Nothing was the same. Not with the house gone.
Walking where my grandmother’s house once stood was like moving
over a carpet of feathers and never touching the ground. And without the
structure there, the land around looked smaller, as if part of it had
been swallowed into the earth along with the house.
I was raised about one block down from my grandmother’s, but even
that area was unrecognizable. I remember my father planting a row of cedar
trees on the east side of our house. What stood there now was a line a
trees so much larger than what I recalled as to be giants. I suppose childhood
is like that row of cedars - something you recall as being large that
was, in truth, small.
But some things had remained the same: the field separating my grandmother’s
house from ours, the creek that ran beside them both, and the branch surrounding
the creek. I was never certain what vegetation made up the branch. Besides
the usual native Oak trees that are a staple in Central Texas, there were
these strange, straight poles shooting from the ground that looked like
some form of cane or reed plant. These plants were plentiful and constituted
what my friends and I referred to as the “branch”. The Oak
trees bordered the creek. The branch encircled both of them like thorny
arms.
It was a wonderful playground for me and my friends at the creek. We would
go after our classes at elementary school were over for the day. Armed
with whatever we could find to make poles from (usually a broken tree
limb or even one of the dead reeds) we would tie bacon on the end of a
long string we had attached to our makeshift fishing pole and try our
luck at catching crayfish from the creek. During the summer months, we
could spend the entire day fishing or just talking in the lazy, June sun.
But, there were times when I liked to be alone, especially during the
fall and winter. And if we were lucky enough to have snow and ice ( a
rare occurrence in Central Texas ) I would bundle up in my heavy coat,
wade through the frozen reeds and walk alone along the creek. The world
outside was distant at those times, and I felt I was the only person alive
in the chilly silence around me.
It was on a cold day in mid -December that I found the well. I was nine
years old at the time.
Saturday morning found me up early. Those mornings were great for me.
My father would be in the kitchen before any of us were awake filling
the cold house with the smell of coffee, eggs and frying bacon. He did
this every morning, but the weekends were special because none of us had
to rush. We could sit around in our pajamas and robes and talk about the
past week or what we planned for the weekend.
Ours was a small family: my mother, father and brother, who was actually
my half brother although I certainly never saw him that way - he was ten
years my senior and my mentor, and there was nothing “halfway” about
him. My invalid grandmother, made so by a stroke before I was born, lived
just across the field, and was cared for by a permanent live-in who had
been with the family following my grandmother’s stroke. I had an
aunt (my mother’s sister) and her husband who also lived on the
same street just between our house and my grandmother’s. The rest
of my mother’s brothers and sisters lived out of town. We saw them
for the yearly holiday gatherings of Thanksgiving and Christmas when we
would congregate at my grandmother’s for dinner and, on Christmas,
for the Christmas- eve tree.
Since the last week of school before the holidays was approaching, the
event that Saturday of light sleet and a soft falling snow brought the
hope of a white yuletide to my head as I guided myself down the slippery
back steps of our house.
The morning was bleak and grey. A fine haze of snow drifted on an erratic
wind as my dog, a very tenacious fox terrier named Bulger, and I headed
for the branch.
There is something so secretive about snow, so silent. The world seems
to come to a halt in the grip of its cold. That morning was no different
as I walked across the field with its dusted, white furrows - the ghosts
of corn stalks crunching under my feet.
Bulger was ahead of me on his usual scouting mission. I suppose he was
ensuring my safety in some canine policing duty. I watched as his figure
became a small, meandering dot at the edge of the branch and followed
his paw prints in the snow. By the time I got to the barbed - wire fence
that separated our property from the creek, my eyes were starting to get
that funny feeling of frozen mist - like Jack Frost was painting a slick
film of ice on them.
I carefully slid between the wire minding not to snag my jacket or my
skin on its sharp barbs. It was then that I heard my dog barking and was
certain that he had found a squirrel or some other animal (hopefully not
a skunk as he had done that summer) and had treed it. I moved as quickly
as my heavy set of clothes and jacket would allow, but the sound of Bulger’s
barking just seemed to get further away the deeper I traveled along the
edge of the creek into the branch. After awhile, I realized I had gone
beyond my familiar territory. I stopped then, knowing that this was a
taboo area - a place where the trees became a thick mass of tangled branches.
An invisible border that my friends and I never crossed because we knew
it was haunted by the ghosts of hobos who had died in a fire there years
before we were born. My mother had told us the story of how when she was
a little girl some men had burned the shacks where the hobos lived to
get rid of them, and how many of the vagrants had been burned and died. “Sometimes,
late at night when the wind stills and the crickets quiet their singing,” she
had said, “you can hear those hobos’ ghosts wailing from the
darkest part of the branch.” What those wronged spirits wanted she
never would say. She didn’t have to. It was enough to stop my friends
and me from crossing the line. That morning I had stumbled beyond the
boundary because of the mist of cold in my eyes, and when the thing ran
by me screaming, I knew I was about to lose my nine years of life to a
gibbering, hungry ghost.
That it should turn out to be only a frightened, little girl who stood
behind me, shivering from the cold and the fear of Bulger, was a welcomed
relief.
We were both shocked by each other’s presence that wintry morning,
and before we had a chance to speak, Bulger came running from the thick
area of trees ready to protect me. The girl ran back toward the treeline
but was cut off my little guard. She turned and jumped toward a clump
of bushes that was no clump of bushes at all. She was now sitting on something
that was covered by the dead remains of the thickets. Not being familiar
with this area of the branch, I thought it to be no more than a large
mass of bushes that held her weight.
Elevated slightly above me, I could now see what a beautiful child she
was.
The girl was obviously Latino. Her raven hair and liquid brown eyes sang
of her heritage. Her skin was not dark but rather a light brown reminding
me of maple sugar. She was wearing an old, red coat that was not tattered,
only worn by what appeared to be years of use. Her small face seemed lost
in its large, fleece-lined hood.
Bulger was still working, doing his job of raising Cain as he ran back
and forth in front of the bushes, scaring the girl whose breath was escaping
in rapid puffs of fog as it met the icy air.
“
Stop it, boy!” I said with authority. Bulger, of course, didn’t
listen and kept on growling and barking, so I grabbed him by the collar
and pulled him away, his short, stocky, terrier body convulsing with quick
yapping all the while.
“
Settle down,” I told him again, and this time he did start to calm.
The girl looked a little less frightened too. “Will he bite me?” she
asked.
“
No, I won’t let him.”
She smiled and said, “He looks like a good dog. He will help you
cross the river. I wish I had one to wait there for me.”
“
River?” I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the creek or
something else.
“
Yes,” she said, sitting down, leaving her legs to dangle over the
throne of bushes. “My grandmother told me that our people believe
a dog, a pet dog, waits for you at the river - the river that runs between
heaven and the after-world. This dog will swim across and take you back
with him to heaven.”
I liked that - the idea that my dog would be waiting for me. “You
don’t have a dog?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked down at Bulger who had settled down and
was staring at her, tilting his head as if in a question. “What’s
your name?” I asked her. She shook her head again and jumped quickly
to the ground running back toward the dark part of the branch. I was certain
Bulger would take off after her, but he didn’t.
“
I have to go home,” she shouted over her shoulder, “home,” her
voice vanishing in the thick clutch of trees.
I found myself running after her. I didn’t care that I was going
deeper into the forbidden region of the branch. And once I made it through
the tangles of reeds and low branches, I came to a clearing. It was almost
a perfect circle, that spot, with the branch surrounding it. I stood at
its center gasping for breath to get air into my chilled lungs. Once I
got my wind back, I noticed there were what looked to be burnt pieces
of wood in different locations of the clearing. It appeared that some
houses had once stood here. Houses that had been burned to the ground
leaving nothing but a few, aged fragments of scorched shards. My mother’s
story of the hobo shanties came to mind sending goose bumps along my back.
A wind kicked up and sang with a hollow, bass tone through the trees making
the dreary moment even more macabre. And as the limbs started to click
their icy casings together in a skeletal intonation, I felt the urge to
leave the place as quickly as possible.
I turned, hoping to find my bodyguard, Bulger, beside me, but he was nowhere
in sight, so I went back through the heavy mass of reeds and trees as
fast as I could, leaving the clearing far behind.
Bulger was waiting for me where I had left him. He was shaking and seemed
to be scared - something unusual for the little terrier. I petted him
and he licked my hand, then went back to where the girl had been sitting
and sat down whining. I walked there and found that the clump of bushes
had been covering another object: a round cement structure with an opening
sealed with flat planks of wood. That was why the girl had found support
on the top of the bushes. She had been standing on what remained of an
old well.
There were a few areas on the planks where the wood had decayed. I spread
the dead vegetation away and tried to look down into the well through
the small holes. But it was dark down there, made darker still by the
cloudy day. Then, I thought I heard movement at the bottom. It sounded
like something was rustling through dried debris.
My fascination was broken by a sudden sense of dread. A feeling so strong
that I almost jumped back away from the well.
Could it have been? Did I see a brief glint from the well’s bottom
like a shiny reflection of light from an animal’s eyes?
By now Bulger had run away. I heard him barking and guessed he had gone
back to the fence and was waiting for me. It didn’t take much to
convince me to join him. The hair on the nape of my neck prickled by what
I had heard and seen in the belly of the well.
* * * *
Christmas came wrapped in sunshine and unusually warm temperatures. Any
hope of a white yuletide melted with the ice and snow a day after I had
found the little girl and the well.
My aunts, uncles and cousins came to my grandmother’s, as they usually
did, and we all had a good time filled with food, fellowship and presents.
The events of that day at the branch seemed more like shadow by then.
I had said nothing to my parents about that day, nor had I told my cousins.
By not speaking of it, I thought it would vanish just as the snow had.
But after Christmas passed, my relatives gone back home, the wrapping
paper dumped in the trash, and the new presents tucked away neatly in
drawers or under the bed, the next storm came. It blew in with a week
still to go before school vacation was over.
The bitter cold that came with this new storm was the bone chilling kind
that kept you indoors. It kept people away from their jobs and cars off
the streets. Fires were started in the fireplaces. Hot cocoa and soup
were companions for the cold, and dreams were the shades that slept with
you under heavy, feather quilts. Dreams of little girls in red coats,
and wells with gaping mouths waiting to swallow anyone who had heard secret
things scurrying in their dark interiors.
My father had the unlucky profession of working for a utility company.
This included him in times of bad weather - the current tempest being
no exception as the cold and blowing ice and snow had wreaked havoc on
power lines and gas mains. But my mother was employed at a funeral home
and was not called upon to brave the bad weather. The dead love the cold
and would need no help from the living for the time being, so she was
home with me.
If I had been spared the dream, I would not have told her about the girl,
or the well.
Even though I had tried not to think of the day at the branch, there were
moments when it came through on its own. Times when the wind would swirl
around the house shaking the windows with its freezing hands. Times when
I snuggled under the goose feather quilt my mother had made years ago
before I was born. Times when the night stilled around me in a ponderous
blanket of frigid air.
One night during the storm, I was awakened by the touch of my father’s
hand. I looked up at him through my sleepy eyes and he said, “I
didn’t mean to wake you, son. I just wanted to put the covers back
on you.”
“
Where you going?” I asked stretching under the blanket.
“
There’s another busted main,” he said and continued to wrap
the covers snugly around me. I couldn’t see his face, only the silhouette
of his features in the dim light from a distant room were there above
me. “You get some sleep now. It’s starting to snow. With the
ice cover, it should stick. Maybe you can build a snowman today.”
“
Will you help?”
“
Shhh. Don’t wake your mom.”
“
But will you?”
“
If I’m back early enough. But don’t wait too long for me.
You know how the pipes hate this weather.”
“
They bust.”
“
Right. They do that. Now back to sleep with you.”
I said goodbye, but he was already gone. I must have dozed a little before
he left making my goodbye only an echo in the dark.
Sleep started to descend on me again. And just as I was slipping into
its arms, I heard a tapping at the window across my room. “Must
be more ice,” I thought, then turned toward the noise. As my eyes
slowly began to close, I heard the tapping again, only this time it sounded
more like scratching - like fingernails were being drummed then dragged
on the pane of glass. The hair on the nape of neck began to needle just
like the day I ran away from the branch. I tried harder to focus on the
window. For a moment I thought I did see bits of ice striking the surface
much like rain will disturb fog on a window. But looking closer I realized
it was fingers that were making the marks on the frosted areas of the
glass. Small fingers. Like those of a child.
I slipped out from under the covers and walked toward the window. I should
have been afraid but was not. Something in me wanted to go to the window.
It wasn’t to find out what was there. It was to join it.
When I got to the window, I saw the face of the little girl from the branch
looking in. I never questioned how she could be there since the window
to my room was some ten feet above the ground. All I wanted to do was
to touch her. I was like one hypnotized. One who seeks to be caressed
by the dark.
There was such longing in her pale, frosted face. Her eyes yearned for
something, but I could not guess what. I put my hands against the glass
to mirror her own on the other side and sensed myself being pulled, tugged
through the cold windowpane and felt a gloomy burden on my arms as I watched
her hands entwine in mine, drawing me through the glass into the night.
Then, there was a swift rush of chilly air around me. Her face was next
to mine as we floated above the ground. Icy lips brushed against me for
a moment then whispered in my ear, “Show me the way.”
The next instant I was standing alone on the ground near the field beside
our house. It had started to snow. There was no wind and the large, white
flakes drifted aimlessly in the stilled air. What light that could penetrate
the cloud cover cast a dull, blue pallet on the scene before me. In the
distance, I saw Bulger waiting at the edge of the branch. I moved across
the frozen ground, my feet numb and unable to sense the clods of dirt
under them. By the time I got to the fence, my dog was gone. That was
the first moment I felt scared.
I started to shake from the cold. Things stirred around me in the heavy
grass and bushes. I saw the reeds part like something was moving through
them. Whatever it was, it was coming at me. I screamed and turned to run,
but my legs were heavy, frozen by the night’s frigid touch. I strained
to move just an inch - just one, ponderous inch. But it was no good. I
couldn’t escape the presence moving through the reeds, couldn’t
drown the horrible clicking of the cane’s frozen stems as they sang
one against the other, surrounding me in a spectral chorus as icy hands
grabbed my legs and dragged me backward, deeper into the branch. The grass
and reeds stung my face and stifled my screams of pain, and, when I was
let go, I found myself on the ground in front of the well.
I looked up wiping the tears from my eyes. The little girl was there.
Her face was no longer beautiful. It was horribly burned. Beside her stood
others burned as well. Their bodies steamed in the damp, cold air, and
their yellow eyes, almost luminous in the night, stared at me. “Show
us the way,” she pleaded pointing behind her at the creek. “Show
us how to cross.”
I tried to answer her and found myself unable to speak. My throat was
dry and hot. But when the planks that covered the well started to grind
against its cement rim, and I heard something scrabbling up its sides
toward the top, I screamed all right. Screamed myself back into a world
where my mother held me tightly in her arms.
* * * *
“
But it was real. How could it be a dream?”
“
That’s the way dreams are sometimes.” My mother held me tight
and rocked me in the chair by the piano in the living room. Its steady
creaking was a comfort in the aftermath of the dream.
The house still smelled of cedar even though the Christmas tree had been
taken down days ago, leaving the ghost of Christmas mixed in with the
sharp aroma. Darkness started to fill the room as the fire died in the
fireplace, but I was not afraid - not with my mother’s arms wrapped
securely around me.
After she had convinced me I was awake and in my bed and not trapped at
the foot of a well, my mother took my still shaking body to the living
room to calm me down. And there among the smells of the fire and what
remained of the holidays I had replayed my dream to her, then told her
of the meeting with the little girl and the discovery of the well that
day at the branch.
“
I should have told you about that old well,” she said as the fire
gave its last cracks and pops, “but I was afraid if you knew about
it, curiosity would get the better of you and you would want to investigate.
So I thought I could scare you and your friends with that story about
the hobos - at least until you got a little older and would be less apt
to fall in that well.”
“
But what about the little girl. She was real. I saw her.”
“
Oh, she probably wandered down from the houses by the highway. They’re
just behind the branch you know.”
“
And Bulger. Where is he? Is he okay?”
Mama laughed. “That dog never left his warm bed on the back porch
all night. You know how he hates going out at night if it’s cold.”
“
So what happened in the branch, Mama? Were there really old shacks there?
Were they burned? Was it what was left of them I saw when I chased the
little girl?”
“
It happened so long ago,” she said with melancholy in her voice. “I
was younger than you at the time. Your grandfather still had a lot of
land. The city limits took most of it away later, but, back then, he had
a lot of hard farm work to take care of and not enough hired hands to
help.
“
It wasn’t uncommon to hire transients in those days, and a lot of
the men he took on would build shanties or whatever makeshift houses they
could put together near where they had found work. The creek and the branch
being next to Papa’s land, it was just natural they would put up
their shelters there.”
“
I thought hobos were lazy and didn’t want to work,” I said.
“
I only called them that to scare you boys more. They were just people
out of work mostly. People who moved from place to place - anywhere they
could find a job for a little while. Some of them even came from the Valley
on the border of Mexico where they picked fruit. Papa always said they
were the best and most reliable workers of them all.
“
Anyway, that year, the year I was six years old, one of the transients
broke into a house just down the road from us. At least, some people said
it was one of the workers from Papa’s farm. It was hard times then,
son. People were angry. So many were out of work and hungry. Folks around
here turned all that anger on the transients - the strangers. They said
the worker had been fooling with a young girl there. That he had talked
her into to taking off her clothes and was trying to have his way with
her when her father came home.
“
There was never any real proof, but it was all that was needed to get
a mob going. Those people went into the branch that night and set fire
to the shanties. It was late and some of the workers were sleeping. Many
of them died - burned to death. Some of them were families with children.
It was tragic, so tragic.
“
I remember finding my mother crying that morning. I asked her what had
happened, but she wouldn’t tell me. She just held me close and asked
God to keep me safe. I later found out from my brother that one of the
families at the branch had lost their daughter in the fire. They were
Mexican, from the Valley, and the girl threw herself into the well because
she was on fire. I have feared that well ever since. That’s why
I want you to promise me you’ll never go near it again. Okay?”
Light was breaking through the windows then, but it was not bright. It
was that languid grey of a dreary winter morning. I could tell it was
going to be another bleak day.
“
I promise, Mama,” I said as she held me close - tears falling softly
from her eyes. Tears for the dead child from that night years ago. “I
promise. . . . Mama?”
“
Yes.”
“
Can the dead ask us for help?”
“
Shhhsh, now,” she answered and continued to rock me in the old rocking
chair.
“
But, Mama, can they?”
“
Hush, baby.” But I was already drifting away.
We never spoke of the dream or the well again, but every once and awhile
I would see her looking at me with that same sadness I caught in her eyes
on the night she pulled me from the well in my dream.
Late that February, Bulger was killed. He had never been one to chase
to cars, but he couldn’t resist running down a rabbit or a squirrel.
I’m certain that’s where his attention must have been, distracting
him from the car that ran over him. We found him in the field. He had
dragged himself there from the road. He was trying to get back home. My
father said he would leave it to me where to bury the little dog that
had been my friend and bodyguard. It was the last time I would venture
to the branch.
I asked my family if I could put Bulger away privately. They consented
because they thought I would be ashamed if they saw me cry. But it was
more than that.
I buried him by the well. The late winter rains were absent, replaced
by a beautiful day of warm sunshine. It was a day Bulger would have loved
- a day for exploring the wonders of the earth. For me it was a day of
good-bye, and a day to help the dead.
After I dug the grave and placed him in the ground, I shoveled the dirt
back, patted it down, and asked my friend to show the little girl the
way. To guide her and the others who had died senselessly in the fire
across the river to find the peace they had never known.
I’m certain he answered my prayer. He was a loyal, loving, little
dog.
* * * *
Do ghosts exist?
Are there spirits walking among us?
Do they flow like an unseen river through our waking days and sleeping
nights?
Are they the things we fear: the curtain that moves when there is no wind,
or the shadow that appears quickly from nowhere then, just as abruptly,
vanishes, as if it was never there at all?
And what do they want, these restless souls? Is it something we cannot
comprehend, or something as simple as a whispered remembrance?
The land before me, the place where I lived as a boy and a young man,
has known many ghosts. They have walked here long before the settlers
came and will wander here long after the living are gone.
I am flooded by them. They dance around me in the growing dusk as I remember
my life here, and the boy who ran across this field with his dog not far
behind.
All of those close to me are gone now just like the house that once stood
here. Their voices have dimmed over the years. Their faces faded like
old photographs. But I know they are still waiting.
As I move across the field toward the branch, I notice my feet are numb
just like they were in the dream that winter many nights ago. And even
though it is late September and too early for that kind of numbing cold,
I walk on. These things no longer worry me.
The branch looks unchanged - frozen in time as if it has been waiting
for me to come home. The barbed-wire fence still stands. It is rusty with
age. I move through it and walk into the growth of reeds and grass. The
creek is just ahead. I hear its water moving over the half-submerged rocks.
And now, there is the well. The place I know I am supposed to be.
The planks are loose on top and easy to remove. As I look down into the
darkness, a current of air moves softly over my face. Icy lips brush against
me for a moment, then whisper in my ear, “Find the way.” I
turn and look at the creek that is now a river. Bulger is watchful on
the other side. |
