Chapter V #5
“Oh,” Bernadette said, glancing down, and I followed her gaze and almost said oh myself but then found I couldn’t say anything, I could only stare at the planchette, which had been, a few minutes ago, in the middle of the Ouija board and was now, somehow, though none of us had felt it move, firmly pointing to the word NO.
Please, Henry. Are you there?
NO
I searched for mythologists in New York City and found many incredibly sketchy websites and one potentially promising lead: the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College.
There was a professor of classical mythology listed there: Natalie Beard.
I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I sent her a quick hey, how ya doing, do you know anything about contacting ghosts?
email, then set off on another nighttime walk.
This time I had a destination, and I headed to Trinity Churchyard, a twenty-minute subway journey I spent hovering somewhere above my body, thinking of the planchette, thinking of Henry, thinking of Evelyn, thinking of the ghost in the corner of the room.
Had I called it with the Ouija board? Was it (hopefully) gone for good now?
Trinity Churchyard was attached to Trinity Church, which at one point held the title of tallest building in the United States but was now dwarfed by all the skyscrapers in the Financial District.
The churchyard, a burial ground, was the final resting place of a handful of early Americans, including Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Hercules Mulligan, and Richard Churcher, a child whose grave boasts the oldest carved gravestone in the city.
(“Do you know the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard and a churchyard, kids?” my father would have said.
I’ll save you the trouble of googling: a graveyard is generally attached to a church, and a cemetery isn’t.
And a churchyard doesn’t have to have any graves at all, but it often does.)
Of course both the church and the churchyard were closed for the day, but I pressed my face against the metal gates and stared inside.
There were no ghosts around, which was a bit unusual. I guess the Farthings never had a chance to be buried down here. We preferred unmarked graves.
I closed my eyes. The metal bars of the gates were freezing against my cheeks.
I couldn’t stop thinking of the third daughter thing.
A whole lifetime of Aunt Bea’s stories about the Farthing girls being descended from Persephone and now I had to confront the fact that it might actually be true, not just some story she had made up to keep us entertained as children.
I don’t know how long I stood there with my eyes closed, but when I opened them, there was a face just a few feet away from my face, and I screamed and fell backward, hard, landing on my butt on the sidewalk.
“I wasn’t grave robbing!” I shouted, immediately unsure why that was where my mind went.
“Pretty hard to grave rob from outside the graveyard, I would imagine,” the priest said, for I guess that’s what he was, as he had the collar thing and he wore all black, like me. “Are you all right?” he added, as I scrambled to get back to my feet.
The priest took a big set of keys from his pocket, on a big rusty metal key chain, and unlocked a door in the gate.
Obviously I thought of Fleabag as he pulled the door open and motioned with his head for me to come in.
He was about my parents’ age and not unpleasant to look at, with a killer smile and really kind eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, slipping through.
“Hamilton fan?” he guessed.
“Sorry?”
He started to quietly rap the first few bars from the musical, which is when I remembered that Hamilton’s grave was just beyond the gates, and I’m sure attracted many musical theater-obsessed fans.
“Oh,” I said. “No, nothing weird like that. I’m just trying to commune with a ghost.”
What was … wrong with me? I thought maybe I had stayed out in the cold so long that my brain had partially frozen, leaving the place that formed coherent language sluggish and strange, causing me to spew absolute nonsense at this poor (hot) priest.
But to his credit, he kept smiling. “What’s your plan, then?”
I sort of shrugged a little (not sure my shoulder movement was detectable underneath my enormous coat) and flapped my arms once, like a baby bird.
“I just lost someone close to me. Well. Two people, really. But one of them is dead. Actually, they’ve been dead a long time.
But I really need to talk to them. I have a question for them.
And I thought a cemetery, maybe—sorry, graveyard—I thought maybe this would be a place that’s, I don’t know …
closer? To them? I don’t know where he’s actually buried, or else I would have gone there.
But anyway. I came here. Does that make sense? ”
“It makes perfect sense,” the priest said.
“Really?”
“No. But you seem harmless. So have at it.”
There was a bench nearby, and the priest gestured to it now, so I went and sat down.
The stone was cold under my legs. I remembered all the superstitions around graveyards—hold your breath as you drove by one, be careful not to walk over any graves, never leave a new grave open overnight.
We were squeamish about the dead, us humans.
All these hang-ups and fears and mythologies around something that was inevitable.
One thing all humans had in common: one day we’d all be dead.
Dressed in black sitting in the middle of a graveyard in the dead of winter, in the dead of night, thinking about death.
This was dramatic even by Farthing sister standards.
I was trying to center myself. I was thinking about the planchette again, how it had moved without us feeling anything, how it had pointed to NO and then flatly refused to answer any of our follow-up questions (okay wait is this actually Henry though, if you’re not Henry, do you KNOW Henry, who was that other ghost that just appeared for a minute, what is it like to be dead) (this last one was from Clara, who sort of hijacked the session by the end of it and went on a long tangent I won’t bother repeating here).
The priest had wandered away but was still in view, and every once in a while, he glanced back at me, making sure I wasn’t vandalizing headstones or taking any unauthorized stone rubbings (legal in most states but assuredly not allowed here, where the repeated motion of the rubbing could damage the delicate old stone).
He was out of earshot but I whispered anyway, releasing my words into the frigid air, hoping they would freeze into icicles and cut into the earth, wriggling their way like snakes into the ground, ending up wherever Henry was.
“I think you’re mad at me,” I began. “And I get that, I really do. I said some very fucked-up things and I’m truly sorry.
But now Evelyn is gone and everything is so much more fucked up.
I just need to know I didn’t ruin everything.
I just need to know she’s okay. I have …
this feeling? I have this feeling you’re together somewhere, and you can’t keep being together without at least letting me know she’s okay.
It’s not fair if you don’t tell me if she’s okay.
Whatever I did, however wrong it was, you have to tell me if she’s okay, Henry. ”
After a few minutes, the priest came back over and sat down on the bench next to me.
“Did it work?” he asked. “Have you gotten your answer?”
“No,” I said miserably, feeling cold and embarrassed and sad.
“Might I offer some advice?”
“Sure.”
“The people in our lives, the ones who have passed on, they’re all around us.
They’re here and there and everywhere. But they don’t often respond to demands for performance.
They have more important things to do. A whole eternity of important things to do.
Down here … we’re a blip in time. A mere second in an endless expanse of hours.
Whatever you said to this soul, it might not reach them for another thousand years.
And by that time, you’ll be with them again, able to ask them right to their face. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense, but it’s not super helpful for me now,” I said.
The priest chuckled. “Indeed not, I admit.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Anything.”
“Do you actually believe in an afterlife? In a Heaven or a Hell or a Purgatory or, like, a Dante’s Inferno situation?”
“I do,” he replied. “I’m not sure I would use any of that exact language to describe it, but I believe there is a place for all our souls, and I believe it is beautiful and will offer unending peace and comfort and love.”
“Right. So obviously he won’t answer me right away, if he’s surrounded by all that.”
“Maybe you already have your answer,” the priest said. “Maybe it’s just something you aren’t ready to admit to yourself.”
He was cute, that priest, but in that moment, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
I didn’t have the answer at all. I didn’t have any answers. Not a single solitary one.
I stopped at Dark Magic again on my way home.
“What even are your hours?” I asked the girl behind the counter, who looked slightly less bored tonight.
She shrugged and picked at her cuticles. “I guess, like, whenever I want. How did your little séance go?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t work. Or maybe it did work. Something answered, maybe, or maybe one of my sisters was just fucking with me and is too afraid to admit it now and I potentially saw a ghost, but that’s also not that unusual for me, so, it’s ultimately hard to say.”
“How many sisters do you have?”
“Three,” I said.
“I’m an only child.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s okay, until I want somebody to use the Ouija board with me. What do you mean it’s not unusual for you to see ghosts?”