Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘Is there any huge hurry?’

  ‘No, just to get it done before the ground freezes.’

  She chuckled; where we lived the ground didn’t freeze. ‘Let me ask around and get back to you.’

  Reassured and relaxed, I spent the next couple of hours with a soft pencil and recycled paper doing sketch after sketch of Chloe, Emma and Liam from memory. I drew them playing with bricks and climbing the mimosa tree, but mostly I drew their heads from different angles, planning a portrait of Chloe which would be the first of three, the other two being, of course, Emma and Liam. I yearned to start Chloe’s portrait right away but knew damn well I was not yet ready; I had only met the girl once. I needed to sketch Chloe from life, take photos, spend more time with her and her family—

  Wait a minute. I knew myself; I was using art as a sneaky way to do something. What was it?

  It would seem I had forgotten all about painting myself a bunch of imaginary grandchildren.

  Hmmm.

  Introspection can be scary. Blessedly, it was interrupted; the phone rang.

  ‘Beverly,’ said a quick-stepping New York voice, ‘I’m just calling to touch base.’

  Oh, crap. It was Kim, my agent.

  ‘How are you doing?’ She tap-danced onward without missing a beat. ‘I hope you’ve come up with something exciting to work on?’

  Another children’s book, Kim meant. Blowing sunshine up my ass on the off-chance that, painting my heart out one more time, I might happen to accomplish parturition of something marketable.

  I said with no elaboration, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Kim’s voice slid up an octave.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Beverly, what do you mean? Aren’t you painting at all?’

  From where I stood by the phone, I could see LeeVon’s portrait on the wall in the front room, and a nearly tangible lifeline passed from it to me. My heart surged. I stood tall.

  ‘I’m not doing any more picture books,’ I said, sounding perfectly cool but feeling fiery with exultation. My masterpiece of a portrait, once I entrusted it to my daughter, was going to make the New York art community take me seriously (about time) instead of dismissing me as a kiddie-lit illustrator. No more velveteen bunnies for me; I would be a real artist, a critically acclaimed artist, and anyone who had ever condescended to me could go bugger themselves.

  I told Kim, ‘I’m taking time to enjoy my grandchildren. Excuse me, I have to go now. Have a fabulous day. Bye bye.’ I hung up.

  LeeVon’s portrait was going to show them.

  For the next half hour I just zoned out on the sofa in the front room, entranced by LeeVon’s painted face. I might have lingered there in a heady haze of self-congratulation for even longer if I hadn’t been disturbed by the sound of a Jeep driving into my yard.

  By the sound of the engine, I knew it was rural delivery accessing my mailbox. When I had first moved here, it had amused me that the mailboxes faced away from the road, but now it seemed merest common sense to have mail carriers get out of traffic and deliver from the driver’s side window. I ran outside; the woman behind the wheel saw me coming and stopped trying to wrestle with my rusty mailbox. We both said, ‘How y’all doing?’ and she handed me one of those overnight express envelopes, cardboard.

  O frabjous day!

  I scuttled back into the house and opened it to be sure. Yes, it was the check from dearest darling Gayle, together with a minatory letter about forthcoming paperwork I would have to sign. Fine. Whatever. It wasn’t as if I had sold my body. Just my old house. And if I’d let it go for less than market value, so what? I was going to be able to take care of LeeVon.

  I hoped. Very much hoped I could really and truly help him.

  The phone rang, and in a few minutes I had more reason for hope. The call was from Marcia, and she had good news.

  So that afternoon we all met – Bonnie Jo, Sukie, her three grandkids, Coroner Wengleman and me – in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, and after I had finished introducing Marcia to everyone and telling them how wonderful she was, she headed up a small caravan – her van, my Vo, Bonnie Jo’s junker – and led the way to the fringes of town and Potter’s Field Road, which dead-ended (how preciously appropriate) at a small cemetery without a fence or fancy gates but not without the dignity of age. That, and a view! By Florida standards, the graveyard was on a hill, perhaps eighty feet above sea level. We could see to all sides: cow pasture, distant ponds, pine woods.

  ‘Don’t you go running around over the top of no dead people,’ Sukie admonished the children as we got out of our vehicles. We had tried not to park on top of any dead people, either.

  ‘I ain’t never been here. I never knowed this was here.’ Bonnie Jo stood studying the old burial place, some graves marked with stone slabs rounded by the winds and rains of time, some with wooden crosses that had maybe once been painted, some evidently unmarked. ‘Who-all are these people?’

  Abandoned babies, I thought, drifters, unidentified murder victims, poor souls unclaimed by any family, each with a story untold. But Marcia said, ‘Unfortunate folks who needed a place to rest.’

  ‘It’s nice up here.’

  ‘Peaceful,’ Marcia agreed, beckoning. She led the way, and the rest of us – except the children, who were running around the cemetery’s irregular edges – followed her between the graves. Potter’s field, a place tottering on the brink as regards official recognition, felt deserted but not neglected; the grass was mowed, which was more than I could say for my yard.

  Near the back edge of the potter’s field, Marcia stopped beside a plot marked off by rough wooden stakes at the corners, each with a bright plastic ribbon stapled to the top and waving like an oriflamme in the breeze.

  We stood looking down as if we had never seen a rectangle of land before, and for quite a long moment none of us said a word.

  Finally, I asked, ‘Sukie? Bonnie Jo? What do you think?’

  Bonnie Jo made a dry sound in her throat, then nodded.

  Sukie said, ‘We can bring flowers to him here.’

  Although I didn’t say so, I felt as if LeeVon might like it here. Relieved, I turned to Marcia. ‘So how do we do this?’

  ‘It’s already done. You are all taxpayers; in a sense, this is already your land. But, Beverly, the borough is going to want you to pay if you decide to use county maintenance workers for the labor.’

  ‘No problem. The check that’s earmarked to cover the funeral just arrived.’ I turned to Sukie and Bonnie Jo. ‘Are you sure you’re both satisfied so far?’

  Sukie nodded. Bonnie Jo seemed to have regained her voice. ‘We’re more than satisfied. We’re grateful.’ She extended a leathery hand toward Marcia. ‘Thank you, Doc.’

  Somehow handshakes turned into hugs. I love to give hugs, but being on the receiving end of gratitude embarrasses me, so I took evasive action, going to gather the kids, who had strayed a small distance into the woods to inspect a gopher turtle burrow. ‘Chloe! Emma! Liam!’

  As they ran toward me, I memorized their happy, upturned faces, all so different. Chloe, rose-petal-skinned and sharp-boned. Emma, golden brown and round. Liam, still half a baby with a flat nose and a soft triangular mouth. Each of them individually alive and lovely. Such beautiful grandchildren.

  Sukie’s grandchildren, I reminded myself.

  That evening, following Marcia Wengleman’s directions, I drove quite a convoluted dirt-road distance into the swamplands south of Cooter Spring to see Nick Crickens, of all people.

  ‘Of all people’ because I knew him only as the one who had twice visited me during unfortunate circumstances, the youngest deputy of the Skink County Sheriff’s Department. But Marcia had explained that Nick Crickens, like his father and grandfather before him, had a passion for making wooden furnishings with hand tools. ‘Don’t even go near a funeral home,’ Marcia had advised Bonnie Jo, Sukie and me. ‘They’ll soak the life out of you for a custom coffin that’s really nothing more than a nice wood box. Try Cricken
s.’ Then, after Marcia had gone back to work, Sukie and Bonnie Jo and I had taken the kids to Cooter Spring’s public playground. While Chloe, Emma and Liam wore themselves out on the colorful plastic equipment, we women sat in the shade talking about LeeVon’s funeral, coming up with a consensus about some basics.

  It took me only a few wrong turns to find ‘Crickens’s Fine Cabinetry’. But then my Vo punched through the wilderness into the clearing occupied by three generations of the family, each with its own … shack? Not really. These small, colorfully painted homes did look a lot like most of the housing around here, but nothing was slouching, shambling, rotting or falling apart. The lemon, persimmon and pistachio cottages stood proud beneath the shade of their live oak trees. I glimpsed porch swings, a plethora of lawn ornaments, a decorative windmill, playhouses and tree houses, and a Victorian-style martin house atop a towering pole. But at the heart of the place, and dwarfing all else, stood a big metal pole building. Light shone out of its large open bay, and Nick Crickens stepped out to meet me.

  ‘Hello, Deputy Crickens!’ I greeted him as I got out of the Vo.

  ‘I’m off-duty.’ His baseball cap and faded jeans certainly attested to this. ‘Just call me Nick, ma’am, please.’ He shook my hand. ‘Mrs Vernon, I hope y’all don’t hold it against me none that I hauled y’all off to the hospital that one time.’

  ‘Not a bit. I’d be crazy if I did.’ I waggled my eyebrows at him. He gawked, then burst out laughing.

  ‘Y’all got me!’ He sounded delighted. ‘Come on in! Doc Wengleman said y’all need something by way of a casket for the little girl?’

  I opened my mouth, closed it again and nodded. I’d nearly blabbed, forgetting that LeeVon’s gender was still the closely guarded secret of an ongoing murder investigation.

  ‘It’s real good of y’all to be taking care of her remains,’ Nick added as we walked into the pole barn. I didn’t reply because I was too busy staring at hand-crafted rocking chairs, whatnot shelves and pretty damn fancy baby cribs; at big wooden-shingled doll houses, and old-fashioned cradles, and all sizes and shapes of lathe-turned bowls polished to show off the woodgrain; at carved horses and birds and Madonnas and crosses and bunnies, oh my. Nick stood watching, utterly in no hurry, until my wandering gaze settled on a huge pile of wood, specifically chunks of tree trunk, in a back corner.

  ‘Cherry, apple, black walnut, tupelo, white pine and this and that,’ he said. ‘We grab up good wood wherever we find it and let it age while it’s waiting to tell us what it wants to be made into.’

  I felt an exceptionally wide smile take over my face, because I recognized the mentality of a fellow artist. ‘Do you have anything that wants to be made into a small coffin?’

  ‘Sure, but that would take a long time. Here’s what I’m thinking.’ He led me toward an area dominated by towers of nesting bowls atop what my mother used to call ‘cedar chests,’ some of them big enough to double as sofas, for storage of blankets. Around a corner, though, Nick kneeled on the dirt floor beside a smaller one made of wood polished to a honey gold sheen. ‘I was making this for a hope chest for my daughter,’ he said, ‘and I was going to carve something pretty on the lid, but I can make her another.’

  ‘Oh, Nick—’

  ‘She ain’t but six months old.’ Interrupting my protest, he looked up to grin at me. ‘I’d be glad for your poor orphan remains to be buried in this. It’s about the right size, ain’t it?’

  ‘Doc Wengleman said four feet to lay out the bones with respect.’

  ‘Well, it’s four foot six. Now see here. All’s I got to do is take the legs off, trim the depth some so she won’t feel lonesome in there, and – dang, I forgot about that there padded silk they always put in these things.’

  ‘Just keep forgetting about it. We’re using crib blankets.’ ‘We’ meant Sukie and Bonnie Jo and me. ‘The softest, prettiest ones we can find.’

  ‘Y’all got it all planned out, then.’

  ‘Yeppers.’ No way could he imagine how much we-all sure all did.

  Nick stood up, smiling down on me like the tall, friendly young man he was. ‘When y’all want it for?’

  ‘How long do you need—’

  ‘Heck fire, I could have it done tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, then, we’ll go ahead and set a date! I’ll get back to you on that. And Nick, how much do I owe you?’

  ‘Just whatever y’all care to give, Mrs Vernon. This here is for the child, y’all know what I mean.’

  I drove home, and oddly, in some subliminal way, I felt as if Chloe, Emma, Liam, Bonnie Jo and Sukie were with me, but not just them; I felt the presence of Cassie and Maurie and Marcia Wengleman, T.J. Tadlock, Dr Roach and Judge Simmons and the janitor in the hospital and the woman who delivered my mail and all three generations of Crickenses and, yes, even pissy old Wilma Lou … I felt comforted by the number of people whose lives continued to brush like angel’s wings against my life because of LeeVon.

  But LeeVon wasn’t among them. He was trapped in my house.

  As soon as I got back home, I turned on all the lights and looked around for LeeVon even though I knew I couldn’t see him – but at times I could kind of feel him. So I sat down at the table and started messing with my bottle caps – you know, the bright-colored plastic ones off milk cartons and such – sorting them into white, yellow, pale blue, purple, pink, orange and red. This is not abnormal behavior for me. It’s just one of my ways of thinking without words. After a while I felt a clear sense of what to do next, so I supplied the studio with plenty of paper, and on the top sheet I drew a big red heart like an empty Valentine. My hands twitched with wanting to decorate it, but it was not for me. It was for LeeVon. I left it there and exiled myself to the back of the house. I looked up Crickens’ Fine Cabinetry on the internet to get a clue how much to pay for the coffin, checked Facebook, then gave up on the computer, watched a little bit of TV and went to bed.

  The next day would be Wednesday – two weeks since I had found a little boy’s remains weighted down beneath layers of bricks as if somebody was afraid he might get out of his grave and come looking for them.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Shuffling to my studio in bedroom slippers first thing next morning, I smiled because LeeVon had been there, but then I looked at his art and sighed. The heart I’d given him he had ripped in two. On another sheet he had painted a smaller heart weeping red tears. And on another, a heart afire, with ragged orange flames devouring it.

  ‘LeeVon,’ I said quite tenderly in case he might be listening, ‘I know most of what your mother did to you, and it was so cruel it makes me sick. I can see you’re heartbroken and crying and afire with rage. What can I do to help you leave the pain behind? Do you want your mother punished? If she was put in jail, would that help? Or would it just keep you stuck the way you are?’

  I stood there in my sleep shirt waiting as if for a still small voice to speak, but none did. However, as I left the studio to go shower and get dressed, my own loud, large voice began singing a variation on a Beatles song: ‘Ob-la-di ob-la-da, life goes on, LeeVon! La la, how the life goes on.’

  I spent the day on funeral arrangements, which came together quickly, maybe because people in Cooter Spring don’t have constipated schedules. The Skink County maintenance guys got the grave dug that same day. Nick Crickens said the coffin would be ready the next day, Thursday. Marcia said she’d bring the bones to my house and lay them out after Nick brought the coffin. Around lunchtime, when I knew the cafe would be busy, keeping her from asking me too many questions, I called Cassie with a quick request.

  And that afternoon, as prearranged, the Ferees and I went shopping for everything else we’d need. I had offered to take all of us in the Vo, and the Ferees had pleasantly surprised me by accepting. Moreover, rather than meeting me in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, they had told me how to get to their homes! By letting me give them a ride and see where they lived, they were honoring me with their acceptance.

  D
riving to pick them up, following their directions, I could not help thinking on the wrong side of the tracks, even though Cooter Spring had no railway. But on one side of town were pillared plantation-style homes, stately and historic mansions, Victorian monstrosities and the like, while on the other side the houses diminished in size almost to the point of invisibility, because who looks at shacks?

  Or trailers. Bonnie Jo’s trailer was in no worse repair than most, and it had flowerbeds in front, complete with some plywood art, including brightly painted cutouts of rudimentary birds, butterflies and flowers on dowels stuck into the sand. Imagining how Nick Crickens would have cringed at this display of woodcraft, I grinned.

  Sukie’s rental house had flaking paint, some wood rot around the edges and screen doors patched with duct tape, but she had put sunny print curtains in every window, dollar-store wind chimes hung from the eaves, and bright plastic toys occupied the yard. No bricks for children in Sukie’s care.

  ‘She ain’t got no car,’ Bonnie Jo told me as Sukie and the kids headed out to join us. ‘Social Services, the post office, the thrift shop, the Mini Mart, the kids’ schools, most places in town she can walk to.’

  ‘Other places, you’re the chauffeur.’

  ‘She don’t ask me no oftener than she got to. Takes an umbrella in the rain. Hey, sis.’ Sukie and her grandchildren loaded in. The Vo’s occupancy was maxed, but Sukie sat in back and held Liam on her lap. In Skink County this was not a problem. Police turned a blind eye to scofflaw motorists; kids and adults alike rode the streets in golf carts, ATVs, motorized wheelchairs, farm tractors and in the ass end of pickup trucks.

  ‘We’re off to see the wizard,’ I sang, as we three women and three kids headed out for our grave and glorious shopping spree.

  Cassie found herself clenching her cell phone a lot harder than was necessary as she talked to Maurie, but she managed to keep her voice relaxed. ‘You call me and I put you on speakerphone,’ she said, explaining her mother’s request, ‘and I call Mom on my old phone, put it on speaker and set it next to you so we can all three talk, sort of.’