by Ann Pancake
I leaned back with my behind on my heels and stared at it there. He was outside. My granddaddy was outside the house—I recognized the barn wall behind him, he stood in the part of the garden that still came up rhubarb, and there was even an unfamiliar beaglish dog pushing his nose into Granddaddy’s hand. I had seen my granddaddy outside one time, and that was in his green recliner, an inside chair my uncle pulled out onto the front porch. In the picture his hair was already white, but he stood outside, a hundred yards from the house, not in pajamas, but wearing regular clothes.
I looked behind me at the kids fighting over the nail-keg horse. I felt a ping of responsibility to show them the picture—or at least to show Sam, who remembered him. But a peculiar protectiveness—of them? of him?—smothered the ping. I found a spot in the album with a photo slot still sound, and I pressed the outside Granddaddy carefully into its corners. I closed the covers and stashed it away.
“COLLECT CALL FROM Raymond Clinster. Do you accept the charges?”
“Something happened between him and the woman on the other side of town,” our father tells our mother when he returns to the supper table, paper napkin flapping from his belt. “He’s got nowhere to go.”
While my granddaddy and grandmother had Ham and Mrs. Dock to work for them, our father has us. He’s decided the icehouse will be the most livable outbuilding and the easiest to clean up. Bundled up against the New Year’s cold, we restack bed frames and canning jar boxes and cobweb-filmed kitchen chairs and who-knows-what’s-in-them garbage bags high against the icehouse walls to make a clearing in the middle. We sweep, we mop, we wipe. We duct tape the slits in the walls where the sawdust insulation leaks out. We haul in a space heater, a mattress on a cot.
At first, our father carries Ham’s supper out to him, but then has to go to Charleston for a meeting, so my mother hands the foil-covered plates to me or to Sam and tells us come right back. By the time my father gets home, he and my mother have been spoiled by our help, and Sam and I end up feeding Ham most of the time.
I am not afraid of outside places, not even in the dark, at least I wasn’t before Ham moved in. And now I am afraid not because of Ham, who, alive, scares me not at all, but because I can’t help but believe that if Ham is here, that white naked-tailed cat cannot be far away. I learn to run fast without spilling the plate, even with a dinner-smell-bewitched dog or two thrashing through my legs. I race between kitchen window light and icehouse window light with my face held down so I won’t risk glancing at a lunatic cat at the edge of the yard. I skid short right outside Ham’s door, settle myself, rap on it twice, and push dogs back with one foot. Ham hollers, “C’mon in,” and I step into the whir of the space heater fan.
Ham is lying always on his side on the cot, and he will eat that way, too, elbow-propped, the space heater aimed at his feet. Always—I do not think it and cannot help it—my eyes are sucked first to those feet, and always the no-toes are hidden in a sock. I lean forward to hand him the plate, my mouseskull necklace swinging out a little—I never bother to put on a coat—and he says, “Tell your mother thanks.” Then I back off a few steps, Ham peeling away the foil, and even though I’m supposed to “come right back,” I can’t help the longer look my eyes must take next.
Down that Ham undershirt, the gray of a blood-swoled tick. Across the sack of his belly. Along the length of the work-pantsed legs that no longer work. Then I take in the smell of Ham, in that close space-heatered clearing, smell familiar to me and not unpleasant to me, the contained unwashedness of grown-up poor people with no water inside. A dry vinegar. Something to do with rising bread if rising bread could smell old and stale. My stare is clothespinned to the gray socks, but no matter how big I bug my eyeballs, how hard I push, I never discern the slightest sign of where those toes are not. Ronnie Phillips told me his brother ordered the X-ray glasses from the back of a Flintstones comic. When they didn’t work, he busted open a lens and found something that looked like a little feather inside.
Often, me standing there with my eyes dangling out, Ham’ll start talking in that tuneful river-flow voice, the beat just right between sentences and chews. When Ham talks to me, it’s like I’m not a kid. Not like he’s a sometimes drunk who used to work for my granddaddy. We’re the same. Not like I’m peculiar and so shy I’ve been mistaken for deaf. Not like he’s a Mrs. Dock kind of poor person whose eyes, even when their outsides stand still, dart around behind themselves. Never expecting or receiving a word in return, Ham talks, all of him right there in his face—the way Ronnie Phillips is, I realize, just like Ronnie Phillips, no gap between who’s inside and who’s out.
“I cut ice for this icehouse when I was a boy. Cut it up on Stump’s Eddy and dragged it out with horses. Them was different winters then. River never freezes that thick that long anymore.”
Or, “Bought me some mousetraps in town today. You all had a few cats around, keep down the mice.”
Or, “I do miss seeing your grandma. I reckon it’s nice and warm for her, though, down in Florida.”
And one evening I fasten on the foot longer than usual because, lo and behold, it’s got a new sock, a white one, no less, which might be easier to see through. I’m beaming into that sock, and I half-hear Ham say something about running into Mrs. Dock today, but I’m not really listening when, suddenly, the air changes. Just like how when Ham talks to my father in the car, I recognize it right away, suddenly everything—Ham, cot, me, sock, space heater—fades to background for the new air, cold like on your teeth, bright that hurts your eyes.
“Now I know Mrs. Dock don’t like to talk about it. But I asked her, early on, just oncet. And she said she knew as soon as she heard that nail what was going on, she didn’t have to hear the other. But then she did hear the other. And after that said she went out to that little back stoop and just set there, trying to think what to do.”
Ham pauses there, forks up another fish stick bite, and sees my face. He lays the fork down.
“Now your granddaddy,” he says, “was one of the kindest men I ever knew.” He holds my eyes to his. “Don’t you let nobody ever tell you anything different than that.”
THE IRON WATER in our house puts rust in our sinks, in our toilet bowls. Rust in the shower, rust in our clothes. We drink rusty water, chomp rusty ice cubes, eat potatoes, macaroni, and rice boiled in a rusty brew. Is it the iron water, I wonder, puts the copper hue in our blonde hair? Our dinner plates dull a mild orange, same color as our underwear. Our father says it is good for us, that it builds up our blood. During a 4-H meeting at our house, Becky Weelis goes to the bathroom, looks in the commode, and screams.
While our father’s at his meetings in Charleston, Sam and I must keep the coal furnace fed. In our house, ghosts rise, not fall, so the basement is less a scary place than a curious one, the place where the house starts to end and the outside to begin, a laboratory for experiments in science class bread mold. Our mother doesn’t like us stoking the hopper alone, so Sam and I descend together to the boardwalk over the coal-watery floor, usually in our pajamas because it’s a right-before-bed and right-after-you-wake-up kind of job. We take turns stepping into our father’s enormous rubber overshoes, then wading puddles to the coal bin, choking up on our shovel handle, and scooping a load. This is where we are, a month after Christmas, when Sam tells me again what he’s going to do.
“No,” I command. “You can’t. You can’t.”
Sam heaves a shovelful over the hopper rim, waits until the skattle sounds end. “Yeah.” Nonchalant. Resigned. Melodramatic. Sam can emanate all three at the same time. “I’m going to.” He hands the shovel to me.
It was ordering I tried last time, so this time I switch to beg. “Please, Sam. Please. Please don’t.”
“I’ve already made up my mind.” He walks out of the overshoes, pivots regally, and his Pufnstuf pajamas retire up the wooden stairs.
That afternoon I don’t have to go in there. No one’s sent me after anything. Usually I dare not enter even
the room we must pass through to get to the little study room, but today, I cup my mouseskull in my hand, turn the knob, and step down in.
The little study room is unheated but brilliant. Winter sun. Dazzling motes. A sink and a toilet along one wall from the days, I’ve been told, when a “servant” stayed here. The floor tilts a little from every corner, all of it running down to a slight center sag. I stand against the wall on an uphill edge, and I look around. At the clutter of the rolltop desk that gives the little study its name. The joint of pipe running up from the old oil stove in the kitchen below. The spider dust, the insect husks, the fly crusts over every place the room lies flat.
Then I brace for the terror, I wait. Until I realize that I am less scared than separated. My eyes not touching my mind, my heart not touching my guts, not touching my legs and arms, and my iron-thickened blood standing still. Nothing touching nothing, so there is no channel for the scared to move through. I already know, from errands past, that there is no box of bullets. No box of nails.
There is rust in the toilet, rust in the sink, but no rust in the sag of that varnishless floor.
BINGO HAS PUPS. Mickey does, too—the only time in my life or theirs such a coincidence occurs, and I know it’s because of Ham in the icehouse. Blizzard of cats. Downpour of dogs. Early February wet false thaw, and Bingo has hers in the garage like she always does, under a wobbly old table, and like always, she has three girls and one boy. Mickey, with her significantly higher IQ, shifts her birthing places, and we have to sleuth a little before we find her under the front porch. I lie on the steps in a cold drizzle, angling a flashlight through the crack, and finally I count eight. Because we still have three pups—now dogs, actually—from earlier litters, this makes our total seventeen.
It takes a while to think up twelve new names, and “Taffy” is not one of my best. But Taffy’s Sugar Daddy–colored hair is the softest of all, and it is Taffy Ham chooses. As soon as she is weaned, and without Ham saying a word to any of us, to my parents or to hers, there Taffy is one evening when I carry in Ham’s plate. She’s curled up against Ham’s sideways belly on the cot.
We are forbidden to bring animals inside, but Ham is a grown-up and a guest. Taffy turns quickly snobblish and prematurely mature, like a little girl gone beauty contestant too young. Never does she leap off the cot and clamor at my legs like a normal dog would do, choosing instead to tuck in closer to Ham, haughty under his palm. By now it is April, still light when I carry out the plate, and the space heater less often turned on. With each warming day, my anticipation builds. Surely the sock must soon come off.
One unseasonably warm evening I burst in, but right after I see the same old sock, my attention is snatched by something else. The icehouse is tumbly with a sharp glassy smell, like the prisms in Polly Sharon’s chandelier let loose to somersault through air. Smell of the old men on the Rexall steps. Smell of Delvin Dock when we give him rides to town. And the truth is, always in Ham’s complicated aroma lies a liquor layer, but since he’s come to live with us, that smell is smothered down under others, and I’ve already figured out it’s part of the deal he’s made with my father. Then I’m reaching his plate to him, and he’s reaching back, when something happens. I let go the plate too soon, he grabs hold too late, and the food falls to the floor.
I hear myself gasp. There are no more leftovers in the house. But Ham just laughs, louder than usual, looser than usual, picks the plate—the meatloaf, the boiled potato—off the floor, and sets Taffy down in the green beans. He begins eating the meatloaf with his fingers while I, even though it’s past time to leave, can’t help staring at the undogly Taffy who hesitates before picking at a bean.
“Lord, I reckon that was a mess. Now that would have been a mess to clean up.”
I whip my eyes back to Ham. I can hear the mush of meatloaf in his mouth, see his own eyes on his feeding fingers. He shakes his head.
“Before he got to where he didn’t hardly leave his bed, he’d pace the upstairs floors at night. Sleep in a different room every night, carrying that pistol with him.” Ham pushes more potato in. “Scared people were after him, you know. He told me that.”
I feel myself nod like I already know this, because if I can trick myself into believing that, the now-knowing might not overtake me. It might stay stuck at my ears. But the truth is, although I’ve never heard this, didn’t I know it anyway?
“He was,” Ham says, and then he swallows and even wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and I can tell he’s talking to himself and not to me, “one of the kindest men you’d ever know.”
THE OUIJA BOARD tells Sam 1976. Three years from now, he’ll be twelve, I’ll be thirteen.
I’m in my room where I’ve been sent for thumping Mavis in the head with a rolled-up Good Housekeeping magazine. The only way into my room is through my youngest brothers’ bedroom, which has not only a window that looks outside but also one that opens onto the back hall, a window left over from a house addition fifty years ago, when they didn’t bother to seal up the old exterior wall. No one is allowed to come in or talk to me when I’ve been sent to my room. When I hear Sam whisper-calling my name, I crack my door and lean around, making sure my feet never technically leave my floor. Sam’s opened that interior window just enough to squeeze his face through.
“1976,” he says.
A drain falls open between my throat and my guts. It foams a cold green fizz.
“You’re sure?” I hiss.
He nods. “I asked it twice.”
The truth is, before we got the Ouija board I didn’t give much thought to Sam living or dying. Now that I have him for only three more years, his dorky glasses, his lopsided cloud of dark hair, his genius for picking at people for hours without ever crossing the line where he’ll be spanked or sent to his room . . . all of it takes on the precious temporariness of captured lightning bugs or the perfect birthday. I swear to myself I’ll never tease him again, and I mean it. But even as I’m making the pledge, I overhear a frantic calculating in some closet of my head. How on earth, in heaven, and everyplace in between am I going to evade two ghosts in the house?
Sam, however, doesn’t look frightened at all, there in his Snoopy sweatshirt and his gigantic smudged glasses. Sam’s face is goldly lit with the purpose of tragedy, a radiant poignancy and, yes, self-pity, but he’s entitled to that. He pushes his glasses back up his nose, steps away, and shuts the window, firm. I hear the latch. Behind its dusty chiffon curtains I imagine him recessing down the hall, stoic, resigned, and above all brave.
THE SHEET OVER my head blinds me good, but it does not help much with sound. Me flat, my Living Word Children’s Bible two hand-lengths from my head, my mouseskull necklace standing sentry on its cover, but still I hear. I hear the usual, the inevitable, although that doesn’t make it less terrifying. The stuff of scary movies and scary books: floorboards creaking, shutters banging, maple limbs scraping gutters. I also hear the peculiar-to-our-house sounds of leaks dripping into plastic buckets, space-age pings of the nineteenth-century radiators, Mavis’s snoring. But the winter and spring of the mouseskull necklace, I hear sounds I never ever imagined, and this means I couldn’t have made them up, irrefutable evidence of how real they must be.
One night I hear the record player in the dining room switch on. For only a few seconds, not long enough for me to identify the song but long enough that I know it’s not a dream. Another night I hear a cascade of keys, bottom octave to top, across the out-of-tune piano in the living room under me. And another night I hear a ruckus in the chimney that I realize, after a baffled moment, has to be the sound of knives and forks dropped down.
Mrs. Dock does not believe in ghosts except the Holy One. She’ll tell you. There are no such things. Mrs. Dock does not talk about my granddaddy: he is a missing volume in her library, I know this, and I know she won’t answer questions even though I never ask. But I remember. Mrs. Dock’s chapped hand on my shoulder, ushering me through the door and under water. Walls green
, blinds green and filtering the summer light green, so that the chest of drawers, the bedside tables, the mirror, my granddaddy—all of them rippled under river water. Mrs. Dock gave me a small push. “Go on, Lainey. Say hi to your granddaddy.”
I went on. The mattress pushed against the collar of my dress. My granddaddy lay in immaculate white pajamas with trim blue piping, his bedspread folded in a straight line across his chest, his fingernails round and pink and white. He smiled at me, said, “What beautiful eyes.”
That was what he always said, then he always smiled, and then he would say nothing else. Under his river water. But the smile, I saw, was real, not an automatic smile or a nervous smile or a smile hiding something else. It was a real smile. Lying across a cave mouth of sad.
Flattened under my own sheets, I wait, I hold off. I do. I am ten years old, humiliated by my babyness, and I don’t want to wake my mother. But eventually I hear myself at a distance from myself, moaning, “Maaa-maawwww.” Wait. “Maaa-maawwww.” Wait. Until she finally wafts into my room in an aura of Shower-to-Shower and foamy green gown, and she does not touch me, but says, sleep-husky and a little impatiently but not without kindness: “Shhhh. Go back to sleep. It was just a bad dream.”
One of those nights, me pleading Jesus for invisibility, something occurs to me that goose pimples me first, then thickens my throat with despair. The clattering silverware, especially the piano keys, even the spontaneous record player: weren’t those exactly the gestures an unhappy and restless mouse ghost would make?
FANGS ARE SOMETHING everybody has four of, but Ronnie Phillips’s fangs are the longest I’ve ever seen on a human, and then he has more than that. Some of his front supposed-to-be-blunt teeth are pointed, too. Within a few weeks of the teacher pushing our desks together so I can help him with his work, Ronnie started helping me with life, like an older brother or a different kind of dad. “Don’t stoop,” he’d soft-chide. “My aunt’s shoulders got stuck that way.” And, “You’ve gotta speak up for yourself. Don’t be so shy.” And, “Why do you worry so much? Smile.” Like Ham’s, Ronnie’s smartness sits unself-conscious and raw in his face—a confidence without pretense or arrogance. Like Ham, Ronnie has no fear and no memory of fear, has never even had to jump over scared. About the Ouija board I decide to try Ronnie out.
