“Well, now you know,” he said.
That ought to be the end of it, but it isn’t. I don’t know how I would have ended up feeling about Harry and myself if he had stayed on for the rest of the summer. A few days later he got a telegram that his father was in a bad way, and he had to go to Baltimore. My father bought him a ticket on the plane and he left. And I didn’t see him again. His father lived on through the summer and didn’t die until I was already back at military school and couldn’t come back for the funeral. I wrote him that I was sorry to hear about that, but I didn’t get any answer.
Of course I thought about him and that terrible thing we had done a lot. Since he wasn’t there anymore except as I chose to remember him, I usually made him the villain of the story, the one who had put us up to it, rather than the one who had made me see the potential of evil and violence in myself. For which, I guess, I should even have been grateful.
Then along toward Christmas, not too long before vacation, I got a letter from home which said that Harry had accidentally killed himself on a hunting trip. That seemed strange because he knew so much about guns and how to take care of himself. And I knew that the truth must be that he had killed himself, though I couldn’t have said why. Except that maybe he knew too much about himself and other people too early.
But the strangest thing of all was how I felt when I surmised this. At first I was just plain numb, the way you always are about confronting a brute and sudden fact. But then one night after taps and after the midnight bed check when the beam of a flashlight crisscrossed our tranquil sleeping faces, I sat up in the cold dark and cried silently. It was a great deep loss to me all of a sudden. As much as I hated the memory of what had happened in the summer and still burned with shame at the injustice of his scorn and laughter, I felt that something had been taken away, stolen from me, that in some wordless way he had cheated me. I wept like a woman deceived and forsaken by a lover.
Nobody gets to choose what yoke to wear.
DAVID SLAVITT
—“The Calf and the Ox”
SONG OF A DROWNING SAILOR: A FABLIAU
GHOSTS?
Sure we have our share of ghosts in old Paradise Springs. Name me any place that is not haunted by all that has happened there. A place like Paradise Springs, a small town dying slowly in bits and pieces, in spite of many schemes and plans, occasional transfusions of new blood and new money, has lost or forgotten the reason it came to be there in the first place. Still, it has been there for quite a long time, and if now it is drying and shrinking slowly like a beached and stagnant pool left behind by the withdrawing tide, there are always shards and signs (a piece of conch shell, a broken sand dollar, a stiff dead starfish and maybe even the squiggle of minnows and other small fry) to prove that the sea was once at home there.
The modest truth is that we have our share of ghosts from all the ages of the land. Nobody knows them all, but it is not beyond the limits of even a lazy imagination to picture them. In the pinewoods and hammocks of the county, driven back by new and old roads, by farms and ranches, shrinking always before the music, the gleaming gigantic eye of the saw blade, tamed by paper mills and turpentine camps; taken also by the old Army camp, not used now but not utterly abandoned either, kept intact for some future and perhaps inevitable time of war; among those trees, moving in lean Byzantine dimensions across the mosaic of light and shade, surely there are the last baffled, outraged ghosts of the Redmen. And no doubt as well there are the fleeting, smoke-colored, holy spirits of the beasts they hunted. Also, some would claim, there must be the clanking armored ghosts of the bearded, bright-eyed Spaniards (each now as rusty as the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz) who came and lived and died and left so little behind them.
In the town itself there are all the other dead, the troubled and the carefree alike. For instance, you will find some who believe in the ghost of a Union soldier, probably a far-straggling deserter from Sherman’s Army up in ravaged Georgia, poor boy who, drunk and all by himself, captured the almost manless village one night by the light of a full moon; who rode up and down the dusty street firing his pistol in the air, singing his head off, alive and kicking until an old lady shot him out of his saddle, off his horse, and into glory, with a single shot of an antique squirrel rifle. They say that her shoulder was black and blue from the bruise of the shot for the rest of her life.
And you would not want to forget the top-hatted, tail-coated ghost of the high-living banker who hanged himself back in the bad days of 1929.
Oh, there’s many of them, the ghosts of our place, and most of them have at least some patch of earth to call their own, marked by a headstone of one kind or another.
With the exception, of course, of Adam Peterkin. Adam, the handsome blue-eyed sailor boy, drowned in the far-off Indian Ocean. And perhaps of all our ghosts, all those among the dead who will not or cannot rest easy until Judgment Day, those wanderers, hunters and hunted, Adam paid the strangest visit to our town.
Katie Freeman, bless her mountainous, quivering, uncorseted, seismic, untroubled flesh and bones, she is the one person alive who knows them best. Born with a sixth sense (they say), she easily learned the skills of tea leaves, of palms, the riddles and mysteries of a deck of cards. If anybody in Paradise Springs really knows what the dead are up to, what they are seeking, what they have lost, what their worries and concerns are, it is Katie Freeman. The funny thing is that none of it, none of this knowledge, troubles her. She is as calm and careless as a saint, kindhearted and easygoing. She loves living, is fond of beer and bourbon whiskey and deep-fried foods. True, she has been called a witch, even in this advanced day and age, but then only from a certain stern pulpit and only on certain Sunday mornings. And we all know that that same hellfire and brimstone preacher himself has visited Katie Freeman from time to time to gain some news of his first wife, the one who fell from the top of a tall mulberry tree at a Sunday school picnic so many long years ago. Even that is not what we would be inclined to call a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. Nobody in his right mind would begrudge the Preacher the right to his official position and his official words delivered from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. Who knows? Katie may be a witch, but she chooses to deny it. And that’s good enough for me.
“All I am is a kind of a messenger,” she explains. “You might say I’m a kind of a long-distance operator, hooking up the circuits between this world and the other one.”
“Don’t it ever give you bad dreams, Katie?”
“Lord, child, I sleep sound and sweet, just like a baby.”
“But don’t you ever get weary, just plain tired of it, passing messages back and forth between the quick and the dead? Doesn’t the burden of all that trouble weigh you down?”
“I reckon I can stand it if they can.”
“What do dead people talk about mostly, Katie? What’s on their minds?”
“Oh, well, a whole lot of different things, you know. Nothing out of the ordinary. Mostly it all boils down to the same old things that living people would have to say for themselves if the chance came along. We have suffered and made other people suffer, they say. We are sorry.”
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
“Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. Anyhow, child, that’s the long and the short of it.”
And now, concerning the late Adam Peterkin.…
Poor Adam, he was certainly the best-looking young man in town. He was so nearly beautiful (the women say) you wouldn’t believe your eyes if you didn’t know him and saw him pass by. Many a girl and grown woman would have given not much less than her soul to the Devil himself in return for the right to possess such a fine, unblemished complexion, such blue-bright eyes, such rich hair, blond and shiny as corn silk, and such a pair of improbably long eyelashes to flutter. And the pity was that Adam Peterkin squandered the time of his youth and good looks in the fruitless, elusive courting of the one woman in the whole county he could never have—Lucy Birdsong. Lucy was a nice
-enough-looking girl, attractive, well-shaped, well-groomed, and well-dressed. But she was born with the soul and vocation of a nun, and she kept it that way. In a strictly Protestant town like Paradise Springs, not a Catholic church in the county and only one small Episcopal chapel to represent the middle way, this meant Lucy Birdsong was born to be an old maid.
Lucy was a vague and dreamy kind of a girl and was happy just as she was, happy being herself, and she never even got close to seriously considering the possibility of getting married. So Adam courted her in vain until he learned, in some kind of slow-dawning revelation, that nothing he could ever do or leave undone would win her to be his wife. And he left town, for good and without good-byes, to be a sailor. And he never came back, though every once in a while somebody or other received a colorful postcard from some exotic place, usually asking about the health and welfare of Miss Lucy Birdsong.
Then along came the news that Adam’s ship had gone down in the Indian Ocean. And later on another sailor from the ship came to Paradise Springs to try to find Adam’s family and tell them about it. Adam Peterkin was the last of his family, and so he told the story to us who had known him. It seems that if only Adam had known how to swim he would have been all right. Everyone else was saved. That’s a strange thing, isn’t it? To have been a sailor on the high seas all that time without even knowing how to swim. It gave people something to talk about for a time, until something else interesting came along and it would be forgotten; no, not so much forgotten as filed away in the dusty archives of the memory, the little footnotes of our history.
One summer night, one of those breathless midsummer evenings when even the leaves on the trees are as limp as old soiled dollar bills and the wings of night-flying moths and insects beat stiff and dry, like tinfoil, in the tepid air, Lucy Birdsong suddenly appeared at Katie Freeman’s house. Now, the truth is that was a real surprise to Katie, and she isn’t easily surprised. Because of all the living people she knew of, Lucy Birdsong was the last she ever expected to have need of her services. She knocked on the door and Katie was so surprised she couldn’t say anything—for once. She just gulped and stepped aside, holding the door, so Lucy could walk in.
First, though, you better get a rough picture of the place, the house, or, let’s be honest, the shack where Katie lived, out beyond the edge of town. Outside it’s all sagging and propped up here and there with cinder blocks and old two-by-fours. It’s unpainted and weather-worn. It could just as well be a nigger shack over in Black Bottom. And inside it’s a complete mess, but not exactly what you’d expect from the outside. It is a fantastic clutter of rich, strange, extravagant, and even foolish things. The first thing you would probably notice is the vast bed, long and wide with tall brass bedsteads, and all covered with a spread of what looks to be dark crimson velvet. There’s that bed and then a large dark oak table, round, with tall straight chairs around it. There’s a high dresser with a tall mirror and the top of the dresser seems to be all glittering and pulsing with little lights like an open jewel box. Step closer and you can see it is cluttered and covered, deep with odds and ends. Oh, there are iron curlers, hairpins, hatpins, perfume bottles, cosmetics, seashells and shotgun shells and bullets of all sizes and calibers; there are stamps, photographs, picture postcards, ball-point pens, combs and brushes, eyeglasses, magnifying glasses, filled ashtrays, movie magazines and paperback books, keys and coins, paper clips and staples, old letters, silver spoons, medicine bottles, demitasse cups, matchboxes, cigarette lighters, and also a Colt .45 automatic pistol, loaded and shiny. Why you could lose a rattlesnake on top of that dresser and never find him again until he bit you. There is a great big black electric fan always turning and blowing up a storm, and there’s a long tall rattan rocker that Katie likes to sit in when she feels like sitting and rocking awhile. There are lots of stray cats, but they come and go. Her only real, full-time company is the parrot, Lancelot, in his ornate gold-gilt cage hanging from the ceiling.
And Katie herself. Knock on the door sometime and you’ll nine times out of ten find her wearing a fancy silk Chinese dressing gown and a pair of laceless sneakers for slippers. And nine times out of ten she’ll have a can of beer in one hand and a paper fan from Fishback’s Funeral Home in the other. And if you happen to be somebody she knows, she’ll most likely be right in the middle of a one-sided conversation with Lancelot. One-sided because that parrot won’t talk back.
—Kitchie, kitchie-coo, Lancelot, you no-account lazy sonofabitch. Why can’t you learn to say something? How come you just sit there and look and listen all the time? You know what I think? I think you are just waiting, biding your own sweet time until you get a real good chance, a perfect chance to embarrass old Katie. Then you’re going to rear back and cut loose and shame us all. What I need around here is a real talking parrot, dammit. Maybe I’ll get me another one that talks. I got about half a mind to have you stuffed. It wouldn’t make no difference at all and it would cut the cost of feeding you. You know something, Lancelot? I had me a crow one time, a ordinary plain old black crow, and he could talk. He could as good or better than most people. Most people around this godforsaken town, anyway. I even taught that crow to recite “The Gettysburg Address” and we were planning to go into show business when he up and died on me.…
Well, then, into this setting came Miss Lucy Birdsong, a real surprise.
“Take a seat, Miss Lucy. Care for a can of beer?”
“No, thank you, ma’am, I never touch alcohol.”
“Oh it isn’t the alcohol,” Katie said. “I take it now and then because it’s carbonated. Helps the gas on my stomach.”
“I make it a rule not to indulge in any alcoholic beverages.”
“Well, you never know about a thing like that,” Katie said. “Some people do and some people don’t. I can’t keep up with all their habits.… Hot one, isn’t it, Miss Lucy?”
“My daddy said the thermometer got up past a hundred today.”
“I used to think I was going to get me an air conditioner. But I think I will get a thermometer one of these days. It might be a comfort to know just exactly how hot it really is. You know, I had one once. I used to keep it on the back porch.…”
Katie noticed that Lucy Birdsong wasn’t listening too well, and Lucy looked worried. Her hair was a little bit frizzy and disheveled. There was a spot of dirt on her cheeks. Katie felt a little sorry for her in spite of herself.
“Is something troubling you, Miss Lucy?”
“Miss Katie,” Lucy said, frowning. “Do you know if there are any strange ghosts in town?”
“No new ones that I know of. Unless you want to count Old Man Bill Robinson that died of liver trouble or that little nigger boy who drowned in the Springs last Thursday.”
“I’m not referring to people like that,” Lucy said. “I mean strangers. Are there any strange ghosts around?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Are you sure? Is there any way to be sure?”
“Is it real important to know?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then, Miss Lucy. I can see by your look that you’re sincere. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will ask around among my friends in the spirit world and see what I can find out.”
“Oh, thank you, Miss Katie!”
“I can’t promise anything, now, honey. I don’t promise you a thing, but I’ll damn sure give it a try. That’s the best I can do for you.”
“I really can’t thank you enough,” Lucy said, rising, hurrying out into the dark.
“Think nothing of it, honey,” Katie called after her.
A week or so went by, and of course Katie didn’t do anything about it because, practically speaking, it was impossible. As all the world knows, it is one thing to establish communications and carry on a conversation with a known and familiar ghost. But it’s something else again, altogether different, to seek and search the invisible air for the traces of a spiritual stranger. However, Lucy Birdsong came back, an
d when she did she was looking worse than she ever had before. She was pale and drawn, and she, who had always been so proper and careful about her appearance, looked now like a worn-out country wife, a slattern. Her pretty blue eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, and bloodshot. Her fingernails were bitten and her hands seemed to want to tremble.
“Have you found out yet, Miss Katie?”
“I think you must have been imagining things.”
“I couldn’t be imagining it!” Lucy cried. “It’s got to be the truth.”
Katie Freeman sighed, long and deep, and resigned herself to a mess of somebody else’s troubles.
“All right, now, Miss Lucy. You are going to have to be straight with me. You are going to have to tell me the whole truth—or a pretty fair share of it anyway—if I’m going to be any use to you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that!”
“I reckon you’re going to have to.”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s all so—embarrassing.…”
Katie Freeman snorted through her nose and couldn’t help chuckling. Lucy Birdsong then commenced to snuffle and cry. Kate shrugged, went and found some kind of a handkerchief, and then put her arm around Lucy and tried to comfort her.
“Now, don’t you be embarrassed with me, honey child,” Katie said. “No need to feel that way. Why, you’d be surprised, shocked probably, at the kind of things I usually have to listen to. Just as a matter of course. And I’m talking about listening to the living and the dead.…”
“It’s just too awful, Miss Katie.”
“Well!” said Katie sternly. “If it’s too awful to talk about, even in front of me, and I’ve heard pretty near everything that can be said about everything that can happen, why then it’s for damn sure too awful for me to do anything about.”
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