The Ming and I (17 page)

“Indeed I do, dear. So will you come with me?” I asked brightly.

“Lord no! Haven’t you even been listening, Abby?”

I hung up and called Mama. There was no answer.

I
did not go out into that dark night alone. I made Dmitri come with me. I would have taken Freddy, too, but I couldn’t find the lid for the Corning ware bowl, and I wasn’t about to have fungal fluid sloshing all over my car.

Dmitri hates riding in cars. He associates them with veterinarians and long glass thermometers that are plunged up places the sun has yet to shine. He stiffened as soon as I opened the car door, and by the time I turned on the engine, he was yowling like a rock musician with his hair caught in a wringer.

“Settle down, dear,” I said soothingly.

Dmitri settled into my lap, his claws embedded to their hubs. I yowled along with him.

By the time we got to Roselawn, we were both hoarse. When I got out of the car, it took me a few minutes to separate cat from pants leg. A light shower had commenced, and Dmitri was not enthusiastic about experiencing its charms.

“April showers bring May flowers,” I crooned.

Never an avid gardener, Dmitri was not amused.

I suppose I could have worn Dmitri like hairy yellow chaps, but he’s a rather corpulent cat, and I was worried that it would put too much strain on his claws. Personally, at that point I didn’t mind the pain. With my eyes blinded by tears I wouldn’t be
able to see the dark mist—no doubt Uma’s blood—that swirled around my car, like something out of a B movie.

It was now an hour since Shirley’s call, but her car was nowhere in sight. Any normal person would have turned around immediately, or at the very least remained locked securely in the car. A glutton for terror and pain, I dashed to the rear entrance, carrying Dmitri in my arms.

Roselawn Plantation, like any respectable southern home, had a back porch. Dmitri and I, only slightly dampened by the shower, took refuge under its generous roof to wait for Shirley. Poor Dmitri was still upset, but the frantic yowls at last subsided into low, throaty growls. Unlike Billy-Bob and Betty Jo, I carried a flashlight, and the twirling patterns I created with its beam along the porch floor seemed to distract my cat—for a while.

I suppose we had been standing just outside the back door for about ten minutes when Dmitri made it quite clear he needed to use the litter tray. A normal cat might well have been content to piddle on the porch, given that the grass was wet, but Dmitri was strictly an indoor cat that had no prior experience with porches or lawns.

“All right, all right,” I snapped, “there’s a linoleum floor just inside that door. But don’t you dare put one paw into the parlor until Shirley gets here. There’s a Yankee ghost in there who’s not just whistling ‘Dixie.’ I have his cap to prove it.”

I unlocked the kitchen door with my left hand. My right hand was holding the flashlight, and my right arm was wearing a cat. Just as the fingers of my left hand found the switch, the bulb went out. Mine and the flashlight’s.

I regained consciousness in utter darkness. I’m not talking about the dark of a moonless night, or even
the dark of a well digger’s ass. I’m talking about pitch-black, the color of Buford’s soul.

Only once before had I seen such darkness, when Buford and I made a valiantly feeble (the valor was mine, the feebleness his) attempt at a family vacation with our children. That was the summer Buford took up with Tweetie, and perhaps I should have suspected something even then, but that’s another story.

At any rate, the four of us took a motor trip to Tennessee. One of our objects was to visit the Lost Sea, which is really a small lake deep within a cavern. While on the tour our guide turned off all the lights so that we could have the thrill of experiencing total darkness.

But that night at Roselawn, the lights never came back on. Even the light in my head flickered only intermittently. In that utter darkness it was impossible to tell if I was conscious or unconscious. With no visual clues to guide me, my thoughts and dreams blended together like coffee and cream. Thanks to Dmitri’s claws, even the old reliable pinch test was useless. I hurt
all
the time.

I may well have remained in this state of sensory-deprived confusion had it not been for Mama’s powerful genes kicking in. My shnoz can’t hold a hanky to hers when it comes to smelling trouble, but it is more than adequate in the scent department. And I smelled something.

Sometimes I dream in color, sometimes I feel things, and I always hear things in my dreams, but I have never smelled anything. This then was reality, not a subconscious flight of fancy, because there was no mistaking the scent of decay.

It wasn’t a musty smell. It was dry and slightly acrid, like old gym shoes found in the back of a closet years after they were worn. It was the odor of dead bacteria and stale air.

With the return of olfaction, my other senses began to sort themselves out. In utter darkness the only way to tell up from down is by one’s sense of touch. Gradually I realized that I was lying down on my side, and not only had my body been clawed by Dmitri, but it was badly bruised as well. I was lying on some of those bruises.

I found my fingertips and felt the surface beneath me. It was earth, probably clay, but dry and covered with a layer of fine grit. With a great deal of difficulty, and not a little noise, I sat up. My head felt like a watermelon that had been bounced to market on washboard roads in the back of a truck. Make that a truckload of battered melons.

“Oh God!” I said aloud. I know I spoke aloud, because in moving my lips I inhaled some of the grit. There was, however, no echo or resonance of any kind.

Perhaps I should court your rational nature and tell you that I realized I was in a pit of some sort, and that I had been placed there by the person, or persons, who had obviously conked me on the head upon entering the kitchen. But that simply wasn’t the case. I
didn’t
know where I was. Despite my pain, I didn’t even know if I was alive or dead.

Even Episcopalians believe in an afterlife, and since I had never experienced one (not to my knowledge, at any rate), how was I to know it didn’t include pain? Surely not heaven, but that other place—the one whose name I had bantered about carelessly ever since I learned it was not a polite word. Perhaps I was there. Perhaps this was my punishment for hating Buford, snapping at my kids, neglecting Mama, ignoring C.J., mocking Wynnell’s outfits, and making fun of that frizzy-haired blond mystery writer who lives in Rock Hill.

“I’m sorry!” I wailed.

Either God didn’t answer, or I couldn’t hear him
above the throbbing in my head. At any rate my circumstances didn’t change. To cover my bets, I decided to try a full confession. Loudly, and slowly, I enumerated, in detail, my manifold sins—at least the ones I could remember. Contrary to public opinion, I have transgressed on more than a few occasions. I began with the time I was five, when I willfully drew on Auntie Marilyn’s white walls with Mama’s bright red lipstick because she wouldn’t give me a second piece of candy. I ended with dragging Dmitri, clawing and yowling, on a trip he clearly didn’t want to take.

Then it hit me like a ten-pound bag of cornmeal. Dmitri! If this wasn’t the
other
place—and I was beginning to doubt it was—my youngest and hairiest baby was missing. Perhaps he was lying somewhere near me, at the end of his ninth life.

Frantically I called his name. Like God he didn’t answer. That was no surprise. The greater the urgency in my voice, the less likely he is to come. I called again and again in a much gentler voice, but to no avail. It was quite possible the feisty feline was not dead after all, but merely refusing to acknowledge my existence. It would not have surprised me to learn that he was crouching not a foot away, and was perfectly well.

Although it was painful to do so, I slowly began to expand the perimeter of my known world. Inch by inch I explored with my fingertips. I was dreading what I might find. Call me a sentimental old softy if you will, but the discovery of a cold, crumpled cat would have broken my heart. As battered and bruised as I was, what difference did another scratch or two make, as long as it meant that my precious hair ball was still alive?

My heart stopped, and then began pounding faster than a madman on a xylophone. My fingers had encountered something, but it wasn’t a cat. It was
round and smooth except for one rather noticeable dent, and it had three holes in it, just like a bowling ball. I put my fingers in the holes, and with the fingers of my other hand to lend support, I picked it up. It was much lighter than a bowling ball, and it wasn’t round after all. Just below the thumb hole was a rough, protruding edge. I ran the index finger of my left hand along the edge. It was definitely perforated, and the strange part was, the perforations felt like teeth. Although it took me a few seconds, I concluded I was holding a human skull.

I let out a scream that would have scared the horns off the devil had he been lurking anywhere nearby. Of course it was pointless. With no one to hear me but myself, it was almost like that proverbial tree falling in an empty forest.
Almost
. The tree, however, can’t hear itself, and consequently can’t be frightened by its own noise.

Ask any psychologist; fear and anger are reverse sides of the same coin. While both emotions can be debilitating, both have their value as well. My fear was obviously not getting me anyplace, so it was time to give anger a try. This was not a conscious decision, mind you, but something instinctual. At any rate my coin flipped, and I was suddenly as mad as hell.

“Damn you!” I screamed to whoever was responsible for my circumstances.

Abigail the timid had become little Abby with the flailing broom again. Nor more flight for this bird. From now on I was ninety-eight pounds of pure fight.

My transformation was not only amazing; it was complete. I didn’t have a shred of fear left in my soul. If the devil himself—now rendered hornless—tapped me on the shoulder, I would slap him silly. And it wasn’t bravery, mind you, because bravery
can only exist in conjunction with fear; it was pure primordial adrenaline.

I fumbled crazily for the skull, and when I found it I flung it as far as I could. I heard it shatter against a hard surface, perhaps a distant wall, and was elated.

“Take that, you anorexic Yankee!” I shouted.

My shaking hands located more of Maynard’s remains: ribs, spinal vertebrae, an ulna, or was it a radius? It mattered not. As much of Maynard as I could find was sent flying in the darkness.

It became a game that was almost fun. “Hipbone connected to the leg bone, connected to the foot bone,” I chanted.

Maynard, if that’s indeed who he was, had remained remarkably undisturbed since the onset of decay. He was still dressed, in fact, but his wool uniform had not fared so well. Some buttons and a few handkerchief-size fragments here and there that fell apart in my hands were all I could account for. His bones, on the other hand, all seemed to be there, and lined up in the correct order as far as I could tell.

I was surprised, therefore—but not scared—when my groping fingers grasped another skull. I turned it over slowly in my hands. It was smoother than Maynard’s skull, and smaller. Perhaps it was a child’s skull, or that of a small woman. Uma?

Turning it over again I discovered a flat plane about four inches across. The skull tapered on the opposite side, forming a small neck. There were no eyeholes or nostrils. No sign of teeth.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said aloud. “It’s a ceramic vase. So, Maynard, you were a Yankee looter, were you?”

Maynard, Yankee that he was, didn’t have the courtesy to answer. It was time to insult him back. Still holding the vase, I groped for another bone to fling, but instead of encountering a metatarsal, or
perhaps one of his phalanges, I stubbed my fingers on what felt like yet another vase.

“Greedy bastard!”

I set the first vase down and felt for the second. It wasn’t a vase after all, but a small ceramic bowl about the size of the one I eat my Cheerios out of every morning. It was upside-down, and I wondered if my harsh treatment had overturned it or whether it had been intentionally placed that way. At any rate I was beginning to feel like a bull—albeit a small one—in a china shop. Who knew what else lay in the blackness just beyond my reach? Had either of the ceramic pieces been broken, I might have cut myself. Bleeding to death in the dark was not how I had ever imagined my demise. It was a far cry from dying in Greg’s arms at age ninety-six, with the second slice of chocolate cheesecake only half eaten beside my bed.

“Be careful,” I admonished myself, huffing and puffing. “Walk your hands across the ground like giant spiders.” Of course I spoke aloud. When one is alone with a hundred-and-fifty-year-old corpse, talking aloud
is
a sign of good mental health.

It was good advice, and fortunately I took it. My pair of giant spiders danced lightly across the grit, and within seconds each had discovered another piece of ceramic. Then another, and another. I counted nine pieces in all. Some were vases, some bowls, but one was a small ceramic box with a lid. And they were all bunched together in a space barely more than a yard square. Who knew what lay in the nether reaches of my black space?

“Jeepers, creepers, Maynard,” I gasped, “planning to set up your own store back in Boston?”

Maynard refused to answer again. As soon as I caught my breath, I would search out a big bone, maybe a nice fat femur, to fling at the darkness.

My breath! I inhaled deeply. Was it just my imag
ination, or was the air staler than before? Was my ragged breathing a result of exertion, or a real lack of oxygen?

I realized with a start that I had been taking my oxygen supply for granted. It is not, after all, a topic that comes up with any frequency. But I was now in a space that was entirely devoid of light, which meant it was tightly sealed, making it impossible for fresh air to enter as well. Or did it?

It had been as black as Buford’s heart in the Lost Sea Caverns, but we had still been able to breathe. The same long winding cave that had led us deep into the bowels of the earth, away from the light, had also admitted air. Perhaps there was a tunnel connecting this space with the outside; or perhaps I was doomed, trapped in a pit more tightly sealed than Mama’s lips when it comes to giving out compliments.