Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  No way. I was not going there, not paying attention to darkness within my mind or otherwise, and nothing I heard in the dark was paying the slightest attention to me or my problems. The world was a random, chaotic place.

  ‘Why don’t you give poor Will a break?’ I muttered in response to the whippoorwill. Very probably someone had whipped, beaten or otherwise abused to death the skeletal child I had found, but almost certainly I would never know who, who, who, as the owl said. Was I lying awake because I felt a bit haunted?

  Or was that thought just another proof that my mind was slipping into random chaos of its own? I didn’t believe in ghosts. Did I?

  ‘Paintings don’t change all by themselves,’ I mumbled.

  Or did they? Late at night, when I played solitaire on my computer, always the same solitaire on the same computer, sometimes the cards looked slim and elegant, sometimes fat and clownish, sometimes like friendly cartoons but sometimes cloak-and-dagger sinister. Moreover, the black was sometimes more black than usual, and the hearts and diamonds varied from a scarlet color, almost orange, to deep crimson. Weird? Not to me. I not only accepted those variations in my perception, I barely noticed them. Implicit trust in the unconscious mind was fundamental to my being an artist. Any good artist would say the same. And the uncanny way disparate artworks by different artists seemed to emanate the same symbolism …

  Did I believe in the collective unconscious?

  ‘Oh, God,’ I groaned, turning over in bed, trying to flounce away from the questions in my arguably senile head.

  Oh, God? I couldn’t possibly believe in God in any literal way; too much didn’t make sense. Yet I had just called on God to please let me get some sleep, now that the reporters had finally gone away after I had spent the entire evening hiding from them in the dark.

  I felt in the dark both literally and metaphorically – really in the dark – and there was no use trying to be logical about anything that was taking place. In the morning, I would go back to my painting, and whatever wanted to happen would happen.

  ‘Whip poor Will!’ called a night bird.

  ‘Who? Who? Who?’ called another.

  FOUR

  Once I finally got to sleep, I woke up later than usual, which should have felt luxuriously good but didn’t. Lovely light, perfect for painting, streamed in between the window curtains, but the thought of painting – specifically, of the painting in process right now – made me feel as if staying in bed might be a better option. In my mind, the night-time shadows seemed to have carried over into the morning. Lonesome howls. Whip poor Will. Who? Who?

  What unspeakable things had someone done to that child?

  And why did I feel as if I, of all people, had to find out?

  Eventually, my stomach and bladder issued a joint ultimatum that got me out of bed. I moved slowly, but it didn’t take me long to get ready now that I was old enough not to bother with makeup, a hairdo or even underwear. Within a few minutes after brushing my teeth, I had put on a T-shirt, knit slacks and matching kitty-cat-print socks in an effort to cheer myself up; I had slipped into my oldest pair of Skechers, found my glasses and headed toward the studio.

  I made it as far as the Florida-room end of the studio, where what I saw on and around the dinner table stopped me short. I stood dumbfounded and gawking, trying to make sense of one thing at a time. Bowls overturned. Bright-colored bottle caps ranked in lines on the floor like little round rainbow soldiers. Mardi Gras beads laid out to form a rectangle around them. A dozen of my precious origami cranes and swans and butterflies pulled down along with the bright-colored yarn that suspended them from the ceiling, scattered on top of the table.

  I hadn’t done that, had I? I would remember, wouldn’t I?

  Of course I would remember. And I would never get down on the floor with my bottle caps when it was such a struggle to get back up.

  Unless maybe I had been sleepwalking?

  But I hadn’t walked in my sleep since I was a child.

  Still, who else would have played with my toys?

  Or was I just scared to say there had been an intruder in my house?

  Yes. Yes, I was definitely spooked by the idea of who that intruder might have been. I was so frightened that I tried to pretend it was a perfectly ordinary petty thief, about which I should call the police. Checking for stolen items, I grabbed my wallet, which was sitting on the table surrounded by origami flittercritters. But all my cash was in the wallet, along with my credit cards. And I had nothing else worth stealing. Except …

  I gasped. ‘Oh my God! The portrait! Please not the portrait—’ Three breathless steps took me farther into the studio, and no, thank God – in whom I did not rationally believe – I saw no damage, no sign that anything had been disturbed. On the easel, the half-finished face of a ragamuffin girl regarded me with apparent distrust.

  Who else would play with my toys? I felt my guts slosh, my insides flip over. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I whispered. I must have stood there for a minute, staring at her.

  She stared back.

  And I blinked first. ‘But it couldn’t have been. I am so not ready to deal with anything kookier than an imaginary granddaughter.’ I took a deep breath and shrugged away everything I’d been thinking. ‘I’ll get to you, contrary grandchild of mine, as soon as I eat some breakfast,’ I told that strange face which, I reassured myself, had formed out of my unconscious mind.

  This scruffy, scowling urchin was not at all the ‘granddaughter’ I had envisioned for myself. She was better; she was real instead of idealized. I felt my heart smiling because the painting promised to be good, very good indeed, maybe even masterly.

  I made coffee, and instead of my usual cereal I had an English muffin; for some reason, I didn’t feel very hungry. Leaving the dishes in the sink, I went straight to my easel; the Mardi Gras beads et cetera could stay where they were a while longer. Maybe I didn’t want to take the time to pick them up. Or maybe I didn’t want to upset the child – and whether I meant the child within me or something else, I refused to contemplate. It was time for my brushes to do the thinking.

  I selected a favorite fake-sable filbert brush from the handmade (by me) pottery jug where they all stood at attention, and I started with something easy – the scrumbled background comprised of wriggly dabs of violet, indigo and viridian green. Once I felt warmed up, I then sneaked some indigo into the shadow under the jaw, coaxed strokes of shaggy hair down around the neck and shoulders, roughed in the umber shadows forming the nostrils and mixed a muted pink for the mouth. The child incarnating under my touch refused to smile even slightly; it was as if someone other than me had taken charge, but I was used to this and considered it a sign that the painting was going well. My hands, brushes, eyes and arms all partnered to paint in a way that sometimes seemed barely to consult my brain at all. As if in a kind of trance, I worked the entire picture, placing lights and highlights, smoothing transitions between tones, shaping curves, allowing myself hints of detail to complete the mouth and eyes.

  I painted all morning and through lunchtime, reluctant to stop when things were progressing so well, except that I had not yet touched the little girl’s dress, which was nonsensical; I should have roughed it in along with everything else. Something was blocking me when it came to the dress, and it would be unprofessional of me not to push through the block.

  I had planned to give my ‘granddaughter’ the prettiest dress I could imagine, but throughout this project plans had changed – OK, that was an understatement – but anyway, regarding the dress I had to compromise. For my stubborn subject, smocking or ruffles or lace seemed out of the question, but surely I could still use lavender, I decided. Surely the contrary child could put up with a nice, fresh, simple dress in such a yummy color.

  With a sense of being back in control, and with a large brush, I laid down a round-collared lavender dress with a hint of shirring below a yoke top. I shaded the deepest darks in the folds of the fabric violet, then bolstered
the midtones with pale cerise, and at the height of the lights I dared a bold, thin glimmer of yellow, then hints of yellow rimming the face and the sandy-brown hair, tying the portrait together.

  Painting the final touches – stray strands of hair catching the light against the background – I felt good, very good, about this particular work of art. But by then it was mid-afternoon, my shoulders and arms ached and my stomach was grumbling. Moreover, the minute I stopped painting I felt as restless as a monkey in a cage because I hadn’t been out of the house in three days.

  Not to worry; I could rectify that.

  I capped the paints, washed my brushes quickly but thoroughly with both hand soap and dishwashing detergent, cleaned up the usual mess, then grabbed my wallet and my car keys to take myself out for dinner.

  Without even needing to decide where I was going, I drove my ancient Volvo, which my daughters affectionately called the Vo, to Waffle House. Cooter Spring, the small town nearest where I live, was pretty much defined by a Waffle House at one end and a Piggly Wiggly at the other. In between, widely spaced in the usual Florida panhandle way, strayed a hardware store, a pharmacy, two churches, two thrift shops, three hairdressers, some modest pastel houses, and – incongruously central to so much banality – the eponymous spring, with cypress knees surrounding cypress trees, anhingas posing cruciform on cypress branches to dry their wings, all sorts of egrets, herons, other water birds, a jungle of wildflowers, the entire subtropical enchilada. This glimpse of Eden was surrounded by a chain-link fence to protect the foolish from the bottomless water and the cooters from the foolish. The cooters were yellow-bellied turtles that had been there since Spanish times, some of them the size of laundry baskets. Occasional tourists gawked at them through the fence, but natives hardly noticed them anymore.

  ‘How y’all doing, Shuug?’ greeted a woman in a Waffle House apron and baseball cap as I came in. Not that she knew me – very few people in Skink County did – but Southern hospitality, in the form of ‘Honey pie,’ ‘Darlin’,’ ‘Ladybug’ and the like, extended to all, even to people with Yankee accents. ‘Shuug,’ apparently an abbreviation of ‘Sugar,’ didn’t faze me, but ‘y’all’ bothered me a little, as I was only one person. Like, how was all of me doing?

  ‘OK, except the head, maybe,’ I replied, sliding into a booth.

  She gave me a genuine laugh, as I’d hoped; I like to make people laugh. ‘Something wrong in the head?’

  ‘Got to be. I came in here for dinner.’ Waffle House steaks and pork chops were notoriously dreadful.

  She played along. ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘No, not really. I’ll have a waffle and scrambled eggs and bacon.’

  My suppertime breakfast came with grits, of course – a Southern anomaly I did not touch, only eyed suspiciously. And it came with yet more redundant calories in the form of buttered toast, with which I made a bacon sandwich. Damn the carbohydrates – full speed ahead! Afterwards, I headed home contented in tummy and mood, driving slowly under the panhandle’s big sky to admire the usual spectacular sunset, trying to think of exact names for the lambent colors in the sky but never quite succeeding.

  I met hardly any traffic, one of the many things I liked about living here. So I was singing as I walked into my house, although not as well as I used to. Another of the insults of age, on top of hair relocation and bad breath and rosacea and yeast infections and everything, is an awful quaver in the singing voice, especially on high notes, but that didn’t keep me from trying. Warbling some half-forgotten folk song from my college years, I opened the kitchen door and, as if to shut me up, the phone rang. Being a telephone of the old black Bakelite circular-dial school, it rang with a bell and clapper and with great authority. I jumped to answer it.

  Maurie considered that Cassie was probably overreacting as usual, but she had promised her kid sister she would give their mother a call, and so she was. This was the first chance she’d had, the first free moment while she was walking across Cornell campus to attend a symposium on ‘Unwritten History: The Losers’ Viewpoint.’ Neither her sister nor her mother seemed to understand how much her career demanded of her. Even now, in the summertime, when she was not teaching classes and correcting piles of papers, she still had academic obligations: graduate students to mentor, faculty meetings to attend, the necessity of putting together curriculum syllabi for the fall, plus struggling with applications for grants, plus her own personal research, and, perhaps most stressful, scholarly essays to write in the spirit of ‘publish or perish.’ This had been one of those days when she was scheduled up to her ears. But now she finally had maybe five minutes … and, millennial damnation, Mom’s answering machine picked up. Considering that only her mother would still use such an outdated device as an answering machine, Maurie left no message, but tried again with the same result. Rolling her eyes behind their black-rimmed glasses, she thumbed redial one last time.

  ‘Hello?’ Mom sounded out of breath.

  ‘Were you outside?’ Maurie complained without introduction; she knew her mother would recognize her voice.

  ‘I went out for dinner.’

  ‘Mom, if you would get a cell phone like a normal and rational person, you could pick up wherever, or I could just text you!’

  ‘Since when have I ever been a normal or rational person? I suppose Cassie told you I found a skeleton in my backyard?’

  Indeed, Cassie had, and Maurie had accessed the Skink County Observer online to verify:

  Florida State Police investigators confirm that unidentified skeletal human remains have been discovered near Pinestraw Pillow Road, approximately eight miles north of Cooter Spring.

  A deputy with the Skink County Sheriff’s Office responded to a report from a homeowner a few minutes after eight p.m. Wednesday. Upon arriving on scene, he observed that the homeowner had been digging in her backyard and had uncovered some bones that appeared human. Sheriff Bronson Pudknucker arrived shortly thereafter and verified probable cause to call in state investigators and the Mid-Panhandle Medical Examiner’s office.

  The homeowner declined to be interviewed for this article.

  ‘Only thing we’re sure of yet is it ain’t just animal bones,’ Sheriff Pudknucker advised. ‘Could be homicide, suicide, secret burial by folks couldn’t afford an undertaker, old bones left over from Civil War times or even earlier. We don’t know nothing and we ain’t disclosing no further information.’

  The Skink County Coroner, Dr Marcia Wengleman, however, confirmed that the remains are being investigated as a suspicious death. She said she could not identify the gender or age of the victim until after forensic examination. At press time, the remains had not yet been removed from the unmarked grave where they had been found. Anyone with information about the possible identity of the remains is asked to call the Skink County Sheriff’s Office or Cooter Spring Crime Fighters.

  Maurie considered that being so tight-lipped was unnecessary posturing on the part of the authorities. Probably half of Cooter Spring knew, as Mom did, that the skeleton had belonged to a little girl. Maurie didn’t care; she just wanted to find out how her mother was doing.

  She said, ‘Yes, Cassie told me. That must have felt a bit Kafkaesque, finding bones in your backyard.’

  ‘Oh, the bones are the least of the surrealism that has been going on around here.’

  ‘Surrealism?’

  ‘Inexplicable weirdness. Somebody or something has been moving my playtoys around.’

  ‘What? Somebody broke in? Did you call the police?’

  ‘No, nobody broke down any doors, and no, I didn’t call the cops because there’s really nothing to report except frivolous objects moving from one place to another. Don’t fuss, honey, I’m fine.’

  Maurie heard something a bit fake in Mom’s too-bright voice, just as Cassie had described. ‘Was it maybe your neighbor, the one with the down-home name, the Avon slash religious fanatic?’

  ‘Wilma Lou?’ Mom laughed in a way that seemed inappropriate. �
�She’s not coming near me. No, I don’t think it was Wilma Lou. Maybe I just have poltergeists.’

  Or maybe, Maurie thought, Mom was experiencing mental decline the way Grandma had done. When Grandma was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, she had frequently said with genuine consternation, ‘People are moving my things around!’ because she didn’t remember having moved them herself. Short-term memory loss manifested first.

  Halted under the portico of a Cornell classroom building, Maurie bit her lip. She didn’t have time to deal with a putatively senile mother right now; she would be late to the symposium. She promised herself she would call Cassie right afterward.

  ‘Mom, since when do you believe in poltergeists?’ she asked in a teasing tone. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course, sweetie,’ Mom said with too much emphasis. ‘I’m fine.’

  After talking with Maurie, I felt exhausted by the weight of all the things I wasn’t telling her, all the things I didn’t want to think about; I needed passive entertainment. So I headed back to my bedroom, which is where I keep the only TV in the house, not for pornographic purposes but simply because I think a TV looks ugly in a living room, and there’s so much violence on TV that most of the time I would rather read.

  Not that night. I actually fell asleep with the TV on.

  The next morning, awakening, I felt recovered. Actually, I felt pretty damn good. Weirdness or no weirdness, evidently I had reconnected with the familiar blissful vibe of being in the middle of an art project that has become challenging, or has taken a puzzling turn, or has otherwise proved interesting.