Ghost Wood Song

by Erica Waters

  “But what about my dreams?” I can’t help but interrupt. “With the little girl and the wasps? I think my little sister Honey dreamed about her too.”

  “Those are because of our father,” Daddy says. “That trouble only started after he died. That man’s become a thing of nightmares, worse than he was living. A black pit of despair and self-loathing and hate.”

  “Shadow man,” I say, shuddering. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  I knew it on some level, but could never completely admit it to myself. All along, it was my grandfather haunting me, as the shadow man, with the rattlesnake and the alligator, even with the little dead girl in my ceiling. He used his own daughter’s death—her murder—to torment me and then my baby sister. He whispered in my ear, making me think my own brother killed Daddy.

  Daddy nods. “I thought you’d be free of him after I died. But when you started playing “The Twa Sisters” in the woods, he saw how like me you were—how you opened yourself to the music. He knew your grief and pain could make him strong again. That’s why he led you to the fiddle.”

  My fingers tremble, making the bow squeal. I’m the one who drew the shadow man here. With my grief and my pain. I let him back into our world. “What does he want from me?” I ask. “To kill me?”

  “Baby, I’m not sure he even knows. I think he wants to cling to this family, to keep on hurting us, even in death. Maybe because of what he’s become he can’t do anything except try to destroy what’s good and pure. There’s no saying what a twisted heart like his is after. I don’t know what he wants, but he’s not going to get it. We’re not going to let him.”

  “Daddy,” I whimper, my terror overtaking me. Believing the shadow man wanted to kill me was bad enough, but not knowing his true motives is somehow worse.

  “Don’t be scared, Shady Grove,” Daddy says. “We’re here now. Your family. We won’t let him take you. We’ll help you.”

  His eyes blaze, kindling a final ember of courage in me, pushing away my terror and my guilt. When he sees it start to burn in my eyes, he nods. “Baby, I think we’ve all had enough of that song. Enough of that grief. Play us something with some joy in it.”

  It takes effort to stop playing “Brandy,” like that’s the one song this fiddle was really made to play and it’s not ready to give up its purpose. I see now why the shadow man taunted me with this song—he’s the one who killed Brandy, the one who caused all my daddy’s pain. I have to yank the bow away from the strings, plunging the attic into a sudden silence. I know better than to give the silence hold, though.

  Without thinking, I start playing “I’ll Fly Away,” which is a strange choice for a family that’s not religious, but it’s got joy and hope in it, which is mostly what we need.

  Daddy smiles sadly for a minute, but then he starts singing, his voice the honey-on-gravel I remember. Aunt Ena joins in, a little off pitch, but that never hurt anyone. I look over at Jesse, and even he’s singing, or mouthing the words anyway.

  The attic, this place of torment and shame, this sealed tomb, fills with my strings and their voices, and a rising hope.

  I’ll fly away

  When I die, hallelujah by and by

  I’ll fly away

  I suppose that’s what we all want, someday, to fly away from all this suffering and this pain. Most people don’t get to fly away until they die, until they’re released from the flesh that binds them to this earth. But there’s a deeper hope in the song, I think, the hope that we can leave the shadows and the pain here on earth, while we live.

  That we can fly toward life instead of death.

  That our lives can be more than a slow descent into the grave.

  That we can fly.

  I think of Cedar, Orlando, and Sarah, of Mama and Honey, of Jesse and Aunt Ena, who sing on either side of me. All the people I love most in this world. The ones I have left.

  So when I feel the shadow man creeping around us, his soul buzzing with wasps, his mind as rotten as the wood of this attic, I don’t let myself feel afraid. He’s drawn here, perhaps against his own wishes, perhaps knowing his dark will is weakening. But he’s here all the same because we are, because Daddy and Aunt Ena have held space for him all these years, letting his poison infect Jesse and me too.

  Everyone stops singing, but I play on, my hands steady.

  Our lack of fear seems to anger the shadow man. The room fills with the sound of rain, lightning and thunder striking overhead. His voice whips around us like wind through the pines, deep and chilling. “You’ve always been a liar, William. Why don’t you tell your children what really happened—what you did and who you blamed?

  “I know every thought in your head, every shadow in your heart,” the shadow man says. “You poured it into your fiddle, feeding it right to me. I know what you are, and it’s you who should have gone to prison, not me.”

  Fear creeps over my skin like the feet of a hundred wasps. What’s he saying? Was Daddy involved in Brandy’s death after all?

  Of course not, I realize. The shadow man is a liar, a manipulator, and I shouldn’t trust a word from his mouth.

  “Isn’t that what all your songs have said?” the shadow man asks, and then pitches his voice into a mocking imitation of a child’s, pitiful and afraid—“My fault, my fault.”

  Suddenly I’m not playing “I’ll Fly Away.” Daddy’s mournful old song for Brandy pours from my fiddle again. As the music builds around us, the wind and rain pick up, lightning forking on every side. And then we’re not in the attic anymore—we’re somewhere else, in a memory, or inside the song, I don’t know which. It feels like dreaming.

  It begins with a scream, a long, endless scream—agonized and unbearable. It goes right through me, searing its way into my bones. The scream that started my family’s history.

  And then there is a little girl’s body on a table, covered all over in wasp stings, her long, blond hair the only beautiful thing left. Daddy’s mother throws herself over the pale and bloated body, and little William’s face is hard and set, a dark, miserable hate forming in his breast—hate for himself, and for his father. He clenches his small fists by his sides.

  My fault, my fault, sings the fiddle. All along, that’s what the music was saying, wordless but clear. My fault.

  Here in the attic, Daddy’s jaw tightens. He looks just the way Jesse did when I asked him what he’d done to deserve jail. Angry and ashamed.

  “It was you who took the cookies, not Brandy,” Aunt Ena says to Daddy, but her voice doesn’t hold judgment, only surprise and pity.

  Daddy nods and forces himself to speak. “She was too scared to take them on her own. I—I didn’t think anyone would notice. I wanted to make her happy. Instead, I got her killed. I should have said something, I should have stopped him.” Daddy’s voice breaks, and the sound wrenches through me. All these years, he’s blamed himself for Brandy’s death. All these years, he’s carried that weight, that shame. I can’t imagine holding all that inside me.

  Sensing he’s losing our attention, that we feel sympathy instead of rage toward Daddy, the shadow man changes tactics, drawing us back into the past. The memory shifts from the house to a field, where lightning flies down, striking an enormous oak tree. William runs to it, his pull to share in the violence and devastation so great we can feel it now, in the room. As the inside of the tree burns molten, he feels his own rage burning just the same—hot, unbearable, searing.

  A huge branch flies off, one of the only pieces not destroyed. William picks it up and holds it tight to his chest, letting it singe his skin, relishing the hurt. He promises himself that he’ll pay and he’ll make his daddy pay—if the man is sent to prison, the moment he gets out, William will burn him like this oak tree. Until then, he’ll carry the flames inside his heart and in this wood.

  The fiddle in my hands grows so hot I can feel the molten wood it was made of, the hate that shaped and formed it and made it what it is. Aunt Ena said Daddy made this fiddle from grief, but
he made it from hate, too, and shame. It’s a thing of fear and loathing and pain. It’s the literal embodiment of Daddy’s heart.

  But I’ve seen what that tree became, and it’s beautiful. Maybe this fiddle can be made beautiful too. “Daddy, it wasn’t your fault,” I say, pitching my voice above the fiddle and the storm. “You have to let what happened go. Your father’s the only one to blame.”

  Daddy’s tears break, flowing like vapor down his ghostly cheeks.

  I lean toward him. “Blaming yourself for Brandy’s death is like Jesse blaming himself for yours—it’s not fair. You don’t hold Jesse responsible for your death, so how you can you hold yourself responsible for Brandy’s? Your little sister died knowing you loved her, just like I know Jesse loves me.”

  I can see the moment my words hit home. Daddy’s face fills with relief, and he falls to his hands and knees, all the guilt and pain breaking free from his chest.

  The storm-swept field is an attic again, the shadow man’s hateful power almost gone. He has played his last card, and it’s not a winning one.

  I thought if I ever made up my mind to face down the shadow man, if I were ever brave or strong enough, I would somehow rip him apart with my music, grind him to dust and let him drift off on the wind. I imagined a violent struggle, bloodless but wild as any war.

  But that’s not how you kill a shadow man.

  I see now, you can only destroy him by letting him go.

  I wrench back control of the fiddle and begin playing “I’ll Fly Away” again.

  In the candlelight, I watch Daddy’s and Aunt Ena’s faces as they struggle through their fear and their hatred, their love and their longing.

  I know what to do now; I know how to cut the shadow man down to size. “Say his name,” I tell them. “Make him take his true form.” We’ve got to make him just a man again, take back the fear that feeds his shadow form.

  I expect Daddy to speak, but it’s Aunt Ena whose tremulous voice names the shadow man. “George,” she says. “George Stephen Crawford. That was his name. But we called him Daddy.”

  The shadow man, too big for these tight quarters, stops his shifting about.

  Aunt Ena speaks only to him. “You were our father and our tormentor, and you were the reason my precious sister died.”

  “But you were just a man,” my own daddy says. “A sad, pathetic man. You don’t deserve to cling to this family. You have no claim on us.”

  The shadow man’s form seems to be clearing, lightening. Daddy’s and Aunt Ena’s words, spoken openly, are unveiling him. And then he’s the man I recognize, a ghost who shares my surname, who once shared my blood.

  George turns his head, and his eyes settle on Daddy. “You here to forgive me?” he says, his sneering voice carrying the hoarseness of a smoker’s.

  “There’s no forgiving what you done,” Daddy says. “But hating you’s not worth what it costs my family, so I’m letting you go. To heaven or to hell or to darkness, I don’t care, but you’ve got to go. We’re done letting you haunt the living.”

  George turns to Aunt Ena. “And you, Ena, after all I took from you?”

  Ena’s got murder in her eyes, a look I’ve never seen there before. She wants to wrap her hands around his neck and choke him, but she can’t. He’s dead, beyond the hurt her hands can do.

  “You didn’t take as much as you thought you did,” she says, her voice trembling but resolute. “And you don’t get to keep any of it. I’m going to wash this house of you. I’m going to erase your memory from this earth. I hope you turn to nothing on the wind, I hope you float into the atmosphere and burn up in the sun. I hope there is no afterlife for you, only nothing. Less than nothing.” Aunt Ena crosses her arms. “I’m done entertaining your ghost.”

  George has lost his darkness and his wasps, and what remains is pitiful. A sad, empty old man, hardly worth the word human. He turns his eyes on me.

  “I never meant to be a monster,” he says.

  I can see a tiredness at the center of his soul, a weariness—of himself and of this world, of all these old griefs.

  “Then stop being one,” I say. “You’ve done enough harm here, so why don’t you try to undo some of it. Go on now. Go on back to your rest, if there’s any rest for a man like you.”

  George nods, all the fight gone out of him. He never really had any power of his own—only what we gave him, with our hate and our fear, our bottomless grief. He doesn’t even have the strength for a farewell speech. He’s there and then he’s gone, like a candle snuffed out.

  Aunt Ena begins to weep, the sobs pouring out of her like there was a weight on her chest, and now she can let out the breath she’s been holding for thirty years. Daddy nods, his eyes sad and solemn. I wonder if he has fully forgiven himself. Can a man who turned an ordinary fiddle into a ghost magnet from sheer grief let go of his oldest, deepest pain?

  I transition from “I’ll Fly Away” into a song I hope will make him smile, the song that gave me my name. I want to hear him sing it one more time.

  He doesn’t disappoint. His eyes light up just the way I remember. And then he’s singing with the most beautiful voice this world ever held, at least as far as I’m concerned. The voice that made the sun rise in the morning, the moon shine at night. The voice that bookended every day of my childhood. The voice that made this earth seem like a place worth loving.

  He went away four years ago, but it’s only now that he’s really going. For the last time, never to return.

  So I drink in his voice and his joy, the love he presses into every syllable of this song. When he’s done singing, I stop playing, because this fiddle’s dark magic’s almost spent. But I can tell Daddy’s spirit won’t disappear right away. He’s got a few minutes left.

  I reach out and feel his hands in mine, cool like any other ghost’s but otherwise just as I remember. His eyes fill and brim over, but not with grief. With pride. With love.

  I look over at Jesse, the brother who loves me as much as my daddy does, maybe even more. I won’t have him left out in the cold, wondering if he’s forgiven. “Come here,” I say. “Tell Daddy goodbye.”

  Jesse joins us, and then Daddy takes us in his arms, the way he did when we were little and fit better. He holds us close against his chest and looks across the room at Aunt Ena. “Bye, baby sister,” he says.

  “Bye, Will. I love you,” she replies, her voice hoarse and sweet at once.

  Daddy pulls back so he can look at us, and I feel like the last four years never happened, like he never died and I never grew up, like Jesse never went to jail, like I never had to find out my family’s secrets or face the monster they made. I’m a little girl in my father’s arms, safe again.

  There are so many things I want to say to him, so many questions I want to ask. But he’s already slipping away from us. He’s finally laid his burdens down.

  “We love you,” I say. I want him to go with his heart both light and full. “You gave us everything we need.”

  “I love you both,” Daddy says, one last time. “With all I am.”

  Then I say the words my father taught me when I was six years old. “Go on home now, go back to your rest.” And I add, just for him, “We’ll keep you in our dreams.”

  Epilogue

  “Please welcome to the stage Wind in the Pines,” the announcer roars. The audience cheers in the welcoming way bluegrass fans always do, and Cedar leads us out, smiling his rodeo boy smile, Sarah blushing behind him. Then Kenneth, Rose, Orlando, and finally Jesse and me.

  Jesse is second fiddle in our band now, playing on my old pawnshop violin. Daddy’s ghost-raising fiddle is just a regular instrument now, its haunted heart gone. I offered to drown it or burn it for Jesse’s sake, but he told me to keep it and play it for the living. He said I should make our family’s darkness into something beautiful. And then he surprised us all when he asked to join the band a few weeks ago.

  It took the rest of us ages to choose a name. Kenneth’s first suggestio
n was the Ghost Whisperers, which made Cedar smack him on the back of his head. Orlando nominated Longwing Summer, for the Florida state insect, the zebra longwing butterfly. Everyone agreed it sounded nice, but Rose thought it was stupid. Actually, Rose thought all the names were stupid. We almost had to choose one without her.

  In the end, Sarah came up with the name after we held a band practice in the woods, sitting out under the trees, the pine needles glowing gold around us, the whispers of the ghosts drifting through the trees.

  “Oh,” she said, out of nowhere, and everyone looked up from tuning their instruments to stare at her. A slow smile spread across her face, making her dimple sing. “Wind in the Pines,” she said, eyes all bright. “For our band name. Let’s call ourselves Wind in the Pines. It’s perfect.”

  Rose laughed. “That’s the first name that hasn’t made me want to lose my mind. I vote yes.” Then she kissed Sarah on her cheek, right over that heart-stopping dimple.

  Rose and Sarah had officially started dating the month before, finally brave enough to try again, after their first disastrous attempt three years ago. Rose doesn’t mind that Sarah never puts herself out there, because Rose is always out there, so a person’s only other option is to run away.

  And Sarah didn’t run away. Instead, she fell in love.

  “Wind in the Pines,” Cedar repeated, smiling. “It’s perfect.”

  The rest of the band agreed, so now, months later, we’re standing together on a stage for our first big show, at the county fair. Cedar’ll be showing off a prize cow or something later, but for now he’s here with us, mandolin in hand, cowboy hat, Wranglers, and all.

  I love our name, Wind in the Pines, not only because it describes the woods that mean so much to me but also because it reminds me I let go of my shame. I let people into my life, let them see who I am, trailer and all, ghosts and all, broken family and all. If I learned anything from my weeks of ghost raising, it’s that shame is what makes secrets so dangerous, shame that keeps us tied to the darkness.