Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  Her face contorted and livid, Gayle screeched, ‘You are the ones who are going to be sorry!’

  ‘Are we clear?’ Maurie repeated.

  ‘I’m cutting both of you out of my will!’

  ‘Just so long as you got the message.’

  Turning to her sister, Cassie felt herself actually grinning; it had felt so good to call her aunt an aging hipster. ‘Come on, Berthe. I think we’re finished here.’

  ‘You’re finished, all right!’ their aunt shouted at their backs as they turned away. ‘You’re disowned!’ She continued yelling as they walked to the car and got in, but Cassie didn’t particularly notice what she said. Once in the car, she and Maurie started laughing with relief as they drove away.

  ‘Cross her off the Christmas list,’ said Maurie.

  The rest of that Saturday, I worried. I worried about Sukie Feree, how she would feel if Detective Tadlock found her and questioned her. I worried about Bonnie Jo, headed home with her groceries and her messed-up emotions and her bad memories. I worried about how to confer with LeeVon when he and I were communicating on such a primitive level. It wasn’t as if I could leave him a note.

  What I finally did was to sit down with his most telling picture and another piece of cheap sketch paper. Using black marker instead of paints, as simply and accurately as possible I copied the three skirted figures he had drawn, smallest to largest, and the towering mother – with a few important changes. In my version, Ma’s whupping strap had dropped to the ground. I put a noose around her neck, yanked her off her big feet and hanged her from a primitive gibbet. Next to her, in red, I put a question mark.

  I left this on the easel when I went to bed.

  In the morning, there it still was. LeeVon had not done anything to it or to anything else that I could see.

  Damn. Now what?

  After breakfast, I phoned Bonnie Jo to see how she was. I felt pretty sure I wouldn’t be interrupting any preparations to go to church on her part, but just in case, I asked, ‘Do you have time to talk?’

  ‘I ain’t got nothing much but time.’

  ‘Are you OK since talking to the cops yesterday?’

  She snorted. ‘No. They called about releasing “the remains” to me. That’s what they call LeeVon’s skeleton – “the remains.” What the hell am I supposed to do with him? I ain’t got no money for—’

  Without consulting my brain, my mouth opened and said, ‘Bring him to my house.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounded relieved. ‘You sure?’

  I wasn’t at all sure, so I hedged, ‘It’s a thought. We should ask your sister. Are you and she close?’

  ‘Sukie? Hell, yeah. We talk all the time.’

  ‘Oh. Good. So you told her about—’

  I was trying to ask whether Sukie knew about LeeVon’s portrait, his active spirit or ghost or whatever, but Bonnie Jo interrupted. ‘Sukie is all fussed up. The cops been to her place already. Her and the grands played bill collector and hid like there was nobody home. It ain’t as if she don’t got enough problems—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, all my other concerns forgotten as my mind wrapped around a single word: grands. ‘Grandchildren?’

  ‘Yeah, she got stuck raising them. Their ma’s a druggie.’

  ‘Sukie’s daughter is an addict?’

  ‘Yeah. Sukie was a good ma, but you know how it is.’

  I didn’t know how it was. I couldn’t imagine being a single mother raising children in poverty. And now grandchildren. Humbled, I asked, ‘Is Sukie a good grandma, too?’

  ‘She ain’t got nothing to spare except hugs, but she does the best she can.’

  Oh. Oh, for LeeVon’s sake and my selfish own, I just had to do something. ‘Bonnie Jo, could you take me to see her?’

  Hesitation. Reluctance. After a moment I sensed why. Mix poverty with a little bit of pride and people don’t want visitors.

  ‘Or could you and she come to see me?’

  ‘I think she’d like that better,’ Bonnie Jo said.

  Marcia Wengleman rarely got to spend a relaxed Sunday at home just lounging in her favorite butterfly chair, catching up on her reading. When her phone summoned her with ‘Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again,’ she rolled her eyes. But when she saw the name on her caller ID, she smacked herself on the forehead, remembering she had forgotten to return the little woman’s call. Laying the journal she was reading in her lap, she thumbed the green button. ‘Hello, Beverly.’

  ‘Oh! You know it’s me. I keep forgetting about smart phones. How are you?’

  ‘No more ghoulish than usual, and I’m sorry I forgot to call back. Yes, I will be there for your date with Judge Simmons tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, that’s great. Thank you. But that’s not why I phoned.’

  Marcia’s jaw dropped. What could be more urgent than court?

  But nattering on, Beverly was already answering that question. ‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but I’m very concerned to know what is going to happen to LeeVon. His skeleton, I mean.’

  Marcia had to clear her throat before speaking. ‘Detective Tadlock tells me you’ve found him a family?’

  ‘Two sisters, yes.’

  ‘Well, after the court releases his remains, they can claim him.’

  ‘What if they can’t afford a funeral or even a cremation? Will the county bury him?’

  ‘No. We stopped using the potter’s field years ago. Our John Does go into a freezer over in Tallahassee. Or if they’re just bones like LeeVon, they’re filed in a box on the shelf.’

  Beverly Vernon said, ‘Huh.’ Then there was a considerable silence, during which Marcia imagined she could hear the grinding of mental molars as the other woman ruminated.

  Marcia intervened. ‘No, Beverly, you are not allowed to take him and put him back where you found him in your backyard.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea anyway. But I have to do something. The hell of it is he needs … I haven’t talked with Bonnie Jo and Sukie yet, but it’s absolutely crucial …’

  After listening to fraught silence for a few moments, Marcia asked, ‘What’s so absolutely crucial?’

  ‘To lay his spirit to rest, not just his bones.’

  ‘What?’ The journal Marcia was reading slid off her lap on to the floor, punctuating her startled reaction with a smack as if something had hit her.

  ‘To get him back together.’ Struggling with the words, sounding as if she might cry, the Vernon woman abruptly ended the call. Marcia sat staring at the blank face of her cell phone, wondering whether Beverly Vernon had really been saying what Marcia thought she had heard.

  I met Sukie that same day. Bonnie Jo brought her and her grandkids out to my place that afternoon, and I walked outside to meet their beater of a car as it sighed to a stop in my front yard. ‘Is it OK we brought the kids along?’ Bonnie Jo asked out of the driver’s side window. ‘There ain’t nobody to watch them.’

  ‘Of course it’s OK!’

  ‘This is Sukie,’ Bonnie Jo informed me, gesturing toward her passengers, ‘and Chloe and Emma and Liam.’

  Sukie acted too shy to speak. Plumper and shorter than Bonnie Jo, she looked like LeeVon with a more rounded face. The children got out of the car and stood still, as silent as their mother. Chloe, the reed-thin oldest, I guessed at early grade-school age, and Emma, a curly-haired mocha-skinned charmer, a bit younger. Liam was a sturdy toddler in shorts and a well-worn T-shirt like his sisters.

  Bonnie Jo asked, ‘Miss Beverly, is it OK if I take these curtain climbers for a walk around your yard? Show them where Sukie and me used to play?’

  ‘Of course it’s OK!’ I felt stupid, repeating myself that way, and followed up with something even more stupid. ‘You can teach them how to throw bricks.’

  Both women, to my relief, looked surprised but started laughing. Sukie even smiled at me, and the children came alive, yelling and running in circles. Bonnie Jo started grabbing them, and leaving her to it, I reached out fo
r Sukie. ‘Come on inside.’

  The idea, I deduced, was for Sukie to have a look at LeeVon’s portrait alone, without her grandchildren there to see her reaction.

  She didn’t say a single word until she stood face-to-face with the image of her dead brother, when she asked him softly, ‘Please don’t cry.’

  I think both she and I held our breath for the next moment. We heard happy noises from the children out in the backyard. But inside my house nothing unreal happened, so I, for one, relaxed.

  Sukie looked at her brother some more, and she was the one who started to cry, a little, silently. Tears on her face. She took in the oval aureole of pictures crayoned on the wall around the portrait, pointed at a bright red airplane and asked a bit unsteadily, ‘Was it LeeVon done this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so. He liked things that flew – but how did he reach so high?’

  ‘He’s a spirit,’ I said, amazed to hear myself say it in such an ordinary way, as if I were talking about having my hair cut. ‘He floats, kind of, I suppose. Would you like to see what he did in the other room?’

  Sukie’s eyes widened and, once again wordless, she nodded.

  I led her into the studio and watched her gaze flash from the origami critters hanging on the ceiling to the rainbow handprints on the walls to the junk in baskets on the table to the pictures LeeVon had painted. Turning to me, she lifted her eyebrows, questioning.

  ‘LeeVon did the handprints one night,’ I said.

  I was about to go on telling her about other gifts he had left me, but she brought me up short. ‘But how? His hands is bones miles away from here.’

  Such a practical-minded question I had never thought to ask – I stood there flabbergasted.

  ‘You don’t know how,’ Sukie rightly observed after a while.

  ‘I sure don’t. I guess you have to believe in magic,’ I admitted. ‘But he did put those handprints on the wall. And I guess Bonnie Jo told you about the picture I showed her?’

  ‘Yeah. Is that it?’ She pointed.

  ‘Yes.’ I peeled it away from the Poster Putty holding it to the wall. We sat at the table and, as she looked at the childish depiction of three kids versus Ma, I told her about my experience of LeeVon, about how he had played with my toys one night, and trashed my place the next, and painted his pictures after that, then left his handprints and turned playful again, sorting my paints and arranging my flittercritters in circles by species. About how he had taken charge of the portrait I was trying to do, although I had not known for sure it was him until he replicated the dress he had been buried in.

  ‘And I don’t have a clue how he did it, any of it,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not as if he took hold of my hand and guided the brush.’

  ‘Do you think he’s here all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know. But sometimes I talk to him like he is.’

  Through the window we could see Bonnie Jo and the kids; they had gathered around the hole in the ground, and the little Ferees were indeed trying to throw bricks.

  ‘Brats,’ Sukie murmured, smiling.

  ‘LeeVon is a brat,’ I told her fondly. ‘Look what he did to this. Not that I mind. I was just fooling around.’ I got up and lifted my line drawing off the easel to show her the painting underneath. ‘Look what he did. He put a beard and mustache on her.’

  But Sukie was looking at the magic marker picture in my hand, the one with Ma hanging from a gibbet. She pointed at it. ‘Did LeeVon do that?’

  ‘No.’ I returned the line drawing to the easel and went back to the table to sit with her. ‘No, I did that, and I just put it out last night. So far LeeVon hasn’t responded. I’m trying to ask him a question.’

  ‘What question?’

  But before I could answer, Sukie went stark still and her face went so pale that for the first time I noticed she had freckles. She was staring at the line drawing. I turned to look, and gasped.

  The smallest black-and-white figure now wore a yellow-and-aqua striped dress.

  ‘Oh,’ Sukie wailed, ‘I loved that dress,’ and then she cried.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Bonnie Jo,’ I called out the back door, ‘bring the kids and come see this.’

  She did, and I left Sukie to explain things to Bonnie Jo in the studio while I took Chloe, Emma and Liam, along with some of my junk, into the front room and got them settled playing there. Chloe all but worshipped the toy horses I brought down from my bookshelves for her, Emma dove right into the bowl of Mardi Gras beads and Liam was fascinated by a Rubik’s cube.

  ‘I love your grandkids,’ I told Sukie, returning to the studio where she and Bonnie Jo stood in front of LeeVon’s latest artwork, whispering.

  Before Sukie had a chance to respond, Bonnie Jo demanded, ‘How’d he do that?’ Her attenuated finger trembled as she pointed at the yellow-and-aqua striped dress.

  I touched it. Not pastel, not crayon or colored pencil, not paint, my fingertips told me. It just was, as if the paper itself had changed colors.

  ‘I have no idea.’ Admitting this was not difficult, as the past couple of weeks had included so much new experience I did not understand. ‘He’s never done anything like that in the daytime before. He must be really happy to see you, Sukie.’

  The dress of the second figure on the picture began to glow, then flushed, then focused to become maraschino cherry red with white polka dots.

  ‘And you too, Bonnie Jo,’ I added, unable at first to take my eyes off the picture. A couple of moments passed before I checked on Bonnie Jo; tears ran down her face and she was trembling as if she wanted to run away, but she didn’t – not this time. Mentally, I chalked up points for Bonnie Jo. I wondered whether the polka-dot dress had been her favorite, but didn’t ask.

  ‘So I guess we can all agree your brother is here, in this house, in some weird way,’ I said.

  Perhaps unable to speak, they nodded.

  ‘Which is why I want his bones brought back here,’ I said, ‘before burial.’

  ‘Burial? What burial?’ Bonnie Jo sounded harsh and hurting. ‘We can’t afford no burial.’

  ‘How do you get by, Bonnie Jo? Financially, I mean.’

  ‘Cleaning rich people’s houses for them and a little bit of this and that. Not what Ma done.’

  ‘I never would have thought so,’ I said very gently, turning to her sister. ‘Sukie, you have the kids, so I’m guessing government money?’

  She nodded. ‘But it ain’t never nearly enough.’

  ‘I’m not rich either, but give me a few days and I think there’s a way I can finagle a funeral for LeeVon. Is it OK with you if I do that?’

  Silence. Intuiting that they weren’t the sort of people I could push to accept help, I waited.

  Bonnie Jo spoke first, her voice rasping very low. ‘I guess so. Since he sort of done adopted you.’

  Sukie nodded.

  I said, ‘Thank you.’

  Sukie found her voice. ‘Thank us? You’re the one giving us charity. Not that most Ferees ain’t too proud to accept it,’ she added wryly.

  ‘It’s not charity. It’s me worrying about LeeVon.’ I took a deep breath; giving LeeVon’s spirit rest was more important than I could say. ‘So, if I can get the money to pay for a burial plot and a casket, can we have the funeral from here, from this house?’ They were his family. I needed their permission.

  Sukie and Bonnie Jo eyed each other, and then they both nodded. ‘This here house is where he is,’ Sukie said. ‘That’s why me and Bonnie Joe come back to Cooter Spring. To find it. Where LeeVon was.’

  Detective T.J. Tadlock drove an hour and a half to get to Delaine, Alabama, and was halfway there before she realized it was Sunday. Not that it mattered; almost certainly it made no difference to the perp, and all days of the week were workdays to T.J.

  Once she reached her destination, Sunset Haven Assisted Living Home, she had ironic thoughts about its name as she parked in its gravel lot. Haven? More like a sharecropper’s s
hack, super-sized. The moment she walked into its shabby, narrow, dimly lit front hallway, she smelled the reek of cheap food, talcum powder, irregular bowel movements and old bodies going rotten from the inside out. There was no one at – sheesh, there wasn’t even a front desk. With her Naturalizers clopping on the linoleum, T.J. walked back the dark hallway, past several rooms with open doorways from which she averted her eyes, until she found a woman in a uniform of sorts. Nurse? Maid? Both?

  T.J. wore a mauve blazer today so she could display her shield on her lapel. She asked in friendly cop tones, ‘Hi, how y’all doing? I’m here to see Romaine Louise Feree.’

  The woman frowned at her over an armload of laundry. ‘I don’t know no Romaine, but there’s an old lady Feree last room in the back.’ She pointed the direction with her chin.

  T.J. walked on. Sunset Haven (so called) was depressingly, even deathly, silent, but as T.J. neared the far end, she heard a raspy voice holler, ‘Where the smelly bumfuck in this hell hole is the party? I wanna party!’

  It came from the room to which T.J. had been directed. She stepped in and asked, ‘Romaine Feree?’

  The old woman swung around, her mouth a toothless rictus that might have been a grin or a leer. Not in bed like most of the others, she stumped toward T.J. on bare, knobby feet the same dried-urine color as her formerly white nightgown. She yelped, ‘Romaine, go get fucked! Don’t nobody call me Romaine!’

  ‘I beg your pardon. What do they call you?’

  ‘My ma so stupid she named me after a lettuce, fucking whore! So I go by Lettie. Lettie Lou Feree, that’s me!’ She stood aggressively close in front of T.J., malodorous, thin and saggy, with skin that looked a lot like the inside of a banana peel.

  T.J. managed not to step back, and forced herself to smile, to sound friendly. ‘OK, Lettie Lou. I’m a police officer, Detective—’

  Trying to introduce herself, she got no farther. Lettie shrilled, ‘What the fuck? You a cop? Well, no wonder, you so ugly.’ She pronounced it ‘ooo-gly,’ with emphasis.