I closed my eyes against what lay in Hollis’s palm. “John doesn’t like talking about it,” I said, wishing he wouldn’t talk about it either. But somehow I knew he wouldn’t let me go. I wondered if he’d even left his wallet in the garden on purpose.
“We was boys when it happened. John and Lonnie and Eugene was off to the store with Daddy but I wasn’t old enough yet to go. Mama was sick with the stomach flu. I heard a thump in her room. I went up the stairs and when I opened the door I seen her laying facedown on the floor. I reckon she had fell out of the bed. I turned her over and soon as I seen her face, I knowed she was gone. I don’t know what made me do it, but Daddy had give me a little old pocketknife. I knelt down there and sawed off a hank of her hair before I went in and called anybody.” I stared down at the dull gray clump, a gag rising in my throat. “I like to keep it on me somewheres,” he said. “Blood kin is worth a lot to me.” I looked at his face because I couldn’t stand to look at the hair. He stared into my eyes, as always standing too close. “Just like these dogtags,” he said, not taking his eyes off mine as he pulled them by the chain out of his collar. “My daddy fought in the Second World War. He killed a bunch of Japs with these right here around his neck. I think family’s about the most important thing there is. Don’t you?”
He had edged even closer to me. I stepped backward, turning my ankle. “I better get to work,” I said. My voice came out no more than a whisper.
Hollis reached and took a strand of my hair, held it without looking at it, his black eyes still boring into me. “You reckon you and John’ll have a son one day?”
I didn’t say what came to me. I hope not, if he would turn out anything like you.
I wish I didn’t remember Hollis so well. I used to believe certain houses were haunted but now I think it’s just me. One day not long ago, I saw the tail of Granny’s dress disappearing around a bend, walking along the fencerow with a bag looking for greens to cook. She always soaked them in vinegar to kill the poison. One frozen morning last winter I woke to the sounds of squealing, sure I would find Granddaddy at the barn scraping a hog, the ground beneath steaming from its warm blood. But the barn was empty and shadowed and still. I stood listening for echoes but there was only the rushing creek. If this place is haunted, at least it has good spirits along with the bad.
Not like the house where John grew up, the sulfur smell clinging to windowsills and sink drains and doorsteps. Being away from Granny and the mountain wore on me after so long, did something to my mind. I knew it was probably rats, but sometimes I heard voices behind the walls there, like babbling in a foreign language. Sometimes I saw flashes of John as a boy with a mop of black hair, hooded eyes and white skin, crouching behind doors and peering around corners, disappearing when I turned around. There was, like Hollis said, a feeling of being watched. Part of it was the pictures. Dusting the frames I examined John’s mother, wiping her face clean with my rag. Her eyes were chilling behind her glasses, dead and vacant as a wax dummy’s.
I was less nervous when Frankie left me alone in the house, driving off in his old Cadillac to check on the store. I preferred whatever ghosts or demons there were to my father-in-law, hawking phlegm into his handkerchief and chain-smoking at the kitchen table as he listened to the radio, sleeping in his chair with his mouth open and his head lolling on his shoulder. When Hollis came home for dinner, he leaned on the counter with arms folded and ankles crossed, watching me cook. Sometimes he helped with the dishes and I winced when his fingers met mine under the water, always touching me on purpose.
I had Hollis’s full attention, but it was John’s that I longed for. More and more he seemed preoccupied, his eyes seldom settling on me. If we had conversations, I started them. Sometimes after work on Fridays he didn’t come home and I knew he was at the only bar in town. When his eyes did find me I saw his disappointment. I wasn’t what he had expected or wanted. Spending my days in haunted houses, I felt like a ghost myself. By the first of September, I was starving for a little bit of life. That’s why when I saw a burning bush sprouting up by the back steps of the Odom house, something moved in me.
The bush was sick and stunted-looking, just beginning to turn red. I had been sweeping the back stoop and stopped to lean on the broom for a closer look, half expecting a voice to come out of it. When a car door slammed somewhere down the street, I woke up and glanced around. The yard was bare, the garden still weed-choked. On impulse, I ran to Frankie Odom’s shed, a lean-to with a rusted tin roof like a half-peeled-off scab. I scraped back the splintery door and saw a shovel against the far wall. I climbed over piles of junk to reach it, a nail from a rotten board scratching my leg in the process. I carried the shovel out, looking left and right to make sure no one saw.
Beside the stoop, I stood on the shovel and dug into the hard ground. When the dirt was loose enough I reached into the hole I had made and lifted the burning bush out by a rich-smelling ball of roots and soil. I took it up the steps and into the kitchen, shedding black crumbs I would sweep up before Frankie or Hollis came home. I leaned the bush in an empty mop bucket while I soaked a dish towel to wrap around its roots. Frankie had left a brown grocery sack of half-rotten tomatoes on the counter, the only yield of his miserable garden. He’d said on his way out the door that morning, “Them’s for you and John to take home.” I unloaded the tomatoes and found the burning bush was small enough to fit inside. One by one I replaced the tomatoes and folded over the sack. I sat for a while looking at my handiwork, feeling guilty and alive. When John came to pick me up I ran out holding the bag by its bottom. “Your daddy gave us some tomatoes,” I said. He looked away, switching a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other.
The next day I didn’t have to go to the Odom house. I watched John eat breakfast, anxious for him to leave. When he was gone I went to the back of the lot beside the tracks where the landlord had a shed much like Frankie Odom’s. I didn’t have to look far for the shovel. It was leaning inside the door shrouded in cobwebs. Until then, I hadn’t tried planting anything where it looked like nothing would grow. But this burning bush was different somehow. If I was careful, maybe it would live. I took the grocery bag around the house, heading for a back corner where John might never see what I had stolen. On the way, I passed the wood stacked under the bedroom window for winter, sprouting fungus and crawling with bugs. That’s when I noticed for the first time a squat door in the house’s block foundation near the woodpile, made of weathered gray boards and fastened shut with a rusty hasp. I paused to inspect it, the shovel in one hand and the grocery bag in the other. Just as I was about to move on, I heard a noise coming from under the house. I froze, not sure I had heard anything. I put down the bag and knelt before the door. Then it came again, a sly shifting. I hesitated before reaching to unlock the hasp. I pulled the door open, hinges groaning, and lowered myself on all fours. What I saw when my eyes adjusted to the gloom made my stomach turn. Under the house it was moldy and earthen and tomblike. The dirt was littered with broken dishes and Mason jar fragments, pipes close overhead with the protective mummy wrappings of winter still clinging to their joints. Thoughts of closed caskets and burial alive flickered through my head. Then, not far from my hand, I saw something from a nightmare. It was a long blacksnake, coiled around what looked like a rabbit’s nest. I gasped and scrambled backward into the light. I sat for a moment catching my breath. I had never been afraid of snakes. Granny had taught me about them. Once I held her hand in a field, looking up at one dangling from a tree branch like a black noose. “It’s just an old rat snake,” she said. “It ain’t poison.” I wasn’t afraid then because she told me not to be. But lately I hadn’t been myself. It felt suddenly important to take another look, if only because I knew Granny would have.