Poor ghost, entirely oblivious in his ghost car, he did not know she was there. How was she to declare her presence and break through the wall that still separated them? She began to talk, spilling out her thoughts in a jumble of low spoken words.
“Mr. Miss-One—I’m sorry I don’t know your real name, but Brian, the horrible little beast, first called you Mr. Miss-One because of your limp. You sort of miss a step. Please, don’t think it’s meant unkindly, at least by me. In fact, the limp adds to your appearance; makes you more romantic. I guess that sounds silly, but I am silly—I can’t help it. I’ve been in love with you ever since that day when you first walked across the dining room and Mother went screaming under the table. She did look funny. I remember you took something we couldn’t see from the sideboard, then disappeared by the kitchen door. Can’t you see, or at least hear me?”
It might have been imagination, but Mr. Miss-One did appear to be a little uneasy. He slid down the window to throw away his half-consumed cigarette. Julia sighed.
“I wonder where we are going? Is this your world? Are the people out there wandering shadows left over from yesteryear, or are we racing, invisible, through today? Please try to see me.”
She could see his left wrist. His jacket sleeve had slid up and the wrist was bare. Sun-tanned, muscular, covered with fine hair. It was also covered with goose pimples. She gasped, then gave a little cry.
“Oh, you’re cold. My poor darling, you’re cold.”
She had not meant to touch him—not yet—but there was no controlling the automatic impulse. Her hand flew to his wrist. For a brief moment she touched warm flesh, actually felt the fast beating pulse, then the car swerved, and’ Mr. Miss-One jerked his head round and stared straight at her.
His face was a mask of pure, blood-chilling terror, and his mouth opened as he screamed. His hands clawed at the steering wheel, as though some part of his brain were trying to right the skid, and the scream erupted into isolated words, like black rocks crashing through a sheet of ice.
“Dead … family … burned … dead … fifty … years … dead … dead … dead …”
The screech of tortured rubber mingled with the screaming words. Outside the gray road was spinning around and around. A black shape came hurtling through the rain. There was a mighty, soul-uprooting crash, then for a brief second-nothing. A heartbeat of total oblivion.
Julia was standing by the roadside watching the car burn. Like a giant red beetle it lay on its back, while beautiful scarlet flames rose from its corpse, like poppies from a long-filled grave. The red enamel bubbled and drooled down the seething metal, as blood tears from the eyes of a dying man, and somewhere in the heart of the shrieking inferno, something moved.
Sound flickered, then ceased. Cars drew up, and the occupants climbed out; mouths opened, faces assumed expressions of horror, shock, or morbid excitement. But they were so many, silent, pathetic ghosts.
Julia turned and walked away.
Home was but a few steps away.
Over the grass verge, through a hedge, under some trees, and there were the gates—broken, rusty, one had lost a hinge and was reeling like a drunken man. Once back in the garden, sound returned. Birds sang, bees hummed, and the sun peeped through a broken cloud bank, making the rain-coated flowers glisten like colored fragments. Julia opened the front door and made her way to the dining room. The family was seated around the table, which was laid for tea.
“At last,” exclaimed Mother. “I called until my voice was hoarse. Honestly, I don’t know who you think you are.”
“It’s really too bad,” Father echoed. “Your mother was nearly out of her mind. Where have you been?”
Julia did not answer, but sank down, staring blankly at the tablecloth. Brian kicked her ankle.
“You locked me in.”
“I ask you,” Mother addressed the ceiling, “is that the action of a rational person? Locking your little brother in the dining room? Heavens above knows what might have happened. Well, don’t just sit there, we are waiting for an explanation.”
“Answer your mother,” Father instructed.
Julia took a deep breath.
“We’re dead. All of us—dead.”
The first shadows of night crept in through the long french window and the silence was coated with the dust of long-dead time. Julia looked up. They were watching her with blank, pale faces.
“Don’t you understand? We’re dead. We died fifty years ago in a fire. Brian did it. He set light to the bedroom curtains. The whole place went up in fire and smoke.”
The ticking of the mantelpiece clock seemed to grow louder; Brian stirred in his chair with a frantic denial.
“I didn’t.”
“You did.” Julia turned on him savagely. “You were told not to play with matches. It was you. You burned us all to death.”
“I didn’t I didn’t.”
He hammered the table with his small, clenched fists, while tears ran down his cheeks, then rose and ran to Father, who put his arms around the shaking body.
“Make her stop. I didn’t I didn’t play with matches.”
“It’s all right” Father whispered. “It’s all right Your sister isn’t well.”
Mother could not speak, could only stare at Julia with wide open eyes. Occasionally she shook her head as though in disbelief.
“Please,” Julia pleaded, “try to understand. We are all dead. Mr. Miss-One was the living. We were—we are—ghosts.’
“Go to your room, dear.” Father’s voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Go to bed, like a good girl. Well look after you. Don’t worry.”
“Yes.” Mother spoke at last “Please forgive me. I never knew. I’ll never say a cross word again—ever.”
Julia rose very slowly, and as she did so, understanding exploded in her brain.
“You think I’m mad.”
Mother shuddered and Father shook his head firmly.
“No—no, of course not dear. Just tired, ill maybe. But not mad. Dear God, not mad.”
Julia fled before their naked terror, and as always, took refuge in her room. She lay upon the bed and stared up at the ceiling, gradually allowing the veil to fall from the awful face of truth. She could never be happy again. She knew. Knowledge was brutal, knowledge destroyed the comforting curtain of doubt.
Father, clearly ill at ease, brought her some food on a tray, talked much too quickly of the healing virtues of sleep, plenty of good food, peace of mind, then departed. Julia heard the key turn in the lock.
Presently she sat by the window and watched the sun put the garden to bed. Shadows lengthened, flowers folded their petals, trees hung their heads, and the evening breeze went dancing across the lawn. For a while there was a great, healing peace.
Then a dark shape limped up the drive. At first Julia thought it might be Father, but as it drew nearer, she saw the black, charred face. The hands were shriveled, twisted; patches of white bone gleamed through the gaping, roasted flesh. Eyes still glittered in the naked skull, and they stared up at Julia’s window.
Julia tried to scream, but her vocal cords refused to function. The most she could make was a hoarse, croaking sound. But out of the heart of her all-demanding terror, a single rational thought ran across her brain like a ribbon of fire.
“Is this how I appear to him?”
All that remained of Mr. Miss-One limped up the front steps and disappeared from view. Julia knew her prayer had been answered. She would never be parted from him again.
Introduction
Juleen Brantingham makes her second appearance in the SHADOWS series with this short piece about country matters and manners, and a beautiful young girl. It’s a love story, though not the kind, thank goodness, we expect to see Ali McGraw in very soon.
JANEY’S SMILE
by Juleen Brantingham
Janey Harmon was a pretty little thing, with startled-fawn eyes and a smile that was worth waiting for. Wait for it we did because it seemed Janey was always
standing in someone’s shadow, usually her Pa’s because Reverend Harmon cast the biggest shadow in these parts.
“She knows a woman’s place,” the Reverend was heard to say once when she was four and a half. It may have been the only time he spoke of her for who speaks of the chair that stands in the corner?
It wouldn’t be fair to say the Reverend neglected her exactly. In that house she could never starve for her Pa made sure the larder was never empty. It was true that during the week Janey wore the ugliest of cast-offs from the mission box, but on Sunday the women of Cedar Grove had their way and decked her out in white or pink with bits of ruffle and lace. She’d look pretty as an angel.
The Reverend himself didn’t pay much mind to what he wore and no wonder. He had his black suits special made, but the generous yards of material were never quite enough. To see him walk from parsonage to church was to behold the miracle of ambulatory fat. Those who met the Reverend and Janey for the first time could not help but question how a whale could have had any part in the creation of that quicksilver child.
Not many people remembered Janey’s Ma for she had died shortly after coming to the Grove. The Reverend, with his sausage fingers and his shortness of breath every time he leaned over, could not be expected to care for little Janey, so she was mothered in turn by every one of the nineteen women in the Grove, even Martha Steinhelfer, old Nate’s third wife and not long for this world, poor thing. Maybe Janey brought a bit of joy to her final days. In old Nate’s house joy must have been hard to come by.
The day of Martha’s funeral Janey must have been about five, if I remember right. The whole town turned out for the services. Martha had been a stranger from down south somewhere and the way Nate was we had never got to know her well, but we wanted to see that she had the proper words said over her. Reverend Harmon was a bit leery of Nate and might have been tempted to skimp here and there if Nate was in a hurry to get on about his business. You wouldn’t know it to look at his rags and his dirty neck, but Nate Steinhelfer is the richest man in the county.
When the words had been said and Martha’s box was being lowered into the ground, I saw Janey standing by Hattie Bryant. Her eyes looked dark, like she was holding her tears inside.
“But where did she go?” Janey whispered to Hattie. “Where did Martha go?’
Well, I ducked over there real quick and took Janey’s hand, leading her away from Hattie and the others. There was no telling what Hattie would say to that, seeing as how her sister had been Nate’s second wife and Hattie still hadn’t got over what he did to her. It wouldn’t do to have Janey hear the wrong things, being the Reverend’s child.
“She went to heaven, darling,” I said, thinking I must be lying in my teeth.
I got Janey out of the churchyard as quick as I could. Old Nate was raising Cain. I could hear him yelling. He wanted them to open the box and take Martha’s dress and shoes. Said she wouldn’t need them where she was going and he might decide to get married again. Well, that didn’t surprise any of us. We knew how he was. That’s why he had to go down south to find his third wife.
Cedar Grove is a quiet place. Not much changes from year to year. We send our boys off to war when the call comes, but except for that we don’t pay much mind to the outside world. We like it that way and those who don’t, the young ones mostly, move out. We tend our crops, fish a little, and go to church. On nice evenings we like to set on our porches and talk—mostly about our neighbors for what else mattered?
Of course, Janey Harmon wasn’t the only youngster growing up in the Grove at that time. Ralph and Helen Foreman had six or seven, Lucy Renkert’s little mistake, Katie, was about the same age, and when Mary Shott left her husband, that city man she married, she sent Mike and Laura back here to live with her folks. There were a few others, enough to keep a teacher busy so we didn’t have to send our youngsters out of the Grove for their schooling.
Janey was friendly with everyone. She joined in the games and the mischief and had to be fished out of Shott’s Creek where it runs fast under the bridge about as often as anyone. But looking at Janey as she tagged along with the bunch, you got the feeling she was set apart from them just the littlest bit.
The boys, they treated Janey like she was made of glass. Even in her everyday dresses, that stuff from the mission box that looked like it was made from feed sacks, with her bright hair floating loosely around her shoulders, she looked like she should be setting on a shelf under glass and only taken out on special occasions. And the girls—well, the girls just put up with her because they’d been told they had to. Janey’s looks was enough to make the girls leery, and we grown-ups probably made it worse because we did things for Janey that we wouldn’t have done for our own.
Laura Bennett, Mary Shott’s daughter, was the worst. She was always teasing Janey and playing tricks on her. Coming from the city the way she did, Laura thought she should be the one to get those special favors. Laura’s grandma wouldn’t put up with city airs and nonsense so Laura took her spite out on Janey every chance she got.
It might have been the piano lessons that upset Laura the most That would have been when Janey was about thirteen. Hattie Bryant who played the piano for services, was getting stranger every year and some of us thought it might be a good idea if the Reverend’s daughter learned how so she could take over.
Kind of on the sly, so Hattie wouldn’t find out about it, someone checked over at the county seat about piano lessons. Since it was for the church anyway we all chipped in to pay and whoever was going over that way on Saturday took Janey to her lesson.
Well, as soon as Laura heard about it she decided she had to learn the piano, too. There wasn’t any reason we couldn’t have taken two girls as easy as one but Grandma Shott wouldn’t hear of it. She’d got it into her head that Laura’s mother, Mary, had been all right in Cedar Grove until she got that job over at the county seat and started thinking she was better than the rest of us. Grandma Shott said she wasn’t going to lose two girls that way and there wasn’t anyone could change her mind.
Laura blamed Janey for this, and she must have made the Reverend’s daughter cry for a while. I was about to have a word with Grandma when one day Laura turns right around and starts saying sweet things about “my friend Janey.” It took me a while to figure out till I was passing the church one day and heard the most awful racket. I stuck my head in the door and here was Janey teaching Laura what she’d learned. That went on for a couple months and I almost wished Grandma Shott would find out and put a stop to it. Laura didn’t have no more an ear for music than Lucy Renkert’s bob-tailed cow.
Janey was turning from a pretty girl into a lovely young woman before our eyes. I guess we all took some pride in her, feeling we’d each had a hand in raising her. If the Reverend felt that way too, he didn’t give a sign of it. He didn’t seem to care what she did as long as there was food on the table, the house was clean, and his suits were pressed. Janey did all that and more besides. She made calls on the shut-ins, taught Sunday school, swept out the church, and made sure there were flowers every Sunday.
Old Hattie was getting more and more strange and some of us were thinking about the old folks’ home over at the county seat. Mostly it’s for folks too scat-brained to take care of themselves, and Hattie was that.
I had a run-in with Hattie one night. There was a full moon and I was out walking, just enjoying the night air. When I passed the church yard I could see a shadow moving around and hear a sort of muttering. Thinking it might be youngsters cooking up mischief, I went inside. But it was just old Hattie. She had a spoon and was scooping up dirt from her sister’s grave, putting it in a bottle.
“Here, now, what do you think you’re doing?” I says, going over and helping her to her feet. “You trying to dig her up, Hattie? Your sister’s dead. Won’t do no good to dig her up.”
Hattie turned on me and I swear that in the moonlight she looked as sane as me. But I guess her words proved she wasn’t.
“I know that, you fool!” she says. “My sister’s dead and there’s a full moon tonight and I’ve got to get some of this dirt so I can fix the man who did it to her.”
“Nate? You think Nate killed her? Now, Hattie, I wouldn’t invite the man to a dog fight, but he’s no killer.”
She glared at me. “He sucked out her soul,” she said. “Sucked it right out with his mean ways and his bad temper. After that she didn’t have nothing to live for. I’m going to make him pay.”
I coaxed her to go along home and I laughed to myself awhile at her funny ideas. Poor Hattie. But she wasn’t hurting anyone. It would have been a shame to take her from the Grove and put her in with a bunch of strangers.
And at that, I’m not sure Hattie was far wrong about Nate. I’d seen Martha Steinhelfer shortly after she came to the Grove, and it did seem that as time went by, something sort of leaked out of her. She didn’t exactly get sick and die, it was more as if she just ran down. Hattie’s sister and Nate’s first wife were a bit before my time but the way people talked, it must have been the same with them.
Maybe Nate did kill their souls and maybe he just sold them. Nate would have sold anything he had no use for.
It had to have been a coincidence that a short while after Hattie talked about making Nate pay for what he did, he began to complain of stomach pains. The women of the Grove know their duty to neighbors, even ones like Nate, so they looked in on him, took him broths and jellies that were supposed to be good for digestive upsets. But one after another he made them mad and chased them away. Except Janey. I don’t imagine he was any nicer to her than he was to anyone else, it was just that Janey would put up with more.
At sixteen Janey was taking Hattie’s place at the piano almost every Sunday and for weddings and funerals. No one mentioned it to Hattie and I don’t think her mind was clear enough to wonder how we managed without her.
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