The Wrath of Angels

43

When I was a boy, I thought everyone over thirty was old: my parents were old, my grandparents were real old, and after that there were just people who were dead. Now my view of aging was more nuanced: there were people in my immediate circle of acquaintances who were younger than I, and people who were older. In time there would be far more of the former than the latter, until eventually I might look around and find that I was the oldest person in the room, which would probably be a bad sign. I recalled Phineas Arbogast as being almost ancient, but he had probably not been more than sixty when I first met him, and possibly even younger than that, although he had lived a hard life, and every year of it was written on his face.

Phineas Arbogast was a friend of my grandfather and, boy, could he talk. There were people who crossed the street when they saw Phineas coming, or dived into stores to avoid him, even if it meant buying an item that they didn’t need, just so they wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation with him. He was a lovely man, but every incident in his day, however minor, could be transformed into an adventure on the scale of the Odyssey. Even my grandfather, a man of seemingly infinite tolerance, had been known to pretend that he wasn’t home when Phineas dropped by unexpectedly, my grandfather having been given some warning of his approach by the belchings of Phineas’s old truck. On one such occasion, my grandfather had been forced to hide beneath his own bed as Phineas went from window to window, peering inside with his hands cupped against the glass, convinced that my grandfather must be in there somewhere, either sleeping or, God forbid, lying unconscious and requiring rescue, which would have provided Phineas with another tale to add to his ever-expanding collection of stories.

More often than not, though, my grandfather would sit and listen to Phineas. In part he did so because, buried somewhere in every one of Phineas’s tales, was a nugget of something useful: a piece of information about a person (my grandfather was a retired sheriff’s deputy, and he never quite set aside his policeman’s love of secrets), or a little shard of history or forest lore. But my grandfather also listened because he understood that Phineas was lonely: Phineas had never married, and it was said that he had long held a flame for a woman named Abigail Ann Morrison, who owned a bakery in Rangeley that Phineas was known to frequent when he went up to his cabin in the area. She was a single woman of indeterminate age, and he was a single man of indeterminate age, and somehow they managed to circle each other for twenty years until Abigail Ann Morrison was sideswiped by a car while delivering a box of cupcakes to a church social, and so their dance was ended.

So Phineas spun his stories, and sometimes people listened and sometimes they did not. I had forgotten most of those that I heard; most, but not all. There was one in particular that had stayed with me: the story of a missing dog and a lost girl in the Great North Woods.

The Cronin Rehabilitation and Senior Living Center was situated a few miles north of Houlton. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside – a series of blankly modern buildings built in the seventies, decorated in the eighties, and allowed to remain in stasis ever since, the paintwork and furnishings restored and repaired when required, but never altered. Its lawns were well tended, but there was little color. Cronin’s was nothing more or less than a neutral corner of God’s waiting room.

Whatever the subtleties of defining the aging process, there was no doubt that Phineas Arbogast was now very old indeed. He lay sleeping on an armchair in the room that he shared with another, marginally younger, man who was reading a newspaper in bed when I arrived, his eyes magnified enormously by thick spectacles. Those owl eyes focused on me with alarm as I approached Phineas.

‘You’re not going to wake him, are you?’ he asked. ‘The only peace I get is when that man is asleep.’

I apologized, and said it was important that I spoke with Phineas.

‘Well, on your head be it,’ he said. ‘Just permit me to get my gown on before you go rousing David Copperfield over there.’

I waited while he got out of bed, put on his gown and slippers, and prepared to find somewhere to read undisturbed. I said that I was sorry for a second time, and the old man replied, ‘I swear, when that man dies God Himself will move out of heaven and join the devil in hell to get a break from his yammering.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t tell him I said that, will you? God knows, I’m fond of the old coot.’

And away he went.

I remembered Phineas as a big man with a gray-brown beard, but the years had picked the meat from his bones just as the fall wind will denude a tree of its leaves before the coming of winter, and Phineas’s eternal winter could not be far off. His mouth had collapsed in on itself with the loss of his teeth, and his head was entirely bald, although a little of his beard remained. His skin was transparent, so that I could count the veins and capillaries beneath it, and I thought I could discern not just the shape of his skull, but the skull itself. According to the nursing assistant who had shown me to his room, there was nothing wrong with Phineas: he had no major illnesses beyond an assortment of the various ailments that beset so many at the end of their lives, and his mind was still clear. He was simply dying because it was his time to die. He was dying because he was old.

I pulled up a chair and tapped him lightly on the arm. He woke suddenly, squinted at me, then found his spectacles on his lap and held them to the bridge of his nose without putting them on, like a dowager duchess examining a suspect piece of china.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’

‘My name is Charlie Parker. You and my grandfather were friends.’

His face unclouded, and his smile shone. His hand reached out and shook mine, and his grip was still strong.

‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’

His left hand came out and joined the right, like a man being saved from drowning.

‘You too, Phineas.’

‘You’re a damned liar. Give me a scythe and a hood, and I could play Death himself. If I stumble by a mirror when I’m up to take a piss at night, I think that’s the grim old bastard come for me at last.’

He took a brief coughing fit then, and sipped from a can of soda that stood by his chair.

‘I was sorry to hear about your wife and your little girl,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I know you maybe don’t like folk reminding you about it, but it has to be said.’

He took my hand in his again, there was a final tightening, and the hands withdrew.

I had a box of candy under my arm. He looked at it bemusedly.

‘I got no teeth left,’ he explained, ‘and candy plays hell with my dentures.’

‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t bring you any candy.’

I opened the box. Inside were five Cohiba Churchill cigars. Cigars had always been his vice, I knew. My grandfather would share one with him at Christmas, then complain about the smell for weeks after.

‘If you can’t have Cuban, I figure the best Dominicans will have to do,’ I said.

Phineas took one from the box, held it beneath his nose, and sniffed it. I thought he might be about to cry.

‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You mind taking an old man for a walk?’

I said that I didn’t mind at all. I helped him to put on an extra sweater, and a muffler, then his coat and gloves and a bright red woolen hat that made him look like a marooned buoy. I found a wheelchair, and together we set off for a stroll around those dull grounds. He lit up once we were out of sight of the main building, and happily talked and puffed his way to a small ornamental lake by the edge of a fir copse, where I sat on a bench and listened to him some more. When he eventually had to pause for breath, I took the opportunity to steer the conversation in another direction.

‘A long time ago, when I was a teenager, you told my grandfather and me a story,’ I said.

‘I told you both lots of stories. Your grandfather was still here, he’d say that I told too many for his liking. He hid under his bed from me once, you know that? He thought I didn’t see him, but I did.’ He chuckled. ‘The old fart. I kept meaning to use it against him sometime, but he upped and died before I could, damn him.’

He drew again on the cigar.

‘This one was different,’ I said. ‘It was a ghost story, about a little girl in the North Woods.’

Phineas held the smoke in for so long I was convinced it was going to start coming out of his ears. At last, when he’d had time to think, he let it out and said, ‘I remember it.’

Of course you do, I thought, because a man doesn’t forget a tale like that, not if he’s been a part of it. A man doesn’t forget hunting for his lost dog – Misty, wasn’t that her name? – in the depths of the forest, and finding her all tangled up in briars with a little barefoot girl waiting nearby, a girl who was both there and not there, both very young and very, very old, a girl who claimed to be lost and lonely even as those briars started snaking around the man’s shoes, trying to hold him there so that the girl could have company, so that she could draw him down to the dark place in which she dwelled.

No, you don’t forget a thing like that, not ever. There was a truth to the tale that Phineas Arbogast told to my grandfather and me, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He had wanted to tell the story, to share what he had seen, but some details needed to be changed, because one had to be careful about such matters.

‘You said that you saw the girl somewhere up near Rangeley,’ I said. ‘You said she was the reason why you stopped going up to your cabin there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Phineas. ‘That’s what I said.’

I didn’t look at him as I spoke, but I kept my voice soft and there was no accusation or blame to my tone. This was not an interrogation, but I needed to know the truth. It was important if I was to find that plane.

‘Do you think she roams, this girl?’

‘Roams?’ asked Phineas. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What I’m wondering is if all of the North Woods is her territory, or if she just sticks to one small area? Because my feeling is that she’s linked to a place, that maybe she has, well, a lair, for want of a better word. It could be where her body lies, and that’s where she returns to, and she can’t or won’t stray too far from there.’

‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Phineas, ‘but I guess that sounds about right.’

Now I looked at him. I touched his arm, and he turned his face to me.

‘Phineas, why did you say that you were beyond Rangeley when you saw her? You weren’t anywhere near Rangeley. You were farther north, past Falls End. You were deep in the County, weren’t you?’

Phineas looked at his cigar.

‘You’re spoiling my smoke,’ he said.

‘I’m not trying to catch you out. I’m not blaming you for altering the details of the story. But it’s important that you tell me where you were, as best you can, when you saw that girl. Please.’

‘How about a story for a story?’ said Phineas. ‘Suppose you tell me why you need to know?’

So I told him of an old man on his deathbed, and a plane in the Great North Woods, and I told him what linked Harlan Vetters’ search for a boy named Barney Shore to the discovery of that plane: the ghost of a girl. The plane lay in her territory, wherever that might be, and despite Harlan Vetters’ story about malfunctioning compasses and lost bearings, I believe he did have some notion of where exactly that plane rested. Perhaps he had chosen not to share the location because he didn’t trust his son, not entirely, or because he was dying and confused, and couldn’t keep all of the details straight in his head.

Or maybe he did share that detail, but only with his daughter, and she had held it back from me for reasons of her own. She didn’t know me, and it could be that she wanted to see what I’d do with the information she’d already given me before she entrusted me with that final, crucial element.

When I was finished telling my tale, Phineas nodded his approval. ‘That’s a good story,’ he said.

‘You’d know,’ I replied.

‘I would,’ he said. ‘Always have.’

His cigar had gone out, so engrossed had he been. He lit it again, taking his time with it.

‘What were you doing up there, Phineas?’

‘Poachin’,’ he replied, once the cigar was going again to his satisfaction. ‘Bear. And maybe mournin’ some.’

‘Abigail Ann Morrison,’ I said.

‘You got a memory almost as good as mine. I suppose you need to, given what you do.’

Now he told the story again, and it was more or less as he had told it before, but the location was changed to deep in the County, and he had a landmark to offer.

‘Through the woods, behind that girl, I thought I saw the ruins of a fort,’ he said. ‘It was all overgrown, more forest than fort, but there’s only one fort up in those woods. Wherever she hides, wherever that plane lies, it’s not far from Wolfe’s Folly.’

It was growing colder, but Phineas did not want to return to his room, not yet. He still had half a cigar left.

‘Your grandfather knew that I was lying about where I saw that girl,’ said Phineas. ‘I didn’t want to tell him that I’d been poachin’, and he didn’t want to be told, and it was none of his business if I was crying for Abigail Ann, but I wanted him to understand that I’d seen the girl. He was the only person I could tell who wouldn’t have laughed me away, or turned his face from me. Even back then, people in the County didn’t care to hear the fort being brought up in conversation. She still comes to me in my sleep, that girl. Once you’ve seen something like that, you don’t forget it.

‘But you were also part of the reason for changing the location. I didn’t want to be putting fool ideas into your head. We don’t talk about that part of the woods, not if we can help it, and we don’t go there. If it hadn’t been for that damned dog, I’d never have gone there.’

I had brought a copy of the Maine Gazetteer, and with Phineas’s help I marked the area in which Wolfe’s Folly lay. It was less than a day’s hike from Falls End.

‘Who do you think she is?’ I said.

‘Not ‘‘who’’,’ said Phineas, ‘but ‘‘what’’. I think she’s a remnant, a residue of anger and pain, all bound up in the form of a child. She might even have been a little girl once: they say there was a child in that fort, the daughter of the commanding officer. Her name was Charity Holcroft. That girl is long gone. Whatever’s left bears the same relation to her as smoke does to fire.’

And I knew that what he said was true, for I had seen anger take the form of a dead child, and heard similar stories from Sanctuary Island at the far edge of Casco Bay, and I thought that something of my own lost daughter still walked in the shadows, although she was not composed entirely of wrath.

‘I used to wonder if she was evil, and I came to the conclusion that she was not,’ said Phineas. ‘She’d have done me harm, but I don’t think she’d have meant it, not really. She may be angry, and dangerous, but she’s lonely too. You might as well call a winter storm evil, or a falling tree. Both will kill you, but they won’t consciously set out to do it. They’re forces of nature, and that thing in the shape of a little girl is kind of a storm of emotion, a little whirlwind of pain. Maybe there’s something so terrible about the death of children, so against the order of things, that this residue, if it sticks around, naturally finds form in a child.’

His cigar was almost done. He stamped it out beneath his foot, then tore apart the butt and scattered the tobacco on the breeze.

‘You can tell I’ve thought on this over the years,’ he said. ‘All I can say for sure is that’s her place, and if you’re going in there then you need to watch out for her. Now take me back to my room, please. I don’t want a chill to get into my bones.’

I wheeled him back to the center, and we said our goodbyes. His roommate was back in his bed, still reading the same newspaper.

‘You brought him back,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’da drowned him.’

He sniffed the air. ‘Someone’s been smoking,’ he said. He shook his newspaper at Phineas. ‘You smell like Cuba.’

‘You’re an ignorant old man,’ said Phineas. ‘I smell like the Dominican Republic.’

He reached into a pocket of his coat, and waved a fresh Cohiba at his rival. ‘But if you’re good, and you let me nap in peace for an hour or two, maybe I’ll let you wheel me out to the lake before supper, and I’ll tell you a story . . .’