Ghost of Lake Michigan

Ghost of Lake Michigan

By: Robert A. Goldsborough

         I collect ghosts. Like so many others collect baseball cards or other bric-a-brac, I enjoy collecting the souls of the dead. It started when I was a small boy growing up slow in a small slow town in Michigan. My parents rented a cozy house closer to town then the water, but we would visit the shores often just to look across the waves and imagine far off places we could not afford to visit. I remember the water of the great lake and I could always carry it home with me in my head. It had voices. Voices that I knew had once belonged to those who had sailed or worked upon the lake’s waves. Merchant seamen, like my granddad, and others who just toiled their lives away digging their own path through the dark water they could never know while they still lived. The great lake of Michigan is an immense body of water, land trapped and secured by man-made locks that only permitted the passage of those who worked or paid to pass. But, the echo of the blue water was there. The ocean hinted itself in every voice that spoke to me.

         The true blue was hundreds of miles from where I lived, but its saline currents played a saccharine role in everything the freshwater tried to do. The drowning of a man was nothing new in the great lake. It had been seeking its bounty long before anyone had established fisheries or paper mills at her shores. Her foundation was littered by the remains of those who could not hear her asking. I could hear her. I could hear those that had fed her. She sounded like a child; a child alone and absent from her parent, and in a way I guess she was.

         I loved the water, but we could not swim or fish her because of the paper mills and the fisheries. So, I could only listen. I could only hear, and hear I did. The voices of those screaming out of the torrents to pull fast and pull hard at the nets, the voices that screamed to no one but me from under the waves; the silent ones that fell on ignorant ears. I heard all of their calls and in my youth I did not understand. I could not help. So I collected them in my young mind. They came home with me to my parents’ modest house tucked away in the eaves of the small towns center and would chatter all through the night. I loved their dialects. I loved their language. Some, because of my youth, I did not fully understand. What child understands what a swear is meant to conjure. What child should know defeat? The defeat of the dying is best left to the dead.

         They would talk to me of loves and lands. They would whisper of far away scents and ladies. Oh, the ladies they would speak of. Brown skinned beauties rolling fresh tobacco between their thighs for the tightest of cigars. The almond eyes dancing behind silk that could pierce the heart of a man better than any arrow. The blue eyed gems of the far-flung isles that treated a man as if he were a god and bedded him with the grace of all the ancestors and the gods before. Feeling as if you touched the face of god yourself you had to explain to these simple island folk that no, you were not here to save them from their neighboring islands politics, but just to bed their women. The voices enticed and excited. Every soul a different story to tell.

         Until, I met a very different soul. This soul sparked with youth; something that I could see and approach with all the curiosity of a child myself. He called out his mother’s name with such pain my soul hurt to listen, but I had no choice. It was as if we were kin. I understood his mourn. I tried to reason with his soul. But, as is true with most souls too young to understand what has befallen them there is no reasoning. There is only listening. He felt me listen. I knew this when his tambour of speech changed and directed towards me. It was as if the perpetual cold waters of the great lake warmed and embraced me. I felt the words pour down my throat searching for understanding, pleading for comprehension. They drowned me in their sadness. I could see the history.

         The blurry memories of youth are true to all even when they are not yours to observe. I could make out his home in a darkness that he felt about every wall. His father tainted everything with the smell of alcohol and curses. His mother was bent and worn, like an old blanket left in the rain for strangers to scrape the mud from their shoes. His mother could only gape at the foulness his father dressed the walls of their home in. He, the father, supplied the very air that they breathed and he would not let them forget it. They were his property and they had become too much for him to bear. He killed her with his own hands wrapped around her throat to stop her from screaming, but she did not scream, nor did she offer any protest. She knew her time was over heedless of how poorly that time had been spent. Her voice was but an echo of the little boy’s, but I could feel his tears run down my cheeks.

         He would be next, but no quick strangulation for him. No the waters, the waters for which he dreaded, would be his death. He had always been terrified of those dark waters. His father’s large hands tough with callouses pushed hard against his face. He felt a snap like a twig had broken between his eyes as he was held down. He tasted salt and iron in the back of his throat. He was scared of the darkness coming up to meet him in the wetness. But, he heard his mother’s whispers and he let himself go. Down, down into the depths he fell loosing his vision and grappling for his mother’s hand. He missed. As she fell downwards, he fell away. They missed each other by an eternity. An eternity enough so that I would catch him.

         He begged me out to the shores, and in the middle of a sleeping night it was only an hour walk from my safe home to the cold damp shore where the water perpetually licked the sand from the rocks. The soft pulse of the land trapped waves murmuring his youthful voice. At two in the morning I stood on the small sand beach and called. I called out to him. I wanted him to show himself. I wanted to see. The small voice mixed with others dragging me towards the waters’ edge. All my ghosts where there and not just content to talk anymore, they wanted to show. I saw. Things a small boy would never understand, but I could feel. I felt all of their cold and my bones ached. I heard all of their cries and my mind went out to them with what was left of my breaking heart. All of their voices rose as one and that oneness pulled me closer. I recognized the one voice given presence by the fallen. It was the water itself, the dark childlike voice of a scared little girl seeking her absent parent.

         I stepped into the water. Real chill traced its way up my legs across my back to punch me in the back of the head but I walked forward. It was important to him, to them, to her most of all. She needed me, to give her voice, to give her solace, to just explain why she could not run into the arms of her mother. I don’t remember falling beneath the waves, but I must have. I hear more of the water now. I wish I heard my mother. I always loved her. I hope she knows that I always loved her.