Galen, NY, on the Clyde River
1936
We were no longer young. We were quilt-puckered from collarbone to ankle, and swollen from ankle to toe from the work we’d done as wives and mothers. We’d dug gardens and wrung laundry with the same hands that cradled stillborn babies. We sang hymns with the same lips that scolded salesmen and lied about what we thought about our husbands. We crimped pies and boiled potatoes and woke every three hours at night, wandered our homes in the dark, sighing at the beauty of moonlight threading through fences and across wide swaths of grass and wanting something we couldn’t name.
In hindsight, their foreignness could have been why we were so drawn to them. It was early in the summer — two years ago, mid-June, the mosquitos just born and mad with the heat, the Clyde a stinking trickle. We were curious, of course. The apartment they rented was dead in the middle of Galen next to the Rexall, and on the first floor, windows facing the street. We’d stroll by on our business and walk slowly past, not looking, but you couldn’t help but see the small table close to the window covered with a deep blue cloth and candles burning on it. The pale yellow curtains, pulled to the side, a lifted veil.
Neither one of them wore a wedding ring, which we decided was because they were uncle and niece until we saw them arm in arm outside the butcher’s shop, looking in at the chickens hanging in the window. The butcher’s wife at the counter thought she heard an accent on the woman: Quebecois. We also took note of how he looked at her, and how he touched her lightly on the arm or back as if he didn’t believe she was real. We could see that he loved her in a way that our husbands did not love us.
They seemed mismatched to us: he was worn and deep-lined, stringy and fidgety, and she, small and snaky, although we had to admit, pretty in a china-doll way. Maybe he fought in the Great War, we whispered. Maybe he had been in one of the German camps. Within a week, they had taken in one of the stray dogs that lived by the river.
Then the sign appeared, hand-painted in perfect, curving letters. Madam Lily, Tarot and Palmistry. Underneath that, Medium. We agreed that the business would fail in Galen, of all places. We were a quiet town. Even our waterways were still; you couldn’t take a boat down the Clyde for all the dead trees in the way, and the span of the Erie Canal that ran through town was so shallow we liked to say the fish were sunburned.
We were correct, of course. Estelle, who worked across the street at the bank, reported that no customers came or went from the apartment for months. The humidity of July buckled the paint at the edges of the sign. By August, some of the letters had smudged, so that the sign read Mad Lil, Tat and Palmy. And didn’t it make us laugh to call it that, Tat and Palmy. We couldn’t imagine what Mad Lil and himself — Harley — were living on, or feeding that dog, but the woman did her shopping in a thick, fox fur coat and hat in all but very hot weather, very extravagant. We decided her eyes lacked color; none of us could say if they were blue or brown.
One afternoon, an old woman inched down the sidewalk. It wasn’t the organist from the Methodist church, although she looked to be that old. Long, dark housedress, thin scarf over her head, bent from the waist like a hay hook, thumping along overdramatically with the help of a cane. We happened to be having rye toast at the Rexall counter and made note of the woman’s slow progress, curious as to where she was headed. When she knocked on the door of Tat and Palmy, our interest grew into a point. When she reappeared after an hour, she seemed to move faster, like a much younger woman. There was a skip in her step. We watched her stop and admire the Joe Pye Weed, seemingly breathing in the air with great pleasure. We watched until she was out of sight. What, we asked each other, could have happened in there? None of us wanted to be first, but we agreed that someone had to investigate. We elected Evangeline; she had the kindest face.
It had to be the hottest day that August. Evangeline disappeared into Tat and Palmy and we gathered at the Rexall counter to wait. Fans rifled the paper napkins in their holders. Our slips stuck to our thighs. Finally, she emerged. The apartment is filled with soft yellow light, Evangeline said, the color of buttercups. It’s decorated with acorns, shells, colored pebbles, dried violets, bleached bones. The whole apartment, she said, in a tone of unnerving reverence, is a shrine to all the beauty that is around us that we never see. Evangeline said that when she walked in, she felt an ache of a joy so large she couldn’t comprehend it, as if Mad Lil and Harley had gathered up the sunshine and filled their house with it. Because of the yellow curtains, Evangeline said, people on the street look like saints, haloed in sun. Evangeline does not normally speak like this.
Was the man there? we asked; we hadn’t seen him in weeks. Is it clean? How many rooms do they have? Are there weapons? We took Evangeline’s hands and turned them up to examine her palms. What did she tell you?
Evangeline’s forehead creased. I should keep Tad home tomorrow because there will be a motor accident and he might be hurt. We started to cluck our tongues, but Evangeline gave us such a sharp look we stopped. The Rexall fans were simply pushing hot air around, and several of us said they could feel a headache coming on. We went back to our own kitchens to berate our husbands and wash our younger children with harsh soap. We had more questions now than answers.
Evangeline did keep her son Tad home the next day. We studied the local papers for news of an accident and found only one — a bread delivery truck and a bicycle – but it was nowhere near where Tad could have been. There was no talking to Evangeline about it; she brought a yellow cake to Tat and Palmy as a thank you.
Other women began visiting Mad Lil over the next months; mostly the younger ones, first-time mothers who fussed about fevers and children who couldn’t read. Mad Lil told the Williams girl to keep her baby away from the cat and she did. Lord knows what would have happened, the Williams girl told everyone who would listen, clutching her 7-month-old like a doll made of glass. Mad Lil told another mother to replace the chain on her son’s bicycle, and of course she did. If she hadn’t, she believed, her eight-year-old would have ridden too fast down the hill and onto the tracks to meet a train head on. Mad Lil drew circles with a lead pencil on the soles of the banker’s daughter’s shoes to bring love. She threw stones into the Clyde at the new moon and counted the rings to see how many children the sloe-eyed waitress, Clara, would have. Eventually, we all went. Those of us with migraines, those losing their sight, those with nasty-tempered children or bad husbands, all slipped through the door to Tat and Palmy to whisper with Mad Lil. We began to believe we had a direct line to the future, and that it was given to us because we were good people, and kind, and deserved to be protected from pain. And we genuinely liked the man, Harley. He was rail-thin and ashen, but always had a kind word. You wouldn’t think he’d generate much heat, but when he touched your shoulder to say hello, his hand was warm.
Things changed the next year. Mad Lil claimed she was instructed to serve others more broadly. She would hold summer message services in the woods chapel outside town. None of us were Spiritualists, of course. We were suspicious of the idea of mediumship, and frankly, unnerved at the prospect of our dead visiting us with advice. Besides, what Mad Lil called an outdoor chapel was an abandoned, dilapidated collection of rough-hewn wooden benches a quarter mile from town.
We swore we’d never go. We said the Apostle’s Creed in church with extra fervor. But when we heard that the young mothers were going, we decided it would be wise to keep an eye on them.
The woods in summer are damp, breathing spaces. We could smell each other’s musk and powder when we sat down on the benches. The pine trees rose up all round us and the scent of sap reminded us of the flannel lining of our childhood sleeping bags. The young mothers twittered reverently; they took up the front rows.
Mad Lil stood and smiled at us. A breeze ebbed, as if waiting to hear. The earth is tattoo-ed, Mad Lil began, in that quiet, accented voice. We’ve scratched furrows into its surface and filled them with color: corn, grapes, soy, wheat. These are our marks, the record of what we’ve done, how we’ve lived, what we care about. But there is another world beyond this world of the body. There is the world of spirit that we enter through the door that is death, and all our loves are there, within our reach. Our life’s journey is not a solitary one. Invisible hands guide and protect us.
Her skin was translucent. The vessels in her neck pulsed in rhythm with her words.
She walked toward one of the young mothers. I have someone with me. May I come to you? The woman nodded. I have James with me. Did you have a James in your life? Yes, yes, the woman said. James is here and he wants you to know that it alright about the house. Does that make sense to you? The young woman blushed a deep red. “May I come to you?” Mad Lil asked the Gooley sisters, both dark-haired and twitchy. I have two men, walking together. Brothers? They’re proud of you, they want you to know that. Do you understand? The sisters sighed and slumped against each other. Smiling widely, they put several dollars into the collection basket on their way out.
When we stepped again into the carnate world outside the chapel, we were newly aware of a cacophony: cicadas in the grasses, sparrows flushed from blackberry bushes, tractor engines, low buzz of electricity from the wires, ever present scold of mockingbirds. It made us feel small in a way we couldn’t describe.
It’s lovely, don’t you think, Evangeline said quietly, the idea of being held by invisible hands?
Again, Evangeline does not normally speak like this.
Stranger still, Estelle chimed in: I heard that when a Canadian lumberman shoots a deer he wraps himself in the skin to ward off witches.
We kept our eyes to ourselves.
And so it went, the meetings and the messages, until it grew too cold and Mad Lil added private medium sessions to her Tat and Palmy offerings.
Through Mad Lil, the woman in a fur stole with a blue feather came again and again to the bank teller, Estelle, and let her know that she should urge her husband to take the second job he was thinking about. Estelle was moved to do this, and was the happier for it, with her husband gone from the house many more hours every day and extra money coming in. She booked a weekly time at the Tat and Palmy with Mad Lil as breezily as she would a hair appointment. Margaret, the postmistress, heard from a dead aunt that Margaret’s son was destined for the Air Force, and Margaret went home right away and urged her son to enlist, now that there were no major wars and he was not interested in getting a regular job. When he did, she turned the overstuffed chair he always sat in toward the window so she could watch the grackles swarm her yard, pecking their iridescent heads at the grass. She, too, saw Mad Lil regularly.
Spirit warned us that the muck-throttled Clyde River would swell in late autumn rain, and surely it did. When a carelessness set the Frost Hill farm on fire in November and the flames spread to the fields around it, we knew it would not reach us, and we did nothing to protect ourselves because we knew we didn’t have to. The fires didn’t jump the town line, and we were smug about that. Mad Lil had given us the confidence of knowing.
Then came the snow. It began falling on Christmas, and we swooned to see it blanketing the town like a postal card. Our hearts were full. But it continued snowing, silently, steadily, one foot, two feet, more. Our cars were buried, some on the side of the road where we’d had to abandon them. Estelle’s husband was forced to walk more than a mile home from his night job and the poor man suffered a heart attack at the end of his driveway. No ambulance could get through the snowy streets; he died there. The coal truck couldn’t get through either, and people who hadn’t put in wood were left to freeze in their homes. We lost a high school math teacher and his wife. Ploughs shoved piles of snow into mountains that reached past the first story of the Grange. Tree branches poked through snow crust like the fingers of a drowning man. Our windows were blacked out by drifts, our doors blocked, our mailboxes submerged beneath the snow.
After three days, it stopped. Estelle buried her husband and went to work as a chambermaid at the Holiday Inn in Lyons. The seniors graduated without Algebra II and we had snow on the ground until July. In August, Margaret’s son went down in a plane doing training exercises over the Yellow Sea.
Why hadn’t she warned us?
Thinking back, we remembered several oddities that occurred after Mad Lil came to Galen. Sudden nosebleeds. Dead fish caught in the muck of the Clyde. And the birds. We’d never seen so many mockingbirds gathered along the telephone wires as we did that spring, scolding us whenever we left our houses. Hundreds of them, shrill and punishing. We’d wave our arms and they’d take off, a dark cloud, but then they’d resettle on a roof to continue berating us.
We gathered in our kitchens and went over the facts, the sequence of tragedies. Would Estelle be a widow if it wasn’t for Mad Lil? Would Margaret’s son be alive? The math teacher? And now that she knew so much about us — what we were afraid of, the things we wished for, things we’d said about our children and our husbands, all that we hid in our palms and cards, all that we’d confessed on those benches in the woods — wouldn’t she use it against us? If Mad Lil could protect us, we reasoned, she could also harm us.
The young mothers stopped making appointments with Mad Lil and kept their children close when she was near. We said the Our Father when we had to pass by the Tat and Palmy. We did not speak to Mad Lil when we met her in the market. A second winter passed.
In March, the most miserable month, word came that Mad Lil’s Harley had died. We kept up our distance. We had our own dead, and we were sick of funerals. Let her be, we told each other. Let her keep company with her own dead, not ours. Evangeline told us Mad Lil planned to bury Harley up on the hill where Estelle’s husband was, and Margaret’s son, the math teacher and his wife, our own parents. We wondered, as we often did, where her people were. Why couldn’t she put him with his people? There’s a sister in Kinder Falls, Evangeline said, but Mad Lil didn’t want him buried there.
For weeks Mad Lil only came out of her apartment at dusk, and when she did, she headed for the woods, eyes straight ahead. She was thin, nearly transparent, and wore the fur coat and hat no matter what the temperature. We’d peek in the windows of the Tat and Palmy when she was gone; the whole apartment looked as gray and furry as 4 o’clock in the morning.
Mad Lil sent word to the young mothers she would start her chapel meetings again; that her Harley wanted her to do it.
The audacity.
Phones buzzed. We whispered. We were in agreement.
Come meeting day we arranged ourselves in the front rows and waited while others, all the younger women, tentatively filed in. We turned to eye them. Carp, they were. Ugly fish who nibble stupidly on the rubber boots that sink to the bottom of a lake because you never know; could be food.
Mad Lil stood at the front of the chapel and looked everyone in the eyes. We, of course, wore our sunglasses, as shots of noontime sun speared through the trees and made us squint. Forgiveness is what frees you, she began in that high, accented voice. This is what spirit teaches, this is what spirit knows. Forgiveness is love, is God.
Audacity.
Mad Lil turned to us. Her voice was quiet. I have a woman with me: Mary? Maggie? We all shook our heads, no. She tried again. There’s a woman in a hat with an iridescent bluebird feather stuck in it; she’s wearing a mink coat — she wants to tell you about something about a well. We knew that was Estelle’s person, but we shrugged our shoulders and stared at Mad Lil stonily. I’m afraid I don’t recognize who you are describing, we each said as she came to us. Mad Lil gave us a baffled look. Margaret, who’d lost her son, rolled her eyes, stood up and said, this is nonsense. One of the young mothers in the back row burst into tears and ran from the chapel. Evangeline leapt to her feet and held up her hands. My hands, she croaked, look at how ugly they are! I’m afraid to touch them together!
We pulled her down to the bench and shushed her. Spirit has its own logic, Mad Lil said, but her voice faltered, and she ended the meeting. We left her there standing among the trees by herself. People always want to know the future, but ultimately, it is unhelpful.
The Tat and Palmy sign disappeared. The new postmistress reported that several boxes of belongings were sent to Canada. It was Evangeline who saw Mad Lil last.
Evangeline was out on her back porch when Mad Lil walked by in her big fur coat and hat. We’d had rain the night before and Evangeline, for a reason only she knows, put on her coat and boots and followed Mad Lil into the fields and down the path to the woods chapel, where she expected Lil to sit and wait for word from her Harley, which, as was clear to everyone, was not coming. No, Evangeline said, she did not do that. Mad Lil stood at the front of the chapel, lifted her face to the sky and opened her mouth. It was inhuman, Evangeline said, the sound that came out, as if she was vomiting the madness and rage of every soul on earth. Mad Lil shook with such violence, Evangeline said, that her body nearly lifted off the ground. She screamed again and again louder and louder and louder until at last nothing came out of her mouth and the woods were silent. Then, Evangeline said, Mad Lil left the chapel, walking faster and faster, until she was loping, running, galloping, and all Evangeline could see was a brown ball of fur disappearing among the black trees, a blur of movement that could have been Mad Lil, or a deer, or a trick of the late afternoon light reflecting off the wet leaves. Evangeline followed her footprints until they vanished.
We didn’t believe a word of it.
Evangeline knew, she said, that Lil was gone for good because her dog was sitting on Evangeline’s porch when she returned. When Evangeline opened the front door, it walked right inside, jumped on her sofa and curled up. Evangeline phoned down to Harley’s sister in Kinder Falls to see if she wanted the dog but the telephone just rang and rang. Evangeline liked the dog well enough, so she kept him. Named him Spirit.
Seemed fitting that the rain came hard that whole week, a rain so hard you heard a brass band in the way it echoed against hard surfaces. The Clyde swelled up and swallowed its banks. When it was done, the town shined slick like it was washed clean.
It wasn’t long before a young couple moved to town and turned Tat and Palmy into a jumble shop. We enjoyed looking through the shelves of castaway things — leaded glass, old linens, wedding veils, Tinker Toys. We would look around and try to remember how the place looked before — the stones, bones, flowers, and shells; the little table with the deep blue cloth — but we couldn’t agree.
We remember what we choose to remember, Evangeline said quietly.
We told the new young couple about Mad Lil’s furs, and Harley, and how we came to that apartment to wash the body when he passed. How we embraced Lil and sat with her. How we brought her food — our salads and lemonade — and how grateful she was to us, how she drank up our kindness. She was probably back with her people now, we said, and happily so. We’d pick up a teapot or a china butter dish — how much for this? — and smile to ourselves remembering how good we’d been to her, she being a foreigner and all.
Image: photo by Luca Dross on Pexels, licensed under CC 2.0.
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I can’t wait to get the book. Lesley, outstanding to say the least. Thank you and hooray!!!
What a good story about how people justify meanness and the lure of the spirit world !
Fortune tellers and small towns….ate it up like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.