Ghosts of the Missing

by Kathleen Donohoe

  “We?”

  “Most of us are from the same place.” She turned to look directly at him, and that was when he saw that her eyes were green, dark as moss. He had never seen eyes that color before, and now he understood that this was why he had been unable to describe her. He’d had her wrong.

  “What’s your real name?”

  Belatedly, he realized that Katie was what his mother called all the Irish girls who worked for her.

  The corners of her mouth lifted. “Helen,” she said.

  She began to walk around the tree and Cassius followed. She picked up fallen berries and put them in her pocket, then held one up for him to see.

  “Birds love rowan berries,” she said. “This tree is on its own, but there are more up the mountain. A bird dropped a berry and here it grew.”

  He stepped closer to the tree, interested. “Are they poisonous for us?”

  “They’re bitter.”

  “If you’re not going to eat them, what are you collecting them for?”

  “You can’t eat them raw, but you can cook them. Mrs. Walsh gets headaches, and I said I would make a tea for her. She told me to leave off the old nonsense, but it works. She’ll see. It’s a powerful tree in Ireland. Here you would call it magic.”

  “I saw a girl here once with red hair,” he said, and added hesitantly, “I think she was a ghost.”

  But Helen didn’t laugh. She sat down beneath the tree and gestured for him to do the same.

  For over one hundred years, her family, the Dunleavys, had been the keepers of the bell of Saint Maren. In the days when the Catholic religion was outlawed, nuns and priests under siege sought to save the relics of their monasteries and convents from being destroyed. They buried them in graveyards, sank them in riverbeds or gave them to a local family for safekeeping.

  The bell was one such relic, the Dunleavys chosen because women in the family were known to have the cure, the ability to heal. For this they were respected, and they were trusted, already the keepers of secrets.

  The family hid the bell, and the knowledge of the hiding place was passed from mother to eldest daughter. Every year on the feast day of Saint Maren, the family hung the bell from a branch of the quicken tree, and the women and children prayed to the saint for their intentions. After four days, they hid the bell away again. Then one year a daughter of the family disappeared and the bell along with her. She had run away and sold it for the price of ship’s passage, it was said.

  But her family believed the daughter had been taken by the sí, the fairies.

  The night before, they had heard the cry of a fox outside their home. At first light the next morning, the woman of the house had found a hare on the doorstep. Saint Maren, it was said, had a pet of each: the fox warned the saint of danger and the hare carried messages from one world to the next. The mother told her children to stay inside, but the one daughter refused. Neighbors saw her at the quicken tree that day. The quicken tree is a fairy tree, the entrance into the fairies’ world. She got too close. Yet no changeling was sent in her place, and this meant she would be returned.

  But from then on, this line of the family was cursed. Girls born to the family lived, but the boys died in infancy or not long after. The name of the town where they lived came to be called baile na n-iníonacha—Ballyineen, or Daughtertown.

  “The woman in the woods is—her?” Cassius asked. “The one who took the bell?” He had heard his mother speak disdainfully of the superstitious Irish. Nonsense, she would say.

  “She is a thief or she is what was stolen,” Helen said. “Believe what you will, but either way, she’s the girl who was lost.”

  “But why is she here if this happened in Ireland?”

  “I’m all that’s left of the family. She goes with me.”

  After that, Cassius saw Helen most Saturdays. He watched from his bedroom window and when he saw her crossing the back garden, he went after her.

  Helen always took off her shoes and left them by the quicken tree. Cassius did the same. Barefoot, they walked through the woods, the leaves crackling under their bare feet. In the beginning, he would step on a stone or a sharp stick and stifle a cry, but soon the pain didn’t bother him.

  Helen carried a cloth bag over her wrist and collected plants and roots and wildflowers. Some days she was silent, almost unaware of his presence. Cassius walked beside her or wandered ahead, then circled back to find her. Archie stayed with her. Other days she told him stories. She told him how, in everything you sew, you leave a bit of your soul. It was important to leave a hidden mistake so that your soul can escape. She showed him her shawl, how in the back, near the hem, there was a break in the pattern. The way out.

  Days when she dusted the bookshelves at the Crofts’ house, he asked her questions. She was sixteen, she said, born in winter.

  Cassius waited all week for these Saturdays, and halfway through November, he told Helen he was sorry to think that soon snow would fall and they would no longer walk in the woods.

  Helen laughed. “And why not?”

  “It’ll be cold.”

  “So it will.”

  She walked farther and Cassius followed. They came to a fallen tree and Helen sat on its trunk.

  “There’s a soldier in the woods,” Helen said.

  “A soldier?”

  “He’s lost,” Helen said, “since your war.” She turned and looked over her shoulder; Cassius followed her gaze. He saw nothing but trees.

  “What war?” Cassius asked.

  Helen looked sideways at him. “Your American war.”

  “The American Revolution?”

  Helen nodded. The soldier had not deserted, as his family had been told. He’d gotten lost in the woods. Sometimes he appeared and would follow them, hoping they’d lead him out.

  “You see him?” Cassius asked.

  “He was very young,” Helen said. “Not much older than I am.”

  “What was his name?”

  She tilted her head and was silent for a long moment. Cassius heard nothing but the rustle and hum of the woods.

  “He doesn’t say it,” Helen said. “You’d think your name would be something you wouldn’t forget, but it’s been a long time.”

  The wood of a quicken tree keeps the dead from wandering. In Ireland, she explained, graveyards were often set beside them.

  “If we knew where to find his bones, we could lay sticks of the rowan tree beside them. But they’ll never be found. It’s been too long.”

  Helen spoiled him for the speech of those who saw only the living. Cassius wrote about their walks in his journal and recorded the things she said. But he felt, in reading over his words, that he could never quite capture what it was like to be beside her.

  Once the chapel was completed, a missionary priest added it to his circuit, arriving on the third Sunday of every month. Alongside the railroad men and foundry workers came the women and girls who worked in the big houses. May through August saw the area’s population double as the owners of the summer homes arrived. The priest said two Masses because of the influx, and even then, given the size of the chapel, only those who arrived early got a place inside. The rest listened outside, through the open doorway, along with the men.

  The Angelus was only rung on Sundays when the priest came. When Cassius heard the bell ring, he would run to his father’s upstairs study to watch the Irish disappear into the woods, a somber parade that belied their reputation. The Irish went to the chapel on the priestless Sundays as well. They were saying the rosary, Helen told him. In fact, they’d named it Rosary Chapel.

  When it came time for college, Cassius moved to Manhattan to study business. His mother worried that he might feel lost in such a big city, but he did not. The room he lived in, the sidewalks, the buildings, were all narrow and crowded and perfect. He took his course work like medicine, the price for being there.

  For the first two and a half years of the Civil War, Cassius avidly read the newspapers. He was home for t
he summer in July of 1863, unhappily committed to working in the foundry office, when the government instituted conscription. All men of eligible age must serve.

  Cassius defended the principle behind the fight, though not the destruction and certainly not the killing.

  At supper one night, when it appeared that the worst was over, he argued with his father and his cousin Augustus, who was visiting, that though he could not condone the riots, and certainly not the killing, it wasn’t fair to exempt the wealthy from the war. It was not right that a rich man could pay $300 to send a substitute in his place.

  “Join up if you feel that way,” Augustus said.

  “If I were a poor man, I would see it as an opportunity, and one I’m not going to be offered twice,” William said.

  “Worth getting killed or maimed over?” Cassius said.

  “Yes,” his father answered, and Augustus laughed.

  Cassius did what he’d always been careful not to. Helen was setting down the plates. He looked at her. She averted her eyes. But later, when he left the parlor where his father and Augustus settled to talk about the business, Helen was waiting in the hallway.

  Cassius stopped when he saw her. He said her name, once.

  “Before you go to bed, bring him outside, around to our door, off the kitchen,” she whispered.

  “Who?” Cassius said.

  “Him. Your cousin.” Helen turned and disappeared into the dining room.

  That night, Cassius told Augustus he had something to discuss with him. Augustus, intrigued, followed him out the rear door. Helen was waiting, backlit by a candle in the kitchen.

  Augustus looked Helen over, from her face to her feet, and then turned to Cassius.

  She is yours and you are sharing her?

  Though he didn’t say the words out loud, Cassius answered as if he had. “Don’t you know me better than that?”

  “I do,” he said wryly.

  Helen spoke then. “You’re going to purchase a substitute to fight in the war?”

  “How did you know that?” Augustus demanded.

  Helen ignored this and said she had someone for him. A good man who would fight well. He, Augustus, could pay this man directly. Save the broker’s fee.

  Augustus laughed. Cassius stared at her. Who is he? he wanted to ask. But the arrangements were made and Helen had shut the door.

  Cassius didn’t move immediately. He kept his eyes on the window on the second-floor landing of the servants’ stairs. A flicker of light. Then Helen’s shadow, and then Helen, holding a candle, climbing up to her room on the fourth floor.

  When the window was dark again, Cassius turned to go.

  “Be careful,” Augustus said.

  “She’s a friend,” Cassius said.

  “That’s worse.”

  The next Saturday, Cassius found her sitting beneath the quicken tree, barefoot.

  He sat down next to her but left his shoes on.

  “Are you going to marry your soldier? Is he a foundryman?” he asked, trying not to sound accusatory. She had never mentioned him.

  She twirled a leaf with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Yes and yes,” Helen said. “If he lives, we’ll have the money to start a life.”

  “Doing what?” he asked, wide-eyed.

  “What did you think, Cassius? I’d stay forever in your house, polishing your boots?”

  Cassius smiled sadly. That was indeed what he’d thought.

  “You told me you’d never marry. Your family is cursed.”

  “The daughters will live.” Helen hugged her knees. “Leave yourself. You’ll die if you go work for your father.”

  Helen’s words, her warning, were in his mind the day Cassius enlisted to fight for the Union. He wrote to a college friend, a woman who was a poet and abolitionist, part of the group he had fallen in with at school, that the cause was noble, and in any case, his death would be worth the escape from a life bent over a ledger book. He wrote to her what he would have said to Helen. She had gone, and no one at Moye House knew where.

  When the war ended, Cassius returned home. After two years as a prisoner of war, he weighed not much more than he did as a boy of fourteen, and with the bloody lung, as the soldiers had called it. The doctor summoned by his mother from Manhattan properly called it tuberculosis. Though he eventually recovered, his health remained fragile enough to keep him tethered to the family home. The loss of a leg or an arm would have been preferable. Those war injuries at least had more nobility to them.

  When his father died, Cassius managed to stand by the grave at the service, leaning on a cane, and though his mother linked her arm through his, he felt her recrimination. You did this. You needed to prove—what? They’d endured two years of worry, believing their only son had died and been buried unnamed. He bowed his head but was not sorry. Though Cassius was unable to travel, the war had given him enough to write about. He wrote in the study upstairs, the one that had been his father’s, from which he’d watched the Irish disappear into the woods.

  Augustus stepped into the foundry, taking over the position that Cassius had been groomed for. Cassius lived off a percentage of the income, the owner in name only. He and his cousin made this arrangement and let it be. It was no use dwelling on the accident of birth that had seen them born to the wrong fathers.

  This, Cassius wrote in a letter to the poet, his college friend. She had been in love with him before the war. To save her embarrassment, he had pretended not to notice. When she came to visit him in the autumn of 1867, she brought her husband with her, a writer, another of that group. The man had been an abolitionist too, arguing the cause in both the college and city newspapers. The pen was the only weapon he’d ever picked up.

  Cassius overlooked their pity and hid his bitterness. The two became his only regular visitors. He loaned them the money to start their own press, and when it became modestly successful, they persuaded Cassius to let them publish a collection of his short stories. Why write and put the pages away in a drawer? Though they commissioned a sketch from the daguerreotype of Cassius in uniform, he would become known for the one story that didn’t feature a single soldier.

  The book was called The Lost Girl and Other Stories, and after the title story was reprinted in a popular magazine, the book began to receive attention. By the second year after its publication, those who’d read it were coming to visit the place where the story was set. Many were on weekend trips to other towns in the Hudson Valley, and they decided to take the side trip to what were still the northern outskirts of the city of Onohedo.

  They came to Onohedo on the railroad and hired carriages to take them to Moye House. They timed their visits to coincide with the date named in the opening scene, October 27. Yet when they asked for directions to the real tree and for the name of the real girl, they were told that while there was a mountain ash that grew in the woods not far from Moye House, the story itself was invented.

  No girl of sixteen had gone picking berries in the woods and vanished. There was no weeks-long search, no quiet giving up. Her mother did not ask for her daughter to be buried beside her if her bones were ever found. No woman appeared twenty years later claiming to be the lost girl, dividing her sisters between a miracle and a lie.

  Cassius, surprised by the need people had to see the “real” place, asserted again and again that though not directly a war story, “The Lost Girl” was inspired by all the men who wondered if they might die and be buried nameless, leaving their families in an agony of limbo. Though his health did not allow him to be part of New York City’s literary life, after “The Lost Girl,” the community came to him.

  The poet and her husband brought company first for weekends and then for longer stays, encouraging them to hone their craft in this mountainside retreat. Many would say they got their best work done at Moye House.

  At the end of the autumn of 1876, it was not another writer or an admirer of his book who came to see Cassius, but a woman who would not give her name
to the girl who answered the door. Cassius had been sick for a week with a cough that took him back to nights in prison when that was all he heard from the men around him.

  But he’d improved. His chest ached but he could take a deep breath. He was not writing at the time, was in between stories, and he expected no company until the weekend. He nodded his permission. A reader, he assumed.

  Cassius heard the maid’s footsteps on the bare floor of the hall but none behind her, and that was when he knew whom he would see behind her. Helen stepped into the room and waited. Cassius told the girl to go without a glance, and she looked from him to Helen before scurrying off.

  He was sitting in front of the fireplace, a quilt over his legs, and was aware of how it gave him the appearance of an old man. Helen came into the room and sat in the chair opposite his, disorienting him for a moment. But of course, she was no longer a servant here.

  She showed him the photograph in a locket she wore around her neck. Her son.

  “He died?” Cassius asked.

  He had, and her husband too, Helen told him. There were two girls as well, and no pension, since her husband had not been killed in the war. His death had come after, unrelated.

  “What do you want from me?” Cassius asked.

  To live here, Helen replied in a voice that was calm and sure.

  “To work—”

  But Helen said she would not be a servant again. She could live in the chapel, empty now that a proper church had been built not far from the one that burned all those years ago.

  “Let me stay there for a time. I won’t bother you or anyone.”

  Cassius nodded and said she and her daughters could stay as long as they liked.

  The three of them took in sewing to support themselves. The wives of the foundrymen began to visit Helen when their children were sick, or when they were themselves. Helen was believed to be a healer.

  This information was given to Cassius by his cook, who came to him because she was afraid Helen Dunleavy would poison somebody. Cassius suggested to Helen that she limit her advice to the foundry wives and the servant girls, and not the city people who came to see the mountain ash he had made famous. (The chapel, very near the tree, often startled the story tourists when they came upon it.)