Waiting for Harvey (The Spirits of Maine) (5 page)

“Well?” he shouted, shaking each of us from our private thoughts.  “Are we going fishing or not?”

“Y-Yes,” Jimmy responded.

“Then eat up and let’s go.”

At the thought of escaping the confines of the cabin for the day, we dug into our hearty breakfasts.  In only a few minutes, the mood had improved, and we were talking with Jimmy’s uncle about the types of fish in the St. John River.  We would take both canoes.  He would take me with him, an idea I appreciated.  We washed the dishes and cleaned up the cabin before we headed out for a big day of fishing and fun.

*

Late in the day we returned with fresh fish.  We were singing crude songs, sharing vulgar jokes, and laughing as we approached the cabin.  Proudly, I held up the brook trout, caught in the Upper St. John.  Mine was the biggest catch of the day.  Mr. Flaherty would coat them in corn meal and fry them for supper.  With potatoes and ears of corn, roasted over the fire pit, we would enjoy a delicious meal.

“Can we go hunting, Uncle Paul?” Jimmy asked boldly.

“No, it ain’t hunting season until November.”

“Nobody would know if we were hunting way out here.”

“James Edward Flaherty, you’d know and I’d know!” Mr. Flaherty scolded.  “You’re just lucky your father didn’t hear you say that.  He’d tan your hide and your granddad would whip you twice on Sunday!”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“You know right is right even if nobody can see or hear it.  What ails you, boy?”

I tried to conceal my smile as Jimmy Flaherty flushed bright red.  When he saw my face he shoved me and I nearly dropped my fish in the dirt.  Mr. Flaherty leaned forward and cuffed the back of his nephew’s head.  He narrowed his eyes and warned him with a single look.  Jimmy looked away and I worried that he would retaliate later.  Mr. Flaherty and John couldn’t watch me all the time.

As we neared the cabin a raccoon, nosing around the heavy, metal trash cans, scurried away.  John and Jimmy ran ahead, laughing at a private joke.  They stomped up the steps onto the narrow porch and banged the door open.  Their laughter died suddenly and they backed out onto the porch again.

“Get those fish cleaned before you come up with any other plans,” Mr. Flaherty called to them. “Erik here will wash the dirt off the potatoes and shuck some corn for me,” he looked down at me, nodded and winked.  When he could, he offered me options apart from Jimmy, without making me feel like a little the baby in the group.

John and Jimmy remained on the porch as we neared.  Their happy mood was gone and they looked pale, even after a day out in the sun.  I followed Mr. Flaherty inside and stopped just over the doorstep.  The box from the OUIJA board was on the table.  The cover had been removed and the board unfolded.  My heart skipped a few beats as I looked at the planchette, pointing downward at the words GOOD BYE.

“Who left the game out?” Mr. Flaherty asked on his way to the kitchen.

“We put it away,” I croaked out through my dry mouth.

“Well clearly you didn’t cause its right there,” he disagreed.

“Sorry, sir,” was all I could manage.

“No sorry needed.  Just get it tucked back where it belongs and let’s get to work.”

I put my prized fish in the kitchen sink with the others.  John and Jimmy stood on the porch looking in at me through the open doorway.  Jimmy gestured for me to go to the table.  I looked back at Mr. Flaherty and reassured myself that he would rescue me if anything happened.  He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me.

Slowly, I moved toward the table.  I watched the board and the pointer for any signs that it might act against me.  My feet shuffled slowly and I considered running outside with John.  I wondered what Jimmy’s uncle would think if I ran to the woodstove with the vile OUIJA board and the planchette too.  Would he allow me to light it on fire and burn it thoroughly?

I touched the pointer and felt the heat from it.  The air above it undulated and I fully expected the thing to melt.  The brass nail in the center of it vibrated.  My eyes widened and I stared at it in disbelief.  Suddenly, the planchette began to move freely.  It slid over the letters of the alphabet, gliding smoothly.

The device circled the letter Y and I turned to look at John.  I was terrified and the older boys were frightened as well.  I beckoned to them, but they remained outside on the porch.  My heart was thumping loudly against my chest.

The planchette moved on its own.  With great flourish, it made loops and swirls as it crisscrossed the board.  When it paused on a letter, there was no doubt that it was intentional.  I picked up a pen from the oval stand near the door.  Afraid of the message it meant to relate and worried that I might not get it all, I wrote the letters on the palm of my hand.

“Boys!” Mr. Flaherty shouted from the kitchen area.  “Get those fish cleaned and quit screwing around!  Erik, stop playing with the game and put it away now.”

“Yes… yes… I… yes,” I stammered.  I scribbled on my hand and stepped closer to the table.  Sweat rolled down my face and I swallowed hard.  The thing stopped at last and came to rest on the words GOOD BYE again.

I grabbed the box and swept the planchette into it.  The nail fell out of it, but it was in the box.  I flipped the edge of the board up and folded it closed.  I mashed the lid on it and wished for a roll of my dad’s duct tape to seal it tight.  That would keep it shut for good.  In a panic, I ran to the shelf and looked up at the top of it.

“John, I can’t reach,” I cried out with tears building.

“It’s okay,” Mr. Flaherty reassured me and ruffled my hair.  He took the box and shoved it up on the highest shelf.  “I didn’t mean to scare you.  Here, take these fish out to your brother and Jimmy now.”  He dropped them into a tin bucket and handed it to me with two knives.

I ran outside, nearly knocking the boys off the porch.  I hurried around the side to the chopping block where the woodpile stood.  The bucket clanged against the fat stump.  John grabbed my hand and yanked me toward him.  He began reading the letters out loud.  Jimmy leaned over his shoulder, trying to keep up with his deciphering of the words.

“What the bleep does that mean?” Jimmy challenged.

“I don’t know,” John responded.

“What?  What does it say?” I pleaded.  With more time and less panic I would be able to make sense of it but they had already puzzled through the message.

“It’s just stupid,” John replied.  He jerked my hand up to his mouth and spat on it.  He rubbed my palm vigorously with his thumbs, smudging the letters I had written there. 

“No!” I shrieked and tried to pull my hand away.

“Just tell him,” Jimmy declared.

“It’s stupid!  It doesn’t mean anything.  This is all stupid crap!”

“Tell me, John.  I wrote the letters for you.”

“It said your mother is dead,” Jimmy announced.

“Shut up, Flaherty,” John roared and gave Jimmy a shove, knocking backward and tipping over the bucket of fish.  The racket brought Mr. Flaherty to the window.

“What’s going on out there?” he shouted through the screen.

“I fell,” Jimmy answered, scrambling to get to his feet again.

“Get the fish cleaned,” he repeated.  “Erik, I need you to come shuck this corn.”

Without a word, I ran back inside.  I wanted to tell Mr. Flaherty everything and ask for his reassurances.  Yet even at eight years old I knew it wasn’t the kind of story you related to adults and expected to be believed.  Grownups never believed you when you told them there was something in the closet or under the bed.  The idea of something relaying messages through the OUIJA board wouldn’t be any more believable.  He would think I was crazy or dumb, and his opinion mattered to me.

Our Mom had been sick for close to a year by then.  At Christmas, she spent two weeks in the hospital.  She was away for another week in the spring.  With four older sisters, John and I were the youngest members of our family.  They managed the house and took care of us.  When Mom was too sick to work anymore, Dad took a second job to meet the bills.  Yet there was little talk about Mom’s illness. 

In June, Dad had announced that John and I would be going away for the summer.  It would be a great adventure in northern Maine, up near the Canadian border at the Flaherty’s cabin.  Jimmy’s parents brought us up and stayed for the first two weeks.  When they left, we remained with Jimmy and his uncle.  It had been a great summer and we hadn’t given much thought to Dad’s reasoning when he sent us away.

I had never considered the idea that Mom might get worse or that she could even die.  She had been sick for a long time, but we took for granted that she would get better eventually.  We didn’t know anyone who had died.  It wasn’t possible.  John was right; the whole thing with the OUIJA board was stupid.  I took the paper bag filled with corn and went out to the porch to shuck off the husks and peel away the silk.

*

Mr. Flaherty’s snores were a comforting sound in the dark cabin that night.  We weren’t alone there.  It provided a continuous reminder that an adult was close by to protect us from the night.  Outside the cabin window, the full moon acted as a night light.  The gloom was pushed back to the edges of the room.  It couldn’t stretch far enough to touch us.

“Is it true, John?” I whispered.

“No, it’s not,” he responded.

“Why did the thing tell us she died?”

“You mixed up your letters, Erik,” John scolded.  “Who knows what the message was supposed to be.”

“It spelled out, Erik is a jack wagon,” Jimmy offered and laughed.

“Takes one to know one,” I muttered.

“Shut up, you little troll!” Jimmy growled.

“Erik, it was your imagination.  Only a baby would believe all of it,” John told me.  He lay there on his back with his arms folded under his head, staring up at the ceiling.  I tried to read his expression, but he kept it blank.

“When can we go home?” I asked.

“School starts in three weeks,” he reminded.  “We’ll be home before then.  Mom will want time to drag us out for school shopping.”

“I hate school shopping,” I grumbled.

“Suck it up, buttercup,” John teased.  “She won’t be happy until we have new clothes, shoes, sneakers, and the rest of the crap she thinks we need.”

“I’m telling my Mom I need a new skateboard for school,” Jimmy announced.

“She won’t buy that,” John snorted.

“She will!  Just wait and see.”

“I want the super big box of Crayola’s with the sharpener in the back,” I declared and immediately regretted my announcement.

“You’re such a baby, Erik!” Jimmy retorted.

“I’m not a baby!” I disputed. 

“Shut your face, Jimmy,” John defended.  “He likes Art class.”

“I’m hungry,” Jimmy offered to change the subject and prevent another punch to his arm.

Quietly we wandered into the kitchen area.  With toaster pastries and root beer, we settled around the table near the open window.  With no refrigerator in the cabin, there were no cold drinks and no ice.  But the straws that twisted and curled made up for it.  We sipped and looked out at the night sky as Jimmy related another of his weird ghost stories.

*

Late in August, Mr. Flaherty announced that we would be going home at the end of the week.  For days, we played in the woods, not too far from the cabin.  Mr. Flaherty took us out on long hikes.  We fished in a number of rivers and ate the brook trout and other fish we caught.  With a backstop set up in front of a thick stand of trees, we practiced the archery skills he taught us.

Day by day we accepted that we had imagined the incidents with the OUIJA board.  It became a scary happening that was no more real than a movie.  It was a menacing tale that we would tell our friends after school started again.  We would scare them with the chilling details and feel delighted that they believed it, even if we did not.

It had been an incredible summer.  On the long trip south to Scarborough, we talked about all of the fun things we had done.  We thanked Mr. Flaherty repeatedly for giving us such a great vacation.  The only bad part about it was that it was ending too soon.  Just one more week was all we wanted.  Well, then maybe one more week after that.

Seven hours later we were nearing home again.  Mr. Flaherty stopped at a fast food place to get French fries and milk shakes for us.  We sat at a small, square table with the seats attached to it.  Joking and laughing as we stole fries from each other.  The games continued until our parents arrived.  Our vacation had officially ended.

Jimmy’s father was in a hurry, so he wrapped the last of his fries in a napkin, said his good-byes and left.  Our dad stepped outside to talk with Mr. Flaherty while we waited at the table.  Impassively, Dad loaded our bags into his pick-up truck.  We thanked Mr. Flaherty one last time and in a flash we were on our way home.

In less than ten minutes, we were home again.  Everything looked the same.  The house was neat and clean, the way our mother liked it.  Music was playing on the radio in the backyard.  Our sisters were sunbathing with friends.  Dad sent us upstairs to empty our bags, put our dirty laundry in the hamper, and put our things away.