by R. A. Nelson
I remember Lucy’s hair being so thick, but now it’s hanging flat against the sides of her face. And that one difference makes me start to see others. And then—
I’m afraid; all I can do is stand still and just watch her, waiting to see what she does.
I’m sure of it. I’m sure.
This is the girl I saw last night pressing her face against the motel window.
“You,” I say. “It was you last night, wasn’t it? At the motel?”
She doesn’t change her look, doesn’t even open her mouth to speak.
“Are you all right? Is there anything wrong? Do you—do you remember me from the healing? You’re Lucy, right? Is something wrong, Lucy? Do you need help?”
I take a couple of steps, till I come all the way into her circle of light. I’m barely more than an arm’s length away from her….
Jesus Christ our Savior.
Her eyes…
The color of her eyes has changed.
The blue is still there, but only enough to remember that’s what they used to be. Now they are cloudy as pond ice and all shot through with tiny, curling lines. She hasn’t blinked. Not once.
She’s still pure beautiful but seems even skinnier, and her dress is wrinkly and hanging lower on one shoulder than the other. The hem at the bottom is tattered and stained.
Before tonight I had dreamed of looking into her robin’s-egg blue eyes and taking her for a walk. A walk where nobody could look at us, bother us, wonder what we’re doing. As far away from the Faith Tabernacle as we could get.
But I know in a heartbeat I won’t ever be able to talk to this being. Can’t touch her hand. Can’t go for a walk with whatever this is standing in front of me.
Still, Lucy’s small mouth trembles like she is going to speak. My skin races all over with goose bumps.
This is all that’s left of her.
This must be what men see on the battlefield. What policemen see on the highways. Doctors see it in hospitals. It’s right here in front of me.
It’s all that’s left of her.
“Why?” I say.
Now she is reaching for me. But it looks so hard for her.
She lifts her arm higher and higher till it’s level with the ground, then holds it there, her little hand in a fist. Her mouth opens. It opens wider and wider, showing nothing but black on the inside. She works her jaw slowly, slowly, no words coming out.
Turns her fist over, opens it, lets a little piece of paper fall.
She looks like … oh no, please … she is trying to smile. That’s exactly what she’s doing, the corners of her mouth lifting up slow and gradual, as if they were being tugged by a wire.
So… beautiful.
Even like this.
“Lightning!” Certain Certain calls. I snap my head toward the sound. When I turn back, she’s gone.
Something hurts. I’ve put a fist to my mouth, and I’m biting down on my knuckles. Harder and harder till I can near taste the blood. I can see the speaker box posts, the dead white movie screen, the hackberry woods. All solid and real.
She couldn’t be gone that quick. The woods are too far away.
Somebody lays a hand on my shoulder; I feel my legs nearly go.
“Hey, boy,” Certain Certain says. “You all right?”
I turn and look at him like I’ve never met him before in my life.
“What?” I say finally.
“You don’t look so good. She take that big a plug out of your hind end?”
Did he see her?
“Miss Wanda Joy, she’s just like that.” Certain Certain starts to tug me toward the motor home. “Come on. Let’s get some supper. That’s right, she wants to head into town. Reckon Miss Wanda Joy feels a little guilty for chewing on you so hard.”
I look at the woods again, working to haul my words up from so far away, I don’t even recognize my own voice. “Did you—did you see her?”
“See which?”
“Her. That girl, Lucy. She was standing right here.”
“All I saw was you. My Lord. Tell me you didn’t really see somebody. Tell me.”
I pull away and take a step toward the drop cord.
“She left something! Help me look! It’s got to be right here somewhere….”
I get down on my knees in the gravel beside the drop cord, raking all over with my fingers.
“Here! Here it is. I found it!”
I rush to the light with the little piece of paper. It’s a piece of an article torn out of a newspaper.
I grab at Certain Certain’s shirtsleeve. “What does it mean? What do you think it means? Is she trying to tell me something?”
“I’ll tell you what it means. Means you found some trash on the ground. Elsewise, Miss Wanda Joy’s liable to sign you up for a rubber room over in Tuscaloosa. Nothing but Ritz crackers and green baloney from now on.”
“But the article!”
“Hold your water. We’ll talk about it.”
I shove the scrap of paper in my pocket. “Please believe me. If you don’t, nobody will.”
“I believe you believe. You ain’t never been one to lie. Probably some little old town girl fooling with you, same as them during the service.”
I stand there, look at the woods one more time. It’s too dark, too thick to see anything. Could he be right?
“But I know it was her. I know it.”
Whoever I was before seeing her, I’m a different person now.
Lucy’s dead.
That sweet, beautiful girl is dead.
I will wake up tomorrow, and it will still be true, and there will still be nothing I can do about it.
What is she? Where is she now?
A ghost. What does a ghost want with me?
For some crazy reason I recall the way they handled witches up in Massachusetts. They piled big stones on their chests, one stone at a time, till finally the witch was slowly crushed to death. I’m feeling the very first stone.
I have a handheld computer Sugar Tom gave me for Christmas that holds the entire King James Bible. The word ghost shows up a grand total of 112 times. Eighteen times in the book of Acts alone.
But it’s not talking about ghosts like in the movies, the kind that walk through walls, rassle over your bed at night, and go “Boo!” It’s talking about the Holy Spirit.
The dead are dead. They can’t hear a thing, see a thing, speak, think, or turn up in your closet with bloody red eyes. They don’t even go to heaven right off the bat; they hang around waiting on Jesus to wake them when the dead in Christ shall rise at the Final Judgment. Amen.
But seeing Lucy’s face up close—if I can even call her Lucy anymore—even if my mind doesn’t believe, my body is telling me the plain truth; every hair I ever owned is standing straight out like bluegill spines.
But could she be something else? Believe it or not, the word demon doesn’t crop up in the Bible one single solitary time. I know it looks that way in the movies. People waving Bibles, shaking crosses, throwing holy water. But the Bible calls those creatures devils. Devil pops up 122 times altogether.
Devils have to be cast out.
“Navy beans,” Sugar Tom says. “Mother made them in a huge pot with little dabs of chunk bacon cut in. She never sat down for supper, not once, she was so intent on serving everyone else. Oh my Lord, if I close my eyes, I can smell them.”
All I can smell is Krystal hamburgers, the little square kinds with the steamy wet buns. The night is cloudy, and green mayflies are bumping the glass. The motor home and the truck take up half the parking lot. Certain Certain is working on a chili pup, and Miss Wanda Joy is sitting by herself outside.
“I know just what she doing,” Certain Certain says. “Got that prayer box in her lap, poppin’ them rubber bands till her finger turns blue. You in the doghouse, Lightning. You shoulda played sick, maybe you would’ve made out all right.”
“But I don’t feel sick. I feel…”
The world is a different colo
r. A different taste. Sound.
“I’ll speak with her,” Sugar Tom says. Mustard on his mouth, and he doesn’t even know it.
“Clean yourself up there, doctor,” Certain Certain says, handing him a napkin. “Daddy King was still here, we’d have us a buffer. He could handle her.”
I’m glad we’re eating here. This is the best kind of place to tell something like this.
“I saw what I saw,” I say. “It was her, Lucy.”
Certain Certain takes a big bite, chews around his thoughts. “Just consider it was some little towheaded gal that favored her, and she just run off. You know how shy them little gals can be.” He winks at Sugar Tom.
“But how could she have run away that fast? It’s not possible … I would have seen her….”
“I’ve known me some girls who could flat get it,” Certain Certain says. “Leave you chokin’ in their dust. Maybe she’s on the track team.”
“But she wasn’t—she wasn’t all there.” I don’t know what I’m trying to say. “It’s like she was there, but she wasn’t there, you know what I mean?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“You had to see her up close to understand. She was different. Different from a … regular girl. It was like she was … made of different stuff or something.”
Certain Certain winks again. “I’ve run into a few of those myself.”
“Ectoplasm,” Sugar Tom says. “The stuff of spirits.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s what I’m saying, a ghost.”
“An apparition,” Sugar Tom says.
“I won’t say I don’t believe you,” Certain Certain says. He leans back in his seat. “I won’t. On account of my grand-mammy saw a ghost one time. It was a pastor they used to have. Apparently, he was walking across a field of winter wheat. Hat on, same old jacket he always wore. She tried to call out from the buckboard, ‘Hey, Pastor James.’ The words just hung in her throat. See, that man’d been dead three weeks.”
“What happened?” I say.
“Whoom, he was gone. Just like that. Like the earth opened up, plumb swallowed him whole.” He takes a long pull on his drink. “That said, ain’t never seen one myself. And I sure didn’t see yours.”
“But—she came to the motel, too. And what about Cobbville! How likely is that if she’s some local girl?”
“Don’t know. Only know most things, nine times out of ten—no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred—whatever makes the most sense, the easiest, simplest thing is the most likely. Been that way all my life.”
“I need to show you my book on Borley Rectory,” Sugar Tom says. “Could change your tune a mite. The most haunted house in England. Ghosts of every shape and description. A phantom nun, a headless man, a minister who was hanged while his bride was bricked up alive in a wall—”
“So you believe in them?” I say to Sugar Tom.
He cuts his eyes in the direction of the motor home. “I won’t say I don’t believe in them,” he says. “Won’t say I do. But one thing’s certain, they can’t be ghosts of the dead. That goes against scripture. But I believe there is something out there.”
“Are they evil?” I say. “Devils?”
“Quite possibly.”
“What do they do?”
“At Borley Rectory? Bells rang by themselves, there were flapping noises. Objects moving in the night.”
“But—do the—the ghosts—do they ever hurt anybody?”
Sugar Tom swallows his last bite of Krystal, making his goozle pipe jump.
“I recall there was a gal moved in there, named Miz Marianne Foyster, wife of the Reverend Lionel Foyster. The spirits took a special interest in her. She got thrown from her bed a lot in the middle of the night. Slapped by invisible hands. Struck by stones. Near smothered to death by a mattress. Her daughter, Adelaide, was attacked, husband took sick until they were driven from their home. Is that evil? I reckon it could be…. Anything that is not of the Lord is not of His kingdom. You know that, Ronald Earl.”
“But are they people? What if they are people?”
“Devils. They have to be devils. Scripture says—”
“Yes, sir, I know what it says… but if you saw somebody … saw them alive, and then—then you saw them again, and they were changed. And you knew the person they were wasn’t alive anymore, what would you think then?”
“Think you been watchin’ too much trash on TV,” Certain Certain says.
“But she gave me something.” I take out the scrap of newspaper again and spread it open on the table.
Certain Certain pushes it away. “Trash on TV, trash on the ground, what’s the difference, Lightning?”
“There were some messages,” Sugar Tom says. “Written to Mrs. Foyster on a mirror.”
I feel my heart ticking. “What did they say?”
“Mostly just calling out for help. Like that poor woman could do anything. When we all know the House of the Lord is the target for all such foul things.”
“But… couldn’t that have been a spirit trying to make contact? Not a devil, but somebody… a person who had really been alive. Supposing they really were desperate? Needing some help? You think maybe Lucy needs me? Needs my help …”
“Son, just pray on it,” Sugar Tom says. “Where are my cigarettes? Have you seen my cigarettes?”
“You up past your bedtime, doctor,” Certain Certain says. “Don’t need to be doing any of that right now.”
Sugar Tom checks his wristwatch. “Well, goodness. It’s after nine. You are right. Good night, all.”
He steps out to the parking lot and disappears inside the motor home. I stuff the clipping about the boy with the burst appendix back in my pocket, disappointed.
“Don’t let on ’bout any of this to her,” Certain Certain says when we get up to go. “You liable to end up stuck in that motor home praying on your knees, six hours straight.”
I find Miss Wanda Joy waiting stiff-backed in the driver’s seat, snapping those rubber bands. Her fingers are striped red. I start to make my way to the back.
“Wait.” She taps the seat next to her. “Up here.”
Uh-oh.
“I know what you’re going to—” I start.
She holds up a hand to shoosh me and touches the photo of Daddy King when I sit down.
“You know, I’ve probably never told you this, but even Daddy King had his moments. Times when the challenges he faced in this ministry seemed insurmountable.”
I look at his picture on the dashboard; I swear I see his mustache twitch.
“Yes’m.”
She takes my jaw in her big fingers, just the way she used to do when I was seven or eight. I watch her bosom rise and fall as she lets out a big, horsey sigh.
“Is there something you need to tell me?” she says, looking into my eyes.
I gulp hard, feeling it all the way to the pit of my stomach. “No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”
She lets my jaw go. “You don’t think so?”
I take in a deep breath.
“I’m all right. Really. I think … I think I just need a change. I just really need to do something different. Something is happening. I can feel… the Lord … I can feel Him telling me to try something different. You think maybe … the things that have been happening lately … you think it’s some kind of sign?”
“A sign of what?”
My eyes light on the picture of Daddy King. “Daddy King … didn’t he always preach that we were to look for the signs? To try to see what the Holy Ghost is telling us, so that we can do His will?”
“He did indeed.”
“I think these things—these signs—I think they are telling me something—telling me I’m not a kid anymore. I need some breathing space. Little Texas needs to grow some, you know what I mean? I’m so tired of people thinking of me like I’m still this little kid, like somebody in a freak show. I can’t pretend to be Little Texas the whole rest of my life—”
“You will always be Little Texas,” M
iss Wanda Joy says, clicking her tongue.
“I know, I know, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, what is Little Texas going to be five years from now? Ten? I can’t keep pretending like I’m never going to grow up. I can’t. I don’t know what is happening, I just know something bad is coming if I just keep doing the same thing. Don’t you feel that?”
Miss Wanda Joy reaches over and smooths my hair. I get nervous when she acts this way; Certain Certain says it runs too much against her nature. I see little knots of muscle working on either side of her jaw.
“So. I can see your mind is set,” she says. “You are getting older, turning into a young man. Wanting to make your own decisions. I have been slow to recognize this, perhaps. It is partly me to blame; I have been too easy. Daddy King always said this was my weakness, my flaw. Suffering the hearts of others.”
I let out a long breath. “But—”
“If this is the way you want it, that is the way it has to be. I have been praying about this. More than you know. And I believe you are telling me it’s time … time to climb another rung on Jacob’s Ladder, praise His name. You need a new challenge, you are set on that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Vanderloo Plantation,” she says, as if she has been thinking about it all along.
“Waterloo?”
“Vanderloo. An old family surname. It means ‘Place of Wandering.’ You recall the time our Lord spent in the wilderness?”
“Forty days and forty nights? When He was tempted by Satan?”
“That was the turning point in His ministry. When He was offered all the kingdoms of the earth to follow Satan and turned them down. I believe Vanderloo will be something like that for you. The crossroads in your personal growth as the spiritual leader of our church.”
“So we’re going to be up against something different, something bigger at this Vanderloo place?”
“I didn’t say we.”
It takes Miss Wanda Joy most of the next day to get things arranged. When we pull out, the sun is already going down.
“That woman,” Certain Certain says. “I’ve been working with her thirty-five, no, thirty-six years now. Every time I get her figured out, she throws me a new one. Shoot.”
