Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

“But it’s private…”

  “No buts, Missy Melissa!”

  “But,” she said, leaning on the word, “there are no boys.” Darn but she hated saying that. “And, I bet it is cooler and lots more comfortable.”

  From the dark, B.A.’s voice was straight, stiff. “Th’ idea. Rafe so soon in his grave.”

  “And with the Marines and boot camp, gone more than two years—two years gone in all, cuz.”

  “Th’ idea!”

  “And I am sure he wouldn’t mind us sleeping in that old shack. No disrespect, B.A., but under this hot roof there is no breath of air. For me, it is sleep in the Boy’s Room or on the porch by the ‘facility.’”

  Thus, Melissa slept her first night in the Boy’s Room. They carried bedding and pillows. In a few steps, their feet were wet with dew. As before, the earth seemed cool, steeped in shadows that soaked into it from the woods. Melissa tingled but boldly trod, leading with the light from the same old night-crawler lamp.

  B.A. hung back, unsure of the propriety of the enterprise. “Th’ idea. I cannot imagine what Mother and Father will want us to say, Rafe so soon in his grave.”

  Rafe’s MEDALS so soon, Melissa thought. Some suit of Marine clothes so soon. She did not say that, of course. “We’ll think of something appropriate after a good night’s sleep, Barbary,” is what she said.

  The Boy’s Room smelled old. A hint of something else hung there, but did not smell too bad, not exactly, not after they threw the place open to night air. There was a little of dry leather to the scent, much of dust and moldy paper. The lantern revealed piles and piles of mildewed magazines, newspapers, funny books, illustrated periodicals of sports and crimes. Maybe there was something of dead animal to the air, too, but in a few minutes, even that had pretty well cleared. It was cooler.

  The old shack leaned like a dog straining its lead; it drooped away from its wattle and daub chimneystack. Even so, the place seemed to have remained tight against weather and the windows didn’t stick too badly to their skewed frames. A push and a shove and they swung open. When they did, air flowed through from woods and field.

  “Oh Barbary, feel the night breathe!” Melissa said.

  “Yug,” B.A. said. She pointed the lamp at a stack of magazines at her feet. In the sudden light, silverfish swarmed like short bright words deserting the paragraphs of THE POLICE GAZETTE. “This was NOT a good idea, cuz.”

  “Objection noted,” Melissa said, quoting a war film she had seen in Chicago. She put her back to the night. “But feel the air!”

  Cautious as to the placement of her feet, B.A. stepped away from the piles. Closer to the window, she sniffed and hugged herself through a shiver. The lantern flickered. Outside, wind-sifted moss swept a quiet whisper through the grass. Dry catalpa pods clacked. Something, some furred critter most likely, cracked a branch along the edge of the trees. Another something ruffled one of the piles of paper in a farther corner of the room.

  “Boo!” Melissa said loudly, jumping at her cousin. B.A. shrieked a quick yelp. As did Melissa, who had frightened herself.

  Then the cousins laughed, made up the old spring bed by the quickly failing lantern, lay down together and soon, sooner than they realized they might, they slept.

  Then on, the visit was pleasant, considering the sadness of its occasion. By permission unasked, word ungiven, the girls continued sleeping in the Boy’s Room.

  The visit was a short one. Melissa’s daddy had to return to Chicago in a few days, return to work, his work of the war. Mother, too, had duties: volunteer war efforts, other duties, duties, if not of family, then of life, life back north in Chicago. “‘Land of Lincoln,’ indeed!” Barbary Ann said of her cousin’s home, and no more was said about it.

  That was on the last night. That night the air was filled with lightning bugs. Glowworms lit the trees, their cold stars winked to life and faded between the shack and the big house. They drifted deeper into the woods and across the land beyond Tozier property. B.A. cried a little at the thought of Melissa Trish leaving, of her being left alone in that place, in that house, in that family, alone. Would she go back or sleep in the Boy’s Room? She cried half about her brother and nearly half about her cousin chugging away in that train, the train going so far north. “North to the Land of…” She sniffed. Lying in bed in the Boy’s Room, the shack where the conjure woman Ophelia had breathed her last spells alone, where the boy, Rafe, had spent his last night in the bosom of his family, the cousins hugged and talked far toward morning and, suddenly, they slept.

  When the bright spirit awoke her, Melissa had no idea the time. The air was almost chilly. A hint of distant thunder mumbled against her chest and eardrums. A soft light had risen on the sagging porch and sifted through the rusted screen door. Sometimes thin, at times nearly solid, it never seemed to be light or substance. Sometimes the form had too many legs for a human or any proper animal. Other times, the thing had an insufficiency of parts. Melissa’s saw it as a figure, a figure that at once walked, at other times simply pulsed softly, its edges drifting apart. The light that flickered in the room was not Will-o-the-wisp, Foxfire, St. Elmo’s. Other things it could not be popped to Melissa’s nearly sleeping head and were dismissed. What it was she did not know. Not at first. Eventually, even a Yankee from the Land of Lincoln knew enough to know a haunt.

  The wraith seemed unsure. Sometimes it moved with the jerky gait of an old soldier on a long parade. Or it moved and didn’t move at the same time, standing statue-still while the cabin crawled by, Melissa and sleeping B.A. merely passengers.

  If a human person moved like that, Melissa would have said it was pacing, looking. It slipped through solids, waded among piles of Rafe’s fragile magazines without turning a leaf. When it passed through the table by the hearth, the rough wood faded and grew solid, like an old skiff looming in the fog.

  Melissa wanted to nudge her cousin awake. She did not, of course. Of course, the spirit that lit the air of the Boy’s Room was that of cousin Rafe. She was certain of that.

  “What’re you sniffing at, you?” Melissa whispered to the ghost. At the moment, the haunt looked exactly as though it was doing just that, peering ’round, remembering, nosing something. Or looking for trouble, like boys would.

  Remembering what, you? Melissa thought. “Life?” she asked aloud, again not aloud enough to wake her cuz. What old life you looking for? she wondered. Seeing death, are you? Are you right now being blown to flinders on your Pacific island? Seeing other boys go to graves?

  The spook turned and drifted again.

  You seeing the ceiling here, nights when you were a boy, alone? Melissa looked up and saw only shadows cast by the haunt’s flickering light. You remember the old outhouse, down there? You see me, back then? See me in your place, here and now? See the life you had and wasted and the life you don’t have and want? You see me?

  When the haunt that had—just had—to be Rafe’s passed through her body, Melissa’s mind shut off for a moment. Passing through her, it felt like…

  Electrocution, she thought. That was after, recalling. There’d been sudden vibrations that climbed her hand and arm. Like that one day she’d accidentally grabbed the bare prongs of a light cord. Him passing through was like that, she thought later, but the haunt’s tingle was everywhere, a buzz that washed her deep. Her vision flickered, her teeth chattered. Every joint felt like exercise in Physical Culture class. Rafe’s ghost—goodness, call it what it is!—never paused inside, but passed without effort. Melissa was transparent to him, a clear, clean window. He left a lingering of cinnamon, of cinnamon and cumin. Just that. No! Cinnamon, cumin and a whiff of chicory. The dry, ground, roasted root of the blue flower and, unaccountably, a whiff of charred cotton and other burnt up things.

  Ghosts, call it that, spooks were unfinished business, life left over, never to be lived. She knew that at least. “What’re you seeing?” she whispered.

  At the wall of the shack, the thing seemed to climb a short set of stairs a
nd sifted into the wood and daub. It stood a long moment, half in half out, drifted apart, drew together. Turned, seemed to look out, over Melissa’s head.

  She was less and less chilled by the old and impotent thing. She wanted to reach out, speak to this remnant of dead Rafe (“…a uniform of clothes, not even his!”), speak to what a fool boy he’d been, tell him... tell him that, well, life is for the living! That was it, the old thing! He ought to get on out of it. Life would go on without him and his old burnt up suit of clothes. Oh, yes, Melissa was curious, curious about After. Curious and, now she thought of it, relieved. There was something after. Maybe not a bright and golden place, no music and angels (which, to be honest, she’d always dreaded), but maybe Forever was not fire and torment nor awful cold and distant echoes either. Surely, though, there was a place where she would go when it was her time, a place in which she would be, for goodness sakes. Death would not be forever nothing, eternity, not a vast empty hole. The minute she died, she would not stop. Nor would death take her to some far-off Kafiristan or backside of the moon (or was it the dark side? She never could… Oh for goodness sake). Forever would not be a place she had never seen, never could see and about which, upon arrival at the Great Final Time, she might not approve. No, eternity would be a place like home.

  Melissa turned to silly, pretty, sleeping B.A. Melissa was about to say, “Look, cousin. There’s your brother, in his spirit world.” She never said it. Squatting on B.A.’s cheek, breathing in that way they had, was a tickly crawly… Oh, for heaven’s sake, call it what it is, she thought, a spider, wolf spider, the spit and image of that long-ago ground up soul-catcher. Why, every now and then, M’lissa Trish still saw that one peering with its thousand eyes bright in coal oil light, peering from the Sears book or scrabbling in the marble mortar. Now here, on cousin B.A.’s face, it was.

  Melissa, out of bed in a shot. Chills climbed her tingles. The Awesome Forever was one thing. Spiders another.

  Half-in, half-out, and half-up the wall of the Boy’s Room, the ghost had stopped. There was a moment between them, Melissa felt, a moment when she looked at the old thing, then down at her cousin, spider and all, then back at the ghost. Melissa reached across B.A., reached to touch the brightness hanging above the floor. As she did, it reached down for her. They never touched. Too darn far. Just so, Melissa was comforted. The worlds might touch, she thought. She had feared that to be a ghost (and she smiled at how silly was the thought), she’d thought that to be a ghost would be like being the only person in a crowded room, someone always alone. Cousin Rafe’s wander, him still aware, able to reach out to her, and her for him, comforted Melissa more than any minister’s presumption of angels and song. The ghostly presence, there in the Boy’s Room, was a guarantee of… well, of something after life.

  A consolation she’d keep inside herself. She’d share it with B.A. later, when the hard immediacy of her brother’s death had softened. Next time she came visiting, she’d tell.

  Life grabbed Melissa. Nothing much happened. For a time, Melissa remembered the haunting as having been shared, that she and B.A. had both been passed through by the ghost, Rafe trapped by their spider, his spirit left to wander Tozier land for his sins. She remembered clearly (and falsely) a phantom truth, that she and Barbary Ann had hugged each other through that scary bright night in the Boy’s Room. She remembered the hug, the talk of ghosts and whispered stories of lives that had had left too much undone in the world at death to go to heaven, hell or anyplace. She was comforted by these memories, however imperfect.

  She told the story several times over the years, always with a laugh, at least with a smile, sometimes with a drink. Eventually, she buried the tale and refused to think it to life. Every few years, something in the senses, the smell of cinnamon, a shadow on the ceiling, a whiff of cotton scorched by a too-hot iron, brought a notion of wandering spirits to mind. Comforted, Melissa waited for life to happen.

  After a few decades, she no longer smiled at the memory. She remembered the Boy’s Room chill, the tingle as the spirit passed through her and beloved Barbary Ann. She remembered a lost spirit on its way. Its way where?

  She didn’t know.

  She never spoke of it in middle-age. That’s a lie. She spoke sparingly. A friend once asked if she believed in the supernatural. She asked over coffee and more or less to make conversation after a movie or reading a book. Mel thought, then told the story, now quite a bit different.

  The friend cocked her head, looked surprised.

  “That’s the south,” Mel said. “Magic.”

  “I’m amazed at you,” the friend said, shaking her head.

  Mel also told her analyst. He was neither amazed nor surprised. He asked what she made of it, the “ghost.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Melissa said. “Maybe there’s a place somewhere in the world for me. Maybe I’ll be able to reach out, touch someone sometime. You think?” She smiled. So did the analyst.

  She was an old woman the next time she came south. Tozier land had long gone from Tozier hands. The family had spread, dissolved. By then, the town of Monocle had bulldozed itself all the way to the peeling Tozier house, gone through it and beyond. Brick buildings stretched along Roosevelt Avenue, the old Bay St. Louis canal road. By then, Miss Melissa Tozier was a woman grown old on a diet of deep fear, dark secret, and tiny sin. When she thought of it, she prayed; mostly, she did not. But there was Afterlife. She held that fact like she did the knowledge of her own heart’s being. There was a future Forever.

  By the time she stepped carefully from the bus at Monocle Station, she prayed only to be a quiet story with a happy ending. She’d come back because. Well, because she remembered being a little girl here and how wonderful it was to have been a little girl here, a woman child, a white girl in the south, such a one not expected to accomplish, not expected to be of much significance, content to be the pretty creature she’d one day surely become.

  Mel had lived that expectation. Her day had come, gone, and now it was late. She barely remembered being silly M’lissa Trish, who’d held her cousin in the long ghostly night, her life still ahead. She remembered perfectly, her first fright and final contentment, seeing ghostly… Was it Rafe? All the pacing, the anger at an unlived life. She remembered the spirit’s long looks, its climb up the wall, its descent, its climb again. The spirit she’d caught for vengeance-sake in that old mashed spider, angry at her, angry at the world.

  Served it right, she thought. Lock her in dark, stink and fear. Is that spook still here? she wondered. Sixty years was nothing to a ghost.

  The cab stopped at the heart of a black business district, long past its prime. The driver, a black man, sixty (More? Who could tell?), guaranteed, here’d been the junction of the old road and canal.

  Nothing remained to remind.

  The cab chugged at the curb. A few shops crammed together, a music store with noise, a burnt out shell next to it, then a frock shop also charred dead and gone.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the driver said. “That ol’ canal bridge was somewhere, there.” He pointed across the wide street. “B’yond, I remember. Bridge fell down, aw, must be thirty years ago. Canal’s a sewer now. Cemented over.”

  Melissa stood washed in the smells of the neighborhood. She hugged herself despite the heat. The cab’s idling engine tap-tap-tapped above a running cough. Hot oil reeked from under the hood. Cab wanted to go.

  The driver seemed to know the city, been a boy here, he said, a boy during the War (Older than he looks, who can tell?).

  Melissa embraced the sun and heat, didn’t mind heat these days, even fierce southern summer. She peeled dollars from her wallet, all the while looking for the place in moonlight, in her past. She looked back toward where the scabby old painted wooden house must have been.

  A run-down glass and aluminum-sided elementary school shimmered in the right direction, at about the right distance. The other way, where fields had stretched unexplored beyond Tozier land, a fast food parking lot ro
iled in waves of grease. Other smells came and went. The cab pulled hot air around her in its wake.

  On the sidewalk, alone now in this strange town and time, Melissa turned. A squall approached, a cluster of boys, African American boys. They came with such loose purpose (she had no idea what) along the street (Tozier land, once). The boys were loud, they overlapped, hardly listened to each other. She cleared their sidewalk, fled three steps up to the door of the music shop.

  For goodness! She’s been around black people all her life, around them as equals.

  They passed, laughing, spoke roughly, every other word, that word, they ignored, didn’t see her. Didn’t see her.

  From the stoop she got her bearings. If there—she looked toward the restaurant—if there was the land beyond Tozier’s, her head turned, why there must have been the outhouse. She chuckled at the memory. She paced mentally, from there to…

  Then realized where she stood. She stood where the Boy’s Room had been. She stood where old Lady Ophelia had lived, conjured and died, where cousin Rafe spent nights, his last night a free boy, a living boy, staring at the ceiling where he’d doubtless been the night she’d trammeled up his spirit in the spider. She turned to look where it had been again. What did I do with that spirit? she wondered and laughed again. Then stopped. An old white woman laughing on the street in the Negro part of town, heavens…

  She stood, perhaps, in the very place, sixty years along, stood, yes, above where she and now-gone cousin Barbary Ann had slept that last cool night of their lives, their lives together. She descended to the sidewalk, took a few steps toward the burned out frock shop. She stepped in space, crossed time, felt a sudden rush, a rush and tingle such as she’d never, well almost never, never except for once, once before in her life, felt. A tingle as if electricity moved through her. It chattered her blood. The tingle made every joint quiver like (oh, God) like her body tingled in Physical Culture class at school. And on the steps of the frock shop, a scent of burnt cotton embraced and entered her, a smell of old flames and…