The Christ Episcopal Church and the Dorchester County Courthouse cap the south end of High Street like porch columns; the Choptank River Long Wharf Park caps the north end. Cambridge Creek runs parallel to High Street from the Wharf to the back of the courthouse. Halfway down to the river, on the creek side of High Street, leans the Dorchester County Arts Center. The path of the ghost walk would span High Street from the Center down to the Wharf, up to the Church, across to the Courthouse and back to the Center.
Mammoth houses crouched back from High Street; their wide, lush lawns provide a safe moat between the living room and the plebian path of the public trekking to the marina at High Street’s river end. I had traveled over the bridge and through bubbling marsh to the true Land of Pleasant Living5 during its gentrified settling into another bucolic night. High Street at April twilight could be the opening shot of an American dynasty film; the rich night poised on the brink of epic story.
These people are loaded, I thought as I unbuckled my seat belt. What’s an arts center doing in this high rent district? The taxes alone could deplete a non-profit budget.
I’m thoroughly middle class. When I left my car, I immediately felt estranged, as if the Cambridge night oxygen was not suited for my lungs and as if the insects were whispering about me. The tree roots reached through the cracked sidewalks for my legs. A female figure turned into the draperies in the lamplight of #116. I felt watched.
The sensation of being watched is woven into the beginning of many Dorchester ghost tales.
I hesitated and forced myself forward.
The Arts Center at #118 High Street was built in 1790 and is half of what was once a hotel. In 1906, Captain James Leonard left the hotel business and sliced the building in two. Engineers rolled what is now #116 on logs to its present position fifteen feet away. Captain Leonard’s granddaughter told me that her great aunt rode in the house as it rolled away, playing with her dolls.
116 from 118. It’s a stretch, I thought, but cut the Divine Proportion in two.
1.618 or the number PHI or the Divine Proportion is the transcendent mathematical ratio that repeats in a staggering number of proportions across nature, ranging from humans to bees. PHI is so peppered throughout the plant and animal kingdoms that early thinkers deduced that the number’s source was God. It surfaces in the spirals of seashells, tornadoes, waterspouts, crop circles and whirlpools.
What kind of building was left from a halved Divine Proportion? I thought as I stood on its rippled sidewalk. An unsteady, spiraling one, I decided.
The white-shingled face of #118 sported two letterboxes with quilting flyers beside its closed door; otherwise it could be a private residence. Bumpy bricks led to crooked steps. The front porch tilted towards the courthouse, and, yet, oddly, had a small puddle on it. Despite the rainy spring, I wasn’t sure how a tilted porch could carry standing water. I opened the door and a bell rang, its sweet tinkling overwhelmed by the sound of whining sanders in the back of house. The air in the building sucked in, as if another door was simultaneously opened somewhere else. The gift shop door was to my right and a small art gallery to my left. The chewy air tasted thickly of wood. The gift shop was empty; its sand candles and watercolors yielded no clues to the committee’s whereabouts. The whine of sanders that drowned out the doorbell drew me to the back of the house where a group of saw-dusted men carved duck decoys in a long hall. I returned to the front door and braved the shallow, narrow uneven stairs. My knees ached and popped as I climbed. The second and third floor hallways were lonely and twisted. The ceilings were low. Someone was watching. I turned, feeling vertigo, and the ceiling dipped lower. Disoriented and considering a retreat to the car, I staggered down the steps to the second floor hall where I stopped by a watermark on the wall above the wainscoting: a long, serpentine curve of brown, bubbled stain that I had not noticed on the search upstairs. I reached up to touch its peeling paint, and something cold and wet passed me, brushing by me.
Whoosh went a chilled wind.
Is it for me? I thought wildly.
Something sodden licked my cheek and splashed into my eyes. It burnt briefly. I wiped it away; it felt slippery, similar to glycerin. I lurched back to the stairs, running my damp hand down my jean skirt.
This will change everything.
Assume that death is a transition in dimensions. Assume that apparitions cross dimensions. What enables those moments? What allows certain spirit energy to cross over and leave only vestiges on my cheek? Once time parallels are linked is there a perpetual circle between them, a spinning portal of sorts? Like a spiral of the Divine Proportion?
“Do they need passports?” I asked the second floor landing.
Lit by the dim, front hall chandelier, Judy stepped out of the gift shop below, slight, freckled, and concerned. She looked like a substitute teacher in her pastel sweater and skirt. I stared at her, clinging to the balustrade, panting, wondering if she was real.
“Are you Maryland?” she asked brightly. She seemed real. She was way too perky to be a specter. Her cinnamon eyes matched her auburn hair.
I took a deep, calming breath. You can do what you want, I thought, but the outcome’s gonna be the same.
“Who’s going to be the same?” Judy asked as she led me through the gift shop to the back kitchen, a small, cluttered room lined with crooked shelves heavy with art supplies. Mismatched chairs ringed a table that was wedged between the shelves and the door.
“Where was this room before? When I looked before?” I muttered. “How could I have missed an entire room?” I couldn’t hear the sanders of the decoy makers anymore.
“Here she is,” Judy announced happily to two women in the kitchen. “I found Maryland!”
The two other women who comprised part of the ghost tour committee sat in the warm, cramped quarters. I knew intrinsically that these women were Episcopalian. They were the image of the Episcopal ladies who had served me cool lemonade in my youth after service on The Church of the Good Shepherd lawn. I had met them at Easter vigils and potluck suppers. I had helped them serve Shepherd’s pie and peas to the masses. But, Episcopalian or not, I was still a Baltimorean from the Yankee side of the state and, at the very least, an outsider.
I know a man who was born in Cambridge and, yet, despite his birthright, is considered an outsider by locals because his parents, who were teachers, transplanted there. I recently received a joke e-mail titled North vs. South; it listed advice for Northerners relocating South. A closing warning read: “if you do settle in the South and bear children, don’t think we will accept them as Southerners. After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we wouldn’t call ‘em biscuits.”
Among xenophobic Cambridge insiders, they refer to us outsiders as foreigners, pronounced fo-nouners.
According to Chief Winter Fox, the definition of a Dorchester native is one who can stand in the middle of the community and recite back six generations without consulting a crib sheet. A Dorchester native can visit all their ancestors’ graves too, unless, of course, they’ve been swept away by flood, which is common. In 1608, the Nanticoke Indians recited to Captain John Smith their heritage of thirteen generations, back to the 1300s. Smith estimated that the Nanticoke tribe had one hundred members and the Choptank tribe had only thirty.
Thirteen and one hundred and thirty.
Thirteen, like the number of original Cambridge families, like the number of the original colonies, like the estimated 13,000 years that Homo sapiens have been roaming North America, like the 13.7 billion years that this universe has been around. Thirteen like the thirteen stars in Solomon’s Seal, like the twelve apostles and Jesus, like the twelve Zodiac signs and the sun, like the thirteen arrows in the eagle’s foot in the U.S. Great Seal, like the thirteen laurel leaves in the eagle’s other foot, the eagle on the back of every U.S. dollar bill.
The