Freddy and I were digging in my backyard – chink, chink, chink – trowels in the stony earth. This was months after the Queer Lunch and the star rock. Summer was just coming. School was out for good tomorrow.
‘No more Miss Truxell,’ said Freddy, spearing the loose soil.
We faced each other across the hole, on our knees.
‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ I said, ‘if she taught sixth grade too?’
‘Or what if you just had to have Miss Truxell forever?’
‘Oh God!’
The hole was almost two feet deep now, and wide, maybe a foot and a half across. We had set it just at the back gate, which led out onto Chadwick Road, around the corner from our front door. Next to the hole, we had the front page of the Times lying in the grass. LBJ PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR SOUTH VIETNAM, it said. CALLS FOR GREAT SOCIETY. We piled our spadesful of turned earth between our dirty knees.
‘Boy, I am really dying to get to camp,’ Freddy said. ‘I found out yesterday my team is called the Tigers. I’m gonna play second. We’re gonna win the league, I swear.’
He was going away for the full two months, to a baseball camp. They played a whole season, with two leagues, and then a World Series too. I had to admit it sounded pretty cool.
‘That’s deep enough,’ I said.
We lay our trowels aside. We lifted the newspaper, carefully, both of us, each holding two corners between thumb and finger. We lay the paper down gently over the hole, like making a bed. It covered the hole and then some.
‘Okay,’ I said.
We started placing pebbles on the paper’s corners to hold it in place.
I was only going away to camp for two weeks, at the beginning of August. It was my first time at sleepaway. I was glad it was such a long way off.
Gently now, gently, we began to spread the turned earth over the surface of the newspaper. Sprinkling it on with our hands at first then using the trowels to spread it thin and even. Fragments of words, photographs, fists, bearded mouths on angry faces appeared through the dirt for a while, then they were covered over. The entire newspaper began to disappear. Our hole began to look like just another section of the yard.
‘Oh man!’ said Freddy. ‘This is great! If Ira comes by here, we’ll just shout something at him, like, “Hey, Ira, your mother wears boots to bed.” Then when he comes running after us – boom! – man, he’s gonna fall right into the trap, he’ll, like, break his leg and we’ll make him lie out here until he starves to death. I mean, you could really do this in a war or something, you know. Like when the Japs came at you, you could just, like, run away …’
There was still a whole month, I told myself. I shaped the dirt, not listening to Freddy. All of July, I thought, before my camp began. I didn’t think: all of July – with her. I didn’t think about her at all, or about our solemn hoodoos by the stream the night before. Or about all the nights we had been together through that spring. What I did think about – while Freddy, bless him, put paid to Pearl Harbor with a few well-positioned ditches – was afterwards, the walk home from her house alone, the bizarre welling in the long summer dusk of the dreamless quiet inside me, the flamboyant, nearly garish limning of the details without – the barking of a distant dog, the smell of mown grass, house lights through maple leaves – and that dizzying sensation that came and went of the world’s objects loosed from their moorings, floating, my attention lodged within them, toward infinite night and outer space. It was always like that after I’d been with her.
‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ said Freddy breathlessly.
Really spooky, I thought. A spooky, spooky little girl.
The bell rang on the last half-day of school and I with the other kids gushed cheering out the doors into the summer noon. We boys shouted to each other in loud, high voices, bursting with exquisite witticisms about Miss Truxell as we strode down the path to the road and freedom. Hilarious puns about trucks and old maids flew back and forth among us. We even stood on the corner an extra few minutes to further abuse that poor, ugly, lorn and probably miserable creature before we finally parted to go home for lunch, secretly sad about the whole thing.
I, with a fine summer melancholy on, went by way of Piccadilly – out of my way completely, that is. Not that I expected to find Agnes by the stream this early in the day. I just figured I’d sit there by myself a while and toss pebbles in the water and take stock of things. I came down to the bank from the culvert, the secret shortcut I always used when I did meet her. Really all it was was cutting through the woods near the ghost house at the top of the hill. Skirting past the wooden shack’s darkened windows always gave an extra spurt of terror to the proceedings, and then I could jump Batman-like off the rim of the big culvert and stroll with casual heroism along the bank to our usual spot.
So I did – and I was surprised to see that Agnes was there after all. She was kneeling by the water, bright and small with the sun right above her, the trees full green and bright overhead and the stream glittering. I was glad to see her, glad for the company, and quickened my pace. But Agnes only looked up briefly when she heard me coming. She was fiddling with something on a rock and there was a puckered scowl on her round monkey mug.
‘Hey, Agnes,’ I said, giving it a try anyway. ‘Hooray, huh? School’s over.’
‘So?’ she said. ‘I hate summers!’ I could see now that she was mashing up some Play-Doh, savagely kneading the jolly reds, blues and yellows into a single ball, streaked, mucky, brown. ‘Jessica and Michelle are going to camp together, all summer. I’m going to fly there at night and haunt them! I’m going to scare Michelle so much she’ll turn white and die.’
‘Whoa.’ I tugged my ear, stifled a yearning for lunch and my mother and home. These moods of hers could be suffocating, but they were part of the spirit of the place. ‘Can’t you go too?’ I asked.
She mashed the clay against the stone. ‘My father won’t let me. He says I’m too young. He says he’ll be too worried about me. My mother says I can’t upset Daddy; no one can ever upset Daddy. She says I should make other friends.’ Oh, the thunderous little frown she lifted to me. ‘I’ll bet you’re going to camp too.’
‘Well … not until all the way in August.’ But I didn’t want to think about that. I sat down next to her at the stream’s edge and began plucking up my pebbles. ‘Aren’t you going to go to day camp or anything?’
‘I hate day camp! I’m not going to go. I’m going to lie in a coffin all summer, all alone, under the ground. Then I’m going to come out at night and fly to Jessica’s camp and stand by Michelle’s window and sing a horrifying song.’
‘Well, yeah, I guess you could do that,’ I said. I looped a stone into the rushing middle depths with a satisfying plink. ‘Or you could just go to day camp and make some new friends like your mother says. It might be easier.’
‘I don’t want to meet new friends.’ It was really determined talk now through hardened jaws. She worked at her clay steadily. ‘I want to meet old people. I’m going to meet people so old that they’re in the past. They’ll be ghosts, like me. I’m going to go with my sister into her garden.’
I aimed for a fiery ball of reflected sunlight in a shallow eddy on the far side. Bullseye – shattered it into sparkles. ‘What do you mean? What garden?’
She was so long in answering, I looked over. The streaked Play-Doh was beginning to take shape into a figure now. Not limbs and head stuck onto a trunk either; a thing entire just sort of oozing out between her fingers. I’d never seen her actually do it before and it caught my attention. It gave me a thrill.
‘I had a dream one time,’ she said, ‘where Lena came.’
‘Your ghost sister. Yeah?’ I rolled my pebbles in my palm. I watched her work the clay.
‘She came and met me in a ghost place – a big, kind of – I don’t know – a big, kind of brown place where everything was broken. There were all these broken, old things lying around in the mud and some of them had arms and heads reaching out of the mud like monsters trying to crawl out, you know? And there were all these …’ She straightened a second to describe them in the sunlit air with her hand. ‘… scary trees, like, all around, that looked like monsters with giant fingers and scary faces staring down at us. And the sky was scary too with, like, clouds. And it was all cold.’ She returned to her figure, the little girl figure she had formed, Lena’s figure. ‘And Lena came there – wearing a white dress – she came there and met me and she said, “This isn’t where I really live. This is just where I have to come so I can meet you. Where I live it’s like a big garden with beautiful flowers all over everywhere like a carpet, and all the mothers are with their children and all the fathers are playing with them and everyone’s laughing.” And she said I could come there with her.’ She looked up, caught me gaping at her hands. ‘She said I could come with her to the garden where she lived.’ She took her figure from the rock and sat back in the dirt with it, bracing it against her scraped knee, shaping the details. ‘I wanted to go, too. I was going to. Only I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not. Once you went to the garden, see, you couldn’t come back and what if it was all like this place, I mean the scary place we were in, you know, with the trees and things and I could never get back – never.’
She stopped and I figured she was finished with her story and I couldn’t help saying something about this incredible figure she’d made and I blurted out, ‘God, Agnes! God, that is so neat! How do you do that?’
She hiked one shoulder, made a grimace of disdain. ‘I just make what I see,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but, I mean, could you, like, make … like a monster or something, like a Frankenstein, something really cool like that?’
She rolled up off her backside back onto her knees, back to the edge of the burbling stream. She held Lena’s figure close to her in one hand. Braced with the other hand on the bank, she gazed down into a quiet pool sheltered from the current by stones.
‘Oh, come on, Agnes,’ I said behind her, ‘don’t drown it. Make a Frankenstein or something, make something cool.’ She hesitated. ‘Come on, Agnes.’
After another moment, she sat back. She was still gazing away sort of dreamily – or maybe sort of insanely, I don’t know – into the shadow-pocked slope on the far side. But she wagged her head. ‘I could make a Frankenstein.’
‘Yeah!’ I dusted the last pebbles off my palms and went over to her on my knees. ‘Only not a Frankenstein.’ I already had the Aurora Frankenstein monster model on the shelf in my room. ‘Something else cool,’ I said. ‘Like a skeleton or something.’
Dreamily, Agnes folded Lena in two between her palms. She mashed the figure back into the muddy ball whence it had come. ‘You can’t do a good skeleton with Play-Doh,’ she said, gazing off. ‘Because of the ribs. Play-Doh’s too soft to make good ribs. I could do a skull though.’
‘Yeah! Great! Okay! Make a skull!’
Slowly, reflectively, Agnes seemed to come back to herself. She heaved a deep sigh and set about the task. I knelt beside her on the sunlit bank, by the dribbling stream, under the trees heavy with leaves on the ridge above us. I watched her as she worked. I was mesmerized by those delicate little fingers in the clay.
And she made a skull, all right, a great one. She let me keep it too. It would be worth – what? – about two million dollars by now. Unfortunately, that autumn —just around the same time I was flipping my baseball card collection into piles of burning leaves – I accidentally knocked the skull from my shelf and it was dented by the fall. Somehow, when I picked it up, when I saw how lopped it was, I became fascinated. My thumb, as if of its own volition, slowly burrowed into the skull’s side, making it crumble, the clay having dried. Then, in a trance, I crushed the thing, and rolled the hardened bits into a clump. After that, I played with it for a few minutes distractedly, and finally threw it into the trash.
But not that afternoon. I carried it home carefully that afternoon. I held it balanced on my palm. Going over and over its ghostly eyes with my own, admiring the detail of its evil grin. No one had one like it, no one – on Long Island, in the whole world – it was a oner. God, if she weren’t a girl, and such a spooky girl, and so mysterious and so hard to approach for things, she could have made a million cool things – we could’ve set up a stand outside my house, like a lemonade stand – we’d have made enough money to buy a car or something … But that was just a thought. I was content enough. Absorbed in contemplation of the thing and with wisps of Agnes’s creepy dream drifting across my imagination and with that incandescent, floaty Walk-Home-From-Agnes’s feeling permeating the periphery of verdant foliage and scrabbling squirrels and summer sky. Raising my eyes as I came home to Old Colony Lane was like being interrupted from a TV show or a good book. There was my house suddenly barging in on my meditations. A big, homey colonial – white clapboards, green shutters – it seemed strangely unfamiliar to me for half a second. And, as I came around the hedges, there was something else – something really unfamiliar that brought me out of my revery the rest of the way. Another car was in the driveway. A family-style Ford of some kind, a Thunderbird I think, shiny and blue but stodgy in a way – and anyhow a foreigner, an intruder in the house, which made me grimace when I saw it.
I remembered who it was, though. My mother had mentioned it to me a week or so before: my Aunt May had finally come for her visit. She was going to be staying with us for quite some time.