The house was set down in a gully, nestled in the deepest part of the cove. A brook flowed beside it. The kind of old house that had high ceilings made of tin. In the centuries before, and still to this day, ceilings are built lower. But for a brief time, near the end of one century and the beginning of the next, height didn’t matter. The future must have seemed limitless, full of possibility. The war was still a long way off.
Still, whoever lived here survived it. Waltzes from an old phonograph I found in one of the upstairs rooms drifted out over the LaHave on summer evenings. Maybe it was a wedding present, or an anniversary. I put on the only disc in the cabinet and turned the crank, and the bent sound echoed off the walls. Harry Horlick’s cover of “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” 1924. The most haunted sound I had ever heard. Like stars, or pebbles at the bottom of a lake, distance had warped its place in reality.
Later, another war, the West Novas, and everything that came after.
One spring, when the shed behind the house had to be torn down, negatives that had been stuffed in the walls or fallen along the foundation blew away in the wind and caught in the alder and chokecherry, where the woods began. Not all of them could be found, and for a year or two they turned up in the garden, or the garlic patch, or caught in the limb of a tree. Out in the yard with my dog, I picked one off the brambles, a fresh blackberry.
Later, I learned their names. Faces that had been there for almost a hundred years, before the towers came down, before the wall came down, before seventy years of what is often called relative peace began. Do the dead rest easier when life on earth is said to be calm? Sometimes I think they were little projectors, projecting the ghosts into the house that were supposed to have been there, their faces lit up by tide glint and shadowed by ash limbs.
Ghosts that wanted many afterlives: ones of darkness, ones of trees. To live at the place where land ended and salt began. Once, long ago, harbours were mined against their destruction.
