Life. Telling Stories Again

A Big Thing in the Wilderness 1992 Brian Kershisnik

Only a ghost could wait as long as I have in this.
Jars of Clay

My youngest child and I are telling stories tomorrow night at her school. We were working on hers. The children are supposed to tell an old story, a folktale or a fairytale; something that, in the librarian's words, "has stood the test of time and people have thought it was a good story for a long, long time. For years." In other words, not anything the children make up themselves.
I have to understand the librarian's concern. I worked with the kids on their stories and heard their ideas. I know that the presence of a spacemonster or a magicpony or superrabbit, no matter how splendidly endowed, will not insure a winning tale. Nor, for that matter are burps and buggers always funny nor enchanted kisses always spellbinding. Awkward is my middle daughter's word-of-the-week for a reason. But you've got to weep, too, a little, when the rules are that a tiny person is not to make things up. In the too short span of life before we learn the expected flow, the accepted ways and forms, when one of us hits a story squarely, well, there just isn't anything better. Richer, more satisfying. More grown up. Go find and read Axe Cop on the net (I'm sorry I can't bring myself to leave you a link. Embedded links trouble me. They make me feel like a newspaper. And Axe Cop is pretty great. What if you never came back?)

So my daughter wants to tell a story and she is full of suggestions that, sure enough, make me uneasy. How do I let her make up her own mind when she has yet to grow some taste? Can't she just enjoy the freedom I allow her to express herself privately? "How about a scary story?" I ask. This is her weakness. It sucks her right in."How about telling about the Lantern Man?"
The Lantern Man. Local Legend from Kanosh, hometown of wildfires, deer hunters, ghosts and spiders and my youngest child. She clasps together her hands, draws in a great breath, makes big her eyes (I believe I mentioned we are a romantic people) and says, "Yes. That's what I want to tell. And," suddenly practical, "it will work well for me. You remember I saw him. On Halloween when we were walking past the park. When I was little."
I didn't remember.
And I've never seen the Lantern Man.

Though I do believe people believe they have. I must, as I know the people who tell the stories and I believe them when they say most other things, so I have to believe this, too. I saw Virge Christensen witch for water in our yard, I saw them dig down where he told them, I saw them find the pipe where the map said there was no pipe, I believe him when he tells about his encounter with the uncanny lantern light on the west desert in the dark night.

We start building a story.
She tells me she hadn't realized how many ghost stories there are about Kanosh and the area around it till her cousin told her. Recently. Alarmed, I ask her what she's heard. Eyes wide, leaning in, she tells me some pretty tame ones, skin walkers and stuff. OK. Those will do nicely for our purposes. I tell her she needs to explain how the town sits on the land, its relation to the mountains and to the west desert. The desert is where the Lantern Man is; sheltering by the mountains is where the rest of us are. I remind her of hellholes, lost mines, haunted valleys and gullies, lava tubes and hot springs. We can see a dead volcano from our front yard. The basalt flow where Indians left hundreds of pictures, the odd graves on the desert, the travertine quarry with machinery still in place and great blocks of marble standing waiting for wagons that never came to take it away. The dry and broken swimming pool and open air dance hall, desolate and dusty, on one of a hundred dirt roads snaking through the nothingness of the west desert. You'd never find it if you didn't know. Or if you did.
"Yes," she tells me. She nods solemnly. We are haunted indeed. "And Topaz. Think how many ghosts from Topaz."
Now that is a stunner. That is right out of left field. We are walking her to school during this conversation and I have to walk for many steps contemplating her silently because that is so very unexpected. And I'll tell you why. I grew up in Millard County and I never once considered Topaz as a source of unhappy spirits because I never heard of Topaz at all till I grew up. Probably at about the same time my little girl heard about it.
How can it be a part of her landscape of explantions if it was never a part of mine?
I knew the west desert was messed up all right, but I had never thought that some of that trouble might have been streaming out from where Topaz had been.
No one, no one ever mentioned it.
You hunted trilobites on the desert and some people hunted animals there or ran sheep or rolled Easter eggs down the sand dunes (you could most always see brightly dyed shell shards in the sand) or drove dune buggies there or looked for gemstones or arrowheads or lost gold mines. Sure. And search and rescue hunted for the lost people who'd been hunting for all those things and for geologists who'd been searching for who knew what. The wildly diverse minerals and the rock formations insured us more that our fair share of geologists. I recently met a very nice man who actually is a geologist and far more familiar with my old home desert that I am and was pleasantly surprised (and mildly disbelieving, at first) to hear him claim never to have been lost and rescued. I wasn't aware that happened. Where I come from, geologist is said with just the same tone and layers of meaning that other people build into the word hick.
But no one ever mentioned such a thing as Topaz.
It was not at all a part of the story of where I grew up.
There's a house in Meadow, the town just north of Kanosh, that is made of two Topaz houses put together. I guess people went out there and took the houses and stuff away after the Japanese people left, took them and used them. It's not like the older people, the grownups, wouldn't have known. Sure they did. But I didn't. Topaz is one of the gemstones you can find on the west desert, if you know where to look. That's all.

It was never part of the reason for things, there, all along, anyway, remembering itself, hoarding and muttering, complaining and enduring in the dusty wind that blows, hard, all all all the time. Waiting.

I'm remembering a conversation I had once with the artist.
I had met a woman he needed to know and I was trying to make him remember which one she was. I was pretty sure he had observed her; I had found her impossible to miss. I had stared. In a crafty and polite way.
I told him, "It was that woman with all the big amber jewelry. All over her, lots of it. Brown and yellow, too. Oh, come on, Bri, she was right by us."
He stared at me.
Have you seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox? How sometimes the animals' eyes are just great big white marbles with black swirls in the middle?
Exactly.
He said, "I didn't see that woman. She wasn't there. What's amber?"

I didn't know about it.
It wasn't there.
What's topaz?

Why should I be so surprised?
Why had I assumed if there were a ghost I'd have known?
Who on earth do I think I am?
I've never even seen the Lantern Man.

I wrote here, a while ago, that the Old State Capitol Museum in Fillmore was haunted, understanding all the while that if you apply the normal rules for building hauntings then the museum wasn't itself haunted, not the rooms, not the walls (whether or not they were able to speak--what would they say? bored bored boring boring), certainly not the uneven flagged pioneer walks and not even the very spooky stairs to the cellar, narrow, steep and atmospheric though they are. The museum building had all the aura, just none of the the history for haunting, the lives people would have had to live in its rooms seeping into the walls and floors, staining them with the unmistakable trace, the spiritual scent of people, real as oil from our hands and wear from our feet. But there is more than one way for people to stay on, leave themselves behind. My childhood museum got filled with hauntings not from lives lived within it but from charged objects brought to it, treasured and heaped up there after the owners were dead. Little stuff they held dear and close, soaking up desires, achings, musings, the bits of people's living shut up all together through hot days and cold, to give off and give back the feelings of rage or love or despair or hope or envy or resignation they had absorbed in all those years of rubbing against the living. Ghost stories, when you tell them, take long-dead feelings and thoughts and punch them up, give them shape and dimension, names and motives, deaths and a reason for lingering. That's why ghost stories are sad, someone is still trying, still striving, still needing to be heard. Listen, listen, look at me. Softly whispered words of the dead. This was my house, my comb, my picture, my anger, my stupid fault, my forgiveness.

The west desert on the other hand. That is something else all together. Here is all emptiness and failure to establish a toehold, to leave our mark. Here is the shore of Lake Enchantment, this eyeblindingly white, bonedusty depression in the alkaline dirt. This is the lake front property people from far away bought and came to view, proud owners of grit and nothing, not even sagebrush. Standing, stricken on the "shore," clutching their brightly colored, verdant brochures, unable to become reconciled to the con. Driving to the nearest town, asking at the store. "Where is...? But, are you sure?" My parents owned the store; my dad told me. Whatever emotions poured out of those poor people into the thirsty, brickhard clay of the lakefront community that never was, wouldn't the wind have torn them away, ground them to bits, tossed them to nothing between the burning sky and the burning ground?

White Boat 1995 Brian Kershisnik

Here is an abandoned government station. "What? what was it for?" "Don't know. They left it." What were you, big but oddly short cement cylinder sitting here like, what? like a tremendous grey Smartie of the desert. Lonely, dirty and broken, that's what you are. Stupid and expensive, that's all that's left behind here. Can there be a ghost of governmental waste? Then the west desert is its home, but I can't hear that ghost at all. Just the wind and the wind. Here's a foundation, an honest to goodness house once out here. Who thought this was a good idea? Or even possible? What kind of people? I stand in the empty kneehigh square that held up their shelter and I feel nothing. Empty, clean as an old bleached shell on the beach. I've never found a haunted seashell. This place is not haunted in a human sort of way. We don't soak into it and cling. I think it's the other way around.

What's haunted here is the land itself and if soft, damp people stay too long on its dry dry bones we can become set dressing in whatever tragedy it hangs on to, from history that doesn't flow at all like ours. The volcanoes are dead but they aren't gone. We built our little towns on the same fault line that blew them into life and being and that shifts and mutters under our corrals and gardens. Our house sits in an old stream bed. The weather changes so you can't easily grow the peaches that used to fill orchards, and the wind has taken to blowing all all all the time. It wasn't like that, even when I was little. The land changes and we watch it, trying to find it the way we remember it. But our memories are not the story it is telling. Every ghost waits for someone to listen. But people want a story like us, a story people have thought was a good story, middle beginning and end, for years and years. We only want to listen if we're going to understand. We collide with the dirt we live on, it burns us up, chokes us, we are lost and wandering till we fall over in the dirt and we lose. Even the sand is brutal to us.

I could tell you stories.

Now that I've thought it through, I don't think the desert is haunted by Topaz. I don't think people can leave a mark out there unless they carve it into the basalt where it depends on the continuance of the rock. My dad told me a story of a war, a story he said an old Indian told him that was told to the Indians by the people who lived there before these Indians came but was about the people who lived there even before them. Long before my ancestor pioneers, long before an American government, warring within and without, captived some of its people in inadequate little houses in a terrible desert. The man told my dad the Indians thought the trouble on the land was from that great, long ago war. Maybe, or maybe those misty, far off people lost control of their story to another history that didn't flow like theirs, got caught in the traces of a greater, older war, fought with volcanoes and shifting mountains, the decline of an inland sea. A war of heats and pressures that left gemstones carelessly heaped across the face of a desert for little people to hunt and save and treasure. Amethyst. Topaz. I think the land was like that from before and that's why Topaz ended up out there. It fit. Impermanence, injustice, insignificance. Great place to set a story you never intended to keep, that you don't really want to understand. No need to talk about it later. It never touched us. The wind blew it away. It was never here.

I tell my little girl the story of the Lantern Man. Is this a story that has stood the test of time? Have people thought it was a good story for years and years? Did it happen, or did a child make it up, nailing a story that was trying to be told of recurring loss and endless hunting? How can I explain the way the town sits on the land, its relation to the mountains and the west desert? Once there was a man who lived at the end of town and kept horses in the old rock corral, on the west desert. Do you remember that place?
She nods, suddenly shivering, rubbing goosebumps on her arms. "Now I'm scared," she says, "I never heard the story before."
What?
"Then why did you think you saw him?" I ask.
"No, I did see him. I knew there was a Lantern Man, I just never heard the story. It's sad. And creepy."
"So what did you see?"
"Just a lantern, going through the park, going west."

A light, low to the ground, moving at a man's walking pace. A man captive, searching, haunted by the desert, dry in its bones.

Pilgrim 1992 Brian Kershisnik