CHAPTER ONE
When I sat down to make a
record of the Dry Falls happenings, I made many false starts in my attempt
to find some logical sequence.
I am a pastor's wife and I
can quote from the Book of Revelation, in which my task, or any writer's
task, is spelled out plainly: "Write the things which thou hast seen,
and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter." St.
John was the chosen instrument of God. He transcribed his visions in the
order in which God sent them. When it came to ordering events, I had no
guidance. Many things were happening around us all at once; some I learned
about too late for inclusion in this chronicle. I must choose a beginning
blindly and with trepidation, as soldiers draw lots to "volunteer" for
a suicide mission. I will mix up past and present as it suits my purposes.
The future is still uncertain, so I can only guess at it. I was determined
to publish my account, have it printed and distributed through the bookshops
in my county. By so doing I will be following the mandate to St. John:
"Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book; for the time is at
hand."
I was not qualified to be
the narrator of these incidents, although my stake in making them public
was very high. I was an amateur whose experience was limited to one topic.
I wrote about foodÑgrowing and cooking it--500 words a week, two typewritten
pages. My readers in the state of Maine were undemanding. If a measurement
was incorrect, they blamed the printers. My readers, after all, were familiar
with my subject. They were cooks like me. I thought of them as my colleagues.
Many of them sent me their families' favorite recipes. I reprinted the
best in a yearly column called "Readers' Choices." I have met my readers
at newspaper-sponsored contests. I have spoken at women's clubs from Kennebunk
to Machias. Often they were more knowledgeable than I was, and more ambitious.
They took courses in cake decoration. They were casual about croquembouches.
If they had no need of advice, why did they read me? They cooked three
meals a day. They ran out of fresh ideas. They looked to me to make their
kitchen chores more interesting. Since I wrote for a newspaper, my words
had the ring of authority.
Suppose I were to lecture
to these groups of nice women on my present subject? I can picture a setting
like so many where I have spoken, a community center, recently the scene
of a flower show, trestle tables placed against the walls bearing withering
exhibits, entries in various categories, on various themes, such as "Fruits
of the Vine," "Table for Two," "Bringing a Meadow Indoors," and "One Perfect
Rose." When they were settled on folding chairs with their cups of coffee,
I would walk to the front of the room and begin to speak. I would tell
them about our town and its time of emergency, about women like themselves
whose bodies were used in sleep. I can see them averting their eyes, darting
glances at friends, burrowing in their handbags. Two or three who were
seated at the back might make a tiptoed exit. Unless I reverted quickly
to culinary matters, I would lose my audience along with my credibility.
On any issue other than menus and food preparation, my respected regional
byline counted for nothing.
For as long as I wrote it,
my little column was a link to humanity. It addressed basic needsÑsurvival,
nutrition, celebration. It was concerned with the continuance of life
from season to season: planting, harvesting, putting food by for the winter.
The document I am presently compiling takes up nonhuman matters, events
that make hunger and survival seem benign and attractive. I must catalogue
human reactions to nonhuman circumstances: fear, depravity, shame, hysteria,
self-deception. I am obliged to spare no one, not my loved ones, my acquaintances,
my countrymen. I have tracked down participants who were desperate to
forget their experience. I have asked the most intimate questions from
an impersonal standpoint. Unjustly, since I was as much a sufferer as
anyone, the work I am doing will set me apart from my fellows. I am sitting
at the desk where I tapped out my column each week, a plank set on two
metal cabinets with plenty of drawer space.
The desk is the same, but
the room it is placed in is different. In the rectory it sat in one of
our three guest rooms (although sometimes I carried my typewriter to the
kitchen table). Here it occupies a crowded corner of our only bedroom.
The rectory was a fine old house, crowned by a belvedere, with Carpenter's
Gothic trim and long French windows, a house that captured and stored
the available light. There were many ideal locations for perennial borders:
along the proper front walk paved with brick in a herringbone pattern;
running the length of the fence by the sidewalk; on either side of the
steps by the screened-in back porch. I never dug up the lawn as long as
I lived there. I believe that borders should relate to existing structures.
Our new home is a two-story
apartment in a white clapboard building on Main Street recently vacated
by a chiropractor. Before Dr. Klinger, the building housed a firm of tax
accountants; before that, it was a branch of the Huguenot Society of America.
We tore down partitions that divided each floor into office cubicles or
examining rooms, leaving us with a large open space on the ground floor
(living-dining room and efficiency kitchen) and a bedroom, bath, and storage
room upstairs. The place is snug, to put a good construction on it, but
adequate to our needs.
Over the front doorbell is
a discreet brass plaque bearing the name of the Center; but Henry and
his employees work underground in the finished basement. The basement
has a separate entrance down a half-flight of steps. Except for two high
windows, it is lit artificially by rows of overhead fluorescent tubing.
There is a washroom, a compact refrigerator, and a two-burner hotplate.
The Center's offices and laboratory are self-contained, although we sometimes
conduct interviews upstairs in the living room. I should mention that
we offer our services free of charge. Many of our clients have been driven
out of their homes, lost their jobs, or incurred hospital expenses because
of emotional trauma. In the interests of our work we are living in straitened
circumstances. Henry inherited money from his father, who made his fortune
smoking and canning seafood. Conrad Lieber died when Henry was twenty-three
and away at war. Henry rarely touched his legacy when he was a minister.
He draws on it now to support the operations of the Center. He still pays
himself an Episcopal clergyman's wages, except that a beautiful house
and grounds were once part of the benefice.
The landing outside our bedroom
is stacked with cartons, the overflow from the storage room. The cartons
are filled with boxes of slides and tapes, newspaper clippings, and notes
scribbled down at the time on anything handyÑnapkins, deposit slips, the
insides of paperback book covers. Each carton is labeled and dated according
to incident: the Manning Case, the Burridge Case, the Violette Brook Campgrounds
Case, etc. Our bedroom is small, with one logical place for the bed, so
my desk must face a wall instead of a window. If my desk faced the window
(thereby blocking the major passageway), what would I see through the
glass to cheer or please me? Outside there is a concrete yard with a drain
in the center and a chain-link fence between us and Baldwin's hardware
store. If I stared out the window too long at this sordid view, the gardener
in me would take over, or whatever is left of her. A hurricane fence makes
an excellent support for a vine gardenÑtomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peas,
and a splash of blue morning glories.
Until I finish this chronicle,
I am cut off from the natural world. I am living, for the present, in
a world of words and abstractions. I am thin, where I used to be sturdy.
I have lost my color. I cook by rote, in a hurry, only at suppertime.
For the other two meals we open cans, jars, and boxes. We live like students
in an off-campus dorm with a communal kitchen. Henry is quite content
with these slapdash arrangements. Before we married he subsisted on creamed
herring, sardines, and crackers. Sometimes when my back aches from sitting
in one position, I invent a new dish in my head, although rarely in practice,
such as a cornbread cake made with buttermilk and filled with vegetablesÑstring
beans, onions, garlic, red and green peppers. When will I be free to lead
a more balanced life? It is more than two years since I put on blue jeans
and struggled through the briars on my way up Pumpkin Hill, tearing my
sleeves, getting long, mean scratches on my arms, until I found the place
where the sweetest wild blueberries were hiding. Did my love for the things
of this earth bring on the trouble in the first place? Did my heedless,
pink-cheeked vitality attract their notice? Did the smells from my kitchen
tempt them out of their element? I am dealing in guilt and blame, which
serves no purpose. Every woman in Dry Falls was an unsuspecting magnet.
Adele Manning took "baths" in the light of the waxing moon. The Roque
sisters, Claude and Arlette, who were in their late teens, camped overnight
in Parsons Ravine during their menstrual cycle. Ruth Hiram, our librarian,
grows old roses exclusively for their fragrance. Jane Morse often nursed
her first child on a bench in the common.
If physical life was a powerful
attractant, it was not the special property of the female population.
Dry Falls is a prosperous farming community, the exception in Maine, teeming
with life, surrounded by fields of feed corn and tender alfalfa, by pastures
where mammals with distended udders are grazing, where circles of cow
dung swarm with carrion insects. In the summer the farm hands work bare-chested,
raising a sweat, bringing earth and manure indoors on the soles of their
boots. We have chicken farms in the area, hens raised for eggs. Michel
Roque breeds sheep and goats, and makes tangy cheeses from their milk.
Evan McNeil's Highland Kennels is famous in New England for its Border
collies, uncanny, intelligent herding dogs with a cast in one eye. Around
here the life cycle operates at a sped-up pace. Something is always breeding
in our vicinityÑsprouting, dropping, hatching, whelping, fermenting. The
township of Dry Falls fairly reeks of generativity, more than enough to
call forth the legions of the disembodied.
If bodiless entities are attracted
by an abundance of life, there are those in our community who are drawn
to the immaterial. Among our year-round inhabitants are a number who have
retired or escaped from cities, and whose interests are far removed from
agriculture. Some of these peaceable refugees started a discussion group,
meeting at one another's houses as often as they could manage it. They
kept the group and its purpose to themselves. If they had broadcast the
fact that their topic was psychical research, who knows what kind of chowderheads
and dabblers might have begged for admittance? No one in the group was
a professional parapsychologist; but they were well informed on the subject,
serious and skeptical. Walter Emmet had scholarly credentials in another
field, eighteenth-century American furniture and decorative arts. Mary
Grey Hodges was a registered nurse, formerly in practice in Bangor, who
founded our Visiting Nurses Association. David Busch had been a staff
photographer for Decade magazine, who went off on his own to specialize
in nature and landscapes. Lorraine Conner Drago was a local real-estate
agent, a mundane career for a person with clairvoyant abilities. At age
fifty-one, my husband, Henry, was their youngest member.
When Henry joined up, I remember
hoping that Bishop Hollins wouldn't get wind of it. Our Bishop was the
crusading sort of clergyman, not much interested in the spiritual life,
let alone in spirits. He thought the mission of the Church was people
helping people, like the Community Chest, the March of Dimes, or the United
Way. On one of his official parish visits he scolded Henry for holding
too many meditation sessions, and ordered him to start a bimonthly meeting
of Parents Without Partners. Henry's psychical research group did nothing
to ease the pain of divorce or stop world hunger, but it seemed to me
they had some concern with human betterment. When they met at the rectory
in October of 1973Ñfour sober elderly people and my youthful husbandÑMary
Grey read aloud a paper on healer-treated water. Mary Grey read too fast
and dropped her voice at the end of every sentence, but the message and
its implications were far-reaching. If one healer could purify a tank
of contaminated water, a squadron of healers might be able to revive Lake
Erie.
After the reading I provided
light refreshments--coffee, cider, and date bars made with oatmeal. Walter
wanted to conduct an experiment in extrasensory perception. "Not a very
rigorous experiment," he said. "Just a little stricter than a parlor game."
He brought in a folding screen from the dining room, and placed a side
table behind it. Behind the screen he opened a satchel and placed an object
from his private collection on top of the table. Walter himself did not
know the identity of the object. He had asked someone else to select it
and wrap it in several layers of heavy brown mailing paper. Walter gave
us ten minutes by the clock to receive impressions and to write down any
images that came to us, however fragmentary. I played along, so as not
to disrupt the atmosphere, but my mind wandered out to the kitchen where
the supper dishes were soaking in the sink and the macaroni and cheese
was hardening in its casserole.
Ten minutes later, Walter
called us to order. "Nothing," said David. "It couldn't have any relevance.
I kept getting a name with a 'k' in it--Kennett? Or Mackenzie?" Lorraine
read her notes out loud: "wavy glass," "the size of a julep cup," "bubbles,"
"black flecks," "tilting sideways." Mary Grey's paper was blank. "I kept
dozing off," she apologized. "I pass," I told Walter, "I have about as
much ESP as a tree stump." Walter turned to Henry, whose notepad was covered
with writing. When Henry closed his eyes he had seen a circle of light,
golden light, with a red glow at the apex of the circle. In a moment the
circle developed a foot, or base. "Like a bowl," said Henry, "a yellow
bowl, but I think it was metal."
Walter started unwrapping
the object before Henry had finished, tearing at the paper, wrenching
the bands of Scotch tape. He pulled out a little footed cup, four inches
in diameter, hammered out of brass, burnished to a soft golden luster.
"One of my prizes," said Walter, handing it to Henry. "This communion
cup belonged to the first rector of King's Chapel in Boston. He took it
with him to deathbeds, when he was called out to give the last rites."
There was a round of applause for Henry. David clapped him on the shoulder.
"A religious object," he said. "You had an unfair advantage, padre."
Henry's accomplishment called
for a round of drinks. I took orders and poured out the liquor. Henry
asked for a brandy. Lorraine seemed a little less animated than the others.
She had once taken part in the ESP trials at Duke University, when the
great J. B. Rhine had given her a high mark for accuracy. Walter salvaged
her pride. "You got through," he said. "You scored a hit. You, too, David."
He explained that the communion cup was displayed on a cabinet shelf next
to a beaker, a hand-blown colonial drinking vessel dating from the 1760s.
The name of the person who had selected the brass cup and wrapped it was
Janet McKay, who did occasional secretarial chores for Walter.
The Uncanny was with us, a
seventh presence in the room. I caught the group's excitement, a collective
shiver. Henry's direct hit now seemed less dramatic than Lorraine's and
David's oblique ones. A priest, after all, is supposed to be in touch
with the invisible. I could see that their faces looked younger; years
had dropped away. With his small, sharp features, Walter looked like a
boy turned white early. Henry's face was so flushed and unguarded I was
almost embarrassed for him. My own face, reflected in the mirror over
the fireplace, looked as pretty as I get, with my bumpy nose, pale green
eyes, pale hair, pale lashes and eyebrows. I looked like a piece of straw,
but a fresh piece of straw before the weather starts to spoil it. I blessed
Walter (who is actually a judgmental, self-centered little stickler) for
bringing some spark to our lives just as winter was upon us.
At the time I believed no
harm could come from these games, since their immediate effects were restorative
and beneficial. I listened as they talked about agendas for the next month
of meetings. I thought I might join them, if more of the sessions were
like this one. It seemed their appetite for thrills had been slaked, at
least for the present. In Henry's opinion, they were putting the cart
before the horse, delving into parapsychology without more grounding in
physiology and psychiatry. David suggested they read a new book on the
two halves of the brain. Mary Grey offered to report on dissociation and
multiple personalities. I decided not to join them after all, if they
were going to be so studious. At least my husband had found a hobby, an
interest outside his work. For some time I had wondered if his work were
more burdensome than satisfying.
Excerpted from Incubus © Copyright 2012 by Ann Arensberg. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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