Phantom Nights (8 page)

"Can't ask you to do women's work? Well, summer's going fast, so maybe I could trust you to split me a big pile of stove wood 'thout chopping off your foot."

First time she'd seen him smile.
Did wonders for him
, Mally thought.
And just maybe, deep down inside, there was laughter in him too
.

M
ally didn't notice the writing tablet Alex had intended that she find until after she returned from dropping him and his bike off at the ball field behind the Methodist church a few blocks from the Gambier house. He must have brought it in the saddlebag strapped to the back fender of his Schwinn, left the tablet beside the Bible in the front room that he assumed, correctly, she read almost every night before turning in.

The tablet looked well used. There were dried-out rubber bands around it that broke as she removed them, part of a child's inky thumbprint in one corner. On the first page inside the boy had
written Property of Alexander Gambier Fifth Grade West End School. Copyrite 1948 by Alexander Gambier
.

Knowledgeable about copyrights. Obviously something important was to follow. Mally sat on her bamboo sofa with a cup of spearmint tea, sunset flood on the pine-paneled picture wall behind her, an orange sea through which box-camera memories surfaced, shadow faces of the deeply drowned. She found a last Chesterfield in the pack of cigarettes she'd bought a week ago, lit up and leafed through several pages of the writing tablet without attempting to read, intrigued by his not-so-neat, blotchy handwriting, the impulsive scrawl of words on blue-lined pulp paper. Alex had had a story to tell, and Mally wondered if she was the first to read it.

THE RESCUE
by Alexander Gambier

Wyatt Sexton was the 7th child of Martha and Big Red Sexton who was so called because of the color of his hair that was likened to a prary fire seen on a dark night. They named the new arrival to the famly after the legendery sheriff of Tombstone Ariz. Mr. Erp himself, who was also proud to be the little boy's godfather. Everybody doted on little Wyatt specialy his sisters who took turns bathing and feeding him while the men of the famly tended all the cattle on ther fabulus spred. Wyatt could walk while he was not even one year old and rode his own paint pony by age two. He will be the best horseman in the famly you'll see! his proud father braged to one and all, and Big Red's word was never doubted at peril to your life. But that was before tragedy befell. It happened in the town where Wyatt, now five years old, was playing with other boys around the watering tr tank in front of the Mercantil Store. A waggen driven by a drunk man who should have known better lost control of his horse team which ran away. The waggen which he did not see coming ran over both Wyatt's legs. They were cruely mangled beneath iron weels! Wyatt was the unlucky one as all of the other boys were spared. When his terrible injuries heeled Wyatt could not stand up by himself any longer or take any steps with his crooked feet. He was a lifetime criple doomed to crawl on his belly like a reptil and boys who had been his frends now made jokes about him. That was worse than if he deid! His days on horseback were over and his heartbroken father sold Wyatt's paint pony. That was the most crushing blow of all! Wyatt was never destined to take his place at roundup time with other men of his famly. What use would he be? He wanted to kill himself. But that was no anser. Self slot killing yourself was reproved in the Bible. He would be condemed to a lost soul in limbo forever. Like Jesus young Wyatt felt the need to have time to think and be someplace where no other soul could find him. So one night when no one was watching he crawled away from the house into the desert one mile, then two miles until he became porched with thurst. All alone in the desert wolves howling and a big thunderstorm filing the sky all around poor Wyatt. What was he to do now as lightning flashed!

Climb to the top of the tall rocks a voice inside him said. Soon there would be a flood in the coolee where he lay and sweep everything from in its path. Wyatt was a criple scorned by many but there was not a cowerdly bone in his body. Bravely he made his way up the tall rocks where wolves waited with yelow eyes that had deth in them. What now? His anser came in a crash of thunder then the hevens opened! Down came a lightning bolt to cleve the rocks and send the wolves tumbling to certen doom. Wyatt could not beleve his eyes! Where the wolves had been now stood a magnificant stalion biger than the bigest horse in Big Red's remuda. Sixteen hands high glowing all over like silver. Are you real? Wyatt asked. You look like a silver ghost. But he knew when the horse nodded that "Silver Ghost" who he named on the spot was ment for him.

After it rained all night sunup was a welcome sight. Time to ride his new horse home. Silver Ghost knelled to make it easy for the cripled boy to mount him. Wyatt rode with both hands on the horses flowing mane and off they went across the desert. It was like flying! Soon they reached the Sexton spred but no fine welcome waited there. For the ranch house was under atak surronded by feerce Apatches! There faces painted. Apatches on the warpath! They were the terrer of the fronteer. Not even Wyatt Erp himself dared to face a band of bloodthursty Apatches.

The house was on fire! Wyatt herd his sisters and mother screem inside. Where was Big Red? At the Gilded Cage Saloon in Tombstone no doubt, as wisky was his manly weakness. Drunk in an upstairs room while Apatche devils killed his loving famly. Wyatt and Silver Ghost were having none of that! His horse showed no feer of the redskin raders. The huge silver stalion scattered there own puny mounts as he galoped into the inferno. One by one Wyatt plucked his sisters from choking smoke and carryed them outside into the fresh air. The nabors cheered this act of curage while Big Red stood by weeping tears. Son I am so ashamed of myself to let this happen and I swear I will never take another drink of wisky in my life. You are a great hero Wyatt! Legends will be told forever about your curage and your marvolus silver steed. God bless you Wyatt Sexton everyone cried. Wyatt knew from that day on no one up and down the wild fronteer would think of him as just a boy with crooked feet.

H
aving read the pages Alex had given to her, and in reading come closer to the heart of him, Mally turned off the lamp and sat for a time in the front room while what remained of her cigarette burned itself out in a saucer, Mally staring through smokerise that divided the ghost square of a twilight window. Men were drinkers, it was a quelling thing in a torpid place like Evening Shade where even some preachers took occasional solace in gin or sin. She recalled that High Sheriff Robert Gambier had had a reputation for passing out on social occasions in someone's garden or down to his own cellar where, maybe, he kept the worst of his unconfessed demons.

Drunk the April night of the fire that swept through his house? Alex thought so.

Mally stirred and yawned and found, in the fruit basket in her kitchen, a browning apple. Leaning against the sink she pared the McIntosh slowly, cutting away the bad place with its deep-down curl of worm as the boy had excised his heart, speaking to her in his only voice of suspected guilt on the part of his father, planting in that raw place a fantasy to absorb his anguish, beguile him as he grew. Mally's heart felt like a cold seed deftly opened by the stroke of her knife so that she loved Alex Gambier not for what he could be to her, a thirty-two-year-old colored woman in her own prison of scars, but for who he was and what he continued to suffer.

"S
he'll only be here for two or three days," Cecily Gambier said to her husband. "Until her own house has aired out. Mom just can't bear the paint fumes, Bobby."

They were in bed, aglow from pure sensation, their humid bodies still deliciously sensitive to the slightest touch. The lingering allure of youthful fecundity, her tangy skin tone and deft contours: Bobby was in the mood to give Cece anything she asked for. Even though he sensed that once his mother-in-law had taken possession of the guest room down the hall, a
For Sale
sign would pop up in the front yard of her own place. Which was why she was spending close to eight hundred dollars on painting and roof repairs.

"S
he'll be next to Alex," he reminded Cecily.

"I don't see why Alex couldn't make an effort to be civil to Bernie for a couple of days. Do you?"

Bobby was feeling sleepy in her arms. He didn't say anything. Cecily took his silence as assurance that the matter was settled. She kissed the bridge of his nose and after some deliberation plucked a single coppery chest hair—which had become a ritual of secret, loving significance (Bobby wondered what she did with them)—before slipping away to their bathroom to shower.

A Traffic of Mourners

Bernie's Wing-Ding

Night Visitors

O
n Sunday, the last full day of Mally Shaw's life, she attended the funeral service for Priest Howard at the Evening Shade Presbyterian Church, which was on the opposite and lower side of the courthouse square from the Baptist church. The Baptists had claimed the high ground, but the Presbyterians' needle spire rose a good ten feet higher than the Baptists' spire. They also could boast of a few more pews inside, and a new education building.

Six hundred mourners were in the church by ten-thirty of another calm, hot, August morning. The tall windows on either side of the sanctuary were open, which scarcely helped relieve the heat inside but invited flies to the tiers of flowers behind the closed bronze casket in front of the altar. Hand-held fans were a necessity, downstairs and in the cramped balcony shared by the colored seating section, the choir stall, and the pipe organ.

Priest Howard had arranged every detail of his passing weeks before his subsiding heart sent a last tremor through his frail body. He had been a vain, thin-skinned man who did not relish having anyone gawk at his remains. There had been no wake, and he had not wanted anyone to dwell on his mummified profile during the service. Better they should dwell on a four-thousand-dollar coffin that glowed in supernal light from the large, round, stained-glass window behind the altar as the pastor, T. Lowndes McClure, and others whom Priest Howard had specifically designated, eulogized him.

Mally, crowded in among members of Burnell's big family, down to the newest grandchild in pink taffeta and beribboned pigtails, found her attention diverted from the expensive casket—a last expression of Priest Howard's vanity—to the squarish jars of sealed tomatoes in a pristine row on a shelf of her kitchen, and her heart felt constricted in her breast. If she had been a fool, at least it was done with, and whatever dark mischief had been in the mind of the dying man would never be revealed.

Her attention shifted again, to the man whose vanity was in his walk and his style, his gold toothpick (not in evidence at this solemn hour), and his combers of blond hair. If hair could have swagger, Leland's surely qualified. He was seated in the first pew facing the bier with his visibly sorrowing brother and Sax's pregnant wife, sorrow and tears also not in evidence in Leland Howard's bearing. Most everyone knew he'd been disinherited. He bore this stigma with stoicism; his own father's distaste for him would be no problem with the voters statewide. Many men, and women, had never got along with their fathers.

Much of what was said from the pulpit had been printed in Priest Howard's lengthy obituary. He had "immersed" himself in community life while achieving success in the banking profession. Name the fraternal or charitable organization, and Priest had at one time or another been the head of it. His office walls were lined with brass-on-walnut distinguished-service citations. The Boy Scouts had awarded him their coveted Silver Beaver.

More appropriate
, Leland thought, looking for a little humor to entertain himself on a depressing day,
if it had been the Girl Scouts
.

Pastor McClure reiterated with his own stab at humor that Priest had been an "avid" golfer not above "improving" his lies. He loved life, his family, his church, and his fellow man.

Long before the eulogies had been concluded, everyone was restlessly anxious to move on to the cemetery.

At twenty past twelve, Priest Howard's burdensome casket was carried down the front steps of the church and stowed inside the old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse the deceased had ordered for himself. The director of Hicks and Baggett Funeral Home had spent ten days locating the hearse, which was found negligently stored in a southern Missouri barn, and a week having the pigeon droppings removed and the brightwork restored at considerable cost.

The cortege, preceded by a Boy Scout color guard, moved slowly to Priest Howard's final resting place. A traffic of mourners in devil sun, all throats athirst. Death and interment a cool dream to the tormented living who found shade to be scarce at this hour in spite of oaks planted near the family mausoleum by Leland and Sax's grandfather Solomon, oaks with a sturdy lifespan to outlast all flesh and its histories of truth, rumors, and lies.