Ghost Story

  Back in the dark corner, Constance giggled—giggled without any humor. That laugh of hers sent chills through me—it conjured up pictures of a nearly bestial life. Of course, that was what they had; and all the other children knew it. And as I found out later, it was much worse, much more unnatural, than anything I could have imagined.

  Anyhow, I raised my hands in despair or impatience, and the wretched girl must have thought I was going to strike him, because she called out, “It was Gregory!”

  Fenny looked back at her, and I swear that I’ve never seen anyone look so frightened. In the next instant he was off his chair and out of the schoolroom. I tried to call him back, but it was no good. He was running as if for life, off into the woods, sprinting in the jack-rabbit country way. The girl hung in the doorway, watching him go. And now she looked frightened and dismayed—her whole being had turned pale. “Who is Gregory, Constance?” I asked her, and her face twisted. “Does he sometimes walk by the schoolhouse? Is his hair like this?” And I stuck my hands up over my head, my fingers spread wide—and then she was off too, running as fast as he had.

  Well, that afternoon I was accepted by the other students. They’d assumed that I had beaten both of the Bate children, and so taken part in the natural order of things. And that night at dinner I got, if not an extra potato, at least a sort of congealed smile from Sophronia Mather. Evidently Ethel Birdwood had reported to her mother that the new schoolmaster had seen reason.

  Fenny and Constance didn’t come to school the next two days. I stewed about that, and thought that I’d acted so clumsily that they might never return. On the second day I was so restless that I paced around the schoolyard during lunchtime. The children regarded me as they would a dangerous lunatic—it was clear that teacher was supposed to stay indoors, preferably administering the ferule. Then I heard something that stopped me dead and made me whirl around toward a group of girls, who were sitting rather primly on the grass. They were the biggest girls and one of them was Ethel Birdwood. I was sure that I’d heard her mention the name Gregory. “Tell me about Gregory, Ethel,” I said.

  “What’s Gregory?” she asked, simpering. “There’s no one with that name here.” She gave me a great cow-eyed look, and I was certain she was thinking of that rural tradition of the schoolmaster marrying his eldest female pupil. She was a confident girl, this Ethel Birdwood, and her father had the reputation of being prosperous.

  I wasn’t having it. “I just heard you mention his name.”

  “You must be mistaken, Mr. James,” she said, dripping honey.

  “I do not feel charitable to liars,” I said. “Tell me about this Gregory person.”

  Of course they all assumed that I was threatening her with a caning. Another girl came to her rescue. “We were saying that Gregory fixed that gutter,” she said, and pointed to the side of the school. One of the rain gutters was obviously new.

  “Well, he’ll never come around this school again if I can help it,” I said, and left them to their infuriating giggling.

  After school that day I thought I’d visit the lion’s den, as it were, and walk up to the Bate home. I knew it was about as far out of town as Lewis’s house is from Milburn. I set off on the most likely road, and walked quite a way, three or four miles, when I realized I’d probably gone too far. I hadn’t passed any houses, so the Bate home had to be actually in the woods themselves, instead of on their edge as I had imagined. I took a likely-looking trail, and thought I would simply tack back and forth toward town until I found them.

  Unfortunately, I got lost. I went into ravines and up hills and through scrub until I couldn’t have told you where even the road was anymore. It all looked appallingly alike. Then, just at dusk, I was aware of being watched. It was a remarkably uncanny feeling—it was like knowing a tiger was behind me, about to pounce. I turned around and put my back against a big elm. And then I saw something. A man stepped into a clearing about thirty yards from me—the man I had seen before. Gregory, or so I thought. He said nothing, and neither did I. He just gazed at me, absolutely silent, with that wild hair and that ivory face. I felt hatred, absolute hatred, streaming from him. An air of utter unreasonable violence hung about him, along with that peculiar freedom I had sensed earlier—he was like a madman. He could have killed me off in those woods, and no one would have known. And trust me, what I saw in his face was murder, nothing else. Just as I expected him to come forward and attack me, he stepped behind a tree.

  I went forward very slowly. “What do you want?” I called, simulating bravery. There was no answer. I went forward a bit more. Finally I got to the tree where I had seen him, and there wasn’t a trace of him—he had just melted away.

  I was still lost, and I still felt threatened. For that was the meaning of his appearance, I knew—it was a threat. I took a few steps off in a random direction, passed through another thick stand of trees, and stopped short. For a moment I was scared. Right before me, closer than that apparition had been, was a thin shabbily dressed girl with stringy blond hair: Constance Bate.

  “Where’s Fenny?” I asked.

  She raised one bony arm and pointed off to the side. Then he too rose up like a—“like a snake from a basket,” I must admit, is the metaphor that comes to mind. On his face, when he stood up in the tall weeds, was that characteristic Fenny Bate expression of sullen guilt.

  “I was looking for your home,” I said, and they both pointed at once in the same direction, again without speaking. Looking through a chink in the woods, I saw a tarpaper shack with one greasepaper window and a stingy little pipe of a chimney. You used to see a lot of tarpaper shacks here and there, though thank goodness they have disappeared now, but that one was the most sordid I ever did see. I know I have the reputation of being a conservative, but I’ve never equated virtue with money, nor poverty with vice, yet that mean stinking little shack—looking at it, you knew it stank—somehow for me appeared to breathe foulness. No, it was worse than that. It wasn’t merely that the lives within would be brutalized by poverty, but that they would be twisted, malformed . . . my heart fell, I looked away and saw an emaciated black dog nosing at a dead cushion of feathers that must have been a chicken once. This surely, I thought, must be how Fenny got the reputation for being “bad”—the prim folks of Four Forks had taken one look at his home and condemned him for life.

  Yet I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t believe in evil, but evil was what I felt.

  I turned back to the children, who had the oddest frozen look in their eyes. “I want to see you in school tomorrow,” I said.

  Fenny shook his head.

  “But I want to help you,” I said. I was on the verge of making a speech: what I wanted to say to him was that it was my plan to change his life, to rescue him, in a sense I suppose to make him human . . . that obstinate, frozen look on his mug stopped me. There was something else in it too, and I realized with a shock that something about Fenny was reminding me of my last glimpse of the mysterious Gregory. “You must come back to school tomorrow,” I said.

  Constance said, “Gregory doesn’t want us to. Gregory said we have to stay here.”

  “Well, what I say is he comes, and you come too.”

  “I’ll ask Gregory.”

  “Oh, to hell with Gregory,” I shouted, “you’ll come,” and walked away from the two of them. That queer sensation stayed with me until I found the road again—it was like walking away from damnation.

  * * *

  You can guess what the result was. They did not return. Things ticked on in their normal way for several days, Ethel Birdwood and some of the other girls giving me liquid glances whenever I called on them for an answer, me toiling over the next day’s lessons in that frigid box of a room and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse. Eventually Ethel began bringing me sandwiches for lunch, and soon my other admirers among the girls were bringing sandwiches
too. I used to save one in my pocket to eat in my room after supper with the Mathers.

  On Sundays I made the long hike to Footville for my required visit to the Lutheran church there. It was not as deadly as I had feared. The minister was an old German, Franz Gruber, who called himself Dr. Gruber. The doctorate was genuine—he was a much subtler man than his gross body or residence in Footville, New York, suggested. I thought his sermons were interesting, and I decided to speak to him.

  When the Bate children finally appeared, they seemed worn and tired, like drinkers after a strenuous night. This became a pattern. They’d miss two days, come in, miss three, come in for two: and each time I saw them, they looked worse. Fenny in particular seemed in decline. It was as though he were aging prematurely: he grew even thinner, his skin seemed to crease on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. And when I saw him, I could swear that he looked as though he were smirking at me—Fenny Bate smirking, though I would have sworn that he didn’t possess the mental equipment for it. For him, it seemed corrupt—it frightened me.

  Therefore, one Sunday after the service I spoke to Dr. Gruber at the church door. I waited to be last to shake his hand, and when everybody else had filed away down the road, I told him that I wanted his advice on a problem.

  He must have thought that I was going to confess to an adultery, or some such. But he was very kind, and invited me into his home, across the street from the church.

  Very graciously, he escorted me into his library. This was a large room, entirely book-lined—I hadn’t seen a room like it since I’d left Harvard. It was obviously the room of a scholar: it was a room where a man comfortable with ideas worked with them. Most of the books were in German, but many were in Latin and Greek. He had the patristic writings in big soft leather folios, Bible commentaries, works of theology and the great aid to sermon-writers, a Bible concordance. On a shelf behind his desk I was surprised to see a little collection of Lully, Fludd, Bruno, what you could call the occult studies of the Renaissance. Also, even more surprisingly, a few antiquarian books about witchcraft and Satanism.

  Dr. Gruber had been out of the room fetching beer, and when he came in he saw me looking at these books.

  “What you see,” he said in his guttural accent,” is the reason you find me in Footville, Mr. James. I hope you will not think me a cracked old fool on the evidence of those books.” Without my prompting him, he told me the story, and it’s as you’d expect—he’d been brilliant, approved of by his elders, he had written books himself, but when he had shown too much interest in what he called “hermetic matters,” he was ordered to stop that line of study. He’d published one further paper, and been banished to the most out-of-the-way congregation the Lutheran establishment could find. “Now,” he said, “my cards are on the table, as my new countrymen say. I never speak of these hermetic matters in my sermons, but I continue my studies in them. You are free to go or to speak, as you please.” This sounded a little pompous to me, and I was a little taken aback, but I saw no reason not to continue.

  I told him the whole story, not stinting on the detail. He listened with great attentiveness, and it was clear that he had heard of Gregory and the Bate children.

  More than that, he seemed to be very excited by the story.

  When I finished he said, “And all of this happened just as you have explained?”

  “Of course.”

  “You have spoken of it to no one else?”

  “No.”

  “I am very happy you have come to me,” he said, and instead of saying anything further, pulled a gigantic pipe out of a desk drawer, filled it and began to smoke, all the while fixing me with his protuberant eyes. I began to feel uneasy, and half-regretted that I had taken his earlier comments so lightly. “Your landlady never gave you any idea of why she thought Fenny Bate was ‘badness itself’?”

  I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the negative impression I’d just had of him. “Do you know why she would?”

  “It is a well-known story,” he answered. “In these two little towns, actually it is quite a famous story.”

  “Is Fenny bad?” I asked.

  “He is not bad, but he is corrupt,” said Dr. Gruber. “But from what you say—”

  “It could be worse? I confess,” I said, “it’s entirely a mystery.”

  “More so than you imagine,” he said calmly. “If I try to explain it to you, you will be tempted, on the basis of what you know about me, to think me insane.” His eyes bulged even more.

  “If Fenny is corrupt,” I asked, “who corrupted him?”

  “Oh, Gregory,” he replied. “Gregory, without doubt. Gregory is in back of it all.”

  “But who is Gregory?” I had to ask.

  “The man you saw. I’m positive of that. You have described him perfectly.” He held his pudgy fingers up behind his head, imitating my own gesture to Constance Bate. “Perfectly, I assure you. Yet when you hear more, you will doubt my word.”

  “For the sake of heaven, why?”

  He shook his head, and I saw that his free hand was trembling. For a second I wondered if I really had stumbled into intimate conversation with a madman.

  “Fenny’s parents had three children,” he said, puffing out smoke. “Gregory Bate was the first.”

  “He is their brother!” I exclaimed. “One day I thought I saw a resemblance . . . yes, I see. But there’s nothing unnatural in that.”

  “That depends, I think, on what passed between them.”

  I tried to take it in. “You mean something unnatural passed between them.”

  “And with the sister as well.”

  A feeling of horror went through me. I could see that cold handsome face, and that hateful careless manner—Gregory’s air of being free of all restraint. “Between Gregory and the sister.”

  “And, as I said, between Gregory and Fenny.”

  “He corrupted both of them, then. Why isn’t Constance as condemned by Four Forks as Fenny?”

  “Remember, schoolteacher, that this is the hinterland. A touch of—unnaturalness—between brother and sister among those wretched families in shacks is perhaps not so unnatural after all.”

  “But between brother and brother—” I might have been back at Harvard, discussing a savage tribe with a professor of anthropology.

  “It is.”

  “By God, it is!” I exclaimed, seeing that crafty, prematurely aged expression on Fenny’s face. “And now he is trying to send me off—he sees me as an interference.”

  “Apparently he does. I hope you see why.”

  “Because I won’t stand for it,” I said. “He wants to get rid of me.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Gregory wants everything.”

  “You mean he wants them forever.”

  “Both of them forever—but from your story, perhaps Fenny most of all.”

  “Can’t their parents stop this?”

  “The mother is dead. The father left when Gregory grew old enough to beat him.”

  “They live alone in that appalling place?”

  He nodded.

  It was terrible: it meant the miasma, the sense of the place as somehow damned, came from the children themselves: from what happened between them and Gregory.

  “Well,” I protested, “can’t the children themselves do something to protect themselves?”

  “They did,” he said.

  “But what?” I had prayer in mind, I suppose, since I was talking with a preacher, or boarding with another family—but as to that, my own experience had shown me how far charity went in Four Forks.

  “You won’t take my word for it,” he said, “so I must show you.” He abruptly stood up, and gestured for me to stand as well. “Outside,” he ordered. Beneath his excitement, he seemed very disturbed, and just for a moment I thought that he found me as unpleasant as I did him,
with his showers of pipe tobacco and his bulging eyes.

  I left the room and on the way out of the house, passed a room with a table set for one. I smelled a roast cooking, and an open bottle of beer sat on the table, so it could be that all he disliked was being kept from his lunch.

  He slammed the door behind us and set off back toward the church. This was mystifying indeed. When he had crossed the road, he called to me without turning his head. “You know that Gregory was the school handyman? That he used to do odd jobs around the school?”

  “One of the girls said something about it,” I replied, watching him continue on around the side of the church. What next, I wondered, a trip into the fields? And what would I have to be shown before I would believe it?

  A little graveyard lay behind the church, and I had time, following waddling Dr. Gruber, to idly look at the names on the massive nineteenth-century tombstones—Josiah Foote, Sarah Foote, all of that clan which had founded the village, and other names which meant nothing to me. Dr. Gruber was now standing, with a decided air of impatience, by a little gate at the back of the graveyard.

  “Here,” he said.

  Well, I thought, if you’re too lazy to open it yourself, and bent down to lift the latch.

  “Not that,” he said sharply. “Look down. Look at the cross.”

  I looked where he was pointing. It was a crude hand-painted wooden cross, standing where a tombstone would, at the head of a grave. Someone had lettered the name Gregory Bate on the horizontal piece of the cross. I looked back up at Dr. Gruber, and there was no doubt this time, he was looking at me with distaste.

  “It can’t be,” I said. “It’s preposterous. I saw him.”

  “Believe me, schoolteacher, this is where your rival is buried,” he said, and not for a long time after did I notice his peculiar choice of words. “The mortal portion of him, at any rate.”

  I was numb; I repeated what I had said. “It can’t be.”