by M Dressler
“They totally are. We have no trouble here at all. And I don’t think ghosts are what we need to be afraid of, in any case. I think what we need to be afraid of is not being attended to, Rose. Of not being listened to and heard and accepted as we are.”
“What?” I ask, surprised.
“Well, if you want to know, I could tell you a real ghost story.”
But . . . aren’t all our stories real?
When she was a girl, this Su Kwon tells me, she lived with her family in a large, airy house, and with them, in the traditional way, lived a bachelor uncle, her mother’s brother, named Uncle Bao. He was a loving and patient man, the perfect relative, and a perfect guest, though he had one fear: tight spaces.
“Claustrophobic,” she explains as she slows her truck through an icy ditch. “Ever since he was a kid. But it got worse when he was diagnosed with his heart condition. Our uncle got to where he was absolutely terrified of being smothered. He told us, if he died, to be sure not to let anyone cover up his face with a sheet. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of it. We all knew that about Uncle Bao. Never let him feel suffocated. Then one year he went into the hospital for heart surgery, and he was perfectly fine afterwards when we came to visit him, but then when we came back, later in the day, he had a sheet over his face. We all wailed. We were so horrified. We had failed him. The hospital had failed him. Everything had failed him.”
The morning after the funeral, her family awoke and found every knife from the kitchen cupboard laid out on the dining room table. Her mother tried putting the knives away. The next day, they came back. Her father tried throwing them away. Again they returned. They tried throwing them in the bay. Again they returned.
“Everyone said we needed to hire a cleaner. They said we had no choice, Uncle had become a ghost, and he had to be put down. But my mother kept insisting, no. She said Bao didn’t deserve to be treated like a mad dog, that that isn’t what we do in our tradition. So she volunteered to stay up all night in the dining room to see if she could speak with him. The rest of my family were afraid, but agreed. We were all supposed to go to our rooms that night, stay asleep, stay away. But me? I didn’t. I crept out and crouched in the hallway. I saw my mother sitting in the dining room in a chair flat against the wall. There was only this one light on, hanging over the dinner table. She stayed still. Waiting. Nothing happened. Nothing happened for so long, I finally fell asleep on the hallway rug. I only woke when I heard a tinkling sound. The knives were all out on the tablecloth. And I could hear someone sobbing.
“My mother, she’s a small person, but tough. She wasn’t the one crying. She was staring at the knives. All the blades were pointing not at her, but away from her. I saw her look down at the hem of the tablecloth. It was shivering, trembling near the floor. She told me later on she didn’t know how she knew what she had to do. She just got up, walked over to that table, faced the knife handles, picked up the biggest, sharpest blade, bent down, and slid it under the cloth at the floor. Something took it from her, and she ran back to her chair. I rushed over to her, afraid. She held me, both of us shaking. Then we saw the tip of the knife. Slicing right up the side of the tablecloth. Cutting it.”
Two hands appeared, and parted the ripped fabric. A bald head came through. Then Uncle Bao’s body. Still wearing his gray hospital gown. The half-naked man blinked, then stood, then bowed to where the two of them were sitting. Then he turned his naked back on them and climbed onto the dining table, reaching for the hanging lamp above it, pulling himself up, feet first, until he walked upside down on the ceiling, and disappeared through a grate.
“Everyone told us he’d haunt the attic next—but nope. Uncle Bao never did. The next night everything was calm. We never saw Uncle again. He was at peace. My mother says that the gwisin—our word for ghosts—are just like anyone else. We all need to be attended to, and respected. It would have been the most terrible thing in the world to call a cleaner in, my mother believed, and I agree. God knows we have plenty of things to be afraid of and worried about these days”—she looks up at the gray sky through her window—“but souls wanting peace and happiness? Who are just like us? They aren’t one of them. I’ve always thought we should leave our fears for better—or rather worse—things.”
I turn to stare at this long-haired woman driving beside me—for I’ve never seen her like in all my days. I’ve never, not once, heard such words uttered by a living human being.
“A wonder,” I say, in a whisper.
She laughs. “Glad you’re not shocked. I wasn’t trying to shock you. I’m just trying to explain what I mean. About honoring what people need. Everyone wants peace. Why make a crime out of it?”
“But not everyone,” I say quickly, to correct her. The living aren’t all the same. Not all want only peace and rest. So why would all the dead?
She slows the truck, turning to look at me, interested. We come to a stop in an alley behind the square.
“You don’t think we’re all Uncle Bao, in the end?” she asks.
“Some are, maybe. Others, no. Maybe some want the farthest thing from rest.”
“And what would be the farthest thing from rest, do you think?”
Adventure, I tell her. Love. Whatever you were denied in life. Justice. Freedom.
“Adventure. Freedom.” She nods, and her thin brows pull together. “I wonder if you’re right.” She goes on looking at me, weighing, then breaks into a wide, happy smile. “Rose! You are so cool! We need to have more time to talk. I have to get back to my studio and get to work—but let’s make some time to get to know each other better, when you can? Right now, I want you to tell me where you want to go. Don’t worry about the metal in the back, you’ve helped enough, I’ll get Bill or Harold to finish the job. Let me get you oriented real quick now we’re back in town.” She points out the window. “That up there on the right is the back entrance to my gallery, next to the back door to Harold’s General Store. Across the alley is my workshop—that barn door. You can come on over and knock whenever you want to find me. Right now, I can take you to where the rest of the tour is, if you want. Up from Ruth’s museum it’s a nice walk to what we call the Knob, near the bridge, if you think you can do it in those shoes. We need to talk to Harold about getting you some better ones. Or I could take you back over to Martha’s place. What’s your mood? Where to?”
My mood is still wonder, but I ask, “What’s the Knob?”
“Where the schoolhouse is. The second historic one in town. The first one burned down.”
I open the door quickly. “I’ll go there.”
“Wait, I could drive you up.”
“No, thank you,” I say, forgetting everything else but this: I burn. I burn.
“I hope all my talking didn’t wear you out.” Su Kwon bends anxiously. “I know I can be a bit of a gabber.”
“Not at all.” I burn.
“I’m here if you need anything, okay? Just let me know. I mean it.” She waves as I leave the alley. I soon lose sight of her.
I hurry past the barred and closed Jailhouse Museum. I hurry away from the empty white square. All seems more still now, after her chattering. And lonelier, too.
Best keep your thoughts, Emma Rose, I tell myself, on the ones that matter. You’re not here to jaw with the living.
I climb, hurrying, hurrying—I won’t slow, I don’t tire, I never tire, even if sometimes I feel every inch of this skin, tight against me—keeping my eye on the building that when I first came I took for a church.
When a wrong thought comes to you, you change it.
8
I take the map again from my pocket, the pocket of the mayor’s coat, to read:
Your tour of White Bar comes to an end as you walk up for a view from Schoolhouse Knob. Named for the one-room school that still stands above town, its viewpoint will reward you with a panorama of the High Sierras, the Eno River Valley, and a glimpse into a nearly forgotten aspect of Gold Rush life. The White Bar Schoolhouse wa
s built in 1852. It was in continuous use until the start of the Great Depression. Though children were rare in the mining camps of the late 1840s, by the 1850s families were beginning to settle in the region. Walk the yard and imagine the voices of children and adults ringing out in play. Though the schoolroom is closed to visitors to preserve its artifacts for future generations, feel free to look through the antique-paned windows, where you’ll see the teacher’s and pupils’ desks, the pegged, wide-planked floor, and the potbellied stove necessary for warmth during the harsh winters. Thank you for visiting Historic White Bar, where we welcome you with a Heart of Gold!
I reach the peeling white clapboard at last. The door to the steepled building is chained and locked, but through tall, rippled-glass windows, rimed with cold, I see into a room and a past as familiar to me as if I’ve traveled so far only to land right where I began.
It’s much the same one-room schoolhouse as the one where long ago I was put in a corner and made to count to five hundred. Plank walls. Seats hard as nails. Sloping desks, each desk nailed to the seat in front of it. The American flag tasseled in one corner. An hourglass on a bench to mark the time. I had to leave school each day at noon and carry lunch pails from the boardinghouses to the lumberjacks cutting down trees. Yet I made sure to do all the lessons I missed, my father’s voice ringing in my ears: Never let anyone tell you we Irish are poor and uneducated, Emma Rose. It’s a thousand years of blood and knowledge we’ve got running through our veins, and it’s all come with us here to America, as much as our backs and necks have, and you must always remember and know that. You’ll always remember and know that, now, won’t you?
After he died, it was no more school for me, and no more learning about mountains, or how to write in a fair hand, or how to be more than a scullery maid.
But after I died and rose again I became more than I was. I’ve learned a thousand things in many thousands of days. A ghost has ages to study the world, a chance to teach herself whatever it is she needs to know. I’m no longer just a poor girl who scrubbed floors. Philip Pratt doesn’t believe a ghost can grow wiser. Yet I have, so that I know, for instance, that I’m looking into a room only pretending to be empty. Its faded books might be shelved, its black stove dark and cold, that finger of white chalk sitting motionless beside its slate. But the light in this room doesn’t fall the way it should, so late in the afternoon, from these tall windows. It wavers, slithering across the wooden floor like a river slipping from its banks.
The flickering, waving light climbs the desk with the slate. The blank tablet rocks a little, as though the wind were shivering it—though there can be no wind inside a locked room.
“Who’s there?” I ask from the window. “What do you want me to see? Should I come in?”
A soul is always learning what she can and can’t do. This body that lets me touch and walk the world—it can’t easily fly, and it can’t slip through a keyhole, as my bare soul can. But my soul is strong. I look down the road. No one’s coming from town. I circle to the back of the schoolhouse, where a grove of pines has grown up next to it. What I must do is push the root of my will against the earth, loosing myself from the ground, lifting this cold body with me. It feels like carrying the weight of shoulders on my shoulders. On the roof, I can relax again, keeping low on these hands and knees, bellying my way to the short steeple. It’s an empty belfry, with a trapdoor unlocked. I suppose White Bar never imagined a visitor might invite herself in this way.
I’m careful to drop where the pegged floor is empty in front of the iron stove. A little puff of dust whirls under these shoes and this coat. The stovepipe at my side is cold to the touch. The pupils’ seats are dusty. On the chalkboard behind the teacher’s platform, the letters of the alphabet curl, A, B, C. I move, carefully, careful now, to the back of the classroom, where the schoolchild’s slate still trembles on the last row, on a desk worn and scratched.
On it, written in chalk, in blockish letters, there is now a single, vibrating word.
Broken.
I nod. “Something has broken.”
The desk shakes underneath it.
My soul shakes, too. We’re speaking at last. Across time, fear, danger. It’s no easy thing, to meet where you aren’t supposed to.
“Will you show me more? I’m as dead as you. You can trust me.”
And with that, I’m shown.
The sun turns high and bright and hot, coming in through the windows. The desks are filled with living children. Nine squirming bodies. The girls’ hair is short and bobbed, the boys’ parted in the center and greased.
On the platform, at a wiped chalkboard, a teacher stands. She wears wire spectacles. Her hair is short and pin-curled, her dark dress falling just below the knees.
But there are more in the room. Not like the others. Fewer. Not nine. Six.
The nine living children sitting in their seats raise their hands and call out excited answers to their teacher’s queries. The ghostly children stand beside them, dead and pale, and say not a word. Their collars are limp. Their faces unsmiling. Their eyes, unblinking, stare forward. Their hair is roughly cut, long or braided. The girls’ dresses are long-sleeved gray sheaths of dotted or flowered calico. The dead boys wear rough gray pants and short-seamed coats.
They stare at the head of the classroom, where, too, a ghostly schoolmaster stands, in his frayed black coat over a frayed collar. His hair is tucked behind his ears. His string tie twists at his long neck. Wordlessly, he glares at the standing children, his eyes fixed on them. A mesmerizing gaze.
The oldest pupils are at the back, as they were in my day. The last one standing is a tall girl in flowered calico. Her dress is ruched at the wrists. Her hair is russet brown, too thick for the childish braids she wears. She stares in front of her, her ghostly face like stone.
The ghost of the flowered sleeves.
I feel my face light, my soul soar. We’ve done it. We’ve found each other.
She shows no answering light. She’s frozen. In torment. She and her fellow spirits are so much older than the children they hover beside. Older, even, than I am, their clumsy boots laced high, their shirt buttons made of wood, their hair tied with twine. For how long, I wonder, has this schoolhouse been haunted?
The girl turns to look at me. Her eyes burning.
I feel you, I burn back at her. I see you. What happened to you?
She turns and stares, accusing, at the teacher.
I reach out toward her, but at a noise the vision she’s made for me crumbles.
I swear like a lumberjack. Shite. What’s happened? I look out the schoolhouse windows. Someone is coming up the Knob.
We, I, can’t be found in this locked room. There’s nothing for it but to go up and out again. I will this small body free from earth’s pull and strain up through the trapdoor, keeping low on the roof again, and edge down the back of the schoolhouse, coming to rest on the snow, walking out just in time to meet a heavy-booted man tramping over the icy schoolyard, carrying something in his arms.
“There you are, Rose!” He waves as though he knows me and I should know him. “Thought I saw you a while ago heading up here. I’m Harold Dubois, from the General Store? Su alerted me you had some immediate needs. I’ve got”—he holds out a pair of boots made of stiff, black rubber—“something I think you’re after.” His bright eyes over his stubbled chin look down at me, kindly. “You really can’t go around in flimsy flats, you know, especially this time of year. You’ll slip and crack your head on a rock. If you don’t lose your toes first.”
Harold. From the General Store. I nod, still cursing inside. I don’t need any more kindness from the living. Why must everyone come when they’re not wanted? Su Kwon sent him, and now he’s here to find me, and so I must smile sweetly, I suppose, in thanks. In the slanted light, I see he’s the muscled man who was busy earlier cleaning his store windows. Harold Dubois wears a knit cap, and under his stubble his neck is deeply tanned, like a man who’s been to sea.
“Mr. Dubois, thank you, you’re so kind.”
He grins, pleased. “Sure thing! Want to see if they fit? Come on over to the stoop here, try them on. They’re overshoes. They’ll do for now till we can get you something more suited.”
I take the rubber in my hands. It feels heavy, plodding. It’ll weigh me down even more.
“And don’t you worry about the price, now.” He stands beside the stoop, leaning over me. “We can’t have a guest like you wandering around and hurting yourself. You’ve been through enough already. Or so I hear.” His dark neck flushes, embarrassed. “Anyway. You just slip ’em over what you got on now. That’s how these work. Then later, like I say, we can get you some proper things.”
He’s so eager. Like all of them.
He looks away as I dress my feet. He brushes a bit of snow from the chain on the locked door, craning his head up toward the steeple, then down at the ground.
“Good on your feet?”
“Like they’re my own,” I say.
“Sized right, then. Good. Now you can make your way safely down the hill. Coming up the Knob is one thing, see, but going down is another. It can be awkward.” He scratches under his cap. “You need good tread, especially this late in the day. You always have to be more careful when the melt re-freezes. That’s when people get hurt.” He backs away from the stoop as I stand up from it, patiently. “Did you have enough time to peek into our schoolhouse, Rose? Isn’t she a peach? Needs a bit of paint, maybe a few fresh shingles. Other than that, she’s shipshape. Ruth handles the inside, me and Bill take care of the exterior. Come spring, she’ll get a fresh coat.”
You don’t know, I think, what’s still fresh inside.
He coughs when I say nothing. “Well, we should probably be getting going. Gets dark here quicker than you might think. And it’s getting colder, isn’t it? We really do need to get you something better than Martha’s last year’s coat.” He holds out his hand, like a gentleman clearing the way for me.