Mansion of High Ghosts

by James D. McCallister

  He closed the door. “I think maybe I’m gonna stick around here through the first part of the year. Help her do some crap. Maybe pressure-wash the deck. Repair that rotten threshold. Clean gutters. Grown-up stuff. Keep feeling like Daddy’s list of home improvement type-deals must be a mile long by now.”

  “That ain’t such a bad idea.”

  “You go on, though. Get going on school.”

  Relief, filling her like no lover ever had. “Are you sure?”

  “Sister of mine, I got this. This one’s on me. Besides—everything’s fine. Mama’s fine. She ain’t going anywhere.”

  Eighty

  Devin

  Christmas morning.

  Devin, led upstairs by Creedence to receive his gifts, tokens kept secret from her mother, as well as him.

  Eileen, cursing from downstairs, epithets coloring her accusations of rank ingratitude at such a display of secrecy and privilege. Gales of coughing and sputtering through her coffee and second of two morning cigarettes. For her sake, Devin had run himself ragged trying to make sure Christmas was ‘normal’.

  But how normal could it be? You’re back home, beau.

  Creedence, shutting the door to her room, smiled but seemed tense.

  “What’s all the suspense?”

  Devin sat on the edge of her bed in lounging pants and a grungy old T-shirt, one Mama kept threatening to throw away. Rubbing swollen eyes, grunting as though suffering a headache and thirsty as all get out; since awakening he’d drunk what seemed a gallon of water, a quart of coffee. Dehydrated. For some reason.

  Creedence, chewing her lower lip. “Promise me something.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “If you don’t like these presents, my feelings won’t be hurt. Not a bit.”

  “I’m sure it’s great. Let’s see what you got.”

  “Always impatient. Nothing changes.”

  Reaching behind the bed she pulled out a package, square and flat. “First, something I did myself.”

  Ripping into the bright holiday paper, snowflakes, silvery on an indigo background; Devin, seeing the back of a frame, a nice one.

  “This better not be a picture of Dusty.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Pulling off the rest of the paper, turning over the frame, his crusty old Devin-heart skipped a beat: Before him lay a beautiful, detailed charcoal drawing of Libby, standing in shafts of sunlight. Libby, holding kitten-Prudy.

  He gasped, clutching the frame to his chest.

  Devin, knowing the snapshot from which the image had been taken, a photo from the last time Libby and Devin had visited Chilton before the accident, only days after they’d adopted the kitten. The day they’d told their families about the move to Arcadia.

  As in the photograph, the drawing of Libby depicted her happy, bright and alive. Libby, cradling the kitten like an infant.

  A squiggle in the corner:

  By Creedence,

  For Devin,

  Xmas 2004

  Devin, biting the inside of his cheek like Dubya and Poppy at the first inauguration, dignity and decorum demanding no tears must fall. “Bless you, my sister.”

  “I call it ‘The Sunbeamers.’”

  “You bet you do.”

  “I thought you might be ready to look at them both again.”

  Putting down the drawing, pulling his sister to him, he held her tight, possessive; he pressed his face into the shoulder of her ratty old terry cloth robe. “Thank god for my sister.”

  “There’s something else, too. Ready?”

  Pulling back, bussing her on the lips, he winked. “Gonna be hard to top the first one.”

  Leading Devin over to another box, a small cube on the floor beside her dresser, she held out her hands and waited.

  “I thought that this might help, too. Even more permanent. Something to outlast all of us.”

  Devin, picking it up. “Dang. Heavy. This better not be a brick with a Wal-mart gift card taped onto it.”

  “Just open it on the floor.”

  Tearing into the paper. “Oh—god.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Is it okay?”

  Breathing hard, not looking at Creedence, he could only nod ‘yes’.”

  Now a flood came, hot and silent, saltwater dripping onto the monument to his cat. Sucking wind. Coughing like his mother’d been doing all season long.

  He settled down. “You got me with this. But in a good way.”

  “I thought we could put it in the backyard, if you wanted. With the others.”

  Devin, composing himself, put his hand on her freckled face. “I know a better place.”

  Eighty-One

  Creedence

  The new year, days away, found Eileen shuffling in a threadbare housedress, muttering and lashing out with sudden, vitriolic rages, many aimed at Devin. Such diatribes, Chelsea noted, ran off his back like warm duckwater.

  He seemed to want to let her get it out.

  Knew it was frustration over the cancer. Yeah.

  Now that her brother had told her how bad, it all made sense. A hospice nurse was to come by starting next week. Creedence was still not supposed to know about that part.

  Well. She still had to move out. If Mama wasn’t gonna act like she was sick, to Chelsea she wouldn’t be sick. She had to start thinking about classes, oldschool stuff like English and History. She’d have to sit through all that mess to get to the art stuff.

  Like had bored her to tears in school.

  She wanted to draw.

  To look at things and draw them.

  She’d get to that soon enough.

  By the time she was thirty-five.

  Or something along those lines.

  Double dang. Mama’s talk about her not needing to go to college had a ring of truth, suddenly.

  Eileen, sparing only the cats her wrath: coddling and spoiling and babytalking the pets to a ridiculous degree, both hers as well as Chelsea’s soon-to-be-transient brood; attached in particular to the aging, declining Mr. Bubbie, the once lion king of the house now able only to eat, sleep, purr, and shuffle around on unsteady paws that tingled from nerve damage—when she found him as a kitten, the tip of his tail had been broken in an accident.

  The cat’s time, nigh; the truth seen in his rheumy eyes, in the greasy coat he seemed no longer willing or able to clean.

  She could see Devin getting the ‘ick’ in his gut over discussion of any such pet drama. Enough, already, was the look on his face. Which she understood.

  Offhand, the night before, he had changed the subject of Mr. Bubbie’s condition:

  “I think old Roy Earl might still be sweet on you, girl. You believe that?”

  “Too bad. He had his chance.” She recalled Devin watching as her gears ground. “He isn’t still single. Is he?”

  “Hasn’t found the right gal yet, he said Something about not enough freckles or pretty long red hair.”

  Oh, she had said. “Goodness. He didn’t mean me.”

  Devin had snorted and shaken his head. He handed over a business card for Roy Earl’s smoothie stand—little cartoon bananas.

  “He said he drew them little banana-dudes himself. I thought y’all would have something in common.”

  She turned it over. A hand-scratched cell number. Let’s get caught up sometime! with a smiley face.

  How sweet, she had thought. How normal. Compared to Billy’s refusal to respond to her apologies, which chapped her dimpled ass but-good, Roy Earl sounded like an actual gentleman.

  Eileen, stooped over wiping down Mr. Bubbie with a special feline cleaning-cloth from a plastic packet beside her on the oriental rug, cooed a whispered mantra of love and assurance, when she wasn’t coughing. Using an oxygen tank at night, now. She kept it in the closet during the day.

  Helluva piece of theater, Devin kept saying, with genuine admiration, at Mama’s attempts to keep Creedence pristine.

  Hearing her
old cat’s motor revving into high gear, Creedence smiled. But also knew.

  “He ain’t too good, is he, Mama?”

  Eileen, unfettered vehemence: “You ain’t got the sense to take care of yourself, much less these damn cats.” Coughing, heaving for breath. “I swear but you don’t. Neither one of you. The thought of you taking him into yet another environment so soon—are you trying to kill this precious animal?”

  Nothing had changed. Mama’s words felt like being kicked in the stomach. “I wish you’d quit with these little scenes. I ain’t gonna leave my pet behind. And look at you. Mama, you can barely take care of your own, much less my kitties. If you didn’t have me and Devin to scoop your damn litter boxes, this place would smell like a zoo right now.”

  A long moment held, like on one of the TV shows right before a commercial break, the two characters having argued up to some dramatic peak to stand there, looking all bug-eyed at each other with music swelling. The mother, the daughter, the cat, purring and old and infirm.

  The mother, infirm. But not old. Mama and Daddy will both have died in their 60s, Creedence thought. Unless of course Mama pulls through. Nothing would surprise me.

  Mr. Bubbie, creaky, walked toward her on his shaky feet for a few steps. Before making it over to his cat-mom and with his breathing labored as though exhausted, he lowered back down onto the floor.

  Chelsea allowed herself to acknowledge the truth: yes, it was Mr. Bubbie’s time. Nothing told you like when their appetite went. And his was mostly gone.

  “Maybe it is time to take him in. Do you think?”

  “Oh, lord,” Eileen wept. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Mama, I don’t know what to do either.”

  Creedence lurched forward—not to the cat, but to her mother. They fell into one another’s arms and both howled with grief, their words coming in long strings of aggrieved gobbledygook like Devin’s old drunk-speak.

  At last the tears dried up. There wasn’t anything to say. They hadn’t been crying about the cat. Well—they had. And other things.

  “He’s fine for now, darling. Let’s not do this to ourselves.”

  “I’ll keep my eye on him another day or two. See how he eats tonight.”

  “That’s right. Now help me go upstairs. I got to lay back down.”

  “You need to have your oxygen on.”

  Eileen gasped. “Hush your smart mouth. That’s only to help me sleep.”

  Chelsea helped her to bed.

  “Where’s Devin been?”

  “He said he was going to see Uncle Hill about borrowing a truck.”

  “For what?” Eileen remembered the moving plans. “Oh—p’shaw. Not that mess again.”

  “It’s too much money, now, not to go through with it.”

  “Lord. Let me get in a nap before I have to fix supper later for you young’uns. I can’t keep fighting these battles much longer.”

  Eighty-Two

  Devin

  Devin, Uncle Hill, strolling the lot and shooting the shit—Edgewater County gossip, Redtails football, a big poker pot the car dealer won in the back rooms at Pike’s Bait & Pawn, where redneck movers and shakers kept a private gentleman’s club and speakeasy. The secret societies who ran the county, as Devin had learned from his dad, operated in the shadows. Had their own rules. The whole idea had made him sick.

  Hampton told Devin of his plans to run for mayor of Tillman Falls; Devin, thinking it’d be an appropriate endeavor for a man of such prior accomplishment, wealth and connections. Wishing his quote-unquote uncle well in the effort.

  “A member of the merchant class as well-known as you should ease right into office.”

  “Yeah—it’s who you know. And I know everybody.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute.”

  Devin, telling filthy jokes and crazy stories about his past on the road; Hampton, doubling over with laughter, almost choked on the juices from the plug stuck in his cheek.

  A sample: “Why on Sunday afternoons do rednecks always do it doggy-style?”

  Hampton, breathless from a previous ribald witticism, gasped I dunno tell me.

  “So they can both look at NASCAR!”

  “Lord have mercy.” Hampton, wiping tears, his merriment in senescence. “Devin, son—you always was a handful.”

  “That’s what y’all keep telling me.”

  “Means the world that you’re here. You’re home. And you seem whole. I speak for your daddy when I say that, you understand.”

  “Glad to be here. And—I understand. More than you know.”

  Putting his hands on Devin’s bony shoulders, he squeezed the two hard bumps underneath the denim jacket hard enough to hurt. “You have been through hell, my boy.”

  “Hell, and back.” Devin, an air of sanguine dismissal. “But I put myself through it, mostly. Don’t forget that.”

  “You did the best could, son. Considering what happened. That’s the way it seems to me.”

  “We better go with that version, then.”

  A hearty handshake. “And I got to say, Colette seems happier than I ever seen. At least since she was a little girl,” his wistfulness here exponentiated. “Back in the day.”

  “Creed keeps talking second chances.”

  “Everybody needs one. But, I can’t just go and replace somebody I trust on the switchboard, not somebody like my baby niece. It’s one of the most important jobs we got here—if the customers can’t get to the sales department, we don’t move freight. Where to route the freaking calls is like the nervous system of the company.”

  “Putting it that way, I guess so.”

  Hampton and Devin went on to share their excitement over the Redtails’ upcoming New Year’s Day bowl appearance, but Devin, a big phony. Abhorring sports and most other entertainments, but faking his way through with reasonable alacrity.

  Running out of small talk, they paused in front of the enormous American flag hanging from a fifty-foot pole. The big rigs downshifted on the freeway offramp a quarter mile away. The smell of charring meat wafted from the Hardee’s. The grinding of a backhoe engine from another nearby parcel; the laying of another plain of asphalt for what Hampton said was going to be a nice-ass plaza with an upscale grocer as anchor.

  Devin, rocking back on his heels, smoking. “Uncle Hill? A question.”

  Cursing his obliviousness, Hampton spat brown juice onto the asphalt of the iconic legacy car dealership he’d inherited. “You need a new car, don’t you? That what this visit’s all about. Shoot, say the word and you’ll find a set of keys in your hand quicker than a New York minute.”

  Devin’s gaze, flashing across the rows of sunstruck windshields, the stars and stripes hanging in heavy repose above their heads; the flag hung still as could be, awaiting a breeze substantial enough to lift such a grandiose shank of colorfully resonant cloth. “That right? Any car on the lot?”

  Uncle Hill, ever the closer, slapped his hands together so hard a report like a gunshot slapped back from the huge glass windows of the showroom. “For you, son? Sign and drive.”

  “No more cars.” Holding onto Hampton’s meaty arm. “Just came to say how grateful I am for all the help you’ve given the Ruckers through the years.”

  Touched, tearful. “It’s what you do for your loved ones.”

  “Only one other thing I need to know, Uncle Hill.”

  “Shoot.”

  Grinning like he’d won a contest against the odds. Against time itself. “You and Mama—y’all still sneak around?”

  Hampton, the ruddy color draining from his face. “I ain’t real certain I understand what it is you’re trying to say.”

  “I’m sure Daddy didn’t mind—since y’all were so close, and all.”

  Hampton, shamefaced. He examined the tips of his polished, snakeskin cowboy boots. “There’s something you ought to understand.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Your Mama, son, she’s a force of nature. When she makes her up m
ind she wants something—?” Grimacing as though physically pained. “Ain’t much anyone can do about it. You appreciate what I’m telling you?”

  Whatever ire previously felt now tempered by a twinge of empathy: “Beau—look who you’re talking to.”

  Hampton, holding out his hands in a helpless gesture of what can I tell you.

  Devin, playful, slapped at one of freckled bear-paws bearing rings: one from Carolina Military Academy down in Charleston, the other bearing the Masonic squared-circle. “I’m just funnin’, you old devil.”

  “You like to give me a thrombo.”

  Devin, leveling a finger at the broad chest of his so-called uncle—the hard Devin, heart crusted over, mean enough to bite the head off a rattlesnake—returned for a bonus appearance. “Creedence loved her Daddy more than all the world. So, no matter what happens down the line, you’d best keep your secrets held close. Like I do. Deal?”

  Hampton, subdued. “If only I had any decent secrets worth keeping, I’d probably be a happier man.”

  Devin, a slow nod. “You’re one of the richest men in the county. You built this place and made it better than your daddy could’ve ever dreamed. You put dumbass Edgewater County field-hands of all creeds and races onto payment plans and with rims and wax and tape decks and the whole bleeding shebang. And I respect that. I really do. But there’s only one more thing. One thing I got to ask you.”

  Hampton, blanching with anticipation, waited with a clenched jaw.

  “Creedence said we could borrow a truck off you for a day or two. To move her stuff to Columbia.”

  “You got it,” he said in a rushing cascade of relief. “Let’s go inside and get the keys.”

  Hampton hollered for a supplicant to scare up an new F-150 to sign out for a few days to his nephew, who was in a hurry; to put Hill’s personal DEALER tags on the vehicle.

  Devin waited, smoking, a pervasive emptiness sweeping through his body—after all this time, the big confrontation. And, what? He had managed to make Hill Hampton self-conscious about shit that went down decades ago.