Ghosts (written in August, 2005)

When I was ten and my brother, Colin, eight, my parents bought an old schoolhouse in a northern corner of Ontario, just north enough to be away from home; too far away for me. It sat on an acre of grass with trees all around it on the outer perimeter, and it was one hundred years old. At first, we went there on weekends and lived in it just as it was, with its pit toilets right inside the house, its one remaining wood and wrought iron desk nailed to the floor, its one large room filled with our bedraggled furniture.

I hated it there. When I wasn’t playing on one of the two puckered wood swings, their thick, rusty chains gritty in my hands, or trying to keep my brother up in the air on the sea saw, I truly hated it. In between charming the garter snakes out of the nest they’d made under the house or climbing the barbed fence to go groundhog spotting in the neighboring field, I wanted so badly to go home that I refused to betray any fleeting interest I had in the place with a smile.
Right from the first, I began to imagine children who must have gone to school at our weekend home when it was built in 1875. In my mind, it was mostly girls who played in the yard, wading through the thick, uncut grass with their long dresses, coming toward me with smiles and a plan to rescue me from my crippling boredom. I wanted them to exist and I day dreamed them into the lonely days I spent with my brother who annoyed me as much because he seemed to like to the schoolhouse as for his speed and agility.

Tree climbing was effortless for him, though I managed somehow to clutch the limbs that would take me high enough to look from that silver maple out onto the other fields and the houses and farms and think of jumping in one free-flying leap toward the farthest one just to see if I could. But rather than jump from tree to swaying wheat, we climbed over the barbed wire to plod through the adjacent fields.

While our parents read and napped, we got to know the McDermotts up the road, whose farm boasted pigs and cows, dogs and cats. If the pigs were out, we rested against the fence, our arms dangling over it while the pigs lay around, their muddied backs cracking in the sun.
Sometimes we headed for the barn and Colin scrambled up into the loft, his little blond head rising almost indistinguishably from the hay bales stacked high as he grabbed onto the rope and swung into the heap of straw below. It was fun to watch him, but I wasn’t tempted. The sweet smell of the hay, its ends brushing against my clothes and prickling my bare legs, was enough for me.

Our parents knocked the ceiling out after the first year, in 1976, and put in three bedrooms, leaving the first floor open after they took out the makeshift walls and moved beds upstairs. The railing at the top was one person wide between slats, the stairs gapped wide enough for an errant foot to slip through. My room had a map of England covering one wall. In love with England through books, I looked at that map every night, running my finger along it, imagining the patchwork of fields brought into focus past the grid lines on the map.

Attached to the schoolhouse was, and still is, a small barn, with a door leading into the house that was sealed shut. Inside were cobwebbed remnants of the building, covered in dust. It was the smell of things forgotten that I still equate with death, not knowing what death smells like, not making sense even then of my longing for the ghosts of children who’d lived a century before me and what they would have smelled like if I could have met them in my own stultifying reality.

When we were old enough to venture further away from the schoolhouse, Colin and I took to the unpaved road that led to Glen Huron, a tiny town with a water wheel and a general store, two or three miles away where there was salvation in candy. We didn’t talk much on the way, united only by our boredom and the appalling lack of kids our age, a persistent problem through the years we’d spent there so far, removing ourselves from our friends most weekends from June through August. Fingering the few dollars entrenched in my pocket, I imagined the chocolate bars I’d buy that would see me through the rest of the weekend. My brother, more private by the time he was 11 or 12, might have been thinking anything; maybe thinking he’d rather be playing with his friend Martin than poking along a country road with his older sister. I never asked him that question, never thought to.

I don’t remember when I was first allowed to stay home while my parents went up North. I must have been about 17 and possibly Colin stayed with me. A few times in my college years I took a girlfriend up for the weekend without my parents there and we went to the beach, to the shores of Georgian Bay, went out to dinner, or cooked at the house, its one room filling with the steam and smoke of whatever our botched efforts yielded. Colin would go up on his own often in his late teens and twenties, perhaps preferring his own company.

I never talked to him about why he liked the schoolhouse so much; likely, I connected it with his inclination away from the family, his pronounced need to spend time apart from us even as he treated us all with a kind of acquaintance-level respect. He and I got along well enough when we reached our teens, but I don’t think we found a mutual pass-through until our thirties when we revealed the work we were both doing, the writing we’d both chosen that would define our lives, shape them and, for Colin, ultimately rob him blind of the life he’d chosen to pursue as a writer.

The crime was committed indirectly in the summer of 2004, by a man driving a car as if he had the right-of-way all over the road, as if my brother were merely a decoy he could plow over. Yes, he stopped afterward, but by then Colin was broken and gone from me, from everyone.

As soon as I could get away with it, I didn’t go up to the schoolhouse; not for years, forgetting the ghosts I waited for who never came, audibly grateful for my autonomy as soon as I had it. Being allowed to stay home while my parents were up there was a power enough. I was too square to dream up illicit alternatives. At 18, I brought my then-boyfriend up and his very real allergies to old things made him ill, so we never went again.

Not long after, I was engaged to Joe and he, too, was plagued by an allergic reaction to the mold that inhabited unmined corners of the house. We weren’t a fastidious family, my mother content to leave things coated in dust, smeared with grease, dotted with crumbs so she could gather fiddleheads or milkweed to make edible. It drove my father mad, but I didn’t know this until long after I moved away and kept my own house. They would visit Joe and me and out of her earshot he’d remark to me how much neater I was than my mother. I’d smile, aware of the truth, that my husband was a far more exacting housecleaner than I would ever be, or want to be, that I kept a reasonably clean house more to sidestep his scrutiny than as an antidote to my mother’s slovenly domesticity. And anyway, though I didn’t say this to my father, I’d always thought of that aspect of her as part of her unusual lack of accountability to anyone. I still admire this about her even as I poke a little fun which has the effect of making her laugh at herself.

Our children love the schoolhouse. They love the supernatural quiet of it, the remove from everything they think of as natural. Of course, they haven’t been there for two years and their last time didn’t leave them hungering for their creature comforts; their internet, cell phones and X-Box. But they still want to go and when we drive up to Toronto to visit my parents, we ogle the indolent cows lying in the sun, the horses grazing near the roadside, and clutch our guts on the roller coaster of the Hockley Valley road. (Just the name of that highway summons queasiness.)

When we’re there with the kids, I look up at the night sky and remember it differently, wishing I’d looked with less fear as a child. One August, when our youngest daughter was a baby and the older two children were still awake, a brilliant light undulated across the sky and I felt certain something terrible was going to happen. It lingered for hours, soundless and graceful, and we stood under it. Beneath that brilliance, I could see where the ground was scarred where the sea saw and swings used to be. The bats had the good sense to stay in the eaves, away from light. Occasionally, I’d go inside and stand behind the screen willing the terror out of me, finally half-convinced that we were all experiencing a close encounter. I pictured our family clawing at the ground with feeble fingers as we struggled against being beamed onto a mother ship and I still laugh at how that single protracted sighting of Northern Lights could stir such panic in me when my mother stood fearless most nights of my childhood under the night sky, beckoning me out when I couldn’t sleep, her absence and my fear pulling me from my bed. And I would join her and my father for a few minutes only to scurry back inside, favoring a lonely house with a maddeningly sleeping brother over a star-clouded ceiling.

In the months before my brother was killed, he told me that part of his plan to write and teach English and Drama the way our grandfather had involved the schoolhouse. He wanted to live there for several months with his dog Gabby who loved it there as much as he did. He would do so in winter, the loneliest time up there, waiting it out until he could earn his teaching degree in Australia the following year. Most years our parents had rented the place to skiers, the sport popular up there with the swells of Blue Mountain and other runs nearby. So, it was winterized and ready to receive him.

I had looked at him in disbelief and possibly admiration when he filled me in. Yes, I knew he liked it; I even felt a certain jealous prickle that he was free to chase his dream, that he could make a decision to change his life and be truer to himself and that part of his scheme involved a cross-Canada cycling trip that would begin his new life.

But what resonated when he first told me about his plan during an October visit to Philadelphia, and asked me not to tell our parents yet, was the idea that he would hole up at the schoolhouse when the earth was dead and the trees bare, the wind shrill at the windows, the people…well, that last didn’t matter because people were not what he was after.

I didn’t tell my parents, leaving it to him when he was ready. When he finally let them know what he’d be doing, from selling his home, to cycling across the country, to staying at the schoolhouse writing away the months of autumn well into winter and then attending school, I recall that pride stuck in my throat, displacing envy. I hope I told him that what he was doing was hats off incredible.

I didn’t tell my brother that I’d started to write a play about our earliest years at the schoolhouse and that the characters of Carrie and Mitchell were composites of my two older children, him and me, or that there was a prominent ghost in the story, named Penelope. She comes to Carrie in her dreams, lulls her away from her belligerent need to hate the place, shows her clues to a lush legacy in the town, relics in the barn adjoining the schoolhouse, mends fences between Carrie and her vexing younger brother, helps them hatch a plan to keep the schoolhouse when their parents find it’s much more than they’d first thought they could handle when they plucked their children from city life to show them that quiet wasn’t just when the lights went out at night.