A Minister's Ghost Read online

  “May I tell him who’s calling, Dr. Devilin?” Melissa asked me zealously.

  “No, you see, Melissa,” I began, “if you know who I am, you don’t need to say that part. I mean, you already know who’s calling. It’s me.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “But you can tell him it’s someone else calling if you want to.”

  “Okay.” She put the phone away from her mouth and shouted, “Dr. Devilin’s calling!”

  The phone clicked and Skidmore’s voice was on the other end.

  “We have an intercom, but Ms. Mathews still likes to shout.” He took the phone away from his mouth. “I got it!”

  There was another click, and the telephone circus was concluded.

  “And she still hasn’t quite mastered the whole telephone answering part of her job,” I said, hoping to lighten the initial moments of my call.

  “Fever.” His voice shifted to low tones. “You’re calling about Lucinda’s little nieces.”

  “I’m at Lucy’s now, in fact. She’s still asleep on the sofa. I’m in the kitchen.”

  “I understand,” he surmised. “You want me to do most of the talking in case she walks in.”

  “Mm hm.”

  “I know she’s got to be really upset.” He sighed. “It was terrible at the scene, and that’s a fact. Their car was nearly flat. That train hit it good. Girls died instantly. Thank God.”

  “Still wearing seat belts?”

  “Yes.”

  “So they hadn’t even tried to get out of the car.”

  “Didn’t look like it.” He shuffled some papers in his desk. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what happened.”

  “But no evidence, that you saw,” I whispered, “of anything out of the ordinary.”

  “No,” he sighed. “It was a really bad accident.”

  “Lucinda wants me to look into it,” I said quickly. “I understand that you don’t want me in your way. All I need to do is go over to Pine City, take a look at the crossing, see the car, examine the bodies, that sort of thing.”

  “I could have guessed she’d want you to do this,” he said, a slight irritation growing in his words, “but I have to ask you not to. I don’t want her upset. And I don’t want you in my way.”

  “Of course.” I’d heard that tone a lot recently. He was tired, pressed—and it was only eight in the morning.

  “Believe me,” he allowed, “you don’t want to look at the bodies. What’s left of them is seriously messed up.”

  “I’ve seen worse. We’ve seen worse together.”

  “Right,” he agreed after a moment.

  We were both thinking about the decomposed bodies we’d found little more than a year before in the woods close to the town mortuary.

  “I still don’t like to think about that,” he said quietly.

  “So you’d understand,” I pressed, “if I just had a look into this for a day or two, completely out of your hair. To appease Lucy. I know it was just an accident.”

  “What did I just say?” he snapped, irritation growing for some reason. “I don’t want you in this mess. I’m really busy.”

  “I know,” I cut him off.

  I didn’t want to hear the litany of troubles I was afraid he might recite. Not because I was uncaring, but because I knew the effect they were having on him—and his home life. His wife, Girlinda, had called me in tears several times over the summer.

  “Keep me posted, then,” I said, clipped.

  He knew I’d look into things for Lucinda’s sake, but he was so strained I didn’t want to press it then.

  “Right,” he agreed, but clearly didn’t mean it. “‘Hey’ to Lucy.”

  “‘Hey’ to Girlinda.”

  We hung up.

  The kitchen door swung open and Lucinda stood sleepy-eyed in the doorway. “That was Skid?” she managed.

  “It was.”

  “How’s he doing?” She yawned.

  “He said ‘hey.’ But he sounded shot. He worries too much.”

  “Or something.” Her syllables insinuated what the whole town gossiped: Skid and his secretary, Melissa, were seeing one another.

  “I don’t want to have this discussion again about Skidmore,” I said, turning toward the percolator. “He’s my oldest friend, I trust him, and there’s nothing to all the talk about Melissa and him. Plus, you know that if Skidmore was seeing anyone but Girlinda, she would kill him, then call the doctor to revive him just so she could kill him again.”

  Lucinda didn’t seem in the mood for levity.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” she said hoarsely, ambling into the kitchen.

  “A stitch in time saves nine,” I intoned.

  “What?”

  “Sorry,” I sniffed, “I thought you wanted to talk in clichés.”

  That, of all things, made her smile.

  “Very funny. Are you drinking my coffee?” She was content to change the subject. “That’s a warning, a danger sign.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “It’s the last days.”

  She shuffled to the table and sat; I poured coffee into her favorite mug. The sun insisted on tidying the room, making it clean of any shadow the night had left behind. Walls were washed in amber morning light, and everything seemed better when I sat beside her, even to drink the awful brew.

  Silence spoke volumes; our eyes didn’t meet. It was the sort of conversation we’d been having, on and off, since we were both fourteen. Some things are understood between two people who know each other that well and don’t need to be said. Unfortunately, other things that yearn to be said sit silent too and make a palpable wall of longing.

  “Will you be all right if I just slip over to Pine City for a few hours now?” I stood and took my cup to the sink.

  “Of course,” she said firmly, staring out the window. “I want you to go look into things. I’ll be okay.”

  “I know, I was just making sure you were ready for me to leave.

  Her chair scraped a harsh yelp across the floor as she turned to look at me.

  “You know I’m never ready for you to leave, Fever,” she said softly, “not to go to college or off to teach, not even to walk into the next room most of the time. I wouldn’t mind it if we were never much out of sight. But I don’t expect that’s what you meant.”

  I set the cup down in the sink, didn’t look at her.

  “I’m here now,” was all I could think to say, staring down at the stainless steel faucet.

  “I didn’t mean … ,” she began, but fell silent.

  “You meant,” I told her, swinging slowly around, leaning back against the counter, “that you’re glad I’m back, glad I’m here now. You meant you missed me when I was gone. You meant you like it better when I’m here than when I’m not. You can put me down for all of that too, in spades. You think I don’t understand something mysterious or secret about our relationship, but I do know a thing or two. I know, for instance, that I’m the only one you called last night. And you know what that means?”

  “What?”

  I looked down at the clean old linoleum floor.

  “I believe you’re sweet on me.”

  “How much more complex is it than that?” she asked, her eyes brighter. “In your mind.”

  “Enormously,” I shot back. “A genuine adult relationship is supposed to be dense; the primary sin of popular culture is a lack of complexity. I consider it our duty to help ameliorate that situation by indulging in the most complicated emotional miasma of the current century.”

  “We’ve certainly got a head start on that. And well begun is half-done.”

  “A bird in the hand,” I said, launching my frame away from the counter, “is worth two in the bush, and I’m off.”

  “I’ll just wait here, then, shall I?” She didn’t move.

  “Maybe we could have lunch when I come back.” I suggested. “What’s today?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Are you on call a
t the hospital?”

  “I’m supposed to go in,” she said hesitantly.

  “You’re taking the day off. That’s not a question.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll call them right now.”

  “I’ll see myself out.” I headed out the door without looking back.

  “I might be in the garden,” she called out, “if you phone.”

  I smiled at that: Saturday gardening could mean that she felt better.

  I paused a moment in the living room to pick up my black leather jacket and to get a good look at one of the photographs on the mantel. Two teenaged girls stood side-by-side holding a carved pumpkin and a blue ribbon between them. Autumn light brushed their faces, and the clarity of their eyes was piercing, even in the photograph. It was signed at the bottom, “To Aunt Lucinda, love Rory and Tess. Look, first prize!”

  Pine City isn’t far from Blue Mountain as the crow flies, but if you’re forced to take the main road, it twists around for nearly half an hour before you see their town hall. I pulled my ancient green pickup to the side of the road close to the railroad crossing and got out. I hadn’t been there in a while, but everything I could see was exactly the same as it had been since I was a boy.

  The road I parked on was the axis of town, the railroad crossing about five hundred yards shy of the square. The cross street where I stood had been a gravel road when I was a boy, but blacktop had long since replaced gray rocks. The rails toward town veered off sharply to the right, away from the square, just after the crossing, and rhododendrons twice my age had grown high enough to hide the trains as they passed. The other side, the direction from which the train would have approached the night before, sloped downward from where I stood, making it impossible to see anything coming until it was less than fifty feet away.

  Like a lot of other towns in Appalachia, the railroad had made a city out of a gathering of scattered farms and businesses. The train station, only a little farther on down the tracks after the curve and the rhododendrons, had once been a palace where exotic treasures from strange places arrived on boxcars, where soon-to-be grooms stood on platforms waiting, a bunch of red roses in hand, for strangers to arrive from Atlanta or farther-away towns.

  For me it had been a place from which to leave home, glad of freedom; a place to return when the world was too wild.

  I left home when I was seventeen, graduated early from high school and shot from Blue Mountain like a cannonball, or a fast train leaving from the Pine City station. My best friend, Skidmore, was the only one there to say good-bye. I could always see that moment in my mind’s eye, Skid barely managing not to cry, shaking my hand and telling me he’d never see me again.

  And I had agreed with him, smiling, glad to think it was true. I would miss my boyhood chum, no doubt, but the rest of the place sloughed off my spirit without a single thought more than Thank God I’m getting out.

  I leapt onto the train, threw open the window, let the air rush past me as the train picked up speed, headed for Atlanta and my real life, blowing away all the bitter dust from hearth and home. I couldn’t think of a strong enough phrase for my sense of freedom. I’d not yet learned to curse.

  But I had come back, of course. I stood at the side of the tracks, leaning back against the hood of my truck, still hearing the train that had carried me away roar in my mind.

  I gazed at the rhododendrons and compared the path of my life to the railroad tracks. The steel lines bent off suddenly in an unexpected direction, but they were cast with iron spikes, as unyielding in their direction as the course of the sun and moon, or the planets spinning in space.

  You never leave home, I thought. You just think you do. My house could be in the south of France and I would still live in Blue Mountain.

  Home isn’t a place as much as a cellular memory, a collection of experiences that trail out behind you.

  Like railroad tracks.

  The business at hand was a gloomy, one and the day obliged by shutting up the sky with gray clouds and a light, cold drizzle. I was glad I’d worn the black leather jacket, it shed the rain and stayed warm; regretted the black high-top tennis shoes—liked the look but the feet were already wet.

  The town square turned to Renoir for images in that mist: the courthouse became a sheet of brick-red light, the lawn in front a yellowing field of wheat. Thick, black vertical lines played the part of oak trunks, topped with dabs of rust and ocher. The Confederate war memorial statue seemed to wave at me in the shimmering air, and the rest of the shops in the recently revitalized downtown area were obscured by a low patch of fog or poor eyesight.

  I should get glasses, I thought, turning from the square to the more immediate task.

  The formerly gravel road, called Bee’s Crossing, was slick. It was lined on either side with weeds and dead wildflowers.

  I gazed up at the railway warning post. There was no arm to come down to keep a car from crossing the tracks, but the tall post sported two red lights on top of a black bowl the size of half a basketball that would be the warning bell. I wondered how I could find out if it was working besides, obviously, standing there until a train went by.

  Nearly leaden with reluctance, I heaved a sigh and pushed myself away from the hood of the truck to wander the scene of the accident. The worst of the wreckage had already been cleared, but the inevitable diamonds of broken window glass glittered in the road and on the tracks. There were a few small pieces of twisted metal and torn rubber, unrecognizable as anything having to do with a car or a train, but everything else had been impressively scoured. I had no idea what to look for.

  I wandered across the tracks, feet more than a little cold.

  Bee’s Crossing ran straight away from me for two blocks, lined on either side with lots of trees and a few big houses, before dead-ending. One of its cross streets went to the rail station if you turned left, or to the shortcut back to Blue Mountain if you turned right.

  The girls were going to take the shortcut, I thought, but I immediately regretted bringing their image to mind.

  I saw them, late coming home from the movies, worried about the parents yelling at them, deciding to go the back way home.

  The shortcut was faster than the highway if you didn’t mind risking the dirt roads that went up the cemetery side of Blue Mountain. If you had no trouble, you could cut fifteen minutes or more off your travel time, but the roads were treacherous if they’d turned to mud, and you ran the danger of getting stuck and ending up hours late.

  The girls had decided to take the chance. If they’d been less concerned with getting home, or earlier out of the movie, they would have gone back on the main road, the way I’d come: past, not across, the tracks.

  I made a mental note to check and see what was playing at the Palace, and what time the movie had let out. Pine City had an old movie house, built in the thirties, abandoned in the seventies, restored in the new century and showing old movies.

  It was a popular place with tourists because the building’s age matched the entertainment offered, and to visitors from the big cities it was an opportunity for time travel: sit in the dark eating a bag of nickel popcorn and watch Jimmy Stewart talk to an invisible rabbit. The place was also a popular dating destination with high school students who had never heard of Jimmy Stewart and felt they were discovering some ancient artifact, a darkened part of the pyramids where no one had ever been before. That sensation was exacerbated by the restoration decor: someone’s vision of Solomon’s Temple. Clearly a biblical scholar had not been consulted.

  The lobby was part Moorish, part Hollywood: tall wooden columns painted gold, frescoes copied from the Sistine Chapel, and wall hangings obviously purchased from the Bela Lugosi estate. Inside the theater, the seats were upholstered with what appeared to be leftover scraps of abandoned “Oriental” rugs. The ceiling had been painted with a “midnight in the desert” theme, stars (twinkling Christmas lights) swirled around a bold full moon (a large auto headlight). In front of the screen, go
ld curtains closed and opened before every show.

  When Lucinda and I had gone to see Lawrence of Arabia there, the place was packed. She asked me why I thought so many people had troubled themselves to come to a movie house to see a film they could rent for less at a video store. I told her I thought human beings in the twenty-first century were hungry for communal experiences. She told me she thought coming to the theater was a better date than sitting at home. Most of the audience were couples.

  I wondered if Rory and Tess had met anyone at the movies.

  I turned around and retraced my steps back across the tracks, paying more attention to anything off to the side of the road. Wet sheets of newspaper, rusted old cans, more broken glass—there was nothing that seemed related to the accident at all.

  I decided to wander the tracks. It was clear from the direction of the glass on the street and the other bits of debris that the train had been coming from out of town and going toward the station. It would not have been slowing down much, the old railway station had long since closed. Trains only rattled through town now on their way north with long boxcars and freight piggybacks. The rails were slippery, so I resisted the urge to tightrope-walk the way I always had as a boy.

  A few feet from the crossing, headed toward the abandoned station, a glint of something caught my eye, a reflection. I stepped over the rail and skidded a little on the wet grass. About six feet from the tracks I found two plastic CD cases. One, by someone named Jane-Jane, was empty; the other had a sticker on it that said “from Aunt Lucinda.” It was the sound track to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?—which made me smile in spite of the circumstances.

  Every once in a while something comes to the mountains that reinvigorates our ancient traditions. In the late sixties and seventies it was the Foxfire project, reintroducing teenagers to their folk heritage. By the turn of the century it was a Hollywood movie reminding America about some of its original music. People all over the world who had never heard of Jeanie Richie or The Skillet Lickers could finally understand, in a context they could accept, the music I considered seminal to our culture: rural, rough roots; simple melodies and age-old stories.