Ghost Wood Song

by Erica Waters

  Jesse slams back his chair, knocking it against the wall. Honey jumps, her eyes going wide, but no one pays her any mind. Last time Jim and Jesse fought like this, Mama had to pull them apart before punches were thrown.

  But Jesse only crosses his arms over his chest. “And what are you good for, Jim?”

  “You got a roof over your head and clothes on your back, don’t you?” Jim picks a piece of chicken from his teeth.

  “So I should be like you, and work a shitty job that barely pays me anything, and make my dead best friend’s kids live in a shitty trailer with a shitty stepdad they hate? You think this is what my dad wanted for us?” Jesse laughs, but it’s a hard, ugly sound.

  “Don’t bring your daddy into this. This is about you and your attitude.” Jim shakes his head, going back to his dinner. He’s trying to seem calm and in control, but his hand tightens around his fork. His job is a sore spot for him. Back before him and Mama got together, his drinking and carrying on got so bad he made a name for himself in town. Nobody but his older brother would hire him, and it kills Jim to work for Frank—probably because everybody loves Frank and thinks Jim’s a piece of trash. I can’t say I disagree.

  When he notices Jim’s grip on the fork, a venomous smile spreads across Jesse’s lips. He never misses a tell. “You know, Jim,” he starts to say, but Mama doesn’t miss anyone’s tells either. She cuts him off before he can get going.

  “That’s enough, Jesse Ray. If you can’t be civil at the dinner table, you can go to your room. We didn’t work all day to listen to you be ungrateful.”

  Anger flashes into Jesse’s eyes again. “He’s the one who—”

  “Don’t talk back to your mama,” Jim says, smirking. He’s got Mama back on his side.

  Jesse studies the two of them carefully, trying to push down his anger and get the upper hand. But when he speaks again, his voice is half strangled with hurt. “You can lecture me all you like, Mama, but I know what you two did, and I’m always going to know it.” He pushes off from the table, rattling the dishes, and stomps from the kitchen. “If you wanted me to be a better man, you should’ve married one,” he says before disappearing down the hallway.

  Jim makes to follow Jesse to his room, but Mama puts her hand on his arm. “Leave it be, Jim. Leave it be.”

  I know Jesse is referring to Mama and Jim’s relationship, but he’s wrong. I asked Mama when Jim moved in if there was something between her and Jim before Daddy died, and she said no, of course not. “Mama, why does Jesse still think—”

  “You leave it be, too, Shady,” she snaps. “And cut up some of that chicken breast for your sister.” I curl my lip at the meat, but I know better than to argue.

  Jim’s still stewing. “A man breaks his back all day and comes home to this nonsense,” he mutters, rising from the table. He takes his plate into the living room and turns the TV’s volume up again, filling the angry silence with the monotonous roar of race cars flying around and around and around in circles—a fitting soundtrack for our lives.

  Mama stares down at her half-eaten meal, looking tired and sad and guilty. Honey’s playing with her food, thankfully oblivious to the rest of us now that the shouting has stopped. I force down a few more bites of watery potatoes, but I can’t stand to sit at this table any longer. “I’m going to go get some air,” I say.

  “All right, baby,” Mama murmurs, not meeting my eyes.

  I take a huge breath of the pine-scented night air once I get outside and plop down onto the steps, leaning my head back against the trailer’s door. But I can still hear the mechanical snarls from the TV, so I wander out to the dirt road that runs past our house, walking along the tree line, where shadows move like the darkness of dreams. I reach the end of our small road and walk for several minutes down the larger dirt road that bumps its way toward the highway.

  With the dark pines at my back, I look out over the cow pasture on the other side, searching for the tree I’ve come to think of as mine. A blasted oak, twisted like a wrung-out rag, the bark smooth and pale, the limbs reaching up like an old woman’s knobby fingers. I guess most people would call it ugly, but I think it’s beautiful, even though it’s dead and barren and all alone. I like to think it’s going to outlast us all; that long after we’re gone it will still be standing there not caring it’s got no leaves and no acorns, that it can’t offer shelter the way other oak trees can. Despite what this tree has lost, it’s still standing, a gleam of white against the dark field. Whenever I see it, something in me reaches toward it, like we’re kin.

  Daddy and I drove past it all the time when he was alive. He’d always start humming an old murder ballad he told me was called “The Old Oak Tree.” He would never sing the words for me, though I loved the sad, lilting melody of it.

  Tonight, pale, distant stars shine overhead. The forest behind me sleeps, breathing silently, the pine trees’ top branches finally at rest. The atmosphere feels the way it did when Daddy played his fiddle—like all creation had gone still and quiet, waiting to see what the music would bring.

  I wait with the trees and the ghosts, trembling in the warm spring air, my body tuned to a frequency that only sounds like white noise, empty static to my mind. No matter how hard I listen, the silence never resolves into melody.

  As I get ready for bed, I still feel restless and on edge—still caught up in that snatch of music I heard in the woods, the spirits’ watchfulness I felt in the trees. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, but I guess all of today’s fighting has worn me out. When I fall into bed at ten o’clock, I drift straight from thoughts of the shadowy, restive woods and into familiar dreams.

  I’m lying in my little twin bed at the old house—my real home—with the window open to a rare fall breeze. My feet are cold, but I don’t want to close the window because I can hear Daddy’s fiddle playing from the woods. A low, mournful song I don’t recognize drifts in with the usual nighttime creatures’ music. It’s a sad song, but it comforts me, and my eyes grow heavy.

  Just then, my bedroom door creaks open, startling me awake, but it’s probably one of the ghosts, nothing to worry about. I pull my quilt higher over my chest, until it’s under my nose. Then I hear heavy footsteps on the floorboards, nothing like the soft patter of the ghosts I’m used to. I turn my head toward the door, where a tall, shadowy figure stands, his features obscured by the hall light behind him.

  My heart begins to race. “Daddy?” I say, but I know it’s not Daddy—his fiddle’s still crying in the pines. “Jesse?” I whisper, though the figure’s too tall to be my brother.

  I already know who’s standing at my door.

  The figure doesn’t speak. He makes his inky way into the room, drawing nearer and nearer to my bed, until he’s standing over me, gazing down into my face. I stare up at him as I have a dozen times before, unable to speak or move or even breathe. The figure has no face. He is darkness. He is nothing.

  A hand reaches down toward my throat, and I know I should fight, know I should thrash and kick and bite, but my body won’t obey me. My limbs lie heavy, useless. Fingertips brush my throat, and finally I work up a scream from somewhere deep inside me. It rips from my mouth, cutting through the shadows in the room, making the dark figure draw back his hand.

  I scream until I am no longer a girl, no longer flesh and blood, but only sound and terror hurtling through the night.

  Warm fingers close over my arm and shake me. “Shady,” someone says. “Open your eyes.” And then I’m back in the trailer, in the room I share with Honey, staring into my brother’s face. Jesse’s eyes soften in relief when he sees I recognize him. I’m still paralyzed, but my eyes flit over the room, searching for a man made of shadows.

  “You were screaming,” Jesse says. “I thought you were being murdered in your bed.”

  “I was.” A warm tear rolls down my face. When I reach up to wipe it away, I realize I can move again. I sit up, feeling sick and dizzy. “Where’s Honey?” She’s not in the bed across f
rom mine.

  “She probably fell asleep in Mama’s room,” Jesse says. He studies me carefully. “Are you having the dreams again, like you did before . . . ?” He can’t bear to say “before Daddy died.”

  “Everybody has nightmares,” I say. But that fear’s still sitting there on my chest, heavy as a body. It’s been four years since I’ve had to fight him off—the dark figure who held me down in the twilight space between dreams and waking, who slipped in and out of the shadows, from choking nightmare to screaming waking. He hasn’t visited me since Daddy died.

  If he’s back now, will the other dreams come back too? The dead girl in my ceiling, the stinging wasps? A shudder runs through me, making me squeeze my eyes closed. And why now? Why has he chosen to come back?

  “Shady, are you all right?” Mama says from the doorway. I must have woken up the whole house with my screaming.

  I find my voice again. “Just a bad dream. I’m fine. You can go to sleep.”

  Jesse doesn’t speak to her. He gets up and heads back to his room. After murmuring good night, Mama goes too, leaving me alone with the memory of cool fingers on my neck, fiddle music in my ears, a secret I’m half afraid to admit to myself.

  The shadow man’s back.

  Three

  There’s still an expectant, uneasy feeling in my chest when I pull up at Aunt Ena’s the next morning, a Saturday.

  The house where I grew up looks like it always has, like it probably always will. The white paint has peeled and turned the same grayish color as the heavy Spanish moss that drips from the massive oak trees in the front yard. The upstairs windows are dark with dirt, and even from my car, I can see the cobwebs. The grass is overgrown, and cracks vein the bricks of the front stoop like spreading kudzu vines.

  You’d think the house was empty of the living if it weren’t for the pink azaleas rioting in the front yard, big and fierce enough to make even the oak trees look nervous. Flowers usually cheer up a place, but against the brightness of the azaleas, the house and the woods behind it look more ominous than ever. All shadows and whispers. It doesn’t help that the sky’s overcast, with big, dark thunderheads rolling in.

  I head for the door, my arms loaded with bags. I’ve been doing Aunt Ena’s shopping on Saturday mornings since the first week I got my driver’s license. It’s not that she can’t go out; she just doesn’t like to. Crowds make her nervous. And so do open spaces. And fluorescent lights. The grocery store is her idea of hell. Mama says she’s always been like that, but it got worse after Daddy died.

  Aunt Ena opens the door, still in her nightgown. “Mornin’, darlin’.” She smiles and stands back to let me in.

  Aunt Ena looks so much like Daddy it makes my chest ache. She’s got his naturally fair skin, dark curly hair, and snub nose. Her eyes are blue, though, a rarity in our family.

  “Your azaleas are going to overtake the house before long,” I say as I pass through the door. “What are you feeding them?”

  Aunt Ena wiggles her fingers mysteriously and then goes to get some cash from her purse. She always gives me ten bucks for my trouble, the only income I’ve got. I’d do it even without the money, though. I like spending time with Aunt Ena, and I know she’s lonely. Plus, I get to missing this old house something fierce if I stay away too long.

  I help put the groceries away in the kitchen, and every drawer and cabinet I open sends a memory whooshing out. Daddy boiling a giant pot of peanuts. Jesse and me eating all the chocolate chip cookies while our parents slept. My homemade volcano shooting red froth up to the ceiling.

  There are bad memories here too—waking up screaming from nightmares of the shadow man and, even awake, creeping around dark corners of the house, watching for him. I sat right here on the kitchen floor one night after a particularly scary dream, crying and shaking, until Jesse found me.

  I try to push the memory from my mind and let the good things I remember take its place. Whatever Jesse might say to the contrary, I know we were happy here, even with the nightmares, even with the ghosts, though the ghosts are why Mama wanted to move out once Daddy was gone. They weren’t her people’s spirits. It’s one thing to live with the ghosts of your own blood, but other people’s—those can be hard to get along with if you don’t have the right temperament. They feel all wrong in the air, against your skin. They make your nerves jittery.

  Mama could never stand it, and once Daddy was gone, she never slept another night under this roof. We spent a few weeks at her friend’s place, and then she used Daddy’s life insurance money to buy the trailer on the other side of the woods. She walked away from Daddy’s old family home without a backward glance. Jesse turned his back, too—he hasn’t set foot in this house since we moved.

  “How’s your music coming along?” Aunt Ena asks, pouring a bag of dried black-eyed peas into a glass jar.

  “It’s all right. It’s not like it used to be. I don’t think I’ll ever be as good as Daddy was.”

  Silence drops and deepens around us. “How’s Sarah then?” she says, arching an eyebrow, trying to lighten the mood.

  I haven’t told many people I’m bi, so I don’t know how Aunt Ena figured out about my crush on Sarah. Probably the ghosts whispered it to her. She’s always had a better ear for them than the rest of us.

  I go to the fridge and pour myself a glass of orange juice to hide my embarrassment. “Sarah’s Sarah,” I say, but Aunt Ena’s not fooled.

  “You ask her to prom yet?”

  I laugh outright at the thought of Sarah in a prom dress. She’d probably show up in Converse and jeans. Maybe a tuxedo if I could talk her into it.

  “Leave me alone,” I say, but I smile too.

  “All right, all right. I’ll make you some French toast.” Aunt Ena makes better French toast than any restaurant ever could. She told me once it was her mama’s recipe, but she doesn’t like to talk about my grandmother, who died right before Aunt Ena started college.

  What little bit I know about my grandparents was hard-won, wheedled out of Daddy when he was distracted, pulled like teeth from Aunt Ena’s mouth. Neither of them ever liked to talk about the past. Daddy would always say something like, “Don’t matter, Shady girl. What’s gone’s gone,” and then he’d go back to painting or hammering or planting. But I do know their mama was Irish and worked as a medium when she was young—helping folks get in contact with dead relatives and lovers.

  Daddy got his ghost-raising magic from her, but the ghosts only came to him when he played his fiddle. That came from his mama, too, the instrument passed down through the family for generations.

  My grandma stopped working as a medium after she married my grandpa. They settled here in Briar Springs, Florida, in the only house they could afford—a house no one else wanted, on account of it being haunted. Once my grandmother moved in, even more lost souls began to haunt the house and the woods that surround it, drawn to her just like they were to Daddy. I guess the ghosts have been coming ever since.

  Our people mostly didn’t mind the ghosts, kin or not. Well, maybe Daddy’s father did, but poor people can’t be too choosy about where they live. I don’t know anything about my grandfather, except that Daddy didn’t seem to like him much. Maybe the ghosts rubbed him raw the way they did Mama.

  Today the ghosts are quiet, listening to Aunt Ena and me chat at the table, Aunt Ena growing steadily more animated. She tells me about the books she’s been reading, the plants she’s been growing, her blue eyes bright as morning glories in early summer. The tight feeling in my chest starts to fade.

  When the faint strains of a mournful fiddle start wafting down from the second floor, we both stop talking. Aunt Ena’s smile wavers and then goes out like a spent lightning bug.

  “What is . . . ?” I stare at the ceiling, trying to catch the melody, all the hairs on my arms standing on end. “Oh my God, that’s ‘The Twa Sisters.’ I heard it in the woods last night, too,” I say, suddenly sure. “I didn’t imagine it.” The song is distant but unmista
kable, and it doesn’t sound light and sweet like when I play it. The only person who ever played like that was Daddy.

  When Aunt Ena’s eyes meet mine, I can tell she’s thinking the same thing. Her face has gone pale, her mouth a hard line. “It’s just an echo of the past. That’s all. Don’t mind it. It’s an echo. You know this old house is full of ’em.”

  The music’s already gone.

  “An echo,” I say, but I know she’s wrong. Tears stand in my eyes.

  “Oh, Shady,” Aunt Ena says, reaching for my hand.

  I pull it out of her reach and wipe my eyes. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw one of the ghosts Daddy raised? He was playing ‘The Twa Sisters’ that night.”

  “You shouldn’t think about it. The past’s the past.” God, she sounds so much like Daddy. Everyone in this family’s determined to forget.

  But the memory crept in with the music, clawed and fanged. I close my eyes and let it rip me open.

  I was six years old, upstairs in my bedroom. I was asleep and then I wasn’t. I was alone and then I wasn’t. From the room below came Daddy’s fiddle music, frenzied and wild as a hurricane night. A ghost stood over my bed, staring at me. The louder and faster Daddy’s music grew, the more real the ghost became until he looked hardly discernible from a living man. Gray hair, a face lined and hardened. His pants and shirt were made of the same rough, beige-colored material, like a work uniform, a long number stamped across the breast pocket. I was just working up the nerve to scream when he spoke.

  “I won’t hurt you. I’m looking for someone,” he said, his voice a confused old man’s. The face that had seemed hard and sinister moments ago became soft, vulnerable.

  “Who are you looking for?” I whispered.

  His brow furrowed. “I don’t know.”

  The fiddle music downstairs was building and building until I thought the room Daddy played in would explode. I saw the old man’s eyes fill slowly with recognition. He looked down at the floorboards. “I think I’m looking for him,” he said, pointing at the floor.