American Ghosts David Plante (bio) On our way to and from parochial school, my younger brother and I walked through a wooded lot between our house and our nearest neighbor. In the spring the thin branches of the trees were leafed in bright green and in the autumn in bright red, and through these branches appeared a big granite boulder that I always paused to look at, and I imagined, from a time long, long past when there were no houses and everywhere was forest, an Indian standing on that boulder and looking back at me. All I knew of my ancestry was that the first to have come to the continent of North America from France would have often seen Indians in the woods. A summer night, when the window of my bedroom was wide open and the shadows of trees were cast on the screen, I, in bed with my younger brother, Lenard, who slept deeply, remained wide awake, staring at that window. The fresh nighttime air seething through the screen smelled of wild roses that grew between our narrow yard and the small lot of woods, and also some other smell, perhaps skunk cabbage or skunk, which I thought of as bête puante. Moonlight fell on the trees out there, and I was terrified that, among the rusted automobile fenders and tires dumped in those woods, the ghost of the Indian was hiding and would come up to my window and look in. My terror became so great that I beat my fists against the headboard until my knuckles were bloody. I woke Lenard, who lay still and silent. My mother, followed by my father, came rushing into the room, which was dim in the moonlight through the window. My mother grasped my wrists to stop me from hitting the headboard, then she pulled me out of bed and to the window, where she made me look out into the moonlit woods, repeating over and over, gently, "There's nothing there, nothing, nothing." For me everything was out there, and this everything would at any moment make itself present to me [End Page 1] as a face in the darkness. My mother said to my father, who was standing back, "Tell him nothing is out there," but my father, from whom I expected no more or no less, said nothing. Upset for me, my mother insisted, "Tell him." Instead, my father said, "I'll sleep with the boy." I wanted my mother, her soft body loosely contained by her white, wrinkled nightgown, in bed with me, to reassure me that there was in fact nothing to frighten me in the outside woods, that there was nothing in all the outside world to frighten me. And I wanted, too, my father, wearing the t-shirt and boxer shorts he wore during the day, to be in bed with me, as if his presence allowed me a deeper reassurance than any my mother could have given me: that however terrifying it was, the possibility of that face appearing in the darkness released in me the greatest sense of everything that was most important to me. I was seven years old, the age of reason. At times I loved my mother and hated my father; but these times could suddenly be reversed, and I would hate my mother and love my father. (This reversal of feelings towards my parents was like the reversals in a dream I often had into my maturity, a nightmare in which at one moment I could not get out of our house because the door was locked and some presence in the house was menacing me, and in the next moment, or even simultaneously, I could not lock the loose, wobbly outside door against a menace from without.) "He's got to get over being frightened of the dark," my mother said to my father, still holding my wrists. "For his own sake, he's got to." "Yes, yes," my father said. She drew me to her to hug me closely, so I felt all her body under her nightgown. "It's for your own good," she said. "You know that." Trembling, I said...
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Jan 1, 2014
Robert R Broeckert 
Open Access