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What Marcy Thought

Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson

    It was Marcy, my second wife, the one who had taken my only son, and moved to California seven years previously, who’d said my childhood home looked like a haunted house. That had been before our marriage, on the one occasion we had visited. It was a surprise to hear her say it; after all, it was the house I’d grown up in—normalized by a childhood, which, typical or not, was all I knew. I’d scoffed at her assertion and she’d grown sullen and silent—which should have been a warning. But now, all these years later, as I turned into the long drive and looked at the brick farmhouse standing back from the road, obscured behind the untidy Manitoba maples, good for nothing but shade, I thought, maybe she had a point. Not that I’d concede it, even if we’d been on speaking terms.
    A gust of wind dragged some leaves off the trees, and they scattered across the dirt lane leading to the house, swirled, and came back under the rental car’s wheels from the other direction. The ruts of the drive had grown deeper, the gravel coating thinner, and the scrappy grass bolder, since my last visit. That had been some years ago. I’d come back this time because Robert, the neighbor, had called to tell me my father had died. His modern bungalow was around a bend in the road, behind a copse, and hidden from view even at night when the lights were on. Neighbors in the county did that. They looked out for each other. They checked in and helped out. After snowfalls, Robert plowed my father’s lane with some archaic piece of metal, a giant iron of sorts, that he dragged behind his tractor. He mowed my father’s lawn in the summer with a different attachment and hayed his fields in exchange for pasture. And called about once a week to make sure that everything was alright. So when my father hadn’t picked up, he’d come over and knocked on the side door; and when it wasn’t answered, he pushed it open. It was never locked.
    My father had been old. And he hadn’t believed in retirement homes or the gun registry or medically assisted death, or bureaucracy and red tape. He believed in taking things into his own hands and the freedom to do what he wanted without filling out forms, asking for permission, or waiting on someone who lived in a city hundreds of miles away who didn’t know him from Adam to tell him what he could and couldn’t do.
    So, on this gray October morning, three hours from the chintzy chain motel, with a sterile lobby that smelled like an asthmatic’s nightmare, with its stale coffee and sugary cereal in a dispenser opposite the reception counter, I was home again. I steered away from the deepest rut in the drive, and drove up on the grass and center mound, passed the side door, which led directly into the kitchen, and pulled up, behind the house, beside a big new pick-up. It was mine now. I stepped out of the car. There were memories. Even the smell of the air. So much looked the same, all the wooden outbuildings: the tumbledown original homestead where the stray cats lived, the drive shed, empty since my father had sold the boat, the outhouse, the barn. And my childhood home, brick, solid, and imposing, lonely and desolate in the cold light of morning. Maybe Marcy was right: it could be haunted. I hefted a duffel out of the trunk and tried the back door.
    The police had locked it. And the side door. But I had a key for that one and stepped into the kitchen. The same linoleum on the floor. The same yellow melamine table, the kind hipsters would die for in the city. The same old electric stove with ringed elements and a door that never closed properly. I climbed the back stairs, narrow and straight, to my father’s bedroom; the top step opened right into the room, but the police tape stopped me. The body was gone. The undertaker had come and done his work. Someone had done some cleaning, but there was plenty more to do once the tape came down.
    Like my father, I wasn’t much of one for asking questions and waiting for permission; I slipped under the tape and crossed the bedroom, ducked a second yellow caution barrier at the far door, and entered a hallway that led to the front of the house. There was a bathroom on one side and my old room on the other. I dropped my bag on the bed. Same sheets. Same wardrobe. Same window looking out at the yellow stubble of the hayfield that dipped down to a low spot where the dogwoods had taken hold and wouldn’t let go. Same crack in the glass that cut a short arc across a lower corner of the window. I opened my bag and moved my clothes, underwear and t-shirts, socks, and jeans, from the travel bag to a scarred and painted wardrobe that stood against the wall. It might have been an antique that someone from the city would like, but you’d have to strip the paint, a sickly shade of teal, to find the wood underneath. Unpacking took all of two minutes and I was standing in my old room looking out the window and there was nothing to do but continue my day: lawyers and the funeral director and police constables and a thank you to Robert.



    Late that afternoon, after a busy day—people seen, forms signed, decisions made, police tape coming down, and the name of a woman who lived in the village and cleaned houses (and the assurance that she could butcher a deer, so wiping some splatter off the wall wouldn’t faze her)—I rewarded my productivity with a trip to the pot shop. It called itself a cannabis dispensary now that it was legal. What did it matter? It helped me relax and sleep; it’d been a long day of talking to people I didn’t much know and didn’t much like. Now it was over and I just wanted to get home, get mellow and get to sleep. I stopped and bought a bottle; my first in a few years, but it’s not every day your father dies. I’d have a proper wake and be sober in the morning. I’d quit once already; I’d do it again. Finishing the last of my drive-through fast-food, avoiding the ruts in the bumpy lane with the old farmhouse perched on a rise in the dusk, a line of daylight holding up a dark sky, I congratulated myself on making it home without breaking the seal. The center of the sky held a darkness never seen in the city. A quiet where you could hear your own breathing as if your soul was speaking to you. There might be some animal sounds in the distance, the yipping of coyotes, the furtive scratchings and scurryings of rodents, the hoot of an owl, the invisible whoosh of wings in flight, but in the spaces in between, there was none of that city hum and drone of ceaseless traffic, people’s voices, the sounds of life and machinery. In the car with the window down, I smoked and watched the night sky and listened to that silence and sat with it.
    I broke the seal and drank from the bottle and felt it hot in my throat. It was too much, too fast, and burned my throat and made me shudder. I screwed the top back on, killed the smoldering pre-rolled, and stepped from the car. A sudden burst of initiative took hold of me and before the last light of the day left, I carried my take-out trash to the burn barrel, poked around in the ashes, found some kindling stacked next to it, and started a fire. Inside, the police tape was still up, but I had permission—not that it was needed—to rip it down. I pulled the sheets off the bed, rolled them into a ball, and took them down the stairs and out to the barrel where I fed them into the fire, slowly at first, making sure there was enough air. The tendrils of flame reached up for the food. I shoved the bedding in. The fire gasped for breath, threatened to smother, and jumped back stronger than ever. I pushed the pillow on top. The cap came off the bottle again and I tasted its heat, and this time it went down smooth. The flames ripped through the sheets, and danced in the darkness, and little pieces of ash came off the fire and rose out of it and drifted up and away from where I stood hypnotized by the blaze.
    It was later, when I was asleep in the darkness of my old room that I heard the noise. A steady and persistent thumping like someone pounding on a door. At first I thought it was a dream, but the banging was clear and real and I was awake. My eyes blinked, but there was nothing to see in the gloom. A fat moon hung over the hayfield with the dogwoods, and its pale light streamed through the window. I stepped from the bed and its beams crossed my body and threw an exaggerated shadow against the wardrobe. Something woke inside of me and I understood the noise was coming from inside the cabinet. Was there a rat stuck there, slapping its long tail against the wall? Banging its head against the door? The thumping seemed too loud for that, but maybe the cabinet created the hollow reverberations of a drum. I had a terrible need to end the noise and made a determined step, braver than I felt, toward the dresser. My feet caught in the loops of the duffle, and in the darkness, my balance failed. I went over. The corner of the bed frame caught my temple as I hit the ground in the darkness.
    I don’t know if I lost consciousness, if I slept, if time passed or not. My next memory was of lying on the floor; the pain had subsided, but still throbbed and burned and ached. And still the banging continued, not mechanical or patterned, but arhythmic, determined, and scattershot. With my head on the pine boards and my feet still tangled in the handles of the bag, it became clear the knocking could only come from a human hand: the pauses in between, the varied intensity of each bang, the plaintive echo. Fear: the chill of the realization, the knowledge there was another being in the old farmhouse, the sour taste in my mouth, the crust of blood, stiff on my cheek, coming down from the hairline and crossing my face. I fought through the terror, freed my feet, rose, shakily to standing, saw my moon shadow again pass across the wardrobe, reached its double doors, and pulled them open. The thin light ebbed into the cabinet. My clothes lay folded and neat where I’d left them. No rodent or human showed themselves. The knocking had stopped.
    And then I saw it. There was a framed picture propped against the back of the cabinet. In the photograph, a figure stood at the side door of the farmhouse. At first, I jumped to the conclusion it was my father, returning to the only home he’d ever known. It would be just like him to cause problems in death the same way he had in life. Inside the photograph, the figure moved. He raised his fist and knocked on the door. Again I heard that plaintive pounding which had woken me. That movement, the shape and size of the figure, and the tentative nature of the approach, all showed me it wasn’t my father; a wash of relief tinged with confusion bathed me. He was younger, lithe, slender, and small: a child, not a man.
    And then I was there, in the kitchen, and I swung the door open, so I could see the boy better through the screen. Our eyes met across the barrier of mesh and glass and aluminum. Time stood as we looked at each other and both seemed to understand in that moment who the other was. The boy at the door was my younger self. And in that moment of realization, I saw he too had an instant of clarity and recognition, seeing me for who I was. He opened his mouth and unleashed a scream of terror, recoiling from the threshold—not so much from the house—as from me. He ripped his gaze from mine and in the same motion, turned and ran down the rutted lane. I pushed the screen and stepped into the cold night air. He stumbled on a furrow in the drive, fell to the ground, but pulled himself up and continued his escape.
    I stood, panting, sweat cooling on my body, exhausted even as he disappeared into the darkness where the lane met the road. And once he had faded from sight, the spell was broken. I stepped away from the picture, from the cabinet, from the horror of the unnatural, knowing the boy was gone, but still feeling the terror pounding in my chest. I flicked the light switch; there was a graveyard of dead flies lying in the concave bowl of the fixture. My duffel, black and twisted, lay flat on the floor, the skin of an unknown beast. There was the compulsion to return to the cabinet, and the picture, afraid of what I would find, but needing to know. My legs shook as I approached. And there I was facing it: except now it was a mirror and I saw the face that had terrified the boy. There was the wound from where my head had met the corner of the bed; there was blood, crusty, and dark along the side; there was the bulge and bump of swelling that pinched one eye and gave a sinister asymmetry to it all. But mostly it was the expression: weary, unsatisfied, despondent.
    A shaky hand reached into the wardrobe for my clothes. I stuffed them into the bag as quickly as I could. I was leaving the house of my father.

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