiers and horses moving silent through mist, than one has not been paying attention. I am positive that if one climbs a one-hundred-foot tree, and while resting, does not feel a presence; danger increases. It increases because the climber does not have enough respect for who he’s with.

  If climbing tall trees is too scary, try walking through an auto graveyard where wrecks have been sitting for so long that weeds grow through floorboards. Be there sun or mist, watch what’s happening.

  Thus can we understand that ghosts of people, and sometimes ghosts of machines, are there to help the living. If, for example, generals of WWI had turned back to study the Russo-Japanese war, and acknowledged the hundreds of thousands of men who died, those generals would not have then destroyed an entire generation of English and European men.

  The generals may have read the casualty figures of the Russo-Japanese war. They may have nodded their heads with pretended wisdom when they thought of assault against mountainous or dug-in positions, or defense of those positions. They may have read the record.

  What they didn’t read were the spirits who rose from the record, and those spirits were twofold:

  The combatants on both sides were going through the first war with truly modern weapons. Their ghosts would have explained that nothing anyone ever knew about war applied. Something different was happening. Something awful.

  The other ghostly, and ghastly spirit would have been a weapon, a machine gun. Had it rattled its voice in the ears of WWI generals as they marched their troops to war, a half a million men might not have died. But, then, generals do not believe in ghosts. They did not learn from a ghost that a single weapon had changed war forever.

  Thus, are ghosts among us bringing messages. I have discovered that they exist, more often than not, to offer aid instead of fear. I have grown fond of them because they have so much to teach.

  Notes

  In his old age he practiced what he called “Cerebral Hygiene” which meant that he read no books except the ones he had written.

  As a young man during the ’50s I recall resistance to the whole business of extra sensory perception. A favorite story of the time, and one that was probably true, said that the President of the American Psychological Association was on record: “If there was a tenth this much evidence to prove something else, I would believe it. If there was ten times the evidence to prove this, I still wouldn’t believe it.”

  About the Authors

  Jack Cady (1932-2004) won the Atlantic Monthly “First” award in 1965 for his story, “The Burning.” He continued writing and authored nearly a dozen novels, one book of critical analysis of American literature, and more than fifty short stories. Over the course of his literary career, he won the Iowa Prize for Short Fiction, the National Literary Anthology Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

  Prior to a lengthy career in education, Jack worked as a tree high climber, a Coast Guard seaman, an auctioneer, and a long-distance truck driver. He held teaching positions at the University of Washington, Clarion College, Knox College, the University of Alaska at Sitka, and Pacific Lutheran University. He spent many years living in Port Townsend, Washington.

  Resurrection House, through its Underland Press imprint, is publishing a comprehensive retrospective of his work in a project called The Cady Collection.

  Gordon Van Gelder was an editor for St. Martin’s Press for twelve years and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1997 through 2014. He has been honored twice with the Hugo Award and he has also won the World Fantasy Award twice. He lives in New Jersey, where he works as the publisher of F&SF.

  The Cady Collection

  The Cady Collection

  Novels

  The Hauntings of Hood Canal

  Inagehi

  The Jonah Watch

  McDowell’s Ghost

  The Man Who Could Make Things Vanish

  The Off Season

  Singleton

  Street

  Dark Dreaming [with Carol Orlock, as Pat Franklin]

  Embrace of the Wolf [with Carol Orlock, as Pat Franklin]

  Other Writings

  Phantoms

  Fathoms

  Ephemera

  The American Writer

  Praise for Jack Cady

  “A fine, fabulous fable packed with marvelous events and wonders.”

  —Gahan Wilson

  “A consummate yarn, told with many digressions and anecdotes that combine with folksy humor to create a tall tale suffused with pathos and melancholy.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Without a doubt Cady’s funniest, weirdest, most original, and—literally—spookiest novel yet.”

  —Peter S. Beagle

  “A pungent mix of Tom Robbins, Ray Bradbury, and Charles G. Finney—but pure Cady, and it’s glorious.”

  —Greg Bear

  “Jack Cady’s knack for golden sentences is an alchemy any other writer has to admire. “

  —Ivan Doig

  “Jack Cady is above all, a writer of great, unmistakable integrity and profound feeling. He never fakes it or coasts, and behind every one of his sentences is an emotional freight that bends it both outward, toward the reader, and inward, back to the source.”

  —Peter Straub

  “A writer whose words reverberate with human insight.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “His structural control and the laconic richness of his style establish Cady in the front ranks of contemporary writers.”

  —Library Journal

  “When Cady settles into yarn-spinning, his stories have the humor and comfortable mastery of Faulkner or Steinbeck.”

  —National Review

  The Off Season is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used in an absolutely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—livi
ng or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 the Estate of Jack Cady

  Introduction © 2015 Gordon Van Gelder

  All rights reserved, which means that no portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is U018, and it has an ISBN of 978-1-63023-010-4.

  This book was printed in the United States of America, and it is published by Underland Press, an imprint of Resurrection House (Puyallup, WA).

  Obed began to dance . . .

  Cover Design by Jennifer Tough

  Book Design by Aaron Leis

  Collection Editorial Direction by Mark Teppo

  Ebook conversion by Hydra House

  The first edition of this novel was released by St. Martin’s Press in 1995. “On Writing the Ghost Story” first appeared in Ghosts of Yesterday, a collection published by Night Shade Books in 2003 and is © the Estate of Jack Cady.

  First Underland Press edition: June 2015.

  www.resurrectionhouse.com