A.W. Hill
My great-grandmother Anna Sloup got off the boat at Ellis Island in 1889 with her worldly possessions stuffed into a small, peeling suitcase with a broken handle that she had picked off the streets back in Pilsen. She did not get off alone, and by this I’m not referring to the three-hundred or so other immigrants who came down the ramp squinting, unbathed and unslept after the turbulent voyage across the Atlantic, and I don’t mean her father, Frantisek, who had traveled with her all the way from Bohemia, for him: to escape conscription into the army, and for Anna: a chance to escape the deadening life that fate had plotted out for her.
What I mean is that twelve year-old Anna was in the company of a ghost.
She’d first encountered the ghost at the age of nine in the empty church where she had come to pray for her deathly ill mother. Death had, up to then, been unknown to Anna. Her grandparents has passed before she was born, and she’d never even lost a pet. The notion that a person could be here today and gone tomorrow horrified her, and when you were horrified, you sought protection in church. That was the drill. The church had smelled of the sandalwood incense used at that morning’s mass, of old wood and candlewax and damp, earthy stone — and something new: a cloyingly sweet odor of decay that Anna associated with the dead leaves of winter her father…
