‘If This Be a Ghost’ by Maureen Ott

I believe in ghosts because of the farm. A haunted place, it has a resident ghost – The Monitor – and once had a visiting ghost: my great-aunt Genevieve, who dropped in briefly in 1921. I sometimes feel the swaying of a family ghost nearby – a slight breeze, then a sense of something peering over my shoulder. Another visit from our departed, shifting at will between the here and the hereafter. 

The day I heard about Genevieve was the day I felt torn open again. The wreckage that was her married life became welded to my own. I revisited old wounds, old glistening scars, then somehow absorbed hers. Genevieve and I have something in common besides DNA: the gut-heaving awfulness of husbands hating us for no good reason. This fact can untether the new bride. She has no concept of his hate, of his need for power over her. On good days he tolerates her, but on bad days he haunts her. That was me, married in 1965, and Genevieve, married in 1920. 

On my desk is a black and white photo of my maternal ancestors – my Irish great-grandparents and their nine children dressed in Sunday-best frocks and suits. It’s Easter in 1902 on their farm that sits on 66 acres of rocky soil on the outskirts of a small rural New York town. For years they eked out a living with generous dairy cows, delivering milk with horse and buggy to the local cheese factory. I peer at their serious faces. I wonder about the stories I forgot to ask about, and now it’s too late. A young Genevieve has her hand resting gently on her mother’s chair. Her face is all soft angles, no edges; dark hair swept up in a nested bouffant. The whole effect is very much like a 1900s Gibson Girl portrait. 

Her eyes look away, into a world we cannot share. 

*

There’s a haunting that occurs in abusive marriages – ice-cold sheets, air you can’t breathe, and the terror of nightmares. I’ll define this condition as a ghost marriage. In ancient traditions, a ghost marriage could exist where one or both parties were deceased. In my marriage I was the walking dead; my marriage a coffin I climbed into willingly, naively. My ghost marriage was a chaotic jumbled mess of confusion and loss with no self-help books to guide me, because there were happy days mixed in, too. This can’t be that bad, can it? Hasn’t he been nice lately? I lost my way over days and then over years. Like a spool of thread dropped on the floor, I unravelled. In part, perhaps, because no one warned me.

*

Genevieve died suddenly on a snowy January afternoon. She was seven-months married, and six-months pregnant. Genevieve’s husband, they said, ‘got a little rough with her,’ and ‘she died as a result.’ How rough was it before she died? I can’t prove this tragedy, but I am choosing to believe it (and to send for her death certificate). There are doors into what we choose to believe, and I am choosing Door #1 – Genevieve’s story according to my family.

Shortly after her death, Genevieve’s ghost appeared to her older brother, Father Bernard at the farm. I imagine her spirit hovering above the frosty morning grass, then gliding away, shimmery, into that ethereal space between death and who knows where. Father Bernard had officiated first at her marriage, and then at her funeral, so it seems fitting that her ghost would pay him a visit. 

But why be a ghost? Pent-up rage, that’s why. If I can understand wishing for my abusive husband to get hit by a truck and die, then I can understand the power of Genevieve’s rage defeating death and enabling her to crash out of a casket. Was she leaving a message? 

I remember Father Bernard from my childhood visits to the farm. I can see that white-haired old man, scowling and quiet, reading his scarred leather missal in the shade of the front porch, cigarette dangling from a dented cigarette holder. One summer I was part of a wild horde of visiting cousins bursting out the front door, screen door slamming behind us, piling onto the porch swing and making its rusty hinges screech. 

 Snapping his missal closed with a sigh, he growled: ‘You kids get out of here, go play in the barn; go join the rats for some hide-and-go-seek.’ 

And we ran. I’m sure he saved his smiles for the grownups. After dinner he’d grab a bottle of whiskey from the pantry and start pouring.

‘Time for confessions!’ he would holler, swinging that bottle around like an incense-filled thurible at a Solemn High Mass. As I think of that old priest now, I wish I had been less afraid of him, and had taken a moment to say: ‘Tell me about Genevieve.’

*

If I could share a pot of tea with Genevieve today I might tell her a bit of my story, and I think she would listen. With my eyes shut tight, I remember one of the darkest of times with my abuser; a physical attack during my second pregnancy. 

The man I married was not tall, but lied proudly that he was ‘over six feet’. Powerfully built, solid, with hands on him the size of a catcher’s mitt. He liked to shake hands ‘like a man’, which made him smirk and others wince. It amused him to twist my toes until I screamed. 

On a cold winter’s night, almost two years into our marriage, wet snow sticks to the apartment windows like old peanut butter on a forgotten knife. Our one-year old daughter is asleep in a hand-me-down white crib, dreaming of whatever sweet babies dream of; perhaps breast milk and a soft mama.

In a narrow, dark hallway we argue, facing off. A hopeless effort on my part, because I can’t win. Ever. He destroys my words. He crushes them as if with a fly swatter. And when I resist, or scream my frustration, things can escalate.

His rage is palpable; waves of fury I can feel reverberating through my body, like earthquake tremors shaking the china. He hisses; blame is a dagger meant to cure another failure. Hallway shadows shift, uneasy, anticipating trouble. Five months pregnant, a bulging belly is an easy target for his fist to find. I fall to the floor; not realizing until that moment that I might be breakable. My hands find soft dust bunnies; I swirl them around. I feel him watching me, silent. Then he steps over me to catch the night-time news on a TV station that reminds us: ‘It’s 11 o’clock; do you know where your children are?’ 

The couch is my bed that night. I sob useless tears that will neither soothe nor improve me. Knocked down by grief.

Later, the light of morning peeks in, and the sun is happy, fooled into thinking it’s just another day. I change the baby’s diapers, cooing like a mom-robot, and she wiggles her delight. I wash last night’s dishes; my mind dishevelled. This is how grief feels, or maybe it’s shock. The dishwater smells of lemons, it’s slippery warmth no comfort to me. Dawn dish soap, the pungent smell of despair. 

Though this is not his first act of violence, it’s one of the darkest. After that night, I learn to watch him carefully. To anticipate trouble. I’m cautious now that hands can hurt you. The teeth marks of trauma have punctured me, but I bottle my fear in a small screw-cap baby jar and shove it under the bed with the dust bunnies. 

*

The Monitor, that fabled old farm ghost, is still spoken of today in hushed tones. Sightings at the farm were rare, but stories were often told and retold, and we listened hard. By the late 1940s the place was vacant, yet the descendants chipped in to pay taxes, knew where the key was hidden, and had family get-togethers – with no electricity, no running water, and a one-holer outhouse.

Its plainness was softened by a long Victorian veranda facing west down a hill with a wooden-plank bridge over a creek and a narrow dirt-rutted driveway. A slant-roofed kitchen to the rear held a stove, a table, an oil lamp, and a cast iron sink with a water pump conveniently outside the door. An oak-slatted ice box was fed with blocks of ice. The dilapidated barn sat south of the farmhouse, filled with ancient straw and shifty rodents.

I saw the Monitor one night during a family campfire at the farm, when Dad was scaring us with ghost stories. Everyone knew that the Monitor lived in the foothills of the mountain just beyond the barn. One night, he peered in the farmhouse kitchen window, terrifying my aunts; their screeches almost lifting the roof, and driving him away. No one could ever actually say for sure what he looked like – maybe it wasn’t important. Belief was the important thing, and passing the Monitor lore down to the next generation. The haunting must be carried on. 

With a low voice Dad whispered: ‘Watch now; the Monitor will be coming over the mountain. You’ll see him, if you’re unlucky.’ 

The nighttime Allegany foothills rose up behind us, eerie ground never to be climbed after dark. My cousins and I stared hard at the moonlit hilltop with its orphaned trio of pine trees on the crest, eager for our ghost. The wind shifted suddenly, swirling the campfire flames. Childish imaginations ran amok, and the trees were complicit, swaying, convincing us that the Monitor could be real. 

Then I saw him. 

What I saw: a tall ancient ghost in black with a top hat on his bent head. Riding a rocking chair on the hilltop. I bit my lip hard. I think it bled.

What I heard: the creaking of the rocking chair rails. I think he saw me. A half-enjoyed marshmallow dropped out of my hand. I feared he might tear down the hill after me. The farmhouse air smelled like old ice cubes, stale, or is that the smell of fear? When I looked up again, he was gone. Only three pine trees on a hill still glowing in the August moonlight.

*

Genevieve was one of a few ‘charming June brides’ headlined by the local paper in 1920 when she married a tall farmer from a nearby village. Genevieve’s five sisters loathed him, sure that she was marrying beneath her. 

Family gossip: One day before the wedding, the sisters hid a small bottle of whiskey in the farmhouse attic. The bridegroom-to-be found it and drank it. He was that type of man.

Her younger sister Margaret, her Maid of Honour, probably gritted her teeth on Genevieve’s wedding day. But in a swelter of love and resoluteness, Genevieve married her farmer in a simple ceremony on the farm, wearing a white georgette gown with matching hat, and carrying a bouquet of American Beauty roses, a deep pink beauty of a rose with fragrant blooms. But all I can think of are thorns and the need for caution.

*

I remember the sisters’ bedroom. As a child I slept in each ancient bed, slumber that connected me to Genevieve in a time-warp way – our sleep jointly disturbed by shattered dreams. (Grown-up beds take little girl dreams and smash them.) I can climb those stairs in the dark. A steep, ineptly handmade staircase leads up to three bedrooms: two small ones on the left, and the girls’ bedroom on the right. A long and wide sunlit room. Six metal beds in a row, cradling lumpy straw mattresses, and a thunder pot under each – for who’s brave enough to trek out to the outhouse on a dark night with the Monitor lurking about? Turn to your right as you enter the room, and you’ll see a half door leading to a low-ceilinged dark attic, where you do not linger. It smells of old fears and cobwebby secrets.

*

Genevieve’s honeymoon was described in the papers as a ‘short driving holiday’. Forty-five years later, my own ‘short driving holiday’ honeymoon was an eye-opener for me. A week of nasty surprises set in a lush waterfront resort. Days alone while my new husband golfed. Nights included choking the bride to start the marriage off right. How carefully I had chosen that resort, and how eager I was to see it in the rearview mirror. Was Genevieve’s short driving holiday a surprise and a dream-crusher as well? I see a balancing act, a circus, and two women tumbling off a high wire into married life. 

*

My family has a traditional toast.

Hoisting a glass, we holler in Irish: ‘Má taibhse seo é is deoch go deo sé!’ but it comes out scrambled.

Then we repeat it in English: ‘If this be a ghost, may it often appear!’ A useful toast, if you are seeking another round. Like cobwebs in a corner, ghostly things keep cropping up in this family.

*

Since I have known about Genevieve’s too-short life, I have imagined her, married and pregnant; recreating in my mind a world for her to inhabit. When you don’t know the details, and only the plot summary, you must be inventive.

An imaginary vignette:

After the marriage, Genevieve spent her short life with her new husband and her in-laws on acres of fertile farmland located between mountains and a river. There were apple orchards, and Genevieve was surprised by the richness of the soil that grew apples rather than grass for cows. When her new family spent evenings in the parlour, her mind strayed, as she was homesick. Slipping out the back door for a solo walk after dinner chores was the best part of her day. She’d found a special spot by the riverbank, with a boulder for a seat, and birdsong for company. 

One early October evening she watched the river current dance, hypnotic in its splashing and tumbling . She had a headache again, and her shoes were tight; the pregnancy weakened her. Quick, unbidden thought: ‘I hate him.’ Then, ‘Hush, hush now, just think of the baby.’

She shivered suddenly as a cold night breeze rushed up from the river, and turned to go back, catching a glimpse of the sun setting on the mountain behind the house, hill trees copper and gold in the fading light. She drank in the sounds of frogs croaking and crickets shuffling grass. The river stones were silent, tense, sensing the future.

*

I think you’re lucky if you have a close female friend you can share your secrets with, and I did. One day, forty years into my marriage, she looks at me intently, leaning in.

‘Why does he never say your name? It’s so weird.’ 

‘What? Why, sure he does. After all this time, I should know!’

And then I realize the truth of her words. My husband never says my name, and yes, it was very odd. And it shakes me, the not-knowing all these years.

A few days later, I mentally gather the ancestors around me (to invite courage), and tell him: ‘I’d really like it if you’d say my name sometimes.’

He snorts: ‘Okay, Maurrreeennn.’ 

‘Or should I say, Mrrrsss?’ 

‘Or maybe you’d prefer Maurreeennn Agggnneeesss?’

The sarcasm cuts me, silences me. I feel diminished, and I can’t summon the courage to ask again.

Thinking back, I now see how he erased me, his nameless wife. I number the ways, like fingering rosary beads, counting one, two, three, four, five:

I am you: ‘Are you upstairs? Hello! Have you seen my remote?’

I am she: ‘She says she’s on a diet now,’ he points at me, snickering, ‘but I found candy wrappers in her car, haha!’

I am her: ‘You should’ve seen her trying to park the car, haha.’

I am always ‘your mother’ in discussions with our children: ‘Your mother wants a divorce.’

In the final, crippled ending of our marriage, my name is missing in letters he sent to my divorce lawyer. I am simply ‘your client.’

‘Your client and I met.’ 

‘Your client is wrong.’ 

‘Your client got upset and threw verbal barbs at me.’

If he never said my name, in his mind I was erased. I was a subjective thing. I was a no-one so he could be a Someone.

***

In 1935, the writer, memoirist, and Irish Republican Ernie O’Malley wrote a letter to his wife Helen, sketching a picture of the west of Ireland and local beliefs in the supernatural:

‘Living is so fantastic and strange and un-understandable that they accept the supernatural or that which cannot be explained as the actual, and with the actual they reverse the effect. The dead are almost closer to us at home than the living and things called “miracles” seem to fit like toast and cream.’ 

Disbelief in the actual is perhaps why I stayed stuck inside an abusive ghost marriage. The reasons varied by day and decade: I believed in staying married and working things out. The kids needed their father. This must be my fault. I just needed to see his point of view. Who leaves a marriage after 25 years; 30 years; after 40 years? Also the terror. If I leave, I won’t make it! What if he gives away my secrets? little shames? big shames? ancient failures? Also, what will people think if I leave? His family’s disgust, my family’s shock. Our kids, our grandkids. What will the neighbours think? (Yes, even the neighbours mattered back then.) But finally, the reality. He would never change. Ever. So then what? 

All these things had to be worked through and discarded, like outgrown outfits before I could walk away. That this took me 46 years is no matter to me. It took as long as it took. With good therapy’s help, I finally understood how abuse was destroying me. And that I was destroying myself by staying.

*

Genevieve’s obituary ran in the local paper in 1921. She had a church burial, with a Solemn High Mass celebrated by her brother. Her ‘Baby Girl’, born an hour before her death, lived for nine hours, and was buried in her mother’s arms. Did this tiny little ghostlet accompany her mother’s final trip to the farm? 

Almost a hundred years later, on a miserable March morning, I get the mail and there it is. I have Genevieve’s death certificate in my hands. I read the contents slowly. On 19 January 1921 she was attended by a local physician who was also a family friend. She died at 5p.m., and the cause of death was ‘puerperal eclampsia/uterus gravid 6 1/2 months.’ Convulsions, coma, and death-by-pregnancy. No autopsy was done. Clinical signs confirmed the diagnosis, and the contributing factor was ‘diffuse nephritis.’ I stare at this longed-for bit of paper. I’m crushed that family suspicions cannot be proven. Officially, her pregnancy caused her death. Unofficially, I think he killed her. Unofficially, I think the ‘contributing factor’ was violence. 

*

In my family, we wake our dead with tears, laughter, music, and stories. It’s a shock, but no surprise to us if they appear in some form afterwards. Apparitions, or a visit by an animal, bird, or butterfly – it’s all the same to us. We believe that this is their way of saying goodbye, or sending a message to those left behind. 

*

One day I visit Genevieve’s grave and bring two cousins that I love. The graveyard air has an urgent feel to it, a tension, like something or someone is pushing us forward, seeking an ending. My breath lurches in my throat as we approach Section C and find a cold grey marker set in patchy clumps of grass: Genevieve 1890 - 1921. No last name; no maiden name. Such thoughtlessness. And no mention of ‘Baby Girl’, a tiny tragedy here beside her mother. Two shortened lives underneath the dirt. Fragments really, like shards of seashells washed up briefly on the shore, before the tide and the sea claim them once more.

Standing at her grave, we speak to Genevieve. We say her life was a story worth telling; that it had meaning; that it mattered. We brighten her gravesite with a basket of saffron-yellow petunias. And when a startled butterfly escapes, we know it’s a message.

I step back from the grave and the petunias and look at my cousins. They know. And I know. The ancestors are here. We’re hushed with remembering, and honouring. I think of ghosts I have known, and the horror of ghost marriages. Things invisible – or are they? My right eye twitches, but no one notices. The sun, having muscled the clouds aside, is now warm on our faces as we turn to leave.

The Ancestors at the Farm, Easter 1902

Genevieve (around 16 years old), is second from left, her hand on her mother’s chair. 

Her brother, Bernard (before he entered the priesthood) is in the middle of the back row, under the Easter lamb tapestry.

From issue #9.5: spring/summer 2020

About the Author
Born in New York, Maureen Ott is a writer from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. She has been published in So To Speak Journal and was shortlisted for the 2018 non-fiction essay contest in Memoir Magazine.