by Richard Peck
“The Gift’s in the family,” Blossom said, “but I don’t have it. Neither does my paw. Oh, he used to could cure warts by passing his hand over the affected area, but he don’t do anything regular. There’s gypsy blood in the family, Mama’s side. She had a sister who foretold the San Francisco earthquake—saw buildings falling and fire raging four days ahead of time. When she heard her prophecy was become manifest, she frothed at the mouth, and we had to lay a spoon across her tongue to keep it from going down her windpipe. We’re from Sikeston. That’s in Missouri. You know Sikeston?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s a place neither North nor South. Farthest upriver cotton grows. It blows like snow across the road at picking time. Sikeston’s a wonderful place for the Unseen. Ghosts of both the Confederate and Union forces, wandering, wandering, forever wandering, trying to get to a Christian grave. My mama has saw them going by the house many a time, with their canteens swinging and dragging their rifles. A ghost battalion. Made her heart bleed, she said.”
I wasn’t rising up to any such bait as that. I just kept trudging and picking at the foliage in the hedges to show Blossom my whole attention wasn’t on her.
“It was quiet for Mama when we moved up here,” she went on, “until she seen the halo from the sink.
“Mama sees halos sometimes, in colors. And they only mean but one thing. A sure sign—and Mama seen one when she was standing at the sink, looking out the window at the back of you folks’s barn.”
“If there’s a halo round our barn, I reckon it fell off a passing angel. He’ll very likely be back to pick it up when he misses it.”
“You don’t want to talk light of halos,” Blossom said. “They’re a sure sign.”
“What of?”
“They’re a sign that a place is haunted. The halo tells it and the color tells who.”
“What who?”
“The kind of ghost that’s haunting it. The halo round your barn is pale pink. That means it’s the ghost of a young girl, cut off in her prime or sooner.”
“Sunsets turn things pink. Especially brick.”
“Sun sets in the other direction. Anyhow, Mama sees it at night. Late.”
“You ever see it?”
“No, I don’t see nothing. I ain’t got the Gift. Mama says the Gift is running thin, and when she’s gone we’ll be just like other people. Common. I don’t do much too well except spell, and that don’t mean anything to Mama. Someday I’m just going to light out on my own.”
Now that took me by surprise. I thought sure Blossom was going to claim she could see what wasn’t there to make herself interesting. And here she was saying she didn’t have the Gift. Not that I fell for that Gift business anyway.
“Your mama seen the ghost itself or only this pink halo?”
“Oh, Mama don’t approach a ghost. But she knows.” We were walking past a horse trough full of green water about then. And I had an urge to give Blossom a big shove right in it to cool off her storytelling. But the way she was going on, I had an idea she’d just settle into the trough and keep right on talking in that soft and steady way of hers.
“How come you’re telling me all this?”
“Mama says you’re receptive. Maybe you have the Gift and maybe not. But she says you’re receptive. You can make contact with the Unseen if you take a notion to, that’s what Mama says.”
“Your mama doesn’t even know me.”
“Mama don’t need the Gift to know you. We live right behind you. Maybe you don’t see us, but we see you.”
“Maybe I’ll have a word with your mama about this. How’d you like that?” I thought I was calling her bluff the same as those girls did the time they looked to see if she was one half of Siamese twins. But Blossom just said, “You can try it if you want to, but Mama don’t tell anything without you paying her. And if you pay her, she’ll say anything that comes into her head. But you can try if you want to.”
That didn’t make a believer out of me, but it had me stumped. Just when I thought I’d catch Blossom, her words would ooze away.
Before we got to the Pine Street intersection, our house came into view. It’s the third biggest house in town, with a good deal of brickwork and carpentry to it. It was built back in the days when people put a lot of style into everything. There’s three-quarters of an acre of yard which we’ve got a bronze deer in and three big flower beds bordered in shells. And there’s a porch roof thrown out from one side that you can drive a team through and let off callers dry-shod in case of rain. Of course, we have an automobile now. And in spite of what Blossom was saying, I thought it was the only thing we had in the barn.
Our house is a regular showplace, though my dad says he could have had a new, strictly modern house built with twice the convenience at half the price. But buying the third biggest house in town was my mother’s idea. Blossom glanced up at it and knew time was running out.
I walked her up to our lane, though, and back past the barn. But I never let her notice when I glanced up at the barn to see if there might be something extra showing. With my imagination somewhat inflamed, I could picture a big rainbow-looking thing arching up over the lightning rods. Blossom talks a good line, and I’ll give her that.
I figured I’d walk her as far as the tracks. Then she could hoof it from there by herself. An open streetcar went past and made a stop down at the corner.
My sister Lucille was climbing down out of the car, but luckily she didn’t notice me seeing Blossom home. Lucille took the streetcar home from the high school because she wouldn’t walk eight blocks under any circumstances, unless maybe it was on the arm of Tom Hackett. She was carrying her book satchel and a hatbox from the Select Dry Goods Company, Lucille not being able to walk past a store without going in and buying something.
She was wearing one of those stiff straw hats girls were beginning to wear then, like men’s hats only bigger in the brim. “That’s my sister Lucille,” I remarked to Blossom for something to say.
“I know it,” Blossom replied. “She’s a dressy kind of girl.”
“She goes out with Tom Hackett,” I mentioned.
“I know it,” Blossom replied. “She’ll marry him if she gets half a chance.”
How these Culps came by all their information beat the devil out of me. “She’d better make haste, though,” Blossom went on, “because these big, full-figured girls are beginning to go out of style, and Tom Hackett’ll turn his attentions elsewhere.”
I looked at Lucille in the distance, bobbing over the track and sashaying up across the back lawn to the house. She was a pretty substantial figure at that, and I’d never noticed. “She’s dressy, though,” Blossom repeated.
My mother called the way she and Lucille dressed “elegant.” I informed Blossom of that. “No,” she said. “Not elegant—dressy.” And then she stepped over the car tracks in her busted shoes and her snagged black stockings and her patched skirt. I watched her all the way to her back porch, which had a washtub hung up by the door. Then I turned around and faced the barn.
Chapter Three
There were cobwebs all over the steps up to what used to be the haymow. Really rich people like the Van Deeters and the Breckenridges and the Hacketts make their servants live up in their lofts now that they don’t need the fodder space. But we just closed ours off for storage since we don’t have any live-in help.
I went from Blossom to the barn just to have a look around and see if our automobile was okay. Inside, everything looked regular, and I was thinking seriously about checking around upstairs, though I could see from the cobwebs that nobody had been up there in quite some time.
Our automobile is a Mercer, and it’s so big that we had to tear out the loose boxes and the tack room and all the barn fittings to give it room. Riches haven’t bought a whole lot that my dad puts much value on, except for the Mercer.
It stood there with its oil cups brimming and its brightwork gleaming. “Money wouldn’t buy a better machine,” my dad
says, and, “They’ll never build them any better.”
It’s a C model, with fifty-eight horsepower. The best day my dad ever lived was when he drove it back from the factory at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and wheeled into the Bluff City Square. There were faces at every window of the Abraham Lincoln Hotel Billiard Parlor. People well acquainted with my dad knew he had laid out twenty-six hundred dollars cash money for it. And those who knew told those who didn’t.
He’d bought it from the Beaver Manufacturing Company at Milwaukee and personally shook the hand of the designer—Finlay Robertson Porter, “a gentleman but down-to-earth” was how he struck Dad.
The Mercer is enameled bright yellow, like all Mercers, with air-dried rock-maple chassis and axles. The accelerator’s out on the runningboard.
I was three steps up the barnloft stairs slowing down to watch a dusty sunbeam just catch the brass fittings on the Mercer’s headlamps. That was when I heard the whimpering.
A little crying whine. Then nothing. Then the little whine again and a scratching. A hornet buzzed down from a nest he’d built in against a ceiling beam. I didn’t want that sound to be coming from upstairs. It could have been a starling. They get in upstairs. They can get in places, and you can’t figure how. But they don’t whine.
I thought about heading on back up to the house. But I knew the minute I hit outdoors, I’d break into a run. And I didn’t want Blossom Culp to see that, if she was watching from wherever she watches.
The hinge on the upstairs door wanted oil. I reached up and pushed it open. If a starling flew out, I didn’t want to jump and maybe lose my footing.
Nothing came out but a beam of low afternoon sunlight. It’s brighter upstairs because of the big window with colored-glass borders to match the house.
While I stood on the steps listening for more sounds, the elastic garter on my right leg gave out and unwound. It took my sock with it slow and easy from right in under my knicker leg down to a heap around my shoetop. But I never moved until I heard a sniffy kind of sob. It sounded like it came from under water.
I was pretty nearly blinded by that sun coming in level. But I took some comfort from the light. So I mounted one more step. That put my eye even with the crack in the door. I saw a jumble of low shapes through it—bowed-top trunks probably. Sticking up out of them was a shape, bright where the sun hit it, dark behind. It was a woman’s shape, and no question about it. But nothing whatever about the shoulders—like the Headless Horseman.
Then I heard growling, way back in a throat. A wet finger of sweat started down the back of my neck. I burst up the last step and banged the door back. Before I got stopped, I was just about in the middle of the room with dust fogging up all around. I whirled and looked my mother’s old dress form square in the busts. They were big, round, and solid, looking very much like my mother did a few years back. I felt like a big relieved fool.
Then I heard the sound right at my feet. I looked down at a mess of matted fur. It was a scrawny little lap dog looking up at me with eyes that recalled Blossom Culp’s, but filmy. And how it came to be hunkered down at my feet all of the sudden I didn’t know.
Somewhat perplexed, I reached down to pick her up. She took a little halfhearted nip at my hand, and when I worked in under her belly she let out a cry. Then she scrambled up on three legs, favoring a front paw, and tried to limp across the floor with the one paw drawn up.
She was dragging a pink ribbon somebody had tied around her neck. The ribbon was in tatters and looked well chewed.
When she peeped back at me with her little pushed-in face, I knew she wanted to be friendly. So I scooped her up and felt she was wringing wet. There were puddles around on the floor too. Which is natural if a dog’s been shut in. The place smelled bad, but not like dog mess. It was a musty smell of damp, though there’s a good slate roof on the barn.
I never entertained the notion of taking the dog to the house. The minute my mother saw it, she’d call the pound. She grew up on a tenant farm surrounded by many a four-legged critter, but she’s put all that behind her now.
When the dog finally let me, I handled her front paw enough to know it was fractured. So I nipped down the stairs to find a couple of laths I could skin off an orange crate and whittle down for splints. I was much encouraged to have ghosts off my mind. And already planning to keep that dog up in the loft, feed her regular, and make her my own. She was an indoor dog anyway and wouldn’t mind the confinement. She’d belonged to somebody, so like as not she was paper-trained.
Later, when I had her bound up with splints and tire patches, I made a bed for her out of the remains of the crate and an old shawl. I brought her a coffee can of water from the downstairs tap and planned on slipping her some food. When I left the loft, her big eyes followed me to the door.
It was pretty near evening then, and I’d have some questions to answer when I got up to the house. But when I’d pulled the barn doors to behind me, I lingered a while. There was an old stone hitching post by the drive. It was left from horse days, sunk in the time of Captain Campbell who built the place.
The top of the post is carved like a pony’s mouth coming up out of acanthus leaves with an iron ring in its mouth. Down at the base in tall grass were initials cut into a panel: I. D. I’d seen those letters so often that I didn’t wonder what they signified.
I fiddled with the hitch ring and contemplated Blossom Culp. She was brazen enough to plant a small dog up in the barn just to give some weight to her storytelling. She was brazen enough for anything. But she was a liar, I decided, and from a long line of them.
I planned to slip back after supper with food and a curry comb to get some of the mud out of the dog’s tangles, which I did. I figured once she got her food from me, she’d be mine. When I went back later, she wouldn’t eat, but she looked grateful. I named her Trixie.
I was in bed that night after my second trip to the barn, grinning in the dark about Blossom Culp and pink halos. If there was such a thing as a ghost, I figured it would haunt the house, not the barn. And it wouldn’t be any young girl cut off in her prime.
It’d be old Captain Campbell, who built this place and hanged himself in it before the mortar was dry. Nobody remembered just which of the twenty-three rooms it was where he’d strung himself up. Ever since I was quite a small kid, I had roamed through the rooms, wondering which one it was.
Very nearly all the downstairs rooms have eighteen-foot ceilings, which would have put the captain to a lot of trouble with a tall ladder and a long rope. The word was that Captain Campbell did himself in before he got well acquainted. Nobody seemed to know how he came by his money. Some said he’d been a captain in the Civil War. Which didn’t explain the fortune he’d put into the house he hadn’t hardly finished before he did away with himself.
Mother wouldn’t hear any talk on the subject. And I never thought for a minute she’d allow a ghost in the house. Certain people thought we got the place cheap since it had an evil name from standing empty all those years. But my dad said that any place that cost fifty-five dollars a winter to heat was not his idea of a bargain.
On account of all this deep thinking, I didn’t drop right off to sleep. I twisted around in the bed till my nightshirt was in a knot up under my neck. Which only made me think stronger about old Captain Campbell.
It’s possible that I drifted off for a minute, but no longer. The ironwork on the ceiling fixture threw a pattern across the room. There was a light breeze ballooning the curtains. I got up to close the window.
It faces the barn. I looked maybe a whole minute in that direction before I owned up to what I was seeing. It was a moonless night, and there’s a Dutch elm tree to throw more shadow.
The dormer window on the barn was candlelit. The colored glass border panes were awash with light. And there was candle flame at the window, haloed with fuzzy yellow. Pinkish-yellow.
The breeze whipped up my nightshirt, and my heart hammered my ribs. Then I made a run for the bed. I grabbed up
my pillow and took off down the hall to a spare bedroom facing the front of the house. In there is a high brass bed with an extra comforter folded at the foot. I shot the bolt behind me. Just as I was climbing into the bed, I heard voices drifting up. The window in that room looks down on the open part of the porch.
They were human voices, and I knew whose they were. I crept over to the window to listen a while.
Down on what Mother calls the piazza Lucille was entertaining Tom Hackett on a bentwood settee. I couldn’t see them clear, but then I didn’t need to.
“Oh, Tom,” says Lucille, “you better never do that!”
“Come on, Lucille, you know you want—”
“I know I want you to mind your manners, Tom Hackett!”
“I won’t mind if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, Tom. Oh ...”
Oh good grief, is what I thought. I crept back to bed and began drifting off right away. Before I slept, though, I had a picture of Blossom creeping up the loft steps in the middle of the night to light a candle that could bum the whole durn place down. Then I had a picture of Blossom sound asleep in her bed, untroubled by a guilty conscience. Then I slept, but I tossed some.
Chapter Four
I rose up next morning out of the wrong bed, sure that Blossom’s scheming was at the bottom of everything. While I waited ten hours for Lucille to get out of the bathroom, I worked my brains as to how I could square myself with Blossom. The usual earthworms and slimy slugs in the lunch-pail wouldn’t faze her. I cast about for something that would.
I was still casting at the breakfast table, where I’d finally gone direct because I never did get into the bathroom.
“Alexander, those ears don’t look scrubbed to me,” Mother observed. My face was low in a plate of breaded pork chops, cottage fries, and eggs that Gladys had just put in front of me.