My Ghosts

ALSO BY MARY SWAN

The Boys in the Trees
The Deep
Emma’s Hands

A house can be haunted by those who were never there
If there is where they were missed
.

—LOUIS MACNEICE

September

In her room at the top of the house, Clare is thinking about time. Thinking with her eyes closed in the poky little space up under the roof, where things scuttle and rustle. Stifling in the summer and far too cold in winter and not anything like the room that will be hers a few years from now, when they all move to the new double house on Pembroke Street. The one where the scent of lilacs drifts through all the open windows.

But that’s in the future, and the future, like the past, is nowhere in her mind. Instead she’s thinking about time in a different way. Thinking about what it is, and why it is. Thinking about how it can be Eternal, and yet gone forever. About how it is a thing that has carried on for everyone else these past hours or days while she was lying in her narrow bed, thinking nothing at all.

The room has two small windows, east and west, and when the word
morning
floats into her mind she knows that it’s there
because of the faint bar of light that falls on her quilt through the panes to her right. The patchwork glows along that bar, a watery blue block at the edge of it. They each have a quilt their mother has made, sleep beneath patterns of worn-out clothing. The blue is from a shirt Wee Alan wore before he died on the crossing. Before he was sewn into a tiny shroud and tipped into the cold sea, while even Clare’s father wept. That’s a story they all know, although she doesn’t remember anyone telling it. In her bed she realizes how far one word has brought her, and she closes her eyes and falls back down into the dark.

At some point she uses the chamber pot. When she gets up to use it again it is clean and that means someone has been there, her mother or her sisters. Maybe while she slept, if that’s what she’s been doing. Sometimes the light falls through the window to her left, sometimes to her right, and she has no idea where she’s been in between. A thing that might worry her, if she wasn’t so very tired. She wonders, idly, if this is what it is to lose your mind. Or maybe it’s her body, the thin white hands she holds before her eyes; maybe her body is the thing that’s been left behind.

Clare thinks that thought and then it’s gone, and she finds herself in a moment when the light is neither left nor right; she is standing on legs that feel like India rubber, then walking a few paces. Sometime after that she sips broth from a white bowl, her sister’s face wavering and strange through the steam. “Eight days,” Kez says, when she asks. “You missed your birthday, we had to eat all sixteen tarts without you.” Then she says, “Are you feeling any better?”

“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I don’t seem to know anything at all.”

Quite suddenly she remembers that her mother is two years dead, and not emptying anyone’s chamber pot. Not sitting beside the bed before dawn, not placing a cool hand on Clare’s forehead, nor singing that quiet song. Her leaving was so easy that it’s always felt that she hasn’t really gone. That she’s somewhere just out of sight, standing by a window before the lamps are lit, or sitting on a chair in the next room. Maybe holding Wee Alan on her knee, while he pats her face with his baby hands. It’s not a thing she’s thought before, but it makes sense to Clare if that’s what Heaven is. Not a place, exactly, but something like a fold, like the part of a let-down hem that has stayed as bright and clean as it was in the beginning, while all the rest fades and fades. Maybe there is a fold like that in time, a sort of sidestep that lets you stay with the ones you loved, lets you watch them and hold them up. But no work to be done, no fretting or cares. When they opened the bedroom door that morning, only the white curtains moved in the light. Their mother’s eyes were closed, all the lines in her face smoothed away.

At one time it could barely hold them all, this tall, narrow house where Clare lies thinking, cheek resting on her folded hands. Like a dance, the way they moved through the rooms, turning sideways, stepping forward and back to keep from crashing into each other. Her brothers’ thundering boots and the way they knocked and cuffed each other, up and down the stairs. Her sisters singing and her mother calling one name or another, and always underneath the
snick
of heavy scissors and the sound of the treadle from the front room where her father cut and stitched fine suits, by the only window that let in enough light.

Clare is the youngest and for so long it seemed that everything happened over her head. Talking and joking and secrets passing back and forth up above her. Some laundry days the sheets were boiled then draped all over the kitchen to dry and she liked to sit under them, steamy at first but cooling fast, a muffled white world and nothing outside but empty land and sky. Her brother Ross told her once about the Eskimo who lived in the frozen North; it’s the only thing she really remembers about him. Even when she was older, and knew differently, she had the idea that was where Ross went when he left. Pictured him dressed in skins and furs, no sound but the snow squeaking under his heavy feet.

She tries now to remember how the Eskimo tell time, and decides that she never knew. Only that their days and nights are different, long periods when the sun never sets and others when there’s nothing but dark. The reason for that a thing she did know once, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to bring it back. She thinks of those problems she used to love at school, the ones that came with a story:
If a man travels 150 miles in 5 days when the days are 12 hours long, in how many days of 10 hours each will he travel 500 miles?
Easy enough to solve, once she’d learned to close her mind to the picture of the man and the road he walked, winding through a forest, and between bare summer hills. His jaunty pace slowing and his boots wearing thin, the sun beating down on his dusty cap. Easy enough if she stopped wondering just where the man was going, that the days were becoming shorter. Who he had left behind, and if he ever missed them.

Ross was already gone when their father took sick, but even though the mails were slow where he was, there would have
been plenty of time for him to come home. When their mother read his letter out, their father said, “He has so much to do, land to clear and a cabin to build, of course he can’t come back.” Then he coughed and coughed, his hair stuck flat to his sweating forehead.