Ah, now we were rolling. Which to get defensive about first—the implication that I was a fraud, or the comparison to a hooker?
And I know, I know. The man was in pain, and he came to me seeking some comfort. I should have forgiven him for his misdirected anger; I should have been tolerant of his agony, and forgiven his terrible manners for his loss. I should have tried to help him. For what it’s worth, I did forgive him. And I was tolerant. And I did try to help him. Yet for all that, I was still just a lying whore because I wouldn’t tell the man what he wanted to hear.
I folded my hands around my coffee cup and sat back in the ironwork chair. “First of all I have never, not even once, claimed to be a medium. On the contrary, I’ve spent the last year of my life hiding—rather unsuccessfully, it would seem—from people like you who want to assign me that title. And second, I wouldn’t take your money if you threw it at me. If I could help you, I would—and I’d do it for nothing. But I can’t. I’m sorry for your loss, but there’s nothing I can do for you. If you’re not okay with that, you need to leave.”
He stood to leave, still crying. Still grasping my tissues.
I exhaled my entire collection of deeply drawn breaths as the door closed behind him.
Similar scenarios had played themselves out so frequently that I’d given up hope for a different ending. Sometimes it took longer for the bereaved to go from grief-stricken and vulnerable to wishing that I, personally, were dead, but the end result was always the same.
And I don’t know how they find me—it’s not like I put an ad in the paper. Maybe they track me down through online rumors, or my name is written on a bathroom wall somewhere. I wonder sometimes what the gossip says. Does it mention me by name? There has to be more to it than “Biracial Southern girl chats up dead people. Come visit the Scenic City and see if you can sucker her into a reading.”
If I could find it myself, I’d delete or wash away every word.
My coffee had gone tepid. I wandered over to the counter and talked someone into trashing it in the sink for me, then reclaimed the cup for a fresh hit of caffeine.
Behind me, the glass door swooshed open again, and I heard the electric hum of a familiar wheelchair. As usual, the sound of the chair was shadowed closely by four paws clapping on the tile floor.
“Hey, Karl,” I said over my shoulder as I pumped myself a refill from the air pot on the counter. “And hey, Cowboy,” I added towards the shaggy brute beside him. I finished my top-off and reached for the creamer.
Karl joysticked himself up to me so that his floppy, feathered cowboy hat hovered beside my shoulder. His diligent sheltie sidekick assumed a politely seated position on the floor.
“You’ve sure got a way with people.” He grinned. “You make ’em cry faster than that Barbara Walters woman.”
“Thanks. I think.” I grabbed a brown plastic stirring stick and swirled my beverage until it turned a uniform beige. I faced him then, leaning my rear against the counter. “And what brings you two old coots downtown today? Anything special?”
“Just you, beautiful. I’ve got a weakness for brunettes, you know.” He winked and wiggled his graying mustache at me.
“And blondes. And redheads.” I reached down and tugged at the brim of his hat, winking back without any real mirth. “And I bet you say that to all the girls who chase people out of the shop in tears.”
His laugh was a rough, low sound that managed to carry a Southern accent even without any vowels. That man could clear his throat in a thunderstorm and you’d be able to hear he was a local.
“You’ve got me there. But I mean it—I was hoping you’d be out and about. Join you at your table?” He and Cowboy were already halfway to Gary’s freshly vacated spot, and I wouldn’t have told him no anyway. Instead, I pulled the seat out to make room for his chair and kicked my purse under the table so Cowboy wouldn’t have to lie on it.
“You want some coffee?”
“Got some.” He waved a foam to-go cup with one hand and a newspaper with the other. “Have you looked at today’s paper?”
“Not likely. Haven’t needed to line any litter boxes since this morning.”
He snorted, and Cowboy’s ears perked, then settled again. “Then I guess no one else has showed you yet.”
“Showed me what?” I asked as a matter of formality, but just as I’d known that Gary would have a photograph on him, I might have known that Karl would have a ghost story. If he hadn’t been holding the newspaper, I’d have guessed he’d come to me bearing a new bad joke. Not a dirty or off-color joke, just a bad joke—one that would take at least ten minutes to wend its slow, painful way to a punch line.
“This article about what happened at the battlefield over Decoration Day.”
I like Karl’s jokes better than his ghost stories, but it was nothing personal, and it had nothing to do with his easygoing narrative style. It’s like I said once before about there being no such thing as old news in the South. Likewise, there is no such thing as a private matter.
On the Internet someplace there’s a list of things you’ll never hear a Southerner say. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s funny—though I’d love to add in the phrase “But it was none of my business, so I didn’t ask.” News or a damn good story will always find its way out, so ever since the whole mess with Malachi I’ve been a lightning rod for spooky anecdotes.
All of that having been said, by the time Karl showed me the article I had heard no fewer than a dozen versions of the Decoration Day incident at the Chickamauga Battlefield.
The story made the rounds in the valley with a speed that would shame a wildfire. Of course it expanded with each retelling until the saga came to include a regiment of skeletal Union ghosts, a couple of soldierless spook horses, a bloody-headed drummer boy, and at least two bugling wraiths who foretold the imminent rebirth and rise of the Confederacy.
So you had to understand my skepticism.
“You just look right here—they hid it on the third page, but it made it in all the same.” Karl unfolded the Times Free Press and sorted it out, seeking a certain picture and finding it. He bent the third page double, nudged my coffee cup out of the way, and pushed the paper forward.
“‘No Leads Yet in the Disappearance of Ryan Boynton.’”
“No, not that one.” He tapped the paper, down below the headline I’d just read.
“‘Mystery at Battlefield Park,’” I tried again, and he approved. “Sounds like a Nancy Drew title.”
He patted at the columns with two long, bony fingers. “Go on and read it. Look what it says about Decoration Day.”
“‘The first unusual incident took place at a Sons of Confederate Veterans gathering, attended by nearly sixty people who claimed their picnic was visited by a ghost. According to eyewitnesses, the specter of a young soldier approached the group and tried to speak, but he seemed unable to communicate. Before he vanished, the ghost pointed at the woods.
“‘One witness, Edna-Anne Macomber, insists that the soldier bore a strong resemblance to her husband at the age of twenty—prompting speculation that the unexpected visitor may have been her husband’s great-uncle. “He had the same-shaped face, and the same way of standing. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw him there. He looked right at us,” Mrs. Macomber claims. “And he knew it too. That’s why he chose us, I think. He knew Evan when he saw him.”
“‘Jeremiah Macomber fought with the Deas Brigade for the 19th Alabama regiment. He died in the Battle of Chickamauga on the first day of fighting, September 19, 1863.’”
I put the paper down and shrugged. “That wouldn’t be too surprising, I guess. Maybe that is what drew old Jeremiah out in the first place—he spotted the family resemblance.”
Karl got all excited. “You think it’s true? You think some old soldier crashed the picnic?” He shifted around in his chair and gripped the brim of his hat with glee.
“I can’t say it’d shock me.” I tried and failed to remember a few details from a long-ago school trip to the battlefield visitors’ center. “How many people died out there, anyway?”
“A lot.” He beamed.
“I should’ve paid better attention in history class. But we know that a lot of people died under violent and painful circumstances. I’d be astounded if there weren’t any ghosts out there.”
“But you don’t hear a lot of ghost stories about the battlefield. You get stories about Old Green Eyes instead.”
“Yeah,” I said, though that fact was something I’d always found strange. Thousands and thousands of dead soldiers are buried in the park, and most of the scary stories passed around campfires were about a made-up monster instead of the logical legions of war dead.
Karl must have been thinking the same thing. “There’s a couple of stories about the tower in that field, and there’s one or two about weeping widows roaming the grounds looking for their husbands; but for the most part Green Eyes gets all the good lines.”
“The villain always does.”
“Now that’s true. I wonder why?”
I tossed my head to the left in half a shrug. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Do you believe in him?” he asked, leaning forward. I’d given him an inch, and here he came chasing after me for a mile.
A year or two before I might have said no, but I’d had my horizons broadened a bit since then. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to people who’d swear on their mothers’ graves they’d seen him, but that doesn’t mean anything. One of them was Mike, for God’s sake.”
“Mike’s the one who got drunk and fell off the roof of the library?”
“That’s him,” I confirmed. “He was trying to prove he could rock-climb at three in the morning. He used to live out by the battlefield, in the subdivision on the other side of the train tracks. You know—there on the edge of the park. Mike and his brother have a million and one Green Eyes stories, but since most of them start off with a case of beer I’m not inclined to take them very seriously.”