Could there possibly be an old Savannah house where no former occupant had ever died? Now, that would be a story, Charles decided.
The group bustled down the street, listening to the tour guide’s every word. He pointed here. Murder. He pointed there. Love triangle.
Then the group huddled in front of Charles’s house.
“Breathe in,” the guide instructed the group. He breathed in deeply, then breathed out.
Brandon breathed in with the rest of them. Charles wasn’t so sure he needed to. The lights were on in the parlor. He wondered just how long a ghost tour had been stopping at his house. He couldn’t wait to tell Nancy. Somehow, this was all her fault.
“Smell that?” the guide asked. “What you might be smelling is Isabel Tyler’s cats.”
What Charles believed he smelled was the drift of wood smoke from his own fireplace. That and the cologne of the little bald man standing next to him.
“Or,” the guide continued, “what you might smell on the night air is the stench of suicide and burning fingers.”
Some in the group nodded their heads and whispered to each other that, in fact, the smell of suicide might be in the air. Brandon beamed broadly at his dad. Charles saw that the boy couldn’t wait to tell his friends that he lived in an official haunted house. Yes, this was all Nancy’s fault.
“Quick!” the guide shouted. He pointed upward. “Look at the roof! Look to both sides of the chimney.”
The guide wanted to know if anyone in the group saw cats.
“Shadows,” a woman replied. “I saw shadows.”
Charles wanted to tell her they were roof rabbits, not cats.
“I saw one,” Brandon said.
“This time of year,” the guide said, “people see cats there, near the chimney.”
“Brandon,” Charles said sternly,“you did not see a cat.”
“Did so,” Brandon said. “I knew they weren’t rabbits, Dad. You and Mom just made that up.”
“The current residents do not own cats,” the guide explained. “They are afraid of cats.”
“I am not!” Charles said.
Everyone in the group turned to look at Charles. Brandon smiled again.
“Yes, they are very afraid of cats,” the guide said, mistaking Charles for an out-of-towner, a tourist. Charles quickly realized his mistake. He had no intention of introducing himself to the group, nor to the tour guide, for that matter. He didn’t interrupt again. He didn’t try to explain.
His house, Charles learned, was haunted by ghost cats. And by the victim of a lunatic suicide. Not to mention her fingers.
A woman named Isabel Tyler had committed suicide in the house in 1916. The Savannah man to whom she was engaged was killed in France in World War I.
Charles doubted that such a woman ever existed. He doubted that anyone named Tyler had ever owned the house, but he was uncertain one way or the other. Besides, people did commit suicide. It happened. Why would the house end up being haunted by cats?
The tour guide asked everyone to take another breath. Charles refused to participate.
“You might be able to catch a little whiff of Isabel herself,” the guide said. “Her body lay in front of the fireplace for weeks. It was by smell alone that she was finally discovered. Before killing herself, Isabel Tyler became a total lunatic.”
Brandon was beside himself with glee at hearing this. He bounced up and down in excitement. Charles considered suing the ghost tour. They couldn’t go around saying that he was afraid of cats. They had no right to do that. It was slander to make up things about real people and then tell everyone.
“She lived alone in that house with two cats, and she went insane with grief,” the guide said. “In the end, she couldn’t face the town, her family, her fiancé’s family. Isabel Tyler could not face life itself. You see, she was several months pregnant when she got the news her future husband had died. Isabel’s fiancé had signed up and been shipped overseas as part of the Allied forces more than a year earlier. Neither could she show her face, and especially her pregnancy, at the funeral.”
He paused.
“You know what they say in the South? ‘Momma’s baby, Papa’s maybe.’ ”
The tour guide smiled briefly, as if waiting for applause, then continued.
“Oh, the citizens of Savannah knew all about that. And a married woman would never be asked about the parentage of her offspring, not in church and not on the street.
“You see, Isabel had lost all hope of ever being married in Savannah. She could confront her future husband with her shame, and it might not go well for her. But when he was killed on the battlefield, Isabel’s only remaining hope was gone. She went insane over it.
“She cut off all her hair and burned it in the fireplace. Then she chopped off her own fingers with a hatchet and threw them in the fireplace, too.”
Charles considered opening the gate and going home, making Brandon come with him. His car, though, was at the parking lot where the tour had begun. So he listened impatiently, tapping his foot on the sidewalk, while Brandon soaked in every word.
The guide’s story ended soon enough. Apparently, Isabel had been so alone at the end that she wanted her cats in heaven with her. She killed them first and burned their bodies in the fireplace, right after she’d burned the hair from her head, and just before she cut off her fingers and tossed all ten in the fireplace. That’s why the cat ghosts smelled of burning fur. The odor was carried on the night air in Charles’s Savannah neighborhood.
It was all a bunch of bunk. It was all made up, as far as Charles was concerned. If she cut off her fingers, how could she throw them in the fireplace? She would have had to push them in with her feet. He was surprised the story didn’t have her dancing pregnant and naked with the devil on the chimney top.
An old man in the tour group approached Charles when the story was over. They were walking back to the bus. The old man grabbed Charles’s arm to slow him down.
“Yes?” Charles said. There was one in every group, an old geezer still dressing up in clothes from his wedding. This one wore a suit and tie right out of the 1930s. His eyes looked glassy, as old eyes sometimes do.
“I’m from here, too,” the old man said. “This tour doesn’t have it right, you know? I’ve been to that house before, when the front door was painted blue.”
The old man nodded back toward Charles’s house.
“Cats took her fingers. Nobody cuts off their own fingers. Not both hands.”
“I see,” Charles said. The guy was a queer old coot, but he said the same thing Charles had been thinking all along. If you cut the fingers off one hand, what hand would you use to cut off the remaining fingers?
“Those cats are voodoo haints,” the old man said. “They’re looking for the baby to take back. The next baby. They’ll wait till there’s one. They’ve waited this long.”
Moonlight fell between the trees, turning the old man’s white hair into a soft glow. His lips looked red in the moon-light, as if he wore lipstick, and his sunken cheeks looked rouged. As the man turned, a sparkle of light glistened at his lapel. A polished gold wedding band was pinned there. That’s different, Charles thought.
“Izzy, now she was pregnant, all right. But she did the wrong thing when her man died in France. She was grieving, but she did the wrong thing. Izzy sought out a voodoo granny to come to the house. She wanted to get rid of the baby. She wasn’t as far along as that fellow said she was.”
“Is that so?” Charles said. He wondered why an old man would be wearing makeup. Brandon walked next to them, listening.
“That’s the way things were then. Only that voodoo granny was smart. She didn’t do what Izzy wanted. She pretended to, and then when it was too late she arranged to take Izzy’s baby for her and find it a home. Things were done in the house back in those days. Izzy could stay in the house the whole last part of when that baby was growing inside her. No one would see. And she could give it to the voodoo woman, who
wouldn’t tell anyone a thing about it. They made an agreement, those two.”
They’d stopped walking. Charles didn’t know what to believe, but the story concerned his house, so he wanted to listen.
“Izzy had a change of heart. She found someone she could trust. It was her father-in-law—well, the man who was to be—and he would see that a better home was found for the child than what the voodoo witch had in mind. He got a midwife from out of town for Izzy, too. So, when the baby came, Izzy didn’t call for the voodoo granny. That baby of hers went elsewhere.”
Charles told his son to get on the bus. Brandon shouldn’t be hearing this. Reluctantly, the boy did as he was told.
“Fine boy you have there,” the old man said.
Charles nodded. “What about the cats?”
“Well, they’re voodoo haints. Those aren’t normal cats. They’re agents for that granny woman. She sent them around to collect her due. Those old swamp women use cats to do their voodoo, for sure they do. What you have to do to keep them out for good is paint your doors blue. Light blue, you know? Voodoo haints can’t cross blue. They think it’s water. And they don’t know how deep it is, so they just won’t go that way. Not ever.”
Charles remembered having heard this before. When he was a boy, he’d heard it.
“And poor Izzy didn’t commit suicide. That fellow had it wrong. She was killed by those cats. They showed up to collect the old granny’s baby and ended up bringing Izzy’s fingers back. That’s all they got from Isabel Tyler.
“Those cats being there drove her crazy. Maybe they killed her. They got behind her and pushed her in the fireplace while it was burning. Or maybe they tripped her and she fell that way. It’s her hair you smell in the neighborhood when a fire’s going. Her hair, not the cats’. Then they took her fingers. Once they’re sent to get something, voodoo cats can’t come back empty-handed.”
“What about the cats now?” Charles asked.
The cats were still there.
“Well, sir, I’ve been meaning to say this to you for some time now.”
In the moonlight, the old man’s lips looked dry. They looked like they would fall off his face if he spoke too loudly.
“When you come out of the house at night, that’s me waiting to talk to you. Those folks in the house ahead of you painted the door red. They didn’t stay in your house very long at all, before they up and moved. You and your lady should go back and paint the door blue. Those cat haints will go elsewhere.”
Charles joined the stragglers getting on the bus. The old man’s words slid by like the breeze. Sitting next to Brandon, he understood what the man had said about trying to talk to him before. The bus lurched forward. The guide would be talking soon.
“Don’t believe a word of it,” Charles told his son. “Not a word about our house is true.”
“We have to tell Mom, don’t we?”
“I don’t know, Brandon, if it would be the sort of thing she needs to hear. There’s more cocoa, if you want some.”
Charles asked his son where the old man was sitting on the bus. He wanted to talk to the old man about what he’d said concerning his trying to talk to Charles when he came out of the house at night. It would have been the nights Charles carried out the trash.
“He didn’t get on with us,” Brandon said. “He wasn’t on the bus to begin with. He just sort of showed up. Did you notice his feet?”
“His feet?”
“Yeah, Dad. Didn’t you see his feet? He wasn’t wearing any shoes.”
Charles didn’t remember. But he did recall that this was the night before trash pickup.
Maybe he would set the alarm early and take the trash out before the trucks got started in the morning. It would be light then. And the cats would be off the roof. Charles had seen them both when the guide told the group to look at the chimney of his house earlier that night.
He’d stop by the hardware store on his way to work. He’d buy a can or two of blue paint.
TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA
Butcher Cat
Jessica Prewitt was mean enough to throw rocks at you. And she taught Sunday school at Larry Crawford’s church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It didn’t seem right to Larry.
Until he was old enough to have a car, Larry walked to school every day in Tuscaloosa. It was how he first met Jessica Prewitt and learned how mean she was at heart. She was mean to everyone.
For bad weather and on cold days, Larry knew a shortcut to school. He crossed the cemetery. The cemetery was on his way, and it was too big to walk all the way around twice a day, especially when it rained.
He always hurried through the cemetery. It wasn’t that dead people scared him, although that was reason enough not to dawdle. He hurried through the cemetery at a jog because of that mean old lady Jessica Prewitt. Larry worried about Finger Man and Butcher Cat at night, when he walked home from football and basketball games. At night in the graveyard, it was difficult not to think about the story that Jessica told the boys in Sunday school.
Finger Man and Butcher Cat showed up together in the cemetery, according to Jessica. And they were what you had to watch out for at night. You had to watch out for both of them, but particularly the cat.
During the day, Larry kept an eye out for Jessica herself. She wasn’t supposed to, but she gardened in the old part of the cemetery, where no grave markers were left intact. Just a few broken stones. She planted strawberries all around those graves. Jessica lived in a small house across the road from the cemetery. Jessica’s house was easy to pick out by the scarecrow she kept out front.
Jessica herself was scarier. She lost her mind when kids walked through her graveyard strawberries, or when they looked as if they might be going to. She threw rocks. She ran after Jackie Mills, Jr., with a shovel in her hand once when she caught him crossing the cemetery on his way home from school. He had to circle the marble angel in the middle of the cemetery to get away from her. When she didn’t have garden weaponry nearby, Jessica would jump out from behind a tree, snarling like a dog, and chase you with her bare hands. Usually, she threw rocks.
Jessica was too mean to teach Sunday school, but she did.
In Larry Crawford’s class at church, she told the boys the story of Finger Man and Butcher Cat, sparing no gruesome detail. They lived in the cemetery now, she informed them. Now and forever. A butcher cat is a cat trained to distract a farm animal when it is about to be slaughtered. It paces back and forth in front of the cow, and stands on its hind legs and paws the air. The butcher cat meows like it’s talking. The cow lowers her head for a closer look, and when she is fully distracted the butcher kills the cow.
“Butcher Cat is in the cemetery now,” Jessica said. “God keeps him there for the likes of you. For the likes of people who would trample graves with no purpose.”
When you see Butcher Cat, the boys learned, it’s too late. Because Butcher Cat always comes along with Finger Man.
“Butcher Cat will show up in front of you just like that!” she said. “You think that cat came from somewhere, but it just shows up. It paces back and forth to get your attention, boys. It meows to beat the band. It will stand on its hind legs and paw the air. Anything to get you to look.”
As soon as someone looked, it was too late to save them. Finger Man was already standing behind the person. He would stick a boy in the back with his long, sharp finger of pure bone.
“Right in the spine,” Jessica said. “You’re done for, boys. You can’t move a muscle. That finger bone holds you like a nail in the cross of Jesus.”
Larry guessed her story had something to do with Sunday school after all. He didn’t like the way Jessica’s mouth moved when she talked. There was spit in the corners where her lips met. She was drooling over her story, drooling like a dog when you’re about to feed it supper.
“All Finger Man has is bones, you see. He wears a long coat and a hat to cover it up as well as he can. But all he has is bones. And he wants flesh, boys. He wants your flesh. He
takes your fingers first, because his are all bone. He reaches around and takes them off your hand. Jerks them clean off, five at a time. If you try to holler and scream for help, or say anything, that’s when he reaches around with his other hand and pulls out your tongue.”
According to Jessica, once Finger Man pulled the tongue out of your mouth, he threw it to the cat.
“Just like a butcher does. That’s when the bleeding starts, boys. That’s when it starts hurting the most. He takes all your skin and all your blood. Finger Man puts your eyeballs in his hat. He takes everything until there’s nothing left of you. Best stay out of the cemetery, day or night. Best stay clean away, lest you see Butcher Cat. And then it’s too late. Once you look, you’re gone!”
Larry asked his mom why they let that crazy old lady teach Sunday school anyway.
“She’s a God-fearing woman. You let her be. She’s old now and lives alone, and she’s scared of boys like you. You’re too rambunctious. She’s scared of you. So you just let her be. Don’t you dare be bothering her none.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Larry Crawford graduated high school, he joined the navy and went to sea. He told the story of Butcher Cat to everybody on his ship at one time or another. He told about Butcher Cat and Finger Man in the cemetery in Tuscaloosa. Everyone liked it. They wanted to know, though, how the story ended, whether or not Larry or anyone he knew had actually seen the cat in the cemetery.
“No,” he would tell them. “It ends when you see that cat. The story ends right there.”
Larry came home the next October to see his family and visit friends. Jessica Prewitt had gotten meaner while he was gone. She was in the cemetery all day. She had a slingshot now and would fire off rocks at kids cutting through too close to her strawberry patch. She was there in the morning and the evening, waiting for anybody cutting through.
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