by Steve Vernon
Dad had only one.
So I’m sitting here, waiting for the holiday to pass so that I can get back to my work and lose myself in the tedium of toil. Days spent racing for that brief glimpse of payday sure beat sitting around and feeling sorry for myself.
“I hate Christmas,” I said to Moose, who only let his tongue hang out a little closer to the floorboards.
Which was when it happened.
I heard a banging at the door, like boots coming up the porch stairs.
I heard the sound of something heavy being dropped.
“Now what?”
Just then, the house lights went out.
Darn this old shack.
Now I have to go and change the fuse.
The banging on the door got a little louder. It sounded like scratching, like a half a thousand cats were at the door trying to claw their way in.
Old Moose barked happily.
Stupid dog.
I fumbled in the darkness until I found the flashlight.
I walked to the door, shining the flashlight before me.
Old Moose, he just kept wagging that sawed-off stump of a tail like he was trying to give birth to the ghost of Chubby Checker.
I don’t know why I felt frightened. Maybe it was the dark, maybe it was the lonely, maybe I was just scared that Old Moose was going to wag what was left of his tail away.
“Who is it?” I asked softly, clearing my throat.
No answer.
I opened the door slowly.
The hinges creaked like they had never heard of WD-40.
I looked outside and smelled pine.
There standing at the doorway was a freshly cut Christmas tree. The light of my flashlight reflected prettily off the icicles dangling from the branches. I walked out into the yard – tiptoeing softly past the Christmas tree leaned against the front door.
It began to snow.
In the distance I heard the sound of snowshoes chuffing and stepping somewhere beyond the darkness. I felt the snow upon my cheekbone, soft and wet and sweet as a mother’s goodbye kiss.
And I knew who it was.
“Nice tree, Dad.” was all I said.
And right then and right there I was glad to be standing in the darkness, deep within the silent heart of Christmas. I knew where Dad kept the string of Christmas lights and I figured I could have them shining like a kite string of stars in the window long before the sun rose up and I finally remembered just how to smile.
Some things slip away and some things sneak. Several years ago, I recollect a contest put on by Cemetery Dance. You had to write a short story. I can’t really remember if there was a prize or anything, but I wrote this little yarn and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It was never published and I can’t even remember the exact date I wrote it – but I hope that you think about this little story the next time you look up and see someone’s old pair of sneakers hanging from a power line.
Lost Sole
I saw the sneaker again today.
Cast off, with its eyelets glinting blindly in the sunshine. A dirty pink tongue poked out. One frayed lace snaked from the left upper eyelet like a pointless question mark. A single tattered oak leaf, dead since last autumn, fluttered against the decaying cotton walls of the shoe.
She’s still following me.
Three years of looking over my shoulder, listening for footsteps for so long that I’ve forgotten what forward even looks like.
I just sit here, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I can hear it all as if it had just happened yesterday. The scream of my old grey Plymouth’s sadly worn brake shoes, the reeking squeal of friction scorched retreads, the impotent thud of my work boot stomping against the brake pedal and finally the thump. Hard and soft all at once like a muted drum beat.
I can still see her face spraying out like a handful of pink plasticine thrown hard against my windshield, her hair a mad halo haystack spidered out in all directions.
The tire tracks of memory charred out behind me even now. I cannot escape them. I still smell the burnt rubber and taste the tinny dryness of barely swallowed fear. All of these elements mosaic together in my memory, haunting me like a half remembered lullaby.
I saw the sneaker for the first time, three days after the accident.
That’s what it was, you know.
A single stupid accident.
I hadn’t been drinking.
I hadn’t been talking on my cell phone.
I hadn’t been under the influence of anything but my mind wandering down some long forgotten footpath. I just hadn’t been thinking, was all. That’s all I can figure happened. I looked away or just stopped watching and then she came running out from the woods straight onto the road.
It was her fault. Not mine.
I only blinked.
I blinked and then afterwards I panicked.
*
Three days later I saw the shoe. Dangling from a power line, like a forgotten suicide note. If this were some story in a book of ghost tales I would have recognized the shoe immediately but I didn’t.
Think about it. Just how many times have you seen a sneaker lying on the sidewalk, forgotten as if the runner had simply stepped out of his or her shoe. Abandoned by a frustrated one-legged man, perhaps. Maybe dipped in dog dirt, smeared irreparably and simply chucked away. You might think about it in passing, maybe even wonder where the other shoe was but you wouldn’t look any closer. You certainly wouldn’t stop to try the shoe on.
I didn’t do anything either.
I just walked away.
Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe if I had bothered to pick up that shoe that very first day and maybe given the thing a decent burial.
A public burial.
That’s what she wants, I expect. Some declaration of her passing. Perhaps an obituary for her shoe.
Let me compose my recitation.
Adidas, left sneaker. Passed peacefully on the sidewalk outside of the Bitter End Coffee Shoppe, barely a block away from a shoemaker. Survived by a pair of mismatched socks and a Doctor Scholl’s insole, slightly used. In lieu of flowers, donations are most gratefully accepted at your local Bata Shoe Store.
Yeah.
That would do just fine.
*
Two weeks following the accident I found the shoe lying on my front lawn as if some dog had dropped it there. I told myself it was nothing more than a coincidence. Shoes are left everywhere. Some child had thrown it here. Perhaps it was a prank or some sort of a game. Let’s see how far we can toss Suzy’s shoe.
That was her name.
I found it out when the newspaper and television began to shout of her disappearance. Young Susan Ellie Whitmore, age 7, was playing in her parent’s backyard on the eve of her disappearance. Foul play is suspected.
In her backyard. I read those three words, over and over. What had she been doing out there on that backwoods road? Had somebody else taken her? Had she been kidnapped and escaped only to find herself hopelessly lost in the woods? Had she run in front of my car hoping to flag me down? Hoping that I’d help her?
I couldn’t find any answers to these questions.
Death is seldom a tidy affair.
A month later I found the sneaker in my desk drawer, next to my stapler.
I panicked. Somebody knew I’d killed her. Somebody had seen it. It was impossible to believe yet I couldn’t imagine any other possibility. Someone had seen me or perhaps someone in my very office had kidnapped little Suzie and left her out there in the woods to run into the road and be struck by my old grey Plymouth.
I didn’t find it ironic to think how I had begun to paint myself in a hero’s light. We all cope with grief and loss and tragedy in our own individual ways. Shining armour is nothing more than a poorly polished funhouse mirror. I began watching what I said aloud in the lunch room at work. I paid attention to the comments that went on around me, trying to find some sort of hint or pattern.
What
did this one mean by “Nice day, isn’t it?”
What did that one mean by “The crunch is on.”?
The echo of her trail grew more and more subtle in the weeks that followed. One morning I awoke to the distinct aroma of stocking sweat on my feather pillow and the scattering of pine needles haloed about my head. Another morning I stepped from the shower stall only to find the tracing of a tiny sneaker sole outlined in the condensation of my bathroom mirror.
I’ve lost twelve pounds over the last month. People have stopped complimenting me on my weight loss. They can see the hunger hiding beneath my eyes. They can see the fear and the haunting despair. I think they can even see the reflection of a young girl screaming.
Only yesterday morning I found a carton of spoiled milk in my refrigerator. I don’t remember buying the milk. There was a picture of her on the side of the milk carton. Have You Seen This Child?
I shook the carton.
There was something inside of the carton.
I didn’t open it up.
Some nights I awaken from the vision of the dark forest floor, the cross hatch of pine needles and dead leaves, limbs and roots of trees twisting through the dirt like a mosaic of stark petrified eels.
And then I see it. Right exactly where I buried it. I see a small pink foot poked out from beneath the dirt of a hastily dug grave. It looked like a strangely twisted mushroom, five fat pink blossoms, a red centipede oaring itself across her cold bare sole.
On nights like these I will awaken and climb into my old grey Plymouth and drive out to the lonely country road where she’ll be waiting for me in the moonlight, her bright pink tracksuit smeared with road dirt and grease.
I pull up quietly beside her and open the passenger door.
“Get in,” I say.
And in the morning when I awake, uncertain as to whether or not I’ve dreamed the whole damn thing, I’ll rise up, placing my feet upon the bare tile floor, my left foot falling precisely into the open mouth of a sneaker.
It fits.
The damn shoe fits.
There always ought to be a story or two in any collection that has not been printed elsewhere – which is where this next story comes into play. I wrote it with a Virginia ghost story collection in mind and it has been sitting in the bottom of my filing cabinet. Yes folks, I am about to peddle a trunk story in your direction. Treat it kindly. I am certain it feels neglected.
Memory Stains
My wife always said I was crazy. She said she loved me just the same but she was certain sure that I was stark raving mad. I had fallen in love with a memory ghost, she swore, that I loved even more than her.
She’d seen it come over me like a fog rolling in from the grey Atlantic, one of my moods coming on. Like an alcoholic yearning for the bottle I’d catch a feeling and I’d walk out the door and stand in the backyard.
Are you out here Granddaddy?
I’d catch a whiff of a memory or a dream. Something on the breeze like the taste of gunpowder or the penny scent of hard spilled blood. The evening sun is a cannonade of recollection and more than a little regret. I can hear my wife in the house behind me, singing softly on the evening breeze, her voice lulled and low and coming in from a long way off.
Let me tell you a ghost story.
I know, most folks nowadays just don’t believe in ghosts.
That’s all right by me. I know better. There isn’t a man or woman walking the face of this earth who doesn’t drag the shackle of a ghost behind him. You’ll feel it tailing out abaft of you, a little like the breeze of autumn catching at the last shadowed coattails of August.
I’m talking about regret, of course. The should-have’s and the would-have’s that we carry through our lives. You can try to grin over it and sing out through it but nothing will hide that stain of guilt in the lonesome hour when the moon climbs up high enough to talk to the maker of all good things worth remembering.
Wall paper won’t cover it.
Paint won’t hide it.
Further back than I can recollect God and the government carved out a little notch in the northeast corner of West Virginia, right where she bumps noses with the pretty little state of Maryland. I live about a stone’s throw and a strong throwing arm away from that notch, just northeast of the town of Petersburg in the little town of Moorefield.
We don’t do much around here except grow crops and grow old but every now and then somebody will strike up a conversation and as sure as squirrel shooting somebody will start talking about the old Frist House.
There are a lot of stories get passed back and forth about that there old house and some of them are true and some of them aren’t. Most of what is remembered is just what folks have talked about since long ago. That’s kind of where history and reckon get together and sit down, right in the middle of hearsay.
But I can tell you the truth of the matter because my daddy’s daddy rode with the McNeill’s Rangers back in the war that broke up everything; sometime after the Confederates hot-shot Fort Sumter into a bonfire to make war over. Right off following the first shot West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy and announced itself to be true Union blue but that was just politicians talking. More than a few of us weren’t quite ready to forget about our Southern roots.
Memories can linger a lot longer than any ghost.
I keep saying us, don’t I? That’s just my Granddaddy talking through my dreams. He comes to me here in the dark hours and we sit and reminisce. He tells me how when Captain John Hanson McNeill rode in from Missouri, my Granddaddy and his friends were willing to join up with the fight. We pulled together what muskets we had and rode out for glory.
I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Saying we when I meant to say they. See, that’s the god blasted truth of the matter. Some nights when Granddaddy gets to talking it’s just me spilling out the yarns he’s told me over the years. Like a river carves its own bed, my Granddaddy’s roots run strong and true through the eel-tangle of my rebel veins.
It ain’t fashionable to talk about rebellion these days. No one but a couple of diehard rednecks really believes the South is ever going to do much more than fart fustily in its union britches. That rebel yell is nothing more than a hoot and a holler you’ll sometimes hear rising up at the truck pulls and pig wrestling.
But me and Granddaddy, we still believe.
Sometimes even in the daytime I can feel my Granddaddy close and true. Sometimes when I reach for a spanner wrench I feel the hilt of my Granddaddy’s cavalry sabre blistering in my hand. Sometimes when I grab for the bolt gun I’m thinking about that old Le Mat revolver my Granddaddy wore throughout the entire Civil War. I’ve never told my wife about that. Sometimes I worry that I’m apt to kill someone at work, caught up in one of my gunpowder reveries.
It hasn’t happened yet.
McNeill and his band of bravos made quite the name for themselves as they rode through Hardy County and the fine state of Maryland. They skirmished where ever they rode across the enemy. They raided supply trains, hay wagons, camps and the railroads that stitched across the countryside.
My Granddaddy says that McNeill was a good man and it was a damn shame that the Confederacy saw fit to court martial McNeill for accepting Confederate deserters into his ranks. Horse forget-me-nots I say. All he was doing was giving them rag-running rebs a second chance. Even after the charges were dropped the stain stuck with McNeill for some time. My Granddaddy stuck just as long. There was only one time when he ever felt that burning sting of shame.
There was a man who lived in Moorefield. John Frist was his name. He believed in the Union and I guess every man is entitled to his own beliefs but what done him in was the fact that his beliefs ran hard against those of John McNeill’s. One night John McNeill led a squad of men into the Frist House. There they murdered John Frist, drawing a bayonet across his throat as they had their way with his wife and used the butts of their muskets on his three children.
“The walls were painted with blood by the
time we got done,” my Granddaddy said.
I sometimes see that painted in my mind. Walls, spattered and dripping with a crimson splashing of spilled life. I wonder if my Granddaddy regrets it or if he reveled in the carnage of the moment and repented at his leisure.
“They needed to die,” My Granddaddy told me. “But their memory stains my mind and not all of the water of the Potamac will wash it away.”
After the massacre the house was used as a prison for captured runaway slaves. That was McNeill’s idea too. I think he thought it was funny, using the walls that guarded the death screams of a man so ardently Yankee as a cage and a casket for those who had momentarily slipped their shackles.
As the war crawled to an end, some say that McNeill chained those slaves in the basement and locked the door behind him. In 1865 a group of concerned townsfolk were led by my Granddaddy down into the Frist house. The air was clotted with decay and the bones of those who’d died below were tangled together as if the runaway slaves had hugged themselves as they died. I wonder what they were trying to hang on to.
The house is still intact here in Moorefield. It has been passed around like an unwanted hoodoo charm, owned by many families over the years. Every year, on the anniversary of the Frist House Massacre, a strange iron-red stain will bleed from the walls and the floors. It might be the memory of the blood of the Frist family or it might be the shackle-specter of iron chains rusting into eternity.
Wall paper won’t cover it. Paint won’t hide it.
I can look across from my back field and see the Frist House. Some nights I can see a lantern burning softly in the upper window. Some nights I hear singing down low like in the cellar. Some nights I see my Granddaddy walking towards the Frist House from a long way off across the field and it never seems like he’ll ever really get there and get gone.
Some nights I remember my wife telling me that she was leaving me. She handed me papers that were written in a fine printed hand. There were tears in her eyes but mostly a weariness that would not fade. I guess I couldn’t blame her. It was hard to stay married to a man so married to the past. I cheated on her every night out here in these lonesome fields talking to the spirit of my Granddaddy.
