Out of the Mist (22 page)

How could we find out about our “visitor”?
Hopefully, Isaac, the corner store owner would have an
explanation.

On waking, we again decided we had more
pressing matters to deal with: urgent and practical situations for
which we hoped we could find solutions.

For some time, we were preoccupied with the
lengthy task of getting water to circulate through pipes that
didn’t leak. The house needed a thorough cleaning, too. Later in
the day, our belongings had to be unloaded and sorted. We had also
negotiated to have the house rewired once we learned that the old
wiring was a fire hazard.

The ghost, if that's what
our uninvited guest was, hid in the back of our minds once we began
sleeping upstairs in our own bed, on that third night. He didn’t
appear. Or maybe he did, but he no longer disturbed us.

A few days later, on
errands in the harbour, we had to stop at the store. I asked the
man who served us if he was Mr. Crozier. He was, so I introduced us
as the new owners of his old family property.

“
I heard that someone from
away had taken it on,” he responded. “So it’s you! I haven’t been
near it for years, not since I bought strawberries there. I hear it
needs a lot of work.”

“
Frank’s working on the
plumbing and the electrician starts the rewire tomorrow.” I
shared.

“
What about the
insulation?” he asked.

I gave him a blank look.

“
Better check that. Unless
it’s been changed, there’s dried seaweed in the walls, and it’s
probably all sunk down to the bottom of the spaces. There’s nothing
in the top five feet of any outside walls. And the attic was bare,
as I remember. No insulation up there.”

The good news kept rolling in.

I asked how old the house was, to which he
replied, “That’s a long story. Listen! I’m off at six. That’s our
house next door. I always have a beer after work. You and your wife
join us, and I’ll answer any questions that I can.”

We had an evening’s essential housework
planned, so we arranged to visit the next day.

In their large family kitchen, with the
evening meal on the stove, Isaac and I took the first taste from
the end of the working day beer. Barb was fascinated by the country
kitchen, and was quickly distracted by Isaac’s wife’s offer of a
look around the whole house.

“
I grew up there, you
know,” was Isaac’s opening statement from across the table. “There
were 10 of us and I was the seventh. When dad died, we let mom have
the house. When she passed, we sold it.”

“
How did your mom and dad
feed the 10 of you?” I asked.

“
Well, we fished.
Everybody down the Passage and onto the island fished. There’s an
old government wharf at the end of your driveway. We had a cow for
milk, couple of goats, chickens for eggs, and we grew all sorts of
vegetables. That’s why it was so easy to grow strawberries later.
Dad and my grandfather, and probably his father before that, kept a
small farm there. Lots of seaweed and lobster shells for fertilizer
and more seaweed to insulate the new house, when it was
built.”

“
New house?” I
asked.

“
Yes. The original one
burnt down one January. My dad would often tell that story. That’s
how I know how old the house is. My dad was only seven when it
happened, and he was born in 1875. In a couple of years, the new
house will be 100 years old. The two add-ons that were to replace
the kitchen came a little later.”

Another drink and then he added, “For years
after that fire, my mother swore that the place was haunted.”

Barb’s attention switched, as she returned
from the tour of the Crozier’s house.

“
What happened?” I asked,
trying to keep the excitement from my query.

“
Mom swore that sometimes,
late at night, she heard Uncle Bill coming down the stairs and into
the kitchen. He’d open the oven on the old wood stove, and look for
his boots that were often put in there overnight, to dry. That’s
how they think the fire started.

“
Someone forgot to damp
the fire down that night and the boots caught alight. Bill, who was
never able to leave home, was my granddad’s much younger brother.
Herman and Elizabeth, my grandparents, got all the kids out: four
girls and two boys, but the youngest died soon after. He was Bill,
named after his uncle. Old Bill was awakened, but he never made it
out of the building.”

“
Did you ever see or hear
the ghost of Uncle Bill before you left there?”

“
No!” Isaac laughed. “With
10 of us, the place was too noisy for ghosts. Dad never knew about
it either. Mom only saw and heard it when she lived there alone,
late in her life. She swore it was Uncle Bill. She spoke to him,
but he never answered, just looked for his boots and went out the
door.”

“
We saw him!” blurted out
Barb. “The first two nights, before our furniture arrived, we
camped out in the living room. Both nights, at about three-thirty,
he came down the stairs, into the kitchen, looked for his boots in
the oven, then left through a door that we still haven’t been able
to open.”

“
Did he say anything?”
interjected Isaac’s wife.

“
It was strange,” I
answered. “He kept repeating the same two words, as if they meant a
lot to him. He’d say, My booooots!!” I tried to imitate the ghost’s
plaintive voice.

“
Those are the only two
words your mom ever heard him say,” said Lois.

Her husband nodded in agreement. He told us
that his mother only saw Bill at those times when the once bustling
house was quiet, usually very late at night

He continued. “Dad always said the fire
happened in the small hours of that January morning, probably about
half past three.”

It was quiet for a moment. Isaac
interrupted, laughing, as he said, “Wait till I tell my brothers
and sisters about this! Like me, none of them were ever quite sure
about mom’s ghost.”

He went on to tell us that
his family first settled our property in Shore Section, sometime
after his widowed great-great-grandmother came from Barrington in
1830. She, her own children and some of the 13 her husband’s first
wife had borne, were on the 1838 census record as living there. The
original house had probably been built about then

His wife asked one more time if we wanted to
stay for supper. Regretfully, we had to decline. All the work we
had to do and a meeting with the electrician took priority.
Besides, we’d had the mystery of our “visitor” solved and we knew
more than the bare bones of our new house’s history.

Over the three years that we lived there,
Isaac, and others, whose families had lived in the community for
generations, put flesh on the property’s historical bones. Some
even believed the story of the ghost, which I only told after the
rum bottle came out, by which time I no longer cared if my “I don’t
believe in ghosts” position was threatened by the telling.

Did Uncle Bill ever reappear?

One night, when Barb was away in Montreal, I
thought I heard something downstairs. But we had two cats and I
assumed one of them was down there eating. The oven door, of the
old, old stove we’d retained and restored, was open the next
morning. When Barb got back she asked why the door at that end of
the kitchen was unlocked. It was still a door we never used and the
key to the replacement lock we’d fitted was still hung on the nail,
hidden in the kitchen cupboard.

When my teenage children visited, my
daughter slept downstairs. One morning, she asked who’d come down
to the kitchen in stocking feet and then gone out of the door in
the middle of the night.

That evening, we lit a fire down on the
beach, and I told them the story of Uncle Bill’s Boots. They
assumed it was one of the ghost stories that I often made up.

I think it’s the only one that I might just
believe in myself.

Postscript:

The house exists. The original was destroyed
by fire. It was the home of the land grantees, the Kenney family. I
don’t know if there was ever a Bill in the family. One of the
Kenney’s did run the local service station. He told me about the
fire as he pumped gas for us one day.

It took us two years to restore the house
and tame the undergrowth that threatened to engulf it. We loved the
summers, but the winters were hard. We became as much part of the
community as anyone did who “came from away”, unless the “away” was
Cape Breton. But we missed city proximity and conveniences and we
did not have the many skills needed to improve the century old
house. “The Crude But Effective School of House Restoration” had
reached its limits.

We painted it blue, kept the surrounding
grass trimmed and the alders at bay. We canoed and even tried
swimming off our property. I think that was our final mistake.
Lakes are to swim in. Everybody on the shore knows that. Besides, I
didn’t hunt, was bored by fishing lakes and streams, and you
wouldn’t get my seasick prone body on the ocean in a Cape Island
boat.

We put the house on the
market, and it sold to Montrealers looking for a summer retreat. We
met them but, for fear of jeopardizing the sale, I did not tell
this fictional story.

The now 130-year-old house
is still used by the Montrealers every summer. In the winter, it’s
cared for by a neighbour. It shares the land with an all-weather
tennis court and a boathouse, where winters a Cape Islander
cruiser. There is also a newly built, luxury house on the shore,
next to the “new” old Kenney House. The owner keeps the older house
for the younger overflow of summer visitors she invites.

One story says that she
built the newest one because field mice kept infesting the old
house.

I wonder if their rustling
at night might disguise the sounds of poor old Bill, still looking
for “My Boooooots!” in the decorated and enamelled, wood burning
range that still dominates one end of the kitchen.

~~~***~~~

Making it Happen

Art
White

Our beautiful
boy came quietly into the world on July 1, 1978, my twenty-fourth
birthday. His eyes were mine; the red mop up top came from his
Scottish father. We called him Joules (pronounced jewels), a term
electricians, like his dad, toss about when talking shop. When
Hansen McPherson first held his ruby-haired son and gazed down on
his own likeness looking back, my rough-cut husband whispered ever
so gently, “Oh, Ruby, he’s a jewel, a God-given jewel.…”

Joules was the apple of
all our eyes, including his older sister, Ruby, who shares my name,
or did until her baby brother dubbed her “Rudie” and it stuck. In
turn, she, three days short of being his senior by four years,
called my newborn her “Darling Child” and it fit.

Deuteronomy
says, “
He found him in a desert
land, in the howling wilderness and led him about, instructing him,
keeping him as the apple of his eye.” The prophet,
Zechariah, enlarged the
endearment, “
Thus saith the Lord of
hosts… he that touches you touches the apple of his eye.” Joules
was God-given all right, and his gift rubbed off; he touched us,
drew us out, and brought us deep, leaving an inner satisfaction,
pleasure and peace.

During breakfast on our shared birthday in 1997,
Joulie told me, “This may be our last birthday together for a
while, Mum. I’m going west with Reg to join Larry. He got us jobs
paying twice what we’re making here. I just gotta give’er a try, at
least earn a wad of money so’s I can come back and live in the
basement ‘til the pogey runs out.” He was his usual light-hearted,
fun-making self, but I tell you, Joules’ announcement settled like
a cannon ball in the womb that bore him.

I reached for his hands, squeezing back tears as my
brand new 19-year-old said words that thereafter became a soothing
mantra in good times and bad: “We’ll always be together on Our Day,
Mum, I’ll make it happen.” Typical Joules. “I’ll make it happen.”
He’d said it ever since preschool and always seemed to deliver.
Joules had me believing he’d do it now.

And he did. The next year I received a single,
long-stemmed rose at my door with the card, “
Lo, a Rose E’re
Blooming
.” We never figured how he got the florist to deliver
on a holiday. Three days later, his big sister opened her door to a
singing messenger bearing 20 pink carnations: “
One for each year
of being your Darling Child.
”

He was intimately thoughtful.

The next year it was a registered letter: “
Do not
open until
our
birthday!
” It contained a $400 gift
certificate to the Pines Resort Hotel. On the backside he’d
scribbled, “
Take Dad out for a day of golf and fine dining, then
stay the night.
”

Rudie got her own hand-delivered letter, also with a
cheque for $400. “
You said your arms were too short to read the
phone book. Here’s half a day’s pay to buy some fancy glasses for
old folks. Your Darling Child
.” It was like he was right there
with us.

On Halloween Day, 1999, at five in the morning, the
phone startled us awake. It was Larry Feener. Joulie had died in a
bunkhouse fire at the tar sands site, along with their best friend
and schoolmate, Reg Conners. I can hear young Larry’s quivery voice
in my head right this minute.

Joules, our darling child, the apple of our eyes,
was gone in a phone call, snuffed out like a cigarette under a
shoe-heel. I never recovered. We never recovered. No one does. We
know that now. But, in the strangest of ways, none of us feel
without him either. It’s as if Joules is just out at the cottage
for the weekend.