Shadows in Summerland

by Adrian Van Young

  “Let us see, girl. Let us see,” this man was saying, bearing down.

  I clawed at his face, but he remained. And then he was wrenching at my clothes.

  “Let us see. Let us see. Let us see. Let us see.”

  He whispered it fiercely, fumbling with his belt.

  With one of his hands he had me pinned. The other one fished inside his pants.

  He did not seem to really want me. There was no heat beneath his skin. He was doing this not out of wanting to do it but rather because I had wanted it less.

  Then there was a blinding light. Edwards stopped fumbling, his trousers half down. He turned around to see the source and as he rotated away, it grew brighter.

  Shadrach Barnes stood in the door.

  “Mr. Edwards, a moment?” he said from the hallway.

  “Hem,” said the other. “If you might—with the door . . .”

  “I shall not budge until you do.”

  Shakily, slowly, Edwards rose, refastened his belt and walked toward Barnes.

  I was sitting there stiff with my hair in a tangle, my dress still up around my thighs.

  Then the room was dark again and I could hear the two of them conversing in the corridor. I heard one of them and, much later, the other making up the basement stairs.

  I lay there benumbed and yet calm in the dark. I could still smell the scent of the coal-baron’s liquor. And I would lie there, gaining strength, rebuilding from the inside out so that when someone came for me it wouldn’t be me that they found lying there but an artefact, an icon, a figure of lead whose aspect they would flee before.

  So let them come and come again. Let them fall on me in legions. Let them think they’d used me up when it was I who would sap them.

  “It’s time for you to go, Miss Conant.”

  Shadrach Barnes stood in the hall. A cadre of shadow-shapes shifted behind him.

  “Go,” I think I said. “Go where?”

  “It is no longer safe for you here,” said Barnes.

  “Was it ever?” I said. I was laughing at Barnes. “Or only now that he has come?”

  “It has never been safe,” said Shadrach Barnes with something naked in his voice. “It has never, for a moment, been safe for you here.”

  “And what if I’m content to stay? What if I am not afraid?”

  “I don’t doubt that you aren’t,” he said. “But you are not in your right mind.”

  “My mind,” I said and tasted scorn, “feels as right to me as ever.”

  “The girl is in shock,” he said, not to me. “Prepare yourselves. She’ll not go easy.”

  “You’re right, but still you’re wrong,” I said. “Not all of you together would be able to lift me!”

  “We will do our best,” he said, distracted by something occurring behind him.

  I struggled upright at his words, eager for what, I could not say. The figures behind him clustered forward, shifting in the light.

  “Try to make me go. Just try. I have lead all through my bones!”

  “Mrs. Edwards, Mrs. Willets, Mrs. Jaffrey,” said Barnes, stepping away from the door. “On my mark.”

  The women filed in then broke apart. I sensed them pushing past me in the dark air of the room. I extended my arms as a sleepwalker might, waiting for them to brush my fingers, and when one did I pushed her back.

  “Keep away,” I yelled at her.

  “Please don’t do that, Fanny dear.”

  “Kindly calm yourself, Miss Conant. We are here are your behalf.”

  Edwards’ wife came in from the left. Her neck was an urn; she was big-boned and strong. She seized both my arms at the wrists, pinching hard, and pinioned them behind my back.

  “Do you know what he did? Your husband?”

  “Miss Conant, for goodness’ sake,” said Barnes.

  Jaffrey’s and Willets’ wives were upon me, dragging me off of the bed toward the door.

  “Any minute,” I said, “your arms will tire! And then you’ll have to set me down!”

  Hannah In Flight

  March, 1859

  Father went fishing that Friday like normal. But Saturday morning had still not returned. Mother sat at the table, surveying the bluffs, when slightly after dawn I woke.

  Haggard this morning, her hard, changeless face. As if she’d been there through the night. As if she had had company that only let her rest come dawn.

  While out across the blue-locked land a pale blue light, by shades, amassed.

  “Maybe,” said I, “he came and went when both of us were still asleep. Or maybe he slept in town. At Heinrich’s house or at the Inn.”

  Mother had nothing to say in response. As soon as I sat down, she gathered me to her. She’d let her hair down from its usual bun. Which, rather than soften her face, made it strange.

  “Forgive me, child,” said she. So softly. “I have done a foolish thing.”

  “Mother?”

  “Forgive me first. We’ll need each other soon,” said she.

  “We need each other now,” I said.

  And then she smiled, not sad but sweet. “It was so with my mother and me. Have I told you? I haven’t, I think. And why would I, before. Well once upon a time . . .” She paused and seemed to wince past something sharp. “She needed me more than a mother should need. She needed me more than I was, at the time. She needed me—like faith—like God. She needed me terribly,” said my mother. “And that is how they broke her, Hannah. In her terrible moment of needing me most.”

  “Broke her?” said I.

  “Without falter,” said she.

  “Broke her because she saw?”

  “Because they could not see. Could not see or saw too clearly. But not out of envy. No, Hannah, not that. It was effortless, really. They were simply afraid.”

  The sun crested a shelf of cloud. Migrating, aimlessly, over the dunes.

  “Was she as old as you are now?”

  Silent a moment. Considering closely. “She was nearly as old as that widow,” said she, “that you and Grace have often seen.”

  I thought of Abby Blackwell’s face. The date of the death of her two darling boys. Yet even so I realized I did not know my mother’s age. Nor either the age of the woman just like her, trapped behind the locket’s glass.

  “You’ve never seen her since?” said I.

  My mother shook her head. “Not once. When they broke her, they broke her in secret, you see. Broke her on a bed of fire. And I have seen a thousand women—sisters, daughters, mothers, all. A thousand strangers, dear to others, every time that I saw her. A prank, I’ve often wondered since. The strangest cruelest kind.”

  While past the window, through the mist, upright shapes of men were moving. Fanned abreast and creeping toward as though we were a flock of quail. Slowed their footsteps to a shuffle. Coyly they approached our gate. Their hands folded across their thighs or held from view behind their backs. In the centre one’s hand, a familiar object. And only when we came outside to meet the men upon our porch I recognized my father’s hook, streaked brown and green from a night in the ocean.

  Q

  Heinrich’s the only corpse they found. This in the wake of a whole day of searching.

  Little taller than a dwarf and pulped by the currents beyond recognition, a wonder they found him at all, I was told, by the men who brought my father’s hook. As to whether or not their dinghy sunk or broke apart upon the cliffs or flipped in the path of the charging nor’easter, none of them had lived to tell.

  No sign of Hermann. Otto. Pieter. All of them were simply gone.

  The Clayhead darkness long and deep out of which, slow to sleep, I could conjure my father. Floating upright out to sea. Man in the shape of a cross from above. Ready to sell his very soul for just a nip of something strong. A thimbleful, he begged the s
un. Taking its leave of the world. Of my father. Just a blessed taste, said he, so I can rest my eyes and sleep.

  Time or tide would tell, I thought, when I woke up on Sunday with father still gone.

  And this I had hoped to see made covenant in every face at Sunday service.

  But what I saw was wholly different. What I saw made me afraid. When the long avenue of familiar faces down which we walked to take our pew was titled, just slightly, toward me and my mother. As if we had some pull on them. As if our blood called out to theirs and told them where to turn their heads.

  Mother pale and clearly anxious. I have done a foolish thing.

  All throughout the hymns we sat, trying not to rub our necks.

  The Revered Hascall in ascension. Light through the windows igniting his hair. The pointy shoulders of his coat were flexing like a pair of wings.

  “Woe betide our little town in what is yet its grimmest season. Five more men, this Friday past, swallowed by the vasty deeps. Five more widows. Five more orphans. Sitting here among us now.” The Reverend Hascall raised his finger. “Woe betide, yet woe be damned.”

  A gasp went up among the pews.

  “Yes, my children, woe be damned. Believe your ears. They hear me right. So let us turn now to the story of Samuel, when Saul of Israel was king. On the evening of the battle with the godless Philistines, Saul and his three bravest generals waited. And Saul the King said: I must conference with Samuel and conference with that man tonight for he and only he, said Saul, can say why God has turned away. But Samuel the King was dead. And Saul did not deny this fact. Nor either deny to his men, as he spoke, that he was wise though dead he be.

  “There is a medium at Endor, said one. So they went.

  “To a creature of night Saul came by night. For she was a creature, this woman of Endor! She thrived, like nightshade, in a cave! She feasted on rats and sometimes dogs! She conjured Samuel out of the ground! And Saul, he opened up his eyes, beheld the newly risen man. Beheld him in his robes of woe, with the stink of the witch’s curse upon him.

  “And Samuel asked him: King Saul of the Israelites, why have you disturbed my sleep?”

  Here the Reverend Hascall paused. In his rumpled black suit, fingering for the passage.

  “Suffer not a witch to live, commanded God down unto Moses. Suffer not a witch to live and yet King Saul had done far worse. Can you say, any one of you here in this church, the words of Samuel to Saul?”

  Said the Reverend: “Can you?”

  Eyes on me and mother.

  “But Reverend,” said she, rising out of her pew.

  Another voice amid the crowd: “The Medium at Endor lives! She lives to curse us all our lives, having brought this doom upon us!”

  “Speaks lies,” said another. “Her tongue is forked.”

  “She came to my house,” said another. “She knew. She warned me my husband would drown in the storm!”

  “And mine,” said Pieter’s wife, atremble. Standing in her wrinkled dress. “She told me to keep him at home. My Pieter. She begged me to keep him at home. She knew.”

  “I wanted to help you,” said mother. “I tried . . .”

  Shielding me behind her hands.

  “Wanted to help us.” Hascall laughed. “Sprinkle not our wounds with salt. Speak one of you, if she will not, the words of Samuel to Saul?”

  Silence now inside the church where all had retaken their seats save for mother. The Reverend Hascall raised his arms and trembled that the words should come.

  “Samuel told him: You. Shall. Fail. For God has turned His face away. Your armies in their thousands will be routed and enslaved. And those who live—who should resist—God will smite their ruin all.”

  Mother standing. Now she knelt. And held me tight amid her arms.

  “Mercy upon us,” she told them. “Please, mercy. My child, my one, not fifteen years.”

  Drawing me in toward the neck of her dress until that dress became my world. The bombazine a cataract. As dark as Abby Blackwell’s veil.

  While through the shadow of the cloth the Reverend sweated far above. His hair plastered across his brow. His suit as rumpled as a flag. The sound of his breath in between his chapped lips the loudest one in hearing in the high room of the church.

  But then the dress was wrenched from me and we were moving down the aisle. The bodies near too dense to pass. Her back to mine, my back to hers, we circled each other like soldiers in strife.

  Christ the Son, His lesson learned, was watching us go from Him wanly, forlornly.

  When I saw, at the opposite end of the church, reflected there as in a mirror, another kind of unwell man who did not hang like Christ but stood. And not in the centre like Christ, but due right. Where before, I recalled, he had stood to the left. Just as now he spoke to me where once he’d kept completely mute. The kelp still flowing from his hair in that same moist and ragged wig. And the saltwater, too, in a steady cascade from out the bottoms of his trousers.

  “Girls?” he whispered. “Girls? Seen Nils? The harbourmaster, Nils Von Schafer? Can everyone not see for miles that we are in for wicked weather?

  “Oh why am I so wet,” said he, “when I have been trying all day to get dry? And why does Inga look so sad when I am not ten feet away? So put your wrist into it, girls and tap her so she turns her head?”

  It wasn’t fair, not one bit fair, and I couldn’t help it, I called out: “He’s here! Your husband Pieter’s here—” said I before my mother’s hand came shushing.

  And that is when the widow sobbed. Or something like a sob, I thought.

  I felt my mother’s bones contract. She raked what I now saw was spit through the full flowing ends of her hair and then from it.

  “Get out of this place,” I heard now from the pulpit. “Like your mother before you, get out and be gone!”

  The aisle of the righteous contracted before us. Narrower and more and more. The faces tightened. Angry, fixed. While the thrusting front-parts of the people blockaded.

  “All of you, get back!” said mother. Brandishing her hands as claws. And clearing a circle she lifted me up and thrust me from her, toward the door. Only to have the defile close upon her, her hand coming unclasped from mine.

  And the people appeared to be eating my mother. Collapsing, viciously, on her. Both sides of the aisle like two halves of a jaw that appeared to be chewing my mother right up. When in among them, slow at first, a rout began to manifest. Bubbling and spilling, then flowing more freely. A hand and then a torso bucked. Murmurs, some vexed, some amazed, at her strength.

  Mother burst from all their arms.

  The Reverend screaming: “Hold her, there! Christians! Countrymen! Hold fast!”

  She heaved them off. Like corded wood. And spread herself before me, panting. Her bombazine dress torn away at the collar. Her hair a nest of Clayhead shrubs. And a long slanted gash down the side of her face from fishing hook or fingernail in which at last, done gathering at last, the bright red blood began to seep.

  “You’re ugly!” said mother. “You’re all of you ugly!”

  It made the people shrink from her. Not least of all Inga, the spitter of curses. Screened behind her three stout boys.

  The dead man still standing against the south wall. Entreating his widow. His head in his hands: “Oh why are you crying—my Inga, my life?”

  The last of the townspeople parting before us. Gratefully, almost, revealing the door.

  Q

  Mother drove the trap uphill.

  “But what about our things?” said I.

  “What things we can manage,” said mother, “we’ll bring.”

  “And what about people?” said I.

  “What about them.”

  “What about my friend?”

  My mother said something too soft to be heard. And then her face slacke
ned. She said something louder. Not repeating her first words, I saw by her lips, but endeavouring new ones more kind than before.

  “Remember her address,” said mother.

  And drove.

  And drove and drove, on through the fog. The grade becoming ever steeper. West of the cliffs lay the broad looming backs of places I might soon be in. Until up ahead in the road stood a dead man. Not labouring upward but standing to face us. Wearing only his shirt and suspenders and pants. About to flag us down, it seemed. But mother neither stopped nor slowed. And just before we came abreast freed one of her hands up to cover my eyes. But not soon enough to protect me from father. Alone of his kind in the dark icy road.

  Standing in his supper-clothes. Calling out something that we never heard.

  Staring after the trap, when I turned back, with wonder profound and benumbed in his eyes.

  The mist closing in as we crested the summit. Obscuring the trees and the town far below.

  Miss Conant on Faith

  March, 1850

  We marched arm in arm through the dark to the station. Shadrach Barnes went on ahead, once in a while turning back to survey us.

  I smelled spruces and pines. I smelled cold mountain dirt. And I felt the cool breath of the dark on my face.

  “You shouldn’t have struggled,” said Edwards’ wife.

  “You poor, bedeviled thing,” said Willets.

  The Devil take you to his bed, I did not say to either of them.

  I had left Roundot only once. It had been with my parents to visit my cousins who lived up north in Buffalo. That place had been a clanging mess: so much commotion to so little purpose. The train, I remembered, had snaked through the mountains from a point of departure not far off. Pebbles and larger, jagged stones had tumbled away from the tracks into blackness.

  The train depot platform at first appeared empty. At the opposite end of it, starkly described beneath the platform’s single lamp, a bell-shaped figure stood and waited. It shifted around to present us its front. Its lace-trimmed black-and-scarlet dress performed an arc about its ankles. Shadrach Barnes was first to greet it. They addressed one another—Professor meet Shape—inaudibly and, I perceived, with solemnity.