#queer ghosts

It’s strange how wanting distills itself. How mundanity can transform into craving with only the addition of lack and fear. And then how swiftly craving falls into obsession.

We eat our thin porridge and stringy coneys and talk of foods we ate Back Then, as if through the talking we could conjure the taste in our mouths. We remember the sweet cream and the tangy cheese, the comforting smell of mutton and rosemary together in a steaming stew, glowing white onions bobbing up big as eggs.

It was Abiel North’s wan boy Adonai who first mentioned mushroom ketchup, though how the lad had any memory of it none of us could tell, for he’d come over shipboard as a suckling. Still he whinged for it, for the saucy snap of the sauce, grated fine and cooked with vinegar until it was smooth. And soon enough he had all of us slack-jawed for the memory of the stuff.

But it weren’t so easily come by here.

You would think a mushroom is the same the world over. That our skill at picking the choicest ones from fields and forests would travel with us across the sea. But you would be wrong. For in this place are impostor mushrooms: to the eye perfectly like our familiar ones, but deadly enough to drop an ox.

Goody Warner lingered only an hour after eating one but by God that was enough. She died in such a rictus of pain that she couldn’t be unwound even to fit her in a coffin. We wrapped her quickly in a sheet and tucked her into the earth unboxed.

We learnt we couldn’t trust our eyes, or what we knew. Yet, still, we craved.

The autumn we first spied his white canoe upon the River was a sultry one. A haze of heat descended upon us when the spring freshet receded, and lingered long past Lammastide. Boys mucking in the mud of the riverbank saw him arrive, and made a hue and cry. Down came the men to the carrying place, clutching pikes, clubs, stones. He was pulling his beautiful canoe ashore.

Hand raised, he called out, a queer foreign taste to his voice, and the wide-eyed boys bolted to the trees. Our men squared up their shoulders. Big Tom Ness nodded and reached out a hand to help him mount the riverbank.

“I’m Thomas Ness,” he said, “And thou?”

“Lum Champyon,” said the traveler, and grinned, taking his hand. And so up we all came from the bank to the village.

Traders on the River are not unknown to us, though mostly they pass our village by--we are barely a scrape on the flesh of the forest--for bigger towns below, crowded upon the sea-strand. Most times when they come to shore they trade in pelts, and we do buy from them, for the winters here are knife-sharp. The traders know little of our tongue but we manage our barter with hands and nods, and figures scratched in dirt.

On that day, we led Lum Champyon to our small rough meetinghouse where we could gather and see his wares. We expected him to unload furs for us to pet and murmur over. Instead, he laid down a Linsey-Wolsey and with great ceremony began pulling mushrooms from his bags in handfuls, arranging them in tidy piles upon the cloth. Some were dried and threaded together on a string, like strange, wild necklaces. Others looked field-fresh, plump and barely bruised. Some were tiny, dark, withered things, just black shavings really, but darkly musky to the nose, in the manner of Gaulish truffles. Others were large and ochre and yellow, fat of stem and full of cap, smelling of butter and autumn leaves. We sat agape and silent watching this show of beauty.

Lum Champyon spoke not, only smiled, his fog-grey eyes darting from his work to us, over and over. When he had plucked the very last mushroom from the depths of his packs he sat back on his heels. Not a one of us could move, nor could we tear our eyes away from the treasure piled before us. After a moment, he shifted slightly, and with one open palm he motioned toward the bounty, made a gentle questioning noise. We were rapt, transfixed. Surely he could see it.

And yet, the old fear held us in thrall.

He rose then, backing slowly from the piles of mushrooms, palms still open. His meaning was clear: we could take our time in choosing what to buy. But he pointed skyward into the rafters, to where we all knew the midmorning sun blazed in its transit above, and making a wide circle with his arm and hand outstretched, let us know he would depart in a day with or without our leave. It seemed a fair agreement.

Big Tom Ness rose too. He’d been our brewer and taverner since we’d landed on these shores and knew his role well when strangers rolled in off the River.

“Come, traveler,” he said, beckoning Lum Champyon to his side, “there’s ale and cakes by my hearth to refresh thee.” And together they departed the meetinghouse, leaving the rest of us to wonder in silence at the breathtaking harvest piled at our feet.

Later that night, unable to contain our curiosity, we packed into Tom Ness’s house, after prayers and supper, to see Lum Champyon again.

We found him perched like a lord upon Tom’s Great Chair when we arrived, his old crimson doublet discarded by the fire and his dazzling white linen shirt open to his breastbone. Tom passed around mugs of ale while Lum Champyon held court, reaching into his pack and revealing treasure after treasure to amuse and delight us: a grey stone full of purple gems, dark brown seeds that lept and shook of their own accord as if they were alive, a huge green beetle kept captive on a tiny silver chain, a piece of a unicorn’s horn.

Finally he reached deep into his pack and liberated a fine redware jar sealed with beeswax. He held it up to us in the firelight, broke the seal with his knife, lifted off the lid, and bade us all look inside.

The glorious scent of the contents reached us first. The jar was full to the shoulder with glistening, fresh mushroom ketchup. We were speechless.

Lum Champyon slid a horn spoon out from a sleeve in the side of his pack and presented it to us, upright, in the manner of a sword. It was a proposal. A challenge. He swept the chamber with his keen grey eyes and we all looked away, craving, desirous, hungry, but cowards.

All excepting one.

“It should be me,” said Tom softly. “I haven’t wife or children. I would be an easy loss to bear.”

Lum Champyon grinned.

We protested, of course. But secretly, hadn’t we each hoped for this from the moment Lum Champyon covered the boards of the meetinghouse with glorious fat mushrooms? That one of us would offer himself up and taste what was forbidden so that we might all eat again?

Tom eased the spoon from between Lum Champyon’s sun-browned fingers.

He paused, drew a breath, and plunged the spoon deep into the jar. He drew out a proud, rounded spoonful and pushed it between his lips. For a moment, all was perfectly still.

Then a look came over Tom like the first ecstatic blush of love. He chewed slowly, slowly, savoring the mouthful, as all we stared. And when at last he swallowed, a hush fell over the company deeper than any quiet heard before or since.

“We should wait and see,” murmured Goody Hunter, eyes fixed on Tom Ness. Her voice was even, but limned with fear.

“You can wait,” said Lum Champyon, and twelve heads snapped round at this, the first sound of his voice. He smiled broadly, showing white teeth. “There is no harm in waiting.”

“Goody Warner suffered an hour before the Lord released her from her torment,” young Mehitabel Noyes whispered, lip a-quiver. As if we could forget.

So Tom nodded, set down the spoon, and refilled our mugs. We began to count away the hour. And then we counted two. And three. By the time we spilled out of the house and into the autumn night, the moon wheeled high above. Big Tom Ness, hale as a buck, waved us off from the threshold, and we, merry with drink and relief, vowed to open our purses at dawn and fill our larders with Lum Champyon’s mushrooms.

We were gathered at the meetinghouse at sunrise, carrying all we had to barter, and scarce able to contain our excitement. Those who’d managed to sleep dreamt of mushrooms simmering in stews, sliced and shining in gravies, cooked with butter and salt, pickled, preserved, pressed into dressed fowl and roasts. Every one of us awoke with a hunger. But when we pulled the meetinghouse doors open, we were greeted only with dust-motes. The piles and piles of mushrooms were gone.

We ran to the River. There was no trace of the white canoe, not even a scrape in the mud from whence it might have been pushed back into the current. As if it had never come, as if it had never gone. As if it had never been there at all.

We clambered back up the riverbank, the iron taste of dread filling our mouths, and made for Tom Ness’s house. When we arrived and shoved open the door, there was not a plate, not a chair, not a coal out of place inside. But Tom was gone, and Lum Champyon with him.

***************

We don’t know what to make of the cries in the woods at night now, on the far side of the River. They are not howls of fear, or of pain. Instead they are the ecstatic ululations of the marriage bed: hunger satisfied, craving relieved, desire fulfilled. It’s strange how wanting distills itself.

He is never coming back.

-----------------------

It is night, and Pentecost Waite waits. It’s something he’s grown accustomed to in the 300-odd years since his death. 

Living men have no idea how haunted they are, how myriad the phantoms that swirl about them. This surprised Pentecost when he became a phantom himself. Looking back, it would have been most useful if Reverend Fiske had but once mentioned this from his creaking pulpit, instead of droning ever on about witches. In near three centuries, Pentecost has not encountered a single witch, but he has seen ghosts galore. The truth is, the dead are everywhere.

When he considers it, he cannot help but think bitterly of his own death as the farcical end of a life barely begun. Twenty-five years of unspeakable longing. A single passionate but deeply unwise encounter in the Wenham Common Wood. And in the end, his handsome dalliance, Flee-Fornication Waldron, belatedly lived up to his name and, guilt-ridden, whispered of their sin to another. How swiftly a whisper travels in a community of the godly! Three days later, as his sister answered the door to the dark visages of the Deacon and Constable, Pentecost slipped out the back ell and began to run. 

He didn’t stop until he reached York, on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There, he wagered, his sins could not follow. But in the greatest irony of all, just as he tasted freedom from the stifling press of his former community, a chance to live out his days undisturbed, if not entirely fulfilled, Death came for him--as it so often does when man is least prepared.

The tavern where Pentecost had planned to spend his first night in York was full to bursting at an hour past sundown, as was his bladder on account of the plentiful cheap ale. He’d packed his clay pipe with borrowed tobacco, drew a rushlight from the fire and headed outside to heed nature’s insistence. In the gloaming, as Pentecost lit his pipe, the traitorous ale weakened his knees and he lost his footing. He hadn’t noticed the embankment there, and fell backwards down the slope, striking his head on a large stone. Blinding pain, and then nothing.

After death, lucky souls are immediately ascendant, or so Pentecost assumes. The unlucky linger on the earth. And the unluckiest, by force or circumstance become trapped, attached to some meaningless object: a kid-skin glove, an oak aumbry, a cocked beaver hat, or in Pentecost’s case, the stem of his clay smoking pipe. The best he can discern, he must have bitten it into pieces when his head struck the rock, and his soul rushed in. He is tethered to this clay piece like a ship to an anchor. He is not alone. More tethered souls dot the landscape around him, just out of reach. A garden of ghosts.

In death, the monotony is pervasive. Through the decades, Pentecost has watched the tavern become a home, watched children grow and die. Clothing and speech change, but people remain the same. He expected to go on like this, a silent shipwrecked observer, as the pipe stem crumbled to dust. 

That is, until HE came.

People tour the former tavern now in eager groups. They cluster in the back on the spot where the drunken taverners once pissed and speak loftily of The History Of The Place. Sometimes, one of the group hangs back when the rest have moved on. They gaze at the building, peruse the ground, pocket a sherd of broken pottery. And that is how Pentecost came to be found.

How the young man spotted the artifact in the shadow of the embankment, Pentecost will never know. In a moment, the pipe stem was plucked from the ground by nimble, curious fingers, and Pentecost with it. Gently pushed into a darkened pocket, he was free.

How to describe the whirlwind journey to the young man’s home later that day? Impossibly fast, a hurricane of color and speed in one of the horseless carriages Pentecost had observed for years with curiosity and trepidation. The young man’s rooms were small, simple, bright with windows. He emptied his pockets on a table by his bedstead, and examined the pipe stem again. Pentecost stood awkwardly in the corner, a guest without an invitation.

The young man, brown of hair and eye, was disarmingly handsome in a boyish way, polite and soft-spoken as he greeted his neighbors earlier on the doorstep. And he smelled divine. Something stirred within Pentecost.

That night, when the young man retired to bed, and with nothing preventing him, Pentecost slid beneath the covers. He lay awake all night, intoxicated by their proximity, memorizing every crease and curve of the young man’s face, the sound of his breath, the slow beat of his heart. That such exquisite intimacy unavailable in life could be so easily come by in death was both an amazement and a grief in turns.

In the morning, the young man arose and left the house. By night he returned. And so Pentecost slipped into a new and wondrous routine: nights spent pressed close beside the young man, and days spent exploring his rooms. 

The young man was an avid reader, Pentecost quickly discovered, and half-opened books lay on nearly every surface. Through experimentation Pentecost learned to turn the pages, and once he did, he read everything in sight. At last, he felt like he could face eternity. 

It is night, and Pentecost Waite waits. 

The young man is late this evening. When he arrives home, he looks weary from work. He has a quiet supper. He washes the dishes and spends a long while looking out the kitchen window towards the rising moon. When he makes his way to the bedroom, Pentecost follows.

The young man empties his pockets on the bedside table, as he does every night. Tonight he picks up the pipe stem there and turns it over and over between his fingers. Time seems to slow.

“I know you’re here,” he says at last. He raises his head to look around the room. 

Pentecost freezes.

“You’re the one who’s been reading all my books, aren’t you? I see the shape of your head on the pillow every morning.”

The young man holds up the pipe stem, eyes still searching the room. 

“You came in on this, and now you’re here with me.” It’s more of a statement than a question.

Silence hangs thick as a curtain. After a moment, the young man opens a drawer in the bedside table and slides the pipe stem in gently, reverently, as if it were Pentecost’s immortal soul itself.

“So you don’t get lost ever again,” the young man murmurs. 

Pentecost realizes he is quivering.

Slowly, slowly, the young man raises his arms, pulls his shirt off over his head. He’s beautiful in the half-light, achingly so. They face each other in the deep stillness that follows. Then the young man holds out his hand.

“Come to bed,” he says, and smiles.

Pentecost doesn’t wait, not one single minute more.