On account of Lester dying, I told Vestil I’d stay on with her that first night after the burial. Me and her had been friends and neighbors nigh thirty years, so it seemed fitting that I keep her company.
Come bedtime, she folded back the covers. “You think two quilts is enough?”
I told her with two of us in the bed it ought to be, though the wind in these here mountains can chill you to the bone even in September.
She fetched another quilt from the trunk. “I’ll lay this’n out for if we git cold on up in the night. It ain’t as warm in here as in yonder, but I can’t sleep in that bed knowing it was but two nights ago I laid there next to Lester. Prob’bly ain’t gonna sleep no way for thinking of him a-laying out there in the cold wet ground.” She set down on the trunk and commenced to crying.
“Hush now. Come morning, things’ll look different.” I helped her to bed and drawed the covers up around her bony little shoulders. Pore as a snake, she was. Then I throwed another log on the fire, blowed out the lantern, and crawled in next to her. In the quiet of night, I laid there listening to ever creak and groan of that old cabin and the beating of my own guilty heart.
Vestil rolled to her back. “Ever time I close my eyes, I see Lester’s face a-staring up at me, pleading with his eyes, begging me to help him. But wadn’t a thing I could do. That stroke took ahold of him and there wadn’t nothing I could do.”
I knowed that to be true, for the devil come for his due. Me and Lester played the fool, breaking the seventh commandment like we done. I been repenting ever day from that day to this, but Lester never would say he was sorry, not to me nor to the Lord. He’d a done it again and again if I’d been agreeable to it.
Vestil said, “Bessie, I knowed one of us was gonna die. That old hound of his come right up under the winder and set to howling. It’s true what they say. You’ll not live to see sunrise if a dog howls under your winder.”
“I believe it. My maw used to tell how the dogs howled before that little McWaters girl died in Colonel Buwing Johnson’s house over in Harlan. Not but three years old.”
“How’d the little thing die?”
“The way they tell it, the colonel built a big fine house for his bride-to-be. He was a handsome man, an officer in the War Between the States. Not long before the wedding, that girl he was fixing to marry sent him a letter by way of her brother. Told him she’d done changed her mind. Too highfalutin’ to marry a farmer, I reckon. It turned him plumb crazy. He never did finish that house. Never put the shutters on the winders nor the banister rail on the stairs.
“He finally let his sister move in there with all of her younguns. Her husband was a drunk and they was poor as field mice. One night their dogs set to howling and the littlest one come looking for her mama after she’d done put her down for the night. Fell right off them stairs and broke her little neck.”
Vestil didn’t say nothing when I got done with the story, so I fell silent, thinking her asleep. My mind turned back to Lester like a witching stick drawed to water. It’s a wonder to me the good Lord let our youngun live, mine and Lester’s, but his living was my punishment. Lord knows, he give me enough trouble—more’n all the other five put together. And that face of his brought to mind what I done ever time I looked at him. I worried that Hardy might figure out he wadn’t his, him being our only brown-eyed child and all, and the boy did favor Lester a right smart. But if Hardy or anybody else suspicioned it, nary a soul let on.
Vestil spoke of a sudden. “You ever see a mummified body?”
“Naw, that’s something I ain’t never laid eyes on,” I told her. “Don’t want to neither.”
“Back when I was growing up, this old man named Guffey lived in a tumble-down shack a few miles down the road. Folks told how he carried a mummified woman around, showing her in the towns. Some said hit were his wife. Said he’d killed her and special preserved her to make money off of showing her.
“Us younguns used to pass by his place to git to the swimming hole down in Gridley Creek, and one blistering hot afternoon, my brother Orvet come up with the idea to take a look at her on the way home. We snuck along behind weeds and bushes till we got way on up in the yard, and then we run for it. Old Man Guffey didn’t have no dogs, just a yard full of cats that scattered quick as they seen us.
“Sure enough, out in the shed, we come upon a gypsy wagon painted with her picture on the side just like they said. Showed her with orange hair, and her all laid out in a shiny green dress. Hazel the Mummy was wrote on the side in great big letters.
“Orvet eased the wagon door open and climbed up in there and the rest of us followed. I’d a rather not gone in that wagon, but I weren’t about to stand out there by myself. Miss Hazel the Mummy was in there all right and did have orange hair, but it was thin and all wore off in patches, not purty like in the picture. Her skin was shriveled up over her bones like leather, and her eyes was squinched shut and all sunk in under the lids. Her shiny green dress was faded and tattered.
“Didn’t take us long to see all we wanted to see. We snuck back out of there and run all the way home. It give me nightmares for years to come.” She sighed. “Law, I wish I’d a never brung that up.”
“It got your mind off of Lester.”
“Did till you mentioned him.”
“Bless goodness, I ain’t no help at all.” To git her mind back off of him, I commenced to tell how my Aunt Nettie died. “Thirty-six years old, standing doing her ironing with Uncle Clyde settin’ there chewing tobaccer and spitting in the fire while he cleaned his gun. That gun went off and shot her straight through the heart. She died with the iron in her hand, still holding onto it when she hit the floor. They was always people said he done it intentional. Everbody around knowed they didn’t git along. I don’t deny she was right hard to live with, but Uncle Clyde, he wadn’t that kind.”
Right after I said that, it come to me that Hardy woulda shot Lester if he’d a caught us in each other’s arms, shot me and him both more’n likely, and I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.
Vestil said, “Back where I come from, they told of a woman had a little baby and no husband. Us younguns wondered how that could be, but we knowed better’n to ask. That baby, when he wadn’t but a wee tiny thing, she took him out in the woods and left him in a cave. Got on a train with two of her gentlemen friends and took off for Lord knows where with that precious little baby laying out in a cold dark cave. Two boys out hunting heard him crying and found him.”
“Lord Jesus, she shoulda been horsewhipped,” I said. “They ever catch her?”
“Never heard tell of her agin, but that baby turned out to be a right fine man, they say.”
A shiver run through me. Lord knows what I done was wrong, but not as wicked as that. Lester caught me in a weak moment is all, touching my hair and sweet-talking me. Hardy’d been gone nigh a week, over the mountain visiting his people to coon hunt and git all liquored up with his no-account brothers. He’d take off like that from time to time. Rake around like a tom cat while I run the farm and looked after a house full of younguns. That day the younguns was all off picking blackberries out in the woods when Lester come walking up. Said he come to talk to Hardy. Later on, I figured out he knowed all along Hardy was gone.
Vestil coughed. I forced my mind back to the present and commenced to talking for my sake as well as hers. “You believe in ghosts, Vestil?”
“I’ve heard a heap about em all my life, but I ain’t never seen one for myself.”
“I seen one, but it weren’t no human one. Late in August it was. I musta been around twelve years old. Maw sent me to take our neighbor woman, Mrs. Purdom, her supper while the others stayed home to help her shell the butter beans we’d picked that afternoon.
Mrs. Purdom was ailing right much and not able to do for herself. She kept asking me to do this and that, and pretty soon it started gittin dark. I told her, ‘Mrs. Purdom, I gotta go. My maw’s gonna be fretting something awful if I don’t git home.’ I finally had to back out the door with her still a-talking. I hollered good-bye from out on the porch and lit out running for a good long spell.
“Before I got halfway home, it got pitch dark. Jest a glimpse of a half-moon ever once in a while when the clouds slid from over it. Katydids a-hollering so loud I couldn’t hear my own footsteps, the air so thick and hot I couldn’t hardly breathe. I commenced to praying like I’d never prayed before and first thing I knowed, a great big white dog come walking out of the woods. Skeered me worse’n the dark, but he wagged his tail. I talked nice to him and he come on up to me and walked right alongside me like he’d belonged to me all my life.
“When I got home, he stood there in the road and watched me go on up to the house. I run in the door yelling for everbody to come see him, but by the time they got out there, he’d done took off. We hunted that dog and asked around for a week or more, but never found a soul that knew nothing about no big white dog like that. Had to been a ghost or a angel.”
“They’s a lot we can’t explain,” said Vestil. “Jessie Mae swears she still hears Tucker out at the well drawing water after dark, and that boy’s been dead six long years.”
I wondered would Lester haunt me, now that he’d passed over, the way he done when he was a-living. I’d be fetching water at the spring or hanging a wash on the line and look up and there he’d be. Some way he always knowed when Hardy went to town, but I had enough of the fear of the Lord in me to turn him down. I’d learnt my lesson. All six of my babies lived, but I figured the Lord might not be so merciful the next time.
Vestil said, “Did I ever tell you about my daddy’s sisters and the blue dresses?”
“Not that I recollect.”
“Well, my—”
“What’s that?” I grabbed Vestil’s arm. “Hear it?”
“Ain’t nothing but a polecat licking the dog pan.”
“Why ain’t the dog barking at it?” I squnched down under the covers with the quilts drawed tight round my neck.
“Likely he’s out in the woods hunting up something fresh to eat. Besides, that hound’s got better sense than to mess with a polecat. Now what was I fixing to say?”
“The blue dresses.”
“That’s right. Daddy’s sisters and the blue dresses.” She give a little cough. “Aunt Naomi was on up in years and in right poor health, so she got her girl Crystal to mail order her a fancy dress, the prettiest sky blue with a white lace collar. Looked like something a queen might wear. She told her that’s what she wanted to be buried in, and she passed away not long after it come in the mail.
“Her sister Dorcas rode all the way from Gray’s Knob for the burying. Her son and his wife brung her in their wagon. They come on in to where Aunt Naomi was all laid out, and bless Jesus, when they looked down in that pine box, there she laid in the exact same dress Aunt Dorcas had on. Aunt Dorcas fainted dead away and hit the floor, and that boy’s wife commenced to screaming and hollering and dancing a jig like she’d done got the Holy Ghost. He didn’t know which one of em to tend to first, his wife or his mama.”
Right then, Vestil’s hound come up and howled directly under the winder. Turned me cold all over. I skooted up aginst Vestil and we laid there a-listening, it so quiet I could hear my own heart thumping. It felt like a fifty-pound sack of feed had been laid on my chest.
One of us was bound to die before morning light, and I knowed which one. The devil had come for Lester, and now for me. Neither me nor Vestil dared to speak another word, but hours passed before sleep come to me.
Come morning, I opened my eyes and seen where I was. Then I recollected the howling. Surprised to be seeing the light of day, I turned to Vestil and seen her eyes open, but queer looking. I reached over and touched her arm. It was cold as the air I was breathing. Then I knowed—not the reason, but the fact. I had been spared, but Vestil had not.