Free Spirits

by Julia Watts

  “You can talk about him all you want,” I say, meaning it.

  “Well, I appreciate the laid-back interview style,” Dr. Branch says. “When Sarah broke up with Rick, it really knocked the wind out of him. He was depressed, and not just about the breakup, but about everything…about Berea, about America. It was like he had no hope anymore. He also kept getting more and more scared of getting drafted, so he finally went down to Mexico…”

  “Mexico?” I say, catching Adam’s eye.

  “Yeah,” Dr. Branch says. “He stayed there for a little over a year while Katherine and I finished up our degrees at Berea. He didn’t come back to Kentucky until his grandmother died and he got word he’d inherited her farmhouse. That’s when he reconnected with Katherine and me and some other folks in our gang and started talking up the idea of a commune. He had a new girlfriend, and he was super-happy and energetic and full of ideas, the same old Rick he used to be before Sarah broke up with him.”

  “And that’s how Strawberry Fields started?” I ask.

  “That’s how it started.” Dr. Branch smiles, his eyes far away. “And I’ve got to tell you, for a little over a year it was perfect. It was the happiest I’ve ever been. I felt like we were living life like it ought to be lived, in a peaceful, non-materialistic way, being good to each other and the earth. But whenever you get a group of people stuck together in an isolated setting like that, there’s going to be some tension after a while. So some people got burnt out and left, and some new people came in who weren’t as good about sharing the workload. And then Rick had his big conversion, and after that, we were doomed.”

  “You mean, like a religious thing?” Adam says, finally finding his voice.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Dr. Branch says. “We had this policy at Strawberry Fields that if anybody came by needing food or a place to sleep, we’d take care of them. We wanted our place to be a home for whoever needed one. Rick always quoted that Robert Frost poem, ‘Home is where when you go there/they have to take you in.’

  Adam looks at me hard, and I read his thoughts, That letter to the editor quoted Robert Frost, remember?

  I nod.

  “Well, one night, this man showed up at the farmhouse—a scrawny guy with a flattop and a clip-on tie and an intense look in his eyes—the kind of look that either draws you in or makes you want to look away. At the time I thought of him as old, but he was probably just in his forties, so he’d be a mere child to me now.” Dr. Branch smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling into crow’s feet. “Anyway, he identified himself as Brother Bobby Scoggins, and he claimed he had gotten lost on the way to some kind of meeting. As the years have gone by, I’ve come to suspect it was a Ku Klux Klan meeting, but of course, he wasn’t going to tell us that. So even though he didn’t look like our kind of people, we invited him in and made him a sandwich and a cup of tea. Then Rick found a spare blanket for him and showed him out to the barn.”

  Dr. Branch gets up from his rocking chair and starts to pace. “That was the last we saw of Rick until morning. He and Brother Bobby apparently stayed up all night, reading the Bible by flashlight with Brother Bobby preaching and testifying. Rick said that when he stepped out of the barn into the morning sun, he was a new man. And he was. But he was a man all of us liked less, unfortunately.”

  “How was he different?” Adam asks, knitting his brow like he always does when he’s really concentrating.

  “Well, you have to understand the brand of Christianity that Brother Bobby was pushing was way different from any type of Christianity I’d ever heard of. On the commune, we were the kind of Christians who believe God is love and that we should try to act like Jesus did: to be loving and peaceful and kind and nonjudgmental. But the Jesus Brother Bobby told Rick about was something else altogether—a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus who only offered salvation to white people. And there was lots of stuff Rick talked about from the Book of Revelation which he interpreted to be about the atom bomb and God’s chosen people…white Protestants, supposedly—rising to power.” Dr. Branch shakes his head. “It was toxic stuff, man. It was like Brother Bobby kept my good friend up all night, feeding him poison until he decided he liked it.”

  “It’s so weird,” I say. “Why do you think Rick went from being so peaceful and kind to being…”

  “The embodiment of the worst qualities human beings can have?” Dr. Branch finishes for me. “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that some people are extreme. Rick was never in the middle about anything. He was either super energetic and excited or so bummed out he couldn’t get out of bed. His ideas were extreme, too. If he was going to be a hippie, he was going to be the biggest hippie of them all, right down to burning his draft card and running off to Mexico. And if he was going to turn into some kind of racist religious zealot, he was going to go far enough with it to make Hitler look middle-of-the-road.”

  Dr. Branch sits back down in his rocker. “The commune disbanded shortly after Rick started following Brother Bobby. He gave us all an ultimatum to ‘turn or burn,’ so we chose to turn away from him. His girlfriend was the only one who stayed but I heard she left him after a while, too, and went back home.”

  Katherine and Mrs. So come up to the porch. Mrs. So’s arms are full of herbs.

  “Well,” Mrs. So says, “I don’t think I’ll ever have the kind of success with herbs that Katherine has, but I’m going to give it a try.”

  “Oh, that rosemary and sage are so hearty, all you have to do is stick them in the ground,” Katherine says. “You’ll have a jungle in no time.” Katherine pats her husband’s shoulder. “Is the interview still going on?”

  “Oh, I think it’s winding down,” he says. “You know, I wish I could give these kids a tour of where Strawberry Fields used to be.”

  “It makes me too sad to see it now,” Katherine says, “the way it’s grown up where the gardens used to be. And Rick’s let the house sit abandoned for years. I don’t know why he hasn’t sold it if he isn’t going to live there. But then again, since when did Rick do anything that makes any logical sense?”

  “I’ll tell you what, though,” Dr. Branch says. “If we did try to take the kids to look at the place, we’d probably pick the one night Rick happened to be there, and he’d shoot us for trespassing.”

  “Or the ghost would get us,” Katherine says, laughing.

  “The ghost?” I ask.

  “We always believed the ghost of Rick’s grandmother haunted the old farmhouse,” Dr. Branch explains.

  “We always believed?” Katherine protests. “Try you always believed.”

  Dr. Branch points a finger at Katherine. “Hey, you saw that rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom rocking by itself just the same as I did. And you know how things in the kitchen cabinets would always get moved around at night.”

  “There was an open window when the rocking chair moved,” Katherine says. “It was the wind. And any number of people could’ve moved around the pots and pans in the cabinets.”

  Dr. Branch grins and shakes his head. “But at the time you believed in Granny Ghost the same as the rest of us.”

  “Well,at the time,I was young and impressionable,”Katherine says, smiling.

  Once we’re in the car, Mrs. So says, “I hope whatever that was about, you satisfied your curiosity.”

  “Yeah, we—” Adam starts.

  “But don’t talk about it in my hearing,” Mrs. So says. “I don’t want to know.”

  I look over at Adam and see his thoughts: I can’t wait to get on the Internet and look up Bobby Scoggins.

  Adam can’t see my thoughts, but if he did, here’s what he’d see: I can’t wait to talk to Granny Ghost.

  Chapter 13

  Today’s the last day of school, and homeroom resembles a zoo at feeding time. There’s lots of screeching and howling and squirming, and Mrs. Pierce, the homeroom teacher, is reading a People magazine and pretending not to notice the chaos.


  Adam slides into the seat next to mine, then slaps a book-thick stack of paper onto my desk. “This,” he says, “is what you get when you Google Bobby Scoggins.”

  “Whoa.” The article on top of the stack is called “The Hatemongers’ Hall of Fame.” It describes Reverend Bobby Scoggins as “a traveling preacher most active in Kentucky, used his pulpit to preach hate toward Blacks, Hispanics,Jews, Catholics and gays and to extol the supposed superiority of white American Protestants.In nineteen eighty-four,he was sentenced to a twelve-year sentence in the Kentucky State Correctional Facility after leading a group of his followers in the attempted arson of several buildings at Berea College, which he denounced as ‘a hotbed of race mixing and communism.’ Scoggins attempted to continue his ministry in prison, but his views proved unpopular, and he was found dead in his cell two years into his sentence.”

  “I remember Mom talking about some crazy guy who wanted to burn down Berea,” I say.

  “Well, Bobby’s that crazy guy,” Adam says.

  “I wonder if Rick was in on the plan, too. It seems weird. I mean, he went to Berea, right? Why would he want to burn it down?”

  “Well, he flunked out of there, didn’t he? And his girlfriend there dumped him. To you and me, those might not seem like good enough reasons to torch a school, but if a person was a little nuts to begin with…”

  “You’re right.‘Why’ is a totally different question when you’re talking about somebody like Rick.” The bell rings, and I pick up the papers and stuff them in my backpack. “I’ll read through the rest of this in study hall.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “You know we’ve got to go out to the house at Strawberry Fields, right? I haven’t been able to get what Dr. Branch said about that ghost out of my head.”

  “You wanna go tonight?”

  “Yeah, I want to, but I don’t see how we can. Mom’s already told me to stay out of this and your mom’s warned you, too.”

  Walking down the hall to our lockers, Adam points to a poster board sign that says “END-OF-SCHOOL DANCE/ TONIGHT/8:00 P.M.-10:00 P.M.” “That’s it!” he says.

  “You have a sudden urge to go to the dance?” I say.

  “You know I’d rather be dipped in honey and tied to an anthill than go to a school dance,” he says. “But if we let our moms drop us off here tonight to go to the dance, then we could sneak off to Possum Creek Road and be back in time to get picked up at ten.”

  “And you think our moms will actually believe that we want to go to the dance?”

  “Sure they will. Moms never want to believe their kids are misfits, so they’ll be thrilled that we’re taking a ‘social interest.’”

  I laugh and shake my head, amazed at how right he is. “You really are an evil genius, you know that?”

  In my room after supper, I put on my silver-flecked sky blue skirt, a white gauze blouse, and my silver moon pendant. I have to look like I’m going to a dance even if I’m really going on a ghost hunt.

  Speaking of ghosts, I’m trying my best to send mental signals to Abigail so she’ll know to show up soon. But the world of the dead is huge, much larger than ours, and sometimes she’s too far away for me to reach her.

  Mom calls up the stairs, “Miranda? Are you about ready?” And at that same moment, I hear Abigail’s telltale scratch on the closet door.

  “Just a minute, Mom!” I yell.

  Abigail steps out of the closet. “My, don’t you look pretty! Where are you going?”

  “We,” I say, picking up the hand mirror, “are going to a house that’s supposed to be haunted by Rick Boshears’ grandmother. She’ll be more likely to come out if you’re with us.” I set the hand mirror on the floor so she can step into it. “But—and this is important—Mom is dropping us off at school. She thinks we’re going to the end-of-school dance.”

  “Oh, I wish we were,” Abigail says. “I get to talk to ghosts all the time, but I’ve never been to a dance.” She points her toe and dips it into the mirror, then sets her other foot on the glass surface, and whoosh, she’s inside.

  I stuff the mirror in my oversized purse. “I’ll get you out just as soon as Mom drops us,” I say. “Sorry to leave you in the dark.”

  “If there’s anything I’m used to, it’s dark,” Abigail says, her voice muffled.

  Adam is already waiting outside the school when Mom drops us. She tells us to have a good time, and I smile and wave, feeling guilty. If Mom looked into my head she’d know everything, but just like regular people do, right now she’s seeing what she wants to see: her shy, misfit little girl blossoming into a young lady with enough social skills to go to a middle school dance.

  “It’ll take us about half an hour to walk to Possum Creek Road,” I say, looking at Adam. “We’d better get moving if we’re going to be back here by ten.”

  I take the mirror out of my purse, and Adam says, “Hi, Abigail.”

  “Oh, I also brought these.” I take out two small flashlights. “These country roads are gonna be awfully dark before long.”

  We walk away from the school, away from the streetlights and car sounds until all we can hear are the chirping crickets and bellowing bullfrogs and the rustling of little creatures in the brush. We’ve been walking for around twenty minutes when my flashlight spots the sign reading Possum Creek Road.

  The dirt road opens up into a clearing, and even by flashlight I can tell it used to be a beautiful spot. There’s a rolling meadow, now overgrown, and a two-story, tin-roofed farmhouse, its paint chipped and its windows broken. “Strawberry Fields,” I say.

  “Yeah, but not anymore,” Adam says. He shines his flashlight on a sign tacked up on the wooden fence: Private Property No Trespassing. “Should we risk it?” I say.

  Adam shrugs. “Might as well. We’re here now.”

  “Abigail?” I say. “Are you willing to trespass?”

  “I’m dead,” she says. “In the world of the living, I’m already trespassing.”

  “Fair enough.” I yank up my skirt in a way I’m sure Abigail finds unladylike and climb over the fence. Adam climbs right behind me.

  The porch steps creak under our feet. I try the front door but it’s locked. “Wait,” Adam says. “Let me crawl in the window and maybe I can let you in.”

  “Uh…are you sure you want to do that? I mean, we’re breaking some laws here,” I say.

  “But it’s for a good cause, right?” Adam says, trying to find a good angle to climb into the window.

  “Be careful of broken glass,” I warn.

  “This window probably hasn’t had glass in it since before we were born.” Adam disappears into the window, and seconds later he swings the door open. He sneezes three times in a row. “Dusty,” he says. “And spooky. It reminds me of that movie The Old Dark House.”

  I’ve never seen The Old Dark House, but there’s no doubt that this house is old and dark. I walk inside, the flashlight in my right hand and Abigail’s mirror in my left. I move the flashlight around, spotlighting different parts of what was once the living room. Cobwebs and spiderwebs. A filthy couch, now probably a condominium for mice. The rag rug on the floor puffs up a cloud of dust when I step on it, and Adam sneezes again.

  “There is a spirit in this house,” Abigail says. “I can feel her.”

  “Mrs. Boshears?” I call. “Hello?”

  “She’s not in this room,” Abigail says. “She’s upstairs, I think.”

  We hold our flashlights so we can see the rickety stairs that squeak with each step we take. I try to steady myself by holding onto the rail, but it’s rickety, too.

  Once we’re upstairs, Abigail says, “The room at the end of the hall.”

  Walking down the hall, the flashlight captures jittery images of the old flowered wallpaper because my hand is shaking.

  The door creaks as we open it, and Adam, as nervous as I am, whispers, “Oh, man.”

  When we step into the room it’s at least thirty degrees colder than it is in the rest of the house. Ho
lding the flashlight in front of my face, I can see my breath. The room contains an old iron bed, a chest of drawers and a cane rocking chair. But that’s all I can see. “Mrs. Boshears?” I call. “Ma’am?”

  Nothing.

  “Let me try,” Abigail says. And then she makes a sound I’ve never heard before, like a high-pitched song, sad and beautiful and not quite human. The sound fills the room, and then the shape of an old woman appears in the rocking chair. She looks about Granny’s age, but she’s fuller figured and is wearing a homemade-looking flowered dress. Her hair is pulled back in a bun. She’d look like she could be anybody’s grandma if you couldn’t see right through her. “Who’s there?” she says like she’s not sure she wants us to be there.

  “Abigail,” she says from the mirror. “A spirit. And my living friends Miranda and Adam.”

  “Hmm,” the old lady says, starting to rock, and I remember that while I can see her, Adam can only see the empty chair going back and forth. “Young’uns come here all the time trying to scare theirselves, but I never let ’em see me. Nobody’s ever come with a spirit before.” She squints and leans forward. “Are you in that mirror?”

  “Yes,” Abigail says. “It’s the only way I can leave my house.”

  “Let me see,” Mrs. Boshears says, reaching out her gnarled hands.

  I’m a little nervous about handing over the mirror, but Abigail says, “Go ahead.”

  Mrs. Boshears holds up the mirror and looks at Abigail. “Well, look at you! Ain’t you a pretty little thing? If you could get out of there, we’d have a big ole time plaiting that yeller hair of yours.”