The Keening

Death Passed

As a child who waded in the head-high grass of our cliffside home, I’d harbored a peculiar fondness for funeral marches—the sight of all those people in one long line, each face holding a memory. Had the tall woman with a book clutched to her chest sat next to the departed on a cracked bench in a one-room schoolhouse? Or had they met in a crowded market when they both reached for the same sun-ripened orange?

Those lives I could only touch with my eyes—their bodies slow and lean with grief—slipped into the trees that reached over the road that stretched north to Hemmings Field. A bitter name when nothing grew there but stones carved with the names of the dead.

Such were the wonders of my early childhood.

In my fourteenth year the influenza infected my whole world. First me. Then Pater. We fought that evil sickness and won. But so many people in our small town of Kingsley Cove had lost their lives to the illness. The funeral marches started to become common in the fall of 1918. Seemed as though just as the Great War came to a close, the folks of Downeast Maine set to fighting a war of their own.

Like a sickness, sadness spread through me when I saw the coffins grow smaller and lighter, knowing families took a child to the grave.

When the marches came as regular as the tide that winter, I stayed inside. Those mourners saddled me with the heavy thought that another home in town bore an emptiness even memories couldn’t fill. Pater made their sorrow permanent when he carved a funeral march in our back wall—the mourners detailed down to the lashes of their eyes, but still partly buried in the stone—a half-formed reminder of the hollowness of death. Now, I don’t go out back much. I hate to even face the road that leads to the cemetery.

In a waking dream, a shadow swept over my bedroom wall, spilling a faint chill as it moved. Death passed our house. I knew this before I caught sight of the dawn mist creeping in from the sea, crawling over the dank spring grass. Or heard the faint keening of the mourners on the road. Without looking, I saw the slow steady march of loved ones shepherding another coffin to the grave.

As the trees swallowed the mourning song’s echo, I buried myself in my blankets and conjured memories of a long ago 4th of July picnic to play them like a nickelodeon show on the screen in my head—the Myers boys throwing a football along the beach as Mrs. Janson and Mrs. Wendell carried picnic baskets so filled with food that the load crushed their long skirts against their legs. I could hear laughter, shouts, and fabric snapping in the wind as Pastor Dempsy spread a tablecloth over his end of a table made of every spare lawn table, card table, and workbench in town. I could taste the sandy sweetness of Aunt Gayle Anne’s cotton candy on my lips. Hear my friend Jake reciting Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride at a gallop.

When I opened my eyes to let in the real world, the sun had come into full bloom, burning away the fog. As I got dressed, I imagined I’d pushed all that sorrow away.

But death came inside that morning. Traveling the hallway down the middle of our house like an ash-bearing wind, it stopped in the sudden brightness of the front stoop.

My breath clung to my lungs until the shadow sped out into the front yard to be swallowed by the sun.

Convincing myself I’d been playing a child’s game of finding spirits in sleepy shadows, I stepped outside. The sun made the wet grass gleam, but it didn’t warm the sea winds of early spring.

The chill turned me to the house and back to visions of that shadow I’d seen lingering there. Which put me in mind of a monster of my childhood—the dusky spirit that rose up from the floor of my bedroom, whispering fierce unknowable things. I tried to keep a lantern burning next to my bed to hold it at bay, but Pater wouldn’t let me.

He must have seen the light when he came up from his workshop down below on the beach. From outside, he’d said, Out with the light, Lyza. Fires burn in your sleep.

Words troubled Pater. They never fell together as he expected. But I took his meaning and put the lantern out, covering my head with the quilt so I couldn’t see the shadow spirit rise out of the floor.

What little rituals could I perform now to trick my mind into feeling safe?

In those shadow-fearing days, Mater helped me send my fears to sea. We’d build ourselves a tiny boat from the wooden boxes her spools of thread came in. Our mast a stick, the sail a small scrap of fabric, Mater’d hand me the boat, saying, Put your fear down in the hold, Lyza. Trap it in with prayer. Then send it out to sea. It’ll never come back.

I’d squeeze that little boat in my hands, praying hard. Dear Lord, don’t let the shadow monster eat me.

A laughable thought today, but my child mind took it as a true tell. I set that boat in the water and gave it a shove, the tide bobbing it out over the ocean. Over the years, a tiny fleet of my fears set sail into the sea.

Even though my mater didn’t follow the Bradley line in taking up fishing, we Laytons seemed pretty tied to boats. Mater and I had our fear boats and Pater sent his sculptures to sea. Pater shivered if someone spoke of selling one. They need to move on now, he’d say. And for each new face, he built a boat and pushed it out into the tide at dawn.

From the cliff just beyond our front door, I watched the waves ripple to the horizon, catching sight of the red tile roof of the library Mr. Carnegie built on Kern Avenue. With town just down the coast, the grassy bluffs looked like a woolly old blanket stretched out between our place and Kingsley Cove.

Hearing the bells of St. Gregory’s chime in mourning, I found myself thinking that our town could fill the cove with an armada of ships, each one filled with a prayer holding down the fear of death. Tiny black sails dotting the water like a teeming school of fish.

My mind drifted out to sea, I saw myself in an old rowboat on choppy water, the darkness of night all around me. I faced the shore—the boat gray and warped by years in the salty sea air, the oar anchors empty. I could see the rocks through the fog, feel the pull of home, but I had no way to reach the shore.

A fitting vision of my state of late, just bobbing over the waves, unable to row myself ashore. Or find where I fit into the Layton family line, in our cozy little cove that had been in my mater’s family for generations. I made a promise to myself then and there. Fear would not pull me into the shadows. I would face it and make my own path.

Chipping the World Away

Mater emerged from Pater’s workshop in the base of the cliff below me, a full basket on her arm. Pater had refused to eat. From the distance, Mater looked little-girl small as she climbed a rock to throw crumbs into the sea, sending the gulls into a diving frenzy.

When Pater took up a chisel, he chipped the rest of the world away. The deeper he carved, the less he knew of the things around him. By the time he reached the details of a face, nothing else existed. Mater played a devil of a time getting him to eat.

Seeing Mater stand on that rock, her dress tossed in the wind like a sheet on the line, I remembered standing at her side one time, flinging old bread to the gulls. Mater didn’t watch the birds. She kept her eyes on the swirling waves of the sea. When I was a child, she said, I dreamed I could dive into the water and shed my skin for a seal’s, join the silkies who watched over the ships. Dusting the bread crumbs from her hands with a few sharp slaps, she laughed. Actually, I’d probably swim ahead of those ships and warn the fish to stay clear.

A true tell, as Mater called it. When she was young she often had to tell lies to keep her family smiling. The Bradleys had fished these northeastern waters since before they called this land Maine. But Mater hated how they hauled in fish by the thousands to sell by the pound. Too much like stealing from God, she’d say.

Mater appeared at my shoulder, having climbed the cliff stairs while I’d drifted in thought. With snake-striking quickness, she licked her thumb, then swiped it down my cheek, saying, Daydreaming’s only stalling, Lyza.

Touching my stinging cheek, I said, And just what am I avoiding?

She gave my hair a twist as she passed. A brush, seems like. Stand out here in this wind much longer and you’ll have better luck with a scissors.

I laughed. Sometimes Mater sounded just like Granny Bradley. Knowing that would grind her up inside, but it only happened when frustration gripped her mind.

Glad to have my mind off darker things, I followed her into the house. I went back to my room to give my hair a brush. Returning into the hall, I heard the ripping slice of Mater’s scissors cutting through fabric. I stepped into the sewing room.

The foamy green of the fabric told a tale. You haven’t started Quinna’s dress?

Mater looked at me with a face set in stone. Just what does it look like I’m doing?

Starting. I should have read the weather of her mood when she passed me on the cliff. Sitting in a chair on the far side of her sewing table, I tried to think of something that’d calm the storm she had brewing in her head. Since Pater caused it, talking about him might let it pass.

Did you see who Pater’s carving?

"A young girl