by Ann Pancake
What were they like?
Dressing tables under a strange white dust as plush as felt and chairs painted in festive colors, aquas and limes and yellows. Decaying clothes looking like dead animal pelts tossed over their backs, and their makeup in some rooms was still sitting open, as though all the actors had leapt up to flee a disaster. They weren’t like dressing rooms on TV and in movies because while every dressing room Janie had seen there had been windowless, insular, lit only by artificial light, these dressing rooms were open, spacious, every fourth wall a window that started below her waist and rose nearly to a ceiling twice as tall as she. It was weird. It was really weird—Yeah, it sounds really weird, it sounds spooky, how come you weren’t scared, Janie?—and Janie knew these rooms were smack dab in the middle of downtown Remington, Janie knew she should be seeing out each window just another brick wall. But every last one, the spattered ones, the fractured ones, the ones missing panes, were flooded with the opaque glary white the sky took on all over West Virginia in the summer, but especially in Remington.
The other popcorn girls were giggling again, teasing each other, while Ronnie smiled shyly, uncomfortable in his authority. “Okay,” he said. “The best for last. I’m gonna take you on down into the bottom basement now.”
Janie turned to follow, then stopped. For some reason, she wanted that last dressing room for herself for a minute. Without even Uncle Bobby accompanying her in her head. She heard the other three voices receding and again she marveled at her lack of fear. If she’d been asked what she felt, she would have said just a little sad. On the dressing table’s surface, a single open jar of face cream, yellowed and parched to cracks. In the ornate gold scroll framing the mirror, a wasp nest. And then Janie noticed the mirror itself.
In the other rooms, the mirrors had been fissured on walls or lay shattered on the floors. Two mirrors had been still in one piece, but reflectionless, just stippled black glass. This mirror looked back. It framed Janie’s red-smocked torso. Cut her off at her neck.
Abruptly, Janie stooped. She seized either end of the dressing table with a hand. She scanned the mirror’s whole surface. And finally the fear flared, but Janie didn’t turn away. The mirror held just her. And to see one’s face in such glass, in such light.
MOUSESKULL
I PUT MY HAND on it while shinnying down a wall in the barn, fleeing my sister Mavis in a game of Witch, and when I grab a side-running beam to slow my fall, my fingers graze it on a little ledge there.
I nest the skull in my hand. Drop the rest of the way down. Throw up my face to make sure no brothers or sisters saw, but they’re still shrieking in the haymow, and only Mickey, the biggest and wisest dog, watches me. I tuck my mouseskull in my jacket pocket, stoop-run to a manger, and wiggle in.
There in the moldy dusk I study it with my fingers, with my nose. The flesh has rotted down to dry, bald bone, but the mouse is new-dead enough it exhales a corpsey odor still, an odor home to me, from all the creatures, tiny as mice, big as coons, who crawl into our house walls to die. I blow across it to unstink it some. Hear the kids rattling down the haymow stairs, hide the skull deep in my jacket. I jump out of the manger empty-handed and still make them scream.
An hour later, I’m in my bedroom unscrewing the lid of the only perfume I own, a bronze liquid labeled “1929” as nostril-shocking as a chemical sap. I cradle my mouseskull in my left palm while I daub it with a “1929”-soaked cotton ball, whispering apologies as I do, then blow on it again, this time to make it dry. I mount it on a pillow at the head of my bed.
It is the unbleached yellow of fresh-killed antlers or grown-up teeth. As thin-boned as locust shell it looks, but when my brother Sam tackled me at the end of Witch, it did not crack—my skull flawless right down to its exquisite tiny fangs. I press with my thumb the jagged place that used to wear the softness of nose. Peer into the bonery at the back where it dropped from its spine, a rough honeycomb that won’t let my finger in. And suddenly I know exactly what to do.
I swing off my bed and rummage through a dresser drawer. I find a long white shoestring with just a bit of grime. I snap the shoestring like a little whip and moisten the frayed end with my mouth, then necklace my mouseskull through where its eyes used to be.
ON MONDAY, I decide to wear my necklace to school, and because there are five younger children to get ready, my mother either doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. I am deliciously hopeful that the other fourth-graders will notice its remarkableness. But desensitized to the unusual like my classmates are—after four years of exposure to the intricate spiralings of ringwormed hair, and Kevin with his shoebox-shaped run-over-as-a-toddler head, and tiny towhead Henry who speaks with the ravaged baritone of a drain-cleaner-swallowing old man, and the CPs and the Downs and the shiny house fire survivors—only two people comment on my necklace.
One is Ronnie Phillips, whose desk the teacher has recently pushed against mine so I can help him with his work, she says. Ronnie has fanged teeth and the manner of a forty-year-old man who after seeing it all has now put away his hard-living, wild-running days and mellowed to a gentle jadedness. Ronnie glances at my necklace and says, “Mouse that big, probably a rat.”
The other is Michelle Livingstone. Who is not from here, who moved to West Virginia from Connecticut two years ago. She sees my necklace straightaway. “What’s that? Who’d put it on a shoestring and wear it to school! You smell gross.”
OUR HOUSE HAS twenty-one rooms, some heated, some not, a few less indoors than out. There are rooms that leak rain and rooms that hold, rooms with windows that peer into other rooms, rooms up two stairs, rooms down three. Rooms from the nineteen hundreds, rooms from the eighteen hundreds, two rooms from the seventeens. A few rooms that comfort, many that scare.
A basement with one room of coal, a pyramid of clinkers, and a squat cement furnace growing out of the ground. An attic I see only by standing in the yard and squinting up at high dormered windows for a glimpse of the blacksnakes Mrs. Dock says raise their families in there. Over top the kitchen a room called “the little study room,” where no one studies. A rust-stained toilet. A rust-stained sink. A freckled aluminum pipe passing through from the old oil stove below.
The ghosts prefer the second floor. For a long time, they were only my grandfather. Then Ham died, too.
HAM, “WHO WORKED for your granddaddy,” as my parents say, lived six miles upriver on our family farm in an unpainted cinderblock house a-foam in a blizzard of albino cats. Cats uncountable, unownable, unpettable, although when we were four, five years old, Sam and I tried. Crept close the house, froze-so-as-not-to-be-seen, crept close the house, froze-so-as-not-to-be-seen. Until we tripped some trigger line and the cat storm blew up, cats mashed themselves under the foundation, bolted silent-screaming into weed fields, warped through open window cracks, disintegrated under eaves and into culverts. Their ear insides, their toes, their tongues, all of that colored like ham, and my older cousins told me Ham ate them, but I knew better than that. Those cats would never have submitted to being meals.
The cat blizzard was a natural chapter in the snowy history of Ham, who, about the time I was born, passed out in a snowdrift while hitchhiking home from the VFW and froze off the three smallest toes on his right foot. Ham never worked again and ever after had to lean on a three-toed cane and wear special shoes that looked hewn from a block of black rock. His real name was Raymond—we knew this from the collect calls from the county jail—and “Why do they call him Ham?” any new brother or sister would ask when old enough to wonder, and my father would weary-say, “Because he likes ham.” But I knew better than that, too. Ham smaller in his hips than he was in his belly and chest, him tapered like a ham standing on end. A whole country ham in its grayish sack, propped upright on the tri-pronged aluminum cane.
After my granddaddy’s estate was settled, the farm fell under the charge of my aunt’s husband, who had an MBA. When I was eight, my granddaddy dead three years and Ham unable to work for way longer t
han that, this uncle had the cinderblock house bulldozed to the ground.
Many a night I lay in bed and visioned it, the cat bomb detonating the instant the dozer blade struck. The cat cloud suspended for long seconds in air before collapsing to flurry the valley, every one landing on its feet. The original cats fructified and multiplied, until within a year the whole countryside was aghost with Ham cats, them always just behind what you could see. In the meantime, Ham moved in with “some woman on the other side of town” and the jail calls kept coming. “Why is Ham put in jail?” some younger brother or sister would ask, and our father would explain again, “Drunk in public. They only keep him a few days.”
Now and again I would be in the backseat of the station wagon when we picked Ham up and gave him a ride to the house of the woman on the other side of town. The whole way there, Ham would talk in his round, rivery voice—“Ham should have been a lawyer, the way that man can talk,” my mother would say—and I kept an eye on the air because Ham, unlike everybody else I knew, sometimes talked about my granddaddy.
“Me and your dad,” he’d sometimes say to my father, or, “Your dad used to,” and, always, right before he did, there would be a change in the air. At first a warple . . . then it snapped cold-bright. “What a shame about your dad,” he said just one time, and just one other time, “Why do you think he dropped that nail down that pipe?” “Your dad was one of the kindest men I ever knew”—Ham said that every other time—and “Uh-huh,” my dad would say, his face shut tight as a jammed dresser drawer, then start talking about something else. And the air dulled back.
A year after the cats went refugee, it happened. We walked behind our barn, six miles north of the Ham-flattened house, and there in the broom sedge crouched a nightmare white tom. Fur spiked like he was outlet-plugged, asylum escapee eyes, and, most ghastly of all, a hairless pink tail. He invisibled himself the moment after we saw.
“We can call him Snowball,” my little sister said. I stared at Mavis’s naïveté. I both coveted it and was horrified at where it might end her up.
JESUS’S VOICE IS not in red in my new Living Word Children’s Bible, on its cover a berobed Christ shepherding children in 1950s dungarees and dotted-Swiss dresses. My new Living Word Children’s Bible was given me three weeks before I found my mouseskull by my normal grandparents, who live in another part of the state. The foreword in the Living Word Children’s Bible recommends that children read first the Gospel of John, so I am reading first the Gospel of John. Every night before sleep, and it is beginning to dawn on me that if I hadn’t ever started this, I wouldn’t have set myself up to disappoint God by stopping, so I cannot stop. I’m scripture-trapped. When I’m finished with my daily dose—the Old Testament has much better stories, I know, but I dare not say this even in my head—I fold in the bookmark ribbon, close the pages, and turn to my nightstand. I place my Living Word Children’s Bible gingerly on top of a stack of books already there.
At the bottom of this stack lies squashed the true book about paranormal activity I ordered from My Weekly Reader in a fit of self-sabotaging curiosity, on its cover a photograph of an actual ghost: a smoke woman descending curved stairs. I have a second Bible, the oldest book I own, a white King James the size and shape of a Band-Aid box, presented to me the week I was born, with gilded pages and my name misspelled in that same gilt on the front. In this Bible, Jesus does speak in red. The King James Bible, I’ve placed strategically in the little bit of space between the bottom of the book stack and the edge of the nightstand, making sure the King James does not touch the true ghost book, but is near enough to throw against it an invisible protective steam.
That done, I lift my necklace over my head. I hold the skull between finger and thumb to gaze in the sockets of its eyes, stroke its nose, rub its forehead the way my horse books say horses like to be rubbed. I press it against my cheek and slip it under my own nose, and just when it seems the corpsey reek might have all the way disappeared, it flares back through the perfume like roadkill in a thaw. I rest my skull in the dead center of my new Living Word Children’s Bible, right on Jesus’s chest. Nothing else can touch the top of that Bible, nothing is allowed to obscure so much as a tuft of Galilean grass except the mouseskull.
I reach over my head and pull the bolt tied to the string that runs through eyes on the ceiling to the bulb in the middle of the room. The second the light snaps dark, I plunge under the covers and jerk them over my head. Recently it’s occurred to me that such nightly oxygen deprivation might cause brain damage, but I figure if a turtle can survive it, I can too. I lie on my back as still as glass, willing my muscles, my bones, to melt towards the mattress. If not a lump of me shows under the bedspread, not the slightest rise of me in the sheets, no ghosts will bother me because they won’t know I’m here. “Please, Lord,” I pray in a whisper. “Make me flat.”
WE GET THE Ouija board a few weeks before Christmas from Polly Sharon, the organist at our church. Every other week, we visit her so our father can buy eggs and we can gape at the Civil War bullet holes in the kitchen door and the Methuselahan dog with the cannonball-sized knot in his side, possibly a Civil War artifact himself. Polly Sharon loves us and gives us a present this year even though our father says, No, no, you don’t have to do that, they don’t need anything. When we unwrap the box at home, it has fewer parts than any board game we’ve played before, and I don’t see how the pronunciation of it, which our mother can say, matches up with its letters. Distracted by the countdown to Christmas Day, only Sam gives the Ouija board any more attention until Mrs. Dock notices it.
Mrs. Dock, “who worked for your grandmother,” now helps our mother once a week with the cleaning and will babysit us after dark. Before dark, it’s me. Mrs. Dock lives down the railroad tracks, and her husband, Delvin, like Ham, drinks too much. Our mother doesn’t drink at all. Our father drinks once or twice a year a wine called Christian Brothers, the word Christian evidently canceling out the sin. To reach my earliest memory of Mrs. Dock I must walk way back in my head, and there I see her laboring up the stairs with a tray bearing a cereal bowl, a small pitcher of milk, and a box of Special K. I asked my mother why, meaning why didn’t Granddaddy eat downstairs with everybody else. My mother, misunderstanding, answered, “Your granddaddy thinks Special K will help him get better.”
Mrs. Dock is a five-by-three-foot library of information our parents either haven’t learned or don’t believe: the “black man” who lives under our bridge and will get us if we’re bad, the rats that gnaw through the soft spots in babies’ heads, the cats who want to suck out their breaths. “Sugar tit” is what she calls a pacifier although she never, ever otherwise cusses, but the word “tit” is one we’re forbidden to say, and we find “sugar tit” scandalous and hysterical. Mrs. Dock acquaints us with hoop snakes that roll up and chase you through fields, and black racer snakes that chase you flat, and milk snakes that slither into barn stalls to suck the cows’ . . . yes, titties. She tells all this without a trace of melodrama, tells it like she tells you you’ll catch a cold if you wade the creek in January. She almost never laughs, has no entertainer in her and no time to waste. The only game she will play is “school,” and only if she can be a student named “Susie.” It was Mrs. Dock alone in the house working for my grandmother when my granddaddy dropped the nail down the pipe.
When Mrs. Dock sees the Ouija board, she says, matter-of-fact, “That’s a tool of the Devil, Lainey.” Mrs. Dock just tells you how it is, you can take or you can leave it. “Do your mom and daddy know you have that?” Then she wobbles off to the kitchen. The second she shuts the door, I shove the Ouija board under all the other games in the closet.
Later, I tell my mother what Mrs. Dock said.
“Do you really think Polly Sharon would give you something from the Devil?”
I finger the shoestring around my neck, shake my head. But the question sounds like what my mother says when I call her in the middle of the night. “It was just a bad dream,” she
says. “Go back to sleep.” And two or three times she’s added, “Even if your granddaddy was a ghost, do you really think he’d do anything to hurt you?”
OUR HOUSE IS strewn round with outlier buildings, as though in decades past it shuffled around and shed parts of itself. The pump house, the icehouse, the garage, the barn, woodshed, chicken house, goat shed. There is also the old mill, not a splinter of it still standing, but its innards retired in unexpected places—grinding stones rupturing the yard to stun mower blades, the giant wooden gear shaft in the barn I was shinnying down when I put my hand on the skull. Each building at a different stage of fall-down, and every one bulging with dead people’s or dead animals’ stuff.
In these outpost buildings we are seldom grown-up-watched. The animal places, now animal-less, are musty and mote-choked with what used to go into creatures and more of what used to come out—hillocks of stale unbaled hay, moldy sacks of oats and corn, and everywhere the desiccated turds you can throw at people, churn with a broom handle into a witch’s brew, build into wigwams and lean-tos for Indian and pioneer elves. In the buildings where people’s things are cached, we mole through dry-rotted cardboard boxes and peculiar-odored trunks and plain old uncrated piles, Mickey and Bingo always busy alongside us, raptured by two centuries of scent.
Oddly, none of these places feels haunted, as though all the castaway junk and belongings left behind have absorbed any ghosts or sated them. We unbury ice skates and child-sized boxing gloves, saddles we throw over nail kegs and ride, box traps and arrowheads and a snake in a jar of formaldehyde. We flip through ledger books and photo albums, the corner tabs unsticking and the pictures shuffling down—most of them boring, old-timey people we don’t know, but in a few I recognize our father and our aunts and uncles. Once, I uncovered one of my granddaddy.
