Bag of Bones (21 page)

In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading
JO'S KNITTING STUFF! NO TRESPASSING
! hung over the pull-knob. In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.

The thing which caught and held my eye was sitting on the old rolltop desk in the center of the room. During the many good summers, falls, and winter weekends we had spent here, that desktop would have been littered with spools of thread, skeins of yarn, pincushions, sketches, maybe a book about the Spanish Civil War or famous American dogs. Johanna could be aggravating, at least to me, because she imposed no real system or order on what she did. She could also be daunting, even overwhelming at times.
She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.

But not now. It was possible to think that Mrs. M. had cleared the litter from the top of it and plunked down what was now there, but impossible to believe. Why would she? It made no sense.

The object was covered with a gray plastic hood. I reached out to touch it, and my hand faltered an inch or two short as a memory of an old dream

(give me that it's my dust-catcher)

slipped across my mind much as that queer draft had slipped across my face. Then it was gone, and I pulled the plastic cover off. Underneath it was my old green IBM Selectric, which I hadn't seen or thought of in years. I leaned closer, knowing that the typewriter ball would be Courier—my old favorite—even before I saw it.

What in God's name was my old typewriter doing out here?

Johanna painted (although not very well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed) and sometimes sold them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She
could
write, of course; most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No. After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job.
You write for both of us, Mike,
she had said once.
That's all yours; I'll just take a little taste of everything else.
Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.

But here was my old IBM. Why?

“Letters,” I said. “She found it down cellar or something, and rescued it to write letters on.”

Except that wasn't Jo. She showed me most of her letters, often urging me to write little postscripts of my own, guilt-tripping me with that old saying about how the shoemaker's kids always go barefoot (“and the writer's friends would never hear from him if it weren't for Alexander Graham Bell,” she was apt to add). I hadn't seen a typed personal letter from my wife in all the time we'd been married—if nothing else, she would have considered it shitty etiquette. She
could
type, producing mistake-free business letters slowly yet methodically, but she always used my desktop computer or her own PowerBook for those chores.

“What were you up to, hon?” I asked, then began to investigate her desk drawers.

Brenda Meserve had made an effort with these, but Jo's fundamental nature had defeated her. Surface order (spools of thread segregated by color, for instance) quickly gave way to Jo's old dear jumble. I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories, but I found no paperwork which had been typed on my old IBM, with or without the Courier ball. Not so much as a single page.

When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned back in my chair (
her
chair) and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one I couldn't remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some local's attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product
looked like a wanted poster colorized by Ted Turner.

I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her folks—some of them friends, most of them relatives—had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while . . . then had simply disappeared, like a cloud over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.

She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The string of her guitar—not a strap but a string—was visible over one shoulder. In the background I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians: they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.

Jo had tinted Sara's skin to a
café-au-lait
shade, maybe based on other pictures she'd seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head thrown back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she bellows out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tidwell hadn't just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fair's shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life . . . 
although I doubt if he said it in his wife's hearing.

In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs. Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, “Walk Me Baby,” bears a remarkable resemblance to “Walk This Way,” by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and consequently got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brooks's father—a white man—in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one. That was the entrancing thing about the past.

“It ain't nuthin but a barn-dance sugar,” I sang, putting the picture back on the desk. “It ain't nuthin but a round-and-round.”

I picked up the typewriter cover, then decided to leave it off. As I stood, my eyes went back to Sara, standing there with her eyes closed and the string which served her as a guitar strap visible over one shoulder. Something in her face and smile had always struck me as familiar, and suddenly it came to me. She looked oddly like Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had gone down to the crossroads and sold his soul to Satan for seven years of fast living, high-tension liquor, and streetlife babies. And for a jukejoint brand of immortality, of course. Which
he had gotten. Robert Johnson, supposedly poisoned over a woman.

*   *   *

In the late afternoon I went down to the store and saw a good-looking piece of flounder in the cold-case. It looked like supper to me. I bought a bottle of white wine to go with it, and while I was waiting my turn at the cash register, a trembling old man's voice spoke up behind me. “See you made a new friend yes'ty.” The Yankee accent was so thick that it sounded almost like a joke . . . except the accent itself is only part of it; mostly, I've come to believe, it's that singsong tone—real Mainers all sound like auctioneers.

I turned and saw the geezer who had been standing out on the garage tarmac the day before, watching along with Dickie Brooks as I got to know Kyra, Mattie, and Scoutie. He still had the gold-headed cane, and I now recognized it. Sometime in the 1950s, the
Boston Post
had donated one of those canes to every county in the New England states. They were given to the oldest residents and passed along from old fart to old fart. And the joke of it was that the
Post
had gone toes-up years ago.

“Actually two new friends,” I replied, trying to dredge up his name. I couldn't, but I remembered him from when Jo had been alive, holding down one of the overstuffed chairs in Dickie's waiting room, discussing weather and politics, politics and weather, as the hammers whanged and the air-compressor chugged. A regular. And if something happened out there on Highway 68, eye-God, he was there to see it.

“I hear Mattie Devore can be quite a dear,” he said—
heah, Devoah, deah
—and one of his crusty eyelids drooped. I have seen a fair number of salacious winks in my time, but none that was a patch on the one tipped me by that old man with the gold-headed cane. I felt a strong urge to knock his waxy beak of a nose off. The sound of it parting company from his face would be like the crack of a dead branch broken over a bent knee.

“Do you hear a lot, old-timer?” I asked.

“Oh, ayuh!” he said. His lips—dark as strips of liver—parted in a grin. His gums swarmed with white patches. He had a couple of yellow teeth still planted in the top one, and a couple more on the bottom. “And she gut that little one—cunnin, she is! Ayuh!”

“Cunnin as a cat a-runnin,” I agreed.

He blinked at me, a little surprised to hear such an old one out of my presumably newfangled mouth, and then that reprehensible grin widened. “Her don't mind her, though,” he said. “Baby gut the run of the place, don'tcha know.”

I became aware—better belated than never—that half a dozen people were watching and listening to us. “That wasn't my impression,” I said, raising my voice a bit. “No, that wasn't my impression at all.”

He only grinned . . . that old man's grin that says
Oh, ayuh, deah; I know one worth two of that.

I left the store feeling worried for Mattie Devore. Too many people were minding her business, it seemed to me.

When I got home, I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen—it could chill while I got the barbecue
going out on the deck. I reached for the fridge door, then paused. Perhaps as many as four dozen little magnets had been scattered randomly across the front—vegetables, fruits, plastic letters and numbers, even a good selection of the California Raisins—but they weren't random anymore. Now they formed a circle on the front of the refrigerator. Someone had been in here. Someone had come in and . . .

Rearranged the magnets on the fridge? If so, that was a burglar who needed to do some heavy remedial work. I touched one of them—gingerly, with just the tip of my finger. Then, suddenly angry with myself, I reached out and spread them again, doing it with enough force to knock a couple to the floor. I didn't pick them up.

That night, before going to bed, I placed the Memo-Scriber on the table beneath Bunter the Great Stuffed Moose, turning it on and putting it in the
DICTATE
mode. Then I slipped in one of my old home-dubbed cassettes, zeroed the counter, and went to bed, where I slept without dreams or other interruption for eight hours.

*   *   *

The next morning, Monday, was the sort of day the tourists come to Maine for—the air so sunny-clean that the hills across the lake seemed to be under subtle magnification. Mount Washington, New England's highest, floated in the farthest distance.

I put on the coffee, then went into the living room, whistling. All my imaginings of the last few days seemed silly this morning. Then the whistle died away. The Memo-Scriber's counter, set to 000 when I went to bed, was now at 012.

I rewound it, hesitated with my finger over the
PLAY
button, told myself (in Jo's voice) not to be a fool, and pushed it.

“
Oh Mike,
” a voice whispered—mourned, almost—on the tape, and I found myself having to press the heel of one hand to my mouth to hold back a scream. It was what I had heard in Jo's office when the draft rushed past the sides of my face . . . only now the words were slowed down just enough for me to understand them. “
Oh Mike,
” it said again. There was a faint click. The machine had shut down for some length of time. And then, once more, spoken in the living room as I had slept in the north wing: “
Oh Mike.
”

Then it was gone.

A
round nine o'clock, a pickup came down the driveway and parked behind my Chevrolet. The truck was new—a Dodge Ram so clean and chrome-shiny it looked as if the ten-day plates had just come off that morning—but it was the same shade of off-white as the last one and the sign on the driver's door was the one I remembered:
WILLIAM “BILL” DEAN CAMP CHECKING CARETAKING LIGHT CARPENTRY
, plus his telephone number. I went out on the back stoop to meet him, coffee cup in my hand.

“Mike!” Bill cried, climbing down from behind the wheel. Yankee men don't hug—that's a truism you can put right up there with tough guys don't dance and real men don't eat quiche—but Bill pumped my hand almost hard enough to slop coffee from a cup that was three-quarters empty, and gave me a hearty clap on the back. His grin revealed a splendidly blatant set of false teeth—the kind which used to be called Roebuckers, because you got them from the
catalogue. It occurred to me in passing that my ancient interlocutor from the Lakeview General Store could have used a pair. It certainly would have improved mealtimes for the nosy old fuck. “Mike, you're a sight for sore eyes!”

“Good to see you, too,” I said, grinning. Nor was it a false grin; I felt all right. Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning. “You're looking well, my friend.”