FSF, December 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  The noise inside the wall stopped. She returned the stick to its place, and asked Albion if he'd care for a sugar cookie.

  "I'd rather know who's in there,” he told her. His voice trembled a little, not with fear but with the joy of a lepidopterist who spots a new kind of butterfly.

  "Oh, just old Captain Jack. You know in 1863? When General Grant came through Bonaparte on his way to burn Jackson? Well, the captain was away with the Confederate army, so Darlin’ Sissy, who was his wife and a lot smarter than anybody else in the family, including him, broke through the plaster and hid the family silver inside the wall. Then she had her Negrahs turn the room into a bedroom and set up the bed so the headboard concealed the opening. When the Yanks arrived, she invited General Grant to spend the night, and he slept in that very bed, keeping the silver safer than anybody else could have!

  "Then Captain Jack was captured at the Battle of Furnace Creek, after getting wounded in a place we won't discuss. Out of gratitude for Sissy's hospitality, General Grant paroled him and sent him home, and she put him in that same bed and nursed him until he died of complications. To comfort his male ego, she told him he was guarding the silver just by lying there. Unfortunately, after he died he kept on trying to guard it, even when the war was over and Darlin’ Sissy had taken it out again.

  "She was a great hostess, Mr. Merkel, especially after her post-war marriage to Mr. Dick, her brother-in-law who'd joined the Republicans and made lots of money, bless his heart. She needed all the silverware she could lay her hands on for her famous sit-down dinners for eighteen or twenty-four. Captain Jack to this day remains a man of few ideas but very tenacious, and raises a fuss whenever he happens to notice for the umpteenth time that the silver's gone. It's really hard dealing with such a stupid man, and I must say that death has not improved him."

  Albion was enthralled. “This darky,” he said, “the one who might be able to tell me why my house isn't haunted—would you give me her name?"

  "Her name,” said Mrs. D., “is Cyrene Foxx.” (She pronounced it Sy-reeny.) “I'll give you her cell phone number before you leave. She is one of the old sort, Mr. Merkel, and you might consider employing her in place of Placenta, a fine and intelligent woman who is, unfortunately, very modern."

  Albion nodded. He felt fairly sure that one of the old sort would not call him Baby. His hostess concluded the tea party with some words of warning.

  "Cyrene worked for me a few years back, and she was an excellent housekeeper and made the most marvelous spoonbread. Yet I had to let her go. She's a physical medium, you see, and the way things flew around was quite distracting. Also, without meaning to do so, she stirred up the ghosts and made it hard to get a good night's rest, what with Powderhorn baying at the moon whether there was a moon or not, and the captain hammering on the wall, and Mr. Dick calling for someone to muddle his toddy, and Darlin’ Sissy (usually the most thoughtful of women) playing “Aura Lee” over and over and over on a piano I sold years ago because it was full of sour notes.

  "I'm warning you about this, Mr. Merkel, so you won't complain if things get a little strange down in Smith's Haven. Cyrene is a true Christian and in Heaven will undoubtedly be a lot whiter than either one of us, but should you decide to employ her, you deserve to be told that having her around is not all gravy by any means."

  * * * *

  Interviewing Cyrene and ridding himself of Placenta took Albion less than a week. Placenta departed in anger after telling him, “What you want to work for you, Baby, is a nigger.” She lifted her upper lip and almost snarled the forbidden word.

  Which wasn't true at all. What he wanted—what he'd always wanted, he now realized—was a darky, specifically one attuned to the spirit world.

  Cyrene certainly qualified for the dark part. Her skin had the almost ebonized finish so rare nowadays among African Americans, most of whom tend toward beige or latte. She was a small, leathery woman who dressed in surprisingly up-to-date pantsuits and went about her work with vigor. When she was ready to leave, Albion asked if she had detected any spiritual presences in Smith's Haven.

  "No, Mr. Alby, I didn't. There is a force here, however."

  "What sort of force?"

  "I don't know, not yit, anyways. But it centers in the liberry."

  "What library?” he asked, never having noticed one.

  "Up there,” she said, pointing at the living room ceiling. “I can just feel the weight of all them dusty old books, pushing down. Well, here's my daughter to ride me home,” she added, as an enormous SUV drew up to the curb. “See you next Tuesday."

  Albion knew that a respectable attic topped his house, for the A/C man had climbed up there to “check out them ducks and fillers.” Aside from the existence of ducts and filters, however, the owner of the house knew nothing about what lay beyond the trapdoor in the hall ceiling.

  Now, with some effort and the aid of a hooked pole, he pulled down a folding staircase and ascended slowly and cautiously until he reached the dusty planking of the attic floor. A good seven feet high in the center, the space would have been easy to traverse except for a clutter of retired furniture and the ducts, which coiled this way and that like foil-wrapped anacondas from their origin in a large metal box. A louvered ventilator at the back of the house admitted a brownish twilight.

  Cautiously, Albion stepped over various sections of the anaconda until he spotted, tucked into the shadows beside the cobwebby brick chimney, an old armoire with a rusty scrolled key projecting from its door. To the accompaniment of falsetto complaints from the lock and hinges, he swung open the door and found inside four shelves of, yes, dusty old books.

  He used his handkerchief to clean the seat and arms of a battered armchair that stood conveniently close, then sat down and began pulling the books one by one off the shelves. They were in every sense weighty stuff—old medical standards like Gray's Anatomy plus many works of skeptical and/or materialistic philosophers. Democritus, Hume, Voltaire, Marx, Spencer, Huxley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana—all were here. Besides the big guns of disbelief, Albion found books by lesser known figures—La Mettrie's Man a Machine, d'Holbach's System of Nature, Diderot's Essays. Flipping through the latter, he discovered that someone had heavily underlined the Frenchman's brutal view that “mankind will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” In the margin the same somebody had penciled, “Yes!"

  Oh, good Lord! thought Albion, his heart sinking.

  No wonder ghosts shied away from Smith's Haven. Albion had bought and settled down in a house once occupied by an ardent and committed skeptic, and everybody knew how the delicate structure of ectoplasm shrivels before disbelief like a flower in a frost. But who could the malignant unbeliever have been?

  * * * *

  On their next meeting, Mrs. DeFlores welcomed him again to the back parlor of Cottonwood, but instead of store-bought cookies fed him brick-like chunks of home-made banana bread that dropped into his stomach like sash weights.

  Bravely uttering little grunts of counterfeit pleasure, Albion put his hostess in the mood to supply him the information he needed. When he felt she'd been warmed up enough, he told her about the library, and asked who it might have belonged to. Maybe Smith, the original builder?

  "No,” she said thoughtfully. “In his day, Mr. Smith was a Presbyterian elder. Some quite respectable people are, you know. No, I would think the books belonged to Doctor Welch, who lived there just recently."

  "Recently?” he asked doubtfully. It turned out that Mrs. DeFlores had her own notions of what constituted recentness.

  "Yes. During the 1920s, I think. I used to hear stories about him in my younger days. When he first arrived in town, everybody was glad to see an enterprising young man take the place of old Dr. Thayer, who didn't believe in germs because he'd never seen one. For a while, Dr. Welch enjoyed quite a substantial practice. Then stories about his rather aggressive and defiant irreligiousness began to get around. One e
xpects doctors to be skeptical, of course, it comes from thinking about bodies all the time—they start to believe the soul must be a secretion of the adrenal glands, or something. But the way he made an issue of the matter did him no good in this town. We are in the Bible Belt, after all. In time new doctors arrived that people trusted more, his practice declined, and in 1928 he shot himself."

  "Shot himself?"

  "Not with a gun. I suppose the correct phrase is shot himself up. He injected poison—hyoscine, I think. Do have another piece of banana bread, Mr. Merkel. It's so nice to find someone who appreciates my baking. Not everybody does."

  That night Albion took two tablespoonfuls of Mylanta at bedtime instead of his usual one, but had peculiar dreams anyway. Nigel Bruce appeared (as Dr. Watson) but Basil Rathbone (as Holmes) kept calling him Welch. After some obscure chitchat, Holmes took out his famous hypodermic and injected himself with cocaine, remarking as he did so, “I have solved the riddle of the universe, Welch! God's secret is that He's a secretion.” Welch burbled along in Watson's usual fawning manner, exclaiming “Pure brilliance, Holmes!” then morphed into a lapdog and began licking Albion's face.

  He woke up. It was seven a.m., and Miss Scarlett wanted to be let out. It was time for her to bark at the morning rush hour, and go back to sleep.

  After breakfast, Albion put on old clothes and returned to the attic. Searching for a clue as to how to proceed, he began slowly leafing through volume after volume of Dr. Welch's collection. Clearly, he'd been a man of forceful and uncompromising views. Scribbled in the margins of every book were his opinions, which were never less than emphatic: “Yes! No! Damned fool! Unscientific! Even that ass Benjamin Franklin knew better than this!” The skeptics themselves had rarely been skeptical enough to suit him: he meted out praise as sparingly as the cook at a Victorian workhouse doling out porridge. One of the few who gained his wholehearted approval was Democritus, whose icy view (in De Rerum Natura) that “nothing exists but atoms and the void” caused Welch to exclaim, "Yes!!!!!!"

  It was all rather discouraging. When Cyrene showed up for work on Tuesday, Albion told her about his discoveries and asked whether she knew how to lift the cloud of unbelief that hung over the house. She said, well, they could try to contact Dr. Welch in the hereafter and ask him to help them lift the spell. Albion was dubious.

  "He seems to have been pretty hard-nosed,” he pointed out. “I'm not sure he'd want to help anybody."

  "Oh, he wasn't all bad,” she said, somehow flipping a bedspread so that it settled down in neat folds, like a military flag at sundown. “He was a mighty proud and scornful man, yet he doctored poor folks and wouldn't take no money for it. Black or white, didn't make him no never-mind. He looked after my mama when I was born."

  Albion stared. If Mrs. DeFlores had her dates right and Dr. Welch had shot himself up in 1928, then Cyrene had to be at least 79 years old. Yet every day the woman did enough physical labor to weary a couple of dock workers.

  "He delivered you?” asked Albion incredulously.

  "Well, not delivered. Mama just kind of drapped me when nobody was expecting it. But he come by the house afterwards and saw to her health and mine. Oops."

  Something had flitted across the room. Albion looked here and there in bewilderment—had a sparrow flown into the house?—then spotted a Haviland dinner plate balancing uneasily on the edge of his chest of drawers. Cyrene retrieved it, dusted it, and put it back in its usual place on the sideboard in the dining room.

  "Plates is the liveliest things, sometimes,” she muttered, returning to the bedroom.

  "Now, as to contacting Dr. Welch: I charges fifty dollars for a séance, and I can't be responsible for any breakage caused by sperrits. If that's acceptable, Mr. Alby, I think I got Sunday evening open. My daughter Altuna says it ain't religious to summon sperrits on a Sunday, but what does she know? She belongs to the Apostolic Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ, and spite of the fancy name, none of those folks knows much. Oh, damn."

  The plate had silently returned and now rested on Albion's pillow.

  "That's so mischeevious,” she said, frowning. “Now I know who's doing it. It's my little boy D'White David. I named him for General Eisenhower, hoping he'd grow up strong and brave, but he got whooping cough and passed in 1952 when he was only six. He been following after me ever since."

  "He's not afraid to come into this house?"

  "Not as long as I'm here,” she said. “If I wasn't, he wouldn't come in here even if you offered him a Tootsie Roll."

  Albion agreed to the Sunday evening séance. Then, because he felt uneasy around children, never having had any of his own, he went outside and sat in the patio and rubbed Miss Scarlett's belly until Cyrene left, with (he supposed) D'White David clinging invisibly to one leg of her pantsuit.

  * * * *

  That weekend Albion had just finished watching 60 Minutes when his bell chimed, and he found a triad of visitors standing on his porch.

  "This here's Cousin Gordon,” said Cyrene, leading the group indoors. “And this is Cousin Na'teesha. They works with me. And you don't have to worry bout the money, Mr. Alby—the price is the same, come one, come all."

  Cousin Gordon was an enormous black man who wore workmen's attire, even though it was Sunday. “I takes care of the Methodist Church,” he explained, his hand swallowing Albion's like a pelican ingesting a minnow.

  Cousin Na'teesha was plump and fortyish, attired in a variety of fluttery garments and carrying an alligator purse. She had a soft voice almost devoid of Bonaparte's traditional Peckerwood drawl, and shrewd, watchful eyes.

  "Now the question is where,” Cyrene muttered. She walked slowly through the living room, asking, “Y'awl smell anything in here? Like ether? I noticed it when I was cleaning."

  She tested the dining room, the hallway, and the second bedroom that Albion was in process of converting into a study. In the end she returned to the living room and briskly ordered Cousin Gordon to move a small table beside the fireplace and bring in four chairs from the dining room. Albion felt cautiously impressed: the table was now precisely under the library in the attic. Cyrene ordered them to sit down and hold hands while she invoked a blessing.

  "Some folks think we shouldn't do this on the Sabbath,” she informed God in a confidential tone, “but I can't find nothing against it in Scripture.” (That was intended, Albion supposed, to settle Altuna's hash.)

  The lights were low. Na'teesha's hand felt small, cool and a little moist, while Gordon's was huge, calloused and dry. Cyrene muttered and gabbled to herself, most of the words unclear, though once she asked rather loudly, “How far to the other side?"

  Maybe it was a signal, for Albion felt a pull at his left hand. He looked up at Gordon's mountainous form and noticed for the first time that he too was asleep or entranced, breathing softly and regularly through his mouth. Was this a whole family of mediums? If so, how did they split up the work?

  As if answering his question, quite suddenly a woman's voice began to emerge from Gordon's lips.

  "This here is Aunt Sally,” the voice announced in the cracked tones of age. “Is that you, Natty? Oh, and there's Cyrene, too. Who's the white fella? I once knew everybody round Boney Part, but he's a new one on me. How's the weather down by y'awl?"

  "Kind of rainy,” said Na'teesha. “How is it where you at?"

  "Very bright,” said Aunt Sally. “Very, very bright."

  "That's nice. I guess you're over the clouds there, so you get lots of light from the sun."

  "Not from the sun,” said Aunt Sally. “Our light comes from the Son."

  "Praise God!” exclaimed Na'teesha. “Now, Honey, much as I'd love to visit with you a while, this gentleman is paying fifty dollars to contact a certain person name of Welch used to live in Smith's Haven."

  "There I can't help you,” said Aunt Sally. “I remember Dr. Welch a little bit, but he ain't up here with us. Come back when you got more time to chat, okay, Na'teesha?"

 
; The next twenty minutes were largely wasted, as a parade of unwanted spirits took the stage. A medieval archer babbled in Middle English; an Irish servant girl who'd died of typhoid in nineteenth-century New York gave thanks she'd never again have to “scrub them damn front steps"; a repentant Storyville whore praised her Redeemer; a U-boat crewman denounced die gottverdammte Engländer who'd killed him with a depth charge in 1943.

  One by one Na'teesha dismissed these annoying wraiths, repeating over and over that Dr. Welch, of Bonaparte, Mississippi, was the only person wanted. And at last, with a suddenness that made Albion jump, a precise and cutting baritone emerged from Gordon's lips.

  "Why are you people practicing your superstitious folly in my house?” it demanded.

  Na'teesha responded, “Will you identify yourself, please?"

  "Peter Paul Welch, M.D. Doctor Peter Paul Welch,” he added, in case those present were too dense to understand the M.D. “May I ask again what the devil you're doing in my surgery?"

  "You practiced medicine in this room?"

  "Madam, I practice medicine here every day. And I don't rent out space for strangers to put on absurd mummeries. Belle, show these intruders out."

  "Doctor Welch, do you recognize the lady seated at your left?"

  Silence followed. Then: “She seems ... oddly familiar."

  "Her name is Cyrene Foxx, formerly Cyrene Brown."

  "That's quite absurd. Cyrene Brown is an infant."

  "No, Doctor Welch. She's eighty years old."

  "Are you insane?"

  "You're dead, Doctor Welch. You died eighty years ago. You're a ghost."

  Surprisingly, Welch's tone softened. “My dear woman, I must apologize for my earlier asperity. I see now why you're in my surgery. I suppose worried family members brought you here. However, you should know that I'm a general practitioner, so I can't treat your mental problems. You need to see an alienist. Unfortunately, this benighted town doesn't possess one, even though most of the people are crazy. Try Charity Hospital in New Orleans."