How the Hula Girl Sings (15 page)

For a whole week I found myself lying wide awake, unable to fall back asleep, listening to a gentle-throated moaning all alone in the night. I had heard someone calling out there in the dark myself for eight nights straight. At first I thought it was Junior in there muttering or crying to himself, but it wasn’t coming from his room. It was coming from the hall. From outside the door. I thought I was maybe losing my mind.

I laid like that for eight nights, trying to decide what to do. Finally, I got up enough courage to pry myself out of bed to take a look. I didn’t know if I was more afraid I’d see something out there that was some kind of spook or specter, some kind of figment of my lonely imagination, or that I wouldn’t see anything at all, and then that would mean I was crazy and past any kind of any hope.

I placed my bare feet along the cold wood floor, stepping lightly, holding in my breath as I listened to the gentle moan, reverberating right outside my door. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and put my hand along the gold doorknob and gave it a slow, careful turn, sure not to make any sound, feeling my heart beginning to beat somewhere within my throat. There it was. I could hear it again. A voice, calm and lilting and sweet, echoing right down the hall. I turned the doorknob, then pulled the door open

There was a shadow out there. It moved along the hallway wall in slow, regretful steps. It crept closer, closer, the moaning growing louder and louder as it moved. I sucked in a breath through my teeth and was closing the door when a thin gray hand reached out to me, cold as the grave. What I had found was much more startling than any delusion or bad dream.

It was Old Lady St. Francis all dressed up in proper funeral clothes, complete with black dress and long black gloves, a black purse, and a black veil covering her elderly face.

“All wounds do not heal …” she whispered, holding my wrist tight. “All wounds do not mend so easily …”

“I reckon not,” I whispered in reply. She let go of my wrist, then began to walk down the hall again, moaning through her black veil. I shook my head and went back inside the room and pulled on my pants and followed her down the hall, hoping to maybe steer her back to her room at the foot of the staircase.

“Forgive me, but it seems you’re not properly dressed,” she said in a kind little smile. “That’s no way to show respect for the dead,” she said, staring at my dirty blue work pants smudged with grease stains.

“I’m sorry.” I smiled. “I didn’t know I’d be going anywhere tonight.”

Then she said it again.

“All wounds do not heal …” She coughed. “Old wounds do not heal so easily …”

“We need to get you back in bed.”

“Trick-trick-trick, the walls begin to drip. Thick as blood on your lips. Trick-trick-trick.”

“That’s fine, sweetheart. How about going back to bed?”

“OK.”

She put her hand in mine and we began to make our way down the darkly lit red-carpeted stairs. I could see the outline of her face behind the veil. I could see her lips and the tip of her nose and her eyes, pale blue and huge and burning bright. She looked drugged, like she was walking in some kind of dream.

“Have you ever ridden in a limousine?” she asked me.

“Nope.” I smiled, helping her down the first flight, careful not to hold her thin little hand too tight.

“It was long and black and shined like marble. It was the prettiest car you could imagine. It took us all the way around town and through the streets and back past the church where we got married and then down La Harpie Road and out to the cemetery and then it began to rain and Mr. Wallace, the director, was afraid I was going to catch my death standing there like that, but I didn’t mind. I needed to be there. They were both there, lying two rows apart. My husband and Ben Veree in their casket boxes. They put my husband in the ground and I knew he didn’t mind sharing space with Ben. His wife wouldn’t let me see him before they laid him to rest. That was OK. I understood her pain. But at least our husbands were buried close. They were the best of friends their whole life, and that’s not a thing that’s likely to change in death.”

I nodded, holding her soft, wrinkled hand in mine.

“Here we go, sweetie.” I smiled, reaching her red wood door. “Here we are. Back to bed.”

“Lay to waste,” she mumbled. “Lay in waste. It doesn’t make sense, does it? It doesn’t seem fair to lose both the men I loved.”

“No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t seem fair at all.”

“Mr. Wallace, will you take me to the cemetery tomorrow? I’d like to visit their graves and make sure they’re doing OK.”

“Sure.” I smiled, knowing this would all be some kind of strange dream to me by the morning. “Sure. That sounds fine.”

“Good night,” she whispered, and laid down on her bed.

I closed her door quietly and crept back up the stairs, shaking my head, muttering to myself. I fell back into my bed and gave a little prayer that she would soon be back asleep and forget it all by morning, that she’d be too mean and proud to ask me to escort her out there to the graveyard.

I must have put my prayer in too late.

She knocked at my damn door at a quarter to seven in the morning, dressed in the same black dress, black gloves, black purse, and veil.

“Good morning,” she whispered. That was it. That’s all she said. The blue look had left her eyes but she was somehow still the same. I gave a little cough and cleared my throat and tried to think of something to say. It was Sunday morning. The day of rest. I had to go to work at two and had planned on sleeping in until then. But now it was too late. This lady was all ready to go. She had picked two big bouquets of bright yellow daffodils from her yard and was standing outside my door, staring at me quietly through that veil.

“Just one second.” I tried to smile. “Just let me get dressed.”

I put on my cleanest shirt and red suit coat and red pants and combed my hair and washed my face and met her at the bottom of the stairs, trying to think of something to say. But nothing would come. Somehow, I expected her to be mean. But she wasn’t. She was just quiet. Even after she started walking toward the bus stop and when we got to the end of the street, she just put her arm in mine very gently and allowed me to help her cross. Then she kept it there, placing her thin gray hand along my arm, leaning against me as if she was suddenly a lot older and much more weak. She had lost something in her life, two men, two men she might have loved very much, all on her own account.

“The bus frightens me sometimes.” She smiled, showing her tiny little teeth. “Sometimes I’m afraid I might get on the wrong one and not know where I am, so I let it go on sometimes and sometimes I wait for the next one, or the one after that.”

In her voice was all the weight of her life.

“There was no showdown or anything deliberate like that. Poor Willem found me there in our bed, not alone, not by myself, and went downstairs and got his gun and came back and shot poor Ben in the head and then placed the gun against his nose and pulled the trigger once more. I ran out of the house in my nightclothes and hid under the porch out back, and when the sheriff came and found me, they said there were pieces of Ben’s scalp and Willem’s blood all stuck together in my hair.”

I felt my mouth become a hollow little hole.

“Ben’s wife came over and broke out all the windows in the house, then she collapsed on the front porch and I ended up holding her in my arms all night, crying together like that, then that was it and I never talked to her or saw her again,” she muttered, crossing her hands. “I haven’t been here in twelve years,” she whispered. “Not since my niece, Julee, left town.”

We got off the bus at the cemetery gates and I helped her down as she held my arm tight.

The gates rose like a grave of their own, locking you in a place of slumber and rest. We stepped along the thin path until that ended and there was nothing but an expanse of dirt and grass and shiny gray gravestones that stretched right along this little hill. The founders of La Harpie had gotten something right. But not at first. They had built the cemetery on low land at first and after one spring when the river thawed and rose and flooded the town, it swept away some of the graves and deceased and replanted them somewhere closer to Mississippi. They moved the rest of the bodies up the hill, out of harm’s reach, surrounding the graveyard with a thick wood fence and iron gate that had begun to wear from the cold winter and sleepy rains. It looked like a place that might just suddenly crumble apart into dust.

“They’re never too far away …” she whispered, holding my hand tight. “Never too far away.”

We walked a little ways toward the center of the cemetery and then she stopped and let go of my arm and laid one of the yellow bouquets beside Benjamin Veree’s shiny black grave. She nodded to herself, then walked on a little more and stopped in front of Willem Tany’s headstone, holding the flowers to her chest.

“Here he is,” she muttered, holding her hand up to her face. “Here he is asleep …”

I nodded and placed my hand on her tiny shoulder and stared hard at that shiny black grave.
Willem Tany
. It was all there. A clean little life left in a few simple names and dates.

“Even the dirt looks like it’s asleep.” She coughed, reaching up under her veil to wipe her eyes with the end of a blue flowered hanky. I held in my breath and took a step back, staring down at my feet.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I wasn’t ready for this. I wasn’t ready to see him like this …”

“It’s fine, ma’am. Take all the time you need.”

She nodded and turned her head and faced the clean stone slate. I took a few steps back and began to walk away. It struck me all at once. The ground felt like it shifted under my feet. There was something there I ought to go see. There was someone there waiting for me.

I stepped lightly along the grass, barely looking at the gravestones as I passed, trying to keep my eyes shut as far as I could manage. There was nothing there I wanted to see. There was nothing there I wanted to face. I kept looking for a very tiny one, one that rose shorter than the rest, one that looked completely out of place in a cold little acre of rest like that.

Hyacinth.

It wasn’t there.

I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t remember her last name. That wasn’t true. I knew her last name as sure as the lines in my hand. But I couldn’t face that tiny cold stone.

Some wounds can’t ever be healed.

Some wounds can’t be turned away.

I went back and found Old Lady St. Francis clutching her husband’s grave, digging her thin white fingers into the stone, moaning to herself as she let it all out. Then she stopped and was still and quiet and took my hand and began to walk away. I could understand. For her, it would never be done. It would be a thing that would never be quite asleep.

We got back on the bus and she didn’t say another word. She didn’t even make another sound until we were already walking back to the hotel and she stopped and lifted her veil and tried to turn her gray little lips into a thin little smile.

“Thank you,” she mumbled. “It’s not an easy thing for me to do. Cry and burden myself on other people like that. Thank you for that.”

I squeezed her hand and helped her up the porch stairs, feeling her weight trembling upon my hand. She turned and smiled again, a thin little feeble smile, and parted her lips like she wanted to say something else but it was all OK. We had seen each other’s darkest waking dreams, and now there was nothing else that needed to be said.

I sat on the back porch that afternoon and had a few bottles of beer before work, then got changed and went off to the Gas-N-Go for my shift. The night went by pretty quick and I was still in a kind of somber, pensive mood, watching all the cars go by, switching their lights on as the dusk rolled into night, and it seemed that whole Sunday was a kind of long church ceremony and everything I did from staring out the window to mopping the floor to locking the door was somehow holy. I looked forward to going back to the hotel and sitting on the back porch or in Junior’s room and seeing his wide round face as a kind of relief. I made it home and went up to his room and couldn’t find him there, so I walked back down the stairs and outside and saw him under the back porch, digging by himself in the dirt.

“What the hell are you doing under there?” I asked, patting him on the back. He looked up. His round face was smeared with dirt. He was hunched there on his hands and knees, gritting his teeth, his lips frozen in a frown that showed all of his pain.

“It changes,” was all he mumbled back to me. “It changes everything.”

I looked down and saw what he had dug. He had dug up that yellow cigar box with the tiny bird he had found beside his head. That yellow box rested gently in his hands, opened, buzzing with flies and the musty odor of decay. I covered my mouth and backed away, shaking my head.

“What the hell did you go and dig that thing up for?” I asked, staring at his sweaty face.

“It’s some kind of magic,” he muttered over his dirty lips. “It changes everything.”

The tiny eyeless bird in the box was gone. Now there was just worms and hard-bellied insects and millipedes and dust and tiny grayed bones. There were some very thin feathers and its hard little feet twisted up tiny and thin, but it was no longer a bird, it no longer resembled anything that might have flown or breathed or lived or died. It was now something else. Something changed.

“I’ve been hearing things at night,” he muttered. “I’ve been hearing things and I wanted to be sure. I wanted to be sure if a thing is dead it doesn’t stay the same.”

His eyes were big and blue and cold. He was serious all right. More serious and stern than I had ever seen him behave.

“It changes,” he whispered, closing the cigar box. “It doesn’t stay the same.”

“It was the old lady,” I mumbled. “It was her making those sounds at night.”

Junior shook his head. “It doesn’t stay the same after you’re dead.”

“But …”

“It wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been her because she wouldn’t be the same.”

His eyes lingered over the box as he set it back in the dirt. I nodded and went inside and up to my room and laid down on my bed.