Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers

by Scott Nicholson

  Biscuits. A time like this, a good scratch biscuit eased the troubled soul.

  He took one out of the Tupperware container and ate it dry, without the butter that sat on a porcelain dish, its yellow edges soft in the heat of the kitchen.

  III.

  By the time Roby entered the sitting room, the widow had eaten half the piece of pie. She chewed with a crooked yank of her jaws, as if she had an aching tooth on one side. Her gaze was fixed across the room where Alfred and Buck were studying over one of Jacob’s rifles. It was a war relic, brought home from Japan by Jacob’s father.

  “What caliber is it?” Buck asked.

  “Japs don’t use calibers. Why do you think they lost? Besides being yellow Commie slants and all that.”

  “Well, it had to have had a bullet.”

  “Daddy showed me one, once. Long as your little finger.”

  “I remember that,” Sarah said. “Maybe the bullet’s in that old cigar box with his medals.”

  The widow cleared her throat. A tarry crumb stuck to her lower lip. “He threw that stuff out. Figured they’d be grandkids running around here before long.”

  She shot a stare at Buck, as if his worthless seed had refused to take root in Ridgehorn soil, as if he were personally responsible for Jacob’s dying without ever meeting a third-generation descendant.

  Alfred lifted the barrel of the gun, pressed the thick wooden stock to his shoulder, and sighted to a spot somewhere near the setting sun outside the window. “Man, bet you could really knock down a deer with this thing.”

  “Or a buck,” Marlene said.

  “Ain’t you funny?” Buck said. To the widow, he said, “Reckon this will go up on the block, too. No grandkids, you might as well sell it off.”

  “We don’t have enough money to buy it and the tractor, too,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t be dumb,” Buck said. “You don’t buy it, you inherit it. I say if we get the tractor, then Alfred here deserves the Jap rifle. Marlene can have—well, what would you rather have, Marlene, the Dodge pickup or Old Laddie?”

  Old Laddie was Jacob’s horse, high-spirited in his day, before they gelded him and turned him out to pasture. He was experienced with plow-and-harness, but when you had a tractor you didn’t need to mess with draft animals. Now Laddie mostly spent the day in the shade of the willows by the creek, his dark tail sweeping flies, his nose wet with age.

  “Jacob said one time he wouldn’t mind being buried with Old Laddie,” the widow said. “Wasn’t there a Civil War general who done that? Buried himself right on top of his horse?”

  “Probably a Yankee,” Buck said. “Who else would be that damned stupid?”

  Alfred lowered the rifle. “If we’d have had ordnance like this, then the stars and bars would be flying over Washington, D.C., right this very minute.”

  “Don’t make fun of Momma, Buck,” Marlene said.

  “They was one,” the widow said.

  “I think it was Jeb Stuart,” Roby said. He actually didn’t know, but figured if it had really happened, it was either Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, or Robert E. Lee, and he didn’t think it was Lee, because Lee had lived many years after the war and his horse Traveler probably died long before Lee.

  And Stonewall Jackson’s arm was shot off, maybe that was what the widow meant. Maybe they buried Jackson’s arm with the rest of his body. Stuart was a cavalry hero, at that. To bury a man on a horse, you’d need a mighty deep hole. Or maybe they were just planted side by side. Roby wondered who’d baked Stuart’s death pie.

  “I want to be buried on top of Harold,” Marlene said, and her eyes were looking right into Roby’s. Nobody else seemed to notice that she was talking dirty.

  “You got to marry him first,” Anna Beth said. “Nobody gets in the Ridgehorn cemetery unless they’re family. Right, Momma?”

  The widow nodded, setting her pie plate on the scarred, handmade coffee table that would have been an antique hunter’s dream except that one of the cherry legs had splintered off and been replaced by a square hunk of locust.

  There were at least two forkfuls worth of the pie left on the widow’s plate. Roby wanted to say something, like maybe Cindy Parsons would go home and tell her mom that the widow let some of the pie go to waste. But it wasn’t his place. A grieving widow had a right to her own appetite.

  “The cemetery will be a problem if you ever need to sell out,” Sarah said. “I done some studying on it. Once you make a graveyard, it puts an easement on it so you can’t never do nothing else with the land.”

  “Goddamned government,” Buck said. “Next thing you know, they’ll be telling you what color to paint your barn.”

  “How big is the graveyard?”

  “The fenced-in part is half an acre,” Alfred said. “You got grandpaw and grandma up there, his parents, the two oldest, plus that one baby that died. With the hole for Daddy, there’s still probably about two generations’ worth of dying room left.”

  Roby clenched his fists, then stuck his hands behind his back so no one could see his anger. This was a family affair, after all. It wasn’t his duty to make sure the survivors behaved like they had a lick of human decency. He had other worries.

  “Turk’s cap lily,” the widow said. “I want to plant Turk’s cap on his grave. He always liked those.”

  Turk’s cap was a drooping yellow-orange mountain flower that bloomed in early summer, its petals curling up so that it looked like one of those fancy, old-fashioned caps. Roby figured a dead man’s wishes were to be respected, even if it involved a horse and a deep hole, keeping a farm together, or passing a tractor down to an in-law.

  “So, Momma, when do we get to read the will?” Anna Beth asked.

  “When the time comes,” Alfred said, not easing his grip on the Japanese rifle. “Best get him buried first. That’s only proper.”

  “Well, you know they ain’t no savings,” the widow said. “And the government trimmed the tobacco allotment again. Down to four acres next year. Why can’t they treat us like they do soybean farmers and pay us not to grow it?”

  “They sued the ass off the cigarette companies, that’s why,” Buck said. “It won’t look good for them to turn around and say, ‘This is good for farmers but bad for everybody else.’ Hell, I almost want to take up smoking just for spite.”

  “Snuff has sure gone up,” the widow said. “Eight dollars a jar now, and the jars ain’t even fit for putting jelly in no more. Used to be pretty glass things, little diamond patterns on the outside. Now they’re plastic.”

  “You need to quit that, anyway,” Marlene said. “Stuff will rot your mouth.”

  “I only do it of an evening,” she said. “After dinner. When me and your daddy—”

  She looked down at her hands. Her voice grew quiet, and even Alfred stopped his fidgeting.

  “We’d sit out on the porch this time of year, rock and snap beans, Jacob with his chew and me with my dip. Never felt like no sin to me. Nowhere in the Bible does it say tobacco’s wrong.”

  Cindy Parsons stood up, went to Alfred, held the hand that wasn’t gripping the rifle. “You don’t need that gun.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need or don’t need.”

  “Honey—”

  “We got the land,” Marlene said. “Forty acres split four ways, we’ll all do okay.”

  “Except you’d sell your share off in a heartbeat, and before you know it, we’ll have a row of condos popping up on the ridge,” Alfred said. “You’d open it up to the same rich Yankee trash that caused the rest of Barkersville to go to hell.”

  “You’re forgetting about Momma,” Sarah said. “Forty acres split five ways.”

  “Won’t be no splitting ‘til after I’m dead,” the widow said.

  “What about we sell it all in one chunk and just divide the money?” Anna Beth said to her. “You can move into the Westfield Estates. It’s real nice in there, air conditioned, satellite TV, an indoor pool, a cafeteria right there on the spot.”
<
br />   The widow worked her lips as if she were holding back too much snuff juice. “It’s an old folks’ home, no matter what fancy name you give it.”

  “But, Momma, you are old.”

  The silence fell again, as thick as the ash dust in the back of the hearth.

  “Dishes,” Roby said. “There’s a whole sink full in the kitchen.”

  He moved across the room, every eye on him. He took the widow’s plate, almost asked her if she were going to finish that last bit of pie, then took her glass. A ring of milk had hardened halfway up the glass.

  “Mind giving me a hand, Sarah?” he asked. Buck gave Roby a suspicious look, then turned his face out the window, toward the barn where the Massey Ferguson sat in the shadows.

  Sarah got up. Marlene crossed her legs and folded her arms. Cindy moved closer to Alfred, who planted the stock of the rifle on the floor as if he were a soldier at parade rest. Anna Beth watched the black screen of the TV.

  The fork fell off the widow’s plate as Roby lifted it. Crumbs flipped onto the gray rug. The fork bounced across hardwood. Roby counted the crumbs. Three big enough to see, maybe six more too small for a mouse.

  Sarah stooped and gathered the fork and Roby followed her into the kitchen.

  #

  IV.

  Lemon-fresh Joy. Roby not only enjoyed its smell, but the lather was richer than that of Ivory or Dove. The dishes were stacked to the left of the sink. Sarah had scraped them clean and was busy putting away the morning’s plates from the drying rack.

  “That’s one thing people don’t consider,” she said. “They bring over food, but nobody remembers to bring paper plates.”

  “It would be even worse if you had to cook, too,” Roby said. “Greasy frying pans, tomato sauce clinging to the bowls, egg yellows that set up and get stubborn on a plate.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened in there.” She wiped her hands on a dish towel.

  Roby lowered the first stack of dishes into the soapy water. He wiped the scrub pad over the surface of the top plate, flipped it over, wiped a circle in the back, and placed it in the adjacent sink.

  “It’s not your fault. And people got to find their own way to get over a death.”

  “But picking and fighting isn’t the way. Daddy would bust a gut if he was here.”

  “Maybe that’s the way of it,” Roby said. “Everybody lost the one person they would look to when something like this happens. When was the last death? Didn’t you lose your aunt a few summers back?”

  “Yeah. Iva Dean on my Momma’s side. Had a stroke in her sleep, the doctor said. Was gone before she knew what hit her.”

  Roby kept working the dishes, getting his momentum, wiping, flipping, stacking. “I remember now. That was some spread.”

  “What was a spread?”

  “The kitchen. Had the sitting over at your cousin Vicky’s house. That was Iva Dean’s only daughter, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Iva Dean’s husband died back in the Reagan years.”

  “Tuna salad. One of you girls brought tuna salad, didn’t you?”

  Sarah turned the cold water tap and rinsed the stack of cleaned dishes. “That was Anna Beth. She made it herself, back before she learned how to cook.”

  “Sweet pickles and mayonnaise and mustard. No onions.”

  “How do you remember all that?”

  Roby looked at the food on the counter, the heaps of it, a feast fit for a king. Probably the most food that had ever graced Jacob Ridgehorn’s kitchen. The refrigerator had enough pork and beans, melons, and corn on the cob to feed a small army.

  “Food and death go together,” he said. “Because food is life.”

  “I reckon. I heard that Vicky hid food up in the attic so the preacher wouldn’t eat it all. Somebody said she done it so that those who dropped in to pay their respects would see no food on the table and would run out and bring some more.”

  “Vicky did hide food in the attic. Some of it spoiled.” Roby shook away the memory of Iva Dean’s lean spirit, forlorn among the molded cakes and collapsed soufflés. A Beverly Parsons pie was among the food that had gone to waste. How do you apologize to somebody when their death pies don’t get eaten?

  The plates were done and he was working on the flatware. The finger he’d cut earlier began to throb, the nerves activated by the warm water. “I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but I think you got the most sense of any of them. You’re married and more or less settled, Buck’s got his own land and a steady job. So you don’t need to worry about who gets what and how much land ought to be sold off.”

  She stared into the rinse water. “Daddy liked Buck. You should have seen them at the wedding. We had a string band, I got to pick some banjo, and Buck and Daddy were square-dancing together, laughing like crazy. And Buck was only half drunk at the time, Daddy maybe three-quarters.”

  “I wished I could have made that one.” Roby had been away, tending to a death sitting on the other side of the county. Serving.

  “At least Daddy got to see one of us settled down. Though I expect Cindy got her claws deep enough into Alfred that he won’t get away.”

  “Cindy might be good for him. Some men lose their dangerous edge when they get married.”

  “What about the others?”

  Roby got busy with the dirty glasses. He’d been to several sittings where the husband was in prison without bail, the wife dead long before her time. Sometimes with kids running around underfoot who were too young to know that their momma wouldn’t be coming back. All they knew was that there sure was some good pie in the kitchen.

  “What I’m trying to say is that it’s up to you to keep the farm together,” Roby said. “I know it ain’t none of my business, I ain’t close kin, but I know your Daddy would want it that way. No telling how much of his blood spilled out there on that dirt, how many splinters drove under his fingernails, how much dust he swallowed in the barn. This place is all about him. And soon he’s going to be buried here, gone back to the soil that he loved so much.”

  “I don’t know. It might be easier on everybody to just sell it. I mean, Anna Beth will soon be wanting to get out on her own, see the world a little, and where will that leave Momma? She can’t keep this place up by herself.”

  Roby’s nose itched. Probably from the smell of the spoiled eggs. “But you got roots here. Memories. Don’t that mean anything?”

  “I’m growing new roots. Me and Buck will probably be having kids in a few years. That’s why he needs the tractor. We probably can’t afford one after that.”

  “You take that tractor off this ground and it’s the same as if you walked across your Daddy’s grave backwards.”

  Sarah turned away and carried an armload of dry plates to the cabinet. “Maybe it’s none of your business. I mean, here we are, close family trying to work out our differences, and you come in and start bossing the kitchen and bringing in your big ideas of what the Ridgehorns ought to do and not do.”

  She paused in her stacking. “Come to think of it, you did that at the Jones house, too. When Granny Aiken died. She was Momma’s great aunt, so that makes you what? Second cousin? Third? Yet you went right ahead and meddled when Momma went after the doll collection.”

  “Them dolls should have rightly stayed with Granny Aiken’s grandkids, somebody who’d appreciate them. What good would it do to sell them off so they’d get stuck on a shelf somewhere?”

  Roby looked at his smeared reflection among the spiderweb cracks of the plate he was rinsing. When had his eyes gotten so old? While he wasn’t looking, that’s when. That’s the way it worked.

  “Well, that money would have come in handy when Gertie needed a heart bypass. The hospital in Asheville said they couldn’t turn anybody away, but you can bet your boots they didn’t go the works for a dirt-poor country patient. And when she died on the operating table, why, it’s just one of them things, ain’t it? Happens from time to time, the doctors said. Every surgery a risk. Except
you can bet if it was one of theirs on the cutting table, the odds would have been a lot better.”

  Poor Gertie, God rest her soul. Dead at forty. Beverly Parsons had made a pumpkin pie for that one, sweet as snuff and thick as tar.

  “And what good would the money have done her dead?” Roby asked. “At least the kids can look at the dolls and have memories. Money don’t make memories.”

  “Yeah, but if Buck got the tractor and we got our share when the land sold, we could afford to build a house and move out of that trailer. You can hear the rats at night. They eat right through them aluminum walls.”

  Roby pulled the stopper and watched the gray water swirl down the drain. “What would your Daddy say?”

  “Nothing, because the dead don’t talk.”

  Roby said nothing. He couldn’t explain, and she wouldn’t believe him if he tried. “There’s still half a pie left. Why don’t you have some?”

  “I ain’t hungry. You got me mad.”

  “It’s not my decision. It’s you-alls.”

  “Well, just shut up about it, then.”

  Roby looked out the window. The sun had hit the lip of the far mountains, splashing the ridge lines with molten gold. The shadows around the barn had grown long, the woods dark by the fence. In the quiet, he could hear crickets through the screen door, and a couple of frogs had taken up conversation down by the watering pond.

  “Buck’s getting that tractor, no matter what Marlene says,” Sarah said.

  “Not while I’m breathing,” said Alfred from the kitchen entrance. Roby wondered how long he’d been standing just outside the room, listening. Then Roby figured it didn’t matter. This family didn’t have many secrets. At least the living members of the family.

  “You don’t give a bucket of horse hockey for this place, Alfred,” she said. “You can have everything else you want. Daddy’s got a bunch of hand tools, the hay baler, the old junk Ford Falcon—”

  “Hey, that’s a collector’s item. Worth some money. Maybe more than the tractor.”