Been thinking about…this night of ghosts

This night is indeed still hot but the tinge of autumn unmistakable now, blue sky turning gray and then indigo in the turning of the season. A beat-up truck drives slowly by, headlights briefly illuminating Chinese elm and catalpa tree, old clapboard siding painted four times over, and a stray cat whose eyes flash green, then obsidian black. Daylight disappears now behind the big sugarloaf mountain that shadows the town. In the east, a waning moon sails low and regally behind clouds. And between, deep river waters still flow south, the waters’ surface black and glassy. Springtime floods are too long ago to be remembered on a night like tonight.

Just up the road a little ways, there are convenience lights and self-checkouts and big blinking signs with schedules outlined in red. Just up the road a little ways are the important things in life, as we are told, a hurriedness and a desperation of expectations, failures and successes, all of which feed our need to be needed, need to be wanted, need to be important, need to establish just how much better we believe ourselves to be.

The river trees are whispering in the dark over a sacred geometry of old concrete poured long ago in the name of progress, concrete now mouldering and unused. Progress passes over these such monuments, leaving them alone in the dark to commune with the things of the night. The modern bridge is just a little ways up the river, and it is a long, passive, safe and boring thing, barely indistinguishable from the regular road. No one could mourn that new bridge’s passing. There’s no personality to remember and the spirits do not gather there.

Up ahead, this mouldering bridge curves north and south, memories redolent with long-lost traffic, old-fashioned cars that came in black, and also, black slow and rumbling farm trucks, and big-engined moonshine runners with speed and power to bely their old-fashionedness. Dark nights have always been good nights for mischief and some night runners never came back, not here in the winding, twisting dark. Up the mountain, modern neighborhoods of green grass sod and tasteful brick cannot undo the past, cannot undo the darkness that once criss-crossed the mountains in full parts of equal measure.

The waning moon is now fully above the eastern mountain, the mountain a grand, dark block of karst limestone shrouded in oak and elm and hickory and cedar. A few stars peek out from between the clouds. This old limestone is not unlike that of the Old World’s, a place half-remembered in the folklore, a place of imps and kobolds, of spectral elf kings and dark mountaintop summonings.

Breeze stirs the river trees again and it is as though, far down within the river bed weeds, something else stirs. No, more than just a something, down there in the snake-laden dark. Silly childhood memories of trolls beneath the bridge rise up and something is decidedly moving down in the dark. It is difficult to resist an urge to shiver. I look down again — a sense of many dark eyes and many dark faces, staring up into the real world just as we stare down into the stillness of a dark, black well. This is not the place to throw pennies, or whistle, or laugh, not even in nervousness. The dark is listening.

Far off, a train whistle. Not so far off, shadows yet move in the dark of the town, certain shadows just a little blacker than the rest. The lights of the silent courthouse are bright enough, but the whole square is too dark to be natural, the silence a guardian to the memory of past hangings. “The scaffold is high, and eternity nears / She stood in the crowd and shed not a tear…” The words of the old Johnny Cash song come unbidden. Down by the old church, another shadow, this one gauzy white, passes by old concrete steps, passes briefly behind a curtain of elm leaves, and is gone.

A porch light comes on but does nothing to break the reverie. Just up the road a little ways, a night stocker is adding more garish Halloween costumes to a shopping aisle too brightly lit to be natural. Another employee is stuffing shelves with freakishly expensive Trick-or-Treat candy. Too often, it is easy to step into the parodies of all that surround us, of all that can teach us lessons of humility, of mortality, of gratitude, of how monumentally small we are before the monstrous face of the cosmos and the deep dark. It is easy to be arrogant when our world is so small and brightly lit that we think we can control it. To overlook the dark is to proceed at our own risk. 

This night is indeed still hot but the tinge of autumn unmistakable now. And way down by the courthouse, the old clock on the old clock tower is striking midnight, somber reminder of mortality, of possibility, and reminder of the past, again this autumn, again on this night of ghosts.