Ghost Summer, Stories

  “You wouldn’t believe how much of life is semantics.” Dr. Jack put his metal slate aside. “I tell people to think of it as an allergy, if that helps.”

  To what? she almost said, before she realized that, of course, she knew: the Moon.

  “I like that, too,” Kenya said. “I’ll take that over my grandfather telling me I was a freak. Oh, and that I should have pride in my freakishness because it makes me superior.”

  Dr. Jack shrugged. “I hear that too. Works for some people, doesn’t for others. Listen, I offer more comprehensive services here, if that interests you. Moon-feasts. Hunting nights and retreats upstate, up by the Adirondack Mountains. Great woods up there. A van-load of folks from Canada join us there twice a year, and they’re a wild bunch. And we do group meetings, like I think I mentioned before.”

  For an instant, something inside Kenya turned sharp and glistening. She’d spent the past few days, and fitful nights, contemplating whether or not she would like to meet any of the others, particularly the commuter from Washington, DC. Even thinking about the stranger made her feel disloyal to Lee, who was almost the same mysterious phantom. She’d never known any others except Gramp, after all, and she’d grown comfortable with the assumption that she never would. She didn’t trust the part of herself that craved their fellowship. Besides, it was too late for that. She had chosen Lee, and she would make a life with him. She would be done with it.

  Perhaps if she had met Dr. Jack and his peculiar circle sooner. But she hadn’t.

  “I have a few singles . . . ” Dr. Jack went on, trying to entice her.

  “I’m engaged,” Kenya said. “I’m getting married in three months.”

  “Is he family?”

  The word “family” confused Kenya for an instant, before she allowed herself to enjoy its reassuring quality. Are you family, Dr. Jack? she wanted to ask, because she really wasn’t sure. Gramp would have known by a scent or something in this man’s gaze, but Kenya’s instincts felt dull and unreliable, so all she could rely on was his hairiness, which could be explained in so many other ways. She’d conveniently used those other explanations herself.

  She thought of Lee’s cherubically hairless chest, his bare back that gleamed with massage oil. He was a vegetarian, but aside from that obvious flaw, he was a painfully good person, and he loved her with great zeal. So far, anyway. Kenya fought a sudden constriction of her throat, as if someone were strangling her.

  “No, he’s not family,” she said. “And he doesn’t know. He lives in L.A., and we only see each other every couple months. Usually I leave the hair alone until right before I see him.”

  “What about after you’re married?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’ll tell him one day.”

  “That’s brave,” Dr. Jack said, staring at her with naked admiration.

  In the end, that was what gave Dr. Jack away. Not his scent or the shape of his teeth, but his envy. She wondered how much time he spent importing his ingredients, making his paste, conducting his group sessions, planning his Moon-feasts. Between that and his regular practice, she surmised, he must not have time for much else, and maybe he liked it that way, basking in the image of Lon Chaney, Jr. Exalting his own strangeness.

  She wondered if he secretly scorned her for being a sheep. The way Gramp would.

  “Good luck with your fiancé,” Dr. Jack said. “That’s a tough disclosure for people to swallow. At least you know we’re here if you get any ugly surprises.”

  Ugly surprises. Nope, Kenya thought, the biggest surprise she might get from Lee would be a spontaneous hug or some profound gesture of his devotion. The ugliness was what she expected; revulsion, surliness, fear. Then, if she was very lucky, gradual acceptance. If Dr. Jack’s hair paste actually worked, that would make her task so much easier with Lee—he might not have to see it, not ever. She had to hope so, anyway.

  She hoped for something much more than the way Terrell Jordan, by the end of their senior year, gave her only wistful half-waves in the hallway as evidence that he had once laughed at her jokes, or that she’d ever made his palms sweat. She’d taken those waves home with her and replayed them in her giddy imagination as if they mattered, as if they were so much more than reminders of Terrell’s cowardice. When she lay very quietly on her made-up bed and closed her eyes, hugging her book-bag to her chest, she could even imagine that Terrell had stroked and kissed that thick patch of hair between her budding breasts instead of pulling his hand away.

  I wrote this for Sheree Renée Thomas’s Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), the second anthology in the series. This volume, just as the first in 2001, was honored with the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2005.

  Trial Day

  Letitia was a few months shy of ten the summer Brother was scheduled to stand trial.

  Brother was only her half-brother, and his name was Wallace Lee, but Letitia had always called him Brother because, to her, the warmth and strength of that word suited him best. In turn, he’d always called her Lettie, the sassier nickname she preferred, instead of the prissier and cumbersome “Letitia” that Daddy and her stepmother insisted on calling her by. Her stepmother thought nicknames were low-class, and Daddy usually went by whatever her stepmother said, so Brother called her Lettie in secret.

  Brother lived with his mama in Live Oak, which was a day’s drive south in Daddy’s shiny new 1927 Rickenbacker, farther than most people she knew had traveled in their lives, so she didn’t see him as often as she wanted to. During the summers, and sometimes for Thanksgiving, Brother took a train to stay with them for as long as two weeks, arranging his long limbs into knots so he could sleep on the living room couch. Brother was only fifteen now, but he’d always been tall. Letitia had never met Brother’s mother, but Daddy was tall enough for two. Letitia and Brother had different mamas in different towns—although Daddy had never been married to either woman—and her stepmother told Letitia the whole thing was a disgrace and a ought to be a source of personal shame to her, as if Letitia could be responsible for any of the doings in the world before she was born. By studying Brother, Letitia decided that his mama must be dark-skinned like her own, and probably pretty too, judging by Brother’s long, thick eyelashes. When he visited them last summer, Brother had been nearly as tall as Daddy and his voice had dropped to a lower register. Letitia had listened to the two of them laughing on the front porch late at night, having a conversation she wasn’t allowed to listen to, and they had sounded to Letitia like two grown men having a gay old time, not a father and son. She still remembered the way they’d laughed, barking out into the night wind. Listening to that sound, which seemed to surround the house, Letitia had fallen asleep with a smile, rocking in their happy noise.

  Even her stepmother, Bernadette, stayed out of the way when Brother was here. Bernadette didn’t talk to Brother with her voice shrilled high the way she talked to Daddy, and sometimes Brother could make her laugh, too. When he did, she’d hide her mouth behind a napkin or her hand as if she didn’t want anyone to witness a smile on her face. Most times, no one did. Bernadette’s smiles were hard to come by, and always accidental. Letitia had long ago given up trying to think up ways to bring out Bernadette’s smiles. But Brother could. Laughter and smiles of any kind were hard to come by during Brother’s impossibly long absences, when Letitia began to wonder if she would see him again or if she’d just dreamed him. Of all the reasons Letitia had to love him—and his kindness toward her was unlike anyone else’s except her father’s and poor Mama’s—perhaps she loved Brother most for bringing the laughter and smiles.

  So it came as a shock to Letitia when she learned that Brother was in jail. Bernadette told as if she were discussing a stranger she’d read about in the newspaper. “Got himself thrown in jail for armed robbery! That’s what these young boys get for being so wild. They’ll probably give that foolish boy the chair, robbing a white man like that,” she told Letitia. “Your daddy took up with every tramp a
nd hoodoo woman who looked his way, so what else can he expect?”

  Letitia was too scared for Brother to be angry about Bernadette’s insults. She knew what The Chair was. The Chair was the electric chair at Raiford State Prison, where colored men were sent to grow old—or to die, if they were destined to take their seat on The Chair. As much as Letitia had heard about Raiford and The Chair in her tender nine years of life, she had never imagined she could know someone who got sent there. Those were the hard-luck stories from people with hard-luck lives.

  Daddy was Richard Reaves. He had his own grocery store and a cotton farm. He had a house with two stories and three bedrooms on a thirty-acre parcel of land that had once been owned by slaveholders. Daddy and Cecil Johnson, who owned the colored mortuary, were the two most envied men in the county—and Daddy was most envied of the two because Bernadette was so much more light-skinned than Mr. Johnson’s wife. (Daddy and Bernadette looked like twins, with their straight hair and honey skin.) When daddy installed the new upstairs bathroom, neighbors flocked to the house because they were still using outhouses and they wanted to see with their own eyes how a colored man right there on Percival Street had a working toilet and bathtub upstairs in his house, in addition to the one downstairs.

  Letitia’s daddy did not have hard luck, so Brother could not have been sent to Raiford.

  “That’s just a misunderstanding, and it’s being worked out. I’m sure Wallace Lee’s home by now,” Daddy said when she asked him, mussing her hair. But he never looked her in the eye when he said it, and Letitia felt a growing, heavy pool of disdain in her belly when it occurred to her that Daddy was lying to her. She had never thought of her father as the kind of man who would lie to a stranger, much less to his daughter. To her.

  That summer, suddenly, everything in Letitia’s world began to feel all wrong. Hearing about Brother’s arrest was the first thing. Hearing the lie in Daddy’s voice had been the next. But the hardest, the worst, was yet to come. Letitia just knew it.

  Letitia knew many things, mostly things she wished she didn’t. Her teacher called her unusually perceptive, which sounded like a grand thing, but Bernadette instead accused Letitia of mischief and lies, helpless to find anything but wickedness in her. Despite Letitia’s efforts to behave as well as she could at all times to make her presence less burdensome, she knew that Bernadette considered her the very living image of everything was wrong with her life. Letitia had known this about Bernadette when she was as young as five, the first time Daddy had brought her to live with him because Mama was too poor. Bernadette hated her right away, at first glance. Letitia had not known exactly why, but the hatred had been as plain as the moon in the sky. In later years, Letitia had come to realize that Bernadette hated her because she was proof that Daddy had known other women before her, and because she hated mothering a strange woman’s daughter when she could not have children herself.

  But knowing why hadn’t made Letitia feel any more welcome in her father’s house. She only felt welcome when Daddy came home at night, when Bernadette locked most of her hatred for Letitia away and concentrated on finding things to dislike about Daddy. Letitia was afraid to enjoy anything about her father’s beautiful house, because none of it was really hers. She could be sent away at any time, and she would hardly ever see Daddy if that happened, like it was before. When Letitia brought powders from Mama to slip into Berndatte’s bathwater, she only wanted her stepmother to stop hating so much.

  Bernadette never said these things aloud like an evil stepmother in a fairy-tale, but she didn’t have to. Letitia knew words were only part of who people were, and usually the least important part. Sometimes, she felt she could just see through people, as if they were standing before her naked. She could see into people’s hearts.

  At church, people who were stealing from their bosses, cruel to their children, or wooing someone other than the person they were married to avoided locking eyes with Letitia, for fear she might tell on them. When she was younger, she’d blurted things out that made adults gasp, and once a minister had plain slapped her face from the shock of hearing his business told. Now, she’d learned to keep quiet. Letitia’s aunties and neighbors near Mama’s house had theories about why Letitia had her gift: It was said that she had been born with a caul covering her face, which gave her the seeing-eye, the third-eye. Others thought it was because Mama was a roots-woman, and she had tied a piece of High John the Conqueror root around Letitia’s neck the moment she was born. She knew things, and usually knowing brought her only disappointment and trouble, so speculating over the reasons why brought her no joy.

  And there would be no joy for some time. That much she knew, too.

  This problem with Brother was going to change everything. The problem with Brother was going to make every other problem seem small from now on. The problem with Brother would be up to her to fix, in the end.

  One afternoon when Daddy was at his store and Bernadette was taking a nap because she’d overheated herself working in her garden, Letitia went to the corner of the parlor Daddy used as his office, with his oak roll-top desk and electric lamp and stacks of papers in different piles. Letitia climbed up into Daddy’s leather chair and surveyed the desk. Before she could decide exactly what she was looking for, or where to begin, the return address typed on a piece of mail caught her eye: LIVE OAK, it said.

  The letter had been opened with a letter-opener’s neat incision across the top. Letitia brought it out to read by the sunlight stealing in beneath the drawn shade. The whole letter was typed, which told Letitia it must be important.

  Dear Mr. Reaves,

  Regarding the matter of Wallace Lee Hutchins, I cannot impress upon you enough how urgent it is that you appear at the County Courthouse at 1:00 p.m. Friday, July 20. Many cases like this one are disposed of in the blink of any eye, to the defendant’s disadvantage. As an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), I am investigating the rising number of very troubling capital cases in this county. Your son’s case is one of an alarming pattern.

  Please allow me to be frank: Two eyewitnesses, including the shopkeeper, have told police they saw the two boys with a .22-caliber pistol at the time of the robbery. The witnesses and the defendants have quarreled in the past, so one party’s word goes against the other’s—but since the witnesses are white, I don’t have to tell you which version will have more credibility. Mrs. Kelly is fighting the charges against her son with all her soul—she was the one who contacted the NAACP—but I’m afraid she is in a similar position to your own son’s mother. Both ladies are ill-respected in this community.

  Again, Mr. Reaves, it is vital that you contact me as soon as possible to help me prepare your son’s defense. My resources in this matter are limited, but I believe if the jury heard the testimony of a respected colored business-owner in his son’s defense, we may get a lesser sentence. You are his best chance. My great fear, sir, is that the prosecutor will seek execution. Two young men were executed earlier this year after being tried in very similar circumstance, where a robbery was committed, but there were no injuries or fatalities. Armed robbery, it seems, is a capital offense for colored boys.

  Plainly put, I am asking you to help me save your son’s life. I think we can both agree that if these two young men committed an armed robbery—and although they both maintain their innocence, it’s very possible that they did—they deserve a severe punishment in the eyes of the law. They will go to jail for a long time, as is only proper.

  But these are sixteen-year-old boys, and neither deserves to die for the ignorant work of one night, especially not under a legal system that is a sham, in a county where hunting colored men is virtually legal. (There was a lynching not a mile from where I’m lodging the night I arrived—my first exposure to the heinous phenomenon. But it is your son’s case that has been sent to the top of the docket.)

  Please help me in this matter. I am trying to prevent another lynching, this one in a c
ourtroom.

  The letter was the most important thing Letitia had ever found. It seemed to howl in her hands. She held it so tightly she was afraid she might rip the neat paper it clean in two, reading it and re-reading it, until she’d memorized the words that mattered. She knew she would want to draw upon the memory of this letter for a long time to come, because there was so much to think about. So much to ponder. She wanted to steal the letter and lie about its disappearance, but she couldn’t steal from Daddy.

  Letitia understood it all, now: Brother and a friend had been charged with robbing a store with a gun. The shopkeeper and another witness who didn’t like Brother claimed Brother and his friend had a gun, and it was Brother’s word against theirs. The court was rushing to take the case to trial, and they would probably ask for The Chair. A lot of colored people have been getting The Chair lately, and the problem is so bad that a national association for colored people came to see about it. And if Daddy didn’t go, Brother might die. It was all so plain to Letitia, it was as if she’d known the whole story the first time Bernadette mentioned that Brother was in jail.

  The letter said the trial was going to start on July 20. Letitia hadn’t thought about what day of the month it was because there was no reason to track time in the summers, but she checked the kitchen wall calendar and learned it was Tuesday, July 17.

  Brother’s trial was in less than three days.

  “You’re going, aren’t you, Daddy?” Letitia said at dinner, when she finally dared.

  Bernadette looked angry before she knew if she should be. “Going

  where?” she said in a suspicious tone. She expected to find wrong everywhere. “What are you talking about?”

  Daddy’s face became stone. He looked at Letitia quickly, then his eyes passed over to Bernadette’s. “She ain’t talking about nothing,” Daddy said.