You the ghost (2019)

If snow fell on a Friday as we drove to the farm, our car might make the only set of tracks on my mother’s road—two tread marks in the dust between two frozen snowbanks. These tracks would bend into her driveway and end in a spot she had just cleared with the tractor. Then our footprints back and forth to the kitchen door as Suzanne and I carried luggage and groceries and sleeping children inside. The next morning, while everyone still slept, I might step off the porch and into the snow alone. My footprints circled behind the house and followed the path up to the cemetery. They came in through the gate in the wall we all built. They passed the gravestones of Othenal and Abigail and Sammuel and others and stopped at the foot of my father’s grave. There was a scuffling as my feet turned. Then I sat in the undisturbed snow on the wall and we started our conversation.

What I had to say got communicated all at once, as in a dream. Maybe the last time we were at the farm the ice on the pond was clear and smooth for skating. I might tell him how Isabelle skated while I flung the younger kids across the ice on a sled. We would start from the far end of the pond. I wore crampons and spun the sled in a circle, like a slingshot, and then whipped it past me so it flew down the length of the pond. But I might also ask my father a question. Maybe I asked about an argument Suzanne and I had earlier in the week which still hung between us last night, as we drove. I might ask why I felt so bored at work or so stressed. Or I might ask what he thinks of how the trees look with snow lining even the tiniest branches.

I tended for decades the trees around his grave. In the years after work stopped on his wall, we let the woods grow until the cemetery was surrounded by a jostling crowd of different trees, softwood and hardwood, with no space for sunlight between them. You couldn’t see the house from his grave then. You couldn’t see the barn or the pond or the fields. One summer, a few years after graduating from college, I cut my way into this thicket with a chainsaw. I would cut and clear intensively and then wait to how the trees left filled the space I gave them. Every year I did something. In the end, I saved only the hardwoods that he and I used to admire together—maple and oak and beech and golden birch.

We wouldn’t talk for long. Like my mother, I can’t sit still for more than a few minutes. Then I would stand up from the wall, my feet making a circle in the snow as I gazed around at our grove of mixed hardwoods. We might admire together how that stand of golden birch looks—it’s filled in nicely—or how much that oak tree has grown. The beech tree at the north corner does need the branches trimmed, and I might ask him whether I should finally cut down that red maple growing just inside the wall.

In the days when we neglected the cemetery, before my mother moved up there from New Haven and while I was occupied in other places, Emily lived in Baltimore and first started dating Bob. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun. She led the Baltimore chapter of a national political action group. He interviewed her for an article, and then they met accidentally at a bar. A few months later, while still getting to know each other, Emily invited him to spend a few days at the farm. They had the house to themselves—kerosene lamps then and only water from that unreliable spring on the hill.

One morning Emily discovered that the thicket outside the cemetery had crossed inside the wall and saplings now grew among the gravestones. She decided they would clean it out. Bob started trimming the weeds and grasses overgrowing the base of each headstone. He was on his hands and knees when Emily fired up this ancient, iron brush cutter that our father had bought a few years after she was born. The blade on the bottom looked salvaged from a sawmill. Watching her strap on this machine and start laying waste to small trees in the cemetery where her father was buried, Bob realized that he wanted to marry her. Sometimes when he tells this story he says he wanted to be part of a family who loved each other this much. Other times he talks mostly about Emily. Kneeling in the moss on top of his grave, Bob had a conversation of his own with our father. He remembers asking not for permission exactly but more as a possibility, Well? What do you think?

When our first born were still the only children in the family, I talked Bob into building a playhouse for them—a little log cabin, because I had built a cabin before and thought I might do a better job the second time. We started it one weekend and managed to finish building a floor. Isabelle was four, and Caroline was three.

My design philosophy was proportion. Kids would play in a house that felt the right size. We kept asking the girls to come stand on the floor so we could measure the height of the walls against them. We did the same with the doorframe. Isabelle kept wondering about a window. “Have you built my window yet?” she would ask. “When will you build my window?” Here she is finally looking out her window.

The girls grew faster than we could finish their cabin so it seemed smaller and smaller to them every time they saw it, and Caroline started calling it “the cabinet.” To round out the ramshackle charm, we built a porch. Emily and I posed the girls on it as if we were teasing our father about his Appalachian heritage.

If you sat beside them on the porch and turned your head uphill, you could see the wall around the cemetery. If you sat on the wall, you could see the girls sitting on the porch.

A few years later, I built a treehouse even closer to the wall. The girls came up to inspect progress, but Caroline didn’t like heights the way Isabelle did, as you can see.

One afternoon, as I worked on the floor, the two of them came running up the hill and right past the treehouse. I watched them run into the cemetery. They stopped at his gravestone.

“Clint,” Isabelle read, touching the letters on the stone. “Clint!” she exclaimed. “Caroline!” she called. “Your brother is named after my dad’s father!”

“I know,” Caroline said. “And he’s my mother’s father too.”

“Oh, right,” Isabelle said.

There were more children now. I posed with Rosalind and Clint and Caroline and Isabelle after the floor was finished but before I added a railing and a roof.

Soon after I finished the roof, we celebrated Halloween at the farm. Take any place that has a lot of outbuildings in various states of repair, and then wait until nightfall, and Halloween is close to spooky enough without much additional effort—or so we thought. We each took stations around the farm and tried to scare the kids the right amount. The challenge was the age span. Isabelle and Caroline were now eight and nine. Rosalind and Clint were four and five. Caleb was here now and not quite two.

I took the cemetery and the treehouse. Between the old gravestones, I made a house of sticks and added a kerosene lamp that lit up the smoke from a rag burning in an old can. I left behind candy and then climbed on the roof of the treehouse. Fastening a rope to a branch above me, I crouched there with a white sheet hidden under my coat. I could still see the light of the lamp and the smoke from the can as Suzanne brought the kids up to the cemetery. This was their first stop. She was carrying Caleb.

“This isn’t scary,” Caroline said. “I’m not scared. Uncle Doug made that pile of sticks and all that smoke.”

“If it was scary,” Isabelle observed, “there wouldn’t be candy.”

When they finished taking candy, Suzanne sent them to the treehouse. I waited on the roof while they climbed the ladder and gathered inside. All the kids went up except for Caleb.

“This isn’t scary either. It’s just the treehouse.”

“Where’s the candy?”

“Yeah, there isn’t even candy up here.”

Then I put the sheet over my head and jumped off the roof. I had adjusted the rope so I dropped down right at eye level with the kids. And I roared.

Everyone inside the treehouse I scared the right amount. But Caleb, still in Suzanne’s arms, I convulsed with fear. He jerked his head and arched his back, stiffening his whole body as if in physical pain, and then let out this whistling shriek that silenced everyone.

Throwing off the sheet, I dropped to the ground, slipped out of the rope, and ran over to him. Suzanne and I held him together. We could feel his heart thumping. Five or ten minutes passed before he could talk.

“Dad,” he said finally, “you the ghost.”

He spoke to me but looked at his mother.

I said yes. I was.

“You jumped down the treehouse.”

I said yes. I did.

Then he turned to look me in the eyes. “Why you scare me like that?”

This is what he asked each adult at every Halloween stop that night.

“Uncle Bob. You the wolf. You howled in the cabinet.”

Yes, he would say. Yes I did.

“Why you scare me like that?”

“Aunt Emily. You the witch. You hide in the sugarhouse. Why you scare me like that?”

He had the same question for Mandy, who hid in the barn. He had the same question for her husband Livy, who hid under the bridge. He continued asking each of us that question when we were all back in the light and warmth of the kitchen. And of course, no one had an answer.

During those years while the children were young, the other place I talked to my father was when I first rolled back the door on the sugarhouse. Stretching away from me, down the center of this small wooden building, ran the evaporator, like a narrow car parked across both spaces in a two-car garage. Everything we would need laid out in the woods lay stored inside here. On either side of the evaporator stood the four collecting tanks we used. Most of them were plastic, but one was an old galvanized metal tank that I remember buying with him at a farm auction. He never used it because it leaked. As an adult, I spent a few weekends sealing the seams and repainting it. We stuck the tank in the back of a truck and used it to collect buckets along the road. It still leaked. Each time we sugared, I complained about the sap sloshing around the bed of the truck and threatened to buy a new tank. I never did.

After rolling back the door, I would stand there for a moment, shoulder against the doorframe. I had opened a box that somehow held him inside. Crammed between the tanks were our sugar lines—stiff coils of black plastic tubing and softer coils of the smaller tubing that hung from each tree, all marked to match the map my mother drew. Stacked on top of the tanks were large plastic tubs full of hardware. Most of the hardware I had bought. Some of the hardware he had bought. I could scoop a handful, open my palm, and tell you which was which. Here I am in second or third grade, putting wood into the evaporator.

On the far side of all the tanks and tubing stood that stepladder behind me in the photograph. Stacked above the narrow windows in the back I could see a row of empty liquor bottles from years past. Why didn’t we throw those out? And a fire extinguisher, which we did sometimes need and three canisters of propane gas. Ropes dangled from the rafters for reasons even I couldn’t remember.

Setting up for sugaring, I started each day working in the woods alone because then I could imagine I was not alone—standing in the melting snow, listening to the dripping trees, cutting and fitting tubing there at the dawn of spring. For years I did this work wearing an old hunting jacket of his that had been ragged and ripped when he wore it, but it still had buttons. It had no buttons when I wore it. Ragged and ripped even further, with a mysterious stain on the back, the practical advantage to wearing his jacket was how many pockets it had. Fitting the lines on the hill requires different kinds of hardware and plastic connectors, as well as various lengths of tubing, rolls of rope and string, and a hammer, and a screwdriver, and a few other tools. I used all the pockets in that jacket until I finally stopped wearing it because I could no longer remember which pockets didn’t have holes, and I kept losing things I needed in the snow.

Most of what we stored inside the sugarhouse moved out in February and up the hills on either side of our valley. I was only alone before breakfast. The kids got their time to wake up in pajamas, playing with their cousins. We all ate. Then everyone climbed up one hill or the other and worked together setting up the lines. Once the lines were up and the holes drilled and the buckets hung along the road, then we waited on the weather. The weather has to be exactly right for sap to run. You want the puddles to be ice in the morning and mud by midday.

Monday to Friday during sugaring season my mother called me in Boston almost every day. She told me the weather. She told me how much sap had collected in each tank. She told me which farmers she met in the grocery store and how their trees were running. But whatever the state of my information, as we drove down her road on Friday night I stopped at the first set of buckets and jumped out in the headlights to look for myself.

And then on Saturday morning, my mother’s old blue Ford truck moved slowly up the road enveloped by a crowd of adults and children and dogs, groups breaking off to collect the buckets around each tree.

Here Isabelle, with Caroline and Rosalind, pours sap into that tank.

Then we started the fire in the evaporator and crowded into the sugarhouse. The building filled with steam.

The kids often sat in the rafters and climbed down flushed and soaking wet.

We had far more guests than we had jobs to do and the rest of the day was more like a party than anything that resembled work.

This was how our father did it too—drinking and talking and laughing while he fed the evaporator, often late into the night. But this isn’t what my children will remember. They will remember me, and not him.

When the year was over, after we carried in the last tank and coiled all the tubing, once the sugarhouse looked like a cluttered garage again, I rolled the door closed. It felt like hanging up an old rotary phone. A click and then a dial tone. I talk to him less now. Perhaps because I am no longer the father of young children, as he was when I knew him. Maybe it has just been too long. Or perhaps because I have been so sick myself.

But our conversation has been growing fainter ever since he died. I have watched him fade away across a lifetime, just as I will fade away. Our conversation will vanish into the conversations my children have with me. The sugaring, the projects, these family traditions that his exuberance began those many years ago will be their memories of me. Then I will be the ghost, and he will be gone. This is the reality of a legacy. It is never yours for long.

Driving home in the minivan the last Sunday of sugaring season and then slouching in my cloth-covered cubicle and pecking at my Monday email, I would think about all the work it takes to be a particular person at a particular place and time and how quickly that disappears. What you accomplish rarely lasts much longer than the next person to invest all the energy and effort in being alive. This has obsessed me ever since he died. And I have never been able to accept it. Ever since I was teenager, I have never been able to accept that what happened to him will also happen to me. Although the answer was perfectly clear, yet I kept demanding to know, Who will hear my voice and for how long?