HONORABLE MENTION, FALL 2018
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Illustration by Andy Paciorek
BY BONNIE ROOP BOWLES
Until a year ago when her mother and Preacher Sunny went swimming in the quarry hole, Ima believed she was a healer and credited her superhuman powers to fallen angels from the days of Noah, angels who after getting the boot from paradise, swooped to earth to corrupt everything God made, impregnating women, animals, and fish, spawning giants like Goliath, strongmen like Samson, and hybrids like centaurs, minotaurs, and mermaids.
But Ima’s not that naïve fool anymore and sets the soothsayer straight. “My daddy’s got six toes on each foot and six fingers on each hand, but he ain’t really part Nephilim. My hand-me-down healing powers were a scam Preacher Sunny and Mama dreamed up.”
The Melungeon busts into wide-mouthed laughter. The three silver teeth on her lower jaw jack out like a gleaming cash register drawer.
Ima stands, ready to leave, when a lanky boy who’s not much older than her fifteen years walks in the door.
“Bunk give me his sickness,” he says to the Melungeon, but his eyes are roaming up Ima’s six-foot frame to fixate on a pattern of whorls, crimsoning to a beetroot hue in the middle of her broad forehead.
Ima was proud of her birthmark when it was known as God’s Thumbprint, but now it’s just a betrayer of emotions and she wishes to be rid of it.
The mushroom tang that has filled the room grows more pungent as the Melungeon stands. “Clint needs my medicine but stay for cards two and three. You’ll be glad you did.”
Ima sits back down.
With a grunt the Melungeon lifts one puffy, cracked foot onto a broad stool, then the other. Ima starts to look to the rafters but can’t drag her eyes from the old woman’s yellowed toenails, thick and layered like bamboo shoots, and recalls her father’s twelve knuckled, hairy toes. She was three the last time she saw him and can’t recall his hands, no matter how hard she tries.
“He ain’t got nothing for you,” the Melungeon says, stepping down with a bundle of herbs. Ima doesn’t know if she’s read her thoughts or is talking to the cat circling Clint’s feet. A kerosene lantern lifts the shadows. A cot-sized wooden box heaped with leaves, half-covered by a crazy quilt. A long rifle, a woodstove, a butter churn, a battered cutting block, a bench. All around the walls, shelves bow with all colors and sizes of jars, chocked full with bark and dried flowers.
Clint lifts a bucket from the bench and the cat skitters out the door. Clint sits and studies his boots, wiping his nose on various parts of his shirt.
“Elder flower. Yarrow. Echinacea root. Mullein leaf. Bonset.” The Melungeon’s voice is strong as she chops the dried bundles, pausing between each pronouncement to stare at Ima.
Since the old woman is a healer of sorts, Ima feels obliged to nod.
The Melungeon scrapes the clippings into a pint-sized jar. “Steep overnight for the quickest cure.”
Clint stands, and with a slight bow, takes the medicine.
“How’s your sisters?”
“Eatin’ us outta house and home.” He looks back to his boots. “Nother took root.”
“Tell your Mama I’ll catch it like the others.”
“Lilly sent you brown eggs like you like,” he answers, stepping backwards, until he’s outside the door.
The Melungeon hobbles to the table, mumbling something about the river taking her laying geese, then flops into her chair. “Healing’s hard work. And, I’m to an age where I could use some help.”
Even if Ima wanted to, she can’t help the Melungeon. The Melungeon is protesting the cell tower Ima’s husband, Surber, wants to erect. Ima trembles to think of his punishment if he finds out she’s come here seeking wisdom and says, “Are you gonna read the other cards, or not?”
The Melungeon sighs and turns over another grimy card. A wide grin about splits her face. “That horny peckerwood is the one lacking. He can’t give you what you need!”
Shamed blood flushes Ima’s birthmark. “Surber says he’s done his part and I’m the one lacking.”
“Only thing you lack is what you had as a child.”
Tears cloud Ima’s eyes and she pulls a crumbled bill from a canvas tote. “Sees what you know. I can’t keep a baby inside me.”
“Card three tells your future. Stay. You paid for it.”
Ima hurries out, almost tripping over a basket of eggs on the stoop: the sick boy’s payment. She starts to leave the way she came, but her fear picks up and she short cuts across the backyard. If supper’s not on the table when Surber gets home, he’ll be suspicious.
Roots drying on a rock, a woodpile, a scrub-board. Something shiny on the ground. A red fragment, a big slice of blue. Twinkling glass crunches underfoot and then gets lost under a heap of rusted pie pans, broken porcelain, tin cans, and twisted metal. Scavenged garbage that might someday come in handy. Ima rounds the hoard and follows the twinkling path to the woods, where Surber’s property begins.
The land is steep, but the grass is turning green; tiny leaves are growing and delicate white flowers blanket the coves like warm snow. Darting birds sing; crickets jump and hold sticky-fast to her legs, tuning their chirps and trills. Except for trips to the quarry, Ima’s always closed up in the house, and she decides the day’s not a total waste. A gentle breeze carries the sweet scent of dogwoods in bloom, and she takes a deep breath.
Coming up the last rise, she sees sunlight burst through the tree limbs and Ima’s stomach sinks. Surber’s words sound in her thoughts as she enters the mountaintop meadow where the twin boys died: The father always swore his boys were hexed and that the Melungeon was behind it. Folks say when the little fellows dropped over dead, one behind the other, the father sat them up side by side at the dinner table with a pie between them and then burnt down the house. Said he dug through the ashes for their tiny bones and teeth and carried them off into the woods and hid them. But that didn’t stop the witching. I ain’t seen the little ghosts, but lots have.
Ima now sees why Surber could buy the land for pennies on the dollar. The fire was years ago but the air reeks of smoke and the ground is patchy with ash. The sparse brittle grass crunches underfoot like cornflakes. There’s no buzz of a fly or bee; no hop of a grasshopper. She considers turning back but the fear of Surber sitting in front of an empty supper plate overcomes the ghost story.
Where the twins’ house once stood is a two-foot foundation of leaning stones, a blackened chimney, a rusted fire grate, and broken bed springs. Ima steps into the gap where the door used to be, thinking back to all the sick boys she’d tended over the years, finally settling on the one with the old man’s face who worked a pocket Bible over his bony body like a cake of soap to wash his cancer away.
Then close to her ear, as if a flock of mourning doves is swarming her head, Ima hears pitiful cooing sounds. She searches the sky, but nothing’s up there except a few clouds. Suddenly, a coldness like four icy fingertips prods and pokes her forehead. She starts to shiver as the mournful coos roll into an intelligible chant: Feel me. See me. Heal meeeee . . .
She crouches, tries to retreat, but her knees rise up and march her to the fireplace. Smoke and fiery ash swirl from the hearth. Her heart pounds as the fiery smoke separates and curls into the shape of two burning boys.
With lightning speed Ima’s hand dives into the tote, obedient to an inner voice she can’t hear. Clumsy fingers fumble over a box of ashes, tinfoil crosses, cotton-ball lambs, crumpled coloring book pages. Even when Ima believed she was a healer, she never thought she could heal spiritual bone and marrow and fights to keep her healing hand and the Bible inside the tote.
The burning ghosts shoot up and down, back and forth. They whirl around Ima’s body with crazy, hot momentum. Their roaring chant shakes stones loose from the foundation.
“It was a scam! I ain’t got any power!” Ima screams.
The song screeches to a stop. All the fire in the ghosts goes out and they hang in the still air like giant dust motes.
After a moment of deep silence, Ima sets down her tote and picks through it. She then goes over and anchors the cotton-ball lambs on a bedspring.
One for each boy.
Last spring when Ima believed in her power to heal, Sunny turned off the asphalt road onto dirt and rock and sent their purple house-bus bucking. Cabinets hanging over boarded-up windows flew open. Ima braced her wide knees on the narrow cot to keep from spilling into the aisle like the Cheerios. They passed hand-painted wooden signs: “NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT,” and Ima searched the surrounding fields for a church of the snake-handling kind.
The bus bumped up a grassy incline and stopped. Ima squared her wide shoulders. “Where’s the church at?”
Her mother, Honey, looked at Sunny and laughed.
Ima watched them head into the thigh-high weeds and then bowed her head. “God, nobody’s come to see me at the last four churches. Sunny said he’s taking us to a big city to sell watches. Those watches might put money in our pockets, but they’ll put me out of church. All those sick kids out there will get sicker. Please send somebody for me to heal so Mama and Sunny will see I still have power, amen.”
Ima opened her eyes to her reflection in the window glass. She barely recognized herself anymore. Over the past year her teeth had spaced out, her chin jutted, and her nose had thickened and spread across her pimply face. She pushed her hair off her forehead and stared at the purplish-red swirl that used to gather in multitudes from miles away.
She jumped off the cot with both feet. The windows clanged in their metal casings, and one of her silky dresses slipped from a hanger. It looked like a doll’s dress crumpled on the floor. She’d worn the dress before the growth spurt; worn it to churches and camp-meetings where people loved everything she did. Now she couldn’t fit three fingers in the fluttery sleeves or two toes into the matching white slippers. At fourteen she was taller than Sunny and outweighed Honey.
The closed-up bus was heating up like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s fiery furnace. She mopped sweat from her face with the tiny dress as if it were a handkerchief and then pushed her feet into sneakers with scissored-off ends and stepped outside.
She followed the trampled weeds, and then Sunny and Honey over rocks and more rocks. Her right big toe hanging off the shoe end snagged a rock, and she tripped and busted her knee. She was about to say, You’re lost, when the path ended, dropping twenty feet into a cavern glistening with water.
Honey pulled her halter dress over her head. Sunny dropped his pants. A shriek. A flash of bare-naked white.
Another, bigger bare-naked splash. When they broke the surface with Honey’s breasts flattened against Sunny’s chest, Ima knew they hadn’t misread the map or took a wrong turn.
“Don’t stand there gawking,” Honey said. “Jump in.”
Ima watched her mother side-stroke over the shimmering, clear water and felt clumsy and stupid. She shooed the gnats from her blood-sticky knee and said, “You said you’d give me one more chance.”
“Nobody will come. Why put yourself through that again?”
Ima had hoped she’d go to one more church and heal one more child and put things back the way they were. Now she knew she wasn’t going to do anything.
“Come on. Jump. I’ll be your swim buddy.”
“I’m staying right here and praying for a miracle,” Ima said.
“Well, I’m prayed out,” Honey said, and then turned to Sunny and yelled, “Marco!” With a big gulp of air, she dove under the water. First her head descended and then her upended naked body, leaving behind a rippling ring on the surface.
Sunny bounced up and down, making waves. Then he got perfectly still and looked down into the water. He splashed off to the left as if to escape a tickling hand. He side-stroked right, yelling, “Polo! Polo!” A shiny fish jumped clear of the water. Sunny swam to the spot where Honey went under and dove down. He was gone for so long, Ima was sure he had touched bottom, and for a moment dread filled her stomach, and she wondered if something under there had grabbed them both. She picked a stick from the ground and whirled it out into the air; it hit the craggy wall, broke, and then floated like two stretched snakes on the water. Two small birds flew from a dark opening on the quarry’s other side and swooped down to inspect the broken wood just before Sunny came gasping to the surface. He breathlessly treaded water, going around and around like a top, searching the rocky crevices above him. Ima could picture her mother climbing out to watch all this unwind and moved closer to the rim, but what caught her eye was a fisherman in a low alcove, and the stiff, still way he studied the water.
Sunny yelled, “Help! Help me! I can’t find her.”
The fisherman flew in headfirst. His body lashed and twisted below the water. His red ball cap bobbed on the surface like a cork. He spouted to the surface emptyhanded and dove under again, deeper. Fourth time up, Honey’s head was nestled in the crook of his arm. He swam in quick jerks to the wall and dragged her out onto a rock. There was not enough space to unfold her, so he lifted Honey back into his arms. Short and stocky, he bounded up the zig-zagging rocks like a goat, Honey’s dark wet ringlets draped over one arm, her long lean legs dangling over the other. Flattened breasts spread out like twin moons. Triangle of black pubic hair, beaded up and glistening. Ima thought her mother was teasing: a game for attention.
Running, Sunny caught up to the fisherman and pushed by him on the rock shelf and snatched up the fishing box and ice chest. The fisherman spread Honey out. Sunny pulled out the strands of hair caught in her eyes as the fisherman lifted her chin, pinched her nose, and blew into her mouth. When nothing happened, the fisherman mounted her hips and Sunny sank back on his naked haunches. As Ima watched the fisherman’s shoulder blades wing open and shut, her hope rose. God didn’t need a church to answer prayers. He didn’t need a church to perform miracles. He’d show them, right here at this quarry hole, she was a healer.
Ima gathered Honey’s and Sunny’s inside-out clothes from the scrubby tree bushes and draped them around her neck. To get her healing blood pumping, she recited: Genesis six and four, “The Nephilim were on earth in those days, when the Sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men of old, men of renown.” Her forehead prickled, and she knew God’s thumbprint was ablaze. She kicked off her ruined shoes, dropped to her belly and slid backwards over the edge and began her descent.
Her thick toes gripped hammered crevices; her large hands grabbed hold of stunted cedars along the way. Dust fell into her eyes, rocks hit her head, chunks skittered underfoot, but she wasn’t scared. God closed a window and then blew a door wide open. She’d paint over CHILD HEALER on the bus’s side and repaint HEALER OF ALL AGES. She’d buy a bigger, silkier dress. She’d pose for a new picture for the pamphlet’s cover. This time in color.
Ima landed on the rock shelf and Sunny grabbed his jeans. He shook them out right. As he tugged them over his pale pimpled haunches, he said, “You’re stupid coming down here, you know that?”
The fisherman had climbed off Honey and now stepped aside. Ima looked down at her mother, mouth open, arms and legs wide, and thought she looked the same as when she was spread out on the bus cot, sleeping. Ima blanketed her mother’s nakedness with the dress, then sang out with all she had, “Work through me, God!”
“Goddamn it,” Sunny said.
Ima spread her healing hand over her mother’s forehead, and continued, “They cried to the Lord in their trouble and He saved them from their distress! He healed them; He rescued . . . ”
“Stop it!”
Ima looked at Sunny. “Abraham never gave up believing in a miracle for his wife.”
“Sarah was old. She wasn’t dead.”
Ima looked back to her mother and saw that her slack tongue and back teeth were in full view. She pushed her mother’s chin up, and yelled, “I say to thee, arise!”
The fisherman and Sunny gawked at one another as Honey’s mouth crept back open. Getting in front of her mother’s one open eye, Ima could barely breathe. She felt like she was drowning on dry land. She whispered, “Mama, please look at me.” Honey’s huge cockeyed pupil didn’t move; it was as if it was stuck watching the foam roll from her nose holes.
A murmur Ima couldn’t make out filled her head. Her eyes closed. Her knees buckled. Kicked from paradise with disgrace, she freefell with breakneck speed. There’d be no new healing title. No autographed pamphlets. No posing for colored photographs. She was just a stupid vain girl branded with God’s mark. Air roared in her ears; the earth closed in with jutting flashes. There’d be no mother with outstretched arms to catch her and she’d hit hard . . .
A rush of air, a dip; an enormous wing cradling her head to the sky. “Take a deep breath. I’ve got you.”
Ima gulped air, whispered, “Save Mama, too.”
“Drink this.”
An elixir of life tasting like cool syrup.
Ima’s eyes opened to a callused hand, big as a catcher’s mitt. This wasn’t a Nephilim. This was the fisherman holding a bottle of Coke.
The next morning the pop and give of the floor woke her. The glare through the windshield loomed around a figure, and Ima believed it was her mother come back to her until it voiced, “I posted No Trespassing for a reason.”
Ima struggled to a sitting position and watched a worldly man overtake the light. Her head was still fuzzy from the Valium Sunny gave her, but she recognized the fisherman’s bald head right away.
He said, “Your Mama’d be alive if she’d listened to my signs.”
“No. It’s my fault,” Ima said, choking up. Something inside her was splintering, breaking up the sobs clotted by the Valium. She couldn’t hold it together and burst into tears. “I didn’t listen. Mama asked me to jump in. She said she’d be my swim buddy, but I . . .”
“Ground water’s ice cold even in summer,” the fisherman interrupted. “Hypothermia could’ve got you. Could’ve got your foot tangled in old baling wire. Your Mama ain’t the first to drown in my swimming hole. Lots under there you can’t see.”
They stared at each other, but Ima didn’t see the fisherman; last night’s dream flooded her thoughts and she saw Sunny drowning and not being able to save him either. She fumbled down the narrow aisle and off the bus, and took off for the quarry, screaming Sunny’s name.
Behind her she heard, “Preacher-man hitched it off the mountain,” and she stopped, and held out for a miracle.
“We’re outta milk. He hitched to the store.”
“Toting a suitcase?”
Ima ran back inside the bus and lifted the box-seat. Sunny’s suitcase was gone, and in its place, he’d left the family Bible. She collapsed, and to keep herself anchored in this world, she picked at a curled strip of masking tape that had lifted from a picture of Baby Moses.
The fisherman sat down beside her. His face was so close, Ima saw hair curling from his nose holes.
“Sheriff’s trying to decide what to do with you. There’s talk of a girls’ home not far from here.”
“I’m not going,” Ima said. “This bus is my home.”
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“If I let you stay in this bus on my land, sheriff would put me behind bars.”
“He’d put you in jail for helping me?”
“I’d go to jail because you’re fourteen,” he said, lifting a stray hair from her teary cheek.
Ima jumped up and looked around wild-eyed. Her heart was beating out of her chest and she wanted to run.
“It’s not my business, but marriage could keep you out of a girls’ home.”
Ima found her eyes drawn to the yellow rings scattered around the fisherman’s boots. “Marry you?” was all she could say, wondering how long it’d take before the ants found the Cheerios.
She wore her ruined sneakers and a polyester dress owned by his first wife who’d drowned in the quarry years before. He wore a limp white shirt and cuffed jeans. All the way over the mountain he talked about limestone. How pulverized limestone sweetened soil, whitewashed coal mines and decomposed bodies. How his bread-and-butter was crusher-run, a mixture of limestone and ground rock that hardens like concrete with water.
He said, “Crusher-run paid for this truck. My house. My land.”
Ima had always lived in a home built on a truck chassis and wanted to believe she’d be happier with a steady, unmoving foundation beneath her. She also wanted to believe she’d be happier after savior turned husband, but walked away from the justice of the peace feeling tired and empty.
Back in the truck, Surber grabbed her thigh and forced his tongue in her mouth, and she pushed as far from him as the door allowed.
He straightened and started the engine. “I didn’t turn you down flat because you ain’t got nothing or nobody. I’m trying to be good to you and won’t have you pulling from me like that.”
Ima tugged at the dress hem to keep it from rolling any further up her thighs and felt like crying.
The driveway was green and bumpy and led up to a small stone house dwarfed by a working quarry yawning behind it. Ima had never seen the Grand Canyon but couldn’t imagine it being any scarier.
Surber opened her door. “When I sell Iron Mountain to the phone company, I’m putting in a swimming pool.”
Everything outside the house—the concrete porch, the tin roof, the dead and dying grass—was powdered over in chalky rock dust. Inside was not much better and smelled like cold dirt and ancient hymnals. The stovetop was hidden by a green chalky crust, and dusty boxes of cereal were stacked between the stove and sink: Captain Crunch, Trix, Fruity Pebbles, and Fruit Loops. The sink was piled with dirty mugs; TV dinner trays overran the trash can.
“Ain’t much on housework,” he said, laughing like he’d told a joke, and then pushed open the screen door at the back of the kitchen.
One step onto the porch, and Ima saw how the backyard fell off into the enormous pit. The plunging gorge of gray rock, the dinosaur-like machines crisscrossing the bottom far below took her breath, made her knees weak. She leaned back against the door.
“Crew of forty down there,” he said, “and they all call me Boss-Man.”
He led her to the bedroom, pulled off his shirt, then sat on the bed. “Baby Boss-Man,” he said, grinning up at a framed yellowed newspaper clipping of a baby sitting between two rock crushing machines, in nothing but a diaper, digging with a tablespoon.
With his poochy belly, round pink head, and sun-bleached eyebrows, Ima thought he looked the same as he did in the picture, only bigger. “I was in the newspaper for healing,” she said.
“Like you healed your Mama?” Surber said, kicking off his boots.
“I’m praying hard and fasting. I’ve humbled my pride.”
“You really do believe that bullshit,” Surber said, before unzipping his pants. “So, I’m gonna tell you what Preacher-Man told me. That thing on your forehead is a birthmark. Your father isn’t an angel or whatever you call it. He’s a drunk.”
Revelation hit like a fist. Tears clouded Ima’s eyes. She slumped over slack-jawed. Calloused fingers hooked her shoulders. His head came like a squashing thumb. Thick lips, clumsy tongue. The polyester dress flew over her head. The bed frame banged the wall. Over the sound of Surber’s baby picture swinging on the nail, Ima heard a whisper, And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked.
Eight months in and Surber was fed up with Ima. He wanted a kid and for her to quit dwelling on the past. To bring her around, he stripped the house-bus of everything holy. He painted over CHILD HEALER. He tore down walls of crayon-colored Bible pictures. He crushed a popsicle manger and pulled the legs from a toothpick baby Jesus, so he could pick corn from his teeth. He burned newspapers, pictures, and pamphlets.
Ima scavenged the family Bible, two cotton-ball lambs gifted by the boy cured of cancer, two folded tin-foil crosses given by a girl cured of palsy, and a stack of coloring-book pages from others she’d healed but couldn’t name. Her powers might’ve been a scam, but the children’s faith in her was not, and she stuffed their tokens into a canvas tote alongside her mother’s ashes, which Surber had unceremoniously presented to her in a wooden box.
“Bringing your rabbit’s foot to bed?” he asked.
Ima pushed the tote inside the bedframe and climbed under the covers.
“I give you a pocketbook, and you carry that thing,” he said, groping between her thighs. “Know what else gripes my ass? All those pamphlets with pictures of you laying hands on strangers, and yet you lay like a gutted catfish under me.”
Since she’d proposed and lost a baby, she endured him by sending her mind off to where deaf ears opened to sound; to where cripples high-stepped. When her legs kept clamping shut on his hands, he said, “You don’t deserve me. Church crazies stopped worshipping you when you turned ugly, but I married you.”
Tears filled Ima’s eyes and she tried to imagine the children she’d healed, but the hot snorts in her ear, the smelly spit rolling down her cheek, kept her from it; she saw instead life savings dropped in offering baskets; kids dead or dying. As her spine raked over rock grit on the sheets, she recalled the stories she’d heard about the Melungeon who lived in the hollow and gave answers for only a dollar.
After coming back from the Melungeon’s and seeing the ghosts, Ima walks up the green bumpy driveway and realizes she doesn’t have her tote. Surber is expected home any minute, so there’s no time to go back to the haunted site. She goes inside and turns on the oven and pops open a can of biscuits. As she puts the biscuits in a pan, the overhead light flickers, goes out. The oven shuts off. She thinks, What’s going on? And then as if answering her thoughts, two shadows lift from a dark corner.
“I told you, I ain’t got any power!” she yells.
Surber bangs through the door. The shadows shoot to the window and steam the glass. His furrowed face takes in the doughy biscuits, his unset table spot. He turns on the light. “Who the hell you hollering at?”
Ima shoves the biscuits inside the cold oven. “Nobody.”
He takes off his cap and runs his hand over his bald head. Most days he strips after crossing the threshold and plops down for supper in his underwear, but today he heavy-foots the kitchen with a slanting walk.
Ima busies her trembling hands by cracking eggs. All six have double yolks.
“Where’d you go today?”
She beats the eggs into a froth. “Nowhere. I took a nap and didn’t wake up.”
Surber huffs a laugh, and then sits, anchoring his gravel-embedded elbows on the table. “I was up on Iron Mountain today with the cell-tower man. He had binoculars. We saw you trotting outta the Melungeon’s house. I didn’t let on you was my wife because if he gets wind my wife is in is in bed with the biggest opposer to his tower, he’ll forego the hassle. He’ll buy Jayhue Dull’s land instead.”
Ima looks to the window and lies to Surber for the the third time since he’s stepped through the door. “I went to see her for you.” She watches two smiles etch into the window fog and adds, “I asked help to have a baby.”
Surber cups his crotch. “She give you her mojo?”
“She says we need to do it under a full moon. Full moon’s tonight.”
Surber clucks his tongue. “Got a taste for me now, do you?”
The next morning Ima searches the burned-down house’s foundation, kicking up ash. The cotton-ball lambs are still stuck to the bedspring, but her tote is nowhere to be seen. The Melungeon must have scavenged the tote for her garbage heap.
When Ima sees smoke curling from the Melungeon’s chimney, she considers creeping away, but then sees the old woman sitting inside the door, waving, messy gray braids dangling on either side of her chiseled face, like some oddly-aged child waiting to play.
Ima gets to the point. “You got something of mine?”
“Your future. Card number three.”
“Yesterday, I left my tote at the burned-down house. Now, it’s gone, and I want it back.”
“You don’t trust me. I told the truth when I read your cards. I ain’t a liar or a thief.”
Ima thinks if the Melungeon doesn’t have it, then Surber must’ve doubled-back and took it and bursts into tears.
“Just because you don’t have something right now don’t mean it’s gone forever.”
The Melungeon gets up stiff from the chair. “Clint picks morels on Iron Mountain. I’ll ask if he’s found your poke. But, I can’t say when. I won’t see him till he needs me.”
Ima wipes her eyes. She needs to get home, but her feet won’t turn in that direction.
“Something else haunting you, girl?”
Ima blurts out, “Two little ghosts followed me home.”
The Melungeon pulls the chair from the doorway. “Come in the house.”
Ima sits on the bench. The Melungeon shuffles through a shelf, then goes to the woodstove with a jar and mug. She pours a heap of dry leaves from the jar into the mug. “Twins,” she says, ladling water from a steaming pot. “Edward and Richard. Couldn’t tell their lungs were give-out from looking at them. Bright red hair and freckled all over. Nine years old and died within days of each other.” She holds the mug out. “Medicine’s in the leaves. Swallow them too.”
Ima takes a sip. A tingle under her tongue. Warmth spreads out in her belly in the same way God’s heat spread out in her birthmark. When she empties the mug, her hands no longer shake.
The Melungeon steadies her eyes on Ima’s. “If you’re willing, I’ll rid you of what’s haunting you.”
Ima trudges up the mountainside, with the Melungeon following, holding fast to a shallow basket. They could have gotten there in half the time if the Melungeon didn’t stop to gather the umbrella shaped lacy white flowers that could halt an unwanted pregnancy, or circle the trees with thick blocky bark for the yellow buds that drop to the ground in the fall as persimmons, or reprimand Ima to step carefully so as not to crush the tiny orange mushrooms she used in cooking.
When the woods open onto light, Ima boldly leads the way then, marching across the barren ashy meadow and through the doorway gap of the old foundation. “That’s where I first saw them,” she says, pointing to the fireplace.
Digging through her basket of twigs and fruity smelling mushrooms, the Melungeon pulls out a bundle of white herbs and sets it afire. A bright blaze shrinks to a small flame, then smoke. She walks around the inside of the foundation waving the bundle in tight circular motions. The smoky air grows heavy with smells of mint and aged earth as it swirls into ashy corners and settles wispy fingers between the stones.
Melungeon’s voice sounds out from behind the murky veil: “Here’s your home. Here’s where you belong.”
Ima feels a tingle in her forehead, a surge of church power.
When the air clears, Ima lifts the heavier stones and sets them in place on the wall. Together they drag out the fire grate and mattress springs and sweep ash with willowy pine branches.
Over the next week they dump wheelbarrow loads of black topsoil inside the foundation’s wall and plant rows of wildflowers, herbs, and medicinal weeds. They sit on the short wall and eat—fresh salads and berries provided by the Melungeon—and look over what they’re creating.
After lunch, Ima helps the Melungeon pick the forest for slippery elm bark and ginger root. She forages the river’s sandy banks for burdock, digs surrounding meadows for dandelion, cleavers, and nettle. She learns which plants heal and which plants hurt. Pine trees are more than Christmas trees: they’re needle and inner-bark teas. Chickweed is more than a yard weed: it’s a cooling salve for rashes and burns.
The end of the first month, green shoots appear, but what’s surprising are the sets of tiny footprints in the soil, the two sets of hand prints around the seedlings.
Ima’s dreams stop being haunted by dying children and are filled with images of the house-bus’s inside walls bowing under the weight of brandied tinctures, squatty jars of beeswax salves, and mason jars filled with dried flowers. She dreams the sick are waiting outside the bus for the potential in those closed-up jars, and “HEALER” is repainted on its side.
Yet Ima is careful. She cleans dirt from her fingernails, makes the bed, sweeps, and puts supper on the table. But all the same, Surber must be suspicious—when she’s up with the sun, when tiny rocks spill from her shoes, when her hands thicken with stained calluses, when Hamburger Helper is replaced with egg-battered morels, fried ramps, and potatoes; when canned fruit cocktail is replaced with fresh raspberries and blackberries—because when she shows up at the garden for the first harvest, his truck is backed up to the foundation, the bed loaded with crusher-run. He sits hunkered behind the wheel, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes.
“Please don’t,” Ima begs. “The garden’s a living thing.”
“I warned you to stay away from her,” he says out the driver’s window.
“The plants are wild. They grow everywhere. You can’t kill them all.”
Surber rolls up the window glass. The bed hinges up.
Delicate chickweed, false unicorn, bloodroot, and meadowsweet vanish under the weight of fifteen tons of tumbling powdered limestone.
After the truck rattles off across the meadow, Ima climbs the creamy, gray-green mound and collapses, facedown into the dust. The cry rising from the hazy cloud isn’t a soundless cry like when Surber mounts her or she burns dinner. This is a wailing cry that sounds from the pit of a heart, like when a father denies you or your mother dies, a cry that comes with losing a baby, with sudden change, a cry that must run its course.
Within the hour, the Melungeon is standing outside the stone wall with her gathering basket. “That’s enough tears, or that rock dust will turn you to stone.” She pulls a shard of mirror from her skirt. “Look here.”
Ima knows water hardens crusher-run into cement but is nevertheless shocked to see her eyes staring out from a green, petrified mask. Her fingers move over her hardened nose, forehead, cheeks, and chin. She says, “He killed everything.”
The Melungeon fingers push under the mask’s thin edges and the false face pulls off with a wet sucking sound. “You need chickweed salve,” she says. “Your skin’s raw as a newborn’s.”
Ima takes the mask and looks into the hollowed-out eye sockets. “There’s nothing to keep the ghosts here,” she says, and drops the mask into the gathering basket. “They’ll go back to haunting me.”
The Melungeon studies the devastation as if mulling something over, then says, “Go home, and come back in a week. I said I’d rid you of what’s haunting you, and I ain’t no liar.”
The first half of the week, the ghosts throw tantrums. They run the walls like a blur, leaving crisscrossed trails of ash. They break picture frames, snap clotheslines, topple milk jugs, blow light bulbs, and mess with the stove. At night they kindle bad dreams and swirl smoke into Ima’s nose and she wakes panicked, gasping. Purple half-moons deepen under her eyes.
The second half of the week the sky turns dark, the air suffocating and volatile. And then without warning of thunder, the sky opens and dumps water. The heavy downpour drives Surber from work and onto the back porch. He doesn’t notice Ima burns dinner or mops ash from the walls because he’s busy watching rain carry dead pines into his quarry, tear huge chunks from its walls, and wash red clay over its rim like waterfalls of blood.
Right before dawn on the seventh day, the rain stops. Surber leaves for the quarry and the day is Ima’s. She heads into the woods where the birds are singing and building nests with the wild grasses that grew up fast from the rain. And how alive everything feels with the ferns licking at her ankles, the pine needles cushioning the soles of her feet like silky socks, the water-weighted vines perfuming her arms and shoulders with a sweet fruity smell as she passes under them. Even though Ima doesn’t know how the Melungeon will get rid of what’s haunting her, she feels confident in the old woman’s plan because the shroud of death is already lifting.
Then about halfway to the stone foundation, flares of light and tinselly reflections begin to flicker through the trees. An unnatural smell fills the woods, sweet and musty like hot concrete on a rainy day. As Ima looks out between the tree gaps she fears Surber’s sold Iron mountain. She imagines a cell tower straddling the twins’ foundation like a false idol and takes off running.
Once she clears the trees, she stops stunned, her eyes scaling a twelve-foot limestone tower rising from the foundation’s short walls like a glittery gray-green pyramid. The tower’s sides are embedded with glaring pie pans, brass canning rings, glossy tin cans, shimmery bottle caps, twinkling silver spoons, broken mirrors and bottles: the Melungeon’s hoard. Branches jut from the tower’s spangled sides like multiple sets of snowman arms. She crosses the marshy ground to the tower and is surprised to see her tote dangling from the first branch. And, so she wouldn’t miss it, they fixed her crying mask into the crusher-run right under her tote.
Ima studies the face’s vacant expression and then makes a decision. She takes the tin-foil crosses from her tote and works them into the eye holes. Sun hits the tinfoil and the eyes shine like Jesus’s transfigured eyes on the mountaintop, like eyes that have seen the face of God. Ima slings the tote over a shoulder and, taking hold of one branch after another, she climbs.
Standing in the windy air at the top, she looks down at the moss-covered roof nestled in the hollow and imagines the Melungeon and Clint’s hands integrating the cast-off and broken things, building up the rock Surber crushed—transforming destruction into a mountain of beauty—and feels a new kind of power.
A wood thrush sounds somewhere high in one of the pines. When the back and forth song of its mate doesn’t come, Ima sits down. She removes the box holding her mother’s remains and opens it for the first time. If an old woman can create beauty from rock dust, then God will create something awe-inspiring from her mother’s remains. She raises the box into air. The wind unspools the gritty ash. Bits swirl and then lose shape as they melt into the sky.
A rumble shakes the ground and Ima drops the empty box and tote. Coloring-book pages flutter. The Bible bounces off the tower’s side and lands not too far from the box. The colored pages stick to places not yet dry, adding their own bright crinkled color. Ima thinks thunder and sunshowers: “The devil’s beating his wife,” until the trees swish and Surber’s dump truck barrels over bushes and into the meadow.
Ima braces. Brakes hiss. Gears whine. The truck comes to a stop inches from the stone foundation. Surber leans over and kicks open the passenger door, but the wind catches it and slams it shut.
He yells, “Jayhue Dull got the tower because of this goddamned voodoo bullshit. The Melungeon ain’t no different from Sunny, using you to get what she wants.”
Under Surber’s voice, Ima hears a whisper: Heal me now.
“You’ve cost me a kid and a swimming pool. I won’t lose nothing else.”
Ima shuts her eyes. Surber steps on the gas. An awful scraping. Foundation stones topple and thud against the tower’s base. Surber backs up. Loud crunching followed by a smash. The tower wobbles and Ima clutches its sides amid the clatter of pie pans, the piercing sounds of breaking glass.
“I’m warning you. Climb down and get in the goddammed truck!”
A smile crosses Ima’s face because she’s sent her mind off to where faith is simple, to where a child can believe in healing, to where two rail-thin boys stand before her waiting. Her hands cut through the dusty air and caress salt-frosted skin and cough-sore ribs. Fevers cool, organs moisten, lungs inflate.
One flat tire flapping, others hissing, Surber rushes the tower.
Teetering on the edge of flight, Ima hears the hissing, but she’s not like Eve, she won’t fall for his conniving ways. She opens her eyes and they shine like tinfoil crosses.
Bonnie Roop Bowles’ stories have appeared in Arts and Letters, Puerto del Sol, The Evansville Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Third Coast, Apalachee Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Reed Magazine, New Madrid, and other print publications as well as online in storySouth. She was a finalist in Zoetrope’s 2003 fiction contest, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won the 2005 John Steinbeck Award for Short Fiction, the 2016 Third Coast Fiction Prize, and received an honorable mention in 2009 from New Letters. She holds a Master’s in fiction writing from Hollins University where she won their fiction prize. She is currently completing a novel and co-authoring a screenplay. Bonnie grew up in a trailer park in the Southern Appalachian region. She is the first woman in her family to graduate from high school.
