The Larson women always sat in the third row from the back because Mama Larson insisted it was prideful to sit in the front row but impolite to sit in the very back, and because all of them enjoyed the thrill of superiority that came from watching the latecomers straggle in and slide into the last pew with their necks bowed. That Sunday the last pew was occupied by a few red-faced members of the Buhler tribe and the Hanson boy who was in his forties but still called “boy” because his time in the war had shaken the sense out of him. But at the very end of the sermon, as measured by McDowell’s increasing volume and perspiration, a man Ade didn’t recognize entered the church and tucked himself into the second-to-last row.
Ade didn’t know much about the wider world, but she knew for certain this man lived there. Everything about him spoke of precision and order. His woolen coat was short and sharp, revealing a long length of pressed black trouser. His graying mustache was clipped with surgical precision. There was an almost imperceptible shuffling sound as every member of the congregation attempted to look at the stranger without anyone else seeing them look.
The service ended and the flow of people bottlenecked itself around the interloper. A few of the first-pew families had taken it upon themselves to make introductions and inquiries. They hoped he’d enjoyed their little service (although Ade was unconvinced that enjoyment was even a distant goal of Preacher McDowell’s) and wondered at his occupation in the area. Perhaps he had relations nearby? Or business on the river?
“Thank you very kindly, sirs, but no, I’ve no interest in riverboats. I confess I’m a land man, looking for likely property.” His voice carried over the heads of the congregation, nasally and foreign-sounding, and Mama Larson huffed beside Ade. No one ought to speak above a respectful murmur while under the church roof.
“I heard in Mayfield there might be some affordable acreage near here—apparently it’s haunted, and not much used—and I took this opportunity to make myself known to you folks.” There was a rippling beside the stranger, a pulling-away. Ade supposed they didn’t much like the idea of a big-city northerner bulling into their church just to swindle them out of cheap land. They weren’t far enough south for carpetbaggers to be much more than badly inked cartoons in the Sunday paper, but they knew the signs. From the tone of their muttered replies Ade guessed they were stonewalling him (no, sir, no land hereabouts, you’ll have to look somewheres else).
The stream of people began to leave and Ade trailed behind Aunt Lizzie as they filed down the aisle. The stranger was still smiling with affable condescension at everyone, undeterred. Ade stopped.
“We got a house on our property that everybody knows is full of haunts—saw one myself, just yesterday—but it’s not for sale,” she told the stranger. She didn’t know why she said it, except she wanted to shake the smugness out of him and prove they weren’t poor rural folk who would sell land cheaply out of baseless superstition. And perhaps because she was curious, hungry for the man’s worldly otherness.
“Did you now.” The man smiled at her in what he must have thought was a charming manner, and leaned closer. “Permit me to walk you out, in that case.” Ade found her arm clamped to his suit sleeve, her feet stumbling alongside his. Her aunts were already outside, likely fanning themselves and gossiping. “Now, what’s the nature of these haunts? What did you see, precisely?”
But her desire to speak to the man had evaporated. She tugged her hand away, shrugging in a sullen, adolescent way, and would have left without speaking another word except that his eyes caught hers. They were the color of moons or coins, unspeakably cold but also somehow alluring, as if they possessed their own gravitational pull.
Even years later, curled beside me in the languorous warmth of the late-afternoon sun, Ade would shudder, just a little, as she described that gaze.
“Tell me all about it,” the stranger breathed.
And Ade did. “Well, I just was going to the old cabin for no reason and there was a ghost boy waiting there. Or at least that’s what I thought he was at first, on account of he was black and funny-dressed and speaking in tongues. But he didn’t come from hell or anything. I don’t know where he come from, exactly, except he ended up walking out of our cabin door. And I’m glad he did, I liked him, liked his hands—” She closed her teeth on the words, reeling and a little breathless.
The not-very-charming smile had returned to the stranger’s face as she spoke, except now there was a kind of predatory stillness beneath it. “Thank you awfully much, Miss—?”
“Adelaide Lee Larson.” She swallowed, blinked. “Pardon me, sir, my aunts are calling.”
She skittered out the church doors without looking back at the stranger in the neat suit. She felt his eyes like a pair of dimes pressed to the back of her neck.
Because of her aunts’ essential softheartedness, Ade’s punishments never varied. She was confined to the upstairs room where they all slept (except Mama Larson, who did not sleep so much as nap haphazardly in a variety of semisupine positions downstairs) for the following two days. Ade bore this confinement with poor grace—the Larson women would spend those days haunted by bangings and thumpings above them, as if their house hosted a particularly foul-tempered poltergeist—but no real resistance. In her figuring, it was best to lull them into complacence before climbing out the window and scrabbling down the honeysuckle on the evening of the third day.
On Monday she was supplied with a basket of fresh laundry to fold and a few stacks of ripped underclothes to mend, because Aunt Lizzie insisted that lying in bed all day was more reward than punishment, and said she might run off tomorrow evening herself and they could lock her upstairs next for some bed rest. At lunch the loft grew greasy with the smell of frying bacon and beans. Ade dropped a Bible on the floor to remind them to bring her up something to eat.
But none of her aunts appeared. There was an authoritative thumping on the front door, followed by the astonished silence of five women so unaccustomed to visitors they weren’t quite sure what action ought to follow a knock at the door. Then a timid chair-scraping and shuffling, and the door creaking inward. Ade lay flat on the floor and pressed her ear to the pine boards.
She heard nothing but the low, foreign rumblings of a strange man in their kitchen, and five women’s voices rising and falling around it like a flock of startled river birds. Once a hearty laugh boomed upward, drum-hollow and well practiced. Ade thought of the big-city man at the church service and felt a strange darkening, a fear of something nameless hanging on her horizon.
The man left, the door closed, and the twittering of the aunts crescendoed into something like cackling.
It was an hour or more before Aunt Lizzie brought up a plate of cold beans. “And who was that at the door?” Ade asked. She was still lying on the floor, having found herself paralyzed by a combination of lassitude and dread.
“Never you mind, nosy. Just a bit of good news is all.” Lizzie looked quite smug as she said it, like a woman hiding a grand surprise. Had it been one of her other aunts Ade might have bullied her for more information, but bullying Aunt Lizzie was like bullying a mountain, except mountains didn’t switch you for impertinence. Ade rolled onto her back and watched the sunbeams stretch across the loft ceiling, pooling in the gullies between rafters. She wondered what the sun might look like elsewhere, in some other world, and if there were really any other worlds to see. Already the things the ghost boy told her were fading and fraying.
On the morning of the third day Ade woke with a foreboding heaviness in her limbs. Her aunts and grandmother still snored and snuffled around her in a sea of quilts and woman-flesh. Sunrise was reluctant and gray, too slow in coming.
Ade sat tense among her aunts as they dressed, wishing herself out the window and in the hayfield already. Her bones hummed and strained; her feet tap-tapped on the floorboards. The loft was close and humid from their sleeping breath.
“We’re going to town today,” Mama Larson announced, and gestured for her town hat—an enormous white bonnet she’d purchased sometime in the 1850s, which looked and smelled increasingly like a stuffed rabbit. “But you’re staying put, Ade, on account of the heart attack you gave us.”
Ade blinked. Then she nodded meekly, because it seemed polite to maintain the fiction that she would obey.
By the time all the Larson women were truly gone—and it took an eternity of fussing with dresses and stockings, followed by another small eternity in the barn convincing the mules they ought to wear a harness and pull a cart before this was accomplished—Ade was almost shuddering with the urge to be elsewhere. She took a September apple and her aunt Lizzie’s work coat and left at a scurrying almost-run.
There was no one waiting at the old cabin. There was, in fact, no old cabin at which to wait: the field was blank, featureless, empty but for a few sulky-looking crows and a line of fresh iron stakes driven into the earth.
Ade closed her eyes against a sudden disorienting dizziness, stumbling forward. Where the cabin used to stand she found a raw tumble of broken lumber, as if a giant’s hand had reached casually from the sky to topple it.
There was nothing left of the door but a few lichen-splotched splinters.
