“Back to Cornwall?”
She sniffed. “Not likely. They went off onto the side of the road, but they was just there on the other side, for we could hear the horse whinnying in the orchard. ‘Well,’ I said to Mrs. Lake, ‘if it come to country matters, I must give Grace her notice in the morning.’
“Then, what do you know, here comes Gracie afoot, back across the bridge, and he’s riding off down the road. Her head was still wrapped in her scarf, and she was so unhappy I didn’t have the heart to send her away. I brought her home and put her to bed. Next day the old lady comes.”
“The Widow Fortune?”
“If that’s how she’s called. Rides up in a buggy, and Grace says can she use the parlor. Which I let her, even to permitting her to offer tea and such. I stayed upstairs, but I could tell the old lady was most sympathetic to Grace’s situation-a kind soul, if you don’t mind. Then she left.”
Grace was now driven to the extremest measures. First she told Mrs. O’Byrne she would leave, then she swore she could not, then she didn’t know what to do. In the end, however, she went away, never to return.
“‘Twas the night of full moon, I remember that,” Mrs. O’Byrne continued. “Grace went out again in the evenin’, and that was the last I saw of her. She just left everything here and went. Never came back for her things, neither. Her sweetheart died, didn’t he?”
I said yes, wondering how she had come by this particular piece of news. I related what I had learned from Worthy about the horse accident, and Mrs. O’Byrne’s look was woeful as she opened the front door for me. “But you didn’t say-is Grace there still? Does she fare well?”
“She’s dead, too.”
“Oh, no-you don’t say! Poor thing. Still, I suppose she’s better off. I wouldn’t want to go through life suffering like poor Grace did.”
I stowed the Tiffany clock in the trunk, along with the slates, while the wind, which had increased perceptibly, drove everything before it.
“Hurricane weather,” Mrs. O’Byrne called. “Stop by again.” She battled the door shut against the gale.
Driving back toward the bridge, I looked at the sky. The moon, round and white, shed a strange light over the landscape, while across its face drifted an intermittent cheesy curd, lending the white light a greenish-yellow cast. Lightning flickered bluely on the horizon, and a steady wind whipped the grass along the roadside.
The car tires beat a tattoo on the bridge planking as I crossed. Emerging from the farther end onto the Old Sallow Road, I could feel the wind take the car again. The air sizzled intermittently, as if wired with a network of faulty electrical connections. I made the turns slowly, keeping the car toward the center of the winding road as I passed the Tatum orchard. I felt melancholy, thinking back over the story of Grace Ever-deen. I found it strange and sad, and a little mystifying.
The lights were still burning at Irene’s house, and as I rounded the next bend, the embankment I had passed earlier was now on my left, and above me I glimpsed an edge of tree-tops waving wildly in the wind. On the other side of the road, the cornfields were whipped to a frenzy; the wind drove leaves and debris along the rutted track leading up to the house, scuttling them around the wheels of the parked cars and the buggy, past the soap kettle, spiraling ashes and carrying all up the steps onto the porch itself, where the parlor windows were glowing.
I slowed as the wind buffeted the car again, and a large branch broke from a tree and flew onto the road. I swerved, then stopped. Leaving the motor running, I got out and pulled the branch to the side of the road. Straightening, I heard what sounded like a cry above the sound of the wind.
As I kicked the branch into the gully, lightning flashed again, a sharp electric current of blue that turned the sky a sickly green color. Then suddenly, above me, at the top of the embankment, materializing out of the darkness, there appeared what I immediately thought must be the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome. Ghastly, eerie, the figure was a gray ashen hue, the white garments flapping like cerements, a specter returned from the grave. I have never seen a ghost, nor do I believe that ghosts exist, but at that moment I was absolutely certain I was looking at one. It seemed to glow against the lurid sky, hovering some twelve feet above me, the body cut off by the edge of the embankment, head upraised, arms outstretched. I tried to tell myself I was imagining all this, but there it stood, a haggard, silvery shape, like some ghoul risen from the dead.
It turned on me the most terrible countenance I had ever seen. An appalling face, the flesh was as white as the clothes, except for the dark recesses of the eyes and the red, grinning mouth. It was this grin that made it seem more horrible, scarcely a smile at all, but the parody of one. A poor, painted smile, witless, demented, grim, the inane smile of a rag doll. Dark gouts of liquid erupted from the corners of the mouth while one hand-feeble, supplicating-lifted in a pitiful gesture and tore at the grin, as though to strip it away.
Then the haggard thing performed a grotesque reel, a dance of agony, twirling slowly, slowly, head once more thrown back to the night sky.
In another moment it had disappeared, vanished as though, in the tradition of ghosts, it had dematerialized. I ran and shut off the car motor, then laboriously made my way up the embankment, using rocks and projecting roots to clamber up the steep incline and onto the grassy plateau at the top.
There was nothing, only the swath of wind-whipped grass, the edge of the woods beyond, and, beyond that, darkness. I called out. No answer came, and no sign at all of the white apparition.
The clouds scraped across the face of the moon. Suddenly bright and shiny as it moved slowly toward the west, it again poured a dazzling white over the dark landscape. I thought how big and bright and shining it was, and how far away, noting its visible geography, its clearly delineated craters, mountains, deserts, seas. Again I lowered my gaze, taking one last look for that other, impossible shape I had seen. And standing there, listening to the wind, I felt sure this was no ghost, no supernatural creature, but something as real as the moon itself, real enough to have been human and alive.’
12
Real enough; but had it been alive? Or was I falling under the influence of Cornish witch tales and charms? I thought of telling Beth of the strange apparition, then, remembering the old trouble, and how easily influenced she was, I decided against it. Better to let the village weave its more salutary spells, whose good effects were so clearly already at work upon her. I was persuaded that it was better to leave my tale of the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome for another, more appropriate time.
The next day, Monday, I worked in the studio sanding the gesso panel I would use for my painting of the covered bridge. When Worthy came, I interrupted my work to help him tackle the roofing job. He was moody again today, with little to say regarding the excursion to Nonesuch Farm, other than that Kate had enjoyed it. I made no allusion to the strange event of last night, and between us we limited ourselves to the scantest of small talk until Beth called us to come in. We ate lunch from folding tables in the bacchante room so we could watch the replays of the Olympic events. Mark Spitz had captured another gold medal, and they were saying he would take an even seven and make Olympic history; I wished him the joy of all that gold.
When we had eaten, I left Worthy to complete the roofing job alone and, taking my water-color equipment, I set out for the Lost Whistle Bridge. On a sudden thought, I pulled in at the Pettinger farm to have a word with Worthy’s mother and father. The place wasn’t much by anybody’s standards, not “all-electric” like the Hookes’s, and without indoor plumbing. Like the rest of Cornwall Coombe, the Pettingers had planted corn wherever the ground might bear it. There was a well and a springhouse, a chicken run, and a barn. If Fred Minerva was jokingly referred to as the biggest hard-luck farmer in the community, Wayne Pettinger surely was the poorest. He had two other sons to help him with the work, but it quickly became evident that he begrudged the time “the boy” was giving to others, myself included.
Both of them, the mother and the father, had the tired, careworn look of the workaday farmer fighting a losing battle against the soil, and neither seemed inclined to discuss Worthy’s trouble when I bearded them in the kitchen, but only sat bleakly and with unswerving gaze as they heard me out. I told them I felt that Worthy should be given a chance, that a great disservice would be done in stopping his schooling,
Mr. Pettinger was angry and adamant. The boy was full of fool notions. Theirs was a poor farm, but with seven years of Worthy’s being Harvest Lord it could become a rich one. Men would come and work it for him and not charge for labor; it could be the place they’d always dreamed it might be. Honor had been conferred; but no, the
