Ghost Wood Song

by Erica Waters

  Jesse stares into my eyes, and whatever he sees there makes up his mind. “I won’t let you die for this fiddle. Not like he died.” His hand shoots out and he grabs the fiddle from me, ripping it out of my hands. “I should have destroyed it then,” he says, backing away. “If I had, maybe Daddy would still be alive. But I’m going to destroy it now.”

  And then he’s running.

  I leap to my feet and chase him through the trees, and I know exactly where he’s going. My fractured rib feels like it’s on fire, but I ignore it because my life is being carried away in my brother’s arms, carried away to be drowned.

  If he wanted to destroy it, he could smash it against any of the hundreds of trees zipping by our running bodies. But he’s going to drown it, the way he drowned Daddy. I see that now.

  I run and run and run, my body screaming at me to stop, my mind screaming at my body to keep moving, to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  I break through the trees into the marshy area that surrounds the lake just in time to see Jesse draw back his arm and throw the fiddle high into the air. It spins out over the water and then plummets down, far, far out into the lake.

  “No!” I scream, and the pain in my rib is nothing to the stab of panic that shoots through my heart. I leap into the lake fully clothed, swimming as hard as I can, but I’m already gasping, the water dragging at me like quicksand. I dive down where I saw the fiddle fall, and my descent to the bottom is an echo of my last dive. But when I touch the silt this time, my fingers find the hard wood of the fiddle. I shoot upward and surface with a gasp, the pain in my rib blinding. As soon as I get a gulp of air, I’m underwater again, fighting against the pain in my chest and the weakness in my limbs. The shadow man seems to laugh inside my head.

  “Shady!” Jesse screams. He splashes toward me. He reaches me quickly and begins to tow me toward shore, while I kick and hit at him, thrashing with all my might to get away, to keep him from the fiddle. I’ll drown before I lose it.

  He drags us both to shore and I lie in the grass, clutching the sodden instrument to my chest. “Please, Jesse, please,” I cry, “I need it.”

  Jesse gets to his feet and stands over me. “You could have died, Shady, just like he died. All for this fucking fiddle.” His voice breaks into a sob.

  He’s right—the fiddle has too much power over me. The shadow man won’t stop until I’m lying belly-up in this lake. But that doesn’t change the fact that Jesse caused our daddy’s death. Jesse’s the one who needs to answer for what he’s done, not me.

  “What did you do? How did you make him crash? I know you did something to make it happen. There wasn’t a deer in the road,” I yell, clutching the fiddle to my chest. That’s why Jesse let himself be framed for Jim’s murder. Because just like Jim’s ghost said . . . he was owed punishment for something else. Jesse almost admitted as much when I visited him in juvie. He said he’d caused enough trouble and pain for one lifetime, that he had done something I’d never forgive him for.

  “You’re . . . right, there wasn’t,” Jesse says, struggling to push down his sobs. “I—I made it up. I wasn’t even in the truck. I never told anyone, not even Mama. I was too ashamed.”

  I gaze up at my brother’s anguished face, anger turning to dread in my stomach. “What happened?”

  Jesse finally gets his tears under control. “Daddy came to my friend’s to get the fiddle back. And my friend was kind of high and his parents weren’t there, so I was on my own. And Daddy was so mad at me for taking his fiddle. We argued, and I got scared and I grabbed the fiddle and ran. I tried to stay in the woods along the lake, but when the trees thinned out, he spotted me, and then there was nowhere to go but the water.

  “He was still driving at the edge of the road, yelling at me from the window, begging me to get in the truck. Begging me not to hurt the fiddle. He said it would kill him to lose it. Said if I loved him at all I should get in the truck and give him back his fiddle.”

  “You should have,” I say.

  Jesse shakes his head slowly, fresh tears running down his cheeks. “I wish I had. I swear to God, every day, I wish . . .” He takes a shuddering breath.

  “How . . . ?” I whisper, unable to say the words.

  “I ran out onto the dock, and then I heard his truck hit the water. He must have sped up and lost control trying to get to the boat ramp, and the truck rolled over the bank. And then it was sinking. And then he was dead—all for that stupid, goddamned piece of wood.”

  Jesse wipes his eyes again. His voice is hoarse. Now that he’s talking, he can’t seem to stop. “I dropped the fiddle on the dock and ran to the truck. I waded in and tried to pull open the door, but I couldn’t. But his window was down, so I put my head down in the water and looked in. He was already dead. The water was red and he was kind of floating upside down.”

  A sob wrenches itself from my chest.

  “I’m sorry.” Jesse reaches for me but pulls back, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to offer me comfort.

  “Then what?” I ask, my voice hardly more than a croak. “Did you pull him out?”

  Jesse clenches his jaw like he’s fighting back nausea. “I reached in and pulled him by his shirt, got about half his body out of the truck window. There was blood everywhere.”

  Jesse’s eyes are wide with fear, as if he’s seeing Daddy’s body for the first time, right here in the woods. “And he was dead, the kind of dead you don’t come back from. Eyes open and staring, more blood out of him than in.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran. I ran all the way back to my friend’s house, and we called the police. I lied and said I was in the truck with him, that I swam out the window. I was soaked and covered in blood, so they believed me. They thought I was lucky.

  “But I wasn’t lucky. I . . . I think we’re all cursed, Shady.”

  I hear an echo of Mama’s words from a few weeks ago, saying she thinks maybe she’s cursed because her husbands keep dying.

  I close my eyes, but all I see is Daddy’s body in its coffin. The unnatural-looking suit, dark against the white pillows. How much smaller his body seemed. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, so instead I looked at his hands. The hands I had spent so much time watching play the fiddle, clean fish for supper, dig into the deep, dark earth in the back garden.

  “We have to destroy it,” Jesse says, ripping my thoughts back to the present, to the fiddle clutched in my hands.

  All I feel for Jesse in this moment is hate—for taking Daddy, for trying to take my fiddle. The image of Daddy’s body floating open-eyed in the red water sears itself into my mind. Twice now, I could have joined him.

  “Let me take it,” Jesse says. “I’ll do it for you.” He comes near and puts his hands on the instrument. My arms are so weak, he pries it from my grip without effort.

  As soon as the wood leaves my hands, I feel an unbearable hunger to have it back. “Please, Jesse, please. I’ll die if you take it. I’ll die, Jesse,” I sob out. “I’ll die just like Daddy did, and it will be all your fault.” Didn’t Jesse just tell me Daddy said the same thing—that it would kill him to lose the fiddle? Well, Daddy was right.

  Jesse stiffens as if he realizes it, too, but then he turns away, carrying the fiddle back toward the trees.

  “Wait,” I scream, and he pauses, still turned away. “Let me play it one more time. One more time, Jesse, that’s all. I’ll raise Daddy’s ghost and you can see him again. He’ll make everything all right. And then you can do whatever you want. You can drown it or burn it or smash it to pieces. Just let me play one more time. Don’t you want to see him? Don’t you want to tell Daddy you’re sorry?”

  Jesse turns, anguish carved into every line of his face. “Do you promise? One more time?”

  “I swear,” I say. “I swear.” I don’t know whether I’m lying or not, and neither does Jesse.

  “Now?” he says. “Here?”

  I shake my head. If I played the fiddle now, with m
y grief thrumming through me, filling up my body like the water that drowned Daddy, I’d wake every ghost in this wood. It’d be too much for the shadow man to resist.

  “I’m too tired now,” I say.

  We stumble back through the woods, Jesse’s hands tight around the fiddle. “I’m going to keep the fiddle then. Until you’re ready to play it for the last time. I won’t lose you the way I lost him.”

  The walk is endless and agonizing, but we finally break through the trees into the yard outside our trailer. Mama’s rental car is there; I’d forgotten she brought him home. Jesse stops outside, like he’s afraid to go in and face her twice in one day.

  I push past him into the trailer, and Mama looks up, her eyes widening at the sight of my drenched, dirty form.

  “Mama,” Jesse says, coming inside with me. His face crumples. “I’m—I’m so sorry. I should have—I should have said it earlier, but I’m—” His voice breaks.

  She crosses the room and pulls Jesse into a hug, crushing him against her. She holds him to her like he was dead and came back to life and she’s never gonna let anything happen to him ever again.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he sobs into her shoulder. She shushes him like a baby and holds on, rocking him gently while the grief pours out of him, unstoppable, seemingly endless. She holds on while his tears and snot cover her blouse, while his body shakes like he’s frozen all the way to his bones.

  But finally she pulls back and puts her hand on his face. “I don’t blame you, baby. Maybe you done wrong, but you didn’t throw that hammer. It’s not your fault.”

  I want to ask her if she knows he’s the reason Daddy’s dead, but I can see in her eyes she knows everything. She knows all that Jesse’s done.

  And she forgives him.

  She’d forgive me too, if it had been me.

  But it wasn’t.

  I climb to my feet, walk to the bathroom, and slam the door behind me.

  Thirty

  The next morning, golden light falls across the green fields down the road from our trailer, making the wildflowers along the barbed wire blaze. The sky looks like somebody took a bite out of a Georgia peach, the orange fading into pink at the edges. I don’t know how the world can go on being so beautiful when all this horror keeps unfolding in my life.

  I came out to the fields to see something twisted and dark, something like the grief and anger wrapped around my insides. Isn’t a lightning-struck oak tree the perfect companion for a girl whose daddy’s food for worms, whose family’s secrets keep rising out of the ground like locusts? A girl who might murder her own brother to get the fiddle he’s trying to keep away from her? I almost feel capable of it. The shadow man whispered all night in my dreams, and twice I nearly got out of bed to take the fiddle from Jesse. I forced myself to lie still, to obey Daddy’s wishes.

  Now my feelings are going in so many directions. I don’t know what’s true anymore. Jesse’s the reason my daddy’s dead. If he hadn’t taken the fiddle, Daddy would still be here with us. But if he did it for me—even partly for me—maybe I’m the reason too. Maybe nobody’s innocent. Not Mama, for refusing to see, refusing to know. Not Aunt Ena, who kept Daddy’s secrets even after he was gone. Daddy’s guiltier than all of us, for letting his grief rend the veil, opening a hole ghosts can flit through and creating a space for the shadow man to fester and haunt us. After all, he kept playing even though he knew it brought my nightmares, even though he knew I was in danger. That’s hard to forgive.

  When I reach the oak, it doesn’t look like the twist of misery that’s inside me. Instead, it’s glowing in the morning light. I slide down its rough bark to the grass. In the quiet of the field, away from the fiddle’s pull, I almost believe Daddy’s words. He said I was strong enough. Strong enough to choose the people I love. I hope he’s right.

  I don’t want to be like Jim and Frank, chained to grief and hatred and a deadly grudge. And even though I loved Daddy more than anyone else in this world, I don’t think I want to be like him either. I don’t want to sacrifice my family, my very existence, to the fiddle’s magic. I want more—I want love and life and beauty. I want to glow like this lightning-struck oak tree in the day’s first light. No matter how much it hurts, it’s time to let the fiddle and its painful past go.

  Holding my decision close, I get up and go home and make my way to Jesse’s room. When he doesn’t answer my knock, I stick my head in.

  “What?” Jesse groans from underneath his pillow, his voice groggy with sleep. He’s always slept with his head under a pillow, which I’ve never understood. Maybe he got in the habit from trying to block out Daddy’s nightly fiddle playing.

  “Get that pillow off your head. We’ve got things to do today,” I say, my voice determined. “Some ghosts to lay to rest.”

  Jesse’s face appears. His sleepy eyes are full of fear, but he nods. “Okay. Let me get dressed.”

  As I sit on the couch waiting for Jesse, I think about calling Cedar or Sarah or Orlando. I think about asking my whole band to come. They’d be here in a heartbeat, and they’d make it easier for me. But this feels like something Jesse and I need to do on our own, something only we can share.

  “Where to?” Jesse asks once we’re settled in the cab of Jim’s truck.

  “The lake?”

  Jesse is quiet for a long moment, but then he shakes his head. “He’s got no reason to stay there. That’s not where he’d be.”

  “You sure?”

  “Aunt Ena’s,” he says, starting the engine.

  The fiddle lies on the seat beside me, and Jesse glances at it every few minutes as we drive. He’s afraid I’m going to snatch it up and jump out of the truck. I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my mind. But I’m resolute. I’ve made up my mind to be rid of the thing after its final performance.

  When we pull onto Aunt Ena’s road, Jesse starts drumming the wheel with his fingers.

  “You’ve never been back here,” I say, realizing why he’s so nervous.

  “Couldn’t. Not without him here.”

  Or is it really because he’d be too much here? Hints of him in every room, memories crowding around every object? The atoms of his grief in every breath we take?

  I know now where Daddy’s true pain lives, and it’s in Aunt Ena’s attic. This is where everything started—Brandy’s death, Daddy’s grief, Ena’s trauma. And all it led to: Mama’s affair, Jesse’s pain, my unbearable loss. It makes sense that this is the place it will end, or at least where the fiddle will play its last desperate notes.

  Aunt Ena opens the door, the cuts on her face almost healed. If she’s surprised to see Jesse standing on her doorstep with Daddy’s fiddle in his hands, she doesn’t show it. She steps back to let us in and then trails behind us up the stairs. But she hovers at the threshold of my old bedroom while Jesse and I move the dresser to uncover the attic door. One arm is wrapped around her stomach, and one shaking hand covers her mouth.

  I’m surprised again by how small the attic door is—it looks like a place a child would sneak off to play. Instead, Brandy was sent up here to die.

  “Are you ready?” I ask Aunt Ena, as gently as I can.

  Her eyes seem to plead with me, not to make her go up those stairs, not to make her walk back into the past. But her feet carry her to us, and she hands us our flashlights.

  We go single-file up the stairs, Jesse in the lead. The attic looks the same as it did when Cedar and I came up, though now that I know its full history, the room feels darker and smaller and more frightening. Aunt Ena lights some candles she brought up, and we turn off our flashlights. A soft, flickering light fills the room.

  We let the silence settle around us for a little while, our nervous breathing the only sound. I listen for wings, but there’s nothing living up here, except the termites boring their way incessantly through the wood. It’s a rotten room with a rotten past.

  Aunt Ena starts speaking as if continuing an earlier conversation. “We got
word he died the year you were six,” she says. “I remember because you were doing a family tree project at school and kept asking who your grandpa was, and we were glad to be able to tell you he was dead. Then you left it be.”

  I remember the way Daddy held me tight and wept into my hair the night his father’s ghost came, how he clutched me to him like I was the most precious thing on earth. I can’t imagine being so afraid of my own daddy.

  I take a deep breath and bring the fiddle up.

  “Can you play Brandy’s song?” Aunt Ena asks.

  “I’ll try.” I know now that’s what Daddy’s song was—a lament for Brandy. I close my eyes and look down into myself, down into my deepest, farthest memories. A haunting melody floats up to meet me.

  After a few moments, I feel the air begin to stir, a welcome chill entering. I almost expect to see Brandy herself, eternally young, traumatized by wasps, but it’s Daddy who appears.

  He is exactly the way I remember him. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a sad, lopsided smile.

  “Shady Grove,” he says, eyes locked on my face like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

  “Daddy.” My heart fills with an ache that’s part joy and part grief, the two almost too close to tell apart. “Jesse’s here.”

  “Hey, Dad—Daddy,” Jesse chokes out. “I, oh my God, I’m so sorry for what I did.”

  Daddy shakes his head. “You did right, son. You always did right.”

  “But you’re dead because of me,” Jesse says.

  “No, I’m dead because of myself. Because I couldn’t let go of the past. I don’t want the same for you two. I want you to be free of all this.” He gestures around the room.

  “Will,” Aunt Ena whispers from her corner, and he breaks into his first true smile.

  “Ena,” Daddy says. “I—”

  “Where’s Brandy?” she asks, interrupting his joy. “I thought she’d be here.” There’s so much longing in her voice.

  Daddy shakes his head. “Brandy didn’t have any reason to stay up here. Her conscience was clear. She left as soon as she died, as the innocent always do.”