Essay
Twilight ghost at the West Tisbury dump
By Dan Cabot - July 26, 2007
Summer is jam-making season at Glimmerglass, as it has been in my wife's family for generations, perhaps back to Eve's first summer in Eden. The other day, Nancy was recycling some glass jars. She had decided her "Jalapeno Jelly 2000" had outlived its use-by date. I was disappointed in myself for not having done a more timely job of consuming it, but her action - throwing away the contents of full jars - triggered an old ghost story in my nonsensically random memory.
It happened before Nancy and I were married - even, I think, before we were dating. I was hanging out at Glimmerglass with Nancy's cousin Jerry, my best friend in those summers. Jerry's mother sent us to the dump to get rid of a couple of dozen jars of home-canned fruit, with instructions to bring back the Mason jars for reuse in jam-making.
In those days, more than 50 years ago, the West Tisbury dump was a hole in the ground, a pit about 60 feet across and 10 or 12 feet deep. You could drive a car all the way around it, except the corner where the tractor had dug the hole. People threw in everything: garbage, glass, paper, broken furniture, even old appliances. When the hole got almost full, the town covered it up and dug another hole. Some elegant and certainly off-Island person has decided such a facility should be called a "landfill," which sounds like a more positive thing than a "dump." But in the 1950s, West Tisbury had a dump.
It was a very wasteful system. The only sort of recycling was that if someone was throwing away something he thought someone else could use, he left it at the edge of the pit. Nancy's and Jerry's cousin Willis Gifford was famous for bringing home more junk from the dump than he dropped off, and he was not above climbing down into the hole after some particular treasure and bragging about it afterwards. On the evening Jerry and I arrived with the Mason jars, there was a rusty bicycle with no seat lying on the edge of the pit.
The dump was always open, but that evening ours was the only car there. When we stood by the open trunk and began pulling jars out of their moldering cardboard box, we were using the last of the twilight. A star was already out and the seagulls had left for the day, but the rats had not yet gotten busy. It was a windless evening, still and almost silent save for an intermittent cricket.
The labels on the jars were faded and smeared. If we had been able to read the dates, they would have been in the 1930s and 40s, for the contents had been put up by Jerry's long-dead grandmother. The jars of fruit - probably, but not certainly, peaches - had fermented and gave off the blended aromas of alcohol and garbage. As we emptied the wretched contents into the pit, we joked that we were likely to get high just from smelling the stuff.
Suddenly from the half-full trash pit came the sound of a melody played on something like a harp, raw and brassy but definitely music. The cricket stopped chirping.
Jerry and I looked at each other and said almost simultaneously, "Do you hear that?" Even if we were squiffed on sniffing fermented garbage, it was unlikely we would be having identical hallucinations. From where we stood we could see nothing that could be making the music. Was there deep in the hole a giant music box mysteriously activated? Was the ghost some murdered musician asking us to search out her secret grave at the dump? Were angels, or mutant dump rats, warning us to leave? The lonely spot, the darkness, the stillness of the night, and the eerie music raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Jerry's too, he said later.
I didn't recognize the seven- or eight-note melody, but it repeated twice. As the last note hung in the vanishing twilight, a dark figure scrambled up out of the pit, picked up the seatless bicycle, and pedaled away without saying a word. We walked the perimeter of the pit to investigate. From a few steps around the hole, we made out the jumbled remains of an upright piano half-buried in trash. The case was in splinters, and the man, if that's what it was, had apparently been amusing himself by plucking the exposed strings to play a tune.
West Tisbury was then an even smaller town than it is now, but neither Jerry nor I recognized the piano player in the pit, and we never saw him again.
Times contributing editor Dan Cabot lives in West Tisbury.
