Family of Shadows

Every family has its secrets, things they don’t want outsiders to know. In some families, however, those secrets stretch on and on through the years, refusing to be buried. Jake writes to tell me about his family’s secrets and the day they finally emerged from the shadows and came into the light.

Jake’s Great-Aunt Betty lived in a house that, to Jake and his cousins, seemed less like a home and more like a museum. Jake spent many happy hours of his childhood playing in the fields and woods surrounding the house in upstate New York, but once inside, children were required to be quiet and respectful.

In one particular room, Great-Aunt Betty’s rules were always in force: the living room was stuffed with family heirlooms, old photographs, and other delicate things that children shouldn’t be left alone around. “I don’t think I ever saw anyone in that room,” Jake tells me. “Ever.”

One rainy day, of course, Jake and his cousin were playing inside when their curiosity and boredom somehow transformed into courage. “We just wanted to look around,” Jake recalls. “There were lots of neat things in there to check out.”

Jake and his cousin poked around in the room, opening drawers and picking up knick knacks, laughing at the strange old pictures and guessing at what some of the objects were supposed to be. “She had a lot of weird art stuff in there,” Jake tells me.

Jake’s cousin was examining a strange sculpture of a bull when he realized too late that the object was made of two pieces. One half of the bull tumbled to the floor with a clatter but, luckily for the boys, was unbroken.

In his surprise at the near miss, however, Jake stepped backward and knocked an old framed picture to the ground. The old frame splintered and the glass shattered with a terrible sound.

Jake and his cousin froze; if playing in the forbidden room was a felony, then breaking something was a capital offense. The boys were about to run and ready their denials when something peculiar caught Jake’s eye.

The frame that had fallen was smashed and the photograph it held lay free on the floor. It depicted a scene from the days when all the land surrounding Great-Aunt Betty’s house was Jake’s family’s farm. Two cherubic kids dressed in overalls – a boy and a girl – stood posing for the camera as a horse-drawn wagon rolled along behind them.

What drew Jake’s attention, however, was not the bucolic scene but a part of the photograph that had been covered by the frame’s matting. There, sitting in the back of the wagon were what looked like two shadowy silhouettes, as if a human-shaped hole had somehow been made in the world.

“My cousin and I didn’t know what it was,” Jake tells me, “and then the door flew open and there was my aunt, pissed as hell.” Jake and his cousin spent the rest of the day serving out their punishments, doing chores for their Great-Aunt Betty.

Jake doesn’t recall all the details of that long-ago day, but one thing he will always remember about the strange photograph is how small the two shadows appeared to be, and the way that they sat in the wagon with their legs dangling off the back. “I think they were just kids, too,” Jake tells me.

Years later, after Jake moved away from New York, his Great-Aunt Betty’s health began to fail her. As his family gathered to say their goodbyes, Jake remembered the strange old photograph in the living room.

When Jake’s cousin arrived at the old homestead, Jake asked him what he remembered from that day. As the young men reminisced, Jake’s uncle overheard their conversation. “He knew all about it,” Jake remembers, “but not for the reasons I thought.”

Jake’s uncle knew all about the incident not because of the boys’ prodigious talents for getting into trouble, but because of the old photograph they upset.

“No one ever talked about that picture,” Jake recalls, “until the day my aunt died.” As upstairs Great-Aunt Betty was breathing her last, Jake’s uncle told him that the photograph was a picture of Jake’s Great-Uncle, Betty’s brother, and Betty herself, and it was taken on the day the little boy was killed.

It seemed that later that day, the young boy drowned in the pond that sat back in the woods. The figures that rode in the back of the wagon were not there when the picture was taken; they appeared only when the film was developed. To this day, no one knows who the shadows are.

Before the day’s events overtook them, Jake’s uncle told him how all the land surrounding the house and much further out had been the family’s farm for generations. It had been broken up and sold off in parcels, and Betty’s lot was the last share still in the family.

Ever since the family had come to the land, they had seen the shadows. The shadows didn’t appear very often, but when they did, it usually meant that death’s hand was not far behind.

Jake peppered his uncle with questions, but the old man had no answers. The shadows were a complete mystery to the family. Were they the grim spirits of some long-lost ancestors keeping watch over the land and the family? No such relatives were known. Were they the ghosts of children who somehow died by ill intent on the land and were now condemned to haunt it? No one knew of any missing children hereabouts.

Could it be then, that these shadows were in this place all along? Could they possess an older, more elemental provenance, one that traces their history to the primeval forests that covered the family’s land long before they ever laid eyes on it? Could these shadows be spirits not of people, but of the very land itself? Could the strange photograph depict the twinned, spectral manifestations of the land, the somber witnesses over the centuries to Jake’s family’s struggles and triumphs, dark heralds of its misfortunes?

Jake’s uncle could not say, but when Great-Aunt Betty passed on as Jake and his family stood by her bedside, through the window, atop a far ridge, Jake thought he saw two shadowy figures surmount the summit in the fading light before disappearing behind the trees.


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