Ghost Story

'Ulalume,'

-Edgar Allen Poe

Lewis Benedikt

1

Two days of a shift in the weather: the snow ceased, and the sun returned. It was like two days of a wayward Indian summer. The temperature rose above freezing for the first time in a month and a half; the town square turned into a soupy marsh even the pigeons avoided; and as the snows melted, the river-grayer and faster than on the day John Jaffrey stepped off the bridge-came nearly up to its banks. For the first time in five years Walt Hardesty and his deputies, aided by the fire volunteers, piled sandbags along the banks to prevent a flood. Hardesty kept on his Wild West costume all during the heavy hard work of carrying the sandbags from the truck, but a deputy named Leon Churchill stripped to his waist and thought maybe the worst of it was over until the bitter days of February and March.

Metaphorically, Milburn people in general took off their shirts. Omar Norris happily went back on the bottle full time, and when his wife kicked him out of the house, returned to his boxcar without a qualm and prayed into the neck of a half-empty fifth that the heavy snow was gone for good. The town relaxed during these days of temporary, warming relief. Walter Barnes wore a gaudy pink-and-blue-striped shirt to the bank, and for eight hours felt deliciously unbankerlike; Sears and Ricky made timeworn jokes about Elmer Scales suing the weatherman for inconstancy. For two days lunchtimes at the Village Pump were crowded with strangers out for drives. Clark Mulligan's business doubled during the final two days of his Vincent Price double feature, and he held the pictures over for another week. The gutters ran with black water; if you weren't careful, cars dodging too close to the curbs could drench you from the neck down. Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie's former girlfriend, found a new man, a stranger with a shaven head and dark glasses who said to call him G and was exciting and mysterious and came from nowhere and said he was a sailor-heady stuff for Penny. In the sunlight, with the sound of water everywhere, Milburn was a spacious town. People pulled on rubber boots to keep their shoes dry and went for walks. Milly Sheehan hired a boy from down the block to hang her storm windows and the boy said, 'Gee, Mrs. Sheehan, maybe you won't even need these until Christmas!' Stella Hawthorne, lying in a scented tub, decided that it was time to send Harold Sims back to the spinster librarians who would be impressed by him: she'd rather have her hair done. Thus for two days resolutions were made, long hikes were taken; men did not resent getting out onto the highway in the morning and driving to their offices; in this false spring, spirits lifted.

But Eleanor Hardie grew exhausted with worry and polished the hotel's banisters and counters twice in one day, and John Jaffrey and Edward Wanderley and the others lay underground, and Nettie Dedham was taken off to an institution still mouthing the only two syllables she would ever wish to say; and Elmer Scales's gaunt body thinned down even further as he sat up with the shotgun across his lap. The sun went down earlier each evening, and at night Milburn contracted and froze. The houses seemed to draw together; the streets which were spangled by day darkened, seemed to narrow to oxcart width; the black sky clamped down. The three old men of the Chowder Society forgot their feeble jokes and trekked through bad dreams. Two spacious houses stood ominously dark; the house on Montgomery Street contained horrors, which flickered and shifted from room to room, from floor to floor; in Edward Wanderley's old house on Haven Lane, all that walked was mystery: and for Don Wanderley, when he would see it, the mystery would lead to Panama City, Florida, and a little girl who said 'I am you.'

Lewis spent the first of these days shoveling out his drive, deliberately overexerting himself and working so hard that he sweated through the running suit and khaki jacket he wore; by noon his arms and back were aching as if he'd never worked in his life. After lunch he napped for half an hour, showered, and forced himself to finish the job. He shoveled the last of it out of his drive-by then the snow was damp and much heavier than when he'd started-at six-thirty. Lewis went in, having created what looked like a mountain range down the side of his drive, showered again, took his telephone off the hook and consumed four bottles of beer and two hamburgers. He did not think he would be able to get up the stairs to bed. When he made it into his bedroom, he painfully removed his clothes, dropped them on the floor, and fell onto his blankets, instantly asleep.

He was never sure whether this was a dream: in the night he heard a dreadful noise, the sound of the wind blowing all that snow back over his drive. It seemed like wakefulness; and it seemed too that he heard another sound-a sound like music blown on the wind. He thought: I'm dreaming this. But his muscles ached and wobbled as he got out of bed, and his head spun. He went to his window, which looked down the side of the house onto the roof of the old stables and the first third of his drive. He saw a three-quarter moon hanging above desolate trees. The next thing he saw was so much like a scene from one of Ricky's odder movies that afterward he knew that he could not actually have witnessed it. The wind blew, as he had feared, and gauzy sheets of snow drifted onto his drive; everything was starkly black and white. A man dressed in minstrel's clothing stood on top of the snow-mountain going down to the road. A saxophone white as his eyes hung from his mouth. As Lewis looked, not even trying to force his foggy mind to make sense of this vision, the musician blew a few half- audible bars, lowered the saxophone and winked. His skin seemingly as black as the sky, he stood weightlessly on snow into which he should have sunk up to his waist. Not one of your old spirits, Lewis, jealous of your tenancy, come for your blackbirds and snowdrops; go back to bed and dream in peace. But still stupid with exhaustion, he watched on and the figure changed-it was John Jaffrey grinning at him from the impossible perch, shoe-blacking spread on his face and hands: white eyes, white teeth. Lewis stumbled back into bed.

After he had steamed most of the soreness out of his muscles in a long hot shower Lewis went downstairs and looked out of his dining-room windows with astonishment. Most of the snow had already disappeared from the trees in front of his house, leaving them wet and shiny. Black pools of water lay over the brick court which extended from his house to the old stables. The range of snow down the drive was only half its height of yesterday. The shift in weather had held. The sky was cloudless and blue. Lewis looked a second time at the diminished range of snow beside his drive and shook his head: another dream. Edward's nephew had planted that picture in his mind, with his account of the leading character in his unwritten book, the black carnival-bandleader with the funny name. He has us dreaming his books for him, he thought, and smiled.

He went to the entry hall, kicked off his loafers and put on his boots.

Pulling his khaki jacket over his shoulders, he went back through the house to the kitchen. Lewis put a kettle full of cold water on a burner and looked through the kitchen window. Like the trees in front of the house, his woods shone and glistened; snow lay damp and squashy on the lawn, whiter and deeper beneath the wet trees further away. He would take his walk while the kettle boiled, and then come back and have breakfast.

Outside, warmth surprised him; and more than that, the warm, almost laundered-feeling air seemed a protection, a cocoon of safety. The menacing suggestiveness of his woods had been rinsed away-shining with their beautiful muted colors of tree bark and lichen, with the mushy snow beneath like a swipe of watercolor, Lewis's woods had none of the hard-edged illustrationlike quality he had seen in them before.

He took his path backward again, loafing along and breathing deeply; he smelled the mulch of wet leaves beneath the snow. Feeling youthful and healthy, his chest full of delicate air, he regretted drinking too much at Sears's house. It was foolish to blame himself for Freddy Robinson's death; as for whispers of his name, hadn't he heard those all his life? It was snow falling from a branch-meaningless noise to which his guilty soul gave meaning.

He needed a woman's company, a woman's conversation. Now that it was finally over with Christina Barnes, he could invite Annie, the blond waitress from Humphrey's, out to his house for a good dinner and let her talk to him about painters and books. Her intelligent conversation would be an exorcism of the past month's worries; maybe he would invite Anni too, and they both would talk about painters and books. He'd stumble a bit, trying to keep up, but he would learn something.

And then he thought that maybe he'd get Stella Hawthorne away from Ricky for an hour or two and just luxuriate in the fact of that astonishing face and bristling personality sitting across the table from him.

Blissful, Lewis turned around and realized why he had always run his path in the opposite direction: on this long return stretch with its two angled sections, you were nearly at the house before you could see it. Going the other way preserved for as long as possible his illusion that he was the only white man on a densely wooded continent. He was surrounded by quiet trees and dripping water, by white sunshine.