The Ghost House
They moved in just after Christmas, a strange time to relocate to an isolated farmhouse at the end of a twisted dirt road. Saskatchewan winters still took her breath away but now that they had the baby, Abby was happy to have the privacy and promise of a summer garden after living in a teacherage trailer on Thunderchild reserve where her husband taught. They had left eastern Canada on a lark, planning to save enough to spend the following year in Greece but the baby had derailed those plans.
Before Will left in the morning, he always built a strong fire in the wood/oil furnace in the cellar so that when she and the baby awoke for the day, the kitchen would be warm. The house was drafty, having been badly renovated. The large picture windows didn’t belong on the rolling prairie on the edge of boreal forest, with its fierce winter winds and Arctic air masses that dipped down from the north. The glass was leaky and hoar frost developed around the edges in feathery shapes so that the world outside was framed by angels. That’s what she told her daughter, Tilly, when she held her tiny hand to the glass.
Abby brought her daughter into bed long before dawn to feed and they usually slept until close to 9:00 am when the sun finally rose. This morning it was very warm. Tilly’s forehead was sweaty and she held her wrist to her but she didn’t feel feverish. She threw back the duvet, suddenly feeling freed from winter, as though spring was just around the corner. The moods of the house were still unfamiliar to her—the way sun slanted onto the floors, a wider wedge each day now that the winter solstice had passed or how the sharpness of light in the morning told time.
“Up you get, varmint,” she said. She changed Tilly’s diaper and kissed the bottoms of her feet, still so soft, having yet to bear her weight.
Tilly drooled on her shoulder as she carried her down the stairs into the kitchen.The floor was icy cold, raising goosebumps on her neck.As she rounded the kitchen island, she saw that the door had blown open and that part of the kitchen was more than ankle-deep in snow. No wonder the upstairs had been so warm. The furnace had been working overtime.
She had trouble pushing the door closed with Tilly still in her arms.She swept as much of the snow away as she could with her bare foot, wetting the bottom of her bathrobe. Then she lay Tilly down on the floor past the reach of the snow.Tilly didn’t like this change from the normal morning routine and started winding up to a full-throttle cry.Abby reached outside the door where the snow shovel was leaning against the porch pillar and started shovelling.
When she was done, she called Eleanor in Livelong, one long ring and two short ones on the party line. Eleanor had been a farm wife but when they retired she and her husband had sold the farm and moved into the small village of Livelong. Eleanor, a Second World War bride from Edinburgh whom she had met at the library when she was checking out novels by Margaret Drabble, was the person who had told her about the rental of the farmhouse.
They had a conspiratorial relationship ever since they both realized that they would be among the few to peruse the few British novels carried by the library in Turtleford, the next town over. Livelong was too small for even a bookmobile.
Tilly lay beside her on the brown carpet of the living room, dreamily watching the shapes she had cut out of construction paper and hung from thread from the ceiling.
“So maybe all your talk about this house is right.I woke up to a foot of snow in the kitchen and the door wide open.”
“Ah, the spirits trying to leave.That’s good news.”
“It was so hot upstairs I thought it was spring. Then the kitchen was freezing. It’s still not warm in here.”
“A cold spot in the kitchen means a haunting.”
“Or a foot of snow on the floor! And why again did you recommend we rent this house?” Abby asked but she was laughing and not expecting an answer. They both knew that Eleanor wanted her to live closer to her than Thunderchild Reserve and that she saw something of herself in Abby’s situation.
Once over sweet tea in Eleanor’s bright kitchen, she had told Abby about when she first arrived on the prairies after a long ocean voyage and then the train halfway across the continent to finally join Steve, the Ukrainian-Canadian farmer she had met when he was stationed in Scotland.
“How could I know what living here would be like? I couldn’t understand, being from Edinburgh. I was used to company and shops and bustling about. When it started to snow in November, we were closed in until April. Even if the roads were open, which they weren’t, there wasn’t enough money for shoes for the children until they went to school. We didn’t even have electricity until 1968, if you can imagine.”
“That sounds hard. In a small way I can relate as we didn’t have a car for the first seven months we were on the reserve. We didn’t expect to stay.” Abby knew this was inadequate in comparison to Eleanor’s hardship but it was all she had. She was still feeling adventurous and grown up being here, so far away from the city where she was raised.
“Do you dream about your old life in the city?” Eleanor asked.
“No. Do you?”
“Sometimes, but those aren’t the dreams that haunt me.”
“What does?”
“I started having a dream when Sarah was about the same age as Tilly. It was winter. I hear a baby crying in a well.I can’t reach the baby. Can’t even find the well. Just that awful crying and me growing more and more desperate.”
Abby had shivered.
“If I didn’t go mad then, I never will,” Eleanor said.
Abby was remembering this conversation and missed what Eleanor had been saying about the house. Something about a body brought her rapidly back.
“What happened?” she asked Eleanor.
“They don’t know exactly. Maybe an accident. Maybe something more sinister. Those brothers lived alone out on that farm for years. Winter can feel awfully long. And tense.”
“No, after that. What happened?”
“I don’t know if I should be telling you any of this. One was found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs. A broken neck,” said Eleanor. “The other brother was out in the barn when it happened. That’s what he told everyone back then.”
“Why do you doubt that?” Abby asked.
“He turned into the town drunk. He never wanted to be out there on the farm with his brother gone. His fences fell down. The cattle died of starvation through the winter. Finally, he was found dead in his bed. Then the house was empty a long time. And after that, the new owner had to declare bankruptcy, but only after doing all those renovations that make no sense in this climate. And then the next ones… well, the wife got sick with cancer. She died and left two little ones.”
Abby was quiet then, wondering if in fact Eleanor shouldn’t have told her this or at least told her before they committed to the house for a year. All Eleanor had said was that some said the house was haunted. But this information seemed like a game then, imprecise, like something offered by one of those childhood Ouiji boards. She could drag out that fact for entertainment when Will’s colleagues visited and put it back in the box when she was on her own. Did she even believe in ghosts? She was twenty-four and had never even been to a funeral. Her grandparents had died in far-off Nova Scotia at a time when her family didn’t travel much. Everyone she knew and cared about was alive, with soft warm skin and familiar voices she could summon up on the telephone if they were far away.
She had been feeding Tilly during much of this conversation, the phone held in the crook of her neck which was getting sore from the unnatural position. Tilly was sleeping heavily in her arms but it wouldn’t last long if she didn’t place her in her crib so she started to say goodbye to Eleanor.
“The downstairs has finally warmed up,” she said as a way to wind down the conversation. Once Eleanor started telling stories, they could go on for a long time. When her voice suddenly sounded a little far off she knew someone was listening in on the line. She wondered if they enjoyed Eleanor’s stories as well. Eleanor seemed to have friends, was a member of the Women’s Institute and brought in the more interesting speakers. She hosted letter writing in her kitchen each month for Amnesty International, attended the United Church but never asked if Abby practiced a religion. She baked pies and volunteered at the curling arena for bonspiels but when she spotted Abby anywhere, she set herself apart from these friends, from other women her age dressed in the same floral blouses, women with the same modest wedding rings on their left hands.
Once she noticed Abby looking at her ring and said, “You don’t wear a ring. Some busy bodies wonder if you’re even married. That old crumpet Janet even called you Will’s shack-up.” Eleanor cackled at that.
“I guess I am,” Abby said. “When Tilly’s a little older, we will head back east and get married. The baby came before we had the chance.”
“Take your time,” Eleanor said. “I’ve always told Sarah that. She’s much older than you and still not married. She’s seen the pyramids and kayaked in the Arctic. Good for her.”
Yet she couldn’t get over the feeling that Eleanor wanted to keep her close, that even the hint that she might head back east temporarily or permanently put a chill in Eleanor’s voice.
She had finally lain Tilly down on the chocolate broadloom, where she slept peacefully, so once Abby said good bye she didn’t bother moving her upstairs to her crib. Instead, she slipped down beside her and looked out the tall floor to ceiling windows that lined the room on one side. Behind the house the rolling prairie stretched out in the winter sun. The house was warm and drowsy as the sun angled closer to where they lay together. Not even one of the windows opened, all were picture glass, and the door to the deck didn’t have a screen door. What a strange house, she thought. They would swelter with this south-western exposure once summer came. She watched a swirling cloud of dry snow skitter across the surface of the field and head towards the house. The windows rattled slightly with the sound of the snow as it hit the glass, then all was clear again.
She had no idea what time it was or how long Tilly had been sleeping. Her days slipped by like this at the farm, too far from the reserve for Will to come home for lunch. When she lived in the teacherage on Thunderchild, she could feel like she was part of the life of the school. The mobile homes were lined up in the schoolyard. The school itself was a collection of portables and the former band office, all makeshift and exciting since the community pulled their kids out of the town schools and went band controlled. The new school, pie shaped, was being built out near the Sundance grounds, mirroring the shape for cultural resonance. There were high hopes in the community that this would lead to a new oil training institute and good jobs. The teachers were all young and recruited from everywhere, the principal had returned to his home community after years away to pull this off. Debates about classroom management spilled over to their trailer when school ended for the day. When she was pregnant and napping in the afternoon, little girls who knocked on the door to no answer wrapped wildflowers around the doorknob like a calling card.
The farmhouse was so quiet in comparison, her neighbours kilometres away, and busy with their chores and lives. She had underestimated what a difference it would make to be almost thirty kilometres from the school. This was her world, hers and Tilly’s. Will’s world was elsewhere. She felt a little shock of recognition. She had become a housewife, married to this house, her fate linked to what she could make of it.
She dozed a little. On her cheek the carpeting was warm and with her ear to the floor she heard a far-off roar. She was dreaming about a train she had meant to board but missed as it pulled out of the small prairie platform.
Then she felt a shaking. The floor beneath her cheek was warm. She lifted her head and listened. There was that train sound, far off but getting closer. By the time she opened the cellar door, there was crackling as well, and pungent smoke. The fire lit the horizontal pipe from the furnace bright red and glowing, a fat snake writhing with colour. Little flames were leaping from the glowing pipe to the wood panelled wall that had clearly been installed too close to the pipe. The flames were dancing, energetic, staining the wall black, still not catching but they would very soon.
She ran to where Tilly was sleeping in the living room, wrapped her in the quilt on the couch and rushed outside into the biting air. Tilly was shaken awake and started to cry with wide frightened eyes.
“Sorry little girl, I have to leave you here,” she told Tilly as she lay her in the snow, just beneath the over grown caragana hedge, hoping it would cut the wind. “Try to stay wrapped. It’s cold out.”
Tilly was screaming now and she realized the absurdity of reasoning with her. She quickly took off her own socks, hit them against her thigh and put them over Tilly’s hands. They weren’t wet yet because the snow was so dry. She didn’t feel her bare feet in the snow but ran fast towards the door. Tilly’s cries grew more faint, far off, as if swallowed by time.
She bounded through the door, crossing some threshold of irrationality. Her daughter became less distinct as the house and its fate loomed before her. The phone was too far off to register, down a long hall and across the living room. She didn’t turn towards it but took three large steps into the kitchen. She grabbed a pot from the stove, dashed again out the door and filled it with snow. At the top of the cellar stairs she paused and held her breath, then plunged down the stairs into the heat. Once she got close to the bottom where the red pipe was pulsating with energy, she threw the snow at the pipe. It sizzled and evaporated almost instantaneously. Back in the kitchen she grabbed a bucket and filled it from the bathtub. Back under the pipe, she hurled the contents of the bucket onto the pipe and wall behind it. The wave of steam that came off it was terrifying and standing under it she realized that if the pipe burst it would rain down on her upturned face, disfiguring her, or worse.
Tilly’s existence was a far-off echo, as she had seemed during the hardest part of labour. Only the urgency of pain existed, no sense of past or future. It was too intense to breathe but she saw that the water had had some effect. The little flames were no longer licking the wall and that part of the pipe had dulled in colour. She was spurred on. After ten or so trips down the stairs, the pipe fire was out. She was drenched. Maybe it was sweat or steam or anxiety. When she went out to find Tilly and bring her back inside, she was still overheated. Surprisingly Tilly wasn’t crying but was looking above her at the fiercely blue sky and the caragana branches that clacked as they swayed in the wind above her head. Her cheeks were very red but it wasn’t the evil chemical red of the pipe on fire. It was the deep pink of delicate flowers, of dawn. As she picked her up to carry her back inside, Abby started to shiver.
Eleanor was upset when she called to tell her what had happened.
“Let that house burn to the ground! Good riddance,” she said. “You could have lost consciousness and then your baby outside, all alone in the cold. By the time the neighbours saw the smoke, it would be too late. There’s no rescue here. At least not in time.”
“I know that,” Abby said.
At the moment she made the decision to dash into the house she felt that her future was linked to the outcome.
That night she saw the pipes glowing again as she lay in her bed next to Will. As she moved her eyes behind her lids, the pipes moved with her. Something had burned into her, changed her in a permanent way.
Will refused to use the wood part of the furnace from then on so the mornings were so much chillier.
He had been angry at her for her foolishness, talking of her burning to death in the house and their baby frozen under the overgrown caragana shrubs over and over until she cried.
“I couldn’t bear to come home and find that,” he said, more gently then.
“I know, I know. There just wasn’t time to think.”
She found herself up earlier as the days moved towards spring.
Eleanor called often but Abby started to find herself too busy to return the calls right away. Some other weather system was forming in the distant quadrant of the sky and her nerve-endings were coming alive with the possibilities of her own future away from here. She did plant the long-anticipated garden in the spring, ripping out long tough lengths of crab grass roots, stripping them like veins from the brown soil. The first sprouts of peas, beans and potatoes and especially corn were magical. Tilly was crawling by then and the knees of her terrycloth sleepers were always dark as her fingernails. She was so gentle, wrapping her hand around a delicate sprout as though around a candle flame. She blew on them with the sweetest breath and smiled up at Abby as though she knew it was a good joke.
Abby scooped her up and kissed her prairie-encrusted hands.
“Oh, Tilly you don’t have just a green thumb. You have a black one too! Lucky girl.
Eleanor called and offered her a young goat one of her former neighbours wanted to give away that had recently weaned a kid.
“Milking is a cinch and then you wouldn’t have to pay for goat milk for Tilly’s allergies. Goats can be cantankerous but one on its own isn’t too much trouble. “You might as well use that hip-roofed barn,” she added. “But mostly she could live outside and keep down the grass.”
Abby thought about it, opening the huge barn door and slipping inside on the cross-cut tamarack log floor. The barn level for animals smelt like ancient grain and dust. It was gloomy and lonely, nothing like the cathedral-like grandeur of the hay mow above it. She recoiled from it. How could she put a young nanny-goat in here alone? No, she wouldn’t.
That first summer, their garden was resplendent and so abundant that they dug up potatoes when they were the size of marbles, ate corn with kernels as small as baby teeth, bursts of sweet sunshiny dew in their mouths. Some meals they just swept through the garden, grazing, with a bucket of water for cleaning on the spot… crisp radishes, raw peas peeled from the supple shell, snappy beans, tender lettuce. She even chewed some young beets, spit and passed the blood-red mush to Tilly on her palm. Everything was sweeter than she could have imagined. For dessert, they grazed the saskatoon bushes along the edges of the garden.She loved Will being there for the summer. The restlessness that had begun in late winter had retreated although she knew that her part of the story in this house would end before too long. In the meantime, the three of them had timeless days of exploring old granaries on the property, collecting deer antlers in the forest, visiting the appaloosa horses on the next farm. She should have been planning how to preserve what her garden produced, either investing in a freezer or canning the old-fashioned way. Eleanor offered to teach her but she procrastinated and before she knew it, the peas had grown large and starchy and the beans developed angry looking purple seeds pushing out their sleek green skins.
By the time Will returned to teach in September and the nights grew chilly, crickets scratching out the end of summer, something had hardened in her, like the seeds inside her neglected bean plants.The next year they only grew early lettuce and sometimes even forgot to pick that before the slugs had their feast. With very little discussion, they both knew they would leave in mid-summer. Then the house was full of boxes, the driveway full of friends who were taking away the detritus of their Saskatchewan lives.
She surprised herself by crying all the way to Saskatoon, finally understanding the term rent in two. Part of her would always be back there watching a sliver of light widen day by day on the living room floor as her baby slept beside her. The crying changed into a heavy head cold that made the rest of the drive back to Ontario seem to pass in two dimensions, like a dream.
She didn’t see the house again for years, until they were moving from Ottawa to Vancouver Island after they both retired from teaching. Abby had spent the last twenty-five years teaching English at an arts high school. Their daughter Tilly had settled in Vancouver and had a baby suddenly in her late thirties. This took them by surprise, shook them up enough that they decided to leave their family home, their neighbourhood and the lives they had built so they could be closer. On the way, they detoured north in Saskatchewan and stopped to visit with friends who had remained all those years. On the way to dinner with their old neighbour, Will suggested that they stop at the tiny Livelong cemetery at the place the paved road turned ninety degrees and became a country dirt road.
“Now that Eleanor and Steve are gone, I guess Livelong is eighty-nine souls,” Will said.
“Well, eighty-six, because we left too!” she answered him, trying for humour but feeling quite lost, emotional.
Her eyes were drawn to a new grave near the grid road, the soil not yet settled or softened with grass.But that couldn’t be Eleanor’s grave. She died over twenty years ago, one year after her husband and only a few years after they visited them in Ottawa. She remembered so clearly Eleanor’s wistful regard for Ottawa’s parkland and flower beds.
“This is a jewel of a city,” she had said. It was May and the canal was lined with vivid bands of tulips. Dows Lake was sparkling, animated by the first sailboats of the season. The gardens of the brick mansions in the Golden Triangle were fresh and manicured.
The women were in the backseat as Will drove them around, Steve beside him.
“People always say that Ottawa looks very British,” Abby said. “Do you think so?”
“This is how I imagined Canada before I got here,” Eleanor said.
Abby remembered what she had told her about the shock of arriving on the prairies.
“When did you accept Saskatchewan as home? How long did it take?”
Eleanor paused and said softly: “You know what? It’s funny, but I never really did.”
Will interrupted her memories and asked her, “Do you want to stop and visit Eleanor’s grave?”
She shook her head. “No. Too sad. She never wanted to end up here.”
A few kilometres on, where the road narrowed and turned through swamp and forest, they could see the spire on the top of the barn of the house where they had once lived. They decided to stop and see the place where they had been young. The last of a succession of tenants who had lived there for over thirty-five years had moved out and the house was finally empty.
A new gravel driveway had been established towards the front of the house that was once surrounded by thick spruce trees that had completely shielded it from view from the road. The long potholed driveway lined with overgrown caragana had been abandoned, partially obscuring the hip-roofed barn that looked worse for wear. This disoriented entry made her expect many other changes but when she looked through the windows, the house was exactly as she had left it long ago. The teak cupboards and creamy island in the kitchen were the same, the chocolate brown carpet in the living room. She remembered the exact chip in the tile on the hearth of the fireplace. The badly built greenhouse with its plastic windows was still affixed to the house but didn’t look as though it had ever been used.
This was the house she had returned to over and over in her dreams. That dream house was always sinister and much larger than it appeared, with hidden passageways that led to dusty rooms where something terrible had happened. In many of these dreams she found herself once again living on that farm confused and bereft of the life she had built for herself in the city. This time she was back by choice and wondered what its hold was over her. When they walked around to the yard where her vegetable garden had once been she realized what it was.She had come back for her daughter and for the part of herself that could have lived and died here. She stood on the long unkempt grass where she had left her baby wrapped in a blanket in the snow all those years ago. The yard was empty, the grass undisturbed. Whatever had once happened here was over and all the participants were released to the many paths that led them away from this place and time.
Read more
