Fade Read online

  I pulled the sheet around my shoulders even though it was a hot night, and I brought forth in my mind the image of my aunt Rosanna and all her beauty, the scent of her and the feel of her as she held me in her arms. Her face was a beacon shining in my mind, a glowing light that led me with sweet caresses into sleep, deep and dark and, because of her, utterly beautiful.

  he photograph was not the only mystery in my life that summer. There were rumors of strange happenings on the shores of Moccasin Pond on the outskirts of Monument. Rumors of bonfires and pagan rituals and the appearance of ghosts. Like all rumors, they were difficult to pin down. Some brave people actually went to the pond to investigate and found nothing. Others reported that they were driven away by phantoms breathing fire on their necks. Those fires were nothing but their own whiskey breaths blowing back on them, my father scoffed. As July burned on, Moccasin Pond became a part of the summer's lore, a topic to pass away the hot and humid days and evenings. Until Pete Lagniard came with proof that the rumors were not rumors at all.

  Pete told me of his proof one Saturday afternoon as we were on our way to the Plymouth Theater, where the latest episode of The Ghost Rider was playing along with a Charlie Chan mystery.

  Pete always was the first to know what was going on in Frenchtown. He was the youngest of a family of nine and his older brothers and sisters carried home the gossip of the shops where they worked. Pete was an expert eavesdropper and he reported all that he heard to me. We both loved drama and movies and mysteries and this cemented our friendship. He lived on the first floor of the three-decker on Sixth Street and I lived on the second. We rigged a pulley system between our windows at the rear of the house so that we could send messages to each other in a Campbell's soup can. It was easier to shout out the windows, of course, but not so dramatic.

  Pausing in front of the Acme Upholstering Company, Pete said he overheard his brothers talking about strange meetings taking place at Moccasin Pond.

  “What's so strange about them?”

  “These are meetings with masked men. They carry torches. They meet Friday nights …”

  “Who are they?” I asked, doubtfully. Masked men and flaming torches were far removed from Frenchtown and belonged on the screen at the Plymouth.

  “Nobody knows yet but my brothers are going to find out,” Pete bragged, strutting a bit. “I heard them say they were going to the pond with a gang next Friday night. My brother Curly said: if these mutts are looking for trouble, they're going to find it.” Curly, a giant of a man who worked in the shipping department at the comb shop, was capable of lifting huge crates that ordinarily required the strength of two or three men.

  “Are you sure of all this, Pete?” I asked, wondering if his imagination was working overtime as usual.

  “Well, there's one way to find out,” he said, his eyes dancing with excitement.

  “How?” I asked, although I knew how.

  “Friday night,” he said. “We'll be there. You and me. At Moccasin Pond …”

  A shiver rippled through my body, a shiver of dread and foreboding and danger. Yet I couldn't deny the excitement that also ran just below the shiver. How often I had longed for adventure, thinking that I could only find it beyond Frenchtown, far from Monument, in the distant places of the globe. But here was drama and mystery only a few miles away, attainable, waiting for us.

  On Friday night, when darkness had inundated the streets of Frenchtown, Pete and I made our way toward Moccasin Pond, after slipping out of our tenements. We cut through the back alley between the Monument Comb Shop and the sheds of Boudreau's Bottling Works and ghosted through Alphabet Soup, that area of streets with letters for names where transients lived in disreputable shacks and shanties. We streaked down Water Street, where the houses were few and far between and the streetlights equally sparse. We glanced at each other occasionally, nighttime conspirators, thrilled to be out so late together. The night was filled with unidentified fragrances, as if it produced a smell of its own, musky and dark and pungent, that the day kept hidden. When an occasional car passed, we drew into the shadows and became a part of the night and its mysteries.

  We struggled up Ransom Hill, out of breath as we reached Pepper Point, a spot from which we could see the lights of downtown Monument winking in the distance. As we paused to rest for a moment or two, Pete asked:

  “What time do you think it is?”

  “After eleven,” I said, guessing.

  The words sounded beautiful. After eleven. And Frenchtown dozing below us, most of the people asleep in their beds.

  “Let's go,” Pete said, and we groped our way into the woods. A dog barked somewhere, the sound emphasizing the stillness of night. Insects buzzed around our heads. Stars wheeled in the sky and a full moon emerged from drifting clouds. We passed under the branches of towering trees and squeezed through clumps of bushes. We bumped into each other, blundering our way forward, tripping and sometimes falling, heard our own desperate grunts and groans. Finally, gasping for breath, we emerged into a clearing and followed an irregular path that led to the shores of Moccasin Pond, the surface shining in the moonlight, the water as calm and unruffled as the white bedspread in my parents’ bedroom.

  Across the pond stood the pavilion where dances were held on Saturday nights, its white clapboards gleaming ghostlike in the darkness.

  “Listen,” Pete said, turning his ear to the pond.

  The sound of automobiles reached faintly across the water, then grew louder, the pond acting like an amplifier. Squealing brakes and the honking of horns mingled with the roar of racing engines. Headlights flashed across the water like searchlights in a prison movie, and we ducked our heads.

  We circled the pond, keeping to the shadows, following the curve of the shoreline, low to the ground. We snaked our way to the picnic area and took up positions behind a table that had been upended and stood on its side.

  Peeking above the table's edge, I saw that fifteen or twenty cars had formed a circle, their headlights focused on a central point, the motors quietly idling, the drivers shadowy figures behind the windshields.

  As the men began to emerge from the cars, slamming the doors and calling to each other in muffled voices, Pete whispered in my ear a single syllable of awe and wonder: “Wow.”

  And I echoed the word silently as I saw instantly what he had seen.

  The men wore white shrouds with peaked hoods, their eyes dark caves where holes had been cut into the material. One hooded figure carried a huge wooden cross, taller than he was, the horizontal bar wider than a man's outspread arms. He made his way to the center of the lighted area.

  He raised the cross above his head, like an evil priest in a pagan ceremony, defying God himself as he thrust the cross toward the sky, the hooded figures gathering around him, cheering and yelling.

  “The Ku Klux Klan,” Pete whispered in my ear.

  “They belong down south,” I said.

  “But they're here.”

  Pete's hand gripped my shoulder sharply, his fingernails digging into my flesh. “Duck,” he commanded.

  As I lowered my head I glimpsed a hooded figure walking in our direction, holding a rifle in one hand, a whiskey bottle in the other.

  Pete's voice trembled in my ear: “A guard.”

  The guard passed so close to us that we heard his feet crunching on pine needles and, after a pause, the gurgling sound of whiskey being swallowed as he went on his way.

  When I raised my head again, the cross had become a fiery torch, angry flames biting at the darkness, the cross brandished high as the Klansmen leapt and danced, shouting, clapping each other on the back in a terrible kind of jubilation. The air blazed not only with the leaping flames of the cross but with an aura that was difficult to define. Words rose to my lips but I could not say them aloud. They were lodged in my throat. Hate. Malice. Evil.

  Sudden silence fell as the hooded men formed a circle around the crossbearer.

  “Get rid of the niggers!” he yell
ed.

  An answering shout from the crowd: “Get rid of the niggers!”

  “Get rid of the Papists!” the crossbearer yelled again, his voice higher and shriller, the cross still aflame above him.

  Pete turned to me with an inquiring glance.

  “That's us,” I said. “Catholics.”

  “Get rid of the Papists!” the crowd echoed, their voices accompanied by the thumping of fists on car hoods.

  “Get rid of the Jews!” The words rang out with a terrible kind of splendor.

  “Get rid of the Jews!” the crowd echoed.

  “Where the hell is Curly and the gang?” Pete whispered in my ear.

  A surge of movement in the darkness beyond the pavilion, vague and undefined, caught my eye. As I squinted in that direction there was an explosion of lights. Headlights and spotlights and flashlights focused on the hooded figures. At the same time, war whoops and screams of delight blazed in the air and, at last, I saw the invaders streaming into the parking lot carrying clubs and baseball bats, yelling and screaming as they ran toward the Klansmen.

  For a long moment the hooded figures stood frozen in surprise, mute, obviously stunned and unprepared for the attack. Then, as if on cue, they began to run, panic-stricken, tripping and falling, encumbered by the flowing robes.

  Pete leapt to his feet and hooted with glee. “Kill the bastards,” he yelled.

  The fight was not really a fight but a furious chase as the Klansmen scurried for their cars, gathering the skirts of their shrouds like frantic women while their pursuers swung their weapons, missing their targets more often than they hit them. Shouts and cries and bellows of pain filled the air. Pete's brother Curly stalked through the smoke and dust, without a weapon, grinning wickedly, as if he were taking a casual stroll on a Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, a hooded figure leapt on his back with a fierce cry and Curly spun him around effortlessly, twisting swiftly for someone so big, and his attacker went flying through the air, striking the side of a car with a dull thud.

  As I shouted “Hooray” I turned to see the wooden cross, fiameless now, abandoned, on the ground, pathetic and charred.

  “Watch out, Paul,” Pete cried.

  The hooded guard was coming our way, waving his rifle at us.

  “I see you,” he shouted, “you little shitters.”

  We scrambled to our feet. Pete pushed against the table and sent it flopping to the ground with a whomp that made the guard jump back awkwardly, almost tripping on the hem of his shroud.

  Dashing for the protection of the woods, we zigzagged, keeping low to make ourselves smaller targets, imitating the movie heroes we had seen in a thousand getaways. Pete plunged into low bushes but I tripped and fell forward onto the beach, my face mashed into the sand. Sputtering and spitting sand, wiping frantically at my face, I tried to get up as I heard the oncoming footsteps of the guard.

  “Come on, Paul,” Pete called from the shadows.

  I attempted to stand but my breath went away as if someone had struck me in the chest and a flash of pain went through me, from the top of my head to my toes. I collapsed on the sand, fighting to regain my breath, thankful that the pain at least had passed as quickly as it came. As my breath returned I saw the guard advancing, a grotesque silhouette in the moonlight.

  Cold invaded my body as I stared helplessly at the nightmare figure lurching toward me, rifle in hand.

  “Where are you, Paul?”

  Where did he think I was?

  The guard came closer, closer, and stopped only a few feet away, the rifle aimed in my direction. Shivering, I began to pray, knowing that I was about to die. Je Vous salut, Marie … I asked forgiveness for my sins, looking up at the guard who stood almost directly above me.

  The rifle wavered in his hand and he looked around, swaying a bit, his hood bobbing up and down.

  I felt a surge of hope. He's drunk, I thought, drunk as a bat and doesn't see me.

  He took a step backward, as if he had lost all sense of direction. Behind him, in the parking lot, the skirmish continued, shouts and cries, and he swiveled toward the sounds, unsteady on his feet, the rifle lowered. I was still shivering, although the night was hot.

  He glanced my way again, muttered, “The hell with it,” and let out a war whoop as he charged back toward the battle, holding on to his hood with one hand, waving the rifle with the other.

  Wasting no time in getting to my feet, I hurled myself into the woods, groping blindly forward. I finally stumbled into a clearing and flung myself to the ground, exhausted, drenched with sweat. No longer cold with fear.

  Pete found me there a few minutes later.

  “What happened?” he asked. “I've been looking all over for you.”

  “I tripped and fell down. I thought he was going to kill me.

  “I couldn't see you, I thought you ran the other way.”

  “He was drunk,” I said. “I was right in front of him and he couldn't see me. He ran back to the fight.…”

  Pete gave me a handkerchief to wipe my face and we slithered through the woods, following patches of moonlight that guided our footsteps. The sounds of the battle diminished, growing fainter behind us until we were aware once more of the woods surrounding us, the presence of things, small scatterings, sensations of flight and movement.

  At last we collapsed at the base of a huge spreading tree, gasping for breath, bones aching. Pete closed his eyes and fell asleep almost instantly. After a while I yielded myself up to exhaustion and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  When we awakened, dawn was spilling blood across the sky, and we drifted out of the woods and made our way like weary phantoms down Ransom Hill and through the streets of Frenchtown to Sixth Street and home.

  The next afternoon, as I arranged oranges in precarious pyramids in the vegetable section of Dondier's Market, Pete brought me the Monument Times. We ducked out of sight and knelt on the floor near the potato bin.

  “Look,” Pete whispered, spreading the front page of the newspaper before me on the floor. I heard the ringing of the cash register as Mr. Dondier rang up the order of Mrs. Thel-lier of the eleven children.

  The headline in the top right-hand corner of the Times said:

  KLAN, LOCAL GANG

  CLASH AT POND

  And below:

  Comeback efforts of the Ku Klux Klan were thwarted here last night when a gathering of Klansmen at Moccasin Pond was disrupted by a group of men reported to be residents of the Monument area.

  Unofficial reports indicated that several injuries occurred but no one sought medical treatment.

  Klan activity, last reported here in the mid-19208, has been on the increase in recent months.

  Police Chief Henry Stowe said today that “we will not tolerate the existence of the Klan in our city.”

  “Isn't that great, Paul?” Pete whispered in my ear. “We were there. We made the headlines.”

  As I read the story once more, my thoughts went back to the beach, and the hooded guard who had stood above me with his rifle, and the pain and the fear, and how I prayed and waited to die. But didn't. In the stuffy heat of Dondier's Market, my knees on the sawdust floor, I shivered at the memory of my narrow escape.

  I did not know that on the beach at Moccasin Pond on that Friday night I had faded for the first time.

  became a spy that summer, searching for more mysteries, carrying on a bittersweet espionage, a solitary watcher and an eavesdropper as well, hanging around corners, listening to conversations, stalking shadows that existed only in my imagination and settling at last on the sweetest of targets —my aunt Rosanna.

  I focused my attention on my grandfather's house on Eighth Street because she had taken over the spare bedroom in the front that was usually reserved for visitors from Canada. My grandparents’ kitchen was seldom empty or silent. Someone usually occupied the chairs around the big table, my grandfather presiding in the rocking chair near the big black stove while my grandmother, a sparrow of a woman who flitted her
e and there and everywhere, kept busy pouring coffee, slicing pies, serving suppers and dinners. No wonder she took a long nap every afternoon.

  I lingered in that tenement, keeping my ears alert to conversations, drifting off to other rooms. Once, when my aunt was out, I slipped into her room and shamelessly opened one of her bureau drawers, saw a pair of her silk panties lying on top of other underwear. I held the pink panties to my cheek while her perfume assailed me and I was weak and half sick with love and longing.

  I schemed to obtain glimpses of her and drank in her loveliness whenever I could, feasting on the marvels of her body. It was torture to be in the same room with her because I tried to look at her and not look at her at the same time, my eyes skittering anywhere and everywhere but coming back to her finally, my heart accelerating, my body fevered, my eyeballs hot and stinging. Whenever our eyes met, I was held there as if hypnotized. Sometimes I tore my eyes away, afraid that she could see right into my soul and knew the terrible and wonderful thoughts I had of her.

  One evening after supper as I sat in the bedroom reading, I heard my father and mother in conversation and Aunt Rosanna's name flashed in my ears.

  “She should have stayed away,” my father was saying. One minute the radio had been playing Amos ‘n’ ndy, the next moment those gravelly voices had faded and my father's words came from the kitchen.

  Getting up cautiously from the bed, I glided to the doorway in my stockinged feet.

  “But Frenchtown's her home, Lou,” my mother said. “Why shouldn't she come home?”

  “She always causes trouble,” he said, his voice stubborn in a way I seldom heard.

  “People make trouble for her,” my mother replied, voice soft as always but with her own kind of stubbornness. “You know what her problem is …”

  “I know, all right. She can't resist anything in pants.”

  “No, Lou, you're wrong. You're not being fair. She's got a heart as big as the world. But she falls for the wrong people and gets left in the lurch.”