The things that people leave behind. The phrase came to me while I waited for my tour group to assemble, and I rolled it over a few times in my mind. I loved a good wistful turn of phrase. Maybe I could use this one tonight.
It had come from my best friend Ella, who moved away the summer I was seventeen.
Before leaving, her parents had their house fixed up, and repainted all of the interior walls in rich, creamy colors that they’d never bothered with when the place was just their home. Before they had, they let the two of us write and draw all over the walls, leaving our marks for who knew who to find. Or more likely, for no one to find at all. I said something to this effect as I retraced my initials and wreathed them with lead pencil flowers – orchids and stargazer lilies – and Ella sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’re too obsessed with that sort of thing Kate,” she said.
“What sort of thing?” I asked.
“What people in the future will find; that sort of thing. The things that people leave behind.”
She wasn’t wrong. My summer employment two years later might have been enough to prove that. I had just finished my first year of college – inland – and come back home to live with my parents and younger sister Louise for the summer. I had also just landed a pretty sweet summer gig, conducting ghost tours for tourists hankering for a bit of after-dinner tragedy and haunting while they digested their clam chowder and lobster. It was your basic walking tour spiced with some solid campfire yarns, but it was a hell of a lot better than Louise’s gig serving ice cream and fish and chips in the snack bar at the mini-golf place.
I loved my job. Gazing out at my motley collection of couples and families, decked in unspooky summer casuals and eager for the kinds of chilling tales that a strong ocean breeze can only augment, I savored the good thing I had going. Jackie, the woman who ran the tours, had taken all of her guides through the basic stories, which we then had some license to make our own. I liked the old stories, the ones that played out in cracked sepia tone in my mind in contrast to the tabloid-fresh colors of recent tragedies, new wounds rendered garishly in Benday dots. Telling stories about near-current events felt exploitative to me, squirm-inducing and distasteful. But the old stories felt like a nice bit of oral tradition, or even idealized portraiture. I made these figures live again every single night, even if it was only for these little camera-toting clusters of people who would forget most of it before bedtime.
I blamed my parents wholly for my obsession with things and people past. My mother, a high school art teacher who did grave rubbings on the weekends and told me the local legends in hushed tones when I was young – widow’s walks and devastating storms, suicides and orphans. My father, a mechanic who loved the music and movies of his parents’ time – of their parents’ time – who introduced me to flickering silver-skinned ghosts with black-rimmed eyes on late night television. Dewy young women in the thrall of vampires. Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson as Heathcliff and Catherine, arm and arm on the moors in the grasp of mortal immortal love forevermore. My modes were, most decidedly, tragic and romantic.
“I bet a lot of you don’t know that this beach is haunted,” I said, like I always did, my lips curling into a smile. When I stopped the group at the beach, leaning against the concrete wall that separated the sands and the sidewalk, it was time to launch into my favorite story of all. The story of Josephine Hanson and Rupert Bowe.
Rupert Bowe was a young man who lived not far from where I grew up, only he lived there in the early part of the twentieth century, and the house he had lived in had since burned down and been built over again, with a little service station and convenience store where the youngest of the local teens liked to hang out after school. It had been a big gray house inherited from his father, all peeling paint and drafty, half-empty rooms. Or so I imagined when resting on the public bench across the street from the service station, rebuilding the Bowe residence in my mind.
“Rupert Bowe was an orphan after losing his father to tuberculosis – his mother had died or left town long before – and he worked as a cobbler, just as his father had,” I told the group. “He was dark-eyed, slim, and shy. Handsome enough, but not someone who people took much notice of. He lived a small, quiet life here in town.” I turned to the beach, and some members of the group craned their necks to see the expanse of sand that had been in front of us all along. “Rupert was a bit of a naturalist, and when he wasn’t in his shop he went walking along this beach and jotting down little notes and making sketches too. His favorites were the piping plovers.” That was one of my details, the piping plovers. I was especially proud of its specificity, which I thought would make the whole thing that much more convincing. “He was well-liked, kind if just a little strange, and the assumption was that he would always be there in his shop, maybe taking a wife and maybe not, mending shoes and smiling politely at his customers.”
I leaned in conspiratorially. “But there was one thing, one very important thing, in Rupert’s life that turned out to be neither small nor quiet. And that was a love affair with a girl named Josephine Hanson.”
Doomed romance. I was sure I had their attention now. They were almost always quiet for this one, the loudest and most skeptical gum-chewing boys swatted into silent submission by mothers who wanted to know how it all ended, though they doubtlessly had their suspicions right from the start.
“Josephine was a poised young woman from a good family – a better family, than Rupert’s. He would see her in church. She had friendly blues eyes, stood very straight, and could carry a tune. She fascinated Rupert. But she was engaged.”
A woman near the front nodded a sad, knowing nod, pushing her glasses frames with one hand while the other rested atop her son’s head, somewhere between a sign of affection and a warning to behave. I continued.
“Her fiancé, Thomas Merchant, wasn’t what people called a bad man. He was generally well-liked, known to be charitable, good-looking and broad-shouldered and, seemingly to most, a suitable choice of husband for any girl, particularly a lovely girl like Josephine.”
Sometimes I could almost stand outside myself while I spoke, hearing myself telling the story again and again, in almost the same words and with nearly-identical vocal inflections. Think of how you feel when you tell one of those jokes or stories that you tell every new friend you make – then multiple it a few times.
“The day after a big dance in town, and Josephine came into Rupert’s shop with a pair of shoes that had lost a heel. She didn’t mind about the shoes, but Thomas hadn’t been much fun the night before. He hadn’t wanted to dance but was certainly in no mood to watch Josephine dance with anyone else. That was something that really only Josephine knew so far: that Thomas was a very jealous man. And now there was this young man with his kind dark eyes and his nervous manner, smiling shyly at her.” I smiled too, my most tragic smile, melancholy to the point of being misty. “And all Rupert saw was the girl he’d dreamed of, missing a heel. He made a little joke. Something about Cinderella.
“The two of them talked awhile that day, and fell into a close companionship thereafter. They would go walking together on the beach and meet one another at night, always keeping it secret, and gradually falling in love.” I took a breath. Time to let the other shoe drop. They were here for a ghost story, and the pieces were in place.
“It can’t be known exactly how Thomas found out.” I figured it was okay to skimp on the details here. I did give them the piping plovers early on, after all. “But he was well-known and well-liked, and that’s like having extra sets of eyes everywhere, looking out for you and out at yours. And he was a jealous man.”
I turned from them and looked out at the crashing waves a moment before finishing the story, then faced the group again. (It would have been more dramatic to finish the tale while gazing out at the sea, but with fifteen or twenty people in tow, there is a need to project.)
“They found Rupert on the beach. He had been beaten, and his pockets were emptied. They blamed thieves; but if they were really thieves, why that final finishing blow? A knife, buried in the quiet young cobbler’s heart?
The engagement was broken off. And then war broke out and Thomas got himself killed anyway, somewhere in France. It was Josephine who remained in town, and never married, and was said to go walking on the beach alone, at night. And when she died, peacefully, of old age, she was still said to go walking on the beach. And it was said that another figure would join her.”
I loved it when I finished this one. My eyes would scan the crowd, and I would see their eyes scanning the beach at sunset, hoping to see Rupert of Josephine, and maybe almost seeing them, if I could just make them imagine it well enough. I reminded them that the story was true, that you could read the obituaries on microfiche in the town library, minus the really salient and interesting details, of course. I would wait just a little longer than I usually did before moving them on to the next spot (a haunted bed and breakfast, if you were wondering), letting the story linger. It wasn’t just my favorite part of the tour, I was coming to realize as the summer went on. It was my favorite part of the day, of the entire season. Because, frankly, my life was distinctly lacking in salient and interesting details outside of century-old love affairs and murders.
With little to do after I said good-bye to my tour group, I would sometimes drop in on Louise and give her the kind of hard time that little sisters were supposed to get. But I didn’t feel like embarrassing her on this particular night. I wandered back to the beach by myself and spent some time just thinking. I was surprised how few of my friends had come back to town. I had never found anyone who you would have called a replacement for Ella – long-standing friendships aren’t so interchangeable as we all like to pretend – but it seemed like I’d been through a lot with all those kids who had stood up at graduation with me, and it was weird knowing I’d never see some of them again.
Still not ready to go home as darkness began to fall, I hit the local pizza joint for an entirely-unnecessary slice of pineapple pizza, the kind that fills your whole plate and you need to fold in half to eat. I smiled at Joe behind the counter, the little brother of our high school quarterback Jeremy McGee. I wasn’t sure if he knew me or not. I retreated to a corner and people-watched awhile: local high schoolers, some who I recognized and some I didn’t, talked about things that already seemed youthful and inconsequential after my big year away in college; a few tourists settled in to discuss tomorrow’s plans over a late dinner.
There were more days like this one, slow and largely lonely. I could only take so much of Louise, who had gradually stopped looking up to me and starting seeing me as another old weirdo like our parents, only with better taste in music and a more extensive collection of eyeliner. I retreated to my room more often than I used to, sitting and drawing for hours or just drifting off to sleep without anyone noticing.
I woke one day and looked around my room – haphazard stacks of books and CDs, a half-finished watercolor, stuff from my dorm room that I had never bothered to pack into a closet and never would – and remembered the night back in my high school days when I’d orally delivered my last will and testament at dinner. All my mix tapes would go to Louise, who could perhaps appreciate the intricacies of my carefully orchestrated aural collages. For Mom there were all of my sketches, especially the flowers, because she would best know how to curate them. For Dad I left my library of paperback movie star biographies: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Jimmy Dean. My mother had cut me off. Even with a morbid streak of her own, she knew this was too much. I was sixteen for Chrissakes. I didn’t bring it up again. Reflecting on it years later, flexing the numbness out of the hand that I’d slept on the wrong way, I determined that I hadn’t accumulated many more things of interest. But Louise probably wouldn’t appreciate my tapes anymore.
I decided to do something kind of weird. It came to me after one of the tours, maybe because of this kid who’d been in the group that night, who’d repeated “piping plovers” over and over again after I told Rupert and Josephine’s story, rolling the words off of his tongue for fun until his mother shushed him. I literally had “piping plovers” ringing in my brain when I decided that the following afternoon before work I’d head out to the beach with my sketchbook and watch the little birds that, according to my story, Rupert Bowe used to love.
I started with a trip to the library that morning, and when I headed to the beach at about two, I had slipped a cellophane-jacketed book on birds into the bottomless, army-green cotton bag that I lugged around for pretty much every journey past my own driveway. The piping plover was an Atlantic shorebird, endangered, known and named for its melodious song. That’s what it said in the book, and there was a picture. Around town, if you had asked, you might have received a less objective description. The birds were spoken of with either reverence or resentment, depending on who was broaching the subject. For people who recycled their trash and bandied about words like “biodiversity,” the plovers were wonderful, fragile creatures that had been left in our dubious care. For people who were annoyed at sections of beach being closed down each spring and summer to protect the birds’ young from harm, the plovers were a menace, little devils with nothing better to do than spoil everyone’s summer. I suppose I fell closer to the former camp, but I can’t deny feigning an allegiance to the latter on occasion in high school, if only to impress the cute guys who’d rather be seen as avid partiers than tree-huggers.
From the sound of it, the odds were fairly stacked against me when it came to actually seeing one of the birds in the flesh to sketch. Aside from being endangered, and having their nesting areas protectively cordoned off from human beings, the plovers promised to be elusive because their chief mating season had passed, what with the end of summer approaching at last. But along with my library book and sketchpad I carried with me a little faith, certain that my odd but romantic quest would yield lovely results – a bit of inspiration and hopefully some of the better drawings I’d done that summer.
I sat and waited awhile.
Seagulls dipped and glided in the air, cars passed and fast food wrappers occasionally rolled by like brightly colored, corporate tumbleweeds.
I waited some more.
Nothing special happened – no endangered species, no wandering humans, no ghosts. So I started drawing my own birds, letting them loop and curl around the page and take whatever shapes they happened to, real or fanciful. And it felt good for a time, to get completely and utterly caught in my work – work like I really wanted to do – and not to want to come up for air at all.
My favorite bird had curlicue feathers extending from under his tail and his wings too, and I imagined him in a whirl of colors even though he was sketched in black and white. He wore a monocle, too, with a chain extending from it to somewhere tucked under his wing. Smiling faintly at the picture, I pretended I didn’t notice the familiar shape of his head or the telltale curve of his beak, the fact that underneath it all, he was just another gull.
A check on my watch told me I’d been sitting there in the sand even longer than I thought. I needed to get home, change, and eat before the nightly tour.
I made it in plenty of time to face my little crowd, ready as they always were for bloodshed and tears. A little blonde girl, maybe eight years old, stood with her parents, holding her mother’s hand. She wore a clear plastic necklace on pink ribbon, filled with a bright blue liquid, plastic seashells, and glitter. I hoped I wouldn’t give her nightmares. A heavyset man with a moustache was lazily picking his teeth. I introduced myself and smiled, taking a breath and wondering how many times I could tell the same story.
I went to the beach again on my last night before heading back to school. I pulled my Walkman from my old familiar bag but left it silent in my lap, opting instead to listen to the ocean crash against the shore. Staring out at the waves – glittering black against the equally dark night sky, I inhaled deeply. I closed my eyes. I didn’t come to a decision so much as I did a realization. This strange, lonely summer of ghosts and silence and lightly sketched birds would be the last one that I spent in this town.
There was a chill in the air, the chill of evening if not of autumn, and I rubbed my bare arms for warmth as I stared out across the quiet, empty beach. I tried to imagine my favorite doomed, reunited couple, the way that I always had, and always wanted the people on my tours to. But this time I couldn’t envision Rupert and Josephine – my good-natured Cathy and Heathcliff of the dunes – locked in an everlasting embrace. I could only see Rupert alone and rooted to the same spot forever, a slight and mournful shade with both hands pressed tightly to his chest, to a heart that still bled.
-Victoria Large