Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  “The police have talked to her once or twice,” Larry’s mother said. “But there’s nothing they can do. She’s senile now. It happens to old people.”

  Larry believed Jessica Prewitt had been senile all along.

  “Don’t you dare be mean to her, you hear? She was a good woman most of her life, you remember that. Don’t you bother her none.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Larry wasn’t about to bother Jessica Prewitt.

  “It’s Halloween time, and you know how boys like to go into that cemetery on Halloween. She put up a new scarecrow the other day. I saw it from the road. Looks like a man in a big coat and wearing a hat. She has it by the old graves where her strawberries grow.”

  Larry thought about Finger Man and Butcher Cat. It was his best story from home. Nothing about it was real, he knew. It was a good one, though, you had to admit. Even if he had learned it in Sunday school. No, there was nothing to the story. Jessica had just wanted to keep the boys too scared to cut through the cemetery.

  “Maybe you should drive by there sometime tonight, Larry, and see if she’s okay. I’m afraid she’ll spend all night out there, scaring off the children, tending to her scarecrow. She might just die, she stays outside this time of year.”

  “She’s too mean to die, Momma.”

  That evening, Jessica put on her thickest sweater. She pulled on two pairs of socks and then her garden boots. If a body kept their feet warm, she knew, they could be warm just about anywhere. She tugged a wool cap down over her ears. The elderly woman picked up a trowel and her beanie-flipper slingshot. She had round pebbles and marbles in her coat pockets. Her arm had arthritis in it now, and she couldn’t throw like she used to.

  Dry autumn leaves caught in a Tuscaloosa evening breeze moved along the street as if they had somewhere to be.

  Jessica wasn’t giving out treats on Halloween. She’d stopped doing that years ago. The kids had soaped her windows and thrown eggs at her house. This year, any of those kids who brought eggs to her house, she’d get them with a rock, or a marble if she had to. She could see her porch from the cemetery. Jessica had a pretty clear shot when she came out from behind the new Finger Man scarecrow she’d put up.

  When someone trampled the strawberry plants this time of year, it ruined them for spring. If she weren’t there to keep guard, those kids would trample them for sure. She had to keep them out of the cemetery on Halloween and guard her house both. Jessica was up to the task.

  That night, it was almost too dark to see. She could hear them going by on the street, those kids dressed up like ghosts. She could see them in the streetlights.

  “Better not come this way,” she muttered.

  When the chattering voices of children came too near, Jessica stepped out from behind her scarecrow. There was a little moonlight, and she could see well enough to take aim if need be. She could see if any of the little goblins in the street came to the cemetery.

  She could see that cat standing right in front of her, too. It stood on its hind legs and pawed the air. It seemed friendly enough to Jessica, friendly enough for her to keep looking.

  That’s when she felt the finger at her back, the bony finger that stabbed through her clothes, slipped inside her skin like a knife, and entered her spine through flesh and muscle. It was too late for stones or marbles, either one. It was too late to scream. By the time Jessica thought of it, Butcher Cat had been tossed her tongue. Fresh blood pooled inside her mouth, drooled from the corners where her lips met. Blood ran from her quivering chin.

  The finger of bone held her upright while the assailant behind her made careful work of poor Jessica. He took the fingers from her left hand first, five at a time, and slipped the flesh of them over his own. Once he had the woman’s eyeballs in his hat, Finger Man took the rest of her in slices. If you hear the story right the next time you’re in Sunday school, he carried all of Jessica into the grave where he was buried. It is a grave in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that is not marked with a stone. The coffin hollow is covered by strawberry vines.

  Schoolchildren wandering through the cemetery sometimes hear a cat meow when they stop to pick strawberries.

  Kids hear all sorts of things. Jessica’s last Halloween, kids out trick-or-treating said they could hear her cackle and laugh in the cemetery when they walked by. The police found her garden boots in the graveyard, along with her two pairs of socks and the rest of her clothes. Her sweater was soaked in blood. Someone had killed her and carried off her body, the newspaper articles said. Neighbors took down the scarecrow and set it in Jessica’s yard.

  Larry Crawford was never sure what happened that night to Jessica Prewitt. All he knew was that no one in Tuscaloosa ever saw her again, and that the story he told his shipmates in the navy had a new way to end.

  HOT SPRINGS, NORTH CAROLINA

  Wedding Cat

  Leave it to Faith Bailey to get married on the Appalachian Trail, Paige thought. Leave it to her college roommate to get married in North Carolina to begin with. How dare she meet and fall in love with someone from North Carolina? Paige laughed. It was easier, she supposed, than meeting the man of your life in San Diego. That certainly hadn’t happened yet.

  The flights from San Diego to North Carolina were a choice between two horrors. Fly all night or fly all day. She could arrive in Asheville just before midnight or at 9:00 the next morning. Paige took the night flight, leaving San Diego at 10:35. Three hours later, she was somewhere over America on a US Airways Airbus when she fell sound asleep.

  At first, Paige pictured things. She saw Faith in her bathrobe in their dorm room, wearing bunny slippers, her hair up in curlers. Before she knew it, Paige was late for her final in a class she couldn’t remember having attended.

  Then she was in a car, driving lazily along a road that rose and fell among lush green hills. In the dream, Paige looked out the window at the scenery. She turned onto a small road and came to a stop in front of a lovely old farmhouse with a red roof. A barn was behind the house, and steep hills rose beyond. The house was surrounded by blooming shrubs that almost reached the roof. A curving flagstone pathway led to the front porch steps. A kindly house cat was at the top of the steps, waiting. The cat was the color of blond wood.

  It was a farm Paige had never seen before, but in her dream she knew she belonged there. It was waiting for her with the front door unlocked.

  When she woke, the feeling of peace and comfort proved fleeting. She rethought her dream, trying to remember details, trying to recapture the feeling she had. Paige wished she knew how to find it.

  Paige was thirty years old. Faith Bailey was the last of her close friends to be married. If Paige couldn’t be married soon, she’d settle for that farm in her dream instead. She was tired of San Diego.

  On the hop from Charlotte, the smaller plane provided a wonderful view of the North Carolina mountains as it descended to its Asheville landing. Paige yawned while signing in for her rental car. She yawned while waiting for her bags. She hoped the light teal dress would do. The bride’s party was that afternoon.

  She had to find her way to Hot Springs, to a place called the Laurel Skyland Inn. Faith had given her directions. The party was supposed to be a forty-five-minute hike on the Appalachian Trail to a place called Lover’s Leap. That’s what the invitations said: “Bridge Street to Lover’s Leap, 45 minutes. Drinks served.”

  Before Paige hiked anywhere, she needed to find some time to sleep. The overnight flight had exhausted her. Hot Springs was thirty-five miles north of Asheville. She ate an omelet at a Waffle House. If it had been called Omelet Hut, she probably would have ordered a waffle. Maybe that’s why I’m still single, Paige thought.

  She looked at Hot Springs on the map. It was near the Tennessee border. The area on the map was packed full of contour lines.

  She was on her way first to a town named Joe. That should be easy. One road passed through there. The road to Hot Springs. Easy as pie.

  By the time Paige found a town called Demo
crat, a town she hadn’t seen on the map and wasn’t looking for, she knew she was lost. She asked directions and was told to go to Jupiter, that Hot Springs was a skip and a hop from there. Paige studied the map again. Trust and Luck were on the way to Joe.

  She gave up on Joe, bypassed Jupiter, and decided she needed a town named Walnut. At Walnut, she would be on the main road to Hot Springs. On the way to Walnut, she tried calling the Laurel Skyland Inn on her cell phone to ask if someone would guide her in. Paige couldn’t get a signal.

  The mountains were thick and green and gorgeous. There was no getting around that. Mountains rose behind the first mountains, and more mountains beyond those.

  Paige found herself on a ridge road. It rolled up and down, and she went up and down right along with it. She started giggling. Then the pavement ended. It shouldn’t do that, she thought. The ridge road turned into a descending dirt road that twisted back and forth into a deep mountain hollow. Water rushed over rocks on one side of her, falling away from the ridge as rapidly as the road.

  It was a beautiful drive, even if her neck hurt and she had to go slowly because of the switchbacks. The rhododendrons along the side of the road were twenty feet tall and should be in a museum somewhere. In San Diego, rhododendrons came in five-gallon clay pots on people’s back patios.

  Finally, the road turned to pavement again. She drove through a low valley with sunny, rolling hills on one side that looked like pastures and orchards, the mountains rising behind. The other side of the road was a steep rise with trees that cast shade across the pavement. Paige had no idea where she was. She tried her cell phone again and still got no signal. The valley road was narrower than the others she’d been on.

  Paige yawned. She thought she saw a big dog in the middle of the pavement ahead. Paige slowed down. The big dog raised its head and stared at her. It had antlers. It was a deer. Paige stopped. The stag didn’t budge, his head held high and steady. The big male looked entirely over her car and beyond. Paige saw movement in her rearview mirror and spun around in her seat. Behind her, crossing from the green fields, a doe and a fawn bounded twice on the pavement and lifted, as if on wings, one behind the other, into the thick trees on the high side of the road.

  When Paige turned to the front again, the stag was gone. She could barely believe what she had seen. She wanted to tell someone.

  Around the next curve was a waterfall. Water poured over rocks and splashed next to the pavement. Paige stopped with her window down to look at the cascade and listen to the rush of mountain water. A cool mist touched her cheeks. They should put these in San Diego, too, she thought.

  She looked across the seat to where the orchards had been and saw a farmhouse instead, a lovely old farmhouse in white clapboard with a red roof. A barn lay behind the house, with rising, steep hills beyond. The house was surrounded by blooming shrubs that almost reached the roof. Paige had to see for herself. She pulled forward to a dirt-and-gravel side road, turned toward the house, and drove slowly closer.

  It was the house from her dream. The house that waited for her. She couldn’t see it yet, but she knew a curving flagstone pathway led to the front porch steps. And that a kindly house cat was at the top of the steps, watching. The cat would be golden blond.

  A small stand of hemlocks guarded the side of the road. Paige turned the motor off and kept her window down, staring at the house, trying to remember every detail of her dream.

  “Oh!” Paige said when someone tapped hard on the trunk of the rental car.

  “Sorry, missy. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  She let out a long breath. It was an old man with a kindly face and shoulders bent forward from a life of work. He smiled under a thick shag of gray hair. All the men over thirty Paige met in San Diego were bald or on the verge.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m lost.”

  “Looks like your car broke down to me.”

  “Oh, no, it’s fine. I was just turning around.”

  The man had his hand on the side of the rental. “No,” he said. “It feels more like it won’t run. Might need jumper cables. I can do that for you in a jiff.”

  Paige didn’t want to argue with the old guy. She was washed with a feeling of kindness coming from him. She was comfortable with his standing there. He seemed to belong. Instead of saying anything, she turned the key in the ignition to show him. Nothing happened. The car wouldn’t start.

  She smiled like a fool and opened her car door.

  “I’m still lost,” Paige said. “I’ve been driving a very long time.” She stretched her back and leaned her head slowly from side to side. She felt like she should know his name.

  “I can give you directions, sure thing, but won’t do no good till your car starts. Tractor’s in the barn. I’ll bring it round. You can go on in the house, if you want to freshen up. There’s sweet tea in the kitchen. You know where it is.”

  He nodded and walked by her, down the gravel road toward the barn, which was farther behind the farmhouse than it had looked to be from the road. Farther than it had looked in her dream.

  Paige walked to the front of the farmhouse. She found the flagstone path that led to the porch steps. The red roof was metal. That surprised her. Her dream hadn’t indicated what it was made of.

  On the porch were two wooden rockers and a small braided rug, but no cat. Paige felt there should have been one. The front door was unlocked. She used the bathroom off the bedroom on the right and found her way to the kitchen. A pitcher of sweet tea was in the refrigerator. She found a clean glass in the cupboard. Paige wandered into the living room. She sat on the upholstered sofa for a minute and sipped iced tea.

  The old man was in the leather recliner watching television with the sound turned off when she woke. Paige was under a soft quilt made of tiny circles inside bigger ones. Her stomach growled.

  “What time is the wedding?” the man asked her.

  Paige cleared her throat. Her glass of tea sat half full on a crocheted coaster on the coffee table. “Two o’clock. How do you know about the wedding?”

  He smiled at the television. “You were telling me all about it before you fell asleep. What’s her name again? Something from the Bible, is it?”

  “Faith,” Paige said.

  A lamp on a small table beside the man’s chair was turned on. A small half-mask hung from a hook in the wall. The rest of the room was dark except for the flickering light of the television. It was the dead of night.

  “Your car won’t start, but I can tow you into town, if we need to do it. Don’t have lights that work on the tractor, though. I ran a cord out to your car and put the charger on. Don’t know if it will hold, if the cells are dead in your battery. There’s Kentucky Fried Chicken in the icebox, and plenty of slaw.”

  Paige smiled. “Thank you,” she said, throwing the quilt off and sitting up. “You want some?”

  “My wife had eyes like yours,” the old man said, following her to the kitchen.

  She found plates and put them on the table, along with utensils from the drawer. Paige pulled off two paper towels from the roll to use as napkins, one for each of them.

  While they ate cold chicken and slaw, Paige found herself enjoying being there. The man might have been one of her own grandfathers, except she already knew who they were.

  “What was she like?”

  “She liked to have fun, my wife did. But she didn’t like people to know it, so she acted stern in front of others. As soon as they were gone, she’d bust out laughing at something somebody said and would laugh all night about it. That’s what I meant by saying she had eyes like yours. You have the same look in your eyes, like you’re waiting till people are gone to laugh.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Don’t know that she did. Thirty-five years, and she said she wanted to be young again. I thought I’d had enough of being young myself. She just sort of disappeared.”

  Paige nodded, though she didn’t understand.

  “The cat was h
ers,” he said.

  Paige spent the night in the guest room because she had no reason not to. He had already carried her suitcases in. She could have slept in the car, but the farmhouse was safe. The old man was her friend. She could feel it in her bones. The sheets on the bed were fresh and clean. The pillows were stuffed with feathers. As she fell asleep, she could hear him snoring in another room.

  When she woke, sunlight filled the room. Paige couldn’t remember a single dream. She usually dreamed she was being chased at night. The chasers must have stayed in San Diego. The air smelled as if it had just rained. She stepped from the bedroom and suddenly smelled something better than rain. It smelled like hot coffee and bacon frying.

  Paige came into the kitchen in time to do the eggs. She fried them hot and quick in bacon grease. The old man cut slices of raw white onion and put one on each plate.

  The toast with preserves was just right. Paige ate the last bite of hers. A plastic white-and-yellow clock was on the kitchen wall above the table. Paige glanced at it, and her heart stopped.

  “It’s eleven o’clock!”

  “I waited till the sun hit your windows to start the coffeepot,” he said. “It takes it awhile to top the hills right here along this side of the ridge. You can have the house to yourself to get ready. I’ll bring that tractor back down and get your car started or hitch it up, one. Hot Springs is pretty close by.”

  Paige showered standing inside a plastic curtain that hung from a circle of chrome over the bathtub. The water was hot and didn’t smell like chlorine. She dried her hair as best she could, letting it fall mostly to one side. She’d put her makeup on in the car. Faith wouldn’t mind if Paige didn’t look her best. And Paige would try not to mind that her oldest and fattest and ugliest friend, with the personality of a roll of wet toilet paper, was getting married and she herself wasn’t.