by Mel Bossa
Then the banns were called, and half the congregation of Reverend Pritchard’s church were stunned to hear that it was the younger sister the Captain was going to marry that June. The other half—more in the know, although just as scandalized—merely turned to each other with looks that said “I told you so.”
May came and went, and no one saw or heard anything of Calder or the Pritchard girls. Then it was settled once and for all: Constance and the Captain foreseeing the unavoidable scandal of a large, public wedding, went for a week to visit her aunt and uncle in Bristol, and got married there. The way in which this was revealed was simple enough—a copy of their wedding registration was delivered to the Nansquett Justice of the Peace, who did just as he was supposed to do in such matters and posted it on the office board and then had it published in the county weekly newspaper.
There was a great deal of talk for some months, then everyone seemed to accept the fact. Not that the Captain and Constance received much company from town. They didn’t. Nor did they begin calling on folks either. Strangest of all, Amity hadn’t been seen in months—she’d taken ill, some of the servants answered when closely questioned by relations, and had remained ill.
This was in 1867. Their situation remained about the same for over a year. Then it came to an unexpected and climactic explosion.
It was the Negro servant Saturn who told everything to the Wilcombs. Captain and Mrs. Calder had been killed when their carriage had overturned and crashed into a ditch at the turning to the Boston Post Road, on their way to Scituate. Amity had been told of their deaths, but hadn’t reacted at all. Someone had to come claim the bodies.
Naturally, everyone in town was shocked. The Post Road was a safe and level enough stretch, even in bad weather. Calder wasn’t known as a reckless driver. The horses pulling the carriage were old and tame, not quick to shy at trouble; they hadn’t been hurt in the accident. When Wilcomb and his father reached the scene of the deaths, just off the highway exit now from Nansquett, they saw what had happened—two wheels of the carriage on the right side had snapped off. Evidently suddenly, and at the same time. Unable to deal with this in the moonlit night, the Captain had probably reined in too tight, and everything had gone over. He was still alive, his skull fractured by the sideboard, blood gushing out of it onto the grass, when they were found next morning. He died as the sun rose, his final words incomprehensible. Constance, it appeared, had died instantly.
Now Amity came out of her seclusion. If the town hadn’t the splendid wedding it felt it had deserved from her, it got the largest and most magnificent double funeral it had ever expected to see. Husband and wife were interred together in the Pritchard family plot, and Amity was cordial and magnificently genteel in her sorrow. People talked, but people always talk when the unexpected occurs. Ready as folks were to commiserate with her, others also had a malicious delight in the double death, as though that was the only thing to be expected for the obviously errant couple.
Slowly, months later, gradually, almost quietly, like water seeping out of a deteriorating dike, the word began to be nosed around the county that the deaths might not have been completely accidental. The Pritchard’s livery servant, who’d been since dismissed from his job and taken to lurking about Scituate, claimed foul play. He’d cared for the carriage, he said, and there had been nothing wrong with it, and if there had been, it was someone else’s doing. Lord knew, he said, there were some people who’d been oppressed long enough to want to get revenge, and he didn’t mean black folk either.
Rumors soon began to run so fast that an investigation was finally made into the matter. The carriage was inspected, but as it had been repaired months before, that did no good or harm. It was clear to all the women in town that if the accident had been intentional only one person held a motive for it—Amity. But whether she—or any woman—knew enough about such mechanical devices, no one could declare with certainty.
Nothing ever came of the investigation, but Amity was tried, defended, and convicted in public opinion. She knew it. While after the funeral she had begun tentatively to socialize again with her closest old acquaintances, she now became completely reclusive, never coming into town, sending her Negro Saturn for needed provisions. The few white servants still remaining were dismissed, and soon the Pritchard house became as though a blight had struck it.
People still talked about her, of course; some claimed to have seen Amity wandering disheveled through the woods adjoining the house, shrieking and tearing her hair out of her head in great clumps from guilt and remorse. Others claimed that she and her remaining servants held all sorts of secret rites and orgies at the house on nights of a full moon. No one knew anything for certain; all was speculation and fancy. And soon, no one really cared. Amity had become a total recluse, whatever her reasons for doing so and however she actually passed her time. As a recluse she was easily categorized and so accepted in the town’s limited view of the world.
Naturally, mothers threatened naughty children with her, as though she were a witch or a bogey. So we all grew up knowing her name and knowing there was something terrible about her. God knows, at worst, she was a tormented murderess, though more than likely she was nothing more than a woman battered time and again by a hostile fate. But who knew for certain? Even I—who’d been so taken with her at the christening—couldn’t say for certain if Amity hadn’t loosened the bolts on those carriage wheels the night Constance and Captain Calder died.
Nor did I ever have the chance to find out. As I said, a year or so after our meeting, her servant Saturn came and knocked on the Justice of the Peace’s door and led a half-dozen men up to the Pritchard place. That morning he’d missed his mistress, searched the house and grounds for her, and not found her. Spooked by this, he’d finally, slowly begun his daily chores, one of which was to draw up enough water from the well for the cooking and laundering.
Floating face up in the well was Amity. No one had to explain her reasons or the probable course of events. She’d merely followed her evil destiny to its final remorse-driven end. Naturally, with a life like hers—with a death like hers—people began to think the Pritchard property was haunted. All I know is that the house was closed up then, and no one has lived in it ever since then. The Todds inherited it all and sold off some of the land closest to Scituate, but none of them ever lived in the house or made any move to change or restore it. They still own it, I’m told, but it does them little good now, as the older Todds are all dead and the younger ones live half a continent away.
Still, tales about Amity are told to this day. Some claim to see strange greenish lights in the house at night, although how they ever got close enough to see is beyond me, since it’s a good 300 yards in off Atwood Avenue and so overgrown, most folks would be foolhardy to walk there at night. But such tales will persist, especially when there is nothing to stop them.
That, to my knowledge, is Amity’s story, boy. You asked, and I told you, omitting nothing I heard.
Chapter 7
“You mean, there’s no ghost there?” I had to ask.
“None that I know of,” Grandpa said.
I turned to look at Chas, to see how he was taking this contradiction. But it was already so dark, I couldn’t see his face.
“Chas saw a ghost there,” I said.
Grandpa didn’t say anything.
“At least, that’s what Chas told me.”
I heard Chas get up and open the screen door to the house.
“There is one,” he said, whispering it. “There is!” Then he went in.
Grandpa Lynch and I sat silent out on the shore-side deck for a long time until the low-lying clouds that had remained pink long after the sun had set were swallowed up into the general deep blue of the night sky.
Then Mother came to call me in to bed.
I kissed Grandpa good night right there and thanked him for telling the story. I wasn’t sure how much of it I understood: passions of the intensity he had told were so new to me, I
wasn’t sure they could be powerful enough to change people’s lives as they had apparently changed Amity’s and her sister’s.
“You liked Amity, didn’t you?” I asked Grandpa.
“I liked her well enough. But what can a boy know. I can’t say that I would have liked her if I were older when I met her.”
As I didn’t know what he meant by that, I let it ride and went up to my bedroom. Chas was undressed, sitting in his bed with the little light on, reading a Batman comic. He didn’t look up when I came in and got ready for sleep. I lay down and thought about Amity and how sad her life had been. I wondered if my own life would ever become remarkable enough for people to talk about it almost a hundred years after. Maybe. Maybe if I did something great, like being the first man on Mars or inventing a medicine to keep people from dying.
While I was thinking, Chas finished with his comic book and shut off his light. I suddenly felt that I didn’t want him to come to my bed that night. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts of Amity and of the future, possible me.
“Chas?” I asked tentatively, intending to ask him if he would mind putting off what we did at night.
“I’m tired,” he said, his voice muffled in the pillow. “Go to sleep.”
That was a relief. “Are you sore?”
“There is too a ghost,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
“But Grandpa said—”
“What does he know? He’s never been there. He’s too yellow to go. For all his talk.”
That irritated me. “Well, I’m not yellow,” I said. “Show me. Show me tomorrow.”
“I will. But it’s got to be at night. She won’t be there until it gets dark. So that’s when we have to go.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We’ll make up some excuse. We’ll say we’re going to get an ice cream and see your girlfriend.”
“Well, whatever she is.”
“We’ll go there after dinner. We have to pass the Pritchard place anyway, don’t we?”
“I guess.”
“Are you backing out already?”
“I’ll go. I just don’t like lying,” I said. Or dragging Eileen’s name into lying either, I wanted to say.
“We won’t be lying, if we go to see her,” Chas said. “Just not telling everything. We don’t tell everything we do together anyway. Do we?”
“I guess not.”
Chas laughed. “You bet we don’t.” He leaned over onto my bed.
“I thought you wanted to go to sleep,” I said.
“You don’t. Look at that,” he said, touching me.
So we got into it anyway—hollow as it felt to me that night, with my thoughts everywhere else but on what we were doing.
When we were done and Chas had gone back to his own bed, I said, “Chas? Do you think that Amity Pritchard really did turn the bolts on that carriage?”
“She went and threw herself into that well, didn’t she?” he said.
“She might have fallen in.”
“In broad daylight?”
“Well, maybe. Maybe it wasn’t in daylight. Maybe she was walking around at night and fell in.”
“And maybe elephants have wings,” he said. “She didn’t fall in—and she did loosen those wheel bolts. That’s why she’s a ghost. She can’t settle down like other dead people, because she feels bad about what she did.”
“Would you ever do something like that, because you loved someone so hard?” I asked.
He sat up in his bed, and I could see his figure turned to me.
“Would you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think I could ever love anyone that hard,” I finally said.
“Well, I’m not so sure of that. Now, good night.”
I pondered a while on what he meant by that, but failing to find any satisfactory answer, I had to content myself with thinking again about being the first man on Mars.
Around dawn I woke up and looked around for the noise that had just awakened me. Chas was sitting up in bed.
“What’s wrong, Chas?” I asked.
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
“Why aren’t you asleep?”
“I had to go to the bathroom. Go to sleep.”
“What’s that in your hand?” I thought I’d seen something.
“A comic book. I’m reading it to tire out my eyes. Go to sleep.” He turned around in bed, away from me.
I was to recall that sleepless night of his years later.
Chapter 8
We didn’t go to the Pritchard place the following night as we had planned.
My father came up to Nansquett to take his own vacation that day, and for the next two weeks he and I spent a great deal of time together. We went to drive-in movies, we took a ferry across the Providence River, which was as wide as a bay and went to Newport and even into Massachusetts, up to Salem. He drove us up to the amusement park at Scarborough Beach. We even went out to Block Island, sleeping over. It was fun for me, not only because I hadn’t seen father in months and had missed him, but because he was unspoiled by all the weeks of familiarity I had with Nansquett and its environs. So, I was able to take him around, as Grandpa had taken me around earlier. I showed him the best fishing spots. I told him the best times to go clamming and crabbing, just before the tide came in again, when the beach was filled with tide pools teeming with oceanic life. I showed him how I’d learned to swim, and we raced across the river and back.
So it was almost September, almost time for all of us to leave Nansquett and for me to return to school, when Chas and I did finally make any definite plan to go to see Amity’s ghost.
This turned out easier to carry off than it would have been earlier. First, it was suddenly getting darker much earlier every night than at the height of the summer. Where before we would sometimes go to sleep at night with some daylight still slipping under the venetian blinds of our room, these nights it was dark by eight o’clock—right after dinner—and we didn’t have to go to bed until ten.
Easier still because we had already begun going over to Eileen’s store for that last ice cream of the day while Father was still in Nansquett. Partly this was because Chas realized that if he were going to live in Nansquett all year ’round beginning in September, when Aunt Linda and Uncle Al’s house would be ready to be moved into, that he’d better start knowing a few more folks in town, especially a few more children he’d be going to school with and playing with during the fall and winter.
Eileen knew them all. And they all seemed to congregate around the ice-cream store in the hours between seven and nine at night, when the store closed.
I got to see another side of Chas in those few weeks as he set out to meet these children. Where I had always known him to be abrupt, opinionated, superior to and irritated by anyone else his age, they got to meet him as quiet, polite, smart, and very considerate.
Eileen told me she was surprised. She had misjudged Chas, she said, and was glad that I had defended him. I believed that Chas was acting this way just until he had them all in the palm of his hand, as I’d seen him do with other people, then he’d go back to being as he really was. Still, I couldn’t be sure of that—couldn’t be sure of anything concerning Chas, who remained as mysterious to me as Amity Pritchard was. So I kept my mouth shut. Eileen was intelligent enough to figure out what he was really like, I said to myself; why make trouble?
Our ghost hunt was planned for a Saturday night. We told our parents that we were going to help Eileen close her shop for the night, and help her move some large barrels her mother wanted put in the big outdoors refrigerator they shared with Millicent’s grocery store. We said we’d probably be home later than usual, and no questions were asked. It was the last weekend of my stay in Nansquett, August 26, I recall, that Chas took me onto the Pritchard property to see Amity and my future.
Of course I didn’t know that at the time. I thought we were going to see a ghost, if Chas were telling the truth—which I half doubted; hadn�
��t Grandpa Lynch said there was no ghost?
All afternoon and even during dinner, Chas kept talking about how desolate the property was, and how the house was set so far in from the road that if something terrible happened to us there, no one could ever hear us screaming for help. We’d have to watch our steps too, he said, as there was no light anywhere to guide us. I suggested bringing a flashlight. But Chas said no, we’d never see any ghost that way; it had to be naturally dark.
By the time we’d turned off Atwood Avenue beyond the bridge, all my doubts were subsiding into a wash of anticipation. Chas kept talking about how we were now on the road that edged one side of the Pritchard property, and were probably already being watched by the ghost. I was feeling sort of skittery.
Chas pointed out how dark it was. The almanac Grandpa kept in the kitchen said the moon wouldn’t rise until after midnight. A few steps more, and I knew we were at the entrance to the place. Not that you could tell, really; it was as overgrown with bushes and brambles as any other part facing the avenue. But I’d been on that spot many times before. There was a telephone pole I had often marked as a landmark whenever I’d stopped to take a few steps in.
“Ready?” Chas asked.
I looked down Atwood Avenue to where the little bridge arched over the river and across to where the ice-cream store lights could be dimly seen. The asphalt on that part of the road gleamed in the streetlights’ glare, making it look enormously far away. I felt myself looking there as though for a last-minute reprieve. All doubts about seeing the ghost had left me: I knew I was going to see something horrible, and I didn’t want to.
“Well? Are you ready?” Chas asked again.
Before he could ask again, I stepped over the low bushes edging the road and onto the property. Chas joined me, and we began walking.