by Bob Bickford
There was a five-gallon white plastic garbage pail in the corner by the sink, with a snap-on lid. I was slouched in my chair, watching the dog outside and thinking about getting more coffee when a slight movement from that corner caught my eye. I watched idly. In a minute, the movement happened again. It was the trash can. It rocked slightly, and shifted just a tiny bit on the floor. Something was inside the can.
I didn’t have a small animal problem inside the cabin, simply because there weren’t any animals on the island, except a couple of squirrels on the far side that appeared geriatric and stayed away from me. The land wasn’t big enough to support anything else.
Whatever had found its way into my trash must have gotten trapped when I put something in and snapped the lid closed. I had just about made up my mind to carry the whole thing outside to release whatever it was, when first one catch, and then the other, popped free with an audible click. I sat back in my chair. What I was seeing didn’t make sense. Nothing could release the catches from inside the can.
The lid tipped and slid off onto the floor. It rolled toward me and fell over. The container was nearly empty. It had a clean white plastic liner, and whatever was in the can was caught up in it. I heard it rustling around in the bottom. I stood up and took a step forward, when a dark-skinned hand appeared and grasped the edge of the can. I sat back down.
The black boy pulled himself out in a single fluid motion, emerging from the small plastic pail as though he were climbing out of a man-hole. He stood in my clean kitchen wearing twill overalls shortened to the knee, and a battered pair of men’s black shoes. They were too big for him, were laced tightly, and worn without socks.
I knew that this was Eli Tull, and I knew that he was dead. Whatever was left of his skeleton was moldering away under six feet of moist dirt in a Georgia graveyard, and it had been there for over sixty years. I was looking at something from the past. The problem was, he didn’t exist, but he was standing as large as life in the middle of my clean kitchen floor. Whatever he was, he wasn’t dead, not quite.
He stood and looked around the room, not making a sound. I felt his look settle on me. I kept my own gaze around his midsection as his appearance began to change, to grow and bloat. His clothes became filthy and the skin on his legs turned gray. He was covered with reddish dust. Against my will, my eyes were drawn upward to the horror of his face. His head seemed to have expanded to the size of a watermelon. His features were smashed, his jaw was broken and askew, and his eye sockets were swollen and empty. The smell of mud and rot filled the room, and I felt my gorge rise.
I held his eyeless gaze for long seconds, and then he was as suddenly just a small boy again. He smiled at me sweetly and went out through the screen door into the yard. I saw Blue on his feet, barking, but not at the boy. There was a yellow dog in the yard with him. The boy held his arms wide, and the dog leapt onto my porch. There appeared to be a joyous reunion, and then the two of them moved soundlessly out of sight.
I stood up to follow them. My legs felt arthritic as I hobbled outside. I was having trouble catching my breath. I could hear myself gasping, but I didn’t seem to be getting any air. Blue was standing at the far end of the porch, still barking toward the trees behind the cabin. I joined him and looked, but the path was empty. I hushed him and listened, but heard nothing moving through the trees.
“Eli!” I called. “Eli! What is it? What do you want?”
A bird chattered, and leaves rustled in the breeze far above me, but there was no other answer. The sunny summer day was suddenly icy cold. I was desperately afraid, not of the small boy, but of his reason for coming to find me on my island.
***
I pulled my jeep into the parking lot of Robertson’s Market. Molly’s purple truck was parked near the front door. I didn’t want to run into her.
Inside, the store was warm and smelled of the cedar logs it was built of. It was still early, and full of the quiet murmuring of staff getting ready for the onslaught of the day. In another hour the place would be busy, and by mid-morning there would be a crush of cottagers that wouldn’t abate until late at night.
I grabbed a plastic carry basket from a stack and waded in to find milk and dog food. The rest of my shopping was haphazard. I never used a list. The aisles were nearly empty.
I turned a corner to find Molly three feet away from me. She was examining green peppers with the absolute concentration she gave to nearly everything she did. Every time that I saw her was a revelation to me. Some unknown lost thing inside of me came back. Something broken was fitted back into place. I could have looked at her for the rest of the day, but given our last conversation I wondered if it would be better to turn the corner and leave her alone.
She looked up at me briefly and then back at the vegetable in her hand. She had seen me, and I had no choice but to approach her. She didn’t look up when she spoke.
“Hi, Mike.”
“Morning. Listen, Molly, I was an idiot. I’m sorry.”
She put peppers in her basket and moved on. I followed. Her voice was even and without expression. “I don’t think,” she said, “that this is the right time to talk about it. How’s Blue doing?”
“He’s going to be fine. There’s going to be some adjustment. He has a little trouble with getting into the boat, so I don’t think he’s going to be a dog that goes everywhere with me.”
“He’s a pain in the ass.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Look, Mike. It’s been pointed out to me that dumping a dog on you was pretty presumptuous of me. If you don’t want him, I’ll be glad to take him.”
“Pointed out by--let me guess, Joseph?”
She looked up and held my gaze. Her eyes showed nothing, no emotion at all, and the loss of her flooded me. She started to move away. “Bye, Mike.”
I stood helplessly in the aisle, holding my empty basket, for a long time after she was gone. I had never felt so lost.
CHAPTER 28
Sam, Jenny, and Michael Latta,
Lake Alatoona, Georgia, Sunday, June 16, 1974:
The boy sat on a rock, shivering from the cold. He dripped water onto the stone beneath him; the drops collected in tiny pools on the warm granite and then formed black rivulets that ran back into the lake they had come from. He was trying not to cry. He didn’t cry often, and he tried to hold onto his outrage at his mother, as a way of fighting the fright he felt.
His father sat beside him, not saying anything. After a minute, the man stood and walked a short distance to the picnic table where the mother sat. She didn’t look at the man when he approached. He got a towel from a beach bag that was sitting on the ground at her feet and returned to the rock.
“I hate her,” the boy said.
“I know you’re mad, Michael, but there are some things you can’t say in front of me. That’s one of them. It’s not allowed.”
He tucked the towel around the boy’s shoulders. Over at the picnic table, the woman stood up and went down to the water’s edge. She was careful to not glance in their direction. She bent, pulled off her sandals, and walked down the shoreline, away from them.
“She hit me.”
Michael was a quiet, contained boy, not given to sharing more than he had to, and he was humiliated by his own tears. Sam felt helpless. He had only vague memories of his own father, and he often felt that growing up without one gave him an essential disadvantage. He saw himself as an imposter, fundamentally unfit for the job.
“She hit you because she loves you,” Sam said.
Michael gave his father a sideways glance, incredulous.
They had come to the lake for a lunch and a swim. Mike went into the water and had been twice admonished, by Jenny from shore, that he was getting himself dangerously deep. He treated this with seven-year-old disdain, until all at once there was no rocky bottom beneath his feet. He bobbed up, squawking, and then went under again, swallowing water. Sam had gone into the water with his pants and shoes on.
<
br /> When Michael was underwater and Sam’s splashing progress to him seemed to be in slow motion, there was a terrible moment when Jenny felt her sanity slip. She wondered if it were possible for fear to stop a healthy heart. Then her Sam had emerged with her Michael under his arm, waded in, and set him on the shore. Wild, she had run down and slapped the boy across the face.
Mother and son had looked at each other, speechless with grief, until the spell broke and time started again. He had shrieked. She had turned away, and each of them had taken a broken heart to an opposite side, leaving Sam helpless between them.
“She hit you because she loves you,” Sam repeated. “She was terrified of losing you, and when she didn’t, she was mad at you for scaring her. You scared me, too.”
“That’s stupid,” Michael sobbed.
“Maybe so, but it’s something you should know. When someone’s really mad, they’re scared underneath. Remember that. Someday, knowing it might help you.”
Far up the lake’s shore, the small figure of Jenny stopped walking and turned to look back at them. They sat and watched her as she started back in their direction.
***
Present Day:
“Sorry about your dad,” Kate said. “Come sit in the back.”
She brought me coffee and a piece of pie and sat down across from me. “Something new. Saskatoon berry,” she said. “I’m not convinced.”
I tasted it. “I’m not either.”
“They’re expensive,” she said. “I have no doubt they’re good for you. I feel foolish, because I got talked into buying them because they’re Canadian. They don’t grow around here, and there’s nothing more Canadian than the billions of blueberries and raspberries that do. I’m a fool.”
“I think it’s probably rare that anyone talks you into anything.” I smiled. “Mark it on your calendar.”
“My niece called me last night. She’s pretty angry with you.”
“I’m not exactly happy with her either, Kate. She’s playing house with Joseph again. It’s so far out of character for her that it makes me wonder if I even know her at all.”
“You’ve known each other for a year now, Michael. You’re obviously wanting more than friendship.” She stirred her coffee and set the spoon in the saucer, clearly weighing her words. “She hasn’t told me how her feelings run,” she said, “or I’d put you out of your misery. I don’t make any secret of it that I’d like to see you two together. At some point, things are going to move forward, or they’ll move backward. I think it’s been long enough that you’d best make yourself plain to her. You have your own issues, or you would have done so a long time ago.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I sighed. “I have other problems I want to talk to you about, though. On the island.”
I told her about my visitor the day before, the boy who crawled out of my kitchen trash can. Eli Tull. “It scared me to death, and if I scared easy I wouldn’t be back on that island in the first place.”
“No chance it was a kid playing around then?” she asked. “Got into your house, playing tricks?”
“No, Kate. This is a small trash can. A bucket. An infant couldn’t hide in it, let alone a boy. Even so, it wouldn’t account for horrible injuries on him appearing and disappearing. And the smell. Like the worst kind of swamp while he was there, and no trace of any kind of odor after he left. It was Eli.”
“Sometimes ghosts are trying to frighten us,” she said. “They’re angry and bitter at where they find themselves, and they lash out at the living.”
“I don’t think so, Kate. He changed into something awful, but it wasn’t for long, and when he changed back he gave me this nice, shy smile, like he was apologizing. I think he was making sure I knew who he was.” I struggled for the real sense of what I had seen. “It sounds weird, but I think he was partly...playing.”
“Like children do.”
“Yes. Not entirely playing, though. He came for a reason.”
“I wish Molly had been with you,” she said. “She has a knack for actually talking to them, not just seeing them.”
“I wish someone had been with me. The dog’s useless.”
“Where is your new friend?” Kate laughed. “Out in the truck?”
“No, he’s at home. He doesn’t like getting in and out of the boat, or the truck for that matter. Too big and clumsy. Happy to stay and sleep on the porch.”
“My Molly loves him, though, so she does. Thinks he’s a fine animal.”
A group of older men at a front table gathered themselves to go. They waved back to Kate on their way out.
“So...you think the whole thing was keyed on you,” she said, “not the place. Not the island or the cabin or the kitchen. An active apparition, not a memory. Aware of you, and trying to interact.”
“Yes, definitely active,” I said, “and one that has come here, all the way from Georgia.”
“Can you tell me about Georgia?” she asked. “Your father’s story? Molly told me a lot of it, but she said you found out something awful about him--didn’t say what it was.”
I told her that my father had shot and killed two grown men when he was a young child, and it was why he had been hounded and harassed right before he died.
“Oh, my God. And how old was he when he did this?”
“Really young. Ten years old. He was so outraged that they got away with it, he shot them both dead. That’s his story.”
She stared at me. “That’s incredible. Do you think it’s true? Can a ten-year-old boy even manage a gun?”
“Sure. Some kids are out shooting squirrels and birds younger than that.”
“I’m not daft, Michael,” she said. “A rifle or a pellet gun is a different matter than having the hand strength to fire a pistol and kill a grown man. That’s a tall order for small hands.”
“True, I get that. Sorry. I don’t know. The act itself fits him, somehow.”
“It would have scarred him,” she said, “very badly. Unless a child that age got help, it would profoundly affect them, right into adulthood. I saw enough of it, early traumas, God knows.”
Like her niece. Kate had been a teacher before she retired to Ansett and her coffee shop.
“Was he charged with the murders?” she asked. “What would they do with a child back then, send them to reform school?”
“No, this is the worst part. Apparently someone else was arrested and hanged for shooting the two guys. The black kid, the first victim--his father. My dad tried to tell what he did, and they gagged him, wouldn’t let him tell the truth.”
“Who did?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I suppose his parents, my grandparents.”
“So an innocent man was executed for it? And he wasn’t allowed to tell?”
“Appears even the police wanted it kept a secret. They had already executed someone. No one wanted it brought up.”
“That’s a burden no child should bear,” she said.
I looked across the table at her. Her eyes were impossibly blue. “And your ghost yesterday, the child?” she asked. “You think there’s a connection.”
I stood up to go. She kept her seat and looked up at me, her arms folded on the table.
“I do, Kate. You’ve always said the island was some kind of doorway, and I have a feeling it’s a convenient door for something that’s come a long way to find me and tell me something.”
I pulled out my wallet, and she impatiently waved it off.
“Then it’ll come clear sooner or later. Go with what you’re feeling. Ghosts are feelings, after all. Pure emotion. It’s why they come here, and why we see them.”
That evening I sat on the dock and looked out at the dark. When I had first come here to live, the inky blackness of the nights had nearly overwhelmed me. Darkness in the city was no more than an electric twilight, visible from many miles away as a huge mushroom of light.
When my urban eyes had adjusted after a week or two, I could see fine at night by the ambi
ent light that the surface of the lake gave back. Only the interior of the island was dark enough to need a flashlight, and I never had a reason to go there after sundown. The night was overcast, but there was a hole in the cloud canopy directly above me. The stars over my head were brighter than the scattered lights on the opposite shore.
Molly’s dock light was off again. I wondered if she was leaving it dark as a message to me, or if she had left the lake and was somewhere else tonight. It amounted to the same thing.
‘Take your ghosts, and your feelings, your ego, and your fucking...tragedy and bother someone else with them.’
The cabin’s screen door creaked open behind me. After a minute, Blue padded out and put his head in my lap. I scratched the top of his head.
“Deep down, you’re a good boy, aren’t you?” I asked.
On impulse, I pulled out my phone. I debated a flimsy premise for calling her and then decided to stick to the truth. I missed her. I opened the phone and peered at the lit screen just as it lit with an incoming call.
I pressed the buttons to listen and put the phone to my ear. The voice was instantly familiar.
“I know what you did.”
My breath caught in my throat. I pressed the phone hard against my ear. “Arthur?”
“I know what you did,” it said again, and disconnected.
I knew the voice. It was the same person, and it didn’t sound like Arthur Sutton. Not at all. It certainly wasn’t his mother, unless her ghost could use a telephone.
‘I know what you did.’
“Son of a bitch,” I said, and let my breath out.
On cue, the dog sighed deeply and left to go back to the house. He could push open the cabin’s screen door to go out, but it swung the wrong way for him to go back in. I knew I’d find him waiting on the porch.
I sat thinking. After a few minutes, I stood up and followed the dog to the cabin and got ready for bed. When I finished brushing my teeth, I looked into the mirror.