You Go Into the ABC Store and the Saleslady Says

Now you listen.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Because I’mma tell you right now they exist.

There’s this one in my house, see, and I don’t know what it’s for. I hear it coming down the hall at night creaking the floor. Coming closer, closer. Until it gets to my bedroom. I can feel it looking at me, standing at the end of my bed, it feels like forever and I can’t move. It comes and sits on my feet. So cold so heavy, like it’s trying to push me down through the floor, under the house. And I stay there with the blanket over my head. I don’t want to look at it.

They say the devil comes for you when you’re weak. And Lord I know it. And Lord I’m angry—been left here so alone. All this hurt in my heart, what’s happened to me.

And you know some of it. Everybody knows some of it. How my girls don’t come home nomore. It’s easy to figure. It’s hard for them now, coming home to me. Their Daddy in the nursing home losing his mind, his memory. I tell them to come on home NOW, he MIGHT be able to still say their names.

And everybody wants to know. Asks me all the time when’s the last time I saw my husband. Like I just threw him in the home whenever he started getting too bad for me to take care of by myself. Like I’m just getting on and dancing on bars and having men over to my house. Let me tell you, yesterday I sat and rubbed his hand for thirty minutes before he looked at me. I was calling him Baby like I always called him. I told him about our girls. I just went on and on. And he didn’t say nothing.

He is a baby now, so afraid. You got to hold his hand and pull him out of bed, pull him to the table.

He’s not my husband. I don’t know where my husband is.

I want to believe he’s the ghost that’s been coming to me. If I could only pull back the covers and look, it might really be him trying to come see me, trying to pull me out of bed, twirl me on the floor. Spinning like we used to dance by the river. We met in the summer. I was wearing a blue dress. He loved to tell that story.

Could you look?

Could you pull back the covers and look?

’Cause what if it ain’t him.

My husband. He’s a ghost, a spirit, he’s off somewhere else fishing, he’s a fish going upstream, laying under a fallen tree, he’s a baby that’s too big for me to hold. I want to cradle him, with his clean hands.

Yesterday I watched him eat with his fingers. He dipped his roll in his sweet tea. He never liked sweet tea before.

Whoever he is, whatever he’s becoming, he’s got clean hands.

You remember how dirty they always were. Always working. Always grease and dirt way down beneath the fingernail. He fixed your carburetor, your cotton picker, your air conditioner. He built your girls a tree house. He BBQ’d a pig when your son got engaged. He gutted all the fish and he gave all the fish to all our neighbors. We all remember his hands.

Do you feel sad now? See I didn’t mean to make you feel sad. But I got to get it out of me somehow I can feel it welling up inside when I just sit and think. Nobody to talk to. I’m alone in my house. Alone here. Preacher says I need to start writing and I’ve been working on a poem here’s how it starts:

I want to share my life with you, just another day

But you’re forgetting who I am

As you fade away

See, you ask me how I am and here I am telling you. I’m telling you that sometimes I sit here at this counter and get so sad that I’m just staring. Just like my husband. Just nothing. I feel like I’m becoming nothing. I’m not his wife no more, I’m not his mama. My girls won’t come home. I’m lost.

And then I hear her singing. Miss Ann Ruby. I can see her out behind you now. She’s down in the ditch with her red pea coat. She’s picking up trash. She’s singing What a friend we have in Jesus.

Hear her?

I can hear her right now.

All our sins and griefs to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. Seems like she’s out there every other morning, as old as she is. Cleaning out the ditch and talking to folks before they come in here. And yes I’ve called her nephew to come and pick her up and take her to the house. And I’ve seen him come out here and try to get her in the car and she fights him and screams at him. Folks think Miss Ann Ruby’s crazy but I’ll tell ya. She’s lived with ghosts. Still living with them now. She knows ’em better than any of us.

See when I was little she lived by my school. She’d come in with that red peacoat, holding her guitar, and interrupt the teacher and ask us if we knew Jesus, that Jesus was our only friend. And the teacher would let her interrupt. Talk for as long as she wanted. She’d say, “Raise your hand if you love music.” And we all would raise our hands. She’d say, “Raise your hands if you want to learn how to play it.” And Cindy Liverman was the only one to keep her hand up and Miss Ann Ruby walked to her in her desk and stood over her and told her that God was going to touch her that night. God was proud she was going to learn how to play His music with Miss Ann Ruby. And at the end of it, the teacher just said thank you Miss Ann Ruby. And Miss Ann Ruby went on to the next classroom and did the same thing all over again.

And here’s the other part you might not know, folks don’t like to talk about it. For when she was a young mother—Miss Ann Ruby was a beautiful woman, a classically trained musician—her husband tied her and their son up in their basement and shot himself in front of them. Made them watch it. But she went on and raised her son to play the piano the prettiest you’ve ever heard. And then he killed himself too.

And we all know what happened last year but I’ll tell it again. When them neighbor boys of hers, 13, 15 years old came over to help her take the clothes off the line like they’d always done. Knocked her in the head with a pipe and ’bout beat her to death. Threw her in the boot of her car. Poured gasoline all on the outside of it and lit it on fire. She was in that car burning. But she pulled herself out.

Oh what peace we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear. All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Miss Ann Ruby she was waiting for me outside one day. She looked me good in the face. I hadn’t been that close to her since I was a real little girl. She said I looked familiar. She asked me where I was from. And then before I could say anything her face turned to look like an angel. And she said, “I remember you, I’ve known you all your life.”

And she’s out there now waiting for you.

It’s alright if you’re lost.

But know you’re not a stranger.