Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

by Kelly Barnhill

  He had been eleven years old when he last saw a Sasquatch. And now all he had to do was pick up the phone and invite Mrs. Sorensen over for dinner. Huh, he thought. Imagine that.

  The meal, though quiet, was pleasant enough. The Sasquatch brought a bowl of wildflowers, which the priest ate. They were delicious.

  Two weeks later, Mrs. Sorensen brought her Sasquatch to church. She brought her other animals too—her one-eyed hedgehog and her broken-winged hawk and her tiny cat and her raccoon and her three-legged dog and her infant cougar, curled up and fast asleep on her lap. The family arrived early, and sat in the front row, Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch in the middle, and the rest of the brood stretching on either side. Each one sat as straight backed as was possible with the particulars of their physiology, and each one was silent and solemn. The Sasquatch wore nothing other than Mr. Sorensen’s father’s old fedora hat, which was perched at a bit of a saucy angle. It held Mrs. Sorensen’s hand in its great, left paw and closed its large, bright eyes.

  Father Laurence did his pre-Mass preparations and ministrations with the sacristy door locked. The sisters hovered at the other side, pecking at the door and squawking their complaints. Father Laurence was oblivious. He was a great admirer of the inventor of earplugs, and made it a habit to stash an emergency set wherever he might find the need to surreptitiously insert a pair at a moment’s notice—at his desk, at the podium, in his car, in the confessional, and in the sacristy.

  “A sacrilege!” Mrs. Ostergaard hissed.

  “Do something!” came Mrs. Lentz’s strangled gasp.

  “GET THAT DEER OUT OF THE CHURCH,” Mrs. Ferris roared, followed by a chaos of hooves and snorting and the shouting of women and men, and the hooting of an owl and the cry of the peregrine and the snarl of—actually, Father Laurence wasn’t sure if it was a coyote or a wolf.

  Agnes Sorensen was too old to have children. Everyone knew that. But she had always wanted a family. And now she was so happy. Didn’t she deserve to be happy? The sisters pecked and screeched. He imagined their fingers curling into talons, their imperious lips hardening to beaks. He imagined their appliquéd cardigans and their floral skirts rustling into feathers and wings. He imagined their bright beady eyes launching skyward with a wild, high kee-yar of a hawk on the hunt for something small and brown and wriggling.

  The priest stood in the sacristy, his eyes closed. “O God, your creatures fill the earth with wonder and delight,” he sang.

  “Doris,” he heard Mrs. Ferris say. “Doris, do not approach that cougar. Doris, it isn’t safe.”

  “And every living thing has worth and beauty in your sight.”

  “Oh, god. Not sheep. Anything but sheep. GET THOSE ANIMALS OUT OF HERE.”

  “So playful dolphins dance and swim; Your sheep bow down and graze.”

  “Father, get out here this minute. Six otters just came out of the bathroom. Six! And with rabies!”

  “Your songbirds share a morning hymn, To offer you their praise.”

  There was a snarl, a screech, a cry of birds. A hiss and a bite and several rarely used swears from the mouths of the Parish Council. Father Laurence heard the clatter of their pastel heels and the oof of their round bottoms as they tripped on the stairs, and the howl of their voices as they ran down the street.

  Several men waited at the mouth of the sanctuary, looking sadly at the pretty widow next to her hulking companion. The men reeked of mustache oil and pomade. Their shoulders slumped and their bellies bulged and their cheeks went slack.

  “Eh, there, Father?” Ernie Jergen—Randall’s sober brother—inclined his head toward the stoic family in the front row. “So that’s it, then?” He cleared his throat. “She’s . . . not single. She’s attached, I mean.”

  Father Laurence clapped his hands on the shoulders of the men, sucked in his sagging belly as tight as he could.

  “Yep,” he said. “Seems so.” Family is family, after all. The dead have buried the dead, and the living scramble and struggle as best they can. They press their shoulder against the rock and urge forward, even when all hope is lost. Agnes Sorensen was happy, and Agnes Sorensen was alive. So be it.

  Father Laurence nodded at the organist to start the processional. The red-tailed hawk opened up its throat, and the young buck nosed the back of the priest’s vestments. A pair of solemn eyes. A look of gravitas. Father Laurence wondered if he should step aside. If he was interrupting something. Two herons waited at the altar and a pine martin sat on the lectionary.

  The organist sat under a pile of cats and made a valiant effort to pluck out the notes of the hymn. The congregation—both human and animal—opened their throats and began to sing, each in their own language, their own rhythm, their own time.

  The song deepened and grew. It shook the walls and rattled the glass and set the light fixtures swinging. The congregation sang of the death of loved ones. A life eclipsed too soon. They sang of the waters of the bog and the creak of trees and of padded feet on soft forest trails. Of meals shared. And families built. Seeds in the ground. The screech of flight, the joy of a wriggling morsel in a sharp beak. The roar of pursuit and the gurgles of satiation. The murmur of nesting. The smell of a mate. The howl of birthing and the howl of loss, and howl and howl and howl.

  Father Laurence processed in. Open-mouthed. A dark yodel tearing through his belly.

  “I am lost,” he sang. “And I am found. My body is naked in the muck. It has always been naked. I hope; I rage; I despair; I yearn; I long; I lust; I love. These strong hands that built, this strong back that carried, all must wither to dust. Indeed, I am dust already.”

  Mrs. Sorensen and her Sasquatch watched him process down the aisle. They smiled at his song. He paused at their pew, let his hand linger on the rail. They reached out and touched the hem of his garment.

  It was, people remarked later, the prettiest Mass they’d ever heard.

  Mrs. Sorensen and her family left after Communion. They did not stay for rolls or coffee. They did not engage in conversation. They walked, together, into the bog. The tall grasses opened for a moment to allow them in and then closed like a curtain behind them. The world was birdsong and quaking mud and humming insects. The world was warm and wet and green.

  They did not come back.

  What he wrote:

  My dearest Angela,

  I have spent weeks dreading what we must do today, and even as I write this, I am not entirely convinced that it is right. We are, and have been, and will be for the foreseeable future, overrun with soldiers, which is to say, our dear American guests. (Which is worse, love, their public drunkenness, or their incessant leering?) Far better, my darling, that you should be far away from this nursery of convalescing men, and far from the multitudes of explosives that spin like vultures in the sky. London will be flattened before the year is up, if the rumors are true. How could we not be next?

  My family, yes, are tiresome. The house, yes, is drafty and unpleasant. But the grounds are lovely. And if you cannot paint the sea, perhaps you could paint the wood. Or paint the sea from memory. Or paint me from memory. Or paint a memory of me. Dear god, my girl, but I shall miss you.

  Ever yours,

  John

  What he did not:

  John watched the train wait at the platform with Angela’s pale, lovely, and petulant face framed by the greasy window. She would forgive him in time, of course. She always did. And the things that she did not know, she had no need to forgive.

  The train shuddered, then rumbled, then slid out of sight. John stood still, watching the empty space where Angela’s face had been, as though a shadow of his wife still hung in the air, like a ghost. Unaccountably, he shivered, and his skin was damp and icy cold. He breathed in, deeply, through his nose, luxuriating in the smell of oil and smoke, and faintly, he was certain, the smell of lavender and lilac that was ever his wife.

  H
e missed her.

  And yet, he did not.

  Shivering again, he rubbed his arms briskly with his long, narrow hands. Hands that were meant to entertain; fingers that could coax music from reluctant instruments and moans from hesitant lovers. Hands that now produced documents—perfectly accurate, deadly quick—for his superiors in the RAF. His instruments lay untouched and abandoned in the music room. His lovers—well, that was a different story.

  He turned and headed out of the station.

  The day was fine again, the fifth in a string of fine days, with a warm sun set in a cool blue sky with a bracing wind coming up over the water. The promenade was inundated, as usual, with soldiers—big, strong-jawed Americans with their strange shimmer and stink, their arms weighted by simpering girls. There were English soldiers too, but by comparison, they were pale, worn, their edges fraying to dust and light. No spending money in their pockets. And they were without women.

  He cut through the gardens into a street of row houses. A man stood framed between a doorway and a shuttered window, leaning against one of the houses. The door was red, the shutters green. The man was trim and pale and clean. He shimmered. John approached the man and leaned where he leaned. The man did not smell like lilacs or lavender. And yet. The bricks were warm and solid. They smelled of sun and oil and smoke. Without a word, the pair slipped inside the red door.

  Later John would try to piece together the events of the day following his wife’s departure, though for the life of him, he could not. He did not know how long he had leaned. He did not know how long he had been inside. A gentleman does not, after all, keep time in such circumstances. Nevertheless, over the course of the late morning and early afternoon, the wind increased and began to rattle at the windows and walls and door. Later, John heard moaning. And whether the moaning was the wind or the lover or something else entirely, he could never be sure.

  Until he was. And by then, it was too late to do anything about it.

  What she wrote:

  Dear John,

  It was a disaster, my love, and it was all your fault. When one travels, one should be rested and fresh, and I am neither (and I believe you know why, you naughty man). As you suggested, I had my sketchbook on my lap, and prepared myself to draw my last images of the sea before I was delivered to that den of stuffy rooms and tiresome conversation that is the place of your birth, but instead of a picture, all I have are the first intimations of wind before my hand drifted to the side of the page and I drifted to sleep. So the sketch is ruined, the painting is ruined, and you, dear husband, are dreadful.

  To make it worse, I missed my stop at Westhoughton, as I was fast asleep, dreaming of you (my love, you wretch). The train stopped with a terrific jolt just outside of Bolton, in view of the station, though not pulled in. Whether it was a faulty engine, or that we simply ran out of fuel, I do not know. No one could say. In fact, no one spoke to me at all. The other passengers milled about outside of the train for some time, muttering, the lot of them, like idiots. I marched myself to the desk and attempted to ring the bell, which did not ring, and I immediately began to hate the war. Now in addition to sugar and jam and beef, we must, apparently, also give up bells.

  And I the sea, and you your wife. What will be next?

  The man did not turn away from his telephone as I tried to talk to him, and instead just jabbered endlessly about the train. What was there to say about the train? It didn’t work, clearly, and it had, evidently, devoured my trunk.

  A kindly man with a truck agreed to give me a lift, though he did not speak either, deaf and dumb, poor man. But I listened as the station guard gave him directions to Westhoughton, and then repeated the directions, not once but three times, to the poor, dear simpleton, and then wrote them all out. So I sat next to him on the cart as we drove. He never once glanced upon me—I daresay he is little used to female companions, so I drew his portrait for him and left it on the seat with a note. I assume he liked it, because as I walked down the track to your infernal mother’s house, I could hear him weeping. Weeping like a child.

  As I wept then. On that terrible day. When we were children. Do you remember? How strange that I should think of that now!

  Forever yours,

  Angela

  What she did not:

  She should have been thinking of greetings and directions. But as she walked down the well-trod track that led to the dark hulk of her mother-in-law’s family home, she barely noticed where her feet touched the earth. For all she knew, they might not have touched the earth at all. What she did notice was memory. A memory so sharp it pricked her tongue. After a while, she tasted blood. Or, she thought she did.

  When Angela was a child, she and her parents and brother spent their summers at John’s family’s home, as their parents were all musicians and spent their summers playing endless adagios in the garden. John, four years her senior, had little time for Angela the child, and spent most waking hours in the company of her elder brother, James, a thin, pale, serious boy, often ill, who much later died of pneumonia while studying at Oxford.

  During that summer in question, however, James had, yet again, taken ill with a fever and could be neither visited nor played with for two weeks. On one particularly fine day, Angela found John in the library, lounging in a pool of sunlight on the floor, and poring over a stack of books. Angela, then nine years old, sat next to John and patted him on the thigh. He didn’t notice her at first. Or at least he pretended not to. She patted him again. John propped the book on his chest, uncurling and stretching his long limbs outward into the sunlight, like a cat.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Watching,” he said, not looking up from the page.

  “Watching what?” she asked.

  “Ghosts,” he said.

  “What ghosts?”

  “Well, it’s an old house, isn’t it? The older the house, the more spirits haunting it. Thought everybody knew that.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Well, it’s as true as I’m sitting here. Look around you. You can see ’em trapped in every window.”

  Angela looked up. She gasped. She saw them. Saw them. Each window held a face—pale, dark eyed, and livid. Each with a pink slash for a mouth. Each with seaweed hair and seafoam skin. Each moving softly, as though underwater. Angela screamed and covered her face with her hands. She wept for each face, each pink mouth. She wept for things lost and things she could not name. John laughed loudly, with gusto, and slapped Angela hard on the back as though they were both men.

  “Poor little idiot,” John said both kindly and unkindly. “Poor little thing.” He left the room, still laughing, and shut the door with a hollow click.

  The ghosts remained in the windows for the rest of the day. Angela shut her eyes when she could and stared at the floor when she could not. Her parents thought she was ill like James, and sent her likewise to bed.

  The next day, Angela started to paint—and she would continue to do so, daily, for the rest of her life, often for hours at a time. The day after that, John decided that she would one day be his wife. She was, he said, the only girl for him. It was mostly true.

  What he wrote:

  My darling,

  I set out today, prepared to be cross. Deeply cross, if you must know. When the post arrived, I tore through the stack of envelopes looking for the clean, sure stroke of your most beloved hand and found it was nowhere to be seen. Is this, I asked, what a devoted husband should expect from his wayward wife?

  In the meantime, Mrs. Wooten at the tea shop scolded me this morning for not sending my beautiful wife away from this unholy den of lusty soldiers.

  “They pant after her like dogs, the poor little lamb,” she said, smacking her wooden spoon upon the counter with a deafening crack.

  “My dear lady,” said I, “I sent her to my mother’s house not two days a
go.” She did not believe me, of course, and insisted on calling me everything from a horse’s ass to a fiend-of-a-man, unworthy of the angel who is my Angela. She insisted that she had seen you just that morning, sitting in your chair by the sea, painting a landscape of wind. She said that your hair was undone and you had a carpetbag at your feet.

  And just as I was about to speak ill of you, my dear, I placed my hand in my pocket and withdrew your letter. How it came to be there, I’m sure I don’t know, but I assume I must have slipped it in without even thinking. Oh, to see your lettering, my love! Oh, to hold the paper once held by your dear fingers. Perhaps this is what happens when we force the artist into the office instead of the studio—a weakened mind, my dear. I do hope you’ll forgive me for it.

  Mrs. Wooten, I’m glad to say, was pacified, my darling. And so am I.

  Ever yours,

  John

  What he did not:

  Although he had received offers of company the previous night, he opted to sleep alone. The wind continued to hiss at the windowpane and insinuate itself into the cracks. The brass bed beneath him creaked and whined each time he shivered. Eight times he attempted to sleep. Eight times he slept, though briefly and not well. Eight times he woke to a dream of Angela. Angela, seated by the sea, her hair undone and sailing like notes in an insistent breeze. Angela, whose long fingers were brought to her mouth as she puzzled over her paints. Angela, whose head was cocked curiously to the side, listening to a faraway sound of twisting metal and dying engines—the percussive slap of compressed explosives hurtling themselves into the sky. She listened as though hearing music. A smile played upon her pale pink lips. John woke in tears. He did not know why.

  What she wrote:

  Dearest John,

  It is official. Your mother is not speaking to me. I do not know what I have done to offend her, but whatever it is, will you please inform her that it is your fault, and I, as usual, am blameless. I arrived last night in the dark and though I rang endlessly, the house was silent. So like a thief, I entered your mother’s home unawares and settled into your old room. The next morning, at breakfast, I greeted your mother and sat down across from her. She ate her egg and sipped her tea—she hoards it you know, and buys it from the blackest of black markets from possibly German spies—and said nothing. I was dying for tea. Dying for it, darling. Yet no place was set, no breakfast called for. I was glad to see that dear old Charles was still in her employ, though he did not speak to me either—doubtless on his mistress’s orders. Once I tilted my head in an utterly charming way and fluttered my fingers toward him. He looked at me then, managed to raise his eyebrows in hello before turning quite white and staring at the ground.