The Ghost of Mary Prairie

Chapter 1

I heard her for the first time on the fourth of July. Hottest damn day of the summer, the weathervane read ninety-eight degrees at ten in the morning. By noon the grass was too hot to walk on in bare feet. The air inside the house felt thick and heavy, and laden down with a strange silence.

No one answered my knock on the bedroom door.

Mama's pie was still baking in the oven but her round, aproned figure wasn't in front of the stove. The house was deserted. It was a Saturday afternoon and by far the scariest day of my life. Little did I know what was coming.

The screams had stopped sometime in the middle of last night. My older sister, Lewella, had been for twenty hours trying to have a baby that didn't want to come out. Doc Fisher and his wife stayed with us all week, but even they couldn't be found anywhere now, and I knew Weaver and Woody had been here last night from the smell of his cigars in the air. With no car out front and the red scarf tied at the very bottom of the fencepost, I knew something had gone wrong somewhere in the world. In my world, on my farm. Had the baby come out backwards or upside down, or worse yet, dead? Or had they taken Lewella and her dead baby into town to get her cleaned up right at Doc Fisher's clinic?

The weight of family responsibility heaved down on me like a thousand pound gorilla. My family had deserted me, though I had trouble digesting this reality. So I kept sane by sticking to the things I knew, and on a farm all you knew were two things - chores, and how to get out of them. So I pretended to be a big city doctor and made my rounds, reminding myself the whole time that everyone had gone without telling me. Mama, Daddy, the farm hands, Lewella, Doc Fisher and Lewella's ham-fisted boyfriend Denny. Denny was the only grown up I knew who was afraid of the dark. Hell, he sometimes had trouble finding his way home from Hooper Circle late at night. I couldn't imagine how he found his way to Lewella's privates, or enough to knock her up anyway. But a brother doesn't have those thoughts about a sister. At least not in 1961 in Grady, Oklahoma.

I started by taking the pie out of the oven. The hand-crocheted oven mitts Grandma Weaver made were like boxing gloves on my knobby hands. Everything wobbled when I picked it up - the glass pie plate filled to the quick, my knees, ankles, innards. I collected Mama's sheets from the clothesline and laid them across her bed, then remembered, at the last minute, that the dogs might run across them and dirty them all up again. So I folded them in a messy stack and started on the potato peeling. I couldn't imagine how Mama did all this every day without a peep of complaint. I knew she didn't like working so hard. Nobody would. But Daddy wouldn't lift a finger to help her and that's the way it was. After the tenth potato, my hands were sticky with the residue left by the dirty skins. My mind wandered. I thought about what Mikey said in the treehouse at our last meeting.

"You're fifteen now, Jake. Time for your initiation."

"Into what?" I asked him, but Mikey had a habit of ignoring the questions he didn't want to answer. I found out well enough three days later, when my rite of passage came in the form of a rock thrown through my bedroom window. Mikey would never throw it himself; he'd get one of his younger brothers to do it for him, since they did anything he told them. Luckily it happened while everyone was tending to Lewella so I'd gone before anybody noticed.

The rock had a note wrapped around it that read, "Initiation into Manhood: sleep on bare ground in baseball diamond. NO sleeping bag, no shoes, no blanket."

No shoes? What kind of a sadist was he?

Mikey made up all the initiations himself, studying books on secret societies he got from the Waurika Library and the community college in Wichita Falls. Most of them involved dissecting small animals and drinking their blood out of tiny glass vials, but Jimmy Wilson threw up when he did that so, over the years, Mikey had changed the rules some. It was his club, he could do whatever he wanted, or so we were constantly reminded. In Grady, a fifteen-year-old boy was either in a club or excommunicated from civilization. Shunned, banished, the scorn of every girl and the embarrassment of the other boys. So I learned early on about the illusion of freedom of choice.

Or, I thought I did.

By the time I finished everyone's chores, Mama's apple pie was cool from sitting in the shade of the porch for two hours. I cut myself a three-helping slice enjoying the autonomy of no supervision, but knowing all the while that I was about to be subjected to some form of discomfort or else why would Mikey have chosen it for me? Boys didn't become men just because they wished it, after all. You had to do something courageous, survive what others weren't equipped to because of either physical frailty or mental weakness. I was somewhere in between, I suppose. My muscles were undeveloped lumps of flabby flesh, but in my eyes was the resolve of knowing I could live through anything. And then I got to the baseball diamond - and changed my mind.

Nothing much happened in Grady after dark. Most of the farmers and ranchers in our part of town had lights out by eight or nine o'clock, and if you had no one to gossip or play cards with, you sat on the front porch looking at the sea of blinking stars. The baseball diamond was only called that because twenty years ago a bunch of doctors from Wichita Falls arranged monthly baseball games with the medical students at the college. This went on for a couple of years and then the college closed down and the baseball diamond became an empty field of course reeds and vile secrets.

People buried stuff there for all different reasons. Buried the ashes of loved ones, dead cats and birds, time capsules, and once Lewella planted some wildflower seeds and a pack of Mama's cigarettes when she was trying to quit. I was sure worse things had been buried, since its size made it the kind of field no one would ever choose to look for something. I learned from Denny, Lewella's clumsy boyfriend, how to ward off evil spirits. He told me to pretend I was somebody else and talk out loud. This kept the spirits away because spirits only bothered you when you were alone. I looked up into the night sky with nothing on but the shirt on my back and some worn dungarees. After the first noise, I became a sea captain. "Ahoy Matees! Launch the life boats, we're goin' ashore." I turned around quick in response to tricks of my ears, and then lapsed back into my role-playing. I walked sideways with a limp like a peglegged pirate, and smiled and chewed out of the side of my mouth. Having read "Treasure Island" so many times, I had it almost memorized. "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Drink and the devil had done for the rest, yo ho ho and -"

And then my ears became fleshy demons again, fooling me, conning me into thinking things that couldn't be. At first it sounded like Lewella's screams from the barn the other night - not steady screams but intermittent shrieks followed by long bouts of desperate quiet. But then I heard the moaning. I had made no camp because Mikey prohibited any normal sleeping comforts, threatening that they would impede the onset of manhood. So I tried to follow every rule. No blanket, no pillow, no shoes or socks, no hat to cover my head or cloth to cover my eyes. No sheets or pillowcases or secret love notes from girls and nothing to be taken from the treehouse either. "Just you," Mikey said, "and the dark night and your twisted imagination."

I covered my eyes with my palms and left an opening between my pinkeys for air to get in, but then I needed two more hands to cover my ears from the wailing sound, and two extra long arms to wrap around my body. It came from every direction. I turned to the right and it got louder. Turned again and my ears drums were about to pop. I would have cut off a finger for another piece of Mama's apple pie right now, but I remembered the last rule of the club - no food. No Dick Tracey cards or my Superman figurines.

So I started running.

First to the left, out toward Happy Jack Road, pounding my bare feet into the rough grass and dirt as hard as I could like I was trying to graft the blades into the fabric of my skin. But the noise only got louder. I turned around a hundred and eighty degrees and ran that way toward the direction I'd first heard the sound coming from, and still it got only louder. Was I going out of my mind? Is this what it meant to go crazy, like Mama's crazy sister Juliet who went to a convent and stopped talking and prayed in Latin lying down on her belly all day long? Then, like Lewella's episode, I heard nothing but crickets and tiny animals all around the prairie floor for three whole beautiful minutes. Silence, dark, cool night air and peace in the pit of my bowels.

Shrieking came again but lower this time. Lower in pitch and in volume like the person was closer to death now. I tried to find her, as I knew it was a woman. A young woman.

"Where are you?" I called out trying to appeal to her sense of responsibility. I was a humanitarian, in that moment, trying to help, to hold her hand while she screamed, while all the life essence drained from her into the cold, unwelcoming dirt. I cried as I ran and never told another soul about it. I hadn't cried ever in my life, or not to myself anyway. I'd cried in front of Mama one time when she made me feel guilty for stealing candy bars from Munroe's store, and I cried on Daddy's knee while his long black belt whipped pink lashes into the flesh of my behind. But never before had I allowed myself the luxury of feeling fear or sadness and let my crying resonate into the night air like this. I didn't care what people thought or how I looked to the boys in our club. To Mikey, or Freddie or Jimmy Wilson or his brother Nate. It was just me running in circles trying to save a dead witch from the tortures of her longing soul.

A speck of the moon peeked out from the layered folds in the clouds. And I saw something, or thought I did. She was twenty yards ahead of me, or I assumed so from the nebulous smears of white and red that I saw in between the spaces of tall fescue. When I moved closer, the sky got dark again but the form in the brush didn't move. Ten yards away now, eight, and I could see it was a blanket. Was it a baby's cry that I'd heard? No - clearly the moans and cries of a woman. Whether she was young or old I couldn't tell and wasn't sure I even wanted to know. As I came upon her, the jerking back motion of my head became a nervous tick. I couldn't stop looking all around me, even though me and the woman in the grass were likely the only two souls out in all of Jefferson County this time of night. I saw her; not just looked but absorbed fully what my eyes were taking in. Her skin was young and smooth without wrinkles, her untrusting eyes, small and dark, and her mouth was gagged with her hands bound behind her back. I wasn't close enough for her to actually see me, but she felt me coming. I could tell because the screams resumed the closer I got. Then when I came into view and gaped down into the bloody grass, it got quiet.

The wide, dark eyes moved back and forth and down the length of my body. The cloth gagging her mouth shut was wrapped high on her face nearly covering her nostrils, but I could still see her fair complexion and beauty amid her despair. She sucked in air violently through her nose as I neared and her wet eyes glistened in the droplets of moonlight shining down through the evil sky. I bent down and reached toward her face to remove the cloth and then the shrieking started again. The sound startled me and I fell back on the hard ground. I didn't know how she made that sound considering her mouth was gagged. It was a full and open scream loud enough to wake every dead body in the Ryan Cemetery twelve miles away. I used my opened palms to try to communicate a gesture of peace, as no words would come out of my mouth, but the closer I got the louder she screamed. So I ran again, and this time I didn't stop till I got to a road. I wasn't sure which road it was as all the light from the sky was blotted out by the clouds terror, but I knew somehow if I stopped running, I would end up dead like that woman would be in an hour. God help her, and maybe me while he's at it.