by Peg Kehret
He snorted as if I’d asked the dumbest question he’d ever heard. “Carbon City had one of the biggest coal mines in the state. Lots of coal mines around here back in my day. The Northern Pacific built a railroad line up here to haul out the coal. Took out coke, too. There were rows of coke ovens down by the town. Some are still there.”
“Coke?” Why would ovens be needed for Coca-Cola? Or did he mean cocaine? Was he a drug addict who imagined he lived long ago?
“Coke. You know, the hard coal that’s left after it’s heated in the ovens. It’s used for fuel.”
“Oh.”
“For a lad who lives in Carbon City, you don’t know much about the place. Ain’t you ever gone to see the coke ovens?”
“I don’t live here. I’ve only been here two days. I’m visiting my aunt this summer; she told me about the tree house.”
“I used to talk to a girl in this tree house a long time ago. She was a pretty young thing, name of Florence. Her sister came here, too, but the sister couldn’t hear me or see me so I only talked to Florence.”
“So you’re a ghost, not an angel.”
“Same thing. Ghost sounds frightening, and angel sounds comforting. I didn’t want to scare you off so I said angel. That’s one thing book learnin’ did for me; I know it’s important to use exactly the right word for what you mean.”
“Are ghosts and angels really the same? There’s no difference?”
“Oh, there’s a small difference. Nothing to get worked up about.”
“What is it?”
Willie looked annoyed. “If you must know,” he said, “a ghost becomes an angel when he’s ready to move on. That’s when you get the wings and the halo.”
“How long have you been a ghost?”
“Since I died. May ninth, nineteen-oh-five. I was thirty-two years old.”
“That’s more than a hundred years ago! Does it always take so long to move on? When will you become an angel?”
“Drat it, boy, you ask too many questions. I’m not going to be an angel, not now, not ever, because The Boss won’t let me.”
The Boss? Did he mean God?
Willie scowled and punched one fist into his other palm. “The Boss says I can’t get my wings and move on until I get over my anger. He says before I get to be an angel, I must love someone so much that the love fills up my heart and pushes out my resentment.”
Willie’s scowl deepened. “Ain’t nothing going to ease my anger,” he said, “and that’s a fact. So I’m trapped in limbo. Who would I love? Nobody, that’s who. The only ones I loved were my wife and my two boys, and they’ve already moved on without me.”
“You’re angry at your wife and sons?”
“Of course not! None of it was their fault. They didn’t kill me. We had a good life together, me and Sarah. We had plans for ourselves and for our boys. Big plans! But I didn’t get to be part of them. Two years after I died, Sarah married a newspaperman from Tacoma. He raised my boys, not me. He bought my wife a house, not me. She had the daughter she wanted with him, not with me. All because of that Emil Davies.” He said the name as if he were spitting out rotten food.
“That’s who you’re angry at? Emil Davies?”
“His carelessness killed me! He struck a match to light his pipe and BOOM! It was the worst explosion the mine ever had. Emil Davies took my life as surely as if he’d held a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. I don’t want to see that wicked man ever again, in this life or the next.”
“What happened to him? If he was in the mine with you, wasn’t he killed, too?”
“He perished and his son with him, and thirteen others besides, including me. The rest are buried in the Carbon City cemetery. All but me. The whole back row of gravestones has the same date of death: May ninth, nineteen-oh-five.”
“You weren’t buried with your leg?”
Willie shook his head, the angry look still in his eyes. “Sarah told the coroner she didn’t think it seemly to dig up the grave where my leg was buried in order to bury the rest of me, but the real reason she didn’t plant me there was because she knew I wouldn’t want to spend eternity side by side with Emil Davies. Never liked him when he was living and liked him even less after he killed me.”
“If the mine blew up and all the miners died, how did Sarah know who caused the explosion?”
“She knew Emil Davies could never wait till he got out of the mine before lighting his dratted corncob pipe. She knew because I complained of it over and over. All of us miners did. We told Emil not to be in such an all-fired hurry for his smoke, but he never listened. When the mine blew, Sarah figured out what had happened. So did everyone else.”
“I’m surprised you were still working in the mine with one leg missing.”
“I had a peg leg—an uncomfortable chunk of wood that I strapped on every morning.”
“Wasn’t it hard to walk down into the mine—and back up again?”
“We didn’t walk; we rode on hoists. Most days I worked nearly five hundred feet below sea level. The peg leg slowed me down some so I didn’t take a rest break with the others. I worked my full shift, then rode the hoist back up. My company brought out ten thousand tons of coal every month.”
Willie looked down at his pinned-up pant leg. “Sarah knew how I hated that peg leg so instead of burying it with me, she burned it.”
“If you aren’t buried with the others who were killed in the explosion, where are you buried?” Even as I asked the question, I realized how bizarre it sounded. Anyone eavesdropping on this conversation would think Willie and I were both crazy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Willie didn’t seem to find our conversation odd. He acted as if we met in the tree house every day for a pleasant chat.
“Sarah buried me by my favorite fishing spot. She got her brothers and mine to help her. They went to where the coroner had all of us dead miners laid out, wrapped in burlap, and when she said she’d come to claim her husband’s body, the coroner agreed.
“The brothers put me in a cart behind my horse and led the horse up the hill to a place I always fished, along the Carbon River. They dug the grave deep and buried me there, and Sarah planted wild roses on the spot. She was a good woman, Sarah. A good woman.”
I didn’t know what to say. More than a century later, I could tell he still yearned for the woman who had been his wife.
“The only thing Sarah didn’t do for me,” Willie said, “was to remove my leg bones from the cemetery and bury them with the rest of me. I want to be all together in one place, far from Emil Davies.”
“Did you tell her what you want? Did you ask her to have the bones dug up and moved?”
A great sadness came into his eyes, and he looked down at his boot. “Sarah couldn’t hear me,” he said. “I tried and tried to talk to her, but she never heard any of it. She never saw me after I died, never sensed my presence. My boys couldn’t see or hear me, either. Most people can’t. I move among them, and they don’t notice. The girl, Florence, was the first to see and hear me. You’re the second.”
Florence. I thought about Aunt Ethel’s peacock. If anyone could shed some light on that situation, it was Willie. “Do you know what happened to Florence?” I asked.
“It scared her that she could see me when her sister couldn’t so she quit coming to the tree house. Sure did miss that girl. It gets lonely with no one to talk to.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to her house to see her when her sister wasn’t there?”
“I could have, but once she got afraid of me, I left her alone. All I wanted was someone to talk to, and you can’t hold a conversation when the other person’s jumpy as a jackrabbit. I watched her sometimes, though. Saw her grow up, teach school, take care of the critters. I liked that about her—she was kind to the animals.”
“What about after she died?”
“She must have moved on right away. Never saw her as a ghost.”
“Do people ever come back to Earth as animals or
birds?”
“Boy, you don’t know much about the hereafter, do you? Why would a person turn into a bird?”
“My Aunt Ethel thinks Florence came back as a peacock.”
“My Florence? The girl I knew?”
I nodded. “Florence had said when she died she wanted to come back as a peacock, and a few months after her death, this peacock showed up at her house, and it’s been there ever since.”
“If that ain’t the most fanciful tale I ever heard. Boy, you ought to be writing a book yourself.”
“It’s true! The peacock hangs around the porch, and Aunt Ethel feeds it cracked corn and calls it Florence. Maybe you could go there and see if the peacock recognizes you.”
“No. I’m not talkin’ to no peacock.”
“Please?” The idea of proving or disproving Aunt Ethel’s theory excited me. “All you have to do is go talk to the peacock and see what happens. If it’s really Florence, she’ll remember you.”
“If it’s Florence and she sees me, she’ll be scared, just like when she was a girl. She’ll fly away.”
I thought how Aunt Ethel didn’t want me to bring Mr. Stray home because she feared he could frighten the peacock, but this was different. This was like a scientific experiment.
“The peacock isn’t scared of people,” I said, “so if it’s afraid of you, that’ll mean it really IS Florence.”
“Or it would mean the peacock’s scared of a ghost. Any ghost.”
“Please, Willie? It wouldn’t take long.”
“No. I don’t go around frightening people or birds.”
“If the peacock is scared, you can leave before it panics and flies away.”
Willie thought a moment. “I don’t like to go places that I never went while I was alive,” he said, “and I never went to Florence’s house, but I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go there for you if you’ll do something for me.”
“What?”
“Dig up my leg bones, then bury them where the rest of me is buried.”
“I can’t do that. There are laws against digging up graves.”
“You don’t have to announce it to the sheriff. All you have to do is get a shovel, go there alone, and dig.”
“What if somebody saw me?”
Oh man, I thought, as I imagined the police calling Mom to say I’d been arrested for grave robbery. My palms started to sweat just thinking about it.
“You can do it at night. Nobody’s there at night. Nobody’s there in the daytime, either, most of the time. That graveyard is not exactly a lively place.” His eyes crinkled at the edges, and I could tell he wanted me to acknowledge his joke.
I shook my head. “No way,” I said. “I’m not sneaking into a cemetery at night, or any other time, to dig up one of the graves. It’s too risky.”
“Will you at least go to the cemetery and find where my leg’s buried? You can look around, see how easy it would be, and then decide.”
After what Willie had told me, I was curious about the cemetery. I wanted to see the row of gravestones all with the same date of death, and I wondered what it said on his leg’s gravestone. HERE LIES THE LEG OF WILLIE MARTIN? Or BELOVED LEG?
“I guess I could look at the grave.” I didn’t mind agreeing to that. I had no intention of digging anywhere, but there’s no law against looking around in a cemetery.
“Good,” Willie said. “Let’s go.” He pointed out the door. “You can walk there on the old railroad bed.”
“I can’t do it now; I have to get home. Aunt Ethel will worry if I stay away too long. I’ll go to the cemetery tomorrow morning.”
“After you’ve been there, I’ll show you where the rest of me is buried, so you’ll know where to take the leg bones.”
“I’m only going to look at the grave, Willie. I’m not going to dig up your leg bones.”
“I wonder if the peacock would know me,” he said. “I thought you were curious.”
“I’m not curious enough to get myself arrested.”
We stared at each other for several seconds while his sad eyes pleaded silently.
“You’re my only hope,” he said. “I wanted to ask Florence to do it, but she got scared and quit coming here before I got up my nerve to ask her.”
“It only took you about fifteen minutes to ask me.”
“I’ve been waiting all these years for someone else I could ask, someone who can hear me. That’s one reason I started spending time in the library. I thought people who read ghost stories might be able to see me, so I hung around the supernatural section waiting to be noticed, but it never happened.”
I envisioned Willie, waiting and hoping for so many years. It made me sad.
“All these years,” Willie said, “I’ve told myself that if I ever meet a living person who can hear and see me, I’ll ask for their help right away. I won’t take a chance that they’ll leave and not return, like Florence did. Now here you are, the only one who can help me. If you won’t do it, it might be another fifty years before anyone else sees me.”
Ten minutes earlier, when I first saw Willie, I had been scared silly. Now I felt sorry for him.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
The ghost smiled at me. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said just before he vanished.
I looked out the window but saw only the woods. No old coal miner.
I took a deep breath. I knew why I’d agreed to go to the cemetery. Besides being curious about the graveyard, I liked Willie.
In every ghost story I’ve ever read, the characters are afraid of the ghost—so why was I calmly carrying on a conversation with one?
CHAPTER EIGHT
I climbed down the ladder, then spotted Mr. Stray on the same rock where he’d watched me before. I sat down by his food. Soon he approached, walking slowly as if unsure whether or not he should come close. When I didn’t move, he stopped beside me and sniffed my shoe.
“Good kitty,” I said.
He leaned against me, rubbing the side of his face against the sole of my shoe. I wanted to pet him, but I was afraid if I reached toward him, he’d run off, so I sat still and continued to talk to him. Soon he stretched forward and sniffed my pant leg.
That’s when I realized that Mr. Stray was really Mrs. Stray!
This cat was nursing kittens! No wonder she was so hungry. I wondered where the kittens were. Hidden in the brush somewhere, I supposed.
My plan to tame the cat and find a home for it had just become more complicated. If Aunt Ethel was unhappy about one stray cat, what would she say about raising kittens?
I made a fist and slowly extended it toward Mrs. Stray. She sniffed my hand thoroughly, but when I tried to touch her, she backed away. She crouched at the water bowl and lapped quickly, her pink tongue darting in and out. Then she moved to the food dish, keeping a wary eye on me.
When she finished drinking and eating, she left.
As I walked back to the house, my brain buzzed with excitement about the ghost and the mother cat, but I decided not to tell Aunt Ethel about either of them. Since Aunt Ethel had not been able to see or hear Willie when she was younger, she might not want me to talk to him, and I didn’t want to push my luck about taming the cat. Let her get used to the idea of one cat before I sprang a litter of kittens on her.
The summer that I had thought would be boring was already filled with secrets and excitement.
Aunt Ethel seemed relieved to see me. “I was afraid you got lost,” she said.
“I’m sorry if I worried you. I was in the tree house, reading.” And talking to a ghost and feeding Mrs. Stray.
She smiled. “You sound like Florence. She always had her nose in a book and forgot the time. Get washed up; our dinner’s almost ready.”
“It smells great,” I said as I washed my hands at the kitchen sink.
“Cheese omelets and sliced tomatoes. Another favorite dinner. Fried potatoes, too, and cantaloupe. It’s good to have someone to cook for again. I’ve always liked to
cook, but Florence didn’t, so we agreed I’d be the cook and she’d be the one to clean up.”
Taking the hint, I said, “I’ll do the dishes. That can be my job all summer.”
As we ate, I asked, “Do you have any books about Carbon City history? I’d like to learn about the coal mines.”
“There might be some in Florence’s room. I never got around to sorting through her things.”
“Is it OK if I look?” I already knew which room she meant, because she had called it “my sister’s room” that first night when she showed me around the house.
“Read anything you want,” she said. “Nothing made Florence happier than a youngster who liked to read. If you don’t find anything you like, we can stop at the library the next time we drive to Diamond Hill for groceries.”
After dinner and two pieces of the best chocolate cake I’d ever eaten, I washed the dishes, then found two apple crates in Florence’s room. Stacked on their sides to make shelves, they were filled with old books.
Several were books for children: The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, The Adventures of Sammy Jay, and The Birds’ Christmas Carol. All had names written inside the cover, but none of the names was Florence. She must have bought used books, or maybe they were donated to the school by the parents of her pupils. Compared to the mystery and adventure books I had brought with me, these didn’t look very exciting.
In the second apple crate, I found two slim volumes—pamphlets, really—on the history of Carbon City. One, called “Mining Disasters,” consisted of reprints of old newspaper articles about the area. I began to read, skimming until I saw the date, May 10, 1905.
EXPLOSION IN CARBON CITY MINE
FIFTEEN MEN MEET THEIR DEATH
Widowed women and fatherless children wept near the mouth of Mine Number Five’s tunnel yesterday, as the bodies of fifteen miners were hauled up out of the mine on the long incline tramway.
An explosion occurred shortly after noon on May 9. Mine Superintendent Richard Jones speculated that carelessness and disobedience of orders by one or more of the miners caused the tragedy. “Someone must have struck a match or exposed the flame of his safety light,” the superintendent said, “probably to light his pipe.”