Had I a Hundred Mouths (16 page)

Little Pigeon just swanked and said, “Go 'way, ghost of Sister Sammye.”

Sammye waited a minute and then said, in a ghost's voice, “Put out something you treasure for a ghost and he will go away.”

“But what?” Little Pigeon asked. “You are trying to get my things, just like Old Mrs. Woman said.”

Sammye said, “I don't care about your things, put out the ghost some supper. And never tell a soul.”

Well, this is the way Sammye got her supper, for a while.

Then Sammye started working her plan. Sammye thought, I'll wart them to death, I'll be a regular Jonah to those two, I'll give them what they asked for and deserve. When Little Pigeon and Old Mrs. Woman would be out walking, Sammye would steal up into the house and touch her fingers on the silver or on the crystal. When they would come back Little Pigeon would find the prints and smuts of fingers on her things and say, “Somebody's fingers been on my things. The ghost has been here.” And Old Mrs. Woman would look with big eyes and not know what to think. Or, again, Sammye would sneak Little Pigeon's purse from where she had it and put it in another place. Sammye would hear the two of them tearing the house down looking for it.

Well, you don't have to hear any more, you can see how it all ended up: Old Mrs. Woman began to get the blame from Little Pigeon for all the stunts Sammye pulled. She tried then to say there was no ghost and to blame Little Pigeon for trying to devil
her
, Little Pigeon was all mixed up but said there most assuredly
was
one, for she had seen it, etc. etc.; and it was the end of their happy honeymoon when Little Pigeon and Old Mrs. Woman had a knock-down-drag-out in the driveway and Old Mrs. Woman pushed Little Pigeon over into the hedge. Then is when Sammye appeared from the basement and picked Little Pigeon out.

Old Mrs. Woman went back over to her big empty house, back to crying; and everything was like it started out, except that Little Pigeon couldn't get
ghost
out of her mind and still thought Sammye was Sammye's ghost and Sammye could not change her mind. So Sammye stayed a ghost; anything to humor Little Pigeon. But otherwise everything was just the same, Sammye had Little Pigeon back, worrying her to death, calling her long distance at Rodunda when she was not with her, mistreating her and fussing at her when she was with her, and accusing her of stealing her purse or touching her things—Sammye got the blame for everything that was wrong—Sammye was about to pull her hair out with Little Pigeon, said she had no life of her own, said she had nothing, was just a ghost of herself. “But she is my sweet sister that I love and adore,” Sammye would still say.

Yet it was peculiar how there seemed to be a real ghost in Little Pigeon's house, just as Little Pigeon had said; for very often they would hear commotions in the basement, and on many mornings they would come down to find the prints of fingers that had touched all over Little Pigeon's things. Sammye would go down to the basement to look around for signs, but there seemed nothing. Once in a while she caught Little Pigeon still going faithfully down the basement stairs with some hot supper for the basement ghost and would have to stop her and try to reason with her that the ghost that used to be down there had gone away and would never come again. But this was difficult, since Little Pigeon was so far gone in her dream of things by that time; so often Sammye would just let her go and play with the ghost she thought was living in the basement. Sweet Little Pigeon.

But when Sammye went down to the basement one day, and just to get something this time, not to investigate or spy, what should she find but Old Mrs. Woman! Sammye smelled a rat and said, looking at her out of the corner of her eye, “Go 'way ghost of Old Mrs. Woman!” Old Mrs. Woman prissed and flaunted and said, “Put out something you treasure for a ghost and she will go away. Ha!”

Then Sammye, who had always been the practical one, decided to use her head. She sat down on the divan that used to be her bed when she was a ghost in the basement herself, and said, “Well, Mrs. Woman, this is foolishness, a ghost pestering a ghost, we'll drive each other into insanity and all end up in the Home. I'm not going to give up and you're not either. We mind as well be ghosts together. I've got no household anymore and you've got none, nor Little Pigeon either, except for what we make for her, by hook or crook; we mind as well make one whole household out of three pieces of households. Why don't you move on in the basement, move your cedarchest with the Letter in it on over here and I'll move my things in from Rodunda—and we'll all three have us a household, us two old ghosts and the sweet Little Pigeon. She can't get us out of her head anyway, thinks we're here when we aren't and we aren't when we are. Everybody's everywhere, so far as I can make out, and I'm beginning to not be sure where I am, myself—and I don't believe you know. This shuttling from house to house is killing us both and will make ghosts of us before we know it. Come on over, Mrs. Woman.'' And then Sammye said something which if she had said it much earlier in the game would have changed the whole story from the beginning; and saved a lot of traffic. She said it in a quiet tone that she used in talking to herself, “All we want, I guess, is a household that will let us be the way we are.”

The two women shook hands, here were the two ghosts down in the basement making covenant, bargaining to make the ghost story come true for Little Pigeon upstairs—who already believed in it anyway and had more or less made it come true, will or nill.

But Sammye and Old Mrs. Woman had a few things to settle first. Old Mrs. Woman said, “This basement is as much your house as it is mine, you seemed to like it well enough to live down here once. Why don't
you
move in the basement, Sammye Johnson?” Sammye did not argue and suggested that they take turns living in the basement, adding that the divan was uncomfortable, though, even for a ghost to sleep on. Old Mrs. Woman said she would move in her daybed that the roomers had bought for her; and it was agreed upon. “One last thing,” Mrs. Woman said, “and that is please to note that my name is Lucille Purdy and you will do me the favor of please calling me the same.”

So Lucille moved her cedarchest with the Letter in it into the basement, and the daybed, too; and the household flourished. In a few years the life of the town all shifted in another direction and moved there, towards the new development of what had been just a no-good thicket, something was suddenly there—oil or mineral or better land or something—that the town craved or thought it did, the way towns do, sometimes; change their shape and size and way, trying to form something—what?—and trying to find something to gather round. It was a time when everything shifted and changed, swarmed and clustered around an idea or a craving, used it up or wearied of it, then scattered to pieces again, it was a time of clashes of cravings, it was like a bunch of sheep moving and wandering, shepherd or no—he only followed when he was supposed to lead and could not summon them all together, or there was no shepherd (maybe that was the trouble), he was lost under the hill.

People of this section followed the town into the thicket where the town became so changed; politicians fought, money came from another part of the country; the town thrived. The old houses in the left-behind section were torn down or simply just abandoned, almost as if in a hurry because of a plague or a flood, this left-behind section became a kind of ghost town—almost as if the whole living town had turned away from Little Pigeon and Sammye and Lucille and would have nothing to do with them. But they stayed behind, and did not even know they stayed behind, they did not even know there was another place to want to go to, their shuttling was through. For the shape of the household in Little Pigeon's house was fixed forever, and it never changed again, it went on aflourishing—it had found something to hold it together, and that was a covenant of ghosts.

In a few years Little Pigeon died, still believing her house had two ghosts living in it, one above and one below, one stealing her purse and the other dancing with her in the paper room; and both of them giving her her insulin, listening to her count her things and tell about them.

After Little Pigeon was buried, the two women Sammye and Lucille had several good years together in Little Pigeon's house; you could see them swanking down the sidewalk on many a sunshiny afternoon, arm in arm, hair all set and good clothes on, strolling through the neighborhood of empty houses and down deserted streets, Sammye in Little Pigeon's ruby earbobs and in her good fur coat, Lucille fat as ever; and few people will ever know what had brought them together to be such friends, who had been such enemies.

Those who know the story to the end say the ghost of Little Pigeon came regularly and counted and touched all her things, but no more to devil the household or to cause it trouble, only just to join it and keep it whole, and that the basement room was always kept nice for her—it was her turn down there, now—until Sammye finally died and left Lucille with too many ghosts for flesh to bear; and so she opened her cedarchest and took out the Letter and put it in her bosom and then took out the revolver Mr. Purdy had given her years ago and ended the last life of the household—joining ghost to ghost, the best household and the longest lasting.

People of the town, the kind who always know mysterious stories about this old house ot that dead person, say the ghosts of two old women walk arm in arm through this ruined section when the sun shines in winter. That you can occasionally still see the three ghosts moving through the house. That one of the women was crazy and another committed suicide, and that the house was a household of violence and hatred and jealousy.

It is true that the house of Little Pigeon still stands, closed up and passed by, as it had always been even when the town was living close around it; so go and look at it if you don't believe it. Go and look through the side windows at the faded paper streamers in the paper room, go around and find the withered tissue snow crystals peeling from the sunporch windows in the back. It has not been sold or rented or tampered with until this day, that anybody knows of, but has grown along in some dream of its own. The trees have grown up high around it and locked branches over it as if to roof it away from the world, and the hedges are uncropped and rank, high and thick as a wall. This makes it seem ghosthouse enough, and it is true that the house is known only as the house where three old evil women lived, a crazy woman and her sister and a woman who shot herself. But that's one story. And if you know the whole story, as now you do, you can come stand at the window and hear a ghostly voice counting out the silverware and linens, or the riffle of ghost feet to the music of “Whispering”; and then you can have it all straight and can understand the household that was covenanted for there. And can understand the town, too; and can have your own story, ghost story or flesh story, out of the whole thing.

Anyway, that is the story about the lives of Old Mrs. Woman, Sister Sammye and Little Pigeon, and how they formed a household in a town that passed them by.

P
ORE
P
ERRIE

For James McAllen

“Tell me the story of pore Perrie. Tell how she lived all her life till she died.”

“Hush asking me 'cause I don't want to tell it. 'Twas buried with pore Perrie in her grave….”

“The flesh of it is buried, but we have the ghost of it again. Pore Perrie's grave holds only half the story—the other's yet to come.”

“Then let me bring the half to the half myself. When Perrie and I join in the Polk plot in the cemetery, laid side by side, we'll settle it all, ghost and flesh, under the dirt. Dirt takes everything back again, in the end. Now let us alone. Leave us to dirt.”

“But this is a good time to tell, while I'm here and you're here—and we may never be again. For soon (tonight) I moan be on my way; I cain't stay. So tell it to me because I want to get it all straight. Let me have it from your mouth now, and for the last time, and then I can have it again from my memory as I go on, on the road.”

“Some one of you always passing through and stopping by, asking my stories, asking my time, asking my grief, won't let a life be. Worse than a bed of red ants. Be glad when my life's story settles down into the ground, a fallen message to be told out no more, locked in the box of my bones: message and bone go back into dirt. (Blood kin buried together settle their
own
stories, a family graveyard plot is a mailbox of messages all reading each other—who ever thought they lie quiet together and in peace at last, gladly beyond?)

“But go get me something to fan with, my cardboard fan from the church is done fanned out; the newspaper will do.…”

2

“Well if you see yonder at those bunch of houses by the boxy churchhouse and see the little squatty one huddling next to it like a chick to a hen, then that's the house where we all lived during the story of pore Perrie. And if I tell you about it one more time, about Aunt Perrie and Uncle Ace (when he was home) and Son, man and boy, then I want you to hush ever asking me about it again. Because you know good and well that I've told it to you, chapter and book, time and time over, and this will be the last, until I go to my grave. Pore Perrie.”

3

The thing of it is, Son was over in Benburnett County working for a while with a rigging outfit when suddenly Aunt Linsie began to have his letters. Son wrote and said Aunt Linsie can you tell me about Aunt Perrie, all how she was when I wasn't there to see, all how she lived and how she died. This gave Aunt Linsie a chance to write one of her long good letters that was like a story she was telling (when you can get her to tell one); and she wrote back, “Son to begin with why don't you stop keeping me in a tumult, I should think you'd have seen for yourself, your pore Aunt Perrie's ghost is haunting you and I'm glad, this is because you ought to have been here with her when she needed you (and not just skimming and skirting round the place here the way you did, like a ghost of yourself), not everywhere you were during those days, there's plenty of ghosts will tell you that, won't let you rest pretty soon, it's your conscience, thas all, Son,” etc. etc.…