by Ann Pancake
Without looking up from the eighteen-wheeler he is sketching, Ronnie says, “My brother burnt up his Ouija board with his records when he got saved. It flew up out of the fire and scorched his eyebrows off.”
Everybody in town knows what happened to my grandfather. It was five years ago, but only Ham ever says. A few weeks after my Ouija board question, Ronnie is copying how I labeled parts of speech, his head cocked to the far right and that eye almost touching his worksheet, the way he does.
“Where were you when your granddaddy shot himself?”
His pencil doesn’t stop moving. I let close the book I’m reading hidden in my desk. “We didn’t live in that house then.”
Ronnie keeps copying. I pull my mouseskull out away from my chest, tuck in my chin so I can study it better. Within the soup of classroom aromas, keenest near me Ronnie’s skin smell of eraser leavings, the mouseskull stink is faint. I have to touch it under my nose and inhale sharp.
My hair prickles. I turn and catch Michelle Livingstone spying on me. She wrinkles her nose so her own fangs show, then shakes her head as she wheels her finger around her ear.
I’VE JUST GOTTEN my jeans zipped when Sam crashes through my open bedroom door, catches himself with a hand on each jamb, and sags in and over, panting even though the dash from his room to mine might be thirty steps. He lifts his face, ablaze with illicit thrill. “I think Ham’s dead.”
Then we are both stealth-racing past the bathroom where my father showers, past the bedroom where my mother dresses, and down the stairs. I gather from Sam as we go that he glanced out his window a few minutes ago and spotted a long gray bundle on the lawn. I’m levitating, stretched between the revolting terror of seeing a real dead person and the overpowering magnetism of seeing a real dead person, and once we’re running barefoot through the dew-cold grass, the magnetism is boosted by my realization that the dead are usually barefoot, too—aren’t they? By now Bingo is chasing alongside us, and she keeps right on going when Sam and I halt a few yards from where Ham lies. Sprawled on his side, fully dressed right down to his shoes, one arm cocked up at its elbow and shielding his face. Now I can smell the tumbling prisms, but before I can contemplate the corpse, Bingo pokes Ham’s head with her nose. The arm swings out and swipes Bingo away just as we hear the back screen slam behind our father.
Not long after this, Sam and I are pressed into helping our father with his annual attempts to patch leaks in the roof. Today the three of us are doing the very top of the house, which means scaling a bobbly ladder two stories, being tied by ropes to the central chimney, then creeping around on a slant with a bucket of gray tarry goop and long-handled brushes. Even though right under us is the attic and, according to Mrs. Dock, generations of mammal-digesting blacksnakes, I much prefer tarring the top of the house to tarring the flatter porch roofs, because when you’re padding around on those, you have beside you always the second-story windows, and who knows what might decide to look out.
We’re taking a break before sealing the last seam when Sam asks, “Where did Granddaddy shoot himself?”
The air warples on “Granddaddy.” Sam doesn’t even have to get to “shoot.” I don’t look at our father, but I hear his jaw tighten in his voice. “You know where. The little study room.”
“No,” Sam says. “I mean what part of his body.”
I slide one hand down to the rope around my waist. I look up at the chimney, and I wonder where the mouse ghost found the silverware that it dropped.
“Why do you want to know that?” our father asks.
Sam shrugs. “I always figured it was in the head, but Ham said it was in the stomach. So he could have an open coffin.”
Now I do look at our father. He’s turned off his face. “When did Ham tell you that?”
“Once when I took him dinner.” Sam grabs the bottom of his T-shirt and tugs it down around his hips. “Just so you’ll know,” he says. “I want an open coffin, too.”
MAY SETTLES IN blue and mild, and Ham takes to watching us play behind the house. Him on a stove log he’s uprighted into a stool, the wrist cuff of his cane leaning against his thigh, his no-toes boxed in his special shoes, Taffy luxuriating in his lap. The day it happens we are playing chase, and a porch pole directly in front of Ham is our base. Ham seems sleepy, now and again slapping his knee like he’s remembering a joke, laugh-talking to himself or to Taffy. But we’re all a little giddy, us kids laugh-talking, too, chattering to each other or taunting “it,” which I just then am. Mavis has one tennis shoe against the porch pole base, her other leg extended, poised, me hovering in front of her like she’s prey. Then she darts, and I leap after her, but from the side of my face I glimpse the ruckus behind her, and I freeze, Ham lunging off his stool, the stove log toppling, Taffy paw-pedaling air, and Ham charges after my seven-year-old sister with his arms outstretched before falling hard on his knees and then on his face, right at the instant our mother reaches the back door to call us for supper.
“Ham can’t be that way around you kids.”
The verdict comes down later that evening. They don’t even sleep on it. After the cinderblock cat house, the woman on the other side of town, jail, and the icehouse, there is just one place, my father learns after a week of phone calls, for Ham to go: the old folks’ home for poor people up in Terra Alta.
On the last day of school, we walk into the yard from the bus and everything—the outlier buildings, the woodpile, the house windows, even the grass—lies a little stiller. I drop my stuff and sprint to the icehouse, Sam right behind. But when I stop outside the door, I know not to bother to knock. I hear Sam open it, but I’m already running back to our house, calling for Taffy. All the not-yet-given-away pups swarm my legs, tongues flopping joyful out their mouths, but Taffy is not among them, and then I’m on my hands and knees, shouting and then crooning under the porch.
Lord knows where Terra Alta is. We only know it’s up, and what kind of place is a nursing home for a pup just starting to grow? “That’s not what he meant,” I said to my parents the minute I realized they were saying Ham had to go, but then I was unable to say what I meant: that Ham was just playing, like Mrs. Dock and school, and worse, he was not only just playing, he was trying to help me catch my sister, trying to help me out. But a question thistles in me under everything else: did I truly want Ham to stay or not, and was that why I couldn’t explain what I meant?
Suddenly I see Ham, a gray clash in the white old-folks’-home sheets. I see Taffy looking on from a dresser top as a stranger changes Ham’s socks. Ham’s face intelligent, his smell out of tune, his toes hidden by the stranger’s hands. A half-dozen albino cats mist through the weeds beyond the old-folks’-home yard, stalking baby’s breaths to suck, and I hear Ham say to the sock-changer, “I used to work for a man down in Romney . . .”
A few weeks after Ham leaves, our father visits him. He comes home quiet, the curtain pulled over his face. “He’s not going to last up there,” I hear him tell our mother. “He can’t get outside and they won’t let him drink anything at all.” I know better than to ask about Taffy.
I SMUGGLE THE Ouija board to the goat shed, the outlier building farthest from the house, back behind the barn, where it teeters smother-webbed in honeysuckle vine. So furtive am I that not only no brothers or sisters follow me, but no dogs either, except Mickey, who God couldn’t outsmart. I smuggle it to the goat shed even though to get there I must pass the rodent-tailed electric-furred tom spot. I smuggle it to the goat house even though to get in I must wiggle and rip through honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and two violent-thorned locust saplings that grow right in the open door.
Mickey’s too wise to trail me in. I stow the Ouija board box facedown in the darkest corner, then stand in a sun stripe with a splinter-handled spade in one hand and look for the softest place in the dirt floor. When I think I have it, I set my spade, aim my foot, and hammer down on the blade. It sinks an inch. I move it and try again. Again the floor gives an inch. I move and try,
move and try, pocking my way across the floor, sweat-soaked already in the small of my back and under my arms from frustrated panic more than the June humidity, and the Ouija board gloats from its corner. I reach a wall and stop. I’m going to have to try another way, but apparently goats don’t poop as much as some animals, or if they do, it doesn’t last as long.
So then I’m shredding back through the thorns, praying past the tomcat spot, to the barn where, as Mickey looks on apologetically for not being able to help, I fill a burlap feed sack with horse and cow turds, marveling as I pick them up at how long the animals’ poop has outlived them. Finally I’m back in the goat shed, frantic now, crumbling the manure with my fingers to make it fine like regular dirt, which I use to bury the Ouija board until not a spot of the box shows, and then I add a layer on top of that. Last, for good measure, I mound over everything whole patties and hard fist-shaped plops in a pyramid almost as high as my knees.
Then I plunge through the thorns and the vines and sprint to the house, sheltering my eyebrows with my hands.
THE OUIJA BOARD got the name one letter wrong. It was Ham, not Sam, who died in 1976, three years after he moved into the old folks’ home. Our father went to the funeral up in Terra Alta and reported that no one else showed except a woman who claimed to be Ham’s sister, which my father was sure Ham never had.
We continued to sight an occasional white Ham cat, one degree above optical illusion, one degree below peripheral vision, usually when we were in the back of the station wagon coiling along some country road. The naked-tailed tom with the asylum eyes, we never did spy again.
By 1976, I was thirteen. Too old to call “Maaa-maawwww.” Too self-conscious to wear mouseskulls. Too cynical to depend on my Children’s Living Word Bible, which I stopped reading the summer of the Ouija board burial and had not a moment of retribution befall me. But I still slept with my head under the covers and still prayed to be flat. I still braced, heart chuttering, for that now double haunting: the ghost of Ham working for the ghost of my grandfather, both of them hovering through the house.
But although I didn’t move out until 1981, I never saw a soul and, far as I know, a soul never saw me.
What I still see decades later is that nail—I see it more than hear it. Flipping end over end down the oil-stove pipe. I see Mrs. Dock, her head flushed up from the dishes in the sink, her mouth falling open and her wet hand flying to her throat. I see her on the back stoop, knees spread in her apron, a fist kneading one thigh. I see her eyes a-dart with what to do.
“AND WHY DO you reckon he’d do that?” Ham says to me “Before he pulled the trigger, drop a nail down that pipe to warn Mrs. Dock?” He has a chicken leg in his fingers, Taffy balled up against his belt. Outside, it’s April dusk, but the sky so vague it could be any season, any time of day. Inside, air glitters like lit ice.
“I’ll tell you why”—Ham nods—“same reason he waited to do it until your grandma was out of town for that church ladies’ meeting. Same reason he picked that little back room instead of messing up the nice room where he slept.”
Ham lays down the bone. I’ve got my gaze fastened to the floor, but Ham stares at my head until I have to look his eyes right back.
His voice comes tender as baby skin and resolute as rock.
“He done it out of kindness,” he says. “He done it out of care.”
And for a minute, pinned in that hard, cold bright, I feel the truth of what he says. Then I open the icehouse door, step onto dull grass, and hear again the shot that follows the nail.
ARSONISTS
THE PHONE RINGS just as he’s zipping his suitcase shut, even though he hasn’t seeped a word to anyone in town, but Dell is not surprised. Kenny always knows. Five years ago, Dell would have let it ring; ten, he would have cussed it, too. Now he cups the back of his head with one hand, shuts his eyes, and says hello.
The first call is Becky, gobbling desperate—“Dell, you got to get up here, get him to himself”—before the receiver is grabbed, Dell hears the scuffle, and the connection thumbed off. Within fifteen seconds, it rings again, Kenny this time—“You just stay where you’re at, boy, I don’t need nothing from you”—before that call goes dead, too. Dell waits until the glow of the number pad darkens in his hand, then calls them back.
“Listen, Becky.” He says his words like flat creek rocks laid. “I’m sorry. I am. But it’s my little granddaughter’s birthday. I’m just out the door to northern Virginia.”
“Oh, Dell, I’m sorry, too, I’m just as sorry as I can be, but I’ve been trying to talk sense to him for two hours. It’s the them-coming-to-burn-us-out again, only now he’s saying he’s got a bomb strapped to his wheelchair and’s gonna blow us all up when they get here, Dell, I don’t know where else to turn.”
Dell tips the receiver away from his mouth. The birthday present lies beside him on the bed. “Can’t you at least try?”
“He don’t want me in that bathroom, you know that better’n I do, please, Dell.”
The wrapping is twisted sloppy, the white undersides of the birthday paper showing. It was Carol always took care of that. Dell shuts his eyes again, middle and first fingers forked below his brows. “All right,” he says. “I’ll be up.”
“Oh, I thank ye, Dell,” the gobbling again, “I thank ye, if it weren’t—”
“Put him on first.”
He waits. When enough time has passed for Kenny to lift the phone to his ear, Dell speaks to the silence. “They ain’t yet burned one with people still in it, Kenny.”
The nothing on the other end lasts so long Dell wonders if Kenny hasn’t hung up and he’s just not heard. Then a mutter comes.
“Boy. You just don’t get it.” The voice rasps to whisper. “This house is worth so much they don’t got the money to put an offer on it.”
ALTHOUGH IT’LL TAKE at least a half hour to crawl the busted-to-pieces road to Kenny’s place, Dell does not rush. Kenny’ll never touch Becky, and anything Kenny’s ever owned that can shoot or blow up is locked in Jason’s old room in the upstairs of Dell’s house. He gets Carol’s Geo Metro started, his truck sitting with a bad alternator, and goes to scraping the windshield with a spatula. He had called Jason as soon as Kenny hung up on him the second time.
“I don’t suppose you could hold it a day, could you, son?” He winced at his selfishness soon as he spoke so it was mostly relief he felt when Jason said no.
“All her little friends are coming over. I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I understand,” Dell cut in quick. “Don’t you worry, I understand.” And while Jason talked on, Dell felt, as he always does, the surprise and then the pride, his youngest son, at twenty-four, speaking into his own phone, sitting in his own condo, surrounded by things he’s provided for his wife and two kids. Jason already that kind of man. He built houses in northern Virginia, went up there at first thinking the job was temporary and then found himself plunged happy over his head in the construction boom, earning overtime every week and sometimes even more than that.
“We’ll do something, too, when you get here, Dad,” Jason was saying. “Manda’ll like that. Make her birthday two days long.”
He’s forgotten to turn on the defrost, and the coffee he stowed on the dash has steamed the windows good. Dell smears holes where he needs them. Then he is stuttering past the padlocked beige trailer that was the Tout post office, past the old gas station/grocery store, with its window shattered into webs, and here and there—rotten teeth among the sound ones—the burned-down homes. Dell sips his coffee careful, his eyes narrowed on the road. Some of the houses are just scorched, their windows like blackened eyes. Others went full-blaze, gaping open now, their charred rooms exposed—a pitiful vulgar to it, Dell can’t help but feel. Others are nothing but steps climbing to rubble-cluttered concrete slabs. The kudzu already covering. Overhead, the flattened hills roll in dead slumps, like men’s bodies cold-cocked, Dell sees them when he brings himself to look, like men knocked out. The humps of th
eir twisted shoulders, their arms and legs drunk-flung. Them sprouting their sharp foreign grass.
The company is finished with Tout, West Virginia, now.
SOMEBODY STARTED BURNING houses within a year after they blew up the first mountain. More than a decade ago, Jason still a boy, Carol still with them. In the worst of the blasting, dust stormed the hollow so thick Dell couldn’t see Sam Sears’s house across the road, and everybody’d had to burn their headlights, their houselights, right through the middle of the day. A few people’d even videotaped it—Lorenzo Mast had, and Sibyl Miller—back when some believed bearing witness could make a difference. That year, there was no summer green, no autumn red. Everything evergray and velvet.
Sam got him and his wife gas masks from an army surplus store, but Dell made do with a scarf. Standing on his front porch, a winter muffler wound round his face, watching the horizon dissolve in linked eruptions like the firecracker strings him and Kenny’d a couple times got hold of as kids. Blasts thunderclapped the wishbone of his chest, and the rock dust taste familiar in his mouth. Dell looked on at first in disbelief and even awe—it was nothing fancy they used, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, exactly how Tim McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City at about the same time—but quick that turned to outrage and frustration and, finally, helplessness and grief. Which was at last, Dell understood now, a different kind of awe. Brimstone. The word would come to Dell, he couldn’t help it. It came on its own in the taste of the rocks. And through it all, the hole opening in him. The hole small at its mouth, but boring deeper, deeper. Craving always to be filled.