A Spring Break Carol: A Short Ghost Story

by Benita Huffman

  * * * *

  “Why do you appear in that worn-out body?” I demanded on Thursday. Yesterday’s headache was gone, and I was back in control. “I never did understand why you let it disintegrate as you did.”

  My question amused Maynard. “Why, Jason, this is a perfect body.”

  “I have difficulty believing that.”

  My own body had recently started to betray that it was growing middle-aged. The muscles under the skin didn’t have the same fullness they once did, and the crease lines on my neck were constantly visible. But I, unlike Maynard, had worked to maintain my leanness and my flat stomach.

  “It’s a spiritual body,” Maynard said. “It’s all my perfect bodies at once. I expect you see the one you’re most likely to recognize.”

  “Do you ever get tired of hearing your own sophistry, Maynard?”

  He settled into his usual lecture position. “I imagine my mother might see my perfect fifteen-month-old body. You know, I’d forgotten existing with that body, how purely delightful it is, with those sturdy legs and baby-powder skin. Now, Claire – she’s my oldest – she might see me in my thirties. I was fit then, and strong, and I’d throw her over my shoulder – my sack of potatoes, I called her, and she’d squeal. . . .” His eyes flicked back to mine. “The body carries its own memories, you know.”

  “The cells in a body are replaced every seven years.”

  “Just look at my face. These little lines here, between my brows? I found them when my son Tommy was a teenager.”

  His eyes were far away again.

  “So what’s perfect about them?”

  “What?”

  “Those worry lines on your face. How are they perfect?”

  “Don’t you see? I couldn’t control Tommy at all, and I loved him more than my own skin. Don’t you have someone like that?”

  As if I would reveal anything personal to this intruder. I assumed the face I wore when I wanted to make junior faculty fidget.

  But Maynard relaxed. “Ah, I see you do know, a little.” He lifted his square hands and feathered his thick fingers over his face. “These lines around my eyes, laugh lines, physical imprints of all the smiles in my life. These here,” He traced two lines carved from his nose-flare to his lips, “these came while holding my father’s hand as the cancer ate his life away”

  “And you call it a perfect body?”

  “Yes, yes I do. And wait, I haven’t even started on the hands. This callus on my middle finger, it’s from writing, grading student essays and my journals and the stories I kept in the top drawer. This scar on my palm, I got that trying to fix that cheap easel of Kate’s, and see how the skin stretched just here –”

  The scent of honeysuckle twined from his “perfect” body toward mine, and the weedy greenness threatened to enwrap me. “Good God, how can you bear to listen to yourself! Next I’ll be hearing about the corn on your big toe!”

  “I’m right pleased, though, that you’re asking some questions, finally. It’s a rare opportunity, to speak to the dead.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Maynard laughed – laughed, if you can believe it. “Why, yes, I do suppose it is.”

  I stabbed my fountain pen into the desk pad, and Maynard regarded my thin fingers curiously. I curled them into fists, hiding my fingers and whatever he might see in them. Beyond the window, the debate team flocked to the cafeteria in a muffled clatter, and the bronze sun, hanging beside the tower’s crenellated peak, pierced the window just below the furled blinds.

  “Don’t you want to know anything else?” Maynard asked. “Anything at all, about what happens?”

  “There’s nothing I need to know.”

  He nodded. “I think I was a little afraid, too.”

  “I am most certainly not afraid, and my religious education has been quite sufficient, thank you, so I need no Sunday school lessons from you.”

  “Well, then, that’s fine. Still, for an intelligent man to have no, say, intellectual curiosity . . . .”

  “Fine. Tell me all about it.”

  “Hmm. . . do you want to know about dying or about death? You need to be precise, because they’re different, you know.”

  “Tell me about dying. Death is obviously the state of contemplating the virtues of wrinkled skin.”

  Maynard tilted his head. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor, Jason. Except when circumstances required, of course.”

  “Simply answer the question.”

  “Now by dying, do you mean the overall process or the actual moment of –”

  “You’re playing with me, Maynard. I don’t appreciate it.”

  “I wanted to see if that humor would flare again.”

  “I wouldn’t want to overuse it. Tell me whatever you want.”

  “A generous offer. You continually surprise me.”

  Across the quad, the clock bells sounded the four quarter-hour notes. The last chime reverberated until it faded over the roofs of the quiet buildings.

  I watched Maynard, and he watched me. A full minute passed.

  “It appears we have more time,” he said. “You don’t mind if I stretch my legs, do you?” He strolled to the window. “Beautiful evening. That quality of the light, it couldn’t be any other time except those few days between winter and spring, could it?”

  “The air is very fine,” I said stiffly. “I walked to lunch today, and I never drive to work if I can help it. The air is softer, this time of year.”

  His pink face and gray hair reflected in the window’s glass as he nodded. He looked as though he might stand there forever.

  “Dying. . .” I prompted.

  He closed his eyes. “Claire was reading to me, I think. I could barely hear her voice. I was dim from the morphine, and what moved in my mind was all that literature about dying I’d taught year after year. Some of Dickinson’s flies buzzing, snippets of Donne, but mostly Eudora Welty. You know ‘The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,’ don’t you? Then before I knew it, there I was, in it. Like a twig plunged over the waterfall.”

  I leaned forward. “And then?”

  He shook his head and trudged back to his chair. The duskiness of the corner after the flaring window made gray splotches swim over my cornea. “Then?”

  “I’m not sure I remember it correctly. Or maybe I don’t remember it directly. The best I can do is a metaphor.”

  “Literary types,” I muttered.

  “Yes, well, we do our best with what we have. No doubt a mathematician would have an algorithm.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  Maynard leaned toward me. “My Grandmother kept aluminum drinking cups next to her sink. It was like drinking her cold well water from one of those cups. My teeth could feel the hard metal of the cup, and the condensation beaded on my lips, and I could smell the minerals in the water. And it quenched everything.”

  Maynard hunched over his hands. His knuckles rose like crags over the loose clench of bones and skin. I traced the delicate blue veins of my own pale hands, and the quiet grew easy between us.

  The Old College bells tolled again, first the half-hour, then the three-quarters. Reluctantly, I pulled myself out of my chair.

  “I suppose you need to be getting home to your wife,” Maynard said.

  I nodded. “She’ll wonder why I’m so late.”

  I waited for Maynard to leave, but he remained in a haze of dust-motes illuminated by the last flare of direct light.

  Finally he startled, as if my presence were the intruding one. “Jason? Shouldn’t you be on your way home for supper?”

  “It’s my office. You aren’t staying here?”

  He shook his head. “I rather doubt it. I’ll be going back, too.” He didn’t move from the chair, though.

  I walked to the door, ready to usher him out. Between the time I touched the doorknob and pulled it back, he had gone.