Everything You See
by Dan Belanger
part 1
Edith Spencer, who took no notice of it when she died back in April, was tending her garden early one morning towards the end of May. A warm breeze moving through the privet seemed to tint the air green with pigment brushed from trembling leaves. When it caressed Edith’s cheek, she remembered her mother’s soft touch, and stopped for a moment to savor the recollection. The sweet remembrance of her mother was interrupted by a rustling sound coming from the forest that bordered Edith’s little garden. Dropping her trowel, she walked over to investigate.
When she got within a few feet of the disturbance, Edith stopped dead in her tracks. Her sister, Primrose, who had died of polio during the epidemic of 1952, was standing at the edge of the forest. She was wearing a pretty yellow dress with little purple flowers on it, blue ribbons, the color of her eyes, in her honey-brown hair. Edith let out a short, shrill shriek like the trill of a tiny bird, startling Primrose, who shrank into shifting patterns of shadow, leaf and light.
I must still be dreaming, Edith told herself, as she picked up her trowel and went back to work.
Primrose was the first to appear, but there would be others, for there were, as Edith would soon come to realize, more than a few out there. She caught a fleeting glimpse of one of them, every now and again, floating through the forest. They slipped into Edith’s dreams in the form of trees secretly moving through the night when there was no one there to see.
Afternoons, these spirits, who, by light of day, were still sheltering in shadowy human form, began showing up with some regularity, coming out of the woods to stand on its fringe, and watch Edith while she did her gardening.
She recognized some of them as the souls of people she’d known in her life. Others were strangers, some of the many, perhaps, who died in the pandemic. They came from every walk. A few had the manicured appearance of the rich, while many were dressed in old, worn clothing. There were men and women of all ages, races and ethnicities.
Some of the white, black and brown people were moving together, some were even hand-in-hand. Having grown up in the early to mid-twentieth century, a time when blacks were segregated from whites, she’d never gotten used to seeing them together. This, along with stories that her father told her when she was a young girl, of black men attacking white women, made her shudder.
“Terrible, these attacks,” he’d say, “and happening all over. So, if you ever see a black man you don’t know on our property, you come and get me, here? If I’m not around, you get the shotgun, and don’t wait to hear an explanation before you shoot.”
While Edith had never seen a black man attack a white woman, her father’s stories were so vivid that she remembered them as if they were events that she’d actually witnessed. They had instilled in her a dread of black men that remained with her all her life.
As unsettling as she found the mingling of the races amongst the spirits to be, she was still quite curious about them. She imagined that the ghosts of her unborn children might be there amongst the hordes of strangers drifting through the forest. There was the one that was stillborn, and the other she’d only dreamt of having. Sometimes she thought that she could hear them filling the air with a murmuring whisper like the sound of a babbling brook. Had things gone differently, they’d have been hers. She guessed that the two dead father might-have-beens were also out wandering between the trees beyond her yard.
If they’re out there, Edith thought with disgust, they’ll probably be around to pay me a visit.
She was right about this. The first of the two men to arrive was Timothy James. After loading trucks on the night shift at McQuinn’s Food Warehouse, Timothy used to frequent Gibson’s Diner where Edith waitressed when she was young.
As he moved across the yard, now, his shadowy form shifted from ragged corpse bones to boyish young man dressed in plaid shirt and blue jeans. When he stopped in the middle of her garden, and stared at Edith, she saw him as she knew him those many years ago.
“What do you want?” Edith asked.
“Come with me,” Timothy said.
His brown eyes moved slowly up spry Edith’s sturdy figure, clad in green house dress, to her smooth face, which, save for almost imperceptibly fine lines around her blue eyes and red lips, had remained virtually untouched by the years.
“No,” Edith replied, “our time has passed.”
“All time passes,” Timothy replied. “We remain.”
Edith pushed a white strand of hair back from her brow. “You’re dead,” she told him. “Dead to rights, and dead to me the moment you left me.”
“I never left you!” Timothy cried indignantly.
“Don’t you remember that night in Crystal Park when you told me it was over between us?” Edith reminded hum. “It was after I lost the baby that would have been our son. You told me you met someone else.”
Edith recalled, but did not mention that the someone else he was referring to was her best friend, Mary Gibson, the daughter of the diner’s owner, who worked waiting tables alongside her.
“That was cruel of me,” Timothy acknowledged. “I apologize.”
“Too late,” said Edith. “It’s too late.”
“If you say so,” Timothy sighed with a sad smile. He turned, and walked slowly back into the forest.
Edith did not recognize a single soul for several weeks after Timothy left. A steady stream of nameless strangers crept out of the forest to watch her for a few minutes before disappearing back under green cover. Then, one day, Frank Gibson, the cook who also owned Gibson’s Diner, appeared, looking at her from behind a blueberry bush. It was, Edith thought, the kind of look a cat has just before it pounces on a mouse. Frank was the other potential father. But Frank, who was separated from his wife after the affair with Edith had ensued, went back to her in the end.
“Scat,” Edith said with a scowl, and Frank scurried off into the underbrush.
The next day was bright and sunny. It was nice and quiet when Edith stepped out into the yard. There was nothing but the sound of the birds singing. Their many songs somehow laced into one in the treetops. Butterflies flitted about the rose bushes. The occasional grasshopper pranced in tall grass that grew where the garden ended, and the forest began.
Edith hoped that the tranquility of the day would not be disturbed by the intrusive spirits. Her hopes were dashed about fifteen minutes after she stepped out into the garden, however, when a young black couple came by and stood for several hours, staring at her from the edge of the forest. They were both quite slender. They were about the same height, a little on the tall side. They had short hair. The man had sharp, analytical eyes and was wearing wire-framed glasses. The woman had on an artsy necklace that looked like it might have been made out of some kind of recycled synthetic, like tire rubber. Her eyes, though possessing a gentleness that Edith did not immediately see in the man’s eyes, were also penetrating. They seemed to look right into Edith’s heart.
They were joined, after a while, by a brown-skinned family. There was a short, stocky man with deeply contemplative eyes, a beautiful woman, also of diminutive height with an oval face and big, almond-shaped eyes. There was a skinny little boy and three girls, two of the same stature and body-type of their parents, one like her brother, tall and skinny. They seemed to be wearing the kind of work clothes that Edith used to see on people who worked on the family farm.
“Who is that?” the tall girl asked.
“This was a white lady we once knew,” said the woman.
“Why does she look so angry?” the boy asked.
“She thinks she knows something,” the woman replied, “but she doesn’t know.”
Edith did her best to ignore them but when, after four hours, they did not leave, she stopped gardening and went into the house where she peered out at them through her kitchen window. Remembering what her father had told her to do under such circumstances, she went into the pantry, unlocked a white-painted cabinet, and took out a double-barreled shotgun. She loaded the shotgun, and walked slowly back to stick it out the window.
“Come on now,” she shouted, “get off my property.”
But they all just stood there, staring at Edith. It made her angry, and brought to mind sad memories of her father. She remembered that before a severe draught caused him to lose the family farm in Spencer, Massachusetts, and move to Worcester, her father had hired migrant families to pick the corn, tomatoes and cucumbers. He had warned her against them, saying that they were not real Americans and could not be trusted. He had his rules about black men as well, since they were also hired on occasion to work on the farm, and, as he’d told Edith many times, had been known to attack white women.
“Shoot first and ask questions later,” he had told her.
Edith cocked the trigger, and pointed the gun at the black man’s head.
The man didn’t flinch. He just looked at Edith. There was no fear that she could see in those eyes. It wasn’t a sorrowful stare or an angry glare. It wasn’t a probing gaze, and it wasn’t a kind one either. It was just looking with open eyes. The kind of look that sees what it sees. But it made Edith feel seen in a way that she hadn’t felt until then. It made her feel he saw things about her that she’d kept hidden all her life. It was a look that seemed to encompass Edith, her house, her garden, even the forest surrounding the little property. The hatred that had driven Edith to action was completely flattened by that plain, straightforward look. Edith lowered the gun.
The little family walked slowly back into the forest. The black man nodded and followed suit. The black woman looked plainly at her. There was something in her eyes that made Edith shiver. What was it? A kindness, she thought. The scent of privet on the wind reminded her that she needed to get back to her gardening.
After watching Edith leave the window to put her gun back into the pantry cabinet, the woman also turned and walked back into the woods.
“Okay, Daddy?” Edith said to the empty room.
“All right,” she heard the voice of her father reply. “You remember what I taught you all those years ago. Good. Nothing has changed.”
Edith had lived her life according to her father’s hatred and mistrust of blacks. She avoided people of color her whole life.
Her world remained small. Dreams of going off to college to earn a degree in education ended when her father’s back condition worsened to the extent that he could no longer work. Edith, from that time forward, was forced to stay home and support the family on her salary from the diner.
After her father had died ten years later, she decided to stick around, feeling that she’d already missed her chance to light out on her own in life. Three years after that, Primrose was diagnosed with polio. She was dead before Christmas. Her other sister, Abigail, would marry a year later. Then it was just Edith and her mother.
She cherished those last days with her mother and was glad she was around to take care of the gentle, sweet woman who, unlike her father, never had a mean or distrustful word to say about anyone.
“Never mind your daddy,” she’d tell Edith when her father said something racist or otherwise hateful. “He’s just a bitter old man.”
Her father’s words, however, which he’d repeated to her throughout Edith’s life had already seeped like liquid poison into her heart. Still, she loved and respected her mother as the kind, generous soul that she knew her to be.
When she died, Edith decided to make some changes in her life. She’d had enough of city living, enough of working hard for little money. She longed to return to the simplicity of country living that she’d known from her childhood on the farm. So, she sold the family home in Webster Square, and bought this little cottage ten miles outside of Frenchville, not far from the Canadian border in northern Maine. Here she lived alone, going into town once a month for groceries.
Fifty years passed like one continuous day; her hours spent alone. Summers she worked in the garden. Winters she sat by the wood stove knitting. She knit little socks, mittens, hats and sweaters for the children she never had. She sometimes sold them on consignment at the general store in Frenchville. Others she stuffed into drawers or put into boxes that she stored in the attic. When the pandemic began, that’s when she started seeing the spirits in human form in her garden, and in the form of trees in her dreams.
Sometimes she dreamt of black walnut trees, sometimes she dreamt of oaks or maples. At some point, each night, she dreamt of a grove of white trees. She dreamt that they were the birch bones of the forest. The birch bones of the forest formed a white man who told her story each night as she slept.
“I am the blood of the forest,” he said, “the mountain stream flowing through this forest of white sins. I am the body, and the blood of sinners. I moan and cry out, ashamed of our sins held here in silence. We never admit to our sins held here in silence, the deep silence of the deep forest.
“From here I watch Edith. I tell her about me, about us, about herself. I don’t really know how she feels, what she thinks. I only know what I witness and what I surmise. If she knew I was telling her story, she’d let me know where I went wrong. But she doesn’t know. When she wakes each morning, the dream I inhabit is gone.
“She knows that she was dreaming of something but doesn’t know what. She knows that she was dreaming of someone, but she doesn’t know who. She tries to remember my face, but she can’t. I don’t have a face because I am not a person. I am a myriad. I am a forest of white sins. She can’t find me, so she just goes on.”
When the pandemic came, and people were ordered to stay at home to avoid spreading the infection, nothing changed in her life. Within a year, the spread of the virus slowed in developed nations, as it gained momentum in poorer countries. Then things started to calm down. Edith assumed that she had escaped the lethal fury of the disease, which had taken her anyway, though without her realizing it.
Copyright © 2020 by Dan Belanger
