The ghosts circled her; they had not expected a woman. Why was she not dead, too? One of the children, a little girl with blond braids, picked up a rock and started to heave it, but her mother, who was dressed only in a cotton nightshirt, caught her by the arm. “No, no,” she said. “Not yet. Maybe not.”
Wrenching herself from her mother’s grip, the blond ghost child ran over to her friend, an African girl whose face was tear-streaked and who kept one hand on her mother’s long, blood-soaked skirt. The blond ghost child whispered in her friend’s ear, and they both clapped their hands over their mouths to stifle giggles. Three of the ghost women drew closer to Clarissa. Mosquitoes fell to the ground like black rain.
The air was thick and rank with decaying vegetation—a smell Clarissa had always associated with snakes. If something happened—snakebite, bear mauling, whatever—she was miles from help, and her cell phone was useless. But to hell with it. She was here now, and there were gravestones lying helter-skelter in the soggy soil just a few yards in front of her. Clarissa loved old graveyards. The headstone inscriptions were tantamount to tiny stories offering clues about the lives of the departed. And Clarissa craved stories the way drowning people craved dry land.
With halting steps, keeping watch for snakes and mud holes, Clarissa made her way over to the grave cluster. Even the earth that was solid enough to walk on felt mushy, leading her to believe that it didn’t take much more than a heavy dew for Poor Spot Cemetery to be underwater.
The ghost women, their fear easing, drew closer. The children played. The babies fussed.
Clarissa knelt on one knee and wiped off a clump of red-tinged moss on the first headstone she came to. A wolf spider the size of her fist scurried from its perch on top of the stone, disappearing into the wet soil. Startled, Clarissa tumbled backward, lost her balance, and fell into a muck pit composed of ancient graves. Screaming, she struggled to sit upright, but the quick mud pulled her in. She heard the scuttling of what she thought were insect legs. Something scurried across her face. She tried to slap it off, but her hands were mired in mud that felt to her as if it were alive, as if its intent were to consume her, body and soul. Her breath escaped her the moment she imagined she was being eaten by swamp roaches. She attempted to flail, kick, thrust her way out, but nothing worked. As slowly as a feather falling through a milky sky, Clarissa Burden sank deeper. Oh, my God, she thought, the graves are eating me; I am being buried alive. She did not want to die with a mouthful of mud: This was her third thought. Her fourth was, Is this cosmic payback for killing—even out of mercy—the red-winged blackbird?
Of all the ways she did not want to die, drowning in quick mud—graves or no graves—ranked near the top. Something slithered through her hair. She yelled, “Oh, hell, no!”
The ghost women watched, wondering if that was why she had come here: to die. But no one had done that in a very long time. Most of the women had been murdered and dumped at Poor Spot.
Not, however, Melissa Jackson. She knew exactly what it was to die out here. A yellow-haired mulatto, she held her baby to her chest and fought the horrible, sudden urge to remember. But fighting an urge, she knew, almost always ended in failure. In 1853, four days after her baby was murdered (the church’s fathers had decided that her mulatto baby would infect the village with evil and had slit, upon birth, the baby’s throat and dumped her in an unmarked grave), Melissa Jackson had fled here under the good light of a three-quarter moon and slashed her wrists so she could be with her little girl. It was not a good place to die.
Mud oozed around Clarissa’s kneecaps; soon it would fill her ears. Because the circumstances were so dire, her reactions evolved like a Darwinian dream. Panic morphed into fear, which flashed into anger; anger erupted into multiple flares of disbelief. This full-blown incredulity slowed her beating heart, thickened her blood. Ultimately, it steadied her; out of chaos came certainty. She would die or she would live; but she wouldn’t give up. No way, nohow. “Help! Somebody help me!” she screamed, the mud seeping over her silver earrings.
Melissa Jackson knew the distance even a ghost had to traverse to save the white woman. She knew, as did all the ghost women, that souls carried weight and, therefore, could fall victim to quick mud. If this woman was to be saved, the children would have to do it.
“Cornelia! Jessamine! Quick! Hurry like little bees,” Melissa Jackson said, addressing the blond-braided child and her friend. She chose them because they bore the least fear.
The mothers of the two girls exchanged glances. No one wanted another dead woman out here. “Jessamine, can you do it?” the African girl’s mother asked.
Jessamine looked at Cornelia, and they, feeling invincible in death, smiled wide. “I think so.”
“Soft step, Cornelia, like I taught you,” her mother said.
Jessamine whispered into Cornelia’s ear. Cornelia, eyes wide, nodded, whispered something in return, and then, holding hands, the two girls made their way out to Clarissa, who, even as she sank, refused to cry. No one would find her out here, and perhaps, given the absurdity of her life (a mother who did not love her, a father who did not love her, a husband who did not love her, a womb so empty she had no children to love her), this was a perfect way to go. And if that were the case, she’d succumb without hysterics.
Hysterics: That was the last word that spiraled through Clarissa Burden’s mind before she felt herself, as if by playful and strong arms, being pulled—up, up, up—from the muck. She heard a tearing and then a sucking sound as the quick mud ripped off of her what was left of Iggy’s shirt. The girls worked hard, grunting as they pulled. Clarissa, for a full ten count, felt as if she were a child on a summer’s day, floating on her back in the Tangelo County municipal pool, staring at the sky. It was a lovely sensation, this miracle of ghost children wrenching her from their grave. She got one knee on solid ground and scrambled with the agility of the spider that had gotten her into this fix in the first place.
Cornelia and Jessamine joined hands again and ran back to their mothers. The ghost women surrounded them, showering them with kisses.
“She felt hot!” Cornelia said.
“Hot as fire!” Jessamine added.
“The living are much warmer than we are,” Jessamine’s mother said, stroking the girl’s hair.
Weak but grateful, Clarissa clung to the first fixed object she found. She did not realize it, but as she hugged the headstone of Florida Lee Bessamer, she was the happiest she’d been in years. A voice in her head whispered, “I am so happy to be alive.”
Clarissa said, “Me too.”
As she sat there trying to regain her bearings in a forsaken cemetery, awestruck at being alive, covered in grave muck, having just been rescued by ghost children, having almost suffocated to death in a mud pit, clinging to a moss-laden headstone, she stumbled through what had just tripped through her mind. Me too? Me too? Who the hell am I talking to?
Amid the dead, Clarissa tried to untangle the voices that crowded her brain: the reasonables and the hysterics; the ovarian shadow women and the fwuk u u liho superheroine; the wise ancients and the girl who could—for a few moments—fall in love with Trash Man. She pressed her cheek against Florida Lee Bessamer’s headstone and tried to understand who they were and if she needed psychotherapy. As a dusting of dead mosquitoes fell into her palm, the simplest and most honest of answers came to her: All the voices—each and every one—were part and parcel of who she was. They weren’t independent beings. They weren’t manifestations of a sick mind. They were different facets of a writer’s being, real as the mud under her nails. And she needed to love them. Somehow, this was essential if she was ever to conquer the frightening landscape composed of white space on her computer screen. With a mud-caked hand, she ran her fingers over the headstone’s inscription.
The ghost women, who had been watching from a few feet away, their curiosity getting the best of them, circled closer. Having accepted their fates long ago, they watched Clarissa without anger o
r remorse, fully immersed in a need to know her story.
“What is she doing here?” asked a pretty, cinnamon-skinned woman with long straight hair. “This is no place for a living woman.” Her flour-sack dress was ripped. Her cobalt amulet gleamed in the flickering sunlight.
Overhead, a screech owl suddenly changed its trajectory when it set its yellow eye on the ghost women, swerving hard to the left and out of sight.
“Child must be lost,” said a black woman whose hair was hidden in a blue cloth and whose arms still bore the bruises of the beating she had suffered at her death.
“Lost or crazy,” said a young, brown-haired white woman who cradled a silent baby.
“Florida Lee Bessamer, 1828 to 1845,” Clarissa said, reading the stone. “May Jesus Accept Her into His Forgiving Arms.”
She rose to her feet and, moving with light, tentative steps, made it to the next stone, which was smaller. She wiped off the grime. “Josephine Bessamer, 1845 to 1845, Infant Daughter of Florida Lee, Born in Sin but Loved by a Patient God.”
Clarissa, urgency tugging at her bones, walked the line of headstones, reading quickly, making sure she stayed on solid ground. “Glorious Louise Johnston, 1827 to 1844, Cleanse Your Heart, So Sayeth the Savior; Cornelia Glory Johnston, 1843 to 1845, May the Child Not Know Hell; Rosa Maria Valdez, 1840 to 1855, God’s Tears Cannot Undo What Satan Hath Wrought; Consuelo Luna Valdez, 1842 to 1855, Little Sister, Once Christ’s Dove, Now Satan’s Breath; Baby Valdez, God Save Her Soul; Jessamine Freedom, 1856, And It Continues.”
What did this mean? And why did the inscriptions become more cryptic, ominous? There were, by her count, twenty-two bodies buried at Poor Spot, and although some of the inscriptions were eroded into oblivion, as far as Clarissa could tell, everyone interred was a woman. She wound her way back through the headstones, trying to make sense of this place, these brief inscriptions that led only to questions. Dead mosquitoes rained down around her. Maybe, she thought, standing in front of Consuelo Luna’s headstone, Poor Spot was a yellow jack cemetery. But why no males? Why had, in death, the females been segregated and buried in a place so hellish that no one—especially no one trying to stay healthy—would visit?
The black woman with the blue head cloth whose name Clarissa did not utter because her headstone had been swallowed by the mud nearly a century ago, said, “What do you think would happen if she knew the truth?”
Three of the ghost women, including Melissa Jackson, in unison said, “Dead.”
Clarissa looked beyond the ragtag line of graves that surrounded her, feeling certain there were plots without headstones, that at some point bodies had been dumped and abandoned, that she was walking on the graves of women and their children who had been long forgotten. No one had tended these graves since the day they were dumped.
A sadness as thick as the sweltering air descended on her. These were her sisters, sisters who had been considered disposable, unclean, unworthy. Maybe it wasn’t a yellow jack cemetery at all. Maybe it was a potter’s field for women who spoke their minds, whose sexuality was considered too obvious, tempting, dangerous, evil—bad women spawning bad seed. Maybe she had stumbled onto her own private Salem. She would find out who these women were, and she would write about them, honor them; she would not let them be forgotten. If they were witches, she thought, I want to be one of them.
She knelt down, grabbed a fistful of dirt, sifted it through her fingers, knowing that come winter, when the heat and creepy crawlies had eased, she would return here—a stronger woman—and tend their graves. She would clean headstones, clear vines, rake leaves, haul limbs, and not fall into the quick mud. She would whisper prayers. Flowers would grow.
Feeling a twinge of the magic that blooms when words and narratives couple, Clarissa said, “God bless this place; God bless these women.”
The brown-haired woman, raising her scarred arms above her head, said, “A benediction! Ain’t no one ever said that over us.”
“Yeah, well, don’t you start crying,” Glorious Louise Johnston said, shaking her head as if she’d seen the woman break down once too often.
Clarissa started back to her truck, the dried grave mud flaking off as she walked, and the ghost women followed. Cornelia and Jessamine ran ahead—ghost children, like their living counterparts, ran whenever walking would do—and clambered into the truck bed.
“Get out of there right this second!” Jessamine’s mother said.
“You leave this place and go out there?” Glorious jabbed her head in the direction of Tremble and Shout, “And a world of trouble gonna descend on you, child!”
The girls jumped down, and when no one was looking except for Cornelia, Jessamine stuck her tongue out at her mother. The two girls giggled and shoved each other. The ghost women circled Clarissa’s truck, and despite Glorious’s admonition, the brown-haired woman began to weep.
Clarissa, thinking it was the dried mud that was keeping the mosquitoes away, got in the cab, her mind clearer than it had been in months. She turned the key. The engine sputtered, coughed, died. It didn’t faze her. She did not panic. Nothing bad had happened to her out here. She had survived the quick mud, discovered a killing field, and had finally found something to write about. She tried again. The truck rumbled to life. Clarissa headed back down the path that led to sunshine.
The ghost women gathered in a knot in the clearing where they had been buried without ceremony or kind words and watched her leave. When they could no longer see her, they laced their arms, raised their faces to the dappled light, and became, once more, a gust of wind.
Back on Tremble and Shout, Clarissa headed north. She tried to remember where she had buried the bird but could not find it. This unsettled her, because she thought that surely a person should be able to remember where she had buried an animal—mercy killing or no—just an hour prior. As the distance between her and Poor Spot Cemetery grew, she thought that the road seemed less ominous now that she was returning to some semblance of civilization. When she passed the depot, she honked. Sweet Trash Man! If he could only see her now, mud-covered, that gleam in his eyes might not sparkle quite so brightly.
Just as she whipped by a patch of swamp turnips whose trumpet-throated blossoms had been snuffed out by summer’s heat, Clarissa spied an obstruction in the road. At first she thought it might be a mirage, but she couldn’t take the chance. If it was a fallen tree and she hit it, she could flip the truck and end up drinking swamp water until something came along and turned her into dinner. She slowed down and thought, Gator? She checked her cell phone: still no signal.
As she drew nearer, the watery mirage froze, pixel by pixel, into something definite and real. When she was within twenty feet, she identified what lay ahead, and because humans are by design predisposed to at least two things—avoidance of pain, and survival—her heart beat faster. A rattler, maybe five feet long, was stretched out on the asphalt, a deadly ribbon absorbing the solstice heat.
Lucky for you, Mr. Snake, Clarissa thought, that I’m the person who has happened upon you; most anyone else would run you over—back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—as if overkill were a necessary component in roadkill.
Clarissa laid on her horn. Nothing happened. The horn, evidently, had lost its honk. She tried again. A spark sizzled like a shooting star up from the steering column, followed by the faint smell of burning wires, but still, no horn. This is not a truck; it’s a disaster waiting for an accident, Clarissa thought.
The snake appeared content, as if sunning itself in the middle of a road were a rational act. Being a Florida native and having grown up in the subtropics before most of it was paved over, Clarissa was schooled in the ways of rattlers, gators, black widows, mosquitoes, and other creatures that if given half a chance could kill you or at least drive you mad. She did not want to get out of the truck. Snakes could strike half their body length (that knowledge—along with understanding that freshwater was mainly for fishing, not swimming, unless you were an alligator or w
ater moccasin—was conferred on a certain generation of Floridian at birth), and given the fact that the snake would not tolerate her measuring distance, length, or trajectory, the cab was a safe space. She could try to drive around it but feared the moving vehicle would startle the reptile, causing it to slither directly under her rear tires. Maybe if she inched up, the snake would get the drift and mosey on. She slowly rolled forward.
He was a beautiful creature, with scales that glinted like tiny bits of polished granite; there was something archetypal about his form, something ancient and dangerous that made her afraid even in the midst of being awestruck. The front of the truck was within a foot of the snake, but he did not move. Maybe he’s dead, Clarissa thought. As if reading her mind, he flicked his tongue.
She rolled down her car window and yelled, “Go! You’re going to get killed out here.” Nothing. And then she remembered that snakes, in addition to being stubborn, were more attuned to vibrations than to any sound that might trip the hidden cochlear chambers of their earless souls. So, ignoring her self-preservation instinct, she got out of the truck and, with the door as her shield, stomped and hollered on Tremble and Shout, grateful that no one came upon her, because Clarissa was sensitive about what people thought and surely she appeared insane. As she flailed, the mud from the graves fell in chunks and flakes, forming tiny dunes of funereal dirt at her feet. The snake ignored her.
“Hey, lady, what do you think you’re doing?”
Clarissa spun around, and a voice in her head—which one, she didn’t know—said, “Never turn your back on a snake.”
A little towheaded, sunburned boy ambled down the road at the edge of a lily pond. He carried a long stick known by locals as a snake stick, named for what it was supposed to keep at bay. He carried a canvas bag over his shoulder; its strap ran at a diagonal across his chest. “You messing with my snake?”
“Your snake?” Clarissa shaded her eyes and saw that the boy was barefoot. “It’s a rattler. Very poisonous. You need to stay where you—”
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 11