Ghost on Black Mountain (20 page)

“She’s colored, ain’t she?”

Pure anger washed over me and ran out my shoes. Nada said we was supposed to ignore white folks’ ways and remember they’re the ignorant ones. But sometimes I thought I might pop wide open. Nada came up behind me where I was standing in the kitchen and placed a hand on my shoulder, reading me like one of her spells.

“My wife is lazy. I don’t know why I ever married her. She ain’t nothing like my mama. She’s going to clean my house like a good wife should.” He shoved the money at Mrs. Dobbins.

“I’ll make sure Shelly doesn’t go to your house again.”

“You best believe there’ll be trouble if she does.” He stomped out of the room and slammed the front door.

Nada pulled me back from the door just as Mrs. Dobbins stormed through. “Shelly, do not go to that Pritchard house again.”

I was polishing the already polished silver. “Yes ma’am.”

“Did you say anything to offend Mrs. Pritchard?”

“No, we got on real good.”

“That Hobbs Pritchard is as mean as they all say. Our church is better off without the lot of them.” She made a show of putting my money in a jar inside the cupboard. “For a rainy day.”

Yeah, whose rainy day?

When Mrs. Dobbins left, Nada turned from the kitchen sink and went to the cupboard. She pulled out half of the rolled-up bills and pushed them at me. “You can’t be thinking on that anymore.”

“We’ll get in trouble.” I took the money anyway.

“How? It’s yours.”

“Nellie’s in trouble.” This slipped out.

“You seeing haints around her?” Nada went back to the sink.

“Yes ma’am. Something is going to happen.”

“It don’t take no spirits to tell me that. You can’t go around her no more.”

“Yes ma’am.”

You could’ve knocked me over with a straw when Nada came to me on New Year’s Day saying I could go help Nellie one more time.

“You said I couldn’t go. Hobbs don’t want me there.”

“He’s gone for now. That girl’s got to have some help.
You go over there and tell her what you know. Get it over with. Then come home. That’s all you can do. The rest is up to her.”

“Yes ma’am.”

By the time I got to Nellie’s house, the worst had happened. Merlin had weaseled his way in and was standing in the corner of the kitchen all cocky. Nellie seen him. I know she did, but she only laughed at me for being a fool. That put my feelings on my shoulders. I followed her up to that creepy attic where she found the wooden box. It was a burying box that folks put keepsakes in to bury with their loved ones. The bad had started and couldn’t be stopped. I know that now in hindsight. When Nellie pulled that necklace out, my stomach went sour. Then she touched that lock of gray hair, and chills moved through the air. All of a sudden I saw what Hobbs had done to his stepmama. I watched it play out. He held a pillow over her face. She struggled something terrible before she ran down and her spirit left her body. He pulled her out of the bed and onto the floor so it looked like she tried to get up but fell dead. Her name was Bess, and her heart was good. She was the old woman spirit.

Bess appeared behind Nellie in the attic and nodded at me. “You got to see what she’ll do if she don’t leave.”

Nellie didn’t hear her, only me.

I saw it all in clear pictures. Nellie holding the ax over her head. Blood, Lord Jesus, the blood. Them horrible vacant eyes where Nellie had gone out of her mind.

The room grew too little, and I got myself out of there. I don’t even know what I said to Nellie. She was a curse on me and I never warned her about a thing. Later, when I calmed down, not telling her what I seen weighed heavy on me.

A week later, I slid off from the Dobbins’ house with the thought I would stand on Nellie’s doorstep and tell her
everything I saw. But I never got down her drive. Merlin Hocket stood in my way. He was a mighty little man. Not much taller than me and little boned like a boy. But his face told me I shouldn’t mess with him.

“Go home, little girl. Don’t shadow Nellie’s door.”

“I got to tell her some stuff and then I’m through.”

“Leave things as they are. She’s a softhearted girl. I’ll not have you convincing her to leave. I need her. You understand? Nellie will come out alive.”

I opened my mouth but never got to say a word.

“If you tell her about Hobbs’s murdering ways, she’ll go for the sheriff. She’ll get it in her head that more can be done. The right thing. That will be her death. If you tell, I’ll bring down the worst kind of curse on your family. I’m too close to let you destroy my work.” He stared at me with pure hatred.

In my heart I knew I was lost to helping Nellie. What would happen would happen. Nellie’s future was sealed when she married Hobbs Pritchard. I had to trust Merlin. I left him standing in the road. And to this day, I’ve never stepped on Pritchard property again.

The night Nellie chopped Hobbs’s head off I woke up out of a deep sleep with a scream echoing in my head. A cold sweat covered my body and for a minute I was sure Nellie had died. I wasn’t a baby, but I wanted to go sleep with Mama in her bed. What if Hobbs showed himself to me?

Time went by, and I didn’t hear a thing about Nellie or Hobbs. Then one afternoon I seen Nellie walk out behind the church to God’s spring. That water had healed the worst snakebite on my arm and saved me.

I understood why Nellie stripped down and washed. She was baptizing herself. God’s finger was touching her soul.

*   *   *

The next ghost to come visit me was Merlin. I was hanging wash on the line and there he was, standing behind one of the Pastor’s nice white shirts.

“If you want to see Nellie, be on the road in morning, early. There’ll be a truck, wave it down.”

“I thought you’d be finished with the mountain since Nellie did what she did.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “I’ll never be finished with the Pritchards.” And he was gone. He was a spiteful spirit.

But I listened to him and got myself out on the road early the next morning. And sure enough the Connors’ truck came rolling up the road. It was so foggy it was there before I could think about it. I waved like a crazy person. The truck stopped.

Mrs. Connor opened the door. “Lordy Shelly, you nearly gave me a heart attack in this fog.”

“I come to ride with you. I want to see Nellie one more time.”

Mrs. Connor opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “I don’t want to know.” She reached over and pressed some paper in my hand. “That be from Nellie.” Two one-hundred-dollar bills is what I had.

Mrs. Connor shrugged. “Don’t ask.”

I saw Nellie before Mrs. Connor did. She looked like some little old boy coming down that mountain road. When she got in, I scooted in the middle. She looked at me, thought for a minute, and then said one word: “Shelly.” That was all that needed to be said. I rode all the way to the train station in Asheville. We left her standing on the platform, waiting on a train to God knows where. Before we left I gave her a hug and whispered, “I seen you in the spring. You’ll do just fine. Don’t worry. That’s healing water.”

*   *   *

So it was over and done. The whole mountain soon tired of buzzing over Hobbs missing. They was happy, if the truth be known. As for me, months at a time would go by before I thought of the people he murdered.

Hobbs waited three years before he appeared to me, standing on my front porch like he’d come calling. “Rose is coming up this mountain. This mess ain’t over by far. It ain’t never going to end.” And then he was gone, leaving me to think on who in the world Rose could be and what wasn’t over.

Part Four

Rose Gardner

Thirty-four

M
y first memory was of Mama making a deal with one of our neighbors to sell me for a thousand dollars. The poor woman had lost her husband in the Great War with Germany, and she was lonely in an awful sad way. I was three years old but smart for my age. The widow taught me to cook, read, and cuddled me on her lap. When the time came for Mama to turn me over and take the money, she backed out. So, somewhere inside her mixed-up mind, she truly loved her only child, me. But all the same, I worried that the widow had been my only decent chance in life and one day Mama would abandon me for good. I never complained about fending for myself and made good use of the time. At five I had read the Bible through twice and found a wonderful book called
Tom Sawyer
that I swiped from a bookstore next to the shop where Mama worked. Often people looked at me with pity in their eyes:
Poor Rose, she has the worst kind of mama.
But I loved her all the same with my whole heart, the kind of love that saw no wrongs. I taught Mama to read better, did her nails, and cooked her supper, hoping these things would keep me in her favor.

Mama was a beautician who ran the numbers and conjured hoodoo spells on the side. By the time I was fourteen, she had taught me everything I needed to know about men. Useful stuff like how to get jewelry, trips, and good meals. How to make them smile when they wanted to beat me instead. I was born in Louisiana, right in the heart of hoodoo and voodoo country, New Orleans. But Mama pulled up our roots, and I couldn’t remember a thing about the city. We moved around the South, living in every state below the Mason-Dixon Line. Mama couldn’t abide Daddy and pretended he never existed. Sometimes she made out that my birth was no different from Mother Mary’s divine conception. That was my mama just full of herself. So I never had a steady male figure in my childhood. Mama looked just like Mary Pickford, and this got her a lot of attention, but the kind of men Mama picked was here today and gone tomorrow. She wore her welcome out with every relative we had and some who weren’t even kin.

When I was seventeen, we landed on our feet in Atlanta, but not before I had attended ten different high schools and gave up altogether. Mama said I was smarter than any of the kids I was going to school with. She was right, but still I wanted to go. She had found work in a decent beauty shop right close to Oakland Cemetery. The year was 1938 and times were hard. The Depression wouldn’t go away even with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Women—even the well-to-do ones—weren’t having their hair done as often. Too many times I had seen the line for the mission’s soup kitchen snake around two blocks or more. Men, women, and even kids would wait and hope they would make it through the door before the cutoff. People were living in tents and lean-tos made out of cardboard near the railroad tracks. On many nights I fell asleep to the sound of the railroad men rounding up the hobos, scattering their pitiful belongings. They always attacked at
night to catch these poor souls off guard. I wished I knew a spell that would make times get better, but hoodoo didn’t work on that big of a mess, or so Mama said. She and I shared one room over the beauty shop. For me that room was enough. Being with Mama was always enough. She made sure our stomachs were full and we had a roof over our heads. Sometimes it took me smiling pretty and sitting next to her latest boyfriend to get him to cough up the rent, but this was a small price to pay to keep our tiny family intact.

One day Mama sent me to buy her special perfume—Chanel No. 5—from Rich’s department store. She said a woman had to keep herself up because you never knew who might come walking in the shop to whisk her away. That one small bottle of perfume cost five dollars, a fortune, a week’s worth of food, Mama’s paycheck. After I had the perfume safe in a brown sack, I took my time and watched the trolleys come and go. The air was heavy, hazy, and thick that morning as if a bad storm was going to roll in from the west. My hair had turned into a million tiny curls. I came upon a crowd of men, pushing and shoving their way into a small business. The sign above the office read T
YLER’S
E
MPLOYMENT
A
GENCY
. A young man with a neat haircut, dressed in a crisp white shirt and a sharp blue tie, walked out from behind a tall counter where he had been helping several men at once. Men who all looked the same, rumpled dress coats and dusty dark pants. Their shoes had seen better days, with heels run down to nothing. Some didn’t even have shoelaces. The look of irritation on the young man’s face turned to surprise and then fear when he saw how many men were outside on the sidewalk.