A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  “And why is that?” Eldora’s voice was still kind and accommodating.

  “Because … because Adelaide said something to me about the house being troubled. That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand what she means by that.”

  Pearl leaned forward. “Adelaide doesn’t believe in the ghost, Eldora.”

  “Yes, I know, Pearl. I’m aware of that. But we’re lettin’ Marielle ask the questions, remember?”

  Pearl sank back in her chair. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Eldora turned back to Marielle. “Did you ask Adelaide what she means?”

  “What?”

  “Did you ask her what she means when she says it’s the house that is troubled?”

  Adelaide’s strange words on the lawn floated back to Marielle. “She said it’s like a record player that keeps playing the same part of a song over and over because it can’t get past a scratch.”

  Eldora nodded. “I see. And did you ask her what she meant by that?”

  “She tried to explain it, but we were interrupted. I never really had the chance to bring it up again because it seemed to be something she wanted to keep just between us. But Carson knows now she told me. And he’s not exactly happy about it.”

  “I wonder why he feels that way.” Eldora laced her fingers together and sat comfortably back in her chair.

  “He doesn’t believe in ghosts either!” Pearl said, and then clamped her hand over her mouth.

  Eldora smiled at Pearl and then turned back to Marielle. “And how about you, dear? What do you believe about ghosts?”

  Marielle shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve never had any reason to believe they exist.”

  “But now you are wonderin’ if you do?”

  “I’m just trying to understand this. I’m living in that house now. It’s my home.”

  Eldora reached for Marielle’s hands. She flinched at the woman’s touch and then slowly relaxed. Eldora’s manicured fingers gently stroked Marielle’s hands.

  “Here’s the thing, Marielle. I can tell you what I felt inside that house. Ten years later I can still feel it. And I am happy to tell you. But I can’t make y’all understand anything. I think in the end it’s you who is goin’ to have to decide where you land on all of this.”

  Marielle swallowed. “All right.”

  Eldora let go of her hands and smiled. “First, you need to know that I didn’t ask for this gift I have. It just came to me. My grandmother had it and so did her aunt. I didn’t know I had it until I was fifteen. And at first I didn’t know what to do with it. And I can’t see the future or make objects move or hear y’all’s thoughts. I see and hear things in the spiritual realm, things that ordinary people can’t see and hear. Lots of people don’t like to think there is a spiritual realm, and those that do don’t like to imagine that some of us can see it and hear it when they can’t. Are you with me so far?”

  Marielle nodded her head slowly. “So you can see … people who are dead? You can hear them?”

  Eldora’s tongue flicked the left corner of her mouth. “I believe I can.”

  “She can!” Pearl whispered.

  “Did you see a ghost at Holly Oak?” Marielle asked.

  Eldora tipped her chin and hesitated for only a second. “I sensed a heavy spirit of sorrow and betrayal in Holly Oak, the most intense I have ever felt. Deep and pervasive. And yes, I felt the presence of someone who believed themselves responsible for it.”

  “Susannah …,” Pearl murmured, practically under her breath.

  Marielle felt a prickling on her skin and shook it off. “Was it? Was it Susannah?” she asked, matter-of-factly.

  Eldora breathed in and out deeply, reconnecting, perhaps, with the sensation she felt when she was inside Holly Oak. “I believe so, yes. Who else could it be? She was a woman who surely had many regrets. It’s widely held that Susannah Page hid Yankees inside Holly Oak, that she married a Confederate officer to hide her alliances with the North. That same officer, Lt. Page, was later betrayed by those same Yankees. They shot him in the head, nearly killed him. Yes, I think it could be her.”

  Again Marielle felt a tingling on her arms and again she willed it away. “But you didn’t actually see her. You didn’t talk to her.”

  “No.”

  For a moment the three women were silent.

  “Do the history books say what you just told me?” Marielle finally asked. “About Susannah?”

  Eldora only paused for a second. “No. They do not. Susannah was questioned only once about her Union loyalties. It was a well-known fact she had family in the North and a cousin who served in the Twentieth Maine. She was accused of hiding Yankees, but she was never charged. And her husband, Lt. Page, was indeed wounded terribly at Gettysburg. He was a supply officer. He wasn’t even on the front lines. Y’all hear what I’m sayin’? He wasn’t even on the front lines. That’s what the history books say.”

  “So, assuming you’re right about … about her ghost, what do you think Susannah wants?”

  Eldora again laced her fingers on the tabletop. “Well, I would imagine she wants what all ghosts want, Marielle. She wants peace.”

  “That’s right,” Pearl breathed. “She wants peace, poor thing.”

  In her mind Marielle pictured the record, spinning madly on its turntable, the needle unable to move past the crooked gouge but refusing to give up trying.

  “And how is she supposed to get it?” Marielle asked.

  “That’s just it. She can’t. That’s why she’s still here. She can’t undo what she did.”

  “That’s why Adelaide sews the uniforms, dear,” Pearl said, peeking at Eldora for approval for her comment.

  “What do you mean?” Marielle asked.

  “You know,” Pearl continued. “The uniforms. Susannah sewed uniforms too. Real ones. In the parlor. Adelaide is trying to go back to the beginning. Make things right for Susannah. Like a do-over.”

  “But Adelaide doesn’t believe Susannah is a ghost,” Marielle said.

  “Yes, but she thinks the house is.”

  “Is what?” Marielle asked.

  “A ghost. Adelaide thinks the house is a ghost. It’s the same thing.” Pearl crossed her legs and lifted her tea glass, looking satisfied with her contributions to the conversation.

  Marielle turned to Eldora.

  “Adelaide thinks the house is stuck, unable to move forward in time with the people who live in it,” Eldora said. “Horrible things happened inside Holly Oak. Horrible things happened in this town. And Susannah made it worse somehow, so the house keeps exacting a toll on its women. It needs restitution to get past its past.”

  “What do you mean, a toll? Are you saying the house has it in for me?” Marielle laughed nervously.

  “No. Not like that. Adelaide would say the house withholds protection over its women to make atonement for Susannah’s many wrongs. That’s why some people think there is a curse on the house.”

  It’s not the house’s fault. It’s not the house’s fault. The echo of Adelaide’s quiet declaration at her reception played back in her mind. It’s not the house’s fault. As if the house had a sense of justice—and the means to dole it out.

  “You actually think the house feels like it’s been wronged? That’s impossible.”

  “I didn’t say I thought that,” Eldora replied. “I said that’s what Adelaide thinks. I think the grieving presence is Susannah. Adelaide thinks it’s the house.”

  Pearl patted Marielle’s arm. “It’s really the same thing when you think about it.”

  Ridiculous images of the house swallowing her whole, of the doors and windows becoming solid wall and trapping her inside, pressed in on her. She shooed the cartoonlike notion away.

  “Houses don’t feel things,” Marielle said.

  “No, but people do.” Eldora took her napkin off her lap, folded it neatly, and placed it on the table. “Susannah did and Adelaide does. And so do you. Isn’t that why you asked me to come here?”

/>   “I asked you to come because I need to know how I’m supposed to live in a house that everyone seems to think is haunted.”

  Eldora shook her head. “Actually, dear, you might want to keep Adelaide’s word for it in mind. Be easier for you. Not haunted. Stuck. Adelaide thinks the house is stuck. I think it’s Susannah who’s stuck.”

  “Stuck,” Pearl echoed.

  Marielle pulled her own napkin off her lap and tossed it onto the table. “Look. I need to make this work somehow. I need to know how to live in that house. What am I supposed to do?”

  Pearl tapped the table with a ringed pointer finger. “First thing you need to do is move out of that bedroom!”

  “Pearl, please.” Eldora held up a hand to silence her.

  “Well, Eldora! They are sleeping in her bedroom!”

  Eldora turned to Marielle. “I don’t suggest you move out of Susannah’s bedroom unless you sense tension and disquiet there. Do you?”

  “It’s just a room,” Marielle replied.

  “I’ll take that as a no. I didn’t either when I was there. The rooms where I sensed the most unrest were the parlor, the cellar, and the slaves’ quarters. Oh, and the garden. But that’s not a room.”

  “Are you telling me to stay out of those rooms?”

  Eldora reached out and squeezed her hand. “Actually, I suggest you try being very intentional about going into those rooms. I suggest you speak absolution to those rooms whenever you can, whenever you are alone in them. I think Susannah has forgotten that God is forgiving. It is more in His nature to forgive than to punish.”

  “You want me to say that to the rooms.” The words sounded silly in her ears as she said them.

  Eldora nodded. “It won’t be as hard as you think, Marielle.” She squeezed her hand again and then pulled her hand away.

  “Why didn’t you say those things when you were in the house?” Marielle asked.

  “I am no one to Susannah Page. I have no right to say anything to her. You live in her house. You are raising her descendants. I think she will listen to you.”

  “And should I say anything to Adelaide about this?”

  Eldora was thoughtful for a moment. “Do you think you should?”

  Marielle didn’t know what to think.

  “Adelaide doesn’t like it when we talk about Susannah’s ghost,” Pearl offered.

  “I’m not even sure I can do what you’re suggesting,” Marielle looked away, toward the tall windows that looked out onto Pearl’s backyard and a long row of bushy peonies bursting with color. “I don’t even know if I believe any of it.”

  Eldora smiled at her graciously. Kindly. “Yes, dear, but your life is playing out as if you do.”

  he sweet, almost tangy odor of pressed fabric under a hot iron wafted about the silent parlor as Adelaide set the appliance down and guided the still-warm jacket—minus its braid and buttons—onto a padded hanger.

  She stepped back to examine her work, making sure there wasn’t a hint of asymmetry in the coat’s proportions. A few threads dangled from the side seams, and she bent to snip them. She liked constructing coats the best. They exuded an air of elegance despite their intended purpose.

  A Richmond Times-Dispatch features reporter had once done a story on her uniform making, years ago, when Sara was home for a summer break from college. Adelaide had been making a coat just like this one the day the reporter had come, and it was at the same stage of completion. Without their buttons, the coats always looked sightless and meek. The man had taken pictures of her sewing a button. He had taken pictures of the parlor too. And the cannonball on the side of the house.

  And the portraits in the hallway. He had asked to borrow a few photographs of Susannah Page, and Adelaide had kindly declined his request. “I don’t feel comfortable with any of my photographs leaving the house,” she said. He said he would take very good care of them and return them promptly. She said no. The reporter turned to Sara then, wordlessly, it seemed, asking her to come to his aid. Sara suggested he take a picture of the photos on the stairway instead, and that’s what he did.

  The interview began in the parlor, though she hadn’t wanted it to. Sara, bless her, commented that it was such a lovely day in the garden, perhaps the reporter would like to interview her grandmother out there, and that she would bring them sweet tea and homemade macaroons.

  Adelaide had been wise to wait to grant the interview until Sara was home on summer break. The man kept dragging the questions back to Susannah’s suspected espionage, and Sara valiantly attempted to redirect the conversation back to uniform making.

  Adelaide finally asked the man if what he really wanted to talk about was Susannah Page.

  “It will make the story more interesting, Mrs. McClane,” he said.

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Was she a loyalist? Actually, was she a spy for the Union? Did she hide Yankee soldiers in this house? Was she one of Pinkerton’s agents?”

  Adelaide played with a crumb of toasted coconut on her plate. Sara whispered to her that she didn’t have to talk about anything she didn’t want to.

  There had been a gentle breeze that afternoon and little humidity. Whatever she said would be carried on the breeze to who knew where—out past the shuttered slaves’ quarters and into the woods or straight into the open windows of Holly Oak.

  “My great-grandmother was a teenager when the war began, and she was loyal to her family, not a cause. She hid a cousin and his best friend, a young man she was very fond of, in this house, and yes, they were Union soldiers. But I know of only the one time she did it. It was before Gettysburg. She told me her husband was not even at Holly Oak at the time, so obviously he was not wounded during their escape. Susannah’s aunt Eliza Pembroke was charged with passing secrets on to the Union Army, not Susannah, and it was Eliza who was imprisoned in Castle Thunder, not Susannah. And I seriously doubt Susannah was one of Pinkerton’s agents.”

  The reporter, who was taping their conversation with a tiny tape recorder, still took notes on a slim, spiral-bound notebook. She read later, in the article, that he had been noting her tone of voice, the confident countenance on her face, and even the accompanying breeze that set her wind chimes to a tinkling applause.

  “I understand you remember your great-grandmother. You were eight, I believe, when she died?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So she told you all of this?”

  “No.”

  The man looked up from this notepad. “So your grandmother or mother did?”

  “No.”

  The man waited.

  “Susannah wrote letters to her cousin Eleanor Towsley. The Towsleys were her father’s family in Maine, and John Towsley was the cousin Susannah hid in the spring of 1863. Eleanor and John were brother and sister. Susannah was very close to her cousins. Not geographically, of course. Susannah and her parents had been living in Washington DC, where Susannah was born. They spent several weeks in Maine every summer. When her father died of influenza in 1860, Susannah and her mother came back to Holly Oak.”

  The man sat forward in his chair. “Do you still have those letters? Are they in a museum somewhere?”

  “I don’t know where they are, I’m afraid.” Adelaide glanced at Sara. And Sara looked down at her hands.

  “But you actually saw these letters? You read them?” the man asked.

  “Oh yes. I read them many times.”

  “But you don’t know what happened to them? Were they stolen?”

  Adelaide had shook her head. “I … I gave them to a family member. And that person lost track of them.”

  The man looked from Sara to Adelaide. “Well, that’s a downright shame. They’d be worth a lot of money, I’d wager.”

  Adelaide had told him they probably would.

  “So. These letters. Susannah Page wrote them during the war? And somehow they made it through the mail to Maine? How did you come to have them in your possession?”

  �
�As I said, she and Eleanor were close. When Eleanor died in 1920, her family sent the letters back to Susannah. And no, she didn’t write them during the entirety of the war. She stopped writing them in the summer of 1862, before the First Battle of Fredericksburg, before she married Lt. Page. Before a lot of things.”

  The man scribbled something in his notebook. “And she gave them to you?”

  “I found them in an escritoire after my grandmother died. Stuffed to the back.”

  The man looked up. “And you didn’t notify anyone, like a museum curator or a historian or something?”

  That had never occurred to Adelaide. Not then. Not ever. “No. They were personal letters.”

  “But of historical significance.”

  “There is nothing significant in the letters that you could not read in any of the mountains of literature written on the Civil War.”

  “Well, except for any parts that would exonerate your great-grandmother.”

  Adelaide stiffened. “My great-grandmother never required exoneration. She was never charged with any wrongdoing.”

  The man smiled. “Yes, but the perception is that she—”

  Adelaide cut him off. “Young man, you are a journalist. You deal with facts, not perceptions. You of all people should know this. People will think what they want. They will always think what they want.”

  The newspaper’s design staff had lifted that quote and set it off by itself in a shaded box with large type.

  The reporter then said he’d like to close by asking her if she had any comments for those with perceptions about her great-grandmother that were untrue.

  “I shouldn’t have to tell the world that things aren’t always what they seem,” Adelaide had said. “Just because you hear a rustle in the trees, that doesn’t mean that the bogeyman is preparing to pounce on you the minute you turn your back. Sometimes the rustling is just God sending a breeze to cool your skin after a hard day in the blazing sun. But I suppose the notion of the bogeyman makes the story more interesting.”

  The man laughed. He told her he enjoyed their interview immensely and that Sara’s macaroons had been exquisite. He promised to send copies of the story after it was published, and then Sara showed him to the door. When she returned to the patio, Adelaide still sat at the table, wondering if she had said too much.