Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  Some part of her thinks, My daddy collects stolen ghosts.

  The dress. The dress keeps tangling around her ankles and she keeps tripping, almost falling. Oh, her daddy gave her this dress, didn’t he? Oh, yes he did. He gave her this dress and…

  §

  And he says, “Isabelle, love. The pictures tonight?”

  And they go. He in his white suit with wax in his mustache and she in her fine new dress. God, how pretty she looks! And she never thinks so, never ever, but tonight with her handsome daddy smiling beside her, she feels perfectly gorgeous. They park the car on the street and when they get out, someone walks up and shakes her daddy’s hand and says, “Good to see you, Mr. Governor,” even though Daddy hasn’t been governor for decades. Everything shines. That joy she feels, that pride… god, it leaps from her and wraps itself around everything! They watch The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks. It is in Technicolor. In the dark next to her father, in his white suit with his pipe–stem sticking out of his vest pocket, everything in the whole wide world is painted in those colors.

  On the way home, her father runs the car into a tree. And something sharp hits her hard in the forehead. And all the color drowns in itself. And everything is no color at all.

  §

  She tries not to cry. That was the subtle clutch of his big thick fingers around her ankle, so light that she didn’t even notice. It kept her next to him, even at thirty–five years old, old enough to be married, to go dancing, to experience all the wonderful things the world had to offer. Damn him. Damn her daddy.

  She rounds a corner and sees the Girls standing in the middle of the trail and holding hands. They shift. Always. Their bodies can’t decide how they died. Now their necks are swollen and stretched and purple, and their heads twist away at strange angles and the blood vessels in their eyes have burst. Now their beautiful dresses, the elaborate Charleston Civil War chic they must have affected so well while they breathed, shred in a dozen places, fill with charred bullet holes, and their faces and their arms are pocked with the same, each dry and black and burnt around the edges, like open unblinking eyes. It’s the power of the living tongue, of what people say about the dead. They say the Girls were hanged. They say they died by firing squad.

  It changes you after a while.

  Isabelle shudders, and the Girls smile. Daddy’s voice dances through her head and she is swallowed by memory again. What had he said? In front of that great Frankenstein mantel? He had said…

  §

  “Do you know what happened to them?” he says, with his shirt open at the chest and his vest unbuttoned, sitting in his big leather chair in front of the fireplace. She is six, maybe seven, when Daddy finds the bodies. While the crew built the carriage trail through the wide and winding woods up the hill to Sunrise. Two bodies, mummified and buried. And Daddy reburies them, sets up a stone to mark their resting place. Now in the sitting room, he tilts his glass from side to side, watches the gin slide from edge to edge. “Spies, darling. Spies for the Union. Can you believe it? Tried and executed. Right here.”

  It is a week, maybe two, after they found them, and Daddy looks so tired.

  §

  She hadn’t understood then, just a little girl, no real scars to compare to those of her father. But there was something else there, wasn’t there? Yes, something shameful and secret and warm kept all to himself. Her father’s vice. Stolen ghosts.

  So it began with the Girls.

  Now the Girls nod to Isabelle. And no, no, no, she does not want to go to them, does not want to walk within whispering distance, where she can’t tell which of them is doing the whispering, but yes, yes, yes, her feet move her forward, and now there is a Girl on either side of Isabelle, both dead and shifting.

  “The key,” says one of the girls.

  “Oh yes, the key,” says the other.

  They giggle together.

  She tries so hard not to let her skin go thick with gooseflesh as their whispers wash over her. She fails. She tells them she knows. They need the key.

  There is a door set into the mantel of that terrible fireplace, that massive golem in her father’s house. A tiny tin door with a keyhole set in its center.

  The Girls giggle again. There’s nothing nice about that sound. There is only something final. Because the Girls call the shots. They always have, ever since the crash and the death and the night she woke up as a part of her father’s ghost collection. Making plans, giving orders, whispering, “Run, Isabelle! Run for Sunrise!” so loud that indeed she had to run, if only to get away from their choked baby–doll voices. “Get us out,” they whispered (and still whisper). “You can get us out.”

  So she runs. Like she has run every night since the last one of her life.

  When she sees the house sliding over the horizon, the first tears come and she almost stops. Almost. Too angry and sad and dead to do that. So she hikes up that beautiful dress and clutches at the hem in one tight white fist and keeps running.

  Damn her daddy. And damn the memories that keep pushing up into her head, her father with his hands on the wheel, it was hot in the car, the kind of summer night in Charleston that would melt…

  §

  It is the kind of summer night in Charleston that melts the wax her daddy puts in his mustache, and now, with his fists locked around the steering wheel, her daddy’s mustache is drooping. She can see the first beads of wet wax work their way down like vines and it makes her laugh like a little girl. Thirty–five years old and laughing like a little girl. She tells him she loves him. He smiles and says, “I love you too, Izza. You’re my baby girl.”

  But Daddy looks sad, so sad, and she reaches over and puts her hand on his arm. And she asks her big beautiful daddy what’s wrong.

  “Going to leave me, darling. Past time. Pretty young woman like you.”

  And she tells him, no, Daddy, no, not yet, she’s not going anywhere just yet, but he lets loose one tight fist and waves her away.

  “I know better,” he says, and the first drops of wax slip away and pad against the thigh of his white pants. Her daddy’s eyes are so wide tonight. So wide it scares her. They stare forward, no twitching, no blinking, and he drives like a man piloting a bullet.

  They ride up onto the hill, toward the carriage trail and home. She puts her hand on his leg, over the place where the wax dripped, and catches the next few spatters. They are quiet.

  And when her daddy says, “The only way to keep something forever,” she’s hardly listening anymore. Just breathing in the night, and swallowing the sounds. She doesn’t really hear him until he says, “Is losing it for good,” and jerks the steering wheel sideways. He has time to say, “Sorry, baby girl.”

  §

  She runs. She runs past the monument he built for her out here, the anchor he tied to her. The stone Madonna is gone, lifted up by the root, but her ashes are in there somewhere, and she shivers and knows that she should not be in two places at once. She runs up the old stone steps, slick and made green with age and mildew.

  She does not stop running until her bare feet slide onto the cold stone porch. Has she come this far before? She can’t remember. She doesn’t think so. No time. No time.

  The Girls are here, holding hands and sharing secrets. Shot. Hanged. Both. They wave, and Isabelle grinds her teeth against her tongue and screws her eyes shut and pretends they are not here. Still, they whisper. They say, “The key, baby girl.” Isabelle wants to scream.

  She opens the door. And the three of them go in together. Sunrise Mansion breathes them in, and they are swallowed and damned when the Girls close the door. The front hall is too long, longer than it ever was when she lived, and lined with her father’s things. The ghastly old collection. Things once owned by the dead, and now owned by them again. And framed in the doorway to the sitting room, the cloister of the slippery–sick fireplace with its many faces, is her daddy. He stands with his back to them, his hands clasped behind him, in his white Mark Twain suit. He breath
es, or he seems to. And Isabelle is split in two. She loves him. She hates him. She blames and forgives and reconvicts and once again pardons him.

  There is noise. There is so very much noise! Just looking at him, standing there and pretending not to know that they have intruded into this place, her world is filled with sound, crashing sound, crunching sound, metal on metal on glass on dirt on flesh crash crunch scream she should scream she can’t scream because she does not have a voice has never had a voice sound!

  She is on her knees with the heels of her hands pressed to her ears before she knows she has fallen. And still her father will not lower his chin and crane his neck to see her. Behind her, the Girls lick their lips and hiss like snake–harlots, and all that noise still presses down on her, paralyzes her.

  Her father says, “So good to see you, baby girl. You look splendid.” And the noise breaks. Silence fills the cracks, shuttles the sound away.

  So Isabelle stands. With shaky knees, with her pretty dress tangling around her bare ankles. She steps forward. And she sees the fireplace beyond her poor awful daddy.

  Oh, no, no, no.

  All of the faces are gone. The faces of Christ and the faces of a thousand nameless under–bit gargoyles and goblins. All sucked in and away. And in their place now, staring out with sadness set in chiseled eyes, her daddy’s face stares back a thousand times. She thinks, Don’t turn around now, Daddy. God, please, don’t turn around. She does not want to know what her handsome daddy has become, does not want to see the swirling vertigo where Sunrise has stolen her daddy’s face.

  He stays put. His hands remain clasped. The faces in the fireplace close their eyes and grit their teeth. “I didn’t mean a thing but love, Izza. You know that.”

  And she does. Because the only way to keep something forever is to lose it for good. But it hurts. And she’s too tired to fight the tears.

  The Girls slide up on either side of her and she winces at the smell of breath from lungs that no longer breathe. They say, “The key?”

  And she nods.

  Her daddy’s sad stone faces, they all curl up on themselves like the faces of crying men, and they say, “Baby girl, I am so sorry.”

  His body reaches into his front vest pocket, where he always kept his beautiful Meerschaum pipe, and he pulls out the thing that she wants. The key. Oh, the key!

  She reaches over his shoulder and snatches it, and close up like this, she sees the place where his face should be. Just a glance. Just a glimmer in her periphery. But, oh it is awful. And she begins to cry so hard that she almost makes a noise.

  The Girls push her forward, past the faceless thing shaped like her father, out of the front hall and into the sitting room. Toward the fireplace, that wall of faces that used to be stolen and are now all her father’s. Those stones once carved with their birthplaces, each to a one now reads SUNRISE.

  And there is the door. The tiny tin door with the keyhole in its center.

  Her father’s faces say, “There’s nothing behind that door. But you know that, baby girl. This never ends.”

  “The key!” whisper the Girls. And they drown her poor daddy into silence.

  She unlocks the door. And she opens it. And now, oh yes, now she…

  §

  She runs. Oh, yes, she runs. Her bare feet slap like hands against the rough loose–packed dirt of her father’s carriage trail. Tiny rocks stick to her heels, gnawing little divots into them, little pink craters like bite marks, and why yes, that does seem just about right, doesn’t it? Because Sunrise Mansion does have teeth. Sunrise Mansion devours.

  She can hear the shrill, severe laughter of the Girls, and she feels like she has missed the set–up and punch line of a particularly cruel joke.

  Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation

  DURING THE FIRST ERA, THEY observe him. They watch him burn. It is a slow fire, a terribly slow fire which burns him in stages that last a thousand years. A millennium’s worth of reddening skin, progressing toward blisters that form in the time it takes for generations to be born and to die. They observe as the flames climb him like leeches, blackening him, curling his skin like old paper, revealing (with a flourish, a magician’s handkerchief yanked away) the strings and highways of his musculature. They watch, and take notes, as his organs boil and burst and their contents spill down the grate at his feet, sluicing down and down and down the sheer walls of the forever–long pit below him. They watch his eyeballs liquefy, they watch him as he becomes unable to watch them. They watch his larynx tumble out, then watch the chords behind it stretch and pop. They watch the layers of his penis curl backward one by one, until there is nothing but a burnt bundle of tissue at his crotch shaped like a rose. They watch his teeth fall, note their velocity and the rhythm of their tic–tic–tic staccato down the drain, jot down the exact moment at which the sound becomes too faint to hear.

  They watch all of this, and they brainstorm. And when it is all over, they do it all over again in reverse, and see if his pain is any less bearable when played backwards. And then they compare notes.

  — Allow the sensory organs to last longer, or not be destroyed at all. Allow him to see, hear, taste, and feel all of it.

  — Leave his penis. I want to see what happens when we leave his penis.

  — He does not scream enough. Hotter fire? Slower?

  §

  During the second era, they pry apart his mind and climb inside. They want to see who he is, and why he is here. They become like tiny mosquitoes and bleed him of his memories and emotions.

  For a few decades, there is only fear. The terrible (delicious, oh so delicious for them, and oh so fascinating; these things always are) sensation of awakening to a lie you’ve been told, one around which you’ve constructed your entire life. No, no, no, this can’t be real, I can’t be here, I don’t believe in this! It is amazing to them how long it takes for the shock to wear off. The damned can never accept that they are damned. They can never grasp that they have simply chosen incorrectly. What was it that the God–boy had said? About being THE way? THE truth? THE light?

  They relish his fear. They do not become bored of it. Not once in the never–beginning history of their kind have they ever.

  And when they have gorged themselves on his emotions, they dig past them and excavate his life. They find that this man’s name is Gordon Dratch. Gordon Dratch was twenty–eight years old when he fell off a ladder outside of his home and cracked open his skull on his concrete driveway.

  — What a wonderfully comical way to die.

  — They laugh at him, I’m sure. His obituary is it’s own punch line.

  — What else? What else?

  They dig, and they find.

  §

  Witness Gordon Dratch as a child. Thirteen, and angry. He opens the closet door slowly, careful of the creak in the hinges and the scrape against the rough carpet. He ducks inside, holds his breath. The closet smells like peppermint and Old Spice and sweat and that dry, aged stench of all those creepy old people at church. Bald buzzard–headed men and fat mean–eyed women, whose toothless mouths can’t seem to shape the words of the hymns, and therefore just sing off–key animal noises. He hates them. But he’s not concerned with them just now. It’s in here somewhere, his prize, his reward for being quiet and cunning and thirteen. He finds it in an old shoebox that used to hold his dad’s dress shoes. A forty–ounce bottle of pale–brown booze, the label torn off so that the only markings on the glass are the torn white leavings of the paper and the sticky label–glue that held it on. His dad’s stash, the secret stuff.

  He used to find it all over the place. Beneath the seat of Daddy’s car. Down in the basement behind the dryer. Even after Daddy’s Big Breakthrough, the day he and Mommy sat Gordon and Annie down in the living room and Mommy said, “Guys. Daddy’s got a problem with alcohol. We’ve got to give Daddy some space and some extra love, okay? He needs us to help him get better.” So, yeah, Gordon knows what booze is, and he knows that his
dad was a drunk. Is a drunk. Whatever.

  He hides the bottle beneath his coat, hard up inside his armpit, and he reaches inside his dad’s jacket and steals a few cigarettes too. Then he slips out, closes the door behind him with the same slow care he took in opening it. And he leaves the house.

  Outside, Mark Milligan is waiting for him with his hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes darting from Gordon’s front door to the street and back again, checking for the hidden cameras, the signs of the trap. He says, “D’ja get it?”

  Gordon nods. They cut across the street and through somebody’s back yard. An Irish setter growls at them, and they spit at it and flip it the bird. They vault the fence and sit beneath the bushes by the railroad tracks, trading swigs of the forty and smoking Winstons. Mark says, “My dad says your dad is gonna start giving sermons sometimes. Like, as practice.”

  Gordon says, “Yup.”

  Mark says, “Is he any good?”

  Gordon cocks an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Like, does he want to be a pastor or something?”

  “I guess. I dunno.”

  They sit in silence for a while, smoking and taking little sips, too young and too scared to drink enough to get drunk. Then Gordon says, “I don’t believe in God, anyway.” They spend the rest of the afternoon like that, silent, pretending to drink, pretending to smoke, until the sun starts going down and they both have to sneak away home and brush their teeth so no one smells the smoke on their breath.