Midsummer's Eve (7 page)
Authors: Kitty Margo
Okay, time for the old reality check. If I would get laser resurfacing, a tummy-tuck, a boob lift, teeth veneers and the much
-
ballyhooed butt implants, it’s entirely possible that I could pass for maybe 40. Although
,
a man would have to have some serious cataracts clouding his vision and glasses thick enough to pick up Sirius Radio for me to pass as 29.
I could always get the above mentioned cosmetic surgery, plus some, and present my new and imp
rov
ed Beyonce
body before Adam’s awe inspired gaze making him pea green
I think maybe I was Scarlett in another life
with jealousy. What a joke. Who am I trying to kid? I would have to get surgery to slant my eyes, along with long black silky straight hair extensions to entice that man.
Nevertheless
,
I had come to a major life decision. I was finished with love. Not even going to go there anymore. Nope. It just doesn’t work for me and it certainly isn’t worth the
accompanying
heartache.
Besides, I have a history of falling for the wrong man, normally a younger man with a fondness for the alcoholic beverage. Like a lot of women, I fluttered toward the bad boy type like a duck to a June bug. A nice hard-working executive type in a suit and tie has zero appeal for me. I desired an attractive, yet rugged outdoorsy man. One in form fitting jeans who enjoys going out and having a jolly good time and as a general rule that seemed to entail drinking, going to clubs and flirting with women.
Oh no! Now Leanne Rhimes is singing
How Do I Live Without You
. Of all things! Time to change the station. Aerosmith,
Love In An Elevator
. We never did that. This could be a safe song. I turned the radio on full blast and tried, unsuccessfully, to drown out my thoughts
.
Four
I
n Twin Rivers snow is a rar
e
occurrence. However
,
the following
Friday shortly after lunch
the skies turned a dull grey and li
ght flurries peppered down. I’
d been so caught up in m
y own misery lately that I hadn’
t heard the weather forecast. And, to
tally shocking, my parents hadn’
t called with their usual Weather Channel update and urgings to rush to the grocery store for bread and milk.
Okay, borrowing from another nursery rhyme, my
cupboards were bare. Food hadn’
t been first and foremost on my
mind in recent weeks. This brought back memories of the many nights, in the beginning of our relationship, when
Adam
would come to my house after work and we would grill steaks and corn on the cob…never mind. I hurried to Food Lion to stock the cabinet and fridge
since I knew I would soon be
having a visitor
.
Sure e
nough, when I arrived back home
Mallory
, one of my best friends and
also an employee
,
was sitting on my porch swing with duffel bag in hand. She has developed a habit of camping at my house during snow and ice storms. The girl is petrified of being stuck in her house
alone when the power goes out, and since I have gas logs
,
we can stay warm even if it does. To be honest, I was thrilled to see her. At least I would have company for the weekend and wouldn’t be snowbound alone.
We were debating on whether to cook spaghetti or lasagna when my parents called and invited us to supper next door. By the time we wa
lked the path between my house and my parent’s
the light flurries had changed to big fat flakes and the snow was coming down in earnest.
We were greeted at the door by the entici
ng aroma
of my dad’
s down home Southern cuisine
. He had cooked a mouth-watering chicken stew consisting of chicken, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, one of his red hot peppers, Spicy V-Eight Juice, and enough butter to clog at least 90% of your arteries. For desert he whipped up his famous snow cream.
Mallory
ate, as usual, like a small elephant. She is blessed with one of those amazing metabolisms that allow her to pig out at will and never gain one stinking ounce. Of course, it also helps that her favorite activity is bedroom related and a calorie-burning workout in itself. And trust me; she burns an outrageous amount of calories at said activity.
After a supper that had us swearing we wouldn’t eat again for three days, we moved to the living room. It was a cozy
room, with
afghans thrown across the backs of a floral patterned couch and chair that were beginning to
show signs of wear and tear. Although
if you asked my dad he would insist the furniture still had several good years of quality usage.
Dad grew up duri
ng the Great Depression and e
ven to this day, he refuses to waste anything. Before he would take money out of
his bank account, he would
rather
do without. Don’t even get him started on buying on credit. It has never been an option for him, and it will bring you a heated lecture on the perils of debt. He firmly believes that if you don’t have the money to buy it, you don’t have any business with it.
Cozy by the fire, I was reminded of the many autumn evenings spent sitting around a campfire and roasting marshmallows when my son was small. And what is my favorite campfire activity? You got it! Ghost stories, of course!
“
Do you believe
in ghosts,
Mallory
?”
T
he wind howled
through the eaves of my parent’
s old house, causing the living room lights to flicker eerily. Oh boy! What an appropriate ambiance.
“You know I do! Don’
t start that shit,
Eve
!” W
e moved away from the intense heat radiating from the crackling fire.
I never understood why Dad wouldn’t just spring for central heat instead of dealing with
all the trouble associated with
heating with wood.
I stifled a smile as we settled back against colorful throw pillows and she seemed to turn quite pale. Bless her heart. I should really be ashamed of myself for tormenting someone who fully believed that spirits hovered in the air around us.
“
This house is haunted y
ou know?” I leaned toward her,
all the while studying her eyes for her reaction. As if on cue, one of Dad’s guinea hens came running around the house screeching that God-awful racket they make and the poor girl almost found herself in the attic. “My mom has frequent visitors from the other side.”
“
Shut up,
Eve
! Now dammit! I mean it!”
“It sure is haunted,”
my mother, Evelyn
, agreed. The woman could hear a pin drop.
My mom is short, plump, with a head full of white hair that she has shampooed, set and sprayed, or I prefer to use the term lacquered, into submission every Friday morning.
Now my parents are two of the most well loved people in the entire county. Everyone in our town, even the ones who aren’t any relation to us, calls my dad “Pa” and asks Mom when she
is going to fix one of her mouth watering
country breakfasts for them. To give you an inkling of how old fashioned my beloved parents are, Mom still refers to her underwear as step-ins, and Dad wears britches and says things lik
e, “I reckon I better go over yunder and get me a poke to put these arsh taters in.”
“
In fact,
this whole area is haunted,”
M
om continued. They’s a old plantation house about a mile from here with a graveyard in back where the slaves was buried. They’s been a whole lot of strange happenings back
there
in them woods behind the house, I can tell you. We have lived here for fifty year and I knowed this was a
str
a
nge place the week me and Joseph
got married and he brung
me here. I just got a feeling.”
“
What happened?"
Mallory
leaned forward, scared shitless, but eager to hear her answer.
Now you rarely catch my mom without a dip of snuff in her jaw, Tuberose, and tonight was no exception. She picked up her spit cup, an empty Maxwell House coffee can stuffed with tissues, and spit a healthy stream of tobacco
juice
. “Tell her what you seen, Jo
seph
.”
Dad is 80 and no matter how much my sister and I complain or worry about his health, he continues his daily trips to the garden during the hottest months of the
summer
growing vegetables to sell at the local Farmer's Market. Age is slowly creeping up on him, but when we were teenagers and watched the
Tarzan
movies every Sunday
without fail, my sister and I were convinced he was the spitting image of Johnny Weissmuller.
“You might not believe what I’m about to tell you, but it’s the God’s honest truth
,
Mallory
.
” He settled back in his recliner to get comfortable. “
When I was about fifteen
,
a bunch of us went coon hunting right back yunder behind the house in the graveyard. It was my daddy, his two brothers, and me and my br
ot
her
.
I wo
n’
t never forget that night as long as I
live. I was carrying a coon
in a sack and walking through the woods, when we heard something running through the leaves making a terrible racket. We thought it was a coon. My daddy shined his light toward the noise. Huh! I
t
weren’
t no coon!"
“What was it?”
Mallory
asked totally engrossed in the story.
“Well, I’
ll tell you,
Mallory
. It was a little black boy running as fast as his chubby little legs would carry him. He would stumble and fall, git right back up and strike out running again. He looked to be about 3 year old. It was cold that night and all he was wearing was a cloth diaper. Them dogs was getting closer to him, so he stopped at the bottom of a hickor’ nut tree and looked up, then looked back at the dogs and started up that tree.”
“He had a real hard time climbing the tree, but made it to the first set of limbs. He held on to the limb above him and stood there while them dogs was barking like crazy and trying to jump up the trunk of that tree at him. When we got to the tree we shined our flashlights up into it and just watched him for a few minutes. Didn’t none of us say a word. It was hard to believe that a small child had clomb a tree that any of us would have had a hard time climbing and was standing on a limb looking at us. But he was.”
Dad shook his h
ead, remembering. “He was
just a crying. I guess them dogs had sceared him pret
ty bad. My daddy finally said, “
Joseph
, climb up that tr
ee and bring that youngun down.”
So I handed him my flashlight and started up the tree. I watched the little boy as I was climbing the tree. He had big ole fat tears rolling down his cheeks and he was trembling. I guess from being cold and
from being sceared of the dogs.”
I watched
Mallory
’
s face, as I had heard the ending to this story hundreds of times from my grandpa.
“
When I got within arms reach of him, close enough to touch him, he just
disappeared
right in front of my eyes. In front of all of us."
“
He disap
peared?”
Mallory
glanced
sideways at me. She was painfully aware that my parents were telling the truth, since my mom held regular conversations with God, and neither of them had ever been known to tell a lie. “What did you do?"
“
I reckon I broke some kind of speed record for climb
ing back down a tree. I was fif
teen, but it sceared the daylights out of me and
my brother
so bad we hung on Daddy’
s coattails till we got back out of
them woods. To this day, I ain’
t never been as sceared as
I was that night! I remember walking back home with my
eyes glued to the ground. None of us was going to risk looking up in them trees and seeing that little boy again. In fact, it was several year before any of us went back in them woods again,
‘special after dark.”
“
And even now, do you still believe the little
boy disappeared?”
“
I don’t just believe it,
Mallory
. I k
now it as good as I know I’m se
tting here. I seen that little b
oy just as plain as I see you se
tting there now. Three grown men and two grown boys seen him. One person might can
‘
magine something, but when five sets of e
yes see the same thing that ain’t no ‘magination.”
“Have you seen him since that night?”
“No, I ain’t never seen him ag
a
in. But several other men have been in the woods hunting at night and seen him. He’s still out there.”
“
It weren’t long after you seen the little boy that we had to start
fighting for bed cover, was it?”
Mom laughed, spitting into her coffee can.
“Right around that time,” Dad agreed. “
I woke up one night freezing to death, cause my cover was gone. I reached down to pull it back up, but soon as I did it slid back down to the
foot of the bed. I thought Evelyn
was hiding at the foot of the bed and playing a trick on me. So, next time I grabbed it and held it tight. I thought she sure was strong, cause it was all I could do to hold on to that cover! Then I turned loose of the cover expecting to hear her fly back agai
nst the wall and come up cussin’
, but I didn't hear nothing. I got up and tu
rned on the light and she weren’
t there. I opened the bedroom door and wen
t in the living r
oom. She was se
tting by the
fire. I asked her why she weren’t in bed and she said, “c
ause something keeps pulling the durn cover off
me!”
“
Has it
happened since?”
“
A couple times a
year,”
Mom answered, not seeming overly concerned with the paranormal activities in her house.
“
Have you ever thought
about moving to another house?”
The toe of
Mallory
’s
shoe made a steady rat
a tat tat on the tile floor as
she glanced nervously around the room.
“Foot naw! Ain’
t nothing
gonna make us leave our house
.
Besides, he
don’t really bother
us. Mostly
just aggervate
s
us
and keep
s
us from getting a goo
d nights sleep. You ain’
t got nothing to worry about when you know God is in the house and I knowed He
was in this house the day He se
nt me an angel!"
“
God sent Mom
an angel concerning my son, JoJo
,”
I informed
Mallory
, who seemed to have settled down somewhat when the discussion had switched f
rom aggravating ghosts to heavenly beings
.
“
He sure did! Lord, I won’t never forget it as long as I live. It was a miracle is what it was. A miracle straight from heaven. I ain’t a gonna lie to you about it. I was having a terrible time, just terrible when
JoJo had
his accident. H
e was at work
one day
when a steel beam fell from above
him
and hit his head. H
e was knocked off a stepladder through the air about ten feet and landed on his back on concrete. He suffered broken bones in his back, his neck, a fractured skull, and had a brain bleed. I didn’t know whether
my baby
was going to make it or not. I’m here to tell you, it was touch and go there for a while and me and his mama like to worried ourselves to death.
I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. All I did was
pray and
worry about him.
Yes
siree, I worried about that child day in and day o
ut.”
“She cried day in and night out,”
Dad agreed.
“
Finally, when I had all I could take, I fell down on my knees one night and commenced to telling the Lord how worried I was and asking Him if there was any way He could lift that burden off of me?”
“The next morning
I got up and went to Food Lion to get groceries. I was about half way through the store when I bent down to get a box of grits and out of nowhere the most beautiful black lady you ever did see squatted down beside me. She was wearing a white shirt and a pair of white pants and had long black flowing hair. I smiled at her, then grabbed my box of grits and pushed my buggy to the next aisle.”
“I picked up several
m
ore things and when I reached over
to get
Joseph
’s fiber cereal
, there she was again. She didn’t have a buggy and she wasn’
t picking up any groceries. She was just standing there. I just thought maybe she was a little tetched in the head or something
,
so we smiled at each other again and I kept on going
to the next aisle. Wouldn’t you know it
, as soon as I turned to go up the next aisle there she stood. She was just standing there
,
smiling at me. Just me. Other people were passing by her without even bothering to speak to her, which I thought sure was rude. I started to ask her why she was following me when I passed
by
her, but I didn't. I guess she was making me nervous, because I just kept on going.”
“When I turned the corner to go up the next aisle she was standing in the middle of the aisle again. I had to know why she kept on following me, so I pushed my buggy to the side and walked up to her and said, “It seems like everywhere I go you are always there.”
She smi
led the most beautiful, peaceful and
loving smile and said, “Yes, I am. Isn’t it good to know that I am always with you?”
“I don’
t know why, but I reached out my hand to touch her and when I did it was like electricity shot down my arm and through my whole body, and a
peaceful
feeling come over me
like I ain’
t never felt before or since. I think I must have blacked out for a minute or two, because when I c
ome to I left my grocery cart se
tting in the middle of Food Lion and walked all over that store and out into the parking lot looking for her. But she was gone. I got in the car and come home and fell to my knees beside my bed and prayed. I prayed until I heard just as clear as you hear me spea
king now, “Do not fear
, Evelyn
. He will recover
.”
“
That was all I needed to hear.
I stopped worrying
about JoJo
after th
at, cause I knowed
the
good Lord would
keep H
is word and make him well again
.
And he did.
”
“Do you really think it was God?”
“Ain’
t a doubt in my mind
,
Mallory
.”
At 9:00 on the dot Dad grabbed the remote and switched on the TV to
boxing. There wouldn’
t be any more stories from him tonight. The man was addicted to the sport.
“We need to get going.”
I grinned at
Mallory
and pointed to Dad as he punched the air each time one of the boxe
rs made a jab at his opponent. “
Thanks
for supper and the snow cream.”
I hugged both of my parents and my mom hugged
Mallory
.
“
Come back to see us anytime,
Mallory
,”
Dad said, his eyes never once wavering from the television screen.
We arrived home just in time to see
Anderson Cooper, on
AC360
. I watched for a while, until I heard
Mallory
snoring. Then I covered her with a blanket and went to bed.
The next morning
when I
reluctantly crawled out of bed
it was still snowing. After a breakfast of French toast, scrambled eggs and bacon,
Mallory
stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, while I sliced and diced potatoes, onions, carrots and garlic and added them to a pot roast in the crock-pot to slow cook until supper. I love the smell of pot roast simmering, especially on a cold, snowy day.
We stretched out in recliners close to the fireplace as the driving wind sent the snow splattering against the windowpanes.
Mallory
isn’t the news junkie that I am, so I channel surfed until I found an interesting Lifetime Movie. It was about the ghost of a young woman, who was killed by her husband’s jealous brother, and has come back to haunt the residents of an old Mississippi plantation, my kind of movie.
I watched snowdrifts piling up on the window ledge, and icicles forming on the eaves of the front porch and on my wind chimes as they did a troubled little line dance in the wind. Maybe I should bring them in, but I was too comfortable to move. Snow, the delicious aroma of pot roast, and the warmth of a fireplace are a drowsy combination.
