Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (12 page)

I finger the shoestring around my neck, shake my head. But the question sounds like what my mother says when I call her in the middle of the night. “It was just a bad dream,” she says. “Go back to sleep.” And two or three times she's added, “Even if your granddaddy was a ghost, do you really think he'd do anything to hurt you?”

OUR HOUSE IS
strewn round with outlier buildings, as though in decades past it shuffled around and shed parts of itself. The pump house, the icehouse, the garage, the barn, woodshed, chicken house, goat shed. There is also the old mill, not a splinter of it still standing, but its innards retired in unexpected places—grinding stones rupturing the yard to stun mower blades, the giant wooden gear shaft in the barn I was shinnying down when I put my hand on the skull. Each building at a different stage of fall-down, and every one bulging with dead people's or dead animals' stuff.

In these outpost buildings we are seldom grown-up-watched. The animal places, now animal-less, are musty and mote-choked with what used to go into creatures and more of what used to come out—hillocks of stale unbaled hay, moldy sacks of oats and corn, and everywhere the desiccated turds you can throw at people, churn with a broom handle into a witch's brew, build into wigwams and lean-tos for Indian and pioneer elves. In the buildings where people's things are cached, we mole through dry-rotted cardboard boxes and peculiar-odored trunks and plain old uncrated piles, Mickey and Bingo always busy alongside us, raptured by two centuries of scent.

Oddly, none of these places feels haunted, as though all the castaway junk and belongings left behind have absorbed any ghosts or sated them. We unbury ice skates and child-sized boxing gloves, saddles we throw over nail kegs and ride, box traps and arrowheads and a snake in a jar of formaldehyde. We flip through ledger books and
photo albums, the corner tabs unsticking and the pictures shuffling down—most of them boring, old-timey people we don't know, but in a few I recognize our father and our aunts and uncles. Once, I uncovered one of my granddaddy.

I leaned back with my behind on my heels and stared at it there. He was outside. My granddaddy was outside the house—I recognized the barn wall behind him, he stood in the part of the garden that still came up rhubarb, and there was even an unfamiliar beaglish dog pushing his nose into Granddaddy's hand. I had seen my granddaddy outside one time, and that was in his green recliner, an inside chair my uncle pulled out onto the front porch. In the picture his hair was already white, but he stood outside, a hundred yards from the house, not in pajamas, but wearing regular clothes.

I looked behind me at the kids fighting over the nail-keg horse. I felt a ping of responsibility to show them the picture—or at least to show Sam, who remembered him. But a peculiar protectiveness—of them? of him?—smothered the ping. I found a spot in the album with a photo slot still sound, and I pressed the outside Granddaddy carefully into its corners. I closed the covers and stashed it away.

“COLLECT CALL FROM
Raymond Clinster. Do you accept the charges?”

“Something happened between him and the woman on the other side of town,” our father tells our mother when he returns to the supper table, paper napkin flapping from his belt. “He's got nowhere to go.”

While my granddaddy and grandmother had Ham and Mrs. Dock to work for them, our father has us. He's decided the icehouse will be the most livable outbuilding and the easiest to clean up. Bundled up against the New Year's cold, we restack bed frames and canning jar boxes and cobweb-filmed kitchen chairs and who-knows-what's-in-them garbage bags high against the icehouse walls to make a clearing
in the middle. We sweep, we mop, we wipe. We duct tape the slits in the walls where the sawdust insulation leaks out. We haul in a space heater, a mattress on a cot.

At first, our father carries Ham's supper out to him, but then has to go to Charleston for a meeting, so my mother hands the foil-covered plates to me or to Sam and tells us come right back. By the time my father gets home, he and my mother have been spoiled by our help, and Sam and I end up feeding Ham most of the time.

I am not afraid of outside places, not even in the dark, at least I wasn't before Ham moved in. And now I am afraid not because of Ham, who, alive, scares me not at all, but because I can't help but believe that if Ham is here, that white naked-tailed cat cannot be far away. I learn to run fast without spilling the plate, even with a dinner-smell-bewitched dog or two thrashing through my legs. I race between kitchen window light and icehouse window light with my face held down so I won't risk glancing at a lunatic cat at the edge of the yard. I skid short right outside Ham's door, settle myself, rap on it twice, and push dogs back with one foot. Ham hollers, “C'mon in,” and I step into the whir of the space heater fan.

Ham is lying always on his side on the cot, and he will eat that way, too, elbow-propped, the space heater aimed at his feet. Always—I do not think it and cannot help it—my eyes are sucked first to those feet, and always the no-toes are hidden in a sock. I lean forward to hand him the plate, my mouseskull necklace swinging out a little—I never bother to put on a coat—and he says, “Tell your mother thanks.” Then I back off a few steps, Ham peeling away the foil, and even though I'm supposed to “come right back,” I can't help the longer look my eyes must take next.

Down that Ham undershirt, the gray of a blood-swoled tick. Across the sack of his belly. Along the length of the work-pantsed legs
that no longer work. Then I take in the smell of Ham, in that close space-heatered clearing, smell familiar to me and not unpleasant to me, the contained unwashedness of grown-up poor people with no water inside. A dry vinegar. Something to do with rising bread if rising bread could smell old and stale. My stare is clothespinned to the gray socks, but no matter how big I bug my eyeballs, how hard I push, I never discern the slightest sign of where those toes are not. Ronnie Phillips told me his brother ordered the X-ray glasses from the back of a Flintstones comic. When they didn't work, he busted open a lens and found something that looked like a little feather inside.

Often, me standing there with my eyes dangling out, Ham'll start talking in that tuneful river-flow voice, the beat just right between sentences and chews. When Ham talks to me, it's like I'm not a kid. Not like he's a sometimes drunk who used to work for my granddaddy. We're the same. Not like I'm peculiar and so shy I've been mistaken for deaf. Not like he's a Mrs. Dock kind of poor person whose eyes, even when their outsides stand still, dart around behind themselves. Never expecting or receiving a word in return, Ham talks, all of him right there in his face—the way Ronnie Phillips is, I realize, just like Ronnie Phillips, no gap between who's inside and who's out.

“I cut ice for this icehouse when I was a boy. Cut it up on Stump's Eddy and dragged it out with horses. Them was different winters then. River never freezes that thick that long anymore.”

Or, “Bought me some mousetraps in town today. You all had a few cats around, keep down the mice.”

Or, “I do miss seeing your grandma. I reckon it's nice and warm for her, though, down in Florida.”

And one evening I fasten on the foot longer than usual because, lo and behold, it's got a new sock, a white one, no less, which might be easier to see through. I'm beaming into that sock, and I half-hear
Ham say something about running into Mrs. Dock today, but I'm not really listening when, suddenly, the air changes. Just like how when Ham talks to my father in the car, I recognize it right away, suddenly everything—Ham, cot, me, sock, space heater—fades to background for the new air, cold like on your teeth, bright that hurts your eyes.

“Now I know Mrs. Dock don't like to talk about it. But I asked her, early on, just oncet. And she said she knew as soon as she heard that nail what was going on, she didn't have to hear the other. But then she did hear the other. And after that said she went out to that little back stoop and just set there, trying to think what to do.”

Ham pauses there, forks up another fish stick bite, and sees my face. He lays the fork down.

“Now your granddaddy,” he says, “was one of the kindest men I ever knew.” He holds my eyes to his. “Don't you let nobody ever tell you anything different than that.”

THE IRON WATER
in our house puts rust in our sinks, in our toilet bowls. Rust in the shower, rust in our clothes. We drink rusty water, chomp rusty ice cubes, eat potatoes, macaroni, and rice boiled in a rusty brew. Is it the iron water, I wonder, puts the copper hue in our blonde hair? Our dinner plates dull a mild orange, same color as our underwear. Our father says it is good for us, that it builds up our blood. During a 4-H meeting at our house, Becky Weelis goes to the bathroom, looks in the commode, and screams.

While our father's at his meetings in Charleston, Sam and I must keep the coal furnace fed. In our house, ghosts rise, not fall, so the basement is less a scary place than a curious one, the place where the house starts to end and the outside to begin, a laboratory for experiments in science class bread mold. Our mother doesn't like us stoking the hopper alone, so Sam and I descend together to the boardwalk
over the coal-watery floor, usually in our pajamas because it's a right-before-bed and right-after-you-wake-up kind of job. We take turns stepping into our father's enormous rubber overshoes, then wading puddles to the coal bin, choking up on our shovel handle, and scooping a load. This is where we are, a month after Christmas, when Sam tells me again what he's going to do.

“No,” I command. “You can't. You can't.”

Sam heaves a shovelful over the hopper rim, waits until the skattle sounds end. “Yeah.” Nonchalant. Resigned. Melodramatic. Sam can emanate all three at the same time. “I'm going to.” He hands the shovel to me.

It was ordering I tried last time, so this time I switch to beg. “Please, Sam. Please. Please don't.”

“I've already made up my mind.” He walks out of the overshoes, pivots regally, and his Pufnstuf pajamas retire up the wooden stairs.

That afternoon I don't
have
to go in there. No one's sent me after anything. Usually I dare not enter even the room we must pass through to get to the little study room, but today, I cup my mouseskull in my hand, turn the knob, and step down in.

The little study room is unheated but brilliant. Winter sun. Dazzling motes. A sink and a toilet along one wall from the days, I've been told, when a “servant” stayed here. The floor tilts a little from every corner, all of it running down to a slight center sag. I stand against the wall on an uphill edge, and I look around. At the clutter of the rolltop desk that gives the little study its name. The joint of pipe running up from the old oil stove in the kitchen below. The spider dust, the insect husks, the fly crusts over every place the room lies flat.

Then I brace for the terror, I wait. Until I realize that I am less scared than separated. My eyes not touching my mind, my heart not touching my guts, not touching my legs and arms, and my iron-thickened blood
standing still. Nothing touching nothing, so there is no channel for the scared to move through. I already know, from errands past, that there is no box of bullets. No box of nails.

There is rust in the toilet, rust in the sink, but no rust in the sag of that varnishless floor.

BINGO HAS PUPS
. Mickey does, too—the only time in my life or theirs such a coincidence occurs, and I know it's because of Ham in the icehouse. Blizzard of cats. Downpour of dogs. Early February wet false thaw, and Bingo has hers in the garage like she always does, under a wobbly old table, and like always, she has three girls and one boy. Mickey, with her significantly higher IQ, shifts her birthing places, and we have to sleuth a little before we find her under the front porch. I lie on the steps in a cold drizzle, angling a flashlight through the crack, and finally I count eight. Because we still have three pups—now dogs, actually—from earlier litters, this makes our total seventeen.

It takes a while to think up twelve new names, and “Taffy” is not one of my best. But Taffy's Sugar Daddy–colored hair is the softest of all, and it is Taffy Ham chooses. As soon as she is weaned, and without Ham saying a word to any of us, to my parents or to hers, there Taffy is one evening when I carry in Ham's plate. She's curled up against Ham's sideways belly on the cot.

We are forbidden to bring animals inside, but Ham is a grown-up and a guest. Taffy turns quickly snobblish and prematurely mature, like a little girl gone beauty contestant too young. Never does she leap off the cot and clamor at my legs like a normal dog would do, choosing instead to tuck in closer to Ham, haughty under his palm. By now it is April, still light when I carry out the plate, and the space heater less often turned on. With each warming day, my anticipation builds. Surely the sock must soon come off.

One unseasonably warm evening I burst in, but right after I see the same old sock, my attention is snatched by something else. The icehouse is tumbly with a sharp glassy smell, like the prisms in Polly Sharon's chandelier let loose to somersault through air. Smell of the old men on the Rexall steps. Smell of Delvin Dock when we give him rides to town. And the truth is, always in Ham's complicated aroma lies a liquor layer, but since he's come to live with us, that smell is smothered down under others, and I've already figured out it's part of the deal he's made with my father. Then I'm reaching his plate to him, and he's reaching back, when something happens. I let go the plate too soon, he grabs hold too late, and the food falls to the floor.