Ghosts I Have Been

by Richard Peck

  Of . . . winds . . . that . . . die

  Alike . . . on . . . land . . . and . . . sea

  O Second Sight! O Second Sight!

  Send one small glimpse to me!

  Commencing with a real poem I have by heart, I added an ending to suit the occasion. By then my eyes were rolled so far back in my head I was looking at my brains. But you could hear a pin drop in the room.

  “What is this vision I see before my inner eyes?” I asked, and waited as if for an answer. “A crime. A crime has been committed. A crime that will be punished with fearful retribution!”

  “Oh dear,” came Harriet Hochhuth’s voice, “I don’t really care too much for this sort of thing.”

  “And the criminal is not far off!” I continued. “No, wait! Two outlaws . . . and in this very room!”

  “Make her stop,” someone said in a small voice.

  “I see the initials of one of the crooks. The letters are floating in the air before me.”

  There was stirring on the floor as, I suppose, everybody shifted around, on the lookout for floating initials.

  “N. N. are two of the initials,” I continued. “And the others are . . . I. and let me see . . . W.! Oh, what have these two been up to that will only lead them to a thrashing from a heavy hand?”

  Whispers came from the floor around me as several came to their own conclusions about the owners of the initials. “They are cheats, these two,” I moaned on, completely warmed up. “They’ve passed the answers on the United States geography test back and forth. But their crime has come to light.”

  There was a general intake of breath from the floor as I got more specific. Miss Spaulding had wound up our United States geography on Monday with a stiff test. I’d seen the papers on her desk, and I knew she’d caught Nola Nirider and Ione Williams red-handed. All their wrong answers were the same, and there were plenty of them. Miss Spaulding is not to be trifled with.

  “Sacramento is the capital of California, not San Diego as these two culprits both put down. And Robert E. Lee hails from Virginia, not Kentucky. There is more evidence before my eyes, but my powers grow dimmmmmm. I only see two more letters—a couple of Fs. But those are grades.

  “But I can hear the sounds of bottoms being smacked and shrieks of pure pain!”

  The curtain rings clattered as Letty swept the drapes back. Light flooded the room. I let my eyeballs roll forward to see Ione and Nola shrinking on the carpet in the midst of the rest.

  “Did you two cheat on the test?” Letty barked, taking charge again with her usual bossiness.

  “Certainly not,” said Nola.

  “What if we did?” said Ione, who is more brazen.

  “Well, if that doesn’t just about make me sick!” spat out Letty. “While all the rest of us beat our brains out studying, you two went off by yourselves and cheated! Then you had no more sense than to get caught.”

  “Just how do you know that?” said Ione, very sassy. “We don’t even have the tests back yet, so how do you know?”

  “Because Blossom said so,” Letty snapped. Then she caught her breath. She’d given me credit and could not take it back. She shot me a look guiltier than Nola and Ione combined. For I had told—or foretold—something no living soul could know, except for Miss Spaulding. And I’d been believed. I had Letty in a cleft stick then, with no time to think. Both Ione and Nola looked plain scared, both of me and Miss Spaulding. Nola commenced to sob, anticipating pain.

  But then something happened that even I could not explain. My eyes did not roll back, yet I seemed to go blind for a second. There was a peal of thunder that nobody else seemed to hear. Then a strange flash, like lightning at night—jagged and blue. The room and the girls flickered and faded from me, and I spoke without conscious thought:

  “Oh dear,” I said, “Newton just fell off the back of the trolley and was run over by Miss Dabney’s electric auto.”

  Then I blinked and saw the room clear and all the girls’ eyes staring at me. But only for a moment. The next second was split by a powerful shriek from Mrs. Shambaugh. Evidently she’d been eavesdropping behind the door the entire time. When I remarked that her little boy had just been run over—several blocks away—the shock of it nearly carried her off.

  It was a confused hour later before it dawned on me. The blood had not run too thin. I had the Gift of Second Sight and the Power to See the Unseen. And maybe more.

  4

  SURE ENOUGH, Newton Shambaugh, the apple of his mother’s eye, had been run over by Miss Gertrude Dabney’s Pope-Detroit Electric brougham. And while a cause for alarm, it was not a tragedy. I wondered at my Second Sight starting up over such a trivial matter, little realizing where it would lead.

  I thought maybe I’d been forcing it with my entertainment for Letty’s club. Maybe being in Newton’s family home provided Vibrations. My mama had spoke highly of her Vibrations when she spoke at all. And then too, maybe my Gift was just coming of age along with the rest of me. A person goes through a lot of changes at that time of life.

  Newton is not always the mama’s boy his mama wishes him to be. She dresses him funny, which only makes him have to prove himself to the other boys in third grade. They all think it’s a pastime to steal rides on the streetcar by clinging to the back end of it.

  The Woodlawn Avenue car had just swung out of Lincoln Square downtown that afternoon, with Newton hanging off the back of it. Then he turned loose and lost his grip.

  Right behind the trolley was coming Miss Dabney in her Pope-Detroit Electric. Most Bluff City people with automobiles have the gasoline or steam type. But Miss Dabney was said to be a nervous spinster with a terror of explosions, so she drove one of the only electric motorcars ever seen. It was as unusual as herself, in the shape of an Amish buggy with brass side lamps and snow-white tires. It would not go faster than a slow mule, and she steered it with a tiller instead of a wheel. Luckily, it was lightweight.

  When Newton dropped backwards off the Woodlawn Avenue streetcar, Miss Dabney steered right over an arm and leg of his. Before she could get stopped, she’d passed over him and collapsed back in her seat, quite gray-faced.

  All this I saw in a sudden revelation just before Mrs. Shambaugh let out her shriek. She pounded out of the house with all the Busy Fingers and me on her heels. We all fled down Fairview Avenue as from a burning house. Porch swings right down the block emptied as people stepped forward to see us pass.

  “Where?” Mrs. Shambaugh screamed back at me, never breaking her stride.

  “West Main Street just off the Square, near as I can figure,” I yelled back at her. On we all sped, though it was better than five blocks. A person would not credit the speed Mrs. Shambaugh could put on, but then she is All Mother.

  We were nearly the first on the scene. Newton Shambaugh was stretched out in the gutter with tire tracks over two of his limbs. He only began to bawl when his mother was upon him, wailing, “Oh, what has happened to my poor baby boy? Is he crippled up for life?” et cetera.

  Miss Gertrude Dabney was being helped down out of her Pope-Detroit by several men from the hotel barbershop. She looked shaky on her pins, but she surprised them all by whipping around and giving the Pope-Detroit Electric a good hard kick. “I will never drive in that thing again and will sell it for scrap. Oh, what have I done? I did not see that little critter until he dropped off the streetcar, and then I could not find my brake lever, and I steered at him instead of away. Though I could not have missed him anyhow. Oh, I feel worse than he does. Is he alive?” et cetera.

  Newton was alive, though nearly smothered by his mother. He was soon on his feet and proving to all that his limbs were sound. “She run right over me, but I’m tough as old shoe leather,” Newton crowed in his piping voice to the Busy Fingers. He’d suffered less harm than his sister had at Les Dawson’s hands. Though all in all it had not been a good week for the Shambaughs.

  Mrs. Shambaugh did not let fly at Miss Dabney as I expected. They’re both ladies of a
certain standing in the community and would not brawl in public. Besides, Newton capering around underfoot would have been a distraction. Miss Dabney had shown her regret by kicking the Pope-Detroit again and again. She kicked at the wheel once, got her foot tangled in the wire spokes, and nearly fell under the auto herself. And so after both being hysterical, each lady congratulated the other on her calmness.

  When it finally penetrated to Mrs. Shambaugh that Newton caused the accident by jumping a free ride on the streetcar, she snatched him up and nearly did real damage to him.

  The end of it was that the two ladies fell into a long and rambling conversation so tedious that all the crowd wandered back to the barbershop. “Was it not a lucky thing,” Miss Dabney remarked, “that you happened to be so nearby when the accident occurred? I declare, I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d had to be sent for. You might have been out paying calls, for I know you are very popular socially.”

  “Oh, but I was at home,” Mrs. Shambaugh replied, only then remembering.

  “But how . . .?”

  I was standing close by, expecting my name might come up. And so it did. More confused than mystified, Mrs. Shambaugh tried to explain that I’d manifested Second Sight. If her head had been clearer, she might not have admitted it.

  “The supernatural?” Miss Dabney said in an entirely more interested voice. “The Second Sight?” She is known to be eccentric, which only means that things surprising to others are no surprise to her. “But I thought you were a boy!” she said, bending over and looking at me through a hole in her motoring veil.

  I don’t consider myself eccentric, but here was a woman I could understand. She’d heard all about how Alexander Armsworth had once seen a ghost, and so she had the two of us confused. I put her straight. “Well, I call all this very interesting!” she declared. And then she gave Mrs. Shambaugh a ride home in her electric, though she’d sworn never to drive it again.

  The Busy Fingers, under Letty’s direction, straightaway abandoned me. I was left standing on the Square as alone as usual, and yet entirely changed. New Worlds were opening up. But even with the Second Sight I could not yet see them plain.

  * * *

  Drop a pebble in a pond, and the ripples will reach to far shores in every direction. That’s the effect of that first Manifestation. There’d been witnesses aplenty, all talkative. And those who might see through that fibbing business about the United States geography tests could not explain my vision of Newton’s mishap any more than I could.

  I might soon be in the public eye, so I was anxious to practice my powers to see if I could get them working good. I didn’t know but what Second Sight is like an unused muscle that needs limbering up and regular exercise to work right. As I was to find out, it’s more of a sometime thing. Sometime working, sometime not. Sometime outdoing itself to an alarming degree.

  As I couldn’t practice in private in a two-room house, I imparted to my mama that I had the Gift. She come close to calling me a liar and then sulked. For many years Mama had claimed that the Gift ended with her, and so it was bad news to her that it hadn’t. She was jealous and showed it. Still, she’s a woman of few words, and we tend to go our separate ways.

  At first, the more I concentrated, the more confusing my visions became. Oh, I’d have them, sure enough. But many were hard to decipher. I will mention one or two that I haven’t deciphered yet and probably never will, just to show how little control I had.

  I’d set out on our porch steps of a night, watching the streetcars pass and listening to the November wind rattle the leaves. This dry rustling and the far-off hum on the rails lulled my mind and led me onto unknown ground. On that very first evening I heard thunder again and saw the world lit suddenly blue. The fit was on me. Very nearly scared, I hid my eyes in my hands, and then of course my Second Sight took over completely.

  I thought of a ship in an ice-strewn sea, sending out an unheeded message. But the scene shifted. And I saw the room under the Shambaughs’ stairs where I’d met with the Busy Fingers that very afternoon. It was the same room, though changed, and the same group of girls, more changed still, and I was not among them.

  They were old women. I barely recognized them. All had hair more blue than white except for Ione Williams, whose hair was sparse and the color of an apricot. In reality Ione’s hair is thick and dark. Some were thinner and some fatter. Maisie Markham was enormous, overflowing a settee where Mr. Shambaugh’s desk now stands. Each of them wore a wedding band rubbed thin with age. They were so old themselves that I was reminded of a coven of witches.

  I could hear them cackling at something Letty was telling them, though I could not hear her at first. Her neck was drawn and crepey, and she wore the oddest pair of spectacles imaginable. They were of some shiny metal, set with little glittering stones.

  But the two oddest things about this vision were these: All of the girls now grown old sat around in dresses like shifts that did not cover their knees, leaving their unfortunate-looking legs all bare. Though they wore flesh-colored stockings like pony girls in a circus. The other peculiar thing was that the odd bluish light that tinted the vision came from a metal box located where a potted fern now stands.

  While Letty spoke on silently to the rest, bossy as ever, most of them kept one eye on the metal box. There was a moving picture in it, flickering, of a smiling young woman holding up a box of either cornmeal or baking powder. I don’t know what else might come in such a box. The young woman smiled and nodded encouragingly to the Busy Fingers and seemed to be speaking too.

  Then the vision faded. But I heard Letty’s voice—cracked and old, speaking up clear as a bell. I only caught a few words. “Oh, lands,” she was saying, “if only Les had lived, for a widow’s lot is not an easy proposition. . . .” And all the old Busy Fingers seemed to agree.

  And that’s all I heard or saw of that first weird vision that haunted me long after.

  Oh, there were other visions in those first days, though some were too vague to call to mind and some too outlandish to credit. Each seemed to start with a great ship laboring in winter seas, as if I was myself far off from solid ground. Once I even had a clear view of Indians tramping along the streetcar right of way, trudging by on foot, with the squaws bringing up the rear. They were all dressed in skins and carried bows instead of firearms. So I knew they were the redmen who’d used this trail long before the white man’s day. They were traveling by night, lit by a moon that was not out in the real world. And I thought long about these people who’d lived across the land and left no mark and done no harm.

  Oh, I had visions! I seemed to look in every direction, and the sights liked to drive me half silly. I’d have been a match for Miss Dabney if I’d told all I saw. Once I even saw faceless men in silver suits walking across rubble under a black sky. They bobbed like balloons or kids’ toys. They were planting an American flag with too many stars on it in the gray ground. The flag was stiffened with wire, for there was no breeze nor any air. And where they were I could not tell, but it was unearthly. This vision dimmed quicker than most, for it was a dark night with clouds before the moon.

  As I recollect now, I wonder if that wasn’t the night I first saw the strange ghost boy. Him who was to loom so large in my life and drive out those other visions from my Second Sight. It seemed like he’d been deep in my dreams long before. When he began, I swear I don’t know, though various people have quizzed me on this point.

  But it may have been that night, or one soon after. Certainly I was on the porch, staring out into many a dim world. Over by the tracks I perceived a white form in utter darkness, no more than a blob, but glowing like Saint Elmo’s fire. I tried to blink the whitish thing away, but it wouldn’t go. Somewhere inside me came the sound of breaking glass and the startled cry of a child left alone in the night. The wind came up then, but not a tree branch moved. I was winter cold.

  A boy lay huddled by the tracks not ten yards from the porch. It wasn’t Alexander Armsworth, and i
t wasn’t Newton Shambaugh. It was a stranger in parts strange to him, though how I knew this is anybody’s guess.

  I made no move in his direction; though it was not fear that held me back, for I knew he was there and not there. And I knew that while he was in great need, there was nothing I could do for him yet. He’d shown himself to me, and I knew we two would meet again.

  He seemed pinned to the ground, and I saw his arms were bound to his sides. His head rose up and turned against the blackness of the Armsworths’ barn. He was a curly-headed blond little fellow, younger than myself, if he had an age at all. I knew he was dead and undead and here and somewhere else. And he spoke an anguished message that I was still deaf to.

  He melted like snow. The gravel beside the tracks continued to dazzle, and I thought of ice. Then the moon broke through and seemed to splinter the clouds into sharp lines of light. “Whiskers round the moon,” I said to myself. And the brighter the moon beamed, the fewer traces of the boy I saw.

  Another night I was returning from our privy when I heart the sound of great groaning. Not of a human voice or one that had once been human. This was the grinding of two great objects against one another—iron against ice, I thought, though why, I did not know. But I knew as sure as I was standing there that if I ventured around the house, I’d see my ghost boy laid bound up and all alone, living again through his dying moments.

  All this made me wonder how I could put my powers to work. This entirely novel vision of the ghost boy was coming back on me, and it was not entertaining. Besides, to neglect the uses of a talent is not my way.

  In the next days at school, it was clear that the Sunny Thoughts and Busy Fingers had closed their doors on me. Letty had sworn them all to secrecy, not wishing to give me credit. I know this for a fact because Tess or Bess whispered as much to me in the washroom. But fame in a school is very small potatoes to me. Besides, secrets a group will keep slip out in individual ways. And I later had the proof of that.