The Vestry

The Vestry – foreword

This is a work of fiction.  I had a normal and happy childhood.  I was blessed with good parents and lucky to grow up in Goffstown, NH in the 1950s.  I would have no one read this piece and think I feel otherwise.  Many small things are true, but a few big things here are outright lies.  This unevenness with the truth seems a human characteristic and so this is probably a truer human account of what I remember than just the facts.

The source of the story is buried in my poem The Congo which is on my blog (August 24^th, 2016).

I spent a half-hour searching for a drug that might sound plausible for the story and came up with the drug often used by people attending all night rave parties.  A week later I saw a news story of how this rave drug was being used to treat post traumatic syndrome cases - which is similar to this story.  My reaction:  Go on.

At heart, I wanted to try and say something about writing and specifically about poetry being memory.  But every time I began to say something that might make sense, my hand jumped back as if I had inadvertently touched a hot burner. 

Please consider this a rough draft.  I have no money for an editor – or anything else for that matter. 

Forrest Greenwood          12/28/2016

All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood, Chong Khae, Thailand.  Feel free to share this work with friends and if you haven’t read Phi Lok, the Specter you could support my writing addiction by buying a copy online.  Life is good.  Have a great 2017. 

Phi Lok, The Specter  www.smashwords.com

The Vestry - one

In my memory, I see the church from street level.  It’s the last week in November on a raw NH evening.  A mist runs this way and that in the air.  It may or may not turn to snow, but as the road surface cools it will surely turn to black ice.  The church rises above the spotlight on its front, rises into the black sky.  It looks to me like a huge bird, a black swan with its head raised skyward and its wings like a cape to the ground.  That or perhaps the spire is the hat of a Puritan walking the night woods alone, totally alone.

OK, Forrest stop.  Stop talking.  This isn’t going to work.

What’s the matter this time?

The same as twenty minutes ago.  You’re an artist and you’re trying to play God and recreate the past.  The sub conscious is where art lives and you are over riding the hypnosis.  If you want to recover the memory about . . . the vestry, right? 

Yes.

You have to stay in the moment.  You can’t force your will on the memory that you have not confronted for . . . sixty years?

Give or take.

The only way I see this working is to let me give you the injections . . .

No! I don’t want designer truth serums to recover a memory that I didn’t understand then and probably won’t understand now.  I don’t want to come back from a bad trip and say wow wasn’t that special.

I assure you, no one has had an adverse reaction to date . . .

To date?

. . .  to date.  Worse case you’ll wake up with no memory of what happened until I or the monk tells you.

Say what?  I will have no memory?  I thought the point of this dance was to recover my – I repeat - my memory. 

It may work that way.  You may wake up clear as a bell.  We may shake hands and you can go on with the rest of your life in the sure knowledge that memory will have no aura, no smoky edges.  I fully expect it to work this way.  On the other hand there have been a few instances when the memory you have been holding onto for . . . most of your life . . . will not form itself into words that you understand or can speak.  Your responses will sound fine to me or to the monk, but you will not understand because you’ve been practicing not understand for so long.  You will not understand until we tell you. Then you will know.   

Then I will understand?

Absolutely.  Good.  You must excuse me.  I must go now.  I have to be in Phitsanulok tonight, but I will be back in three days.  I will give Pracherin an abstract of my project . . .

Your project?

. . . My project, your project, the monk’s project, what does it matter?  The human memory cannot be claimed by planting a flag somewhere in the cerebellum or patenting an array of neurons.  We might as well think about patenting the Milky Way.  Please think about the injections.  I’m not sure, in your case we can go forward without them.

Wouldn’t a couple of beers do the same thing?

(metal click of the doctors small valise)

No.  And I don’t think the monk would be happy with you drinking in his wat.  I’m going to leave some documents with the monk.  When he is done with them he can give them to you.

Are they in English?

Yes, for the most part.

Then give then to me.  I’m the patient.  I’m his English teacher.

Forrest, I’ve been in Thailand a lot longer than you and find your language and combative mindset distressing.  You think it is critical thinking, but it isn’t.  You seem to have learned nothing about Buddhism or the country you’re in.  Information and knowledge are exchanged differently here than wherever you’re from . . .

Goffstown

Right, Goffstown.

Haven’t been back there for a lifetime, but . . .

OK, just call it a matter of courtesy if you like, but it’s a good deal more than that.  At any rate please stay calm.  Sit down and say nothing.  Try and meditate a little.  The monk will walk me to the car.  I want to talk to him.  We can start again in three days.

Start again, so today was a total waste of time? 

You’re not sitting . .  .  Good.  I don’t see hypnosis working, so try and think about the injections.  Ah . . . good.  Don’t think about the church, OK?  We will try again in three days.  We start new every time we try and recover a lost memory.  Sometimes it’s like tracing a line in the sand until it becomes the size of the Grand Canyon.  But no matter, our memory always goes to the same place.  In three days.

The Vestry – two

In my memory it’s my first night in the house in Hollis.  The old couple was supposed to leave a key, but they didn’t, so I had to break a window in the outside door to get in.   I’m working twelve hour days because the company I work for in Nashua is on strike.  I was surprised to find out that I was a part of management, but it was either work or get fired.  So I unload trailers and drive a fork truck, something I haven’t done since college.

I’m beat and am on my third beer.  The phone rings.  It’s Mary Anne who will come up with her mother in the morning to clean mostly.  She sounds excited.   It’s our first house, although we still aren’t married.  Two beers later I’m trying to sleep on the bedroom floor.  There’s a decent carpet, but I toss and turn thinking that two people in their eighties were sleeping in this room the night before.  They were both heavy smokers and after forty years in the house the ash tray smell is overpowering.

The phone dings.  It doesn’t ring, it just dings.  Once, twice, three times and then stops.  I go to sleep.  It dings again.  I wake up but I am like a sleep walker, totally disorientated.  I wait standing in the dark room for it to ding again.  There are no curtains on any window and I have an eerie feeling I am being watched from the black world outside. 

The phone dings again.  I find it and answer:  Hello, hello?  I hear a distant sound of static that washes in and washes out.  Then I hear a woman with a heavy Yankee twang speaking softly.  She asks what the problem is.  I tell her the phone keeps dinging.  I hear her say “ayup,” then her voice seems to float away, but I’m pretty sure I hear her say you’re in the log, I’ll have Rory check her in the morning.  Then, nothing, not even a dial tone . . .

Mr. Forrest . . . Mr. Forest.

Wha . . .  Wow.  I’ve been meditating . . .

Not meditating Mr. Forest, sleeping.  Sleeping like . . . a baby.

Pracherin, I haven’t slept like a baby for more the seventy years, so I must have been meditating.

Not meditating, teacher, out like a . . . light.

Your doctor seems like a quack to me . . .  sorry, an old American idiom that means he is no smarter than a duck.  Not a doctor.

Oh no, teacher.  He is famous doctor.  Spends high season in Thailand teaching.  The rest in San Marco, Arizona.  Teacher, you must go now.  Almost night.  You could sleep here if you want.  I can call my cousin and tell her . . .

No.  My wife would kill me.  Thai girls are like that.  You talk to the doctor?

Yes, teacher.  He’s very kind.  He say three things.  One, you must stop being angry with yourself.  Two, you must sign agreement in envelope, and three . . .

Let me guess.  He wants me to use the injections.

. . . three, he hopes you will not joke so much.  Jokes are like stone walls that divide up this world and the last.  Please take envelope.

Are you sure?  Doctor says I can’t take it until you are finished with it.  You haven’t opened it.  Are you sure?

Yes, I am very sure.

The Vestry – three

“Dear Mr. Greenwood:

Thanks you very much for the poem.  I enjoyed reading it several times and I am sure the memory you describe in the poem is worthy of a session or two of RMT (Recovered Memory Therapy). 

Please find enclosed the agreement between doctor and patient that you should sign and/or acknowledge by checking the box initialing at the top of the page.  This is required by US law.  You need not sign the document, but please understand the foundation that supports my work cannot cut you a check for the small stipend allowed for participating in the study without your signature.  Signing he document also grants me the permission to describe our RMT sessions in any future paper(s) I may author.

Thanks, again, for the poem.  I look forward to our meetings.

Sincerely, 

J. Christian, MD

Director Forensic Psychology Group

University of Arizona at San Marco

ENC:

PS:  I am sure you share with me your admiration for our mutual friend and student Pracherin.  While it is not unusual to find Buddhist monks with academic aptitude, it is unusual to find them in graduate level Psychology courses.  He speaks warmly of you.  JC”

RECOVERED MEMORY THERAPY – A synopsis

This is not approved for media release.  All inquiries should be directed to the Director Forensic Psychology Group, University of Arizona at San Marco

Until 2008 recovered memory (sometimes referred to as repressed memory) had a very uncertain reputation in American courts.  Memories of sexual abuse of subjects occurring as early as the age of three were often introduced under special conditions in capital cases.  But hypnosis, the primary medium of recovery, has never reached the threshold required by science to be considered as anything approaching evidence in courts of law.

In 2008 a team led by J. Christian MD at the University of Arizona described a new Recovered Memory Therapy in the Psychiatric Times Journal.  The method uses a series of increasing injections administered while the subject is under hypnosis.  By focusing on elderly subjects who displayed no hysteria often found in sexual assault cases the team has reported substantial benefits.  These benefits include measurable and repeatable heightened mental acuity and the reversal of certain progressive diseases including early onset Alzheimer’s.

The injections are empathogen-entactogens in the phenethylamine family such as  MDxx class MDMA, MDEA, and MDA.  The injections are of miniscule dosages and only administered under a doctor’s supervision.

“Humans have only one system for creating and maintaining memories,” Dr. Christian has said, “and this system handles traumatic memories in the same way as non-traumatic memories.  We’ve known for a long time that in severe cases the system will protect the subject from accessing certain traumatic memories.  What is new here is that in perfectly normal subjects, in all of us, the brain must segregate some memories as a balancing mechanism to keep our memories and the sense of who we are intact.  This is why total recall is rare in humans.  With RMT the subject can access the forbidden side of memory, and even though these forbidden memories may be as inconsequential as remembering the name of a family cat, the health results can be large.  I might say that RMT reboots memory without any detrimental side effects.  But my favorite analogy is that the subject becomes “enlightened” in the Buddhist sense of the word.

If we humans expect to extend our life span beyond 150 years, periodic psychic refreshment with RMT may become a prerequisite for longevity.” 

In my memory, I am at Lake Horace.  My Cousin Joey’s mother has brought us to the public beach in their new, 1954 Buick convertible with red leather seats.  Her name is Nellie.  I like her.  She can drive, my mother can’t.  I don’t like to swim.  It’s hot and there many kids my age.  Joey knows them by name.  I do not.  I’m only up here visiting the farm for one day.  The beach here is just an open cut of gravel that hurts my bare feet.  The water is murky.  I wade out until the gravel stops and the bottom becomes muddy.  Joey has frog fins and rubber, swimming spectacles.  He is out beyond where I know I can go safely.  I walk back up the beach, reaching for the bottom to keep my balance as I step on unseen rocks.  There is a wooden changing shack.  My dungarees are in there.  I pick them up and go into the next small room looking for a toilet.  There are four grown farm boys in this small room.  They are all naked.  Their hairy crotches scare me.  One of them says, “Well come on in sweetie.”  I leave.  They are laughing.  I find Nellie.  She hands me a bottle of Coke.  Had enough, she asks.  The upright paper straw bobs in the black liquid.

The Vestry – four

Good.  You’ve brought the agreement and you’ve signed it.  We can start.

(the sound of a valise being unsnapped)

Do you have a mobile phone?

Yes.

Will you turn it off please?  Do not mute it, turn it off.  Show me please.  Good.  Pracherin.  Do you have a mobile?

Chai.

Will you turn your phone off too.  Show me.  Good.  And I will do the same.  See?  Off, off, and off.  OK, I need to take your temperature with this little electronic thermometer.  It goes in your ear.  (small beep) Good.  And this little clip goes on your finger.  Good.  Now I need to take your blood pressure.  For this I will use my old fashioned BP Cuff.  (shhsh, shhsh, shhsh,  wahssh).  Good.  I will leave the cuff on, but only use it at the end of the session.  Do you have any questions?

Why turn off the phones?

Primarily so we aren’t disturbed.  But the drug I am about to administer is similar to the drug kids use when the go to an all-night rave.  Have you ever been to a rave.

I am seventy-two years old.

Right.  Well, the drug sensitizes the rave participant to sound and light.  In our case it is the sound that may be startling.  So no phones.  In larger doses . . . see this is a very small needle . . . it may induce euphoria.

Can I get a double?

Ah . . .  I asked Pracherin to tell you no jokes, and I’m afraid that’s a rule I must insist on.

Sorry.

The reason is much more complicated than this explanation, but when you get a joke whether it is a sight gag or a one-liner, or a Jack Benny pause . . . if you get the joke you become an insider.  If you don’t get the joke you feel like an outsider and are under a lot of pressure to understand.  In RMT we are working with very subtle and nuanced balances within the brain.  These balances react to this type of pressure much like a butcher might put his thumb on a scale when we buy meat or cheese.  Any questions?

Yes, who is Jack Benny?

Forrest!

Sir.

I mean it.  Do you agree?  Good.  Now you will feel a little pin prick . . . and we are done.  The drug is taken up very quickly, but we have probably two minutes.  In that time I want you to do the same as last time.  Look over my shoulder to the picture of the King on the far wall.  Now, don’t look at the picture, but at the black and while funeral bunting below the picture.  Good, now look at a single gather below the center of the picture.  Without moving your head make your eyes swing slowly in a small arc back and forth over the small drape of black and white.  The arc lets down and goes back up.  Good.  Now I’m going to ask you some question.  If the answer is yes, say yes.  But if the answer is no, shake your head no.  Do not say no.  Just shake your head.  And if you are unsure if the answer is yes or no, just wobble your head a little from shoulder to shoulder as people in India do.  Do you understand?

Yes.

Good.  Now as I ask these questions my voice will seem to get quiet and seem to move away.  If you try you will find that you can still understand me.  Good.

Is your name Forrest Greenwood?

Yes.

You live in Thailand?

Yes.

Do you write poetry?

Yes.

Do you know why you write poetry?

(head bobble)

Good.   Do you have bad dreams or night mares?

(no)

When you were a child did you have bad dreams or nightmares?

Yes.

Did these bad dreams have anything to do with a church?

(head bobble)

Good.  Was the Congregational Church ever in one of your bad dreams?

 Yes.

Do you know why this church gave you bad dreams?

(no)

Do you think something bad happened to you at this church?

(head bobble)

Do you think something bad happened to someone else?

Yes.

Do you know who this person was?

(no)

Do you believe in ghosts and evil spirits?

(no)

Can you still hear me?

Yes.

Good.  When I tell you it is OK I want you to close your eyes.  You may sleep if you like.  When I ask you a question, you may answer me as fully as you want.  You will be able to answer me even if you are asleep.  Do you understand?

Yes.

Good.  Now close your eyes.  What is the first thing you hear?

Our phone is ringing.

Where are you?  I am sleeping in my parents’ bed.

Why are you in your parents’ bed?

I am sick.  Maybe pneumonia.  Doctor Snay just gave me a shot in the butt.  He will come back late this afternoon.  If I am not better by then he will put me in the hospital.

How old are you?

Eight.

Is the phone still ringing?

No. My mother has answered it.  She has closed the bedroom door and is talking quietly so as not to disturb me.

Can you hear the conversation?

No.

Please try harder.  Listen.

Hmm.  Will services be cancelled?   This is awful.  Yes.  I couldn’t live with a secret like this without telling my husband.  Yes, I will tell him it is a secret.  Bye.

Do you think this phone call was about the church?

Yes, I am sure of it.

Good.  I want you to jump ahead until one half hour before the doctor is due to come back.  What are you doing?

I am shivering.  The whole bed is wet because I have been sweating so much.  I am thirsty.  I get up and get the Pale Dry Canada Dry bottle from the refrigerator in the kitchen near the phone.  I am so weak I am shaking.  I pour a Welch’s juice glass, take one sip, but I don’t want it.

Where is your mother?

She must be downstairs in the cellar.  I can hear the washing machine running.  I go to the cellar door and open it.  Our postman Mr. Watt is coming up the stairs.  He is tall and has to duck down to keep from hitting his head.  When he looks up, I see he has a green garter snake clenched between his teeth. The snake is wriggling.  My sister behind me starts screaming and screaming.  She gets me scared, too.  Mr. Watt just checks in his leather pouch for mail and ignores my sister’s screaming.  He walks past me and goes out the back door.  Now, I see he is wearing one of those silk KOREA jackets.

Do you have a Korea jacket?

(no)

Forrest you can say no.  Do you know anyone who has a Korea jacket?

No.

Forrest?  Are you done talking?  Forrest?

Maude Eaton.

. . .

(shhsh, shhsh, shhst,  whssh)

Good.  How do you feel?

Fine.

Your mind is clear?

Yes.

Do you remember what we talked about?  Forrest?

(no)  No, not much.  You will tell me now, right?

I have a few questions first.  How old were you when you had pneumonia?

Oh, sixteen maybe.

Can you tell me about a snake and the postman?

Yes!  My sister and I were home alone one afternoon.  The family cat could get in the house through a basement window.  Then it would scratch on the door to be let up into the house.  My sister opened the door and began screaming.  I ran down the hallway to see what was going on and there was Stripy with a wriggling garter snake in its mouth.  “He brought in as a gift,” my father said that night at supper.  The mailman heard the bloody murder screaming and let himself in through the breezeway.   He got the snake away from the cat and took it outside along with the cat whose eyes were riveted on his prize.  The three went outside, but my sister was still shaking.

And do you remember talking about Korea?

No.

And about a fancy silk jacket with Korea in English on the back that soldiers used to bring back from the war?

I know what you mean, but . . .

And Gracie Eaton?

My aunt.  My grandmother’s twin sister.

Paternal or maternal?

My mother’s mother.  She and my aunt  . . . I never really knew her.  Did I talk about her?

Yes.

Well, what did I say?

Forrest, things you spoke of were pretty mixed up, mixed up in time and images.  So we will try and sort them out tomorrow.  Perhaps your subconscious, or your dreams tonight will sort things out, but I want at least another session, before you and I start pasting a time line together.

That’s not what you told me.

Isn’t it?  Tell you what.  Let me give you a hundred US against today’s stipend but there is such richness in your memories that I want to make sure of some things first.

How will you do that from Thailand?  Goffstown in in New Hampshire, remember.

The Internet is everywhere and it never sleeps.  We have a deal?

The Vestry - five

In my memory, I am in the Goffstown library looking out the reading room window down the length of Main Street.  It’s July, school’s out, it’s hot and going to rain.   Outside of the librarian, Mrs. Vickery, I’m alone.  I’m watching for Billy Whipple who is going to give me a ride up to Dunbarton for a French summer  class with Mrs. Zeller.  A beat up ’52 Chevy comes up Main and careens to a stop in front of the town common.  I know the car.  It is missing a passenger side, front fender leaving the wheel exposed.  It also has a “spinner” strapped onto the steering wheel, so you can muscle the car around with one hand.  I know the woman who drives the car, but not by name.  She has wild brown hair and wears an Air Force gray pilot’s jacket. I often see her peeling out with her arm out the window.  She sometimes beeps at me and holds a bottle in a brown paper bag out the window towards me.  Then, she laughs and guns the car.

The rain is coming.  The library windows are rattling in the rising breeze.  The bus to Manchester comes into my view and slows in front of the Foodliner.  A man gets out of the Chevy.  He takes a pull off a bottle in a paper bag and walks toward the bus, but the bus leaves without him.  He raises his arms out to the side and yells, “What the fuck?” back at the driver.  The car springs to life, pulls a “U-ie”, and picks the man up.  The rain hits.  The car is blowing its horn and flashing its lights and catches the bus just beyond the church.  Water on the library window blurs brake lights, but I see the man get out and punch the side of the bus before he walks around and gets on.

The man was wearing one of those silk Korea jackets.

I sigh deeply and fall back into a peaceful sleep.

Later

In my memory I am sleeping on the back seat of Barpa’s Hudson.  I sometimes  drive with him from Goffstown to the Concord hospital where my grandmother works nights.  They live upstairs.  Nana I think married him because he has a little pension from the Boston and Maine.  She works, I think, because the pension isn’t much.  We are on our way back to town.  They think I am asleep, but I am listening.  Barpa speaks English hesitantly.  In fact he speaks very little of anything.

D’chew see Gracie tonight?

I know Nana shoots a look at me in the back seat to make sure I’m sleeping. 

Poli, I don’t want to talk about her.  We may be the same flesh and blood but, God forgive me, I don’t give a fig what happens to her.  Doctor tells me to keep away because every time she sees me she starts screaming so it wakes the whole ward.  After all these years . . . she’s a crazy for sure.   I’d like to feel sorry for her, but I just can’t.  I ought to tell her her precious little Suzie Q is drying out over in the Colby building for the umpteenth time.  Touch and go who passes first, mother or daughter.  Poli, I want an Old Gold.

Barpa makes a jerking movement with his right had to get a cigarette free.  Nana takes it.  There is a bedroom, candle yellow flame light in the car for a second.  Nana exhales and I can smell the smoke.

I thank God every day my own kids didn’t catch the crazy bug.  That’s what doctor says we think mental illness is now, a virus, a bug of some sort, donchano.  You catch it as a baby and it just festers inside your brain for the rest of your life.

I stopped a suicide tonight, although they don’t know if the woman will pull through.  She tried to hang herself and I had to hold her up while Isabel Archer from Tooky undid the knot.  Seemed to take her own time doing it, too.

Barpa is shaking his head.  Chris, is all he says.

Look.  I’ve heard they’re going to reopen the Top Of Mile Hill restaurant.  You could stop and have a coffee.  You wouldn’t have to bring Forrey with you to keep you awake.

I sigh deeply and fall back into a peaceful sleep.  I’m happy like a kid who wakes up and then remembers it is Saturday and can go back to sleep.

In the morning, in the beautiful Thai morning, I am taking my usual walk.  I walk south in the bike path for step-thru motorcycles.  To my right I catch glimpses of a rice field which reaches out to huge silver rice barn, standing alone in a pool- table evenness of green.  The barn looks close enough to walk to, but I know it has to be four miles away. 

This part of rural Thailand is being inundated by the modern world.  People here live in a ribbon between the road and the fields.  They live mashed together in tin shacks under banana and coconut trees for the most part.  Outhouses are the rule here and I am proud to say we have two, although I wouldn’t use them.  I have my own western bathroom.  It never ceases to amaze me how my wife and her two older girls can be dressed to the nines, as if they just walked down Fifth Avenue, and relieve themselves in these dark, dirty outhouses.

When I first got here, the family would keep food under a big plastic cover to keep the birds and varmints away.  There would be little dishes of water under each table leg to keep the bugs away, too, but that was it.  Now as I walk, the ads nailed to trees beak 50/50 between fertilizer and High Speed Internet.

To my left is the irrigation canal, dug eons ago by hand.  It is as big as the Piscataquog in Goffstown and runs die-straight south.  On the far side, the canal land rises up to a road that gets a lot of traffic to LopBuri.  A family has cleared bushes from a strip of land and is cultivating marigolds.  They’ve laid robin-egg blue PVC pipes to water the crayon yellow marigolds.  Water gets sucked up out of the canal by a small gas engine.  A maroon plastic boat left over from the floods six years ago is how they get across the canal.  It’s not their land, but who cares.

I get sucked into a poem by an image I can’t get out of my head.  Not a thought or an idea, but a picture.  But this morning, this beautiful Thai morning, my mind seems unusually clear and I am getting sucked in with every step I take.

The Vestry – six

(attachment – from Dr. J. Christian)

Dear Forrest,

I apologize for my leaving Thailand without telling you. I had a totally unforeseen emergency back here in San Marco that only I could deal with.

I am sending you money for your participation in our three sessions.  I will also send money for “merit making” at Pracherin’s wat.   If you could pass the check on to him, I would be in your debt.

I will report that your mind remains clear and that you seem happier and more productive than before RMT.  From a purely clinical standpoint, I will also report that three sessions seems to be the optimal amount required for RMT therapy to be effective.

To recap some of the memories recovered in you sessions:

1.        Your Aunt Gracie, a twin of your maternal grandmother, was committed to the Concord Hospital at about the same time as the time you recount in your poem The Congo.  That your family never spoke of her or her problems is understandable in the mid-Twentieth Century New England.  The unwanted consequence, however, was a blind spot in your memory which has been teasing your subconscious for sixty years.  Your aunt became a long-standing patient and even survived your grandmother.

2.        It is unclear if your grandmother was employed at the hospital before or after your aunt was committed.  Unfortunately, it was a state psychiatric hospital which even in the best of times was poorly funded.  The hospital is still in operation, but digitizing old paper records is not one of their priorities.  I am happy to report, however, that the institution has pulled itself up out of the sinister Victorian institution it once was into a modern psychiatric facility. 

3.        Gracie did have a child named Susan Boisvert.  My interns could uncover very little of her history.  We are a forensic unit and well skilled in recovering police and other records, but Susan does not much appear.  We know from digitized micro fiches that she was admitted to the Concord Hospital for delirium tremens (DTs) at about the same time your grandmother and aunt were there.  I would not be surprised if Susan was not spoken of by your family or others in Goffstown much the same as Gracie’s history was not spoken of.  We are not sure the name Boisvert has any relevance, but we are sure that she died in Billerica Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts in 1987.  Again, she had been admitted for the DTs.  No family claimed the body.

4.        It seems likely that Susan was the driver of the car without a front fender in your library memory, but we can’t be sure.  There are no records of car ownership or even a driving license to make the connection.

5.        The man with the Korea jacket is another enigma.  He appears to have gotten on the bus in the rain in your memory and disappeared.

6.        As there appears to be no connection in your recovered memories of the church on Main Street, I am sure we have more work to do.

Comments:

Your memories flowed easily in our third and last session, I am sure you had unconsciously rehearsed what you wanted to say.  This is a good thing.  Your mind is teaching you how to recover memories you have long blocked.  In a way RMT shows you stones in a river you have forgotten were there.  You can now easily cross the river by stepping on these stones.  If you ever get to a point you cannot see you way forward, simply go back and try again later.  Do not be afraid or panic.  The memories will come in their own time.  You need not fear them.

I should be back in Thailand in six months and we can, should you like, continue then.

In the meantime I would concentrate on memories of your grandmother and any stories she might have told you – or information about her that others might have told you and which your clever brain told you to forget.  She is key, I’m sure of it.

I would not try to remember the church or the man in the Korea jacket.  If they are important they will rise up, if not they will simply fade away,  J.Christian

You have my contact numbers.  Please stay in touch.  If I don’t hear from you in a month or so, I will try and contact you.

- sent from my Ipad

The Vestry - seven

In my memory I am talking to my grandmother.  She now resides in the county farm nursing home in Grasmere. 

My four-year-old son died during elective surgery almost two years ago and I still haven’t relearned how to behave around people.  I live in a two-room efficiency in Nashua and work alone in safe dark room that is air condition and humidified to be the same year in and year out.  Inside I couldn’t tell you if it was snowing, raining, or sunny outside.  I couldn’t tell you if it was August or December.  Just me sitting at a desk with a machine called a Victoreen in the dim red light.  Other techs don’t want the job because it is too dim to read the racing form and there is no phone.  They can’t make book without a phone.  So I get the job.  My mother called and said Nana was failing and that I should go see her.  I said I would.  The whole conversation took less than two minutes.

Nana sits in an upholstered rocker that swivels too.   I remember the chair from Spring St.  There really is nothing else personal in the room.  She had eye problems in the 60s and usually has thick coke bottle glasses that magnify the size of her eyes, but she is not wearing them today.  Her eyes seem like sad little seeds when I sit down on the bed.  She takes my hand and quietly says, “Forrey.”  I’m touched, but say nothing.

There is a black and white photograph of her before she married my father Arthur Forest.  She is a stunning turn of the Century girl.  I know the story behind this photo.  A man came to Goffstown and said he had been commissioned by Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester to make a photographic history of New England.  It was a come-on of course, but in the end that’s exactly what he did.

Nana begins rocking her chair.  There is a photo album on the only shelf of the night stand.  All the photos are held on craft paper by little black eyebrows at the corners of almost painful white borders.  I’ve seen all these pictures before.  There are none of Poli and only one of my grandfather Forest cutting hair.  He was a barber and died years before I was born.  I show it to her and she says, “Arthur!  You’re the spitting image of him.”  I’ve heard this all my life from her, but strangely not from my own mother.

“He died of appendicitis, right?” I say, already turning the page.  When she says nothing, I look up.  She’s shaking her head “no”.  “Nana, he didn’t die of appendicitis?” I ask.  She is still shaking her head “no”.   I’m not happy talking about death.  I find a picture of my own father as a college boy with his hair parted in the middle and show it to her.  But she is still shaking her head “no”. 

Then she says, “Gracie did it!  Everyone knows that.  Stuck him with his own scissors!  You know that Forrey!  Everyone knows that!”   She is working herself up into a pure fury.  My mother told me she was failing, her memory is going.  I try to touch her hand to re-establish the tenderness I felt when I first entered the room, but she pulls her hand away.

“Don’t you touch me, stupid boy!”  She begins throwing stuff in her chair at me, a large magnifying glass for reading, a box of Kleenex, her glasses case.  She is yelling, “Get out! Get out you stupid boy!” A nurse has been watching at the door and comes in.  She pins my grandmother’s shoulders against the chair back.  My grandmother throws her head back and is screaming up at the nurse’s face. 

I am shaking at this transformation.  The nurse looks back at me with a confident face and says, “You should go now.  I’ll give her something to calm her down.  Don’t you worry.”  Another older nurse arrives.  I am bewildered, but when the second nurse begins drawing the modesty curtain around the bed, I leave.

The parking lot outside is not level for some reason, but follows the down slope of the hill.  Across the road below are still some animal barns and the old brick buildings still being used by the county farm.  A red sun is setting and the bricks look ancient, not smart and new at all.  It was a prison and poor house when I was a kid.  Probably still is.   At the bottom of the parking lot, I decide not to go on to Weare and see my mother and my new ex-Methodist minister stepfather.

My father had a sister named Gracie.  She was the live-in housekeeper of a carpenter for years.  Then there was a cousin about my grandmother’s age who ran an antiques shop in South Weare before they built the dam and flooded her out.  Her name was Grace, too.  There is a type of confusion that is inexplicable.  You should know the answer, but just can’t speak it.  Halfway to Nashua, round about the toll booth, I slowly realize that this Gracie was neither of those, but Nana’s twin sister. 

She is the Gracie I now remember from sleeping in the back of Poli’s Hudson.  Of course there wouldn’t be any pictures of her in her in Nana’s album, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t exist.  As Nana said then in the ride back to Goffstown so long ago, she was a crazy for sure. And if she killed my grandfather . . .

In my safe room back at work, I feel myself being sucked into a very black place.  There is no beauty in the world.  I think of taking my life.  These thoughts come without any provocation, morning, noon, or night.  I read, get into fights at the YMCA during pickup basketball games, and drink alone.  Mostly I drink.  I survive.

The Vestry – eight

Joy, depression, memory shift this way and that like mist in the cold November night air.  My mind’s not right.  History itself is fungible; there is no beginning, middle or end.  In old age, months when I was happy seem interspersed with barren, joyless months.  It is as if someone had shuffled all the calendar pages of my life and now I turn them over like tarot cards hoping for a sign, a sequence, an algorithm.  But the wisdom that comes with old age is that it’s useless to look for omens that tell the future.  The only real omens are the ones that plumb the past.

I’m in Thailand.  In my recent memory, I am talking on the phone with Clark back in the US.  I’ve known him all my life and we talk in code, jumping seamlessly through shared memories.  He’s still working at a company he helped start and I tell him he’s going to die in the traces.  

He is something of a genealogist, too, and has worked up everyone in our small Goffstown graduating class.  He knew my grandmother Maude from Spring Street.  I ask him if he ever came across a twin for her named Gracie.  He comes up with the two Graces I remember, but, no, he has never heard of a twin for my grandmother.  His mother was a nurse at the Moore General hospital across from the County Farm, and when I mention that Arthur died from appendicitis he says that doesn’t sound right.  I ask why and he says because they were doing the appendix operations three years before his death at the Moore General.  I want to tell him about my RMT sessions, but suddenly I am in a black mood and don’t seem to have the energy.  Stay well, I say and hang up.

I lay in bed staring at the dark ceiling which I can barely make out from the neon light over the front door that falls like a lighter gray shadow in the room.  My wife’s eight-year-old granddaughter sleeps on the floor at the foot of the bed.  My wife no longer sleeps with me but in her two room beauty shop near the road.  She moved out to be with her mother who is not well and sleeps out there, too.  My wife is twenty-six-years younger than I am.  It’s an amicable enough relationship by Thai standards, I suppose.  Sometimes in the day, my wife will touch me with the same tenderness I felt my grandmother touch me the last time I saw her.  But it is duty, not love, that binds Thai families together and after being in the hospital four times in the past year, there is no doubt the she and her daughters will honor their duty to me.  When I’m sick I call the little girl sleeping on the floor below my feet piobhan Beam (nurse Beam).   I am sure this is an act of love, though, not duty.

Gracie Eaton didn’t catch the crazy bug.  It was already in her genes which means it is in my genes, too.  My middle name is Eaton.

In my dreams I am in the vestry that dark high room with tall folding doors to block it off from the sanctuary.  The other kids have either been picked up by their parents or are just rocketing around of the lawn outside. 

A girl with wild brown hair is standing on the stairs that lead down to the kitchen.  She calls my name, “Forrey, come here, I want to show you something.”  I don’t know her, but she is about the same age as the other girls who have been taking care of us for the past week.  I go to the top of the stairs, but when I don’t follow her she grabs my arm hard and pulls me down the steps.  

At the bottom there is a room with tables and a wall with a serving window and a door into the actual kitchen.  A woman in a black choir robe is standing in that doorway.  She takes a step toward me and places a half-full bottle of Four Roses on one of the tables.  She bends over a little and says, “Why Mr. Forrest Eaton Greenwood how tall you’ve gotten.  Mercy me, I didn’t think they could stack chicken shit that high.”  She straightens up and laughs.  “Come here and give your Aunt Gracie a kiss. “  I refuse to take a step toward her and the girl with wild brown hair pushes me forward.  “Don’t want to kiss your auntie, heh?”  She takes a step back into the kitchen and reemerges with a pig’s head held by both of her hands .  My eyes go big with fear.  She slowly walks toward me, rocking the head from side to side.  “Well then, how about you kiss the fuckin’ pig’s head then, you little Spring Street shit.”

I wake up sweating heavily as I did when I had pneumonia and sit up.  I’m shaking and would reach for a cigarette if I had one, but I gave up smoking decades ago. I recognize this is the nightmare that I had as a kid and now I’ve had it again as an adult.

The Vestry – nine

In my memory I am listening to my mother, she’s crying and sobbing.  My grandmother and my father are with her.  I know they’re in the living room but I don’t know where I am.  Maybe I’m outside the house near an open window, or maybe I’m inside.  I’m confused.  I can’t remember.  All I know is that I’m listening to them, but I’m not with them.

“I just don’t know how she could do such a thing,” my mother says.  My mother has a balled up Kleenex in her hand, although I don’t know how I see this.   She puts her chin almost on her right shoulder.  “I just don’t know how in God’s name she could do this to us after all we’ve done for her about Daddy.”  She leaves her mouth open as if she was trying to fight back saying anything more.  Finally she shakes her head violently and says, “I’m just so mortified!”

My grandmother starts rocking in the chair I remember from the nursing home.  She looks straight ahead and half raises her arm.  Her elbow is still on the armrest.  “Well God knows Arthur wasn’t any saint.  Everyone knows that,” she says.

“Mother!” my mother screams, “How can you talk about poor Daddy like that.”

“I could tell you things about that man that they couldn’t print in the paper.”

“Mother!”

I’m wrong.  My father is not with them.  He’s gone, but I don’t know where.

In my memory I know things, but I don’t know how I know them. Gracie and Arthur are arguing in the barber shop where he worked.  It’s after hours and they are alone.  Through the window I see the old covered train bridge across the street.  It looms up higher than it really is.  Like my memory of the church it is a dark vision.

Arthur is yelling, telling her to get out of town, it’s the only thing to be done now.  He pushes her away.  Gracie spins toward the counter below the mirror, but saves herself from falling.  Her hands fall on a pair of scissors.  She grabs them, screams like a banshee, wheels and stabs Arthur in the gut.  I hear him say oof!  He grabs her and this time throws her to the floor. It’s not a deep wound.  He pulls a curtain across the window blocking out the view of the train bridge.  He manhandles Gracie to her feet and pushes her to the door.  Their faces are close.  Go back out to Weare, Gracie, he says.  It’s the only thing for it now.  He slams the door shut and throws the dead bolt.  After a moment to compose himself, he takes a step forward and looks at himself in the mirror.  There’s a small red blood stain on his white barber smock.  He feels no pain from the wound.  He raises his chin to see if he might have a shave before going home to my grandmother. 

It’s not a deep wound, but Gracie’s insane thrust has nicked the peritoneum wall.  Two weeks later, infection has flooded my grandfather’s gut.  He refuses to go to the hospital, although he is in hellish pain and sweating like a stuck pig.  He dies at home.

Life is not a journey but an entanglement.  What happens on the other side of the universe is somehow instantaneously known here.

In my memory I know things, but I don’t know how I know them.  My older sister went off to college.  I did not miss her.  She was here one day and then gone.  The difference in our ages made us inhabit different worlds.  She brought home a boyfriend.  His name was Sean Conway.  I saw him for a total of five minutes.  A month afterwards he got her in a “car accident.”  I saw a picture of her with two black eyes.  She was in the hospital, had to leave college, went to Colorado to get her Master’s and never came home.

In my memory I know things, but I don’t know how I know them.  There was no car accident.  My sister’s boyfriend beat her up and left her for dead on a back road in Durham.  He was older than my sister, going to school on the G.I. bill. He got ten years for the assault.  I wake up in a sweat and know beyond any doubt this is the man with the Korea bomber jacket.

The Vestry – ten

I have been sick again.  My wife drives me to the government hospital in Takhli then sits outside with her two smart phones for company while another pint or so of antibiotics drains through my veins.  If the doctor comes, I call her and she will translate over the phone instead of coming into the emergency room herself.  She never sits with me during the treatment anymore.

I am depressed.  Illness and depression have become my constant companions these past few months.  I no longer feel the need to write and when I do manage to get a few words down, I think it is just excrement and not even worth the energy required to read.

I have written to Christian telling him I think his Recovered Memory Therapy is just crap.  I’ve remembered everything I couldn’t remember before and I am definitely not happier.  He sends me a long e-mail back and I delete it without reading it.  I’m done with this bullshit.  He tries to call on my cell, but I don’t answer.  I’m tempted to answer though because he is the only one who has tried to call me this year, but as I said, I’m done with this bullshit.

I am not a drunk, but in the late afternoon I sit in my orchid bower and have a couple of beers.  The orchids have long gone, I don’t know where or why they’ve gone.  But they have gone.  My wife finds out I am drinking beer and goes into a wild tirade.  She says we are finished.  She threatens to kill me.  It is a performance.  It’s all stick and no carrot.  Her two younger daughters watch and listen so they can learn how to behave when they have old husbands.  I wait her out until she and the girls go back to their smart phones.  I am surrounded by an ocean of sixty-five million Thai speakers but I am the only English speaker here.  I have no friends, but I don’t care.  The peace of these late afternoons is something best celebrated alone.

I’ve moved through many worlds in my lifetime.  Thailand, the last of these worlds, suits me, but I doubt it would suit many others.  I live a monkish existence here which I find liberating.  Every day, even in illness, I am allowed to look and to dwell upon what I see.  In the other worlds I’ve lived in I have never had time to do this. I am enormously grateful for being allowed time to do just this and nothing more.

I begin rereading my poems.  I don’t like them all, but I like enough of them that my mood changes.  The west’s obsession with finding roots and then holding this knowledge above all others seems foolish to me.  The poems are snapshots, black and white photos in an album, which belong to me, not some overarching sense of race or culture.  Poetry is memory.  I relent and call Christian to apologize as much as anything.

We talk.  We talk a lot.  I tell him all the things I know but don’t know how I know them.  I agree that Gracie probably frightened me badly in the vestry, but probably wasn’t holding a pig’s head.  Nine-tenths of myth is underwater like an iceberg, he says.  When we see the whole thing for what it is, when we let it become a rightful thing in the real world, we are very likely to become depressed. But that depression will lift and we will be free to move on.  And move on we must.

He is very supportive of my writing.  He asks if I have seen Pracherin.  I say no, he was a student who came in one door and left through another without so much as a goodbye.  A teacher can be friendly toward students, but they never will be friends.  “Ah,” is all he says.  Then because he is Buddhist, I suppose, he says, “When you need him, he will be there.”

As my battery dies, I promise him one last session when he returns to Thailand.  I ask him one favor.  Could you see what you can find out about Sean Conway?  He agrees.

The Vestry - eleven

In my memory, the covered train bridge at the heart of Goffstown was a monstrosity.  Before it burned, it had been neglected and unused for years.  Some planking was missing from the walkway and people had stuffed trash here and there inside its walls.  In August the year it burned, the creosote, oils and tar paper roof made it a funeral pyre waiting to be lit.  People who want to restore the bridge today never took care of it before it burned.  They were happy to let it rot in place.  If some kid had been hurt climbing up its inside, the town fathers would probably have torn it down.  Horse and buggy covered bridges are romantic, a place to duck into during a shower, but covered, wooden train bridges are an example of engineering overreach.  They are a mistake.

I suppose the acute angle the train bridge formed with the cement car bridge was a model rail roader’s dream of an action scene.  But history is not, I think, a model railroad.

In my memory I stand one last time looking into the bridge’s raised up shark-mouth.  I look through its inner darkness to the tracks vanishing in the distance and confess to a feeling of nostalgia.  But it is a boy’s longing, not an old man casting his mind back upon something that had meaning or value.

My Thai wife is being civil to me again – at least she is not threatening me with instant death.  I feel my cold-blooded heart warming to life again and allow myself to think about writing.  I know I am a fool and a blockhead for letting my mind drift in the direction of art, but if I feel driven to do it.

Christian calls.  He has information on Sean Conway.  Convicted of a violent crime he served his full term in a Tennessee correctional facility.  Released in July of 1976, he made his way back to New Hampshire.  Picked up for driving with an expired license, he spent a week in the Hillsborough County Farm.  On the morning of August 16 he left but was suspected of setting a pretty substantial fire in one of the animal barns before leaving.  Evidently, he made his way up the train tracks to Goffstown setting two small grass fires along the way.  And, of course, the 16^th is the date the train bridge in your memory burned.  After this, we could find no records of the man.

Forrest?  Forrest are you still there?

Not knowing what to say, I stand up as if some puppeteer has pulled up all my strings.

Forrest?

“Go on” is all I can say.

Phi Lok, The Specter  www.smashwords.com