“Spaulding.” Having never actually said the word before, it sounded foreign on his lips. “Spaulding, Massachusetts. To visit my Aunt Josie.”
The black woman extended a huge paw of a hand and introduced herself as Hattie Mae Jackson. “Always nice when kinfolk move away but still remain close.”
Ned didn’t know what to say. He glanced out the window at an endless procession of cabbage palmettos. Front lawns and rock gardens were littered year-round with a colorful array of Jamaica dogwood, Spanish bayonet, and rhododendron. “I’m spending a week with my sister, Darlene. Her family’s situated just outside Arlington. I head up there every year about this time, and she visits with the kids around Christmas.” The woman shifted in the seat “Should be cooler in Virginia. Not so humid.”
Ned was happy to be seated next to the pleasant, dark-skinned woman and not some nasty old coot who slept with her mouth open or stared sullenly out the window. “Do you make the trip often?” she asked.
“What trip?”
Hattie Mae peered at him uncertainly. “To see your aunt.”
“Never met the woman,” he confessed. “Aunt Josie doesn’t even know I’m coming.”
The black woman was holding a plump grape up to her lips but lowered her hand and put the fruit back in the plastic bag. By way of explanation, Ned added, “My mother had an identical twin sister. For the past fourteen years, I thought she was dead. Dead and buried. And now, a week ago last Friday, I discover Aunt Josie’s very much alive.”
Hattie Mae cocked her head to one side as though she were trying to process what she had heard. Finally, she tapped him lightly on the wrist. “Either you’re on some heavy-duty medication,” she spoke in a throaty bass, “or you’ve got one heck of a weird family.”
The bus driver shifted into the left-hand lane to pass an elderly man puttering along in a battered pickup truck. A white egret on skeletal legs was resting in a drainage ditch, which bordered a grapefruit grove. The sun climbed slowly in an azure sky. “One heck of a weird family,” he confirmed.
Ned stared out the window at the endless expanse of sandy soil that covered the land. The well-drained loam which blanketed most of the Lake District was ideal for citrus groves, and Ned’s father cultivated several varieties of oranges, grapefruits, lemons and limes in their back yard. The best soil in the state, though, was the muck and peat deposits of the southern peninsula, a soil type born of the decayed vegetation from the marshes and swamp forests. Not that Ned gave two hoots about Florida topsoil or much of anything else right now except reaching his final destination in one piece.
At the tender age of fourteen, Ned understood how early settlers felt striking out on their own: Louis and Clark traipsing up the Missouri River toward the Rocky Mountains; the Midwest prairie farmers staking claim to wilderness homesteads. Of course, those early adventurers didn’t have the luxury of an air-conditioned, Greyhound bus with a lavatory in the rear.
Passing under a bridge, Ned glimpsed his reflection in the darkened window. His brown hair flopped down over a wide brow like an unkempt weed patch gone to seed. From his mother, Ned inherited hazel eyes flecked with brown plus a tendency to somber moods and prolonged periods of quiet reflection. From his easygoing father, a willingness to conjure up the numerous shades of gray sandwiched between contentious opposites.
The Greyhound passed Cape Canaveral, Titusville and Daytona Beach. Then a huge forest of longleaf, loblolly pine interspersed with slash pine, black gum and tupelo. Up around Jacksonville, they reached the state line. Halfway through Georgia near Fort Frederica, they crossed the Altimaha River. When the bus pulled into Savannah, Ned got off for ten minutes to stretch his legs, grab a root beer and ham salad sandwich from the snack bar. “Last call! All aboard!” the driver shouted. Ned settled in next to Hattie Mae Jackson, slouched down in the leather seat and closed his eyes.
On Friday two weeks earlier, Ned woke up in the middle of the night to the familiar sound of his parents bickering. “Twenty years, for God’s sake!” Mr. Scoletti muttered. “When does the insufferable feuding end?”
“A hundred and twenty years,” Ned’s mother shot back acidly, “wouldn’t be long enough.”
“So you’ll never make peace with your sister.” His father’s voice sounded menacing as a late-summer, Florida thunderstorm. “Carry the infernal grudge to the grave and beyond.”
Sister. What sister? Aunt Josie died almost fifteen years ago. Right? At that moment a sharp pang of terror swirled through Ned’s gut.
“It’s over and done with.” His mother’s voice was calmer, more conciliatory now. “In all the ways that truly matter, Josie’s dead.”
Ned glanced at the glowing face of the clock on the night table. Two a.m.. The central air conditioning broke down after supper. When Ned’s father called the repairman, he reached an answering machine. The bedroom was hotter than a furnace in hell, an interminable, bone-weary heat that wore you down through the steamy, summer and left you wishing you lived anywhere else but South Florida. Ned rolled over on his back. The sheets were drenched with sweat. He gazed out the window where a swarm of moths flitted crazily about the streetlights lining the roadway. In the hazy darkness the tropical vegetation exuded a dank oppressiveness. How many times had his father tamed the wiry brush and weeds before they crept back to reclaim the cleared land? Their relentless quest to overrun his mother’s flower and vegetable gardens crippled a half dozen lawn mowers and gas-driven weed whackers.
Ned was usually a heavy sleeper. If the air conditioner hadn’t broken down he would have slept straight through the night, waking non-the-wiser in blissful ignorance. But not really. He always figured Aunt Josie among the living, sensed a bewildering presence that his parents would neither deny nor confirm.
For one thing, no one ever mentioned how she died - a disease or untimely accident? - or where his aunt’s body lay buried. This woman who was the spitting image of his mother simply evaporated into thin air, transformed into a wraithlike wisp of nothingness. If her name was mentioned twice a year, that was plenty.
Aunt Josie, the ubiquitous nonperson. Aunt Nobody from Nowheresville.
One further, unsettling clue: a card postmarked July 3, 1987. Place of origin: Spaulding, Massachusetts. The crumpled card lay buried beneath a pile of odds and ends in Mrs. Scoletti’s sewing machine drawer. Signed Love, J, it bore no message.
The day after his parents’ quarrel, Ned found his mother sorting clothes in the laundry room. “Is Aunt Josie alive?”
If the outlandish remark caught Mrs. Scoletti off guard, she revealed nothing. Rather, she dropped a pile of dirty towel into the washer and adjusted the temperature setting. “When was the last time you had a friendly heart-to-heart, with your favorite aunt?” His mother spoke into the belly of the washer as the rising water swirl over the towels.
The element of surprise having slithered away, it counted for nothing. But then, Ned should have known better. Where his headstrong mother was concerned, such reckless strategies never worked. Especially when the subject was taboo. Off-limits. “Never laid eyes on Aunt Josie much less talked to her.”
Mrs. Scoletti added a dash of detergent. “Well I guess you answered your own question.”
In all the ways that truly matter, Josie’s dead! Ned recalled her scathing indictment from the previous night. In the back yard, Ned’s father was pouring some foul-smelling chemical over a colony of fire ants and the boy retreated to the rear of the house. “No one hardly ever talks about Aunt Josie.”
Mr. Scoletti stuck a twig in the mouth of the anthill and a platoon of smallish red ants rushed out to discover what was causing the commotion. “Yes, that’s a fact.”
“She isn’t dead, is she,” Ned pressed, “in the conventional sense?”
Several of the ants succeeded in climbing halfway up the offending stick before Mr. Scoletti threw it aside. “An interesting choice of words.”
Ned fingered a hibiscus with its large, showy flower
s. His mother had ringed the edge of the fruit trees with a mix of royal poinciana, camellia, and fragrant gardenia. “Well, is she or isn’t she?”
His father soaked the ants a second time with the lethal mix and straightened up. “You heard the fight last night?” Ned shook his head. “Figured as much,” he said and walked away without elaboration.
What unspeakable crime had Aunt Josie committed to be banished - in his mother’s spiteful words - for a hundred and twenty years? There had been a falling out. Something outlandish on the scale of the Hatfields and McCoys. And here he was jumping right into the center of the maelstrom. God help Ned Scoletti!
*****
The next day Ned called information. “Josie Applebee in Spaulding, Massachusetts.” Applebee was his mother’s maiden name.
After a short pause the operator said, “Yes, I have that listing for you. Area code 508...”
The next day, weighted down with a pocketful of loose change, he trekked a mile and a half to the Cumberland Farms and dialed the number. “Hello.”
“Is Josie Applebee there?”
“Yes, this is Josie.”
Something short-circuited in Ned’s brain. A light dimmed and flitted out like a circuit breaker on overload. He jammed the receiver back on the hook.
Okay. Let’s not have a nervous breakdown or do anything rash! We need a plan. A sensible course of action. But how could he develop a coherent plan if his parents continued to deny Aunt Josie’s physical existence? On Wednesday Ned withdrew 500 dollars of his college savings from the Sun City Bank and bought a round trip ticket to Spaulding, Massachusetts.
*****
At nine p.m. the bus passed through Charleston en route to Myrtle Beach. Ned dozed off and on. Dinner was a bag of tortilla chips and a soft drink. His teeth felt grimy, but he forgot to put a toothbrush in his backpack.
“Now there’s some serious reading,” Hattie Mae whispered mischievously. A gaunt Jewish man, wearing a knit skullcap and lugging the largest book Ned had ever seen, joined the passengers an hour out of Daytona Beach. The bearded man, who was dressed in black, settled into the seat across from them, cracked the book open and never lifted his eyes from the volume. His lips fluttering noiselessly as he read, an emaciated finger accompanied the text across the page.
“Right to left,” Hattie Mae observed. “That monstrous book ... he’s reading right to left. Opposite of English.”
Ned leaned far forward in his seat. Sure enough, the Jewish man’s finger inched across the printed page as though he were reading backwards. Ten minutes later when Ned got up to visit the lavatory, he stole a glance at the immense volume. On one side, words blossomed in a flowery, exotic script he’d never seen before, presumably Hebrew. On the facing page was the English translation.
“While you were gone,” Hattie Mae confided when Ned returned, “I asked him about the book. Some Spanish philosopher wrote it almost a thousand years ago. Imagine that!”
“Yes, it’s quite amazing,” Ned replied.
“A Guide for the Perplexed. That’s what it’s called.”
A Guide for the Perplexed. What if a person could simply consult an ancient, moth-eaten manual and, abracadabra, solve all his worldly problems - set the universe spinning on an even keel. Was it just wishful thinking, a fanciful pipe dream? Ned gazed at the Jewish man. He was still bent over the heavy tome. A lock of dark hair, which he absent-mindedly twirled around an index finger, hung down almost to his shoulder. For this religious zealot, the world with all its intricacies and complications fell away. There was only a thousand year-old text and a Greyhound bus speeding north.
At the next stop an elderly couple boarded the bus and sat diagonally across, a seat in front of the scholarly Jew. “Hillbillies,” Ned mused. The elderly man, who looked like he’d slept a month-of-Sundays in his rumpled clothes, had a wide grizzled jaw that reminded Ned of the tempered steel scoop on a backhoe. He seemed angry and distracted as he stuffed a lumpy canvas bag into the overhead rack.
“Here let me help,” his wife offered.
“Leave me be!” He kept repositioning the bag but it was much too wide for the cramped space. “The morons who design these infernal contraptions never leave enough room. It’s disgraceful!” He spoke loud enough to insure that everyone on the bus was aware of his sentiments. The wife was trying to help ease the bag into the overhead rack but finally the man changed his mind, wrenched it free and crammed it under his seat. “Well, we’re off to a great start.”
“No need getting yourself lathered up over nothin’,” the wife spoke pleasantly.
“Shut up, you dimwitted fool!”
The woman winced as though she had been walloped with a pressure treated two-by-four. Then she screwed her face up in a hurt expression and sulked while her husband sneered at the back of the bus driver’s head. To the left, the Jewish man poured over his divinely inspired text. At the next stop the elderly couple got off. Lugging his lumpy, canvas bag, the hillbilly muttered something unintelligible and made a threatening gesture as he left the bus. Following on his heels, the downtrodden wife wore the look of martyrdom like a badge of honor.
The seat remained empty until a young woman with a newborn baby took their place. A shroud of darkness wrapped the countryside. “Was you tellin’ me the God’s honest truth back there in Saint Lucie County?” Hattie Mae was staring at Ned with a solemn expression. “About going to visit some auntie you ain’t never laid eyes on?”
At times, it didn’t seem real to Ned either. And he was the one making the trip! The revelation scared him half to death. But not enough so to scramble off the bus at the next scheduled stop and put his return ticket to practical use. “I wouldn’t lie about such a thing.”
Ned Scoletti was fourteen years old, a thousand miles from home and finally out from under his mother’s wrath and chronic consternation. The bus driver had turned off the lights so passengers could catch some shut eye. The Rabbi lit the tiny overhead light and was still grappling with his Guide for the Perplexed.
Darkness felt reassuring. A person could hide in the dark, take solace, and lick his wounds. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living some Greek tragedy.” He knew the pronouncement sounded melodramatic if not outright silly, but Ned needed to vent. He felt edgy, a mass of percolating emotions. In a word, a mess!
Hattie Mare Johnson wriggled her nose. Her black skin was perfectly smooth, flawless, so that it was impossible to gauge her age. “I knew some Greek people once, but never was partial to that goat cheese or stuffed grape leaves.”
“My family’s like a Greek tragedy,” Ned continued. “My mother murdered off her own twin sister twenty years ago.”
“But she ain’t really dead,” Hattie Mae interjected, “least not rotting in some moldy grave.”
“That’s why I’m sitting on this bus in the middle of the night,” Ned affirmed. “I aim to bring the metaphorical corpse back to life.”
“You,” Hattie Mae patted his arm, a comforting gesture, “sure got a funny way with words.” She stared out the window for the longest time, her jaw grinding back and forth as though the woman was chewing a mouthful of leathery meat. “Truth is, you don’t chuck family out with the trash,” she said grimly, “like a pair of smelly, worn-out sneakers.” Hattie Mae stroked her fleshy chin thoughtfully. “Can’t imagine what awful crime your auntie committed to be banished forever.”
“Sort of like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.”
“Can’t rightly say as I know the woman.”
Ned told her a condensed version of the Hawthorne story. “Infidelity. Yeah, well it’s a possibility. But I was thinking your aunt must have done somethin’ a hell of a lot worse.... something flat out awful. Strangled a newborn child with her bare hands or become a depraved dope fiend nymphomaniac.”
Ned shrugged. He fingered the rectangular piece of cardboard in his front pocket. The roundtrip ticket had cost a hundred and thirty dollars. That left $370 for incidentals. If his au
nt were a murderer or slutty dope fiend, he’d turn around and catch the next bus south. But not before treating himself to a lavish, sit down meal in the best restaurant he could find. And maybe a restful night in a decent hotel.
“Can’t say’s I envy you.” Hattie Mae patted his hand reassuringly.
Ned located a scrap of paper and scribbled a number on it. “When you get to your sister’s would you call my folks and tell them I’m okay.” He pressed the paper into the black woman’s pudgy hand. “Tell them I’m on my way to find Aunt Josie.”
“Sure will. And I’ll mention what a fine young man they have for a son.”
Ned didn’t think his straight-laced mother would be any too happy to hear that her son, who ran off without so much as a kiss goodbye, was a fine upstanding person.
*****
Mrs. Scoletti was a woman of extremes. A flawed creature prone to emotional excesses. Once, during a domestic squabble, she hurled a breakfast plate at his father. The dish shattered against the far wall leaving the buttermilk pancake and a half-eaten, hickory-smoked sausage plastered to the wallpaper. Bursting into tears, his mother ran from the room. Mr. Scoletti swept the broken plate into a dustpan then wiped the soggy pancake batter off the wallpaper.
“Your mom’s a humdinger!” Ned’s father chuckled. Judging by the veneration in his tone, Ned took that as an act of charitable forgiveness. Regarding the plate-throwing incident, there were no repeat performances. Over the years, Ned had learned to accommodate his mother’s whimsical moods. To love someone was to make allowances even when their behavior bordered on flagrant nuttiness.
In the morning they passed through Fayetteville and Elizabeth City. The endless stretches of Florida flat land were left far behind. Hattie Mae poured herself a cup of tea from a thermos and sipped at the steamy liquid.
“I’ve got pictures.” Ned pulled two snapshots from his breast pocket and handed them to his seatmate. The first photo showed two young children, Ned’s mother and Aunt Josie, dressed in matching sailor suits. The twin toddlers were hugging each other and mugging it up for the camera. A sign overhead read ‘Manatee Cove, Fort Pierce, Florida. Home of the Sea Cows!’ The second picture showed the girls in their late teens leaning up against a palm tree.