Ghosts of the American East
Market Street’s broad and unbothered sidewalks were meant for those who traversed here long ago. Not now. The A&P closed decades back. Jeweler, corner drugstore, and the other drugstore with the soda fountain all absent. And the cobbler man whose skinny storefront window displayed a silver machine with a rotating drum from which he’d dispense hot peanuts in a paper sack. All now spectral presences only some can see. I was a specter back then. I believed only some could see me. Most animals could: The stray dog wandering the alley. Thick-furred winter rabbits scavenging beneath the backyard bird feeder or huddled under the pines along the fence. The guinea pigs, scuttling amongst the wood shavings in their glass containers at the Woolworth store downtown, could see me as I pressed my face close, looked into their dark metallic eyes. I thought the lady who worked in the sewing and notions section could not see me as she shuffled past, but once she said excuse me as she pushed a wobble-wheeled cart down a cramped aisle.
Two dark-eyed brothers, teenagers, were able to see me and did not like it. I was returning from the candy store where the candy store man only saw me when I was with others, usually a cousin or some other kid. When I was by myself, he’d appear from behind the backroom curtain and disappear behind it again, like he was mistaken, the bell above the door hadn’t rung, I wasn’t fixed before the candy case, a coin clasped in anticipation. I knew then I contained ghost magic because I made sound silent, became invisible in lighted rooms. But those brothers saw me, and chunked sharp words and rocks at me. Some of the words I’d not heard before but understood their meanings. The boys’ faces contorted with jeers. They looked like the television news. I gathered a ripe handful of those rocks and put them in my pocket.
Sometimes I saw others who most did not. I saw a shadow man trail the son of the next-door neighbors six months after he’d returned from war. The shadow man followed him as he walked toward downtown, as he walked toward the bridge, as he walked toward the mill employment office. The shadow man said nothing, said to say nothing. Down at the south end of town where the dam goes across the river, the faint image of a boy bobbed about in the choppy current. His body washed up near the Fishers Ferry landing the summer before. An older cousin died in a motorcycle wreck. I saw him only once, thin as mist, walking at the edge of the woods near the state highway, his head twisted as though he was looking for something.
Mostly that has passed. More people can see me now, can hear me. That’s okay. I talk to them and they to me. The world is different these days. Or so it seems and doesn’t seem, oddly both at once. Still my renegade spirit sees more: my great-grandfather, dead over sixty years, waits in a chair on his porch for me to return from the corner store with a paper sack of red licorice whips. He speaks grumbly German to his wife through an open kitchen window, and they both laugh a little. My mother, passed on before my son turned two, makes her way to bingo at Saint Luke’s parish hall remembering aloud that she was one call away from last week’s jackpot. I try to reconcile these disparate worlds: the one we are in and the one we will join. Now and then I talk things over with Dempsey, my great-grandfather times many. Mostly I do it on walks down by the river with one of the dogs. Dempsey navigates a world where his White father gives him freedom yet sells away his Black mother, where he works to buy his wife, a Congo woman, property of a Huguenot planter who factors the loss of offspring into the price which costs Dempsey months, years. Dempsey tells me not to fret. That I know how the story ends. He eventually bought a mill and died in his sleep with credits in his accounts. I should tend to my own time, he tells me. I understand. Some days I reach in my pocket, then chuck a stone into the rolling water, watch the stone and then its ripples disappear. For now, small gestures like this are the best I can do.
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Jerry Wemple is the author of four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Become of You from Broadstone Books. He co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, the poetry anthologies Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry, both from Penn State Press. He also co-edited, with AD Stuart, Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania from Catamount Press.
