How to Talk to Ghosts

Story of a heroic father who met a tragic end.

How to Talk to Ghosts

"Mommy? Where are we going?"

"To the cemetery, Hecky."

"Ugh," Hecky crossed his arms and frowned. "The cemetery is the boringest place! Why do we have to go there?"

"Because Daddy wants to talk to the ghosts." Hecky's father quietly chuckled.

"Woah!" The boy sat up in his booster seat. "You can talk to ghosts, Daddy?"

"Sure can!" said his father.

"Woah." In the boy's face was a medley of astonishment, wonder, and curiosity. "Can you teach me to talk to the ghosts?"

"Sure, buddy. If you behave at the cemetery, I will teach you to talk to the ghosts."

Hecky wiggled happily and sat back politely, crossing his feet and clasping his hands in his lap. So did he remain, silently, for the rest of the trip.

 

As Jacob turned in through the gates of Peter and Paul cemetery, Hecky glued his face to the interior of the backseat window.

“What are those rocks?”

Hecky’s father had grown silent and seemed not even to hear the question.

“Those are headstones, Hecky,” said the boy’s mother. “That’s where the ghosts live.”

“Those are ghost houses?” said the boy in disbelief. “How do they fit inside?”

“They live underground. They don’t need a lot of space because they’re ghosts.”

“They live underground?” echoed the boy. “Woah.”

“Many of them are sleeping, though, so we need to be quiet and respectful, okay Hecky?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

Hecky’s father, Jacob, whose expression had grown deeply solemn, followed the gravel path, turning where appropriate, until they’d arrived at a slender aspen, ornamented by a red bell and ribbon, next to which he stopped the car. Jacob drew a single full breath and stepped out onto the gravel, leading his family toward the aspen.

Hecky tugged at his father’s pant leg. At a near whisper, he asked, “Daddy, can I please go talk to the ghosts?”

Jacob surveyed the landscape then knelt to the level of his son. “Do not touch anything,” he said into the boy’s eyes. “Stay where your mother and I can see you. And �" Heck, look at me.”

The boy reestablished eye contact with his father.

“And be very, very respectful. Do you understand? This is a serious place.”

Hecky mirrored the solemnity of his father. “I understand, Daddy.”

The boy set off with no apparent plan, and Jacob and Linda continued toward the aspen, shaded by which, studded firmly in the green earth, was a copper plate.

 

HECTOR “COURAGE” MONTGOMERY

1968-2003

A truly great father

 

Jacob and Linda positioned themselves at a respectful distance from the plate. Linda kept one eye on her son, who was whispering to one of the headstones. Jacob’s gaze was fixed, trance-like, on his father’s grave. He doffed his hat with one hand and held it by his side. Silently, he stared.

To Linda, it seemed her husband was, indeed, mentally conversing with the ghost of his father.

“I understand if you’re not ready,” assured Linda, “but I would like to know.”

Still and stoic, Jacob stood, responding neither in speech nor gesture.

Linda pressed no further. Her attention turned back to her son, who’d found himself another ghost to whisper to.

Jacob broke his gaze with his father, lifted his eyes to his son, then closed them. Deeply he inhaled, and a gentle breeze seemed to follow his breath, fluttering the hairs on his head and the leaves of the aspen, producing an arrhythmic chime in the red bell.

He was ready.

 

­­­­­­______________________

 

            Every Sunday, Mom and Dad took me to the park. Park Day, we called it. Many of the scenes of this particular Park Day have been lost to the mind’s waste bin, but some have permanently, and with vivid clarity, crystallized in my memory.

The car ride was much like every other. No music. My father drove in silence, especially when accompanied by my mother and me. In music’s stead we spoke to one another.

During this particular car ride I learned that I had a middle name, Friederick, which had been passed down through an ancestral tradition dating back at least to my great, great, great grandfather.

“Everybody’s got a middle name,” said my mother.

“Everybody?” I echoed, amazed. “What’s your middle name?”

“Lucille,” said my mother.

“Lucille! That’s such a pretty name, Mommy!”

Warmly, she said, “Oh, thank you, Sweetheart.”

“What’s your middle name, Daddy?”

My father puffed his chest and haughtily said, “Courage!”

My mother found herself a laugh. “Oh please,” she said endearingly, “you’re courageous when you know there’s no danger! Shall I tell Jakey the centipede story?”

My father’s chest popped like a balloon. “You shall not,” he said. He smiled at my mom and then at me in the rearview mirror. It made me smile.

A few hours of normal Sunday life passed without much worthy of long-term memory.

The next memory begins as my mother pushes me at the swings. It’s strange, but the memory to me presents itself as in the third person. I have a somewhat elevated vantage, looking down at the mulchy terrain of the playground, its colorful equipment, and my mother pushing me joyously on the swing.

My father was not in sight. He’d gone back to the car to fetch something, sunscreen or snacks, perhaps.

Approaching rather innocuously in one corner of my aerial view is a dog. It walks slowly, with a calm gait in a linear path. Little Jacob noticed the dog before his mother.

“Doggy!” I said.

My mother, noticing its glistening tag, said to me, “I wonder if he’s lost. Come Jakey, let’s see if there’s a name on his collar.”

Echoing from far away, I heard my father shout to us. “Susan! Jake! Get the hell away from that thing!” I turned to see him, far out but moving quickly toward us. The dog, likewise, but much more slowly, continued to approach.

“It’s just a dog, Heck!’ shouted my mother back at him. “I think it’s lost!”

I echoed my mother’s sentiment, adding to it a bit of anger. “Daddy! I want to see the doggy!”

“I said get the hell away!”

But neither of us listened.

As sight of the dog became clearer, the more ominous grew its appearance. Its fur was quite feral, dark with patches of gray. We began to notice its head tick, and its snout twitch into a succession of snarls.

My mother stopped me with a stiff hand to the chest.

What neither my mother nor I had understood was that my dad had identified something in the dog’s gait and snarl.

The dog was rabid.

“I said get the hell away from that thing!” echoed my father again, closer now, but still quite far away.

As soon as he said this, the dog’s composure had turned sinister, its snarl had turned to a vicious roar, and its gait to a full-fledged charge toward my mother and me.

My mother had seized me with the strength and instinct so characteristic of mothers in emergency, threw me over her shoulder and ran.

But instinct was not enough. Looking behind my mother I saw the dog lunge.

It’s here the memory returns to a first-person point of view. With each passing fraction of a second, its face made another inch toward mine. It was clear to me that I was the target. Somewhere in midair, its eyes met mine. Those were eyes I would never forget. Sick with rage and hunger. Its maw was already opened, bloody fangs exposed. In terror I shut my eyes to brace for the mauling I was surely about to receive.

My mother and I both were sure to be eaten alive.

But that’s not what happened.

Nothing happened.

I’d opened my eyes to see that my dad had tackled the rabid beast. Well, I’m not sure who can be said to have tackled whom. Whatever the case, they were both on the ground, one in the struggle for survival, the other for murder.

“Get to the car!” shouted my dad.

The dog had secured itself on his forearm, but was quickly flung off, after which landed my father a few swift and powerful kicks to the creature’s jaw. But it did not let up.

Meanwhile, my mother and I had escaped unscathed and made for the car.

Once my father saw we were safe, he executed one final blow and jolted himself. He’d gotten a head start, but the dog had gained on him as he neared the car.

As he launched himself into the vehicle, the beast made one final lunge for his foot. The foot might have come off had not my father heel-kicked the sucker in the forehead. The dog recoiled, allowing my father an opportunity to slam the door shut.

A bloody mess and robbed of breath, he shouted at my mother. “To the hospital! Drive! Drive to the hospital!”

She did.

 

­­­­­­______________________

 

In the near distance could Hecky be heard striking up another one-sided conversation. “Hello, Mr. Ghost,” he’d say, and then whisper, “Are you awake?”

Linda was crying softly.

“I’m sorry I made you cry,” said Jacob.

“Your mother,” she said, ignoring the apology, “when did she --?”

“Later that year,” he quickly responded. “All I have left of her is her journal. Of my father, a book he’d written and dedicated to me, meant to instruct me on how to be a good man.”

“Knowing you, it must’ve been a great book,” said Linda.

Jacob nodded in agreement. “Had he lived a few centuries earlier he would’ve made a great philosopher.”

Linda remained silent, not quite knowing what else to say, but Jacob filled the silence.

“Page 93, line 14: ‘Know this, Jacob, that you have an ethical obligation to acquire knowledge and to share it with others, especially if it could save lives.’ The phrase ‘ethical obligation’ seemed to be one of his favorites.”

Linda was still silent.

“I doubt it,” Jacob continued, “but I wonder sometimes if he, in his final moments, recognized that dreadful irony.”

Linda finally spoke. “Do you remember any of those moments?”

A few seconds passed before Jacob responded, then he started in a calm, dry voice.

 

­­­­­­______________________

My mother ordered me out of the emergency room, but her account is documented in the journal she left behind. My father’s wounds were numerous. Beyond a certain level of severity and after a certain point in the progression of the virus, it becomes impossible to treat, and once symptoms start to appear, the disease is almost always fatal. Nor was there much that could be done to manage the pain. My father simply had to deal with it. My mother simply had to watch.

The virus attacks the nervous system, but my father would have had enough clarity, even if only momentarily, to know what was happening. He knew he was going to die, and he knew it was not going to be quick and painless.

One of its symptoms is an increase in the production of saliva and difficulty swallowing. “He would not stop gagging,” my mother wrote. Being closest to him, the doctors thought she might have the most success in feeding him water. “He flung back in repulsion at the very sight of it, grasping his throat with both hands. His eyes, and nothing else, were screaming. Then, he’d fall limp for a few relieving moments before seizing again.

“Those eyes,” she continued. “Those horror-filled eyes and every fiber of his being beckoned to me, pleading desperately for help. There was nothing I could do. And it was my fault. I couldn’t bare it. I can’t bare it. His eyes haunt me still, asleep and awake.”

That was her last journal entry.

In addition to the virus’ assault on the brain stem, sparing not one of its functions �" swallowing, breathing, heartbeat regulation �" it also inflames the whole of the brain, pressing it violently against the walls of the skull. The victim is severely irritated. And irritable. It’s likely my father, in some bouts of rage, said some quite nasty things to my mother, things that might likewise have haunted her to the end.

Finally, the victim is mercifully relieved by coma. Into such a state did my father fall and in which did he remain for two weeks. His heart stopped beating on August 7^th, 2003.

 

­­­­­­______________________

 

Linda was again speechless.

A worn-out little Hecky began to make his way back to Mom and Dad. Jacob quickly dabbed Linda’s eyes with his handkerchief.

“Any luck, buddy?” said Jacob.

“No.” Hecky sighed, defeated. “I think they are all asleeping.”

Hecky looked down at the plate before his parents’ feet. “Woah!” he exclaimed. “This ghost has the same name as me!”

Jacob found himself a smile. “Dad,” he said, “this is Hector, your grandson, the sweetest fruit of your sacrifice.”

Linda struggled to maintain her composure, but she managed.

Hecky, as if it were his turn to speak, nervously said, “Hi, Grampy.” He looked to his father, wondering whether he should expect a response.

“Daddy,” whispered the boy, “I don’t think it’s working.”

“He heard you buddy,” assured Jacob. “He says you are one handsome young fellow.”

“Really?” If the boy’s eyes widened any more, they might have fallen out. “Thanks, Grampy!”

It was now Linda who could not untrain her eyes from the plate. Still, she stood, as had her husband moments ago.

“Mommy, say hi to Grampy!”

Mommy remained silent, but something deep within had bubbled to the surface. Slowly, her face contorted as tears began to ooze from her face, which by now was a shade of red her son had never before seen on a human being.

“Thank you. So much. Hector,” she said to the plate.

Hecky turned eagerly to his father. “What he said? What he said?”

Jacob pulled his wife to his hip, stroking her hair. “What do you think he said?”

“You’re welcome?”

Jacob tousled the boy’s head. “Hey! You’re getting pretty good at this!”