Terena Elizabeth Bell

Grandma just knew there was a haint, but there was some small question over what kind. There had to be something: late at night she could hear the echo of her children moving in their beds, in the morning the sound of her husband at the washbasin. Yet when she rushed to see him, the sink was always dry: no faucet mysteriously on, no doors phantasmagorically open or shut. The piano did not play, the stairs did not creak, and it never made noise in the attic. Whomever or whatever this phantom was, he did not use traditional means of haunting.

            “Haint still up to nothing?” her grandson Michael asked, setting his hat on the table one morning at breakfast.

            “That’s not funny,” Grandma said as she turned off the cookstove.

            His cousin Cecelia looked over, telling Michael to shut up with her eyes. She had never seen the ghost, but did claim to feel it when she went in their grandfather’s room. Their Aunt Helen also believed, maintaining the ghost was not her father, rather the spirit of the house itself. “Momma and Daddy kept this old place company for so long. Now that she’s here by herself, I imagine it’s keeping her company back,” she said, stirring sugar in her coffee. “Of course, if that were the case, it wouldn’t technically be a haint — just a spirit.”

            Whatever it was was bound and determined to keep Grandma from getting lonely, doing little things for her ever since Grandpa died, like bringing nine tomatoes in from the garden.

            “That was the neighbors,” Michael said.

            “No,” replied Grandma, “the back-door was locked.”

            The week before, it cleaned her bathroom.

            “Haven’t seen that floor shine so much in years,” Grandma said. “You’d think it was new linoleum.”

            “I’ve never heard of a cleaning haint before,” laughed Mrs Elmwood from down the street. “Ask me,” she leaned forward, lowering her voice to a whisper, “Evaleen’s done lost her mind.”

            Granted since Grandpa had died, Grandma’s wit did not appear as sharp as it once had been.

            “It ain’t her faculties,” Aunt Helen said, “She’s just been so preoccupied since the funeral. All that stuff to sort.”

            And there was a lot: hats and clothes; newspaper clippings and childhood photographs; loose floor notebooks and blue thermos bottles. Most of what they’d owned had belonged to Grandma, but she gave everything away anyway until the home became half-empty. If the spirit truly was the house, as Aunt Helen claimed, giving away the stuff that filled it must have set it free.

            “You saying Grandma’s haint has an empty stomach?” Michael laughed.

            “You make fun,” said Cecelia, “but next time you’re in Grandpa’s room by yourself, see if you don’t sense him.” She stood up and looked at her cousin, setting her left hand down on the table. “You don’t have to believe me,” she paused, “but you better go to believing Grandma.”

            Michael pushed corn onto his fork and popped it in his mouth. “I ain’t gonna help her little delusion,” he said, scooping up more. “Y’all are just ignoring the early signs of Alzheimer’s and I ain’t gonna help with that.”

            “You go back there to his room,” Cecelia said again. “You go back there and see.”

            “Grandpa’s gone.” He dropped his fork on the plate. “And making up some haint won’t bring him back.” Michael wiped his hands on a napkin and resumed eating, steadily and silently staring at the plate, shoveling corn then squash then macaroni. He gobbled and ate and ate and gobbled until Cecelia had left the kitchen, then laid his head between his hands and thought about crying.

            In her grandfather’s room, Cecelia searched feverishly and fervently for the ghost, turning down the bedspread, opening empty dresser drawers.

            Something, she thought — someone — was here because she knew it, had known it all along, and while you may temporarily forget them, the things you know never change. But there was nothing, nothing but spider webs and spiders and dust. Well, Cecelia thought, he ain’t no haint what will appear on command, so I guess it really is Grandpa. A spirit of a house could be summoned by walking about it, an omnipresence you would find when you looked. But the ghost of a man comes and goes as he pleases.

            “There’s no doubt,” she told Aunt Helen. “It’s definitely Grandpa.”

            “I don’t dispute that there’s some type of spirit,” Aunt Helen said, adding milk to her coffee. “But that it’s my father, I need more to persuade me.”

            So Cecelia continued her quest to prove that the ghost was him, as much to console her grandmother as to prove Michael wrong. Of course Grandpa would want to keep taking care of Grandma after he was gone. He must have found a way. She started going through his books, looking for answers — at least what was left of them after Grandma had given so many to the neighbors: western novels, spy stories, the P and the G from the World Book. Then she went over to Michael’s and sorted through the ones that he had taken home. “I don’t see what leafing through those is going to do,” Michael said, hat in hand as he walked to the closet. “It ain’t gonna bring Grandpa back, reading those old things.” He hung the cap on its peg and shut the door. “You ain’t taking them with you,” he said. “Grandma gave them to me and they’re mine.”

            “I don’t want to take them,” Cecelia muttered, not bothering to look up. “I just want to see what they’re about.”

            Michael sighed. “I don’t see why you keep holding on to this. She’s going to have to see a doctor at some point and clinging to Grandpa won’t keep him here.” He walked out of the room and into the kitchen where he opened the refrigerator and grabbed a Coca-Cola. He knew he was the only one who didn’t buy into their little pipe dream and wondered if that somehow meant he loved his grandfather less, if the fact that he was willing to let him go had meant he didn’t want badly enough for him to stay. “But that’s fool-talk,” he later confided in Aunt Helen, “fool-talk that just because I don’t believe in this haint business like the rest of you means I don’t miss him, too.”

            “We know you do,” Aunt Helen said, plugging up the coffee maker and pouring the water in.

            Had Grandpa known, Michael thought, that the whole family would act this way after he died, he might have done a few things differently beforehand. While Cecelia hunted through his relics for some sort of how-to on haunting, Michael searched his memories for anything Grandpa had said that would dismiss this lunacy once and for all. His query came up as empty as hers.

            This was what really made him want to cry as he stared at his cream corn every night, as he lifted fried squash to his mouth. He remembered his grandfather less clearly than he liked: the man become memory, the memory a vapor.

            “That’s all haints are, really,” Aunt Helen said, mug moving from tabletop to mouth. “Vapors, hints, movement.” She blew across her coffee to cool it and Michael could almost see something rising off the top, the chill of her breath hitting hot, “The haint could be in Momma’s mind. Doesn’t make it less real,” taking the heat inside as she tilted the mug to drink. “Want some coffee?”

            “No, thank you,” Michael said, leaving Aunt Helen’s to drive to Grandma’s, where she stood in the kitchen frying bacon. “You eat those tomatoes your ghost brought yet?”

            “I thought you didn’t believe in haints,” she said.

            “I believe in tomatoes,” he answered back.

            “They were good.” She flipped the strips one at a time with her fork. “Your grandpa always did know how to pick them,” the grease popping twice.

            “You miss him?”

            Grandma didn’t answer, just kept turning the bacon, moving it from one side of the pan to the other, smoke rising up while the kitchen window fogged and the rain began to fall. From ceiling to floor, the house felt gray: the table dirty, the wall paint chipped. Meanwhile, Michael’s eyes filled and filled with water. When he finally cleared them, he looked up and saw his grandfather out the window: blue hat, short-sleeve shirt, Liberty overalls. He stood completely dry, the rain stopping all around him, his aura an umbrella. And in that moment, Michael believed. He believed and every memory he’d ever had came flooding back. He blinked and blinked then Grandpa was gone. The window shook and the rain went away and Grandma stood there with the bacon, saying, “What kind of question is that?” as though she hadn’t seen a thing.