She often wore a deadpan expression that she used to good effect playing straight man for her own jokes. Her delivery and her accent were a little like Carla from the television show Cheers. Shawn said she protects her alabaster skin by carrying a parasol in the sun, preferring darkness, as all vampires do, but Tracy, who has a surprisingly down-to-earth side, wouldn’t go along with such glamorization.
“Look at me,” she demanded, holding out a pale arm. “I’m just like my dad. He bubbled all up in the sun.”
She is a witch as well as a vampire. Both palms are tattooed with pentacles that she uses to send and receive energy. She also has a pumpkin tattoo. She grows pumpkins in her garden, carving runes and other ancient symbols on them so that as they grow the magic grows. “Then you make a pie, and the magic goes inside of you,” she said.
She also constructs a scarecrow each year that is magic.
“You bring it alive by your actions, and by thinking of it the whole time you’re stuffing it and trying not to think of anything else,” she said.
“That’s how you do a spell. You’re putting life into whatever you’re doing, you’re breathing life into it. At the end of the spell, you send the energy. It’s a scientific fact that energy is matter, and if you concentrate hard enough you can send it.”
“It’s the scientific mind-set,” she said, like a kid proving a point. “I watch Nova.”
Witches believe everything is alive. When any of the vehicles they own begins to stall, Jeff is wont to begin cursing the machine. Tracy stops him.
“It’ll hear you, and then we’ll never get home.”
Tracy describes herself as having been a normal kid. In junior high she started to think that she’d like to look like some of her heroes in rock bands. She dyed her hair white and began dressing in leather and metal and in torn clothes. Kids started to call her names. A less determined girl might have conformed. Tracy started wearing even more bizarre clothes.
She was vague about how the vampire phase started. Her attitude paralleled many magical people’s. They often say, “It’s just something I discovered I was.” Tracy is strict about how a vampire ought to act. No nasty costumes are allowed at her ball. “Sexy is all right, but not gross.” She won’t tattoo hookers or strippers. If she’s tattooing a guy who starts talking about having gone to a strip joint, she presses harder. She pushes until he hollers.
Here’s the part of her story that made me wince: Tracy’s daughter is named Carrion. Carrion, as in roadkill. Carrion Abigail. The child’s grandmother cried when she heard the name. If you’re a goddess in some mythic tale of cosmic meaning, naming your child Carrion is all right. But New Hampshire isn’t Mount Olympus.
There’s a photo of Carrion on the table. She’s a pretty little blonde. Pink is her favorite color, and she takes dance lessons.
“I didn’t name her Carrion because it’s dead meat. It’s a pretty name. If she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t have to use it. She can call herself Abby. Or Carrie. Or Carrie Ann. I don’t care. Just so long as she’s happy,” said Tracy, who usually calls her daughter Boogie because that was the first word that made the baby laugh.
“Do you mean ‘boogie’ with one o or two?” I asked. “Bogey as in bogeyman or boogie-woogie?”
She shook her head as though to clear it. “Boogie as in your nose. I was getting a boogie out of her nose and she laughed.”
Oh.
“I have a picture to show you,” she said. She went to the back of the house, and when she returned she handed me a black-and-white, eight-by-ten photo of Carrion at about six months old. It’s a fall day and the child is naked, sitting on the ground surrounded by fallen leaves. Her legs cover any part of her that might make the photo pornographic. Tracy, the moralist, would never show salacious photos of her child.
The baby is looking directly into the camera. She’s smiling. Her skin glows in the light. I looked at the photo for a long time. The leaves are dry enough to crackle. The soft baby flesh seems real enough to be warm.
“Some people look at that photo and never see what’s behind her,” Tracy said.
I hadn’t seen it. Maybe the brain doesn’t want to see all that the eye beholds. Posed behind the baby, nestled into the leaves, was one of the skeletons. Its bony grin was clearly visible.
There was Boogie, the most precious thing in the world to Tracy. Soft and glowing with life. And behind her, behind this little girl named Carrion, was the fate that awaits every living thing.
As a young child, Tracy understood something about the world, something that all of us probably understand and then spend the rest of our lives trying to forget. Poking with a stick at those dead animals, she saw the great mystery and wonder of our short moment here. And she never forgot.
She was smart enough to know that what she had to say wouldn’t be listened to in the world at large. She found that out when she dyed her hair white. So she decided to embody her ideal of power and elegance and life that never ends. She decided to live it, to turn herself into a symbol of it. I don’t know if she thought about it that way. Probably she just did it.
“Who wouldn’t want to be a vampire?” she said. “You’re powerful and strong. You’re elegant, and people look up to you. You never get sick, and you never die.”
Golden Dawn mage William Butler Yeats might have understood what Tracy was doing. “We cannot understand the truth,” wrote the mage and poet. “We can only embody it.” Shamans of ancient traditions might have also understood. When Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux had a vision of sacred horses, he was told that his tribe must enact the scene in a horse dance. It took energy and time and resources to do it, but they did it because acting out the vision would give it power and help make it reality.
Tracy said it in her own way. “My dad taught me to write my name large.”
He had died of emphysema four years earlier. One of the photos on her wall is of her as a little girl with him. They’ve caught a fish that’s almost as big as she is, and he’s holding it up between them.
She gestured toward the shelf in the dining room where his ashes sit. “He wanted me to scatter him, but I haven’t been able to yet.” For a minute she seemed about to cry. “That can of ashes used to hold me on his knee.”
Then she gave us a tight little smile and changed the subject.
Ken the Quaker Mortician and Myrna the Death Puppet were not quite as strange as Tracy, but they were close. I met Ken for the first time at Shawn the Witch’s house during a ceremony.
It was late September, a time the witches call Mabon, which is their Thanksgiving feast and the beginning of the Season of the Witch. We were in the backyard of Shawn the Witch’s house. Spooky music was coming from loudspeakers at the house. Shawn’s aboveground pool loomed behind us. Flanking an arrangement of pumpkins and hay bales was a chain-link fence. We were the only ones out. The neighbors were inside, watching TV or hiding from us. The night air was cool, and the fire’s flitting shadows licked over our faces, bright and then dark.
The ceremony started when Shawn’s roommate Teisan handed us each a sprig of lavender to increase our psychic abilities. We rubbed the lavender between our palms, sniffed it, and tossed it into the fire. The harvest was in and death was in the air as all of life prepared for the long winter, Shawn said.
He told us to kneel before the fire and declare some part of ourselves that we wanted to let die. We must drop our masks, he said. He went first.
“Here before my friends and family, I am vulnerable,” he said. He wanted to let his bad temper die. He wanted to let go of his fear. He wiped his hand over his face like a man in grief. “I am so afraid that I’ll be hurt.”
Jen Cosgrove, a neonatal nurse and single parent, talked of a hard year. She was grateful for the lessons and happy to let the year go. Jacqui Newman, who is a hereditary Strega, or Italian witch, wanted money troubles to die and her psychic business to flourish. Teisan wanted to drop the mask of coldness that he wears and show others the vulner
ability inside himself. At the end of each confession the speaker sealed the deal by yanking strands of hair and tossing them into the flames. I could hear the hair pop as it let go.
When it came time for me to speak, the circle of figures around me was dark and still. As I sank to my knees before the ceremonial fire, the flames’ light was so bright that I squinted. Everything else disappeared. The witches were silent, waiting for me to speak.
I said I wished to let the past die. I meant the silly, selfish, foolish moments that float around in my head and can make me flush twenty years after they happened. But I didn’t say that. I also wished to stop being afraid. I could have named all the ways I am afraid, but we didn’t have all night. As I rose from my knees Shawn whispered, “So mote it be,” which is a witchy version of amen.
I sat next to a harmless-looking guy with short brown hair named Ken Glover, often called Ken the Quaker Mortician because he is one. That night he was alone. Usually he brought Myrna the Death Puppet, who is his license to be “a bit naughty,” so naughty that Shawn’s invitation specifically excluded the puppet.
“She’s like a little grim reaper,” Ken explained. “She channels for death.”
Ken is unfailingly polite, soft-voiced, considerate. He speaks slowly, precisely, without any inflection, a little like Hannibal Lecter, Shawn said. To me he sounded more like Mr. Rogers. Myrna, in contrast, is rude, caustic, and mean-spirited. Her voice is high-pitched and whiny with a Brooklyn accent. Ken makes no attempt to disguise his mouth movements when it’s Myrna’s turn to talk, I was told. Myrna is part of Ken’s comedy act, during which she does psychic readings for members of the audience.
“You’ve made death into a comedy routine?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s what I’ve done.
“I told this one guy that he was going to be in a car accident. He was not wearing his seat belt, and he’d have a car wreck. I said, ‘You’re going to bleed to death because your head is going to go through the windshield and your head will bob up and down until the glass cuts your carotid.’
“Then Myrna said, ‘But don’t worry. It won’t be your fault, and you won’t be cited.’
“Once I told this woman, ‘You’re going to live to be very, very old, and everyone you know will be dead and you won’t know anyone.’
“And Myrna said, ‘But don’t worry. You won’t know who you are either.’
“And people laugh. They think they shouldn’t but they do, and I love that. That’s the place I like to bring them.”
“Why do you like to do this?” I asked.
“It’s the only joke I can tell,” he answered.
Myrna’s predictions about death have not come true as far as Ken knows. But she does bring up things from people’s lives. Myrna told Shawn that he would die in a fire started by a candle left burning in a bathroom.
“But don’t worry,” she told Shawn. “You won’t burn to death. The smoke will kill you.”
Shawn’s home did burn once. He wasn’t in it, and no one was hurt, but that reality gives extra edge to the prediction. Ken told him what he always tells Myrna’s victims, “That doesn’t have to happen.” If they’re careful, they can avoid that fate, he says. They still have free will. And now they’ve been warned.
Ken has been thrown out of at least one party, and he’s often told to leave Myrna at home. Jacqui hates the puppet, calls her a potato on a stick. Teisan stays as far from Ken as he can. “He gives me the willies,” he said.
Myrna scared me too. I didn’t want to hear what she might tell me, but I had to meet her. I couldn’t resist. It took a while to arrange, but a month later we met for lunch. Restaurants are my least favorite places to meet. They’re too noisy, and it’s hard to take notes while you eat. But people like them. This time I had already eaten so my hands would be free to take notes. I ordered iced tea. Ken ordered soup. Myrna was in her black carrying bag. Gently Ken pulled her out, smoothing her dress. We both looked at her.
Myrna has a carved mahogany head with hollow sockets for eyes and a slight smile in the void that is her mouth. Some people think she was carved out of casket mahogany, but that’s not true. For hair, Myrna has one piece of rope with unraveling ends that wave wildly about her skull. Her clothes are made from a black shirt that Ken got off a guy he met on the dance floor. She carries a sickle, which she sometimes uses to sip drinks when at lunch.
Her head is large compared to her body, which is a stick underneath a robelike black dress. Not a bad-looking puppet. She could definitely star in a nightmare. No way would I have said anything bad about her hair or her big head. I looked at her for some time, but she didn’t speak. Ken put her away.
We talked for the next two hours. Early on I asked a question he must have answered a million times. Why mortuary work? He said he’d taken a computer aptitude test that indicated he could be either an engineer or a funeral director.
“Funeral director seemed like it would impress people more, but later I found out that lots of people who take computer aptitude tests get funeral director.”
Ken believes that being a mortician protects him from dying too early or too painfully.
“Since I clean up after death, I’ve thought that death would give me a certain amount of favoritism.” Some morticians become overly cautious and fearful, and in that way Myrna helps him.
“Whenever I think of death, I’m not thinking of dying but of something that Myrna can say about it,” he told me. Without Myrna, he wouldn’t be able to give prophecies. “If someone asks how they’re going to die, all I get when Myrna’s not with me is, You’re going to stop breathing. The same as everybody. Myrna’s my id,” he said. And maybe something more.
Ken built the original Myrna with his friend Richard. Ken first saw Richard across a bar. There was a certain smugness about him that Ken liked. “He was probably trying to look sexy.”
Ken said to a friend who knew Richard, “Introduce me.”
The friend said, “You don’t want to meet him. His T cells are 17. He’s dying.”
Ken said, “Introduce me.”
At the end of the evening Ken told Richard, “I’ll call you.”
“Don’t call me. I may be dead. Let’s make plans.”
The next week Richard was in the hospital, but he didn’t die. He lived a few more years, and they spent a lot of time together. Cutting humor was a big part of their friendship. “I hope you die,” Ken would sometimes snarl at Richard after particularly funny insults, and they would laugh. Richard’s humor was a lot like Myrna’s. It’s love disguised as cattiness, Ken said. “It’s a warning. Change or prepare to die.”
The last time he saw Richard was before Ken left on a trip to Spain.
“I had to walk out of the house and not look back because I didn’t want to upset him or myself any more than I was,” said Ken. “It was very painful. I never saw him again, and that always left a tremendous hole in me.”
And how does being a Quaker fit with Myrna? Being a Quaker is about centering down, about being a voice for God’s spirit, said Ken. So maybe there’s a connection.
“You don’t think Myrna is God speaking, do you?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think that,” he said. But she might be Richard.
Myrna has never told Ken about his own death. “I’ve never asked, and she’s never said,” he said. “I never will ask.”
At the end of lunch Ken picked up the bag that held Myrna and smiled at me.
“Myrna didn’t get to tell you anything about your death, but that’s okay,” he said. “And you know why? Sometimes you don’t need to know. And the other thing is that sometimes you’re not meant to die until it happens. There’s no predestination. Sometimes you just live your life.”
“So you mean sometimes Myrna has nothing to say?”
“That’s right.”
“Because she doesn’t know?”
“That’s right. You’re probably not taking any risks.”
“Not if I can
help it,” I said, a big understatement.
I left Ken still not understanding him or his audiences. Who would find such stories funny? And how could this man who seemed so kind get his yucks in such a crass way? How does a man spend Saturday night scaring the wits out of people and then go to a Quaker church on Sunday morning where all he does is sink into himself and listen for God?
He had assured me that he wasn’t on medication and had never been. “Mental institutions?” I asked. No, he said.
I pondered Ken’s story for weeks. I looked through my notes and thought about everything he’d told me. And finally I got it.
One story gave me the clue.
“I was at a party one time, and someone said, ‘Read for David over there, he’s a jerk,’ but they used more colorful language,” Ken said. “I happened to know David. He was a neighbor of a friend of mine, but David didn’t know this. So I set about doing a reading that would really zing him. I asked, ‘Is there someone here drawn to know how they’re fated?’”
Ken imitated David’s gravelly feminized voice. “Yeah. I want to know. How am I going to die?’’
“I see snow. It’s two, three in the morning, and it’s cold and crisp, and the snow is swirling around the street lamps, and when it falls it’s very quiet, and you can almost hear the ice cracking. It’s that beautiful hush. I see you on a little stone path.”
Ken explained to me, “He has a little stone path going to the street. I must have been aware of that because I’d been by his house.”
Then he resumed his story. “I see you walking out to the street. I hear a scraping noise. A scraping noise. It’s a snowplow, and it’s coming into a cul-de-sac.”
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