Chapter Four (Untitled)

[Note: Earlier posts to this blog contain previous chapters. If this is your first visit, I highly recommend that you read the chapters in order. Also, be warned that as this is a work in progress, consistency is not guaranteed. For instance, names of characters — and och aye, that does include ghosts — are not written in stone. Example: the protagonist, who began as Debra, is now Gloria.]
 
Harry, who hadn’t watched the egg fall, started.

“If that isn’t just my Gran,” I said.

He pulled back to look from the egg into my face.

“You’re not upset?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“No. Not upset. Curious. Concerned about what I have to do now.”

“Do you think you need to go there?”

“She’ll need to be buried, and there’s the property to be dealt with.”

I took a breath before adding, “And there’s this thing about eggs.”

Harry just looked at me.

I told him about Captain Mackay’s egg comment.

“It sounded like he said she was making headway on something to do with an egg.”

We both looked at the runaway Easter egg as if it could tell us what all this nonsense was about. But at the moment, the yellow egg just looked like an unfortunate and unwilling accessory to the crime.

Harry cocked a thumb in it’s direction.

“You don’t think your Gran had anything to do with that?”

“I most certainly do. But the thing is, Harry, even if there was nothing about eggs, knowing what she now must know about what Kurt Vonnegut said, I could see her pulling a stunt like this just to bug me. You know?”

“Um, well, no.”

“Of course not. You never met the crazy old bat.”

By mutual consent we separated and reached for our gin and tonics.

“Here’s to the crazy old bat then,” Harry proposed, holding his aloft.

We clinked.

“To Gran.”

I drank deeply, hoping to quell the shaky feeling that was growing in my chest. While it was true I wasn’t about to subside into convulsions of tears over my Gran’s death, the knowledge that I was now the oldest surviving member of my family left me feeling — orphaned. Exposed. No longer did an older, wiser (hah! there’s a good one) blood relative stand between me and death itself. Not that she’d ever been much of a grandmother when she was alive.

“I’m sorry,” Harry murmured. “I shouldn’t have called her that.”

I glanced at him, then realized he had mistaken my silence for ire.

“My darling, you can call my Gran anything you want, and you’ll never call her half the things I have. To her face, behind her back, in writing, you name it. Truly, there was no love between us.”

He took my hand.

“Let’s go outside and sit in the sun. I want you to tell me about her.

I laughed.

“I think you’re going to learn all about her without me telling you a word. I think she’s decided to haunt us.”

I could almost see Harry’s effort to not look spooked, and felt sorry for him. Harry, like most people who have never had the experience, is of the popular Hollywood horror movie opinion that an encounter with ghosts has to be terrifying. Which now that I thought about it, might have been one of the reasons he’d never really seemed to believe me when I told him of my encounters. Because in response to the inevitable question — Weren’t you frightened? — my answer has always been an unequivocal no. Perplexed, yes, at least until it became clear that this experience was being caused by a ghost, at which point, if I were to look at my thoughts, they would be something like this: Oh, it’s a ghost. Well, all right then. That explains it.

The thing is, people don’t want to believe that. I think it’s almost a disappointment to them. They want to hear that I ran from the house screaming as blood dripped from the walls, or some such nonsense. But that’s not the way it works.

We settled ourselves in a bright spot with the sun on our shoulders and the gently roling soy bean field in front of us. The season was still too young for planting, so at the moment the field was a muddy mess of herbicide-killed plant debris, but you take what you can get.

I told Harry all of my Gran stories. He’d heard most of them before, of course. But this was part of our ritual whenever somebody died. We drank whatever that person most liked to drink (pure coincidence that we happened to be preparing Gran’s favorite when the call came from Captain McKay?), and worked through our memories of that person, telling stories, laughing, crying, hoisting our glasses for many toasts. Kind of a private wake. Always more meaningful to me than the impersonal services put on in those living tombs called funeral parlors. Talk about something that makes you want to run screaming.

And so all the old stories were brought out and aired and shaken and inspected, with maybe just a tiny exaggeration stitched on here and there to keep things interesting. That was our tradition.

Although in the case of my Gran, there was absolutely no need to exaggerate. Quite the opposite, actually. I’d learned, over the years, to never tell stories of her antics to my American friends or, if I did, to tone down the truth a bit to make her actions more palatable to them. They simply couldn’t fathom a woman like her. Even some Scots found her hard to take.

I mean, what kind of woman would barricade her five-year-old grand-daughter and her three best friends (soon to be former friends) in the bathroom and refuse to let them out until every last one of them had kissed the old bat’s pet painted turtle, George, on his slimy little lips? Absolutely unmoved by our tears and real terror, she thought it was hilarious. Lord, how I used to yearn for a normal grandmother who would bake cookies and nag me about going to church. Not my Gran. She called those types of women holy rollers and hypocrites. The first time my parents left me alone at home for an entire weekend (I think I was fifteen) with the admonition to not bring anyone into the house, my Gran slipped me twenty dollars and told me to have a wee party while they were gone. And there was the time (I still groan with embarrassment whenever I think of it) that she danced on my parents’ coffee table at a get-together for all the neighbors. True, the table was solid oak and her spike heel shoes only dinged it up a little. But still.

So, that’s just a taste of my Gran. I won’t tell you everything all at once because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about her. I mean, truth be told, she was a good woman at heart. If she heard about some ninety-five year old living alone at the end of the road, neglected by family and abandoned by friends who’d all had the gall to die first, my Gran would make a point of stopping in for a visit, even if she’d never before met the man or woman in question. Which in itself was a decent thing to do. What upset people was the pint of whiskey or gin, or bottle of wine that she’d take along to share with the poor old soul. Mind you, we never heard a peep of complaint from the old souls themselves. But their families had a tendency to get annoyed when they found grand-dad singing in his rocker, or grandma dancing a polka in her housecoat.

Gran’s response when my mother took her to task for one such episode?

“Och, away wi’ them if they cannae take a joke.”

What do you do with a woman like that?

When I was a little girl, she used to take my friends and me to the cemetery in town and show us a stone that marked the grave of a woman who, remarkably, had the same name as my Gran.

“See that? That was me in my former life,” she’d say.

And we would all duly note that the Molly Faley buried in that spot had indeed died just a few months before my Gran was born.

“But I died before I finished what I was sent here to do.”

And then we would calculate (with the help of Gran) and discover that the woman under the ground had indeed died at the age of thirty-three, and while that seemed perfectly ancient to us kids, Gran would assure that this was much too young an age to be up and dying.

“So I had to come back to finish the job,” Gran would go on, “but I was born in the wrong country, and what a time of it I had finding my way back here. It took some doing, so it did. But once I’d convinced my lass to come here on her holiday, she met her man, and I knew it was just a matter of time. And right enough, as soon as my man, Dan, died, they sent for me to come and live with them. And here I am.”

“And what’s the job you’re here to do, Gran?” I would ask, for at that time I still believed her nonsense.

“Och well,” she’d say, and she’d study me for a bit, and then my friends, before pronouncing that we were too young to understand. “Maybe when you’re a wee bit older.”

But I was never old enough. When my parents died together in a car wreck on Highway 12, I was eighteen. And damn if my Gran didn’t pick up and move back to Scotland just a few months later.
At first I was flabbergasted that she would leave me alone at such a time. Then I became furious. Her last day in the house with me, we fought. Or I should say: I fought. Gran just sat and smoked, sipping her gin while I ranted. When I’d worn myself out, she said, “Someday you’ll understand.”

“Understand hell!” I shouted and stormed from the living room.

I didn’t come down the stairs when she left for the airport an hour later. One of her bar buddies came for her in his red pickup. I watched from my bedroom window as he loaded her three suitcases into the back. Three suitcases, and in them, everything she owned. No intention of coming back.

She looked up at me as the truck backed onto the road. I didn’t wave and neither did she.
It was to be the last time I’d see her.

“I think you did love her,” Harry observed, as I wiped a bit of moisture from my eye and blew my nose.

“You don’t love someone who abandons you,” I replied.

“She hurt you terribly and you haven’t forgiven her,” he went on.

“Nor will I. And here’s to that.”

We clinked glasses. We were into our third gin and tonics and I was feeling more than a little drunk.

My Harry knows how to make a good drink.

“Why do you suppose she went back to Scotland when she did?”

“Because she was a mean and nasty old woman,” I said.

“You hear that, Gran?” I shouted this up into the sky as though perhaps Gran was hovering there with her halo and harp. More likely she’d be down there with a forked tail and horns.

“Did something happen there?” Harry asked.

I was confused for a moment. Down there?

“Where?”

“In Scotland. To make your Gran need to go back.”

“Oh. How should I know?”

“Well,” he persisted (Harry is an exceedingly persistant person, which is a trait I sometimes find annoying), “did she get letters or telephone calls from anybody there?”

“Oh. Well, letters of course.”

“From who?”

“From whom,” I corrected automatically (once an editor, always an editor), before turning my mind to his question.

Harry knew as well as I did that when my grandfather died, Gran was left entirely alone in the world but for a daughter (my mother) who lived thousands of miles away in America. For generations, it seems, we’ve been a family of only children. So obviously the letters hadn’t been from family.

“Friends, I imagine.”

“You don’t know any names? She didn’t tell you any stories about them?”

“No.”

“So why did she go to the Orkneys instead of back to Glasgow? Did she have friends there?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured.

That had been the particularly galling part of her departure. If, after the death of her daughter, she’d returned to the comfort of her hometown and support of lifelong friends, I might have understood. Instead, she hadn’t even set foot in the city where she’d been born and grown up. Rather, she’d flown straight on to Aberdeen and from there climbed aboard a ferry for the overnight trip to the Orkneys. Why?

“I have no idea.”

I’d been watching a wren intent on nest building dart into and out of the tiny, cedar birdhouse we’d hung from the sugar maple. It reminded me of my conversation with Kurt Vonnegut.

“Because they make good eggs?”

We both began to giggle then, like the innocents that we were, never suspecting that we were being led down the path of la-la certitude that everything in the world is as it seems, completely forgetting — not that we had ever seriously considered the issue to begin with — that there was more than one practical joker and trickster in the world.