Tripping the Tale Fantastic

by Christopher Jon Heuer

  How your family become fascinated—dead soldiers and battlefields? she’d asked me, looking up from the EMF manual. Sweat trickled down into her beautiful cleavage. It struck me that she saw my family as holding a possible kinship for her on a metaphysical level, and maybe not on a blood and bones level, my level.

  What could I say? The truth is that piles of bronze coins, minie balls, glass shards, tin tokens, and pieces of finger or foot bones didn’t mean anything to me growing up. That was stuff people left behind. These were always lying around the house in muddy five-gallon buckets, waiting to be cleaned up and sold.

  But ever since I was a kid in Whitford’s fifth grade Western Civ. class, and I saw pictures of the crawling plaster of paris figures of Pompeii, I’d felt horrified, even angry, by the agonized absences people left behind. Living where we did, the older Deaf staff at the school told stories about soldiers walking through the night, streaming up and around the minie-ball splintered trees, gliding around the base of the house, disappearing into the woods.

  Even now, sometimes, when I get up and it’s a specific kind of early morning in September, still dark, smelling of leaves drying on the trees, I pause before I turn on the headlights. And then see a pair of glass eyes staring back at me. Sometimes the hands on those raccoons can look so much like small, gloved hands.

  Suppose you capture soldiers, Confederates? she asked me, not seriously. I’d ask them their names—what, I had replied. She loved the strange spellings of the names we saw in the nation’s first official cemeteries nearby. Bumpas, Corbell, Ulysses, Bushrod, even an Unthank.

  What you think is my real name? she asked me.

  I think—I’ll name you P-r-u-d-e-n-c-e U-n-t-h-a-n-k, I told her with a grin.

  Ha ha, she said and stuck her tongue out.

  I walked around our attic, pointing the meter and seeing the needle pulse in response to the hidden life of the house. Stella took my other arm, and we slowly promenaded in and around each corner and across our attic. The needle seemed almost alive, like the hair on the back of your neck, but even better, engineered. The fan and the clock both pulsed the needle, just a flick, like a finger tapping.

  But the needle leapt up and stayed pressed to the right when we walked closer to the bathroom. Laughing, we squeezed ourselves through the door and into the small space. I handed the meter to Stella and she held it low before her like a dowsing rod. We followed the rise and fall of the needle to the old galvanized pipes of the tub.

  E-u-r-e-k-a! she’d said.

  Looking back, I remember my heart aching even as we laughed so hard she cried. I’m not sure why. Did I think that this was coming to an end? I wanted to remember this sweet moment, to hold it in my mind, suspended.

  Following Stella’s new theory, we decided to start with Antietam because there would be almost no chance of missing whatever was left. My thinking went something like this; if we picked up absolutely nothing, then that would force Stella to think about just what she was asking for when she asked for LaLa. After all, I was the one there in the room with her. Me. What would it take for her to stop looking behind and finally see me in front of her?

  At night, in Sharpsburg, my uncle had told me, it becomes very, very dark, even on starry nights in the middle of the summer, even near the summer equinox. The dark settles in like a cloud of silent black birds. I didn’t actually believe, not in the same way as Stella. But what if?

  Long after Stella had drifted off to sleep in the single numbers of the night, I turned the EMF meter back on. I rested it near her and watched the needle. I lay there, and sweated, and tried not to worry, tried not to loop through events like Stella falling through a black iron railing.

  Why was it that, by instinct and a certain crawling feeling on the back of my neck, I made sure to never look in that particular corner by the stairs up to the widow’s walk in the middle of the night? There was no reason to look.

  Stella’s breath was here, slow and heavy on my arm, part of the house’s calm, old, night, punctuated by the wind seeping in through the slats in the walls. This was before the threatening and hostage-taking words appeared, the words written in scratchy felt-tip pen in small capital letters on the back of the EMF manual, left by accident outside on the patio, and the half-written word written in blood on the attic wall, but never finished.

  Next on the list: recording devices. A visual recorder needed to be sensitive enough to record in the near-total black, or the blacker than night, of the Antietam battlefield. I bought one secondhand at a pawn shop in the old railroad town near us.

  We tested the camera, and she posed for me, but always reluctantly. She didn’t like being the center of attention, and there’s something about a camcorder that changes things. This was when camcorders were still fairly large, fitting into the meat of a man’s palm, a strap wrapping around the knuckles.

  There was a lot of “noise” in the digital screen playback, but she always looked so fresh and beautiful, even with fuzzy edges and the color bleed from the RGB pixels. I prize those recordings from that green, hot, summer and keep copies, first on CD and now USBs, in a bank safety deposit box. Soon I’ll have to make a decision about whether or not to transfer these to the cloud.

  The Earnshays started leaving notes with an increasingly nasty edge. First it was about the rent, which was, of course, always late, and then non-existent. Then it was about the need to clean up a little better. Then it was about needing to move my bike because the tires were flattening against the ground. The last notes were about evictions and hiring an attorney, which they were loath to do.

  I didn’t care. We didn’t care. We were together, and I usually walked down to the corner liquor store to pick up some cheap tuna, mayo, and white bread. She stayed behind, always. Nix had been seen driving around slowly, too slowly for anyone’s good. Gross food for summer, but better than the round, plastic wheel of bologna, smeared blue ink dates well past expiration. Everything was so dreamy and warm and so weirdly calm that I don’t think I even felt angry about Nix at that time. This was the warm round globe I lived in, at the top of the house, with Stella. Time slipped forward and backward. No one could enter it without our permission.

  But then summer leaned closer in early August, the dog days. The sun slanted directly now into our windows, and the attic became unbearable. We gathered up enough change to buy beat-up box fans and put them in two dormer windows at opposite ends, one to pull in warm air and one to push out hot, stale air, now leavened with the smell of dust, dried-up bugs, and old cigars from a long-ago haunt of the widow’s walk.

  Most of that summer I wore only cut-off jeans and cheap blue shower flip-flops that began to curl up. There was something primal and animal about seeing my body become leaner and sinewy as the thermostat crept higher and higher. Stella’s white tank top and the recordings, of course, were the wonder of my days.

  I settled on August 1, 1996 as the day of the Antietam investigation. That year I ended up not going until September 17, but that, oddly enough, ended up being appropriate because that was the actual start day of the Battle of Antietam.

  September 17 began with a chill, a bright, beautiful, sunny day, the kind of morning that normally would make you feel glad to be alive, made you feel like you survived the summer. I recognized that deceptive morning light when it came again, five years later, on 9/11.

  The trick was to make it into the park before dark and hide when the rangers made their final sweep before locking down the Visitor Center for the night. My goal was to hide out in or behind Dunker Church and wait until midnight. I put on a long-sleeved dark shirt and my black church pants, loaded my gear in a small backpack.

  The church, a low, one-story, brick building painted white, was not the original Dunker Church that the Dunkers worshipped in while cannons fired from the battlefields, the same sloping fields our Beuna Vista widow walk overlooked. It’s a reconstruction, just like everything else. But when I slipped inside the cool quiet of the church, the dark flo
or and simple, dark wooden pews made me feel as though I’d entered a coffin. No, that’s not the right word. I’d entered an empty mausoleum. Not a church and not a coffin, but something in between. White outside, dark and cool and still inside. The dark, small, animal pounding of my heart reminded me I needed to be quiet.

  A ranger took a quick peek inside but didn’t see me sitting in the back pew. I saw the latchkey drop. This was before the parks began to be visited regularly by paranormal teams and retired Civil War tourists and scavengers. I guess you could say I was one of the first.

  I waited. Then I moved outside and watched the last of the sun fade and the moon rise.

  Just as I’d been warned, the battlefields stretched out, darker than the dark, the only light coming from the white outlines of field statues, frozen forever in mid-action. It was eerie, but this was where I needed to be.

  Slowly, I made my way to Miller’s Cornfield, the site of some of the battle’s worst carnage. If there were going to be any sightings from disturbed, uneasy, spirits, they would converge there. Or maybe Sunken Road, but that would have to wait for another time. I wasn’t ready for Sunken Road.

  I nearly tripped and fell over several of the War Department tablets, angled at just the right angle to stab me. Those dry recountings of who was where and which unit went which direction—where had these details come from? From soldiers’ letters home or from the generals who dropped down into their camp chairs and wrote candle-lit dispatches back to Lincoln and Davis?

  At least that much was known, even if it felt too dry and stiff and incomplete. No wonder the number of mediums and spiritualists exploded after the Civil War; everyone wanted to know. Maybe not to know the horrible and wrenching details of the last moments—who can bear that? But maybe to get some confirmation that the tie that binds is still there. That death is not the end.

  There was—creepily enough—still corn in the cornfield. Row upon row upon row of corn past the peak, now beginning to turn brown. The cornstalks stood in dark rows, alert and attentive, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. I almost turned back.

  Even now I’m not sure why I stayed, but what I do know is that I saw something. Maybe just the cornstalks rubbing against each other. If Stella had been with me, I would have brought her close to me.

  I crouched low so I couldn’t be seen—why, I’m not sure—was I afraid of a spirit seeing me? My hands shaking, I turned on my camcorder. I sat and waited for my eyes to adjust, but they never did. The dark only deepened, and there was a feeling of something gathering, rustling, congealing in that field.

  Then—I swear—I saw something float out of the stalks—a round shape like someone hunched over and crawling on all fours. Just barely—almost a suggestion, an imprint against the dark. Then another, the size and shape of a child or a woman’s back, rounded. No features, just a shape wearing itself.

  My throat tightened and all I could feel was the roaring of my blood and the air pushing in and out of my chest in hot, tight, gasps. Everything narrowed to the edge of the cornfield and the shapes emerging, one by one, rolling forward then disappearing, rolling, then gone. I held on as long as I could, my camcorder shaking but still running. The red light pulsed.

  Hold, hold, hold on. Her hand in mine.

  I stood and waved at the round shapes rolling and emerging from the field. She would see me. A dark bird in my chest heaved and flew up and out.

  In front of me, cornstalks shook and fell. A group of teenagers in summer shorts and t-shirts flew out, running, their bare arms and legs flashing, flashing, falling, hopping, then gone.

  Their car lights flashed and spun over the fields as they careened over speed bumps. I laid myself down. The ground pressed up and into me, gravel pocking my face and long blades of grass tickling my neck and forehead.

  This is how it felt. This is what I’d come to the field to know. It nearly killed me, but at least I knew. This was not her cornfield, but if she was anywhere, it would be here, at the pathway.

  I poured my hot breath into the ground, dug the points of my knees into gravel, clawed her name into the dirt and broken cornstalks. Heart: blood and bone: water.

  Years later, after Nix was found guilty and locked up based on the evidence he’d left behind in the widow’s walk, I found the video those kids made. Someone from that group, now in their 30s, had posted it on YouTube. Someone else debunked it by pointing out they’d made those shapes by blowing big soap bubbles.

  Every year on August 7th, I still go back to the cornfield where she was found, one week after she’d been killed and carried off.

  Someday she’ll answer back. It won’t be a sound, but it will be something that I will see. I will know it for what it is.

  ***

  UNDERSTANDING

  Kelsey M. Young

  Of the several professors who complained of his comprehension difficulties, one recommended that Bryant come see me. With the depth of his difficulties, it was a miracle he made it into Bell University. We were known as the best university for the oral and speaking deaf who lived within Milan; not so much for those who weren’t oral.

  The shy young man opened my office door a crack, making my floor vibrate. “Hello? Are you Dr. Natasha? They said you could help me.”

  “Come in.” I turned to face him and the door opened wider. Dark-haired and tall, Bryant had the gangly look that so many first-year students have, and he lacked the confidence of most. But his smile, though nervous, was genuine. “Sit down.” I pointed to the seat across from mine.

  He sat, shifting a little. Most of my students struggled with starting this conversation, but Bryant surprised me by getting right to the point. “My professors said I’m missing a lot of information in class. I don’t get why. If I can see them talk, I can catch what they’re saying. When I can’t do that, they sound all mixed up.”

  “I see.” I brought up his records on my screen. When I spoke, I turned to face him. “Your chart says you’re high-functioning and don’t need aids. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. People don’t believe me when I say I don’t need aids! One audiologist told me I was this close to not qualifying for being deaf.” He grinned as he held his index finger and thumb a milliunit apart, indicating he had only a mild hearing loss.

  “Aids are not the problem,” I said. His audiogram was close to perfect. “How do you do in class?”

  “Okay. I read their lips.”

  I moved closer to him, to show I valued what he had to say. Many people with comprehension difficulties lacked respect from their peers and elders.

  “If they turn around, I’m screwed,” Bryant continued. “I did okay with some of my high school classes, because the teachers in those classes always faced us. But some insisted on writing on the holoboard while talking at the same time. I miss a lot in class.”

  “How did you succeed enough to enter Bell University?” The latter type of teacher he described was far more common here, given that nearly everyone in Milan—and certainly every “Lanner” employed at Bell University—took listening skills for granted. Children who couldn’t adapt to Milan’s ways were sent down lower paths early on.

  Bryant sat up more and his smile widened more than usual for Lanners. “I’m bright. My mom says I started reading early, and I learned how to understand people through the garble. Basic survival skills.” One of his shoulders tilted forward in a shrug, another oddity for a Lanner.

  “Have you looked into other ways of getting information? Can you get notes from your friends?”

  “I don’t have a lot of friends here who I can copy notes from.”

  I had always thought it problematic that students here were forced to rely on each other for notes, in the classic group mentality of Milan. That was one problem with moving to a different country on Eyeth, this colony planet of deaf people: dealing with narrow-minded people in one’s new country. My home country, Pegasus, had universities that were better for all, with professors providing a basic set of notes to
expand on in class. But Pegasus allowed for multiple ways of communicating: speaking as well as various sign languages. Milan, compared to Pegasus, was pitiful with its reliance on speaking. “And that’s blocking your success here? Less resources?”

  Bryant nodded. “I think so.”

  On my screen, I called up a boilerplate form for the notetaker request, added his name and the date, and sent it to his student address. “Send this form to the professors you have difficulties with,” I told him. “This will give them permission to call up a notetaker for you. Next week we’ll discuss other ways of dealing with your situation.”

  Bryant’s eyebrows creased upward in a wince. It was always humiliating, being forced to ask for help, but it was the first step of many. The line of his mouth tightened and he nodded. “I’ll send it out. Thank you so much, Dr. Natasha.”

  “You’re welcome. See you same time, next week.”

  After he left, I typed out the basic diagnostic paperwork for his records. Some of my previous students had managed to complete a degree with only my notetaker forms. That was great … until the day they left university. Prevailing wisdom in Milan was that, past high school age, these struggling young people no longer needed assistance. They were expected to sink or swim upon entering university or the real world.

  As the Comprehension Coordinator, my job was to provide assistance for those students with difficulties. A previous president had inaugurated my job title as a way to increase the graduation rate. It had worked so well, I was the third to hold the position. My predecessors, like me, earned little respect from faculty. Half of them hated me, even though my position was badly needed, because I could walk any of their students away from speaking and toward communicating like the so-called animals in other countries. If they had to be animals to be happy, so be it.