I tugged on my grandfather’s trousers. “How come the black horse doesn’t have anybody on it?” My question hung unanswered within my grandparents’ living room. Usually full of joy and revelry during the Thanksgiving weekend, it was now as solemn and subdued as the funeral procession playing out on their tiny black and white TV.
“Why does the black horse only have those empty boots on its back like that? Whose sword’s on its side? He’s way prettier than Mrs. Clegg’s horse. How’d he get so—”
Mom’s tap on my shoulder accompanied by her shushing ended my inquiries. “Not so many questions Cody. Just watch.”
A second later, my PaPa, the man I admired more than any other, a man who, at fifty-nine years of age could drive an eighteen-wheeler two days straight with no sleep, was kneeling beside me with his arm around my waist. He held me tight whispering into my ear.
“First off, Mrs. Clegg’s horse is a mule. This horse is a thoroughbred named Black Jack. In the wagon in front of him is a coffin, or casket as some call it, and in it is our president. Black Jack’s following it to show he’s no longer with us.”
“Whatcha mean? Is he dead?”
“Yes, Cody. He is.”
“He sure must’ve been liked a bunch. There’s a lot of people there.”
I looked into his eyes. I’d never seen him cry before but there it was, a tiny tear finding its way down through his gray stubbled beard.
I turned back to the TV and the image of a little boy standing beside a lady in a black dress with a black hat and see-through lacy black cloth over her face. Even with the cloth I could sense her sadness. As Black Jack passed in front of them, a line of soldiers saluted the flag-draped coffin that proceeded him. The little boy raised his hand to his forehead, fidgeting as he waited to lower it along with the men in uniform. Responding to a sudden urgency to do the same, I lifted my chin and followed with a salute of my own, holding it as the room filled with the sniffling and muted weeping of family and friends who had gathered to pay respect to our deceased President Kennedy.
My mother stroked my hair. “Why don’t you go outside and play with your brother?”
The word “outside” instantly had me squirming free of my grandfather’s embrace. I bounded through the house, into the kitchen and out the back door shedding the gloom as I ran out into my grandparents’ backyard. It was on this magical plot of land where my brother and I spent six of our most formative years, the years where every minute was an hour long, every find of a new leaf or bug was a major scientific discovery, and every flicker of mica in a piece of gravel was a gold rush in the making.
Situated on the fringes of the small southern town of Burlington, North Carolina, our block was one of the biggest in the county mainly because we shared half of it with our K-12 school. Next to the school, was the first of five houses that occupied the other half. It was the home of a choppy, sandy blonde-haired girl named Mary Libowskenstein. A tenth grader like my brother, she was as rough and tumble as any of the boys favoring overalls or jeans to dresses and preferring to be called Mary Lib rather than burdening anyone with a mouthful of Libowskenstein. What she lacked in femininity, she made up with an infectious positive attitude, the type mom usually pointed Drew to when thoughts of our father turned him blue.
In her backyard was a small mossy stone koi pond. Chained next to it was a fearsome beast with a disagreeable disposition. Bullet, a perpetually snarling black mutt, was Ms. Libowskenstein’s deterrent to any unlawful pond dipping.
Next to Mary Lib’s was my grandparents’ house where Drew and I lived for six years while my mother went off to become something called an anesthetist, a tongue twister of a job that I always substituted by simply saying she put people to sleep. For all those years she would drive six hours in a tin can ’56 Chevy to spend every other weekend with us, and every other Sunday evening I’d ring the front porch chimes as she headed out the driveway back to school. Her time away, however, didn’t come close to PaPa’s absences. As a long-haul trucker, he would be gone two to three weeks at a time leaving a dark cloud over my brother for the first couple of days. I was only three when my father was killed, so my memories of him were faint, but for Drew, they were ever present. During these trips I had him to look to while he had no one.
The one mainstay of the household and the rock of the family was our grandmother. Dubbed Gonny, by the oldest grandchild for no reason other than lacking the verbal dexterity to say Granny, she was written into her high school yearbook as the Burlington Bulldog’s “Littlest Angel,” a moniker used to address her five-foot one-inch stature but also for her staunch religious beliefs. Following her biblical teachings while adhering to the phrase spare the rod, spoil the child, she was always quick to keep my brother and me in line with a good switching, the practice of whacking our bottoms with a stiff reed from a despicable bush that lurked at the darkest corner of the house. Our love for Gonny ran deep only to falter during the times when our misconduct called for us to fetch our own switches. The death march, as my brother and I called it, required us to walk to the bush, pull off a reed switch, of at least three feet, then deliver it back for her to carry out our corporal punishment.
Calling my grandparents’ house modest was a modest exaggeration. A post-war, one-story, three-bedroom home with no air conditioning, separate cold and hot water faucets and a telephone party-line shared with Hilda Harwell and Leona Kunkle, it stood in stark contrast to the house on the other side of the driveway. Located on the corner was an opulent two-story Victorian house where my great-grandmother Maudie lived. Full of turn-of the-century manners, she was as regal in character as the great house itself. Minus her occasional habit of sniffing snuff, she was every bit the grand dame of the neighborhood even though she was confined to a wheelchair because of a stroke that left her partially paralyzed from the waist down.
Turning the corner onto Tucker Street, was the home of Mrs. Clegg, a reclusive widow who only communed with her mule, Julius, and spent every sunny day tending to her award-winning tomatoes in a garden that butted up against the back corner of our school’s baseball field.
Smack dab in the middle of our little village was a two-acre patch of earth that consisted of a one-acre open field facing another acre of pecan trees and three rows of muscadine grapevines. Except for the school, which was fenced off, a narrow one-car-wide gravel road wound its way throughout our complex connecting everything. It was on this twisty stretch of rocky highway where our imaginations transformed us into fellow truckers like PaPa. Envisioning his big rig’s trailer, we used our bikes to pull wagons carrying empty boxes of make-believe cargo from house to house. Other times we found ourselves traversing an intercoastal waterway, or sailing down an angry river in search of lost treasure in a remote jungle that most often came in the form of an unruly Magnolia bush bunched up against Mrs. Clegg’s house.
On most days, all I would need to locate my brother, or any of our neighborhood buddies, was to run out to the open field and spin around once. Within a second, either through sight or sound, I’d find them climbing trees, racing along the gravel road or playing tag, roller-bat, or any of the hundred games of pretend we devised. Today was different though. It was a crisp autumn afternoon with the sun shining bright, and the birds chirping, but no kids were to be found.
“Drew! Where are you?” I waited with no reply. “Drewww, where are youuu?”
“Not so loud,” Mary Lib’s voice came from back of the house.
I turned to find her jagged blond mop of hair sticking out from behind a partially hidden door next to the switch bush. “What’re you doing down there?”
“Come on,” she said waving me in.
Eager to be included in whatever was happening in the dungeon, our pet name for Gonny and PaPa’s root cellar, I raced toward her.
She held a finger to her lips, “You gotta be quiet, we’re conjuring.”
“What’s conjure’n?”
“Just come on in and be quiet. You’ll see.”
Halfway above ground, halfway under, the dungeon was a dark, dank cinder block room tainted with the smell of oily rags from days of PaPa working on Mack trucks and a newfangled powered lawn mower that never seemed to run right. It was where Gonny stored her crates of fruit and vegetable preserves and where PaPa kept cases of his homemade muscadine wine along with an assortment of musty old tools and discarded items from the house that just couldn’t be parted with. The only light came from a missing brick in the foundation and the cracks around a sagging door. On the brightest day a flashlight was still required to see. On other days, such as this, a day when my brother held court with one of his many spooktacular shenanigans, a candle was used.
I took one bold step in and a cautious half-step back. “What’re ya’ll doin’?”
“Just sit down squirt,” Drew said with an authoritative air.
Five years my senior, I had always looked up to my brother. With the wit and wisdom of our elders he was the centerpiece of all our juvenile exploits, usually commanding us with a cool hand and unnatural patience. Wicked smart for his age, he was especially patient with me, particularly when it came to school and learning. According to him he wasn’t about to go through life with a dufus by his side. Whether I liked it or not, or even when I wasn’t aware of it, he was also working to shape not only my vocabulary but my character. It was for these reasons that I fiercely protected our relationship.
I surveyed the room. Bunched shoulder to shoulder circling the candle, he sat crossed legged with Mary Lib, and two other kids from across the street. There was Jessie Limberg, a spunky pig-tailed red head also known as Cackles for her raucous over-the-top way of laughing. And Peeps, short for Peepers Petey, a thick-rimmed bifocaled fellow sixth grader with a split-tooth grin and fidgety nature. A year younger than me and Peeps, Cackles loved teasing him and spouted off anything that came into her little red noggin.
“Where you want me to sit?” I asked.
“Between me and Cackles,” Mary Lib said.
I immediately plopped to the dirt floor and squeezed my way in between the girls, tucking my knees into my chest to take up as little space as possible.
“So, what’s a conjure’n?” I asked.
“You promise you’re not gonna get scared are ya,” Drew said.
I looked across to Peeps and into the large, distorted orbs his thick lens created.
Cackles ripped off a squawky high-pitched laugh. “Don’t be look’n at Peeps, he always looks scared.”
Mary Lib patted me on my knee “Nothing to be afraid of Cody, we’re just summoning the dead is all.”
“What!” I said jumping to my feet.
“Would you sit back down.” Drew said sternly. “He’s the one who’s gonna be scared.”
“Who’s gonna be scared?” I said inching back to the floor fighting the urge to bolt out into the sunlight.
“The president,” Drew replied, “we’re doing a séance to bring him back.”
“Say who?”
“A sé—ance,” he said drawing out the syllables hoping to nail the definition.
It’s a ritual that brings somebody’s ghost back where you can talk to ‘em,” Cackles said.
“Why do we want to talk to him? He’s dead. He ain’t gonna want to talk.”
“Oh, he’ll have plenty to say,” Drew added.
“Peeps, do you think he’ll come back?” I asked.
“Sure, he will,” Drew said cutting in. “He’ll want to know who shot him. And we’ll tell him it was that Lee Harvey fella. Now come on, we’re gonna miss our chance. He’ll be in heaven before long and won’t want to talk to anybody. Now everybody hold hands. I’m going to say the chant once and then you guys repeat it with me.” He cleared his throat. “Here goes…President Kennedy, hear our chant, fly away buzzard, fly away crow, wherever you’re at where the cold wind blows. Come Mr. President, come.”
“I can’t remember all those words,” I said.
Cackles snickered under her breath. “What’s buzzards and crows got to do with anything?”
Drew sighed. “Gosh darn it, they’re just to get his attention is all, and Cody, you can just move your lips like you’re saying it. Now let’s do this. Start when I say go. Ready—set…”
On go I began mouthing the words as the others performed a dysfunctional harmony of Drew’s homegrown chant, wondering to myself why anybody’s ghost would come back because of those buzzards and crows.
For a long minute we sat in silence, eyes darting around the room in anticipation of the president’s apparition to appear.
“I-I don’t think…” Peeps began.
“Shush,” Drew whispered, “Give him time.”
Another minute passed as our eyes went from scanning the room to scanning each other as we waited for Drew’s next directive.
“Maybe we should do it again,” Mary Lib said.
He nodded. “Good idea. On go, okay? Ready—set…”
Another round of chanting followed with more silence and increasing skeptical glances around the room.
“One more time,” Drew said. “Ready—set…”
Unlike the other chants this one ended with a different result. With the final come a loud bang sent us all jumping out of our skins.
“Didja hear that?” Drew exclaimed.
We all sat wide-eyed, unable to answer. A moment passed as the sound of my heartbeat pounded in my ears. Then slowly it came, the sounds of dead feet dragging across the ground, like the sounds of the mummy’s walk in the horror flick we’d all gone to see the week before—the same movie I later found out Drew had got his séance idea from. Louder and louder the footfalls came—then nothing. The room fell silent once again. Only the sounds of our panicked breathing could be heard when suddenly we heard someone hollering.”
“Kids! Are you in the cellar?”
A collective sigh, part relief, part frustration, went up among us.
“Yes Gonny, we’re down here,” Drew groaned back.
“Well come on out. We’re all going over to Maudie’s for lunch.”
“Yes ma’am,” he replied half-heartedly.
One by one, we filed out with Drew bringing up the rear. On our way to Maudie’s, I looked back over my shoulder to see him eyeballing the back screen door that had slammed causing us all to nearly wet ourselves. I couldn’t be certain, but I would’ve bet a dollar to a donut it was a smile he was wearing and not a frown. If there was one thing Drew Edwards loved more than anything else, it was a good joke. A trait that would ultimately bring more than just laughs.
