My mom was worried about Christmas so she couldn’t sleep. When she looked outside first thing after getting up from bed the morning before Christmas Eve, she saw that the fear that had kept her awake had come true. Although the yard was still nearly too dark to see, what beams of early sunlight did shine through the thick cedar trees glistened and shined on everything they landed upon. Everything was iced over just like the weatherman had predicted.
Immediately, after one look, even though she had known in her heart what she would see, she felt sick to her stomach. The fear and worry felt cold and dull and heavy as the blanket of ice outside. Because they weren’t going to make it home that day. Their rescheduled flights would again be rescheduled; which meant they wouldn’t make it home for Christmas. And she went about her day hoping that she would be wrong, buzzing around organizing what had already been organized and cleaning what had already been cleaned, so that she could pretend to be a thoughtless automaton without stresses or problems.
But when she was right, and the flights were rescheduled, and they didn’t make it home, and she wasn’t even in the end a thoughtless automaton, she went on. And things worked out. And she got her hair dyed up again to pretend like she didn’t have all those stresses and problems that had long ago turned her hair gray. She didn’t even know exactly how gray her hair really was, she’d been dyeing it for so long.
“We’ll just have to wait on Christmas until we’re all here together,” is what she told us.
My brother and I didn’t mind much, even though Christmas (which was no longer Christmas) day was a bit strange. Nothing to do and nothing to celebrate. I guess it’s like that for a lot of people on Christmas. But for us, it was a first.
Anyway, we had a regular day on Christmas day. And on December 27th she had the Christmas of her dreams with the whole family there. From coffee cake and scrambled eggs all the way through to the rib roast, civility and sensibility. A true Christmas miracle. And it was really great for her. Perfect almost.
“I was so worried the flight delay would set your sister off, but I think she did pretty well. I actually think she seems ok. It’s just a big relief for me. You know she really has been through a lot,” she said, regarding the maintained sobriety of my twenty-two-year-old recovered alcoholic sister.
“I just wish you and your brother didn’t have to drink all those beers right in front of her. That couldn’t have been easy for her, you know,” she said.
The point is that we made it through. Christmas was late but the emotional crisis was controlled; not averted, but finessed. Taken into stride, as they say.
And things went on like normal. Except that everybody left besides me. Usually everybody left. No besides me. But this year I just didn’t exactly have any place else to go. I had worked out a job laboring for a builder who was working on a new house up the street. I guess that's about all I had.
So we stayed there, my mom and I, together. We went to work in the dark in the morning and came home in the dark at night, talked about our days, made dinner, cleaned up, watched a little tv, went to bed. Laundry cycles. Dishwasher days.
My mom worked up at the elementary school helping out the special kids and, for the most part, my Dad wasn’t around. He always traveled for work, my whole life. But now he really traveled for work. I’d been home about a month and seen him probably four nights. So it was pretty much just like he wasn’t there at all. That’s how we treated it anyway. We just didn’t care.
“I have no idea where Dad is,” my Mom would say. Or something like that. “He said he’d be home Friday and he won’t text me back.”
I didn’t respond.
“I just wish I knew where he was…”
I looked at her hard. She had old surgical scars on her chest. Because of the way she dressed you would never see them. But you could hear them in her voice.
I hated hearing the scars in her voice.
It was around that time, maybe a week or two after Christmas, when it started happening. My mom was still having trouble sleeping, but it seemed like she was always complaining about not sleeping well so I didn’t think much of it.
One night, a particularly dark night—it was always so dark—, I was reading a book on the couch, a collection of stories by Larry Brown (excellent). My mom was next to me watching Chicago Med or Friday Night Lights or something like that. I didn’t know how she could stand to watch shit like that. More distracting than the show itself was my thinking about how she could stand to watch shit like that. It kept me from my reading.
But then there was this sound. This eerie gurgling from the top of the stairs that had the dogs jumping and growling just like somebody didn’t know had stepped onto the front porch.
And it was late. And it was dark. And nobody was on the front porch.
“Did you hear that?” my mom said. This wasn’t really very out of the ordinary. We heard lots of noises. She heard lots of noises. The house was surrounded by old looming cedars with drooping, sweeping branches which stirred in sneaking winds rising off the water to the East. And one of the dogs had an anxiety problem so a branch would scrape along the house and he’d cower and howl.
“No,” I said, and kept on reading.
She paused her soap opera so she could listen hard.
Silence, other than the shuffling noises the dogs made getting up and circling around in their agitated attempts to resume comfortable sleeping positions.
Then it came again, a deep, wet purling gurgle sound. Like an old guy struggling to breathe through a big lunger. The dogs barked really ferociously this time and backed toward us on the couch and whimpered quietly when they quit barking, turning circles and shooting nervous looks at us then back up the stairs.
“You heard that one, right?”
“Yeah,” I said and put my book down.
Then a creak. Then a slam.
“What the hell,” I said, getting up. I went up the stairs, the dogs whimpering and pacing and watching me as I went.
My bedroom door just at the top of the stairs was closed the way I had left it, but the lights were on and I distinctly remembered having left them off. So I opened the door. Slowly. Cautiously. I stood tall and spotlighted in the bright open doorway with the darkness behind me. But there was nothing. The light was on. That was all that I could tell was out of the ordinary. Still, I thought the whole deal was strange.
So I told my mom I thought it was strange. And that was all it took. I wish I could have kept my thoughts to myself for once. I was always telling her too much.
After that she started hearing things all the time. And after a while she started to supply herself with a narrative for what she was hearing.
“I think there’s someone living in this house,” she said one night. “Not a regular person though, a spirit. He’s a grumpy old farmer who used to live here. But I think he’s one of those grumpy guys who’s actually a nice person, you know what I mean. Gruff but kind, that type. I hear him coughing all the time. Lately it seems like I hear it more and more every day. Like he’s started to get more comfortable being around me with my knowing that he’s there.”
“Mom,” I said without looking at her—I was microwaving myself the last of the pot pie she’d made for dinner the night before, “what are you talking about? This house was built the year before you and dad moved in. It’s not fucking haunted.”
“It is. I really think it is,” she said slowly with her eyes faraway. “And please don’t curse at me. I don’t want to have to ask you again.”
I turned to purse my lips and squint at her.
She ignored the lazer beams I was attempting to burn into her and went on, “yesterday I heard that awful gurgling again like he really had a big one he was working on. It just went on and on. Disgusting!” She was getting herself all excited. “And then, I swear to god, the chair next to me pulled out real slow and then, squeeeeaaakk, went right back in. Like he was sitting down, you see, next to me. And then the newspaper I was looking at yanked over. Pulled right against my hands. Like he wanted to read it with me. Isn’t that creepy!? And also maybe a little cute I think.”
I was shoveling hot pot pie into my mouth while she talked and had to breathe slowly through my overful and open mouth. So I couldn’t give her the kind of look I wanted to give her, nor could I respond in the way I would have liked to respond. All I could do was grunt and moan. In order to maintain my dignity, I had no choice but to ignore her and walk away. But she had gotten to me, kind of. I just couldn’t tell why the thought of having a ghost in the house had her worked up in this unusual and almost perverse way. She didn’t seem scared at all. The way she was talking she sounded like a damned schoolgirl.
She even started wearing makeup after that.
I never once heard another sound even remotely resembling a gurgle after that first night. But now she was saying it followed her around the house wherever she went, even said she thought it was sleeping in bed with her some nights, not that she could say for sure “his being ghostly, and all that” as she had put it.
“This is getting very fucking weird, mom. I hope you are aware of that.”
She turned to me so fast her hair fanned out like an anime warrior, “please! Cursing!” she said. This was rather scary for me, for my mom did not normally get mad or tell me what to do because normally she didn’t want me to get mad and tell her to “fuck off.” But just as I was about to Vesuvius her in a rageful diatribe, she softened, “I don’t think it’s weird.” She paused. “You really think it’s so weird?
I had to blink slowly to control the vitriol all but oozing from my eyes. She was my mother after all. “Yep. Very very weird. The way you talk about it it sounds like you want to f…” her hair bristled with electricity and fires leapt up behind her eyes “...bang this ghost. It sounds like you want to bang it. Like a sexual haunting” I said. “Which is weird and gross.”
“What!” she said, offended. “I do not! How would that even work?” She laughed nervously. Then she got quiet for longer than a moment, like she was really thinking hard about how to put the next part. “I just think he’s nice, that’s all. And I think it would be nice to be able to communicate with him.”
“Ok, first of all,” I said, “where do you think this spirit, this *(spooky voice) oooold gentle farmer man*, came from in the first place. You think somebody got murdered here on Bainbridge fff….reaking Island?”
“Thank you,” she said, then “no, no, no. No, he wasn’t murdered. That would be awful. No, there was a battle here. He fought and died like an honorable man.”
I threw my hands up in the air, yelling in a old-timey Yosemite Sam kind of voice “an oooold battle on Bainbridge Island! The Antietam of the North West!” I made wild musket-wielding gestures and poses. “But seriously, what would they have fought over?”
“Strawberries,” she said flatly. (Primary crop farmed on the island historically).
This was just too ridiculous to believe. “So, you mean to tell me an old farmer, who is gentle and sweet, fought in a battle over strawberries on our suburban land over a hundred years ago and has now chosen to manifest in and haunt our house, but in a cute and nice way?
She nodded, “yes, pretty much. His name is Tom Wilson.”
I shook my head, then had a thought. “Ok, Tom Wilson,” I said, “and you would like to communicate with him?”
Again, she nodded, “yes, I would like to.”
Now I had her, “how do you know all this if you can’t communicate with him?!” HA.
“He moves things around. It’s kind of creepy. But also sweet that he wants to talk to me, you know. He moves things and leaves little messages and symbols. Pieces of book covers and corners of magazines. A strawberry and a little toy soldier, for example, tattered rips, one from Better Homes and Gardens and the other from Guns and Ammo.”
“That’s what happened to all my books?” I screamed.
And now it was my mom who had me, she pointed “so you admit he is real!”
Once again, in order to maintain my dignity, and my cool, I had no choice but to ignore her and exit the room.
But after that she started talking to him. A lot. To me, it sounded like she was talking to herself everywhere she went. But she said she was talking with him, because he was with her.
“Flowers!? Oh thank you Tom,” I would hear, “you old sweetie.” And things like that.
“What was that, mom?”
“Oh nothing,” is what she would say.
But it was making her act different, like she didn’t have a second in the world to spare. One night I asked her, “hey mom, I’m hungry, what’s the deal with dinner tonight?”
I thought I could see individual hairs on her head straightening out and lifting up from her shoulders, shimmering with rageful kinetic energy.
“I have other things to worry about than cooking you dinner tonight,” she snapped, not looking at me. “And I don’t give a damn what you eat anyway.” Whoa. She cussed me. Then she walked away muttering her grievances to old Tom. It sounded almost like he was consoling her.
I just couldn’t take it. I could no longer ignore this stirring madness, this dark fantasy which was now threatening my very way of life. Something had to be done. Because I could no longer read in peace. And because I was beginning to starve.
Naturally—it seemed at the time there was no other choice—we turned to the ouija board as a means for communication, a medium is what I think they call it. We knelt before it, solemn as sinning children in church, and placed our hands upon the planchette. And it moved. I stared at her deeply and carefully, saw that she hadn’t been sleeping still, saw that hollow-boned look of exhaustion in her face, and looked harder still as though interrogating her very soul, yet I could not tell if she was secretly manipulating the movement or not. It kept moving, and spelled out, slow and steady the letters L-O-N-E-L-Y.
“Awwwwww,” my mom said. She had her fingers interlaced under her chin and was leaning her head on them slightly sideways. Imagine how awful that must be for him knowing that we’re over here together and he’s right there alone by himself.”
He flipped the lights on and off rapidly and shook the chairs.
The hair on my neck stood up—horripilating. And, suddenly, for the first time, I was afraid. Really afraid.
He was there. And he was agreeing with my mom’s interpretation of the message.
“See!” my mom said. “He is here, and he is lonely!”
She shouted out to him, and the furniture continued to shake like the bed in the Exorcist, and the lights flickered off and on rapidly, “I’M RIGHT HERE, TOM! YOU’RE NOT ALONE! I’M HERE!!” Is what she shouted over the cacophony of wind and the moaning, shaking, rattling furniture. Then, “I LOVE YOU, TOM! I LOVE YOU. I WANT TO BE WITH YOU FOREVER!.”
“What the fuck is going on!? Mom, what are you saying!?
She didn’t answer. She was entranced, lost in this spectral rite I had unwittingly commenced with a game board. I cursed myself, then realized that nothing in the world could have been more ridiculous than to curse myself.
And then I sniffed. It smelled funny.
“Mom, did you fucking fart??”
“YES!” she cried, ecstatic now, “YES, TOM! I’M READY! I WANT TO BE WITH YOU!”
And then I knew, she had not farted. That smell was propane gas and there was my scratched up old zippo lighter rising, levitating, out of her open and upright facing palm, her hair aloft and rigid in an electric current, her eyes closed.
“TAKE ME HOME, BABY!” she howled.