elow the Falls
Gentlemen, I am tired of ghost stories.
They are always the same. A respectable narrator visits a country house where he experiences a series of unsettling incidents before the final appearance of the ghost bursts on his mind like a thunderclap. His faith is shattered or his sanity. He is changed forever.
But if the defining quality of a ghost is its mystery, its otherness, I propose to you we are surrounded by such spirits whether we acknowledge it or not. In pain the mind hides even from itself, becoming a darkened star around which light bends but does not pass through.
I hope you might permit me to read from an old diary. The story it tells is a kind of ghost story, though the dead do not walk in its pages, except in the usual way by which the words of the deceased survive on paper after their graves are filled.
The diary came into my possession some years ago when I was practicing medicine in Lynn, Massachusetts. A nurse at the State Hospital in Danvers had learned of my interest in psychoanalysis and sent it to me after the death of its author.
Her name was Isabella Carr and she was born in Walpole, New Hampshire. Her father died when she was seventeen. Her mother married again and Isabella lived with her mother and stepfather for a time until age eighteen when she married Horace Carr of Beacon Hill. The diary begins shortly after Isabella’s wedding to Mr. Carr and depicts the weeks prior to her committal.
Apr 2
Alfie was here again last night.
I heard him at the door, his faint scratching. He was just outside the room, waiting for that late hour when the whole of the house lay sleeping and there was only me to hear him.
I opened the door. He scuttled inside, dragging his belly on the floor. He was terribly thin, his hair all in patches. It came away in tufts beneath my fingertips, baring the pitted skin beneath, the sallow flesh speckled with rot: they had buried him alive.
I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around him. He did not resist but merely lay with his head against my chest as I whispered into his ear.
I’m sorry, I said. I thought you were dead.
His breathing was strained and rapid but still he did not stir. He listened as the words poured out of me, an undammed torrent. I spoke for hours, or what seemed like hours, and later, I awoke to find him gone with the bars of sunlight on my face.
Bridget woke me. She entered the room while I slept and now applies herself to the tasks of stripping the bed, taking down the curtains. She whistles as she works—an Irish song, I suppose, for I do not recognize the tune.
Downstairs, the clocks all sound the half-hour, and I know
that I have overslept. Mr Carr awaits me in the breakfast room. He will be dressed for his clients, his club, checking his watch as the minutes tick past and still I do not come—
Apr 7
A letter from Uncle Edmund—
This morning I woke early, before dawn, and padded downstairs in my nightgown. In the hall I found the mail where it had been dropped through the slot. In amongst my husband’s correspondence was a letter addressed to me in my uncle’s hand.
I recognized it at once. Edmund is my father’s brother, his senior by ten years or more. He is a big man, like Father was, and likewise well-spoken, if occasionally given to maundering, and his avowed agnosticism once made him a figure of some controversy in our household.
When Father died, Edmund took to writing me long letters, and these I cherished like jewels, for I heard my father’s voice in his words and seemed to catch his scent upon the page. The letters ceased with Mother’s marriage to Mr Orne, who is a Methodist of the meanest sort, though it was months before I realized they had hidden them from me.
Uncle Edmund had obtained my husband’s address from a gentleman friend in Walpole of some slight acquaintance with Mr Carr. He rarely speaks of it, but Mr Carr was born in Walpole and is, in fact, my mother’s cousin, though he relocated to Boston as a young man and was subsequently estranged from his family for years.
Now Edmund writes to say that Father’s house has been sold and is soon to be demolished. My mother has moved with Mr Orne to Vermont, to be nearer his church, while our neighbors the Bosworths have bought the property. They have plans to erect a gristmill, damming the creek where it plunges to the falls.
Soon it will all be gone: the gardens, the paths down which we walked on summer evenings, Father and I, when the damp lay thickly on the air and the rosebushes rustled all round. I remember. We crossed the creek at the footbridge, where the petals lay like a blood-trail, and sat together in a place above the falls while the current frothed and broke among the rocks below.
Apr 8-9
Midnight—
I hear the church bells tolling, the passing of the mail coach. An old man sings his way home, and a young girl weeps in the alley. In the silence of this hour, each sound recalls to me my shame and the solitude that followed. Days and nights in that bedroom with the curtains drawn while Mr Orne kept watch outside and Mother walked the halls, screaming.
From the bed I watched the curtains change in color from
gray to yellow to crimson. On cloudless nights the moon shone through the fabric, flesh-white and glistening with grease, making stains on the bedclothes and running like an oil in the blood—
For months I listened for the swollen creek, fat with autumn rain, white water roaring as it fell. Sometimes I thought I was dying. Other nights I was certain of it. In the evenings, I heard the winds blowing outside, and Mother weeping, and Mr Orne ascending the stairs—
Then one night he unlocked the door and entered the room with his bible under his arm and the usual prayers upon his lips. He knelt beside me and took hold of my wrist. He said some words. There was a sharp pain, then, and a light washed over me, cool as spring rain or the touch of God’s breath on my forehead, and finally, I slept.
Apr 11
Sunday, no church—
I will not go. Mr. Carr is away on business, and for all of her coaxing, Bridget could not rouse me from the bed. She is a Catholic girl, of course, and quite devout. From the window I watched her hurry off to Mass, wearing her Sunday hat with the brim pulled down to her ears.
Then I dressed myself in the blue silk he had loved and sat by the window with my diary in my lap. As I write, I watch the birds circle the rooftops opposite. I admire their ease, their lightness. They drift like bracken on the churning current, carried this way and that with the wind through the chimney-pots, dropping like stones when they sight the river.
The ice is out of the Charles. Every morning reveals a surface more degraded, riven with forks of liquid water. Last week Mr Carr walked home with me after church. He was meeting a client after lunch, a young man of my own age, and was in rare good spirits. The day was fair and warm and we took the bridge over the Charles.
Halfway across, I paused and gazed down at the river with its plains of blue-gray ice and glimpsed the creek behind them like the words in a palimpsest. I could hear the falls, too, over the clatter of wheels and footsteps, and recalled the garden at night. The rush of water spilling over rocks, foaming far below. The answering hum of the blood running through me.
Mr Carr joined me at the railing. I asked him of what the ice reminded him. He thought for a moment and said that it resembled a map.
Yes, he said, more confident of himself. It is much like a map of the city. Do you see? he asked, pointing. There is my street, my house.
April 11th and the ice is gone and Mr Carr’s map with it. Beacon Hill has dwindled away into the black water, and soon my father’s house will follow. There will be only the river, only the creek, two channels feeding the same sea. I must go back—
Apr 15
This morning at breakfast I raised the matter of the house in Walpole and asked Mr Carr for leave to travel there. At first I thought he had not heard me, for he did not answer, and did not wrest his gaze from the newspaper.
I must see it, I said. While it remains standing.
He turned the paper over. He continued to read.
Hmm? he murmured.
Father’s house, I said. Our neighbors, the Bosworths—
Mr Carr slapped down the paper. His cheeks were flushed. They had darkened to purple and the pores stood out below his eyes. We have been married three months, but I have never before seen him angry.
And how is it you have heard of this? he demanded.
Uncle Edmund wrote to me.
Is that so? How interesting.
He reached for his coffee cup. He sipped from it, seemingly lost in thought as a carriage passed in the street outside, rattling the buds on the trees.
He shook his head slowly. When he spoke, his voice was low and level.
He said: It is entirely out of the question.
I will be discreet, I said. I will say nothing of your—
He slammed down his cup. The saucer cracked beneath it, upturning the cup and sending the hot liquid spilling across the table. He leapt up and called for Bridget. The girl appeared in the doorway with her eyes downcast, looking terrified.
Clean this up, he said. He indicated the mess before him.
Yes, sir.
He glared at me. Leave us, he said.
And I left—but I listened outside the door.
Mr Carr was furious with Bridget. He hissed and spat at her and threatened her dismissal. It would seem he believes that she sneaked a letter to my uncle on my behalf. The good Catholic girl, Bridget did not deny the accusation, but bowed her head and accepted this punishment as her due, speaking up only to voice her agreement, and later, her apology.
See that it does not happen again, he said. Good day.
Bridget swept out in her apron and skirts. She scurried past me with her face in her hands, reaching the staircase at a run. For his part Mr Carr pushed back his chair and vanished through the opposite doorway. I heard the front door shut behind him, his footsteps on the stoop.
He will visit his club when the working day is done. He will not return for hours.
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