Ghost Summer, Stories

by Tananarive Due

  “Aren’t you going to Brother’s trial?” Letitia said.

  When she said the word trial, Daddy’s shoulders hunched as if a huge weight had suddenly been hoisted upon them.

  “Richard . . . Washington . . . Reaves,” her stepmother said. Her voice whispered, but her face was shouting, changing colors in the queer way it often did.

  “Now, come on, Bernadette . . . ” Daddy said, pushing himself away from the table. He stared at the floor. “Don’t start up again. We’re sitting to a pleasant meal.”

  “We settled that, Richard. You promised.” Her voice was creeping toward a shout now.

  “Yes, we settled it,” Daddy said. “Of course we did. Pay Letitia no mind.”

  “But you are going, aren’t you, Daddy? If you don’t, Brother could die.”

  Daddy started cursing under his breath then, something he rarely did. He stood up from the table quickly, throwing his napkin onto his plate. Then he took Letitia’s arm in a way that felt nearly rough, bringing her to her feet. “That’s enough, Letitia,” he said, thundering. Letitia’s heart seemed to rock backward and then fall still. “You come on with me right now.”

  Letitia was nearly in tears by the time Daddy took her to her room and closed the door behind them. Daddy had only beaten her with his belt once before, when she’d sassed at Bernadette, and she’d cried for two days straight. Letitia couldn’t imagine she’d earned another whipping just for asking about Brother. Midnight, Letitia’s stocky black cat, mewed softly from the bed, and the sight of his curious green eyes comforted her. On days like this one, Midnight was her only friend. He rarely left her room the whole day long.

  “Have you been into my mail?”

  “Yessir,” Letitia said. “But I only wanted to know about Brother.”

  “Well, I’m very sorry you did that, Letitia, because that letter was not for your eyes. That letter was from a lawyer from New York who’s just trying to scare us so we’ll do what he says. He hasn’t lived down here, and he doesn’t understand my position. He’s asking me to do something I can’t do, and I want you to put it out of your head. Your brother got himself in some trouble, so he’ll probably go to jail. But I sent some money, and he’ll be just fine.”

  Letitia did not remember any part of the letter that said Daddy should send money.

  “Daddy, he says you have to go, or Brother will get The Chair.”

  Letitia’s father was perspiring now, and Letitia didn’t think it was just because the upper floor was stifling after so many daylight hours of rising heat beneath the angry summer sun. Daddy looked nervous. No, not nervous—he looked scared, the way he looked when he brought his hunting rifle out of the closet because a strange car was driving slowly past their house at night. Some people were jealous of him, he said—some white people—and jealousy was apparently something to fear. There was a bead of sweat on the bulb at the end of his nose, and he could barely make himself keep his brown eyes fixed on hers.

  “You’re too young to take all this in, Letitia,” Daddy said, his voice sad and gentle. “You can’t believe everything somebody says just because it’s typed on a piece of paper. That lawyer’s job is to help your brother. But I’m not a lawyer, and I’m no help to him. And besides that, there’s no chance they’ll give Wallace Lee the chair. He didn’t kill nobody.”

  “The letter said—”

  He shook her, just enough to make his words sink in. “What did I just tell you about believing everything that’s typed on a piece of paper? That’s a spook story he wrote in that letter. That’s so I’ll do what he says.”

  “But why won’t you, Daddy? You have a car. You could drive there.”

  Daddy sighed, and his breath smelled like pipe tobacco. “Nothing’s that simple, little princess. Wallace Lee’s mother and me knew each other a long time ago. She’s shamed herself in that town in ways that have nothing to do with me, and if I get all tangled in this mess, running off to a courtroom where there’s newspaper reporters and such, then I’ll be shamed too. A businessman can’t afford to be shamed. All a colored man has in this world is his name, Letitia. And besides that, there’s no use me going trying to stir up trouble. The Klan runs that county, and there’s Klan in this county, too. People in a place to make life very hard for all of us. Now, my heart aches for Wallace Lee—but I’ve seen how such things come out in the end, and it wouldn’t do any good for any of us. I would just make this situation worse. Far worse.”

  For the first time, Letitia realized that Daddy had a whole list of reasons why he was not going to Live Oak to save Brother, one having little to do with another. As she stared up at him in that instant, he shrank in her eyes, although he was still three feet taller, with thick arms and thighs as solid as the trunk of an oak. He began to look very small, the way he looked to her when Bernadette chased him from one corner of the house to the other with her sharp tongue, his shoulders wincing with every blow.

  “It’s ’cause of Bernadette, isn’t it?” Letitia said. “She don’t want you to go.”

  Daddy was not the slapping sort, but Letitia realized from the stewing cloud that crossed her father’s eyes that he had probably come as close as he ever had to slapping her in the mouth. She had learned long ago that the truth made people angry, and to speak of it was considered evil. If she hadn’t been so upset about Brother, she would have known better.

  Letitia’s room was directly across the hall from Daddy’s, and even when their door was closed, she knew what went on in there when she wasn’t trying. She knew how Bernadette expected Daddy to account for his whereabouts every minute of every day. She knew how Bernadette told him no when he said he was thinking about buying more land or expanding his store, because she preferred him to buy pretty things for the house. And worst of all, Letitia knew how Daddy had to beg—how he had to make his voice sound silly and ask a dozen times or more, each time sounding sillier than before—just to convince Bernadette to lie in his bed with him like a man lies with his wife. Most times, begging or no begging, her answer was no. Letitia did not know much about the private things men and women did together, but she knew that the sound of her father’s begging made her feel sick to her stomach.

  If Daddy understood how much she really knew, he would have slapped her for sure.

  “Letitia,” Daddy said, a low thunder still roiling in his voice. “Don’t you dare put that magic-eye on me, gal. You best learn to stay out of grown people’s business. I’ve made my decision, and that’s the last I have to say about it.”

  You’re so weak, Daddy, Letitia thought. You look big and strong, but you’re weak through and through. And she began to cry. Daddy left her to sort out her tears for herself instead of kissing them from her cheeks the way he usually did. Letitia cried late into the night, stroking her cat, wondering how the whole world could have gone so wrong in so little time.

  The next day, as she always did when she had nowhere else to turn, Letitia walked the half-mile’s distance on an unpaved road to see Mama. Whenever Letitia went to Mama and cried about how mean Bernadette was to her, she knew how to fix it. She knew which powders, which doll, and which combinations of roots, bone and blood would make Bernadette more humble, more tolerable, more kind. Bernadette never got completely quiet—something Letitia had wished for often—but after a good ritual or two, Letitia noticed she had two or three weeks in a row when Bernadette did not say a single unkind thing to her. That was all the proof she needed that Mama’s magic worked.

  After she heard the story, Mama clucked her tongue in the space where she’d lost three of her front teeth in a riding accident when she was a very young woman. The work of a curse, people said. Everyone considered the lost teeth a great tragedy, since Mama would be very pretty otherwise, but Letitia knew that Daddy must not have minded. Maybe he hadn’t loved Mama because she had no teeth, but he had thought she was pretty enough to court.

  “That man, that man,” Mama sighed. “Well, don’t nothin’ change. Always too skeered of
what people think.” It was rare that Mama said anything bad about Daddy in her presence.

  “I think it’s ’cause of Bernadette.”

  “Well, shoot, we know that,” Mama said. “What ain’t the fault of that devil-woman?”

  “Do a spell, Mama. Make it so Bernadette will say Daddy can go save Brother. Make her go out her head, or get her real sick.” Or kill her. That was what Letitia really wanted to say. Once, when Mama had made a little rag-doll of Bernadette when she was being more unpleasant than ever, Letitia’s fingers had itched to tear the doll’s tiny head clean off. Instead, Mama had given the doll’s leg a good twist, and Bernadette had been laid up in bed for two weeks because she hurt her knee after falling in a near Daddy’s tomato patch ditch.

  But this time, instead of consulting her doll or her large leather pouch where she kept vials of powders, or gathering herbs from the woods alongside the roadway, Mama sighed and shook her head. “Cain’t, Letitia. We hexed that woman five, six times. I told you that kinda’ magic comes back on you. She got protection, and she’s comin’ back strong now. Naw, chile, we mess with any bad juju now, and yo’ brother’s gon’ die.”

  Brother’s gon’ die. Meeting Letitia’s ears, those three words turned her blood cold. Tears appeared in her eyes, but froze there. Her entire world felt frozen.

  “The spirits is playin’ tricks,” Mama said, running her hand across her tightly-braided hair. Her bracelets of shells and cheap metals tinkled together. “Somebody got a curse on that house, and we got to do a higher ceremony. I think it’s got to be you, ‘cause you’re blood kin to your brother. You need a sacrifice ritual, Lettie. You seen me bleed chickens, and that’s what you got to do. But if you want the message to get across, don’t use a chicken. That might not get what you want quick enough. Use your black cat.”

  Letitia had been filled with horror since her mama said the word sacrifice, because no matter how important the cause, she hated to see animals killed. For that reason and that reason alone, Letitia considered it a lucky thing she’d moved away from Mama’s house, because people came for favors and Mama routinely slaughtered chickens, goats and pigs, for rituals or for meals, or usually for both. Letitia had been mortified enough at the idea of killing her first chicken, but nothing compared to her horror of hearing her Mama mention her cat.

  Although Letitia didn’t speak, Mama saw it in her eyes.

  “Lettie, I know you love that cat. But you’ll make the spirits listen if you bleed something you love. You see how I keep my bleeding chickens apart from my stewing chickens? I treat ‘em special. And I had to do this, too, when I was your age.”

  “I won’t,” Letitia said.

  “Then you don’t wanna save your brother then, do you?”

  Letitia’s stomach hurt as she thought of Brother’s row of smiling teeth. Brother was in a cage somewhere, and soon he would go to The Chair.

  “Daddy will go see about him,” Letitia said.

  “Chile, yo’ daddy ain’t goin’ nowhere. I know yo’ daddy. I know him. If he was gonna go, he’d’a gone from the start. He woulda been there an’ back. Nothin’ can’t keep that man from somethin’ he wanna do, and nothin’ can’t change his mind, neither. Bernadette’s got him stuck bein’ wrongheaded, to let his own boy die. There’s ways for women to get ahold of men until they can’t fight, an’ that’s how Bernadette’s got him. An’ she was too strong for me, chile. Else, you an’ me both would be livin’ in yo’ Daddy’s fine house, wouldn’t we?”

  That was true, too. Letitia had always known it, but it hurt to hear Mama say it. The idea that Bernadette was more powerful than Mama terrified her. But of course she was! By now, Letitia’s her tears had freed themselves, glistening across her face. She hitched back a sob.

  “This is one o’ them times you got a choice, Letitia. You can do what you want and hope things don’t turn out wrong, or you can do what you know will make things right.”

  Letitia’s next sob escaped throat fully formed. She suddenly wished that her parents had never met for the secret Sunday-afternoon meetings Mama had told her about, because then she would never have been born.

  “If you gon’ do it, do it clean and quick, like you seen me. When the blood’s spilt, say this prayer: Spirit, release my daddy an’ give him strength to fight the curse. An’ do it at midnight. See how you named that cat? Like you known it from the start. Mama’ll come bring you a new cat someday.”

  That was a lie, too, in its own way. Mama could not afford to bring her hardly anything.

  “By myself?” Letitia heard herself ask.

  “Just take the cat out back, to yo’ Daddy’s barn. Do it quick.” With that, she handed Letitia a slender, shiny knife from the pocket of her stained old apron. Just the size for Midnight.

  Letitia did not remember her walk home, nor did she remember most of the day. She told Bernadette she didn’t feel well—which wasn’t the least bit untrue—and she sat on her bed stroking Midnight’s velvet-soft fur, rubbing her chin against the top of his head while his purr’s roar seemed to fill her ears. As much as she hated to believe Mama’s words, she knew their truth. Daddy had made up his mind, and he would not go see about Brother on his own. And Brother, most certainly, would die without Daddy’s help. If there was a curse on her house, like Mama had said, then the curse on the town where Brother was in jail was a hundred times bigger. A hundred times stronger. It was a curse that had touched many families already.

  And the trial day would ruin everything, Letitia knew. If Brother went to The Chair, Daddy would be a changed man. The bourbon bottle he kept hidden in the pantry for special occasions would become his constant companion. Bernadette, full of her own guilt, would be more hateful than ever. And Letitia would grow to despise them both. For all her life, she would judge men as weak and act accordingly, learning from the lesson of Daddy and Bernadette. She might hate them, but she would imitate them all the same. She knew these things as sure as she knew her name. Letitia felt her future unfolding like a clear-minded dream. It was so imminent, poised with terrible ease, that she marveled that Daddy and Bernadette couldn’t see it, too.

  But they couldn’t. If they could, Daddy would have left for the trial by now.

  Midnight’s green eyes shined up at her like two perfect marbles, and he mewed at her. In Sunday school, Letitia had studied Judas Iscariot, the Betrayer, and the thought made her cry harder. Midnight wasn’t the same as Jesus, of course, but he trusted her. For the past year, since Daddy said she could keep the cat who had planted himself on their doorstep, she had taken care of Midnight, and he had taken care of her. How could she kill a creature that loved her?

  But then Letitia remembered Abraham and Isaac from the Old Testament. God told Abraham to sacrifice his son—which she had thought was very mean of God when she’d heard the story, to tell the truth—but in the end it was only a test. Just like Abraham, she only had to show her willingness to do what Mama said, and God would provide another way to save Brother. Or maybe this was the only way, and she and Midnight were making a sacrifice like Jesus had, to save another’s soul.

  By sunset, Letitia made up her mind with a deep, ragged breath. She would do it. Just before midnight, she would take the cat to the barn. She would bring Daddy’s catalog-ordered gold pocket-watch, which he kept on his desk at night, and as soon as the tall hand and short hand pointed to midnight, just like Mama said, she would . . .

  She would . . .

  “I have to do it, Midnight,” Letitia whispered to her cat, who was curled in her lap with none of Jesus’s inkling at The Last Supper that his sacrifice was waiting. “Maybe God will save you. But even if He doesn’t, you can save Brother. I know you can.”

  And it seemed to Letitia, miraculously, that the cat mewed a tiny Yes, the way a cat would say yes if it could speak, as if Midnight understood it all and it was perfectly fine with him.

  Midnight was happy to be in the barn because Letitia had brought out a dish of milk first. He found t
he dish and crouched comfortably beside it, lapping it up. She watched him drink, enjoying the slurping sound he made and the sloppy droplets of milk dotting his whiskers. Midnight was two parts cat and one part hog, Daddy always said. That thought made her smile through her tears.

  Then, she felt her resolve melting. Watching Midnight, she felt frozen with disbelief at the very thought of what she planned to do, and she and wanted nothing more than to scoop Midnight into her arms and run back to bed before she got caught outside the house. Then, she remembered that wonderful sound of Daddy and Brother laughing on the porch, how that sound had lulled her to sleep. How he called her Lettie. How he hugged her and said he loved her every time he came to stay, never tugging on her hair or teasing the way her friends’ older brothers did.

  Only two minutes until midnight. How had the time gone so fast?

  Quickly, watching Midnight drink his milk, Letitia said a series of prayers. God, please let Midnight forgive me for what I’m about to do . . . and please let this just be a test, so you will stop my hand at the last moment . . . and please don’t let Midnight die . . . but if Midnight has to die, please let his sacrifice stop the curse so Daddy will go look after Brother and keep him safe.

  Her prayer gobbled a full minute. With as heavy a heart as she had ever known, nearly choking off her breath so that her head felt light, Letitia realized it was time. Time to take out the shiny knife Mama had given her. Time to hold Midnight tight and feed his blood to the spirits.

  Midnight had once gotten himself covered in mud and Bernadette had demanded that she fill up a tin tub and bathe him or else he could not come into the house—so Letitia knew from experience that it was hard to hold Midnight still for something he didn’t want to do. She knew to watch out for his claws, especially those powerful back claws, and she would have to hook her arm tightly around him. And she knew she would have to keep no space between her knees, because he would back up against her as far as he could.