Tina Mcelroy Ansa (23 page)

Lord help me, she thought, I think I miss him already.

Out on U.S. 90, Lena had meant to gun the motor and fly into town. Instead, she found herself cruising along at the speed limit while singing softly to herself,

All day long, she tried to play catch-up. Rushing into meetings breathlessly to be greeted with puzzled disapproving faces. Getting someone else to collect and deliver the cakes for the raffle at the church even though the nuns and ladies who provided the baked goodies all said how surprised they were and how disappointed the children were that she didn’t come herself.

Through it all, she went about the day singing the same tune under her breath the way she, as a child, had heard Dinah Washington purr it on her parents’ old 78 rpm records.

She sang it in her off-key fashion with such quiet contentment that the women at her realty office got a little miffed that Lena was not a bit more contrite about throwing a monkey wrench in their well-ordered schedule two days in a row. All day at the hospital and she wasn’t even sick, they thought. Then, a whole morning of scheduling wasted. And at the end of the week, too.

The women—for only women worked at Candace and Lena never had to face even a mention of sexual discrimination—moved around the bright and airy office complex behind Lena and looked at each other out of the sides of their faces. Wanda, Brenda, Carroll, Deborah, Caryl, Dorothy and Lois—friends of a sort since elementary school—knew Lena was usually sensitive about her nonsinging voice. Now, the women noted silently and with raised eyebrows, here she was singing out loud as she signed contracts or headed out the door to show a special client a property. Then, here she would come back in singing the same tune. And she didn’t sound too bad, either.

Just more of Lena’s luck, they thought.

Her employees all knew she was born with a veil over her face, and although they appreciated working in the caul’s lucky aura, they did tire of Lena McPherson always getting first pick of anything new or nice or eligible in town, or in the state, for that matter. She seemed to meet the new men in town in just the same way she was always the first to sport the newest fashions. She looked good in the clothes, but the affairs seemed to die abirthing.

“Hell, it never work out, do it?” local women from Savannah to Atlanta asked each other over the phone. The newly divorced president of the nearest agricultural college—”Man still husky in his fifties!”—a few years before was the last straw.

Her former grammar school classmates, returned to Mulberry and the South from Southern California and upstate New York and Minneapolis
with ended marriages and nearly grown children in tow, would hardly be able to keep from cutting their eyes at her in Mass. “She didn’t even hardly mess over that last one. That college president. Didn’t hardly even mess over him.”

“Well, it still ain’t right that she just
automatically
get the new men ’cause she got the prettiest clothes in town. Shoot! I do very well, thank you, for a schoolteacher. And I could stand to meet a man myself.”

After Lena’s last dating fiasco, Toya, an office assistant, met her boss at the espresso machine and laughed, “Oh, Miss McPherson, you probably gon’ end up marrying the
garbageman
!”

The married women in town were the worst.

“Lord, ham mercy, all these young single women here,” her married sisters would proclaim at parties where she was one of the “young single women there.”

“Lord, let me get my
husband
and go home. Let me get my
husband
from up in through here with all these young single women with no children and no responsibilities and go home.”

If Sister were present, she would always lean over to Lena and say,
“Please
, take your
husband
and get away from here. Please! Get him off my bra strap.”

Lena had learned a thing or two in being a pretty single woman for more than two decades. She had learned to say “No!!!” whenever the husband of one of her colleagues or clients asked her, “Lena, want to know a secret?”

When Lena had first hurried in that afternoon, flushed and radiant in her fire-engine-red suit and red patent-leather Gucci mules, she had muttered something about an emergency at home that kept her all morning, but that did little to placate her people. They took into consideration that she had spent all the day before in the hospital. But that was yesterday and folks had
business
they wanted to conduct.

Some, like the receptionist, Mrs. Jeffries, who had known Lena practically all her life, were genuinely concerned.

“Good God, Lena, where you been?!! We didn’t know what had
happened to you. Mr. Jackson called three or four times. Come here, baby, you got a piece of thread on that pretty suit. Why, Lena, we thought you was
dead
out there by the river.”

Lena just gave her a quick hug and a quick apology. “I’m so sorry to have worried you all.” Then, she moved on.

“Well, we called you four or five times,” Wanda said as she gathered papers into her briefcase and popped the screen off on her computer. But all Lena offered in explanation was an absentminded “Uh-huh,” because her mind was on Herman, wondering if he would be at home when she got there.

Precious gave Lena the names and numbers of missed appointments who would not be placated by a call from a personal assistant.

“Mr. Potter at the bank said he didn’t think you had ever missed an appointment. Mr. Jackson finally came by this morning just after you called. He said he was ’bout to head out toward your house if he didn’t get an answer. And Miss Louise won’t believe me when I tell her you had vegetables for lunch. She wants to talk with
you.”

When Precious had finished her litany of guilt, she stopped and looked at Lena intently.

“Can I do something else for you, Miss McPherson?” she asked as she poured her boss a crystal goblet of mineral water and brought it to her desk.

When Lena smiled her thanks and shook her head, Precious leaned down and really looked at Lena.

“Really, Miss Mac, are you okay? You look kind of funny.”

Lena just laughed and waved Precious on back to her work. “Oh, I’m fine,” she assured her.

Lena
felt
kind of funny. Although her attention was now on her myriad duties and responsibilities—juggling real estate, personal, community and business concerns the way she always did—her real focus was out at her house: the ghost of a man with whom she had spent the morning.

In just a matter of a few hours, Herman had made Lena feel as if she truly had always had someone watching over her. She felt as if
throughout her life, he had taken her firmly and gently by her shoulders between his two strong hands and turned her out of harm’s way.

It seemed Herman had been watching over her all her life, all day and all night.

It had made Lena feel safe and protected to hear Herman tell that morning of times he had seen her in trouble and tried to help. Of times he had tried to veer her away from some scary, frightful ghost. Of times he had even wrestled like Jacob with the angel to keep some angry lonely vindictive spirit from overwhelming her. The images began to soften her memories of those terrorizing times.

Then it came to her.

Herman was her guardian angel!

Lena immediately thought of Sister Gemma in fourth grade who had instructed all the students at Blessed Martin de Porres Elementary to leave a little room on the edge of their seats for their guardian angels to sit.

“Now, he’s with you all the time and it’s only right to think of him,” Sister said, for the guardian angel was always a “him.” Years later, Lena was still angry with herself for not having questioned the automatic male gender of all guardian angels. “So, just scoot over a bit when you sit at your desk or in the pew in church. Even if it’s not a Catholic church,” the chunky Irish nun assured the Protestant children in the class.

“You see, you don’t even have to be baptized into the
one true church
to have a guiding spirit. No, you don’t. God gives one to each and every soul He creates. Catholic and Protestant. Jew and Gentile. Isn’t our Lord generous?”

Lena had to chuckle at the memory now. She certainly felt blessed with the Lord’s generosity in sending Herman to watch over her. She
even looked over her shoulder every now and then to see if he was standing there the way he had stood in her bathroom that morning.

She handled her duties, made apologies, smoothed ruffled feathers, soothed concerned townspeople. But the whole day, she was thinking about this solid corporeal ghost she had last seen disappearing in her bathroom.

“A ghost!” she would say softly to herself. Her mind landed briefly on Rachel.

Umm, she thought suddenly, I wonder if Rachel knows Herman. Maybe, she had something to do with his coming here, she speculated.

Then, she thought, If he died a hundred years ago, maybe he was a slave, too, like Rachel! It was a sobering thought. But to Lena, Herman did not look any older than thirty or so. She assumed that spirits did not continue to age after death.

She continued to calculate in her head as she sat at the big flat teak table she used as a desk and returned missed phone calls, if he died in 1895, then slavery still existed when he was born.

Maybe, he looks younger than he is, she thought.

What she really wanted to do she could not: reach for the phone and call Sister with the news of this new man in her life.

She chuckled to herself recalling the Mae West line: “It’s not the man in your life. It’s the life in your man.”

From his smile alone it appeared to Lena that this man, though dead, had plenty of life in him.

“Herman.”

She said it softly as she sat at her desk, the telephone poised in her hand. She felt a little tingle run through her body.

“Herman.”

She said it again, the way he pronounced it, “Hur-mon,” a little louder this time, and felt a smile spread all over her face.

I
t was dark, and a big old full moon was shining in the blue-black velvet sky dotted with what looked like every star in the galaxy by the time Lena got her business day about straight and headed back to her home out by the river.

She and Precious were the last ones to leave the Candace offices. But even after a long day, Lena wasn’t a bit weary. She was so excited she could hardly keep still.

“I wonder, will he be there? I wonder if James Petersen saw him. I wonder how he’s going to come and go? I wonder where he’ll sleep … I wonder …”

She laughed at herself because she didn’t even feel like a little foolish fool.

For nearly her entire life, and especially since she had met Madame Delphie in New Orleans, she had felt in danger of being enveloped, eaten up, consumed by that other ghostly world that she knew existed. Now here she was driving as fast as she could to embrace just that world.

By the time she hit U.S. 90 along the Ocawatchee, she could feel her heart pounding as if she were sixteen and going on her first date. She was gunning the motor at 85 mph, fast even for her. But she was excited.

Her stomach felt as if it were full of butterflies. And her entire body felt flushed as if she had driven into a wall of fire. She dropped a window and let the cool spring evening air into the car. The night air felt chilly on her skin, but she was still hot.

Her heart had not settled down since she heard the first “Ahem” outside her shower that morning. It was still beating wildly in her chest, and she unfastened the shiny top button on the jacket of her suit to give her heart a little more room.

Lena hit the CD selector and smiled when Billie Holiday’s voice joined the sound of the night wind whistling through the automobile.

When she crossed the wooden bridge spanning the Ocawatchee on her dirt road, she felt for a moment that someone had arranged a greeting party for her. All over the surface of the river, flowing clear and pristine in the darkness, lightning bugs—thousands of them, it appeared to Lena—floating in droves, signaled their welcome to her in green fluorescent flashes.

BLINK-BLINK, BLINK-BLINK, BLINK-BLINK.

There were so many fireflies that it was difficult to see the reflection of the sorrel moon on the clear glassy surface of the river. It seemed there were hundreds more than the night before when she had first noticed them.

And there was music in the air. So many animal noises that the racket drowned out Lady Day. Tree toads, said to be in danger of extinction worldwide and a harbinger of the end of life, seemed to be
having a noisy convention on Lena’s land, all singing alto. Frogs on the banks of the river added their bass with deep throaty roars. Cicadas, awake after a seven-year slumber, sang their sopranos and falsettos on cue. Other crickets and creatures of the night joined their chorus to the symphony already being played.

Altogether, they sounded like a true symphony. The din grew louder and louder as she neared her house. Night birds hooted and screeched. A family of bobwhites began calling to each other—”Bobwhite! Bobwhite! Bobwhite!” A lone loon put in her crazy-sounding laugh.

And Lena had to laugh, too.

The symphony was turning into more of a shivaree.

The fireflies, flying low right along with her car, frolicked in the air, lighting the way along with the Mercedes’ headlights cutting through the tunnel of darkness formed by the overhanging oaks and pines along a stretch on her road.