The Ballad of Mary Ellen

er Richard first saw Mary Ellen standing half-obscured in an overgrown field. He called out to her, and she turned to look at him. She wore a long white dress with ruffles at her throat and wrists, and she had long black hair loose and tangled from the wind. Her black eyes were sad as they regarded him.

  I thought my brother had made up the story to tease me, till one afternoon I found the girl sitting beneath an apple tree, her white skirts tucked beneath her. She looked scarcely spectral, and it was not till I met her black eyes beneath her wide-brimmed hat that I realized this was Richard’s mysterious person.

  Her nose was covered with light freckles, and her wide mouth curved as she looked at me. “I’ve been wanting to meet you,” she said. She gestured for me to sit near her. “I am not used to meeting people. I was hoping you would see me first and speak to me.” There was something melancholy in her black eyes and the downward tilt of her mouth.

  I was not beautiful like her. I was small and sallow, unused to the hot Oklahoma sun, and still trying to find my way here. I wasn’t sure what we had in common, but I wanted to be polite, and I was curious about her.

  “I was about to go fishing,” I said. “Want to come?”

  She didn’t know how to fish, which surprised me since she was from the country, so I taught her despite my limited experience. We sat on the bank side by side, her in her white gown, me in my brother’s overalls. She baited her hook the first try, which was more than I could have said for myself.

  When the sun went down, she grew frightened and asked me what time it was. I checked my watch and told her eight. She settled back uneasily and we lingered a while longer. Being with her felt like an adventure, and I didn’t want the evening to be over.

  In another half-hour we heard a raucous cry coming from the thicket. She rose, visibly disturbed, and moved toward the sound.

  “My mother’s calling me,” she said through pale lips.

  Your mother has the voice of a ban sidhe, I thought with a shiver.

  As I trailed after her through the brush, I saw Mary Ellen’s tall, broad mother watching us with squinting eyes. “Who’s that boy?” she asked, her voice harsh and reminding me of a parrot’s.

  “I’m not a boy!” I cried, hurt, though I could tell by the look on her mother’s face she was thinking Mary Ellen had been caught in a rendezvous.

  It took her a moment to believe me. She scrutinized my muddy overalls, grubby hair and sallow face with a scowl. When I looked at her, I saw that she looked nothing like Mary Ellen. She had height, but no slenderness, nor delicacy. She was dressed in dirty homespun. I wondered why Mary Ellen wore a ruffled white dress.

  Mary Ellen took her mother’s hand and together they moved toward the road, going under the barbed wire fence one at a time. I was tempted to follow—I wanted to know more about Mary Ellen: if she didn’t live in that burned-out shell, then where? It all led to my gut instinct that Mary Ellen just wasn’t real.

  At home, I told Richard about my encounter with Mary Ellen. At first he was quiet, then bitter; then soon I found this concealed fury. “You’ve fallen in love with her,” I said, meeting his burning gaze.

  Instantly he pounced on me. “You’re a little fool. You know nothing of it—of her—of me!” I knew enough to know there was going to be trouble. Mary Ellen’s mother would be furious to find her daughter had an actual boyfriend.

  The situation could no longer be ignored when I saw Richard heading toward the creek with no fishing pole. I feared the wrath of Mary Ellen’s mother— so I decided to meddle.

  “I’ll ask her parents’ permission to court her,” Richard said.

  I feared for Richard’s safety. All I knew of Mary Ellen’s upbringing was that it was abnormal. She was not really a woman in mind. And there was something ruthless about the woman who controlled her.

  The next day I was invited to spend the night with Mary Ellen. She came and got me herself, visiting briefly with my aunt, uncle and Richard, and admiring my dress, which was my best—my black flower-sprigged. She wore a white gown which seemed very fine, but antiquated.

  We walked together through the thicket and across a field of yellow, waist-high grass till we approached an overgrown orchard. The ground was littered with weeds and rotten apples and I started running when wasps buzzed around my head. I approached the sunken steps of an old manor and waited for Mary Ellen to catch up. A shadowed door was decorated with a single oval pane of whorled glass.

  “Welcome home,” Mary Ellen said serenely, and led me inside amidst a mess of dead potted plants and scattered gardening tools on the front porch.

  Mary Ellen’s mother was expecting us. She stood poised in the parlor in a patterned muslin dress decades old, her wispy, graying hair pinned on her head. “So this is my daughter’s new friend?” she asked with interest, an eyebrow lifted somewhat sardonically.

  “Charlotte, this is my mother, Damaris.” Mary Ellen clasped her hands politely and nodded at each of us.

  I curtseyed politely, feeling Damaris look me up and down intensely. “How do you do, Charlotte?”

  “Very well. Thank you, ma’am.” I took the seat on the old velvet sofa to which Damaris gestured, and Mary Ellen sat beside me. At her mother’s directive, she began the work of serving tea to each of us.

  “How long have you lived in Oakwood?” I asked Damaris, trying not to stare around in avid curiosity at the faded portraits and peeling wallpapers.

  “Ours was a founding family,” Damaris commented. “We’ve lived in this home for three generations.”

  “Your furnishings appear antique,” I observed.

  Mary Ellen bounded up. “I’ll give you a tour.”

  “I should like that very much.” I followed my new friend up the stairs. In the receding afternoon light her figure shone ghostly and slim, one thin hand clutching the splintered banister, the other her yellowed lace skirts.

  It was so quiet. The large house could easily encompass a family of considerable size, yet each room carried a feeling of neglect. I stared at everything, thinking of how I would tell Richard.

  When we reached the furthest parts of the mansion, Mary Ellen turned to me in the gloom. “Charlotte. You must know of my feelings for your brother,” she said in a hushed whisper, her cheeks crimsoning.

  I drew further into the shadows, fearing our voices would reach her formidable mother’s hearing. Despite my fears, I could not let her confession go unanswered. “He much admires you, Mary Ellen. Who wouldn’t?”

  “My mother will never allow it. You must help me.” She slipped her cold white fingers into mine.

  “What can I do?”

  Her face was so pale, so luminous in the dark. It was still difficult after all this time to believe she was not a ghost. But her cheeks bloomed with color, and there was hope in her eyes.

  “Will you take my place here? Just for a little while. I want to be free. I will never grow up if I remain here.”

  I looked at her with disbelief.

  “We are of a similar height,” she said. “Our hair is not the same shade, but it is the same length. My mother—“ she lowered her voice further. “My mother’s vision is very poor. And she doesn’t have her wits about her. It will not be difficult to fool her. You yourself saw that she mistook you for a boy initially.”

  “That is because I am an ugly girl. I am different from you in nearly every way. She will discover the lie instantly.”

  “We will try an experiment tonight. You will wear my clothes, and we will rehearse your manner. Then when my mother comes into the room, to bring us milk, and to say good night, I will be out of the room, and you will pretend to be me.”

  I did as Mary Ellen told me. I wore one of her fragile old dressing-gowns and too
k down my hair, and combed it out. Her mother came into the room later.

  “Mary Ellen.” Her voice was a short bark. “What have you been doing in here all this time? Are you telling secrets? Where is the girl?”

  “She is in the outhouse, mother,” I said calmly. “Thank you for the milk and cookies.”

  She left the room abruptly, but she had looked at me directly and mistook me for Mary Ellen.

  Mary Ellen came from behind the curtain, exultant.

  That night I learned that she was twenty. I was surprised. My brother and I were only fifteen.

  When I woke up, the sun filtered through lace curtains yellowed with age. Between the curtains and the glass was a thick network of cobwebs. I was alone.

  Next to me in the bed was a note from Mary Ellen: “Be me for two days. Please. M.E.”

  I smelled coffee and cooking from below. I became aware that no one else was in the house besides Mary Ellen’s mother and myself, and I felt afraid. I wanted to run away, but I feared exposing her.

  I dressed and went downstairs. “Good morning, mother.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  “She had to leave very early to help her aunt and uncle in the garden.”

  “You’re looking rather sallow this morning, Mary Ellen. Sickly. You’ll be like your Aunt Grace, dead before she was twenty-five.”

  “Why? I’m not sick.”

  “Not a drop of strength in you. Best go back up to bed.”

  I left the room. I wondered what to do. I had no notion of how Mary Ellen spent her time.

  Half an hour later she found me sitting at Mary Ellen’s vanity stool, my legs curled up with my chin on my knees. I was lost in reverie and feeling trapped and slightly panicked.

  Had Richard and Mary Ellen eloped? Would I see my brother again? What was I going to tell my parents? My mother would be devastated. This wasn’t fair to them. I was sick that so easily I had become caught up in this ruse, whose consequences were serious.

  “What are you doing still mooning about?” she barked. “You’re thinking about a boy, aren’t you?”

  I leapt to my feet. “Miss Damaris, it is I, Charlotte, not Mary Ellen.”

  For a moment she was overcome with shock, before she grew thunderous. “Then where is Mary Ellen?”

  “I don’t know,” I sputtered. I put my hands over my face, momentarily overcome with panic. “She—she ran away.” I didn’t want to mention my brother. “I want to go back to my aunt and uncle.”

  To my dismay, Damaris accompanied me home, a short while later once I was changed into my black flower-sprigged dress.

  My aunt Lily met me at the threshold. “Richard is gone,” she said, before I could stop her. Then she looked at Damaris in a grim moment of shared realization. Aunt Lily was concerned, but Damaris was furious.

  I ran past them as quickly as I could to my room. I opened my jewelry box to find a note. I knew my twin would not leave me without saying goodbye. He told me where they were going. I didn’t share this information with the adults. I slipped out the back and took a horse from the barn and rode quickly. A terrible feeling had risen up in me.

  The sky was dark. The morning had been nearly scorching, but a haze had covered the sky, an unnaturally golden haze. The wind was whipping hard. I sensed a tornado was coming on.

  I reached Carson five miles away. Huge drops of rain were pelting my back and neck. The train station was deserted. It was clear there wouldn’t be any more stops here today. The offices were closed up. I tied my horse and lingered beneath the overhang as lightning flashed in the sky, and the drops grew larger, and harder.

  Then I saw a figure lying prone on a wooden bench. It had grown so dark I could scarcely make him out.

  “Charlotte,” I heard a weak, dry voice call out.

  In a moment I was at my brother’s side, gazing at his pale face. “What’s wrong? Where is Mary Ellen?”

  There was a note clutched in his hand. “ ’Dear Richard. For whatever it is worth, you have saved me. I must be free now, or I will die. Never attempt to find me. However, you have my love and gratitude.’ ” He crumpled the note against his forehead. “She brought me a drink from the concessions. She kissed me, then tilted it to my lips. It is the last thing I remember. I am a fool.”

  I sagged with relief against the bench. “She must have been desperate. Her mother is crazy. She would never have let her go. I don’t know what was going on, but something terribly evil. Don’t hate her, Richard.”

  “Ugh.” The note drifted from his fingers and skittered over the pavement in the gathering wind. Despite his scowl, I saw tears in his eyes.

  Quickly I grabbed it and tore it into little bits, and scattered it. Then I inched further away from the station exterior.

  “A tornado is coming. We can’t go home now.” Secretly I was relieved. It would be hours before we would be found, and by then Mary Ellen would be safely far away from her former home.

  We sought shelter from the storm, and waited it out, fearing for our lives as pillars were halved and splintered, glass shattered and trees fell all around us.

  I never returned to visit Aunt Lily and Uncle Edgar again after that summer, but I never forgot Mary Ellen, who was like a flame in a field of desolation, a force of nature who broke free and was saved.

  I would have done the same.