I walk past this store on my way to Prospect Park or when I’m trying to get to the Botanical Garden on Saturdays before noon when it’s free. It’s right after where Grand merges with Washington, past the weird triangular parking lot by the gas station whose air machine has been broken since last fall.
A man sits behind the counter and talks on the phone. His chair is short and I can only see his head and the top of his shoulders. He works here, but his call doesn’t look like business. He speaks quietly beneath the sound of the music and laughs loudly. There is a black and white Pekingese laying on the countertop, asleep.
I walk to the back of the store and pass a small basket of wrinkled brown roots on a shelf behind the counter. John the Conqueror roots bring luck and virility to those who possess them. I eye the man behind the counter—if he has one of those roots I might be drawn to him. He is good-looking: clear brown skin and wide eyes, thin with large hands. I stare a little longer until I know I’m not wild for him.
The floor is tiled in linoleum and the shelves along the walls are galvanized steel. The shelves in the back hold prayer candles and incense. There are candles in honor of St. Michael, St. Anthony, The Infant of Prague. The descriptions on these candles are written in Spanish on one side and English on the other. There’s a yellow candle that says Control with a picture of two big blue spiders in a web. A black and red candle for uncrossing love spells says Reverse Reverse with two arrows. A white candle pictures a black cat, back arched, and brings good luck to gamblers. There’s also a zodiac candle and a lottery candle, a love candle and a money candle. I pick up the love candle.
I was talking to a guy at a party last weekend. He kept trying to explain that he was good at skiing but he couldn’t find the way to say it modestly: it was easier than he thought it would be––it was really hard but he caught on fast––moguls weren’t all that fun anyway. And while he was babbling I brushed my arm against his sweater and it was so shockingly soft. I wondered why he was wearing something that looked so plain but was like walking through a field of milkweed in the fall when the shells open and send their seeds out on downy white tufts. I stared into the pale gray and he put his hands in his pockets uncomfortably. When he gave up on his story I blushed and couldn’t think of anything to say.
I hear the man on the phone say, “Joan? She’s in the back. I’ll tell her.” I put the candle back on the shelf.
At the very back of the store is a blue and white printed curtain. I try to peek behind it but it looks more like an office than the sort of secret chamber I was expecting. More linoleum tiles and steel shelves. A table that looks like a desk. I go closer to it and hope I move through it without effort, like I am in the jungle and standing in front of a waterfall that hides a magic passage.
The man hangs up the phone and I circle back and read the items on the shelf opposite the counter. Lavender water, rose water, eucalyptus water, holy water. Sometimes my grandmother’s friends go to the Vatican and bring back a vial of holy water for her. She used to take me into her room and put it on my forehead and make the sign of the cross. Now she has trouble walking and so she sends me into her room and directs me from her green upholstered chair in the parlor: “On my dresser, open the second drawer! There’s a little red box with the cross! Isn’t it a pretty box? Now bless yourself!” I don’t bless myself. I look at her jewelry box and fix my hair in the dresser mirror while I shout back to her, “Ok! Yes! Ok!”
The shelves are dusty and the tips of my fingers are dirty from turning over all the candles in my hand, Spanish to English. My back is to the counter but the man says towards me, “Are you looking for something in particular?”
I turn around. “Do you recommend anything for protection when traveling?”
“Traveling… Well, that’s St. Michael.” He opens the back of the counter and reaches around in its shelves. It’s glass and full of prayer cards, a few plain felt dolls, small brown amulets. The dog is still laying on top of it and I start to pet it. I like it when animals are asleep. When my cousin died last spring, the funeral home printed prayer cards with his picture on them. It felt like a souvenir: I made it through the wake of Charles D. Clark.
Joan comes out from the back of the store and stands beside me. He asks her, “What do you recommend for traveling?”
“Sacred heart.” She turns to me. “You are traveling?” Her hair, her skin, her eyes are the color of cinnamon. She wears glasses with thin silver frames.
“My parents are traveling. They are traveling in Nicaragua,” I add quietly.
“In Europe?”
“In Nicaragua. Central America.” The dog moves under my hand. It turns to face me and sits down again. The woman who greeted me in the mirror gets up and sits down on a stool next to Joan. She looks bored and is eating candies wrapped in gold foil.
“Oh. What do they do there?” Joan asks me.
“They are retired but they’re building a house there.”
“A house? That’s wonderful.”
“On the Pacific.”
“They are looking to the ocean then.” She smiles. Her hair is short and moves in waves across her head. “Are they Catholic?”
“My mother.”
“She will believe in the sacred heart. Catholics believe in the sacred heart.”
My mother told me once how the priest used to come to everyone’s house to bless their Pascha baskets: the bread, pysanky, kielbasa and butter molded in the shape of a lamb. He wore his velvet robes and hat and filled the house with smoke from his thurible while he chanted the blessing in Russian. My mother was so scared of him that she ran and hid behind the front door as soon as he came in. When my grandmother found her she dragged her out to the kitchen up to the stooping back of the priest and waited for him to finish with the basket and to pray for her little girl.
When I was little my dad used to meditate and I asked him why. He said that when he meditated he was more aware of the world. I asked what that meant and he told me that before I was born he was driving home from a party with my mother, aunt and uncle when all of a sudden he slammed on the brakes and swerved off the road in front of an overpass. As the car stopped skidding, a truck flew off the other side of the overpass and landed in the road in front of them right where the car would have been if he had kept driving. I asked him how he knew and he said he didn’t know it––he just did it.
“Are you from Barbados?” I ask Joan.
She nods and says again, “Sacred heart and Guardian Angel.”
I look at the counter beside the dog where the man set the prayer cards. “Is it ok that they’re there and I’m here?”
“Sure. Say the prayer. The prayer’s on the back.” Joan walks back towards the candles and I watch her blue and white checkered shirt as she moves between the shelves. The store is bright with daylight that comes in through the front windows that face northwest, but it changes each moment as the sun falls lower.
“Can I also have a porcupine quill?” I ask the man. I see the open box through the glass.
He looks at me and smiles. “A porcupine quill? You know, very few people know what these are.”
The woman from the mirror asks, “What do you do with a porcupine quill?”
He says, “You write with it,” and looks at me a little sideways. “Do you write with it?”
"No, I don't write with it. But I keep it around. I had one but I gave it away last night. I wanted to replace it right away." He takes one from the box and hands it to me. The inner end is dirty with the porcupine's flesh.
I leave my things on the counter and return to the shelves. I look at a section of soaps in plastic bottles for Luck in Relationships, Luck with Money, Potent Spells, Breaking Spells. One is called Ghost Chaser and is the color of a robin’s egg. A package of garlic hangs from the shelf above it. Five bulbs. I pick up the Ghost Chaser and return to the counter.
“Do you have something that’s the opposite of this?”
He looks at the bottle and then up at me. “The opposite?”
“Yeah, I don’t want to chase ghosts away. I want them to be welcome.”
He smiles again and leans back in his chair. He laughs but faces me carefully, aligning his shoulders with mine. “Well, now. What are you talking about? Who are you trying to reach?”
I tell him, “There’s a boy who died a long time ago and he’s buried next to the tomb of Ulysses Grant in Manhattan. There’s a little monument to him. I’ve always wondered how he died.” I wonder how close he is to me when I’m there, or how close he is to me when I’m not.
The woman from the mirror steps closer to the counter and says loudly, “Sounds like you need the Ouija Board!” According to the Ouija Board, mine is the oldest soul in the family and my sister’s is brand new. My father and his best friend fought in the Union Army together and my mother came from Budapest. No one wrote out the family tree until two years ago but we’ve had these readings from the Ouija Board since I was born.
“Wow,” he says. “I must have walked by that monument a hundred times and never seen it. Sounds like you need to contact him. You’ve got to talk to her about that.” He nods towards Joan who is in the back of the store. She passes through her curtain.
I’ve never tried to contact a ghost before. I say, “I mean, I don’t want to disturb anyone who I shouldn’t disturb. But I’d like to see what he’s seen.”
He shrugs as if ghosts aren’t easily bothered. Like to conjure a spirit is as much of a disturbance as asking someone at the table to pass the bread. “See what he’s seen…” he repeats. “No, you talk to her.”
I walk to the front of the store and wait for Joan. There are display racks with pamphlets and chapbooks. Most of them are about winning the lottery and bringing luck. There are two copies of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and a guide to the saints. A few other people are in the store and I want them to leave. I read my horoscope for February. Pisces. Everything is so clear to you that you won’t even have to search for your numbers. They will find you. 8-1-0.
Joan walks up to the counter and I hear the man say, “She has someone she wants to reach.”
“Who she want to reach?”
“She tell you. She tell you.”
I pretend to read my horoscope again and look out the window. This is where all the Jamaican restaurants are. There’s one place with an upstairs dining room that’s like a tropical tree house. The stairs are as steep as a ladder and the ceiling is so short it’s hard to stand upright. But the walls are painted like an island paradise: palm trees, parrots, ocean. It’s hot there and it feels like summer. I take dates there—when I go on dates. If he doesn’t like it I won’t see him again. If he does I take him home.
I turn from the window and put my horoscope back on the rack. I go back to the dog. It lifts its head and I pet it.
“You are American?” Joan asks me.
“Yes.”
“Where you from? Upstate?”
“No, from Pennsylvania.”
“You with these girls here?” She looks at three girls who are smelling the soaps and laughing together.
I shake my head.
“Come here. You tell me who you need.”
I squeeze between by the girls and walk to the end of the counter and stand next to a peace lily. I tell her the story. “There’s a little boy who I’ve always been curious about. He died in 1797 and he’s buried by the Hudson River in Manhattan. There’s a little monument there that calls him an amiable child. He is right next to a tomb for Ulysses Grant who was a president.” I’m rushing.
“The president...” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye.
I start fidgeting with my shoes and my voice sounds far away. “I like this place because it’s the two of them there. Two monuments.” I suddenly feel silly for walking here to ask this. “I want to know about the little boy. I want to know how he died.”
“Oh, he an old man now,” Joan says and nods. “He an old man now.”
I never thought of him aging, and I don't completely believe it. “I guess that’s right,” I say slowly.
She takes a step closer to me. “He had a liver problem.”
“The liver? He was sick?”
She looks over my shoulder and speaks slowly, her eyes focused on something distant. “He had a liver problem. His parents had corn fields.”
I grew up in corn fields. “His name was St. Clair Pollock.”
“His family was wealthy. He died sudden.”
“Does he know General Grant? Do they interact?”
“They do… They do… They do…” She is smiling and her tone changes. I hear her and my head feels likes it’s full of smoke. The Monsignor came to my cousin’s wake to say the funeral prayers and it lasted over an hour. It was a little room and he and two other priests from the church shook their thuribles back and forth while he sang in prayer. The room was hazy with incense and one by one my great aunts started to cough: Aunt Cora, Aunt Annamae, Aunt Dot. “They do… They do…” I look away from her and stare at the shelves of candles through the leaves of the peace lily. “They do… They do…”
I can barely see through the smoke. “They do?”
“They do… They do…”
Her eyes look darker brown than before. I feel very far away from her, like we are losing one another in the smoke. “That makes me happy,” I hear myself say. My words are slow and heavy.
“They do… He love kids. Grant love kids… His foot was swollen when he died.”
She grabs my arm and I look at her fingers above the crook of my elbow. She laughs. “See? I can’t do this now. It’s like I get drunk with this and I can’t get out. You go meditate and you will find him. We are just in this world for god. God directs us.” She lets go of my arm and takes a step back. “Do you meditate?”
“Not often.”
“Well, you meditate and think on him and he will come. And you can come back here too.”
“I can meditate here?” I glance at the curtained room in the back, the waterfall.
“You can do it at home. Come back here if you want.”
I touch her arm. “Thank you. My name is Sarah.”
“What month you born, Sarah?”
“March. March 1st.”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. I February 20th.”
The man at the counter calls to Joan. “So what did you find out?” The woman in the mirror gets up from her chair and looks down the counter towards us.
“She born in March. She a Pisces too.”
“Yes.”
“The boy had a liver problem. And his parents were wealthy.”
The mirror woman shouts, “Of course they were wealthy. You gotta have money to be up there by a president!”
Joan adds, “They had corn fields.” She walks back to her room.
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