I turned the thermostat down when I thought he wasn’t looking.
On the weekends my father and I were on our own. No aides came then. It was just the two of us, or an occasional neighbor or friend who dropped by to chat and to see how things were or to bring some food for us, and which I nearly always ended up eating because he wanted nothing but oatmeal because nothing else tasted good to him any longer. Things were the same, the neighbor would see after a few minutes; my father was still dying inch by inch, breath by breath.
Often on those long weekends we would sit in the den, the small room off of the kitchen, and he would be in his green plaid chair that he had salvaged from my grandmother’s house, his hands clasped along its padded arms, and I would sit on a wooden kitchen chair that I had brought into the room. Every morning when he rose, he always built a fire in the Franklin stove that he had installed some years ago. He had built the fire wall of brick behind it, the floor of brick under it, and the half-wall of brick between that room and the kitchen. My father had never been trained as a mason.
We would sit in that hot room, thick with smoke from the Franklin because he didn’t want the windows opened, and there would be silence.
Sometimes the television was on, but the volume was down low because he was going deaf, and it didn’t matter to him any longer what was being shown on the old black-and- white. Yet he would look at the flickering images so that he wouldn’t have to look at me.
Sometimes he would say he wanted to tell me some things, and I would ask what things. Just things, he would say, almost slyly. I would wait for a few minutes, and when he didn’t continue, I would ask him again, though sharply this time, what he meant.
He would turn his head, and he would look at me with those yellow-brown eyes, the eyes of a wolf, and he would say, things.
Things he disapproved of in me, things he thought I should have done with my life, things we had disagreed about so many times in the past. Just things.
He never told me. I asked him now and then, but he just said later.
I kept telling him there would be no later, that he was dying, and he would say no, he wasn’t. He wasn’t dying at all.
I would start to cry then. I would put my head down and grab the Kleenex I kept in my pocket, and the hot tears would come, and my shoulders would shake even though I didn’t make a sound.
He would want to stand up then, but couldn’t, and so I would go to him and take his bony hands and help him to his feet, and watch as he shuffled from the room.
I would watch that sad form and my eyes would fill with tears again. This was the man who had built the wall of bricks without instruction.
****
I have a ghost, and I want to exorcise it. But I do not know how.
The ghost of my father lives with me, inside my mind and out.
Each night my father comes to visit me, to remind me what I did not do, to remind me of all that he did not say to me.
I did what was best. At the time. I thought. I did what I could do. I regret the yelling, the harsh tones, the bitterness, but I can’t take them back. You can’t change what has happened in the past, can you? What is done is done, no matter the regrets.
And yet… why not?
Why can’t I take them back, now after two years? Two years that I’ve given to mourning, to a life inhabited only by myself and the ghost of my father. Why not?
If I do, will his ghost go away? Will he leave me alone, my father, so that I can sleep through the darkness, be rested for at least one night?
I am scared. I want to take back all those ugly things that I did to him when he was dying, and yet if he goes, what will I have? He is my only nightly visitor.
He is dead, I tell myself.
He is a ghost, and I am rapidly becoming one myself.
I swallow, lick my lips.
I take them back, I say aloud in the darkness. I take them back, all those angry tears and furious words, and childish impatience when he took too long to feed himself or to pick up a pencil or to finish his sentence. I take them back.
I take them.
Back.
****
It is nighttime. I am in my bedroom.
I grow aware of a scuffling, a breath-like sound. As I lay in the dark, I hear the sound grow louder.
And knowing, I still get up.
It is dark as I stand in the doorway of the room, but I can see clearly. I can see what is in the hallway.
It is me, and I am crawling up the length of the hallway.
****
Remembrance by Kathryn Ptacek
I met Dave Silva back in the “old days”… you know, before writers had the Internet… before most of us even had e-mail! Gasp!
Not long after that, Dave bought one of my short stories for his magazine, The Horror Show. And, in fact, that issue had an interview with me as well… I was pretty new to horror (my first novels were historical romances, and I had just moved into the horror field), but Dave was incredibly supportive, and I was honored that he would devote so much of his magazine to me, an unknown writer. The story, about a woman putting her mother in a nursing home, struck a chord with Dave, and we ended up talking a lot about our aging parents.
We chatted on the phone often back then, and when I started my market newsletter, Dave was one of its earliest supporters with many excellent suggestions. Years later, after he restarted Hellnotes (initially edited by Paul and Dave), he asked me to do a market report. I enjoyed doing that, as well as some articles and reviews, for a number of years.
By then we’d moved onto that new-fangled e-mail, and we probably kept in touch more often. We didn’t talk much about personal stuff; mostly, it was about writing.
Then I went through a rough patch; a lot of rocky things going on in my life demanded all my time and energy, and I know Dave was having health concerns at the same time. Still, we managed to come up for air occasionally and shoot off a message to see how things were going.
Dave contacted me frequently when Charlie was in the hospital, and then later after Charlie died, Dave sent this: “I’m sure there’s an emptiness that just can’t seem to be filled. But the day will come when the sun suddenly shines a little brighter, when there’s a ray of hope slipping through, and you’ll be ready to take it all in again.”
And he was right. Bit by bit, things did improve, and there was that ray slipping through.
Dave continued to be supportive of my writing, and ran whatever item I had about a new sale or a recent publication, and for that I’m very grateful. He was an excellent editor and writer, although most people know him as an editor.
Whenever I noticed I hadn’t heard from him in a while, I’d drop him a line to see how things were going, and he’d do the same with me. Still, I wish there were more E-mails, more phone conversations. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s never enough.
Anyway, I can imagine Dave and Charlie and Rick and Karl and Melissa and Mark and Alan and Dick sitting around now… all the horror writers we’ve loved so much and lost… and they’re energetically dissecting horror past and present, and one of these days the sun will shine a little brighter for all of us left behind.
Kathryn Ptacek
YELLACHILE’S CAGE
Robert R. McCammon
I kant write too good, but I wanted to get this down. On paper, where it seems more real than it does in your head. A pincil and erasore can be messy things, cant they? Well, I am gone start learn in me how to use that machine up in the liberry. Mister Wheler say he gone teach me them keys and how to put that ribbon in and all, and he’s a truthful man.
Well, now that Im started I dont know where to go. Reckon you should always start at the first, huh? So thats a good place.
I did the crime they said I did, and I never said I didn’t. Mans gone cut you, you got to cut him first. I seen the blade grin when he jerked it out of his coat, and thank the Lord I’ve got a fast hand or Id be sitting in the clouds right now. My momma now, sh
e’d be saying Id be sitting on a hot rock where the sun dont shine. I gave her a lot of trouble, I reckon. Gave everybody a lot of trouble. Well, you don’t get in prison for singing too loud in church, thats for damn sure.
I always heard things about the Brickyard. Bricknell Prison’s its real name, but nobody inside and few outside call it that. Its the kind of place you hear about when your a kid and you start sassin and crossing the line real early. You know what I mean. Lord, if I had ten cents for every time somebody in Masonville said, “Boy, you gone wind up in the Brickyard yet!” I sure as hell wouldn’t have got here in the first place. Masonvilles where I was born and raised, but it aint my home. I never felt much like I had a home. My old man run off when I was a kid. Mama say I look just like him and I got his bad blood too and I say you better quit that talking or Im gone tear this house up. And I would, too. Pretend I was crazy mean just to get her to stop that talking about how bad I was and how bad my old man was and all that such jive. To this day she say I got such a temper I could blow the Brickyard’s walls down, but I just pretended to get mad so I could get me some elbow room. Somebody thinks your crazy mean, they aint gone be hanging on your ass ragging you all the time.
Aint much to say about the Brickyard. Its gray, even when the bright sun comes in the winders. Long halls, lots of cages. Always smells like sweat, or piss, or that sick-smelling crap they use to wash down the walls and floors. Toilet backed up in the cell next to mine few days ago, you shoulda seen ol’ Duke and Kingman doin the highstep in there and hollerin their heads off. This is an old prison, and at night it moans.
I turned twenty-one a week before they brought me here. Closed the gates behind me on March 24, at sixteen minutes after ten in the mornin. The clocks at the Brickyard work real good, and you remember things like that. Its been seventeen months, twelve days and four hours since them gates closed and locked, and its been five days since Whitey passed on. I dont say die, cause Im startin to think theres no such thing. These last five days, well theyve been real strange. I thought and thought of the right word to discribe them but I don’t know words so good yet. When I walked in here I couldnt hardly read or write, and now look at me here with a pincil cuttin a buck.
I’ve spent time in juve centers and workhomes and crap like that, but you say “Prison” and your talking a different animal. You walk in a prison like the Brickyard and you be twenty-one years old and you better keep a tight ass and your head tucked down real low to the ground or somebody he gone knock it off cause thats his kick. My first day I didnt answer when a plowboy said somethin to me and I got a fist upside my head and a size-ten boot in my jewlls. Im not such a big feller and I learned real quick that playin crazy mean don’t go too far in here. Theres plenty who are crazy mean for sure, and they love to do the fandango on your backbone. Anyways, I didnt pay a feller no respect and I was in the hospital bout three hours after the Cap’n dropped me down the chute.
I woke up to somebody pokin the bandage on my head, and I liked to jump out of that bed cause I thought oh Lord they gone bounce me again.
Old man standin next to my bed. Wearin the gray pajamas they give you when your sick or laid up. He say “Boy, you look like you been killed, buried and dug up.” His voice made me think of my momma’s knuckles scrubbin wet clothes on a washboard. He laughed, but I didnt think it was too funny. He say “Whats your name?” and I told him but he say, “The hell it is! You a Wanda, boy! A fresh-meat, dumb-ass Wanda is what you are!”
Wanda is what they called the new boys at the Brickyard. At least right then. The name changed every few weeks, always some girl’s name.
“You a big, bad Wanda, aint you?” he asked, just standing there and grinnin like a black ole fool. He was blacker than me, that African black that’s so black you can see blue through the skin. And his eyes were pale amber behind a little pair of wire glasses and he had a tight cap of white hair done in cornrows. His face looked like the bottom of a dried-up mud pond, and I swear there wasnt enough room for another wrinkle. I mean, he was old! Maybe like sixty-five or something, I figured. But he was skinny like me, just walkin bones, and those hospital duds hung on him like a tent.
“Go way and leave me alone,” I remember sayin to him. My head was aching fit to bust, I couldnt see straight and all I wanted to do was sleep.
“Wanda says go way. Think we ought to?” Talkin to somebody else, only there wasnt nobody in the beds around.
“Crazy as hell,” I say, and he smile and say, “Yellachile, look at a prime cut of fool.”
Well, he holds up somethin out of them gray tent folds and I saw what it was: a little yella bird. A canary, I guessed it was. My Aunt Mondy had a canary in a cage that she called Sweet Thang and a cat thought it was sweet too cause it gulped it down and didnt leave a feather. He holds it in one hand and its wings are flappin like its fixin to fly and I figured bird shit on my head was about all I needed. I say, “Get that thing outta here!” and he say, “Yes’m, Wanda. Just for you.” He put his other hand over it to keep it from flyin off and back it went into the folds.
And then he leans over real close, and I saw his teeth were as yella as that bird, and he say soft like, “Wanda, you gone be in here for a long time. Cut a brother’s throat, didnt you?”
“He tried to cut me first,” I said. Didnt bother me that he knew. Aint no privacy in a prison. “They all sing the same tune. Goes like this: tweet, tweet I didnt do it tweet tweet no sir not me tweet tweet…”
“Didnt say I didnt do it,” I told him. “Just say I didnt pull the knife first.”
“Yeah, and you stuck it in first too. Well, reckon the Brickyard’s better than the boneyard, aint it?” He laughed; it was a little chuckle, but it brought a cough out of him and that made another cough come up and another one and then his eyes were full of hurt and he was hackin his lungs out.
“Your sick,” I say when he stop that coughin.
“If I was well I wouldnt be in here with the likes of you, would I?” He wheezed a few times, and then whatever it was passed but he had a deep sickness in him. I could tell that right off. The whites of his eyes looked like cups of pus. “Come on, Yellachile,” he said to the canary, “let’s get on away from Wanda and let her get that beauty sleep she’s gone need.”
He didnt go too far, just to a bed across the aisle. He laid down on coarse linen like the King of Africa on a gold throne, and the sun was shining in through the bars hot and proper and somebody else was moppin the floor. I sits up and I saw that canary flying round and round over the African’s bed, and all of a suddens he reached up and caught that bird and he pulls it to his cheek. Started whistlin to it, makin love sounds to a bird. I knows he’s a number-one fool now! But after awhile I got to enjoyin the sounds, and it seemed to me that him and the bird were talking back and forth in a language that was older than anythin Id ever heard. I laid my head back on a pillow and slept, and I dreamed of Aunt Mondy’s canary flyin in its cage and a catface lookin in.
Well, time passes even in here. You get a routine, and thats how you live. They put me on the garbage detail, which is bout the lowest you can get and not be belly-crawlin, cause a prison’s garbage sure aint perfumy. Lot of fellers wanted to fight me cause they heard I figured myself to be bad and such like, and plenty of times I got struck out but I hit me a few home runs too and that was all right. You dont fight back in prison, you might as well be sewing a gravesuit. The trick is not to hurt nobody too bad and cause a grudge. Grudges get you killed real quick. Anyway, I got me some friends and a new name. “Wanda” turned into “Wand,” cause I’m so skinny, and by that time we were callin new meat “Lucys.”
Every cellblock has a different schedool for time in the excercize yard. I was in Block D, and we went out at two-thirty. One day we were out there rappin and shooting some baskets and when we were resting we start talkin bout our first day in. Well, I told em about that old man and the canary, and Brightboy Stubbins say, “Lord, Wand! You done met Whitey and Yellachile!”
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br /> “Yellachile’s that bird’s name, I guess,” I said, “but that old man sure aint a whitey!”
“Shush up, boy!” Stretch say. “You dont wanna be disrespectful to Whitey, no sir!”
“Aint being disrespectful,” I say. “Aint being nothin. How come the hallboys let that old man keep a bird?” I remembered the Cap’n read in the rules in a roar that quaked my bones. “Aint supposed to be such a thing in here.”
“Whitey’s special ,” McCook say. “The hallboys leave him alone.”
“Yeah, and you know why.” Brightboy leans his head down, like hes talkin to his shadow. “Whitey’s a voodoo man, thass why. Lord, yes! He speaks the conjure tongue!”
I laughed. “Hell, the conjure tongue didnt keep him out of this place, did it?”
They all looked at me like I was a roach on two legs. Stretch put his hand on my shoulder, and Stretch has got a mighty big hand. “You listen up,” he says, and the way his eyes were glintin I didnt think we were gonna be friends any more. “Whitey Latrope is a mighty important feller around here. Dont matter if you dont believe in the power of the conjure tongue. He dont care. But dont you never show disrespect to Whitey, or you gone have to deal with ol’ Stretch. Okay?”
I said okay real quick. Wouldnt want to knock heads with Stretch, no sir!
“Whitey Latrope’s a voodoo man,” Stretch said, in that low quiet voice hes got, “and Yellachile aint just a bird. Yellachile knows things, and speaks em to Whitey.”
“What things?” I was brave enough to ask.
“Yellachile flies out of his cage at night,” Brightboy said, and it was funny to hear such a big man whisper. He looked past me, the sun slamming down on his moon-pie face. I saw he was staring at the tall fence topped with barbed-wire, and the fence beyond that, and the gray stone wall that eight men had died tryin to get over, and the brown dusty hills and limp-limbed woods that surrounded the Brickyard for too many miles. “Yellachile flies,” he say. His shadow lay across the tight fence mesh. “Out of his cage, through a winder, out of Block A and gone.”
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 11
