Little Ghosts (Chapter 1)

The little parsonage stood back from the street, picture perfect white clapboard and green shutters, framed by red and orange oak leaves. Everything gleamed in the sunlight: house, trees, lawn, dented blue Subaru, big white UHaul. Amy wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, but I squinted, nearly blind.

“I thought Portland was supposed to be rainy all the time.”

Amy laughed.

“Somebody up there is looking out for us on our move-in day!” she said.

“I guess so,” I shrugged. “Still, I’m sure the rain will start soon enough”.

“Tomorrow will worry about itself,” she said, winking at me. “But I already worried about today. There’s an extra hat and some sunscreen in the trunk. Now get a move on, I want to be done before dinner time”.

I followed her to the car, but as she bustled and hummed, I found my brow knitting, my eyes drifting to the little white church across the street, and to the overgrown cemetery beside it. I’d made the call. It was too late to change my mind, too late to return to the secluded hills of New York. Still, I wondered if we would come to regret our impulsivity. We had followed in the footsteps of countless reckless souls; how many before us had been wrecked by the wilds of the West?

“Yoo-hoo!” Amy snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Hey! No moping, no brooding, not today, you promised”. She handed me a bundle of sage. “Go on,” she said. “Go cleanse the house, and yourself too while you’re at it”.

Amy always had a strong sense of destiny, so when a job offer in Oregon aligned with an offer on our house in New York, she didn’t hesitate.

“It’s a sign!” she told me. “We’re supposed to go to Portland”.

I was less than wholly convinced by this appeal to fate, but the offer on the house was good and I was aching to get back to work, bored out of my mind by the monotony of small town life and sick of long graduate classes and longer commutes. I didn’t need another graduate degree. I needed a life.

“Alright,” I told her, after less than a day of deliberation. “Let’s do it”.

So we rented a truck, packed up everything we owned, and started driving. Neither of us was certain about the legality of transporting Amy’s shotgun across state lines, nor of what its use would be in the middle of a city, but it had been a gift from her father, so we brought it anyway, nestled between rugs and end tables, boxes of theology books and bags of cat toys.

And just like that, two weeks after deciding to sell our house and cross the country to move to a city we’d never seen, we were moved in, all our boxes unpacked, the whole house, thanks to Amy, looking like a spread out of Country Living Magazine. The days shortened, the rain came, and we settled into a life of red wine and hearth fires, Amy sewing and mending while I wrote sermons and newsletters long into the night.

We’d been in Portland about a month when Amy finished sewing my new suit. She’d started it as soon as she heard I’d be preaching again.

When she saw me in it for the first time, she threw back her head and laughed.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re happy!”

“I suppose I am,” I said, and gave a turn, before she could ask.

She clapped her hands together, and stood up from her chair. She grimaced as the weight shifted to her knees, but then smiled wider to hide the moment of pain.

The light in that house was warm and dim, the furnishings dark wood and earthy textiles. It all fit her, filled out her thin figure and made the gray in her hair grandmotherly.

“Let’s dance,” she said, and slid a delicate arm around my waist, grasped my hand in hers.

“A dance before dancing?” I teased, already falling into her gentle rhythm.

“And after dancing, and always.”

As we swayed and spun in the quiet night, the old cat Maggie jumped up on the sill to peer out the window. I thought she was looking for the neighbor’s tomcat; Amy wondered if she could see the ghosts in the church graveyard.

“I saw one, just the other night,” she said, as casually as anything.

“Oh, yeah?”

I never did know what to make of her otherworldly encounters.

“I was coming back from the grocery store with that bottle wine and some olives, and I decided to walk through the cemetery and take a look at some of the names, while there was a bit of light left over from the day. He was sitting on the ground under the pine tree, where most folks are Mayes or Frosts. I’ve been meaning to go back, but I haven’t yet”.

“Want to go now? We can be a bit late, the dancing doesn’t start right away”.

“Isn’t the cemetery closed after dark?”

“Sure, it is,” I said, laughing. “But I’m the only one around to watch for intruders”.

So we put on our coats, gathered our keys, cell phones, and wallets into our pockets, and headed out the door. Amy paused to lock up behind us, as she always did, and we crossed the street to the little white church. I paused to look at its darkened windows, but Amy went straight on to its graveyard, stopping only at the locked gate.

I hurried to catch up, pulling the key from my pocket. It took a few twists and firm pushes to get the key into the lock, but it finally turned, as it always does.

I took Amy’s hand and she led me toward the far end of the cemetery, and the tallest trees. Some moonlight lit the path, but we were walking away from the street lights, and the shadows were deep.

“Here,” she said. “Somewhere around here”.

We were standing beside a towering pine tree, its shadow engulfing the cluster of graves at its foot. Amy bent down, squinting.

“Here,” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket.

I turned on its flashlight and bent beside her, peering at the stone.

“No,” she said, before I’d read it. “Too old”.

We moved on, she declaring each resident too old or too female.

“He was young,” she told me. “Look for angels. Angels mark children’s graves”.

I was beginning to feel anxious. The light from my phone only made the world outside its beam seem darker, and the graves looked like strange and threatening shapes out of the corner of my eye. Besides, I reasoned, she was taking this too seriously. It was meant to be fun and silly, this ghosthunting, and now here we were, searching for dead children.

“Here!” she said. “An angel!”

Something child-sized lunged out of the tree towards me. I gasped.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

Blinking, I looked down at my feet.

“No,” I said, embarrassed. “It’s just the tomcat”.

She looked at me, took in my pale face and furrowed brow, and stood up.

“Let’s go dancing,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Let’s go dancing”.

I forgot about ghosts after that, for a while.

Amy, I learned later, never did.