My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  Inverhaven is a town like any other, though perhaps a little more tolerant, because of the strangers who flood in every summer. Different faces, different clothes, different ways of talking and carrying on. There’s a certain banding together because of that, busy times and money to be made, and relief when the cool mornings come, and we’re left to ourselves again. But people here talk and they judge, like everywhere else, and I never minded for myself but I worried for Robbie, though he was not the only fatherless boy in town. Now that I’ve seen how it is with Young Rob and Stevie, the things they ask their parents, the things they know, I wonder that Robbie didn’t ask me more. That the bits and pieces I told him seemed to be enough. I told him that his father’s hair was curly too, and how handsome he was, and clever, how we met in a different town, not here. To my shame I once said that yes, his father was brave, had rescued a woman and a dog from a burning building, a story I’d read in the newspaper the day before, about another man entirely.

  I couldn’t say much more about my own life, but he liked to hear about the big ship that crossed the ocean, and the time I had learning how to milk a cow. And I told him about walking in the woods with my friend Lucy, how we thought we heard a bear and ran splashing across the shallow river, our wet boots collecting mud and twigs and moss until they were so heavy we could barely walk. I made it into a funny story, left out all the things it would do him no good to know. How I was alone in the woods that day, long before I met Lucy, and running from the farm where I’d been placed. How I was caught, how I was punished. My grandsons sometimes ask about the ship, about the burning building and the bear, and I’ve realized that the bits and pieces I told Robbie, over the years, made some kind of picture for him of where he came from, a version of the family we might have been. I always knew that when he was older there were other things I should tell him, about how we came to be in Inverhaven, but the longer I waited the more clearly I understood the uselessness of a truth that comes too late, when it can do nothing but harm.

  I’d always thought I would be too damaged inside from things that had been done to me when I was a girl. The farmer’s thick hands and the hatchet handle, all the rest of the things I closed my mind against when I came to a new place, and my life got better. My bleeding had never been anything like Lucy’s, so regular she knew to the day, and when I was sick in the morning I blamed the oysters, then the milk from O’Hare; Sam said he hadn’t noticed that it didn’t smell quite right. The possibility of a child wasn’t anything that entered my mind, but when I felt a sudden flutter inside, as light as the touch of a small bird’s wing, then somehow I knew it at once.

  Well as I knew him, some foolish part of me thought that Sam might surprise me. Thought he might place his hand on my stomach, his long fingers spread, and we wouldn’t say a word, just smile. Instead I saw the quick flicking away of his eyes, heard the sound of him exhaling a curse, the door closing hard, in anger or just haste to be gone. I lay in our bed as the no-colour winter light turned to dark, and everything in me that had become careless and easy lifted away, like a magician’s bright cloth. What was revealed was not a treasure, but the hard, dull stone that had always been there.

  Lucy would have said, “What did I tell you?” She would have sighed, would have tutted, and then helped me any way she could. But Lucy was far away, married to a widower who had advertised. She wrote once about the drafty house, filled with the dead wife’s runners and samplers. The three sly children who rummaged through her things and shook salt in the soup when her back was turned. The widower himself was a little man with a big voice; He shouts Save Me Lord—you know when I mean, she wrote, and I could hear her voice, could imagine her giving me that Lucy-look. None of it matters, she wrote, I’m just waiting, and I knew she meant for Heaven, where her real husband was, and her own little girl. I’m not sure about Heaven, but I know the comfort it gave her to believe she knew exactly where they were, the ones she would always miss.

  I’ve known terrible nights, but maybe that was the longest. Sometimes I thought I heard the click of the latch, a creak that was Sam, trying to move quietly, like those times he came home from the tavern and rolled me awake, his breath sweet with ale and his hands so gentle. As it came close to morning the room began to appear, filled with things that belonged to the day before. A pair of my stockings crumpled with Sam’s shirt on the chair, and the blue dish on the dresser that held the lucky river stone with a few loose buttons and coins, the combs that he’d taken from my hair. Everything was quiet except for the thin sound of the river, as it struggled to find a way through the hard-forming ice. All I knew was that I had to be away.

  There was never much money in the cash box but I took what was there, nothing else except a leather bag to hold my few things. Not his father’s gold watch, that would have kept me for months, not either of his new cameras, or the old one he’d given to me. Not the picture of the two of us with our heads close together that we’d tacked up where only we would see it. I stood at the end of the station platform and boarded the first train that came, and when I overheard a man say they were hiring at the factory in Wilton, I got off there. The next months were like that; I wound thread in the factory in Wilton, served drinks in Coldwell, helped a laundress in Stour. There’s always work to find if you don’t mind what you do, and I didn’t. My mind was fierce but restless, until the day the train was late in Inverhaven, and I came upon that cold bench looking over the ice-tossed lake.

  I don’t often think about that time, but this morning it unspooled in my mind as I walked down the main street, and I was slow to notice the sound of something behind me, a whir in my ear as a boy on a bicycle raced by on the new, smooth sidewalk. Head down and elbows up, he clipped my shoulder as he passed, a strange, rude echo of that earlier boy, and skidded to a stop up ahead, in front of the Verity picture house. Nothing more important to him, apparently, than checking what the new shows would be. Robbie would say I sound like an old grump again, but it’s true that something’s happened to manners.

  He teases me about things like that at the supper table, tells little Stevie to fetch me a pen so I can write one of those letters to the paper. He asks did I know that the grumbling old men are saving me a place on the bench outside the station, and I play along. He’ll never be the same, but it’s so good to hear him joking, to see him full of ideas and plans. When he first came back from the war he was like a bad actor, the rest of us giving him cues so he could recite the lines he knew he was supposed to say. I thought Edie harsh sometimes, the way she carried on as if nothing had changed. Paid no attention when he wrestled with his laces, or left him to scoop up a struggling Young Rob, who was making a fuss for candy from the grocer’s glass jar. But I see now that without her certainty he might just have drifted away.

  Robbie took a camera to the war, a little Kodak, and in the beginning he sent pictures he’d had developed, city streets and the places they’d trained, and ships and open water, the Rock of Gibraltar. Would you ever have thought, he wrote, that your boy would be sailing on the Mediterranean Sea? He tried to describe the colour for me, wrote, It’s just like the lake, on those certain days when the sky is very blue and the sun picks it out on the water. There’s a particular colour that shows in bands on those days and it’s exactly that, do you know what I mean? And I did.

  I sent him pictures too, of Edie and of Young Rob when he was born, of their little house that would be all fixed up by the time he came home. Pictures to tell him he was coming home. And though I knew the direction was wrong, and the time, when I looked out from the shore I imagined that at just that moment he was looking back at me, from wherever he was. I even fancied one day he’d come sailing in, though I knew he’d return to the station, as he did, looking so rumpled and tired. Looking like someone who was missing more than an arm. It could have happened differently, and he could have become one of the ruined ones. The twitchers and shouters, the drinkers and layabouts; years on they’re still around, and we’re not as ge
nerous in our thoughts as we were at first, when we thought they’d get over it, when we thought that we understood. But instead he found a way to go on and he’s a good husband to Edie, a good father to his sons. They still play ball in the yard most evenings, and with his left hand he can throw and catch well enough. “I could hit that with one hand tied behind my back,” he shouts, and when the boys were smaller that made them laugh so hard.

  How easy it was, even if I didn’t know it, when Robbie was small, and the two of us were enough. He learned his numbers from the brass ones on the hotel doors, his colours from the boats in the harbour. Most mornings we walked a little time on the beach, and I was happy just to listen to his chatter, to feel his weight in my arms when he said that his legs were too tired, though before long he’d wriggled away again. When he was old enough he helped me lay the tables and turn out the rooms, and older still he buffed all the boots before he came home to bed, and carried bags and ran errands for the guests, who sometimes tousled his hair, and tossed coins he snatched from the air. The ones like Edie’s great-aunts, who returned year after year, always made a great fuss about how he’d grown. Away from the hotel he lived a boy’s life, sledding down the steep harbour hill and climbing on roofs and tall, swaying trees, walking far from shore on the winter ice, and other things, I’m sure, I never knew about.

  It was easy until it wasn’t, until I had to drag him from his bed in the mornings, until he began to leave tasks half done and vanish, never where he should have been. Once he stole a bicycle so he could ride around with his friends, whooping and charging and causing all kinds of trouble, and more than once he came home from school with a split lip, a torn shirt, and shook me away when I asked what happened. A proper mother, I was sure, would have known what to do or say, but I had no idea. And then one day I opened my door to find him standing with Angus, who had a firm hand on his shoulder and told me Robbie had been staring down trains on the tracks, putting more than his own life in danger.

  Angus said that his first thought was that the boy needed a good hiding, but on their walk through town he’d changed his mind. Instead he had Robbie come sweep out the station before school and after, found other jobs that needed to be done, and before long I knew that if I couldn’t find him, that’s where he’d be. He learned the whole schedule and Angus taught him the wire, sometimes left him in charge of the key when things were quiet. A few times an engineer would let him ride in the cab to the next town, and another would bring him back again. Angus gave him a book filled with maps and he used to sit, tracing his finger over the rail lines. His talk was full of things Angus had said or done and he held his shoulders a little differently, tried to make the same parting in his tangled hair. And one evening, during that time, I opened the back door of our cottage and Angus ducked his head a little, to meet my eyes. “Robbie’s not here,” I said, and he said, “I know,” and that was that.

  We were together for years, in our way, hours that could be counted. It was never right but that’s how it felt, as if there was a magic circle around us, and what happened within it a completely separate thing that had nothing to do with his wife and child, with mine. Angus knew me better than anyone had or would, because I let him. When he touched my scars I told him a little, and more over time, about the worst things and about what came before, Miss Weir and the Home, and how my family was scattered and lost. If Robbie remembers it at all it will be as a story about the white-sailed ship I imagined them on, all together. But Angus knew how real it was, the watching, and he knew what I was looking for those times I took my camera into crowds, and later pored over the prints, not yet dry from the developer. Once he lifted his head from my lap and said, “But Abby, how would you even know them?” And I felt something loosen, understood that maybe I wouldn’t. I could keep looking forever but maybe it had already happened, maybe we’d walked past each other and carried on with no idea at all, and that wouldn’t be anyone’s fault.

  I know it was chance that Angus found Robbie on the tracks that day, that we stood in a doorway and spoke the first words we ever said to each other. If that hadn’t happened we would have lived our separate lives, and maybe never known the lack. The things we told each other would have stayed inside, but we would have been different, I think. The first time we lay together he asked me about the photographs tacked up by my bed, and though I don’t think he understood, he listened while I tried to explain that they were ones I took for myself, not for money. Faces, mostly, like that last one of Maggie, that capture some essence, that somehow satisfy, even if I can’t say why or how. I told Angus so many things I’d never said aloud, and things that hadn’t ever been actual words in my head, and when his heart exploded and he was gone, really gone, I understood how much that had meant. That for a little while there had been someone in the world who carried my secrets. A good man, who guarded them like a treasure.

  This morning I walked restless through town, down one street and another, and it was maybe because of my eyes, but I felt as if things were going on, just out of sight. As if maybe I was walking through that ghost town, different times all jumbled together. And I suppose all along I knew that I would end up at the beginning of Centre Street, looking at the square brick house where Stinson from the newspaper now lives, with all his wild children. The front yard is a mess and one of the windows is boarded up—they must have broken it with a ball—but other than that it looks just the same, the house where Angus lived, and Bella and Edie. After the summer that Edie fell so sick I didn’t see him again, not properly, and I understood that, though from time to time I walked down Centre Street at an hour when I thought he might be leaving for the station. Taking care not to loiter, a basket over my arm as I walked quickly enough that it would seem I was on my way into a busy day.

  Angus used to say that he came to me wrapped in a cloak of invisibility, and once, when the fog rolled in from the lake, he told me about the magic mist that could be called up to surround all of Ireland, keep it hidden from those looking to cause harm. He’d lived in Inverhaven almost as long as I had, but maybe he really didn’t know how it is, the way someone always sees something, and passes it on. A sign, I suppose, of how well he was regarded, that talk never made its way back to Bella. Or maybe it was more to do with how people didn’t quite know what to make of her. A kind of paying back for what they assumed was thinking herself better, the way she held herself apart.

  They didn’t know what to make of me either, until Reuben gave me his camera and I started carrying it with me. I took pictures of circus parades, the Dominion Day races, the wire walker high above the river. Sometimes people asked to buy them, and they started coming to me when they were putting together souvenir booklets for the Old Boys and other reunions and events. People got used to seeing me with my equipment, and it gave them something to latch on to, when they thought of me, and that brought with it a kind of acceptance, though maybe no more than a stray dog would have when its habits become predictable. And I followed the rules; when Angus died, before the war, I knew that his funeral was a place for people with a right to grieve. Most of the town turned out, it seemed, and sang the hymns so loudly I could hear them tumbling over the bluff, passing over my head where I sat on the damp sand, near the place where we sometimes met, growing fainter, those words, as they moved out over the lake.

  I didn’t know her well, of course, but there was something I recognized in Bella, some darkness she was folded around. It showed in the way she held herself, always, the way she seemed to slip away, without ever leaving a room where other people were talking. Everyone thought she’d fall apart after Angus died, but she surprised them, at first. She kept the house but went back and forth to the city, where Edie was studying, where her aunts and uncle lived together in a main-floor apartment, the people above them always rapping with a broom handle when the piano playing got too loud. Robbie told me how jolly it was there, with music and singing and all the tricks they played. Like a second childhood, he said; their minds were a
ll right, except maybe Charlie’s, but it seemed they’d decided to do whatever they wanted, and not care who minded. And I could imagine it, knowing them all from those years they came to stay at the Lakeview. I noticed other families, of course, but those MacFarlanes always made me think what it could have been like, growing up, growing old with my own sisters and brothers.

  Then the war came and Robbie was gone. Edie came home again and Young Rob was born, Bella and I two grandmothers, spending time with each other because of that, and sometimes pushing the baby’s pram around town when Edie needed a rest. Once we rounded a sunny corner and the youngest Connell girl was skipping ahead of us, her hair aglow, flipping up and down, her thin arms and legs, her thin voice singing a bubbly song. And it may have been my fancy, but it seemed that for a moment we both had the same thought. That it could have been each of us, skipping along in a life we might have had, with the sun warm on our shoulders, the tops of our heads, and the green leaves shifting high in the trees.

  I’ve known this place for more than thirty years, and I don’t exactly have friends here, but I have a place. I’ve known people who’ve died and people who’ve been born, jokers and liars and gossips, as well as the kindest you could ever find. Buildings and businesses have come and gone, the storefronts painted a different colour each time, fresh at first and glowing in the light. So many changes, in thirty years, and now a criss-crossing web of wires everywhere, carrying light, carrying voices and the whole modern world, right into people’s homes. There have been fires and catastrophes, there’s been sickness, and that time so many ships sank in the November storm I went down to the shore with all the others, bringing our own sheets and blankets to cover the dead as they washed up. We rolled bandages and packed boxes in the war, and held our breath when the telegraph boy appeared in the distance; whatever I sensed that first day has proved right, that this is a place to stay.