The Stretcher

If every night kids demand you scare them with a ghost story, you better always have a stretcher handy.

The Stretcher

“It’s ghost time, Grampa.”

His gaze took in those three pairs of pleading eyes one by one. “You can beg and plead all you want, but I never tell ghost stories, kids, not any more, not since the grownups have read me the riot act one time too many. Last night was the last time, so help me God. I know when I’m licked - not that I wouldn’t like to see your Mama Millie hang me by my toes over a cauldron of boiling mayonnaise while she fries my gizzard. Besides, we all know stories are lies and nothing like reality. No, reality is like Mama Millie’s cat Sisyphus -" snuggles up in your lap once in a blue moon but the rest of the time hides or is all claws and hisses. Stories make sense, whereas reality is just what it is and sense be damned. Not that I haven’t noticed reality is a little bit afraid of your Mama Millie, who you may or may not know is also my commander in chief and wife, if you can imagine me of all people married and a privy private...”

“We know who Gramma is, Grampa.”

He liked Amanda’s impatience. This was not a girl who was ever going to just sit back and take it. “Who is she? I forget.”

“Gramma!”

“Gramma? My beautiful sweet young bride is Gramma too?”

“Stop fooling, Grampa. It’s ghost time. I want scared.”

“Okay, Jimmy. Great idea! Let’s get Grampa in trouble with your Mama and Gramma. So, if I wanted to tell the flat-out truth and nothing but, I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of a ghost story without a stretcher. Fortunately, although grownups can’t see it, I have my stretcher right here and I’d be lying on it if it weren’t haunted, because you see the truth from a stretcher but are more obliged to it than bound by it. With a stretcher I can see that a story is a prison from a ghost’s point of view. If you were a ghost, would you want to be imprisoned in a story told the same way over and over? Of course you wouldn’t! A ghost story is as much a contradiction as a ghost prison.

“Now, what is a contradiction aside from a way to bore grownups and get them to leave us alone to our campfire, fates and stretcher? Mama Millie claims to be a gardener and tells anybody who doesn’t know better that gardening is her hobby. In the spring, Mama Millie sticks a seed or a store-bought plant in the ground, and then once or twice before winter she takes time out from her book or TV program to peek out the window and see whether what she planted is beautiful yet. She does not weed because she is a normal, loving woman who hates weeding. Unlike good children without any spunk, unruly weeds are not grateful for her efforts. She does not water and feed them either because, if she went outside, she would see her plant is being choked to death by bloodthirsty ninja weeds, which would make her feel as if she should do some weeding.

“Now, perhaps you don’t believe there are such things as weeds. I know you like weeds, Mandy. Joe-pye weed is your favorite flower. You like jewelweed and sneezeweed, too, if my failing memory remembers anything at all. Just as every person is of equal value, so every plant has the right to be seen as a free and equal plant, you think. I agree. I don’t believe in weeds either. So I don’t entirely agree with the traditional wisdom that gardening is at least ninety percent weeding. But from the beginning of human time, people have pulled, strangled or poisoned the plant they don’t want in order to preserve and see thrive the plant they like. Weeds don’t exist, but a gardener murders them anyway, just like a skeptic murders ghosts that supposedly don’t exist. Understood in that sense, a gardener who doesn’t weed is a perfect example of a contradiction. A true gardener is someone who loves pulling stilt-grass in a cold rain just as much as in the hot, dry chigger and mosquito season.

“Now that we’ve driven the grownups away, we can get on with the reality of the many ghosts I’ve known. Yes, lying on a stretcher, you get to know just the facts and the ghosts because, as you’ve already guessed, a haunted stretcher is basically a ghost ship, which is like a space ship except that space and time are different in a ghost ship in the same way that murder differs from love. In fact, it’s when you see me, an old geezer, lying on the ground by our fire taking off on his stretcher that contradictions become perfectly obvious. I hope you will not allow me to get away with any contradictions -" or I will.

“I first discovered the occult magic of a stretcher when I was approaching my first shave, still a half-pint and mostly a sorry excuse for a boy. That’s when I found an old stretcher left over from World War 2 at the Army Navy Surplus Store. My dad really liked that store, seemed to feel at home there in a way he didn’t any place else. Maybe he could have held a job if they’d have hired him to sweep and maybe stock shelves. Maybe he’d have recovered quicker from his ghastly war and lived to have the pleasure of knowing each of you. He had a lot of war wounds, and I got to see the ones on his body whenever I helped Mother bathe him. The wonder was that he could still walk -" though there was a gimpy drag to his left leg that might have made you think he wasn’t so much walking as trying not to fall. He didn’t use his right arm much, I think because it embarrassed him, so it mostly hung there while he used his left arm as best he could for carrying and eating. You might think his medals were a sufficient reward for some missing toes and fingers or scars covered easily enough with clothing. His medals weren’t something he ever once took out of Mother’s desk, and he never said anything when I expressed interest in them, just gave me his wide-eyed stare.

In any event, the government used to make a pretty good living from Army Navy stores, selling all the uniforms and tents and canteens and stuff they didn’t want to store until the next war, all of it supposedly unused. But I could smell the blood and the guts of the men that died the moment I walked in as a boy, and let me tell you, I told my dad, you can take me along any time you like to that store. I needed some height fast given the fact other boys at my school were tough and intended to kill me if they could. A stretcher was just the thing I needed. It might have looked unused to a careless eye, but it was dusty and smelled, under its mustiness, of gunpowder and grisly death. Even if no one else could, I discerned bloodstains they couldn’t quite clean off from all the dying men that stretcher carried on the battlefield. It was made of canvas on a wooden frame with short, foldable legs so that the wounded soldier could be put down on the ground without any discomfort. My father agreed to let me buy the stretcher but indicated by pulling from his pocket his only dollar that I would have to pay for it with my paperboy money. Mother had only trusted him with money enough to buy me some footwear because she didn’t want me to get teased again or worse for coming to school barefoot.”

“I’d love to do school barefoot,” George said.

“Son, I liked going barefoot just fine. Toughens up your feet, and so long as the mean boys don’t accidentally stomp too hard, your toes don’t break. But the doctor ordered my mom to get me some shoes if she had to steal ‘em herself. Next time he heard I was barefoot in school he was gonna send her a bill she wouldn’t like for fixing my broken toes. But nowadays, what with progress and all, there probably aren’t any mean boys anymore…”

“There are, Grampa,” Jimmy burst out. “There are even mean girls.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been seeing an increasing number of girl ghosts recently. As we sow, so shall we reap. When we got to the cash register, Dad paid his dollar for my Army boots, which we hoped my feet would eventually grow into. Until then I could wad up newspaper in the toe of each boot, he said, one of the few times I ever heard him speak in those days. I then asked the man behind the cash register how much the stretcher cost, and he said, well, how much money you got, captain? So I took out all the coins in my pocket and counted them and told him I had one dollar and seventy-one cents including my lucky Indian head coin dated 1899. You should have seen the look of surprise on that man’s face. He said, Well, don’t that beat all! I’m plumb speechless I’m so amazed! I never expected in my dad-blamed life to see such a coin-cidence! That’s exactly what that there stretcher costs, son.

“I shot up like a weed thanks to all the time I put in sleeping on my stretcher, and suddenly all the boys who were gonna kill me before turned friendly. I grew so fast that all my new friends started calling me Stretch without even knowing about my stretcher, which I was determined to keep secret so that they wouldn’t get one of their own, get taller and start thinking they could kill me again. I have been true to my nickname ever since. I fail to understand the reasoning of the Motor Vehicle Bureau in not allowing Stretch on my Driver’s License when I was Stretch in various institutions of learning, on my social security card and on the blesséd marriage certificate that made me the happiest man alive with the perfect woman, a woman who has never in her life made a mistake except marrying a deeply flawed sinner, which isn’t really her fault since I talked her into it. You may have noticed, however, that Mama Millie is much like the Motor Vehicle Bureau in her principles and never addresses her husband as Stretch when anybody else is within hearing, although she whispers the name tenderly in my ear on a happy occasion. So I have a suggestion for you, Rocky. If you want to be called Rocky instead of George, just tell kids when you meet them, Friends call me Rocky. You don’t need your mom’s permission.”

“I want to be Mandy,” Amanda declared.

“That’s what I call you, Mandy.”

“But they won’t.” Amanda glared at her brothers.

“Rocky and Jimmy will probably be happy to call you Mandy if you call them what they want. If not, I believe in giving varmints a taste of their own medicine.”

“Mom’s gonna have a hissy fit,” Jimmy said.

“Moms try to shape reality, but when reality resists, they generally cave in or get steamrolled. Even I caved in when I had no choice.”

“What do you mean?” Amanda, all suspicion, asked.

“You don’t even know your Mom’s real name, do you?”

“Her name’s Cat - isn’t it?”

“I’m going to tell you a secret you will make use of only when up against the wall staring bravely at a firing squad. Your mom’s given name on her birth certificate is Catherine. As her father, I can tell you I never imagined having a cat for a daughter - a kitty, perhaps, or even a dog, but never a cat. I resisted. Your grandma resisted. If anything in this world is futile, it’s resisting a Catherine who wants to be a Cat.”

“It’s not fair if she can be Cat and I can’t be Mandy.”

“No, it’s not fair, but it’s up to you to change reality and make it fair through resistance, subterfuge and spunk. That’s the thing, Mandy: from a stretcher you can see that reality is only an enemy until it’s a friend, and friends are there for each other. Get yourself a stretcher you can lie on, and I guarantee you’ll see reality come into crystal clear focus, and if you don’t, just lie some more, preferably only when other kids are around, no grownups. You must have the name you feel is you or enchantments aren’t possible. And what is life without enchantments?”

“No life at all.”

“Ah! If you truly get it, I can die happy. Now, when Rocky and Jimmy get it, I can die even happier.”

“They kind of get it, Grampa. They just don’t know what the word enchantment means.”

“So let’s work on that. You see me stretched out on the ground by the fire, but I am in fact lying on my old stretcher. When you’re talking about a ghost, you need a good fire going, by the way. Ghosts want warmth, and if there’s not a fire, they’re likely to get in you to get warm. Look at the flames real carefully, and you can usually make out a ghost in there warming up. So I was 12, the age of power that comes only once in your life unless you get the kind of stretcher that makes it last until you die and are judged worthy of heaven or hell or condemned by deeds too foul for hell to the reality of a ghost. Lying on my stretcher I could still smell the blood and guts spilled by the dead and dying carried from the battlefield to their just reward. The one who counted most was the one the good Lord saw fit to reject out of hand. Leave his soul glued to that stretcher, the good Lord shouted upon that scum’s death, for the judge of judges was as furious as he was disgusted at what that man had done - a deed so foul it remains to this day unspeakable in American history books. But that’s a ghost story, and I swore not to tell one of those…”

“That’s not fair! You always tell us a ghost story.”

“And get in trouble with the grownups. Mandy, you’re trying to get me in trouble.”

“You belong in trouble. You always say that.”

“True, I do. But Trouble with a capital T rhymes with G, which stands for Ghosts, not Grownups. I’ve got a secret to keep.”

“They already know you’re not a grownup. Mama Millie even said so.”

“She did, huh. I wonder who told her. Jimmy, did you?”

“I never tell.”

“Rocky wouldn’t tell.”

“It was Amanda - Mandy - I’ll bet.”

“I did not! I never tell.”

“Well, maybe grownups are smarter than I give them credit for. So a stretcher isn’t something any of you would ever breathe a word about to the grownups??”

“No.”

“No.”

“Never!”

“I guess I’m up a crick with a ghost and a chance to get paddled, then. I always loved getting paddled. What kind of kid never gets paddled? Only one without any spunk. So, by the age of 14, I was a veteran lying on my stretcher, looking up at reality, which was sometimes blue, at night dark and starry or moonlit, sometimes cloudy, and, where I lived, raining quite a bit except in winter, when I could count on sometimes having a nice warm blanket of snow. A man stopped and I guess noticed my Army boots and the khaki pants and shirt my father also helped me pick out at the store with my paperboy money, and he remarked, ‘A veteran!’

“‘Yessir!’ I was a veteran as far as lying on my stretcher was concerned.

“‘That’s a U.S. Army stretcher unless I miss my guess,’ he said, rubbing his bristly jaw and eyeing me as if I were a sucker. ‘So they at least give you your stretcher.’

“‘No sir. I had to pay one dollar and seventy-one cents for my stretcher.’

“‘It hurts me to hear we got such cheapskates managing the fighting on our side, son. You earned that stretcher, son, do you hear me?’

“‘Yessir, I hear you just fine, sir.’

“‘How would you like to go to a peace demonstration? I’ll pay you two dollars, so you’ll have your money back and then some for that stretcher.’

“‘I’d like that just fine, sir. But how long will I be at the demon station?’

“‘Why does that matter?’

“‘My bladder, sir. It’s a stubborn reminder of my reality.’

“‘How do you manage your bladder now, if you don’t mind my asking?’

“‘I roll halfway and aim over the side, sir.’

“‘Well, you can’t do that at a peace demonstration or you’ll get arrested for more than exercising your Constitutional rights. I guess we’ll have to get our medical auxiliary to stretch your bladder or something. Shouldn’t hurt much. She’s a medical student or maybe even pre-med but cute as a button on a banana.’

“‘Thank you, sir, but I think I’ll just hold it for as long as I can. So at the demon station…”

“What about the ghost?”

“Please don’t ask me what the ghost did because it’s just too horrible for words, even when you’re lying on a stretcher…”

“Tell us!”

“No, I won’t tell you…”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll get blamed again if you can’t sleep tonight. We’re talking about a ghost as malevolent as he was odious. Just hearing about him you might be scared for the rest of your life that something as bad as this monster from hell could happen to you if you’re not careful every second.

“That’s not fair!”

“Sure it’s fair. I shouldn’t be scaring kids your age to death, Mandy. You’ve got to understand - if I start talking about an evil ghost, then he’s coming, trying to get into the act. The worse the ghost, the less he can resist being talked about.”

“He’ll just be in the fire. I want scared.”

“All right, you asked for it. But you guys have got to keep the fire up enough that the shadows hop and flicker or you can’t see a ghost for what he is. If anybody’s got a queasy stomach or is subject to the heebie-jeebies, they better get their fannies outta earshot right now. I’m on my stretcher, and that means the ghost has got me on his ghost ship speeding back to what haunts him. See, when a ghost is confined to a stretcher and you start lying on that stretcher, you’re confined to it, too, whereas when a ghost is imprisoned in a story, you can just forget the durned story and get away. I’ve been stuck to that stretcher since I was 12 years old. Even when you can’t see it, it’s there and you can’t lie your way out. You get me? My ghost has got me right where it wants, and he’s not letting me get away. No, I’m stuck in that French village my pa told me about, in pain, with a choice between trying to catch cockroaches or a rat while I’m lying on my stretcher wounded, nothing to eat but what my buddies give me. What we were eating nobody would ever say. But once I was seeing reality from my stretcher, I knew.

“I liked the town well enough when we first fought our way in. Pretty place. The church steeple was blown to smithereens so neither side could use it for reconnaissance. There wasn’t much to the town except for a few closed-up shops and maybe two dozen houses, some of them damaged or destroyed by artillery fire. There was also an orphanage for boys. When we first arrived they came out and cheered our arrival, but to our surprise the villagers took our arrival as the time to flee. My buddies set my stretcher down at the orphanage. Normally I would have been left behind, but Weasel - he was our Sergeant till he got broke back to buck private for what he done to some corpses - Weasel seemed to think I might come in handy if our future turned out to be as hungry as our past. Weasel was a butt-kicker and, to tell the whole truth, if a contest for nicest guy in America had been held at that time, Weasel would surely have come in dead last. Weasel wasn’t just a bad guy. He was so odious that all the world’s evil demons were torn between jealousy and admiration. Dadblastit!”

“Grampa - what’s wrong?”

“Something’s watching us, slowly getting closer…”

“Who?”

“Can’t you feel him? I’d know his odious presence anywhere. That’s the thing about ghosts: you start talking about ‘em, you better believe in ‘em or they get all bent out of shape. I had a friend didn’t believe in ghosts - scientist, Ivy League guy - okay, don’t believe in ‘em, but he made fun of ‘em - thought he’d tell funny ghost stories. He wound up with warts all over his body, couldn’t hardly open his eyes or blow his nose for all the warts. Like every other man in his right mind, I was afraid of Weasel, and so I was not surprised that, when he got angry and shouted and waved his gun at the boys, most of them ran away. Maybe it was that up close we looked pretty scruffy and more like a beaten, retreating army than conquerors. But two of the boys approached and agreed to look after me while my buddies searched the town for booby traps and Germans waiting in ambush. At least two of the houses were in fact booby-trapped, because they blew up when our guys went inside. We lost some more good men, maybe leaving us with no good men at all.

“Meanwhile my caretakers introduced themselves. They were about your ages. I knew just enough French to get that the dark-haired one who was just skin and bones but liked to cut a caper was Little Louis. The one with curly blond hair and the ready laugh was Fat François. He wasn’t actually fat, more like normal, but it seemed to be a joke between them that François was fat. François would thrust his imaginary belly out, supporting his huge sagging gut with both hands, and waddle around in circles while Little Louis hooted and giggled, enjoying the joke so much you couldn’t help an inside smile if your face wasn’t working anymore. I had forgotten there was such a thing as laughter but found Little Louie’s example irresistible. They gave me some water to drink and sang me some songs I couldn’t understand a word of and tried to clean me up a little bit. Then they sat on the ground and talked in French, trying to include me in the conversation, so now and then, instead of moaning and groaning, I would say something in English like Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, which I could manage without moving my shattered jaw. I’d never had such an appreciative audience, and here I was in too much pain to enjoy things. They laughed, clapped and cheered in their funny French way that I liked a lot. They seemed to think I was hilarious, so I told them I was going to adopt them and take them to America. When I explained this in a one-handed pantomime, they seemed to understand and couldn’t get enough of shaking and kissing my remaining hand. Unfortunately, I don’t know how many hours later, my buddies came and got me when I would much rather have continued under the care of Little Louis and Fat François.

“We soon learned why the villagers fled. The Germans launched a massive counterattack all along the front, their tanks in no time passing our village by and advancing many miles beyond, while the infantry that followed put us under siege. We were outnumbered and surrounded.

“Days passed. Our soldiers were exhausted, starving and not really in their right minds anymore. In a story the author can make sure there’s a happy ending or at least one that makes human sense. But reality is different. Ghosts don’t just happen for fun. Something terrible makes a ghost what he is, or she is. Nobody starts out wanting to be a ghost. It’s a fate much worse than death and hell. I’d rather burn forever in the fires of hell any day. You would, too, believe me. You’d much rather be chopped in little pieces and fed to rats. A ghost did something or suffered something that makes being tortured and burned alive in hell over and over again forever much too good a fate. If you don’t believe in hell, fine, Jimmy. I envy you. Ghosts think of hell as heaven compared to being a ghost.

“So we were trapped in a little French town … I don’t remember the name, Amanda, and couldn’t pronounce it if I could...sisstoootsweetoonay or something like that.”

“Mandy!”

“Mandy. Forgive me? I should be shot - but drawn and quartered and boiled in oil first… So it’s the Battle of the Bulge, and we were surrounded by Germans. It took three Americans to equal one German on a battlefield. Put two Germans together and what do you have? A military organization. Our guys thought they were in France to romance the pretty French girls. The Germans - they were serious about fighting to the death, no surrender. Whoa - that stench! That’s what I really hate about ghosts - they usually appear as they did at the moment they died. Yuk! Smells just like Weasel. That means he’s out there but not too close yet or we’d be overcome by the fumes. Weasel was ugly and stinky enough before he mutilated himself and that horrible black gangrene with lots of smelly yellow pus set in. You know what dread is like? Like you started picking your moist boogers and hiding ‘em on the wall behind your bed when you were too sick to get up and dispose of them properly? And then you’ve got to worry your mom is gonna notice them the next time she cleans your room good? You don’t know serious dread until you know Weasel is coming just the way he looked when he died…Unhhhhhhh…”

“Grampa? Grampa, say something!”

“Unhhhhhh…”

“Is Grampa hurt?”

“Aonhhhhhh…”

“Grampa, are you hurt?”

“Maybe he’s having a heart attack…”

“Unnhhhh…I was already shot to hell and lying on my stretcher, wounds from my head to my toes, most of which were gone. I knew I was gonna die and just had to behave my a*s a little longer and the gangrene or the bleeding would finish me off - but I was hungry. All the food was long gone, too. Nothing to eat but mice and cockroaches for weeks on end, and now they were gone, too. Or maybe my buddies just weren’t sharing their roaches with me because they figured I was too far gone. We was all hungry, but that ain’t no excuse in the Lord’s sight. I was ready to eat my remaining fingers I was so hungry.

“Then Weasel remembered those little boys in the orphanage. The people fled but left the boys in the orphanage. Or maybe the boys hid so they didn’t get put in a stew pot and only came out when the Americans showed up. Let the Germans do whatever the hell they want, Weasel shouted, we’re gonna have us a feast. Weasel’s voice was this raspy roar like a chain saw cutting concrete. I hated that voice, always shouting about wanting a plate of thick ribs or how nice it would be to sink his teeth into a bloody rare steak or juicy loin chop. Weasel was a butcher in Chicago before the war, so he always hung ‘em upside down before he cut their throats. I can still hear Little Louie’s screams. But nobody ever did nuthn to stop Weasel…”

“Little Louie?” Amanda’s voice was barely a squeak.

“Of course the Lord was having a hissy fit while we was chowing down. I got mostly Little Louie, Weasel told me, but some of Fat François, too.”

“You ate Fat Francois?” Amanda’s voice rose to a wail.

“Weasel wanted to fatten me up so he wasn’t just gnawing on my bones. So when I got butchered a couple days later, I was treated the way Cain was after he slew his brother, Abel, and sent by God to wander the earth in punishment - though the real punishment is reliving that last meal over and over again. That’s how I got here in hell or wherever. I’m still fond of a stretcher you may have noticed. This isn’t hell? No, not for you, Jimmy, but for a ghost it’s worse than hell. Can’t even get me some whisky and a smoke after my meal. Only entertainment I get is from scaring kids, telling them I’m gonna eat ’em the way I did Little Louis and Fat François.

“You got nothing to worry about, kids - so long as you don’t come near my stretcher. Of course, if I leave my stretcher, you got a whole lot to worry about. I ain’t never tried to do without a stretcher, but who knows. I don’t see no reason in reality why I can’t come and get you while you’re asleep if I get a hankering for some nice and tasty boy or girl meat roasted over an open fire. I like it real bloody rare and juicy. It’s so tender it just about melts in my mouth.

“Yeah, it was my turn to be the luncheon special a couple of days later. Weasel did the carving and roasting, so he got the choicest cuts, but he didn’t like to eat alone, so he shared what he didn’t want with my buddies. I looked around for Little Louie and François, but apparently they’d already made it to heaven, and I realized they wouldn’t have known how to haunt anyone anyway. They probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it, either, whereas I was not going anywhere while Weasel was Master Chef. And I happened to know the one thing Weasel was terrified of. He was fine for catching and eating roaches, and mice were just a tasty snack. But he could not abide spiders, especially them big garden spiders and wolf spiders. Ghosts can’t really do nuthin directly to humans. We ain’t allowed to touch. We can chill your blood when we pass through you, but not much else. We can, however, get critters to do things. It took some trial and error, but before long I got ants, roaches and best of all spiders crawling over Weasel whenever he lay down and tried to sleep. No matter how he swatted and bellowed, the critters kept coming, and if he did manage to drift off for a moment, I got them crawling in his ears, nose and mouth. Night and day he tried to get a little sleep, but I kept the critters coming.

“Then, as my coup de grace, I hit him with no-see’ums - the mites of fleas, which are so tiny you can’t see them, but boy do they make you itch. Before long Weasel was scratching and scraping the skin off his legs and arms he itched so bad. It drove him mad the way his arms and legs were turning black and dripping all that foul-smelling yellow pus. He finally started shooting at the other men, and shot some, but others fired at him and finally tossed a grenade his way. When the Germans walked in, there were only a few Americans left to surrender. Why are you guys crying? You’re s’posed to be scared.”

Time to lower his voice to a ferocious growl: “Now get to bed before I eat you, too, or sic some spiders and no-see’ums on you while you’re sleeping. I knew I shouldn’t bring up my stretcher. Your grampa’s spoiled you with phony ghosts in stories. One of you needs to get to 12 and some power and then haul the others along. Then if I’m not still a ghost myself, it’ll be time for the stretcher again.

“I do not agree with the so-called authorities on ghosts. God gets angry and disgusted but in my opinion gets over it. God leaves ghosts among us in the hope they’ll get over it, too, and become human again and fit for hell, or maybe sometimes even heaven. I’ve seen a ghost come back to life again when nobody thought that possible. It took a long time, but he started pulling weeds one day. Stilt grass was his special enemy, I guess, or maybe just a good pull. He pulled stilt grass with a vengeance and liked to pile it and set it on fire after it was dry enough. Then he’d chuckle a little and finally start laughing. But as the years passed and the stilt grass kept coming back in the same places no matter how much he pulled, he finally realized it was just a place holder growing where nothing else was. So he started planting stuff in the places where the stilt grass was having such a great time. Turned into a true gardener, mostly weeding but planting some, too, and caring for what he planted, watering it, talking to his babies real sweetly. He was in his garden rain or shine. Couldn’t talk to me hardly at all, but he could talk to plants. He’s dead now, but I don’t think he’s in hell anymore. Wars make a lot of ghosts. People do terrible things. But I suppose ghosts are kind of like stilt grass. There are more and more ghosts if we don’t plant something better, like you guys.

“Now get to bed or for the first time in my life I’m paddling butts, boys and girl alike!”

Author's Note

Any review is welcome, but my grandfather assured me negative reviews are the most fun.

Reviews

[Kerra]

A very interesting read, nicely written.