The Ghosts of Varner Creek (21 page)

"What’re you doing back at this time?" she asked him when he was within earshot.

"Sol wants to go get something over at Annie's," he told her. It wasn't entirely a lie. It just happened to be my dead sister I wanted to go and get from out of the well. Uncle Colby had called my old home Annie's place simply out of habit, even though Mama hadn't been there in nearly a month.

"What's he want from over there?" she asked disapprovingly.

I had heard the conversation from the henhouse and answered for him. "A book," I told her as I walked over to them. It was the first thing I could think of. "One of them that Miss Thomas brought for me and Sarah."

She looked over at me like a skeptical mother, "A book? Well, Sol, honey, I don't reckon I remember seeing any books when we was there. Looked to me like your Mama took them with her." Aunt Emma was still stuck in eternal optimism, or denial one.

"I think I saw one in the kitchen next to the stove," I entirely lied. I supposed a fib was inevitable and it might as well have been me that told it. Aunt Emma had made me a quick meal in the kitchen that day she came to get me, but it was one of the only places she hadn't gone over with a fine toothed comb, so it seemed the best place to put an imaginary book that I knew wasn’t there.

"Well, I declare I would have seen such a thing," she said, "but reckon maybe not." She looked like she was trying to see the kitchen again in her memory. "Is your Daddy gonna be home?" she asked me after failing to remember every nook and cranny of the kitchen in her mind.

"Naw, he's at work," said Uncle Colby flatly. We were officially conspirators, now. I scratched his back and now he scratched mine. At least he was still fib free, mostly.

That's how we won Aunt Emma over without even a battle, "Huh," she said, "Well, I guess there ain't no harm, then. But make sure y’all leave things like they is 'ceptin that book if you finds it. Ain't no sense lettin' Abram know y’all was in there when he not home if it ain't there. He might think we was trying to spy on him or somethin’," she told Uncle Colby. Besides, I think another thought must have struck Aunt Emma about a possible benefit to us going home because she snuck up close to Uncle Colby and said in a whisper, “And if anything looks funny over there, you make sure to take note of it.”

He promised her he would and I promised we wouldn’t ransack the house and risk having Pap fly off at the handle. Uncle Colby could handle him well enough but there wasn’t much sense in any unnecessary confrontations. We walked along over the empty fields towards my home, or my old home as things were. Tobacco used to grow in the fields here, but they hadn’t been tended or worked in years. Uncle Colby didn’t say much as we walked, and the silence was too loud for me.

“
I do appreciate you coming with me, Uncle Colby,” I said. “Reckon I’m a bit scared.”

My walk fell in step with his, but his stride was long and I had to stretch to keep pace. “Might not should be thinking such things, Sol, but I understand you got an itch needs scratchin’. My guess is ain’t nothing’ there, but if it helps you feel better, I don’t see no harm in it.”

I knew he didn’t believe me about seeing Sarah. He probably thought I had either imagined it or talked myself into believing it. It didn’t matter, though. He had come with me and that was enough for me to be in his debt in my mind.

When we reached the house it looked a little bit different than it did just a few weeks ago. Mama used to have a little cluster of flowers by the back door, but they were overrun with weeds now. It seemed as though they knew the keeper of the garden was no longer on duty. So was the vegetable garden. Little stalks of weeds that barely nipped at my ankles before were now over my waist. Dandelions were assaulting the squash and had nearly conquered the tomatoes.

We walked over to the well and Uncle Colby put both hands on either side and looked down into it. He had brought a thick and long rope with him. Looking carefully he seemed to take stock of its depth and width. “Well, ain’t but one way to know what is and ain’t down a well, and that's to get down in it. I reckon I could tie one end to that fence post over there,” he said pointing to one of the posts of Lilipeg’s old pen, “should hold me fine.”

I looked at his broad shoulders and the well that would barely fit him. “Naw,” I said. “Uncle Colby, I’ll climb down. I’m a lot smaller and if you was to get stuck or somethin’, wouldn’t be nothing I could do but to go fetch somebody. You could just yank me out quick as you please, though.”

He poked his head back over the well, “I guess that'd be fine,” he said. “Only ’cause I don’t think there’s anything down there to worry over.”

We didn’t need the fencepost with Uncle Colby holding fast. It was like tethering to an oak tree. I took off my clothes down to my cotton whities, and we tied the rope around my waist leaving a good ten feet off the end, which we put over the edge into the well. Then I climbed in and Uncle Colby began lowering me down without effort. It was spooky how the light faded so quickly. Just above it was midday and the sun was shining directly overhead as Uncle Colby had planned, but somehow the bottom of the well ate most of the light up, just as I’d imagined it would. It was precisely the reason I thought of the well . . . somewhere pitch dark and under water. When Mama and Pap bought the house the well had fallen in on itself. They had to have it dug out again and the black boys who had come to do it had put brick up the inside to keep the hole from collapsing again, but as I slowly went down I could see roots of various kinds poking out here and there and the bricks becoming slimy the lower I went. It wasn’t a very deep well, really, but it was enough to make me feel like I had fallen into the earth. I felt the water kiss my toes as I slid into it. Goosebumps jumped up from my skin like a plucked hen in winter. The water came up just below my neck but before it reached any further I felt the bottom beneath my feet. It was an icky, gooey mess down there. My legs sank a few inches into a thick muck that sucked at me when I tried to move around. I looked up and could see Uncle Colby standing over the well when he felt the slack in the line. “You all right, there, Sol?” he called out.

“
Yessir, I’m fine.” I tried to peer into the water but it was too dark and murky to see anything. Instead I used the tried and true method of just walking around to see if anything was at the bottom, kind of like the noodlers do when they’re looking for a catfish holed up. But I didn’t feel anything. Just sticks, mud, and a build up of leaves and whatever else had found its way in. I made three or four good passes over the bottom making sure I covered it adequately. “You findin’ anything?” Uncle Colby asked at length.

I had been so sure. My near drowning experience in the very bucket hanging next to me, seeing her head at Aunt Emma’s well, the dreams. I thought for sure it had been her trying to tell me she was here in the dark water of this well. But she wasn’t. “No, sir. She ain’t here,” I called up finally. “Sarah ain’t in here.” I felt relief, of course. Better that I should be a little crazy than my sister be drowned down a well. But at the same time a speck of me felt loss. I had been so sure the night before. What was she trying to tell me?

After satisfying myself that there was no way a person’s body could be in that well without my having felt it, I called out to Uncle Colby to pull me up. The rope tightened around my waist uncomfortably and I went back up just as smooth as I had gone down.

We hadn’t the foresight to bring anything to dry off with, so when I reached the top I just used my hand to try and press the water off of me. It worked well enough and I knew the Texas sun would finish the job before I walked back into Aunt Emma’s kitchen. No book, we would tell her. Must have been mistaken. I took a few steps towards my clothes and felt a pinch beneath my left foot. I looked down as I pushed it away with a sweep of my leg and noticed it was smooth and white. I bent down to pick it up and then turned it around in my fingers. It didn’t look like any of the other pebbles or small rocks strung about. And then it dawned on me. It wasn’t a rock at all. It was part of a tooth. I remembered my dream and seeing the face torn from flesh before it became alive. Her left front tooth had been chipped down to the root. That's it! I thought.

“
It’s her tooth!” I cried out to Uncle Colby.

He was busy wrapping the rope back into a neat little circle, through his palm and around his elbow back again. “What’d you say?” he asked.

“
Here! This is Sarah’s tooth! I saw her in my dream and her left big tooth was cracked in half. Here it is, too, the other half.” I held it up so that he could see it.

He walked over and took the foreign object in-between his thumb and index finger like I had, turning it over and around. “Sol, this here could be from anything.”

There was no convincing me otherwise, though. I remembered that dream vividly, “No, that's it, Uncle Colby, I know it. She ain’t in the well but somethin’ sure enough happened out here. That's her tooth, I swear it is.”

He gave it one last glance and handed it back, “Well, maybe we’ll have Doctor Wilkins have a look at it if it'll make you feel better. But look like from an animal or somethin’ to me.” And I could see there wasn’t going to be any persuading him to a contrary opinion. He had already humored me this far today, and been proven right in the process, so I didn’t think I should be pressing my luck. “We bes’ be getting on home, though,” he said.

I got dressed and we started back, but as we walked I held the object in my hand pondering how it came to rest by the well. Maybe she had been in the well, her and Mama both, but maybe after the sheriff went and talked with Pap he got spooked and pulled them back out of there and did something else with them. That would make sense, I thought. If Pap had done it, he couldn’t very well leave them there. The water would go bad, let alone the smell of death all around. They’d be found for sure. But if that was the case, what about all their things, and Lilipeg, and the wagon? Where could he hide those things?

As we walked I looked up into the sky and could see one of those buzzards gliding around on a breeze. I held the piece of tooth in my hand trying to imagine how it came to be there and what Sarah's ghost had been trying to tell me. I thought about those moments I’d seen her. What was different about those moments than the other times I was waiting for her? It was the water, of course. I thought she had been hinting at the well, but maybe it was something else. What was that odd feeling of searching I had when she had grabbed on to me? It was as though I was sharing her thoughts, or she was somehow putting hers in my head. She had been searching for me. Had I tried truly searching for her during these weeks? I’d thought of her often, but realized I hadn’t actually sat down and tried just concentrating on finding her, not in the well or wherever she was physically at, but in that strange black place where the green light was. I hadn’t tried looking there in my own thoughts. So as we walked I held on tight to the tooth, pressing down on it like it was my way into that other place, and I thought over and over again in my mind, Sarah, Sarah, I have to find Sarah. As my thoughts centered around her the piece of tooth in my hand suddenly seemed to get cold. I looked down at it thinking intently about Sarah’s face with the chip in her tooth as I’d seen it in my dream, and all of a sudden a blinding light seemed to strike inside my head. It wasn't exactly painful, but it was like an egg had just hatched inside my brain. I saw the creek again, just like this morning, except this time I was a little further south on it. I recognized the spot immediately because Pap and I used to set out traps in the water there and catch the little blue crabs that would crawl in after a dead fish or chicken gizzards, whatever we had baited them with. It sat on a curve and there was a large willow tree that hung heavily over the creek. And under it the water had eroded some of the under soil, so that it created a big shelf over the water. Across the creek I suddenly had an image of Sarah, standing there in that green aura and pointing towards the bend in the creek at the natural shelf. She was mouthing something again, and it looked like “There,” to me. Then she hovered right off of the riverbank, out over the water, and disappeared into the water beneath the overhang. Then I felt cold and I was under the water, too, looking into Sarah’s eyes again as she pleaded with me. I understood. I knew now what she had been trying to tell me, and I tried to tell her so but the words wouldn’t come. She seemed to understand, though, and as she faded away this time, she didn’t seem to fight it. She’d finally done what she’d been trying to do all along. I knew where to find her now.

I felt myself being shaken roughly, and suddenly my eyes snapped back into reality to see Uncle Colby standing in front of me. He had his hands on my shoulders and was saying something. “Sol? You all right, boy? Sol? What’s wrong with yah?”

My heart was racing and I turned my head to look southward where the creek was some mile or so. “She showed me,” I said. “I know where she's at, now.” And I slipped right out of his arms and took off at a run.

Uncle Colby stood dumbfounded for a moment, then he yelled out “Sol! Sol, where you running to?”

“
The creek!” I yelled. “I know it, now!” And I kept running. I must have looked like a madman, but I didn’t care. I was so fired up at finally understanding what had been going on that I felt like I was flying. I didn’t know if Uncle Colby was behind me or not, and I knew that even with his long strides he wasn’t going to be keeping up with me, but it didn’t matter. I had seen it all clear as crystal in my mind, and I went as fast as I could go. As I ran I began to think about the consequences of my vision being true, and I realized I didn’t want to be right.
Let me be crazy like Uncle Colby thinks
, I told myself.
She won’t be there.
I ran out of steam three quarters of a way to the creek, but kept on at a quick walking pace. Part of me didn’t want to take another step towards what I might find, but the rest of me was being pulled like an obsessed person. I had to know. A cramp in my side felt like someone had reached in and was yanking on my guts, but I kept going. I had to know if she was there, if everything I’d seen been real or not.