The Ghost's Grave (6 page)

Breakfast was pork chops, green beans, fried potatoes, and the leftover applesauce from the oatmeal pancakes. I was glad that the beans were cooked.

I washed the dishes quickly, then headed for the tree house again. I took the book I'd brought home the day before and carefully placed it on the table. Then I went back down the ladder to refill Mr. Stray's bowl.

I didn't see the cat, nor did I hear any movement in the woods. No deer, no squirrels.

Back in the tree house, I looked out each of the windows, my eyes searching for Mr. Stray. When I
didn't see him, I reached for a different book, one that I had left there overnight.

As I picked it up, a voice from behind me said, “You won't like the ending.”

I dropped the book and whirled toward the man's voice, my heart thumping.

He peered in at me through one of the windows. He must have moved the ladder—which meant I couldn't climb down now and run away. Why hadn't I seen him when I was feeding Mr. Stray? How could I not have heard the ladder being moved?

“The horse dies,” he continued. “I don't like books where the animal dies at the end. Why can't them writers figure out a better way to tell a story than to kill the poor horse?”

“Who are you?” I whispered.

His eyes lit up, and a huge grin spread across his face. “You can hear me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Can you see me, too?”

“Yes.” Why wouldn't I?

“Hee-haw!” The man yelped like a cowboy starting into the rodeo ring.

I backed toward the door.

He's crazy, I thought. He's a delusional escaped mental patient. I'll have to jump from the door to the
ground, hope I don't break a bone, and try to outrun him.

“I thank you for the loan of your books,” he said. “Never owned a book myself. 'Course, I didn't learn to read until after I died.”

My scalp prickled with apprehension.
After he died?

“Still can hardly believe I'd be glad for book learning,” the man said. “I quit going to school when I was seven years old in order to stay home and help with farm chores, and I left with no regrets. The only parts of school I liked were lunch and recess. I played hooky half the time and ignored my lessons the other half. Never thought I'd know how to read. I didn't learn for the rest of my life but since then, well, I have a natural curiosity, and after I died, I started spending my nights in the library. Being around so many books, I naturally opened one here and there to look at the pictures, and then one night I opened a book that had pictures of coal mines, and I started figuring out the words, and once I got the hang of it, I never stopped. Since they closed the Carbon City Library, back in 1964, I don't get many chances to read.”

As he talked, I slid my feet closer to the door. I hardly heard what he said. How had he moved the ladder so quickly? Only a few seconds had passed
between when I'd looked out the window and when he looked in.

“Don't go running off,” he said. “I ain't had anyone to talk to in more than fifty years.”

Keeping my eyes on the face in the window, I felt behind me until my hand touched the door. I shoved it open and saw the ladder right where I had left it. What was the man standing on?

“Nothing to be scared of,” the man said. “I ain't armed, if that's what you're thinking, and I wouldn't hurt you anyway. You're the first friendly soul I've met in decades.”

Friendly? I was trying my best to get away from this nutcase, and he thought I was acting friendly.

“I wouldn't take the life of a boy, that's certain,” he said. “Unlike some folks I know, I value a human life.”

His voice had an angry edge now, as if he were talking about a specific incident. I decided it would be best to change the subject and calm him down before I tried to escape.

“Do you live around here?” I asked.

“Used to. Do you mind if I come in?”

Since he'd already been in the tree house at least twice, I figured I couldn't stop him even if I wanted to so I said, “OK,” and the next thing I knew he was
standing near the little table. He didn't climb in the open window; he simply materialized inside the tree house. One second he was a face at the window, and the next second he stood beside me.

I gasped. He must be a ghost! How else could he float through the wall that way? All his talk of learning to read after he died made sense, if he was a ghost.

I stared at my visitor. I'd always thought ghosts were delicate, transparent beings that a living person could see through, but this man was as solid as a tree stump. If I had not seen him go from outside to inside the tree house like magic, I would never have suspected he wasn't a flesh-and-blood person.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“Name's Wilber,” he said. “Wilber Martin, but everyone called me Willie. I'm an angel.”

Unkempt hair framed his face. He wore a grubby gray work shirt, an odd hat with some kind of light on the front of it, and one sturdy high-top boot. His right pant leg was pinned up above the knee.

This angel needed a shave.

“You don't look like an angel,” I said.

“How do you know? Have you met other angels?”

“No, but I always thought angels wore long white gowns and had shiny wings and halos.”

“Ha! That's a stereotype, if ever I heard one.
Angels aren't all the same, just as people aren't all the same.”

“An angel should look kindly, like Cinderella's fairy godmother in the Disney movie.”

“Cinderella? Disney?”

I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe he really was an angel. What did I know about angels?

Whoever or whatever he was, he didn't seem to be a threat. My heart quit thundering in my chest, and my breathing returned to normal. Part of me still wanted to scramble down the ladder and run, but another part of me overflowed with curiosity. I stayed next to the door, ready to bolt if I needed to, but I kept talking to the man/ghost and listening to what he said.

“Tell me about yourself,” I said.

“Not much to tell. What do you want to know?”

“How did you lose your leg?”

“In a mining accident. Got caught in the explosion of nineteen-oh-three. My leg's buried in the Carbon City cemetery. My brother made a proper little casket for it, like you'd put a baby in. He said a Bible verse, and my wife sang a hymn, and they laid my leg to rest. 'Course, I didn't attend the funeral service. I was still in the hospital.”

“What kind of mine did you work in?” I asked as I tried to imagine burying my own leg.

He snorted as if I'd asked the dumbest question he'd ever heard. “Carbon City had one of the biggest coal mines in the state. Lots of coal mines around here back in my day. The Northern Pacific built a railroad line up here to haul out the coal. Took out coke, too. There were rows of coke ovens down by the town. Some are still there.”

“Coke?” Why would ovens be needed for Coca-Cola? Or did he mean cocaine? Was he a drug addict who imagined he lived long ago?

“Coke. You know, the hard coal that's left after it's heated in the ovens. It's used for fuel.”

“Oh.”

“For a lad who lives in Carbon City, you don't know much about the place. Ain't you ever gone to see the coke ovens?”

“I don't live here. I've only been here two days. I'm visiting my aunt this summer; she told me about the tree house.”

“I used to talk to a girl in this tree house a long time ago. She was a pretty young thing, name of Florence. Her sister came here, too, but the sister couldn't hear me or see me so I only talked to Florence.”

“So you're a ghost, not an angel.”

“Same thing.
Ghost
sounds frightening, and
angel
sounds comforting. I didn't want to scare you off so I said
angel
. That's one thing book learnin' did for me; I know it's important to use exactly the right word for what you mean.”

“Are ghosts and angels really the same? There's no difference?”

“Oh, there's a small difference. Nothing to get worked up about.”

“What is it?”

Willie looked annoyed. “If you must know,” he said, “a ghost becomes an angel when he's ready to move on. That's when you get the wings and the halo.”

“How long have you been a ghost?”

“Since I died. May ninth, nineteen-oh-five. I was thirty-two years old.”

“That's more than a hundred years ago! Does it always take so long to move on? When will you become an angel?”

“Drat it, boy, you ask too many questions. I'm not going to be an angel, not now, not ever, because The Boss won't let me.”

The Boss? Did he mean God?

Willie scowled and punched one fist into his other palm. “The Boss says I can't get my wings and move
on until I get over my anger. He says before I get to be an angel, I must love someone so much that the love fills up my heart and pushes out my resentment.”

Willie's scowl deepened. “Ain't nothing going to ease my anger,” he said, “and that's a fact. So I'm trapped in limbo. Who would I love? Nobody, that's who. The only ones I loved were my wife and my two boys, and they've already moved on without me.”

“You're angry at your wife and sons?”

“Of course not! None of it was their fault. They didn't kill me. We had a good life together, me and Sarah. We had plans for ourselves and for our boys. Big plans! But I didn't get to be part of them. Two years after I died, Sarah married a newspaperman from Tacoma. He raised my boys, not me. He bought my wife a house, not me. She had the daughter she wanted with him, not with me. All because of that Emil Davies.” He said the name as if he were spitting out rotten food.

“That's who you're angry at? Emil Davies?”

“His carelessness killed me! He struck a match to light his pipe and
BOOM!
It was the worst explosion the mine ever had. Emil Davies took my life as surely as if he'd held a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. I don't want to see that wicked man ever again, in this life or the next.”

“What happened to him? If he was in the mine with you, wasn't he killed, too?”

“He perished and his son with him, and thirteen others besides, including me. The rest are buried in the Carbon City cemetery. All but me. The whole back row of gravestones has the same date of death: May ninth, nineteen-oh-five.”

“You weren't buried with your leg?”

Willie shook his head, the angry look still in his eyes. “Sarah told the coroner she didn't think it seemly to dig up the grave where my leg was buried in order to bury the rest of me, but the real reason she didn't plant me there was because she knew I wouldn't want to spend eternity side by side with Emil Davies. Never liked him when he was living and liked him even less after he killed me.”

“If the mine blew up and all the miners died, how did Sarah know who caused the explosion?”

“She knew Emil Davies could never wait till he got out of the mine before lighting his dratted corncob pipe. She knew because I complained of it over and over. All of us miners did. We told Emil not to be in such an all-fired hurry for his smoke, but he never listened. When the mine blew, Sarah figured out what had happened. So did everyone else.”

“I'm surprised you were still working in the mine with one leg missing.”

“I had a peg leg—an uncomfortable chunk of wood that I strapped on every morning.”

“Wasn't it hard to walk down into the mine—and back up again?”

“We didn't walk; we rode on hoists. Most days I worked nearly five hundred feet below sea level. The peg leg slowed me down some so I didn't take a rest break with the others. I worked my full shift, then rode the hoist back up. My company brought out ten thousand tons of coal every month.”

Willie looked down at his pinned-up pant leg. “Sarah knew how I hated that peg leg so instead of burying it with me, she burned it.”

“If you aren't buried with the others who were killed in the explosion, where are you buried?” Even as I asked the question, I realized how bizarre it sounded. Anyone eavesdropping on this conversation would think Willie and I were both crazy.

W
illie didn't seem to find our conversation odd. He acted as if we met in the tree house every day for a pleasant chat.

“Sarah buried me by my favorite fishing spot. She got her brothers and mine to help her. They went to where the coroner had all of us dead miners laid out, wrapped in burlap, and when she said she'd come to claim her husband's body, the coroner agreed.

“The brothers put me in a cart behind my horse and led the horse up the hill to a place I always fished, along the Carbon River. They dug the grave deep and buried me there, and Sarah planted wild roses on the spot. She was a good woman, Sarah. A good woman.”

I didn't know what to say. More than a century later, I could tell he still yearned for the woman who had been his wife.

“The only thing Sarah didn't do for me,” Willie said, “was to remove my leg bones from the cemetery and bury them with the rest of me. I want to be all together in one place, far from Emil Davies.”

“Did you tell her what you want? Did you ask her to have the bones dug up and moved?”

A great sadness came into his eyes, and he looked down at his boot. “Sarah couldn't hear me,” he said. “I tried and tried to talk to her, but she never heard any of it. She never saw me after I died, never sensed my presence. My boys couldn't see or hear me, either. Most people can't. I move among them, and they don't notice. The girl, Florence, was the first to see and hear me. You're the second.”

Florence. I thought about Aunt Ethel's peacock. If anyone could shed some light on that situation, it was Willie. “Do you know what happened to Florence?” I asked.