Nathan Ballingrud
We live in a haunted world, Mama told him once. A wise boy will come to know the spirits, and distinguish the good from the wicked.
A dutiful son, Jasper sought to catalogue the spirits he knew in a handbook. First and foremost there was the Holy Spirit, which is the one Mama used to talk to in the angels’ tongue. That spirit made her shake and shudder, even let her handle the serpents so that they might know their subservience to mankind. After she lit out, he asked his father if she’d gone home to God. His father just fixed him with that flat ugly look he sometimes got, so he didn’t ask again. She might come back one day, or she might not. He only hoped that wherever she was, the serpents retained their lesson.
Next there was the spirit of his baby sister, Lily, who died when she was five years old and who lived now at the bottom of the dry well. Though her grave was ten miles up the road at the Jubilee Church, it did not seem strange to him that she lived in the well. He knew that ghosts must travel dark roads invisible to a mortal eye, and that she simply traded one underground home for another, closer to her family. Jasper never heard her speak except when he was dreaming, and whatever she told him then were things he could not bring back with him into the daylit world. He would wake up with the sound of her voice still in his brain, and the smell of the sweet, cold place she lived now lingering in his nose—but the words themselves were gone. He didn’t tell anybody about that, but he made careful note of it in his handbook.
There were the wicked spirits his father kept trapped in honey jars down in the root cellar. Each jar held a slip of paper with one of his father’s sins written upon it, which is what had lured the spirits into their confinement. Jasper would sometimes visit the cellar with a cigarette lighter held aloft, the shelved jars reflecting that shivering light like rows of haunted orange lamps.
Other spirits walked the woods at night. These were wild spirits, feral and hungry, scraping his window with tree branches and scuttling under the trailer with heavy, lumbering movements. Normally they would not keep him awake for long. He was ten years old, wise to their tricks, and satisfied with the protections of his home. Mama claimed it was the Lord’s grace that kept the aggressions of the spirit world at bay, and what few slipped through were trapped in the baited honey jars his father placed by the door. Jasper reckoned that was mostly true, but he kept up with his handbook just the same.
Uncle Kyle gave it to him a few years ago. He was Mama’s brother, and she told him once that Kyle was what college folks called a “naturalist.” Kyle showed him his own notebooks whenever he came to visit, and they were always filled with wonderful things: drawings of different kinds of birds; squirrels and raccoons; varieties of trees and seeds and acorns. He even had a couple pages given over to the bees Jasper’s father kept out in his hives, which were not actually real hives at all but big white boxes, with racks you could slide out to get the honey. Each picture was accompanied by his uncle’s cursive writing—a style he’d learned in school, back when he was Jasper’s age.
“Don’t they teach you how to write cursive in school no more?” he asked. When Jasper shook his head, he spat in the dirt. “Well it don’t matter how the words look. It just matters that you put ’em down. You just write down the things you’re interested in. Draw a picture, and write a little bit about how they act. Add details like when you saw ’em, and how often, what kind of things they eat, stuff like that. You can learn a lot about something just by watching it, and paying attention to what it does when it thinks it’s by itself.” He removed one of his own filled notebooks from his backpack, and gave it over to Jasper so he could fan through the pages. “When you fill one up, it can serve as instruction to other people. Then you don’t call it a notebook no more, ’cause it’s graduated away from that. Then you call it a handbook. The best part happens when someone else uses what you wrote, and adds their own ideas to it. It’s like a conversation that happens over a distance of time.”
The notion electrified Jasper. There weren’t many people for him to talk to out here. He liked the idea of talking across time. “I want to make a handbook.”
“Now how come I thought you might say that?” Uncle Kyle fetched an unmarked book from his bag, peeling off the cellophane wrapper and passing it to the boy with a thoughtful smile. Jasper felt gravity in the gesture. He resisted the urge to hug his uncle.
“What are you gonna put into it?”
Jasper shrugged, although he was already thinking about Lily singing out from her cold, wet home. As much as he loved his uncle, he didn’t want to tell anybody about that. He already knew his handbook would be a rare, secret book—something unique in the world.
A few months later Jasper learned that Kyle had never gone to college at all, at least not beyond a brief stay at the local technical school, where he flunked out. This didn’t change Jasper’s opinion of the man, or of his instruction. By that time he’d already put the notebook to use.
After Mama left, Kyle stopped coming around as much. The relationship between him and Jasper’s dad, always shaky, took a darker turn. His uncle didn’t stay over anymore; he just talked to his dad on the front porch, usually asking questions. Jasper never got to hear what they said, but when his dad came back inside afterward, he was always angry.
Last night it all came to a head. Jasper awoke to the sound of a shout. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, waiting for more. He heard nothing at first. Then violence erupted somewhere beyond his door. It sounded like a full grown buck panicking inside the house. He crept out of bed and peered into the living room, where he saw Uncle Kyle and his own father struggling on the floor. His father’s hand gripped Kyle’s throat. Kyle’s face was purple, with rage or from lack of oxygen. He had one hand on his father’s wrist and the other pressed against the underside of his chin.
Jasper panicked. “Dad!”
His father turned his attention to his son, lips curled back from his teeth, murder pooled in his eyes. Uncle Kyle wrenched himself free and smashed his fist into his dad’s jaw, dropping him like a sack of mulch.
As Kyle rolled away, Jasper saw broken glass beneath him, dappling the back of his plaid shirt with blood. His father groaned, marshaling his senses. Uncle Kyle got to his feet and delivered a heavy kick to his ribs; the sound of bone snapping made Jasper jump. His uncle paused with his hands on his knees, face red and breath rattling. Then he kicked his father twice in the head.
Jasper loved his uncle perhaps more than any other person on this earth, with the exception of his mother, so when he attacked him he did it with a broken heart. He crashed into Uncle Kyle, who staggered back a step, and pounded his fists into him. He screamed with more fear than anger. Kyle shouted something, but it was lost in the frenzy, and it wasn’t until his uncle shoved him to the floor that Jasper was able to stop his assault, crying like some weak little brat on the glass-strewn carpet, next to his bell-rung father.
Uncle Kyle opened the door and the warm August night poured in, smelling of jasmine. His uncle reached for him. “Come on, Jasper. Let’s go.”
Jasper didn’t understand. He looked up from the floor, propped on his elbows, a strange, confused hope rising inside him.
His father pushed himself to his hands and knees. “Fuck you, Kyle.”
“Walter, you just stay down, you hear? Stay down.” He looked back at Jasper. “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here. You shouldn’t be here.”
His father tried to stand. Something broken in his chest made him cry out and he slipped to his knees again, clutching his side. His eyes looked unfocused—a blind, questing intelligence coiled there, like some wrathful animal sniffing at the lip of its cave. His face was beginning to swell from the beating. “Kill you,” he said quietly. “Kill you.”
Uncle Kyle did not seem to take that lightly. “God damn it, Jasper, right now. Come on!”
“But, Dad . . .”
“Fuck that old man! He ain’t shit! Let’s go!”
His father, still on his hands and knees, head hanging between his shoulders, extended a bloody-knuckled hand in Jasper’s direction.
Jasper gave his uncle one last look—he would later wonder what expression he wore, what message he sent—then scuttled to his father’s side, letting the man put a heavy arm around his shoulder, bearing his weight for him as best he could. He heard the door close behind him, and a moment later the engine of his uncle’s old Chevy growled into life. The sound swelled and then receded as his uncle drove away from him forever.
Jasper tried to help his father to his feet, but he guessed it hurt him too much, because finally his father pushed him off and settled back onto his side, breathing heavily, his eyes closed.
“Dad? Should I call the ambulance?”
His father opened his eyes. “That faggot ain’t gonna send me to no doctor. Bring me my bottle.”
Jasper fetched the bottle of rye from the kitchen cabinet. He didn’t bother with a glass; his dad hadn’t used one at all since Mama left. In another half an hour his dad was passed out, bleeding and swelling on the living room floor, and Uncle Kyle was probably fifty miles away. Jasper sat outside, wondering what time it was. The night was humid and thick. Trees pressed close, and he listened as, somewhere beyond his line of sight, something walked among them.
Jasper awoke with his sister’s voice fading in his head. His father had migrated to the couch. He was passed out drunk, the bottle empty on its side. Sunlight intruded through the slats on the window. The place stank of booze worse than usual. Jasper swept the broken glass from the night before onto a junk flyer he retrieved from a stack on the counter, and slid it into the trash can, where it sifted to the bottom like spilled dirt. Somewhere down the road he heard the bus grumbling by, and he imagined for a moment being on it, sitting with other kids his age who were probably thinking about normal things, like homework or hunting trips, or whatever it was normal kids thought about.
He’d stopped going to school a couple months ago, sometime after Mama had gone. Eventually the truancy officer came by, and he’d been sent to hide under his dad’s bed. He listened while his dad told the officer that his mama had taken him away, and he didn’t figure they’d ever come back.
“You know what address they’re at?” the officer said. “We got to transfer him out of here, otherwise he’s gonna be marked delinquent. I tell you, it’ll cause him trouble down the road.”
“I don’t know where she took him. The bitch lit out in the middle of the night. She’s got people in Mississippi. I guess maybe she took him there.”
“Well . . . can you have her get in touch with the school next time you talk to her? I just don’t want Jasper to get in trouble, is all. You know how the government is. Likes to stick its nose every damn where.”
“That’s the government’s problem. Let it go looking, it wants to find her so bad.”
Jasper heard the door shut, and he wriggled out of his hiding place. He peered through the window and watched the truancy officer climb into his car and drive away. As far as the school was concerned, Jasper no longer existed. He thought he should feel good about that, but in place of that feeling there was a peculiar absence. He spent the afternoon hitting his favorite spots in the woods, finally settling into the rusted cabin of a long-abandoned ’74 Gremlin, grappled by kudzu and shaded by red maple. He watched the sky through the maple branches and imagined himself traveling to locations beyond his father’s reckoning.
Now, months later, Jasper approached his father and stood cautiously beside him, yet far enough that he might leap beyond the arc of a swinging arm. The blood had crusted under his father’s nose and on his lips. The flesh along the right hinge of his jaw had swollen and gone dark purple, almost black. His mouth gaped open and the raw stink of liquor—and something else, something ripe and frightening—blew out of him with each heave of his lungs.
“Dad?” Jasper whispered. “Can I have some breakfast?”
His father didn’t make a sound. Jasper was relieved. This meant he could pour himself a second bowl of Rice Krispies, and even put some extra sugar over it. Previous experience had taught him that as long as he was quiet, he would likely have the run of the place until well into the afternoon. Even then his dad would wake up chastened, and keep mostly to himself. It might be a good day.
After breakfast he spent most of the morning perambulating about the property, whacking the leaves from tree branches with a stick and singing snippets of songs he half remembered from when his mama still lived here and played her radio. Before the days when the only music she tolerated was God’s music. He climbed the hill to where his father’s hives were kept, and stood at the edge of the clearing, listening to them drone. There were six of them, big white boxes on table legs, bees swooning in drunken orbits.
Finally, he got hungry for lunch, and made his reluctant way home. He approached the house with a soft step, wanting to preserve the peace of the day just a little while longer. There were two capped honey jars on either side of the front door, a twisted strip of paper barely visible in each. He never asked what his father wrote down on them. They were used more often since Mama had left, though; and because this was part of their interaction with the spirit world, Jasper made note of it in his book.
Jasper turned the handle on the door and eased it open. If you did it slowly enough, the hinges wouldn’t squeak. He stopped—only a two-inch gap between the door and the jamb—when he heard a sound. He didn’t understand what it was at first; when he did, his blood chilled.
His father was crying. His breath came in a series of small, broken gasps, like he was trying to suck it back into himself. From this vantage point, Jasper could see his left shoulder, his left knee. He was hunched over, and with each stifled sob his body shook. Jasper retreated, quietly closing the door again. He returned to the woods, this time to sit upon a rotted stump and dwell over the image of his father brought low.
He had never seen the man cry before—not when Lily died, not when Mama left them both for whatever called out to her from the wider world. He had seen him fight, and he had seen him take some hard licks. God knows he’d seen him deliver them too; he’d been on the receiving end more than a few times. But to see him weeping in the broad light of day was harder than any clout to the head. The ground felt suddenly fragile, like a shell over a great hollow.
He remembered what his uncle had told him. “You can learn a lot about something just by watching it, and paying attention to what it does when it thinks it’s by itself.” Jasper considered writing down what he saw, but held back. His father was not a ghost. He didn’t belong in a book about them.
They already had a ghost in the family.
Lily died a year ago, when Jasper was nine years old. She’d been a loud and willful child, with a core of mischief that frequently landed her in trouble. Because their father’s rages were indiscriminate, Jasper often joined her there, whether he deserved it or not. On the last day of her life, she ignored their parents’ restrictions and ventured too close to the hives, and got herself stung several times. She raised holy hell, running back to the house with a wail so loud Jasper thought his eardrums might split. They both took a beating that day—Lily for disobeying, and Jasper for letting her do it. Their father had already been deep into the bottle, so he delivered his blows with extra enthusiasm. Jasper hated Lily for it. As they were ushered to bed, he told her that he was going to beat her too, and he was going to do it even harder than their dad did. He had no such intention, but it felt good to say it. It felt good to see her scared of him.
That night both children went to sleep, but only Jasper woke up again. His parents said she must have been allergic to bee stings, and suffocated in the night. The bee sting had happened hours before bed, and she’d been breathing just fine then; but Jasper didn’t understand how allergies worked, so he had no real reason to doubt it. He thought about the last thing he’d said to her, and cried silently into his pillow.
He never saw her body.
Everything changed after that. That’s when Mama started talking to God in her weird new language. That was when the music she played on the radio changed. In some ways it was nice, because she paid more attention to him. She hugged him more, and she told him about how he could protect himself from the evil spirits. That’s when his dad started putting the jars out, too; so he could catch them before they got inside the house.
Mama didn’t let him talk about Lily, after the Holy Spirit joined them. Jasper liked that at first, because it meant that she stopped crying about her all day. There was room to breathe again. And he liked all the extra attention that came his way.
But after a while, he wondered how Lily felt about it. He wondered if it made her feel lonely.
A thought occurred to him. He tore a page from his book—it seemed sacrilegious, but Uncle Kyle did say a handbook was like a conversation—and wrote a few questions onto it. They were questions he thought a naturalist might ask, but mostly they were questions he was actually curious about. Questions he’d want someone to ask him, if he was a ghost.
Why do you live in the well instead of at home with me and dad? Are you mad at me?
What do you eat when you’re hungry?
Are you scared because you’re alone in the dark?
Then he walked out to the ruined well, sunk beyond the tree line, its lip flush with the ground and covered over by a handful of rotting boards. An abandoned chicken coop sagged on its foundations nearby, its door perpetually locked to keep kids from mischief, haunted now by black widow spiders and paper wasps. Jasper leaned over the stone lip and peered into the black hole. Before Lily had taken up residence there, he had dropped rocks into it, and sometimes larger items—once, daringly, a schoolbook. Each time whatever he threw disappeared from sight. He could almost count to ten before he heard the distant, heavy squelch of mud.
He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it down.
He returned to the house with trepidation, but was pleased to see his father standing up, shuffling his feet as he moved slowly across the living room, toward the kitchen. He held his hand against the side of his head. He winced as he turned to face Jasper.
“Where you been all day?”
Jasper studied the tone of the words, trying to get a sense of his father’s mood. “Outside.”
His dad flicked his eyes to the windows, as if someone might be staring inside. “Your Uncle Kyle come by?”
“No, sir.”
“If he does, you make sure you let me know right away. Don’t you talk to him, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” Jasper didn’t think his uncle would be coming back. A border had been crossed last night, and now they all traveled through a darker world.
His father made his way into the kitchen, passing the door to the root cellar. He paused once for balance, then opened the cupboard by the sink where he kept his liquor. Jasper knew it was empty, and he steeled himself for a shift in the atmosphere.
Father seemed calm about it, though. He turned slightly and leaned against the counter. Gingerly, he lifted his shirt, teeth bared in pain. His pale white belly sagged over his belt, and a bruise the size of a small plate marred his left side. It was dark blue, almost black at its center, and Jasper gasped to see it. Father let the shirt fall again. Air hissed through his clenched jaw.
“Dad? Are you okay?”
“Fetch me my wallet.”
Jasper darted into his parents’ bedroom—just his father’s bedroom, now. The air smelled close and sour. Laundry, both dirty and clean together, lay in small piles on the floor, and mounded on a chair. He found the wallet on the nightstand, a narrow flap of brown leather worn pale through long use. A cereal bowl with a scum of milk sat beside it, along with a water glass reeking of whiskey. A couple of his father’s little orange medicine bottles lay nearby.
Mama’s things used to be on the other side of the room, in her bureau. In truth, most of them had been gone long before she actually left. The jewelry box spilling over with department store finery; the Hollywood gossip magazines; the tubes of lipstick and boxes of eye shadow she doted over, trying on new styles and asking Jasper his opinion of them—all vanished when the Holy Spirit came into her life. Her own disappearance just seemed like the conclusion to a long process. The place had the feeling of an empty socket.
He brought the wallet out to his dad, who took it from him and extracted a twenty dollar bill. “I need you to go on down to the grocery and get me some of that Evan Williams.”
Jasper accepted the bill with a thrill of trepidation. “But can I even buy it?”
“Should be old Wiley behind the counter. Just tell him I sent you. He’ll sell it to you.”
“Are you sure?”
Anger clouded his father’s face. “Go on, boy.”
Jasper cut through the woods and ran past the beehives until he reached the asphalt road, a pocked two-lane passage through a green vault of trees. He slowed down here and allowed himself to amble a bit, reveling in the heat of the sun on his shoulders. The walk was long, and for a time he lost himself in the easy, flighty thoughts of a ten-year-old boy in late summer.
Wiley’s store—simply called Groceries—was situated at a four-way intersection with stop signs at each corner. Jasper looked before he crossed, but there wasn’t anything coming from any direction. There hardly ever was. Mr. Wiley’s car was parked off to the side, next to a big propane tank people used to fill up their own tanks for grilling.
Inside, it was cool and dark. Mr. Wiley kept the blinds down to keep the heat at bay. An air conditioner labored on the far side of the store. The old man was already staring at him as he pushed his way in, like he had some instinct that helped him pick out little miscreants while they were still coming from a mile up the road. His face was hard and unwelcoming.
Jasper hesitated, then approached the counter and placed his father’s money on top of it.
“Well?” said Mr. Wiley.
Now that the moment had arrived, he couldn’t remember the name of the whiskey he was supposed to get. Panic percolated in his guts.
“That’s a lotta money for you to be haulin’ around, son. You come to clear me outta my chocolate bars?”
“No, sir. My dad sent me for his bottle of whiskey.”
Mr. Wiley’s face maintained its dour configuration. “Did he now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What kind does he want?”
“I . . . I don’t remember. I think it has a black sticker.”
“They’s a lotta black labels, son.”
Jasper lowered his head to concentrate. The harder he tried, the further it slipped away. He could almost see it go. His father waited for him on the end of his return trip. He was hurting and all he wanted was his favorite drink, and Jasper couldn’t even remember what it was. He started to cry; it shamed him, but he couldn’t help it.
“Okay now, that’s fine, that’s all right. I know what your dad drinks.” Mr. Wiley turned around and shambled over to a shelf behind him, where he kept ranks of bottles. He pulled down one that looked just like what his dad kept at home. There was the name, too: Evan Williams. It looked almost magical, solid and full, and he knew his dad would be okay for a while. He tried to stop crying, but now he was so relieved he couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense.
Mr. Wiley punched some buttons on his cash register. “Your dad hasn’t been by with any honey for me to sell in a while. Got some folks askin’ after it. He still keepin’ his bees?”
Jasper thought about all the extra spirit traps. It never occurred to him that that meant less honey to sell. “Yessir,” was all he could think of to say.
“Hm. Well I got to say I’m surprised he still has money to spend, now he’s not getting your mama’s disability checks anymore.”
Jasper felt obscurely insulted by this statement, though he didn’t really understand it.
Mr. Wiley took the money and counted out some change. He paused and looked at the boy. “Unless he is.” He stared at Jasper, like he was waiting for him to say something important. Something that might change things for good.
“My mama left,” Jasper said.
Mr. Wiley pushed the change across the counter. He didn’t meet Jasper’s eyes; he seemed somehow chastened. “Yeah. I know she did, son.” He slid the bottle into a paper bag and handed it over. “You be careful with that, now. Don’t drop it.”
“I won’t.”
As Jasper was leaving, Mr. Wiley said, “Grab some chocolate off the shelf. For the walk home. Go on, now.”
Jasper grabbed a Hershey bar with almonds. He felt funny doing it: guilty and grateful at the same time. He turned around and said thank you, but Mr. Wiley already had his back to him.
• • •
It was late August, and the sun still lingered well into the evening. Jasper kept a wary eye on it as he hurried along the empty blacktop toward home. It winked through the leaves, dipping a little further each time he turned away. Shadows flitted through the trees on either side, swelling from the earth. Fireflies drifted in glittering tides. He thought about the feral ghosts, the ones who kept their vigil on the outskirts of the woods, waiting for the protections around their house to fail. He hurried his step.
Jasper pulled the Hershey bar from his pocket. Mama would have disapproved. Sweetness attracts the devil, she said. But it didn’t seem like an evil thing. It seemed like a kindness. He tore off the outer wrapper, gently peeled down the silver paper, and bit the corner from it. He let it sit in his mouth for a moment, the warm flavor soaking into him, filling his awareness like a sweet and gentle word.
They’ll sniff you out. They’ll follow your stink all the way home. That’s why you leave the honey out. Evil gonna lap it right up.
Jasper devoured the chocolate in a few great bites, the guilt of it almost enough to ruin the flavor. He liked sweet things too; was that a sign of wickedness? Could the dark spirits smell him even now?
As though summoned by a spell, all his bad thoughts bubbled up from the mud in his brain: the way he thought Lily had earned her beating that night, even while he wanted to stop it but was too scared. How he’d threatened her himself. How he relished the peace that followed her death.
He left the road and ran along the shortcut through the woods, racing the nightfall. He passed the beehives, humming in the twilight, with a ripple of apprehension.
Despite the chocolate, he reached home safely. The sun was nearly spent, sending low orange beams through the black woods. His little house looked like a fortress. A warm yellow light slipped through drawn curtains and sent a spear into the night. He imagined Lily waking up now, her eyes spilling a cold light, her little blue fingers reaching through the mud toward the paper he’d dropped.
Stepping past the honey jars, Jasper went inside and closed the door gratefully.
The house stank. It wasn’t a smell he recognized. Something hovered beneath the old booze, something metallic and sour. His father was laid out on the couch again. He was awake, but he made no sign that he knew Jasper had returned. His face was pale, his hair plastered with sweat. He was whispering something, and for a moment Jasper wondered who else was here.
He realized with a chill that it was no one he could see.
“Dad?”
He retreated into a corner, his eyes darting around the living room, into corners, into the kitchen, looking for some sign of whoever his father was talking to. Did something get past the jars? A short hallway led off the living room into the bedrooms. The doors to his room and his parents’ room were both open to yawning darkness.
“Dad, I got your drink.”
Still muttering.
Jasper thought he heard something moving outside. He quickly turned the deadbolt on the door, and scurried over to the couch, where he crouched on the floor by his father’s head. He wiped his father’s hair away from his forehead; the skin was hot to the touch. Scared, Jasper kept stroking his hair. “I got your drink. Want me to get you some?”
“. . . Lily . . .”
Jasper whipped his head around, his fingers gripping his father’s hair too tightly. The living room was bright and empty. He went to the window and pressed his face to the glass, seeing nothing but the empty slope of earth leading to the trees. Was his dad scared of Lily? Why?
“Go away.”
“Dad, stop!” Lower lip trembling, he returned to the couch. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and tilted it over his father’s mouth. The whiskey spilled down his cheek, but enough got in that his father stopped muttering and craned his neck to it, like a baby to the breast.
His father took it from him. He took another swallow, spilling nothing this time, and drew a shaky breath. His eyes found his son; they looked raw and bloodshot.
“Jasper,” he said. His voice sounded far away.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
His father palmed the back of Jasper’s head with a rough hand. The strength of that hand overwhelmed whatever fears had harried him along the walk home and worried him now; it was stronger than any ghost. He wanted it to overwhelm him, too.
“Tell her I’m sorry, boy. Tell her that for me.”
• • •
Jasper awoke with a start. The sense of something fading pulled him upright in his bed. He could almost see it: like a wisp of smoke. He felt desperately cold, and a longing that hurt so much it sprang tears to his eyes. A moment later it was gone, leaving him bewildered and shaken.
Morning sunlight flowed through his windows, outlining every ordinary thing—his piled clothes, his action figures, his air rifle—with solid clarity. There was nothing here that had not always been here.
He remembered the questions he’d asked Lily, and looked around the bed for any evidence that she’d been there. There was nothing.
Something tickled the back of his mind. A rag of memory: his sister, curled against him in sleep, huddling for warmth. Her cold fingers wrapped around his hand. Then it went away.
• • •
Jasper’s father hadn’t left the couch. The bottle at his side held more whiskey than Jasper had expected, which meant he’d spent most of the night asleep or unconscious. Jasper approached quietly. He pressed his hand to his dad’s forehead again. It still felt warm, but not as hot as last night. That seemed promising.
In that moment, he felt his mother’s absence more acutely than he had in weeks. It had been horrible at first, of course, and he hadn’t been able to stop crying, even when it made his father yell at him. When it got to that point, he’d run outside, into the woods so no one could hear him. Usually he’d go to the old car tangled in kudzu. He’d try to avoid going to the well when he could, because he didn’t want to make Lily sad. But sometimes he couldn’t help it. Sometimes he needed to be close to her.
Jasper snatched up his notebook and headed out to the car. He wanted to be by himself, where he could think.
His mother would have known what to do. She would have made him something nice for breakfast and she would have given him some medicine that would make him feel better. She would sit on the couch with him and hold his head in her lap, and say things in that quiet way she had which always made the world seem just a little bit softer.
He worried about her out in the world by herself. She needed her scooter to ride around on when she went anywhere. She was really big and sometimes that embarrassed her so much it made her cry, but her size was one of the things Jasper loved best about her. She felt comfortable and soft, and when she hugged him he thought it was the gentlest feeling in the world. He liked to help her get up off the couch because it made him feel strong. Sometimes she would let him ride the scooter. He missed that too.
She was too big to drive the car anymore. His dad had to take her places whenever she wanted to go. Jasper wondered how she got away from here, without his dad to drive her. She must have driven the scooter up the long dirt track to where the road started. And then down the road to wherever she ended up going.
He knew the scooter was too small to hold them both, so he understood why she left him behind. But he wished she had asked him to go with her anyway. He could have walked beside her. Who was going to help her get up now?
It occurred to him that she might have seen his book. He’d put stuff in there about the Holy Ghost. She wouldn’t have liked that. Maybe that’s why she left.
Of all the spirits, the Holy Ghost was the hardest one to write about. He never saw it, but it seemed like Mama saw it a lot. She sure talked about it a lot. He knew it had to do with Jesus and God; she told him once that it was the same thing—they were all the same thing—but then she’d talk about them like they were all separate, too. Jesus had always possessed a sinister aspect for Jasper because of it; he imagined Him rising desiccated from the dark cave where He had been interred, the shroud sliding down His face, His eyes terrible and red as they fixed upon Jasper’s every wicked thought, every evil hope.
Despite that, the Holy Ghost was supposed to be a protector. If it didn’t protect him, at least it protected his mom. That’s what she told Uncle Kyle that one night. Jasper remembered it clearly because it was what his uncle called an “example of behavior,” so he wrote it down in the book as soon as he heard it.
Sitting in the derelict car now, he read through that section again. It gave him a sharp pang. He’d almost forgotten that Uncle Kyle had told her to leave, all those months ago. It must have been him who gave her the idea in the first place. They’d been outside, talking by Uncle Kyle’s Chevy. His uncle was getting ready to drive back into town after spending the weekend with them. Jasper didn’t remember much about that weekend, except that his uncle and his dad didn’t talk to each other at all. They never liked each other much, but that weekend had an extra tension.
“You got to get out, Mae. Take that boy and get out.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can! I’ll help you do it. It’s only gonna get worse now.”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Kyle.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“He’s not as bad as you think.”
“He’s worse.” He paused, and tried again. “I got a responsibility, Mae. You’re my sister. Jasper’s my nephew.”
“The Holy Spirit protects me, Kyle. Just like He does Jasper.”
“Like He did Lily?”
She slapped him then, hard. Jasper remembered the sound of it even now, the way it carried like a rifle shot, the way it made him feel sick in his heart.
“How dare you,” she said. “You got no right. No right.”
He put his hand on his cheek. Jasper tensed, waiting for him to hit her back, the way his dad would have done. Waiting for the sound of punched meat, the snap of a bone in her nose. His whole body grew heavy with dread. He wished he was bigger. He could fix things if he was bigger.
Nothing happened, though. Instead Uncle Kyle fixed his mom with a look he had never seen on him before, something ugly and sad. He said, “I got every right.” And then all he did was get inside his car and drive away, leaving a cloud of road dust hanging in the still, hot air.
His mom turned and made her way back to the house, treading carefully without her scooter, breathing heavily with the effort. Jasper wanted to go out and help her, but he was afraid she’d be mad at him for eavesdropping. And anyway, she had Jesus’s Ghost to help her, he guessed.
Sitting in the old car, Jasper studied the words he’d written down that day, and at the crude little image of a ghost—the kind with a sheet over its head—floating over a crucifix. It had seemed a daring illustration at the time, but now it just embarrassed him. How it would have shamed his mother to see it.
But his gaze kept drifting back to Lily’s name. She’d slapped Uncle Kyle when he said it.
Something terrible stirred in his brain.
Dad, what did you do?
• • •
Jasper pulled the boards away from the well. It gaped at him, dumb and hostile, exhaling its wet, earthy musk. He stretched out beside it, edging forward enough to peer over the edge.
His notebook laid open beside him, the pen resting in its gutter. He extended his right hand into the hole, gripping tightly the little flashlight he’d purloined from his dad’s toolbox. He felt the clutch of vertigo. If he dropped the flashlight, he’d pay for it with his hide.
Turning it on felt like an intrusion, but he did it anyway. Balancing on the lip with his chest, he reached out with his left hand and twisted the top of the flashlight. White light speared into the darkness, illuminating the moist, brick-walled shaft extending sixty feet into the earth. The walls glistened; things seemed to slide and skitter across them. He knew that might just be a trick of the light, but the instinct to recoil was strong, and he had to beat it back.
He aimed the light straight down. It was too deep, and the darkness swallowed it.
“Can you see me?” he said.
Jasper listened. He filtered out the sounds of the woods around him—the birds, the chittering squirrels, the shift of leaves in the wind. He focused the whole of his attention on the cool black gulf, and the silence that welled up from it like a breath. He thought he heard something whisper.
“Lily?”
He inched forward, the flashlight still aimed into the depths. He clutched the stone rim with his left hand, the top of his chest now over the open well. Was that a glint of something? The reflection of an eye? Something metal?
The image of his mother’s scooter flashed into his mind, broken and half buried in black mud. It hit him like a bullet, something fired through his skull from a distance, and the shock of it rattled him enough that he teetered on the edge, his body for one icy moment balanced like a seesaw between solid earth and the cold, deep fall.
Jasper scrambled away from the lip, the flashlight tumbling into the well. His stomach dropped, and for a dizzy moment he thought he had fallen too. He pressed his face against the packed dirt. Adrenaline sizzled in his blood. He lay there, breathing, until it went away. Only then did he realize that he’d lost the flashlight. With a feeling of despair, he peered into the well again, more carefully this time, and confirmed it. There, like a tiny, tumbled star, was a bright pinprick, and a little wedge of light. Everything around it was black; it illuminated nothing.
Well. It would not be the first beating he’d taken.
Before he went home to receive it, though, he had his task to accomplish. He retrieved his notebook, found a blank page, and scrawled another question for Lily.
Did Dad hurt you?
He tore it carefully from the book, crumpled it loosely, and dropped it down the well. He sat for a moment, considering. He felt the heat gathering behind his eyes again, and he wrote another one.
Did he hurt Mama?
And he dropped that one down there too.
The tears came. He lay there, letting them have their moment. Then he wiped them away. He got to his feet, brushed off his clothes, and walked home to take what was coming to him.
• • •
Jasper found his father lying facedown on the floor. He stood paralyzed in the doorway, the heat of the sun prickling the back of his neck, a chill creeping out from his heart through the rest of his body. The bottle of Evan Williams lay on its side beside the couch, much of its contents spilled onto the floor, filling the little house with its reek.
A groan slipped from his father’s lips, and suddenly Jasper could breathe again. He crept inside, the fear of losing the flashlight returning to the forefront of his mind. Kneeling, he grasped his father’s shoulders and tried to turn him over. It was like trying to roll a felled buck.
His dad hissed through his teeth. A dark swelling had emerged where he’d been kicked in the head. He opened his mouth and a slurry of half-formed words spilled out: boneless, nonsense syllables. Somehow this scared him more than the ghosts.
“Dad, what? What?”
His father put his big hand on Jasper’s shoulder and tried to push himself up. The weight of him collapsed Jasper to his hands and knees, and he had to brace himself before his dad could try again. Even then he almost buckled, but it was enough for his dad to achieve his feet again. He stood uncertainly, his eyes drifting around the room as though he were looking for something familiar. He clamped Jasper’s shoulder with his left hand. He looked at his son with bewilderment.
“Dad?”
“I’ma gowow,” he said, and took a step toward the kitchen. He paused, as though considering his next move, and took two more steps before pitching to his left. There was nothing around for him to grab hold of, and he hit the floor hard. His head bounced off the floor with a hollow tok! He lay quietly where he’d fallen, eyes half-lidded. When Jasper shook his shoulder, he remained as still as the dead.
• • •
He could walk to the grocery store before sundown, but not there and back again. With luck, he wouldn’t have to; Mr. Wiley would be driving him back. Jasper didn’t know where else to go. The phone had been disconnected weeks ago, and Uncle Kyle was not coming back. He needed help, and Mr. Wiley was the only remaining adult in his world.
His father wouldn’t move. Jasper knew what drunk looked like; this was something different. He moved the bottle of Evan Williams to within his dad’s reach, in case he woke up and wanted it.
“I’m gonna get some help, Dad.”
He lit outside and made his way to the road. It lay out before him in a long, simmering ribbon, the horizon wavy with the day’s gathered heat. As he hurried along it, his mind cooked up fantasies of an old Chevy manifesting from that haze, Uncle Kyle emerging from it like a hero in a movie. But nothing like that happened. The road remained as empty as a kicked pail.
By the time he got to Wiley’s store, it was later than he’d thought it would be. The sun had already disappeared behind the tree line, spilling an orange light across the world. With a lurch in his gut, Jasper realized that Mr. Wiley’s car was not in the parking lot. Nor was anyone else’s.
He ran to the front door and pulled on the handle, ignoring the CLOSED placard hanging inside. The door was locked. He tugged again, calling out Mr. Wiley’s name and pressing his face against the glass.
Everything within looked like it had been sitting there for a long time. The only light came from the exit sign overhead, and from a bulb over the restroom on the other side of the store. The interior was a half-lit mausoleum, a place where things might live that could not live in daylight.
Despairing, Jasper turned away. Shadows had massed beneath the trees and encroached upon the street. The sky was a deep twilight blue, still lit like a lamp, but not for long.
Jasper turned for home. He would go out again in the morning, early. His dad would probably be up by the time he got back home anyway, maybe ready to lay some leather on him for being out so late.
The air was still, but the woods were alive on either side of him. Things moved out there in the darkness, rustling through the leaves and the branches. Overhead, Venus peered through the blue night.
The feral ghosts seethed in the woods to either side. These were the ones Jasper knew the least about. These were the ones that made the night sounds, the ones that surrounded the house in the moonlight, their numbers thinned only by the meager protections of the honey jars. They came hungry for his blood, drawn to his sins like angels to a stinking trough.
They need a home, Mama had said. They smell your nasty heart and they gonna move inside it. She had delivered that proclamation looming over him as he was settling into bed, the light coming into his room from behind her, so that she seemed the personification of all the dark entities curling through the woods at that very moment, sniffing out his wickedness. He spent that night fighting sleep, listening to every sound intruding upon the stillness.
Jasper had arrived at the place where he could cut through the woods to his house, shaving off a good fifteen minutes from his walk. By now the night had risen to its full grandeur. He stood by the wall of trees, staring into their depths. He’d never been out this late on his own, and had certainly never passed through the forest so far after dark. If he went through, he would walk close to the well; he could call down to Lily, and see if she called back. The thought was both appalling and irresistible.
He pulled his handbook from his back pocket and the pen from his front. He clicked the pen repeatedly, the sound of it grounding him in the moment, the notebook in his hand a link to the comforting memory of Uncle Kyle. He stepped into the woods. The moonlight was snuffed out by the foliage overhead. Treading softly, he crept through the trees toward the well, and toward home beyond it.
Sitting by his window at night, or huddled under the blankets with his father’s flashlight, he’d sketched out images of what he thought the feral ghosts looked like. Never having seen one plainly, he went by instinct, measuring their forms by the sounds they made, by the branches left shuddering in their wake. Glimpses here and there. What kind of ghosts were they? Were they once regular people, like Lily, only driven mad by grief and loneliness? And if so, what did that mean for Lily? Would she someday go mad too? Was she mad at him?
I’ll beat you harder than Dad ever did.
Or maybe they were something different, like Mama said. Something more sinister, something hungry. Something that had never, ever been good or kind.
The darkness was nearly complete, and Jasper almost walked right into the open well. He sensed it before he saw it, the earth’s cold and rotten breath tickling his nose an instant before he would have pitched into thin air. He lurched backward and landed on his butt. Slowly, blood drumming in his temples, he lay on his chest and crept to the lip, peering down.
It was like looking into an abyss. No light intruded there, and when he lifted his arms off the ground he felt as though he were floating in some primeval space, as though the well led not to some underground water source but to the cold kingdoms of death, where stillness was absolute.
The little star of light was gone. He didn’t think he was going to get in trouble for the missing flashlight, though. He understood that his dad was dying. Something was wrong with his head and it was killing him. Uncle Kyle kicked him too hard.
That’s why he had to talk to Lily.
“He said he’s sorry,” Jasper said. “Okay? He said he was sorry so you have to leave him alone now.”
Was she even down there to hear him? He thought about the dark roads he imagined ghosts traveled, the ones that led from their graves to the haunting places—the bottoms of wells, the interiors of empty houses, maybe even to old chicken coops sagging with neglect. How long did it take to get from the grave to here? Did time work for ghosts the same way it did for people? Was a conversation with a ghost—like the writing in his handbook—one that took place over a distance of time?
Was Lily hungry down there? Was she starving?
“I’m sorry, Lily.”
Light speared up from the bottom of the hole. It blinded him, froze the breath in his lungs, and although he was in no danger of falling this time he felt as though a dozen hooks had latched into his body and strove to drag him down. He scrambled away, his skin prickling with adrenaline. The light played along the well’s edge. Something wet shifted in the mud.
Jasper climbed to his feet. His eyes fell on the sagging chicken coop, a dozen feet away; its door, always locked tight, leaned open.
Jasper ran. The night was huge and clamorous around him. The sounds of things in the wood beat against his ears. A cold presence bellied from the night, driving him faster, lighting his brain with fear. He passed the opening in the trees where the beehives droned. A heavy shape crouched beneath one, its mouth affixed to a hole it had torn in the wood. Angry bees swarmed around its tangled hair as it slurped what was inside. He kept running, heedless of the branches cutting his skin or of the roots that tripped and staggered him. When he finally saw the single lit window of his house, he sobbed with relief.
Jasper locked the door behind him. But a door was no barrier to ghosts.
His father was nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Jasper hadn’t looked at the honey jars outside. Were they there at all? Had they been broken? He was too afraid to look again.
“Dad?”
Not on the couch, not in the kitchen where he’d fallen. He was about to look in the bedroom when he noticed the door to the root cellar was open. Jasper paused, then looked inside. His father lay still at the bottom of the stairs.
Jasper crept down and turned him on his side. The bruises he’d sustained from the fight with Uncle Kyle had swollen and darkened. His face was misshapen, his eyes open and unfocused. The pupils were different sizes. Blood crusted in his ear. Jasper knelt and put his ear to his father’s lips; he felt with gratitude the breath stirring his hair.
The cellar was dark but for the spill of light from the kitchen. The honey jars were arranged in dim orange ranks. There were thirty-seven of them, unlabeled, unremarkable save a single strip of paper suspended inside each. Jasper could barely see the paper strips in the dark, but he had been down here enough when it was light to know they were there. He could not make out the writing on any of them, nor was he meant to. These were his father’s secret crimes, each a morsel to attract the dark spirits that beleaguered them. Within each sealed jar a trapped devil.
And now, he noted with horror, each of them uncapped, their lids in a discarded pile on the floor. His father had opened the cages.
There were four full jars which had not been set as traps, but were instead set aside for delivery to Mr. Wiley. These were labeled in his father’s careful script: Walt & Mabel Dodd’s Honey Farm. Maybe four would be enough. Jasper took them into his arms and climbed the narrow stairs to the kitchen, where he unscrewed the lids and arranged them in a little arc in front of the door. The light was welcome, but it still seemed small and weak in opposition to the pitch darkness outside. He stole a glance through the window, but could see nothing through the reflection of the house’s interior. All kinds of things might be moving out there.
Jasper took out his handbook and placed it by the open jars. He paged through it quickly, knowing exactly where to find what he was looking for.
There: the notes about Mama speaking in the angels’ tongue, about the times she told him how sweet his bad thoughts would taste to the spirits in the wood. He tore the page out, and added a note to it: Mama went crazy and then I didn’t like her anymore.
And there: Lily dead in the well. The vanishing thoughts in his mind every morning, the tail ends of a lonesome dream. The last words he ever spoke to her just another threat.
I didn’t protect Lily.
Mama gone too, a glint of reflected light at the bottom of the well that might be her scooter, that might be her staring eye.
I didn’t protect Mama.
He stole a glance toward the living room window, but all he saw was the reflection of the lit interior. The night, and what lived there, was invisible behind it.
He wrote down the last and most damning note. I’m glad you’re gone. Don’t come back. I don’t want you here anymore. He paused, and added another line. If you come back I will beat you harder than Dad ever did.
Heart fluttering, he tore each sin from the book, and pushed each one deep into the honey of a separate jar. Then he placed the lids carefully beside them. He took a storm candle from the pantry and lit it with the lighter they kept in one of the kitchen drawers. He switched off the light and the darkness swarmed in.
Through the window, he saw a single light bobbing far behind the tree line. Someone—something—coming home.
Jasper descended into the root cellar once more, closing the door behind him. His father pulled each breath from the air with slowing regularity. The honey jars gaped like open graves. He took them down from their shelves and arrayed them in a circle around his father and himself. The reflected light from his candle gave them a Halloween glow. Unless he was quick, the spirits would soon find their way out, and consume his father before his eyes.
He recalled his dad bleeding on the floor as Uncle Kyle kicked him again and again, while he cowered with indecision. Quaking like a little boy, just like he had when his sister needed him. And maybe just like when his mama did too.
He kissed his father on the forehead. “I’m gonna save you, Dad.”
Taking the closest jar, Jasper sank his fingers into the honey and scooped a heavy portion into his mouth. It was thick and wonderfully sweet. It trailed warmly down his hand and onto his wrist, fell in heavy dollops onto his shirt. In an earlier time, this would earn him a beating. He would welcome it now.
The next swallow of honey brought with it the rasping tickle of paper in his throat. His father’s sin, consumed. The spirit absorbed. What dark crime had it held? What horror crawled inside him now?
He scooped out another mouthful, and another, and he kept going until the sweetness overwhelmed him and he was forced to stop by a cramping in his stomach. Doubled over, he stared at his father, who lay with his back to him. The candlelight limned the dark, bruised swelling of his temple, pushed light through his tousled hair. Jasper thought he looked beautiful. Almost innocent.
The cramp passed and Jasper kept going. He finished the jar. He started on the next. And then the next. And the next.
Sometime during the night, after vomiting twice, he paused, shuddering by the still form of his father, listening for the soft tread of a little foot on the floor above.
Not yet, he thought. Please not yet.
He still had such a long way to go.