Willie didn’t seem to find our conversation odd. He acted as if we met in the tree house every day for a pleasant chat.
“Sarah buried me by my favorite fishing spot. She got her brothers and mine to help her. They went to where the coroner had all of us dead miners laid out, wrapped in burlap, and when she said she’d come to claim her husband’s body, the coroner agreed.
“The brothers put me in a cart behind my horse and led the horse up the hill to a place I always fished, along the Carbon River. They dug the grave deep and buried me there, and Sarah planted wild roses on the spot. She was a good woman, Sarah. A good woman.”
I didn’t know what to say. More than a century later, I could tell he still yearned for the woman who had been his wife.
“The only thing Sarah didn’t do for me,” Willie said, “was to remove my leg bones from the cemetery and bury them with the rest of me. I want to be all together in one place, far from Emil Davies.”
“Did you tell her what you want? Did you ask her to have the bones dug up and moved?”
A great sadness came into his eyes, and he looked down at his boot. “Sarah couldn’t hear me,” he said. “I tried and tried to talk to her, but she never heard any of it. She never saw me after I died, never sensed my presence. My boys couldn’t see or hear me, either. Most people can’t. I move among them, and they don’t notice. The girl, Florence, was the first to see and hear me. You’re the second.”
Florence. I thought about Aunt Ethel’s peacock. If anyone could shed some light on that situation, it was Willie. “Do you know what happened to Florence?” I asked.
“It scared her that she could see me when her sister couldn’t so she quit coming to the tree house. Sure did miss that girl. It gets lonely with no one to talk to.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to her house to see her when her sister wasn’t there?”
“I could have, but once she got afraid of me, I left her alone. All I wanted was someone to talk to, and you can’t hold a conversation when the other person’s jumpy as a jackrabbit. I watched her sometimes, though. Saw her grow up, teach school, take care of the critters. I liked that about her—she was kind to the animals.”
“What about after she died?”
“She must have moved on right away. Never saw her as a ghost.”
“Do people ever come back to Earth as animals or birds?”
“Boy, you don’t know much about the hereafter, do you? Why would a person turn into a bird?”
“My Aunt Ethel thinks Florence came back as a peacock.”
“My Florence? The girl I knew?”
I nodded. “Florence had said when she died she wanted to come back as a peacock, and a few months after her death, this peacock showed up at her house, and it’s been there ever since.”
“If that ain’t the most fanciful tale I ever heard. Boy, you ought to be writing a book yourself.”
“It’s true! The peacock hangs around the porch, and Aunt Ethel feeds it cracked corn and calls it Florence. Maybe you could go there and see if the peacock recognizes you.”
“No. I’m not talkin’ to no peacock.”
“Please?” The idea of proving or disproving Aunt Ethel’s theory excited me. “All you have to do is go talk to the peacock and see what happens. If it’s really Florence, she’ll remember you.”
“If it’s Florence and she sees me, she’ll be scared, just like when she was a girl. She’ll fly away.”
I thought how Aunt Ethel didn’t want me to bring Mr. Stray home because she feared he could frighten the peacock, but this was different. This was like a scientific experiment.
“The peacock isn’t scared of people,” I said, “so if it’s afraid of you, that’ll mean it really IS Florence.”
“Or it would mean the peacock’s scared of a ghost. Any ghost.”
“Please, Willie? It wouldn’t take long.”
“No. I don’t go around frightening people or birds.”
“If the peacock is scared, you can leave before it panics and flies away.”
Willie thought a moment. “I don’t like to go places that I never went while I was alive,” he said, “and I never went to Florence’s house, but I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go there for you if you’ll do something for me.”
“What?”
“Dig up my leg bones, then bury them where the rest of me is buried.”
“I can’t do that. There are laws against digging up graves.”
“You don’t have to announce it to the sheriff. All you have to do is get a shovel, go there alone, and dig.”
“What if somebody saw me?”
Oh man, I thought, as I imagined the police calling Mom to say I’d been arrested for grave robbery. My palms started to sweat just thinking about it.
“You can do it at night. Nobody’s there at night. Nobody’s there in the daytime, either, most of the time. That graveyard is not exactly a lively place.” His eyes crinkled at the edges, and I could tell he wanted me to acknowledge his joke.
I shook my head. “No way,” I said. “I’m not sneaking into a cemetery at night, or any other time, to dig up one of the graves. It’s too risky.”
“Will you at least go to the cemetery and find where my leg’s buried? You can look around, see how easy it would be, and then decide.”
After what Willie had told me, I was curious about the cemetery. I wanted to see the row of gravestones all with the same date of death, and I wondered what it said on his leg’s gravestone. HERE LIES THE LEG OF WILLIE MARTIN? Or BELOVED LEG?
“I guess I could look at the grave.” I didn’t mind agreeing to that. I had no intention of digging anywhere, but there’s no law against looking around in a cemetery.
“Good,” Willie said. “Let’s go.” He pointed out the door. “You can walk there on the old railroad bed.”
“I can’t do it now; I have to get home. Aunt Ethel will worry if I stay away too long. I’ll go to the cemetery tomorrow morning.”
“After you’ve been there, I’ll show you where the rest of me is buried, so you’ll know where to take the leg bones.”
“I’m only going to look at the grave, Willie. I’m not going to dig up your leg bones.”
“I wonder if the peacock would know me,” he said. “I thought you were curious.”
“I’m not curious enough to get myself arrested.”
We stared at each other for several seconds while his sad eyes pleaded silently.
“You’re my only hope,” he said. “I wanted to ask Florence to do it, but she got scared and quit coming here before I got up my nerve to ask her.”
“It only took you about fifteen minutes to ask me.”
“I’ve been waiting all these years for someone else I could ask, someone who can hear me. That’s one reason I started spending time in the library. I thought people who read ghost stories might be able to see me, so I hung around the supernatural section waiting to be noticed, but it never happened.”
I envisioned Willie, waiting and hoping for so many years. It made me sad.
“All these years,” Willie said, “I’ve told myself that if I ever meet a living person who can hear and see me, I’ll ask for their help right away. I won’t take a chance that they’ll leave and not return, like Florence did. Now here you are, the only one who can help me. If you won’t do it, it might be another fifty years before anyone else sees me.”
Ten minutes earlier, when I first saw Willie, I had been scared silly. Now I felt sorry for him.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
The ghost smiled at me. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said just before he vanished.
I looked out the window but saw only the woods. No old coal miner.
I took a deep breath. I knew why I’d agreed to go to the cemetery. Besides being curious about the graveyard, I liked Willie.
In every ghost story I’ve ever read, the characters are afraid of the ghost—so why was I calmly carrying on a conversation with one?