THE COUNTRY HOUSE

Jameson Currier

Arnie always graciously warned his guests about what to expect at the country house: slamming doors, crashing plates, flickering lamps, the dogs out of control, even a spike in their own temperaments. “Mitch and I have been fighting more and more since we bought this house,” he would add after he had extended an invitation to his friends to spend a weekend with them in their haunted country house. “I think our ghosts get a kick out of seeing us irritated with each other.”

After five blissful years of living together in a tiny cramped studio in Greenwich Village, Arnie and Mitch found the large, rustic rooms of their weekend retreat both liberating and aggravating. Arnie, who fell in love immediately with the giant kitchen and new appliances, wanted to cheaply furnish the other rooms, but Mitch was headstrong about scouring the local flea markets and estate auctions for deals and had soon developed a taste for overpriced broken furniture.

“The drawers won’t open,” Arnie complained about an oak hutch Mitch had found at a garage sale and brought back to the country house. “And the legs wobble.”

“It’s art deco,” Mitch pointed out. “Look at the carving on it.”

“And the shelves are missing. You got pinched on this one.”

“I can get someone to fix the leg and put in a new shelf.”

“And it’ll end up costing more than it’s worth. We should’ve bought something new.”

“You can’t buy a new antique.”

“If it was new, you could have gotten a discount,” Arnie complained, “not a four-hundred percent markup. What a waste of money, if you ask me.”

“No one’s asking you,” Mitch answered. “Which is why I bought it.”

Mitch and Arnie’s country house is a ninety-minute drive from Manhattan, not far from the Delaware River and the canal and the quaint village shops of New Hope and Lambertville. Originally a small two-room stone cottage built in 1823, it was expanded in 1871 with a second floor and renovated and enlarged with a new wing a century later in 1983 by a well-known interior designer and his significant other. The property is outlined by the low-rise stone walls made from clearing the land for crops, and branches of the gnarly-trunked oak and maple trees shade the house in the summer and blacken in the winter months. A stone path, blistered by roots, leads from the road right up to the kitchen door. Inside, in the kitchen, is an enormous working hearth where the meals were cooked in the original house, along with the modern-day upgrades of a double-door Sub-Zero refrigerator, granite countertops, two ovens, and a six-burner grill. Upstairs, the master bedroom has a cathedral ceiling and a hot tub in the bathroom. Neither Arnie nor Mitch were any good at husbandry—carpentry, gardening, plumbing—and luckily all that was necessary before they moved in was to have the rooms painted and central air-conditioning installed, a process Arnie was insistent on and that meant sawing through the old floorboards and plastered ceilings of the house to install the vents, which had probably dislodged and disturbed the already restless resident spirits.

“Money well spent,” Arnie confided in me one weekend when I was a guest at their house. “Or the humidity would have done us all in.” I have known Arnie since our college days, long before we both reached our late thirties and he settled down into this high-maintenance relationship. Arnie loved to tease me with the details about why he felt he might soon be back on the market for a new lover: Mitch’s overanalysis of every conversation, Mitch’s dysfunctional home purchases, Mitch’s ill-mannered table habits. And on and on. Arnie also confessed to me that he and Mitch had purchased the house with a significantly low bid—it had been on the market for more than a year after a series of married couples had bought and then sold the property after they had been unable to abide living with the cranky poltergeists.

“If I can live with Arnie, I can live with any sort of irritable ghost,” Mitch would joke with their guests when they were entertained in the dining room with an elaborate three-course dinner by candlelight that Arnie had spent a day preparing. “You don’t have to guess which one is easier.”

This sort of banter always seemed to amuse their weekend visitors—usually other dramatic couples from the city: a gray-haired film director and the young actor-boyfriend he had rescued from hustling, the hefty lesbian couple who ran a pet-grooming salon in Chelsea, the anorexic European fashion magazine editor and her chain-smoking photographer-husband from Greece. During a weekend in the country, Arnie’s seething resentment never failed to bubble to the surface. “I spend my entire time cleaning and cooking, while Mitch shops for old paintings and broken furniture,” Arnie would pout, and rattle his dishes and pots through the warm water in the sink, since he had neglected to notice that his new state-of-the-art kitchen did not have a dishwasher and he had not a clue of how one could be installed. “It’s an ideal arrangement for him.”

Sometimes their argument would escalate—Mitch might criticize that the pot roast was too dry or that the lemon-apple tart was store bought; Arnie might announce how much money Mitch had been fleeced for on a seventy-year-old cracked cookie jar in the shape of a clown’s face—and if a second bottle of wine had been opened the conversation could turn nasty and wounding, depending on the familiarity of the guests, the heat of the weather, or the difficulty of the recipes. Sometimes the dinner would be interrupted to clean up an accident created by one of the two hyperactive cocker spaniels that the couple had adopted in an effort to seem more like country squires—a swift swipe of a chicken bone from a guest’s plate that could send it crashing off the table or a puddle of piss shot onto the wooden floor intended to garner their masters’ attention (and hopefully deflect all the rising bad tempers). One weekend when I was there with my new boyfriend Scott there was a threat by one lover with a carving knife that ended in the other lover performing a head-lock on him. The sudden and sheepish apology by both men to all in attendance occurred over after-dinner drinks poured from an expensive (and fractured) crystal decanter Mitch had found at an estate auction.

But much of the conversation during the couple’s elegant inedible feasts would be spent on the ghosts of their country house, particularly if a guest had heard one of the phantoms slamming a door upstairs or tapping noisily at the window. Arnie was rather fond of the door-slammer, in fact, except on those occasions when he wanted to take an afternoon nap. “Lucy—Lucinda was her real name—was the wife of the original builder of the house,” he would explain, usually after Mitch had cut him to the quick with a wicked remark about a filmy fingerprint on a wineglass or a too-heavy hand with the garlic in a recipe. “Overworked and underappreciated. No wonder she just dropped dead one day. A little thank-you now and then always does her good.”

Arnie liked to proudly explain that he thought himself particularly receptive to vibrations from the realm of the supernatural and Mitch loved to point out to their guests the hot spots of paranormal activity within the house, or, rather, the locations of strange, chilly draughts and severe drops in temperature. “Emma’s bedroom, upstairs, at the far end of the house,” he would usually begin his list. “There’s a cold spot at the foot of the bed where she must have died. The dogs won’t even go near it—they yelp as if someone has just stepped on their paws.”

Emma was Lucy’s daughter-in-law and believed to be the true source of any vicious disturbance in the house. “One morning I was standing at the top of the stairs and felt something push me,” Mitch might tell the lesbian groomers or the European editor. “It was deliberate, like I was expected to lose my balance and fall and hurt myself. I could feel the anger in the air. It was as if something had conjured up all of Arnie’s bitterness and I had stepped right inside it.”

“Pity she didn’t succeed,” Arnie added.

No one had ever actually seen any of the ghosts at the country house, at least not during Arnie and Mitch’s tenure, only heard them or felt them in the dark of the evening hours, which usually meant their weekend guests would greet one or both of their hosts the following morning with an odd source of their insomnia, an anecdote of sensing someone at the foot of the bed, the creaking sound inside the armoire, an eerie light going on and off in the hallway. As for myself, I never seemed to be any kind of spiritual magnet and have generally reached a deep and unencumbered slumber on my visits to their country house, particularly since I am out of the city and away from the noisy traffic beneath the window of my third-floor apartment on Ninth Avenue. One guest, however, Cheryl, an overweight and middle-aged out-of-work actress, said she sensed something strange in the guest bathroom one night, where there had never been a spirit presence detected before. “I felt as if someone were looking at me when I got out of the shower,” she explained in a dramatic fluster of over-the-shoulder gestures. “I felt so vulnerable and exposed, like something was going to happen.”

Mitch told Cheryl she had been watching too many teen slasher movies, but over an elaborately concocted cup of vanilla roast coffee served in a disfigured and chipped set of ceramic cow mugs that Mitch had found in a thrift shop in Buckingham, Arnie commiserated with Cheryl that perhaps it was because the ghost recognized her from the low-budget insurance-fraud commercial she had filmed over a decade before. Later, in private, Arnie told me that perhaps Cheryl had only wished someone were looking at her. “She’s desperate for attention,” Arnie said. “She hasn’t been on a date for over a year and can’t seem to get a callback audition.”

Though Arnie and Mitch have never seen any of their ghosts, they have never regarded them with frivolity or contempt, especially since the quarrelsome couple prided themselves on being progressive, inclusive, and multicultural (even when they are at odds). Mitch, a psychiatrist, liked to think of their ghosts as part of their extended family, more welcome in his home than his demanding parents, needy siblings, and pampered nephews and nieces. Arnie, a corporate travel planner, is the more compassionate one, always trying to find a reason for the noise or the cold air, hoping that if he helps change the course of the haunting he might also alleviate any eternal pain; lighting a stick of incense to change the mood, for instance, or leaving open a book of poems or family photographs to soothe the restless soul.

“Emma likes all my divas,” Arnie might explain to the theater director and his ex-hustler boyfriend about his selection of background music during dinner. “Show tunes. Opera. Madonna.”

“But she goes wild when two men sing together,” Mitch would add. “Duets. Chorus boys. Something always goes flying to the floor.”

“We’ve been wondering if she was some kind of feminist or suffragette, but that is clearly anachronistic,” Arnie said. “More likely she was abused. Put upon. Like many in this house are still treated.”

But there is one haunting that the couple deliberately warn their weekend company to steer clear of at all costs—the linked spirits of two soldiers who fought in and survived the Civil War only to meet their grisly end in the stone cottage. The bodies of the two young men appear only at daybreak by the giant hearth in the kitchen, or so goes the legend, and a curse falls on those who witness them. “Never find yourself alone in the kitchen when the sun comes up,” the real estate agent who sold Arnie and Mitch the property told the new homeowners. The sight of these two ghosts was a bad luck omen and the last straw that had driven all the married couples away. “A very unhappy ending,” the agent whispered to Mitch. “And a bloody mess you wouldn’t want to clean up,” she told Arnie.

Peter Altemus was the son of the original builder of the stone cottage, Robert Altemus, who had built a new and larger house when his son became a teenager. By the time he was twenty Peter was broad-shouldered and clean-shaven, dark and sullenly handsome, and had the strength of one of the horses he used to plow the upper pasture in the spring. When Peter married Emma Frey, a woman from Philadelphia, the young couple moved into the stone cottage. In the years before and during the Civil War, Robert Altemus was part of the underground railroad movement, shepherding slaves northward by night to their hopeful freedom elsewhere. Peter had sat out the first months of the Civil War—there were the crops to attend to and a colicky but pretty new baby girl, Sarah Ann, to take care of. The young couple were used to seeing figures coming and going from the barn they shared with Peter’s parents—Robert’s hired hands, the escaping slaves, a wandering Union soldier—but it had never aggravated the women as long as the men were there to keep order. In 1862, Peter joined the Philadelphia regiment and left his young wife and sickly daughter in the care of his aging parents in the larger house, leaving the stone cottage empty and abandoned. In the spring of 1863, Robert Altemus was shot and killed while attempting to prevent a Union officer from taking one of his horses from his barn and Emma had written her husband with the news, begging him to return to the farm. That fall, Peter Altemus was captured and later transferred to the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville in 1864. In the last days of the war, Peter and Will Ogden, the Confederate officer who protected him at the camp and became his close buddy, left the prison and made their way on foot back to Peter’s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

At dusk one day Emma had seen the two men from the upper window of the larger house, approaching about a mile away on the main post road. She did not recognize her husband, his gentleman’s posture changed by a broken foot and a bullet-wound through his shoulder, and thought instead that he was just another of a number of aggressive strangers the women had had to chase off the land. She saw them headed in the direction of the barn and the stone cottage and decided to let them spend the night, knowing that in the morning she might be faced with a difficult confrontation if they still remained on the property.

Before daylight the next morning, Emma arrived at the barn with her father-in-law’s rifle, found no one there, and fed their last horse, a lame mare named Molly. The war and hard work had streaked Emma’s brown hair with gray wisps that she was forever pushing away from her forehead with the back of her hand. It was daybreak when she approached the front door of the stone cottage. She found the two men in the front room, asleep by the hearth atop a pile of straw and a rubber coat, their arms and bodies entwined like lovers. She had only noticed the Confederate insignia on the discarded jacket when the first of the two men stirred, saw her standing by the door and reached for a knife he kept tucked in his belt. Emma Altemus shot Will Ogden in the heart before he was fully standing. She did not recognize her husband—he was slimmer and gaunt, his hair thinning and his face covered by a scraggly beard. She shot him as he was opening his eyes from sleep, awakened by the blast that had killed his mate.

Emma did not know what she had done until minutes later when, searching through jackets and pockets, she discovered a letter she had written her husband more than a year before. She looked at his name on the envelope, studied her own handwriting as if it were in a foreign language, then fell to her knees and began to cry.

The plan came to her about an hour later, as the dark red blood traveled along the floor to the place where she had collapsed. She dragged the bodies to the barn, burying the two men in a hole she spent several hours digging. She burned their uniforms and clothing in the hearth, which created a great and unnatural stench for most of the day. A slow, northeasterly wind prevented the odor from reaching the new house and her mother-in-law’s notice, and Emma burned her own bloody clothing to hide any trace of the crime. No soldiers had ever been in the stone cottage, she decided. She would tell nothing to her mother-in-law. Her husband had died in the war, in prison, a Confederate retaliation for the Union victory, not from the trigger of a gun held by his own nervous wife.

All this had been recounted in a letter Emma Altemus had left for her daughter when she died in 1914. Emma had moved back into the stone cottage almost immediately after the murders; the felony had never been discovered, and when she remarried years later, her new husband added the second floor to the stone cottage. The larger Altemus house had been sold decades before Emma’s death when Emma’s mother-in-law Lucinda had died. By the time of her mother’s death, Sarah Ann had married a printer in Easton and had had four children, and she had been too disturbed by her mother’s news to have the barn floor excavated and the bodies located and properly buried. When no immediate buyer could be found for her mother’s stone cottage, it lay abandoned until after the Second World War, when Sarah Ann’s grandson began renting the property to an artist and his companion. From there the hauntings began, or, rather, began to be recorded. In his diary, the artist, Michael Franz, wrote of slamming doors and tapping sounds throughout the cottage. One morning, at daybreak, he smelled a strange odor in the kitchen and witnessed the bloody corpses of the two men on the floor beside the hearth. He fell ill later that same day, dying of pneumonia a month later.

During the next thirty years the legend of dual ghosts was widely publicized, primarily due to the posthumous renown of the artist and a big-ticket auction that included his Pennsylvania paintings and diaries. In the following years, however, the appearances of the ghosts of Peter Altemus and Will Ogden were sporadic and infrequent, though they were always preceded by a strange burning stench and witnessed at daybreak, always in the same spot beside the large hearth in the kitchen; their embracing last moments became entwined with mysterious or suspicious meanings, particularly since Michael Franz had referred to them in his diaries as “the tragic lovers of years past.” And calamity, misery, tragedy, or just an endless run of bad luck seemed to haunt any living soul who saw them. Reese Tanner, the interior designer, who had the misfortune to see them in 1983 in the middle of his expansion of the stone cottage into a two-story country retreat, fared particularly badly. He saw them at sunrise, pooling in their own blood. He went upstairs to where his partner, David, was sleeping, roused him, and said he had just seen the two ghosts.

Afterward, Reese and David had only experienced some minor handicaps with the expansion of the house—a contractor who deserted them, a foundation that cracked and had to be repoured, windows built to the wrong size and then installed upside down. Reese was a handsome and persuasive man, however, thirty-eight and well built, and he often chose workmen who also liked to party after hours, particularly if David had remained in the city or was tied up with supervising another design job. One morning, about four months after his observance of the soldiers by the hearth, Reese noticed a reddish patch of skin by his collarbone, about as big as a one-carat diamond. Other lesions appeared quickly thereafter, on his thighs, his arms, his chin, his nose. In the final stages of the disease, he lost his eyesight and never saw the completion of the renovations of the country house, which David reluctantly finished on his own. David never spent another night in the house after Reese’s death, however, selling the property to the first married couple who would take it off his hands.

And as for the fate of the more recent slew of married owners, the details I heard were secretive and limited, but among the words Arnie and Mitch whispered to me one night at the dinner table were miscarriage, adultery, and cancer.

When my boyfriend Scott first heard the tales of the ghosts of Arnie and Mitch’s country house he disbelieved my theory that the two soldiers in the Civil War might have been murdered and buried by a jealous Emma Altemus. “I don’t doubt that the two soldiers may have had some kind of sexual intimacy with each other—or certainly some kind of intimate bond with each other from having survived the war and been in a prison camp together—but I doubt that the wife would have displayed such a furious jealousy,” he told me. “That’s such a modern reaction. She killed them because she thought they were intruders.”

This started our own little quarrel. Scott, an intensely focused businessman concerned mostly about net worth and the bottom line, thought my jealousy theory was inappropriate. In his estimation the concept of homosexuality was a modern-day psychological invention, perhaps because he had only recently discovered his own inclinations toward the same sex. Married for sixteen years, Scott had only been out as a gay man for four months when we began dating one another, so everything about gay life—and gay history—was new and a surprise to him. He was amazed to learn that Hadrian, Alexander, da Vinci, and Lincoln all had gay pasts (not to mention quite a few of the ancient popes). “During the Civil War men used to dress up for the prison balls,” I told him, when our argument about Peter Altemus and Will Ogden began. “They strung blankets around their waists for dresses.”

“Then why aren’t the ghosts seen in drag?” he asked. Scott was a no-nonsense sort of man. There was a logical explanation for everything. He saw nothing spooky about a squeaky door, for instance; it only needed to be oiled. (And he had all the husbandry skills our hosts lacked, a talent that resulted in our frequent weekend invitations to the country and Scott being peppered for handyman advice.)

“Technically, it would have only been one in drag, not both of them,” I answered him. “And it would have only been occasionally, not a daily thing, especially since I doubt that there were a lot of prison dances or that Emma Altemus would not have noted that one of the men was dressed as a woman. So they appear the way they lived and died—soldiers embracing as lovers.”

“They were probably embracing because it was cold,” Scott said. “You’ve been reading too many gay books,” he said. “Not everyone in the world is gay.”

Though Scott was often amused by my anecdotes of gay history, he believed that I saw life from a narrow gay perspective. I worked as an editor for a gay news service that syndicated stories to gay newspapers, gay bar rags, gay blogs, and gay websites, and I enjoyed looking for historical precedents of current news items that I was reporting on. Scott never took my job seriously because in his estimation I didn’t make a serious income from my gay work, certainly nowhere near his non-gay six figures. I believed that Scott diminished his homosexuality, hiding its existence as if he were ashamed of it. Scott was only out to a small circle of gay friends. Neither his ex-wife, his two children, nor his coworkers at the bank knew about our relationship, nor did Scott expect to change this arrangement anytime soon with new disclosures—a continual source of irritation between the two of us, because I always felt that he undervalued our relationship in comparison to those he had had with his girlfriends and his wife.

“Peter could have written Emma a letter about what it was like at the balls,” I said, not ready to drop our little discussion or let Scott think he was off the hook. “Dear Emma, the privates of our brigade had a ball last night,” I began, reciting an imaginary letter. “Some of the boys got themselves up in ladies clothes and were right pretty. A few of them even looked good enough to know better and I guess some of them did get things on with each other. I know I slept with my favorite pretty one. He kept me warm all through the night.”

Scott arched an eyebrow at me as if I were the queerest man he had ever met. “Maybe you should direct your imagination toward solving global warming,” he said. “The planet really needs someone like you to step up to the plate and make things better for everyone.”

Scott and I were close to breaking up the weekend of Arnie and Mitch’s Independence Day party. The arguing had started the day before our drive to the country when Scott had introduced me as “a friend” to one of his coworkers we had run into at a restaurant near Times Square. We had spent the night together in the city at my apartment discussing the pros and cons of coming out. (Scott felt that he would be discriminated against at work; I felt that I was being discriminated against at home.) On the drive to the country the next morning, we had reached an icy stalemate and had managed to avoid each other during the barbecue alongside Arnie and Mitch’s new pool, talking with the other weekend guests—mostly a couple who had driven up from Washington, a closeted lobbyist and his very out and flamboyant boyfriend.

That evening Scott and I spent the night upstairs in “Emma’s bedroom,” avoiding any intimacy. (Sex was the primary thing that kept us together—usually we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, but that night we slept at opposite ends of the large king-sized bed, deliberately shunning each other.)

The next morning the chill remained between us; the sky grew gray with thick, dark rain clouds; and fearing that we would all be trapped with one another in the country house because of the miserable weather, Arnie proposed an outing to the nearby movie theater, purposely to prevent his guests from escaping to the city early and leaving him alone with Mitch.

Scott wasn’t interested in seeing the movie—a romantic comedy—and decided to stay behind, saying that he needed the time to prepare for an office meeting on Monday morning. In his own way, Scott was as high maintenance as our hosts. He always traveled with a cell phone, a Blackberry, a laptop, an iPod, and a thin briefcase full of thick files. I didn’t protest or plead for him to join us on the outing to the movie, thinking he was hitting the last nail in the coffin of our relationship. Before we left the house, Scott had spread out his papers on the small café table that was beside the giant hearth, flipped open his laptop, and was contentedly at work, oblivious to the rest of us scrambling for parkas, caps, and umbrellas.

It was raining when we left the house and, during the course of our movie, the sky blackened and the rain came down harder. Back at the house, Scott abandoned his work at the table for short intervals to stand in front of the windows and look out at the sloping countryside and the water puddling on the stone path that led to the kitchen door. Alone, he was attuned now to all of the old house’s quirky noises and motions—the tapping of the rain, the wind blowing sheets of water against the window, the creaking floorboards in the kitchen as he shifted his weight, the muffled, wet swinging chimes by the door. Scott was not a superstitious man and his practical mind was as far from wondering about the ghosts as it could be. He was thinking of the power of the rain, the solidity of the structure of the old house, how much it would cost him to put a down payment on a similar place, how he would redecorate it if he were its owner—how he would reorganize the kitchen counters and change the configurations of the guest rooms. Somewhere in there he imagined himself the resident owner and in that imagination he saw me as his partner in the kitchen cooking, reaching for a mixing bowl to make pancakes (his morning favorite) or experimenting with the color of margaritas (my favorite).

He returned to the table and his reading material and became absorbed in his work. Outside the sky darkened more, the rain continued, and Scott worked away. Upstairs a door in the house closed with a violent shudder, obviously pulled shut by the wind of the storm coming inside the house, and Scott was forced to look away from his laptop for a few seconds. Next, the overhead light in the kitchen sputtered and went black, and the laptop on the table slipped into the auxiliary power of its battery. Outside flashes of lightning flickered and a burst of thunder was so sudden and fierce Scott felt the table vibrate. He waited in the darkness for the power to be restored, for the lights to flicker and resume burning brightly, but when there was a dark quiet for several seconds, he sighed, then began to take note of where he was in his work, saving the documents open on his laptop. The kitchen was as black as night, the rain hammering the shingles of the roof and sliding down the gutters and windows and stones. For a moment he wondered where the circuit breaker was located in the house and realizing he didn’t know, he folded his arms and sat back in his chair and waited a few minutes till the rain suddenly stopped and the black clouds blew away and the sun began to break through the darkness.

Light broke across a page of his notes first—bright and yellowish as if the morning had just arrived. The light widened over the table, then moved up his arms and chest and across his shoulders. For a moment he was conscious of the warmth of the sun and he squinted to adjust his eyesight to the fast rising light in the kitchen. The sunlight was accompanied by a strange burning smell—like that of wet wood and scorched hair—and Scott lifted his eyes away from the table to make sure that nothing was cooking on the stove top. Immediately, he felt a change in the kitchen and within himself and he knew he would see the ghosts before they had even appeared.

The trail of blood appeared first—initially as a crimson light against the wooden floor, then thickening and darkening into a river of red. His eyes searched out the edges of the red liquid, then followed it back across the room to where he sat by the hearth, and the deep red covered his legs and shoes. His heart was beating faster but he was not frightened or panicking. He was awestruck, in fact, as if he were watching a common phenomenon of nature such as the aurora borealis or comets streaking across the nighttime sky.

He thought about closing his eyes and avoiding what was next, but he refused to give in to fear. Beside the hearth, just beyond his shoes, a blood-soaked pile of straw covered with a tarplike cloth appeared, and then the shape of the bodies.

One man was lying on his back, his eyes and mouth opened wide with astonishment, the center of his shirt and chest blown apart with a bloody hole. The other man was on his side, his eyes closed in a wince, a blackened wound at his neck where the bullet must have hit.

As the sunlight moved further into the room, the pool of blood began to recede, as if time were reversing itself. The red edges shrank toward the hearth and the bodies and the smell changed, or, rather, disappeared. This was what worried Scott— he had not heard of this aspect of the legend.

But he didn’t run away. Instead, he sat and watched the blood drawback, disappear toward the hearth and the men. When he looked again at the bodies, he saw that their positions had changed. They were lying on the tarp face-to-face, embracing each other as if to draw their bodies closer together for warmth. The wounds and the blood were gone and there was an unmistakable intimacy between the two men—one man’s lips were nuzzled against the other’s neck, reminding Scott of how he had liked to sleep with me, before our testy dispute. As he watched the two men sleeping, he realized that they were alive and breathing and there was nothing to be afraid of.

And then they were gone—vanishing as quickly as sunlight could fill the kitchen.

Scott was napping in the upstairs bedroom when we returned from the movies. The violent rainstorm had tumbled branches and leaves off the maple trees closest to the house, but had left the air cool and sharp and fresh. The power had been restored and I cleaned up the papers Scott had left on the small table beside the hearth, replacing them in the manila folders, and brought them upstairs to the bedroom, along with the laptop he had left behind. He stirred lightly when I entered the room, then rolled over and shook off his sleepiness when I was beside the dresser and placing the folders and the laptop near his briefcase. “I’ll do it slowly,” he said. “The kids first.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I’ll introduce you to Wesley and Jennifer.” Wesley and Jennifer were Scott’s children, aged thirteen and fifteen, who lived with his ex-wife. “There’s no sense in meeting Melissa. I’m sure she knows, but there’s bad blood there already.” Melissa, Scott’s ex-wife, had pressed him hard for extra money and child support during their divorce settlement.

“Why the change?” I asked him, sitting on the edge of the bed.

He looked up at me, met my eyes, and said, “Don’t be afraid. I saw the two men.”

“What men?”

“The soldiers. The ghosts of the two soldiers.”

The blood drained from my face and my mouth opened as I looked for some kind of response or appropriate form of sympathy.

“When the rain stopped,” he said. “They were there, lying together by the fireplace. There’s nothing to be scared about. I don’t believe they’ll cause us any harm. You were right. They were in love. I saw what they felt for each other. It’s how I feel about you. They were simply two guys who felt like us.”

Scott was right, no harm or misfortune or calamity came to him. Or us. The two soldiers were never seen again, nor have their remains ever been searched for in the barn or relocated to a more acceptable final resting place. But Scott and I often credit the ghosts of Peter Altemus and Will Ogden with turning around our relationship and creating a solid union between us, or so we like to tell our guests when we entertain them at our own country house. In the six years we’ve been together, Scott has come out to his coworkers at the bank, I’ve stopped pressuring him for proof of his feelings for me, and we bought a house down the road from where Arnie and Mitch continue to spend their weekends. Our country house is not haunted, except on those occasions when we invite Arnie and Mitch to join us for dinner. They arrive bearing quarrels and wounded feelings, though they always seem to be in better spirits when they leave.