The Harpsichordist - 1. Story

The Harpsichordist

by Carl Holiday

We were at that point—What’s it called? The seven-year itch?—where even the mere sight of Jerry wasn’t supposed to bring any excitement to my heart, except with Jerry that’s impossible. To tell the truth, Jerry has this great big bag of excitement he carries around with him and freely spreads it everywhere. He’s his own party, anniversary, celebration, or whatever else you’re having; bubbly doesn’t even come close to describing how Jerry is sometimes. Ever since I picked him out of a crowded party nine years ago, Jerry has been the light of my life.

Okay, truth time, yes, we’re on the ropes. My eyes wander a bit toward some guys who are attractive to me. Slender calves and forearms draw my attention, as they did with Jerry, then I’m studying what they’re attached to. If the thighs prove equally slender, then it’s the face that gets scrutinized. I don’t know why and really don’t care, but round is a turnoff, as is long and narrow. Oval seems hard to find, but gives me a tingly feeling all over.

Short? Don’t even ask me about short. Jerry is five-five to my six-three. Yeah, Mutt and Jeff, as my mother would’ve said.

Except, you see, it wasn’t me who climbed over the fence. Okay, I’m forty-three and Jerry is thirty-seven. You’d think six years wasn’t such a big spread, but Jerry ran into a guy who’d just turned thirty and, well, they were together a few months before they got sloppy and someone saw them. That someone told me.

I came home from work early and fixed supper. Jerry normally does all the cooking for us. He’s better at some things, I’m better at others, like vacuuming and dusting. He was surprised to see me. God, I was so mad I almost threw a pan full of boiling spaghetti sauce at him.

“Mikey, what’s wrong?” Jerry asked. Obviously, he’d picked up on the tension running through my body.

“What’s his name?” I asked. My voice nearly cracked, but I stared directly into his eyes. He swallowed, you know, gulped.

“Mark,” Jerry said, “but it isn’t like you think.”

“I hear he’s still a teenager,” I said. I was losing it. I was forty-three years old and I was going to start crying.

“He just looks young,” Jerry said. He hadn’t made a move to get close to me. “He turned thirty last month. He’s a lawyer who deals with child abuse cases. I’ve seen him around for a couple years, but didn’t meet him until he came in on a case I’m working on. Honest, Mikey, it’s not what you think.”

I went into the guest room and locked the door. We fought, in between not talking to each other—me not talking to Jerry no matter how hard he tried to communicate with me—for three solid weeks. Oh, god, did we fight, but neither of us could go in for the death grip and destroy the other. We loved each other so much that in the end I simply came back to our bed.

“I forgive you,” I said that night as I crawled under the covers, “but there’s a hole in my heart and I don’t know how to fix it.”

To help me, Jerry booked into a B & B out on the coast. This huge Victorian farmhouse on a bluff overlooking the ocean takes in a few guests a week for whatever you want to do because, “We provide the active guest with a place of warmth and relaxation and a hearty repast to break the fast.” The graphics company Jerry’s sister works for did the brochures.

They have a porch where you can sit and watch the Pacific Ocean crash onto the beach. You can rent horses to ride along miles of empty beach, fishing poles to try your luck in the surf or the pond out back, and a games room with a large selection of DVDs for when the rain simply refuses to go away. For the modern tourist, one of the local tribes has a casino twenty miles down the road toward civilization.

“Come on, Michael, there’s a first time for everything,” Jerry said early in the morning, the day after we arrived. Although it was still a bit cool and the fog hadn’t lifted above the trees, he was dressed in white cargos and a powder blue pullover. He looked absolutely ravishing up on that brown and white beast. Painted, I think horse people call them.

“I’ve been on a horse,” I said. “I was raised on a ranch, we had horses, and they’re wicked creatures put on Earth to do the devil’s work.”

“Michael, the children!” Jerry admonished with a limp hand on his cheek. The brother and sister he’d roped into this little project were giggling. They weren’t quite teens, I guess they call it pre-teen, and appeared to be twins. They were wearing identical blue jeans, Harley-Davidson t-shirts, and even their shoes matched. They were definitely pre-teen and momma picked out their clothes; made my skin crawl.

Horses are petulant creatures. We’ve had them around us for untold millennia, but they still can’t see where they’re putting their feet. They have to look ahead and remember not to stumble over the big rock. Sometimes they don’t remember and they’re going down with you still in the saddle. You yell at them for being so stupid, but it’s you who is the stupid one for getting on such a stupid beast.

Horses, though, are beautiful creatures as long as you leave them in their natural element. If you’ve ever been to Central Kentucky you know what I mean. Put a few horses in a pasture with some big shade trees, white fences, and acres of the greenest grass you’ve ever seen and you just want to pull off the interstate and contemplate the meaning of life. Actually, any pasture will do because horses have a lot of power built into them and you can see the potential for excitement, just don’t get too close or they’ll bite you.

I was raised in Southeastern Colorado and we had acres of prairie, lots of beef, and a few horses and dirt bikes to move them around. It was lucky my parents had lots of kids because I had absolutely no interest in ranching, rodeoing, 4-H-ing, or anything else to do with dirt, dust, cow and horse shit, and flies. Dad said I was peculiar when he went down to the co-op, but that was as far as it went. When I finally got up enough guts to come out, Dad was already dead; Mom, who’d moved into town by then, told me to stop by whenever I was in the area; and all my brothers and sisters told me to stay away from their children. Why is that?

I must have dozed a bit because the next thing I knew someone was poking my shoulder. It was a little girl, maybe seven or eight, with sandy brown hair pulled back into pigtails tied off with blue ribbons. Her yellow gingham dress billowed out from a couple petticoats. If it wasn’t 2005, I could’ve sworn she was straight out of the 1890s.

“Yes?” I asked.

“James Leonard won’t play with me,” the little girl said with a pout. “He keeps running away.”

“I do not!” A little boy exclaimed from the other side of me. He was maybe a year older—maybe a year from being a pre-teen—and was wearing a white button down, collarless shirt, brown shorts with suspenders, and knee socks that were in need of a good washing. Both children were not wearing shoes. “Rose Anne is always chasing me.”

“I do not!” Rose Anne said. “I don’t! Do I sir?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen you until this moment,” I said.

They both looked bewildered at this statement as if I should’ve seen them since arriving last night.

“Why don’t you go play and I’ll go back to my nap, okay?” I said. It was shady there on the porch and the surf started doing its magic on me again.

“But James Leonard won’t play with me,” Rose Anne said in that whiny voice only girls seem to possess.

There was a reason Jerry and I considered then rejected the idea of raising a child. This was a prime example of how a whiny voice is totally out of place in a relaxing environment. I wanted to doze, but Rose Anne had other ideas.

“How about a game of croquet?” I asked. The hoops and stakes were already in place on the lawn.

“Sure!” Rose Anne said.

“Yipee!” James Leonard exclaimed.

I got up and went inside to find out where they hid the mallets and balls. The younger half of the ownership team looked at me incredulously. Jim was in his early fifties, but fit enough to pass for someone in his mid forties. The other half, Gustav, was closer to fifty and obviously had bad genes because he looked nearly seventy.

“Who are you playing with, yourself?” Jim asked, with a leer.

“No, there’re two kids out on the porch,” I said, completely missing a comeback. “They seem bored out of their minds so I offered to play a game with them.”

“We don’t have any children here this week other than the two who went horseback riding with your partner,” Jim said.

“Then who were the kids on the porch?” I asked. There was something about this I didn’t like.

“James Leonard and Rose Anne,” Jim said.

“Yeah, that’s what they said,” I said.

“They both died August 7, 1891, when their drunken uncle threw them off the widow’s walk,” Jim said, matter-of-factly. “You should feel honored as we can go months without a sighting. Usually it’s one or both of them running up or down the stairs past a startled guest. Oh, if they’re still out there, the mallets and balls are under the porch. There’s a small door between two rhododendrons.”

Of course, they weren’t there and my mind began trying to come up with all sorts of reasons it had all been my wild imagination feeding off the wind, sea, and all the troubles Jerry and I had been going through. Yet, they had been very real and Rose Anne had touched me.

With little else to do, I pulled out the mallets and balls and set out to play a little game with myself. I selected red and then decided Rose Anne should be red. I figured James Leonard to be a blue person, but gave him yellow. That left me with green. As I played the game I kept looking up to the house to see if I was being watch, but there were no children’s faces in the windows or children leaning on the porch railing. A few of the guests, coming and going to various activities at the house or down the road at the casino, probably thought I was crazy. That didn’t matter though, nothing mattered, and even Jerry’s infidelity was no longer of any significance. I was lost in the game with two wonderful children who tragically lost at life at an early age.

Oh, yes, James Leonard won, but I think he was cheating.

My visitation was all around the house that night and everyone wanted to know everything I experienced. I couldn’t say anything other than I thought they were real. They certainly looked real, maybe a little dated with the clothes they were wearing and their focus on chasing after one another. They were children as far as I could tell. Since my family kept their precious issues away from the dirty pervert, the seed of the devil, and the something or other about Leviticus, my experience level with snotty noses, whiny voices, and perpetual whys was very limited. Even my friends, who were primarily gay or single, didn’t have children. I could proudly say that in my twenty-some years as an adult I’d never encountered the aroma of a dirty diaper and considered that an accomplishment.

We’d all gathered into the game room and Gustav gave a little lecture about the history of the house. It had been built as a vacation home for a sawmill owner in Tacoma back in the late 1880s. As was common at the time, the whole family including grandchildren ensconced themselves at the house for the season. Various other members of the family came and went as the summer progressed. It was an idyllic place.

One of the odder members of the family, Uncle Harold, was known to imbibe to excess and be disruptive in the process. In laymen’s terms, Uncle Harold was a mean drunk. If you saw that he was on one of his binges it was advisable to stay out of his way. One night two of the older grandchildren, nine-year-old James Leonard Berge, Jr., and eight-year-old Rose Anne Berge were playing on the stairs when Uncle Harold came home drunker than he’d ever been before. For whatever reason, he grabbed the children by their collars and dragged them screaming and struggling up to the widow’s walk. There was no pause to ponder the situation, no listening to the pleading of the adults trying to get to him, nothing stopped the inevitable. The roof from where he flung the two children was steep and did not have any dormers; at the eave it was a three story plummet to hard packed clay.

Someone went for the local constabulary who notified his superiors in Aberdeen of the situation. The following morning Uncle Harold was dragged off in handcuffs about the same time the local undertaker arrived for the children’s bodies. Uncle Harold had his own tragic demise at the wrong end of a hangman’s handiwork.

Gustav went on to talk about how the sightings were extremely rare and about having a paranormal team come in with all their equipment and find nothing. It was as if the children’s spirits could sense when the time was right for another visit to the old house. I had to give a little speech about what the children looked like so that anyone else who might see an extra child around would know they too were given the rare opportunity.

Unfortunately, I do not like the spotlight and was very uncomfortable being the star attraction that night so I retired early leaving Jerry to bask in my glory, something he’s used to doing.

When Jerry came up a few hours later, still bubbling over with excitement over the next day’s hike into the woods with his set of giggling children and their dull parents, a CPA and a chiropractor, I turned off the John Wayne war movie I’d been watching and patted the sofa beside me. Jerry kissed me on the cheek, sat down and leaned against me. It was his favorite position in the evening; well, favorite before he wandered off in search of a younger dick. I kind of felt a little sad I could still feel that way since I’d supposedly forgiven him.

“Are you positive you don’t want to go on the hike?” Jerry asked. He began undressing, starting with his shoes and socks. He’d get naked first and then undress me. Depending on his mood, and sometimes mine, we might not start with kissing, saving that for afterwards as we came down from our highs. I’d been particularly rough the past couple of weeks, doing a lot of top shit that I normally don’t do, but it seemed to release a lot of tension inside of me. I think Jerry simply took it as punishment for stepping off our path.

“The kids aren’t too bad, it’s the parents that are dull,” I said. What did we have in common that might lead to a meaningful conversation?

“They might not go, they were talking about going down to the casino for the day or back to Aberdeen to the mall for some shopping,” Jerry said. He was naked, not hard, and still sitting beside me. Maybe he was waiting for me to make a move.

“So it would be just us and the kids?” I asked. For some reason that intrigued me, to spend the day with someone else’s children seemed surreal. Jerry did that every day in his work with the Child Protective Service, so for him having these “normal” kids around him was fun.

“Probably just us and the kids,” Jerry said. I felt his hand on my thigh, but it wasn’t eliciting any response from the associated appendage. “And a picnic lunch from a little café up the road and a bucket or two if we run into some blackberries or huckleberries. Gustav told me which trails might provide the best opportunity for tracking down and capturing those wily and secretive fruits.”

“This sounds more like work,” I said. Yet, to be with the children for quite some time sounded strangely appealing. “How many extra bedrooms do we have in our house?”

“What?”

“How many extra bedrooms do we have in our house?”

“None, but there is the two guest/work rooms upstairs, the hobby room in the basement, three maybe,” Jerry said as he slipped his fingers into my zipper looking for something that was doing a very good job of hiding. “Why?”

“I was thinking about what you said a couple of months ago about opening up our home to a few gay youth who needed a safe roof now and then,” I said.

“Is this about those children today?” Jerry asked. He knelt at my feet and started undoing my shoes. “Because you know we need safe houses and there isn’t one close to our neighborhood. My supervisors would be so tickled they’d probably come over and help us paint, but are you sure about this?”

“I need something, okay,” I said. “I need something to give a little meaning to my life right now.”

“It’s still about me, isn’t it?” Jerry asked. He crawled up onto the sofa and snuggled up against me.

“I’m sorry, I want to love you, I need to love you, but that hole you made in my heart is still there and I thought if we could put some children in it, even if they were teenagers, it might save us,” I said. I turned, took him in my arms and kissed him deeply.

My bladder woke me in the middle of the night and putting on my robe—the B & B lived up to its advertising as an old Victorian farmhouse by having shared baths down the hall—and went to take care of the problem. When I came out of the bathroom, Rose Anne and James Leonard were waiting for me. They definitely looked angelic.

“Uncle Harold would like you to join us at his recital,” James Leonard said.

“Come on Michael,” Rose Anne said as she took my hand. Hers was warm as you might expect it. James Leonard took the other. This kid stuff was really working on me.

We went downstairs and over to a corner of the sitting parlor where the door to the tower was located. There was a sign on the door that said quite clearly in bold, red, all-capital letters, “UNSAFE – DO NOT ENTER.” We were told at check-in that the foundation of the tower had become unstable and, until repairmen could come in, the county building inspector requested the door be locked and the sign put up.

“Get the key, Michael; it’s over the door,” Rose Anne said.

I reached up and found the key. This wasn’t right, but I knew they couldn’t read or see the sign. It hadn’t been there in 1891, but I was here now and now the sign was there. Yet, I unlocked the door, turned on the light, and followed James Leonard up the cobwebby stairs. Rose Anne followed behind. I do not like spiders and kept looking for the little devils, but the lights must have scared them into dark corners. Actually, I was so busy looking for the little buggers, I stumbled more than once on the uncarpeted stairs that circled around the outside wall of the structure.

There was a trapdoor at the top that led into a small room with windows on the ocean side. It was still clear and light from a half moon danced on the waves. Fog wouldn’t form for another couple of hours. I turned and saw the back of a man sitting at a harpsichord. There were wooden, straight back side chair around the room and the children led me to three of them. After I sat down, Rose Anne sat down on my left and James Leonard on my right.

The music began almost immediately. I’m no fan of twinkling harpsichords or baroque music, especially Bach, but I found myself getting into the music. The children simply sat there quietly. I don’t know if they’d listened to enough of Uncle Harold’s music to know he was very, very good or if they were simply being polite as children of that century tended to be. There are positives things that can be said for a willow switch.

I sat there for longer than I realized as the fog had begun to gather around the house, slowly creeping its way up the side to the tower windows. The moonlight was slightly bright, but it highlighted soft billowing clouds of fog and not water. There was a still, unmoving sensation around me as Uncle Harold’s music filled the room and the fog drew nearer.

Finally, there wasn’t anything outside the windows except a gray darkness. I looked over at Rose Anne and she wasn’t there, nor was James Leonard sitting on my right. The man at the harpsichord had stopped playing.

“Thank you for the music,” I said as I rose to my feet. “It was very good.”

There was a hoarse cough and a whispered, “You’re welcome.”

I went down the stairs carefully watching for little eight-legged crawly things and was surprised when I got to the bottom. Jerry, the owners Jim and Gustav, and probably most of the other guests, were in the parlor. I knew this wasn’t going to go over too well.

“Can’t you read?” Gustav asked. “I have a mind to ask you to leave in the morning, but that was a very good performance. Too bad it was in the middle of the night.”

“That wasn’t me playing,” I said.

“Don’t tell me, the Phantom of the Opera?” Jim sneered.

“No, Uncle Harold,” I said. “The children intercepted me on my return from the toilet and invited me to a little recital. I read the sign, but, of course, they couldn’t because it wasn’t there in their time.”

“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” Jim said, “but how did you get in?”

“Used the key from over the door,” I said as I handed him the object.

“Is he still up there?” Gustav asked.

“I suppose, but I wouldn’t count on it,” I said. “Your ghosts seem rather selective in who they haunt.”

“Are you coming back to bed?” Jerry asked.

“Yes, and I’m going on that hike in the morning,” I said.

© 2008 Carl Holiday

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