Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  I smile as if I don’t know what this means, hold the plaque up, and say, “Thanks again!”

  When he retreats, a woman who has been clearing glasses behind the bar approaches me and points to a sign on the wall with a painting of a bull on it and the words: Beware of the Bull. Then she tilts her head in the shaggy-haired man’s direction.

  PART FOUR

  I clap and stomp my foot on the pub’s worn wooden floor as a motley group of musicians play pipes, fiddle, bodhran, and flute, many of the jigs familiar: fast-paced, high-energy music full with joy. The two big, sweet guys who run Tommo’s, the hostel down the road where I’m staying, nod their heads in time and smile bleary-eyed. The one with the black beard winks at me. In the mornings they cook and serve the breakfasts in aprons, overseeing everything with finicky attention, but by afternoon they’ve arrived here to the pub and parked themselves at the bar, drinking pints of Guinness, watching the comings and goings of the various girls staying in their establishment.

  A woman stands up and sings along to a tune I know well: “The Black Velvet Band.”

  •

  In a haze of wet light, I wander alone on winding roads outside of Doolin, looking at farmland and nearby ranges of mountains. A tall, fat goose guarding a field around a thatched cottage on the road to Liscannor waddles toward me as I near its property. I speak to it, trying to make friends, or reach some kind of understanding. It cranes its neck, stepping from foot to foot, then breaks into a chase. I run, laughing and breathless, until it stops and turns back, satisfied with my distance from its jurisdiction.

  •

  Philip and Jan leave for Yeats country on the second day in Doolin, but I remain behind. There is something welcoming and easy about this place, and something hypnotic about the music. Hours, entire days go by as I listen to long improvisational sessions weaving one piece into another, repetitions, variations, long traipsing fugues. Closing my eyes, I feel as if I’m swimming in the music. Time loses its coherence.

  The fourth night at Tommo’s on the edge of sleep, I think of Yeats country and imagine the sacred woods, the giant Irish deer. The images comfort me, but I make no move the next day to get there.

  •

  Two of the Swiss girls I’ve been going to the pub with have invited me to take the ferry across for a day trip to the Aran Islands. We will all meet at the pier for the one o’clock boat. An hour before, while the two of them are at the beach, I go to a small local shop.

  It’s all shadows at first when I walk in from the daylight, and for the flash of a moment, I mistake a side of dark, coppery-smelling bacon hanging from a hook for a person. I approach the counter where a stack of peat bricks for sale issues a black, earthy coolness. “Hello,” I call out.

  Silence. Under the foggy glass cover of a cake dish, a rope of pale sausages lies curled up in a pile.

  I feel someone here. I don’t move. After a beat, I hear fidgety squeaking from the back of the shop and a breathy, dejected groan. Whoever it is is listening for me to move.

  I take a step and look down the last aisle. On a chair in the corner, a woman sits stiffly, her eyes cast off to the side. She appears to be in her thirties, though it is hard to know for certain. Her skin is dull yellow and pulls tight against sharp cheekbones. She lets out a sudden breath, as if bristling at my presence. I both pity and fear her. Then, leaning forward, she cocks her head slightly and looks at me. I see my mother, her square jaw and wet blue eyes. The air around me goes heavy as water and twinkles like flecks of glitter swirling in a snow globe. I make myself focus. The woman’s nose and mouth and many other things about her face are nothing at all like my mother’s.

  Even still, she retains some element of my mother. I turn so I can no longer see her, and walk toward the door, which looks far away. The air in the place tries to hold me there, to keep me from moving, but I strain against it. Everything is too slow. With great effort I pass faded advertisements on the wall, a green cardboard one for Player’s cigarettes, and a yellow picture of a cow that says Yeats country, and in smaller letters beneath, the word dairy. I hear footsteps as I retreat through the door, pushing my way outside into brightness.

  •

  Mom selects a white coffin, upholstered in blue silk quilting, and a pale blue silk-and-lace gown. She tells me that the morticians will wash and comb and style Nanny’s hair, which has not been tended in years. They will put on lipstick and powder, and polish her nails. She asks me to go with her to pick out jewelry. “You’re artistic,” she says. “You’ll know what to get.”

  We drive in silence to a store downtown. We pick out cameos: a necklace and a pin. She is worried that the ivory and pale beige colors won’t go with the blue of the gown but I assure her that they will.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “What do I know?”

  •

  Mom and Nanny sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking with great animation about people they knew in Yonkers.

  “That woman would lie about anything and not bat an eye!” Nanny says.

  “No one would ever suspect that!” Mom replies, shaking her head.

  “She asked me once for a quarter to buy bread and potatoes for her kids. I saw her half an hour later at the drugstore drinking an ice cream soda!”

  When Mom laughs, Nanny breaks a smile.

  •

  It is a rare overcast and windy morning. Mom has traveled back East with Nanny’s coffin. My father and Jerry have put Nanny’s green swiveling chair into the trunk of the car, leaving it open. We drive to the dump. When Dad and Jerry heave the chair onto the mountain of garbage, the cushion separates and flies at an arc, landing at a distance on the heap. The chair falls on its back at an angle facing the sky. Crows and carrion birds shriek and circle above.

  My father lights a cigarette, shielding the flame from the wind with his cupped hand. When I first see the flame, I think it is meant for the chair.

  “Can we throw a match at the chair?” I ask.

  My father looks amused as he exhales a mouthful of smoke.

  “This isn’t a bonfire,” he says.

  It smells terrible here and the birds caw. Some sit on the garbage and stare at us. Everything here is destroyed, smashed, discarded. Even still, we all remain looking at the chair.

  •

  It is time to meet the Swiss girls at the pier, but after leaving the shop I am too shaken. I walk back in the direction of Tommo’s. I don’t want to believe it, but it is so real to me in this moment: my mother has been absorbed somehow by that unbalanced woman and is damned in her afterlife to remain part of her.

  I have it in my head that I saw a rope tied around one of the woman’s ankles, that she’d been restrained in the corner. And then I think that maybe she had no arms. I don’t remember seeing any.

  The road, the sky, even the stones on the ground look distorted and everything emits a high-pitched hum.

  As I move quickly along the roadside, I hear a dry, uneven panting amplified over the sound of my own breathing and heartbeat. The woman is pursuing me, wanting me to look in her eyes again, so I’ll see my mother stuck there, suffering in this awful, claustrophobic union.

  Though Tommo’s was my destination, I pass it, continuing down the road. In my pocket I have a rough map that one of the proprietors drew for me the day before, the walking directions to the Cliffs of Moher, a seven-mile trek there and back. I head in that direction.

  •

  When Mom comes back from the East, she opens the window in Nanny’s room to air it, intending to clear things out, but retreats and stands there right outside the door staring at the mirror from an angle that doesn’t reflect her, just the crucifix and the bare wall and the window full of daylight. I stand there, too, in the hall, a few feet behind her.

  Before she left for the East she took some of Nanny’s clothes out of the drawers, and now they lie in crumpled disarray, some folded, some on top of the dresser, some on the bed. A gust comes through the screen of th
e open window, making the clothes quiver. One faded old slip, lying precariously on the edge of the bed, blows to the floor. The door begins to creak closed, then slams shut of its own accord. Mom does not move from her spot, her face only inches from the slammed door. I touch her arm, wanting her to come away, but she remains there with a hurt, stunned expression on her face.

  •

  A perpetual soft, uneasy rustling comes from Nanny’s room.

  •

  The following weekend, when Nanny’s things still have not been cleared out, I am in the kitchen with my mother.

  “Ba’bra! Ba’bra!” The voice comes from up the hall.

  “For the love of God,” my mother says, her face going white. She and I rush to the hall and for the flash of a moment, we see Nanny.

  I grasp what we are seeing before my mother does. Sheila has put on one of Nanny’s old dresses and sits on Tracy’s shoulders. Tracy is hidden beneath the dress. They walk down the hall toward us, one awkward, slow-moving being.

  When she understands, my mother’s face empties of feeling. She doesn’t get mad at them, but in a quiet voice tells them to take off the dress and never to do anything like it again.

  She makes herself a cup of coffee and goes to sit alone in the living room.

  •

  On a hot summer day, Jerry teaches me to drive Dad’s brown Chevy, coaching me as I reverse out of the driveway. I steer slowly and shakily down the street, panicking when another car comes up and honks behind me.

  “It’s okay, Reg, they’ll pass, don’t worry.” He sticks his arm out the passenger window and waves them on.

  I head toward the rodeo grounds and pull onto a wide dirt road flanked by stretches of dry mesa. I drive in circles and experiment with going in reverse.

  “You’re really doing a great job,” Jerry says. “You’ll be an expert before you know it.”

  •

  The higher I go on the pass to the summit, the harder the wind blows. I walk across an expanse of flat stone and stand looking at a progression of five cliffs, flat at the top with grassland and heath, and falling sheer to the sea, seven hundred feet at their highest point, I have been told. They are layered in sandstone and shale, patched in spots with green moss or lichen. Birds that nest in the shelves of rock, thousands of them, small as specks from where I stand, circle and screech below, all up and down the height of each cliff, their cries mournful, just audible over the low thunderous noise of the sea.

  Why haven’t I left Doolin already? I should be walking in hazel woods in Yeats country.

  •

  I have just turned fourteen. I stand in the dark front yard on a spring night, the wind going wild in my mother’s trees. I am transforming, growing out of childhood, getting taller and slimmer, amazed by the slope between my waist and hips. I lift my head high and lean it back, my hair assaulted by the gusts. I hold my arms out away from my body, palms lifted, and think of the word rapture.

  Sensing someone at the screen door, I drop my arms and turn. It’s Dad looking out at me. I feel embarrassed, caught at something so personal, a private form of devotion. Dad steps outside from the low-lit vestibule and stands a few moments on the porch.

  I wonder if he will ask what I was doing, and I am ready to shrug it away somehow, dismiss it. But he doesn’t say anything for a little while, just stands looking at me. He seems tentative, as if he’s afraid he’s trespassed.

  Then he recites:

  Who has seen the wind?

  Neither I nor you:

  But when the leaves hang trembling

  The wind is passing thro’.

  He gets in the car and backs out of the driveway, headlights illuminating the houses as he turns onto Louraine Street and disappears.

  The wind blows so hard in the poplars and the willow, it sounds like a waterfall.

  •

  At dinner, Dad tries to sprinkle salt over his rice, but nothing comes out.

  “This is empty,” he says.

  “Oh, God help us!” Mom cries, getting up. “The man of the house has no salt!”

  While we all sit unmoving and silent, she grabs the shaker and fills it, then slams it down before my father on the table.

  “The man of the house!” she screams, prolonging the word man. “The man of the house needs salt!”

  Dad, who has been still, reaches for the pot of peas and pours the contents over his head, wearing the pot like a hat. Peas spill over his shoulders and shirt, all over the floor.

  For a few moments, Mom is silent. When she starts again to speak, Dad takes the pot off his head, stands, gets his jacket, and leaves an hour early for his shift at the Tap Room.

  •

  Jerry starts buying pot by the pound and selling lids from the window of his room. He keeps the pot hidden in his bumper pool table. I go to Jerry’s room to ask him for a joint.

  I find him sitting on his bed holding a shoe box full of rocks, the ones he’s been collecting for years. He looks up from them, and says something that shocks me: “Mom’s taken up Nanny’s crusade against Dad. She hates Dad like Nanny hated Dad. Only worse.”

  •

  When it’s dark, Tracy and I take the joint Jerry gave us out to the aqua Dodge Dart, a used car Dad bought for Jerry to use. It’s parked on the street beside the poplars. We listen to the radio and get high. No one can see us in the car in the dark, but we can see the people who step out of their houses onto their lit porches, or pass along the street. We rename our neighbors as they pass: Bobby Pringle becomes Blobby Pretzel. The twins Reid and Randy Warner become Weed and Pansy Foreigner. Ben Vigil becomes Bean Vengeance.

  We laugh until our sides hurt and our eyes are wet.

  •

  Mom finally undertakes the emptying of Nanny’s drawers and closet; she won’t let any of us help. She often stops and sits on Nanny’s sheetless bed. I watch her from the doorway as she holds one of Nanny’s earrings in her hand, a clear light blue earring that looks like a small ice cube.

  •

  I wake to screaming and when I come out of my room, I see Mom on the hall floor. I run and try to help her get up. She grabs my ankle with such a strong grip that I almost fall.

  “You can’t pass,” she growls in a voice slurred with rage and exhaustion. “You have to walk on me.” I refuse and she tries again to grab my ankle.

  Sheila appears in her pajamas, squinting from her bedroom door.

  “Walk on me,” Mom demands. Sheila, unsure what to do, attempts to walk across her back, then gets off, shaking and on the verge of tears.

  When Jerry arrives at the end of the hall, Mom yells at him, “Put on your boots and walk on me.” He disappears.

  “Jerry,” she screams. “Jerry.”

  I rush past Mom to the end of the hallway and look through the doorway into the kitchen and den that lead to Jerry’s room. He stands frozen, head hanging, in the middle of the dark den, illuminated by a soft light through the open door of his room.

  “Jerry,” I say, “what should we do?”

  His hunched shoulders stiffen at my voice, but he doesn’t move. When I say his name again, I walk toward him and in a flurry of panic he rushes into his room. I hear the door lock.

  Going back toward the hall, passing the dark kitchen, I wonder what time it is, but do not think to switch on the kitchen light and look. I both hope and fear that my father will arrive home from the Tap Room.

  “Jerry,” Mom cries out again. Twisting her head up from the floor, she says, “Tell Jerry to put on his boots.”

  “You have to stop it,” I say. “You have to get up.”

  She lifts her head a little, straining her eyes upward to look at me as she sticks her tongue out and touches it to the floor.

  “Mom, please stop,” I plead, starting to cry. “Stop.”

  As I reach down and try to make her get up, she grabs my foot and bites it hard. I scream and struggle to get it away from her.

  Maybe it’s the sight of blood on my foot, or th
e taste of it in her mouth, that makes all the fight in her drain away.

  •

  My mother winds the white rosary around my hands, which are steepled together in prayer. She makes sure that the little crucifix faces front. She adjusts my Communion veil so it fountains evenly over both shoulders.

  The photographer goes under a black tarp behind a big standing camera. As Mom moves off to the side, she nods approval. I am her beautiful bride. I smile at her as the shutter clicks.

  •

  We ask if we can take the car and go see the new version of Wuthering Heights. Mom agrees and gives us money.

  Tracy, who really has expressed interest in seeing it, is easily persuaded not to when I tell her that Jerry has given me a joint. She says that she would rather smoke. “I’m nervous to see a movie version, anyway,” she says. “I’m afraid they might ruin it.” Wuthering Heights is Tracy’s favorite book.

  We sit on the car parked at an overlook in Tesuque, the radio on loud, the car doors open. The song “Ruby Tuesday” casts a reflective, melancholy spell on us.

  Tracy lies back on the windshield, looking up at the stars. “I’ll tell you what Wuthering Heights is about,” she says.

  “Mom probably won’t even ask.”

  Tracy insists, and I listen as she summarizes the tumultuous and tragic story of Cathy and Heathcliff, up to the end when a shepherd boy sees the ghosts of the two of them near a tree on the moor.

  “Why did things have to be so terrible between them?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer, just keeps looking at the sky.

  “Why doesn’t Dad stop Mom?”

  She is quiet and I worry that I shouldn’t have asked it. Tracy gets angry with me sometimes for saying things. I don’t always know what will make her mad, but she holds hard to a grudge, and I don’t want to lose her. She doesn’t look angry, so I take a chance and ask, “Why does Mom hate Dad so much?”

  I think at first that she’s ignoring the question when she says, “There’s a scene where Cathy tells the maid, ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’”

  But then her lips tremble and she closes her eyes. She adds, “‘He’s more myself than I am.’”