"You folks bought the O'Neil place… again?" Our country relatives’ surprise quickly turned into smug amusement; here was more proof that city life addled a person’s good sense.
My family had bought and escaped from the decrepit farmhouse once and it had two other owners but then we hitched ourselves to it again. We had missed our summer place too much. There was an odd bonus to our nostalgic homecoming, all the junky items we originally sold with the house were still there. The old bedspreads and chipped china were arranged as my mother had last handled them. It was as if the intervening decade and other owners had never occurred.
The house was known as The O'Neil Place after an Irish family who arrived on the island in 1898 and bought the farm from William Ghillie. I know this because Ghillie was a distant ancestor. His descendents still refer to him as Black Will, because of his abundant dark hair, and to differentiate him from the numerous other Williams that sprouted from our family tree. It was an old custom that the proper name meant less than a descriptive tag earned later on. Black Will stood out from Red Will, Good Will, and Willie Beag. I don’t how much better Good Will had to be than the others to earn his title, and “beag” sounds kinder in Gaelic than its English meaning of “little.”
The O'Neil's had to build a new home because the Ghillie house was no good to them. I have only two remnants of hearsay about the older homestead. One is that it had partly burned down and the other, that a young woman was killed out in the back field by a lightning strike. As a child I linked the two incidents, but now I know they were separate. A stone at the local cemetery cites the death of one Margaret Ghillie in 1892. She was only nineteen. When I stand by the marble tablet with its century scars of winter and lichen, I can picture Ghillie's daughter hastening the milk cows home under a violent sky. A chimney fire occurred five years later. It was serious enough to ruin the house, but the foundation was left unmarked and sound. The double tragedy was too much for the Ghillie family and they moved to town. The new owners pulled down the scorched timbers and built on top of the sandstone cellar laid down by Black Will.
James O'Neil must have been a man of ambitious whims with a bit of extra coin stowed in his baggage. In an extravagant gesture for that time and place, the Irish immigrant hired an architect to design the farmhouse. This fellow of impeccable degrees had been especially imported from Scotland to design Protestant country churches. There was such a demand, that a different holy house was built every few miles along the main road to serve the horse and buggy people. The steeples of the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches alternately signaled to their distant congregations.
The churches were small wooden buildings with simple lines. Outside walls had decorative molding set between clapboards or geometric patterns worked out in contrasting shingles. The northern winter bleakness lasts so very long, that people crave colour for solace. Against the usual austere church white, exotic touches of royal blue, crimson, lavendar, and parrot green trimmed the steeples and clear arched windows. A hundred years after these churches were built, having evolved into the era of the automobile, the United Church decided to amalgamate all its scattered country flock into one large squat building with steel beams, and drywall. It is a statement of righteous angles. Old churches were destroyed as a gardener rips away wildflowers.
One little church was painted butter yellow and maroon with windows shaped as giant keyholes. At age five, I perceived the interior was really an upside down boat drawn onto its last shore. I remembered my grandfather telling me of a drastic sea voyage that his grandfather had barely survived. I looked up and saw rafters curved as the ribs of my great Uncle Welland's old dory, with wood grain running like water. The wainscotting, laths, and pews were all burnished to the silken warmth of old varnish and years of human touch and breath. There was strong comfort to be had when surrounded by such wood. I saw my mother and her family thumb the hymnals for the right song to carry up to heaven the hope and sorrow of all voyages. The day the church was dismembered, people stood in the graveyard and wept as its beams shattered and fell.
The Catholic churches were less frequent but much larger, and constructed of quarried stone or brick. There were stained glass stories and carved lintels. The steeple had room enough for many bells. The inner walls glowed with white plaster, and marble statues gazed down at the pews. I never went inside these churches until I was an adult. They were not as formally forbidding as I had supposed and I imagine that as a child I would have been thrilled to be in the company of statues that looked as if they should whisper secrets.
It is remarkable how in small faraway places people who in those days weren't supposed to abide each other in the larger world quietly braided their differences together. In the interest of prosperous living, the Protestant architect and the Catholic farmer conceived a beautiful house. The outside was designed in the spare maritime style of the other farm houses. There is a steeply pitched roof with one dormer, a porch, and tall windows on each floor that look out like eyes in the front and the back. The inside has the definite mark of churchmen. The silvery wooden floor in the living room was laid to a herringbone pattern, but if one stands at either of the long ends, a cross rises out of the design. Over the main stairway a pointed arch elegantly bestrides the midway landing. Once one arrives at this chapel setting there is a tiny multi-paned window that allows a view across the bay to a distant white steeple. It is the beacon of the old Anglican church. It leads one to suspect that the architect had an irrepressible sense of irony.
The O'Neil family must have been affected by the subliminal grace for eleven children were born and raised in this house, and nine of them went on to become priests or nuns. It is equally possible that even the extreme demands of the church seemed better than the unforgiving realm of farming. In any case, of the remaining two sons, one was lost to city life and the other inherited the farm. The inheritor eventually sold the house to my parents and the pastures to our cousin. So the land title circled back into our family.
I play God. Standing by the bathroom sink I see a tiny spider in the air seeking its potential. I might have thought it was dust, but for the movement of a parachutist winding and unwinding drift lines in the middle of nowhere. With the wonder at my own power I softly breathe on the spider. I am afraid of spiders, but I cannot stand to kill them. I think of clever Anansi, and Ariadne with her secret thread. I imagine the luck of broken mirrors. I rejoice at all the mosquitos which will not have a chance to needle me. I send the spider toward the window where there is cracked paint and a clutter of beach glass and muscle shells on the sill. Perfect places to hide and weave a wicked tapestry. Lost flies and moths speed towards the daylight and knock against the glass. They are netted easily by the one or two spiders which are always in residence. A young spider has a good future here.
I blow gently and the arachne lands among the strands of another spider's house. I see the pinhead body furiously trying to orient itself in this strange event. The web shivers and a telegraph is delivered. Another small spider suddenly appears and smoothly descends. In less than a minute my baby spider is poisoned, enshrouded, and stuffed in the other spider's pantry. In a corner, where the frame has split, is a miniature cave where the light is grey and dusty bundles hang. The victorious spider reappears and waits for the next coincidence. It is not much bigger than its latest victim. Meanwhile I am stunned at how quickly my generous intent twisted into indifferent fate.
The house is immersed in these dramas. One year the spider population booms and we arrive to find large webs strung across the outside of every ground floor window. These spiders sit upside down in the middle of a gossamer spiral, their slender legs splayed like a pianist feeling for chords. They are ordinary garden chatelaines grown to bizarre proportions. Their fat bark coloured bodies look as if they could be softly squished. We kill one that mistakenly enters our indoor territory and the shell hard body crackles as it dies.
The next year it is white moths that surge and flutter in the early morning among the balsam poplars. I stare out of my bedroom window at a pink sunrise and notice thousands of small white leaves detaching themselves from the branches, moving in and out of the grove like an errant lace curtain.
In my family we navigate the memory of our island summers by a natural horoscope that the house has cast for us. There were the years of the baby fox, the skunks in the basement, the bat in the hallway, the disappearing flies, the lustful dog that jumped through our kitchen window, and the runaway cow.
In the suburbs, our house walls divided us completely from nature. June bugs stuck on the outer screen door. We stood on the inside and flicked them back into the night. At our island home, spiders hunted from corners, and mice cantered inside the ceilings as we lay in bed. There was the smell of thawed wood and damp clay. Piles of tiny silver wings rustled and we wondered where the insect bodies had gone. Some corners were always twilit and the house had the presence of watchful walls. At night we fell asleep to the sound of bewildered moths thrumming against the lampshades.
I learned to love the scent of aging books and the sound of the glass bookcase in my father's study, the clink and rattle every time it was opened or closed. The plaster on the ceiling was flaking and the wallpaper had soft pockets of air. I even knew each floor board's thickly painted appearance. In a house so full of cracked lead paint we should all have died in blind madness.
It is because of this house that I believe in ghosts. It seemed that the house always had the presence of other spirits meandering through, whether it was specific small gatherings of ghostly energy or the overwhelming grace of Nature. Like some invisible tide that crept along carved channels, nature permeated the beams, flowed across door sills, and traced the shapes of rooms with invisible waves. Through this waded the occasional inquistive ghost. Sometimes I felt as if the house was alive; a hollow body that had simply grown out of the ground to open itself up to whatever energies chose to take shelter, and I understood we were lucky enough to be incidental currents passing between its walls.
My mother's family were avid story trekkers. They found deep joy in the sharing of a good tale and were willing to travel a fair distance to satisfy this need. Sometimes Mother would formally invite her various aunts, uncles, and cousins from around the island for a meal and visit. Some of these aunts and uncles were in their seventies or eighties, yet they still called each other girls and boys. A group of old men taking a load of cattle to an auction was referred to as "the boys are going to town." I would hear a grandmother say "the girls and I drove up to the fair at Dundas. We had a great time." The girls might be her older sisters. I used to picture the granny girls careening around the countryside in their pick-up trucks honking whenever they saw a granddad boy on a tractor. It made me feel hopeful about growing old.
Most of the time relatives arrived unannounced to settle around our big kitchen after supper. We draped ourselves across creaky chairs, a firewood box, and the back stairs that tumbled through a kitchen corner. As the evening advanced and the past year's local gossip began to spin itself out, family stories would be hauled out like some heavy ancient chest from under an attic bed. There were jewels in that box and we were driven to polish them year after year. I remember Uncle Welland leaning forward to tell this one:
"I'll tell you what Frank McKay done told me. You know the Dooley place at Munro Crossroads? Ever noticed the boarded up windows on the second story? Been like that for some time now, nearly forty years I'd say. Frank used to play cards there in the evenings and he knew them Dooleys pretty well I guess.
See there used to be a John Bea Dooley. He was out from Ireland. Came over same time as the O'Neils. Everyone called him Johnny Beesting, but not to his face. He was a right feisty man and whenever his temper’d go off he'd get red in the face with spots like bug bites. So folks had a bit of play with his name and habits. He was into drink real terrible and all the trouble that calls up. So it was Mr. Dooley please sir, and you'd never want to owe him a turn. Father used to work the potato fields next to Dooley and he'd say you couldn't help feel sorry for his woman there and the children. That Johnny Beesting was a mean old bugger, and I don't like to speak ill of the dead.
A sorrier situation you can't imagine and it went on for years until the old man took fits and none could figure why. I'd say he finally got whiskey jitters in his head. He'd be out runnin’ down the lane in his nightshirt or put chickens in the kitchen. Drove his woman near witless herself. Then one night he set fire to a barn. My father said a more terrible thing you could never see, unless you went to war. The neighbors rushed over. Wasn’t it the pig barn with hay in the loft! Went up like flash. The sows wouldn't budge without their young. Just drove them back into the corners and fought to kill anyone that went to get them out of the pens. The boys couldn't save any of them. Well, pigs scream like people. It was all the men were crying that night. They even tried shooting through the flames, maybe hit one to put her down quick. Now Johnny Beesting run around laughing hi-sterics like a monkey, and he would have put himself into the fire, but they tied him up.
Finally Mrs. Dooley said 'nuffs enough and she had good reason to call the doctors for to fetch her husband away to hospital. But the day they come, Johnny takes on so bad, there's a terrible row to get him out the house. He's spittin’ and cursin’ worse than you want to know. Then on the front step he just seizes up like stone and dies.
Now you'd think there would be a bit of peace, but don't things get even worse for poor widow Dooley and her family. Every night in her bedroom things shake and chivvy, fly around. She moves to another room. That's fine for her, but every morning she gets up and finds the furniture jumbled up in the old bedroom. None could sleep in there and she couldn’t even use it for storage. You see her old man came back to rule the house. Even beyond the grave, he had too much guff for any good.
Well them Irish are right smart, so she calls in a priest to chase out Johnny for good, but it don't work. Another priest is called in and says special prayers right there in the house and tells them they must light a white candle when the sun sets and place it by the dead man's bedroom door 'til the rooster calls. That will stop the botheration. Sure enough, the ghost settles down.
Now Frank McKay says he played cards there in the evenings long after Johnny Beesting's time and don't they still light the candle! One evening, come sundown, Frank is there dealing a round of hearts and he hears a flock of birds rushing through the house like the wings are beating his head. The phantom birds fly right up the stairs to the bedroom. And he hears furniture being dragged and a crash. Well, he kinda looks over at the other fellows to see what this is on about, but them Dooley boys are hunkered down over the cards and talking about the price of potatos and pig feed like it's just another day at the hay. Finally one of the women gets up, goes into the pantry and brings out the white candle. She carries it upstairs. Pretty soon the banging stops. Frank said he can't get over them folks living out their days in a house with a ghost friggin' around like that. That's the why the corner windows are still covered over."
My mother told her ghost story. One night she was reading in the living room right there in our own house. The book rested upon her stomach and she was deeply involved in keeping up with some detective. Suddenly she was drawn to look at the top of the stairs. There was nothing to be seen but something stood there. The invisible vision descended the steps. My mother's intuition was her radar and she perceived a tall man. At the bottom, he turned and glided across the living room. In the middle of the room was a massive set of sea shell chimes. They were a souvenir of a tropical fantasy beyond our experience. Dozens of translucent white disks, clustered in a formidable colony, hung from the ceiling where a chandelier used to park. The man's strange transparent bulk crashed into the shells, which swung and clattered together like a chorus of mad limberjacks. He moved on to the kitchen, where his presence dissipated.
Mother sat detached and afraid at the same time. She had always known that the house was never empty. Certain rooms she could not sleep in and sometimes she turned to say "what?" to one of us children or called out "yes?" to my father and we were not there. The playroom often had a cold spot in mid air and the skin on the back of her neck tingled when she passed into this room. One night soon after the living room incident, she suddenly blurted out while doing the dishes, "It’s only Black Will! He wouldn't hurt anybody. He’s wondering what happened to his house. Poor old soul." It was like my mother to have compassion for everyone, even those trapped in other dimensions.
We sold the O’Neil place again long ago. There won’t be third season of us for the house. Yet despite living in many other interesting places over the years each of us carries on an affair with this home in our sleep. Although we acknowledge this curious connection, rarely do we share details of these recycled memories. We might only mention that the old place came to us the other night.
I used to picture silent winds rushing through the house. Filmy rooms shifted around and into each other. I recognized the place, because of the familiar atmosphere between shaded walls. It had a different appearance each time, while I seemed to be the same solid figure. In my waking state I know that the opposite is true, that I am the one twisting and turning with age, while the house, despite remarkable efforts by its current owner, remains essentially the same.
In my latest dream the walls are painted white and there are simple wide boards to serve as doors. Water has advanced up the creek from the bay. There is no longer a back field, our house is on the verge of submersion. Doors gently blow open and shut. Empty clean rooms beckon. There is finally light in all the corners. Glass has dissolved from the window frames, so the tide will have no trouble entering here. This is the future, the house seems to say. Too much clear water will cross over the beautiful red shore. The house welcomes the flood.
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