Things that happened

A short story

There were spiders, I remember. Not the delicate ones that spin modestly in unbothered corners. These were the fat, grape bellied browns that spanned the posts on the front porch and made you duck your way into the house. And there was the cemetery on the other side of the fence. Thats what I remembered of the house me and Brian grew in. That’s where I would start if I were writing a story, with the spiders and the cemetery.

Growing up in a webbed house on the living side of an iron fence separating us from the town’s graveyard christened our boyhood into that cosmic feud between the living and the dead. Once we discovered that several hundreds of bodies lay buried a stone’s throw away from where we slept, and encouraged by frequent sightings of homeless spirits by our impish father, life was invigorated with that eternal animus the dead have for the living.

Dad was an instigator. He would take us out back past the sand pit into the deep woods at night with a sheet and a flashlight. We would huddle along in the pitch until he screamed “monster” and we would scramble like mad to refuge under the translucent, impervious cloth and click on the light. Once, the sheet got pulled out from over me and froze me there in the chaos, Dad and Brian under the dome of light. Couldn’t have been more than three. Never in my life was there such a vast and thin separation between life and death, light and dark, order and chaos. I remember that.

Nothing was natural, nothing neutral. Creaking pines were the trees foreboding a ruptured grave; a rustle of leaves in the distant wood was an ambush set by ghouls to drag us into the underworld clawing at earth. Creeping mists squeezed from the warm air off Lake Winnipesaukee and slept in gravestone shadows giving our eyes solid evidence of the spirits stretching their legs. Not a few empty milk bottles became the containers of captured ghosts, which always seemed to escape by midday. 

Such sightings busied us to line the cemetery fence with various magical items on hand – grips of dandelions, a dead cat (once), Morton’s salt, shards of stained glass, and the entirety of 2 Samuel ripped from the Bible and jabbed onto pine branches lining the fence, all set as a deterrent to spiritual trespassers. It was a line of defense we meticulously maintained year round because that was what needed to be done. Only Providence knew the apocalyptic horrors averted by our vigilance.

Weekends were a truce, however, especially in the summer. There is nothing so quiet as a summer cemetery. On Saturdays and Sundays before church, we would slip through the fence where an iron tooth rotted out, far in the back corner under a the cover of maples. We would rove about about the polished headstones and peer into the fractured mausoleums to sniff at the chilled shadows. In the lanky shade of junipers we’d stretch on the silky Kentucky blue grass and wade through the noon listening to the lichen munch the granite stones, and sibilation of cicadas electrifying the air. On occasion, we would tussle and I would lose, being small and asthmatic as I was. But Brian took care not to get me wheezing and generally kept a watchful eye on me, though the age between us was barely the span of a pregnancy.

All our boyhood was a handshake between the holy and the heathen. Pagan mythologies were woven together with a loose protestant faith into a patchwork dogma by which we understood the world. We’d die defending its inerrancy, or amend it by fiat given the slightest provocation. Our catechism gave equal weight to the doctrine of sola scriptura, the Knights Code of Chivalry, and occult incantations for wart cures. Nothing was ever redacted. Add to it the clearest contradictory information and it would do nothing to debunk any other assumed truth, taking its place snuggly next to a square circle. Only faith can bend and flex with such opposing realities, and it is this faith which fruits daily in the hearts of children, that is the envy and enemy of adulthood. Faith was effortless and hope waited unopened, for who hopes for what he already has?

Meredith, New Hampshire, our town, quaint and pretty in the fall, barely had the facilities to lift is above village status. Along the main street was a post office, a diner, and handful of antique shops with sagging clapboards and chipped paint, a general store and filling station. Behind main street, propped up on the slope descending to the lake, a paper mill rotted. Old enough for decommissioning but lacking the charm that draws gentrification, the mill empty and quiet, the only paper being made by the wasps whipping up their sour gray nests into the eaves. Leaving town, hooking up and around the lake on route 3 was Hart’s Turkey Farm which served a fine turkey tetrazzini, if you had the money.

Main street hosted Independence Day parade which gathered the entire town in their holiday dress, waving flags at Shriners buzzing around on their mopeds, local chapter of the VFW, girl scouts, local high school band and such. Children perched on the granite curbs like vultures waiting for thrown candy. The town was pretty and proud, though not lovely enough to outsiders to have a face on a post cards, until in my adulthood when some investors saw the bay town gem for what she was and whored her out to time shares and condos.

We Sundayed at an old church built the year Lincoln was elected (his first term). This was a thrill to us, though we had only a slight idea of who he was, other than that he freed blacks and died by gunshot to the head, both which garnered our respect. From this tidbit of information we were certain our very own house of worship was used as part of the Underground Railroad, though it was a clear six hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. There was no scrupling about smuggling blacks between Brian and I, only that the church we called our own was part of such piracy, even if our certainty was unmolested by facts. And any house of God that could fly the Jolly Roger had our respect, even if it was only in our imaginations.

On top of a hill overlooking our quaint village, the church sat, patient and matronly. From main street, two purple maples arched over a frost heaved brick path stopping at the foot of a granite stair leading up to the faded oak doors of the church. Holding her up were great granite stones the size of a banker’s desk and the color of pepper. Green velvet moss carpeted the ground around the foundation as a consequence of poor drainage and negative slope, which we surgically removed with sharp stones for our window sills. But the transplant never took. Trenches worn by rainfall from the roof filled with acorn caps and granite pebbles and an erstwhile oak sprig or two hoping to test its strength against the stone. On top of the box was a bell tower, brick on bottom, and capped with a white tooth of a steeple. A bell hung in the midst which we had never heard rung.

Inside, tall colored glass windows messed with the light and spilled waves and colors onto the old pine floors. Two section of a dozen or so pews each sat facing the front split by a worn red carpet leading to a stage where the preacher roosted and crowed. Underneath his feet was a baptismal pool, which, in seven years time would bury and resurrect my brother to a new life. I never went under that water but did at another time, in a New York lake at sunset. Posterior to the stage was a choir loft and organ, which accompanied bold hymns weekly until the organist’s husband ran off with the young wife of another parishioner, and the whole lot of them fell off the earth somewhere. It was a big thing – the kind of deal when you are a kid you only know the feeling of the queasiness in sanctuary on a Sunday, like a shared nausea.

That church was our second home. Thrice on Sundays for Sunday school, service and choir practice, Wednesdays bible study, AWANA on Thursdays, and then the occasional missionary presentation throughout the year. Familiarity breeds contempt; the sayer of this quote was a Sunday school chair sloucher, of that I am certain.

I did my level best to refuse any advances of the Sunday school teachers. What I couldn’t figure out is if all the stories in the were about men of action why I had to sit there and listen. It made no sense. What boy wants to sit and and hear about routing enemies without going to find some that need routing? And so Sunday school and I were not on speaking terms and made sure I left each week unconvinced and not a proverb wiser. 

The church as we knew it was not as it was built. As the church grew over the years along with the town, it came into someone’s mind that they needed more space for fellowship and classrooms, a space for the sheep to graze. So a two story building was constructed to the church’s backside. My grandfather, Lawrence Wyatt, hobbled as he was from an arbor accident when he was thirty, but still as hard and humorless as a gravestone, was asked to be foreman of the build. This was on account that he always spoke his mind and had earned veneration of the other parishioners after punching a visiting preacher in the nose when he kicked a homeless man out of service for drinking from a paper bag. He bled all over the place – the preacher, not the hobo – and was invited to leave and not return. He was like the Good Samaritan with a wicked left hook. The vagrant, as it turns out was so impressed with the spectacle he came back the following week and even answered the altar call. But that seed sown on the stones and was not to be seen again thereafter.

Me and Brian were Wyatts, a name which anticipated trouble . The Wyatts, my grandfather and his brothers, were infamous in the small bay town were we resided – wild and unruly, like a tornado in a library. Feelings of perpetual summer and solitude that wafted around Meredith made the raucous caused by the Wyatt boys like a loud greeting in the morning. Russel, George, Larry and William were a drunk, thief, brawler and philander respectively, though these vices hardly maintained the strict boundaries of the individuals. They all died young and ignominiously with the exception of Larry, my grandfather. Russel, drunk, slept it off in a snowbank at the end of his own driveway. George got stabbed in a bar fight, which he started, and William ate a bullet when faced with the grim and yellowing future of liver cancer. I believe there was a sister in the mix who died after taking a shovel to the head at three. Larry was the only Wyatt to see his sixties.

Between the Friday night debauchery and Sunday morning bail, Larry worked hard, provided for his family, knocking his wife around as often was she was knocked up. My mother was the oldest of ten, four not living to see their third birthday. Never one to abide another man telling him what to do, Larry began a sting of his own businesses, though I don’t think the word “entrepreneur” could be rightly applied. After hauling trash, dog catching, and sludging out irrigation canals are exemplary of his blue collar acquisitions, before he got into his final enterprise, trimming trees.

One day before his coffee had kicked in but after the alcohol had worn off, his rope failed 50 feet up and he plinked off branches all the way down. Broke his back. He survived; a superfluous statement, since here I sit recounting. He was on his back for two years pissing into an empty milk jug and managed to give his wife eight years his junior a sixth child to look after. If he was a hedonist on his two feet, he was a blasphemer on his back which made cursing heaven all the easier. 

Larry’s eldest daughter, Mary, me and Brian’s mother, started attending the aforementioned church for no apparent reason, but most likely to escape the squalor of the foundering household as it quickly took on debt. Mary asked the minister to visit her father, which he did, which Larry couldn’t refuse, laid up as he was. Over the course of time, through the faithful preaching of the word, the Lord wrestled my grandfather’s souls into submission. Me and Bryan figured he tried to give the Lord a right hook to the jaw, but God said something like “Dammit Larry, I already broke your back” then he just tapped out and confessed his faith in Jesus Christ for the salvation of his soul. 

This regeneration, however, never reached around to his back, cause he never worked again. Not a small amount of narcotics kept him functioning throughout the day where he would grow into his blue Lazy Boy. To keep himself occupied, he would fastidiously record the barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, cloud formation and other local moods of the earth. Also chronicled was local news of note: deaths, accidents, small town dramas, businesses that opened and shuttered, other ephemera of small town life. To this day my grandmother has dozens of spiral bound notebooks in her possession, and this years after he shuffled off. I suppose every man needs something to pass the time.

Shortly after this conversion the minister of the church asked if he would oversee the building of an addition to the backside. He agreed and over the next two years the construction was completed. However, adjoining the ancient brick to the new timber and concrete was not the job for a novice, which he was, and made for some architectural peccadilloes, one of which needs describing as it pertains to the events that followed.

The two story addition has stayed as it was built in the sixties, and is still now as my brother and I knew it. A handful of classrooms, a few bathrooms, a nursery and a kitchen that smelled of crumbs and aluminum, as all old kitchens do. The back entrance to the sanctuary, which led from the new addition, dog legged through a heavy oak door. In the middle of the dog leg was a platform about four feet off the ground, which led to the back of the choir loft. Resting on the platform was a wooden ladder which extended to the height of the sanctuary ceiling and rested against the wall. At the top of the ladder, to the right, was a small plank door, the threshold of it hanging in space. 

Now, if you are having a hard time following me, that is because it defies reason the way this architecture was conceived. Something between a toddler’s Lego creation and Frank Lloyd Wright commission piece. The threshold of the door was suspended twenty five feet above the ground. To get to the door you had to jump up to the platform, climb the precarious ladder, reach out over the abyss, and push open the small wooden door. With hand hooked and around the jamb, you would step from the ladder horizontally onto the threshold, hoping your hand, of the ancient wood, didn’t give. My fingertips feel like newspaper just thinking about it. It was a moment in time that always returned young apostates like us back to the faith, at least until safe over the threshold, whence the backsliding would resume.  

I was twelve, Brian thirteen, when we first ascended the ladder, despite the strict prohibitions from our mother, who had had ample opportunity by that time to turn our mischief into a sociological study. But adventure seeded in a boy’s mind, though labeled a sin, seems a sin itself to resist. We could not more avoid the ladder as stop our beating hearts; it was a law waiting to be broken. It was during a Sunday sermon, and the minister was no respecter of time, that we ascended.

Spared here will be the details of our rendezvous and necessary lies told to leave, the silent ladder climb, and the butterfly-stomached step across space, and onto our discovery. Brian went first. The door opened into a small attic lined with pine shelving; a reliquary of ecclesiastical life dusted in old boxes, all of which would be leftovers at a thoroughly picked through rummage sale. Silk day lilies for Easter Sundays, shepherd staffs from ghosts of Christmas pageants past, dusty hymnals with fractures spines, polyester choir robes, a cane made from an old branch (which I stole), boxes of glass vases, old Bibles in the King’s English, white baptismal gowns – it was like crawling up and into the mind of an old man. This robbers hideaway was the New Heaven to us. Can you imagine a hideaway as equally outlawed as it was inaccessible and secret? We might as well have been snipped out of time.

As I said, all this occurred during the service. Parishioners below tucked into their carpeted pews fanned themselves with bulletins, as the pastor busily pollinated their minds with his droning bee song of a sermon. Stepping through that doorway was the entrance to a universe in a cupboard. The smell of dust and old wood was sweet. Wood creaked like an old ship. If that were all the adventure there was to be had it would have been worth the risk. But there was more.

Within the attic, another short stair lead up to a door in the ceiling. The ceiling! Ceilings are not for doors. Ever in our short life experience doors were set blandly in walls, opened in, and required little effort to swing. Brian heaved with the back of his neck; the door was heavy and groaned awful. Dust tinkled and tempted sneezes. A cement counterbalance in the shape of an old coffee can eased its lifting. We climbed the steps. 

The site that met us was transcendent. We were no longer in an old church in a small town. We were in the belfry of Notre Dame, amongst the bones of Old World architecture where time stopped and thought about running backwards. Southern sunlight angled in from a broken window with such solid yellow that could bear weight. Ancient timbers vaulted overhead giving the whole roof a whale belly appearance, and we Jonah, disobedience and all. Large beams ran the length of the floor, the ceiling of the sanctuary, front to back, wider than sidewalks. Dust motes waltzed in the spotlight of sun and twirled and scurried in the disturbed silence that hadn’t been smelled in decades. It was so glorious. I didn’t know who they were singing to down below, because God was clearly up here in those beautiful bones.

Across this hallowed space, on the east end, was a ladder and rope that led up to the belfry. My brother’s face was open, mouth and eyes. I imagine I looked about the same. We were outlaws make no mistake; in a forbidden place at a forbidden time. Below, the organ thrummed How Great Thou Art, heralding the sermon was closing. Our pew seats were empty and cooling. We made our way to the ladder, across the timbers sliding along like fencers. Ceiling vents on either side of the timber showed us the parishioners pious, silver heads and gave us both the compunction that a single misstep off the timbers would have us falling a great distance. Dust as thick as snow coated the ceiling tiles. A bat skeleton picked clean by time nested in the dust, white and bewaring.

We reached the ladder. It was secured to the brick with iron bolts but was missing the bottom three rungs and ascended up the throat of the bell tower ending in a square hatch rimmed with light. To the right of the ladder was the bell rope, wrist thick and cut clean through about eye level. Brian pointed to the frayed end of the rope with a look of the mystery of the silent bell solved. Unable to climb the ladder because of the missing rungs, Bryan grabbed the frayed, severed rope to heave himself up to the ladder rungs. Even after so many silent years, the rope pulled easily with his weight and, to our horror, the great bell nodded and rung, reverberating out and down. It was a whisper of a knell, as much as bells can whispers, but the echo hung in the air for half an eternity. The thrumming organ covered for us, though, and for the moment we escaped detection. I avoided the rope and climbed up behind.

Up through the hatch we went and were greeted in a heartbeat by all the elements of the universe. Blinding sun, sweet breeze, and all the earth and water the eyes could take in. We had a bird’s map the town. Down toward the lake the green trees tumbled and the sun played on the water. White wakes of boats frozen in the water and the far off droning of submerged horsepower. Matchbox cars turned and yielded, climbing south towards the high school and West towards route 3 and towns of import, their drivers oblivious to the observation of two bell tower spies far away on a hill. Above, but not that far above, cirrus clouds combed east by jet streams and perhaps a bored horizon was gathering clouds to storm in the west.

Blinking and sniffing we sat. Neither my brother or I expected to find such treasure. But we remained unsurprised, if you take my meaning. It was all to be expected, in a way. Not that what we saw in particular was expected, but simply the expectation of the unexpected. It is very difficult to truly surprise a boy, because adventure is their purpose and adventure is predictable, planned and expected surprise. In some cosmic way we were in some Twain story guided with pen and ink through a life by an off page Author. Life was a story, and some grand ending was inevitable. Of course it was. We were the protagonists carried along in the stream of prose towards our Act Three, caught up in some chowder thick plot. 

Below us the church let out and the congregation spilled onto the lawn, shaking hands and saying their goodbyes, and then to their cars, off to Harts or sabbath dinner. We descended, reluctantly, careful to avoid the bell rope, but with the promise we would return. That was the first time we climbed. Not the only. Our forging path became a highway of adventure. It was the biggest secret of our life. Each time we would go up we did so in the firm grip of anonymity, obeying that godly maxim that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, which was in Paul’s letters somewhere. Our secret was kept by subterfuge and just the slightest stretching of the ninth commandment.

It was a week later the dream came. It was gray and silent like an old movie. A girl, young and lovely, maybe sixteen, on that Oedipal cusp of being a twelve year old’s love interest or maternal projection. She was smiling, talking wistfully as though accepting some award or asking some boy to a dance. Looked right into my eyes and, my God, but she was beautiful. I wanted to belong to her in some timid way. She wore a skirt that hung below the knees and a sweater buttoned in the front, both shades of grey. She clasped a Bible in her folded arms. I couldn’t recall the surroundings. Then she turned, pony tail bobbing, and walked away. That was it. 

That’s not a dream that seems like its worth much. But dreams never lie. Discard them or believe them to be what they are not, but they do not lie, only they speak in a different language. They are as honest as arithmetic. But they are never about the images that play out. It’s the feeling. I’ve had dreams of doomsday prophecies in real time, moon crumbling like a sand out of the sky, and worlds lit only by fire, and I wake up cooler than the other side of the pillow. Other dreams have no scary or troubling images, but are injected with some dark truth that soaks your mind. 

This was that kind. I woke up with my mind still wet with the dream and its stayed wet the whole day, like a damp towel thrown into a corner. Something about her face – the hope and expectation, the yearning, the possibility, the demands that youth makes upon life to not let it go without having a blessing conferred upon it. There was a trust that hung about her eyes, a gratitude that brightens the soul with guilelessness. In her eyes there was nothing bad or looming, no shadow of a sorrow or doubt, only the pure faith that the earth and all it’s plenty was stretched out before her in an unbroken field of daisies.

It did not enter into my mind what the dream meant. Not the first time I had it, not after the dream visited every night for a week. Not even when I learned my brother started having the same dream, of the same girl, starting the same night. 

Neither was this strange to us. As far as Brian and I were concerned, two completely different people having the same dream – down to the last detail, without having spoken to the other about it – this was still well within the realm of elementary childhood magic that wasn’t in the least bit strange. I mean, it was strange, but it fit in with the logic. When your axioms are anything at all is possible then anything at all meets the requirement of logical soundness. It seems as natural as a duck in water. Tell us to sit quietly in church and pay attention and that truth lies therein, and that would dispel the robust mythological superstructure by which we governed our lives. Like a duck driving a cab. 

One Sunday afternoon, a month later, found me and Brian at my grandparents’ apartment. Mom and dad visited with them, talking politics, and Brian and I went looking for any signs of trouble that we might get caught up in. We snuck into my grandfather’s bedroom (they slept separately – he snored) and started rooting around like hungry skunks. 

In his sock drawer we found some old keys, a few pennies he thought were worth something, pictures of his brothers, creased and faded with frequent handling, and a folded up picture from a magazine that showed a woman in a bathing suit riding a dolphin, which we looked at longer than we should of but less than we wanted to, and moved into his closet. A forest of threadbare flannel smelling of camphor and tobacco, we found, and underneath, dozens of spiral bound notebooks stacked on the floor. These I mentioned earlier, if you recall. We grabbed one at random, a yellow one, and opened it. A newspaper clipping fluttered to the carpet. The entry was August 7th, 1965 and attending in the black spidery cursive:

“September 17th 1961. Weather, cool in the morning, warmed up to 76 by the afternoon. Spat of rain just before dinner with some thunder but no lightning to be seen. Southern wind off the bay. A&P going out of business. Death of the Carpenter girl.” 

We picked up the clipping. It read:

“Our small town of Meredith is grieving today for the sudden and unexpected loss of Jeannie Carpenter, age 17. Jeannie was a loved and respected student at Interlakes High School where she was captain of the glee club and debate team. She served in her church, teaching Sunday school and was recently awarded with a new Bible for perfect attendance at Sunday school (see picture below). 

Jeanie’s body was found in the attic of First Baptist Church, where she attended, after a three day search. The cause of death was deemed a suicide by hanging. She is survived by her parents, Thom and Betty Carpenter and her two younger sisters Patrice and Lily. We pray God would grant them peace and comfort in their hour of trial.”

In the picture was a young girl with a tight pony tail in her hair, a knee length skirt and wistful smile. It was the girl from our dream. Unmistakable. Black and white. Hopeful smile, all of life laid out before her as flat and boundless as the sea. Scrawled under the picture in my grandfathers handwriting said, “Found in the belfry, cut her from rope.”

I swear to God this happened. 

All this, it sounds anticlimactic when I write it down years since it happened. But I tell you, from the bottom of my heart, with all honesty, it goes no farther than this.

A couple years back I interrogated my mother and grandmother about the clipping. It revealed nothing. No seedy activity going on behind the scenes, no mysteries unquestioned, or fiddling pastors, no murderous intrigue, no hope of generational curses as explanatory causes – nothing that would make for good story. She was just some girl who killed herself.

So I need to write it down now. I need to believe that it happened the way it did and that there is something there I haven’t found, some piece of information that will turn on the machine or complete the puzzle. And even as I sit here I’m clawing my mind and beating it like vending machine that I fed but wont give.

I didn’t make any sense of it then because I didn’t need to, and now that I need to I can’t. When you are a kid, it’s all there right in front of you, the raw material of meaning, and it all makes sense because all the anomalies are baked in. That’s the tease. Life drips with meaning when you are young, and you are fed with the heavenly mana of meaning daily made and so you never look for it. And for me and Brian, it didn’t need to mean anything because meaning was not some separate category from the magic of life. The dream wasn’t supernatural because everything was. When life is filled with specters, eventually you would run into one of them. It meant nothing because it didn’t have to, meaning is one of those things people need to justify aberrance in the plot. Meaning is mystery cashing out.

Nobody tells you when it changes. Brian died two years ago now, at thirty-eight, leaving two kids and a wife that loved him. He was a good man; nothing too bad could happen when he was around. He was three quarters through a Master’s degree and then an aneurysm. That was it. No final words. No loving hand clutching his face and dropping tears as he slowly faded. He died in a bathroom, wedged between the wall and the toilet, middle of a chapter, middle of a sentence, middle of a goddamn word. That was it. And I have not been doing well.

But it has to mean something. I need it to mean something. It has to mean something. Something I am overlooking, maybe, and if I can just find the place I left off in the story and find the plot again and then I can see what the author is doing, and why he died when no good writer would kill off that character. No one. You get to a point where you are a character that fell out from behind the lines of a novel and plopped onto a beside table somewhere and all you want to do is climb back up the rungs of sentences on the printed page and slip back in behind and be re written back in, become part of the tale again where it all made sense because you were part of the story and didn’t know you were invented like the rest of the world.

It has occurred to me from time to time to return to the belfry and the attic. Maybe I would find some clue or resolution. Some finding that would plunk into place why this all happened and that it wasn’t random. I would replace the bell rope with fresh hemp and ring it once more, breaking some unnamed curse and meaning would ring clear and resonant. Then I could tell you that life is full of meaning all around, and it would make sense, and the dream was part of some grand character arc, and death was planned, and I meet peaceful resolution on a lake dock at sunset, and I look up to the heavens with gratitude and revelation. Or maybe life is just a series of things that happen.