I was a disappointment to my parents. They never said so, but sometimes walking into a room, where I heard a whispering conversation seconds before an embarrassed silence descended. My mother was always the first to recover. “There you are, dear; your father and I were just discussing we should go out and find out what you are about.”
I suppose I could be considered the black sheep of the family, though I have a brother who would be a close second. He has, since his days of illicit drugs and bourbon barrel parties, settled down, married and has three children. He’s the only protestant of the family shouting to all who would hear him out that the Catholic Church failed him in so many ways.
“But no matter what, Susan, I’m a sinner. My decisions were my own. I just wanted to escape instead of facing things like a man. Thank God for His mercy.” He was sitting by my fire one fall evening, his family tucked away in my guest bedrooms. His words sounded trite and memorized, but his face conveyed his conviction. I think that is why I remain the final back sheep.
My parents went through many trials with my brother while keeping their faith and instilling is me and my other brothers and sisters our own faith in God. No small feat in the late 20th century. I’m not without pity for them. Yet, their concern for me is weighed down with suspicion. How do I afford a home and property? How do I afford clothes, food, utilities, all the things they consider necessities? My other siblings, including my once backsliding brother, work hard at a profession and (or) a trade. I seem to survive on air.
When they insisted I go to college, I left. I sent them a letter; told them I was fine and would let them know when I settled down. I drove north to find the lands of James Oliver Curwood and thought (I wouldn’t admit it at the time) an older man, roughly handsome and well versed in the stories of the Great Lakes. I found both. The land was as beautiful as it was brutal and the older man as well read as he was old.
We met in a coffee shop, where I stumbled in, half-starved and as clean as a sink in a public restroom would allow. I was frightened. I was looking for work and too far north to turn around and retreat back to my parents. People were embarrassed and mumbled their response to how sorry they were, but they had no work for me. I left, and he followed me out and asking me if I had read Jane Eyre. I had, in fact, along with what most of the 19th century offered in fiction.
“I’m not her, though. I’m no Jane Eyre. Naïve, afraid and sorry, I left home but simply running away from what I don’t know.”
He found me a job in one of two local pubs and told me that women around there married, had children, tilled gardens and waited for their husbands to come home off the long boats. I stayed and, for the first year, avoided all of those expectations.
I wrote to my parents every week for a year. They could have easily found me even though I used a PO Box as a return address. They wrote back, filled me in on goings on and prayed I was happy, and I was relatively so. I went home for my sister’s wedding. I went home for my brother’s graduation from college. I went home for my black sheep brother’s graduation from his 12-step lessons in recovery. In between my comings and goings, I quietly wed the ruggedly handsome old man who decided I was just the woman he needed to see him to his grave.
Eyebrows were raised in the coffee shop the first time we came in together. The pub was disappointed to lose me. I spent our first year together cleaning and painting and listening to the horn of the longboats and how to garden and preserve what the garden gave us.
“Do you want children?” he asked one night.
“No,” I said, wondering at that moment how I became the person who sat and watched the fire burn in the hearth and if I needed to find fuel for my car and move on.
“Good,” he said.
I returned to my cloth covered book and let its fiction comfort and calm me.
And then it happened. I made my way to Huron, to walk the shore and listen to the stories of ghosts and ships and heartbreak and madness. I would return to make sure he had his coffee and ask him about his time on the Great Lakes, the ghost ships he saw and the men he knew.
His funeral was quiet, and his lawyer brief. The property was prime and worth a good amount this close to the shore, but if I sold, I would lose the fortune he had stored up for one such as me.
“He saw you, you know, said the man in the tie. He saw you years before you showed up, disheveled and jaded. You haunted him, he would tell me, when I would come out and talk money and will and property.” The lawyer shuffled his papers into order and placed them back in his leather briefcase. “Do you know what he would say to me?”
“No,” I said.
“You wait and see. I’ve been haunted by her for years and I’ll get even. I’ll haunt her for the rest of her days.”
I wear my wedding ring, thick gold and heavy, on an equally heavy golden chain around my neck. I learned how to paint the shores of Huron and the ships that sailed upon the solemn waters through the ages. My family wonders about me and how I survive this solitude, storm and eerie silence.
Simple. He keeps me here, this ruggedly handsome man of the north.