Tina Mcelroy Ansa (22 page)

She started to nod yes.

“I sho’ didn’t mean to scare you or force you. By the way you was actin’ in yo’ car and dancin’ yesterday down at that place a’ yo’s, I was sho’ you saw me or felt me there. You looked right at me and cussed.”

“Give me a minute here,” Lena was finally able to say.

“Lena, I know the difference ’tween ’quit’ and ’no.’ I do. And I swear to God, all I heard was ’Quit.’”

“Just give me a minute here,” Lena said again. She felt she needed to slow things down a bit. She was falling so easily into conversation with this full-bodied spirit that it scared her a bit. She had hardly spoken since he had shown his face. And she was having trouble believing that this ghost was truly real.

“To tell you the truth, Lena, I’m havin’ some trouble believin’ I’m here myself,” Herman said, reading her mind again.

“I been floatin’ ’round these parts a long time, ’cause this the last place I lived. Middle Georgia, South Georgia and North Flor’da. This used to be my old stompin’ grounds. And, too, this spot a’ earth meant som’um to me. But like
this? Flesh and blood! Bone and muscle!

“Naw, Lena, I just been kinda floatin’ ’round from what seem like place to place.

“Sometimes it feel like I been in the belly a’ the whale fo’ just three days and three nights. Then, again, like now, it seem like I been waitin’ a eternity.

“To be honest wid you, Lena—and I don’t ever plan to be nothin’ else but—even though I been hangin’ ’round Georgia and Flor’da, mostly, I don’t know
exactly
where I been these last hundred years ’cause I ain’t been in yo’ world or the next.”

“The last one hundred years?” Lena wasn’t sure if she had heard correctly.

“Well, this here nineteen hundred and ninety-five, ain’t it?” he asked.

“Um-huh, April second … or third … or fourth.” Lena couldn’t believe that with Herman sitting so near she could not even remember the correct date.

“Yeah, that’s when I passed. The first week of April in eighteen hundred and ninety-five. Kicked in the head by a mule.”

Herman turned his head to Lena to show her the half-moon scar on his right temple. It made her gasp. And Herman sort of reached his hand out to comfort her. He merely brushed her bare shoulder above where she had the towel tucked around her, and she felt better right away. The touch, electric and warm, felt like a blessing. It left her arm tingling.

“Oh, it was my fault, really, Lena,” he said reassuringly. “My mind was somewhere else, som’um I was workin’ on, probably, can’t remember what it was to save my life. But I know I was distracted. And I came up on the mule from the back too fast, sudden-like.

“I shoulda knowed better, Lena, but, like I say, my mind was somewhere else. He just r’ared up and kicked back on me with both hind legs, and I was dead ’fo’ I hit the ground.”

Lena found herself growing sad at the picture Herman painted. Herman lying on the ground, blood gushing from his wound, his brain kicked into stillness. And he rushed to make it better for her.

“I wouldn’a been no good fo’ anybody if I had ’a survived, Lena,” he said with a self-effacing grin and a shake of his generous-sized head.

Lena did not think that was a bit funny, but she had to smile at this man making fun of his own death to try to make her feel better. Then, she chuckled at the thought of Herman, this handsome husky black man from another century, not being good for anything.

“I’m good fo’ you, Lena, baby, I’m
yo’
man. You called me here. You called me up just as good. I’m
yo’
man.”

Lena liked the sound of that. She had never had anyone refer to himself as her man.

“In the car the other mornin’ by the river, last night in the pool, I just got too close,” Herman continued. “But I tell you. Next time,
you
decide when we get that close again, all right?”

His suggestion made all the difference in the world to Lena’s comfort.

Lena stared at him as the pieces fell into place.

“Herman,” she said, using his name for the first time. “You were the breeze. You were the face in the mirror in the car. You were the smell at The Place.”

Herman smiled and nodded. And Lena suddenly felt she was talking with a trusted friend, not a strange ghost.

They sat on the deck—she still wrapped in her big fluffy towel, her wet braids hanging to her shoulders and dripping down her bare back in the morning air—and talked.

“There was just always som’um ’bout you, Lena, that seemed to draw me to you when you seemed to need some he’p or some guidance or some protectin’ a little. I’d be right there beside you in Middle Georgia. Then, the next thang I know, I’d be off somewheres else, down deep in Flor’da or over in the panhandle where we went scoutin’ for oysters and such.

“You know, it ain’t easy fo’ a spirit, even one still caught ’tween this world and that, to just move around anywhere he please. Yo’ spirit is just so tied to some places and sometimes to people.

“That’s what happened wid you. I’d see you as a little thang bein’ pulled over alive into a world of dead folks by another pretty little girl, and I can’t help but tickle her feets so she let you go. Then, the next thang I know I’m down in the bogs of the Okefenokee Swamps. Next time I see you, Lena, you a big girl layin’ out in the woods behind yo’ house at night. Scared as you can be. And rightfully so, too. There was all kinda thangs out in that night wid you. It was like watchin’ a baby rabbit ’bout to be set upon by a wildcat.”

“In the woods? Was I about sixteen or so?” Lena asked, remembering her nights of sleepwalking as a teenager and the terror of waking one night alone and lost in the woods dressed only in her nightgown.

“I don’t know how old ’xactly you was, Lena, but you looked to be ’bout a girl in her teen years. I didn’t know what to do ’bout you. Lena, you was surrounded by all kinds a’ spirits. So I just girded my guts the way my pa had taught me as a boy and strode right into that scene.

“Well, I musta been more powerful than I thought or I was just doin’ what I was supposed to do, ’cause them spirits scattered. They just broke in a million pieces, it seem like, and scattered.”

Lena, sitting on the edge of her chair, listened as if she were five and her grandmother were telling one of the ghost stories that Nellie thought were too graphic for the children. Especially for Lena, whom her mother had marked in the womb as high-strung.

“Then, there was the time I saw you on the train. You was goin’ to college, I think. You didn’t even know how surrounded you was with spirits ready to do you harm. I was real glad when you made it through that. Then, later in yo’ dormitory room, I think you saw the spirits then, didn’t you?”

Mostly, Lena just nodded or shook her head in response to what sounded like rhetorical questions. Every once in a while, she would think, I’m sitting here on my deck talking to a ghost in broad daylight. But for the most part she did not give her behavior a thought. Herman enthralled her.

Lena was learning more about life, death and herself in one conversation with Herman than she had learned in her whole life of struggling and bumping around trying to find things out.

She had not felt this relaxed with anyone since she first encountered Sister almost thirty years before.

Herman told her all kinds of things about spirits.

“Ghosts can only terrorize folks who
allow
theyselves to be terrorized,” he told her.

“It’s easier fo’ spirits like me to come back to this world ’cause I ain’t completely crossed over yet.

“I gi’ you my word that you the first livin’ human who been able to draw me completely back into the world. I’d stop by a campsite and
try to eat a piece of fried fish or tripe or som’um good I couldn’t resist. But mostly I just been wanderin’ and watchin’ and observin’. Content to do it. There’s so much to see and appreciate in yo’ life. Somehow, we can’t seem to get the knack a’ that while we still here livin’.”

Herman tried in different ways to explain to Lena about the state he had been in since his accidental death in 1895. But in the final analysis, he had to admit, “Lena, I don’t rightly know why I’m still out here like this. All I know fo’ certain is that with each tick of yo’ clock, with each passin’ of each one of yo’ years, I seem to get stronger and stronger. I feel I must feel less dead right now than just about anybody around, ’live or dead.”

He paused and looked Lena dead in her eyes.

“And now, Lena, I know why I’m here. ’Cause
you
want me here. Period.”

Lena could not help herself. She believed him.

She believed she had invited Herman in, and she was beginning to feel it was the best decision she had ever made.

W
hen Lena heard James Petersen noisily coming into the back door for the day, she jumped like a cat.

“My goodness, what time is it?” she exclaimed, trying to gather both her towel and wits about her.

Herman tilted his head back and looked up at the sun.

“Oh, it’s ’bout ’leven-thirty or noon,” he said as if he were checking a clock.

“Noon??!!” Lena shouted.

“Uh-huh,” Herman answered. Lena could have sworn she saw him smile.

“Noon??!! You mean to tell me I been sitting here talking to you all morning?”

Herman just nodded his head.

“Noon???!! I can’t believe this,” she screamed and, wrapping her towel more securely, hurried inside.

She could hear James Petersen coming through the house toward her suite.

“First, I waste all that time in the hospital yesterday and now all this morning
with a ghost,”
Lena muttered to herself and Herman as she headed for the bathroom, tucking her big Turkish towel in above her breasts.

“I do apologize, Lena,” he said lightly, following her. He said it sincerely, but Lena couldn’t help but feel he was almost teasing her. Then, he dropped all teasing tones.

“I’m especially sorry for that business yesterday mornin’ down at yo’ juke downtown.”

Lena spun around in her tracks. She turned and looked directly into the calm deep face of the ghost leaning on the jamb of her bedroom door.

“Of course,” she said. She had sensed the connection earlier. “That was
your
room!”

But Herman didn’t have a chance to reply.

James Petersen was standing at the bedroom door calling to Lena through the open door to the bathroom.

“Lena, you still here?” he asked, surprise on the verge of concern in his voice. “Everybody was worried ’bout you. They just called me to check. How come you didn’t tell me you had a accident yesterday?”

He did not wait for her to respond.

“You call in sick?” James Petersen asked, averting his eyes as he almost caught sight of Lena in the bathroom mirror unwrapping the big white towel from her body and then, suddenly, rewrapping it outside the shower.

“Sick?” Lena could not get herself together enough to answer sensibly. “Sick?” she repeated dumbly while she watched Herman starting to fade over by the door to the bedroom. She could almost see through him the way she had when he had first appeared. But she could still see him. James Petersen did not seem to see Herman at all.

“Good God, Lena, you got thirty-six messages on your machine,” James Petersen shouted right through Herman as he glanced over at the machine next to the bed he was stripping of linen. “Didn’t you hear it ringing? Oh, look, the ring is turned to ’off.’”

James Petersen was surprised. “You do that?” he asked as he balled up the linen and tossed it onto a chair.

Lena answered vaguely, “Oh, right. The phone. The answering machine, James Petersen.” But she was still watching the spot where Herman stood.

“I guess those pain pills they gave me at the hospital made me oversleep,” she called to her houseman in the next room. Herman had all but disappeared now.

Lena had only rushed from the deck into the bathroom through the bedroom, but she felt that she was running in circles as she hurried into her dressing room through the second bathroom door. She could not bring herself to walk through the vapor of Herman that still lingered in the doorway between the bath and the bedroom.

She grabbed a red Versace suit with a short tight skirt from the rack, threw open a couple of drawers and boxes, snatched some silky red and black underwear and sheer hose out and headed back to the bathroom, dropping her towel on the floor as she slipped into the shower again. She felt clammy all over.

“No telling how many meetings and appointments I’ve missed already,” she muttered as she soaped her loofah mitt in the steamy shower and quickly scrubbed her body.

The spot on her bare shoulder where Herman—she said the name out loud but in a whisper just to see what happened and the door to the shower rattled a bit, making Lena jump and giggle—had briefly touched her in conversation was still tingling a bit, and she barely washed it.

Herman had faded from sight by the time she hurried out of the shower. But his old hat was still resting on the vanity of the sink as if it belonged there. She looked around for James Petersen, then she reached out and touched the battered hat. It seemed to shimmer a bit where it sat. Then, slowly, right before Lena’s eyes, it disappeared.

She stood a moment in the middle of the huge bathroom and stared at the spot where the hat had rested, thinking about her morning visit from Herman.

“Uh, uh, uh, a spirit, a ghost, come to be my man,” Lena said aloud as she finished drying off and reached for the bottle of lotion on the counter. She had to laugh.

“Now, what else was I expecting?” she asked herself with a dry chuckle.

She slipped into her red outfit and, flipping open her cellular phone on the way out the door past James Petersen, called Precious to say she was on her way into town.

When she slid behind the wheel of her car, she expected the interior to smell like The Place the day before. She was disappointed that it did not. She looked several times in the mirror as she pulled out onto her road, hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghost there. But there was none.