More Than You Know (32 page)

So that was all right, I was in the right town.

“Do you know Conary?”

“Conary Crocker?” she said. She almost pulled it off. “Of course,

dear. Known him from a tot.”

“Can I see him?”

“Not right now, dear.”

“Is he in the hospital too?”

“No, he isn’t.” She had to go rather suddenly.

There was either one person they forgot to prime, or else one

who had some objection to lying. That was Mr. Gilbert Davidson, the

Congregational minister, a rabbity sort of person I’d seen hopping and

gnawing around the library stacks but never spoken to. One morning

I woke up and found him sitting beside my bed. When he saw I was

awake he introduced himself. “I thought I ought to see if there was

anything I could do for you.”

I thanked him. I wasn’t really feeling up to starting new rela-

tionships.

“Is there?”

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What I wanted was some answers to my questions, which so far

everyone treated as whimsical. No harm in trying him.

“There was an accident?”

“Yes. A car accident.”

Oh. This was new, someone who didn’t dance around it.

“The car?”

“There’s not much left of it. It hit the phone pole right outside

Miss Leaf’s house. She was the first one to reach you, but I think I

was the second.”

“Is Conary . . .”

He waited mildly for me to frame my question.

“. . . in trouble?”

“No. He is not in trouble.”

“Even though we wrecked the car?”

“He’s out of trouble, Hannah. He’s dead.”

I looked at him, and his eyes met mine, steadily, truthfully. I

closed mine, and began to cry.

He sat with me and held my hand. It was awful, the crying. It

made my head hurt so much, and I made a sound like the sound the

ghost made. Is this what it wanted?
My
body to cry with? It had
had

its own life; what right did it have to mine?

I tried as hard as I could to stop, because it hurt so much in my

head and my heart, and after a while I managed it, sort of. Mr. Da-

vidson kindly brought me tissues and, most surprisingly, neither fled

nor offered false comfort.

When I could speak I said, “I had a dream. It woke me up.” I

told him about it.

He said “What day was that?”

“Tuesday.”

He nodded, as if that was about what he’d expected.

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“He was with me, and then I woke up and he was gone. I want

him to come back,” I said and, horribly, began crying again.

Mr. Davidson said, “No, dear, you don’t. Your grief is for your-

self, now, for your loss. But not for Conary. He’s left you his blessing

and gone to peace.”

This sounded enraging to me, like those people who say that

heaven is a big cloud house and everyone you love and miss is up

there together with a man with a big white beard. How did he know?

My anger passed, though, as I remembered that it was true that

the feeling in the dream of Conary was intensely peaceful. Unlike the

hell of feelings I had awakened to. But it wasn’t true that I didn’t

want him back. I wanted that dream, or I wanted him himself outside

my window. I wanted it so much I didn’t know how I could survive.

I said so.

He said, “I hope it won’t shock you if I say that your dream is

not exactly what I would call a dream. You know our creed names

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If there is a Holy Ghost, am I likely to

deny there are others?”

I don’t believe I said anything, and I hope I am remembering

fairly what he said after. Of course I came to know him well in later

days and to believe he was far more truly a man of spirit than his

appearance had led me to think when I was still young enough to

judge people by appearances.

He said, “You remember that when our Lord left the body, he

was seen two days later, though not exactly as he had been in life, by

people who were grieving for him? That he continued to appear for

some days, it depends on which Gospel you read, and then finally was

gone? If his was a pattern life for us all to follow, why is this not also

what we should all expect of death?”

I didn’t know the answer, then or now.

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“I believe,” he told me, “that the moment of death is something

like waking up in the morning. At first, you don’t want to leave the

state you’ve been in. There is then a period . . . a few days, maybe

longer . . . when the soul, or spirit, the same one that was in the body,

but changed, is still present in this life. It visits people and places, it

appears in the dreams of loved ones, it says its good-byes. And all the

while it is . . . growing less, thinning out, or diluting, like drops of dye

in a basin of water, until finally what had been a person lets go and

becomes—I think—dissolved into the universe. Willingly, joyfully.”

“All of us? Dissolve?”

“That is the problem, of course. Not all. That is why I said you

don’t wish Conary back. Not that wishing makes any difference.”

I asked him to go on.

He said, “I believe there are those who . . . for whatever reason . . .

are so unfinished with the life they have lived, so unwilling . . . there

are those who somehow refuse, and get stuck in whatever the state is,

not alive, but not released. And they are not for the most part the souls

one would wish to see more of. The holy ghosts are the ones like

Conary, who let go.”

Still I asked, “Why does it . . .”

“I don’t know. I tend to think it’s like a kaleidoscope, in which

the same bits of glass and rock form and re-form to make patterns of

endless variety. As we move through our lives, all made of bits and

pieces of lives that have gone before, sometimes we must form pat-

terns that existed before. Suddenly there’s a match, or something that

looks like one, and it’s something that such an unfinished spirit can

make use of . . .”

“To do what?” I could hardly speak above a whisper.

He shrugged. “Defy God. Try again to change the pattern.”

“Can it?”

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“Oh, yes, but not in a way that will do it any good. Not if, as I

believe, the pattern itself is God.”

No. I could see that there was not any good likely to come of

that, for anyone.

I know this whole conversation sounds like a hallucination.

Maybe it was one. I was very deep in grief, and also full of medicine.

But I think he said something like that. Much later, when I’d come

back here to live, he told me what had happened to him in the Haskell

house. How he knew at the time it was what I needed I have no idea.

After he left, for days and days, I mostly wept.

Mrs. Pease came to see me, and Mrs. Allen, and Dot Sylvester

and Nella B., and my grandparents. They none of them stayed long;

I was so glad to see them, because I knew it meant they cared for me,

and so glad when they left, because I didn’t have to try not to cry.

They gave me back my book bag that had been in the car. It didn’t

have that much blood on it, and I so much hoped the blood was

Connie’s. After a while I began to write in my diary again. My left

wrist and collarbone were broken, but my right only hurt like hell.

During the time I was there I had two other unexpected guests.

The first was Miss Leaf. She marched in wearing her baggy corduroys

and slouch hat and plopped herself down in the chair beside me and

started talking.

“They told me you were mending, but I had to see for myself.

Once on a road down in New Jersey I stopped to help a lady in an

accident. Cars didn’t go so fast in those days, but she was pretty

bunged up. I had a ways to travel still, so I didn’t stay to learn how

she came through it, and I’ve always been sorry. So here I am, came

to see for myself, how are you?”

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It reminded me so piercingly of the day she surprised me and

Conary in the burial ground that I burst into tears.

“Oh, gorey, now don’t cry,” she more or less yelled, and then

slapped herself on the knee and said, “Why say a stupid thing like

that, Maude? What else is there for her to do?”

So I cried, and she sat there, and after a while when I subsided

she handed me a tissue.

“I’m a waterworks,” I said.

“I know, I know. I brought you something.” I dried my eyes and

looked at her and saw she was carrying a paper bag. She opened it

and took out Earl, and then Eleanor. The bear and pig, our children.

She carried them to me and put them on the bed. I had to hold my

fists to my mouth to keep from going off again.

“They were in the backseat. The horn was going, you were

moaning, and the boy was dead, you could see that much. But here

were these two little fellows. I thought if you lived you’d be wanting

them.”

I gathered them up in my arms and said thank you with my lips.

I couldn’t manage a voice. She said, “You’re welcome,” and got up

to go.

I held up my hand, and, kindly, she gave me a minute, until I

could speak.

I said, “When you . . .”

“Found you, yes.” I nodded.

“Was there . . .”

“Blood?” she boomed. “You went right through the wind-

shield . . .” But I was shaking my head. Not blood. I tried again.

“Someone . . . ? We stopped for . . .” Oh, hell, I was thinking. I

knew the answer. But the last words Conary said in this life were

“Careful you don’t sit on Earl and Eleanor.”

“Someone else in the car? Honey, his head hit the tree, yours

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went through the windshield. That was enough. Anyone else in that

car would have been thrown in the road.”

Of course. I knew that, and Conary knew it. There was no one

else there.

The other visitor was Conary’s sister, Mary. She came in very

shyly, and when we saw each other we both wept. That was a relief—

the one person in the town (who was likely to talk to me) who had

loved Connie as much as I did.

She told me about the funeral. Baptist, church full, for her unen-

durably painful. Her father had behaved like a wounded bear and was

now mostly drunk. The Britton family had been kind, even sent a

wreath. (The car had been insured.) Mary brought me a copy of the

bulletin, and the newspaper clips about the accident, and Connie’s

obituary. Obituary. Connie’s obituary. I still can hardly bear the words.

Before she left, she took a book out of her purse and laid it on

the bed beside me. It was
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens. She

hadn’t gone out and bought one; it was
the
copy. She had stolen it

from the library. I didn’t know whether to be shocked or to weep with

gratitude.

Mary stood and said, “Connie told me to bring it to you. Please

don’t ask me to explain.” I looked at her for a long time, and her gaze

didn’t waver. I didn’t need her to explain.

I whispered, “Thank you,” and she went out.

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1922

Gilbert Davidson had not been born when Sallie Haskell

was tried for the murder of her father. He was a twinkle in his father’s

eye in Redfield, South Dakota. When he was called to minister to the

Congregational church in Dundee, Maine, he was twenty-five. Dundee

was off the beaten path, not a prestigious appointment, but he found

the village beautiful and tranquil the summer he arrived, and he rea-

soned that the winters couldn’t be any worse than they were in South

Dakota.

His duties were not heavy at first. In July and August, retired men

of the cloth who summered in the area made it clear that they would be

pleased to preach a Sunday or two, and the new minister, still insecure

(with good reason) about his abilities in the pulpit, was only too glad to

let them. This left Gilbert free to concentrate on some fresh ideas about

stewardship he was eager to put into practice.

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He studied the records of the ways the church members were ac-

customed to raise money for the minister’s salary and aiding the poor: a

white elephant sale in the summer, the blueberry pancake breakfast, the

Christmas crafts bazaar. In his opinion a great deal more could be done

by way of tapping inhabitants of the summer colony, who more and more

filled the beautiful airy meeting house on summer Sundays (while more

and more members of the year-round congregation chose to worship their

Maker under the blue dome of his heaven at this time of year). The

outgoing minister had not died in harness, but he had come close, and

in Gilbert’s opinion he had let slide the obligation of visiting elderly

members of the parish to discuss, along with spiritual matters, the final

disposition of their worldly goods.

He spent days in the basement of the meeting house with the church

secretary, Flossie Eveleth, getting the lay of the land.