by R. A. Nelson
“I’m—I’m okay,” I say, quavering. “She—she was here again. Her. The girl. Lucy.”
Miss Wanda Joy comes over with Tee Barlow. Sugar Tom is rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“Why didn’t you hear me?” I say. “Didn’t you hear the racket up and down the hall? And the drumming—that’s where it started, in the cupboard.”
Miss Wanda Joy walks over and pulls the cupboard door open. “Drumming?”
“This room used to be Faye’s aunt’s when she was a girl,” Tee Barlow says. “That’s her things in there. Nobody has messed with those things in years.”
Miss Wanda Joy gasps. She’s pulling something out of the back of the cupboard—it’s the drum, I can see the red trim.
It’s smashed in. The top of the drum is all ripped up and caved in. Just like claws have been at it.
“I can’t—I can’t sleep here tonight,” I whisper to Certain Certain. “Something’s trying to get at me—please—I’ll sleep on the floor in your room, anywhere.”
He nods at me. “I’ll see what we can do.” He drops my clothes on the bed.
“I believe it might be better if Little Texas were moved to a different room, where he could sleep with someone,” Miss Wanda Joy says, still holding the drum.
“No problem,” Tee Barlow says.
Tee Barlow and the others leave the room, everybody except Miss Wanda Joy. She sits down on the bed next to me, making it creak. Puts her big hand on my shoulder.
“Could it be I was wrong,” she says, “thinking you were ready for this?”
“Ma’am?”
“This is just the beginning. Do you know what lengths Satan will go to to defeat the bearers of light?”
“But wait—if you had been here, you would’ve—”
“Were you harmed in any way? Or even touched?”
“But the drum—the drum—”
“Are you going to give Satan his victory without a fight?”
“No, ma’am, I—”
“Where would we be as Christians if we were to give up so easily?”
“You ought to know me better than that.”
“You said you were ready to grow up.” She shows just the barest traces of … a smile?
“I am ready. I’ve been ready. I just wasn’t expecting—”
“What? You are in a spiritual war, and you didn’t expect there to be skirmishes?”
“I don’t know—I just never believed—I never believed in ghosts before.”
“You have to see them for what they are. Satan’s messengers want you to believe they are the spirits of the departed. That is the way they undermine your faith. Faith is your protection, Little Texas.”
Certain Certain puts his head back in the doorway. “You coming?” he says to me.
I look at Miss Wanda Joy, feeling my jaw go hard. “Um. No, that’s all right. I’m okay now. I’m going to stay right here. Nothing is going to root me out of this room.”
“You sure, boy?”
“I’m sure. I’ll be more ready next time.”
“I’m only a couple of doors down. If’n you need me, just give out a holler.”
I did. And you didn’t come.
“I will,” I say.
Miss Wanda Joy gets up to go. She puts the busted drum back in the cupboard and latches it shut. I follow her over to the doorway. The hall doesn’t look any different as she makes her way back to her room.
I won’t let her win. I won’t.
But what her am I talking about?
I turn to head back to the bed.
“Ow!”
I look down—it’s a little corner of brick about the size of a skipping stone, sharp under my foot. I pick it up, feeling its weight in my hand.
This is what she dropped.
I’m holding something she held. I turn it over and see words written in square letters the color of gold:
I LOVE YOU
A cold, wormy feeling runs all through my back.
I drop to my knees.
Here is proof. Something they could see and hold. But I don’t want to share this with anybody else. Not yet. It’s too … personal. Something meant just for me.
So shaky and muzzle-headed, I crawl into bed, prop myself up with Bible pillows, and study it.
A ghost loves me?
A demon? A devil?
Those three words, I love you, tear into me and threaten to blow me up. What am I feeling? I don’t know. I don’t know.
Does this piece of brick mean I’m not crazy?
Maybe sometimes crazy is a place where you can go and still come back from? Or what if it’s all just a trick of Satan’s, trying to fool me, draw me out, make me think she’s …
Good?
I remember the claw marks on the revival tent. The noise outside the motor home. Could a girl like her, so beautiful and perfect… could she be evil?
I drop the piece of brick in the blankets and go digging through my suitcase for my copy of King James. Whenever I’m faced with a problem, I flip through the pages at random, poke my finger on a spot—eyes closed—and the words my finger strikes are the ones that hold the solution.
Close my eyes. Snatch the Book open. Set my finger down.
“Now therefore go to, proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him return and depart early from mount Gilead.
Judges, chapter seven, verse three.
Sugar Tom says Gilead means “hill of testimony.” King David went to hide there, and Gilead was the home of Elijah, who brought fire down from the sky and ascended into heaven on a whirlwind. Am I supposed to witness? Give my testimony as to what is happening?
Or am I supposed to hide, fearful and afraid?
I leave the light burning and close my eyes. Every few seconds I open them and look at the cupboard. The door stays shut. The drum is still.
She loves me.
Light is slanting across the water, turning the trees on the island golden. All the bad feelings from last night have leaked away. I may be crazy, but the world is still lovely and strange. In my hand is Lucy’s brick.
The words are still there: I LOVE YOU.
A flash of cold joy explodes in my chest. I get dressed in a hurry and tuck the brick into my pocket.
“Afternoon,” Certain Certain says when I get down to the kitchen. “Bogeyman keep you up? Don’t worry, Miss Faye saved you something.”
Faye bustles over, all smiles and smelling of flowers. She sets a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me. “Bad dreams?”
I shrug a little, fingering the brick piece.
“My man Lightning’s got one powerful imagination when his head hits the pillow,” Certain Certain says.
“Tee says something woke you in the middle of the night?” Faye says.
I take a sip of juice, stalling. “Yes’m. I thought I heard something, is all.”
She snaps a dish towel at me, playing. “Please, call me Faye, I told you. This house is haunted, you know.”
I drop my fork. Certain Certain looks up from his coffee, frowning.
“I should have mentioned it before. It was featured in one of those Kathryn Tucker Windham books. You know, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey? She came and did a story about our attic. Such a sweet little old thing. Gave me a recipe for butterfly biscuits.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I say.
Faye smiles, making the skin around her eyes crinkle up, all sweet and friendly, plus sort of secret and mysterious. Like the two of us have this plan we’re working together the others don’t know about.
“Tee doesn’t,” she says. “Me? I like to keep an open mind.” She passes behind my chair, gives my shoulders a little squeeze, then runs her hand along my arm as she heads back to the stove. It gives me a funny tingle.
“What’s in the attic?” I say.
“Well—”
“Miss Wanda Joy and Sugar Tom are already down at the dock, waiting on you to drag your raggedy s
elf out of bed,” Certain Certain says loudly. “You ready to see the plantation?” He gives me a sideways look.
I push away from the table and Faye gives me a little pinch, says, “Later.”
When we get outdoors, the sun is higher than I suspected and the water is jumping with tiny points of light. A breeze rattles the beech trees, and I can see a dog zigzagging his way down the hill on a scent.
Miss Wanda Joy’s hair is trussed up in a yellow ribbon—a color I have never personally seen her wear.
“Tee will take us over in the pontoon boat,” she says, smiling.
We clamber down the long slope to the water, the tall Johnson grass dragging against my jeans, throwing lady-bugs into the air. The Barlows’ dock points toward the island on the far side. From here Devil Hill looks like a foresty wedge of hillside that just happens to have a shoreline.
The boat is old and sits low in the water. It has a little piece of awning flapping on one end that you have to duck under.
“Oh, sumptuous day,” Sugar Tom says, using me to help him get his balance as he steps aboard. His arms feel like pickup sticks with sleeves. “‘He hath made every thing beautiful in his time.’”
“Amen,” Tee Barlow says. “Everybody, please sit down.”
The seats are damp, and the bottom of the boat smells of fish water. Miss Wanda Joy comes along first, then Faye, letting me help her with my fingers and giving me that look she gave me earlier over the breakfast table.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she says, and gives me a kiss on the cheek. She takes my hand and clutches it the whole way, giving it friendly little pats. Nobody has ever touched me this much.
Tee cranks the boat and steers us into the channel through a cloud of blue engine smoke.
“Look yonder,” he says.
In the near distance we can see the railroad trestle standing over us like a rusty crown spotted with bird mess. I smell the stink of the knocking engine.
Can ghosts float over water?
I’m surprised when we don’t land at the first dock, but instead turn up the shore in the direction of the trestle, puttering away. The closer we get to the island, snatches of driftwood and river wash start jumbling the boat. A mud turtle flops off a log and puts his head up like a periscope.
“Fishing much good?” Certain Certain says.
“Channel cats as big as you want,” Tee Barlow says. “I’ve taken out a sixty-pounder. They say divers up by the turbines have seen cats as long as a man, two hundred pounds or more. Put a smelt on a line, you can hardly drag it into the boat, praise His name.” Tee Barlow holds up his fat hand to show us where he got finned years back. “The depth drops off quickly. You push out a little ways from shore, you are in deep, cold water.”
“It’s me, I’d be settin’ up a trotline, shoot,” Certain Certain says.
“There’s a current,” Tee Barlow says. “You can’t see it, but it’s there. Take a good strong swimmer to get back to the other side.”
I look at the black water, shuddering a little. I have never been swimming all that much. I think I might could make it— but I wouldn’t want to have to.
Every few seconds I sneak my hand into my pocket, feeling for the little piece of brick.
I watch a redbird sitting on a sassafras limb. It knows what is real, and that never changes. I don’t. Not anymore.
On this big boat with five regular folks, I can only make believe I understand what we’re doing here, in this world. Up to now I always thought I did. But nobody does. Nobody. It can all change in the blink of an eyelash. Leaving you undercut.
Unprotected.
All my prayers … nothing I know in the scriptures speaks to this. I reckon this is just what happens to people who see strange things. And I will still have to get up every day. Put on clothes. Preach. Eat supper. All the time knowing nothing is what it seems.
What if she comes again?
What if she doesn’t?
We’re passing under the trestle now. So thick with woods at either end, looks like it grew right out of the forest. I can see the crossties above our heads, some of them missing, all of them dried out and weather-beat.
We come around a long headland where the island pokes a finger of hillside toward deeper water. Not a cloud in the sky. The air smells of pine trees and mown hay. The pontoon boat has to cut its way through big, floppy milfoil leaves to get us into shore.
“Good for bass,” Tee Barlow says.
He noses the Chris-Craft into a square little dock where we can hop out. We make our way up a twisty little path through some scrub rhododendron and dogwoods, and just as things start to level off, I see it for the very first time. The ruins of the old Vanderloo Plantation.
Lord.
“‘And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall,’” Sugar Tom says. “Quite an imposing structure.”
“They used to call it the Parthenon of Alabama,” Tee Barlow says, hauling his belly up into his chest. “You can see why.”
We hike up to a grassy clearing surrounded by oaks that have got to be a couple hundred years old. Some of the limbs are hanging so low, you could sit on them like benches. Between the trees stand a couple dozen tall pillars fixed in a rectangle, with the short side of the rectangle facing the water. The pillars taper at the top and are coated with gray mortar, but you can see a layer of bricks underneath. The brick is an orangey brown.
“Fired from native clay,” Tee Barlow says. “Normally, columns like these would have been cut from granite. But there was none available. It certainly wasn’t a matter of cost. Faye’s ancestor spent $175,000, all told, to build Vanderloo, which was a bushelful of money for the time, just before the start of the Civil War.”
“Soldiers ever occupy the place?” Certain Certain says.
“The Union used it as a field hospital,” Tee Barlow says. “Confederates, as a lookout point. A Yankee officer was shot on the front steps.”
The top of each column is decorated with sculptures that look like bunches of black corn on the cob. Here and there real plants grow out from the sides of the pillars, long and feathery.
“It was quite a house in its day, I imagine,” Miss Wanda Joy says.
Only now there is no roof to hold up, nor walls, neither, and the foundation is nothing but grass.
“What are those?” I say, pointing. Stretched between the columns, about twenty foot off the ground, are some zigzaggy iron railings hanging in midair.
“That was the railing for the second floor,” Tee Barlow says. “Gives you an idea how tall this place was, doesn’t it? Forty-five feet to the pilasters, three floors, with a big glass observatory on top.”
We walk into the middle of the clearing. I scuff my foot around, come up with a couple of pieces of plank wood painted white.
“That’s all that’s left of the original camp meeting stage,” Tee Barlow says. “Everything else was picked over for salvage lumber years ago.”
“Satan,” Certain Certain says, glancing my way. “Which way did he come from?”
“It was just beyond that stunted peach tree,” Tee Barlow says, waving his arm toward the woods in the back. “Been left to grow up wild for decades.”
“Who keeps this part cleared?” I say.
“We have a man who comes around two, three times a year and mows it with a Bush Hog. That’s about it.”
“I love the feel of this place,” Miss Wanda Joy says at my elbow. “Imagine the witnessing that can be done in a setting like this.”
We turn and look back the way we came for the first time, see the sweep of the lake, the fuzzy shoreline in the distance. I don’t think I will be afraid here after dark.
“It’s prettiest this time of day,” Faye Barlow says. “I prefer the morning sun, don’t you?”
“Now. The promotional details,” Miss Wanda Joy says.
She pulls the Barlows off to the side with Suga
r Tom, leaving me and Certain Certain to sweat in the middle of the old ruins. We sit on a hump of ground, propping our hands behind us.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” I say. “Just a regular old place.”
Certain Certain shakes his head. “Not so bad now, you mean. You wait till you get out here in the middle of the dark, noises in the woods, trees closing around you, columns looking like they might wind up on your head.”
I notice him thumbing his slave tag. “You know what went on out here, don’t you, boy?” he goes on. “You think that kind of thing can’t get down into the land, soak right into it like a poison?” He scuffs the ground with the heel of his boot. “This place feels dead.”
“Are you saying you don’t want me to do it?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Then why are you trying to spook me?”
He plucks a stem of goldenrod and goes to chewing on it. “You doin’ a bang-up job of that your own self.”
We sit quiet awhile, watching Miss Wanda Joy wave her arms getting her points across. She’s like a mosquito that has spied a vein.
“You don’t believe me about last night, do you?” I say.
“Didn’t say that, neither. I know real fear when I see it.”
“But do you believe me? Do you believe me that it was her?” I slip my hand into my pocket, touching the brick. “She left something behind. Just like she did with the newspaper article.”
I take out the piece of brick and hand it to him. Certain Certain turns it over in the strong light. He hands it back to me.
“You want some more where that come from?” he says.
He stoops low and fishes around in the grass at the base of one of the pillars. “Here you go, Lightning.”
He puts something hard and raspy in my hands. It’s a little piece of brick. The exact same shade. It hits me so hard, I nearly gasp. That’s why her hair looked wet last night.
Lucy’s brick is from here. It’s a piece of the old plantation.
“Did I ever tell you about my Pulaski angel?” Sugar Tom says.
We’re eating a picnic of homemade dill pickles and pimento cheese sandwiches. Miss Wanda Joy and Tee Barlow aren’t paying us any attention; they’re too busy with the preparations. Faye hustles around keeping us filled with sweet tea and making odd faces at me. I can’t help but think she is aching to tell me something.
