What Eli Sees – Chapter 28
“Agnes’s Last Lesson”
In March of 1975, Agnes Birch had a heart attack. It was not fatal — she was home within a week, in her Cape Cod on Alder Street, already complaining that the hospital food had been inadequate and that the nurses had been too cheerful. But it was a reminder, which Agnes accepted with the stoicism of someone who had been accepting reminders since 1938, that she was seventy-four years old and not going to be available indefinitely.
She called Eli on the telephone.
“I have things to tell you,” she said. “Things I should have told you in November but there wasn’t time. Will you come?”
Eli’s father drove him to Dunmore on the last Saturday of March. He sat in the Cape Cod with the cats and the mentholated smell and the cookie tin and Agnes told him, over three hours, everything she knew.
She told him the full history of the Pale Woman as it had been passed through the women of her family — not just the Harwick house connection but the deeper history, the pre-colonial history, the specific nature of what the Pale Woman was. Not a ghost. Not the lingering soul of someone who had died. Something older and more fundamental: a presence that had grown in a specific place from a specific act of terrible darkness that had happened on that land before any European had walked it, an act whose nature Agnes’s grandmother had only partially known and whose full truth was lost.
“What she is,” Agnes said, “is grief given form. Not any one person’s grief. The grief of this place. The accumulated sorrow of everything that died on that land and was not properly mourned.” She paused. “When Edmund Harwick chose that place to die, he was not choosing randomly. Some part of him — the dark part, the part that was already walking toward the barn — felt her there. And she felt him. And the symbiosis began.”
“Can she be destroyed?” Eli asked.
“I have been asking this question for fifty years,” Agnes said. “The honest answer is: I don’t know. My grandmother believed she could be unmade the same way she was made — through the proper mourning of what created her. But what created her is centuries old and most of it is lost.” She paused. “What you did in that barn — freeing Edmund Harwick — that was the closest anyone has come, in my knowledge, to actually reducing her fundamental power rather than just containing her.” She looked at him. “You have a gift for this. More than the sight. You have the ability to give the dead what they need. That is rarer than the sight itself.”
“Agnes,” Eli said. “When you’re gone. Who keeps the knowledge?”
She smiled — the rare, complete smile that her face did not produce often.
“Thomas will keep the local knowledge,” she said. “He does not have your gifts but he has my stubbornness and that will serve.” She paused. “And there is a woman in Rhode Island, a woman named Dora Kent, who has the sight as you have it and who knows things I have taught her and things I have not.” She pressed a folded piece of paper into his hand. “Her address. Write to her. She is sixty and in good health and will be a resource to you for many years.”
“And when she’s gone?”
“You will know others by then,” Agnes said. “People with the sight find each other. It has always been so.” She paused. “You will find your people, Elijah. And you will build the knowledge further than I have built it. That is what the sight is for.”
She reached into the cookie tin and gave him three cookies and poured them both tea and they sat in the Cape Cod for another hour talking about things that had nothing to do with the dead — about Thomas’s progress in school, about what Eli was reading, about the merits of Hartford versus Dunmore as cities for growing up in.
When his father came to collect him, Agnes walked him to the door.
“One more thing,” she said. “The Pale Woman. What she said to you on the last night. We know.“
“Yes.”
“She meant it,” Agnes said. “They do know. They know you are coming back. They are patient enough to wait.” She looked at him with the clear eyes of someone who had spent a lifetime looking at difficult things. “Be sure you are ready when you do.”
“How will I know when I’m ready?” Eli asked.
Agnes thought about this for a moment.
“You’ll know,” she said, “when you stop being afraid of the answer.”