Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (13 page)

I hear myself gasp. There are no more leftovers in the house. But Ham just laughs, louder than usual, looser than usual, picks the plate—the meatloaf, the boiled potato—off the floor, and sets Taffy down in the green beans. He begins eating the meatloaf with his fingers while I, even though it's past time to leave, can't help staring at the undogly Taffy who hesitates before picking at a bean.

“Lord, I reckon that was a mess. Now that would have been a mess to clean up.”

I whip my eyes back to Ham. I can hear the mush of meatloaf in his mouth, see his own eyes on his feeding fingers. He shakes his head.

“Before he got to where he didn't hardly leave his bed, he'd pace the upstairs floors at night. Sleep in a different room every night, carrying that pistol with him.” Ham pushes more potato in. “Scared people were after him, you know. He told me that.”

I feel myself nod like I already know this, because if I can trick myself into believing that, the now-knowing might not overtake me. It might stay stuck at my ears. But the truth is, although I've never heard this, didn't I know it anyway?

“He was,” Ham says, and then he swallows and even wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and I can tell he's talking to himself and not to me, “one of the kindest men you'd ever know.”

THE OUIJA BOARD
tells Sam 1976. Three years from now, he'll be twelve, I'll be thirteen.

I'm in my room where I've been sent for thumping Mavis in the head with a rolled-up
Good Housekeeping
magazine. The only way into my room is through my youngest brothers' bedroom, which has not only a window that looks outside but also one that opens onto the back hall, a window left over from a house addition fifty years ago, when they didn't bother to seal up the old exterior wall. No one is allowed to come in or talk to me when I've been sent to my room. When I hear Sam whisper-calling my name, I crack my door and lean around, making sure my feet never technically leave my floor. Sam's opened that interior window just enough to squeeze his face through.

“1976,” he says.

A drain falls open between my throat and my guts. It foams a cold green fizz.

“You're sure?” I hiss.

He nods. “I asked it twice.”

The truth is, before we got the Ouija board I didn't give much thought to Sam living or dying. Now that I have him for only three more years, his dorky glasses, his lopsided cloud of dark hair, his genius for picking at people for hours without ever crossing the line where he'll be spanked or sent to his room . . . all of it takes on the precious temporariness of captured lightning bugs or the perfect birthday. I swear to myself I'll never tease him again, and I mean it. But even as I'm making the pledge, I overhear a frantic calculating in some closet
of my head. How on earth, in heaven, and everyplace in between am I going to evade two ghosts in the house?

Sam, however, doesn't look frightened at all, there in his Snoopy sweatshirt and his gigantic smudged glasses. Sam's face is goldly lit with the purpose of tragedy, a radiant poignancy and, yes, self-pity, but he's entitled to that. He pushes his glasses back up his nose, steps away, and shuts the window, firm. I hear the latch. Behind its dusty chiffon curtains I imagine him recessing down the hall, stoic, resigned, and above all brave.

THE SHEET OVER
my head blinds me good, but it does not help much with sound. Me flat, my Living Word Children's Bible two hand-lengths from my head, my mouseskull necklace standing sentry on its cover, but still I hear. I hear the usual, the inevitable, although that doesn't make it less terrifying. The stuff of scary movies and scary books: floorboards creaking, shutters banging, maple limbs scraping gutters. I also hear the peculiar-to-our-house sounds of leaks dripping into plastic buckets, space-age pings of the nineteenth-century radiators, Mavis's snoring. But the winter and spring of the mouseskull necklace, I hear sounds I never ever imagined, and this means I couldn't have made them up, irrefutable evidence of how real they must be.

One night I hear the record player in the dining room switch on. For only a few seconds, not long enough for me to identify the song but long enough that I know it's not a dream. Another night I hear a cascade of keys, bottom octave to top, across the out-of-tune piano in the living room under me. And another night I hear a ruckus in the chimney that I realize, after a baffled moment, has to be the sound of knives and forks dropped down.

Mrs. Dock does not believe in ghosts except the Holy One. She'll tell you. There are no such things. Mrs. Dock does not talk about my
granddaddy: he is a missing volume in her library, I know this, and I know she won't answer questions even though I never ask. But I remember. Mrs. Dock's chapped hand on my shoulder, ushering me through the door and under water. Walls green, blinds green and filtering the summer light green, so that the chest of drawers, the bedside tables, the mirror, my granddaddy—all of them rippled under river water. Mrs. Dock gave me a small push. “Go on, Lainey. Say hi to your granddaddy.”

I went on. The mattress pushed against the collar of my dress. My granddaddy lay in immaculate white pajamas with trim blue piping, his bedspread folded in a straight line across his chest, his fingernails round and pink and white. He smiled at me, said, “What beautiful eyes.”

That was what he always said, then he always smiled, and then he would say nothing else. Under his river water. But the smile, I saw, was real, not an automatic smile or a nervous smile or a smile hiding something else. It was a real smile. Lying across a cave mouth of sad.

Flattened under my own sheets, I wait, I hold off. I do. I am ten years old, humiliated by my babyness, and I don't want to wake my mother. But eventually I hear myself at a distance from myself, moaning, “Maaa-maawwww.” Wait. “Maaa-maawwww.” Wait. Until she finally wafts into my room in an aura of Shower-to-Shower and foamy green gown, and she does not touch me, but says, sleep-husky and a little impatiently but not without kindness: “Shhhh. Go back to sleep. It was just a bad dream.”

One of those nights, me pleading Jesus for invisibility, something occurs to me that goose pimples me first, then thickens my throat with despair. The clattering silverware, especially the piano keys, even the spontaneous record player: weren't those exactly the gestures an unhappy and restless mouse ghost would make?

FANGS ARE SOMETHING
everybody has four of, but Ronnie Phillips's fangs are the longest I've ever seen on a human, and then he has more than that. Some of his front supposed-to-be-blunt teeth are pointed, too. Within a few weeks of the teacher pushing our desks together so I can help him with his work, Ronnie started helping me with life, like an older brother or a different kind of dad. “Don't stoop,” he'd soft-chide. “My aunt's shoulders got stuck that way.” And, “You've gotta speak up for yourself. Don't be so shy.” And, “Why do you worry so much? Smile.” Like Ham's, Ronnie's smartness sits unself-conscious and raw in his face—a confidence without pretense or arrogance. Like Ham, Ronnie has no fear and no memory of fear, has never even had to jump over scared. About the Ouija board I decide to try Ronnie out.

Without looking up from the eighteen-wheeler he is sketching, Ronnie says, “My brother burnt up his Ouija board with his records when he got saved. It flew up out of the fire and scorched his eyebrows off.”

Everybody in town knows what happened to my grandfather. It was five years ago, but only Ham ever says. A few weeks after my Ouija board question, Ronnie is copying how I labeled parts of speech, his head cocked to the far right and that eye almost touching his worksheet, the way he does.

“Where were you when your granddaddy shot himself?”

His pencil doesn't stop moving. I let close the book I'm reading hidden in my desk. “We didn't live in that house then.”

Ronnie keeps copying. I pull my mouseskull out away from my chest, tuck in my chin so I can study it better. Within the soup of classroom aromas, keenest near me Ronnie's skin smell of eraser leavings, the mouseskull stink is faint. I have to touch it under my nose and inhale sharp.

My hair prickles. I turn and catch Michelle Livingstone spying on me. She wrinkles her nose so her own fangs show, then shakes her head as she wheels her finger around her ear.

I'VE JUST GOTTEN
my jeans zipped when Sam crashes through my open bedroom door, catches himself with a hand on each jamb, and sags in and over, panting even though the dash from his room to mine might be thirty steps. He lifts his face, ablaze with illicit thrill. “I think Ham's dead.”

Then we are both stealth-racing past the bathroom where my father showers, past the bedroom where my mother dresses, and down the stairs. I gather from Sam as we go that he glanced out his window a few minutes ago and spotted a long gray bundle on the lawn. I'm levitating, stretched between the revolting terror of seeing a real dead person and the overpowering magnetism of seeing a real dead person, and once we're running barefoot through the dew-cold grass, the magnetism is boosted by my realization that the dead are usually barefoot, too—aren't they? By now Bingo is chasing alongside us, and she keeps right on going when Sam and I halt a few yards from where Ham lies. Sprawled on his side, fully dressed right down to his shoes, one arm cocked up at its elbow and shielding his face. Now I can smell the tumbling prisms, but before I can contemplate the corpse, Bingo pokes Ham's head with her nose. The arm swings out and swipes Bingo away just as we hear the back screen slam behind our father.

Not long after this, Sam and I are pressed into helping our father with his annual attempts to patch leaks in the roof. Today the three of us are doing the very top of the house, which means scaling a bobbly ladder two stories, being tied by ropes to the central chimney, then creeping around on a slant with a bucket of gray tarry goop and long-handled brushes. Even though right under us is the attic and, according
to Mrs. Dock, generations of mammal-digesting blacksnakes, I much prefer tarring the top of the house to tarring the flatter porch roofs, because when you're padding around on those, you have beside you always the second-story windows, and who knows what might decide to look out.

We're taking a break before sealing the last seam when Sam asks, “Where did Granddaddy shoot himself?”

The air warples on “Granddaddy.” Sam doesn't even have to get to “shoot.” I don't look at our father, but I hear his jaw tighten in his voice. “You know where. The little study room.”

“No,” Sam says. “I mean what part of his body.”

I slide one hand down to the rope around my waist. I look up at the chimney, and I wonder where the mouse ghost found the silverware that it dropped.

“Why do you want to know that?” our father asks.

Sam shrugs. “I always figured it was in the head, but Ham said it was in the stomach. So he could have an open coffin.”

Now I do look at our father. He's turned off his face. “When did Ham tell you that?”

“Once when I took him dinner.” Sam grabs the bottom of his T-shirt and tugs it down around his hips. “Just so you'll know,” he says. “I want an open coffin, too.”

MAY SETTLES IN
blue and mild, and Ham takes to watching us play behind the house. Him on a stove log he's uprighted into a stool, the wrist cuff of his cane leaning against his thigh, his no-toes boxed in his special shoes, Taffy luxuriating in his lap. The day it happens we are playing chase, and a porch pole directly in front of Ham is our base. Ham seems sleepy, now and again slapping his knee like he's remembering a joke, laugh-talking to himself or to Taffy. But we're all a little giddy,
us kids laugh-talking, too, chattering to each other or taunting “it,” which I just then am. Mavis has one tennis shoe against the porch pole base, her other leg extended, poised, me hovering in front of her like she's prey. Then she darts, and I leap after her, but from the side of my face I glimpse the ruckus behind her, and I freeze, Ham lunging off his stool, the stove log toppling, Taffy paw-pedaling air, and Ham charges after my seven-year-old sister with his arms outstretched before falling hard on his knees and then on his face, right at the instant our mother reaches the back door to call us for supper.

“Ham can't be that way around you kids.”

The verdict comes down later that evening. They don't even sleep on it. After the cinderblock cat house, the woman on the other side of town, jail, and the icehouse, there is just one place, my father learns after a week of phone calls, for Ham to go: the old folks' home for poor people up in Terra Alta.

On the last day of school, we walk into the yard from the bus and everything—the outlier buildings, the woodpile, the house windows, even the grass—lies a little stiller. I drop my stuff and sprint to the icehouse, Sam right behind. But when I stop outside the door, I know not to bother to knock. I hear Sam open it, but I'm already running back to our house, calling for Taffy. All the not-yet-given-away pups swarm my legs, tongues flopping joyful out their mouths, but Taffy is not among them, and then I'm on my hands and knees, shouting and then crooning under the porch.

Lord knows where Terra Alta is. We only know it's up, and what kind of place is a nursing home for a pup just starting to grow? “That's not what he meant,” I said to my parents the minute I realized they were saying Ham had to go, but then I was unable to say what I meant: that Ham was just playing, like Mrs. Dock and school, and worse, he was not only just playing, he was trying to help me catch my sister,
trying to help me out. But a question thistles in me under everything else: did I truly want Ham to stay or not, and was that why I couldn't explain what I meant?