Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (6 page)

As Kelly watched from the window, the thing bobbed closer. Eight months old. But that wasn't right. Ghosts couldn't age, could they?

Her belly buddy squirmed. She began singing. “Hush, little baby, don't say a—”

She left the melody suspended, the creaking house adding useless percussion. Because the next line started with “Daddy.” Chet. He wouldn't buy anybody a mockingbird, even if their lives depended on it.

She could always change the gender, make it “Momma's gonna” do thus and such. But she'd lost the mood, and the baby had settled. Outside, the ghost also settled, a sodden sack of spirit.

Kelly climbed into the cold bed. She rolled into the cup of mattress where she and Chet had once cuddled, played, made a baby. She wondered if she would dream of her baby's gender. Some women did that.

The quilts were nearly warm by the time she fell asleep.

Kelly walked the frosted morning on her way to feed the chickens. She tugged up her oversize sweat pants as she went. Her breath hung in front of her, a silver miracle that died away to make room for the next. Breath like a ghost.

The chickens gathered around her feet, pecking the kernels she thumbed from hardened corn cobs. There might be a couple of eggs. The baby would like that. He always gave a kick of joy when that food energy flowed through the cord.

Kelly wondered if the ghost kicked each time she ate. Or did it feed from somewhere else? An umbilical cord for the dead, with energy flowing to them from the living. Invisible, with soul juice pumping into the amniotic sac of the afterlife to keep them from fading into nonexistence. Were they connected to one another?

The cemetery was only a couple of hundred feet farther. If she were careful, she could manage the frozen-dirt trail without slipping. Being pregnant helped her keep her balance, for some strange reason. Hard on the feet, though.

She was swelling today. The health department had told her swelling might be a sign of pre-something-or-other. High blood pressure. Bad news.

She made it to the white stumps of stone, old rain-worn markers. Granite. One of them just a piece of bleached quartz about the size of a baby's head. Little flecks of mica sparkled on the skin of the quartz.

Twenty-seven Stameys. She counted again just to make sure.

Susan Eleanor, Donna Faye, Laney Grace, Melville Martin, Timothy Mark, Simon Martin. Her father John Randolph Stamey, the ten-dollar letters chiseled neat and final.

More. Many without names, all connected by the dirt.

Some older ones, the name spelled S-T-A-M-Y.

Off by itself, where the dust and dead bones were cuddled by the roots of an old apple tree, stood a lonely grave. It bore the only marble marker in the lot. A fine hand had etched a lamb near the top, amidst some Biblical-style scrollwork.

The name, Lewis, engraved in the marble.

Her father's twin, who died so quickly after birth that he never got a middle name.

The grass in the shade of the apple tree was brown. One lone apple clung to a branch, shriveled and spotted. The baby squirmed as Kelly approached the grave.

She knelt before the marker. How sad that this child had never danced across the yard, napped in the hayloft, chased leaves in the October sundown. This child had never tasted the April air, a corn bloom, the cold mist of the creek. This child had never known his mother’s arms.

This child never connected.

At least Lewis had been buried with love. Paying for such a fancy monument must have been a strain on a mountain farm family. But the Stameys had always taken care of their own. From the cradle to the grave.

“Since I'm the last, who will bury me if I die?” Kelly whispered to the morning.

Chet. He would come back to bury her. Chet wasn't all bad. Once, when Kelly had a deep cut across her hand, Chet didn't make her wash dishes for a week.

But Chet was gone. And she would not be the last. She rubbed her belly. “You'll live,” she said.

She had dreamed it was male. He had talked to her last night, even though in the dream he was not even old enough to walk, his skull still pointed from the pressure of birth. His eyes were brown, like John Randolph Stamey's. The family brown.

She told her belly, “You will carry on the name.”

Kelly leaned forward and touched the marble. She would have a family. Her baby would live and grow. She would be connected.

She groaned as she struggled to her feet, pulling on a tree limb for balance. The sun had killed the frost and the ground glistened in a thousand wet sparkles. A mile away, rising from the forest, came a thread of chimney smoke from the Davis place. Beyond that, the Blue Ridge mountains stretched toward the horizon. Blue as a stillborn.

Mothers weren't supposed to think that way. Sure, you had your little fears, but you let them pass and thought only of the baby against your breast, alive and grunting in ceaseless need. You hoped and prayed that everything would be perfect. And you forgot about everything that could go wrong. Just like you forgot about Chet.

She made her way back to the farmhouse. Her back ached, so she sat in a rocker in the kitchen. The sun through the window fell on her belly, warmed her. The baby kicked, then rolled in her womb so that either a shoulder or a knee squeezed her bladder.

“You're going to be a mover,” she told him. “Just like your daddy.”

Chet, who wriggled like a snake. Who moved so fast that nothing stuck to him, no responsibility, no steady job, no woman. No family. No connections.

She looked out at the Chevy in the driveway. She'd drive herself in, when the time came. She'd have to do it early on, because you never knew what to expect with a first pregnancy. They said some women spent two days in labor, while others dropped them five minutes after the first contraction. You never knew.

Chet’s sister had offered a room in town, right up close to the hospital. But Kelly belonged here, on Stamey ground.

The baby squirmed again, probably hungry. Kelly had forgotten to look for eggs. All this foolishness over graves and ghosts, and she wasn't taking care of duties. She rose from the rocker and went back to the barn. It was either that, or oatmeal again, and if she ate any more oatmeal, she'd probably give birth to a colt.

“You can't see ghosts in daylight,” she told her belly.

But you could see them during the day, if the place you're in is dark enough. The barn had only a couple of windows, set high in the plank walls and covered with chicken wire. She'd tried to get Chet to run electricity to the barn, but there was always fishing or hunting or a Squad meeting. The important things.

The ghost was closer now, the closest it had ever been. She'd come around the corner and nearly dropped the little basket of eggs. But if the ghost wanted to hurt her, it had missed plenty of chances.

She couldn't run, anyway. She could waddle, maybe, take three or four steps while her hip ligaments caught fire and her breath left her. How fast was a ghost? No, if it wanted her, it would have had her any night while she was asleep.

The ghost wiggled in rhythm with the baby. Kelly tried to look at the ghost's face, but it was like watching patterns on the surface of a windy lake. Shifting, sparkling, not knowing what it wanted to be. She stood before it, waiting.

The sound came from between the trees. She knew it well, she'd laid awake many nights listening for it. Chet's Chevy pick-up, with the rusted muffler. The truck was coming down the long driveway.

Kelly smiled. Somehow, she'd known he would come back. He was a good man. He loved the good times, sure, but he knew when to stand up and be a man.

Kelly set the basket on the hard dirt floor, and the first contraction hit when she raised back up. She'd had a few Braxton-Hicks contractions, the false ones that were just practice for the real thing. This one was different. This rippled around her womb and clenched like a fist.

She gasped, but her lungs were stones. The ghost hovered nearer, its substance touching her, ice cold, and she tried to wave it away. Chet's truck stopped by the house, and she fought for enough air to call him. Another contraction hit.

Chet yelled her name. Was he mad? Did he expect to drive in after ten weeks gone to find breakfast waiting for him on the table? She'd take him the eggs, make him happy. Or throw them at him.

The next contraction drove her to her knees. They weren't supposed to come on like this, one on top of the other at the start. The health department had told her what to expect, and this was none of the normal things. This was one of those symptoms that meant you'd better get to the hospital and fast.

The ghost moved closer, Kelly could see the silver and white threads of the borrowed life that held the thing together. It was like one of Mamaw's old quilts, stitched after the woman's eyes had failed. Loose and tangled, nonsense. If not for ache in her guts, Kelly could have watched for hours, tracing the nearly-invisible lines.

The pain came again, like a knife blade and a punch at the same time, and Chet yelled her name from outside. She crawled toward a pile of hay, sucking for air. The ghost hovered over her, shaking and spasming like linen on a December clothesline. She wondered if the baby was spasming, too, but she couldn't feel him through the globe of hurt.

Maybe the ghost was causing all this, the pain, the fetal distress. If the ghost and the baby were connected, like to like, one jealous dead and the other with an entire life yet to live, years and years and years stretching out ahead, a billion heartbeats owed him . . . .

Chet called again, and this time she managed to shriek. Nothing to write home about, but it was loud enough to get through the walls of the barn. Then she curled up in the hay, clutched her stomach, and tasted the dust that spun in the air. Her water broke beneath the tails of the long flannel shirt she wore. The barn door banged open, and daylight sliced through the ghost and cut it to nothing.

“What the hell's going on?” Chet blinked into the shadows.

Kelly gulped for another breath. “B—baby...”

Chet hurried over, the smell of bourbon arriving before he did. He looked down at her, at the basket of eggs, at the amniotic fluid soaking her clothes between her legs. Kelly tried to smile at him, but her lips were dumb.

“It's our baby,” she said. Everything would be okay now. The hospital was only twenty minutes away, you could hold out until then, why, the pain was nothing if you held onto that dream of brown eyes. And the baby was part Stamey, it was tough, it could bear up under a little trouble. Kelly was heavy, but Chet could manage, he would put her in the truck and slow down for the bumps.

“It ain't mine.” Chet smiled. Except the smile was turned down at the corners, sharp as sickles.

His boot came fast, knocking over the basket. She heard the damp crack of the eggs, and then her mind screamed red because the boot was at her stomach, into her stomach, fast and then again, the pain worse than the contractions even. He tugged at her waistband, and she thought at first it was some new kind of pain, then cold air rushed over her skin.

Chet pulled the bloody pants down to her ankles, laughing, grunting.

“Ain't mine.” He walked away, leaving her numb and broken and half naked. The truck started, backfired, and headed toward Tennessee or wherever it was he went to hide from himself.

Chet wouldn't bury her after all. No one to bury her.