Mama Patty’s Scar

And the perfection of a soul

By Cynthia Adams

It’s there.

Right where Mama Patty’s soft pink nightgown flares slightly open at the armhole. I stare furtively at the depression, the angry network of scars, as she reads, cat-eye reading glasses in place, blue-black curls propped against a lace-edged pillow. She’s gripped by one of her Zane Grey novels.

Beneath the gown she wears a white cotton bra. A form pinned into the left empty cup is held by two gold safety pins. At age 6, I am dying to ask her about this, but something stops me. She says I ask too many questions, which vexes her.

Questions about my grandfather, Lewis Clive Tucker, and their baby Roy vex her, too. Both dead.

My friend Tony died when he ran in front of an Oldsmobile. Baby Roy died, too, writhing on the kitchen table. Spinal meningitis, misdiagnosed.

Mama Patty walked outside, frantic for the doctor’s arrival, and had a vision of a small white coffin.

Little Roy was buried in such a coffin, the color of pearls.

Yet she lies beside me, reading her western like nothing in the world is wrong apart from the worry that I might interrupt with another question.

Until she reaches up and turns the knob on the bed light, I watch that angry pink place on her left side until it becomes my scar, too.

The sheets smell of the sun. The Martha Washington bedspread is carefully folded. The mourning dove sings its mournful song. This all fills my head, imprinting something in me in the darkest of darkness.

Mama Patty breathes deeply. I try to sleep, thinking of the morning to come, dreading that she may want to fish. Snapping turtles and water moccasins sometimes appear at the wild old pond. The fish, once hooked, wrenches and arcs until it is placed, flapping, into the tin bucket. When she cuts off its head and strips out its guts, the gore splashes onto her apron.

The next day, although I do not know this as I drift to sleep, she will fill a large washtub and let me splash to my heart’s content.

Mama Patty will give me a baloney-and-mustard sandwich to eat, and take me to check the rabbit boxes. We will walk to the mailbox, wearing red flip-flops and sucking the juice from a honeysuckle.

The questions that come in daylight are easier than questions that come in darkness. I do not think of the scar all day, forgetting completely that a part of her has already been cut away.

Her beloved Pearl Grey Zane (Pearl was his first name) was a sensation in his time. He was untamed. He feared man would destroy all that was untamed in the natural world.

I need this wild life, this freedom, he wrote.

The next night, as Mama Patty turns a page and the gown gapes again, it is impossible to look away from the depression where a breast should be.

I do not want them to cut one more thing away. Mama Patty is just right as she is. Perhaps perfect.  OH

Cindy Adams is a contributing editor of O.Henry.

Partying Pilgrims and “Progress”

Two ships in the night, a lost garden and pork paradise

By Billy Eye

It’s not my place to run the train, the whistle I can’t blow,

It’s not my place to say how far the train’s allowed to go.

It’s not my place to shoot off steam nor even clang the bell,

But let the damn thing jump the track and see who catches hell!

— Author Unknown

Our parents and grandparents partied in different ways than we do today. In an era before anyone could buy a mixed drink in a bar or restaurant, like-minded tipplers generally congregated in smoky alcoves, like the M&M (Merchants & Manufacturers) Club, a private bar and grill tucked inside the confines of the O.Henry Hotel.

The party got kicked up a notch after WBIG Radio’s morning sensation Bob Poole relocated from New York City to Sunset Hills in 1952 (later to Irving Park), by way of New Orleans. In an act of conspicuous consumption, Bob, his wife Gloria, and my parents took to motoring from one neighborhood to another in a custom outfitted school bus converted into a rolling speakeasy. (A sordid story told in last February’s O.Henry.)

Around that same period, in November of 1955, WBIG sponsored a weeklong cruise aboard the luxury liner NS Stockholm. Destination — the isle of Bermuda. Young folks from some of Greensboro’s most prominent families were on deck that fall: Nancy Bryan, Betty Jane Bledsoe, Elizabeth Day, Margaret Anne Cowan, Robert Taylor and “Brother” Bill Taylor to name a few.

Once outside of American waters, the booze flowed freely. After that first night of over-imbibing, many folks who were supposed to be enjoying their breakfast were still struggling with last night’s excesses. Bob was noticeably hungover on that first morning’s ship-to-shore call back to WBIG studios.

Turns out, Bob and company tossing their cookies over the side of the ship wasn’t the worst calamity that befell the Stockholm over its illustrious career. That came a mere eight months later.

On July 26, 1956, following the same course as the WBIG tour, the Stockholm set sail for Bermuda under fog so thick revelers couldn’t see a few feet past their noses. By the time crewmembers detected the shadowy silhouette of a larger ship dead ahead, it was far too late for evasive maneuvers.

The Stockholm’s icebreaking bow hot-knifed into the side of a floating masterpiece of Art Deco-dence, tearing an 80-foot diameter gash into one of the last of the ultra-opulent European cruise ships of yore, a wound that spread open, in the words of one observer, “like a ripe watermelon.” Within minutes, dozens of panicking vacationers were plunged into an oceanic grave 200 feet deep under the frigid, murky waters of the North Atlantic.

It was one of the most catastrophic maritime disasters of the 20th century. The name of that world-famous cruiseliner the NS Stockholm sank under foggy conditions in 1956. None other than the Andrea Doria.

And now you know (borrowing from Paul Harvey) . . . the rest of the story.

***

You may remember, back in April of 2017, I profiled the last elegant house and grounds remaining on West Market Street west of Starmount Forest. Situated on 4 acres, it may as well have been the land of Wakanda. No one ever seemed to notice or could recall it being there, sandwiched as it was between garishly lit fast food franchises, grocery stores, a postal distribution center and a troublesome 1970s era apartment complex.

It was a decorative Craftsman-style farmhouse not unlike that place Dorothy Gale longed to return to, built more than a century ago when that parcel of land was far outside city limits on what was then called Winston-Salem Road.

By the time I stumbled across this hidden-in-plain-sight homestead, its life-long resident, Rosemary Barker, had just passed way at the age of 85. Miss Barker, as she was known to generations of school kids, taught fifth grade at Allen Jay in the ’50s before transferring to Bessemer and Erwin Elementary in the ’60s, then Lindley Junior High in the ’70s.

Her parents were pioneers in organic gardening techniques. It’s been said the Barkers’ garden was one of the most exquisite and luxuriant this city had ever known, populated with just about every species of flora known to thrive in this region.

From the 1930s on, spinsters could be spotted toddling across the property trimming boxwoods, tending to flowerbeds and hedgerows under shade trees grown to mammoth proportions, shielding the spinsters’ corner lot on West Market from view. An island of antiquitous gentility inexplicably flourishing long after being enveloped on all sides by what we laughably refer to as “progress.”

In last year’s column on this house I closed with, “It’s perhaps inevitable that this verdant locale where breezes whistled softly through the pines, air honeyed in wisteria and flowering pears, will one day reverberate with the words: “Welcome to Sonic.” I was wrong, but only slightly.

Instead, what you’ll hear at that location this morning, through a tinny speaker, will be, “Welcome to Biscuitville, may I take your order?” Bet you’ll take notice of that corner now!  OH

Billy Eye is unapologetically O.G. — Original Greensboro.

Winter Salads

Eat well — and wild

By Jane Lear

Salad in the cold months can be tricky. The mild, tender lettuces available at any supermarket are all well and good, but most other salad staples — tomatoes are an obvious example — are disappointing out of season.

More important, though, a typical garden-variety salad doesn’t suit the heartier, richer food we crave at this time of year. Serving a plate of nicely dressed hothouse lettuces after braised short ribs or cassoulet, for instance, can seem tacked on and curiously unsatisfying. Dinner guests tend to pick at it and wonder what’s for dessert rather than appreciate the punctuation in the meal, so to speak, and feel revitalized.

For the sort of bracing counterpoint I’m talking about, look to bolder greens such as endive, watercress, arugula, the pale inner leaves of escarole, or springy, spiky frisée. Slivers of sweet, earthy celery root, tangy green apple or aromatic fennel will help matters along.

One of my favorite winter salads always puts me in mind of the Mediterranean — in particular, Provence and Sicily. The recipe stars fresh fennel and any members of the mandarin citrus family, which includes satsumas, tangerines and clementines. The large, relatively new hybrid marketed as “Sumo” (easily recognized by its prominent topknot) has a superb balance of sweetness and acidity, and the fruit segments, which can be neatly slipped out of their ultra-thin membranes, keep their shape on the plate.

Dandelion greens — which have become more readily available — have a clean, sharp flavor that also reminds me of the Mediterranean. That’s where their use in the kitchen was developed, and you can trace the word “dandelion” from the Latin down through the French dent-de-lion, or “lion’s tooth.” This is no big surprise, given the jagged shape of the leaves, but personally I have a fondness for the common French name, pissenlit, which reflects their purported diuretic properties.

Wild dandelion greens have intense flavor, but these days, I prefer them cultivated unless I know that the grass they’ve been plucked from is pesticide-free. Wild or cultivated, they have a great affinity for a hot skillet dressing. It won’t necessarily wilt the greens, but it mellows them and softens their rawness. Toasted nuts give the vinaigrette a suave sweetness.

The evolution of salad from a side dish or separate course into the main focus of a meal has come into its own, and this makes scratching together a nourishing, delicious weeknight supper — one of life’s greatest challenges — just a bit simpler. Two staples that I swear by are lentils and sausage, especially the smoked Polish variety called kielbasa.

Lentils are a great gateway legume. Unlike most dried beans, there’s no need to soak them beforehand, they cook quickly, and slide from homey to haute with aplomb. I suppose you could say they’ve been around the block and know a thing or two: After all, they were there in the beginning — er, Beginning — as the pottage for which Esau gave up his birthright in Genesis 25:34.

Although I’ve never met a lentil I didn’t like, I’m a sucker for the pretty green French ones called lentilles du Puy. Yep, I know they’re more expensive than other lentils varieties, but they’re worth it. Their characteristic flavor — peppery and minerally yet delicate — comes from the good volcanic soil and dry, sunny climate in which they’re grown. And because they contain less starch than other varieties, they exhibit a lovely firm-tender texture when cooked. In fact, if your opinion of lentils was formed by one too many mushy stews at indifferent vegetarian restaurants, then these will be a revelation.

French green lentils are delicious in soup, of course, or scooped into the hollow of a baked winter squash, or tossed with small pasta shells and crumbles of fresh goat cheese. What I do most often, though, is serve them in a bistro-style warm salad with kielbasa. Add some crusty bread, good butter, and a glass or two of red, and life will feel very civilized.

All three of the salads described above are incredibly versatile. As you’ll see in the recipes — think of them more as guidelines — one ingredient can often be switched for another, and as you go along, don’t be afraid to improvise, based on the contents of your refrigerator. Odds are, it will taste wonderful.

Mandarin-Fennel Salad

Serves 4

Add some cress or arugula sprigs if you like; substitute green olives for the black. Ruby-red pomegranate seeds would add sparkle and texture, and parsley leaves, an herbal punch.

1 large fennel bulb, trimmed of its feathery stalk and some fronds reserved

3 mandarins, peeled

1/4 cup brine-cured black olives

Your favorite best-quality extra-virgin
olive oil

Fresh lemon juice

Coarse flaky salt (Maldon adds a wonderful crunch) and freshly ground black pepper

Cut the fennel bulb in half lengthwise and discard the tough outer layer or two to expose the cream-colored heart. Then cut the bulb into very thin slices with a handheld slicer or a very sharp knife. Put them in a salad bowl.

Remove the weblike pith from the peeled mandarins (children love doing this and are very good at it). Separate the segments and, depending on the thickness and tightness of the membranes that enclose each one, remove those or not; it’s entirely up to you. Cut the fruit in half crosswise and add it, along with the olives, to the fennel.

Drizzle the salad with olive oil and lemon juice to taste and gently combine. Scatter with salt and a few chopped fennel fronds. Season with a few grinds of pepper.

Dandelion Salad with Toasted Pine
Nut Vinaigrette

Serves 6

I’ve called for sherry vinegar below, but balsamic or red wine vinegar would be fine. If you don’t have pine nuts, use pecans, hazelnuts or homemade croutons. Dried cranberries or cherries would be a nice embellishment, too.

6 handfuls tender dandelion greens, washed, spun dry, and tough stems removed

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

3 tablespoons pine nuts

1 tablespoon sherry vinegar, or to taste

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Shaved or very coarsely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Tear the greens into generous bite-size pieces and mound them in a large heatproof bowl.

Heat the oil in a small skillet over moderate heat until hot. Add the garlic and pine nuts, cook, stirring them often, until the garlic is golden. Stir in the vinegar, then pour over the greens. Season with salt and pepper and toss to coat. Add the Parm and toss once more. Serve right away.

Warm Lentil Salad with Kielbasa 

Serves 4

This salad, a staff favorite at Gourmet, varies according to my time and inclination. It’s perfectly delicious with nothing more than onion and garlic, or carrot and garlic. As for the kielbasa, feel free to substitute another smoked sausage, country ham, pancetta or lardons — thick-cut strips of bacon sliced into matchsticks and cooked until crisp. Serve it on a bed of watercress or tender leaves of a Boston or Bibb lettuce. If desired, gild the lily by topping each serving with a fried egg.

2 cups French green lentils (lentilles du Puy), picked over and rinsed

6 cups water

1 bay leaf

A couple of sprigs of fresh thyme or, if you can find it, winter savory

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided

1 cup finely chopped onion

1 cup diced carrot

1 cup diced celery, plus chopped celery leaves for garnish

1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic

1/4 cup redwine or sherry vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1 smoked kielbasa sausage, cut crosswise into 1/4-inch slices

Bring the lentils, water, bay leaf and thyme sprigs to a boil in a 3-quart pot. Reduce the heat and simmer the lentils, covered, until they are almost tender, about 15 minutes. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt and keep simmering until tender but still firm, about another 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery and garlic and cook, stirring every so often, until the vegetables are just softened and smell delicious, 8 to 10 minutes.

While the lentils and aromatics are both working, make the vinaigrette: Whisk together the vinegar and mustard in a small bowl and then whisk in the remaining 1/2 cup oil. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Drain the lentils in a colander, discarding the herbs. Return the lentils to the pot and stir in the vegetables and vinaigrette. Cook over low heat a few minutes until hot, remove from the heat and cover to keep warm. Wipe out the skillet and brown the kielbasa on both sides. Stir into the lentils and garnish with celery leaves.   OH

Jane Lear was the senior articles editor at Gourmet and features director at Martha Stewart Living.

Make a Note of It

A catalog of the oddities of life

By Susan S. Kelly

For a certain kind of writer — OK, this kind of writer — what’s in your Costco cart, and what you do at night to get ready for bed, is invaluable and fascinating. Unfortunately, this sort of ephemera, discussed offhand in a grocery store parking lot, or city park, or next door on the treadmill, or at the office water cooler, tends to get lost, forgotten or ignored while you’re bringing in the trash cans, refilling the copier paper tray, or debating shredded or chunk parm.

So I make a practice of writing everything down, copying it to the computer, printing it out, punching holes in it, and filing it in notebooks under tabs, just like you did in fourth grade. A new year seems like a good time to revisit these collected works, and reconfirms my opinion that people will tell you anything.

What you may classify, in today’s parlance, as oversharing or TMI is pure gold for a writer. You never know when you’ll need an offhand comment like, “My grandchildren all sound like outlaws or whaling ships: Sophie Morgan. Casey Jackson. Wyatt James,” to punch up a scene. Or my friend’s house cleaners, a gay couple that comes while she’s at work, and routinely leaves complaint notes in the fridge saying, “Why don’t you get something decent to eat?” And while we’re on the subject of fridges, there’s my friend who told me she looked so terrible one day that she couldn’t go out in public. Instead, she went to the drive-through window at Krispy Kreme and bought four bottles of milk. Because she remembered that, as a child, Krispy Kreme had the best milk.

It pains me that I will likely never find a place to use this email: “Remind me to tell you the story some time about the husband of our class valedictorian (who herself picked her nose and ate it in class) who came to a hometown funeral and his tooth moved when he talked. I didn’t see it, but it was well reported by another friend.” Still, I’m comforted that, sooner or later, I’ll probably be able to fit in my Charleston friend’s road trip with her history-buff father to visit all the Civil War battlefields. But only the ones that the Confederacy won. So much for revisionist history. And Gettysburg.

Next time you make a move, stay focused on what’s really important and do what one friend did: While everything’s being wrapped, packed and stacked, draw a big smiley face on the box that has all the liquor in it.

Embarrassment tales are a dime a dozen, but here’s one I bet you won’t find in that long-gone “Was My Face Red” page in Reader’s Digest. The day after giving birth, a friend was immensely relieved when the doc came into her hospital room. She opened her gown, showed him her breasts and said, “I am sooo glad you’re here. My milk has come in and they hurt so badly and can you look at them and tell me if they’re normal and give me something for them?” The doctor looked at the floor for a long minute, then said, “I’m the pediatrician.”

But seriously, what is it about underwear? Stories tend from the mild — the friend who stained (OK, steeped) — all her heirloom linens in tea for the perfect antique shade, which was inspired by the memory of her mother boiling her bras when she came home from boarding school, to the lawyer who took off his blazer at work, not realizing a pair of underwear was stuck to the back of his shirt. Let that be a lesson to check your lint traps. Tricot has a natural affinity for non-iron Brooks Brothers shirts.

Underwear-related and completely unedited from the notebook original, this gem of a tail, I mean tale:

I know airport toilets are all about efficiency, but they are over-zealous. The best news is that every toilet I visited had seat covers plentiful, and I visited plenty between RDU, Dallas and Denver. So, I head for the toilet with 90 coats, backpack, luggage. As you disrobe, the toilet flushes because you’re moving. Then, I get the toilet cover assembled, and another auto-flush because you’re moving. Which creates the problem, because you’ve set the cover on the seat and it flushes the cover down, so you have to get another cover assembled. Of course it flushes again as you turn around to take off pants to sit down, but this time you’re holding the cover, but it keeps flushing forever and your cover is fairly mangled, so by that time you are holding it, trying to undo your pants and sit on it while it’s flushing, but still maintain sanitary integrity holding the seat cover and you sit down in a hurry still holding the seat cover that is trying to go down the toilet. It was exhausting and a complete waste of water.

And it’s only January.  OH

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud grandmother.

In Deep Water

Huck Finn meets Moby Dick in Lee Zacharias’ delightful new novel

For a good wintertime read, lose yourself in the nautical-themed novel, Across the Great Lake by Lee Zacharias prize-winning author, longtime editor of The Greensboro Review and emerita professor at UNCG.

It’s the kind of book that immediately seizes the imagination. Part adventure in the vein of Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn, part ghost story, part tragedy filled with a motley assortment of characters, Across the Great Lake (University of Wisconsin Press) tells the remarkable odyssey of 5-year-old Fern Halvorsen. Told in first-person by an aging Fern, the book recounts the single most defining experience of her life: a trip in 1936 aboard The Manitou, a freighter ferrying railroad cars across the icy waters of Lake Michigan. Fern’s father is the boat’s captain, who has brought his daughter with him, as her mother lies dying back in their home in Frankfort, on Michigan’s northwest Lower Peninsula (distinct from the state’s Upper Peninsula, or UP, as Fern learns). With no one but her teddy bear, also named Manitou, for company, the plucky child protagonist explores the ship’s nooks and crannies, befriending a gentle deckhand named Alv and fraternizing with the crew along the way. In the following excerpt, young Fern sits in on a poker game among the raucous “black gang” who stoke the coal fires of the boat’s engine room, among other characters — and learns first-hand that The Manitou is haunted.

Like Dick Butler, Nils was an oiler, one step above fireman, but I was confused because I didn’t know what a Yooper did on a ship, and Amund had to explain that he was a water tender, that was his job, but he was also a Yooper because he was from the UP. Supposedly the term is new, but sailors used it even before the Mackinac Bridge was built and the Yoopers started calling everyone who lived below the bridge, on the Lower Peninsula, trolls. Sitting at a table in the flicker playing cards the men called each other a lot of names, though no one seemed to mind. Nils picked me up and set me on his lap even though I was all sooty, but no one in the black gang cared about that, not as long as you washed your hands at one of the sinks along the bulwark between the flicker and the hold before you picked up your cards, because even after they washed up there was coal dust ground into the creases around their eyes and in the back of their necks and their wrists and knuckles. Nils showed me his cards and even let me hold them, making sure I pointed them straight up so no one else could see, and that’s how I learned to play poker. One of his fingernails  was black and sort of bubbled up, but it wasn’t from the coal dust, it was from catching his hand in a hatch. Malley, the other water tender, was at the end of the table playing a sad song on his harmonica instead of cards. That was because his girlfriend wouldn’t marry him, Amund said, she didn’t want to marry a man who was at sea all the time. Nils, Malley, and Amund, all of the men in fact except Bosun and Twitches, would explain a lot of things and tell all kinds of stories as we crossed the lake. They seemed so eager to explain how things worked it was like a contest, who got to tell me most, probably because there wasn’t anyone else to tell what they knew because the other men knew the same things and when they came home the people who hadn’t been to sea didn’t care. Or maybe it was just because I listened so hard. I wanted to learn everything so that I could grow up to work on a ship too.

Amund and Dick Butler each threw another penny in the middle of the table, but Nils took his cards back and laid them facedown. “I’m out.”

“I want to keep playing,” I protested, so Dick explained that when you folded it meant you knew you couldn’t win and if you couldn’t win and you were smart you got out of the game. He said it so nice I wondered if he knew I’d seem him smoking on the car deck. Not that I’d tell. Because that was the second rule on a ship. Though they might quarrel among themselves, sailors didn’t rat each other out.

But one thing no one explained was the shower. It was like I thought it would be, but in the shower you had to turn the faucets just right or else the water was ice cold, and then it was so hot I jumped back and fell, with scalding water pouring down all over my backside. I wanted someone to come, but my father didn’t know I needed help because at home the person who always helped me was my mother. So I had to get up by myself and reach around to the faucets, but finally I found the place that was like a warm summer rain, and after that I cheered up and sang a song because I had heard about singing in the shower. Later I would wonder if the ghost knew about the faucets, because if it did it could have helped me, though I guessed ghosts didn’t care to go around assisting people. What they wanted was some kind of help themselves, but ghosts can’t say what they want, and that’s why people are so afraid of them, though all that was something I thought about later, after I was used to it. That first night I wasn’t used to it at all.

When it came, it was after the rudder pin broke and the engineer began his walk across the ice, after the bowling alley closed and I could no longer hear the crack of the ball and explosions of the pins, and I began to hear the ship speak in a way you don’t hear it in the daytime, maybe because the way you listen in the dark is different. There was still the grinding of ice against the hull, though not as loud because we weren’t trying to push through it anymore. Instead the ship itself was groaning and creaking, moaning and carrying on like it was a ghost, or like you think a ghost might do, but it wasn’t the ghost, it was just the night air making the steel hull contract. A ship is built to flex or else the hull will break apart, so I knew what I heard was the ship and not a ghost, but even so I clutched Manitou tight against my neck and kept my eyes open. The snow had stopped hours before, and the air outside was colder now not just because it was night but because the sky had cleared, and before I went to bed I knelt in one of the hemp chairs in the observation room and saw all the stars like a sky full up with diamonds, the way you only ever see them from the beach on a winter night because up on Leelanau Avenue there were too many trees, and so I tipped my head up and looked until I was dizzy, and then I went back to my cabin and closed the door and got in bed and the ship started making all that night noise.

But even though my eyes were open I never saw the ghost, because no matter what some people say about glimpsing apparitions, figures you can see through or shadows without anyone to cast them, the main thing about ghosts is not what you see. Holgar, who was one of the deckhands, the one who didn’t like Finns and was always taking pictures with his Brownie camera, was forever asking to see the special compartment because he’d heard you could see the ghost’s face in the wood paneling, and he said that sometimes ghosts will show in pictures even when you can’t see them in real life, but the crew wasn’t allowed to hang around the passenger quarters, except Alv, who came and got my clothes and washed them and hung them to dry on the line strung across the flicker, so I don’t know whether this ghost would have showed in a picture or not. Also when the ghost came it was dark. Outside, all around the deckhouse and the aft pilothouse there are lights. On a platform on the forward spar below the crow’s nest, red and green port and starboard lights keep ships from running into each other in the fog or at night, and from the passenger lounge you can see the light that’s kept on all night in the galley, but inside my cabin with the door and shutters closed up tight it was what they call pitch black.

And what happened when it came, it wasn’t the way you would think, because it didn’t make any noise at all, and the way I knew it was there was how quiet the ship got. All of a sudden you couldn’t hear the ice or the flexing steel plates on the hull, all the moaning and groaning and shrieking just stopped. Some ghosts are supposed to weep, and the ghosts of the cholera victims buried alive on South Manitou Island cry out for help, their voices echoing over the water, trying to hail the passing ships. People hear footsteps on the stairs, the thump of an empty chair set to rocking, or the slamming of a door, though the only reason a ghost could have to slam a door would be to get your attention, because they don’t need doors or windows to go from room to room, not that they travel much—they don’t wander the earth like some people say, only a very little part of it where something terrible happened. I didn’t know what happened to the ghost on the Manitou or even who it was, nobody seemed to, only that in the daytime it lived in the special room the managers used when they crossed the lake. I’m not sure the men even knew that it came out at night and moved around the passenger quarters because it never went anywhere else on the ship, not down to the flicker, where the black gang bunked, or up to the pilothouse, not even to the galley or messes nearby, because if it had, the men would have talked about it, but they never did, not even the bosun, and he was not one to keep a ghost to himself.

So that was how I knew it was there, because everything got so quiet, and at the same time I felt it, because you don’t have to see or hear a ghost to know one’s there. You feel it the same way you feel a storm is coming, there’s a change in pressure, a heaviness in the air, you can’t breathe, and what you hear isn’t the ghost but your own blood pounding inside your ears and what you feel is that same blood beating in your throat, but a ghost doesn’t warn you like a storm will, it just comes all of a sudden and then it’s there. And what this ghost did, it reached down and took hold of my big toe. I can’t say whether it lifted the scratchy wool blanket, reached through it, or what, because I couldn’t feel anything but the pressure of its hand on my foot, not the nib of a fingernail or warmth of a palm, because the ghost didn’t have surface, only weight, a heaviness that was not like anything else, and all night long it gripped my toe and never said what it wanted or why it was there, and I wanted to be the girl I bragged I was, but I wasn’t, because that first night when the ghost came into my compartment and clasped my foot in its hand I was so scared I couldn’t even scream, and in the morning when I woke and the ghost was gone, my eyes were all crusty in the corners, and both Manitou and my pillowcase were wet, and I realized that I had cried all night long without ever making so much sound as a sniffle.   OH

Excerpted from Across the Great Lake by Lee Zacharias. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. ©2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.