The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Haunted

Joyce Carol Oates

Location: Minton Farm, Elk Creek.

Time: Summer, 1987.

Eyewitness Description: “There weren’t such things as ghosts, they told us. They were just superstition. But we could injure ourselves tramping around where we weren’t wanted – and you never knew who you might meet up with in an old house or barn that’s supposed to be empty . . .”

Author: Joyce Carol Oates (1938—) is one of the most prolific contemporary US female writers and her vision of the dark side of American life has been compared to that of Honoré de Balzac, “whose feverish productivity she has more than matched,” according to John Clute. Born and raised in the rural countryside around Lockport, New York, she has combined the roles of teacher and author, writing over 75 books that have forged new directions in psychological realism and taken the supernatural tale into new and unexpected paths. Among Oates’ highly rated novels are Wonderland (1971), about a dreadful life haunted by doubles; A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), a Gothic tale of spiritualism; and Mysteries of Winterburn (1984), in which detective Xavier Kilgarvan investigates a series of supernatural cases. She has acknowledged her admiration for Henry James, William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence in, respectively, her short story, “Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” (1972); the southern novel, Bellefleur (1980) and the essays in Contraries (1981). “Haunted” draws a little from all three as well as her rural upbringing to relate a story of crime, punishment and the inexplicable that lures the narrator – and with her, the reader – into a situation of almost unbearable terror.

Haunted houses, forbidden houses. The old Medlock farm. The Erlich farm. The Minton farm on Elk Creek. No Trespassing the signs said, but we trespassed at will. No Trespassing No Hunting No Fishing Under Penalty of Law but we did what we pleased because who was there to stop us?

Our parents warned us against exploring these abandoned properties: the old houses and barns were dangerous, they said. We could get hurt, they said. I asked my mother if the houses were haunted and she said, Of course not, there aren’t such things as ghosts, you know that. She was irritated with me; she guessed how I pretended to believe things I didn’t believe, things I’d grown out of years before. It was a habit of childhood – pretending I was younger, more childish, than in fact I was. Opening my eyes wide and looking puzzled, worried. Girls are prone to such trickery; it’s a form of camouflage when every other thought you think is a forbidden thought and with your eyes open staring sightless you can sink into dreams that leave your skin clammy and your heart pounding – dreams that don’t seem to belong to you that must have come to you from somewhere else from someone you don’t know who knows you.

There weren’t such things as ghosts, they told us. That was just superstition. But we could injure ourselves tramping around where we weren’t wanted – the floorboards and the staircases in old houses were likely to be rotted, the roofs ready to collapse, we could cut ourselves on nails and broken glass, we could fall into uncovered wells – and you never knew who you might meet up with, in an old house or barn that’s supposed to be empty. “You mean a bum? – like somebody hitch-hiking along the road?” I asked. “It could be a bum, or it could be somebody you know,” Mother told me evasively. “A man, or a boy – somebody you know—” Her voice trailed off in embarrassment and I knew enough not to ask another question.

There were things you didn’t talk about, back then. I never talked about them with my own children; there weren’t the words to say them.

We listened to what our parents said, we nearly always agreed with what they said, but we went off on the sly and did what we wanted to do. When we were little girls: my neighbor Mary Lou Siskin and me. And when we were older, ten, eleven years old, tomboys, roughhouses our mothers called us. We liked to hike in the woods and along the creek for miles; we’d cut through farmers’ fields, spy on their houses – on people we knew, kids we knew from school – most of all we liked to explore abandoned houses, boarded-up houses if we could break in; we’d scare ourselves thinking the houses might be haunted though really we knew they weren’t haunted, there weren’t such things as ghosts. Except—

I am writing in a dime-store notebook with lined pages and a speckled cover, a notebook of the sort we used in grade school. Once upon a time as I used to tell my children when they were tucked safely into bed and drifting off to sleep. Once upon a time I’d begin, reading from a book because it was safest so: the several times I told them my own stories they were frightened by my voice and couldn’t sleep and afterward I couldn’t sleep either and my husband would ask what was wrong and I’d say, Nothing, hiding my face from him so he wouldn’t see my look of contempt.

I write in pencil, so that I can erase easily, and I find that I am constantly erasing, wearing holes in the paper. Mrs Harding, our fifth grade teacher, disciplined us for handing in messy notebooks: she was a heavy, toad-faced woman, her voice was deep and husky and gleeful when she said, “You, Melissa, what have you to say for yourself?” and I stood there mute, my knees trembling. My friend Mary Lou laughed behind her hand, wriggled in her seat she thought I was so funny. Tell the old witch to go to hell, she’d say, she’ll respect you then, but of course no one would every say such a thing to Mrs Harding. Not even Mary Lou. “What have you to say for yourself, Melissa? Handing in a notebook with a ripped page?” My grade for the homework assignment was lowered from A to B, Mrs Harding grunted with satisfaction as she made the mark, a big swooping B in red ink, creasing the page. “More is expected of you, Melissa, so you disappoint me more,” Mrs Harding always said. So many years ago and I remember those words more clearly than words I have heard the other day.

One morning there was a pretty substitute teacher in Mrs Harding’s classroom. “Mrs Harding is unwell, I’ll be taking her place today,” she said, and we saw the nervousness in her face; we guessed there was a secret she wouldn’t tell and we waited and a few days later the principal himself came to tell us that Mrs Harding would not be back, she had died of a stroke. He spoke carefully as if we were much younger children and might be upset and Mary Lou caught my eye and winked and I sat there at my desk feeling the strangest sensation, something flowing into the top of my head, honey-rich and warm making its way down my spine. Our Father Who art in Heaven I whispered in the prayer with the others my head bowed and my hands clasped tight together but my thoughts were somewhere else leaping wild and crazy somewhere else and I knew Mary Lou’s were too.

On the school bus going home she whispered in my ear, “That was because of us, wasn’t it! – what happened to that old bag Harding. But we won’t tell anybody.”

Once upon a time there were two sisters, and one was very pretty and one was very ugly. . . . Though Mary Lou Siskin wasn’t my sister. And I wasn’t ugly, really: just sallow-skinned, with a small pinched ferrety face. With dark almost lashless eyes that were set too close together and a nose that didn’t look right. A look of yearning, and disappointment.

But Mary Lou was pretty, even rough and clumsy as she sometimes behaved. That long silky blond hair everybody remembered her for afterward, years afterward. . . . How, when she had to be identified, it was the long silky white-blond hair that was unmistakable. . . .

Sleepless nights, but I love them. I write during the nighttime hours and sleep during the day, I am of an age when you don’t require more than a few hours sleep. My husband has been dead for nearly a year and my children are scattered and busily absorbed in their own selfish lives like all children and there is no one to interrupt me no one to pry into my business no one in the neighborhood who dares come knocking at my door to see if I am all right. Sometimes out of a mirror floats an unexpected face, a strange face, lined, ravaged, with deep-socketed eyes always damp, always blinking in shock or dismay or simple bewilderment – but I adroitly look away. I have no need to stare.

It’s true, all you have heard of the vanity of the old. Believing ourselves young, still, behind our aged faces – mere children, and so very innocent!

Once when I was a young bride and almost pretty my color up when I was happy and my eyes shining we drove out into the country for a Sunday’s excursion and he wanted to make love I knew, he was shy and fumbling as I but he wanted to make love and I ran into a cornfield in my stockings and high heels, I was playing at being a woman I never could be, Mary Lou Siskin maybe, Mary Lou whom my husband never knew, but I got out of breath and frightened, it was the wind in the cornstalks, that dry rustling sound, that dry terrible rustling sound like whispering like voices you can’t quite identify and he caught me and tried to hold me and I pushed him away sobbing and he said, What’s wrong? My God what’s wrong? as if he really loved me as if his life was focused on me and I knew I could never be equal to it, that love, that importance, I knew I was only Melissa the ugly one the one the boys wouldn’t give a second glance, and one day he’d understand and know how he’d been cheated. I pushed him away, I said, Leave me alone! don’t touch me! You disgust me! I said.

He backed off and I hid my face, sobbing.

But later on I got pregnant just the same. Only a few weeks later.

Always there were stories behind the abandoned houses and always the stories were sad. Because farmers went bankrupt and had to move away. Because somebody died and the farm couldn’t be kept up and nobody wanted to buy it – like the Medlock farm across the creek. Mr Medlock died aged seventy-nine and Mrs Medlock refused to sell the farm and lived there alone until someone from the country health agency came to get her. Isn’t it a shame, my parents said. The poor woman, they said. They told us never, never to poke around in the Medlocks’ barns or house – the buildings were ready to cave in, they’d been in terrible repair even when the Medlocks were living.

It was said that Mrs Medlock had gone off her head after she’d found her husband dead in one of the barns, lying flat on his back his eyes open and bulging, his mouth open, tongue protruding, she’d gone to look for him and found him like that and she’d never gotten over it they said, never got over the shock. They had to commit her to the state hospital for her own good (they said) and the house and the barns were boarded up, everywhere tall grass and thistles grew wild, dandelions in the spring, tiger lilies in the summer, and when we drove by I stared and stared narrowing my eyes so I wouldn’t see someone looking out one of the windows – a face there, pale and quick – or a dark figure scrambling up the roof to hide behind the chimney—Mary Lou and I wondered was the house haunted, was the barn haunted where the old man had died, we crept around to spy, we couldn’t stay away, coming closer and closer each time until something scared us and we ran away back through the woods clutching and pushing at each other until one day finally we went right up to the house to the back door and peeked in one of the windows. Mary Lou led the way, Mary Lou said not to be afraid, nobody lived there any more and nobody would catch us, it didn’t matter that the land was posted, the police didn’t arrest kids our ages.

We explored the barns, we dragged the wooden cover off the well and dropped stones inside. We called the cats but they wouldn’t come close enough to be petted. They were barn cats, skinny and diseased-looking, they’d said at the country bureau that Mrs Medlock had let a dozen cats live in the house with her so that the house was filthy from their messes. When the cats wouldn’t come we got mad and threw stones at them and they ran away hissing – nasty dirty things, Mary Lou said. Once we crawled up on the tar-paper roof over the Medlocks’ kitchen, just for fun, Mary Lou wanted to climb up the big roof too to the very top but I got frightened and said, No, no please don’t, no Mary Lou please, and I sounded so strange Mary Lou looked at me and didn’t tease or mock as she usually did. The roof was so steep, I’d known she would hurt herself. I could see her losing her footing and slipping, falling, I could see her astonished face and her flying hair as she fell, knowing nothing could save her. You’re no fun, Mary Lou said, giving me a hard little pinch. But she didn’t go climbing up the big roof.

Later we ran through the barns screaming at the top of our lungs just for fun for the hell of it as Mary Lou said, we tossed things in a heap, broken-off parts of farm implements, leather things from the horses’ gear, handfuls of straw. The farm animals had been gone for years but their smell was still strong. Dried horse and cow droppings that looked like mud. Mary Lou said, “You know what – I’d like to burn this place down.” And she looked at me and I said, “Okay – go on and do it, burn it down.” And May Lou said, “You think I wouldn’t? Just give me a match.” And I said, “You know I don’t have any match.” And a look passed between us. And I felt something flooding at the top of my head, my throat tickled as if I didn’t know would I laugh or cry and I said, “You’re crazy—” and Mary Lou said with a sneering little laugh, “You’re crazy, dumbbell. I was just testing you.”

By the time Mary Lou was twelve years old Mother had got to hate her, was always trying to turn me against her so I’d make friends with other girls. Mary Lou had a fresh mouth, she said. Mary Lou didn’t respect her elders – not even her own parents. Mother guessed that Mary Lou laughed at her behind her back, said things about all of us. She was mean and snippy and a smart-ass, rough sometimes as her brothers. Why didn’t I make other friends? Why did I always go running when she stood out in the yard and called me? The Siskins weren’t a whole lot better than white trash, the way Mr Siskin worked that land of his.

In town, in school, Mary Lou sometimes ignored me when other girls were around, girls who lived in town, whose fathers weren’t farmers like ours. But when it was time to ride home on the bus she’d sit with me as if nothing was wrong and I’d help her with her homework if she needed help, I hated her sometimes but then I’d forgive her as soon as she smiled at me, she’d say, “Hey ’Lissa are you mad at me?” and I’d make a face and say no as if it was an insult, being asked. Mary Lou was my sister I sometimes pretended, I told myself a story about us being sisters and looking alike, and Mary Lou said sometimes she’d like to leave her family her goddamned family and come live with me. Then the next day or the next hour she’d get moody and be nasty to me and get me almost crying. All the Siskins had mean streaks, bad tempers, she’d tell people. As if she was proud.

Her hair was a light blond, almost white in the sunshine, and when I first knew her she had to wear it braided tight around her head – her grandmother braided it for her, and she hated it. Like Gretel or Snow White in one of those damn dumb picture books for children, Mary Lou said. When she was older she wore it down and let it grow long so that it fell almost to her hips. It was very beautiful – silky and shimmering. I dreamt of Mary Lou’s hair sometimes but the dreams were confused and I couldn’t remember when I woke up whether I was the one with the long blond silky hair, or someone else. It took me a while to get my thoughts clear lying there in bed and then I’d remember Mary Lou, who was my best friend.

She was ten months older than I was, and an inch or so taller, a bit heavier, not fat but fleshy, solid and fleshy, with hard little muscles in her upper arms like a boy. Her eyes were blue like washed glass, her eyebrows and lashes were almost white, she had a snubbed nose and Slavic cheekbones and a mouth that could be sweet or twisty and smirky depending upon her mood. But she didn’t like her face because it was round – a moon face she called it, staring at herself in the mirror though she knew damned well she was pretty – didn’t older boys whistle at her, didn’t the bus driver flirt with her? – calling her “Blondie” while he never called me anything at all.

Mother didn’t like Mary Lou visiting with me when no one else was home in our house: she didn’t trust her, she said. Thought she might steal something, or poke her nose into parts of the house where she wasn’t welcome. That girl is a bad influence on you, she said. But it was all the same old crap I heard again and again so I didn’t even listen. I’d have told her she was crazy except that would only make things worse.

Mary Lou said, “Don’t you just hate them? – your mother, and mine? Sometimes I wish—”

I put my hands over my ears and didn’t hear.

The Siskins lived two miles away from us, farther back the road where the road got narrower. Those days, it was unpaved, and never got plowed in the winter. I remember their barn with the yellow silo, I remember the muddy pond where the dairy cows came to drink, the muck they churned up in the spring. I remember Mary Lou saying she wished all the cows would die – they were always sick with something – so her father would give up and sell the farm and they could live in town in a nice house. I was hurt, her saying those things as if she’d forgotten about me and would leave me behind. Damn you to hell, I whispered under my breath.

I remember smoke rising from the Siskins’ kitchen chimney, from their wood-burning stove, straight up into the winter sky like a breath you draw inside you deeper and deeper until you begin to feel faint.

Later on, that house was empty too. But boarded up only for a few months – the bank sold it at auction. (It turned out the bank owned most of the Siskin farm, even the dairy cows. So Mary Lou had been wrong about that all along and never knew.)

As I write I can hear the sound of glass breaking, I can feel glass underfoot. Once upon a time there were two little princesses, two sisters, who did forbidden things. That brittle terrible sensation under my shoes – slippery like water – “Anybody home? Hey – anybody home?” and there’s an old calendar tacked to a kitchen wall, a faded picture of Jesus Christ in a long white gown stained with scarlet, thorns fitted to His bowed head. Mary Lou is going to scare me in another minute making me think that someone is in the house and the two of us will scream with laughter and run outside where it’s safe. Wild frightened laughter and I never knew afterward what was funny or why we did these things. Smashing what remained of windows, wrenching at stairway railings to break them loose, running with our heads ducked so we wouldn’t get cobwebs in our faces.

One of us found a dead bird, a starling, in what had been the parlor of the house. Turned it over with a foot – there’s the open eye looking right up calm and matter-of-fact. Melissa, that eye tells me, silent and terrible, I see you.

That was the old Minton place, the stone house with the caved-in roof and the broken steps, like something in a picture book from long ago. From the road the house looked as if it might be big, but when we explored it we were disappointed to see that it wasn’t much bigger than my own house, just four narrow rooms downstairs, another four upstairs, an attic with a steep ceiling, the roof partly caved in. The barns had collapsed in upon themselves; only their stone foundations remained solid. The land had been sold off over the years to other farmers, nobody had lived in the house for a long time. The old Minton house, people called it. On Elk Creek where Mary Lou’s body was eventually found.

In seventh grade Mary Lou had a boyfriend she wasn’t supposed to have and no one knew about it but me – an older boy who’d dropped out of school and worked as a farmhand. I thought he was a little slow – not in his speech which was fast enough, normal enough, but in his way of thinking. He was sixteen or seventeen years old. His name was Hans; he had crisp blond hair like the bristles of a brush, a coarse blemished face, derisive eyes. Mary Lou was crazy for him she said, aping the older girls in town who said they were “crazy for” certain boys or young men. Hans and Mary Lou kissed when they didn’t think I was watching, in an old ruin of a cemetery behind the Minton house, on the creek bank, in the tall marsh grass by the end of the Siskins’ driveway. Hans had a car borrowed from one of his brothers, a battered old Ford, the front bumper held up by wire, the running board scraping the ground. We’d be out walking on the road and Hans would come along tapping the horn and stop and Mary Lou would climb in but I’d hang back knowing they didn’t want me and the hell with them: I preferred to be alone.

“You’re just jealous of Hans and me,” Mary Lou said, unforgivably, and I hadn’t any reply. “Hans is sweet. Hans is nice. He isn’t like people say,” Mary Lou said in a quick bright false voice she’d picked up from one of the older, popular girls in town. “He’s . . .” And she stared at me blinking and smiling not knowing what to say as if in fact she didn’t know Hans at all. “He isn’t simple,” she said angrily, “he just doesn’t like to talk a whole lot.”

When I try to remember Hans Meunzer after so many decades I can see only a muscular boy with short-trimmed blond hair and protuberant ears, blemished skin, the shadow of a moustache on his upper lip – he’s looking at me, eyes narrowed, crinkled, as if he understands how I fear him, how I wish him dead and gone, and he’d hate me too if he took me that seriously. But he doesn’t take me that seriously, his gaze just slides right through me as if nobody’s standing where I stand.

There were stories about all the abandoned houses but the worst story was about the Minton house over on the Elk Creek Road about three miles from where we lived. For no reason anybody ever discovered Mr Minton had beaten his wife to death and afterward killed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun. He hadn’t even been drinking, people said. And his farm hadn’t been doing at all badly, considering how others were doing.

Looking at the ruin from the outside, overgrown with trumpet vine and wild rose, it seemed hard to believe that anything like that had happened. Things in the world even those things built by man are so quiet left to themselves . . .

The house had been deserted for years, as long as I could remember. Most of the land had been sold off but the heirs didn’t want to deal with the house. They didn’t want to sell it and they didn’t want to raze it and they certainly didn’t want to live in it so it stood empty. The property was posted with No Trespassing signs layered one atop another but nobody took them seriously. Vandals had broken into the house and caused damage, the McFarlane boys had tried to burn down the old hay barn one Halloween night. The summer Mary Lou started seeing Hans she and I climbed in the house through a rear window – the boards guarding it had long since been yanked away – and walked through the rooms slow as sleepwalkers our arms around each other’s waists our eyes staring waiting to see Mr Minton’s ghost as we turned each corner. The inside smelled of mouse droppings, mildew, rot, old sorrow. Strips of wallpaper torn from the walls, plasterboard exposed, old furniture overturned and smashed, old yellowed sheets of newspaper underfoot, and broken glass, everywhere broken glass. Through the ravaged windows sunlight spilled in tremulous quivering bands. The air was afloat, alive: dancing dust atoms. “I’m afraid,” Mary Lou whispered. She squeezed my waist and I felt my mouth go dry for hadn’t I been hearing something upstairs, a low persistent murmuring like quarreling like one person trying to convince another going on and on and on but when I stood very still to listen the sound vanished and there were only the comforting summer sounds of birds, crickets, cicadas; birds, crickets, cicadas.

I knew how Mr Minton had died: he’d placed the barrel of the shotgun beneath his chin and pulled the trigger with his big toe. They found him in the bedroom upstairs, most of his head blown off. They found his wife’s body in the cistern in the cellar where he’d tried to hide her. “Do you think we should go upstairs?” Mary Lou asked, worried. Her fingers felt cold; but I could see tiny sweat beads on her forehead. Her mother had braided her hair in one thick clumsy braid, the way she wore it most of the summer, but the bands of hair were loosening. “No,” I said, frightened. “I don’t know.” We hesitated at the bottom of the stairs – just stood there for a long time. “Maybe not,” Mary Lou said. “Damn stairs’d fall in on us.”

In the parlor there were bloodstains on the floor and on the wall – I could see them. Mary Lou said in derision, “They’re just waterstains, dummy.”

I could hear the voices overhead, or was it a single droning persistent voice. I waited for Mary Lou to hear it but she never did.

Now we were safe, now we were retreating, Mary Lou said as if repentant, “Yeah – this house is special.”

We looked through the debris in the kitchen hoping to find something of value but there wasn’t anything – just smashed china-ware, old battered pots and pans, more old yellowed newspaper. But through the window we saw a garter snake sunning itself on a rusted water tank, stretched out to a length of two feet. It was a lovely coppery color, the scales gleaming like perspiration on a man’s arm; it seemed to be asleep. Neither one of us screamed, or wanted to throw something – we just stood there watching it for the longest time.

Mary Lou didn’t have a boyfriend any longer; Hans had stopped coming around. We saw him driving the old Ford now and then but he didn’t seem to see us. Mr Siskin had found out about him and Mary Lou and he’d been upset – acting like a damn crazy man Mary Lou said, asking her every kind of nasty question then interrupting her and not believing her anyway, then he’d put her to terrible shame by going over to see Hans and carrying on with him. “I hate them all,” Mary Lou said, her face darkening with blood. “I wish—”

We rode our bicycles over to the Minton farm, or tramped through the fields to get there. It was the place we liked best. Sometimes we brought things to eat, cookies, bananas, candy bars; sitting on the broken stone steps out front, as if we lived in the house really, we were sisters who lived here having a picnic lunch out front. There were bees, flies, mosquitoes, but we brushed them away. We had to sit in the shade because the sun was so fierce and direct, a whitish heat pouring down from overhead.

“Would you ever like to run away from home?” Mary Lou said. “I don’t know,” I said uneasily. Mary Lou wiped at her mouth and gave me a mean narrow look. “ ‘I don’t know,’” she said in a falsetto voice, mimicking me. At an upstairs window someone was watching us – was it a man or was it a woman – someone stood there listening hard and I couldn’t move feeling so slow and dreamy in the heat like a fly caught on a sticky petal that’s going to fold in on itself and swallow him up. Mary Lou crumpled up some wax paper and threw it into the weeds. She was dreamy too, slow and yawning. She said, “Shit – they’d just find me. Then everything would be worse.”

I was covered in a thin film of sweat but I’d begun to shiver. Goose bumps were raised on my arms. I could see us sitting on the stone steps the way we’d look from the second floor of the house, Mary Lou sprawled with her legs apart, her braided hair slung over her shoulder, me sitting with my arms hugging my knees my backbone tight and straight knowing I was being watched. Mary Lou said, lowering her voice, “Did you ever touch yourself in a certain place, Melissa?” “No,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what she meant. “Hans wanted to do that,” Mary Lou said. She sounded disgusted. Then she started to giggle. “I wouldn’t let him, then he wanted to do something else – started unbuttoning his pants – wanted me to touch him. And . . .”

I wanted to hush her, to clap my hand over her mouth. But she just went on and I never said a word until we both started giggling together and couldn’t stop. Afterward I didn’t remember most of it or why I’d been so excited my face burning and my eyes seared as if I’d been staring into the sun.

On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.

A few days later I came back by myself. Through the ravaged cornfield: the stalks dried and broken, the tassels burnt, that rustling whispering sound of the wind I can hear now if I listen closely. My head was aching with excitement. I was telling myself a story that we’d made plans to run away and live in the Minton house. I was carrying a willow switch I’d found on the ground, fallen from a tree but still green and springy, slapping at things with it as if it were a whip. Talking to myself. Laughing aloud. Wondering was I being watched.

I climbed in the house through the back window and brushed my hands on my jeans. My hair was sticking to the back of my neck.

At the foot of the stairs I called up, “Who’s here?” in a voice meant to show it was all play; I knew I was alone.

My heart was beating hard and quick, like a bird caught in the hand. It was lonely without Mary Lou so I walked heavy to let them know I was there and wasn’t afraid. I started singing, I started whistling. Talking to myself and slapping at things with the willow switch. Laughing aloud, a little angry. Why was I angry, well I didn’t know, someone was whispering telling me to come upstairs, to walk on the inside of the stairs so the steps wouldn’t collapse.

The house was beautiful inside if you had the right eyes to see it. If you didn’t mind the smell. Glass underfoot, broken plaster, stained wallpaper hanging in shreds. Tall narrow windows looking out onto wild weedy patches of green. I heard something in one of the rooms but when I looked I saw nothing much more than an easy chair lying on its side. Vandals had ripped stuffing out of it and tried to set it afire. The material was filthy but I could see that it had been pretty once – a floral design – tiny yellow flowers and green ivy. A woman used to sit in the chair, a big woman with sly staring eyes. Knitting in her lap but she wasn’t knitting just staring out the window watching to see who might be coming to visit.

Upstairs the rooms were airless and so hot I felt my skin prickle like shivering. I wasn’t afraid! – I slapped at the walls with my springy willow switch. In one of the rooms high in a corner wasps buzzed around a fat wasp’s nest. In another room I looked out the window leaning out the window to breathe thinking this was my window, I’d come to live here. She was telling me I had better lie down and rest because I was in danger of heatstroke and I pretended not to know what heatstroke was but she knew I knew because hadn’t a cousin of mine collapsed haying just last summer, they said his face had gone blotched and red and he’d begun breathing faster and faster not getting enough oxygen until he collapsed. I was looking out at the overgrown apple orchard, I could smell the rot, a sweet winey smell, the sky was hazy like something you can’t get clear in your vision, pressing in close and warm. A half mile away Elk Creek glittered through a screen of willow trees moving slow glittering with scales like winking.

Come away from that window, someone told me sternly.

But I took my time obeying.

In the biggest of the rooms was an old mattress pulled off rusty bedsprings and dumped on the floor. They’d torn some of the stuffing out of this too, there were scorch marks on it from cigarettes. The fabric was stained with something like rust and I didn’t want to look at it but I had to. Once at Mary Lou’s when I’d gone home with her after school there was a mattress lying out in the yard in the sun and Mary Lou told me in disgust that it was her youngest brother’s mattress – he’d wet his bed again and the mattress had to be aired out. As if the stink would ever go away, Mary Lou said.

Something moved inside the mattress, a black glittering thing, it was a cockroach but I wasn’t allowed to jump back. Suppose you have to lie down on that mattress and sleep, I was told. Suppose you can’t go home until you do. My eyelids were heavy, my head was pounding with blood. A mosquito buzzed around me but I was too tired to brush it away. Lie down on that mattress, Melissa, she told me. You know you must be punished.

I knelt down, not on the mattress, but on the floor beside it. The smells in the room were close and rank but I didn’t mind, my head was nodding with sleep. Rivulets of sweat ran down my face and sides, under my arms, but I didn’t mind. I saw my hand move out slowly like a stranger’s hand to touch the mattress and a shiny black cockroach scuttled away in fright, and a second cockroach, and a third – but I couldn’t jump up and scream.

Lie down on that mattress and take your punishment.

I looked over my shoulder and there was a woman standing in the doorway – a woman I’d never seen before.

She was staring at me. Her eyes were shiny and dark. She licked her lips and said in a jeering voice, “What are you doing here in this house, miss?”

I was terrified. I tried to answer but I couldn’t speak.

“Have you come to see me?” the woman asked.

She was no age I could guess. Older than my mother but not old-seeming. She wore men’s clothes and she was tall as any man, with wide shoulders, and long legs, and big sagging breasts like cows’ udders loose inside her shirt not harnessed in a brassiere like other women’s. Her thick wiry gray hair was cut short as a man’s and stuck up in tufts that looked greasy. Her eyes were small, and black, and set back deep in their sockets; the flesh around them looked bruised. I had never seen anyone like her before – her thighs were enormous, big as my body. There was a ring of loose soft flesh at the waistband of her trousers but she wasn’t fat.

“I asked you a question, miss. Why are you here?”

I was so frightened I could feel my bladder contract. I stared at her, cowering by the mattress, and couldn’t speak.

It seemed to please her that I was so frightened. She approached me, stooping a little to get through the doorway. She said, in a mock-kindly voice, “You’ve come to visit with me – is that it?”

“No,” I said.

“No!” she said, laughing. “Why, of course you have.”

“No. I don’t know you.”

She leaned over me, touched my forehead with her fingers. I shut my eyes waiting to be hurt but her touch was cool. She brushed my hair off my forehead where it was sticky with sweat. “I’ve seen you here before, you and that other one,” she said. “What is her name? The blond one. The two of you, trespassing.”

I couldn’t move, my legs were paralyzed. Quick and darting and buzzing my thoughts bounded in every which direction but didn’t take hold. “Melissa is your name, isn’t it,” the woman said. “And what is your sister’s name?”

“She isn’t my sister,” I whispered.

“What is her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!”

“ – don’t know,” I said, cowering.

The woman drew back half sighing half grunting. She looked at me pityingly. “You’ll have to be punished, then.”

I could smell ashes about her, something cold. I started to whimper started to say I hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t hurt anything in the house, I had only been exploring – I wouldn’t come back again . . .

She was smiling at me, uncovering her teeth. She could read my thoughts before I could think them.

The skin of her face was in layers like an onion, like she’d been sunburnt, or had a skin disease. There were patches that had begun to peel. Her look was wet and gloating. Don’t hurt me, I wanted to say. Please don’t hurt me.

I’d begun to cry. My nose was running like a baby’s. I thought I would crawl past the woman I would get to my feet and run past her and escape but the woman stood in my way blocking my way leaning over me breathing damp and warm her breath like a cow’s breath in my face. Don’t hurt me, I said, and she said, “You know you have to be punished – you and your pretty blond sister.”

“She isn’t my sister,” I said.

“And what is her name?”

The woman was bending over me, quivering with laughter.

“Speak up, miss. What is it?”

“I don’t know—” I started to say. But my voice said, “Mary Lou.”

The woman’s big breasts spilled down into her belly, I could feel her shaking with laughter. But she spoke sternly saying that Mary Lou and I had been very bad girls and we knew it her house was forbidden territory and we knew it hadn’t we known all along that others had come to grief beneath its roof?

“No,” I started to say. But my voice said, “Yes.”

The woman laughed, crouching above me. “Now, miss, ‘Melissa’ as they call you – your parents don’t know where you are at this very moment, do they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do they?”

“No.”

“They don’t know anything about you, do they? – what you do, and what you think? You and ‘Mary Lou.’”

“No.”

She regarded me for a long moment, smiling. Her smile was wide and friendly.

“You’re a spunky little girl, aren’t you, with a mind of your own, aren’t you, you and your pretty little sister. I bet your bottoms have been warmed many a time,” the woman said, showing her big tobacco-stained teeth in a grin, “. . . your tender little asses.”

I began to giggle. My bladder tightened.

“Hand that here, miss,” the woman said. She took the willow switch from my fingers – I had forgotten I was holding it. “I will now administer punishment: take down your jeans. Take down your panties. Lie down on that mattress. Hurry.” She spoke briskly now, she was all business. “Hurry, Melissa! And your panties! Or do you want me to pull them down for you?”

She was slapping the switch impatiently against the palm of her left hand, making a wet scolding noise with her lips. Scolding and teasing. Her skin shone in patches, stretched tight over the big hard bones of her face. Her eyes were small, crinkling smaller, black and damp. She was so big she had to position herself carefully over me to give herself proper balance and leverage so that she wouldn’t fall. I could hear her hoarse eager breathing as it came to me from all sides like the wind.

I had done as she told me. It wasn’t me doing these things but they were done. Don’t hurt me, I whispered, lying on my stomach on the mattress, my arms stretched above me and my fingernails digging into the floor. The coarse wood with splinters pricking my skin. Don’t hurt me O please but the woman paid no heed her warm wet breath louder now and the floorboards creaking beneath her weight. “Now, miss, now ‘Melissa’ as they call you – this will be our secret won’t it . . .”

When it was over she wiped at her mouth and said she would let me go today if I promised never to tell anybody if I sent my pretty little sister to her tomorrow.

She isn’t my sister, I said, sobbing. When I could get my breath.

I had lost control of my bladder after all, I’d begun to pee even before the first swipe of the willow switch hit me on the buttocks, peeing in helpless spasms, and sobbing, and afterward the woman scolded me saying wasn’t it a poor little baby wetting itself like that. But she sounded repentant too, stood well aside to let me pass, Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

And I ran out of the room hearing her laughter behind me and down the stairs running running as if I hadn’t any weight my legs just blurry beneath me as if the air was water and I was swimming I ran out of the house and through the cornfield running in the cornfield sobbing as the corn stalks slapped at my face Off you go! Home you go! And don’t forget!

I told Mary Lou about the Minton house and something that had happened to me there that was a secret and she didn’t believe me at first saying with a jeer, “Was it a ghost? Was it Hans?” I said I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t tell what? she said. Couldn’t tell, I said. Why not? she said.

“Because I promised.”

“Promised who?” she said. She looked at me with her wide blue eyes like she was trying to hypnotize me. “You’re a goddamned liar.”

Later she started in again asking me what had happened what was the secret was it something to do with Hans ? did he still like her? was he mad at her? and I said it didn’t have anything to do with Hans not a thing to do with him. Twisting my mouth to show what I thought of him.

“Then who – ?” Mary Lou asked.

“I told you it was a secret.”

“Oh shit – what kind of a secret?”

“A secret.”

“A secret really?”

I turned away from Mary Lou, trembling. My mouth kept twisting in a strange hurting smile. “Yes. A secret really,” I said.

The last time I saw Mary Lou she wouldn’t sit with me on the bus, walked past me holding her head high giving me a mean snippy look out of the corner of her eye. Then when she left for her stop she made sure she bumped me going by my seat, she leaned over to say, “I’ll find out for myself, I hate you anyway,” speaking loud enough for everybody on the bus to hear, “– I always have.”

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest. Now that I have completed my story, filled up half my notebook with my handwriting that disappoints me, it is so shaky and childish – now the story is over I don’t understand what it means. I know what happened in my life but I don’t know what has happened in these pages.

Mary Lou was found murdered ten days after she said those words to me. Her body had been tossed into Elk Creek a quarter mile from the road and from the old Minton place. Where, it said in the paper, nobody had lived for fifteen years.

It said that Mary Lou had been thirteen years old at the time of her death. She’d been missing for seven days, had been the object of a countrywide search.

It said that nobody had lived in the Minton house for years but that derelicts sometimes sheltered there. It said that the body was unclothed and mutilated. There were no details.

This happened a long time ago.

The murderer (or murderers as the newspaper always said) was never found.

Hans Meunzer was arrested of course and kept in the county jail for three days while police questioned him but in the end they had to let him go, insufficient evidence to build a case it was explained in the newspaper though everybody knew he was the one wasn’t he the one? – everybody knew. For years afterward they’d be saying that. Long after Hans was gone and the Siskins were gone, moved away nobody knew where.

Hans swore he hadn’t done it, hadn’t seen Mary Lou for weeks. There were people who testified in his behalf said he couldn’t have done it for one thing he didn’t have his brother’s car any longer and he’d been working all that time. Working hard out in the fields – couldn’t have slipped away long enough to do what police were saying he’d done. And Hans said over and over he was innocent. Sure he was innocent. Son of a bitch ought to be hanged my father said, everybody knew Hans was the one unless it was a derelict or a fisherman – fishermen often drove out to Elk Creek to fish for black bass, built fires on the creek bank and left messes behind – sometimes prowled around the Minton house too looking for things to steal. The police had records of automobile license plates belonging to some of these men, they questioned them but nothing came of it. Then there was that crazy man, that old hermit living in a tar-paper shanty near the Shaheen dump that everybody’d said ought to have been committed to the state hospital years ago. But everybody knew really it was Hans and Hans got out as quick as he could, just disappeared and not even his family knew where unless they were lying which probably they were though they claimed not.

Mother rocked me in her arms crying, the two of us crying, she told me that Mary Lou was happy now, Mary Lou was in Heaven now, Jesus Christ had taken her to live with Him and I knew that didn’t I? I wanted to laugh but I didn’t laugh. Mary Lou shouldn’t have gone with boys, not a nasty boy like Hans, Mother said, she shouldn’t have been sneaking around the way she did – I knew that didn’t I? Mother’s words filled my head flooding my head so there was no danger of laughing.

Jesus loves you too you know that don’t you Melissa? Mother asked hugging me. I told her yes. I didn’t laugh because I was crying.

They wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, said it would scare me too much. Even though the casket was closed.

It’s said that when you’re older you remember things that happened a long time ago better than you remember things that have just happened and I have found that to be so.

For instance I can’t remember when I bought this notebook at Woolworth’s whether it was last week or last month or just a few days ago. I can’t remember why I started writing in it, what purpose I told myself. But I remember Mary Lou stooping to say those words in my ear and I remember when Mary Lou’s mother came over to ask us at suppertime a few days later if I had seen Mary Lou that day – I remember the very food on my plate, the mashed potatoes in a dry little mound. I remember hearing Mary Lou call my name standing out in the driveway cupping her hands to her mouth the way Mother hated her to do, it was white trash behavior.

“’Lissa!” Mary Lou would call, and I’d call back, “Okay, I’m coming!” Once upon a time.