My Ghosts (18 page)

Those bags would have already arrived, would be sitting somewhere in his house, like the effects of a dead man, and he wondered how large they would seem, in his son’s small world. He tried to imagine himself walking through his own
front door, but another picture formed in his head and he saw himself slumping down, heavy in his seat as they drew into his station. He saw himself staying on the train and riding farther, riding north to the end of the line. There was a ferry there, he knew that, and he could sail with it across the neck of the lake. He saw himself walking down the short ramp on the other side, walking on and on until he reached the start of the dense bush that would seal itself behind him, after he’d passed through.

That would be right, that would be better, and it would be a better thing, a braver thing, to leave his son with the story he would make for himself, from the things unpacked from the battered bags. From the banjo with its snapped strings and the jacket with polished buttons, from everything else he’d be told. They would tell him the only things he should know, Edie and Robbie’s mother. The funny stories and the scrapes he got into when he was a boy, the facts of the rest of his life. And that way his son would grow up knowing the best of him.

It had nothing to do with his missing arm, although that’s what everyone thought. Would think. Back at the hospital Elizabeth sometimes sat with him on that bench by the roses, her cool hands folded in her lap. She told him once about her fiancé, Patrick, who was somewhere in muddy France, and she asked him to believe her when she said that nothing would matter,
nothing
, as long as Patrick came home alive.

He had let her believe that she’d helped him, because she was kind, and it was kindly meant; he knew that Edie would say the same, but he also knew that he didn’t deserve it. He’d seen something in himself, he’d
been
something, that left him shamed and grim. The smooth skin of decency had shredded so easily, leaving something raw and puckered and angry. He had no memory of the racing speed of that other train, no
memory of the crash, or the broken bodies flung wide. But he remembered the old woman with her smoky grey ball of wool, and he knew that he was a man who would have kicked her aside to save himself.

The train carried on through the scruffy countryside and he began to recognize each tree, each weathered barn, and each place where the lake glinted briefly before vanishing again. Time seemed to have speeded up, and suddenly he wasn’t sure of anything. What was courage, and what the worst kind of cowardice. He remembered the burned boy, holding on for all of them long after he should have let go, and wondered if it was really that, wondered if he even knew that he was alive.

Splinters of thought were piercing the calm that had wrapped him; he tried to imagine himself in that boat on the empty water but he couldn’t do it and then, too soon, they were into the last, long curve before the station. There was a point in that bend where he could see the track ahead, and he looked for the boy who had balanced on the rail like a rope walker, both arms held out at his sides. He looked for the boy who was trying so hard to be brave, staring straight at everything that was rushing toward him.

She used to stand on the shore with the boy, looking out at the vast ruffled lake and imagining that it was the ocean, that at any moment a ship could appear, bringing her lost ones back to her. Just for a little while; the boy was always hungry for his breakfast and when he tugged at her hand she let him draw her on to the wooden steps, counting with him as they climbed. One two three four. The wind and the sound of the waves falling away, replaced by the sound of their own harder breathing, until—seventy-three, seventy-four—they were back on the bluff near the bandshell, back in the town
.

Every night before he slept, when Robbie was small, he liked me to talk about all we’d done that day. “Tell it like a story,” he used to say, and I did:
It was a cold, windy morning and the woman walked with the boy. She made him wear his new warm sweater even though it itched him, and the lake was all ruffly, and he found a black stone with a hole right through
. “And the woman is you,” Robbie said. “And the boy is me, I found it.” And I said, “Indeed you did.”

Sometimes I told him about the ship the woman watched for, that was bringing her family back. The snapping sails and brother Frank at the big wheel, with a peaked cap on his head, brass buttons on his jacket. Millie and Jim high in the rigging, holding on with one hand as they lean out, waving, and our mother standing in the prow with the baby in her arms, both of them dressed in the cleanest white. She points to the shore, showing the baby, and they are smiling so wide, maybe laughing, as if they would never be anything but happy. “And that’s why you’re Francis James Robert,” I always told him, and it was mostly true. Though Robert was my own father’s name, or so my mother once said.

How can it be, that all that time has vanished? All the days and years we walked through together, my same hand turning down the lantern, night after night. A silly question to be asking myself, no point in wondering, no answer. Like the rules of light and shadow, some things just are as they are, and the only way is to start from there and carry on. Robbie was a boy and now he’s a man, he’s been to war and come back changed, has children of his own. Like a seedling growing, like a bud that opens to flower, you can be there every day and still not see exactly how and when it happens. Though when I think of that, I know it was the boy who was wide open, a bright flower. His growing up somehow a process of folding away.

Those old steps from the beach are not much used now, except by children, or by people who don’t want to be seen. But I climbed them this morning, pleased that I still could, though I needed to stop and rest along the way. And each time I lowered myself onto a step, looking west out over the lake, I marvelled at the changes that had happened while my back was turned.
Curls of pure white breaking everywhere farther out, and the band of pinkish-mauve along the horizon slowly expanding, pushing up the lowering clouds. The scrub on the hillside turning from grey to green, and then different shades of it. By the time I reached the top and turned to look out again the sun had cleared the trees, cleared the town behind me and poured out over the lake. The gulls that had wheeled by the score from wherever they slept, high flashes of silver and bronze, had settled on the rocking water. I thought about where I had started and where I was now, about the way everything is transformed by time, by light.

I’ve never been much of a churchgoer, except in the Home we were taken to when I was young, that was supposed to give us a better life; between scrubbing and praying we spent most of our time there on our knees. It would be comforting, I’m sure, to be able to believe that everything happens for a reason. To believe there’s a plan, God’s plan, and you only need to surrender. There are rules in the world, I know, things that clever people understand. The path of the sun, the stars and the tides and currents, and gravity that lets some things rise up and keeps others firmly on the ground. But it’s always seemed to me that the rest is all chance: the people you meet, the places you end up, which way you turn at a corner. That all you can do is make the best of where you are, no point in dwelling on what might have happened if you’d gone another way.

It was just chance, I know, that brought me to Inverhaven, when Robbie was still curled safe inside me. I had an advertisement for a housekeeper folded in my bag, and if the connecting train hadn’t been so late I would have carried on to that other town and had a different life. Chance too that the
sun was shining that April day, and the station master—not Angus, but the one before—gave me directions to a hotel with a dining room that was reasonably priced. The town was like all the others I’d ever been in, a short main street, still frozen and rutted, a grocer, hardware store, pharmacy. But the sun was actually warm, and a man who was stretching in a doorway wished me
Good day
. I passed a school just as the children tumbled out; a young boy running with his jacket unbuttoned called back
Sorry missus
after he bumped me, and I was struck by his grin, by his healthy pink cheeks.

I must have missed the street I was meant to take, and found myself following a cleared path that led past a bandshell to where a snow-covered bench looked out on the sudden expanse of lake, a strange landscape of frozen mounds and furrows, and the enormous sky. It should have reminded me of the boat from Liverpool all those years before, the terror of so much open water, but perhaps because of the ice, I didn’t think of that. Instead a great calm settled on me, even my hunger gone. I brushed off the bench and sat looking out until the sun had lost its warmth, until I heard a distant train whistle and knew that it would go on without me.

Robbie’s house is in the opposite direction, but this morning I followed the sound of hammer blows to the place where the new inn, huge and modern, is rising from the ashes of the Lakeview Hotel. The old Lakeview burned to the ground one January night, burned so fiercely that even if the lines hadn’t been frozen, people doubt that much could have been saved. A bitter smell lingered all winter, the blackened mess softened by falling snow. Everyone knows what happened and who was behind it; cheaper to rebuild than repair, especially with the
insurance money. There was an investigation of sorts, but of course nothing could be proved.

Maybe it wouldn’t have happened, if I’d done what Robbie and Edie thought I should and tried to fight the will. Or maybe I’d have burned up with it, maybe it was lucky that I didn’t have the heart. I know they were right about the principle, and there were others in town who made a point of saying the same, which was maybe kind of them. Whatever they’ve thought and said about me, it seems they count me as belonging, compared to some slicker from the city. Though I’m sure there would have been muttering too, if the hotel had come to me. That’s just how people are, and I’m sure not only here.

This morning I found it hard to remember the old hotel, looking at the high, new walls, the workmen moving in and out of the spaces where doors and windows will be. I tried to picture the dove-grey paint, the shady wraparound veranda, but the sun was bright, daubs of colour everywhere. A splash of yellow on a ladder, the back of a man at a sawhorse, his blue shirt criss-crossed by bright red suspenders, and I thought of a double exposure in a photograph, that can happen by accident or design. A ghostly image that doesn’t belong, mixed up with the one that does, past and present together in a way, and hard to tell which is which. I thought of how it is with a child you’ve watched grow, or a person you haven’t seen for years, how you still know them, and they seem to trail all their ages with them.

Once thoughts like that get going they roll like waves and can be just as impossible to stop. This morning, by the spot where the Lakeview once was, those thoughts led me to Angus, and I remembered a time when we sat together near those old beach steps, in the late summer dark. We were talking about
similar things, I suppose, about changes and the way the edges of the town were spreading out, new houses where there’d been nothing but bush and open fields. Angus said lately he’d noticed that when he gave directions from the station, they were based on where things used to be. Turn right where the big maple was, go past the corner where MacArthur had his store, left before the old iron footbridge. He said maybe he had a ghost town in his head, an ideal one, and if he could put together all the places that came into his mind, from their different times, he could imagine himself walking down its streets, maybe we both could. Remembering that, how I missed him. I never had the right, but I always did.

It was luck or chance that brought me to Inverhaven all those years ago, and the same that I walked through the door of the Lakeview Hotel when I did, with my story about hard times, a husband lost to a fever. I’m sure Maggie didn’t believe a word, but the sun and melting snow that day had her in a panic. A reminder that spring was near, that she’d fired the last two women for miles around who were willing to work for her and now had no one to help get the place ready for the coming season, to take care of the rooms, serve the meals. I said that if she had a bed I would start at first light, and I made myself useful enough in the coming weeks that when the pains came she sent for the midwife, and there was never any question but that Robbie and I would stay.

Maggie was difficult, with her moods and her rages, but I’d known much worse, and once I understood that there was no point in trying to please her we went along all right. She said a crying baby would disturb the guests, so Robbie and I lived in the two-room cottage she owned nearby, and that
suited me very well. Her husband, Reuben, was as sweet as she was sour, just tilting his head and smiling when she called him an old fool, and worse. That only made her wilder, which I came to see he knew very well. People said that deep down they were devoted, the complaining and name-calling just their way, but I think that says more about what people need to believe. It’s harder, after all, to accept that things can be exactly as they seem, that there’s nothing gentle beneath harsh words, beneath cruelty.

Reuben, I learned, was a man of sudden enthusiasms, and he always plunged right in. Perhaps that’s what happened when he met Maggie, one October when his ship was storm-stayed, or perhaps it was as she often said, that he took advantage, that all he wanted was an easier life.
Fool’s Folly
is what she called the shed out back that was filled with things he’d moved on from. Curling rocks and bicycle wheels, a white-painted board covered with pinned butterflies, their proper names written crookedly beneath. In one corner there was a heavy wooden easel, a floppy kind of hat draped over the top, and stacks of paintings. Strange, wobbly portraits of Maggie, of the fat orange cat that slept in the doorway, and others with streaks and blobs of colour that were meant to be sunsets over the lake. They were dreadful, Maggie was right about that, like something a blind person might do. I used to think it would be hard to be like Reuben, with the desire to do so many things, but no knack at all. But perhaps he didn’t think like that, just set his failures aside and moved on to something new.