Because of your mother, possibly. They are attracted to disturbances of all kinds. Then again, sometimes a ghost is a person out of your future. A person dropping back through time, I guess, by mistake. I’ve heard that from my own mother.
His mother, my grandmother, was from a medicine family. She’d said a lot of things that would seem strange at first but come true later in life.
She would have said to watch for that ghost. It could be trying to tell you something.
He put down his cup of coffee and now I remembered that last night he’d slept next to the sewing machine instead of my mother, and that he and Uncle Edward had figured out the priest was a suspect, and that they’d probably figured out even more than I realized because I’d fallen asleep. The priest and the gas can and the pile of stinking clothes and the court cases all collected in a tangled skein. My throat went dry and I couldn’t swallow. I sat there. He sat there. The ghost had come for my mother, or to tell me something.
The last thing I want to know is something that a ghost wants to tell me, I said.
At that moment it struck me that Randall also had seen something similiar, which relieved me. If this ghost, or whatever, was looking for Randall, he could fix it with his medicine. He’d put out tobacco. I would put out tobacco. The ghost would leave, or it might even help my mother. Who knew? She was upstairs with the coffee on her side table, cooling off. I knew she wouldn’t touch the cup and it would be there later on. An oily sheen would have formed on the cold, repugnant stuff. It would leave a black ring in the cup. Everything we gave her came back and left a ring or a crust or went cold or congealed or went hard. I was sick of bringing down her wasted food.
My father bent his head down and rested his forehead on his fist. He closed his eyes. There was the ticking of the clock in that sunny kitchen. Around the face of the clock there was a kind of sunburst. But the rays were plastic squiggles and the thing looked more like a gilded octopus. Still, I kept looking at the clock because if I looked down I would have to see the top of my father’s head. To see the egg-brown scalp and thin patch of gray hairs would put me over the edge. I’d snap, I thought, if I looked down.
So I said, Hey, Dad, it’s just a ghost. We can get rid of it.
My dad reared up and wiped his face with both hands. I know, he said. It has no damn message and it hasn’t really come for her. She’s going to get better, to get over this. She’ll start working again next week. She said something about it. And she’s reading books, I mean she’s reading a magazine anyway. Clemence brought some light reading into the house.
Father Travis, I said. He can bless the yard or something.
My father took a sip of coffee and his eyes gauged me over the rim of the cup. I could see an energy fill him now. He was something like his old self. He knew when he was hearing bullshit.
So you were awake, he said. You heard us.
Yes, and I know more, I said. I went to the round house.
Chapter Five.
When the warm rain falls in June, said my father, and the lilacs burst open. Then she will come downstairs. She loves the scent of the lilacs. An old stand of bushes planted by the reservation farm agent bloomed against the south end of the yard. My mother missed its glory. The flimsy faces of her pansies blazed and then the wild prairie roses in the ditches bloomed an innocent pink. She missed those too. Mom had grown her bedding plants from seeds every year I could remember. She’d had her paper milk carton planters arranged on the kitchen counter and on the sills of all south-facing windows in April—but the pansy seedlings were the only ones that lived to get planted outside. After that week, we’d forgotten to take care of all the others. We found the spindly stalks dried to crisps. Dad had dumped the seedlings and dirt in the back and burned the bottoms of the milk cartons with the trash, destroying signs of our neglect. Not that she noticed.
The morning I told my father about the round house, he pushed his chair back, stood, and turned from me. When he turned around, his face was calm and he told me that we’d talk later. We were going to put in my mother’s garden. Now. He’d bought expensive bedding plants from a tumbledown hothouse twenty miles off the reservation. Cardboard flats and plastic trays were set out in the shade. There were red, purple, pink, and striped petunias. Yellow and orange marigolds. There were blue forget-me-nots, Shasta daisies, lavender calendula, and red-hot poker flowers. Dad gave me directions. I set the plants one by one into the flower beds. She had a tractor tire painted white and filled with dirt, and matching rectangles of dirt beside the front steps. I added lobelia and candytuft to the pansies in the narrow beds that lined the driveway. I kept all of the flimsy plastic plant markers for her to see. From time to time, as I worked, I thought of the files. The ghost. The bits and pieces of confusion. The round house. I was beginning to dread the talk with my father. The files again. And the nagging thought of the priest, then the Larks, then the priest again. Behind the house her vegetable garden lay—still heaped with straw. After I’d planted the flowers, I went around back of the house to stack the plastic pots and put away the tools.
Keep those out. We’re going to turn over the dirt in your mother’s vegetable garden, said my dad.
For what?
He just gave me back the shovel I had dropped, and pointed to the edge of the yard, where onion sets and tomato sprouts and packets of bush bean and morning glory seeds waited. We worked together for another hour. When we’d finished with half the soil, it was time for lunch. He left to buy the rest of the plants. I went inside. I was supposed to watch over my mother. I looked around the kitchen. There was a tin of minced ham on the counter, a key fixed to the top to roll the cover back. I made myself a sandwich, ate it, and drank two glasses of water. There was a package of cookies with red jam in the center. I ate a handful. Then I made another sandwich and put it on a plate with two cookies to decorate it. I walked upstairs with the plate of food and a glass of water. Pearl had learned to watch for and wolf down food left outside the bedroom door, so we always brought it into the room now. I balanced the plate on top of the glass of water, and knocked. There was no answer. I knocked harder.
Come in, said my mother. I went in. It had now been over a week since she had walked up those stairs, and the bedroom had taken on a fusty odor. The air was heavy with her breath, as if she’d sucked out the oxygen. She kept the shades pulled. I wanted to set the sandwich down and run. But she asked me to sit.
I put the sandwich and water on the square bedside table from which I had removed so many stale sandwiches and half-drained glasses and bowls of cold soup. If she’d eaten anything I’d not seen it. I dragged a light chair with a cushioned seat close to the bed. I assumed that she wanted me to read to her. Clemence or my father chose the books—nothing sad or upsetting. Which meant the books were either boring romances (Harlequin) or old
Now I reached forward to switch on her bedside lamp—she wouldn’t want the shade drawn up, light to pour through the window. Before I could touch the switch, she gripped my arm. Her face was a pale smudge in the dim air, and her features were smeared with weariness. She’d become weightless, all jutting bones. Her fingers bit hard into my arms. Her voice was fuzzy, as if she’d just woken.
I heard you two. What were you doing out there?
Digging.
Digging what, a grave? Your father used to dig graves.
I shook her arm off and drew back from her. The spidery look of her was repellent, and her words so strange. I sat down in the chair.
No, Mom, not graves. I spoke carefully. We were digging up the dirt in your vegetable garden. Before that, I was planting flowers. Flowers for you to look at, Mom.
Look at? Look at?
She turned over, away from me. Her hair on the pillow was greasy strings, still black, just a few streaks of gray. I could see her spine clearly through the thin gown, each vertebra jutted, and her shoulders were knobs. Her
